La Voix et le geste: André Frénaud et ses peintres (review)

The contribution of painting and individual painters to the development of modern French poetic practice, and in particular to the poetics of the book, is one for which Yves Peyré's Peinture et poésie: le dialogue par le livre (Gallimard, 2001) makes the most substantial existing case. The present work explores the idea of dialogue central to that general survey in considering an important and relatively inaccessible dimension of a major individual poetic œuvre. It comprises fifteen essay-length presentations of André Frénaud's 'principal' collaborative projects which, taken together, establish both the importance of those projects for an understanding of Frénaud's poetic work and work processes, and the rich and diverse aesthetic potential of the collaboratively produced books to which they gave rise.

The number of such projects aside, there is something both appropriate and challenging to the basic premise of the livre de dialogue for a poetic voice already fundamentally dialogical. Frénaud's poetics characteristically reveals, 'par son mouvement même, l'identité de l'identité et de la non-identité' (Bernard Pingaud, 'Préface', Il n'y a pas de paradis (Gallimard, 1967, p. 12)), in what Daniel Leuwers (contrasting him with Char and Guillevic, two other poets born in 1907) has called 'le chassé-croisé des voix antagonistes, qui caractérise l'œuvre' (Europe, 734-35 (1990), p. 9). Some of the readings here are explicit on the complexity of the dialogical template as it relates to Frénaud's collaborations, the resultant book becoming multiply dialogical 'jusqu'au vertige' (Stéphanie Thonnerieux, on La Femme de ma vie, done with Jean Fautrier). Christian Doumet, writing on the collaboration with Ubac, questions the very possibility of reading the products of such 'marriages'. Other contributions, such as that of Jean-Marie Gleize on the collaboration with Alechinsky, problematize discourses of the artistic gesture. Perhaps the dominant effort on view is, however, that of envisaging each book as a complex unity and of deriving meanings in terms of that postulated unity — a position well-grounded in the existence of the book-object, of which there are many detailed and tantalizing descriptions in this volume. Each of the commentaries here could have served as prefaces or accompaniments to the collaborative work to which they refer. Detached from those works, they are required to establish their validity otherwise. Jean-Yves Debreuille develops an editorial position which is both prudent and creative. The high-quality colour reproduction of representative plates or pages from each commented work adequately addresses the problem of visual quotation, while never attempting to mask the secondarity of the volume to its chosen, complex objects. Each contribution is conceived of as a construction of the supplementation of meaning brought about in the contact between two artistic practices. This construction is in turn thought to pre-figure a readerly experience, itself analogous to that of the artistic process — inviting us to enter into 'l'oscillation de l'artiste, dont chaque livre porte témoignage' (p. 11). Debreuille's argumentation sits well with the idea of Frénaud's livres de dialogue as amplifications of a multiplicity observable in his unaccompanied work. Interestingly, the collaborations are shown to occur frequently at an intermediate stage in Frenaud's creative process — his poetic texts, generally reworked, reclaim their autonomy before a wider subsequent readership. This volume, a multi-layered invitation to dialogue, re-opens the book on those texts also.