Shall We Escape Analogy

Abstract

Claude Royet-Journoud's and Anne-Marie Albiach's work can be read as manifestos against metaphor (relation by similarity, the vertical selection axis of the speech act) with which poetry has long been identified. Whereas Royet-Joumoud takes as his theme metaphor in the largest sense (including, finally, all representation that is based on analogy), Albiach's Enigme dramatizes the loss of the vertical dimension through, ironically, a metaphor: the fall of a body. Formally, both stress as alternative the horizontal axis of combination (especially the spatial articulation on the page) and the implied view that the world is constructed by language, that it does not exist prior to it (waiting to be represented or expressed). This article is available in Studies in 20th Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol13/iss1/9 SHALL WE ESCAPE ANALOGY Rosmarie Waldrop Providence I want to talk about the refusal of metaphor which Claude RoyetJournoud and Anne-Marie Albiach dramatize in their work (the latter most explicitly in Enigma, the first part of her book, Etat (State]). It is a stance they share with a number of French (as well as American) poets, but as editors of the magazine Siecle a mains and, in Claude Royet-Journoud's case, of the radio program Poesie ininterrompue, they did in fact much to focus the concerns of their generation.' I find this attitude of particular interest because, for the long stretch from Romanticism through Modernism, poetry has been more or less identified with metaphor, with relation by analogy. In linguistic terms, this has been an emphasis on the vertical axis of the speech act: the axis of selection, of reference to the code with its vertical substitution-sets of elements linked by similarity, rather than on the horizontal axis of combination, context, contiguity, syntax, and metonymy. By contrast, it is the latter that this generation of poets tends to foreground and, by implication, a view of the poem as constructing a world through its process, rather than expressing or representing an experience or world existing prior to its formulation.' In a narrower historical context, the change of attitude is focused in a reaction against Surrealism or, among English-speaking poets, against Imagism, strong schools whose mainstay was the image, and especially metaphor. It was with the explicit program of searching for alternatives to Surrealism that Claude Royet-Journoud founded the magazine Siecle a mains. Opening books by Claude Royet-Journoud or Anne-Marie Albiach, we are immediately struck by the amount of white space on the page. So much so much white! wailed a reviewer of Le Renversement.' It seems indeed a far cry from Breton's psychic automatism which, in its desire to catch the functioning and speed of the