Recent French Poetics and the Spirit of Mallarme

Abstract

The single most telling metaphor which French poetics has created in the last ten years seems to me the word ecriture. This concern among the French is all the more interesting at a time when the nature of poetry in America has been redefined by poets touring the continent and reciting their lines for enormous fees while their books do not sell. Examined in the light of the poetics of l'ecriture, poetry readings cause a problem. They afford pleasure because they are sonorous performances of an otherwise silent score. But it is a perverse pleasure, since it dramatizes everything about poems that is unliterary: the poet's looks, voice, accent, social class, and declared meaning. Reading aloud even robs the poem of some of its specific qualia: the aspects of words on the page, the etymologies which sounds dissolve but letters conserve, the spacing which silent reading alone permits, and finally, most precious of all, the printed guarantee of permanence. Literature is a record of letters, literally, which is again to say, by means of letters. A return to these truisms about the literacy of literature seems to attract some French theorists today, whether their names sound familiar to us, like Sartre and Barthes, or new like Derrida, Sollers, Pleynet, and the other structuralists who write in Tel Quel. The common presence behind them all is the ghost of Stephane Mallarme. The distinction between prose and poetry which Sartre made in the first chapter of What is Literature? over twenty years ago is too well known to need rehearsing here. However, I still find it new