One of du Bouchet’s most challenging palimpsests of synesthetic theory and praxis, his book-length poem Peinture (1983) at once discusses and inhabits creative processes of unwriting and unpainting. Examining fluid thresholds between “painting,” disappearance, and the open, the text performs collusions of rhythm, the visual, and the tactile.

Gradual and rapturous modes of immobilization and disappearance are approached through experimental gestures of what du Bouchet calls “decentering.” Far from merely celebrating the transitory and contingent, the poem insists on locating irreversible loss and identifying “the place of disappearance.” “Painting” emerges as the locus of sudden blindness (peinture – où je cesse de voir), and writing takes on the task of searching for prereflexive immediacy and inventing a not-yet-represented “face before painting” (antérieure de la peinture), a face that needs to be restored or reproduced for, and as, a sustained look (Restitué au regard).

Du Bouchet’s poem exemplifies what it writes into being: a scattered, sparse landscape of clearings (clairsemé). Productive spontaneity and tradition are presented as the labor of renewal in the guise of a drawing that perpetually reconstitutes itself (à nouveau, se dessinera). Evoking uncannily embedded exposures “beneath the eyes,” and operating with laconic paradoxes such as “transparent blocks of stone,” du Bouchet’s ethics and poetics of survival culminate in the surprising assertion that a tangible opening for genuine dialogue is at hand, despite the apparent destruction of language—“the destroyed word is intact” (la parole détruite est intacte).

Paul Auster provides a careful translation in his du Bouchet anthology, The Uninhabited (New York: Living Hand, 1976).

Categories: French Literature, Literature, World Literature

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