The Politics of Poetry

Before the enthusiasm of 1968 had flagged, one might have expected poetic activity and political activism to join forces, as they did in the United States during the Vietnam War. In France, however, they did not. To understand what may at first seem an unexpected disjunction between two fields that had historically been allied, one must go back to

the Resistance—to the emotional politico-moral stance that typified so many of the poems written by Louis Aragon, Paul Eluard, and René Char. One could not, of course, condemn the poets' desire to participate in the liberation of their country, nor could one too openly criticize them for having forsaken their previous, experimental, practices. Intellectuals of the sixties, so as not to appear to condemn those poets outright, turned their ire to an indictment of their position through a critique of lyricism. Georges Bataille had already declared in 1950 that "there was an incompatibility between literature and commitment," and in 1962 Marcelin Pleynet was to write: "The poet is certainly no stranger to political events; however, it is impossible not to note that his poetry most frequently speaks of other things—that he speaks on the sidelines."^[38] For Pleynet, when the poet chooses to act, he changes voices. In fact as a poet he has nothing to say, since his "event" is not concurrent with history but rather with his own birth.

It is then no wonder that Tel Quel elected Francis Ponge as one of its representative figures: he had long condemned lyricism—not only the lyricism of lachrymose poetry but also that of Resistance poetry, that morally legitimate enterprise. In Ponge's own life, his civic responsibilities during the war had remained entirely separate from his poetic activities. One might wish to ascribe a patriotic intention to his praise of the plane tree or appreciate his comments on the shortage of soap as a subtle marker of a period's difficulties; for Ponge, such readings were not pertinent.

But the rejection of lyric poetry that so typified the poetics of the sixties had its origins in yet another manifestation, perhaps most characteristically defined by Michel Deguy as "autobionarcissism."^[39] To write lyric verse not only implied self-centeredness but also confirmed the continued privileged status of the poet as that Other in the company of men and women. Lyrical topics—essentially, love poetry—had also become taboo. But more than the topics, the form itself had become questionable.

As Jacques Roubaud has recently shown in his study of the alexan-

drine,^[40] one could easily assume that that twelve-syllable line had become a metonym for lyric poetry, and for poetry in general. To assail lyricism could then be interpreted as a way of undermining the edifice of traditional poetics. Although for Americans it may be hard to see the "overthrow" of a poetic line as an ideological act of profound significance, this notion does give us special insight into French concerns, wherein art is never confined to its simple expression. Poetry especially, since it appears neutral (except in polemical, satirical, or patriotic moments), has been a thorn in the side of avant-garde debates. As free verse had at one point seemed a departure from time-honored authorial pretensions, so would the rejection of the lyric form and its alexandrine infrastructure seem at another time.

So clear is the association between lyricism and readability that during the war Aragon explicitly supported and practiced the return to sonnets written in classical alexandrines.^[41] They were presumed to be the most effective way of reaching the largest audience possible, an audience whose tastes had been shaped by lyceé education. By the same token, it became a form of betrayal in the sixties to continue writing affective or political poetry in which the heart sang out, sonnets—and lyric verse in general—that might have made poetry more accessible. Resistance poetics had in fact forsaken écriture for a return to content, to classicism, with all that that implied. As a consequence, this avenue of political poetry as a form of littérature engagée was closed off. For further proof of the vacuity of lyrical expression, one only had to read Apollinaire's love poems or Aragon's devotional, troubadour-like texts addressed to his Elsa.

Besides the exclusion of lyricism, a critique of narration in the long run may have been of even greater significance. Classical poetry depends on narration. It tells a story, whether a love story or a Boileau-like satirical tale. There is thus a collusion of the poet's identity and his or her desire to pursue an understated form of story-telling. The novel, too, having dropped the possible models found in Sterne's Tristram Shandy or in Diderot's Jacques le fataliste , went on in the same linear way.

But narration, in light of Tel Quel's , analyses, was associated with the gratification of bourgeois reading needs and was thus off-limits. Any infringement of this relegation would raise questions, which, taking off from the text, ultimately forced one to reflect on the relation between a type of literary production and class stipulations. Narration, in effect, in all its conventionality, was decried from the standpoint of poetics and branded as a reactionary practice.

Since lyricism and narration had been the very models that permitted literature to be used for political purposes, denying the validity of both meant that another formal and innovative poetics had to be expounded—some form, some content heretofore barely present in doctrinal poetic pronouncements. Risset quotes Bataille to that effect: "Sovereignty is revolt; it is not the exercise of power."^[42] And yet if there was to be a poetic consciousness, somehow the writing of poetry had to be identified with the struggle. To this end, Tel Quel took it upon itself to eradicate all traces of bourgeois tradition from within poetry. An aggressive restructuring of writing itself was to jar the complacent reader. By employing an antirhetoric rhetoric, insisting on autoreferentiality, negating classical narrativity, and substituting a grammatical I for the lyrical subject, writers would accentuate their disengagement and force on readers a new and active involvement in decoding the text. Pleasure was out: retraining was in. Poetics would be politicized, as Tel Quel argued, through an objective denunciation of bourgeois ideology where it hurt the most—in one's armchair, in one's bedroom, away from the Sturm und Drang of the outside world. As a result, what might have appeared yet another form of hermeticism ("unreadability") was actually the avant-garde's fidelity to its semantic origins: the avant-garde, after all, was originally the military force with the most courage, out in the front lines of battle.

It was not, then, merely a question of the relation of literature to politics and, moreover, the efficacy of the word in a revolutionary setting, or even whether literature had anything to say in a revolutionary process. Before asking those weighty questions, one might have asked

another, perhaps more basic, one: whether a theory of literature, as it was then being elaborated, could reconcile poetry with the novel, a genre that seemed to carry the full burden of human existence.^[43] In other words, to what extent were literary genres noncommunicating vessels? The answer may be located in a reading of écriture as something that runs through all forms of textuality and thus, going beyond specific genres, shapes a general theory of aesthetics as a sign of commitment.

In raising the ethical issue of the compatibility of politics and poetry, the sixties answered in the following terms: Literature in general (prose and poetry) has always sought its place in revolutionary situations, however negligible it might have been in actually changing people's minds. What counted was that authors figured in that drama and thereby justified their moral existence. All well and good, but if one wished to be faithful to one's political convictions and, at the same time, to continue writing (poetry or prose), only theory would satisfy this double ambition—a theory that could break down traditional modes of reception, which only écriture could do. As far as poets and writers were concerned, that commitment, more than any other, could break the canonic relation among reader, text, and author—the three subjected to society's needs and to its control.

In its theorizing (some called it "terrorizing"), Tel Quel decided to violate existing codes whereby reading was a purely aesthetic experience, rather than a confrontation with one's being in the world as embodied in the text. Sartre's question in "What Is Literature?" introduced one contesting position; Tel Quel would offer another, expressed by the poet Denis Roche. He declared that theory would reorient neglected texts, whether Sade's or Mallarmé's, and make of them, through a rearticulation of the basic premises of the text, a form of thinking that would correspond to history rather than to the needs of a university curriculum. In sum, this ambition was founded on the proposition that a redefined understanding of the applicability of theory and its illustration in literary texts—themselves at one with theory—would actively participate in a revolutionary process.