Hold the Line: (An Essay on Poetry) between France and Singapore

By Pierre Vinclair

In this book, Pierre Vinclair investigates the different forms and functions of verse in French poetry from 1850 until now.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pagesetters Services Pte Ltd
• Release date: Oct 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9789811484209

Book preview

I. The

Metaphysics of

the Line

Something happened.

Most people did not notice it. Or if they did, they thought it just happened to poetry—mere literature. Classical prosody had turned into free verse. Even if they had noticed, they would have said, so what?

Mallarmé noticed. A fundamental and fascinating crisis in literature is now at hand, he wrote 150 years ago. This crisis concerns literature, but also other fields of human experience. This is especially if you believe, like Mallarmé did, that literature is the artistic medium that reveals the way language works.

This is not without importance: with such statements, along with his very singular practice of poetry, Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898) is considered one of the main precursors of Modernism. He was admired greatly by W. B. Yeats, James Joyce and T. S. Eliot. First a disciple of Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)—the master of Symbolism, the first French poet of urban landscapes, and promoter of the prose poem—Mallarmé produced both the theory of free verse and an entirely new proposition on prosody with the 1897 publication of A Throw of the Dice will Never Abolish Chance. ¹

Classical prosody, with its regular rhythm, was a symptom of the belief that the world was well-ordered and rational, so that human language would be able to find truth and express it accurately. If the world was rational, and if grammar was logical, a well-shaped sentence could depict truth. But what if language wasn’t actually able to express this truth and describe the world? What if meaning had been structurally eaten away by contingency—if the arbitrary way we used words had absolutely no relation with the real world? What if a sentence was not—could not—be rational? What if speech were like the wind?

If you have in mind the situation of postcolonial Singapore, these statements may be hard to understand. As the mixed result of influences that include Malay, Chinese and English poetics (and each influence differs in content, register and social use), Singaporean poetry knew from the outset that ideas like the pure expression of the rational mind just don’t make sense. And contemporary Singaporean poets know that it is the colonisers who claim universal mediums of universal rationality. But the situation was very different in France in the 1880s: most French literature came out of the 17th-century rationalist belief that—as Boileau coined it—Whatever is well conceived is clearly said, / And the words to say it flow with ease.² According to these statements, the classical French form of the 12-syllable rhyming alexandrine was not only seen as something conventional, but also as a transparent natural device. Moreover, French grammar was perceived as the best tool for reflecting the structure of the mind in general.

What Mallarmé saw

In the 1870s and 1880s, some French poets became aware of what linguists, logicians³ and postmodernist philosophers⁴ would later theorise in the 20th century: namely, that the signifier is not the same thing as the referent. Put another way, words don’t fully correspond to the things that they refer to and a sentence is less a depiction of reality than it is a mere convention in a language game closed off from this reality.

The development of philology in the 19th century had made these poets aware that words are not featureless mirrors of the real—they have their own history and thickness. We thought we were living in a glass house looking out on the world, and then realised it was just wallpaper made to look like the outside. What these poets used to think was a transparent depiction of the real was just an effect of the vocabulary, grammar and conventions of their common language. For Mallarmé, also an English teacher, the plurality of languages showed that words were unfit to describe the real. This was all the more so as nothing and nobody⁵ could assure us of the equivalence between the linguistic representation and the represented real.

Like a piano player who knows his keyboard cannot depict reality, Mallarmé concluded that sentences are only able to suggest emotions, like musical scores, and not describe things as they truly are. Every sentence is a dream and a chant, he wrote. That is, a fiction and a song, not something inherently true.

This nihilistic statement has had a very positive consequence for poetry. If every sentence is a dream and a chant, a good sentence has to be evaluated as music, not truth. Poetry becomes the essence of speech itself, and the poet an avant-garde researcher of the sentence. If common language means conforming to the conventions of language, the poet should create new conventions, new styles. He is not just a performer of the society’s language games; he is a composer, an inventor of new ways of perceiving and wording the world. He is a voyant, a seer. In the words of Arthur Rimbaud, he can retune the inner piano of language into new modes and make new ways of shaping emotions. Anyone could and should be such a voyant. As Lautréamont, another poet of the 1870s, said, Poetry must be made by all and not by one.

These poets thus tried to create new kinds of expression, using the potentialities of the French language to reach, shape and share the unknown. Poetry went from being an ornamental device for speeches in the 17th and 18th centuries to becoming folkloric expressions of a visionary self during the Romantic period, and in the 19th century it finally emerged as a field of experimentation. Poetry was now devoted to revealing the opacity of what was previously thought transparent: language itself.

The contradiction in the new poetics

Other disciplines, too, soon became aware that common language wasn’t able to depict the world, that logically organising words was insufficient for discovering truth, despite the hopes