Colorsteps in Modern and Contemporary French Poetry
Rent from DeepDyve- Colorsteps in Modern and Contemporary French Poetry
Color fills an important space of coincidence and of difference between verbal and visual media, yet receives strikingly little attention in discussions of poetry (or, indeed, in studies of literature more generally). Bound by the monochrome world of the printed word, literary researchers appear prismatically indifferent, judging color as a referent somehow not proper to their domain, viewing color as improper even.1 When color engages us directly as readers and critics, we often deem it inconsequential or incidental; color is perceived as decorative, supplementary, and secondary; synonymous with and reducible to "local color". And a line is thus drawn—a black line. Unlike our co-workers in film, history of art, textile studies or musicology, literary researchers are remote from those perceptual and pleasurable pressure points that may be acoustic, tactile or visual, and which, in this instance, are prismatic.2
Color practice is a blind spot in contemporary critical readings of French poetry and poetic writing, a paradoxical situation given critics' attentiveness to the interart and intermedial significance—manifest and latent—of French modern poetic practice.3 The obscuring of color is anomalous, too, given our concern to bring into dialogue concepts and tropes drawn from cognate research disciplines as part of a wider arts and humanities project.4 Our "color blindness" as critics is ironic when counterpoised with the sustained reflection of modern and contemporary poets on the color-practice of painters, and the alertness of poets to their own verbal engagement with color.5 Yves Bonnefoy's Le Nuage rouge: Dessin, couleur et lumière (1977) and Francis Ponge's L'Atelier contemporain (1977) are signal contributions to the reading of Renaissance and modern painting, while René Char's work with Miró on Flux de l'aimant (1964) exemplifies the livre d'artiste, [End Page 35] and Bonnefoy's collaboration with Geneviève Asse for Début et fin de la neige (1991) illuminates the interart impetus of twentieth-century poetic innovation.6 And then there are the myriad instances where poetry, with or without a direct pictorial referent, moves beyond the evocation of the enduring tropes of art, such as landscape, and begins to reflect on the visual quality of poetry and its potential to stir acts of chromatic imagining in its narrators and its readers. Jean-Michel Maulpoix provides mesmeric instances of contemporary poetry's reflection on this prismatic project in Une histoire de bleu (1992):
L'azur, certains soirs, a des soins de vieil or. Le paysage est une icône. Il semble qu'au soleil couchant, le ciel qui se craquelle se reprenne un instant à croire à son bleu.
(Le Regard bleu)7
The writing of color has important implications for poetry's "capacity," as the fragment from Maulpoix quoted above suggests with its speculative mode ("il semble"), with the intentionality it imputes to color, and with its stress on the "tending" of color ("L'azur [. . .] a des soins"). By "capacity" I want also to suggest poetry's potential to shape attentiveness. In this article I begin to address that occluded capacity of color in poetry. My concern is with the movement of poetry (or of poetic writing in the case of Hélène Cixous) towards color (as artistic memory and as remembered—or imagined—visual sensation), and with readers' reception of color—of color-made-language— in poetry. I explore these issues in prismatic practice with reference to Apollinaire, Cendrars, Michaux, Maulpoix, and Cixous. Color instances in their work will provide illuminating points de repère, markers as we move towards a more focused color reading of a range of texts by Jacques Roubaud, a poet renowned for writing black.
First, I want to consider some of the conceptual, material and affective implications of color writing. I begin with Hélène Cixous's reflections on Rembrandt's Bathsheba bathing (1654) in an essay that is instructive for how color may be written and how it might be read.
Cixous takes twenty-four steps in the direction of the biblical Bathsheba. Close now to Bathsheba, Cixous asks "Where does Rembrandt take us?", and she proposes, "To a foreign land, our own. A...
