WHAT IS LITERATURE?

I have no doubt that charity or anger can produceother objects, but they will likewise be swallowed up;they will lose their name; there will remain only thingshaunted by a mysterious soul. One does not paint significations; one does not put them to music. Under theseconditions, who would dare require that the painter ormusician engage himself? On the other hand, the writer deals with significations. Still, a distinction must be made. The empire of signs is prose; poetry is on the side of painting, sculpture, andmusic. I am accused of detesting it; the proof, so they say, is that Les Temps Modernes publishes very few poems.On the contrary, this is proof that we like it. To be con11 vinced, all one need do is take a look at contemporaryproduction. "At least/ 5 critics say triumphantly, "youcan't even dream of engaging it." Indeed. But why shouldI want to? Because it uses words as does prose? But it does not use them in the same way, and it does not evenuse them at all, I should rather say that it serves them.Poets are men who refuse to utilize language. Now, sincethe quest for truth takes place in and by language conceived as a certain kind of instrument, it is unnecessary toimagine that they aim to discern or expound the true. Nor do they dream of naming the world, and, this beingthe case, they name nothing at all, for naming implies aperpetual sacrifice of the name to the object named, or, as Hegel would say, the name is revealed as the inessential in the face of the thing which is essential. They donot speak, neither do they keep still; it is something different. It has been said that they wanted to destroy the"word" by monstrous couplings, but this is false. For thenthey would have to be thrown into the midst of utilitarian language and would have had to try to retrieve wordsfrom it in odd little groups, as for example "horse" and"butter" by writing "horses of butter." 3 Besides the fact that such an enterprise would requireinfinite time, it is not conceivable that one can keep oneself on the plane of the utilitarian project, consider wordsas instruments, and at the same contemplate taking their instrumentality away from them. In fact, the poet haswithdrawn from language-instrument in a single movement. Once and for all he has chosen the poetic attitude which considers words as things and not as signs. For theambiguity of the sign implies that one can penetrate it at  will like a pane of glass and pursue the thing signified, orturn his gaze toward its reality and consider it as an object. The man who talks is beyond words and near theobject, whereas the poet is on this side of them. For theformer, they are domesticated; for the latter they arein the wild state. For the former, they are useful conventions, tools which gradually wear out and which onethrows away when they are no longer serviceable; forthe latter, they are natural things which sprout naturallyupon the earth like grass and trees. But if he dwells upon words, as does the painter withcolors and the musician with sounds, that does not meanthat they have lost all signification in his eyes. Indeed, it is signification alone which can give words their verbalunity. Without it they are frittered away into sounds andstrokes of the pen. Only, it too becomes natural. It is nolonger the goal which is always out of reach and whichhuman transcendence is always aiming at, but a propertyof each term, analogous to the expression of a face, tothe little sad or gay meaning of sounds and colors. Havingflowed into the word, having been absorbed by its sonorityor visual aspect, having been thickened and defaced, it too is a thing, increate and eternal. For the poet, language is a structure of the externalworld. The speaker is in a situation in language; he is invested with words. They are prolongations of his meanings, his pincers, his antennae, his eyeglasses. He maneuvers them from within; he feels them as if they werehis body; he is surrounded by a verbal body which he is hardly aware of and which extends his action upon theworld. The poet is outside of language. He sees words13  inside out as if he did not share the human condition,and as if he were first meeting the word as a barrier ashe comes toward men. Instead of first knowing thingsby their name, it seems that first he has a silent contactwith them, since, turning toward that other species ofthing which for him is the word, touching them, testingthem, palping them, he discovers in them a slight luminosity of their own and particular affinities with theearth, the sky, the water, and all created things. Not knowing how to use them as a sign of an aspectof the world, he sees in the word the image of one ofthese aspects. And the verbal image he chooses for its resemblance to the willow tree or the ash tree is not necessarily the word which we use to designate these objects. Ashe is already on the outside, he considers words as a trapto catch a fleeing reality rather than as indicators whichthrow him out of himself into the midst of things. Inshort, all language is for him the mirror of the world. Asa result, important changes take place in the internaleconomy of the word. Its sonority, its length, its masculineor feminine endings, its visual aspect, compose for hima face of flesh which represents rather than expressessignification. Inversely, as the signification is realized, thephysical aspect of the word is reflected within it, and it, in its turn, functions as an image of the verbal body. Likeits sign, too, for it has lost its pre-eminence; since words,like things, are increate, the poet does not decide whetherthe former exist for the latter or vice-versa. Thus, between the word and the thing signified, thereis established a double reciprocal relation of magical resemblance and signification. And the poet does not utilize the word, he does not choose between diverse acceptations; each of them, instead of appearing to him as anautonomous function, is given to him as a material quality which merges before his eyes with the other acceptation. Thus, in each word he realizes, solely by the effect ofthe poetic attitude, the metaphors which Picasso dreamedof when he wanted to do a matchbox which was completely a bat without ceasing to be a matchbox. Florenceis city, flower, and woman. It is city-flower, city-woman,and girl-flower all at the same time. And the strangeobject which thus appears has the liquidity of the river> the soft, tawny ardency of gold> and finally abandons itself with propriety and, by the continuous diminution of the silent , prolongs indefinitely its modest blossoming.* To that is added the insidious effect of biography. For me, Florence is also a certain woman, anAmerican actress who played in the silent films of mychildhood, and about whom I have forgotten everythingexcept that she was as long as a long evening glove andalways a bit weary and always chaste and always marriedand misunderstood and whom I loved and whose namewas Florence. For the word, which tears the writer of prose awayfrom himself and throws him into the midst of the world,sends back to the poet his own image, like a mirror.; . i nil "This sentence is not fully intelligible in translation as the author is here associating the component sounds of the word Florence with the signification of the French words they evoke. Thus: FL-OR-ENCE, fleuve (river), or (gold), and dfaence (propriety). The latter part of the sentence refers to the practice in French poetry of giving, in certain circumstances, a syllabic value to the otherwise silent terminal e. Translator's note.  This is what justifies the double undertaking of Leiriswho, on the one hand, in his Glossary, tries to give certainwords a poetic definition, that is, one which is by itself asynthesis of reciprocal implications between the sonorousbody and the verbal soul, and, on the other hand, in astill unpublished work, goes in quest of remembrance ofthings past, taking as guides a few words which for himare particularly charged with affectivity. Thus, the poeticword is a microcosm. The crisis of language which broke out at the beginning of this century is a poetic crisis. Whatever the social and historical factors, it manifested itself by attacksof depersonalization of the writer in the face of words.He no longer knew how to use them, and, in Bergson'sfamous formula, he only half recognized them. Heapproached them with a completely fruitful feeling ofstrangeness. They were no longer his; they were no longerhe; but in those strange mirrors, the sky, the earth, andhis own life were reflected. And, finally, they became things themselves, or rather the black heart of things. And when the poet joins several of these microcosms together the case is like that of painters when theyassemble their colors on the canvas. One might think that he is composing a sentence, but this is only what it appears to be. He is creating an object. The words-thingsare grouped by magical associations of fitness and incongruity, like colors and sounds. They attract, repel, and "burn" one another, and their association composesthe veritable poetic unity which is the phrase-object. More often the poet first has the scheme of the sentence in his mind, and the words follow. But this scheme  has nothing in common with what one ordinarily calls averbal scheme. It does not govern the constructionof a signification. Rather, it is comparable to the creativeproject by which Picasso, even before touching his brush,prefigures in space the thing which will become a buffoonor a harlequin. To flee, to flee there, I feel that birds are drunk But, oh, my heart, hear the song of the sailors. (Fuir, la-bas fuir, je sens que des oiseaux sont ivresMais o mon coeur entends le chant des matelots.} This "but" which rises like a monolith at the threshold of the sentence does not tie the second verse to the preceding one. It colors it with a certain reserved nuance,with "private associations 55 which penetrate it completely.In the same way, certain poems begin with "and. 55 Thisconjunction no longer indicates to the mind an operationwhich is to be carried out; it extends throughout theparagraph to give it the absolute quality of a sequel. Forthe poet, the sentence has a tonality, a taste; by meansof it he tastes for their own sake the irritating flavors of objection, of reserve, of disjunction. He carries them to the absolute. He makes them real properties of the sentence, which becomes an utter objection without beingan objection to anything precise. He finds here those relations of reciprocal implication which we pointed outa short time ago between the poetic word and its meaning; the ensemble of the words chosen functions as animage of the interrogative or restrictive nuance, and vice17 versa, the interrogation is an image of the verbal ensemble which it delimits. As in the following admirable verses:

                                                  Oh seasons! Oh castles!

                                                  What soul is faultless?

                                                   (O saisons! O chateaux! 

                                                 Quelle dme est sans defaut?)