The Material, the Real and the Fractured Self: Subjectivity and Representation from Rimbaud to Réda

Abstract

By Susan Harrow. University of Toronto Press, 2004. 269 pp. Hb £35.00; $55.00. In this admirable study, Susan Harrow revitalizes the study of modern French poetry — scandalously under-researched despite the treasures displayed here on every vivid page — by using ideas from cultural theory, autobiography theory and art history. The prime focus is on the interaction between embodied subjectivity and the materiality of the real, with language's own material riches as indispensable go-between. Throughout, Harrow shows how poetry works to resist the homogenizing pressures of modern capitalist society. Three of the four poets examined are canonical, but in each case the critic shows them in a new light. Stressing the ‘hyperactive outwardness’ of his project, Harrow sees Rimbaud as a poet of mess and debris as well as sensation and colour, whose texts, crammed with discordant and fragmentary discourses, embrace the body's dissident priorities. In Apollinaire, the tensions between materiality and subjectivity are probed in a brilliant new account of the war poems in Calligrammes. Far from representing indifference to the horrors of war, Apollinaire's poetic performances — read as autobiographical fantasy — embody poetry's resistance to ready-made responses, enacting the anxiety and irresolution fostered by participation in historical calamity. ‘Combining the roles of participant, ethnographer, and memorialist of war’, Apollinaire creates verbal and visual artefacts that render the soldier-self's negotiations with the real. Drawing on ethnographies of the everyday, Harrow develops a superb reading where ‘the obsessive naming of parts’ and ‘pleasurable immersion in small things’ offset the terrible generalities of war, providing small havens of agency. Renderings of colloquial speech likewise indicate how lexical inventiveness and homosocial bonding serve to shore up collective self-identity, as do pervasive references to the feminine and the erotic, which Harrow treats with considerable insight. In Ponge's writing, Harrow, with considerable originality, considers the configuration of the cultural, the material and the subjective, drawing on recent theoretical reorientations that have (partially) reinstated the human subject. Analysing the alienated subjectivity behind the mordant social critique of the early Douze petits écrits, Harrow goes on to explore the attention to bodily (often oral, erotic) experience in Ponge's famous celebrations of mundane things. Thereafter, through close readings, she shows that Ponge's attention to the overlooked is restorative with regard to the self as well as the world. This lays ideal foundations for a fourth poet, Jacques Réda, given his first extensive treatment in English. In Réda, as in Ponge, we encounter a subject in process, constantly made and unmade in negotiations with the outside world. In Réda's case, this pliancy (a key notion developed by Harrow) is exercised amidst the sights and sounds of city or suburb, traversed endlessly on foot or Solex. Harrow views Réda as an ‘artisan of the everyday’, making parallels with Michel de Certeau, notably with regard to walking in the city and to the quotidian as a zone of resistance (an excellent comparison is also made with Agnès Varda's film, Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse). Exploring the embodied, kinetic character of Réda's ‘excursive desire’, Harrow investigates his treatment of ordinary ‘micro-practices’ identified in the apparently nondescript. A final section, linking back to Rimbaud and Ponge, shows how in Réda attempts to articulate nuances of colour betoken the movements of desiring subjectivity. Beautifully written, engaged without being rhapsodic, always to the point, Susan Harrow's fine book will be a major reference-point for many years to come.