Texte en anglais :

Literary Creation: an Experiment¹ in being absolutely modern

Novelty is in the mind that creates, not in the nature that is painted…You who know that there is always something new, show it to them in parts they have ignored. Make them think they have never heard about the nightingale nor about the spectacle of the vast sea. (Eugene Delacroix)

Superior men are naturally innovative. They come and everywhere they look, they find the foolishness and mediocrity into whose clutches everything has fallen and which manifest themselves in everything people do. (Eugene Delacroix)

First, it seems to me that concept of innovation has to be reinterpreted, as the addition of something that is seen as new in comparison with the established/dominant repertory of literary production in a given period, and worthy of belonging to that repertory, because this concept is essentially dependent upon the specific historical context in which the innovation appears. Why call into question the ordinary meaning of that concept, if this reappraisal does not aim to facilitate the comprehension of innovation by shedding new light on this concept? That’s why I would like to redefine innovation as experimentation in its most basic sense, as the action of making experiments, the action of looking for, of imagining, of contemplating, and of trying out new things, new ways of doing things or new ideas. I want to focus on explaining and throwing into relief the tentative, provisional, exploratory dimension of experimentation, of innovation as an experiment, as an attempt or several attempts which materialize before the poets’ eyes, almost without the poet’s/the poet knowing it. Moreover, innovation cannot be ascribed to some deliberate choice or conscious intention on the part of the poets, because in spite of their genuine desire to innovate, they can seldom dispel the doubts they have about the novelty of their poems. When they explore the potential novelty of their poetry, they move back and forth between the genesis (preparatory notes, first drafts) and the more or less final version, without being able to trace the initial emergence of that “absolute poetic modernity” very closely or precisely, without being able to pinpoint the inaugural surfacing of that novelty. In the experiment, that surfacing is elusive, intangible, as smudgy as something drawn by a trembling hand.

Secondly, it is impossible to talk about innovation without mentioning the avant-garde, artists who denied any filiation with their predecessors² and thus “challenge the artistic and aesthetic validity of the established forms of art…of their time”³ by refusing to acknowledge the significance of any previous work of art. The term is often applied to artists who are considered ahead of their time”⁴ These avant-gardes are obviously inseparable from the historical context which shapes them: they are both historical and historic when their aesthetic quests become a notable poetic legacy, a turning point in the history of poetry, a part of the universal treasure trove of poetics, of the art of writing poetry which reflects the multiple facets of the life of the mind. Therefore innovation or modernity is never a complete break with the past: it can even coexists with tradition. Who does not perceive both the novel, reputedly modern form and the putatively traditional structure in “Un coup de dé” (A throw of dice) by Stéphane Malarmé, or in Appolinaire’s “Calligrames” or in any poem by Anne Sexton or within the strange quest illustrated by the poems of the Portuguese, Herberto Helder?

Furthermore, could poetic innovation fit Leonardo Da Vinci’s definition of art as “cosa mentale”? Conversely, could “cosa mentale” correspond to the problematics of contemporary art? If we return to the twentieth century, after the imagists (post-romantics such as Henry Longfellow and Alfred Tennyson, and then after Ezra Pound’s programmatic method, after the incorporation of Dada in Surrealism, which preceded the advent of noise music which subsequently evolved into performances in the years 1950-1970, to mention but a few of the artistic movements, the latest poetic innovation now seems to consist in interweaving poetry and cybernetics.

These examples appear to show that each poetic attempt to innovate represents a specific aspect or facet of the tense and direct relation between art and history, be it the history of the artists, the history of the artistic works, political history, economic history, or social history. Many poets unwillingly become history shapers who eventually go down in history, the history of literature—and some are history’s playthings, the victims of historical forces—and they are also shaped by their individual and collective history as they try to make sense of what is happening to them and to their writing. Dada, noise music performances, the ready-made, the happening, event arts are artistic innovations which are or slowly become part and parcel of the contemporary artist’s history and creative experience.

Therefore, innovative poetry cannot be properly understood without taking into account the specific historical period in which it is a perceived as groundbreaking, without considering the limitations that this context places upon any novel work of art. Any artistic creation encapsulates a specific but limited temporality, a particular but circumscribed human experience of time, of duration and history.

However, each artist speculates upon the marks she or he might leave on history and on what tends to assure the permanence of those marks. Each artist wants to transcend the pioneering empiricism which usually presides over the discrete emergence of novelty, hopes to transform this fleeting moment into an unforgettable watershed.

Those groundbreaking poems must also erase any trace of the painstaking and time-consuming search for poetic novelty, any remnant of that past in the present of the final version, and make sure this novelty does not sound recherché.

To innovate, the poet has to establish a new method of challenging the public’s expectations and preconceived ideas, to invent a new way of achieving an acme of etiological knowledge by searching for the causes, the sources of poetic innovation, in the expressive buried potentialities of living language, in the artist’s heart of hearts.

Now I want to widen this investigation of the meanings and sources of poetic innovation by exploring the connections between, on the one hand, experiment or experimentation, and on the other hand, experience in the philosophical sense of that term. In the philosophical tradition, sensory experience is often opposed to reason. That’s why poets are often seen as artists who are blinded by their sensory experience while they write and therefore incapable of perceiving “objective reality” in the cold light of reason, although this sensory experience is a reliable window into another “objective reality”, the reality of author’s emotional and material, bodily life. As a result, reasoning is thought to play but a poor part in the composition of the poem which often flies in the face of ordinary logic and usage, with enriching deviations such as anacolutha, neologisms, and oxymorons. You sometimes have to say the opposite of what you think to achieve beauty, to invest novelty with beauty; speaking of which, beauty might be the only ahistorical attribute of poetry, or rather the only hallmark of great poetry that manages to be both historical and ahistorical, by transcending its own historicity; hence its universality.

Moreover, the connection between “objective” reality and verbal experimentation also manifests itself in its reliance on concrete, material objects: sheets of paper, manuscripts, typescripts, notebooks, computers and internet access dependent on cable modems etc. The absence of those material objects or tools has become a serious impediment to poetic innovation.

But this connection with material reality does not mean that poetic innovation is somehow endowed with a form of permanence, is not as liable to vanish without trace as an incorporeal or abstract thing, as a fleeting and mistaken impression. Sometimes poetic innovation turns out to be a response to a past historical and cultural context that is no longer relevant to the contemporary readers’ reality and experience, because the targeted author or artistic movement have long sunk into oblivion. Consequently, with time, the experimental dynamics of that kind innovation which had been so stimulating for that specific artist are doomed to become utterly irrelevant. From that perspective, the avant-garde denotes a plurality of experiments and destinies.

More generally the writing experience is fettered to history, subject to historical mutability, to changes that are sometimes unpredictable. Therefore poetic innovation borders on a kind of half-controlled, partially insubstantial and elusive alchemy, a process blindly initiated by the unwitting poet.

Now, to shed light on my perception of poetic innovation, I would like to quote Michel Collot who made a few decisive remarks about it:

“When you evoke “poetic experience,” you obviously run the risk of introducing a fair amount of subjectivity into the analysis. But if you failed to mention it, you would take the much more serious risk of depriving poetry of an essential dimension, of forgetting that it is the adventure of subject fully committed to the thorough exploration of the world and of human language.”

To explain my conception of the connection between the writing or poetic experience and innovation, I would live to give preference to the praxeological approach–which is based on the idea that human behavior, human action, is essentially purposeful–in order to confront this approach with the experience of writing poetry, of poetic innovation. This approach is never verified by the writing experience except when this experience consists in writing a story, a narrative. The practical or pragmatic purpose of the writing experience is of secondary importance because this particular purpose is not the main preoccupation of the writing experience, of writing as an experience. Here, to give you a more accurate description of the idea that I’m trying to convey, I do not only need to stress the opposition between writing as a mere action with a purpose, and writing as an experience. I also have to explain that the term “experience” takes on considerable significance in my analysis, because I see experience and experiment as phenomena, which have to be examined in light of a kind of phenomenology of artistic creation. That phenomenon, that writing experience, is very often an experiment which consists in trying to write something new. And that phenomenon is also a process.

Now, the phenomenology that I have suggested enables us to understand that the process of producing an original, novel piece of writing in a context characterized or dominated by more conventional or established literary works can be compared with the chemical or photographic phenomenon which enables us to make a visible image of a photographic shot thanks to a developer in a trough. There is indeed an interesting analogy between the gradual appearance of the image of that shot on the blank photographic film, and the emergence of the potentially innovative text when it is noticed or published and appears to elude or to conform with the literary norms of its time. Thus the examination of the relation between the innovative text and its context or background shows the wide variety of creative strategies developed by artists in the history of literature, ranging from academic (rigidly conventional and excessively formal) invention to, for example, Henri Chopin⁵’s sound poetry. What would have happened to André Breton if he had not read Lautréamont?

The writing experience hinges upon the immediacy of feeling, of an emotion capable of unsettling the reader after it has overwhelmed the poet, of an emotion powerful enough to leave both the poet and the reader vulnerable. A genuine poem is actually nothing but the condensation of the poet’s continuous self-experience, nothing but a ceaseless search for ways and means of capturing the overwhelming emotion which, for a moment, has become the dominant self-experience, nothing but the constant inner struggle with what you write and what you don’t write. The experience which all poets have in common, is a quest for light, a phenomenon in the etymological sense of the act of bringing to light, for a form of knowledge that cannot be explained but only dramatized by a unique and novel form of language. The scientific conception of light as wave and as particle⁶ can help us enrich the evocation of that light sought and sometimes found by poetry, by seeing that light as something consisting in quantitative, qualitative, and dynamic elements. Thus the discovery of that light can be seen as a passage from darkness to light, from ignorance to knowledge (experience), as a wave-like dynamic disturbance that may lead to revelation of the totality of Being⁷. In that quest and in that discovery, the artistic forms, eras, styles and schools or movements are not as important as the intimate experience of the writer for whom the writing experience is luminous or a lightless, fruitless pursuit. This quest for light accounts for the fact that poetry is constantly evolving: it drives the poets’ endeavor to find the novel forms that might reveal that light by relying on the exploration of the moment’s insight or of the connection between their distinctive styles of poetic expression and the literary past.

To go beyond, for a while, the historical contextualization of some experimental forms of literary writing, it is perhaps necessary to return to a few useful generalities in order to give a better definition of the concept of experimentation. I see experimentation as the exploration of multiple paths of thought by blazing undiscovered trails, roads not taken. I see it as the invention of a way of writing which does not consist in merely filling or occupying pages but in haunting them so that the writing may strike the readers as a haunting presence and not as nothing more than ink and paper. I see this experimentation as something that provides the poem with an indestructible movement and transforms the text into an innovative work of art. Innovation is the only thing that enables literary geniuses to express their own idiosyncratic styles, the only way out of their predicament. Here I am reminded of Nietzsche’s thoughts in The Dawn of Day.

However innovation is not only a particular relationship with the past. It is also connected with the future, the afterlife of art, for example in the stunning longevity of Chinese landscape painting, in the remarkable immortality of the age-old novelty of this art. For a thousand years, many different geniuses have devoted their lives to an art which has apparently always managed to combine tradition with innovation, creating the deceptive impression of churning out the same inexhaustible rhetoric. Therefore the attachment to tradition is not an obstacle to innovation. Artistic tradition continually renews itself, reinvents itself, with the emergence of new schools or movements: a good example of that reinvention is the 5/7/5 form of the Haïku which originates in the Tanka.

And since I am now touching on the subject of generalities concerning art and innovation, I would like to add that poetry conveys an ontological experience. It describes a state of being just as much as it expresses “the being of beings”⁸, and of the poet’s being that manifests itself in the movement (and unexpected twists) of each line, of each stanza. Furthermore, it is perhaps necessary to say that this experience, which is both poetic and ontological, involves a large amount of astonishment and wonder for the poet who participates in this experience: the poet’s wonder and the wonder of the poem. I would even advance the idea that a considerable part of that experience—which is part and parcel of poetic experimentation—boils down to what the poet knows or fails to know about the unfamiliar or the uncanny. I think that the desire which a lot of poets share, beyond the search for novelty, is to battle and fight for language and style, to defend the unique ethical significance, meaning, and value of language and style. In my opinion, there is no genuine literature without genuine ethics.

Archery can serve as an instructive metaphor to shed more light on that subject. To hit the target, you must follow three main steps: first you have to nock the arrow, then draw and anchor the bow, and finally aim (before you release the string). This division into a sequence of three steps should not obscure the fact that the three different steps lead to as single thing: the act of shooting an arrow. Well, literary experimentation works the same way: the words and the sentences are the arrow and you must find or try out those that may fit the intended meaning or feeling, then draw and anchor them in the proper literary or poetic form to aim at or for the desired effect on the page or in the book.

Finally I would also like to quote Maurice Blanchot whose intelligence can throw light on my presentation:

“It is not a question of newness at any price: technical newness or new- ness of form or vision. Nor is it always a question of imposing and successful works, revealing those great individuals for whose return the admired name of Balzac and the beloved name of Stendhal make us wish in vain. NaturaIly, talents are very useful; the creative power, sometimes annoying, is an aid that one cannot do without, even if only to go beyond it. But what is at stake is something else, an excessive demand, a rigorous and exclusive assertion that is directed in one single direction, with the passion that makes the impossible attempt necessary.”⁹

A novel work of art is an epoché, a suspension¹⁰, an interruption in the history of the art, a rupture which epitomizes and brings to light all the constellations of poetry, of poetic excellence.

Michaël Taugis

Notes