evasion is pursued across Mes bouquins refermds sur Ie nom de Paphos', Don du
poeme' and lBrise marine' to that dark (obscure) moment in which (an Idumaean)
semiotic fluidity gives birth (and rise) to a voluptuous though fragmented orality, a
provisional discontinuity voiced just beneath Mallarme’s sm∞th writing surface.
Reconstructions will always risk non-sense. Redirections, perhaps, 'invitant les orages',
will always 'penche[nt] sur les naufrages'...
From language on the brink of exhaustion to art on the point of collapse of
belief in representation. Timothy Mathews’ essay on Apollinaire and Cubism confronts
demystification, defamiliarisation, manipulation and fragmentation in the relation of
expression to experience. Through Picasso and Apollinaire, he explores the
possibilities of form after the abolition of horizon - and measures the cost of
indecipherability. To the spatial is added the temporal, as memory is shown to function
in the creation of a present which cannot simply be identified or identified with;
Mathews’ insight that 'Cubist Art concerns itself with an indivisible unfamiliarity
which permeates our experience of the present and our involvement with it' ∞mes
close, indeed, to Michel Foucault’s telling caution that 'necessarily, we must dismiss
those tendencies that encourage the consoling play of recognitions ... History becomes
effective to the degree that it introduces discontinuity into our very being'.2 Shifting
attention from Apollinaire the art critic to Apollinaire the poet, Mathew’s goes on to
show how 'nostalgia in the poem is galvanized and represents the unavailability of
remembered experience' and, memorably, how it is precisely Apollinaire’s 'ignorance
which allows him to find new forms of expression with which to approach the world'.
Finally, and in a powerful re-engagement with Maijorie Perloff and her study of The
FuturistMoment, Mathews remobilises discontinuity. For the erosion of undifferentiated
subjectivity - as Imavoidable as the subversion of the unmediated expression of
experience - in no way undermines or diminishes the creative power of 'intervening
in the process of signification without repeating if.
Where Tim Mathews signs off, Jacqueline Chenieux-Gendron takes over.
She, too, confronts fragmentation or, more specifically, holes. Tackling the notorious
issue of the degree to which it is possible to speak of a theory of poetry in the work of
Andrd Breton, Chenieux-Gendron argues that 'demonstration and lyricism feed upon
each other' in a kind of bricolage. Meticulously, she examines the series of 'symptom
texts' in which, she claims, 'a rich and complete meditation on being and time as well
as on poetic language and visual expression may be read'. She goes on to analyze such
concepts as the imagination and subjectivity in a form of poetic discourse she terms
Table'. Mirroring the complexity of Breton’s own practice, Chenieux-Gendron endorses
his metaphor of nest building in the attempt to encapsulate the rhythms (akin to music)
of automatism. Suggestively, she argues thaζ by a process she designates libido
sciendi, the fable 'arouses in us a taste for interpretation and for all sorts of adventures