Palimpsests of the Real in Recent French Poetry (review)

Glenn Fetzer's eleven essays on six contemporary French poets embrace the canonical (Dupin, du Bouchet, Guillevic) and the more recently consecrated (Jean-Louis Chrétien, Emmanuel Hocquard, Céline Zins). Whilst several of the chapters have appeared in article form, their contiguity here amplifies philosophical resonances that range from the Pre-Socratics through Lucretius to Bergson, Wittgenstein and Levinas. The opening essay, on Dupin, focuses attention on neglected or potential parallels with Parmenides in order to complement Heraclitean readings. Mindful of the epistemological limitations of a strictly Parmenidean reading, Fetzer takes forward a broader study of permanence and the desire for rootedness, the bounded transcendent and the positing of alternatives in the pursuit of what-is. He moves on to chart the reciprocity of call and response in Chrétien's writing, attentive to Pre-Socratic and Neoplatonic resonances. Of particular interest here is the focus on Chrétien's cosmology (night as the analogue of Levinas's Other) and on his articulation of corporeality as mediation between self and the real. Memory and forgetfulness, and their tendency to melt together in the experience of recollection, are explored through Chrétien's debt to Philo of Alexandria. Reading Guillevic, Fetzer challenges critical commonplaces and stresses a cerebral, more 'sacred' dimension. First, he draws out analogies between the thought of Anaximander, particularly in the dyadic relationship of affirmation and speculation, of the thing and its idea, and of self and object. However, Guillevic's poetic vision resists dyadic containment, and figures of the wall and the partition invoke a desire for correspondence and rapprochement, and the yearning in Guillevic's writing to fill the space between real and ideal. A second essay, on Euclidiennes (1967), considers the privileging of the sacred in the context of the everyday, focusing on the coincidence of geometry and subjectivity, as the mathematical materialist imprints his figurations with desire, affect, the spiritual and a sense of time. Fetzer registers echoes of Heraclitus in Céline Zins's L'Arbre et la glycine (1992), and foregrounds her pliant approach to antinomies as a means of articulating the universal. A second essay, on the body in Adamah (1988), stresses the Heraclitean desire for unity sought in ambiguity and fracture. Tracing analogies between du Bouchet and Anaximenes, Fetzer explores the creative significance of air and its relation to the (pencil) stroke in the recent collection D'un trait qui figure et défigure, and draws attention to the less prominent, but parallel evocation of density and substance, particularly in Peinture. The second essay on du Bouchet, while making some intriguing points on the gaze and the eye linked to Bergson, seems to contradict the first (pp. 114, 129) as to whether air is nothingness or not nothingness. Fetzer traces a fascinating analogy between Lucretius' colour theory and Hocquard's evocation of the particular, of order and of surface. These thematic readings are pursued with clarity and sensitivity. The restrained footnote freight indicates a substratum of robust scholarship, but the philosophical touch is light. Critical points might have benefitted from more developed discussion, but base coverage is limited by the slim format. One can hope that Fetzer will undertake a more ample project which situates these writers in the broader twentieth-century tradition of poetry's interaction with philosophy.