Vol. 25 No. 1 1958 - page 60

60
PARTISAN REVIEW
and the modern nihilist alike are but vulgar lumps of matter, de–
prived of soul and reality, he "moralizes the landscape"
in
order to
give back to man a significant and real world. This is the meaning
of his furious involvement of consciousness in things. "Expression,"
writes Ponge, "is for me the only resource. The rage of expression."
Against the man of today, Ponge takes the part of tomorrow's man,
who will be, he assumes, at home in the universe.
"It
is also in order
to put your nose into your dirt that I describe a million
other things
which are possible and imaginable. Why not the bathtowel, the po–
tato, the washing-machine, the pieces of anthracite.... In
all
possible
tones. In this world with which I have nothing in common, where
I cannot desire anything ... why should I not, arbitrarily, begin
with etc. . . etc. . ."
(Proemes,
1943). Ponge, in his tension to–
wards the real world, adopts as his poetic art this manneristic formula:
"The poet must never present a thought, but an object; I mean
that even to the thought he must impart the pose of an object"
(Proemes) .
Such an excess of "reism," in spite of the hyperconsciousness of
its means, and the verbal artifice it implies, finds echoes among cer–
tain gifted young poets (Andre du Bouchet). Elsewhere it is com–
pensated for by a contrary trend, towards a well-intentioned and often
sentimental neo-romanticism. A slight "Blue flower" quality charac–
terises the best poets of the Ecole de Rochefort, Rene Guy Cadou in
particular. Here anti-nihilism, allied to the exaltation of the "vege–
table kingdom" (which is also the realm of earthly love and beauty),
is revealed in a more naive manner. Unfortunately it often suffers
from diffuseness and superficiality. It is not enough to write, as did
Jean Rousselot on the title page of his last book, "There is no exile,"
for it to be really so. Nothing is given in advance. No exile? That
would be too good to be true.
Other poets, perhaps, have better expressed the nature of this
spiritual struggle, while showing how its outcome remains uncertain
for the men of our time. They take a less clear-cut attitude towards
the epoch's major issues. Divided between the temptation of nihilism
(degenerating, besides, into a facile intellectual conformism) and the
attraction towards the real which they do not yet feel themselves able
to face, they undergo a severing of the sensibility. Of this breakage
their poetry is largely the testimony.
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