Perpetuum Mobile: The Literary Travels of Claude Michel Cluny

Abstract

Poet, essayist, novelist, art and literary critic, editor, historian, lucid chronicler of the second half of the twentieth century Claude Michel Cluny has produced a substantial and multifaceted body of work. For his seventyfifth birthday in June 2005, the Sorbonne's Center of Research in Comparative Literature is presenting him a Festschrift.1 This tribute is a long overdue celebration of one of France's most accomplished literary personalities. Drawing from a rich life experience, Cluny employs a wide variety of writing genres, from irregular to regular verses, from prose poems to novels-in-stories, from short stories to essays and historical studies. Early on, he thought of becoming a painter. His knowledge of art and artistic techniques are reflected in the lavish visual elements in his works, from painting with words and frequent references to the visual arts to the use of cinematographic techniques. Yet he is mostly defined by his travels: life travels, knowledge travels, and writing travels. Uniting life and art and exploring their possibilities to the fullest, he creates a new kind of literary travel altogether. Le Silence de Delphes, the first volume of Cluny 's literary journal, which covers the years 1948-62, reveals his anguish at not having found his literary voice. When he published Un jeune homme de Venise, his second novel, at age thirty-six, he was still doubting that he would become a writer. Still, the novel is a surprisingly mature work that announces many of his major themes and methods. The center of the novel is a brief event, a meeting between friends whom fate will soon separate. The action takes place within a fortnight, a knot with loose ends that unravel into the distance as the friends will be separated by death. Their materialistic detachment echoes the desire for a total gift of self, even to death, and a poignant feeling of and longing toward youth and innocence. Wishing to erase the novelist's presence, Cluny plays with linear time in a method reminiscent of the cinematographic techniques of fadeout and flashbacks. In so doing, he writes what we would call today a novel-in-stories, forcing the reader to add context and to construct the novel. Wishing to further distance the novel from its concrete anchors, Cluny blurs the distance between reality and confabulation by stating in the novel's afterword that the action's decor, eighteenth-century Venice, is construed so as to make impossible the placement of the action in a specific historical time. He also skillfully plays with the issue of the writer's absence /presence, stating (still in the novel's afterword) that he wants to erase all trace of the In addition to his work as a poet, novelist, and essayist, Claude Michel Cluny has written short stories, film criticism, and historical studies. His freestyle analysis of the theme of the raven in Poe, Baudelaire, Mallarme, and Pessoa is woven with a commentary on the paintings of Julio Pomar. As a film critic, he co-edited Les Dossiers du cinema (1971-75) with JeanLouis Bory and the Dictionnaire du cinema (1986, 1992) with Jean-Loup Passek and Michel Ciment. He has also written film, art, and literature reviews and travel writing for the magazines Cinema, Les Lettres Frangaises, Combat, Le Nouvel Observateur, Lire, Grands Reportages, and L'Express. Cluny's life has been busy in other ways. He is currently serving on the juries of the Grand Prix de Poesie Roger Kowalski de la Ville de Lyon and the Pr x Max Jacob, and at Les Editions de La Difference, his primary publisher, he founded and directed the poetry collection Orphee (220 titles published between 1989 and 1997). In 1986 h received the Pr x Guillaume-Apollinaire for the poetic volume Asymetries. In 1989, as the poetic volumes Poemes du fond de Vozil and Odes profanes were published, Cluny received the Grand Prix e Poesie Franchise. In 1991 his activities as editor of the Orphee collection were crowned by the Prix Diderot-Universalis; in 2002 the Prix Renaudot-Essai crowned the first of his literary journals, Le Silence de Delphes, 1948-1962. Cluny is still very active. Two subsequent volumes of his journals have appeared, Annees de sable, 1963-1967 (2003) and Impostures, 1968-1973 (2004), which constitute the first thr e volumes of a collection entitled L' In-