CORRIGER LES PAROLES
Paroles : The Paradox of Apollinaire
With some obvious exceptions (Montaigne, Saint-Simon, Bloy), we can safely affirm that France tends to produce its literature in conformity with the history of that literature. If we compare manuals of French literature (Lanson's, for example, or Thibaudet's) with their English equivalents (Saintsbury's or Sampson's), we discover, not without surprise, that the latter consist of conceivable human beings, and the former, of schools, manifestos, generations, avant-gardes, rear guards, lefts and rights, cenacles, and allusions to the tortuous fate of Captain Dreyfus. The strangest part is that reality corresponds to those frantic abstractions: before writing a line, the Frenchman wants to understand, define, cla**ify himself. The Englishman writes in good faith, the Frenchman in favor of a, against b, conforming to c, toward d. He wonders (let us say): What kind of sonnet would be composed by a young atheist with a Catholic background, born and bred in Nivernais but of Breton stock, and affiliated with the Communist Party since 1944? Or, more technically: How should one apply the vocabulary and methods of Zola's Les Rougon Macquart to the elaboration of an epic poem on the fishermen of Morbihan, combining Fenelon's ardor with Rabelais' garrulous profusion and, of course, without ignoring a psychoa***ytical interpretation of the figure of Merlin? This system of premeditation, the mark of French literature, fills its pages with compositions of a cla**ical rigor, but also with fortunate, or unfortunate, extravagances. In fact, when a French man of letters professes a doctrine, he always applies it to the end, with a kind of ferocious integrity. Racine and Mallarme are the same writer (I hope this metaphor is acceptable), executing with the same decorum two dissimilar tasks . . . . To mock excessive forethought is not difficult; it is important to remember, however, that it has produced French literature, perhaps the finest in the world.
Of all the obligations that an author can impose upon himself, the most common and doubtless the most harmful is that of being modern. "Il faut etre absolument moderne" [One must be absolutely modern] , Rimbaud decided, a temporal limitation corresponding to the triviality of the nationalist who brags of being hermetically Danish or inextricably Argentine. Schopenhauer ( Welt als Wille und Vorstellung II, 15) concludes that the greatest imperfection of the human intellect is its successive, linear character, its tie to the present; to venerate that imperfection is an unfortunate whim. Guillaume Apollinaire embraced, justified, and preached it to his contemporaries. What is more, he devoted himself to that imperfection. He did so-remember the poem "La folie Rousse"-with an admirable and clear conscience of the sad dangers of his adventure.
Those dangers were real; today, like yesterday, the general value of Apollinaire's work is more doc*mentary than aesthetic. We visit it to recover the flavor of the "modern" poetry of the first decades of our century. Not a single line allows us to forget the date on which it was written -- an error not incurred, for example, in the contemporary works of Valery, Rilke, Yeats, Joyce . . . . (Perhaps, for the future, the only achievement of "modern" literature will be the unfathomable Ulysses, which in some way justifies, includes, and goes beyond the other texts.)
To place Apollinaire's name next to Rilke's might seem anachronistic, so close is the latter to us, so distant (already) is the former. However, Das Buch der Bilder [The Book of Pictures], which includes the inexhaustible " Herbst tag' [Autumn Day], is from 1902; Calligrammes, from 1918. Apollinaire, adorning his compositions with trolleys, airplanes, and other vehicles, did not identify with his times, which are our times.
For the writers of 1918, the war was what Tiberius Claudius Nero was for a professor of rhetoric: "mud kneaded with blood." They all perceived it thus, Unruh as well as Barbusse, Wilfred Owen as well as Sa**oon, the solitary Klemm as well as the frequented Remarque. (Paradoxically, one of the first poets to emphasize the monotony, tedium, desperation, and physical humiliations of contemporary war was Rudyard Kipling, in his Barrack Room Ballads of 1903.) For Artillery Lieutenant Guillaume Apollinaire, war was, above all, a beautiful spectacle. His poems and his letters express this. Guillermo de Torre, the most devoted and lucid of his critics, observes: "In the long nights of the trenches, the soldier-poet could contemplate the sky starred with mortar fire, and imagine new constellations." Thus Apollinaire fancied himself attending a dazzling spectacle in " La Nuit d'avril 1915":
Le ciel est etoile par les a bus des Boches
La foret merveilleuse au je vis donne un bal
A letter dated July 2 confirms this: "War is decidedly a beautiful thing and, despite all the risks I run, the exhaustion, the total lack of water, of everything, I am not unhappy to be here . . . . The place is very desolate, neither water, nor trees, nor villages are here, only the super-metallic, arch thundering war."
The meaning of a sentence, like that of an isolated word, depends on the context, which sometimes can be the entire life of its author. Thus the phrase "war is a beautiful thing" allows for many interpretations. Uttered by a South American dictator, it could express his hope of throwing incendiary bombs on the capital of a neighboring country. Coming from a journalist, it could signify his firm intention to adulate that dictator in order to obtain a good position in his administration. A sedentary man of letters could be suggesting his nostalgia for a life of adventure. For Guillaume Apollinaire, on the battle fields of France, it signifies, I believe, a frame of mind that ignores horror effortlessly, an acceptance of destiny, a kind of fundamental innocence. It is not unlike that Norwegian who conquered six feet of English earth and, what is more, nicknamed the battle Viking Feast; not unlike the immortal and un known author of the Chanson de Roland, singing to the brilliance of a sword:
E Durendal, c*m ies clere et blanche
C**tre soleil si reluis et refeambes
Apollinaire's line, "The marvelous forest where I live is giving a ball," is not a rigorous description of the artillery exchanges of 1915, but it is an accurate portrait of Apollinaire. Although he lived his days among the baladins of Cubism and Futurism, he was not a modern man. He was somewhat less com plex and more happy, more ancient, and stronger. (He was so unmodern that modernity seemed picturesque, and perhaps even moving, to him.) He was the "winged and sacred thing" of Platonic dialogue; he was a man of elemen tal and, therefore, eternal feelings; he was, when the fundaments of earth and sky shook, the poet of ancient courage and ancient honor. His legacy is these pages that move us like the nearness of the sea: "La Chanson du mal-aime," "Desir," " Merveilles de !a guerre," "Tristesse d' une etoile;' " La folie Rousse:'
[SIL]
Of all the obligations that an author can impose upon himself, the most common and doubtless the most harmful is that of being modern. "Il faut etre absolument moderne" [One must be absolutely modern] , Rimbaud decided, a temporal limitation corresponding to the triviality of the nationalist who brags of being hermetically Danish or inextricably Argentine. Schopenhauer ( Welt als Wille und Vorstellung II, 15) concludes that the greatest imperfection of the human intellect is its successive, linear character, its tie to the present; to venerate that imperfection is an unfortunate whim. Guillaume Apollinaire embraced, justified, and preached it to his contemporaries. What is more, he devoted himself to that imperfection. He did so-remember the poem "La folie Rousse"-with an admirable and clear conscience of the sad dangers of his adventure.
Those dangers were real; today, like yesterday, the general value of Apollinaire's work is more doc*mentary than aesthetic. We visit it to recover the flavor of the "modern" poetry of the first decades of our century. Not a single line allows us to forget the date on which it was written -- an error not incurred, for example, in the contemporary works of Valery, Rilke, Yeats, Joyce . . . . (Perhaps, for the future, the only achievement of "modern" literature will be the unfathomable Ulysses, which in some way justifies, includes, and goes beyond the other texts.)
To place Apollinaire's name next to Rilke's might seem anachronistic, so close is the latter to us, so distant (already) is the former. However, Das Buch der Bilder [The Book of Pictures], which includes the inexhaustible " Herbst tag' [Autumn Day], is from 1902; Calligrammes, from 1918. Apollinaire, adorning his compositions with trolleys, airplanes, and other vehicles, did not identify with his times, which are our times.
For the writers of 1918, the war was what Tiberius Claudius Nero was for a professor of rhetoric: "mud kneaded with blood." They all perceived it thus, Unruh as well as Barbusse, Wilfred Owen as well as Sa**oon, the solitary Klemm as well as the frequented Remarque. (Paradoxically, one of the first poets to emphasize the monotony, tedium, desperation, and physical humiliations of contemporary war was Rudyard Kipling, in his Barrack Room Ballads of 1903.) For Artillery Lieutenant Guillaume Apollinaire, war was, above all, a beautiful spectacle. His poems and his letters express this. Guillermo de Torre, the most devoted and lucid of his critics, observes: "In the long nights of the trenches, the soldier-poet could contemplate the sky starred with mortar fire, and imagine new constellations." Thus Apollinaire fancied himself attending a dazzling spectacle in " La Nuit d'avril 1915":
Le ciel est etoile par les a bus des Boches
La foret merveilleuse au je vis donne un bal
A letter dated July 2 confirms this: "War is decidedly a beautiful thing and, despite all the risks I run, the exhaustion, the total lack of water, of everything, I am not unhappy to be here . . . . The place is very desolate, neither water, nor trees, nor villages are here, only the super-metallic, arch thundering war."
The meaning of a sentence, like that of an isolated word, depends on the context, which sometimes can be the entire life of its author. Thus the phrase "war is a beautiful thing" allows for many interpretations. Uttered by a South American dictator, it could express his hope of throwing incendiary bombs on the capital of a neighboring country. Coming from a journalist, it could signify his firm intention to adulate that dictator in order to obtain a good position in his administration. A sedentary man of letters could be suggesting his nostalgia for a life of adventure. For Guillaume Apollinaire, on the battle fields of France, it signifies, I believe, a frame of mind that ignores horror effortlessly, an acceptance of destiny, a kind of fundamental innocence. It is not unlike that Norwegian who conquered six feet of English earth and, what is more, nicknamed the battle Viking Feast; not unlike the immortal and un known author of the Chanson de Roland, singing to the brilliance of a sword:
E Durendal, c*m ies clere et blanche
C**tre soleil si reluis et refeambes
Apollinaire's line, "The marvelous forest where I live is giving a ball," is not a rigorous description of the artillery exchanges of 1915, but it is an accurate portrait of Apollinaire. Although he lived his days among the baladins of Cubism and Futurism, he was not a modern man. He was somewhat less com plex and more happy, more ancient, and stronger. (He was so unmodern that modernity seemed picturesque, and perhaps even moving, to him.) He was the "winged and sacred thing" of Platonic dialogue; he was a man of elemen tal and, therefore, eternal feelings; he was, when the fundaments of earth and sky shook, the poet of ancient courage and ancient honor. His legacy is these pages that move us like the nearness of the sea: "La Chanson du mal-aime," "Desir," " Merveilles de !a guerre," "Tristesse d' une etoile;' " La folie Rousse:'
[SIL]
