AMONG THE WORLDS OF SELVES

The Themes of Time, Space, Self and Others

Two Forms of Time

THE POINT OF VIEW OF THE OTHERS

AN EXAMINATION OF BLANK SPACE

CODA

COMPILATIONS OF WORKS BY PIERRE REVERDY

NOTES

The author is President of the Alliance Française de Pittsburgh. This article is adapted from an unpublished manuscript, Objects and Experience in Poetry of Pierre Reverdy © 2005 Peter H. Beaman.

Pablo Ruiz Picasso
Portrait de Pierre Reverdy.
Paris. 15-November/1921. Etching on zinc. 11,8 x 8,8 cm. (Frontispiece of Pierre Reverdy’s Cravates de chanvre, 1922). OPP.21:120 ; P.III:1145 ; GB:63
© Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Pierre Reverdy (1889-1960) moved to Paris from his native Narbonne in 1910, whereupon he shortly became connected with Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Braque, Picasso and others in their circle. He printed and published a leading avant-garde journal, Nord-Sud, during 1917-8, and numerous volumes of poetry and critical works during the period 1915-1930 ; and thereafter less frequently during the balance of his life. Converted to Catholicism (as were many other artists at the time-for example, Max Jacob and Jean Cocteau), Reverdy abandoned the artistic tumult of Paris to live with his wife in Solesmes, site of an ancient abbey near LeMans. His calling cards identified him as “éloigné de Paris” and, despite visits to and relationships which he maintained in the capital, his village residence fostered the themes of loneliness and isolation already inhereent in his work. Reverdy, in response to a magazine request for biographical details, responded that these were “of no interest” and refused to provide them.[1]

One of many aspects of Reverdy’s poetry is the decontextualization of the poetic context - in fact, the elimination of context and the corresponding disintermediation of experience. Reverdy’s poems place the reader within the experience presented by the poem. He uses a variety of devices to eliminate the sense of contextualization which generally occurs within a text. A prepositional structure of place is absent. Conversely, the immediate location of the poetic experience is also the totality of experience imaginable within the confines of the poem. As the experience is immediate and “total”, it is also without time or place.

The decontextualization and immediacy of the poetic experience is, however, also disconcerting and strange. The absence of a self or others —i.e., outside the experience of the poem-is both disconcerting and illustrative : disconcerting as unusual, rare and unformulated ; illustrative as demonstrating the need for self/other and various other distinctions upon which the familiar, the not strange, are based.

What is Reverdy’s mode of presenting experience to the reader : Could the poem be an object ? If so, how ? What is the visuality of the poem : does the poem “present” “experience” ? Or is the poem a form of experience itself ? The relevance of Pierre Reverdy to these questions is that his poetry provides a method to build for the reader a concrete and immediate experience presented and realized as if the reader were absolutely alone.[2]

The fundamental “alienation effect” in Reverdy’s poetry is the interaction of subjects in all pronomial aspects which depersonalizes each. This pronomial analysis considers the subjectivity of the persons described in the poem and the presentation of author/reader as subject and object.

Within these depersonalized experiences of self and other, the elasticities of time and space are related to the immediate experience presented by the poem when the reader is its sole subject. The poetic “object” is perceived directly by the reader who is the poetic subject and the only sense in which Reverdy’s poems are “objects” is in their function as part of our experience.

Who are we ? Who am I ? Why are we here ? Where are we going ? It may be that every poet attempts to answer these questions, that the act of writing naturally propagates both the questions and an answer. For these are the poems which must be written in order to write at all.

DECLENSIONS OF THE SELF

“Un être qui n’aurait jamais connu son coeur-quelqu’un qui n’en aurait pas l’air. Il pleure. ’Vous avez brisé mon miroir.’”[3]

For Pierre Reverdy there exist multiple approaches-each marked by questions and doubts-to every aspect of the self. These doubts pervade the description of perception, the encounters of self and object, and of one person by another. There is no equivalence of “I” and “you”.

The “you” is always a doubt : either a stranger-unknown, threatening, or the lover who will disappear, leaving the self abandoned. More fundamentally, the ways in which the other person is imagined-is in a sense structured or created-implicate the vagaries of perception. Reverdy does not bifurcate the “I” into contending, opposed parts. Reverdy’s subjective experience is entirely unlike that which Jean Cocteau characterized as the “difficulty of being”-by which he meant the difficulty of composing himself from numerous readily defined and available elements. For Reverdy, the elements are not readily available or known and it is difficult to understand or conceive what it is to be a, or another, person. This difficulty is expressed by poetic descriptions of the self in which it is not clear who speaks : I, you, a third party or none of us. The reduction or elimination of the self from the poem-in whatever guise-at once creates a sense of alienation and freedom from the limits of a particularized, subjective point of view.

The declension of selves is illustrated by the poem “Auberge”, from Les Ardoises du toit :

« Auberge/Un oeil se ferme/Au fond plaquée contre le mur la pensée qui ne sort pas/Des idées qui vont pas à pas/On pourrait mourir/Ce que je tiens entre mes bras pourrait partir/Un rêve/L’aube à peine née qui s’achève/Un cliquetis/

Les volets en s’ouvrant l’ont abolie/Si rien n’allait venir.... » (PT I, 170)

A series of juxtapositions alternate the subject and object and the “I” and the “you”, centering at the moment when the poet holds something (a lover ? an object ?) in his arms. Her shadow-if it was his lover-is distant on the avenue, as if lost or being lost. Against this drama the daily events continue : an eye awakening, people playing cards. Somehow nothing was known ; perhaps because no one says anything ; everyone continues as before ; the days press to the “exit”. The last passages of the poem intensify the feeling that its substance, whatever knowledge it conveys, is held by “on”-by the others-and that the intense drama which has apparently occurred to the poetic subject is somehow of no account. The dilution of the subject creates an “objective” style, in which, as Anthony Rizzuto suggests, the others are the only actors :

“The style is also objective. Unidentified persons such as ‘il’ and ‘tu’ are present. ... Though these pronouns are affective devices in the text, they are also transforming the poem into a human drama with little or no direct reference to the poet. This movement is complete in Reverdy’s use of “on”, which appears more than any other pronoun. Its frequency draws attention not only to itself but also to the absence of “je” as the main point of reference.”[4]

In addition, the “ambiguity” in the relation of the poet to the persons described in the poem is transferred to the reader.

This process evokes an experience which is logically permitted by, but not contained within, the poetic text. As much as the text describes, it opens itself to further description by the reader. The “final” version of the text does not exist until made by the reader. The poem is a locale for the interaction of text and reader : when this occurs the reading becomes alive, involved in the scene which the reader constructs : the poem happens in this process.

The ambiguous declension of persons is, in one sense not ambiguous or ambivalent, but a form required to express an omniscient perception. Those distinctions between “I”, “you”, “he”, “we”, being removed, or used so ambivalently as to negate any fixed perspective within the poem, permit an ultimately fixed perspective outside the poem. This point of view comprehends the interior ambivalence as a subset of the larger poetic gesture. The “I”, being reduced to a non-subjective character such as a “he”, tends to be viewed as a third person by the reader who becomes the only subject in the poem.

More profoundly-and without use of the alienation of a described “I” from self-consciousness-the absence of such consciousness in a poem can require its introduction by the reader. Since the text, to have meaning, must be understood and since the text expresses no consciousness of itself, the reader encounters the text as a form of immediate experience, one to which the reader must supply the consciousness of the text.

The technique by which this perspective is created is the elimination of the “I” from the poem. Rimbaud had postulated that : “Je est un autre.” In Reverdy, the “I” is truly made into another. Logically, it must be another because in many poems the self has ceased to exist. The absence of the expressed self places the reader within the experience of the poem, making the reader the missing subjective point of reference, an absent “Je” who is now truly the other. The logical consequence of the absence of “I” in the poem : that is, that the propositions expressed by the poem are stated without any subjective reference, and this manner of statement necessitates and enables the formation of a point of view which is independent of any self.

One method of eliminating the explicit subjective in the poem is to describe people solely in the neutral third person, as “on”. In a poem populated by others whose self awareness is never described, who (at least in the manner in which they are described) share the unconscious nature of objects and whose consciousness (if recognized) is viewed as alien to that of the author or reader of the poem, only the reader is left to “understand” or perceive the events which the poem describes.

The indefinite third person “on”, severally translatable as “one”, “someone”, “he”, “she”, ‘we” or “they” or “people in general” generates an automatic ambiguity which defines Reverdy’s feelings toward the self and others.

In Reverdy’s case, the use of the ambiguous “on”, which has numerous psychological and perhaps philosophic consequences, also serves to force the reader-as the only subjectively active participant-into a closer experience of the poem. The reader is inserted within the text by its neutral presentation, by phrases such as “there is” or “there is not”, which generate the sensation of immediate observation. Similarly, the use of the third person neuter “on”, especially when other descriptions of people are absent, places the reader in the position of directly observing another person.

“L’auteur lui-même, non le poète, est une tentation tôt consumée. Il se sait en excès et se retire. Le ‘je’ est banni ou neutralisé. Personne ici ne se parle, ne se découvre. Et moins qe quiconque l’homme de passion, de rires, et de fureurs que nous avons aimé. Il est absent. Retiré jusqu’à l’invisibilité derrière la poésie la plus dépouillée, la plus nue, la plus silencieuse. Invisible afin de ne laisser aucun obstacle, aucune opacité devant l’imminence d’une parole qui voit maintenant déployer sa force.”[5]

The scenes created in Reverdy’s poetry-witness “Auberge”-often reflect a sense of distance which is generated by stillness, by absence of the human voice, as well as by description of things which are far away. If the felt experience of nearness requires live, speaking human beings, then Reverdy’s poems are “distant” because these two are rarely joined. The human who is there is silent ; only the absent can speak. Even the human which is present but silent is abstracted by the substitution of the part for the whole : as a hand for a motion ; the raising of an eye for a face ; a gesture for a substance ; process for a result. In the counterconventional, counterintuitive environment of Reverdy’s poetry, the near is perceived not as geographically but psychologically distant. Modes of perception change.

Distance is difference and also strangeness.

The logical follows the verbal inversion.

Gestures weigh.

Absences grow.

The noun is motion.

Concepts abandon the norms of themselves.

But the world is counterintuited only by intuition which is counter to fact-or counter to suppositions which are set forth as facts. Within a relativity of perceptions the eye can stand for the face, the gesture for the condition. The mind creates its own perception of events, governed by senses which are distinct from the usual. In this context, the expected parameters are stripped away. The normal forms of referentiality are abandoned. The poem can avoid the habitual distinctions : here/there, now/then, below/above ; backward/forward. This avoidance does not deny any of these terms by more than a mediated, postulated denial. Within the denial, a corresponding affirmation is presumed. Therefore, each frame of reference may coexist, side-to-side with another, both being within the experience allowed by the “poem-object.”

Maurice Blanchot visualizes the replacement of the I by the (s)he as the acquisition of objectivity, of a form of universal voice :

“Dans l’effacement auquel il est invité, le ‘grand écrivain’ se retient encore : ce qui parle n’est plus lui-même mais n’est pas le pur glissement de la parole de personne. Du “Je” éffacé, il garde l’affirmation autoritaire, quoique silencieuse.”[6]

The writer removes his own voice to give voice to the universal. Having eliminated the self, the text is free to present the real, unadulterated by an isolate point of view, free of the subjective and its accidental effects. Human beings can now be described as they “objectively” are, as the “someone” we see in every other person :

“Quelqu’un est le Il sans figure, le On dont on fait partie, mais qui en fait partie ? Jamais tel ou tel, jamais toi et moi. Personne ne fait partie du On. “On” appartient à une région qu’on ne peut amener à la lumière...parce qu’elle transforme tout ce qui a accès d’elle, même la lumière, en l’être anonyme, impersonnel, le Non-vrai, le Non-réel est cependant toujours là. Le “On” est, sous cette perspective, ce qui apparaît au plus près, quand on meurt.” [7]

Of course this substitution has the minimal consequence of isolating any residue of subjectivity, and of separating the author from his text. “Le ‘Il’ qui se substitue au ‘Je’, telle est la solitude qui arrive à l’écrivain par l’oeuvre.” [8]

Reverdy’s analysis of the alien self could be variously approached. There is the difficulty of understanding the other and of expressing the self ; there is the gradual substitution of the other for the self, and of natural forms and forces for the other ; there is the gradual substitution of the natural inhuman for the natural human. These tendencies are expressed by themes such as the absence or impossibility of attaining a name, of speaking, seeing, the exchange of human and animal regards, the animation of nature, the motionlessness of human beings. Perhaps overriding is the distance from which the poet contemplates the self, a distance which seems to require that the poet regard himself as an object :

“De tous les poètes, en effet, Reverdy est le plus objectif, c’est-à-dire le mieux capable de poser sur soi, comme sur un objet, un regard extérieur.” [9]

This position includes the ability-in fact the need-to question the nature of subjective identity. In Reverdy’s poem “Civil”, the identity of the subject dissolves in a series of questions : “Où sont mes papiers et mon identité vieillie et la date de ma naissance imprécise.” [10]

This poem reflects an actual ambivalence of birthdates, since Pierre Reverdy’s birthdate was incorrectly shown in the municipal records of Narbonne. [11] “Et, d’ailleurs, suis-je encore celui de la dernière fois ?”[12]

Transience of life ; transience of name ; transience of fact :

“Pour Reverdy, le passant ne se distingue peut-être pas du lecteur, et la question est troublante sur tous les plans. Quelle garantie avons-nous que le narrateur est ‘celui de la dernière fois’ ? Combien de personnages peuplent cette scène ?” [13]

Distance from the self occurs even at close range, and even in the most intimate forms of address, as in “Visage” :

“Il sait à peine d’où tu viens/Malgrè la ride qui te marque/Malgrè ces traces sur tes joues/Et les mouvements de tes mains/Il ne veut pas que tu t’en ailles/Sur la chaise il n’y a plus qu’un trou.” (PT I, 230)

Perhaps by not identifying the absent person (later described as “far on the road”), Reverdy creates a larger sense of his/her absence. He lets the poem deal with absence itself rather than with a localized sense of absence which would be limited by its relation to one person. Distancing the particular, the larger and more general feeling is enhanced.

In “Dans les champs ou sur la colline”, “On attendait/On regardait/C’est à tout ce qui se passait ailleurs que l’on pensait.” (PT I, 216)

The projection of human sentience and emotion is a frequent technique. In “Regard humain”, there is no regard until the last line of the poem, where we learn that we (who thought, perhaps, that we were the only ones watching) are being watched :

“Dans ce mélange de mouvement précis, de bêtes noires où l’esprit se défend-toujours caché derrière des paroles, les cris du désespoir. Où autrement ces yeux qui vous regardent dans les buissons du soir.” (FV 95)

The normal context of a regard-two subjects looking at each other-is absent. There is no subject-in the sense of a self-conscious being-within the text of the poem. By inference, consciousness is beyond the capacity or intent of the poem and its inhabitants. The normal context of human interaction (i.e., speech) is absent. This absence is shown in the description of a man stretched out on the road :

“On attendait que l’homme étendu en travers du chemin se réveillit. ... Les animaux n’étaient là que pour animer le paysage pendant que tout le reste marchait.

Car tout marchait, sauf les animaux, le paysage et moi.” (FV 29, “Plus Lourd”)

Here the static animals are presented for no apparent reason than to “animate” a scene where everything moves except the (dead ?) man, the poet, and a statue which is mentioned in the last line of the poem : an enigmatic presence equivalent to the standing poet and the fallen stranger. The sense of alienation is heightened by our ignorance of the answer to the question : who created this scene ? For whom were the animals there to animate it ? Was the poet inanimate like the dead person ?

Sometimes not even the person witnessing the scene, but only his sense is described. Moreover, language can be disembodied : “Et, en même temps, sans que personne au monde le leur dise, des mots confus se mettent à sortir./ Les lèvres tremblent.” (FV 45, “L’Élan normal”) It is not clear, however, that the words are spoken by the lips which are being described.

At one level of ambivalence it is unclear who speaks or acts among the possibilities presented by the poem. Nevertheless, the existence of a sentient subject is implied. At the next level, this implication is removed. Those emotions which we would call “subjective”-which in effect are the defining characteristic of the human subject-are not only not expressed by a “self” who is identified in the poem and whose experience is described from the perspective of such a person ; they are also not expressed by other people, or even by animals-but only by the landscape itself. In “Jour monotone” the poem occurs in a sere garden :

“Un jardin sans oiseaux/Un jardin sans bruit /Vous allez cueillir des fleurs noires/Les feuilles ne sont jamais vertes/Toutes les épines sont rouges/Et vos mains sont ensanglantés”

Following this description, the poem concludes :

“On n’entend pleurer que la pluie.” (PT I, 94)

The other person described in the poem can only pick black flowers with bloodied hands. Is this person a projection of the “Je” ? Implicitly the poem concludes that we cannot act, that we cannot express feelings, that we can only hear the rain crying-i.e., that feelings are only expressed outside ourselves : “Irai je plus loin que moi-même ?” (F 41-2, “Le Lendemain de la saison”)

Another unidentified persona, “he”, inhabits numerous poems, often an isolate creature surrounded by a crowd of unidentified strangers. Since the “he” is no more identified than are the strangers, the sense of collective identification with any of the characters is absent. In “Droit vers la mort” a small boy plays in the morning sun :

“Le matin allait à peine ouvrir son œil/Sur la route où passaient les hommes gigantesques /Seul il roulait sa boule parmi les yeux indifférents” ...

“Le soir ferme sur lui une immense paupière/Et la peur durera autant que la lumière....

Et lorsque dans la nuit il tomba pour jamais/Personne n’entendit le nom qu’il prononçait” (PT I, 77)

The theme of the name also recurs. The persona is either speaking to a person or attempting to make himself heard, in some cases (e.g., “Civil”), to be identified. There is no response ; there is also no space in which to speak, even to die. It may be that the person addressed (if it always is the same) is dead. In “Sur les dix doigts,” we read : “Une parole/la dernière/Je tiens entre mes doigts/Sa main encore tiède”. (PT I, 81-2)

Who are the others in Reverdy’s poetry ? What are their roles ? How can they act in the poems ? What are other human beings ? In many cases, the other cannot be distinguished from the role created for the one whose experience is shown in the poem. The others and the I are so entwined as to become confused :

“Une transposition familière aux amateurs de poésie surréaliste consiste à faire voir par les yeux d’autrui, de rapprocher et même d’identifier les deux regards.... On aperçoit la même sorte de ‘vision commune’ ou ‘transposée’ chez Reverdy....” [14]

Within the present which Reverdy uses as the format for time in most of his poems, others are tangible in various degrees. The more tangible the other, the less complete will its relation be to the poetic subject. The other may be a physical part of a person, its idea, its rumor always less than the whole. The less tangible the other, the more likely it will speak to the subject ; the more it will simulate communication, affection, interaction. The combination of tactile and intangible, of present and absent, of near and distant yields a constant anomie, at times resolved at different levels but never exhausted. Amid the isolate exhaustion which often seems to be the characteristic experience of Reverdy’s poetry, only the forms of exhaustion, of lack, of absence, and death seem energetic. The expression of these and similar experiences in time, space, and through the eyes of the self and others is our next topic.

AMONG THE WORLDS OF SELVES

The Themes of Time, Space, Self and Others

Prelude : Differences

Change is our expression for difference. That which is different reflects change ; unless there is no time. Without some medium for processing and developing difference, change cannot occur. Without time, we might only hypothesize the differentiation of things. The concept of time is logically subordinate to that of change. Without the latter, never the former. Our idea of change does not logically require the passage of “time”, but follows directly from the perception of difference-even the perception of black and white in a frozen moment. The experience of perception itself suggests the “passage” of time. We cannot perceive a world in which differentiation and change do not exist. The perceived difference constitutes change within the static ; yet the process of perceiving the differences, itself motile, belies a static universe. It takes “time” to change ; if there are differences, there must be time. To negate change is to negate time except in a world having unknown formal properties. As that of change, the concept of cause derives from perception. The perception of change permits and engenders the notion of causation, which becomes linked to that of time. The idea of causation is inferred from sequence : that which occurs “later” is “caused” by what occurred “before”. This conclusion is only inductive. There is no logical reason that the past cannot be caused by the future. In any case, each of the ideas of cause and time is logically a subclass to that of difference.

Prior to such abstraction, a self apprehends the world. This apprehension is “immediate” in the sense that it is not explained, not “mediated” through any analytical sieve. In the case of poetry, words and their meanings are the medium : medium between experience and its description. One of the goals of any art may be to achieve the effect of the immediate experience by the creation of an autonomous, direct link to perceptions. Music and painting are unmediated arts in two senses. The first (and weaker) is that any experience which they describe is communicated without the imposition of verbal explanations upon sensory experience. But it is not only verbal reflection or criticism which attacks and defeats the unmediated description. The visual and the aural may themselves have “texts,” interpretative devices which interweave between the experience and its perception. The second (stronger) sense is that the experience which is communicated does not require verbal interpretation. For we who are prone to discussion this is easy to forget. The verbal aspect of poetry lends itself to, but does not require, verbal interpretation. “Pure poetry” might be that poetry which is not explained-or poetry in that unexplained state in which, after all, it first presents itself. This would apply to verbal and nonverbal forms. But written poetry, having simultaneously aural, visual and verbal qualities, is a mediated art which sometimes seeks to achieve the “unmediated” aspect of painting or music. To do so, it tries to reduce itself to, or to express, a directly apprehended and pre-verbal experience. This reduction to the immediate may occur in two forms : that of the subject and that of the object. In the former, the poem presents an experience as if the reader were apprehending it directly, pre-verbally and without intervention by the poet. Various conditions may be created which generate an illusion that the reader is originally perceiving the experience described in the poem as the reader’s own. If so, the reader experiences the (mediated) experience of the poem as if it were his own, direct, subjective apprehension of the situation described. In this context the thing itself may seem so tangible as to have the character of an object without, of course, being one. When Reverdy writes : “Quand la rosée descend les pieds nus sur les feuilles/Le matin à peine levé/Il y a quelqu’un qui cherche,” (“Chemin Tournant”, SV 9) then the experience of the naked feet of the dew becomes that of the person searching, or of the reader who must, by virtue of the ‘naked feet’, experience directly the touch of dampness on the leaves. In this sense the experience, rendered immediate, becomes ours. If, on the other hand the reduction of the poem to the immediate occurs by way of making the poem an “object”, the poem becomes that which is alien to the reader, which lacks consciousness, which may be held, touched, manipulated. This the poem accomplishes at best by analogue. Within its text the poem must not be self- referential or self-analytical. Nor should conscious beings be described. It must seem direct, concrete, appearing as part of experience and without internal reference. The addition of self-referentiality mimics consciousness and destroys its “objecthood”. In Reverdy’s poetry, the subject (when there is one) perceives the scene directly, without narrative intermediation. The “I”, often removed as a named character, is at most an implicit subject whose experience is being described. The poem may equally be about an experience which is not of any person ; or about experience which belongs directly to the reader. One may focus on the text or on the experience which it conveys. Reverdy does not treat the text as an object per se, although he is certainly aware of this possibility and, as mentioned above, had explored many forms of the “concretization” of poems. His more fundamental concern is the concretization of the non-textual real : of time, space, self, others and objects. The poetry acts as the mediator between self and object, developing the interaction of text, author, reader. There is no priority of focus within this format. The text may belong to the reader just as to the author. “Time”, “change” and such other categories are abstractions of events-imperceptible, outside the perceived world. They at once possess and lack the static condition which some believe inherent to art. Not being objects, they are conceptually infinitely malleable. An idea is that which infinitely can be made : the creation. A world of percepts may be occluded, fogged over, opaque : its sensory nature seems to imbue it with an otherness which is absent to subjectively generated concepts such as “time”, “space”, “I”, “you”, “he”, “she”....

The distinction of self from others is matched by the treatment of interior and exterior landscapes. The treatment of the outside world parallels that of the other, separate person. Similarly, Reverdy’s analysis of the interior evokes his description of the self-self which is the means of describing time ; and his descriptions of others evoke the object-filled world, even though in each case the parallels may be inverted. For example, the others may be subjects, the self an object, the others conscious and myself not. In the sections which follow we shall explore Reverdy’s description of the self through the conceptual masks of time and space, in each case evoking the special immediacy created by his poems which describe human experience through these lenses, and the particular forms which he gives the lenses themselves.

Two Forms of Time

“...la poésie du temps mort, du temps qui ne coule plus.”[15]

The experience presented by the text occurs within Reverdy’s analysis of the dimensions of time, space, self and others. Reverdy conceived the work of art as static. The stasis of the work of art is not that of a Chinese vase, but a suspension of time. To suspend time is to divorce the work from the flow of events. So much of Reverdy’s poetry consists of the isolation of one set of moments within the flow of events : time which is now and in France is stopped for the moment in this particular poem. In this pause, the poem is freed and separated, sometimes fearfully, from the flow of events in the normalized, mediated world. Then, events suddenly resume, as if the world were a motion picture which had been stopped and is now restarted.

When we choose to “freeze” time we think often of the past. The poem presents itself as seen through a rear view mirror, after events have receded. But this is not the only choice and the frozen events which are described may be occurring in the immediate present or the future.

Reverdy does not articulate these thoughts. His tangible world is too intense, filling the poems. Abstracts are excluded and time is not discussed. The world and its events seem reduced to the varied psychic and observable chimerae which impinge on life and collect in memory. Reverdy demonstrates a concrete picture of time, an abandonment of the abstract. Time must not be a concept but the image of a string of events, linked and bound, twisted among others not seen, such that the particular string is a series to be explored and presented, but only one amid others which might have been selected or endured. The poet may also section the bundles, exposing at once various events which are cut from the same planar space. By eliminating the sequence which obtains from a linear description of events along the string, Reverdy substitutes a static environment, one which appears motionless-one where the motion is not described.

In a chapter from L’Espace littéraire called the “Essential Solitude”, Maurice Blanchot describes the “fascination of the absence of time”. The absence of time is not a pure negation :

“Plutôt qu’un mode purement négatif, c’est au contraire un temps sans négation, sans décision, quand ici est aussi bien nulle part, que chaque chose se retire en son image et que le ‘Je’ que nous sommes se reconnaît en s’abîmant dans la neutralité d’un ‘Il’ sans figure. Le temps de l’absence de temps est sans présent, sans présence. ... Le souvenir est la liberté du passé. Mais ce qui est sans présent n’accepte pas non plus le présent d’un souvenir. De ce qui est sans présent, de ce qui n’est même pas là comme ayant été, le caractère irrémédiable dit : cela n’a jamais eu lieu, jamais une première fois, et pourtant cela recommence, à nouveau, à nouveau infiniment. C’est sans fin, sans commencement. C’est sans avenir.” [16]

The absence of synchronic time depersonalizes the self. The “I” cannot conceive itself without time. To be, it must possess the idea of time, whether or not this idea has a perceptual basis. Death is the absence of time, as of possibility. In the environment of depersonalized time, the self has vanished and the “he” or “she” —the perceived other— becomes the only form of humanity which can live or be conceived as alive. Without a self, is there a need (or ability ?) to perceive these others ? or the “time” in which they exist ? Or alternatively do the others exist in a hyper-context where time and consciousness are not required :

“Et l’on s’étonne/De ne pas voir dans la fumée/Et dans l’air libre qui résonne/Le fil où pend cette araignée/Une main qui n’est à personne/Dans l’espace s’est arretée” (“Saison Tremblante”, SV 138)

In such a landscape we can understand Blanchot’s idea that others can exist even where the “I” does not : in a motionless form of the present, where action is impossible because the future does not exist, where the only developmental form of the possible is an exploration of the past. Reverdy eliminates the development contemplated by history and concentrates on the absolute [i.e., motionless and undeveloping] present. There are subjects but they are reduced to voices without meaning. In the most reduced case, no one is described :

“Dans la rue vide où personne ne vient/Une seule voiture glisse/Un air triste que l’on retient/Tout tourne plus vite que le temps/Les oiseaux qu’emporte le vent” (“Horizontal et tout est dit”, SV 134)

Although full of verbs which imply motion, the effect of the poem is to create a frozen, still moment. In “Le Sang troublé”, the same techniques are applied to the description of a person :

“On entend venir quelqu’un qui ne se montre pas/On entend parler/On entend rire et on entend pleurer/Une ombre passe

Les mots qu’on dit derrière le volet sont une menace” (“Le Sang troublé”, PT I, 85)

If present, the self is reduced, lacking the range of consciousness or capacities which we might expect, which others appear to possess. There is a connection between the abbreviated self and an “other” who, while hypothetically complete, remains distant from and unavailable to the self. As if thinly seen through thin atmosphere, the self finds present the absent, absent the full presence of the other. Neither is identified, identifiable, or expressive of any meaningful proposition. Sometimes the presumed experience of the two together may only be inferred from the (usually dark, empty) surroundings. In this environment, what is the experience of the subjective present ? Does it exist ? What are its limits ?

“Dans l’absence du temps, ce qui est nouveau ne renouvelle rien ; ce qui est présent est inactuel ; ce qui est présent ne présente rien, se représente, appartient d’ors et déjà et de tout temps au retour.” [17]

One may ask : why should the new “renew” ? Why should that which is here be not now ? Why should that which is ready to hand not be anything, but re-present or recall itself ? If time is based upon a theory of repetition Blanchot’s comment makes sense. Then the new is but a recall, the now is always in part the past, that which is ready to hand is in some sense not the real, but a recollection. Another possibility is that time can only “look” to its rear, can only “move” backwards. If so, time can only “occur” in memory. Put another way (by Edmond Jabès), memory is the sole means of describing time :

“Le temps est une mémoire sans objet. Froncer le temps à se souvenir c’est, pour ainsi dire, arrêter le temps.”[18]

In “Le Magasin monumental”, Reverdy describes memory as a curtain without folds, in effect a wall :

“Les ailes sont chargées/Le désespoir s’envole/Mes mains ont laissé descendre lentement/Le rideau sans plis de ma mémoire/Mais l’intermède du jour bruyant se joue toujours sous la coupole” (“Le Magasin monumental”, PT II, 45)

We are unsure what side of the curtain the author is on ; or what is on the other side ; or whether the induction of memory is indeed a voluntary act. Certainly the poem does not suggest a freedom of movement within memory. Whatever freedom there may be is interrupted by the present, which prevents the recapture of the past.

If the past cannot be reclaimed, the present has only a limited horizon and, when examined, appears to evaporate. Blanchot describes the present as dead, as a form of absence :

“Le présent mort est l’impossibilité de réaliser une présence.... Quand je suis seul, je ne suis pas seul, mais, dans ce présent, je reviens déjà à moi sous la forme de Quelqu’un. Quelqu’un est là, où je suis seul. Le fait d’être seul, c’est que j’appartiens à ce temps mort que n’est pas mon temps...mais le temps de Quelqu’un. Quelqu’un est ce qui est encore présent, Quelqu’un. Quelqu’un est ce qui est encore présent quand il n’y a personne.”[19]

Although Blanchot never alludes to Reverdy, it is difficult to imagine a more apt description of the atmosphere in many of Reverdy’s poems. Here, the abstract survives the passing of the tangible real. The tangible real is gone, can only be remembered, can never be recreated. In its absence, an abstract concept of the past remains. Similarly, the absence of anyone generates a “Someone” as if by generation of negatives —that is, the truth of the assertion requires the existence of its contrary. The logic might be as follows : no one is there, except me ; I cannot exist without someone else ; I am here ; because I am here, there must be someone else here also. Yet the “Someone” appears to constitute a separate, nonopposed category : a consequence of absence but not necessarily its opposition ; rather, the plenitude which remains when non one else is “there”. Perhaps the “Quelqu’un” is the author’s own past.

In Reverdy’s poetry, instead of the past we have only the present. The “past” exists as an abstract residue that engenders a set of intense emotional consequences. These may be characterized as follows : the reduction of time bears upon and reduces the concept of the self as an actor or communicator ; this reduction reduces the sense of the possible, which coincides with that ambiance of depression characterizing much of Reverdy’s poetry ; the reduction of time is the elimination of the possible which is achieved by reducing the perception of “time “ to the recollected past and to a present in which nothing moves or, more properly speaking, nothing changes. As always, a conversion is implicit in the reduction : those effects which have been removed from humans reappear as the properties of objects. Similarly, the reduction of the poetic space to an “evaporated” or at least a rapidly transpiring present permits a sense of motionlessness and an intensity of focus on that which it describes. This presence gives new meaning to the objective “On.” The space of the poem belongs to another, a space from which the subject is either absent or, if present, is observed as an object. If the subject is present, it is present in a time which is either a residue of the past or a time that is made by others
— for Blanchot, in unrediscovered time. This is a time where the “I” returns to itself as a stranger. There is also the possibility that the self is absent and, in that case, it is the “someone,” the other/object who acts in the present and attempts to recall the past. And if the self is present in the poems, it is the self which remains when no one else is left : a self which itself is a recollection. This self which is not present defines the nature of presence by being recalled, as Orpheus would have recalled Euridice. The attempted recollection, or the recapture of the past, is summoned to a present where the possibility of the recapture is a temptation too great to resist. Reverdy expresses the temptation of this choice in the present tense :

“Tout le monde a pu tranverser dans sa vie ce moment de tentation perfide où l’on sent que la chance est là, facile à saisir comme un fruit. Il suffirait de déplacer le destin d’une ligne, l’épaisseur de la peau, le poids de la conscience pour repartir à neuf, libre et heureux enfin dans une sorte d’azur sans aucune déchirure ni aucun pli. On ne quitte rien, on ne déplace aucune ligne, le moment est passé et l’on retombe dans le noir.” (LB 133)

For Reverdy, the temporal modality of choice is the present. Expressed in form of time, choice is the effort of the present to escape the past, or what Edmond Jabès calls “cet effort du futur pour échapper au temps.” [20] For Reverdy, even the possibility inherent in the present is revocable, a condition which repeatedly falls toward its own past :

“Sous l’arc du front bandé les flèches aiguës du désir/Ce soir l’esprit troublé du goût irritant de partir/Au verson blanc du monde sur des chemins nouveaux/Sur les quais sans espoir vers les retours soudains/Partir toujours partir/Courir à la renverse” (“Les Buveurs de l’horizon”, FV 32)

The separation of the possible from the desired, of the present from the uncaptured past, is linked to the theme of travel and departures. In “Départ” :

“L’horizon s’incline/Les jours sont plus longs/Voyage/Un coeur saute dans une cage/Un oiseau chante/Il va mourir/Une autre porte va s’ouvrir/Au fond du couloir/Où s’allume/Une étoile/Une femme brune/La lanterne du train qui part” (PT I, 179)

For Reverdy, the ineluctable passage of time is a dimension which cannot be traversed, a phrase which must always be spoken to its unwanted conclusion. In this respect, Blanchot’s analysis of time is more radical. His hero, Orpheus, wishing to escape the evaporated present, tries to reshape the past. In so doing, he violates the dimensions of the present and destroys its possibility. He finds that the past cannot be retrieved ; no present can be chosen more than once. His futile vision will destroy the assertion of any of their contraries. He must repeat what he has already done.

Although Reverdy does not explicitly deal with ontological questions, his poetry seems to reflect Blanchot’s concept of the absence of time and the presence of the other who is already the self. Remembering the thesis that time is a form of differentiation, its absence is reflected by a motionless, undifferentiated condition.

“L’ombre penche plutôt à droite Sous l’or qui luit Dans le ciel qui fait mille plis L’air bleu Une étoffe irréelle C’est peut-être une autre dentelle à la fenêtre Qui bat comme une paupière à cause du vent L’air Le soleil L’été Les traits de la saison sont à peine éffacés” (“Matinée”, PT I, 220)

When Reverdy varies the norm of referring solely to the present, his references to other forms of time are often conditional as if the past or future were uncertain possibilities rather than dimensions to which we are wholly committed by belief. As to the present, if the poem is analogous to a still life, then it is regarded in the motionless now. It is static.

The reduction of the poetic event to the present tense is also the attempt of the poem to display a name or a message in the darkness of the moment which is always about to disappear.

As to our recollections and those we have known :

“Nous sommes dans les glaces limpides qui ont pu nous voir passer sans se froncer-ou dans ces silhouettes furtives que nous avons laissées dans l’air aigre des coins de rues.” (LB 86-7)

These silhouettes, which are the memories of the past, float freely in the streets.

As if on a crisp, light day they could be recaptured in sunlight.

As if time could be seen in a sufficiently clear air, motionless : an idea. But time which cannot be seen moving is hidden from view.

Its motion is off-site.

The function of seeing is not bound up in a conflict of “now” and “then”. Rather, the vision provides a static form (poem) which, igniting the moment, captures a present minute for example, the bitter air of a streetcorner. The reader turns from the sensual world to that of the spirit : “Or, dans le vrai, l’aventure est sans atmosphère.” (LB 81)

In the sensual world, where the atmosphere exists, it is full of danger : “les abîmes sans paroi de l’atmosphère.” (“Le Coeur soudain”, F37)

The “true” adventure is ours to make, perhaps solely in the imagination ; not in things but in ideas. No objects but in ideas.

The structure of the personae created in the poems governs their permitted experience. The anonymity of the “on” engenders loneliness, isolation, fear and hopelessness. Colors have been subdued and the poem reduced to matte : elements have been removed instead of added. The landscape is reduced to various planes, dully-colored, where isolate figures and images starkly juxtapose and seem to interact. What interaction occurs is intensified by the sparsity of the described surround, by the animation of the not living. The absence of true interaction intensifies our awareness of its possiblility, likely or not, and releases an awareness of its potential.

To achieve the communication implicit in “us” requires development of the “I”.

The most reduced experience of the self is “silence où le coeur et l’esprit battent pendant des jours et des jours, sans écho.” (LB 183)

From this silence the “I” must experience, must become the “you”, the “me”. What begins as an ambiguity of declension becomes a description of actual experience. In contrast to the silence, the fear, the impotence of the “I”, the “other” has a distant power, an ability to move, to speak, to exist. In some poems it is not clear that this existence is much beyond that of an object. In others, the “you” or “he” can speak, sometimes even to the poetic subject. The forms of communication-and their limits-flow from the reduced picture of the human being which the poet presents :

“Un visage immobile est aussi énigmatique qu’un portrait, c’est-à-dire que nous pouvons interpréter à notre guis le faux mystère de ses traits. ...” (LB 40)

From self to another is Reverdy’s impossible journey. The self becomes strange, abnormal, unknown ; without boundary or edge, without action, without direction or knowledge. The self finds itself lost and confused, surrounded by people laughing :

“J’aurai peut-être perdu la clé, et tout le monde rit autour de moi et chacun me montre un clé énorme pendue à son cou.

“Je suis le seul à ne rien avoir pour entrer quelque part. Ils ont tous disparu et les portes closes laissent la rue plus triste. Personne. Je frapperai partout.” (“Belle étoile”, PT I, 41)

The disorientation is heightened by the shifting of tenses within the poem.[21] The beginning of the poem is a supposition which enters the past tense and becomes an assumed set of facts and then a situation which we are asked to join-as the poet tries to decide what to do. By the shift in modes of possibility, from pretense, to past tense, to the realm of choice, the reader is thrown into the experience of the poem as if it were his own. The reduction of the self and expansion of the object (i.e., the keys) negate an otherwise clear identification of the reader with the subject of the poem. As the poet remembers the faces : names are eliminated ; bodies are eliminated ; perception is reduced to the visual sense, but sensed through separate sets of eyes.

“I have seen Cadiz from the water,” wrote Ezra Pound, as if the particular experience, the personal point of view mattered, as if things were well defined. One cannot imagine Pierre Reverdy writing such a line. The personal clarity suggested by Pound is absent to Reverdy, whose geometry is no longer demonstrable ; has been replaced by the sense that there are many geometries, simultaneously and equally (in)valid perceptions of the one same, immeasurable shape and place. The world begins as totality and undifferentiated mass ; ends as the exploration of the lost attempts at difference and resolution. Logic fails because we are finite ; we cannot elaborate the endless line ; all our thoughts get closed like books. The real is only what we have imagined ; and that we cannot express.

THE POINT OF VIEW OF THE OTHERS

Who are the others in Reverdy’s poetry ? What are their roles ? How can they act in the poems ? What are other human beings ? Within the present which Reverdy uses as the format for poetic time there are various degrees of tangible others. The more tangible the other, the less complete will its relation be to the poetic subject. The other may be a part of a person, its idea, its rumor. The less tangible the other, the more likely it will speak to the subject ; the more it will simulate communication, affection, interaction. When the tactile, emotive subject does appear, it is quickly replaced by the anonymous gaze of the other. The combination of tactile and intangible, present and absent, of near and distant yields a constant anomia. At the first level the self is presented as a person having at least potentially the means of speech and feeling. Creating the expectation that speech and feeling are possible, the poet introduces various reductions by which the same expectation is removed, the norm is eliminated and humanity removed from the poem. When the human form is observed as an object, the self is decomposed, stripped of its normal attributes : organs, thoughts, acquaintances. There is substituted some disembodied portion of a self -a part for the whole— and the attributes reappear in displaced and dehumanized form. Next, with the self absent even as its own metaphor (for, in this case we are now sure that the “self” is a unity, not a series of components which may be joined by the formulation of an image), the landscape itself becomes the human form, becomes at once nature and the experience of the self in nature. This process is mediated through the substitution of “abnormal” for “normal” conditions. The self which should speak cannot, being seen as if through thick glass ; it cannot express emotions ; it cannot understand the emotions of others ; it cannot act intentionally, or move in a regular fashion : these characteristics are attributed to inhuman elements of the scene which become substituted for a self. If the stranger is recognized and present, the self is also a stranger. The self is unnamed. It is at once known and always not, at once subject and object, static and motile. Although the self moves, it is acted upon and never acts, except in ineffectual ways. Because the poem always preserves (at least through the use of the present tense) the sense of the potential, that which seems strange and disfigured retains a human form. No matter how frozen or distant the scene, it is always possible that time will resume, the players will speak and act ; loves and deaths will occur. In the poet’s isolate psyche, thoughts and other intangibles reify. People, having vanished as subjects, are replaced by intangibles which become actors. These assume a subjectivity, an intensionality :

“Le long de l’avenue où glisse la rumeur

Perdu dans le brouillard l’illusion des comètes

la mémoire lavée par l’eau de la défaite

les linges de la peur” (“Déroute”, F 24)

The “rumeur” slides along the street as if it were alive. But people assume an objecthood-a lack of intent. The death of the human landscape is counterbalanced by the life of objects or intangibles which “normally” do not live. Also, these intangibles behave with the quality of objects. An illusion can be lost, as if it were a thing. One could conclude that the illusion were lost because the poetic narrator no longer believes in it ; but the illusion is lost in a specific place (in the fog), as if a thing. It is lost

in two ways : first as an observable object which can no more be seen ; secondly as the illusion of comets which did not exist. Sometimes not even the person witnessing the scene, but only his sense is described : “l’oeil s’attarde sur chaque trait, sur la ligne limpide et sur le corps entier.” (“L’élan normal”, FV 45) Moreover, language can be disembodied : “Et, en même temps, sans que personne au monde le leur dise, des mots confus se mettent à sortir./ Les lèvres tremblent.” (Id.)

It is not clear that the words are spoken by these lips....

In “Les buveurs de l’horizon” the poet regards the customers of a restaurant and attibutes to them a fantasy of their tortured lives :

“Les plages et les portes/Les aventures mortes/Dont l’ardeur se détache fermente et vient rancir/Les narines gonflées par de fauves parfums/Des relents d’efforts

de luttes sauvages/d’agonies obscures dans l’ombre des tables” (F 31)

There is a double anonymity here. First, the anonymity implicit in the commonness of the scene ; the actors are nameless-not because they could not be named but because the effort in naming them would be meaningless. There is no point to the establishment of their “unique” identities. The unique has no value : it consists solely of the set of letters which constitute a name, of facial peculiarities : nothing of worth. Second, the anonymity derives from the sense, purveyed by the lack of detail in the poem, that a description which would identify the people in the poem may be impossible. Either it is impossible for the subject in the poem to learn their names, due perhaps to his fears, or they are in fact nameless. At one point, this person is unable to visualize the way from the upstairs to the room where the game is played. An aphasia limits his ability to participate, except as an unnamed observer, in the described scene. His anonymity follows logically from the impossibility of observing the cardplayers, and equally and independently from the impossibility of communicating with them.

Anonymity and isolation lead to depression. In “Miracle”, the persona of the poem listens to talk of himself in the next room. “La porte se serait ouverte/Et je n’oserais pas entrer..../On parle/Et je peux écouter/Mon sort était en jeu dans la pièce à côté.” (PT I, 198) The happiness of the self in this poem depends on someone else getting up and letting him in. In “Avant l’heure”, the person watching outside the house must return home when no one answers the door where he knocks. He leaves without being seen :

“Et toute la tristesse est restée enfermée

Attendant le soleil qui ouvre les fenêtres

Et les desseins obscurs qui roulent dans ma tête” (PT I, 241)

In “Nuit”, the self, hidden behind a door, listens to the sounds from outside and, from within, the mocking laughs of the curtains. (PT I, 244) It is the others who understand and achieve happiness. In contrast, the self is unreal. The others are real, can act, can laugh and enjoy themselves ; will laugh and enjoy themselves at the poet’s expense. The paramount status of the others is not surprising, because the self flees even its shadow. In “Ça”, the self runs down the road : “Sur la route mon ombre me suit, oblique, et me dit que je cours trop vite.” (FV 31) Arriving at the door, the self sees his friends laughing inside the next room : “Peut-être est-il question de moi ?” (Id.)

Flight is only one element in the larger pattern of disorientation. The self is deprived of the ability to act ; it must escape ; most importantly, it cannot find itself. Reverdy’s equivalent of the regard of Orpheus is self-referential. What it sees -itself— it still loses. To keep the other one must not look. The “others” in Reverdy’s poems have the same characteristics. Although they may sometimes speak and even be loved, they are often hidden, as if memories in fog ; unseen and unknown. Implicitly it is impossible to see or to know them. Within this vague condition the “I” is sometimes presented to the reader as the reader’s own, subjective experience, without intermediation, without intervention of the narrator or another subject. It is a virtual “I” which encounters the world. Memory-that “curtain without folds”-which is the vehicle for recreating many of the experiences described in the poems, becomes lost in a concept of time which is never defined, in contexts where today and yesterday do/might/could not exist.

AN EXAMINATION OF BLANK SPACE

“...les abîmes sans paroi de l’atmosphère” (FV 37)

Space, geography and landscapes are as strange as time, memory and perception. For Reverdy the landscape has no social function. We do not find physical scenes illustrating the interaction of humans and nature or an attempt to describe historical settings. The perspective has shifted to the immediate as it had in painting through studies of perception and expression to an analysis of forms and their structures. The poetic equivalent is an I:you relation to land and buildings, to any surfaces described by the eye. A simple binary model of self/nature, human/object. In this model : “Le poéte construit le paysage, le tableau. Il n’y a plus alors qu’un rappel à une réalité qui procède de lui. Comme dans un miroir, avec toutes les profondeurs qu’acquièrent les choses à se refleter. Mais les objets sont intervertis, fragmentés, rassemblés à nouveau, d’une façon inédite. Le poème enferme son auteur, encadre ses sensations. Mais au centre il y a cet oeil qui a fait l’analyse et qui a construit un objet indiscutablement humain.” [22]

“Reverdy, en localisant les choses, les illimite ; il les extrait de leur mesure, il les exorbite, il les transfigure en leur assignant un lieu ; il découvre leurs rapports inconnus, leur solitude ignorée, il révèle leur invisible voisinage, en déplaçant à peine les lisières du possible et de l’exactitude....”[23]

In describing the manner of seeing : names are eliminated ; bodies are eliminated ; the discussion is reduced to that of the visual sense, as sensed through eyes separated from any human being other than those of the reader :

“La lumière d’en bas soutient les plus indifférents et les lames tordues qui viennent du côté de la vitre s’engagent doucement dans les plis du regard. Le ciel est autrement placé au-dessus de ces têtes.” (“Première table”, FV 83)

People are reduced to the “folds of a look”. In “Haut terrain vague”, the waste land is expressed by a gaping door, a view to a road which distances itself. Nothing is left but a facade, and the space of a look (“la place d’un regard”). (PT I, 33)

In “Plus d’atmosphère”, a storm is described without reference to any particular observer.

“Le clocher devient bas/Un nuage le casse/Dans le jardin l’arbre pourrait tomber/Une main ressemble les branches/Et les serre comme un bouquet/Les mille doigts du vent frappent plus fort/ À la fenêtre/La tête qui paraît regarde dans le ciel/Attend ce qui peut arriver” (PT II, 36)

Everything is reversed. Instead of the cloud becoming low and breaking the bell tower, the bell tower is low. Our expectation that clouds cannot “break” anything is itself broken. There is no conventional self-centering of the text by reference to a participant observer. Nor is the landscape animated. Nature does not resemble man ; man mimics nature. This imitation reduces the “need” for a subjective presence in the poem : the poem adopts the point of view of the nameless, natural other ; of the branches, not the hand. Then the two are joined in the gesture of the hand squeezing the branches like a bouquet, which itself is mimicked by the thousand fingers of the wind, touching. The experience of a self is projected throughout the poem, as if nude, touching and breaking the sky. Finally a head appears, perhaps observed through a window. Of course the person suggested by the head says nothing : it waits in the charged atmosphere of the storm for what might happen, already suggested by the possibility of the tree being destroyed. The head, which we expect to be the “I”, is seen as the other, a silent object, from the point of view of the landscape or of the unnamed. Anything can be expected when there is no more air.

It is appropriate that a landscape poem or still life eschew self-reference ; and that it avoid reference to human conditions outside the poem. When branches are described as the “hand” of a tree, the landscape is not necessarily being imbued with a human subjectivity. This comparison may serve only to heighten the distance of the tree to that of our own limb. Yet if the scenery is active and alive, the self is reduced, exposed :

“Le poème de Reverdy est un paysage qui a renoncé à cette clôture du verbe sur soi-même où la poèsie se protège pour s’accomplir ; c’est un poème ouvert comme un blessure, un paysage déchiré”. [24]

The structure of the poem is “open” in the sense that it does not wrap itself in the envelope of a subjective being. Being “open” in this sense, the scene is created without the intermediary of a voice. That the poem is a “wound” depends on the emotions conveyed by its imagery.

By contrast, the landscape may receive the projection of a self, as in “Son de cloche”. At midnight, when the stars have stopped shining and every light is out, the wind sings through the trees. The earth does not turn. Only : “Une tête s’est inclinée/ Les cheveux balayant la nuit.” (“Son de cloche”, PT I, 184)

The distinction of inside/outside resembles many others in Reverdy’s poems : self/object ; I/you ; I/(s)he. The interior may not be the self and the exterior is not always the other ; nor are these scenes necessarily objects. The scenery may actively participate in the poem. In “Écran”, all is regarded through a screen of abstractions. The world regards the world and seems to laugh, then disappears. In the back, against a wall, silhouettes slide. The title and the first lines prefigure a view through a curtain or screen. “Une ombre coule sur ta main/La lampe a changé ta figure.” (PT I, 235)

Whether physically near or far, Georges Poulet believes that Reverdy’s landscapes always have a psychic proximity which is necessary to their intensity :

“Or, on ne trouve presque aucune trace de cette contemplation à distance chez Reverdy. Le monde rêvé par lui ne se recule nullement dans le lointain. Il est là, peut être tout près, peut être à portée de la main, mais derrière un écran qui interdit de le voir. Cet écran est absolument ininterrompu, opaque et solide, bref, c’est un mur.” [25]

The simultaneous reification and disincarnation of an object or event is not surprising. It matches the inner void which constitutes and destroys the shadows of thought and ideas. Outside, an exterior consisting of uncontrolled, live experiences act upon the conscious screen —a screen reflective of the being which cannot react. “Plus la conscience du manque est vive, plus nettement l’esprit doit se rendre compte du caractère inexorablement exclusif de l’extériorité. Entre elle et la conscience, aucune compréhension n’est possible. C’est en vain que l’on pense, car tout ce qui est pensé se révèle aussitôt comme n’ayant pas son lieu dans la pensée,...au dehors, là où s’épaissent toujours les couches d’être qui envellopent le vide intérieur.” [26]

Because the self cannot react, distances adopt a new aridity. The “I” will not cross them. Rather, the objects or scenes which are described can interact amongst themselves as if alive, as if crossing to each other. These are personified abstracts. Reverdy develops what Georges Poulet calls :

“...une dialectique de la distance qui consiste à établir entre l’object rêvé et la pensée une espace indéfiniment extensible, mais non franchissable, qui représente la difficulté qu’éprouve l’esprit à se joindre à l’objet rêvé.” [27]

“Selon un jeu de mouvement contraire et parallèle à celui de la conpression/expansion et à l’éloignement /rapprochement présents dans bien des poèmes, on apercoit un espace dynamique à l’intérieur crée au moyen d’une ouverture signalée, niée, signalée de nouveau, niée de nouveau et ainsi de suite. Puisque par définition, cette poésie statique n’avance pas, il n’y aura point la possibilité d’un élan vers l’extérieur, lequel sera remplacé par une sorte de rebondissement contre les murs étanches, cet élan intérieur établissant toute la résonance et tout le rythme d’alternance caractéristique du poète.” [28]

For example, in “Le sang troublé”, the room is : “Un trou noir où le vent se rue/ Tout tourne en rond/La fenêtre s’éloigne de la glace du fond/Le vin n’y est pour rien/ C’est un paysage sans cadre” (PT I, 85)

The static nature of the poem has varied elements : the pictorial (making the poem the equivalent of the painting) ; and numerous psychological consequences. A sense of motionlessness enhances the feeling of isolation : if nothing is moving, perhaps nothing is alive ; if nothing is alive, the scene is estranged. If nothing moves, perhaps time has stopped. If time has stopped, perhaps other “rules” are also broken. Our expectations will not be met. Characters will (can) not meet : nothing will occur.

That the poem has no ostensible subject at once distances and intensifies its emotional impact. Because no one, apparently, is involved, the poem achieves an isolation of affect, an abstraction of emotion, which makes any feeling seem remote. At the same time the entire text is animated with emotion, and the reader, having no particular context or reference, experiences the emotion directly, as if his (or her) own : “Tous les doigts, toutes les feuilles d’arbres, toutes les paupières remuent. Les prunelles à travers les rayons du ciel sont à l’affût. Les ailes passent.” (“Dehors”, FV 51)

The absence of any suggestion of subjective point of view highlights the immediacy of the experience. Only the reader is left in the poem as its subject, having at once an omniscient perspective and the lack of control which is caused by reading, rather than writing, the poem.

Because the author is “not there”, we are. Because the poem has not expressed perspective, it has our view. Because there is no identified subject, the reader is. We can experience the poem as our own.

CODA

The best critique of Reverdy’s work is the work itself. Only the experience of its openness to life can explain its goals. A structured analysis, such as that attempted here, is but the suggestion of paths which the work itself permits the reader to experience. What is sought is an uncompromised openness to self and the world at large, and the means of having these things in words.

For Reverdy, the reality of our passage becomes the shape of our age. Life is a waiting room. In “Salle d’attente” :

“Un baiser de tes lèvres mortes et le départ de cette auberge où j’aurais tout seul passé ma vie.

“Le voyage, les départs et le calme. On arrivera, on repartira éternellement sur les routes toujours les mêmes malgré leur nombre.”

“Et les arbres, les poteaux télégraphiques, les maisons prendront la forme de notre age.” (PT I, 35-6)

The form of our eyes shapes the seen. Gradually the passing, passively received telegraph poles and houses become (or do we become their ?) perception of ourselves. We merge into our own perception of the passivity of the waiting room.

In Jacques Dupin’s eulogy of Reverdy, the shape of the age, its difficulties and the difficulty of describing it, result from Reverdy’s uncompromising and uncompromised encounter with the real :

“Quand on refuse les tentations d’un ailleurs, les illusions d’un au-delà, les mirages d’un futur. Et qu’on se tient sur la terre, au plus près des choses, à l’écoute de soi, les yeux ouverts, et qu’on persiste. Et qu’en face, la réalité, bien pleine, vous repousse, comme un mur lisse et sans issue. Vous emprisonne et vous exile. Ou que la seule fenêtre, sous les combles, la lucarne de la soupente, vous tient captif, et séparé, d’un monde en éclats et fuyant dont les discordantes parcelles glissent sans fin sur un versant mal éclairé. Et que même la solidité du mur qu’on croit heurter, et contre quoi la tête pourrait au moins se fracasser, n’est qu’un brouillard qui se dissipe. Et se reforme. Qui s’ouvre, le temps d’un poème, sur les débris d’une vie dispersée...”[29]

COMPILATIONS OF WORKS BY PIERRE REVERDY

While original editions of Reverdy’s work are long out of print and rare, Flammarion and Gallimard have each compiled his poetry and, in the case of Flammarion, his collected works. Selected poetry and criticism include :

Cette émotion appelée poésie, écrits sur la poésie, Paris (Flammarion) 1974 (cited as “Cette émotion”)

Ferraille, Plein verre, Le Chant des morts, Bois Vert, Paris (Gallimard) 1981 (cited as “F”)

Flaques de verre, Paris (Flammarion) 1982 (cited as “FV”)

La Liberté des mers, Sable mouvant et autres poèmes, Paris (Flammarion) 1978

Le Livre de mon bord, Paris (Mercure de France) 1948 (cited as “LB”)

Main d’Oeuvre, Paris (Mercure de France) 1949 (recently re-presented by Gallimard in the collection “Poésie”)

Nord Sud, Self defence et Autres écrits sur l’art et la poésie (1917-26), Paris (Flammarion) 1975 (cited as “NS”)

Note éternelle du Présent, écrits sur l’Art (1923-60), Paris (Flammarion) 1973

La Plupart du temps, Paris (Gallimard) 1945 (collecting previously published poetry from 191522) (references to this compilation are to the two volume paperback edition published by Gallimard, with citations as “PT I” and “PT 2”)

Au Soleil du plafond et autres poèmes, Paris (Flammarion) 1980 (cited as “ASP”)

Sources du vent, Paris (Gallimard) 1971) (cited as “SV”)

Ancres, Paris (Fondation Maëght) 1970.