Strands of Utopia: Spaces of Poetic Work in Twentieth-Century France (review)

This study attempts to outline the poetic within the discursive system of twentieth-century French literature by confronting that practice with the complex theoretical concept of utopia. Drawing upon the oeuvres of Victor Segalen (1878-1919), René Daumal (1908-44), and Yves Bonnefoy (b. 1923), it traces poetic work along the social and textual axes of what is argued to be a sustained and radically inclusive utopian practice within the literary field. In all, Michael Kelly's study encourages revised understandings of both the poetic and the utopian in the modern French literary context.

Strands of Utopia: Spaces of Poetic Work in Twentieth-Century France is an attempt to come to terms with a significant cultural reality: an evolving continuity of French poetic practice throughout the twentieth century as one committed to the principle and significance of its own difference. In structuring and pursuing that attempt it draws heavily upon the multidimensional theoretical resources of utopia. Utopia designates a complex tension within poetic work, that is, between the energies of realization, construction, imposition, and those of de-realization, negation, escape.

The organizational principle of the study is thus that of the division of space into three categories—social, physical, and textual. The general parts into which the study is divided correspond to these three distinct "strands of utopia." Arguing in the first two chapters for the importance of space and the problem of the poetic, the study develops its argument in the three subsequent chapters with reference to three major oeuvres by contemporary French poets. The character of poetry in continuous renewal is argued to exemplify a utopian dynamic traceable across French contemporary poetry.

Kelly suggests that just as the utopian illuminates the poetic, so too does the poetic have important implications for attempts to reflect upon utopia. The study argues for the richness of an idea of utopia as a form of creative hope, within a context of disenchantment, and attempts to relate a modern practice of poetic writing to utopia as it evolved within the twentieth century. Kelly's discussion does not ally itself with a particular critical discourse. Rather, through the theoretical resource of utopia and the spatial divisions to which it gives rise, it attempts to do justice to the idea that the poetic text is validly open to many approaches (phenomenological, psychoanalytic, sociological, and onto-philosophical, among others). Kelly argues convincingly that these, rather than disqualifying one another, potentially constitute sources of both mutual enrichment and qualification. None ultimately abolishes the utopian aspect of the poetic.

Kelly's contribution opens with a sustained, highly theoretical meditation upon the value of the literary and moves on to a careful ordering of the place of poetry. However, for many twentieth-century French thinkers of the literary there is a sense that poetry, rather than a locus of difference, constitutes something of an inconsequential pursuit. Strands of Utopia provides a welcome and valuable addition to the perhaps still limited catalog of utopian and French poetry studies.

Strands of Utopia is concerned with the notion of poetic work and with the concept of utopia (Thomas More, Heidegger, Bloch, Mannheim). This relation of utopia against ideology was reconsidered almost half a century ago by Paul Ricoeur in a series of Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. For Ricoeur, utopia requires to be understood not as a genre but as being of the order of a rhetorical position—emergent in relation to its "dominant" other. Utopia is thus used to characterize the dynamic element of a dialectical entity. Ricoeur reflects upon the ambiguous usage of utopian to qualify certain discourses to suggest the possible or lack of realism. What this requires us to clarify, in Ricoeur's view, is a pragmatic essence of the utopian, which emerges at odds with a dominant discourse and takes its identity from this difference. It is this difference that may be thought as grounding the textual reality of the...