5
contemporary critical theory’s suffused influence on the re-readings in this volume is
strongly in evidence here. On a single syllable is the world∕word made to pivot,
simultaneously constituting and, paradoxically, undermining ontologies, cosmologies.
Differentiality for Collot as for Blake, for Ponge as for du Boucheζ is the keynote: 'for
Ponge there is no creation ex nihilo'. Collot could be striking that same note for the
whole of the present collection when he claims: 'caught between a there-already and
a not-yet, poetic emotion is not the simple reception of some anterior given, but the
projection of an ulterior language'. Not that immediate access ensues, for Ponge
'denounces as an "imposture" the idea of some total immediacy of language'. Rather,
'one cannot escape from these onomatopoeias', these 'first signifiers [which] are also
infrasignifications'.
For Martin Heidegger, 'man is the site of openness'. Touched upon by Nancy
Blake with reference to the poetry of du Bouchet, a trajectory of 'thinking-through-
language' is further explored by Michael Worton in his treatment of the interface
between the writings of Ren6 Char and those of Heidegger. In the process, he invites
meditation, too, on the multiple performative functions of translation as interpretation
and, by extension, of the question of influence. Interrogating various notions of Bloom,
Kristeva and Riffaterre, Worton would situate the CharZHeidegger relationship 'in the
interstice between post-Freudian, psychodynamic theories and reader-based intertextual
theories'. A clear link with several of the other essays here is his concentration on the
,highly imagistic, if rarely traditionally mimetic' modes whereby both writers prefer 'to
represent - and thereby to re∞nstitute - the phenomenal world through language'.
Both, for Worton 'situate separation at the heart of their creative enterprises'. In this
lighζ Char’s epigraph, from HeracHtus, to Le Marteau sans mditre, '∏ faut aussi se
souvenir de celui qui oublie ой тёпе Ie chemin', points to a common thread of via
negativa thinking which binds (and unbinds) much of the poetry discussed in this
volume. What is more, Worton’s situating of Char’s poetry in the Rimbaldian line of
'la pensee chantee' and of Heidegger’s 'das dichtendes Denken' (poeticizing thought)
re-echoes the strains of earlier Mallarmean voicings. In his 'Interrogative answers to
a question from Martin Heidegger1 (1966), Worton reminds us, Char writes: 'La po6sie
sera "un chant de d6part". Poesie et action, vases Obstinement communicants'. Beyond
Breton? Stubbornly (and necessarily) so. For even the hint of a trajectory (be it
'UbersezzeziTtranslation or ⅛2>ersetzen7feπying across) derives from that very sense of
separation (obstinately) confronted in a ∞mmunicative process which, though it is
thought, can only be activated through poetic expression.
Timely reassertion of a poetics devoted 'to the hazardous rhythms of a
presence beyond fixable meanings', Michael Bishop’s essay on lPresence and the
Imperceptible' might serve as an overdue reminder - before the reader shps into the