La Langue, la poésie: essais sur la poésie française contemporaine by Jean-Jacques Thomas (review)

B o o k R ev iew s Jean-Jacques Thomas. L a L a n g u e , l a p o é s ie : e s s a is s u r l a p o é s ie f r a n ç a is e c o n t e m ­ p o r a in e . Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1989. Pp. 189. Through an incisive functional approach to contemporary French poetry, Jean-Jacques Thomas elucidates the poetic text as a distinct manipulation of language and linguistic device. Dividing his study into three main sections, he investigates initially the demise of mimetic concern for a reality external to the workings of the text in its own right, and pur­ sues thereafter the role of the “ intertexte” whereby present writing feeds mnemonically upon past writing and text becomes the reorganized and developed product of previous textual resource. In the final section of the book, he uses the term “ techno-ludique” to describe poetic practice that combines an acquired understanding of how language works with a zest for rhythmical play, modular experimentation and controlled innovation. The result is a pleasing diversity of enquiry and example that offers renewed insight into poets and movements both familiar and less familiar (for example, Goll and Leiris, Dada and Oulipo), while drawing upon a linguistic appreciation finely attuned to the specifics of very different writings. The resistant nature of the contemporary poetic text is broken down through a meticulous analysis of its constituent parts and through the consciousness that, each time, the fundamental properties of language—phonological, morphological, seman­ tic, lexical, syntactic—are being redistributed on the page and brought into play anew. To Michel Deguy’s charge that language is too serious an affair to be entrusted solely to the linguists, Thomas replies that poetry is too serious an affair to be left solely to the poets (160). Certainly, the analytical detail of La Langue, la poésie demonstrates the efficacy of linguistic interrogation within the realm of a writing often characterized as cerebral and obscure. It also raises some questions. If the text is primarily self-referential to the extent that it is ultimately its own end, how is the reader to relate contemporary poetic practice to the surrounding reality in which writing takes place? If the work of a poet such as Jacques Roubaud confirms the definition of a text as “ un système fini et fonctionnellement autonome, gouverné par des lois sous-jacentes propres toujours susceptibles d’être identifiées et réécrites” (155), what of such poets as Yves Bonnefoy who struggle, perhaps vainly but nevertheless insistently, to wrest from language and its perceived closure an immediate if provisional rapport with a world at once fragile and fleeting? Is not Bonnefoy’s “ présence” the paradoxical search through language for that which lies ever beyond language, this as opposed to the belying process that Thomas describes: “ la généra­ tion d’un discours figuratif, image de littérature, se faisant passer pour présence de réel” (51)? Moreover, while Thomas finds fault with the Oulipo movement in that it espouses a deficient linguistic methodology, it must be asked if this practice would really be bettered as poetry from further knowledge of linguistics. In truth, Thomas’ analysis places emphasis less on a semantic whole than on an attempt at exhaustive formal play within the finite and closed system of language. The meaning of the poem is reduced to the very mechanics of its mode of production and furnishes only another example of language use, of language that can be used up: Thomas describes “ une volonté affirmée d’épuisement de la matière ver­ bale et des régies combinatoires” (175). Clearly, then, the tendencies which this book meticulously identifies must be considered within a larger realm of contemporary poetic endeavor and debate. Though coherently conceived, the book does suffer from quite frequent typographical errors which hinder at times immediate comprehension and detract from otherwise stimu­ lating analysis. For example, Thomas’ remarks on the poem “ Le change 21” (156-157) are clouded by lack of continuity of sentence structure, by grammatical omission, by a mis­ quote and...