CONTEMPORARY FRENCH POETRY
53
Poetry is the supreme imposture, a make-believe disguising the true
meaning of all human life, which is absence of poetry, the radical
impossibility of any poetry. The sincere poet of the time will do
without it. Genuine poetry must turn into apoetry, anti-poetry. The
"hatred of poetry" (as Georges Bataille so aptly said) will become
its battlecry. "The terror in literature" had attacked during the hey–
day of Surrealism the value of the conventional outer world, of ra–
tional consciousness, of traditional morals, of the social structure, of
any given reality. It now turns against the expressive vehicle itself,
language, where it detects the very blemishes of existence with which
speech makes common cause. Present-day literary terrorism has no
illusions to spare about the saving grace of the poetic "logos" or of
imagination, in which Rimbaud and Breton still believed. Its nihilism,
like that of J arry and of Dada, is total. It celebrates a kind of anti–
paradise, in which man finds his salvation only by surrendering to
Ie
neant.
In its final stages this tendency exalts the advent of uni–
versal death, of which it everywhere discerns the rise, and whose
hegemony it no longer consents to deny, to veil or to combat. There
are strange echoes of Leconte de l'Isle's "Solvet Saeclum" in the
gloomy but unshapely prophecies of these most un-Parnassian
moderns.
1
This message of funereal truth breaks through the rebellious vio–
lence of Jacques Prevert. It inspires the hallucinatory spectacles Henri
Michaux conjures up in order to counter the great invading dalk–
ness: "Exorcism," he writes, "a reaction in full force, like the attack
of a battering-ram, is the true poem of the prisoner." It sounds
through the prosaic irony of Jean Tardieu (whose first master was
P. Valery), the cataclysmic rhetoric of Audiberti, the gibes and
clown's antics of Queneau. Lettrism, finally, is an extreme phenome–
non, directed at once against the obsolete world of things and the
fraudulent world of language.
Instead of extirpating poetry by destroying its linguistic roots
as the lettrists do, it is possible to belittle it, to cast doubts upon its
pseudo-magical powers through the constant use of sarcasm. In Ray–
mond Queneau's verse, irony aims more at the suspect use of lan-
1 The real significance of the Parnassians within the whole picture of French
poetry of the last hundred years remains to be brought out. It is far deeper
than is usually granted, at least from the ideological point of view.
