La "Pléiade" de Saint-John Perse: la poésie contre l’histoire by Renée Ventresque (review)

VENTRESQUE, RENÉE. La “Pléiade” de Saint-John Perse: la poésie contre l’histoire. Paris: Garnier, 2011. ISBN 978-2-8124-0224-1. Pp. 442. 59 a. Saint-John Perse, one of the rare writers to be honored with a Pléiade volume in his lifetime, was unique in being allowed to edit it himself. He took charge of the project and composed every element, from the (auto)biography to the footnotes . Under the guise of a scholarly edition this particular Pléiade is thus the octogenarian’s last great creative work, to which he devoted six years in a race against time (he died two years after publication). Even readers who are not focused on Perse will be fascinated by Ventresque’s account of the astonishing prestidigitation that went into this 1400-page self-Pléiadizing. Scholars have known about Perse’s editorial role and studied certain of its facets. Ventresque’s achievement is to reveal the wizardry behind every curtain, even those we did not suspect . Author of three previous books about the poet, she is a perceptive reader, adept at discerning strategies and subtexts. With privileged access to the Gallimard archives in addition to the poet-diplomat’s own papers, she retraces the painstaking assembly of his huge project and shows how the myriad elements coordinate to project the image of a larger-than-life Mage, destined from birth to a major destiny, connected to all the major cultural and political figures of his time, rising above the “trop humain” (131) to a timeless universality, a man whose life and works are all of a piece and reflect “l’éclat du magique et de l’exceptionnel” (132). Others have noted how Perse’s poems address myriad unnamed interlocutors, admired literary predecessors with whom he engaged in dialogue. Ventresque shows how his prose pieces, too, are dialogues with unseen figures. In these cases, however, the unmentioned addressees are often adversaries with whom he has some bone to pick: literary critics; Paul Reynaud, the foreign minister responsible for his exile; or Charles de Gaulle, the lifelong frère ennemi, whose invisible presence haunts the Pléiade edition and also this book. During the war Perse considered the General to be an illegitimate leader; forever after, he suspected him of being a dictator -in-waiting. De Gaulle retaliated by opposing Perse’s election to the Académie Française and ignoring his Nobel Prize in 1960. The Pléiade volume was an opportunity for the poet to settle scores while also erecting a monument for posterity. Ventresque explores the poet’s motives in each of the separate components: biography , letters, speeches, tributes, notes. Critics knew that Perse rewrote and even invented many of the letters that appear in the 442-page section devoted to correspondence . This study details how he orchestrated the letters and why he included certain figures (Conrad, Gide, Claudel, Stravinsky, Kennedy, and dozens of others) while excluding others, like Segalen. Three famous talks, the Nobel Prize acceptance speech as well as homages to Dante and Briand, have traditionally been read as tributes. Ventresque uncovers their polemical dimensions, revealing how they target specific ideas and individuals and, once again, Perse’s nemesis: “Avec De Gaulle, plus qu’avec quiconque, il s’agit bien de passion, une passion faite d’hostilité et de fascination, comme celle que conçut jadis Chateaubriand pour Napoléon” (30). Another word would be obsession. Ventresque shows this obsession at work in many more texts than critics realized while avoiding the danger of projecting de Gaulle even where he may not be the primary target. In the one debatable case, an allusion to Jesuitism, personalism and paleology, the target is arguably Teilhard de Chardin, another of Perse’s boucs émissaires, rather than the General (319). As Ventresque points out, Perse’s archives “vivent d’une autre vie, plus souterraine, plus intense, plus complexe qu’il n’y paraît d’abord” (309). Her book demonstrates Reviews 397 how the Pléiade volume and Perse himself pulse in ways that are more intense and complex than we imagined. Princeton University (NJ) Carol Rigolot VOUILLOUX, BERNARD. La nuit et le silence des images: penser...