Where poetry points: deixis and poetry's ‘you’ in Éluard and Desnos

Abstract

The struggle in poetics between the textual hermeticism of semiotic readings, on the one hand, and materialist theories of reference, on the other, has been a thorny issue for theorists of the lyric for some time. Taking up the question of whether or not poetic texts open on to a world of referents, this article considers deictics (words for showing or indicating) in poems by Paul Eluard and Robert Desnos, recalling Emile Benveniste's inclusion of the personal pronouns I and you, along with demonstratives, under the rubric of indicateurs. Specifically, the article examines the function of words such as this, that and you and looks into the possibility that poems are always addressed to their reader and therefore mean you in the strongest sense possible. Poems do not refer to the world mentioned on the level of their themes or fiction but rather perpetually refer to relationships they sustain with the reader. In this sense, the reader's understanding or interpretation is an extension of a poem's addressivity, a kind of intimacy whereby the reader manages to meet the requirements of love and desire according to a uniquely discursive reality. It is precisely in understanding how a poem's semiotic operations carry within them their own justification: that the reader fleshes out the addressee or the you of the text.