Bernard Noël: le corps du verbe (review)

This volume brings together essays by the most important critics of Bernard Noël's work, and it achieves coherence and thoroughness. Alongside a small number of contributions that are as much poetic response as scholarly assessment, there are many convincing arguments that will enrich the reading of Noël by all students and researchers of his work. The theme of the body has proved specific enough to allow a sense of Noël's particular interrelation of the physical, the linguistic and the political to emerge. It is also broad enough to encompass the diversity of Noël's half-century of meticulous thought, expressed in a range of formats that itself questions definitions of the poetic, while allowing space for varying critical approaches from the contributors. Those approaches include Andrew Rothwell's detailed analysis of the relationship between the body and the acts of looking and thinking, the tracing by Anne Malaprade of the skin as a guiding thread in Noël's poetry and prose, and Hugues Marchal's examination of Noël's materialism as a writing of the body, rather than about it. The volume demonstrates that Noël's texts cannot be easily classified by genre or subject matter, and together they show that he is a writer for whom body and mind, breathing and looking, writing and engaging in the world are inseparable. In his ambitious conclusion, Scotto does not summarise the essays. Instead, he brings them together in his reading of Noël's work as attempting not to represent what is unrepresentable, but rather to present unrepresentability itself. Therefore the communication of which Noël dreams, according to Scotto, is corporeal rather than expressive (p. 283). The volume includes two further contributions: previously unpublished texts by Noël himself, whose presence reinforces the extent to which scholarship on him is engaged in an ongoing encounter with his work, and the final dossier compiled by Jean Frémon. This sets out the circumstances of Noël's prosecution for 'outrage aux bonnes mœurs' for Le Château de Céne. The dossier includes a long list of responses, by writers and other figures in the arts, academe and public life who had agreed to support Noël, to questions about literature and censorship. Reproduced with little interpretation, the documents reveal the importance of Noël's long resistance to what he names 'la sensure' in modern culture: not overt censorship, 'la sensure' controls and stifles thought by removing nuance from the meanings of images and words. The essays in this volume represent a significant contribution to our understanding of Noël's vigilant attention to the ways in which we encounter the world, attention which permits him to produce an experience of reading that is open to ambiguity and change, and is corporeal even as it is intellectual.