Anathemas and Admirations (44 page)

At once emanation and exegesis of a demiurge, the Poem — which, in Perse’s vision, proceeds as much from cosmogony as from literature — is elaborated like a universe: it engenders, enumerates, compares the elements, and incorporates them into its nature. The Poem is closed, subsisting in and of itself, yet open (“a whole mute nation rises in my words”), restive yet subjugated, autonomous yet dependent, as attached to expression as it is to the expressed, to the subject that savors itself and to the subject that records: the poem is ecstasy and enumeration, inventory and absolute. Sometimes, merely responding to its formal aspects and forgetting that it sounds reality, we are tempted to read it as if it were no more than the glamour of its music, as if it corresponded to nothing objective, nothing perceptible. “Beautiful, all right — like Sanskrit!” our passive and enchanted ego exclaims, capitulating to the voluptuous delights of language as such. But this language, once again, adheres to the object and reflects its appearances. The space it delights in is that
“Raum der Rühmung”
dear to Rilke, that space of celebration in which reality, never unfulfilled, tends toward a surplus of being, in which each thing participates in the Supreme because nothing falls under the curse of the Interchangeable, source of negation and cynicism.

Existence is legitimate and valuable only if we are capable of discerning, at whatever level, even that of the infinitesimal, the presence of the irreplaceable. If we fail, we reduce the spectacle of process to a series of equivalences and simulacra, to a play of appearances against a background of identity. We imagine ourselves clear-sighted, and doubtless we are, but our perspicacity, by dint of making us waver between the futile and the funereal, ends by plunging us into fruitless ruminations, in the abuse of irony and the complacencies of denial. Despairing of ever being able to confer upon our imprecise animosities the density of venom, and, moreover, weary of laboring over the invalidation of Being, we turn to those who, engaged in the enterprise of praise, superior to the shadows, exempt from the superstition of negation, dare consent to everything, because for them everything counts, everything is irreparably unique. The Poem will celebrate, precisely, uniqueness — not that of the passing moment, an inconsequence, but the uniqueness in which the eternal exception of each thing is deployed. In that epoch of celebration, there is only one dimension: the present — limitless duration that enfolds the ages, a moment at once immemorial and actual Are we in this age? Or at the dawn of Greece or China? Nothing more illegitimate than to bring chronological scruples to a work and an author blessedly unscathed by them. Like the Poem, Perse is a contemporary — a timeless one.

“I shall be there among the very first for the irruption of the new god.”

We feel, ourselves, that he has already witnessed both advent and twilight of the old gods, and that if he anticipates others, he does so not as a prophet but as a mind in which reminiscence and presentiment, far from taking opposite paths, unite and coincide. Closer to oracle than to dogma (an initiate by energy and attitude, by what we might call his Delphic aspect), he espouses no specific cult: how condescend to the god of others, how share him with them? For all that he idolizes words, converting their fiction into essence, the poet creates a private mythology, his own Olympus, which he populates and depopulates at will, a privilege he is granted by language, whose proper role and final function is to engender and destroy the gods.

No more than he affects any specific period, the Stranger of the Poem takes root in no country. He seems to traverse some empire celebrating an inexhaustible festivity. The human beings he encounters there and their customs doubtless attract him, though less than the elements. Even in books he will seek the wind and the “thought of the wind,” and more than the wind, the sea, invested with the attributes and advantages ordinarily enjoyed by divinity: “unity restored,” “light made substance for us,” “Being surprised in its essence,” “luminous instance,” . . . In its infinite productivity (in many respects, does it not evoke the Night of the romantics?), the sea will be an Absolute arrayed, a fathomless wonder yet a visible one, revelation of a bottomless appearance. The Poem will have as its mission to imitate the sea’s undulation and brilliance, to suggest its perfection in incompletion, to be or to seem a swirling eternity, coexistence of the past and the possible within a Becoming without succession, a duration that endlessly falls back upon itself.

Neither historical nor tragic, Perse’s vision, emancipated from both terror and nostalgia, partakes of the Tremor, of that tonic shudder of a mind that has “built upon the abyss” instead of falling into it and cultivating its pangs. No predilection here for panic, but the ecstasy that triumphs over vacuity, the sensuality of awe. From his universe (in which the flesh acquires a metaphysical status), evil is banished, and good as well, for here existence finds its justification in itself. Truly? When the poet has doubts, when he cannot sound Being-as he might the sea, then he turns to language in order to study its “great erosions,” to explore its depths, the “old layers.” Immersion complete, he surfaces again to utter, like the waves, “one long unstopped sentence forever unintelligible.”

Were a single meaning to be attached to work, it would be condemned without appeal; stripped of that halo of indeterminacy and ambiguity which flatters and multiplies its commentators, it collapses in the woes of clarity and, ceasing to dismay, suffers the dishonor reserved for the obvious. If the work would avoid the humiliation of being understood, it must, by a certain dosage of the unimpeachable and the obscure, by attention to the equivocal, provoke divergent interpretations and perplexed fervors, those symptoms of vitality, those guarantees of
lasting
. It is lost once it permits the commentator to know at what level of reality it is located and of what world it is the reflection. The author, no less than the work, must dissimulate his identity, yield everything of himself except the essential, persevere in his enchantment and his solitude, a sovereign subservient to his words, their dazzled slave. Even so evident a master of words as Perse, we cannot help feeling, suffers their despotism, which in his fascination he identifies with the elements, even with the elemental — with the caprices and commands from which he can never escape.

This impression may be corrected by another, contrary one, every bit as legitimate: the more we read him, the more we discern in Perse the dimension of a legislator impatient to codify the vague and the impalpable, to call words to order . . . , to wrest them from their anarchy or rouse them from their torpor, in order to send them to our aid, charged with salubrious and vivifying truths. Antithetical to a Valéry or an Eliot (“Ash Wednesday” is the exact antipodes of the world of Perse), he avoids insisting on the “purity of Nonbeing” or on the “infirm glory of the positive hour,” and when he invokes death, it is to denounce its “immense pomps,” not to exploit its magic A poet in his complicity, his affinity, with beings and with things, he neither regrets nor condemns that original rupture which swept them out of unity, into a procession — anything but funereal, according to him, actually blessed, since it provoked that parade of the multiple, of the patent and the strange, whose exhaustive accounting he undertakes. Everything one sees deserves to be seen, whatever exists is incurably
existent
, he seems to be telling us, while, in a trance, in the vertigo of plenitude, in an orgiastic appetite for reality, he labors to fill, to cram, the void, without inflicting upon it that scourge of opacity and gravitation which discredits matter.

There are poets whose help we seek in our will-to-wane; we want them to encourage our gainsaying, to aggravate our stupor, our vice. They are irresistible, marvelously debilitating. . . . There are other poets, more difficult of access because they do not espouse our rancors and our obsessions. Mediators in the conflict that sets us against the world, they invite us to acceptance, to an effort over the ego. . . . When we are overcome by ourselves, and still more by our cries, when that eminently modern craving to protest and to assert our rights assumes the gravity of a sin, what a comfort to encounter a mind that never falls into such ways, that retreats from the vulgarity of revolt, like a man of antiquity, of both heroic antiquity and waning antiquity, like Pindar or even like Marcus Aurelius, who exclaimed, “Whatever the hours bring me is a flavorsome fruit, O Nature.” In Perse there is a note of lyric
sagesse
, a superb litany of contentment, an apotheosis of necessity and expression, of fate and of the word, just as there is, without the slightest Christian accent, a visionary side. “And the star of no nation climbs into the heights of the green age”: do we not seem to be reading some verses of a
serene
variant of the Apocalypse? Were the universe to vanish, nothing would be lost, since language would immediately take its place. If just one word, a simple word, were to survive the general engulfment, it would in itself defy nothingness. Such is the conclusion the Poem implies and demands.

1960

9

Exasperations

A
T TWO in the afternoon, rowing on the Étang de Soustons, I was suddenly thunderstruck by the recollection of a phrase:
All is of no avail. 
Had I been alone, I should have flung myself into the water then and there. Never have I felt with such violence the necessity of putting an end to it all

Devouring biographies one after the next to be convinced of the futility of any undertaking, of any destiny.

I run into X. I would have given anything in the world never to encounter him again. To have to endure such specimens! While he talked, I was inconsolable not to possess a supernatural power that could annihilate both of us on the spot

This body — what use is it, if not to make us understand the meaning of the word
torturer?