I have often thought of that little story, whose setting was a country which does not in the least number among those with which I am infatuated but is one to which I am attached, not only by the memory of my Aunt Claire but also by the fact that it is one of the first I visited and because I was still a small child when I went there. I have already said how it was to Belgium that I looked back in my mental aberration, as I emerged from the inhuman state into which the mastication of a gross quantity of poison had temporarily plunged me. Musing on what I had experienced at Heist-sur-Mer when I thought I possessed a gift that would have situated me singularly outside of the ordinary, I have long wondered to what extent a buoyancy of the same nature as that childish pride did not animate me when, having become a young man and not knowing very well what to make of my person, I wished to be a poet. I wanted this, of course, from a love of poetry and for the joy that I would derive from writing it, but—once past the phase of schoolboy poems in which I scarcely sought more than to turn to music my overflow of feelings—what I wanted most was to raise myself to the rank that I assigned to the person who uses language like a sort of Pythia proffering her oracles, a role as visionary which, to his benefit as well as his detriment, removes him from vulgar existence and makes him a sort of demigod (or quarter-god) living on a level to which ordinary mortals, prisoners of their norms, cannot have access. Certainly, my presumption was great, for it was, in fact, to the prerogatives of the genius that I aspired, and to a destiny quite exceptional which my own life hardly resembles, extremely comfortable and regular despite the dissatisfaction of which I complain. And it is perhaps just because I sensed how far this life was from being incandescent that I applied myself to exercising my craft as writer in a worthy way, imposing rules on myself as though, since no flame was devouring me, it was necessary that in my course of action, so lacking in magic, I should at least be someone who was correct, and, if possible, above all reproach. To treat language with as much deference as though it were in essence divine (something that, despite the nobility of the formulation, amounted to substituting for the sacred fire of the poet a strict professional conscientiousness), to situate myself politically “to the left” (last and pale avatar of my belief in the impossibility of being at once a poet and a respecter of the established order)—such were essentially those rules of which even the one having to do with politics remains quite platonic, since, without disobeying them, it was possible for me not to engage in any strictly militant activity and to confine myself to honest adoptions of positions (if necessary merely by apposing my signature to the bottom of manifestos or petitions). With that rule, a rule of substance, whereas my taboos were aimed rather at mistakes of form, I avoided the negativity of the latter only through a semblance of commitment. Not to move more than a stylite, using the excuse of purity—isn’t that a consistent trait in me? And even if, from time to time, an action interrupts my inertia, isn’t it to this that I always revert: to withdraw into oneself, to make it a point of honor not to allow oneself to be breached, to seek one’s Good in a refusal of compromises, because in truth one loathes positive decisions and because one is too prudent to adopt the ostentatious economy which, to those errors accumulated in a debt [passif] that is possibly quite heavy, opposes a credit [actif] such that delinquencies and deviations will perhaps be no more than quaint errantry enlivening a graph that would otherwise be much too dry.
More defenseless than anyone if I write from another perspective, whatever the difficulties I may run up against in the composition of this book, I am inspired by my own desire to bring together, here, in a single compound what I love and what in myself I want others to love. Which is as much as to say that an incitement of a poetic order is held out to me here, and it is this that encourages me, rather than the austere desire to establish my beliefs once and for all. Certainly, by covering my eyes in the face of this reality I have complicated my task: whether a puritan reaction or a stroke of perversity which made me rebel against my true inclination, I have treated the love of poetry as merely one of my preferences, namely as one of the data of a problem that is different from that of poetry itself, the object of a choice that I made well before worrying about establishing its validity. A fundamental element, which poses many questions but cannot be called into question, and which there is no reason to bring up again except to find out what I mean when I speak of being a poet, an aspiration that has not ceased to be mine even when, from the point of view of literary genres recognized in schools, I have turned in an entirely different direction.
To write poems, to be a poet. A formulation of the same nature, though more general, to write books, to be a writer would be, in my opinion, only a pleonasm or a tautology and would lack the lively content of the terms that sum up my youthful ambition. The reason for this is that the writer is, for me, only the author of works in the domain of “belles lettres,” whereas I have never believed that the poet could—like a builder of organs or pianos, characterized by the objects he makes artfully—be merely someone who makes pieces of poetry.
From an artisanal point of view, poetry may be regarded as nothing more than a genre, immediately defined by a certain mode of writing. Being “nondiscursive” (in other words, giving precedence to a comprehension of the whole, or to creation, over analysis), it is situated far from aspects of the common good, and this remoteness is signaled from the outset by the fact that, instead of playing, here, the role of simple method of transcribing, language, here, seems strangely distanced: by the classical means that consists of subjection to a prosody and the employment of a select vocabulary, by the injection of images in strong doses (something of which the Romantics and their successors were past masters), by the invention of a rhetoric radically new, or, the reverse, by means of the extraordinary transparency that may be attained by someone who has faith in traditional rhetoric to the point of applying it with almost aberrant scruples (Raymond Roussel, for example, whose stylistic effort amounts to an almost maniacal concern for limpidity and for an impeccable use of the French language). But it seems impossible, unless it is a pitiful simulacrum, that such a distancing can be effected by someone who has not, himself, been distanced by some torment, some irony, or some other sign of profound disharmony, from everyday life, shaped by conventional ideas. To want to be a poet is thus not merely to want to find in language something other than what most people find in it, it is also to want that troubled and divided life that alone allows for poetry, which, unless one were fated to have such a life, one would exhaust oneself in vain trying to couch in writing. What is involved here, of course, is an impulsion that is unthinking, scarcely coherent, and not a choice based on solid foundations. Even at the time when I thought that unhappiness was my lot and my chosen sign, it was for salvation much more than for martyrdom that I was a candidate, since I reckoned that this unhappiness, once poured into the mold of lyricism, would lose a part, at least, of its harmfulness by being thus transfigured. And if, in order to reach my goals, I felt I was prepared to brave the setbacks of fate and desperate extremities, I did not know that such blows, when they come, do not have very much in common with the completely ideal image one may have formed of them. Experience and reflection, extended over many years, were necessary for me to discover, for example, that Rimbaud did not experience the adventure that excites us so: what he experienced for himself (and not according to the idea that others would later make of it for themselves), was quite simply a dog’s life, as is shown by the complaints contained in his letters from Ethiopia. In the same way, what I may have believed about Nerval finding his solution in a sort of voluntary madness—a fusion of life and dream—seems puerile to me today: how great must have been his anguish, when, as a man who lived by his pen, he was prevented by his attacks from working, and, during the respites they left him, told their tale or exploited the material furnished by his delirium, at once in order to try to extricate himself from it and to produce the copy that was his livelihood!
To be a poet
. If the person who is keen to be one, without false impersonation, must live poetically and reject the bourgeois mind—a slave to routine, and prosaic for that very reason—this break, more or less manifest and more or less radical, may assume many guises, of which the bohemian life, with its chaotic nature, is only one example among others and too neatly categorized, these days, not to be suspect, although, taken to an extreme, it may verge on heroism. To be a door open to dreams (little dramas the night has us perform in its own language) and to poetic events (those that, often very meager, have the special capacity of creating images even though they may not be the images of anything other than themselves); to have a life intense enough and singular enough so that it lends itself to legend (the profane form of myth); by taking the path of outright revolt or that of freedom of the passions, to commit oneself to the human direction in which poetry goes, as a means of freeing oneself from the rut—these are different but equally valid ways of “living poetically.” Or rather these would be, for the great extent of this range of possibilities shows the inanity of a guiding principle so vague that there are scarcely any ways of being or acting at all removed from the norms that one cannot regard as responding to it, on one or another of these levels: of immediate feeling, of all-encompassing viewpoint, or of projection into the intellect. To put it another way: as living poetry, as possible themes for stories marked by a certain wonder, or as actions whose convergence with poetry will be recognized by means of a sort of calculation of trajectories. Or: in the present of lived experience, in the past of the story, or in the future of the great design of changing the present world into a world more liberated and open (a transmutation that, as such, is poetic despite the prosaicism of most of the acts necessary for this overthrow). Or, again: in the first person, that of the interested party, in the second person, that of his relations with others (including those who, later, will perhaps sympathize with the part he is playing), or in the third person, that of the assessment from which would emerge the ultimate meaning and effect of what he has done or written. Finally, counting by fours instead of by threes in order to widen the range: in the indicative of what is occurring, in the subjunctive of actions reverberating in a foreign memory, in the imperative of the control that one is so eager to exert (whether it is a matter of inspiring someone with love or of transforming something through political action), in the conditional of the last judgment which alone can say whether a certain life, as a whole, has really helped to loosen our fetters. Instructions, therefore, that one may understand in too many different ways for them not to have to be made more explicit (unless one admits that the true poet, a sort of complete athlete, must shine all in every sport). But in such a domain, isn’t it absurd to search for what the guiding principle might be? To make plans to go hunting for poetry would be to deny its nature as an exceptional thing that would cease to be exceptional if its attainment, instead of occurring (beyond good or bad fortune) as an outstanding piece of luck, were an acquisition obtained through the application of a suitable strategy. To decide to live poetically (as one may choose to live as a debauchee or as a thrill-seeker rather than as the father of a family) is, in the end, nonsense and, in practice, almost inevitably leads to wretched affectations: to play the dreamer preserved from the daily course of things or Hamlet poised between reason and madness, to give the slight distortion that transforms into a miracle a relatively commonplace achievement, to nurture one’s legend, to profess hatred or scorn for the bourgeois order even while one puts up with it, to flirt with revolution (while avoiding the total engagement that would lead one in fact to relegate poetry to the back burner), to misrepresent lukewarm or vulgar loves as passions lofty enough to be all-powerful, to behave like an absolute monster but to apply oneself most of all (it would seem) to being a damned nuisance to those close to one.
To write poems, to be a poet—this was in fact my youthful ambition. No question, at that time, of trying to determine what it was to live poetically. Everything was contained in my desire to write poems capable of being compared with those that I loved. Like the fabrication of gold for the alchemist philosopher (who saw it not so much as a laboratory success as the accomplishment of the work of perfection), to make such poems would have proved to me that, entrusted with a secret that was larger than any aesthetics or any morality, I was in the correct path, a state of grace as indefinable and, with greater reason, uncodifiable as that of saintliness. In surrealism, what attracted me immediately, and what I never renounced (even if I have rejected literarily the indulgence in automatism and even if I increasingly mistrust a wonder too easily manipulated), was the desire it manifested to find within poetry a total system: in a form suited to nourishing the imagination, the beautiful, the good, and the true, all muddled up together with the disrespect for conventional ideas and decoiffed of the capital letters that propose them as great fixed principles. A totality, of course, that I persist in pursuing, but going about it in the worst possible way. To try to explain clearly the poetic truth is to seek to circumscribe poetry by means of discourses, to enumerate its aspects with the excuse of better comprehending it, and, in fact, to allow it to escape, since its essence is of the order of all or nothing and cannot therefore obviously be retailed in small parts. Even if I were thus to succeed in having a poetics and a morality, I would not have won the game. I am aiming for a practical goal, and what I would need is—a thing alien to any theory—to feel I was firmly settled in the midst of poetry. On the level of intelligence and on the level of conduct, this implies (without its having to be demonstrated) that at least one is exempt, by nature and without even thinking of it, from such mundanities as stupid blunders and petty actions. Yet isn’t it a stupid blunder that I turn myself into a speechifier and arguer in order to try to arrive at what poetry is, whereas this way of thinking, which bores me to death, even before anyone else, can only distance me from it? And isn’t it a petty action to have chosen, instead of a dynamic method, a barrier of taboos behind which, negatively, I allow myself to take refuge: not to deceive in literature (a way of not having to invent anything and enabling me to answer criticism with the alibi of authenticity), not to lie where love is concerned (an argument for renouncing illicit loves), not to be a bourgeois conservative (a minimal law that permits one to fall back on “progressivism” if one knows one is not cut out to be a revolutionary).
That an unpromising system of prohibitions should have represented this morality that was supposed to be dictated to me by my profession—for this, I sought to justify myself by telling myself that, in attempting to establish a morality linked to poetry, one could proceed only through negation. Playing on this word, which enchanted me (not by its rather poor music but because of the almost mute irreducibility it evoked), I noted that negation goes hand in hand with the pursuit of poetry, since the latter aims to destroy—that is, to deny—limits. This was, of course, manipulating the language a good deal in order to give a positive value to what, in truth, did not escape its negative neutrality. But being a tool too abstract not to be good for all uses, this word, naked and null, which sucked me in like a void, lent itself in a parallel way to a less fraudulent plea: the fact is that to slap with a prohibition (to cross out or deny) a small number of things that the poetic process seems to exclude a priori amounts to subjecting it, by indicating what it is not instead of inserting it into a definition, to the slightest limit and, with that trifling restriction which protects it instead of hampering it, to giving it practically unlimited powers. Still, I did not understand that these prohibitions—severe, but apparently leaving open a wide field—sin by excess much more than by default, if one applies them without avoiding anything of what they entail: not to deceive (an order which, observed scrupulously by the author of confessions, would lead him to proscribe even the slenderest artifice of presentation or style), not to express oneself except in the most exact way, and as a consequence the flattest at the same time as the hardest to assimilate, to avoid diversions, to refrain from ve
nturing over terrains about which one does not have a perfect knowledge, to abstain from all indiscreet intrusion, not to employ either terms that are too technical or locutions that are too clever, to reject all indulgence and all weakness—this is in practice to renounce the liberties, the impulses, and the leaps into the unknown which create the literary work, even to consign oneself to the negativity of absolute silence. Without denying some taboos that I believe are open to criticism in the letter but not in the spirit and that seem to me, at least, as strongly rooted in me as the very opposite inclination that attaches me to baroque eloquence, I am aware of how unreasonable it would be to erect them into a system and how loathsome—as is any sort of puritanism—to want to conform to them with a bigoted rigorousness. These taboos, or rules that appeared to me in the course of this work to be those from which I ought not to deviate lest I risk changing the meaning of the work—it seems to me that I appreciate them at their true value if I consider them, egotistically, to be the surest means, now, of adroitly extricating myself by fully exploiting my possibilities, and if I consider, from a broader point of view, that although they may fail to constitute the bases of an art of poetry, they represent, at least, something like the underlying structure of an art of the autobiography. But isn’t it a fact that putting things back in their place in this way amounts to declaring that after so many years spent closely inspecting myself and describing myself, I have only managed at the very most to indicate the elementary rules that one must endeavor not to infringe when one devotes oneself to an enterprise of this sort? At the end of the enterprise, I discover the very rules that must preside over its conduct, and, far from having been broken, the circle thus remains closed. Except for a change which I can scarcely expect any longer, if my life may find its justification in the end, it will be in an area which, in the beginning, I did not consent to be mine, that of literature in the narrowest sense: after having wanted to be a poet (dreaming of living as a sort of mythological hero), I will have become the author of decent autobiographical essays that will perhaps play the role of defense and illustration of this literary genre. Unless I admit that (as I have often thought) the last word of any professional morality is to do what I alone can do, a principle as unexciting as that of the use of one’s talents, the judicious implementation that I am effecting here is nothing but a declaration of defeat.
The Rules of the Game Series, Volume 3 Page 32
