Following Generation

Les Colchiques [Autumn Crocuses]

GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE

Translated into English by Oliver Bernard

Le pré est vénéneux mais joli en automne	The meadow is poisonous but pretty in the autumn
Les vaches y paissant	The cows that graze there
Lentement s’empoisonnent	Are slowly poisoned
Le colchique couleur de cerne et de lilas	Meadow-saffron the colour of lilac and of shadows
Y fleurit tes yeux sont comme cette fleur-la	Under the eyes grows there your eyes are like those flowers
Violâtres comme leur cerne et comme cet automne	Mauve as their shadows and mauve as this autumn
Et ma vie pour tes yeux lentement s’empoisonne	And for your eyes’ sake my life is slowly poisoned
Les enfants de l’école viennent avec fracas	Children from school come with their commotion
Vêtus de hoquetons et jouant de l’harmonica	Dressed in smocks and playing the mouth-organ
Ils ceuillent les colchiques qui sont comme des mères	Picking autumn crocuses which are like their mothers
Filles de leurs filles et sont couleur de tes paupières	Daughters of their daughters and the colour of your eyelids
Qui battent comme les fleurs bat-tent au vent dément	Which flutter like flowers in the mad breeze blown
Le gardien du troupeau chante tout doucement	The cowherd sings softly to him-self all alone
Tandis que lentes et meuglant les vaches abandonnent	While slow moving lowing the cows leave behind them
Pour toujours ce grand pré mal fleuri par l’automne	Forever this great meadow ill flowered by the autumn1

You’re reading Autumn Crocuses, that Apollinaire poem. You didn’t notice anything special, you didn’t see anything, you passed right by it. There is, in lines 10–11, a small mystery. This mystery is held in the little phrase that runs: “autumn crocuses which are like their mothers / Daughters of their daughters.” Now admit that you’ve never asked yourself what this could really mean, these “mothers / Daughters of their daughters.” You’re going to do just that right now, you’re going to ask yourself that question now. Now? Yes, now, which is to say, afterwards.

Following in his footsteps, after him, “he” being Lévi-Strauss, one of the first to have felt the need to investigate, concerning the Autumn Crocuses, the mystery of “A Small Mythico-Literary Puzzle” (a text published in The View from Afar). Lévi-Strauss does not present a reading of Apollinaire’s entire poem, but only of this “detail that has remained enigmatic to commentators. Why does the poet equate with autumn crocuses the epithet mères filles de leurs filles (‘mothers daughters of their daughters’)?”² You’re about to discover this enigma, after Lévi-Strauss.

You are, we are, part of the “generation following” structuralism. The “generation following” structuralism, its “following generation,” means first of all the descendants, the inheritors, the sons and daughters. Next it means the process of education (formation), of engendering, of constituting the following itself, the form of posterity. “Following generation” invites a reflection not only on what it might mean to inherit, but also on the shaping (formation) of the inheritance by its inheritor, on the fact that an inheritance—no matter what it may be—far from being entirely constituted, must again, in some way, be engendered, shaped, regenerated to be what it is—to be something given. This double game of passivity and of activity or spontaneity in inheritance will once more evoke the menacing motif of autumn crocuses, the mute cry of these flowers that arrive to interrupt the sequence of filiation and education so as to poison the order of succession. Here, in the fields of the poem, in its meadowlands, daughters are before mothers, sons before fathers.

But what does “structuralism” mean? Without seeming to, that’s fundamentally what Lévi-Strauss is asking himself here. The phrase “mothers daughters of their daughters” corresponds to no existing kinship structure, no facts of lineage that the anthropologist might be able to study. Which is to say that, by building...