PARTISAN REVIEW
actress who played in the silent
films
of my childhood, and about
whom I have forgotten everything except that she was as long as a
long evening glove and always a bit weary and always chaste and
always married and misunderstood and whom I loved and whose
name was Florence.
For the word, which tears the writer of prose away from himself
and throws him into the midst of the world, sends back to the poet
his own image, like a mirror. This is what justifies the double under–
taking of Leiris who, on the one hand,
in
his
Glossary,
tries to give
certain words a
poetic definition,
that is, one which is by itself a
synthesis of reciprocal implications between the sonorous body and
the verbal soul, and, on the other hand, in a still unpublished work,
goes in quest of remembrance of things past, taking as guides a few
words which for him are particularly charged with affectivity. Thus,
the poetic word is a microcosm.
The crisis of language which broke out at the beginning of this
century is a poetic crisis. Whatever the social and historical factors,
it manifested itself by attacks of depersonalization of the writer in
the face of words. He no longer knew how to use them, and, in
Bergson's famous formula, he only half recognized them. He ap–
proached them with a completely fruitful feeling of strangeness. They
were no longer his; they were no longer he; but in those strange
mirrors, the sky, the earth, and his own life were reflected. And, to
conclude, they became things themselves, or rather the black heart
of things. And when the poet joins s'?veral of these microcosms to–
gether the case is like that of painters when they assemble their
colors on the canvas. One might
think
that he is composing a sentence,
but this is only what it appears to be. He is creating an object. The
words-things are grouped by magical associations of fitness and incon–
gruity, like colors and sounds. They attract, repel, and
uburn"
one
another, and their
~ociation
composes the veritable poetic unity
which is the
phrase-object.
More often the poet first has the scheme of the sentence in his
mind, and the words follow. But this scheme has nothing
in
common
with what one ordinarily calls a verbal scheme. It does not preside
over the construction of a signification. Rather, it is comparable to
the creative project by which Picasso, even before touching his brush,
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