Vol. 25 No. 1 1958 - page 55

CONTEMPORARY FRENCH POETRY
55
fice of an aristocratic literature propounded by bourgeois esthetes, a
poetry of direct and brutal demand is opposed. The satire of a false
human order and of the fake language reflecting it is here achieved
by means of a provincial or proletarian
faubourg
dialect, handled
with virulence. Paradoxically, a Guillevic, a Prevert, make use of an
anti-poetic idiom, and thus seem to draw close to the tendency rep–
resented by Queneau. But this slangy truculence, which in Queneau's
writing translates the sneer of hopelessness, the symptom of human
debasement, becomes in Prevert a weapon in the political struggle, a
package of dynamite thrown into the correct
sous-prefectures
of re–
actionary poetry. Queneau, a middle class nihilist, denounces life
itself:
Infirme est toute La nature
(Les Ziaux)
Neige demain seche avant-hier
ru d'avenir coule en un puits
c'est la belle train des amours
c'est la belle train des vacances
elle mene jusqu'
a
la mort
qui vient apres convalescence
(L'instant fatal)
Prevert's ferocity, in "Familiale" or the "Diner des Tetes
a
Paris-
France," is directed against a particular world and certain people:
La vie continue La vie avec le tricot la guerre les affaires
les affaires la guerre le tricot La guerre
Les affaires les affaires et les affaires
La vie avec Le cimetiere
(Paroles)
But he exerts it neither against
the
world nor against
men.
The re–
semblance with Queneau is fortuitous, involving a superficial simi–
larity of means. Thereby Prevert parts from nihilism, although he,
like Bertold Brecht, borrows from its arsenal expressive tools, arms
of denial with which to bludgeon a regime from which he expects
no salvation. His aim, however, is to exalt the great Sunday of the
future, the utopia of happiness on earth, of which his popular love
3...,45,46,47,48,49,50,51,52,53,54 56,57,58,59,60,61,62,63,64,65,...162
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