Pierre Jean Jouve: la modernité et ses possibles by Laure Himy-Piéri (review)

Jouve has long interested observers of the poetic twentieth century in France as a serially marginal and thereby strangely exemplary figure. Critical attention has tended to cohere around the critical years of Jouve’s renunciation of his already established œuvre in the mid 1920s, and the subsequent decade, in which he published key poetic works such as Les Noces and Sueur de sang and a set of powerful novels and prose texts grounded in his complex new engagement with Freudianism. In this significant contribution to the discussion on Jouve, Laure Himy-Piéri cuts across the standard framings to reflect on her subject as indeed an exemplary figure, because of what he allows us to understand about processes of poetic individuation in a ‘modern’ context. The study is innovative in its search for an overview of Jouve by means of involved explorations of three distinct albeit composite phases in the life’s work as a whole. The first part (which is consistently grounded in a stylistic approach) thus proposes a welcome treatment of the unquestionably premier, and radically neglected, Jouve — the late symbolist production of the sympathizer of Unanisme, largely through work published in the first decade of the century. The second framing is daringly composite, as it groups works written during the First World War by Jouve the pacifist fellow-traveller of Romain Rolland, together not only with the turn to prose that occurs in Jouve’s work circa 1925, but also with a reflection on the mission de la poésie in the fateful year of 1933 as seen from the vantage of the poet’s later writings (most notably En miroir, the fascinating ‘journal sans date’ from the mid 1950s, in which he offers something approaching a definitive self-presentation). This second part, more methodologically composite and theoretical in nature than the first, is of value, among other things, for its insistence upon an underlying consistency to Jouve’s engagement with the challenge of modernity. It also interestingly connects Jouve’s positions and problematics with those of authors alongside whom he is rarely considered (thereby resisting the heavily cultivated figure of Jouve as a radically isolated literary figure). In this sense, the œuvre becomes symptomatic in ways it had not itself perhaps fully envisaged. The study moves on, in its concluding part, to the relations of poetry and engagement in Jouve, justifiably urging renewed attention to his pro-Gaullist ‘poésie armée’ of the Second World War, and particularly to the major text of this period, La Vierge de Paris. Here again, significant modulated continuities emerge with the earlier poetic self. The stylistic orientation is again dominant in Himy-Piéri’s concluding discussions, and here as elsewhere the author has on occasion to work very hard (and the reader with her) to make persuasive connections from the plane of textual micro-analysis to the kinds of generalized insights Jouve actively invites. To say that these connections do successfully emerge at several junctures, however, is to understate the considerable value and strength of this scrupulous and knowledgeable piece of critical reading.