(Conférence en français et texte en anglais ci-dessous) "Towards an Anthropology of the Voice with Henri Meschonnic” dans le cadre de Thinking Language with Henri Meschonnic QMUL, London, 22September 2017: Respondent: Robert Gillett (QMUL). URL : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRemUh4qaG8
Of Rhythm: Voice and Relation
SERGE MARTIN
ABSTRACT: I would like to start from a short proposition by Henri Meschonnic in his master work, "La voix est relation" (Critique du rythme, Anthropologie historique du langage, Lagrasse, Verdier, 1982: 294), to propose a historical and relational anthropology of the voice. Such an anthropology necessarily passes through the poem, attention to the poem since. Starting from the dialogism of the poem as "la position du sujet de l’énonciation et du sujet de la lecture" (Critique du rythme : 456), and the specific continuity that the poem constructs from the individual to the Society, from the intimate to the political, we can constitute the voice as a medium favorable to listening to the overflows of significance of the poem and therefore trans-subjectivations in and through language. My contribution will show the consequences of such an anthropological orientation from Meschonnic, both in terms of traditional stylistics and postmodern semiotics.
Seul le poème peut nous mettre en voix, nous faire
passer de voix en voix, faire de nous une écoute.
(Only the poem can put us in voice, can make us
pass from voice to voice, can make of us a listening.)
Henri Meschonnic, Célébration de la poésie[1]
INTRODUCTION
Laurent Jenny, reviewing Philippe Jousset’s Anthropologie du style (Anthropology of Style)[2], adds a re-reading of Critique du rythme (Critique of Rhythm) to his critical commentary, linking both books because ‘l’appel à une anthropologie du style a toujours le sens d’un combat contre la rhétorisation du style’ (‘the call for an anthropology of style still means combatting the rhetoricalization of style’)[3]. It is interesting to observe closely what Jenny re-reads in Meschonnic. Three reproaches follow: first the ‘manque de progression argumentative’ (‘lack of argumentative progression’) which stems from an inability to take the project in question through to the end, and thus furnish a method for the theory; second, Meschonnic’s theory, being inscribed in a thinking about continuity and nourished by ‘présupposés monistes’ (‘monistic presuppositions’), has allegedly solved the dualisms ‘par un trait d’union synthématique […], relevant plus de l’incantation de continuité que de son articulation conceptuelle’ (‘through a syn-thematic use of a hyphen […], indicative more of an incantation of continuity than a conceptual articulation’); and finally the mistake of ‘faire se rejoindre’ (‘making connect’) signifiance and sense, since signification would have been divided ‘en deux régions’ (‘into two areas’) which contravene the continuitist-moniste hypothesis of and prevent any comprehensible method, at the risk of promoting the senseless. Without prejudging the clichés that sustain each of these arguments (method as application-result of a theory; confusions between continuum and continuity and between representation and activity in and through language), it seems to me that Jenny has not read Critique du rythme closely enough, or uses a questionble critical approach to dismantle Meschonnic’s ‘progression argumentative’ (‘argumentative progression’).
Within Meschonnic’s masterwork, Critique du rythme, Jenny relies on two small quotes from the long essay ‘L’enjeu de la théorie du rythme’ (pp. 65-115) (What is at Stake in the Theory of Rhythm). He borrows them from the seventh section of the essay—‘Le rythme avant le sens’, p. 98-105) (Rhythm before sense) which precedes the final section of that central chapter (‘8. Le discours, non la langue’ [‘8. The Discourse, not the Langue’]). We should not take the title of this section as a fixed definition of rhythm. After anchoring the process of subjectivation, the subject, or rather, the trans-subject, as Meschonnic sees it, in the attention to individualisation in and through language, and having refused the functionalist framework which dehistoricises the processes of individuation and ignores functionings to focus on universals, Meschonnic makes an illuminating reminder of the modes of interiority that rhythm has always triggered with respect to the process of signification, and therefore of individuation, in language. We know that, with the notion of rhythm, all the conceptual work is a work of dissociation – of rhythm and meter, of rhythm and scansion, inter alia: here, Jenny contents himself with taking up statements that identify definitions of rhythm which Meschonnic can't use as his own, since he specifies that ‘il y a à distinguer deux antériorités’ (‘there are two anteriorities to distinguish from one another’). And Meschonnic undoes Jenny’s criticism since he, for one, says that ‘étant du discours, [le rythme] n’est pas antérieur au discours particulier où il est un autre du sens. S’il y a une antériorité du rythme, elle précède le sens des mots, mais non les mots eux-mêmes. Antériorité seulement à la priorité habituelle du sens’ (p. 99) (‘being of discourse, [rhythm] is not anterior to the particular discourse where it’s an other of sense. If there is an anteriority of rhythm, it precedes the sense of words, but not the words themselves. Anteriority only to the usual priority of sense’). But Jenny would thus hide, through his non-reading of Meschonnic's argumentative progression, the fact that Meschonnic doesn’t want to change the theory of sense: which is, we know it, fastened to a hermeneutics that indeed aims at interpretation, when Meschonnic seeks to respond to the continued functioning of literary works, their trans- and re-enunciation – we can see here the divergence in their viewpoints about literature and society.
Meschonnic’s approach itself does not include an analytic of description laying out its method, when, a little further on, he shows that his research is firstly a critique working on its relationship with what it is bound to: ‘Avant les mots, avant la compréhension du sens, avant l’individu, et pourtant dans son discours, le rythme est l’involontaire’ (p. 101) (‘Before words, before the comprehension of sense, before the individual, and yet in its discourse, rhythm is the involuntary’). The reversive conjunction (‘et pourtant’ [‘and yet’]) throws the problem back until it is reformulated: ‘c’est la parabole à théoriser de l’inconnu dans le sujet, que fait le poème, le rythme’ (p. 102) (‘the parable to theorise the unknown in the subject is what the poem, the rhythm, does). For Jenny, ‘rhythm’ should be at best an element of the literary product which could participate in a comprehension-interpretation methodological haul. For Meschonnic, it is an operator for thinking language and even equivalent to the aim not for a discourse about but at a discourse with (in and through) the poem. In fact, the apposition (‘poem, rhythm’) is wholly different to what Jenny indicates as an example of the ‘chaîne de synonymies’ (‘chain of synonyms’) which he reads in Meschonnic to suggest that theorisation is impossible, since no concept is stabilised in it – they are first considered in their active congruence, in a constellation of conceptualisations. If Jenny reproaches Meschonnic for positing rhythm as anteriority, the latter precisely answers that ‘le rythme est de tout le discours, et de tout discours, comme le sens’ (p. 109) (‘rhythm is of all discourse, and of every discourse, like meaning’).
Jenny does not want to consider the fact that, in Meschonnic’s argumentation, rhythm as ‘diposition, organisation de la signifiance’ (p. 115) (‘disposition, organization of signifiance’) can only be conceptualized by recognizing the historicity of discourses, including that of the discourse on rhythm. Jenny assimilates theory to the search for a method whereas Meschonnic keeps working on ‘a theory’ that ‘est une recherche de la théorie. Elle ne peut absolument se confondre avec une théorie, quelle qu’elle soit’ (‘is a search for theory. It cannot absolutely merge with a theory, whatever it is’) because, for him, ‘une poétique du discours est un inaccompli théorique’ (p. 33) (‘a poetics of discourse is a theoretical unaccomplished).
It’s within this ‘unaccomplished’ that I propose that we think. If ‘rhythm’ is not a method but rather, because ‘la significance est infinie’ (‘significance is infinite’), ‘le primat du rythme contribue à situer le sens dans la non-totalité, dans la non-vérité, dans la non-unité’ (‘the primacy of rhythm contributes to locate sense in non-totality, in non-truth, in non-unity’), I would like to continue this ‘effet critique’ (p. 272) (‘critical effect’) by situating it in the historical work of my own research: from language to voice and relation. .
THE DIALOGISM OF THE POEM: LISTENING
For all the contributors of a collection dedicated to the ‘pratiques du discours solitaire au théâtre’[4] (‘practices of solitary discourse in the theatre’), ‘le monologue s’avère bien un objet complexe’ (‘the monologue proves to be a complex object’) and, more precisely, the monological’ often ends up ‘lui-même dialogisé, c’est-à-dire pouvant s’éclater non pas dans le resserrement d’une contradiction mais dans l’expansion de multiples voix internes’ (‘itself dialogised, that is intensified not in the tightening of a contradiction but in the expansion of multiple internal voices’). And very directly, the two directors of the collective underline from the start, without however explicitly making it clear, that they are opposed to the Bakhtinian doxa since, ‘loin d’être "un", le monologue se révèle protéiforme ; loin d’être une simple forme canonique, il se révèle paradoxal et transgressif, repoussant sans cesse les frontières qui pourraient le définir […]’ (‘far from being "one", the monologue reveals itself to be protean; far from being a canonical simple form, it reveals itself to be paradoxical and transgressive, constantly pushing the boundaries which could define it […]’).
It is necessary to remember Meschonnic's ‘critique du monologue’[5] (‘critique of monologue’), since, most particularly following Bakhtine, ‘la logique extrême de l’opposition entre la prose et la poésie a fait de la poésie un monologue, et de la prose, matière du dialogue, et du roman’[6] (p. 447) (‘the extreme logic of the opposition between prose and poetry has turned poetry into a monologue, and prose, the matter of dialogue, into a novel’). Dominique Rabaté’s accurate remarks upon the novel, in ‘Bakhtine chez Beckett et Bernhard (voix, idée et personage dans la théorie dialogique)’,[7] coincide with the critique offered by Meschonnic, himself grateful to Bakhtin for his fundamental dialogism that the vulgate erased for the benefit of a ‘novelistic dialogism’ (vs. poetic monologism). This ‘novelistic dialogism’ forces us to take the voice of a character and his thoughts as unitary, just as this ‘théorie personnaliste de la voix résiste difficilement à l’épreuve des textes plus sombre et destructeurs’ (‘personalist theory of voice cannot stand up to the test of dark and destructive texts’), as Rabaté writes[8]. Let me simply recall that, for Meschonnic, the monologue ‘n’est pas plus solitaire que l’individu n’est asocial. Le dialogisme est de tout le langage’ (p. 454 – italics by author) (‘is no more solitary than the individual is asocial. Dialogism pertains to all language’). This dialogical principle as a universal of language is thus not restricted to literature but it involves, particularly regarding this latter, the continuum from enunciation to socialisation as relational activity constructing social relation, the communal, and ‘l’inter-subjectif essential au langage’ (‘the inter-subjective essential to language’), that is, the fact that there is no ‘poésie du je qui ne soit par là-même une poésie du tu, de la réciprocité qu’est la personne’ (p. 455) (‘poetry of I that is not in itself a poetry of YOU, through the reciprocity that is the person’. Meschonnic also underlines what holds, perhaps, for any literary work as a dialogical relation both intersubjective and trans-subjective:
Le dialogisme du poème est à la fois une position du sujet de l’énonciation et du sujet de la lecture, tous deux mutuellement impliqués d’une manière que le poème invente, qui lui est propre. (p. 456)
(The poem’s dialogism is at the same time a position of the subject of enunciation and of the subject of reading, both mutually implicated in a invented by the poem, particular to the poem.)
Such a dialogism does not involve any typology or topology as it is more concerned with an active principle, a force, even the interpenetration evoked by Humboldt.[9] A ‘force’ Rabaté notices in Bakhtine as something ‘au-delà de la forme’[10] (‘beyond the form’) of a text. But ‘form’ should not remain caught in the statism of a topics any more than the force/form separation and its purported Hegelian overcoming (‘mise en forme théorique, l’obligeant constamment à se dépasser elle-même’[11] [‘a theoretical shaping that constantly forces it to overcome itself’]) reverts too much to a doxaof content and form, inside and outside, norm and exception. And when Meschonnic suggests that ‘un poème convoque directement un dialogue’ (‘a poem directly summons a dialogue’), adding straight away that ‘il [un poème] le présente sans le représenter’ (p. 456) (‘it [a poem] presents it without representing it’), such a remark is not limited to a genre, to poetry, but demands to be historicised each time, in poetry, novels, even in theatre and everywhere else, as ‘la question même de l’altérité’ (‘the very question of alterity’), that is, of the ‘délitement de cette notion unitaire d’identité, et conséquemment de la notion même de personnage, et du présupposé d’une définition fictive de la persona représentée, ainsi comme disloquée sous le flot d’une parole s’auto-engendrant’ (‘disintegration of this notion of unitary identity, and consequently of the very notion of character, and of the presupposition about a fictive definition of the personarepresented, and thus somehow dislocated under the flow of a self-engendering speech'), as summarized by Françoise Dubor and Catherine Triau.[12] We should mention, as a counterpoint to this journal issue, the collection directed by Jean-Pierre Ryangaert, Nouveaux Territoires du dialogue[13], not forgetting a double issue of the journal Études théâtrales[14]. Jean-Pierre Sarrazac, who coordinated that issue, takes up his thematic of the ‘partage des voix’ (‘sharing voices’) in the work directed by Ryngaert.[15] He borrows it from Jean-Luc Nancy.[16] Sarrazac situates himself in the same Bakhtinian problematic in order to observe the ‘reconfiguration du dialogue dramatique’ (‘reconfiguration of dramatic dialogue’) in contemporary theatre. Contemporary theatre ‘se dialogise’ (‘dialogizes itself’) because, as Sarrazac specifies regarding Théorie du drame moderne (Theory of the Modern Drama) by Peter Szondi,[17] it organises ‘la confrontation dialogique de ces voix singulières’ (‘the dialogical confrontation of these singular voices’), including that of the ‘rhapsodic subject’ rather than that of the ‘epic’ one. Sarrazac’s reflections are exciting but his reading of Maeterlinck seems debatable to me. This latter, when talking about an ‘autre dialogue’ (‘other dialogue’), never suggested that such a dialogue ‘exprim[ait] l’“ineffable”’ (‘express[ed] the “ineffable”’), as Sarrazac claims: ‘c’est la qualité et l’étendue de ce dialogue inutile qui déterminent la qualité et la portée ineffable de l’œuvre’ (‘it’s the quality and the extension of this useless dialogue that determines the quality and the ineffable impact of a work’), Maeterlinck asserted.[18] Sarrazac reiterates a dualism of both dialogues and of both times; but Maeterlinck doesn’t conceive, like Nathalie Sarraute and Michel Vinaver whom Sarrazac mentions, of ‘un dialogue au second degré’ (‘a second-degree dialogue’), because he looks for the continuity of meaning and significance, and maybe more for the dependence of meaning on significance, on its force. Ultimately, it is not a ‘partage des voix’ (‘sharing of voices’) as suggested by Nancy that guides all of Ryngaert’s reflection in his preface,[19] and thus throughout the book's contributors: it follows that Ryngaert talks of the ‘tiers spectateur’[20] (‘third-party spectator’) when what needs to be grasped is a spectator-actor, no matter what theatrical form is addressed, as Claude Régy suggests in all his writings.[21] Rather than a ‘partage des voix’ (‘sharing of voices’), at issue would be another form of listening, the passage of a voice that is continued, intensified, replayed: all the senses of what we are searching for here.
We should not mistake such a dialogical principle for some expressions of the return of the subject in literature, or even of the return of 'the Other’, what we could call ‘le pole de l’altérité’[22] (‘the pole of alterity’). Thus, with this first foothold from Critique du rythme, I would happily associate to this work, whenever a poem is concerned, not ‘la question même de l’altérité’ (‘the very question of alterity’) nor ‘la question du sujet’ (‘the question of the subject’), but ‘le primat de la subjectivité’ (p. 298) (‘the primacy of subjectivity’) in literary works as relational subjectivation.
SUBJECTIVATION WITH THE POEM: RELATION
On the occasion of a reflection about voice, Meschonnic decisively risks a theory of the subject in and through language. Previously, the anchor in a theory of discourse principally referred back to Benveniste, but also to his own activity as poet and translator, made it possible to dismantle ‘l’ancienne tripartition’ (‘the old tripartition’) (‘qui mettait le lyrisme dans le je, représentait le drame avec le tu, renvoyait l’épopée au il’ [‘which placed lyricism in the I, represented drama with the you, referred the epic to the he’]) saying that ‘le je est l’impersonnel subjectif, étant, outre, la “première” personne, l’échange de la function de sujet’[23] (p. 102) (‘the I is an impersonal subjective, as it is the switch in the function of the subject, on top of being the “first” person’). Meschonnic adds that this decisive anchor appeared at the very moment when ‘le structuralisme est allé vers l’oubli de la voix’[24] (p. 275) (‘structuralism moved towards a forgetting of voice’). Admittedly, since then, we have largely rediscovered the voice– I will come back to this below – albeit without granting it its own critical force and often even ignoring the relation which constitutes it. Meschonnic wrote about this in 1982 – and this is the starting point of all my research: ‘La voix est relation’ (p. 294) (‘The voice is relation’). Here I try to dissociate and to reassociate these two notions in many works and literary studies which have focused on the voice again in recent years,[25] but which have often forgotten Critique du rythme. Thus, there would be different vocal turning points …
On first reading, Meschonnic’s study is a historical approach, as it is interested in the traditions of speech, like relations between the voice and diction, as a test of a form of orality at work in discourse, and therefore of a subjectivation:
La voix et la diction, dans leur rapport nécessairement étroit, découvrent ceci, que la voix, qui semble l’élément le plus personnel, le plus intime, est, comme le sujet, immédiatement traversée par tout ce qui fait une époque, un milieu, une manière de placer la littérature, et particulièrement la poésie, autant qu’une manière de se placer. Ce n’est pas seulement sa voix qu’on place. C’est une pièce du social, qu’est tout individu. Tous les dualismes se retrouvent dans la voix. Ils se ramènent essentiellement, pour et par le poème comme révélateur, au dualisme de l’intériorité et de l’extériorité, à l’opposition, qui n’est peut-être pas une contradiction, entre l’auteur et le lecteur. (pp. 284-285)
(Voice and diction, in their necessarily close relationship, uncover this: that the voice, which seems the most personal, the most intimate element, is, like the subject, immediately traversed by everything that constitutes an epoch, an environment, a way of situating literature, and particularly poetry, as much as it is a way of situating itself. It isn’t only our voice that we situate. It’s a piece of the social, which every individual is. All dualisms are found in the voice. They essentially come down, for and through the poem as though revelatory, to the dualism of interiority and exteriority, to the opposition, which is perhaps not a contradiction, between author and reader.)
As often for Meschonnic, the phrasing of the essay allows interactions that are sometimes hard to follow but indispensable to re-deploy. The necessary relation between voice and diction is immediately displaced, or, more emblematically, carried by the relation between voice and subject, which are consubstantial: the more there is voice, the more there is subject; or: the more we pay attention to the voice, the more we pay attention to the subject and vice versa. The antinomy between the individual and the social is then challenged to make way for a continuity to which the voice bears witness, because individuation is fundamentally social in it, as for Marcel Mauss, expressly mentioned by Meschonnic.[26] Mauss also questions the whole series of dualisms that generally follow each other, and first and foremost that of interiority and exteriority. In other words, where there is literature, it is the topos of expression – if not of expressivity, which is itself contested. In the same way, the opposition between author and reader, and thus the categories that have long been foundational for doxa, such as ‘l’horizon d’attente’[27] (‘the horizon of expectations’) or older categories regarding inspiration, are also contested, or at least revealed by the strong relation between voice and poem as so many cultural representations of an epoch. There is no pretence, in Meschonnic, to define voice other than by constantly working on what makes it function in literary works: its continuity with subject, rhythm, prosody. Yet, for the poetician of rhythm, there is also a strong attention to historicities, the most diverse cultural and linguistic areas, and concomitantly, on the anthropological aim at a universal of language. What Meschonnic highlights near the end of his study, starting with what is obvious and transforming its range:
La voix unifie, rassemble le sujet ; son âge, son sexe, ses états. C’est un portrait oral. On aime une voix, ou elle ne vous dit rien. Éros est dans la voix, comme dans les yeux, les mains, tout le corps. La voix est relation. Par la communication, où du sens s’échange, elle constitue un milieu. Comme dans le discours, il y a dans la voix plus de signifiant que de signifié : un débordement de la signification par la signifiance. On entend, on connaît et reconnaît une voix – on ne sait jamais tout ce que dit une voix, indépendamment de ce qu’elle dit. C’est peut-être ce perpétuel débordement de signifiance, comme dans le poème, qui fait que la voix peut être la métaphore du sujet, le symbole de son originalité la plus « intérieure », tout en étant historicisée. (p. 294)
(The voice unifies, binds the subject; its age, gender, conditions. It’s an oral portrait. We like a voice, or it doesn’t appeal to us. Eros is in the voice, as it is in the eyes, the hands, the whole body. The voice is relation. Through communication, where sense is exchanged, it constitutes an environment. As in discourse, in the voice there is more signifier than signified: an overflow of signification by signifiance. We hear, we know and we recognize a voice – we never know all of what a voice says, independently of what it says. It’s maybe this perpetual overflow of signifiance, as in the poem, that makes the voice a metaphor of the subject, the symbol of its most “interior” originality, all the while being historicized.)
The obvious, like common sense, has its own validity, Meschonnic reminds us, but poetics is a work of transformation of this knowledge in a non-knowledge whose activity is the source of a far more decisive value. Indeed, here the hypothetical modulator (‘peut-être’ [‘perhaps']) achieves, as so often elsewhere in Meschonnic’s work, the dissociation and reassociation of these notions,: ‘le débordement de signifiance’ (‘the overflow of signifiance’) is the operator that makes it possible to modify simultaneously the conception of the voice and that of the subject which previously had constructed common sense. Interiority has become a passage of the subject. Originality is no longer an essence but a force: ‘La voix est une force, autant qu’une matière, un milieu. Elle a une efficacité. Comme la signifiance du rythme et de la prosodie. Elle est à la fois naturelle et dépasse l’entendement’ (p. 294) (‘The voice is a force, as much as a matter, a milieu. It has efficacy. Like the signifiance of rhythm and of prosody. It’s both natural and exceeds understanding’). Meschonnic considerably enlarges the attention that should be paid to what voice does to literature and more generally to language through the poem: not only does he dare to stay tuned to what is often of the order of the relational imperceptible – ‘le lien qu’on ne voit pas est plus fort que celui qu’on voit’[28] (‘the link we don’t see is stronger than the one we do see’), Meschonnic wrote in one of his final works –, but it also obliges us to conceive of the continuity of the activity of the voice, without ever separating what constitutes it, what it constitutes, and that which moreover carries it beyond itself.
THE EPIC AND THE VOICE: THE RELATION OF RELATION
It is precisely at this turning point that I start my third fulcrum for a theory of voice starting from the Critique du rythme, after those of dialogism and the relational subject: that of the relation of relation.
The pragmatic dimension of voice is well known to ethnologists.[29] We cannot however restrict it to a prehistory of orality, nor reduce ethnological works to such a prehistory. Mallarmé knew that a ‘divination’ (‘divination’) carries the text as long as it is a poem: ‘L’air ou chant sous le texte, conduisant la divination d’ici là, y applique son motif en fleuron et cul-de-lampe invisibles’[30] (‘The tune or song beneath the text, inching our guesswork forward, applies its motifs to the text as an invisible fleuron and tallpiece’). In other words, ‘l’historicité de la voix inclut celle de l’écriture’ (‘the historicity of voice includes that of writing’), and not only of what is spoken and of dictions. Meschonnic insists on this – and emphasises: ‘Tout ce qui déshistoricise l’une, déshistoricise l’autre’ (p. 296) (‘Whoever dehistoricizes one, dehistoricizes the other’). That is why orality is decisively at stake: its theorization as well as its practice and its listening, its anthropology as well as its poetics and its politics. It is here that dehistoricizations are permanently at work, to avoid carrying out a decisive ‘saut épistémologique’ (‘epistemological leap’) which, for Meschonnic, occurs because the ‘le rythme comme sémantique, et oralité, est une subjectivation spécifique du langage’ (p. 600) (‘rhythm as semantics, and as orality, is a specific subjectivation of language’). The interpolated ‘et oralité’ [‘and orality’] is decisive here for the theory and practice of the voice with the poem: outside any physiologism, because it is an activity of the order of a semantics, Meschonnic asserts that ‘la voix, non la respiration, est la matière de l’oralité’ (p. 660) (‘voice, not breath, is the matter of orality’). Thus, the voice returns to language, to the language-body, through the poem. It s the constitutive activity of it. On one decisive condition: ‘travailler à sa narrativité propre. À sa prose’ (p. 504) (‘working its own narrativity. Its prose’), as Meschonnic says.
It is not a question of restoring the voice of the poem to the narrative or to its narrator. Meschonnic starts with the decisive relation between the said and the saying and then between voice and epic. This last notion is reconceptualised by drawing on his own biblical translations, but also by relying on the beginning of Aristotle's De Interpretatione: not ‘les sons émis par la voix’ (‘the sounds emitted by the voice’) in Tricot’s[31] translation but ‘ce qui est dans la voix’ (‘what is in the voice’). Then, Meschonnic introduces the notions of recitative and, alongside it, of phrasing. It seems to me that the notion of racontage (telling)[32] could expand these last notions, not towards a possible reception but towards a relational activity of poeticity, associating vocality and listening in a history of the passage of voice, as Walter Benjamin outlined in his study of Leskov.[33] However, Benjamin, through the apocalyptic tone he likes to give to his studies, makes this ‘narration’ drift towards the muthos which, as Meschonnic reminds us, ‘chez Homère, désigne le contenu des paroles’ (‘in Homer designates the content of words’).[34] Nevertheless, it seems to me that it would be a mistake to dissociate the said from the saying, while quite aware that Meschonnic’s critique is decisive and that the primacy of the saying is part of the very principle of the poem as an activity at once transubjective and even hypersubjective. If epos must carry away muthos, it is perhaps through the relation of relation in which the active semantics of narration--to be understood as deverbal--and of intersubjective linkage mutually augment each other.
This third fulcrum consequently excludes any heroism on the part of the subject to focus instead on its weakness even, the voice as invention of an orality, relation of relation, subject becoming subject by another subject, in and through ‘prose en action, et non en récit’ (‘prose in action, and not in narrative’), as Boris Pasternak said; that is, as Meschonnic indicated, ‘passage du “fait organique”, du vivant, dans le langage’[35] (pp. 460-461) (‘the passage of the “organic fact”, of what is living, in language’). Pasternak talks about ‘la prose pure dans sa tension de transfert’ (‘pure prose in its tension of transfer’). About which Meschonnic specifies: ‘non traduction’ (‘not translation’) but ‘le transfert, la transmission’ (‘transfer, transmission’). This last term very precisely suggests the relational value of this ‘voix de la prose’ (‘voice of prose’) which we could thus call racontage.[36] Passage of voice and passing voice: the relation of relation. Or even: voice in the voice, because the strongest interaction of narrative relation and intersubjective relation is the condition of an internal pluralisation of the voice, of its echoisation in the Hebrew sense, where echo is the daughter of the voice.[37] One single phrase in parentheses from Mallarmé’s ’autobiography’ to Verlaine of 16 November, 1885, would perform this last etymological metaphor: ‘(à côté de mon travail personnel qui, je crois, sera anonyme, le Texte y parlant de lui-même et sans voix d’auteur)’[38] (‘[next to my personal work which, I believe, will be anonymous, the Text talking by itself and without any authorial voice]’). This confidence, found in a biographical note sent to the poet of Romances sans paroles, points to the continuity of the personal and of the anonymous, so as to render audible the echo of what is left without a voice… Yet, as I have already suggested, is not ‘the Text’ pure orality?
POEM, FORM: VOICE, LIFE
Since its publication in 1982, Critique du rythme has constituted a decisive operator for thinking the poem, as this work permits a critical grasp starting from a vehicular notion that is often left to the unthought. It has also pursued a conceptualization that had been started by Meschonnic’s various publications for Gallimard since 1970. Thus, this ‘anthropologie historique du langage’ (‘historical anthropology of language’), which is the work's subtitle, would enable a re-reading of this movement of conceptualization as a large-scale theoretical experience. From ‘forme-sens’ (‘form-meaning’), which we often forget to link to ‘forme-histoire’[39] (‘form-history’), to rhythm, what is being written is a critique of the sign, in and through the tireless activity of a great reader, combing through publications from many fields, and of a poet and translator thinking out his multiple experiences as elements of this ‘anthropologie historique du langage’. However, it is in its prolongation that the notion of poem has launched the movement of conceptualization in a more recent book, which took the title[40] of an unpublished foreword to Ève Malleret’s translations of poems by Marina Tsvetaieva.[41] Malleret participated in the seminar on poetics directed by Meschonnic at Paris VIII-Vincennes, and shared with him the same knowledge for Russian. This linguistic and literary realm, particularly where poetry is concerned, testifies in Meschonnic's view to a ‘ratage’ (p. 261) (‘failure’), a ‘non-rapport’ (p. 260) (‘non-relation’) between two traditions, Russian and French. Let me leave aside any reflection about ‘ce non-rapport’ (‘this non-relation’) that ‘ne préjuge pas des possible’ (‘does not prejudge possibilities’): ‘le retard de la bouteille à la mer’ (‘the delay of the bottle in the ocean’) which Meschonnic had sensed with Mailleret. I choose only one example, almost legendary, that Meschonnic shows with Tsvetaieva’s poetry as it performs ‘un débordement de la tradition par outrance’ (‘an overflow of tradition through excess’) since in her poems ‘la rime mange les mots’ (p. 266) (‘rhyme eats the words’) or even ‘l’air porte les paroles’ (p. 267) (‘the air carries the words’) – those are comments that Meschonnic certainly drew from his reading of Clio by Péguy. But here, I merely indicate what will enable a push of the ‘poem’ into conceptualization. After all, Meschonnic remarks that ‘en prose comme dans les vers’ (‘in prose just as in verse’), in Tsvetaieva’s work, ‘c’est une pensée par la rime, de rime en rime’ (p. 269) (‘it’s a thinking through rhyme, from rhyme to rhyme’); that is, ‘la rime finit par devenir non plus matière seulement, mais sujet du poème’ (p. 270) (‘the rime ends up being not only matter of the poem anymore, but subject of the poem’). That’s why, as ‘Tsvetaieva est une figure de la poésie où la rime et la vie se sont rejointes en une même matière de langage’ (p. 270) (‘Tsvetaieva is a figure of poetry where rhyme and life have joined in a same matter of language’), Meschonnic comes to this decisive formulation: ‘La rime-rythme apparaît comme une forme de vie’ (p. 271) (‘The rhythm-rhyme appears as a form of life’). Further on this formulation is reversed into the following one, which shows the continuity of a matter and of a form, one in and through the other one: ‘La rime-vie fait de la vie une écoute’ (p. 271) (‘The rime-life turns life into listening’). The gloss just before this quotation (‘La poésie et la vie dans une indistinction antérieure à leur séparation, et qui pourtant passe par la technicité du langage’ [p. 272] [‘Poetry and life in an indistinction anterior to their separation, that nevertheless proceeds through the technicity of language’]) announces the conclusion that this essay is progressively constructing: ‘La rime est une éthique’ (p. 273) (‘Rhyme is an ethics’). Since it is through this tautology (I reverse the formula: the ethics of language is rhyme), which issues from the empiricism of the Tsvetaieva-poem whose ‘cri’ (p. 268) (‘shout’) is not without echos and resonances in the Meschonnic-poem, that Wittgenstein’s thinking[42], linked to Humboldt’s thinking, allowed Meschonnic to develop the formulation, constantly remade, of what a poem does in its historical anthropology of language: ‘une forme de vie transforme une forme de langage, une forme de langage transforme une forme de vie, les deux inséparablement’[43] (‘a form of life transforms a form of language, a form of language transforms a form of life, both inseparably’).
It is thus as a ‘forme-sujet’ (‘subject-form[er]’) that the poem invents an interpenetration of forms of life and forms of language, where the form of life makes language and the form of language makes life, that Meschonnic forces us to think about the specificity of this activity at the heart of a relational anthropology:
C’est pourquoi, pour penser la poésie, le poème, il y a à repenser tout le langage, et tout le rapport entre le langage, l’art, l’éthique et le politique. Le continu. Le rythme. Le sujet du poème. La pensée poétique comme transformation de la poésie par le poème, forme-sujet.[44]
(That is why, to think poetry, the poem, we must think anew all language, and the whole relation of language, art, the ethical and the political. The continuous. Rhythm. The subject of the poem. The poetical thinking as a transformation of poetry through the poem, subject-form[er].)
What should be brought up to its active principle: a universalism which the empirical never ceases to work, multiply, carry to a dimension of the infinite through what ‘échappe’ (‘escapes'):
Parce qu’il s’agit toujours de signifiance avec le langage. Même et peut-être surtout quand le sens échappe, ou qu’il est perdu. Ce qui échappe est une force. Cette force est du sujet. Une historicité. Parce qu’elle est nécessairement le passage d’un sujet à un autre sujet, ce qui les constitue sujets. Faisant du poème l’allégorie du sujet.[45]
(Because it is always a question of signifiance with language. Even and maybe above all when sense escapes, or when it is lost. What escapes is a force. This force is of the subject. A historicity. Because it is necessarily the passage of one subject to another subject, what makes them subjects. Making the poem the allegory of the subject.)
Translated by Rafael Costa Mendes
Serge Martin is professor of contemporary French literature at the University Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3. He recently published Voix et relation. Une poétique de l’art littéraire où tout se rattache (Marie Delarbre ed., 2017), Poétique de la voix. Le racontage de la maternelle à l’université (L'Harmattan, 2015) and will soon release Ghérasim Luca, une voix inflammable (Tarabuste, 2018) and L’impératif de la voix de Paul Eluard à James Sacré (Classiques Garnier, 2018). As a poet under the name of Serge Ritman he published recently at Editions Tarabuste: Tu pars, je vacille (2015) and Ta Résonance, ma retenue (2017).
[1] Henri Meschonnic, Célébration de la poésie (Lagrasse: Verdier, 2001), p. 249. Unless otherwise stated, all translations are my own (RCM).
[2] Phillippe Jousset, Anthropologie du style (Pessac: Presses universitaires de Bordeaux, 2008).
[3] Laurent Jenny, ‘Une difficulté dans la pensée du style’, Critique, 752-753 (2010), pp. 36-46. All of Jenny’s quotes refer to these pages. The page numbers in parentheses refer to Henri Meschonnic, Critique du rythme (Lagrasse: Verdier, 1982).
[4] Christophe Triau and Françoise Dubor, ‘Avant-propos : Monologuer. Pratiques du discours solitaire au théâtre’, La Licorne, 85 (2009), 7-17. The quotes that follow refer to these pages.
[5] It is the eleventh chapter (p.447-457) of the important essay entitled ‘Prose, poésie’ in Meschonnic, Critique du rythme, pp. 391-518.
[6] H. Meschonnic criticizes the Bakhtinian theory in detail on pp. 448-455, which I refer to for more details.
[7] Dominique Rabaté, Poétique de la voix (Paris: Corti, 1999), pp. 225-245.
[8] Ibid., p. 244.
[9] Wilhelm von Humboldt, Introduction à l’œuvre sur le kavi et autres essais, introduction and translation by Pierre Caussat (Paris: Seuil, 1974), p. 73. I shall take the liberty of referring to the 17th chapter of my dissertation (‘La volubilité: une force amoureuse’ [The volubility: a love force]) and more particularly to the ‘six principles of volubility’ taken from the 1820 essay which was only published in 1906.
[10] Rabaté, Poétique de la voix,, p. 245.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Dubor/ Triau, ‘Avant-propos : Monologuer. Pratiques du discours solitaire au théâtre’, p. 15.
[13] Jean-Pierre Ryngaert, Nouveaux Territoires du dialogue (Arles: Actes Sud / CNSAD, 2005).
[14] ‘Dialoguer, vers un nouveau partage des voix’, Études théâtrales, 31-32 (2004-2005).
[15] Ryngaert, Nouveaux Territoires du dialogue, pp. 11-16.
[16] Jean-Luc Nancy, Le partage des voix (Paris: Galilée, 1982).
[17] Peter Szondi, Theorie des modernen Dramas (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1956) ; translated by Patrice Pavis as Théorie du drame moderne (Lausanne: L’Âge d’homme, 1983).
[18] Maurice Maeterlinck, ‘Le tragique quotidien’, in Le trésor des humbles (Bruxelles: Labor, 1986), p. 107.
[19] Ryngaert, Nouveau Territoires du dialogue, p. 5.
[20] Ibid., p. 6.
[21] See for example: Claude Régy, Au-delà des larmes (Besançon: Les Solitaires intempestifs, 2007).
[22] See, among other references, the conference proceedings from June 1988, Poésie et altérité : Actes du colloque de juin 1988, edited by Michel Collot and Jean-Claude Mathieu (Paris: Presses de l’École Normale Supérieure, 1990). I carried out a critical reading of George Nonnenmacher’s contribution in ‘Poésie, relation et altérité’ in Langage et relation (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006), pp. 94-96.
[23] The notion of the ‘fonction de sujet’ (‘function of the subject’) is also linked to Michel Foucault. See, among other references, Meschonnic, Politique du rythme. Politique du sujet, p. 241.
[24] This quote relevantly sheds light on the essay ‘Le poème et la voix’ in Meschonnic, Critique du rythme, p. 273-296.
[25] In journals, this would significantly start with Poétique, 102 (1995) (which includes a feature entitled ‘La parole et la voix’), pp. 131-192). For more references, see Jean-Pierre Martin’s very useful bibliography at the end of his work La Bande sonore. Beckett, Céline, Duras, Genet, Pérec, Pinget, Queneau, Sarraute, Sartre (Paris: Corti, 1998), p. 287 – yet, it does not mention that issue of Poétique.
[26] Ibid. pp. 293-294. Also see pp. 648-651.
[27] Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, tr. By Timothy Bahti, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982). The differences between Jauss’s works and the doxa prevailing in literary studies at school should be evaluated – see, among other references, ‘La critique pour quoi faire?’, in Le Français aujourd’hui, 160 (2008).
[28] Henri Meschonnic, Dans le Bois de la langue (Paris: Laurence Teper, 2008), pp. 80-81.
[29] See, for example, Nicole Belmont and Jean-François Gossiaux, De la Voix au texte. L’ethnologie contemporaine entre l’oral et l’écrit (Paris: Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques, 1997) – It is made of the proceeding of the 119th congress of historical and scientific societies (French anthropology and ethnology sections) at Amiens in October 1994.
[30] S. Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, p. 387; article translated by Malcolm Bowie as ‘Mystery in Literature’, in Mallarmé in Prose, edited by Mary Ann Caws (New York: New Directions, 2001), p. 51.
[31] Aristote, Catégories, De l’interprétation, Organon I et II, translated by J. Tricot (Paris: Vrin, 1984), pp. 89-90. E version !
[32] See my work, Quelle littérature pour la jeunesse ? (Paris: Klincksieck, « 50 questions », 2009).
[33] Walter Benjamin, ‘Le narrateur’ in Écrits français, introduction and notices by J.-M. Monnoyer (Paris: Gallimard, “Folio essais”, 1991), pp. 264-298. Also see ‘Le Conteur’, in Oeuvres III, translated by P. Rusch (Paris, Gallimard, “Folio essais”, 2000), pp. 114-151, and more recently Le Raconteur, translated by S. Muller (Paris: Circé, 2014).
[34] H. Meschonnic, Politique du rythme Politique du sujet, pp. 358-359.
[35] H. Meschonnic quotes this text from the Russian version (Boris Pasternak, paper given during the 1st Congress of Soviet Writers on August 29, 1934).
[36] See my work Poétique de la voix..., pp. 33-47.
[37] See H. Meschonnic, Critique du rythme, p. 293.
[38] S. Mallarmé, Oeuvres Complètes, p. 663.
[39] H. Meschonnic thus wrote: ‘C’est l’œuvre unité de vision syntagmatique et l’œuvre unité de diction rythmique et prosodique –, système et créativité, objet et sujet, forme-sens, forme-histoire’ (‘It’s the syntagmatic unity of vision work and the rhythmic and prosodic unity of diction work -, system and creativity, object and subject, form-meaning, form-history’) in Pour la poétique (Paris: Gallimard, “Le Chemin”, 1970), p. 62.
[40] Henri Meschonnic, ‘La rime et la vie’ in La rime et la vie (1989) (Paris: Gallimard, « Folio essais », 2006), pp. 247-273. Henceforth I will give the page number only.
[41] Marina Tsvetaieva, Tentative de jalousie, introduced and translated by Ève Malleret (Paris: La Découverte, 1986). She had taken part in the team directed by H. Meschonnic for the collective translation of A. Fournier, B. Kreise, and J. Young de Iouri Lotman, La Structure du texte artistique(Paris: Gallimard, 1973).
[42] See §19 and §23 in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Investigation philosophique (1945), third edition, translated by G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986). E version
[43] Meschonnic, Célébration de la poésie, p. 35.
[44] Meschonnic, Célébration de la poésie, p. 216.
[45] Meschonnic, La Rime et la vie, p. 246.
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