Dupin's Parmenidean Echoes

un Parménide à pas comptés, dans le sable

Jacques Dupin, Échancré

If, as Yves Charnet notes, there is an impressive coherence to the poetic itinerary of Jacques Dupin, ¹ then it is of interest to us not only to examine certain recurrent features of his work as many have done, ² but also to explore links to those thinkers whose ideas furnish frameworks through which the poet's work may be apprehended. As one of only a few critics to highlight the connection with the pre-Socratics, John E. Jackson draws a link from Dupin to Heraclitus. ³ Jackson explores the various configurations of the subject position of the poetic persona in relationship to reality as it is perceived as being external to the self. It is by tracing throughout the poet's œuvre a propensity to project an image of reality from the vantage point of a changing subjectivity—which he refers to as "le principe de contradiction" (56)—that Jackson reads Dupin through a Heraclitean lens. With his vision of the cosmic order as one based on flux, ceaseless change, and strife, Heraclitus foregrounds the tensions between grasping the static essence of reality and, paradoxically, its varied and subjective experience, tensions which Jackson identifies as fueling Dupin's headlong rush to court the subjective self's other. Because the impulse of Dupin's poetry is so decisively oriented around the dynamic and volatile experience of reality, it is tempting to privilege the restlessly transforming dimension of the equation to the exclusion of its counterbalancing force—the conceptual abstraction of reality's being.

On two occasions in Dupin's Échancré, however, the name "Parménide" arises in the context of change, and its occurrences suggest some relevance to the poetic endeavor. Both instances occur in successive segments of "Une écharde", a piece in which the poetic voice, discomposed and wandering, speaks of the necessity of writing in the face of the subjective self's ignorance of what to write: "écrire à l'écart le rien qui sait, qui comprend tout. être mort pour ça. pour écrire, avec le souffle qui me traverse et qui vient d'ailleurs, l'inutile et le nécessaire, ce qui vient d'ailleurs, ce qui va plus loin" (É 112). Framed by epistemological uncertainty and yet with the undeniable sense of something which is there and which crosses the perceiving presence and moves it to writing, the poet invokes Parmenides:

Parménide, pourquoi. avec. malgré. un désœuvrement augural, et la vibration, le miroitement de l'ouverture. de la tranchée. la tendresse de la pensée, l'injonction. l'ouverture est fraternelle, l'écriture noire. est noire, est mouvement de l'autre à soi, corbeille d'oranges, offrande parodique, glace et révélation de la vivacité ou de l'improvisation d'un geste, d'un regard, d'un pas, précédé de sa volte imaginaire, de sa disparition répétitive . . . maîtrisant à distance la parcelle de l'éclatement de tout, sans autre lieu que le corps soulevé, allant dans l'air, croisant les nuages. (É 124)

And in the very next section we read of "un Parménide à pas comptés, dans le sable . . . comme si personne ne pouvait l'atteindre, ni l'entendre, ni jamais" (É 125). Like the collection's titular image of a splinter, the poet's brief references to Parmenides, seemingly negligible yet of potentially considerable import, hint at a network of associations as of yet unexplored. Consequently, just as Jackson effectively reads Dupin in light of one Greek philosopher, so might we consider the essential, ontological aspect of his work in the light of this other pre-Socratic thinker.

Initial reaction might discourage our entertaining a link between Dupin and Parmenides. After all, this Greek philosopher who proposes the existence of being argues that existence is capable of being grasped by reason. And, as some have done, it may be argued that the poetry of Dupin, highly intuitive and restless, resonates more immediately with the Heraclitean...