Tu vois?: Anamorphic Writing in Emmanuel Hocquard's "LE CANALE SYNOPSIS"

It is obvious that an imagined world, however different it may be from the real one, must have something—a form—in common with it.

—Wittgenstein, Tractatus (2.022)

Démêler les lignes d'un dispositif, dans chaque cas, c'est dresser une carte, cartographier, arpenter des terres inconnues, et c'est ce qu'il [Foucault] appelle le "travail sur le terrain." Il faut s'installer sur les lignes mêmes, qui ne se contentent pas de composer un dispositif, mais qui le traversent et l'en-traînent, du nord au sud, d'est en ouest ou en diagonale.

—Deleuze, "Qu'est-ce qu'un dispositif?"

French poet Emmanuel Hocquard's 1997 text titled "LE CANALE SYNOPSIS" offers ample reason to doubt the notion that there has been any radical shift in the directions of, or critical perspectives on, French poetry over the past decades that span the twentieth and twenty first centuries.¹ Rather than simply negative, my opening sentence seeks to move toward a new disposition, toward what we even understand by the notion of a shift from one perspective on the French poetic tradition to another; a shift that first assumes critical readers of French poetry are sufficiently confident in their shared knowledge of a previous perspective to say that it is no longer a subsequent one. As this essay shows, I am confident neither in this knowledge of changing perspectives nor in how it gets shared or imposed. Hocquard's writings in general, and "LE CANALE SYNOPSIS" in particular, offer some further insight into both the reasons why such confidence is lacking, and why this lack might not be so negative.

Despite occasional bouts of certainty as to the beginnings and ends of literary-poetic movements, as to definitive fault-lines in the canon, and as to more or less stable definitions of aesthetic experience, the usual state of affairs remains one of uncertainty, of more or less scrupulous hesitation, and of dissent within varying intellectual ranks. To choose one twentieth-century instance among many, Stanley Cavell's 1967 essay "Music Discomposed" is a perfect example of scrupulous hesitation since, in considering the attempt to communicate his experience of the "art object" to someone else, he runs up against the apparent impossibility of this attempt:

Only I find I can't tell you; and that makes it all the more urgent to tell you. [. . .] It matters that others know what I see, in a way it does not matter whether they know my tastes. It matters, there is a burden, because unless I can tell you what I know, there is a suggestion (and to myself as well) that I do not know. But I do—what I see is that (pointing to the object). But for that to communicate, you have to see it too. Describing one's experience of art is itself a form of art; the burden of describing it is like the burden of producing it.²

Cavell's past dilemma is wholly pertinent to the contemporary writings of Emmanuel Hocquard, and it helps expose a number of uncertain shifts in potential perspectives on contemporary French poetry. For instance, when perceiving, creating, or creating through perceiving and describing a given work or object from a certain point of view, at a particular time and place, how can one proceed to generalize this particular experience (since, in the final analysis, Cavell laments that no one else can share exactly his particular perspective on "that" object there to which he points)?³ In other words, how can one proceed—if one must proceed—to make of this fragmentary perspective the communication of the whole of aesthetic experience? Does not this particular or fragmentary perspective stand as a particular "vanishing point" or hole in a more generalized aesthetic perspective?

The logic or rhetoric according to which the part may safely stand for the whole assumes a certain stability that, in the opening pages of his 1997 Le Voyage à Reykjavik (Chronique), leaves Emmanuel Hocquard skeptical: "L'ennui avec ce mot [fragment], c'est qu'il renvoie à un continu...