The "Presence" of Memory - Richard Stamelman L'Esprit Créateur, Volume 36, Number 3, Fall 1996 , pp. 65-79 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins ...
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The "Presence" of Memory
Richard Stamelman
L'Esprit Créateur, Volume 36, Number 3, Fall 1996 , pp. 65-79 (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/esp.0.0153
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/263971/summary
[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]The "Presence" of Memory
Richard Stamelman
Les vrais paradis sont les paradis qu'on a perdus.
—Proust, Le temps retrouvé
C'est le re de ce revivre qui est la folle chimère.
—Vladimir Jankélévitch, L'irréversible et la nostalgie
AT THE BEGINNING OF THIS ESSAY I want to talk about be-
ginnings: the opening lines of two poems, written more than 130
years apart, on a subject and an experience that have in that time
changed but little. The first incipit, "J'ai plus de souvenirs que si j'avais
mille ans," is by Baudelaire, the second, "Ce souvenir me hante," by
Yves Bonnefoy.1
When the nineteenth-century poet starts one of his four "Spleen"
poems with "J'ai plus de souvenirs que si j'avais mille ans," and then
goes on to tell us what a necropolis his mind and heart have become—
"une pyramide, un immense caveau" with more corpses than a potter's
field, "un cimetière abhorré de la lune," a landscape filled with frag-
ments of a dead past, an old boudoir musty with the nearly effaced
fragrances of bygone days, a cumbersome piece of furniture with its
drawers overflowing with the mementos of a forgotten past—Baudelaire
makes clear how weighted down and broken he is, how haunted, by an
excess of memory. "Gros meuble," "pyramide," "caveau," "cimetière,"
"boudoir," "vieux sphinx ignoré du monde insoucieux"—each meta-
phor is a figure that represents a loss and a disappearance (of vibrancy,
of force, of life). Yet, by its presence in the present instance of the poem,
each figure, even if it designates a loss, adds a "something" to the
"nothing" of spleen; each image announces the advent, the presencing,
of a word, une parole, within the space of a language whose subject and
origin are absence. The image literally "em-bodies," "in-carnates" this
absence, giving to it the shape, the presence, the "surplus of significa-
tion"2 that only figuration can achieve: but a figuration that is also, it
should be noted, a disfiguration, since the originary, generative loss
cannot be represented, not in any full or permanent way, that is. "Le
souvenir," writes Vladimir Jankélévitch,
Vol. XXXVI, No. 3 65L'Esprit Créateur
avive par son insuffisance même ou... par son impuissance notre faim et notre soif de
réalité: le souvenir, loin de suppléer au Revenir, aiguise la nostalgie et confirme l'irréversi-
ble.... En dégageant la passéité du passé, le souvenir nous rend sensible, hélas! tout ce que
nous avons perdu: l'odeur irremplaçable du présent et la saveur incomparable de la
présence, la tangibilité du réel en chair et en os.3
Poetic figuration, seeking as it does to endow an absent reality with
presence and thereby reverse absence, disfigures the loss into which this
reality has fallen and with which it is coincident. Each figure functions as
a monument commemorating and thus giving presence to the past, but at
the same time designating the pastness and goneness of this past. A crypt
whose external facade represents and commemorates the irrefutable fact
of loss, but whose internal chambers preserve the relics and fragments of
that loss, the poem is at once metaphor and reality, commemoration and
death, remembrance and oblivion, celebration and mourning: a para-
doxical and simultaneous doubleness not lost on a poet as sensitive to
dualities as Baudelaire. And so he ends this poem of lyric melancholy
with the image of a faraway song emerging out of the darkness of the
crypt and voyaging into the darkness of the world: "Un vieux sphinx
ignoré du monde insoucieux,/Oublié sur la carte, et dont l'humeur
farouche/Ne chante qu'aux rayons du soleil qui se couche." The song of
spleen, which rises from the matter of dead things, from the weight of a
thousand years of memories, to sail into a moment of declining light, at
the end of day, at the end of life, resounds with the vowels and con-
sonants of a memory weighed down by death, loss, melancholy, and for-
get fulness, a memory of absence granite-like in its hardness and perma-
nence. This melancholic lament, which struggles to express itself in the
declining moments of the poem and of the poet's fierce, yet losing, battle
with the ravages of time, is a cry born of the excessive, proliferating
absence that returning memories bring in their wake.
Memory—as sign of a past object, person, event, reality, or experi-
ence resurfacing within the present and designating the return of some-
thing thought to be lost, gone, or absent, while at the same time pointing
to the shadowland of night, that irreversible pastness, out of which it has
come—is simultaneously the harbinger of hope and despair: the hope
announced by recurring images and words; the despair derived from the
fragmentary incompleteness of remembrance, index of the vast expanse
of what has been forgotten and sign for an unseizable signified. Memory
explodes haiku-like into the present with a burst of forgotten light, but
the power of the explosion and the uniqueness of the flash indicate the
66 Fall 1996Stamelman
ephemerality as well as the insufficiency of what has reappeared. Exiled
from its originary, generative event and recuperated for only a fleeting
moment, the light of memory will pass into the darkness of the past. The
present is indeed haunted by a memory and by what will soon become the
ghost of a memory: the phantom of a phantom. For memories are not
what they seem: every memory, as Freud said, is a screen-memory. How
horrified Baudelaire would have been to learn that his hyperbolic percep-
tion of memory was no mere poetic image, that the thousand years of
memory fragments he imagines flooding his soul were but screens behind
which lay still more and more bits and pieces of hidden mnemonic
matter.
To say, then, that we possess more memories "que si nous avions
mille ans" is to admit that we are truly haunted, invaded, and possessed
by the ghost of the past. Bonnefoy is right to begin the liminal poem of
Ce qui fut sans lumière, and therefore the entire collection itself, with the
statement, "Ce souvenir me hante," referring thus not only to the reality
of memory, but to its persistence and obsessiveness, the way it becomes
glued to one's being, for it is not just any memory that is announced at
the threshold of Ce qui fut sans lumière, but ce souvenir, a memory that
the preceding work of verse, Dans le leurre du seuil (1975) had explored
as far as it could at the time and that Pierre écrite (1965) had confronted
before that. A memory, like any image, is a lure, a trap, a temporal frag-
ment that gives only a fleeting illusion of wholeness. When the past
returns in the present, it cannot be what it once was, namely, the present
in the past. Remembrance is a question of images, traces, substitutions,
not originals. And so the poet, faced with an irreversible past, "un
absent qui jamais ne redeviendra présent" (Jankélévitch, 372), with a
déjà -vécu that can never be relived, turns, faute de mieux, to poetry
where he can explore this need for memory which coincides so intensely
with the need for place. For Yves Bonnefoy, as we will see, a feeling for
place is inseparable from a feeling for the memory of place.
What, then, is this recurrent memory, this recollection, that haunts
the poet, filling his mind and being with images of its mystery, its imma-
nence, its presence? It is, the poet informs us, the memory of an Arcadian
landscape of forests, mountains, terraces, ravines, olive and almond
trees, creating the pastoral backdrop, as in a Poussin painting, for an
ancient abbey half in ruins, site not only of a summer home, but of the
incarnation of a dream of perfect at-homeness. Here, being and place,
fused by their common roots in the world, become the absolute itself. It
Vol. XXXVI, No. 3 67L'Esprit Créateur
is the dream of "le vrai lieu," of "l'arrière-pays," of "la terre," of the
"hic et nunc," of the other country, the other shore, which the poet
seeks in the places he passes through and in the texts he writes: a mater-
nal, protected space of oneness, immediacy, and presence, the "great
cathedral space of childhood" in the words of Virginia Woolf, where
death has no dominion and time moves at a radically different pace. This
haunting memory of presence and the absolute, this "old Oedipal nos-
talgia," as Yves Bonnefoy calls it, resurrects the image of the abbey-
home at Valsaintes which the poet has had to abandon and, along with it,
the dream of the "true place":
There was more of the real here than anywhere else, more immanence in the light on the
angle of the walls or in the water from new storms, but there were also a thousand forms of
impossibility .. . and so there was also more dreaming. . . . For Valsaintes gave me back, if
not the garden of Eden, at least something of the way in which the child looks at the world.
. . . That house . . . was like a second birthplace."
So the dream of Arcadian space and the memory of a maternal land-
scape, which is in many ways a screen-memory of other, deeper and
earlier landscapes—the house by the canal associated with his father's
death, the memory of la rue Traversiere in Tours, more the creation of
dream than of remembrance, and his grandparents' idyllic home of
summer bliss at Toirac, "land of timelessness"5—all of which the house
at Valsaintes comes to represent and evoke—are challenged by the im-
practicality of daily life in "le vrai lieu."
Yet, the memory of Valsaintes and of all the other places that stand
behind it is indelible. The poet cannot easily forget the abandoned house,
now buffeted by wind and rain, home only to birds and their mute
shadows. He is not unaware of Valsaintes's power of illusion, of the
imaginary of desire it sustains, of what might be called le leurre de son
seuil. He knows it as an image and not as presence itself: "Image
impénétrable qui nous leurra/D'être la vérité enfin presque dite,/Cer-
titude, là où tout n'a été que doute" (CQFSL, 14-15). But along with the
dwellings with which it is cognate, Valsaintes is the north star to which
the compass of the poet's life continually points. And, while recognizing
the tear in the fabric of his being which its loss represents, he cannot help
but feel the old attraction, the magnetism, of this lonely and lovely place.
The first memory of Bonnefoy's poem "Le souvenir" is thus of VaI-
saintes's abandonment, its isolation, the tumult of its loss, and the conse-
68 Fall 1996Stamelman
quent disjunction that occurs in the poet's relationship to life and imma-
nent being:
Que le vent tourne
D'un coup, là -bas, sur la maison fermée.
C'est un grand bruit de toile par le monde,
On dirait que l'étoffe de la couleur
Vient de se déchirer jusqu'au fond des choses. (CQFSL, 11)
But no sooner does the memory return than it gives way to dream: "Que
faire de tes dons, ô souvenir," asks the poet, to which he answers,
"Sinon recommencer le plus vieux rêve,/Croire que je m'éveille" (11).
And wondrously, in this land of the oldest dream, of the dream of
dreams, the noise, tumult, struggle, even the wind, surrounding the
abandoned abbey, stop. The house, which was closed and empty when
recalled in memory, is now in dream "la maison [qui] respire, presque
sans bruit." The arduous struggle of a man and a woman to push a boat
in the water, the poet's metaphor for the couple's tenacious efforts to
make the abbey habitable, ceases. The recalcitrant boat is now gently and
peacefully integrated into the landscape: "La barque de chaque chose, de
chaque vie/Dort, dans la masse de l'ombre de la terre" (11).
The passage from memory to dream, a passage the poet undertakes in
the full knowledge that he is yielding to the powerful attraction of illu-
sion, represents the surrender to a desire stronger than the poet's aware-
ness of the fictionality of this desire. Waking memory can go only so far
until it needs to call on dream to complete itself. And the dream, with its
powers of fiction and image-making, momentarily repairs the faults of
memory, fills the gaps left by forgetfulness, adds links to the narrative
chain, simplifies and condenses the syntax, reweaves torn and loose
threads, and substitutes an imaginary presentification for what was once
real presence. Once "le plus vieux rêve" is resuscitated, the poet comes
alive. Like the dream, he, too, awakens, as if arising to greet an old and
trusted friend. And this dream, which puts the poem, and the returning
past, and "le flux de la mémoire" (CQFSL, 89) in motion, is the dream
of habitation in the here and now of immanent being: namely, the bliss
that derives from living in the timeless intensity of a true place and of
simple things, in what the poet calls "Ie miracle d'ici" (CQFSL, 23).
Bonnefoy's récits en rêve, whether part of a verse poem, or inter-
jected into discussions of art and poetics, or narrated in their own right
as tales concerning the complex imbrication of dream, waking life, and
Vol. XXXVI, No. 3 69L'Esprit Créateur
memory, tend to follow a similar pattern. The poet presides over his own
return to consciousness, presenting himself as waking up in the very
dream he relates. His awakening in the dream is coterminous with his
awakening to dream. Such a self-conscious awareness of his own self-
awakening in the dream world or his own self-doubt in memory points to
the coincidence of landscape and mindscape in Bonnefoy's work.
Despite the concrete references to elemental, natural phenomena—water,
air, fire, earth, trees, clouds, snow, light, stars, birds—and despite the
insistence on the immanent reality and presence of being, on the here and
now of existence, Bonnefoy, like Baudelaire before him, represents the
processes of inner thought and feeling, the interdependence of soul and
mind, perception and consciousness, as they interact with the world. If
Baudelaire's "Le cygne" is a poem of mentation, of pensivité, the rep-
resentation of mind and feeling at work—"Andromaque, je pense Ã
vous," "je ne vois qu'en esprit," "je pense à mon grand cygne," "je
pense à la négresse," "à quiconque a perdu ce qui ne se retrouve/Jamais!
jamais," "je pense aux matelots oubliés.../Aux captifs, aux vaincus!... Ã
bien d'autres encore"—and if "Le cygne" is a poem in which this inner,
mental activity gravitates around different strata of memory—personal,
collective, spiritual, psychic, urban, literary, historical, national, topo-
graphic—then poems from Ce qui fut sans lumière, like "Le souvenir,"
or "L'agitation du rêve," or "La branche" (where there is a Baude-
lairean echo in "Branche, je pense à toi"), or the prose poem
"L'Egypte" (RT, 9-15), move inward to explore self-consciously the way
dreamwork and memory-work function, the way they touch the world of
everyday life, the way they interact to express desire and hope without
ever losing contact with the immediacy of the real: the passing cloud, the
setting sun, the cricket's chirp, the falling snow, the light on the wall of a
beloved house.
So Bonnefoy's poems of dreams and memories are poems of con-
sciousness, which examine the complex functioning of oneiric and
mnemonic experience as mediated and transformed by poetic expression.
And when, in these representations of inner life, which also present the
external world in all its vibrancy and transitoriness, the poet awakens,
when he arises from one dream to participate in another, he moves
actively, decisively, and with determination through the dreamed world:
"Je me lève, j'écoute," "je vais à la fenêtre," "je descends," "je me
penche," "j'ouvre la porte," "j'avance," "je vais," "je sors" (CQFSL,
12-16). Usually, the poet is alone; others sleep as he begins his peripatetic
70 Fall 1996Stamelman
journey, la promenade d'un rêveur solitaire, through the still house, "Où
dort toute une part de ce que je fus" (CQFSL, 12), and then outside
through the tranquil landscape clothed in moonlight, "la terre que j'ai
aimée." Sometimes he meets an uncertain figure, more shadow than
flesh, a guide, a muse, a girl or child, incarnation of the absolute, who
leads him through the countryside, until the time comes for her or him to
leave forever, to enter a realm into which neither memory nor dream can
provide access. The poet-dreamwalker is protective of the timelessness of
his dream. When a certain consciousness of temporality threatens to dis-
turb the joy and plenitude of this dream-experience, the poet turns away:
Joies, et le temps qui vint au travers, comme un fleuve
En crue, de nuit, débouche dans le rêve
Et en blesse la rive, et en disperse
Les images les plus sereines dans la boue.
Je ne veux pas savoir la question qui monte
De cette terre en paix, je me détourne,
Je traverse les chambres de l'étage. (CQFSL, 12)
It is essential that the dream remain uninterrupted and that the dreamer
continue undistractedly to explore its landscape. The poet seeks to pre-
serve the unbroken continuity of the dream world, even refusing to
"awaken" the fire barely smoldering among the ashes:
Je me penche sur lui, qui bouge d'un coup
Comme un dormeur que l'on touche à l'épaule
Et se redresse un peu, levant vers moi
L'épiphanie de sa face de braise.
Non, plutôt rendors-toi, feu éternel,
Tire sur toi la cape de tes cendres,
Réacquiesce à ton rêve, puisque tu bois
Toi aussi à la coupe de l'or rapide. (CQFSL, 13)
The rejection of the fire's epiphany, of its resurgence, does not pre-
vent the poet, however, from opening himself to an epiphany of grander
proportions, that of presence, lying in the still, predawn fullness of the
natural world bathed in the radiance of "les choses du simple" (CQFSL,
14): "Ô terre, terre," he apostrophizes, "Présence si consentante, si
donnée" (CQFSL, 13). Yet, the poet's summons to the earth reveals the
degree to which he refuses to be lured by the illusory plenitude of the
dream world, for within the immanence of the earth and the immediacy
Vol. XXXVI, No. 3 71L'Esprit Créateur
of the world, momentarily experienced or remembered through dream,
comes the recollection of a distance and an absence: the memory of far-
off voices: "Tant le cœur reste pris à ces voix qui chantent/Là -bas,
encore, et se font indistinctes/En s'éloignant sur les chemins de sable"
(CQFSL, 13).
The poet recognizes that human life, because it is lived in time and
change and according to the capricious rhythms of desire, can never truly
come to know or possess the exquisite presence, the sublimated pleni-
tude, of an instant of ripening fullness, which only the pear or the grape
can experience: "comme un fruit/En son instant d'extase se détache/De
la branche, de la matière, saveur pure?" (CQFSL, 14). The moment of
completeness and fruition, when "ripeness is all," is coterminous with a
moment of death and separation. And this simultaneous explosion of life
at its most intense and death at its most acute characterizes memory, as
well as dream, in Bonnefoy's imagination. The dream of la saveur pure,
associated with the absolute, occurs against the background of a closed
and abandoned house, a reality of loss that cannot be reversed by the
recovered bliss of a dream or the resurrected joy of a memory. Valsaintes
is the locus of the real, "le lieu de l'évidence, mais déchirée" (CQFSL,
21). The sun of dream and memory shines radiantly in the sky of Bon-
nefoy's poetic universe but haloed by a dark nimbus of loss. And so the
poet knows that even though he feels the intense joy of the earth he loves,
smells the sensuous fragrance of the almond trees bathed in moonlight,
and hears the cry of an unknown bird in the ravine, he will have to say
goodbye to the dream, for "Le paradis est épars, je le sais" (CQFSL,
22):
Adieu, dit-il,
Présence qui ne fut que pressentie
(.-)
Adieu, image impénétrable qui nous leurra
D'être la vérité enfin presque dite,
Certitude, là où tout n'a été que doute, et bien que chimère
Parole si ardente que réelle. (CQFSL, 14-15)
And the poet knows as well that he will nonetheless never be able to
say goodbye to the dream, to the vision of a prelapsarian paradise, for it
is a part of what he is and what he was and thus not so easily severed
from identity; one can say farewell to a place but not to the memory of a
place: "Et maintenant, enfin, il se détourne./Je le vois qui s'éloigne dans
72 Fall 1996Stamelman
la nuit./Adieu? Non, ce n'est pas le mot que je sais dire" (CQFSL,
15-16). Valsaintes is the place of dream, of an idyllic childhood reverie; it
is earth and shadow as they are embodied in the apparition of a girl who
for a while walks with the poet in the grass, silent figure from an absolute
realm of existence, whose face shines with "la phosphorescence de ce qui
est" (CQFSL, 15). The memory of this face and the dream that prolongs
and elaborates it will return even if, henceforth, landscape must remain
mindscape. The dream ends because the poet refuses the illusion of per-
fection and completeness which—motivated by the longings of desire
and by wish-fulfillment—the dream creates. Dream, memory, and
poetry, working together as they do to revive the experience of oneness
with the world, which is what Bonnefoy means by "presence," must also
be conscious of the impossible permanence of such resurrection. For
presence is always already past; it ends just as it begins, a flash of light-
ning which consciousness registers only after the fact. Presence is invari-
ably the memory of presence. We are not made to live in the instant, and
presence, because it suspends time, is a plenitude of the instant made
eternal. Through memory we may be able to recollect the flash of pres-
ence. Through dream we may provisionally complete this memory, tenta-
tively reversing a part of the forgetfulness that has dimmed its light.
Through poetry we may be able to blend dream, memory, and language
to repair briefly the rips and gaps that our time-bounded life has taught
us to expect. But dreams and memories must be shown for what they are:
images, epilogues, instants out of time, which manifest the unreality of
their timelessness. Poetry must continuously seek to return to the world;
it must not forget that the house of dreams has been closed to human
habitation: the furniture covered, the roof leaking, the walls crumbling,
the pages of old manuscripts blowing aimlessly over the dirty floor, and
the only "voices" (the only "dialogue") those of nesting birds. In the
realm of dream, memory, and art, one must, as Bonnefoy counsels for
language, "ouvrir/L'amande de l'absence dans la parole" (CQFSL, 42).
We can say, therefore, that in Yves Bonnefoy's writing the presence of
memory cannot be separated from the memory, the pastness, of
presence.
While a poem like "Le souvenir" passes from memory to dream, the
poem "L'agitation du rêve" (CQFSL, 85-90) moves in the opposite
direction, as if to confirm Freud's observation that "dreaming is another
kind of remembering."6 Beginning with a dream image, in which the "I"
builds and tends a fire on the prow of a boat, the poem moves to a
Vol. XXXVI, No. 3 73L'Esprit Créateur second dream image where the "I" stirs ashes in the hearth of a house he visits every night in his sleep; from these ashes arises a third image, that of a sleeping couple in the granary of a house, "leur lieu, et leur bon- heur" (CQFSL, 86). But the fabric of the dream rips. Announcing that "je dois me délivrer de ces images," the poet awakens, but not as much into the world as into the memory of that world: "Je m'éveille et me lève et marche. Et j'entre/Dans le jardin de quand j'avais dix ans,/Qui ne fut qu'une allée" (86). In this walkway the poet is at once child and adult, existing in the past and the present, involved in lived and remembered experience. Here the voices of relatives and friends reach him from an upper window, falling on him from an opening out of the past; here pud- dles from recent storms reflect the sky and also the vast spaces of remem- brance; here the ground reveals a place of childhood and a magnetic field of memory. It is a soil rich with the ore of the past, a clay from which the poet will fashion a monument and a language, both of which could well become a home, an abode, a poem. The poet seeks not only the past that memory might restore or that dream might recreate, but a speech through which he can poetically dwell in the here and now of existence: "Je sais/Que les mots que j'ai dits, décidant parfois/De ma vie, sont ce sol, cette terre noire" (CQFSL, 86). The allée and its earth become—the reader will forgive this unpoetic word—"a dump," where fragments of the past are deposited to await resurrection, a labyrinth of "le bric-à - brac confus" which Baudelaire—walking through a Paris where past, present, and future had become indiscriminately mixed—evoked in "Le cygne." For is memory not a dumping ground? Is it not the chaotic debris of a city under construction, destruction, and reconstruction? Is it not a site of exploration and of interpretation, out of which are brought treasures from different moments of the past, a metaphor of excavation to which Bonnefoy (like Freud before him) is unusually sensitive? Con- sider the image of the archeologist in L'arrière-pays (36ff.), or the art historian who discovers a cache of forgotten paintings in "Les découvertes de Prague" (RT, 42-54), or the man who seeks to decipher the effaced letters of stone inscriptions in "L'indéchiffrable" (RT, 123-28), or the poet struggling to unearth from the depths of memory and dream the unlocatable street of his childhood in the "Rue Tra- versiere" narratives (RT, 67-74). So the loam of memory is enriched by the deposits of the past that fall there, generating heat and light as they decompose. Lieux de mémoire, as Pierre Nora calls them, are places of excess, of a generative multiplicity and unfettered, silent proliferation, 74 Fall 1996
Stamelman
especially when they are also, as they are for Bonnefoy, mémoires de
lieux.7
And to return to "L'agitation du rêve," where oneiric restlessness
leads to mnemonic restlessness, we observe the poet as he discovers and
tries to read the detritus of the past—old greenhouses, hoses, sheds,
fences, tarps, furniture, pots, mirrors, pictures without frames—signs of
a loss that memory strives vainly to overturn and that language seeks
vainly to repair. Will the archeologist-poet be able to pull these rusting,
broken fragments of the past from the ground of their fossilized being
and, breathing poetic life into them, restore them to the present?:
"Agenouillé,/Je détache de l'infini l'inexistence/Et j'en fais des figures,
d'une main/Que je distingue mal, tant est la nuit/Précipitée, violente par
les mondes" (CQFSL, 87). The poet's answer is ambiguous, because the
words and signs that may be found or created by his knowing hand to
carry the past into the present, to transport what was into what is, to give
breath to what is distant and "ailleurs," suffer from the same pre-
cariousness, the same imagicity and illusionality, the same gap between
resemblance and identity, as those images that walk through our dreams
and memories. And these signs, words, figures, and images stand up
poorly against the forces of death and nothingness wreaking havoc in the
world at large. The poet's skilled hand can hardly be perceived in the
menacing dark night of temporal reality. No wonder that, after the rest-
lessness of dream and that of memory where nothing of permanence
seems to have been raised from the shipwreck of the past, where order
and form give to remembrance no fully mimetic representation but only
the tenuous contours of a sketch, the struggling, yet courageous, poet
exclaims: "Que lointaine est ici l'aube du signeî/J'ébauche une con-
stellation mais tout se perd" (CQFSL, 87).
Admittedly, this cursory examination of the poetics of memory in
Yves Bonnefoy's work can only scratch the surface of the question. Let
me in conclusion briefly outline, therefore, aspects of the link between
memory, on the one hand, and presence, dream, and writing, on the
other, that a deeper investigation would reveal.
First, the nature of memory as epiphany, a sudden explosion of the
immediacy of the past within an intense instant of the present, something
that is seen in the poem "La seule rose," where piles of snow suddenly
yield to the remembrance of "le pré de mes dix ans,/Les abeilles bour-
donnent"; the continuous buzzing of bees among the falling snowflakes
maintains the copresence of past and present.8
Vol. XXXVI, No. 3 75L'Esprit Créateur
Second, the poet's recognition that his interest in determining the
limits between past and present is linked to a lifelong preoccupation with
borders, with the "mysterious point" or line or space separating here
from there, now from then, the visible from the invisible, Ie pays from
l'arrière-pays, the "I" from the "you," immanence from transcendence,
presence from absence, identity from resemblance, the real from the
imaginary, life from death: what the poet describes as "l'obsession du
point de partage entre deux régions, deux influx [qui] m'a marqué dès
l'enfance et à jamais" and what he ponders when he asks "Est-ce ici que
l'autre monde commence?" (AP, 102). Frontiers between states of being
are not fixed in the Bonnefoy universe, which explains why memory and
dream intersect so easily, constantly crossing each other's indistinct
borders, as occurs in "L'été encore" (Début, 21) where memories of
summer leaves rustle behind falling snowflakes.
Third, a desire to gather and fuse memory fragments, a clear example
of which the poem "La branche" (CQFSL, 43-44) reveals. Here the poet
remembers a branch used as a walking stick and abandoned to the forest,
a branch now buried as deeply under the snow as it is in the faraway past
of his memory. Companion to hours of solitary wandering it can be
grasped again but only through recollection. Poetry is the anamnesis that
makes this happen, for the poet preserves the memory of the branch and
of its far-off place of dwelling by joining it to another memory-site,
another memory-fragment. On the fire, which he imagines burning in the
hearth at Valsaintes, he sees himself placing the remembered branch
from the forest. One memory unites with another on the plane of the
imagination, in the space of a poem, through the agency of a fiction, a
wish, and a dream, offering a necessary correction and a new site for the
expansion of desire.
Fourth, the Chinese box quality of remembering, where memories
resume and signify other anterior memories. Every memory is the sign
for only one signified, every recollection the resurgence of only one time,
every landscape and site the return to only one place: namely, "le pays de
l'enfance" (CQFSL, 69).
Fifth, remembrance as an experience of loss and otherness, where
memory of loss (Valsaintes, childhood, the passing of loved ones) is
clearly different from memory as loss (memory as the tattered, amnesiac
survivor of a lost past). The best example of this is found in the "Rue
Traversiere" tales (RT, 67-74). The long street, at one end of which the
child remembers there being a large botanical garden, is unlocatable
76 Fall 1996Stamelman
within the geography of the city of Tours, but it remains clearly marked
within the topographical imagination of the poet. Yet, the map of
memory, which follows the geography of childhood, is contested by the
otherness of the map of reality. Two different memories coexist, and
there is no way for the poet to join them, for they bear witness to the
alterity of the past, to the road not taken, or taken and then forgotten, at
a crossroads.
Sixth, memory as a language which, like a stream, irrigates the pres-
ent. In his poem "L'adieu" the poet compares the word to "cette auge Ã
demi brisée, dont se répand/A chaque aube de pluie l'eau inutile./
L'herbe et dans l'herbe l'eau qui brille, comme un fleuve" (CQFSL, 22).
From the leaky trough, where rainwater left by past storms stands idle,
there flows in random directions through the grass of the present a trickle
of the past. The word, the poem, is this reservoir where droplets of the
past accumulate and then leak or flow slowly into the present.
Seventh, and last, memory as obsession, as a disturbance in and dis-
orientation of language, which is seen in the complex récit "L'Egypte"
(RT, 9-15). The text is composed of three parts: first, a dream—the poet
arrives by boat in a port whose location and name he does not know and
whose inhabitants cannot understand his language—then, an event in
real time—the poet awakens from the dream and learns that during the
night his mother has suffered a stroke, severely diminishing her ability to
speak—and third, a memory—the poet remembers the endless childhood
summers "dans l'autre pays" and the mad woman who used to wander
through the village repeating the same expression, Promé té ché, an
inversion of the syllables in "Je te promets que...," the last words whis-
pered to her, years earlier, by a lover who abandoned her. The promise,
while broken in reality, is maintained in memory. The mad woman is
pure pastness, pure anamnesis. Her language repeats an originary event
that it cannot ever forget and that she renews with every utterance of the
obsessive phrase. And the child-poet's final wish, which he expresses as a
dream, to repair someday, "mais comment? la faute de celui qui s'était
enfui au matin du monde" (RT, 15), is the desire to repair language
through the vocation of one who will "work" in and on language. But in
truth, all memory, since it is a kind of translation from one discourse, the
past, to another, the present, confounds meaning, reverses the order of
words, disorients language. It suffers, like the incoherent woman, from
a kind of aphasia. The fissures of memory cannot be repaired. The
memory of presence is not itself presence, but an image, a simulacrum, a
Vol. XXXVI, No. 3 77L'Esprit Créateur
re-presentation. Presence, existing as it does for a mere instant, can be
repeated only through remembrance: the re-suturing, the re-membering
of fragments, not all of which will come together to make a seamless
whole.9
A memory from the poet's childhood past gives us perhaps an appro-
priate metaphor with which to conclude this examination of the presence
of memory and the memory of presence in Bonnefoy's writing. It con-
cerns a game the poet and his young schoolmates played when one of
their classes became particularly tedious. A student would take a small
mirror from his pocket and, catching a ray of light from the window,
would make a tiny spot dance across the walls, on the ceiling, and in the
teacher's hair ("La mort du peintre d'icônes," RT, 113-14). This bounc-
ing, trembling, erratic dot, reflection of a light source temporally and
spatially distant from the place of its appearance, literally falling to earth
from another world, expresses well the dialectics of presence and absence
in memory. The return of memory is resurrectional, the projection of
another time and place onto the here and now of the world. But it is only
a reflection, an image, and its dancing presence among us nothing more
than the aleatory, fleeting, and vulnerable movement of past radiance.
When memory comes, it arrives with a kernel of absence, "l'amande de
l'absence" (CQFSL, 42), at its center; for no remembering can hide the
thick mud of forgetfulness that lies on the bed of memory's clear stream,
easily troubling and obscuring the water. The fire of memory consumes
the wood of the past. Stirring the ashes of this past may for a moment
enliven the fire, but too much ash has been produced for memory to
recapture the lost presence of what once was. Which makes of memory,
in its very presence-absence, what the contemporary American poet
A. R. Ammons calls the "life nearest to life which is/life lost."10
Williams College
Notes
1. Charles Baudelaire, "Spleen," Œuvres complètes, 2 vols., Bibliothèque delà Pléiade
(Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 1:73. Yves Bonnefoy, "Le souvenir," Ce qui fut sans
lumière (Paris: Mercure de France, 1987), 11-16, hereafter referred to in the text as
CQFSL.
2. Susan Stewart, On Longing. Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir,
the Collection (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 24. See also my
Lost beyond Telling: Representations of Death and Absence in Modern French Poetry
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 3-46.
3. Vladimir Jankélévitch, L'Irréversible et la nostalgie (Paris: Flammarion, 1974), 26;
hereafter cited in the text.
78 Fall 1996Stamelman
4. "Interview with Yves Bonnefoy," In the Shadow's Light, tr. John Naughton
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 166-67.
5. Bonnefoy refers to Tours in particular in L'arrière-pays (Geneve: Albert Skira, 1972),
lOlff., hereafter abbreviated as AP, and in Rue Traversiere et autres récits de rêve
(Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 67-68, 70-74, hereafter referred to as RT. The house at
Toirac is mentioned in AP, 103-07 and in the story "L'Egypte" (RT, 13-15).
6. "The Case of the Wolf-Man. From the History of an Infantile Neurosis," The Wolf-
Man by the Wolf-Man, ed. Muriel Gardiner (New York: Basic Books, 1971), 195.
7. See "Entre mémoire et histoire. La problématique des lieux," in Pierre Nora, ed., Les
Lieux de mémoire. I. La République (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), xv-xlii.
8. Début et fin de la neige (Paris: Mercure de France, 1991), 48; hereafter cited asDébut.
9. For a more detailed interpretation of "L'Egypte," see John Jackson, Mémoire et
creation poétique (Paris: Mercure de France, 1992), 61-71.
10. "Easter Morning," The Selected Poems, expanded edition (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1986), 107.
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