“Le Visage Triomphant”: The Poetry of Andrée Chedid

“Le Visage Triomphant” : The Poetry of Andrée Chedid Richard Stamelman Seul le visage est notre royaume, Son jour traverse nos nuits. —Andrée Chedid, “ Seul, le visage” I N A WORLD WHERE UNCERTAINTY DOMINATES, knowl­ edge is difficult to gain, change perpetual, and truth unascertainable , the simplest realities become mysteries and the most common, everyday phenomena open to question. And so about the most evident, most visible, most simple, most vulnerable, naked, and exposed of human forms we must ask, “ What is a face?” What is this arrangement of eyes, nose, mouth, ears, forehead, so protean in its gestures, so ephemeral in its manifestations, that expresses itself with and without words, that opens itself to or masks itself from the world, that remains at once obsessively near and hauntingly distant? How does it inhabit and occupy the space through which it moves? Does it exist as a fullness or an emptiness, as a plenitude or a void, as presence or absence? How do I perceive it, address it, or speak to it in its openness or guardedness, in its familiarity or strangeness? What chords of feeling and thought, what strings of repulsion and attraction, does it stir within me? What relation­ ship does the face have to language? How does it speak itself? Can I ever know the face of the other, or participate in its world, or take possession of its being, or must I accept the irreducible otherness and unseizability of this face, which exists beyond intentionality, appropriation, assimila­ tion, thematization, possession, and the embrace of thought and knowl­ edge? 1 How can I see or understand or even remember the intricately subtle gestures of a face that is fundamentally unrepresentable, that no image or figure can seize, because it is continuously exterior to my con­ sciousness and beyond the power of my vision?2Into what kind of dia­ logue or exchange or social contact with the other’s face may I enter? How does it summon me to respond, to leave the protected harbor of the self in order to venture out into a world that is always foreign, always other? In its call or appeal, what demands, what self-denying responses and responsibilities, does it elicit from me, what doubt does it cast on my VOL. XXXII, NO. 2 31 L ’E s pr it C r éa teu r self and my identity? And what social and ethical relationship, what dia­ logue between self and other, is mediated by this singular confrontation of two faces—the face-à-face, the vis-à-vis—that constitutes the mystery of encounter itself. As Emmanuel Lévinas, the philosopher of alterity and of that relation of otherness that stands beyond being (that is “ autrement qu’être” ) writes, the face is “ le présupposé de toutes les relations humaines,” although for him le visage is an intangible reality, more idea than person, more abstraction than image, more epiphany than object of perception.3It establishes the fundamentally ethical nature of existence, for, as he writes, “ Le face-à-face demeure situation ultime” (Totalité et infini, p. 53). The face is, for Lévinas, an incarnation—in the immediate moment, in the here-and-now of existence—of the other in all its unseizable presence as person, in all its mysterious vulnerability as human being, in all its irreducible nakedness as that which no idea, no form, no image can encompass.4 If Lévinas is the philosopher of le visage in the twentieth century, then the poet of le visage is Andrée Chedid. Born in Cairo in 1921 of Egyptian and Lebanese descent, Chedid has resided in Paris since 1946. The author of several novels, plays, short stories, essays, children’s books, and two large retrospective collections of poetry—Textes pour un poème (1949-1970) and Poèmes pour un texte (1970-1991)—Chedid is a poet of presence and passage, phenomena of mortal existence that have found expression in much contemporary French poetry (that of Yves Bonnefoy, Philippe Jaccottet, Pierre-Albert Jourdan, Jacques Dupin, André du Bouchet, and Jacques Roubaud, to name only a few).5She is also a poet of loss and absence, of what might be called...