Palimpsestes dans la Poésie by Deborah M. Hess (review)

Professor Hess has taken on the daunting challenge posed by eight contemporary poets whose complex compositional techniques defy a traditional, linear approach to interpretation. Her choice of the anachronistic term "palimpsest" as a critical tool for reading poetry written in the wake of the revolution in computer technology affords her the freedom to bring together an otherwise disparate group of French and Francophone poets writing between 1980 and 1995. "Le palimpseste est une métaphore pour l'ordinateur, pour sa façon de traiter les données, de les modifier, et de les enregistrer . . . en plusieurs dimensions" (7). The analogy stands for the process of continual re-writing common to the use of parchment in ancient times and computer editing. Severed from the prosodic conventions that governed poetry as a genre until the end of the nineteenth century, post computer-age poetry, she claims, (pace Mallarmé) demands a reconception of how poetic signification is constructed through a web of multidirectional interactive semantic chains (réseaux).

In her opening chapters, Hess provides informative theoretical and historical grounding for the analyses of the poets that follow, connecting their use of blank space, fragmentation, repetition, interference, and dynamism to both the role of chance in chaos theory and the technology of computer writing. Poems by Tahar Ben Jelloun, Jean Daive, Edouard Glissant, Marie-Claire Banquart, Nicole Brossard, Edmond Jabès, André du Bouchet, and Jacques Roubaud are seen to represent eight different applications of Hess's theory of "palimpsestic" writing, labeled: "intertextuelles, interculturelles, scéniques, symboliques, philosophiques, enchassées, multidimensionnelles, et hypertextuelles" (205). Given the looseness of these categories and the fact that the poems referred to are generally not quoted in their entirety, either in an appendix or in the body of the text, a willing reader is obliged to follow Hess somewhat blindly on the strength of her detailed, often ingenious cross-readings of semantic chains. Her treatment of individual poets is suggestive, but uneven. Although her approach often succeeds in enriching the allusive texture of these works, one wonders, at times, whether it is fully justified or carried out systematically enough.

Intertexuality would seem to be the most obvious example of a palimpsestic structure, yet the chapter on Ben Jalloun as reader of Baudelaire is limited to the identification of motifs of "home," rather than engaging in a strong dialogical analysis of the francophone writer's ambiguous reworking of the trope. The same weakness is true of Hess's study of Baudelaire as an intertext for Glissant's "Les Grands Chaos," which stresses the Parisian context but includes little or no in-depth analysis of Glissant's paradoxical adaptation of the city as a temporal space. One would think "Le Cygne" would have been an ideal poem for demonstrating with specific tropes and words how Glissant rewrites the nineteenth-century poem of exile and dislocation. Hess's study of Jabès's construction of a Jewish identity through the strata of historical exiles and place markers is more rewarding because it gives one a sense of the profundity and gravity of the poet's undertaking. The unearthing of related lists of themes and motifs in the works of Daive, Du Bouchet, and Roubaud leaves one impressed by the critic's attentiveness to discrete elements of these long, intricately composed texts; but without the poems as a whole to refer to, the reader may wonder what it is that makes their poetry important beyond the sheer play of words. It may be true that " . . . the superimposed poems symbolize the complexity of temporal perspectives" (165), but one would like to experience more concretely how du Bouchet uses space and words to inscribe his life-long struggle against the abstractions of Mallarmé and his symbolist heirs. The poet's admiration for pre-computer predecessors like Reverdy, Char, and Giacometti would suggest the anguish of his effort to revivify a subject disappearing into the nothingness of space, rather than "art as play" (167), a concept more appropriate for Daive's use...