"Un manquement comme bien": The unsaid as poetic resource in Heather Dohollau

[Errata]

Heather Dohollau (born 1925) is the author of twelve volumes of poetry, one novel and one collection of essays, all published in French: her adoptive writing language since 1966, after she moved to France as a young woman. She belongs to the rare women poets in French since the Renaissance to have received international critical attention in the form of several book-length publications, as well as two international colloquia, one of which took place in Cerisy-la-Salle, and one film, La promesse des mots.¹ Dohollau has made an important and distinctive contribution to issues central to postwar French poetry: those of place, memory, exiles and returns, poetry's dialogue with the visual arts and philosophy, formal transitionality. Her life trajectory has been marked by successive losses and exiles: having lost her mother and left Britain as a young woman, she later had to leave the small island off the north Breton coast, Bréhat, where for twenty years she led an insular or semi-insular life, and where two of her daughters are buried. Yet in her poems absence, without losing its emotional charge, finds a form of redemption: "[c]e qui nous appartient ne peut être perdu, simplement détruit".² Poetry can give a place and a degree of embodiment to what is no more and what could have been, not by striking elegiac chords, but by cultivating a rich and protean relation with what eludes words.

In this philosophically significant endeavour, Dohollau's language change plays a crucial role. In 1966, she elected her "daughter tongue", as she calls French, as her main poetic language. This choice provided her with a liminal stance which became the foundation of her poetics. Not only is she a bilingual poet, but she has almost always lived in linguistically dual areas (Wales, Brittany). The awareness of this duality, her own language change and her practice of translation have enabled her to cultivate a certain distance, or resistance, which she calls "difficulty" in her rapport to words. Thus, Dohollau is uniquely placed to contribute to the recent reassessments of language undertaken in philosophy and translation studies. She works with, not against, the limits of language as she sets out to explore the grey areas between words and what remains inarticulated. This purpose finds expression in an epigraph where she quotes André du Bouchet:

De cette langue à l'autre

Quelquefois sera touché au passage ce qui va hors de l'une et de l'autre³

This essay explores the different manifestations of that which goes out of languages, and the different poetic strategies deployed to let it appear within a range of texts. First, I examine what eludes words because it eludes memory, or what Dohollau calls "La source intarrissable [sic] de l'oubli".⁴ I then turn to the poem's refusal of closure and the risks of that venture: the idea that "[l]e poète vit de sa mort".⁵ My last two sections examine the role of the unsaid as poetic resource and its embodiment within the textual space, as areas of unprinted whiteness. Electing "un manquement comme bien", Dohollau's poetics enacts her motto: "pour garder l'impossible intact"—a fragment from La Venelle des portes which her late friend Derrida once inscribed into a book which he sent to her.⁶

1. "La source intarrissable [sic] de l'oubli"

The first "manquement" I shall investigate is that of oubli. Dohollau claims a positive value for this word, identifying it as the very substance of memory in the title "Mémoire d'oubli".⁷ Associated with birth ("l'oubli est critère de naissance"),⁸ it even becomes a source of fulfilment in lines such as "nous comblant d'oubli" and "la source/ intarrissable [sic]/de l'oubli", or in the idea of "un talisman/dont le manque me réveille soudain/et me pénètre d'oubli".⁹ This awakening to an absence that makes itself feel present enables Dohollau to redefine oubli as a potential interface with the past. Indeed, we...