Michel Deguy has oft been saluted as the “French Dichter-Denker,”
or “poésophe.” He is a thinker poet of the first order. “Deguy redefines the
art of poetry,” his friend Jacques Derrida observed in his essay on Deguy “How
to Name:” “in a performative and irruptive gesture, he gives it a new
definition, a new name (he rebaptizes it) and thus, in another space, from his
invention of a new cartography, he assigns it a new task. He assigns one to it,
that is to say, he signs a new concept of the art of poetry, a new
correspondence to its ancient name, and a new responsibility.”
Deguy’s poetry resembles oak: it is hard-grained,
enduring, complex, and pushes its roots deep into the abiding earth. There is a
roughness to its bark, its outer husk, the heave and tumble of its syllables,
what Baudelaire called “l’élastique ondulation.” The sacred oak of the
sanctuary known as Dodona, located in in a mountainous region of limestone
folds and thrust fault blocks named Epirus in the ancient Greek world, had
oracular significance; it was the favored tree of Zeus. Priests divined the
pronouncements of Zeus in the rustling of its leaves.
Oak trees are large, spreading their branches in a pyramidal
profusion of radial prodigality, catching the wind in wonderful agitations of
give and take. Oak is able to do this because its internal structure consists
of cells that stretch inward from the bark to the pith and stabilize the
framework, keeping the vertical fibers from splitting. It is the constant buffeting
of wind that brings the oak tree to life, that causes it to shake and bob,
chatter and convulse.
“There is no inertia in consciousness,” observed
Jean Paul Sartre. Agitation is the life of the mind in its exertions toward
meaning, those rare and wonderful encounters in the more delicate, exquisite
region of one’s Being where Being encounters is its own Nothingness.
Poetry speaks to that region. It is where
consciousness, to quote Sartre again, “makes itself, since its being is
consciousness of being; it sustains being in the heart of subjectivity, which
means once again that it is inhabited by being but that it is not being:
consciousness is not what it is.”
So what is it? We must look to comparison. The
eyeball cannot look at itself, but only through itself. We need a mirror in
order to see the very eyeball that permits us to see.
Analogy and metaphor, contrast and comparison are
the mirrors whose Funhouse distortions permit us to see those things that are
hidden in the transparency of language. It is a paradox. It is the very
communicability of language that obscures and vulgarizes access to the
ineffable. It is when language falls into the service of expediting
communication that, as Heidegger puts it, “language comes under the
dictatorship of the public realm, which decides in advance what is intelligible
and what must be rejected as unintelligible.” Poetry is a site of resistance.
It is the irreverent play of language that frees it from the “cult of
rhetoric,” the banality of communication, and instigates the kind of
flexibility needed to apprehend the marvelous, what Proust termed “un peu de
temps à l’état pur,” a “bit of time in a pure state,” the power to
apprehend - to taste, smell, grasp, fondle - that
which is absent, unreachable, fugitive. Past events, ghostly emanations, the
aura of intensity surrounding everyday phenomena exquisitely defamiliarized in
a rite of poetic exaltation. “L’imagination poétique est le hôte de
l’inconaissable” remarks Deguy in L’energie
du déséspoir.
Deguy’s poetry is generous, generative, and germane:
it burgeons in analogy, flourishes in comparison. Reading Deguy is an
intellectual adventure. The spirit of inquiry is immediate and strong and
boundless in ramification. I think of Deguy whenever I rush into a room and
forget to turn on the light and must feel my way in the darkness for familiar
objects, a desk, a bed, a bureau, and eventually a lamp. Illumination, too, is
immediate. Phenomenal.
The word ‘phenomenon’ stems from the Greek verb phainein, meaning “to shine, to appear.”
In other words, that wherein something can become manifest, visible in itself. Martin
Heidegger devotes a chapter to it in Being
and Time. He elaborates further:
An entity can show itself from itself in many ways [von ihm
selbst her], depending in each case on the kind of access we have to it. Indeed
it is even possible for an entity to show itself which in itself it is not. When it shows itself in this way,
[“sieht”… “so aus wie”…] it “looks like something or other…” This kind of
showing-itself is what we call “seeming”
[Scheinen]. Thus in Greek too the expression (“phenomenon”) signifies that
which looks like something, that which is ‘semblant,’ ‘semblance’ [das
Scheinbare,” der “Schein”].
Again, the paradox of revelation by concealment.
There are occasions in which, to bring something to view, to make something
manifest, apparent, we must conceal it by putting something in front of it.
This, essentially, is the true function of comparison, to say something is
“like” something. We see what these things have in common, and what they do not
have in common.
The principle of comparison is crucial to a deeper
understanding of Michel Deguy’s work. The French word ‘comme’ (the English
equivalent of ‘like’ or ‘as if’) is pivotal, operates a “pivotal reciprocity,”
as Deguy phrases it. Derrida compares it to a circuit breaker, or light switch:
… one could be tempted to say that the interruption, let’s
say the switch or circuit breaker of the comme
will have been exhibited more and more in the clarifying machine, in the
seeing machine which a poetics is… the logic of a certain “as though” comes
along to disturb the truth, to divide the selfsame presence of the comme, to work otherness into the
assembly of resemblance and to therein slip the simulacrum or fiction, a
fiction without configuration. This movement seems to become accentuated in all
the works that follow, right where they faithfully continue to implement the
poetic thinking of the comme.
It’s as though the comme,
about which one believes too hastily that it unites, symbolizes, and promises
identification, had ceased to operate or let itself be operated. It would seem
to be operable and to produce works. It would announce the inoperable. Not by
contradicting itself but by still working in the name of the comme, about which Deguy often recalls,
expressly for example in Things of Poetry
and A Cultural Afffair (1986), that “poetry forbids violent identification,
through the comme”; or that
“comparison looks after the incomparable, the distinction of things among
themselves.”
Let’s not call it a moment in order to designate a period
and a turning point in the history of Deguy’s work or thinking, but rather a momentum (a movement, a force, a lasting
impetus) that inscribes, records, and simultaneously produces, acts, takes note
of the shape of a crease both internal and external to the comme. Internal and external like an obsession making poetry at
once chant and disenchanted. In truth it inaugurates a poetic disenchantment,
or a des-cant, a defection of the poetic chant as its rhythmized movimentum, the breathing, inspiration,
and expiration of the caesura. Where ends that which is never-ending.
I bought a copy of Comme Si Comme Ça on the Boulevard Saint Michel in Paris. Since
then, Deguy has become a compulsion. The impulse to immersion in his work
pulses, propels, pulls the attention in a momentum of smoldering foment. There
is heat. There is appliance. There is feeling. Most importantly, there is
interrogation: searching, probing, branching out. Divergence, expansion,
proliferation. And their contraries: compression, condensation, distillation.
Enchantment and disenchantment.
Deguy’s influences are names generally connected
with modernist and postmodernist poetry, in France and the United States:
Baudelaire, Nerval, Rimbaud, Ducasse, Mallarmé. There are touches of
surrealism, but Deguy’s poetry always remains engaged with actual, raw
experience, the complexities and abrasions of external reality, the so-called
“everyday.” Yet, strangely, although it avoids
the phantasmagoric manias of the surrealists and opens itself with breathtaking
frankness to some of life’s more painful and intimate experiences, Deguy’s
poetry does not degenerate into the anecdotal, one-dimensional work more apt to
be found in the New Yorker or read by
Garrison Keillor on NPR. Kenneth Koch expresses this complex dynamic in the
introduction to Given Giving, a
collection of early poetry by Michel Deguy translated into English by Clayton
Eshleman:
Deguy’s
work doesn’t show the same confidence in the world of dreams, sensation, and
the unconscious. He is interested in how his predecessors wrote -
unexpected transitions, confidence in momentary sensations, willingness
to remain unclear - but not in their conclusions. The
unconscious, the irrational, isn’t the answer. The intellect or, perhaps more
precisely, intellectual disciplines, such as psychology and linguistics, come
back in his poetry. They come back as directions and as points of view and,
verbally, as part of the very texture of Deguy’s poems. They are not, however,
any more than are dreams and the unconscious, the Answer: in fact, for all
their intellectual atmosphere, Deguy’s poems suggest that, for him, if anything
is the answer it is the happy - or
distressing - confusing mixture of all the complicated
thoughts and points of view that delineate his subjects. This kind of
complexity is expressed not by a sustained lyric tone - this
is less revelation than questioning
- but by a changing surface of
tones, and kinds of language. The poem proceeds, verbally as well as
thematically, by means of hesitations, interruptions, changes. It stops, it
diverges; it often has an air of being unfinished -
even, one could say, of having gone nowhere, the way a moment goes
nowhere, a moment of perception or sensation with all its intermixture of
memories, associations, ideas.
These qualities are precisely what draw me into
Deguy’s work and provide a range of possibilities, a spectrum, for where I’d
like to take my work. Though I must say it is far from being strictly a matter
of writing and literary endeavor. It is a matter of Being, of coming into
fuller awareness with the phenomenon of being alive, animate, mortal,
vulnerable, often overwhelmed by a glut of sensation and feeling and often an
acute sense of loss and a commensurate sense of dread. Deguy has a term for
this, too, which he borrowed from Blaise Pascal. It has to do with a certain
disproportionality, of smallness, of diminution and mortality in the face of
things -
magnitudes - beyond our ability to comprehend them. “This
whole visible world,” observed Pascal,
is only an imperceptible trace in the amplitude of nature.
No idea approaches it. However much we may inflate our conceptions beyond these
imaginable spaces, we give birth only to atoms with respect to the reality of
things. In the end, the greatest perceptible sign of God’s omnipotence is that
our imagination loses itself in this thought.
Let man, returning to himself, consider what he is with
respect to what exists. Let him regard himself as lost in this remote corner of
nature, and from the little cell in which he finds himself lodged, I mean the
universe, let him learn to estimate the just value of the earth, kingdoms,
cities, and himself.
What is a man in the infinite?
But to present him with another equally astonishing prodigy,
let him examine the most delicate things he knows.
Deguy’s À ce
qui n’en finit pas (To that which does not end), is one of the most moving
collections of poetry I’ve read. It grapples with issues I find difficult in
the extreme to come to terms with, the loss of a loved one, mortality, the
pangs of solitude. À ce qui n’en finit
pas was published in 1995. It is a threnody, written shortly after the
passing of Michel Deguy’s wife of forty years, Monique. I find it remarkable
that he not only had the strength to write, but to explore his pain and this
universal sorrow with such remarkable articulation, depth, and frankness.
The work consists of short prose fragments, each a
deep reflection on the experience of loss, on the nature of existence, on
coping with the absence of a partner, and the dynamics and sometimes harsh
reality of marriage itself: “Je relate que la vie conjugagle fut contentieuse,
violente, impossible. J’ai souffert du marriage comme personne, comme beaucoup
comme tout le monde?” (“I relate that conjugal life was contentious, violent,
impossible. I suffered in marriage as anyone, as many as everyone?”).
The book is unpaginated because, Deguy remarks,
“each page, or almost, could be the first, or the umpteenth. There is no
ordinal series. Everything begins with each page; everything ends with each
page.” He had, in fact, originally wanted the book to come out as a roll, a
forever unrolling scroll of paper.
“Non-being is a euphemism,” Deguy remarks. It is
impossible to conceive of non-existence. As soon as we begin to imagine
non-existence, it recedes. It cannot be imagined. Imagining non-existence is to
give it a conceptual being. To give it a name, such as “non-being,” is to give
it an identity and mask its stark reality. “Non-being” is a term, a
philosophical abstraction, an entity of sorts. The finality of death is so
utterly beyond human imagining that its impact on the living must be filled
with something, anything, flowers, prayer, shrines, graves, tombstones. There
must be devised a substitute, a proxy, a recognition that acknowledges death as
a fact but not as a reality. Who hasn’t felt at home in a funeral home? What a
wonderful (albeit expensive) fiction.
Jean-Luc Nancy remarks on the phrase “non-being is a
euphemism” as a “mild way of speaking
that assuages, refuses to accept the crashing violence, the
dazed sense of loss, and the bitter realization that says “I know that I cannot
bring her back alive.” What he [Deguy] describes here as a “scrap of Orphic
allusiveness,” which opens his lament for the dead, or threnody, should of
course be taken to refer to both Monique and poetry too. Or rather, not to
Monique and poetry but to the one as the other. Not the one absorbing the
other, in order to prettify it or make it more touching. Not intimacy exploited
but intimacy exposed, precisely because it has
to be laid bare, and this has to happen to avoid its being poeticized. Philippe
would call this, I think - and for once he would say it in the manner of
Michel -
the intimation of intimacy. Not a poetical trafficking with death, or a
morbid trafficking with poetry. But the one as the other because the nonliving
bringing back of the past, which is infinitely over and with which the bringing
back of the past must grapple. The “euphemism,” he reminds us elsewhere, “was
invented by the Greeks to mean: to pass
over death in silence.” To restore death to its silence by speaking it,
which also means to allow death to speak amidst our human, all-too-human
silence, and to speak with its ever-fresh, ancient voice. To pass over death:
not to pass beyond it, nor to endure and maintain oneself in it, but to pass
with it, within it, on a par with its eloquent silence, if that is possible.
It is by way of Deguy’s use of the aforementioned
word ‘comme’ that he is able to give such an acute sense of presence to
alterity, the “eloquent silence” of the unknowable, its possibility as
appearance in perceptual consciousness. It is the logic of one hand touching
the other. Comparison brings the unknowable
- that which resists perception,
eludes even a thematic framework - within
perceptual range, particularly when the objects of our consciousness are
altered, inverted, converted, reconstructed. “Death,” remarked Deguy in a piece
titled “// et ratures,” “is that ‘unknowable,’ immeasurable thing whose event
comes to transform all life, perhaps ‘giving all things the status of figure.’”
It is a haunting. An obsession. Deguy elaborates further:
We are haunted, to
pick up on that saying by Mallarmé, which is also a saying by Merleau-Ponty
(one of those imaginatively charged terms whereby philosophy gets
ventriloquized by poetry); obsession: an intimate, cureless mode of the
two-in-one relation… if at every point in language “the union,” the sound-sense
crease has already always occurred. To this obsession, which is indivisibly
“obsession with the world" in its figures or “rich postulates enciphered”
(Mallarmé), poetry devotes itself, tearing language away from this usage that lessens it through
univocalities, but also dialectics that restrains play itself.
Deguy is a prolific writer, but only two of his
books have been translated into English thus far: the aforementioned Given Giving: Selected Poems of Michel Deguy,
translated by Clayton Eshleman and with an introduction by Kenneth Koch,
published by the University of California Press in 1984, and Recumbents, a translation by Wilson
Baldridge of Gisants: Poèmes, first
published in 1985 by Editions Gallimard. Recumbents
(published by Wesleyan University Press), includes a substantial essay on
Michel Deguy by Jacques Derrida, “How to Name.”
