The Play of Light

Ann Smock

Description

Drawing from five contemporary French poets—Jacques Roubaud, Emmanuel Hocquard, Danielle Collobert, Anne Portugal, and Jacques Jouet—Ann Smock juxtaposes them and provides a milieu suitable for philosophical reflection on identity, on not-being and being, on communication, and on secrets. Smock also includes thinkers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein and Giorgio Agamben, who contribute to the conversation, as do Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot. Though the poems considered here are often thought difficult, Smock maintains a light touch throughout. She writes in an accessible, even pleasurable style while contributing to the scholarly study of literature at the border shared by poetry and philosophy
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Varieties of Light

1. "Thy blackness is a spark"

2. "Birth was the death of him"

3. Palindromes

4. Beware of Enigmas

5. Is This a Dream?

6. Interlude: All and Nothing

7. Fin' Amors

8. Diaphanous

9. Entre Deux

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• France
• Comparative literature

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 février 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438481517
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Play of Light
SERIES EDITORS
David E Johnson Comparative Literature, University at Buffalo
Scott Michaelsen English, Michigan State University
SERIES ADVISORY BOARD
Nahum D. Chandler African American Studies, University of California, Irvine
Rebecca Comay Philosophy and Comparative Literature, University of Toronto
Marc Crépon Philosophy, École Normale Supérieure, Paris
Jonathan Culler Comparative Literature, Cornell University
Johanna Drucker Design Media Arts and Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles
Christopher Fynsk Modern Thought, Aberdeen University
Rodolphe Gasché Comparative Literature, University at Buffalo
Martin Hägglund Comparative Literature, Yale University
Carol Jacobs German and Comparative Literature, Yale University
Peggy Kamuf French and Comparative Literature, University of Southern California
David Marriott History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz
Steven Miller English, University at Buffalo
Alberto Moreiras Hispanic Studies, Texas A&M University
Patrick O’Donnell English, Michigan State University
Pablo Oyarzún Teoría del Arte, Universidad de Chile
Scott Cutler Shershow English, University of California, Davis
Henry Sussman German and Comparative Literature, Yale University
Samuel Weber Comparative Literature, Northwestern University
Ewa Ziarek Comparative Literature, University at Buffalo
The Play of Light
Jacques Roubaud, Emmanuel Hocquard, and Friends
Ann Smock
Cover illustration: Félix Vallotton woodcut, la Mer , 1893, courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2021 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Smock, Ann, author
Title: The play of light : Jacques Roubaud, Emmanuel Hocquard, and friends
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2021] | Series:
SUNY series SUNY series, literature … in theory | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: ISBN 9781438481494 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438481517 (e-book)
Further information is available at the Library of Congress.
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CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Introduction: Varieties of Light
1 “Thy blackness is a spark”
2 “Birth was the death of him”
3 Palindromes
4 Beware of Enigmas
5 Is This a Dream?
6 Interlude: All and Nothing
7 Fin’ Amors
8 Diaphanous
9 Entre Deux
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author wants to thank Éditions du Seuil for permission to reproduce poems from Le Grand incendie de Londres. Récit, avec incises et bifurcations (1985-87) and Poésie: (Récit) , by Jacques Roubaud; Éditions Gallimard for permission to reproduce poems and parts of poems from Quelque chose noir , La pluralité des mondes de Lewis , La forme d’une ville change, hélas, plus vite que le coeur des humains , and Churchill 40 by Roubaud; Bénédicte Vilgram and Bernard Rival, of Théatre Typographique, for permission to reproduce parts of “Mont Cicada” from Roubaud’s La fenêtre veuve ; Catherine deléobardy, of Éditions A. M. Métailié, for permission to reproduce material from Roubaud’s Echanges de la lumière ; Patrizia Atzei of Éditions NOUS , for permission to reproduce poems from Tridents by Roubaud; Vibeke Madsen, of P.O.L, for permission to reproduce poems and parts of poems by Emmanuel Hocquard from Un privé à Tanger , Théorie des tables , Un test de solitude , Conditions de lumière , L’Invention du verre and Méditations photographiqus sur l’idée simple de nudité ; also poems and poem fragments from Anne Portugal’s Le plus simple appareil , De quoi faire un mur and et comment nous voilà moins épais ; materials from Volume I of Danielle Collobert’s Oeuvres ; and from Poèmes de métro by Jacques Jouet.
The author is also very grateful for permission granted to reproduce poems and parts of poems in translation. I thank Anne Portugal for permission to cite material from Nude ; Joshua Edwards, of Carnarium Books, for permission to cite parts of Hocquard’s The Invention of Glass ; Michael Palmer and Peter Gizzi, of o-blek editions, for permission to cite poems and poem fragments from Hocquard’s Theory of Tables ; Cole Swensen, of La Presse, for permission to reproduce material from Exchanges on Light and Sleep Preceded by Saying Poetry by Roubaud, and from Conditions of Light by Hocquard; Rosmarie Waldrop, of Burning Deck, for permission to cite from Hocquard’s A Test of Solitude and from Crosscut Universe by Norma Cole. Finally, I thank John O’Brien, of Dalkey Archive Press, for permission to reproduce material from Some Thing Black , The Plurality of Worlds of Lewis , The Form of a City Changes Faster , Alas , Than the Human Heart , and The Great Fire of London , all by Roubaud.
Small portions of reworked material from four previously published articles appear in this book: “Cloudy Roubaud,” Representations 86 (Spring 2004): 141-74; “Everyday,” l’esprit créateur 49, no. 2 (Summer 2009): 62-76; “Jacques Roubaud’s ‘Sonnetomanie,’ ” Literary Imagination 12, no. 3 (2010): 344-54; and “Geranium Logic,” Qui Parle 21, no. 2 (2013): 27-59.
I am especially grateful for the friendly encouragement offered me as I was finishing this book by Pierre Alferi, Norma Cole, Peter Gizzi, Robert Kaufman, Michael Palmer, Anne Portugal, Jean-Jacques Poucel, Cole Swensen, and Rosmarie Waldrop.
I’ve been lucky to have had the sure and generous guidance of Rebecca Colesworthy at SUNY Press.
Michael Sheringham was a unique champion of twentieth- and twenty-first-century French poetry. I had the great good fortune to know him and to participate in two stimulating and festive poetry events he organized. I wish I could show The Play of Light to him. I hope that Priscilla Sheringham will find some pages to like in it.
And I will be extremely glad if my Berkeley friends and acquaintances—teachers, students, and allies past and present—will sense in my book a spirited salute to them.
The Play of Light is dedicated to one among them: Carol Dolcini.
Introduction
Varieties of Light
Emmanuel Hocquard, one of the poets to whom this book responds, takes a great interest in a particular kind of question: the kind that, as he puts it, has no object. For its ostensible object is the reply.
Si la réponse est ceci
qu’est-ce que ceci? est une question sans objet
If the reply is this
what is this? is a question with no object. ( Theory of Tables , 34) 1
In these lines you may sense the tremor or blink that frequently occurs in Hocquard’s pages—it can bring you up short—when something opaque suddenly turns transparent, or vice versa: clarity abruptly blackens. Dark/light. Bright/dim. For the question whose object is instead its answer seems by turns so obvious there is no point asking it and utterly inscrutable. Thus, the blackness of a fish’s back glimpsed by the protagonist of Hocquard’s novel ( Aerea in the Forests of Manhattan ), alternates swiftly in sea water with the white flash of the fish’s belly. Curved surfaces of fallen leaves underfoot in Manhattan’s Riverside Park cast shadows on each other, while their thin edges catch the pale winter sunlight and gleam. “Alternation of shimmering and fading, of brilliance and matte” ( Aerea in the forests , 104/ Aerea dans les forêts , 102). 2
“Toutes les évidences lui sont mystère,” Anne-Marie Albiach wrote, and Hocquard cites her, as though the observation applied to him. 3 Everything obvious is for him an enigma. Each clue is a mystery, everything clear obscure. Sometimes in the blink between the light and the dark something seems to come unfastened just for an instant.
Une fraction de seconde
un trou de lumière grand
comme une pointe d’aiguille ( Théorie des tables , 29)
A fraction of a second
a light-hole as large
as the point of a needle ( Theory of Tables , 29)
Something opens and snaps shut, like a camera’s shutter, and in the interval (as large as it is tiny) you see—what you do not. A “nonvisible” is suddenly exposed.
Jacques Roubaud, the other protagonist in this book, places his own variety of odd question at the heart of his life’s work. I believe he calls it “l’auto-énigme” because it bears solely upon itself. The question is: What is it? Or you might say, the question asks, What am I? Dominic Di Bernardi’s translation of “auto-énigme” is “self-riddle.”
Roubaud sometimes calls it “mute question”—when he is thinking of the young knight Percival, dumbstruck in the palace of the Fisher King. Had Percival known what question to ask when he saw the mysterious objects passing before him, shining lance and gleaming cup, he might have cured the ailing king and redeemed his wasted land. But no: “question sans question,” “question muette.” 4
The questionless question, inasmuch