Mémoire de la mémoire: Jacques Roubaud et la lyrique médiévale (review)

This book, adding to a number of other recent publications on Jacques Roubaud (including Jean-François Puff's own extended dialogue with him), is a sign that the poet is finally beginning to receive the attention and recognition he merits. It is a wide-ranging study that seeks to offer a comprehensive reading of Roubaud's work in the light of the troubadour lyric, or trobar. The poet has repeatedly emphasized how much he loves and admires the troubadours and how important an inspiration they represent for him. The book underpins its documentation of the ways in which he draws on their heritage with two main theses. It argues that Roubaud's constant concern with renewing poetic forms can be traced back to the inventiveness of poetry in the High Middle Ages, as evidenced in the richness and diversity of the canso. In addition, it claims that the motive force of his creation is the very same principle that found expression in the troubadour tradition, namely amors: for Puff, Roubaud echoes medieval lyricists specifically in that his œuvre presents a poetics of love. To develop these theses the author returns not only to Roubaud's Occitan sources, but to numerous other precursors belonging to very different traditions, whose legacy he identifies as actively at work in Roubaud's text: Averroès, Cavalcanti, Dante, Petrarch, Aristotle, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Ono no Komachi, not to mention more recent figures such as the Surrealists (especially Aragon and Desnos), or his Oulipian co-travellers Perec and Queneau. Notwithstanding the erudition thus displayed, the strength of the book lies above all in its detailed consideration of the links between Roubaud and the troubadours, notably Raimbaut d'Orange, Arnaut Daniel, and Bernart Marti, principally because these are the points at which the author engages most deeply and cogently with Roubaud's own poems. Despite Puff's regret that the majority of critical attention hitherto paid to Roubaud has focused on his prose rather than his poetry, his book shares somewhat the very tendency he deplores, devoting as much if not more space to the paraphrase or 'synthèse commentée' (p. 258) of Roubaud's theoretico-critical texts such as La Fleur inverse or La Vieillesse d'Alexandre as to textual analysis of the poetry; in effect, it is not until page 174 that the reader has the pleasure of a detailed consideration of one of Roubaud's poems. Similarly, clearly motivated (if unnecessarily, in my view) by the need to make the work 'intelligible', Puff allows himself to be diverted too often from his main purpose by offering a lengthy summary or 'exposé détaillé' (p. 268) of a conceptual framework, such as Lusson's 'Théorie du Rythme Abstrait', for example, or the via negativa. Crisper editing would have made the book considerably more concise and would have better enabled the reader to grasp the originality of the contribution it undoubtedly makes to our understanding of Roubaud. It is to be welcomed as a worthwhile and timely contribution to the study of a poet increasingly acknowledged as one of the most important voices in recent French writing.