Templa serena: Lucrèce au miroir de Francis Ponge by Sylvie Ballestra-Puech (review)

This exhaustively researched study of the relationship between the writings of Francis Ponge and the poem De natura rerum by Lucretius (as well as with Epicurean thought on a larger scale) sets itself three ambitious tasks, and it is to the author’s credit that she has been able to accomplish two of them so thoroughly, and in well-developed, lucid prose. Sylvie Ballestra-Puech’s global project is, as she states, ‘lire Lucrèce avec Ponge et réciproquement, pour tenter d’appréhender quelle sorte de “De natura rerum” Ponge nous révèle’ (p. 11). Her first step towards this goal is to provide a review of the extensive literature on the implicit relationship between Epicurean physics and the views of language expressed in both Lucretius’s and Ponge’s work both explicitly and through their poetic style. Ballestra-Puech handles this with ease, fleshing out the existing literature with her own astute close readings to show a homology between atoms and letters, the continuity between the physical world and the text, and the materiality and fluidity of both for the poets under discussion. She next presents us with a persuasive narrative of the evolution of Ponge’s explicit engagement with Lucretius through the influence of two main figures: the author’s friend Bernard Groethuysen and Dr Benjamin-Joseph Logre, author of L’Anxiété de Lucrèce. She describes how the latter, with his psychopathological reading of Lucretius’s poem — and especially his comparison of the poet to Ponge’s detested Pascal — provoked a crisis for Ponge himself, forcing him to examine and explicitly defend his relationship to the Latin poet. Again, these chapters are both well researched and supplemented with the author’s own close reading, tracing references to Ponge’s response to Logre throughout the poet’s latter work. If anything, however, the concentration on this turning point narrows the focus of the book’s final movement — a discussion of the essay ‘Braque, ou, Un méditatif à l’œuvre’ — and results in leaving the incredible depth of this essay and its complex relationship to Epicurean ethics unexplored. While Ballestra-Puech claims in the introduction that in this essay ‘Ponge nous livre le résultat de sa longue pratique de Braque et de Lucrèce qu’il fait dialoguer à travers les siècles’ (p. 14), her own analysis of that result presents a much more reactive response to Logre’s rehash of the classical Christian objection to Lucretius, one that focuses on Ponge’s positive reading of the ‘Suave mari magno’ passage of De natura rerum with which he closes the essay. This argument, while not unconvincing, ultimately does not do justice, or even devote adequate space, to the implications of the Braque essay. Although Templa serena fails to deliver completely on its own promise — that promise was perhaps more ambitious than could be accomplished in a single work—as a thorough study of the relationship between Ponge’s style and Lucretius’s physics and poetics, and as an intellectual biography of Ponge in relation to Lucretian thought, the book is both a useful and fascinating contribution to Ponge studies.