Poetic Becomings: Studies in Contemporary French Literature by Jérôme Game (review)

What happens to the poetic subject after deconstruction? How does poetry deconstruct the self? What does the deconstructed self do to poetry? And how can the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze help us examine these questions? Such are the concerns addressed by Jérôme Game in Poetic Becomings: Studies in Contemporary French Literature, a rich and stimulating study of four writers, Christian Prigent, Dominique Fourcade, Olivier Cadiot, and Hubert Lucot. These are forerunners of a generation of poets in France, who—like Baudelaire before them—are not so much engaged in a redefinition of poetry, as they are in its "un-definition," in its liberation from the shackles of Aristotelian didactism. For instance, "poetry may now be written in metered verse as well as in prose, that is to say in sentences, paragraphs, chapters" writes Game (16). Poetry can even move outside the book, one might add, as does Game's own poetry, but this is another study. Game concentrates here on pioneering writers who are particularly relevant to the question of the poetic subject and its paradigmatic shift in current French poetry. He describes how crucial the debate on subjectivity is in contemporary French writing, and in particular how wide-ranging its criticism of the very idea of subjectivity. His aim is to show how Deleuze's philosophy and theory of literature can enlighten one's reading of these key writers, even if they themselves are not necessarily influenced by Deleuze. Game delves deeply into his subject, but always with great clarity, explaining the key concepts every inch of the way: "I call poetic becoming this poetic subject whose precariousness is a transcendental feature rather than a theme or a posture, and whose form is that of a (de-) subjectifying process carried out by linguistic signs" (52).

Poetic Becomings is very much a book of close readings and analyses rather than a literary history (which it does not claim to be). However, the book is always entertaining, and sufficiently contextualized for readers to acquire a good general grasp of the early period of poststructuralist writing in France. Game begins with Prigent's work, showing how his poetry presents human existence as primarily bodily. The deconstruction of being is therefore accomplished through anatomy, which is either shown undone with skin or flesh removed, or is made only precariously human through a process of becoming animal. Game argues that Prigent's work is not simply scatological or simplistically Rabelaisian, but that "[i]t is an ontology of the in-between, a linguistic anatomy of the Body-without-organs. In it, the self is pure becoming" (106). The following chapter is a study of Fourcade's rhizomatic poetics, a poetics of the line and the surface, of horizontality, where the integrity of the self is compromised by a play with lines and sentences and the rhythmic dynamics of language. Game also convincingly analyzes the deconstruction of self at play in Cadiot's Futur, Ancien, Fugitif, a landmark piece of contemporary French literature playing on the story of Robinson Crusoe and the theme of the castaway. This Robinson is a rather uncertain being; he is first described dealing with the difficulties of life on a deserted island, but then as a psychiatric patient on a hospital ward. There, the truth of his past on the island is put in doubt. Game argues that the protagonist's sense of self is destroyed by the suggestion that his narrative could have been unreal. Indeed, if this were the case, it would have been composed by an unreal self and would be the work of a schizophrenic. But, suggests Game, what matters here is not so much whether this Robinson's experience really happened, as the creation by Cadiot of that sense of a dismantlement of the self, by which we have a character narrating his story on and in his own deconstructed self. This sense of dismantlement is also made visible in the stuttering narrative. Game...