Henri Michaux: Poetry, Painting, and the Universal Sign (review)

Margaret Rigaud-Drayton's scholarly, probing and readable account of Michaux's concern with the 'universal sign' is a cumulative investigation of the allures and illusions of universalism itself. If travel loosens the grip of cultural preconception, and Esperanto that of aggression and conflict, Michaux commits unreservedly to those ambitions. A seasoned campaigner against the strangulations of signifying convention, Michaux seeks a language that for Rigaud-Drayton is at once transparent and intimate. She shows the history of this ambition in the natural language of Rousseau and in colonial and primitivist fantasies, particularly of the interwar years. So is the 'universal sign' desirable or not? Rigaud-Drayton shows how the idea emerges initially for Michaux because his work cannot unproblematically be thought of as either Belgian or French, which in part drives his uncomfortable relation to the French language. A 'shifting space' of writing emerges comprising the Nordic and the Latin, each pitted against the other: which is not only national but anthropological in character, and is marked by an effort to be rid of words altogether and their shameful legacies. Such legacies are prevalent in Michaux's parallel activity as poet and painter, which explains his ambivalent attitude to each one, and to travel as well. Rigaud-Drayton shows how Michaux's engagement with different cultures carries the traces of European pre-conceptions and nostalgia, and all the accompanying illogicality and contradition. Where is the writerly space to be found that would rid us of that, rather than replicate the shifty cultural frame of the attempt itself? Rigaud-Drayton raises the question and leaves it openly unanswered, almost unanswerable, in her illuminating readings of Michaux's anxieties of influence, which include experiences of the body as well as intertextuality. This cumulative account of incompatibility in Michaux's creative practice leads to Rigaud-Drayton's concluding engagement with issues of sign and signing built up to in the rest of the book. Her allusion to Derrida allows her to describe Michaux's practice of signing some of his non-discursive signs as gestures that are 'intimate and impersonal' and also 'anonymous'. They locate Michaux's identity, bringing its disparateness together in the graphism of the hand, but they also testify formally not only to the fragmentation of the self but its dissolution — perhaps Michaux's only counter to cultural constriction and shame. There is much to explore in this excellent book, not least Michaux's own exemplary investigation in and through rhetorical form of culture and ideology.