‘Et que faut-il penser | De ces pommes jaunes?’: An Ecocritical Reading of Yves Bonnefoy’s Punctual Colour Work

This article investigates how Yves Bonnefoy uses the white canvas of snow to experiment with punctual dashes of colour in the collection Début et fin de la neige (1991). Reading these poems alongside two of the poet’s essays on painting, I consider how Bonnefoy’s critical and poetic writings question the power that colour has to excite but also to resist the linguistic imagination. Colour asserts its dynamic and processual nature in these essays and poems, making the poet sense the kinetic nature of material existence and the contingency of human perception. I probe how this experience throws the poet’s conception of subjectivity into crisis, undermining his notion of the distinct value of human life. I explore how this crisis also galvanizes new conceptions of identity, however, as colour elicits a ‘world-centred’ rather than a ‘self-centred approach to viewing’ (Michael Taussig). I investigate how this immersive gaze re-awakens the poet’s sense of wonder at the material world, alerting him to the porous or ‘ambient’ nature of his own subjectivity, making him feel the diverse ways in which he is enmeshed in a dynamic material world and intimately exposed to its unpredictable currents of agency and affect.