Recognizing the Lure: “Sail On, Disappoint Them”

A series of geographical-related prose and poem are presented here to demonstrate how Bonnefoy strives to reconcile with his inner urge by recognizing its lure. Through these poetic landscapes, Bonnefoy again gives his rumination on place and space meanwhile confronting the unachievability of his desire; by facing and accepting the inbuilt confinement of life along with all its predicaments, the poet reaches the agreement with himself as well as intrinsic turbulences. The subsequent prose “Leaving the Garden: A Variant” and poem

“Ulysses Passes Ithaca” are selected in 2008 collection The Anchor’s Long Chain, both illustrate an imagined place with Bonnefoy’s intentionally relating to the biblical or mythological backdrops: the former being Adam and Eve leaving the Garden of Eden, the later recounts Ulysses’ returning to Ithaca from twenty years of wandering.

In “Leaving the Garden: A Variant,” the whole setting of the locale is highly

metaphorical: first the dense trees that balked the two beings, then “unfolds an expanse of gentle hills verdant with a tinge of gold” (SS 227), then “an otherwise deserted earth,” “the open threshold” (SS 229). The purposefully arranged associations have given anxiety to this described landscape, rendering it identical to the one presented in The Curved Planks, an undifferentiated, “clearly uninhabited” placeless space in which human beings are lost:

[t]he young woman stretched out her arm toward who knows where, toward a horizon. And then they set off again … but even so, aren’t they still there? You could almost believe they’re motionless. (SS 227)

In a space devoid of reference points, even the time “still hasn’t begun” (SS 229). Four characters are introduced in the prose, respectively Adam, Eve, the I narrator, and the child whose voice and presence seen only by the narrator. Although Adam and Eve’s departure

from the Garden serves as the keynote, these two characters are somehow reduced to the background owing to their ignorance: in a place deprived of spatial and temporal dimensions, not only the two refuse to “give any of this a thought,” they also, voluntarily, “consent to wander off into the dark” (SS 229).

The lack of the couple finds its abundance in the I narrator, who stands in contrast with the two is fully conscious of the external world and is ready to be involved. With the

unfinished sentence “[t]he imagination keeps insisting…” which begins the whole prose, the reader immediately realizes that, from the very start, the succeeding illustration of “[a] man and a woman [Adam and Eve]” are nothing but a whimsical creation of the narrator,

subsidiary and unknowing (SS 227); the fact is actualized once again by the narrator in a much straightforward manner: “I look at these two beings I imagine” (SS 231). The narrator, therefore, is more of a dominant creator than a mere teller: he veers the reader’s attention from the backdrop of the two biblical characters as well as the landscape where “the greatest silence [once] prevailed” onto a mysterious sound that enchants him.

A sound. Which seemed to come from father off, but also from closer by, than all these random, uneventful noises … Was it just a musical note, the echo of a little flute from distant plains? Was it a human voice? I listen. (SS 229, 231)

The act of listening is always worth pondering in Bonnefoy’s oeuvre: it is a redemptive as well as a humble gesture that displays the subject’s willingness to accept and to reach out, and here to build a connection between the self and the other. Contrary to the narrator’s curiosity, Adam and Eve remain “[n]onplussed—and maybe still doubtful” (SS 231). As the prose proceeds, the sound proves to be a boy who, strangely, proclaims his presence only in linguistic contexts of interrogative sentences, subjunctive moods, or future tenses particularly employed by the narrator. When hearing the noise in the bush, for instance, the narrator

assumes that it is a human being, “as if someone had been crouching” (SS 233, emphasis added). The narrator continues the speculation on this human figure with a sequence of unidentified descriptions:

… Someone who’ll scurry off and lie down on the grass, who’ll jump up and run again—but then he’ll pause, think it over, and return … Is he the voice that called from the other side of the visible, the little flute I heard dreaming there? Yes, only a child would prowl like that, naked and artless, in this solitary place.

And in fact, he does return … I know I’ll spot him several times more along the trail, eager to watch the man and woman—wanting to be seen, and yet afraid.

(SS 233, emphasis added)

Since these grammatical structures are often used to arouse the uncertainty, assumption, or anticipation of the subject, the child might be interpreted emphatically to be the narrator’s yearning for rationalizing the landscape, or, as what children usually function in Bonnefoy’s late works, an emblem of hope.

Although the child’s movements are prescribed, his state of being is but the narrator’s imaginings similar to Adam and Eve’s imagining flee, his sentiments and the failure of approaching the couple somehow haunt the narrator relentlessly. As previously examined, when the narrator describes the child’s meeting with the couple on the road, he emphasizes the child’s ambivalence whether to get near or remain his invisibility (“eager to watch the man and woman—wanting to be seen, and yet afraid”); the child’s self-restriction obsesses the narrator, urging him to further scrutinize the child’s motivation in so doing.

I think of the last time—after how many others, who can tell?—when the child

crept up to spy on them, ready to throw himself at their feet. He curbed his desire, but why? Did he understand it was there, right away, that everything would end? Is that what spurred his desire, so he renounced it with even greater grief, or darker joy, to rove through eternity once more? (SS 235)

These questions seemed to be randomly placed, yet their answers are already embedded in these inquiries. Children in the most general understanding are a status contrary to grownups, recognized often as credulous, innocent, and vital; in Bonnefoy’s late writings, however, children are presented rather congruously with the shared feature of being delightful and weary, naïve and mature, abundant but also vacant in what have been inherently given to them as seen in “On the moss-stained … ” (“a child playing / With too many dreams,” CP 61). The child presented in this prose also suffers from his dual inclination for inhabitation and departure (“rove through eternity once more”); although he might receive comforts and security from this human bond, the couple’s presence also reminds the boy of his possible future, of seeing with indifferent mind and living with unrealized hope (“there, right away, that everything would end”).

Recognizing this termination of letting oneself be forever confined to particular placial experience concretized by the values and intimacy felt within the human interactions and correlations, the child throws himself to the unknown (“spurred his desire … to rove through eternity once more”). An implication of the narrator and the child’s doubling is implicitly suggested since the ambivalent wrestling against one’s desire is also mentioned by the narrator beforehand. The landscape abounds in silence was loved by the narrator, who yet confessed later that the serenity of the place “started to trouble me, as much as it treasured me before” (SS 231). Since the narrator, presumably the poet himself, is omnipotent in bestowing his active imaginings on this highly allegorical sketch, the characters presented can be to some extent regarded as the narrator’s own projections. With the performances as well as

uncertainties clearly illustrated by the narrator, the child clearly doubles the narrator: the child’s tentativeness serves similarly as the narrator’s stance when facing the yearning.

Bonnefoy indeed understands the tempting nature space possesses by saying that “[s]pace is such a lure” in a sonnet “San Biagio, at Montepulciano” (SS 207); it is also true that the poet would very often reveal his concern for such a futile quest as implied in this prose:

Will we ever reach what we long to grasp? I’m afraid not. A mysterious diffraction gets the best of us; and hard as we resist, our hand is pushed away from what we desired. (SS 233)

The recognition of the necessary failure (“Will we ever reach what we long to grasp? I’m afraid not”) does not confine the poet from exploring, nor restricting his imagining act; on the contrary, the poet repeatedly demonstrates his determination to go through the trials, to test himself to the limit, and to proclaim his faith in such a quest.

In the sonnet “Ulysses Passes Ithaca,” Bonnefoy provides another reflection on the place with his rewrite of Ulysses returning to his homeland.

What’s the pile of rocks and sand? Ithaca…

You know you’ll find the bees, the ancient dog, The olive tree, the faithful wife. But look:

The water glitters, black under your prow.

No, don’t waste another glance: this coast Is just your threadbare kingdom. You won’t Shake the hand of the man you are now—

You who’ve lost all sorrow, and all hope.

Sail on, disappoint them. Let this island slip by, Off to port. For you, this other sea unrolls:

Memory haunts the man who wants to die.

Speed ahead. From this day on, set your course For that low, huddled shore. There, in the foam, Plays the child that you once were, here. (SS 205)

The poem deploys with the narrator’s persuasion of Ulysses to sail on, even if the king in such a home-bound journey is so close to his homeland Ithaca, a place thoroughly

familiarized by the king with the values given (“you’ll find the bees, the ancient dog, / The olive tree, the faithful wife”). In contrast with the king’s presently unsteady stance on the ship, or, if put in a larger context, an undifferentiated, grand space of sea, Ithaca serves as the place of concentration of former memories and sentiments as well as the pause.

However, Ithaca is purposely defamiliarized as the poetic lines proceed; from a place of stability it gradually becomes the remnant of bygone values, and ultimately a barren land (“this coast / Is just your threadbare kingdom”). The reason for such defamiliarization comes exactly from the king’s present identification with himself (“You who’ve lost all sorrow, and all hope”) as well as the knowledge of the spatial potentials that sets him free from the bound to a fixed place (“The water glitters, black under your prow;” “For you, this other sea

unrolls,” emphasis added). In the traditional sonnet form, a sudden turn of the thought known as the volta is expected, which usually takes place in between the octave and the sestet of the Italian sonnet or before the final couplet of the Shakespearean sonnet. In this sonnet,

however, Bonnefoy demonstrates not one, but two dramatic turns. After congregating and dispersing Ithaca’s place-ness displayed in two quatrains, the subsequent triplets show double

turns of spatial attitude: first by the king’s resolution of leaving the place (“Sail on,

disappoint them. Let this island slip by, / Off to port”) and then with the similar determination of seeing that place as destined to return to (“From this day on, set your course / For that low, huddled shore”). Ithaca, being put in such a dialectic imagining, has become one of the multiple, oneiric houses of Bonnefoy, in which “a profound need” is satisfied, as well as “the root, the bonds, the depth, the fathomlessness of dreams” (Bachelard, PIR 152).