After Transparency (Henri Michaux)

It is 1949—five years after the end of the occupation. From its very opening, Henri Michaux's poem "The Old Age of Pollagoras" reads as an allegory of a postwar consciousness—a consciousness exhausted, scorched, and bled on, like a field, yet raised from its post-battle slumber by the very people who have died on it.

With age, says Pollagoras, I have become like a field on which a battle was fought, a battle centuries ago, a battle yesterday, a field of many battles.

Dead men, never quite dead, wander silently around or lie at rest. It's as if they have lost the will to win.

But suddenly they burst into motion, those who are lying down get up and attack, armed to the teeth. They have just encountered the ghost of a former enemy who—shaken—suddenly charges feverishly forward, ready with his parry, forcing my surprised heart to quicken its beat in my chest and in my sullen being, which reluctantly comes to life.⁹⁶

The speaker is their liege and prisoner, their container: his self-purity is denied, both with age and thanks to the only metaphor left to him, that of a battlefield. Michaux sets the ghosts that populate Pollagoras's "sullen being" ravaging, and in speaking of ghosts haunting a battlefield and compelled to fight anew the battles that laid them low, he evokes not just a man but a figure for a broader consciousness, perhaps the consciousness of Europe, perhaps that of the "multiple agoras" of the past his name seems to evoke. At once dead and "never quite" so, having survived their battles, these "men" pit the different selves and pasts of this consciousness against one another. All these selves who live beyond their life and like this consciousness have become exhausted, emerge with violent force obstructing Pollagoras's rest and dissipating his individuality.

Pollagoras emerges in this account as one man among others and yet an exemplar of his age and world: his undead warriors can be said to haunt Europe and history. Not only do they deny it a singular or pure selfhood, but they guide these very divisions, struggles, and traumas as the only life left. The dead of the past force the reluctant Pollagoras and his "surprised heart" back to life, much as they keep Europe—a Europe that has lost its power and pride, and perhaps even its hope and promise—at the limit of its own life.

What a figure for postwar European consciousness, what an announcement of the postwar regime: appropriately pessimistic in 1949, marking a Europe divided anew, its sides poised toward a battle, its recent war barely over, its old projects of ameliorating the lives of the living exhausted, much like its dream of progress toward wisdom? In the 1930s, and keeping with a tradition that saw Europe as mature by comparison to other, supposedly less civilized lands, Paul Valéry had fantasized it as "Old Europe." Valéry, in one of his Monsieur Teste prose poems dating to 1903, had offered a very different version of the self—the "man of glass":

So direct is my vision, so pure my sensation, so clumsily complete my knowledge, and so quick, so clear my reflection, and my understanding so perfect, that I see through myself from the farthest end of the world down to my unspoken word; and from the shapeless thing desired on waking, along the known nerve fibers and organized centers, I follow and am myself, I answer myself, reflect and reverberate myself, I quiver to the infinity of mirrors—Iam glass.⁹⁷

Michaux's version of Old Europe lacked the persistent hopefulness of Valéry's writings, just as the self he proposed here lacked any transparency, any positive relation to glass. The name Pollagoras, a nom de plume—much as Plume had been for the young Michaux—is also a name that responds to the pre-Socratic Protagoras, as he counters the "first" of the Greek prota with the "many" of polla and suggests not just a personal age but a public. Is it excessive...