Saint-John Perse, neveu de Nietzsche (review)

Following Jean Bollack and Michel Philippon, who have mentioned affinities between Perse’s poems and Nietzsche’s critique of ossified thinking, May Chehab amasses facts about the former’s reading habits and about Nietzsche’s reception in early twentieth-century France in order to prove a deep connection between the two authors. Adding to these facts a study of the lexical and thematic overlaps in both bodies of writing, Chehab tries to justify three main claims. First, that Nietzsche’s ideas were very much in vogue from 1900 onwards, thanks in part to articles published in the Mercure de France, and that, through his friendship with several French intellectuals, the young Alexis Leger (who would later write under the name Saint-John Perse) became familiar with these ideas. Secondly, that, after reading French translations of The Will to Power and other books, Perse turned some of Nietzsche’s insights into his own — both in letters sent to friends and in his early works Éloges (1911) and Anabase (1924). Thirdly, that Nietzsche’s writings are a key to understanding Perse’s poems. Whereas the first two claims are probably well founded, the third one flounders. There can be no ‘key’ to good poetry, despite what most Perse scholars bent on unearthing biographical causes of his work might claim. Moreover, one of Nietzsche’s main arguments is that value and meaning are continually being renewed and altered by writers (and especially poets), with the result that strong literary works cannot be tethered to fixed ideas, or to supposedly stable propositions that they are wrongly supposed to express. The urge to explain (away) Perse’s verses by linking them to similar phrases from Nietzsche occasionally leads Chehab to make sweeping claims: for instance, that Anabase is an Apollonian poem and Amers is Dionysian (whereas both strands are already present in the first work); or that Exil and Vents recount the struggle between a self ’s need to create its identity and the obstacles to such self-creation. Contradicting the latter claim is Chehab’s insightful comment (on p. 163) that Perse’s lyricism is built not on the pronoun ‘I’ but rather on plural voices. The ‘we’ in such poems name individuations in movement, not identities creating themselves. There are, fortunately, other perceptive remarks in this study. For instance, both Nietzsche and Perse insisted that artistic creativity rather than religion or rationality marks human progress (pp. 63 and following). Blending poetry and philosophical reflection gave rise to the metaphysical dimension of Perse’s poems and to the poetic tone of Nietzsche’s writing. Chehab also argues, correctly, that Perse’s subordinating a writer to his or her work, so that poetry’s voices take precedence over personal expression (p. 52), develops Nietzsche’s attack (in Human, All Too Human) against the vanity of authors and the belief in a psychological source of inspiration. Insights such as these make Chehab’s book a thoughtful study of Nietzsche’s influence on Perse’s poetry of the living word, even if the verbal movement created by such poetry outstrips any set of philosophical propositions.