「帶著地方遠颺」：伊夫．博納富瓦的詩意空間

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(1)國立臺灣師範⼤學⽂學院英語學系碩⼠論⽂ Department of English, College of Liberal Arts. National Taiwan Normal University Master’s Thesis. 「帶著地⽅遠颺」：伊夫．博納富瓦的詩意空間 “He Takes His Place Forward on the Ship:” Poetic Space of Yves Bonnefoy 潘采均 Pan, Tsai-Chun 指導教授：狄亞倫博⼠ Advisor: Aaron Deveson, Ph.D.. 中華民國 109 年 8 月 August 2020.

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(3) Acknowledgements. The thesis would never be identical to what it looks like now without Professor Aaron Deveson’s guidance and instructions. I am greatly indebted to Professor Deveson for granting me the ultimate freedom to think and write, and for his endless patience and tolerance of my whimsical ideas. This venture into Bonnefoy’s poetic space was undeniably difficult yet exceptionally worthwhile; I am truly honored to have him guided me. My gratitude also goes to Professor Justin Prystash for examining my thesis and giving me selfless and always helpful suggestions; I am both encouraged and inspired by his warm comments and insightful thoughts. I am also grateful to Professor Shou-Nan Hsu at NUTN for showing no hesitation of being the committee member, and for inviting me into conversations that are unquestionably equal and profound. I sincerely thank Professor Zi-Ling Yan at NUTN for his guidance throughout the college years. Professor Yan had always surprised me with his considerable knowledge of literature, philosophical theories, architecture, and paintings. Being the first person who taught me how to write, what to think, and where to see, he inspired me to imagine the world; for that, I am forever grateful. My special thanks also go to the department office’s members, Mu-Han and Tzu-Yi, for their assistance in the paperwork and the timely reminder; to Kuan Li at NCKU for his generosity in reading my earlier sketches; to Juliena Liu for her casual yet soothing talks.. My mother and sister have always, so selflessly and effortlessly, granted me the place to berth and a space to dream. Their presences constitute my homecoming. This thesis is dedicated to them.. i.

(4) 中文摘要. 本論文以加斯東．巴舍拉於《空間詩學》中的論述為主，探討法國當代詩人伊夫．博納富瓦的晚期四本詩集《雪的開始與結束》、《彎曲的船板》、《長錨鏈》與《當下時刻》中所呈現的詩意空間；在此架構中，我不僅呈現博納富瓦自身詩學的不斷革新，也加以論證此詩意空間的延展與動態建構，實是詩人自身的存有之展。我假設此詩意空間為各物質、場所、事件與情感的集合體，它有其深度及厚度，同時因詩人之想像主體的活動而有其動能；在詩人以不同詩意象回歸特定母題時，此架構中的物質特性、乃至詩人情感皆不斷更新，連帶也調動此詩意空間之不斷建構與形變。本論文雖以巴舍拉論述作主調，但要強調的是巴舍拉是以幸福空間為研究主幹，相比之下，博納富瓦的空間詩學所處理與涵蓋的空間型態要來的更加廣泛，其中不乏空乏、靜滯、或敵意空間。因此，本論文可視為巴舍拉空間研究之另一切入。本論文主要三章節，分別以「空間之誘惑」、「空間內冒險」、「於廣袤中建立信心」為論述主軸。第一章分析《雪的開始與結束》（1991），前半著重詩人如何在詩及散文中建立空間感、並在地方與空間的經驗中來回置換；後半以巴舍拉的動態想像，論述「雪」意象的動態性及詩意。第二章以《彎曲的船板》（2001）為分析對象，以石頭、水、家屋、船等詩意象的雙重性帶出巴舍拉想像哲學的動態辯證，說明詩人的力量意志如何在靜滯空間、無空間、甚至是敵意空間中前行；我辯證此動能即是此詩意空間不斷形變的根本原力。第三章分析兩詩集，《長錨鏈》（2008）與《當下時刻》（2011），強調詩人對自己詩學恆持的信心；此章節著重想像主體與客體間的相互關係，與詩人詩學中所呈現的「回歸」，以帶出此詩意空間之動態形塑與詩人的存在實為不可劃分、且呈相互辯證與消長之關係。. 關鍵詞：伊夫．博納富瓦、《雪的開始與結束》、《彎曲的船板》、《長錨鏈》、《當下時刻》、詩意空間、加斯東．巴舍拉、想像、動態辯證、詩意象. ii.

(5) Abstract This thesis explores four of contemporary French poet Yves Bonnefoy’s (1923-2016) late writings Beginning and End of The Snow (1989), The Curved Planks (2001), The Anchor’s Long Chain (2008), and The Present Hour (2011) to demonstrate the constructing process of the poet’s poetic space through the reading of Gaston Bachelard’s theoretical discourse proposed in The Poetics of Space (1958). By closely examining these four volumes, I not only demonstrate Bonnefoy’s evolving attitude toward his poetics but also indicate plainly how such poetic space is made possible. I propose that this poetic space is a collective unity of distinctive matters, events, places, and sensations; it possesses its verticality and profundity, meanwhile is capable of shaping and reshaping itself with the subject’s imaginative faculty: the poet’s returning to particular poetic themes along with his different stances have endlessly renewed this poetic space, bringing about its endless formations. Though my proposed structure of poetic space has its roots in Bachelard’s discourse on space’s poetics, the two are not entirely identical; Bonnefoy’s poetic space exceeds Bachelard’s in the poet’s inclusion of positive and negative spaces, spaces that are and are not. This thesis is divided into three chapters, each has its particular theme to pursue, namely temptation, venture, and confidence. Chapter One probes into 1991 volume Beginning and End of The Snow to demonstrate the transformation of Bonnefoy’s placial and spatial experiences from geographically concrete to poetic and imaginative; with Bachelard’s discourse on dynamic imagination, I demonstrate how Bonnefoy contours his poetic space with plentiful performances of the snow image. Chapter Two continues the discussion of imagination’s dynamism with Bonnefoy’s 2001 volume The Curved Planks, focusing particularly on its workings in negative and even hostile contexts to show how poetic space still possesses its potential to grow and expand. Chapter Three examines The Anchor’s Long iii.

(6) Chain (2008) and The Present Hour (2011) to present the dialectical relationship between imagining subject and the imagined image, and how the two co-constitute the immensity which points to the depth of the being. I see the dialectical co-constitution of the two as the completion of Bonnefoy’s poetic space: it constitutes the roundness of this structure in which the poet ceaselessly returns to and dwells.. Keywords: Yves Bonnefoy, poetic space, Beginning and End of The Snow, The Curved Planks, The Anchor’s Long Chain, The Present Hour, Gaston Bachelard, imagination, dynamic dialectics, poetic image. iv.

(7) Table of Contents. Acknowledgements. i. Chinese Abstract. ii. English Abstract. iii. Table of Contents. v. Abbreviations. vii. INTRODUCTION. 1. I.. Yves Bonnefoy: The Successor of Nineteenth-Century French Poetry. 4. II.. Bonnefoy’s Poetics and Spatial Inclination. 7. III. Aims and Objectives. 11. i.. Methodology and Hypothesis. 13. ii.. Proposed Structure of Chapters. 16. Chapter One: Temptation Beginning and End of the Snow (1991). 18. 1.1 Experiencing Place and Space. 19. 1.1.1. Sense Structuring. 20. 1.1.2. The Interchangeability of Place and Space. 22. 1.2 Imaginative Opening of Poetics of Space. 27. 1.2.1. Bachelard’s Imagination and Mobility. 28. 1.2.2. Snow Image and Its Poetics. 30. 1.2.3. The Outlining of Poetic Space. 38. v.

(8) Chapter Two: Venture The Curved Planks (2001) 2.1. 2.2. 48. Imagining the Ambivalences. 49. 2.1.1. Bonnefoy’s Imaginings of Passivity. 51. 2.1.2. The Placeless Space. 52. 2.1.3. The Childhood House. 67. Poetic Advancing of the Images. 79. 2.2.1. Bachelard’s Idea of Dialectics. 80. 2.2.2. The Matter of Will: Throwing Stones. 81. 2.2.3. The Nautical Search: Venturing of the Boat. 86. Chapter Three: Confidence The Anchor’s Long Chain (2008) & The Present Hour (2011) 3.1. 3.2. 92. Dreaming the Immensity. 93. 3.1.1. The Imagining Depth. 94. 3.1.2. The Convergence: “He Dreamed; He Set Sailed”. 96. The Ultimate Dialectics. 105. 3.2.1. Recognizing the Lure: “Sail On, Disappoint Them”. 107. 3.2.2. Poetic Faith: “He Seemed Buoyed Up, Forever”. 113. 3.2.3. Bonnefoy’s Homecoming. 118. CONCLUSION: POETIC SPACE. 124. Works Cited. 129. vi.

(9) Abbreviations. Texts by Gaston Bachelard. AD = Air and Dream: An essay on the Imagination of the Movement. ER = Earth and Reveries of Will: An essay on the Imagination of the Matter PIR = On Poetic Imagination and Reverie PS = The Poetics of Space WD = Water and Dream: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter. Texts by Yves Bonnefoy. APP = The Act and the Place of Poetry CP = The Curved Planks EP = Early Poems: 1947-1959 PH = The Present Hour SS = Second Simplicity: New Poetry and Prose, 1991-2011. vii.

(10) INTRODUCTION. “You have navigated with raging soul far from the paternal home, passing beyond the sea’s double rocks, and you now inhabit a foreign land.” —MEDEA, Euripides. “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.” — Four Quarters, T. S. Eliot. I am curious about place and space. When referring to a specific locale or the position of an object, the word place is used; when speaking of an undefined distance between two objective ends, or an image that implies open, immense, or uncertain, then space is employed. Surely the terms would have multiple applications in different domains, I am much more interested in the overall philosophical or humanistic geographical contemplation on such terms, such as how placial and spatial experiences are formed, and what are their influences on the subject. Jeff Malpas targets on how place, with his understanding of such a term through the topological inquiry into Heidegger, already implies different forms of relationships:. Place … establishes relations of inside and outside—relations that are directly tied to the essential connection between place and boundary or limit. To be located is to be within, to be somehow enclosed, but in a way that at the same time opens up, that makes possible. Already this indicates some of the directions in which any 1.

(11) thinking of place must move—toward ideas of opening and closing, of concealing and revealing, of focus and horizon, of finitude and “transcendence,” of limit and possibility, of mutual relationality and coconstitution. (Heidegger and the Thinking of Place 2). These shifting qualities, Malpas further claims, constitute the “philosophical centrality” shared by place; they also closely relate to Heidegger’s idea of “being-in-the-world”, the idea that is “essentially a focus on place and placedness” (2). On the other hand, Gaston Bachelard provides his poetic readings of different places and spaces in The Poetics of Space; he states clearly that “all really inhabited space bears the essence of the notion of home” (27). Inspired by the two philosophers’ contemplation on place and space, my foremost interest in this thesis is as follows: What constitutes this home, and how are we homed? I intend to probe into the concept of place and space from word home as a noun and even as a verb, namely to find the home-like qualities in our placial and spatial experiences, and to demonstrate how such homeliness provide the subject the feeling of comfort and security. Yves Bonnefoy’s poetry seems to be a perfect illustration for all the pondering of place and space, and, significantly, of the relationship between the subject and the external world. Bonnefoy’s poetry, which will be explained later in a much detailed way, roots almost in the existential philosophy: a highly Heideggerian orientation which is transparent in the poet’s preference for words like absence, presence, and being-in-the-world. This already implies a certain gesture and worldview of Bonnefoy, which also foreshadows and partly explains the poet’s yearning for a true place. The gesture displayed by Bonnefoy is also significant in my later interpretation. The poet surely cares for his involvement in the world, and he does not, despite the many temptations and frustrations his desire for other places brought him, give up hope. As Whiteman observes, “[i]t is entirely characteristic of Bonnefoy’s late style to be so optimistic about life, to transmute a vivid image of aging into something fresh and 2.

(12) prospective” (463). Bonnefoy’s poetry as an analyzed object is chosen out of my personal preference: I always have a passion for poetry, and I am particularly fond of the ambivalence in Bonnefoy’s works, of being linguistically simple yet contextually obscure or philosophically profound. Through the repetitive reading of Bonnefoy’s prose and verse, I feel the need and responsibility to respond to all these ponderings on which I often find myself dwelling: How the poet confronts or constructs place and space? How do place and space function on the subject in return? What does poetry offer in this structuring? Starting with the above inquiries, the central question I intend to answer in the thesis is the following: How does Yves Bonnefoy construct his poetic space, within which he comfortably dwells and is homed? Following this central question, I intend to pursue two aspects of sub-questions, namely, the establishing process of poetic space, and the poet’s attitude toward such structuring. For instance, when it comes to the formation of poetic space, I question: What matters and spatial archetypes constitute this poetic space? What forces advance such a structure meanwhile keeping its dynamism of expansion and growth? How does this poetic space endure its numerous transformations in the process of expansion, yet maintain also its form? How does this poetic space resonate with the poet’s inner voice, and why is it regarded eventually as a manifestation of the poet’s very being? To answer such an aspect of questions on how poetic space is structured, another trajectory of diving into the poet’s shifting attitude of poetry and his yearning for other places through different writing processes is also needed. This raises questions on how Bonnefoy deals with spatial themes in different periods of his life: How does the poet confront different places and space? How does he interact with or respond to the potentiality, and even the improbability, granted by different spaces he encountered? How do that reflections help achieve space in their poetic context, which further fortifies Bonnefoy’s poetic space as a whole, collective unit? By answering these two aspects of questions, I advance my argument and eventually reach my central concern of what poetic space is, how it is constructed, and how the poet finds himself 3.

(13) homed in such a structure as well as on his contentment. By probing into poetic space of Bonnefoy along with the close examination on the poet’s response and philosophical discourses on place and space, I also find possible answers to my previous ponderings.. I.. Yves Bonnefoy: The Successor of Nineteenth-Century French Poetry. Born in Tours, France, Yves Bonnefoy (1923-2016) has been undeniably the most influential and recognizable Francophone poets since World War II, whose works have received much appreciation from general readers and critics alike. Being a productive writer, in the span of sixty years of writing career Bonnefoy had explored beauty through poems, prose, and even essays, from many disciplines. Following his symbolist predecessors like Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898), Paul Verlaine (18441896), Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891), and Paul Valéry (1871-1945), Yves Bonnefoy’s poetry and prose perplex yet also satisfy his readers. In his twenties, Bonnefoy was shortly bedazzled and related to Surrealists in Paris between 1945 and 1947; the poet, however, established his poetic frame with highly experimental and personal work Du mouvement et de l'immobilité de Douve (On the Motion and Immobility of Douve, 1953), the one that considerably stirred the literary circle and had put Bonnefoy to the front line of remarkable young French poets after the tradition set by nineteenth-century symbolists. Bonnefoy was elected to the Collège de France in 1981 to the seat left empty after the death of Roland Barthes. He also won numerous literary awards and honors, and was greatly believed to be a potential winner for Nobel Prize. Despite his prolific poetry collections and the attentive concern for the purpose, the act, and place of poetry as well as poetry traditions, Bonnefoy also demonstrated tremendous passion in disciplines like art studies and translation, striving to show the correlation between poetry and visual arts meanwhile reflecting on the problems of translation. The poet’s 4.

(14) preference for art history proves to be shockingly extensive: the spectrum ranges from the Roman Baroque, Byzantine art, French Gothic fresco, to contemporary artists like Giacometti, Joan Miró and many others. Naughton had described the poet’s interdisciplinary inquiries and particularly his interest in contemporary arts: many artists Bonnefoy wrote about had illustrated for his works, while in the poet’s poetical lines the same “visual aspects” appeared (13). Bonnefoy had long been a prestigious translator of Leopardi, Petrarch, Donne, Keats, Yeats, and particularly Shakespeare: ten of Shakespeare’s plays along with the sonnets and other longer poems were translated. Bonnefoy’s translation of Shakespeare is generally perceived as the finest in the Francophone world. This experience of intense immersion with English poetry tradition had profoundly enriched Bonnefoy’s poetic creation. Translated into thirty languages, Bonnefoy’s works published in English include the complete works On the Motion and Immobility of Douve (1968), In the Shadow’s Light (1991), The Curved Planks (2007), Beginning and End of the Snow (2012), The Present Hour (2013), The Digamma (2014), and The Anchor's Long Chain (2015); the collected collections Poems: 1959-1975 (1985), Early Poems: 1947-1959 (1991), and Second Simplicity: New Poetry and Prose, 1991-2011 (2011); the collected prose works Together Still (2017) and just published Prose (2020); art criticism Alberto Giacometti: A Biography of His Work (1993) and The Lure and the Truth of Painting: Selected Essays on Art (1995). Major translators for Bonnefoy’s works are Antony Rudolf, Beverley Bie Brahic, Emily Grosholz, Galway Kinnell, Hoyt Rogers, John T. Naughton, Richard Pevear, and Richard Stamelmann, most of whom are not only keen readers and friends of Bonnefoy but also themselves distinguished scholars and poets. Ever since Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) published his experimental work Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil) in 1857, French poetry in the late nineteenth century had turned the course of Post-Romanticism, naturalism, and realism to modernism and symbolism. With Baudelaire’s audacious attempt “to achieve ‘the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm and rhyme,’” he tremendously broadened the spectrum of French 5.

(15) poetry: his prose poems “display an enormous range of tones, forms and structuring devices and they made available to his successors forms of experimentation which would decisively redirect theories and practices of the poetic” (Birkett 151). Paul Valéry (1871-1945) laid bare the importance of Baudelaire in the influential essay “The Place of Baudelaire” published in 1924, that certain pieces of Paul Verlaine (1844-1896), Stephane Mallarmé (1842-1898), or Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) were heavily foreshadowed by the formal and inspirational qualities of Baudelaire’s poem: “[w]hile Verlaine and Rimbaud have continued from Baudelaire in the way of feeling and sensuousness, Mallarmé extended his influence in the realm of perfection and poetic purity” (211). The preference for linguistic accuracy appreciated by the former generations was now replaced by highly obscure and suggestive linguistic indications which, with the collaboration of freer versification and the appreciation of the musical nature of the verse, awaken the sentiments of the contemporary audience along with their perception of external and internal complexities. Such metrical flexibility was a necessary change of the time, since it made it “more responsive to the expression of the individual poet’s sense of place in the changing realities of nineteenth-century experience” (Birkett 173). The flame lighted by Baudelaire had therefore passed on to other symbolists’ precursors such as Mallarmé, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Valéry, and eventually to Yves Bonnefoy. Bonnefoy in fact has written essays on his predecessors, such as Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Valéry; he also published his profound reflections on Rimbaud’s life and poems in 1961 with the work Arthur Rimbaud, which is regarded as one of Rimbaud’s authoritative readings. These precedent poets are each significant in shaping Bonnefoy’s poetic characteristics and tendencies, along with his recognition of poetry’s role, function, and purposes as listed in the essay “The Act and the Place of Poetry.” According to Bonnefoy with the exemplification of the poem “The Swan,” Baudelaire has actualized the act of poetry in his creations, realizing poetry’s purpose and its involvement with the world:. 6.

(16) For all around this wounded woman, and through the sympathy she arouses, the world—rather than being abolished as it once was, or proliferating senselessly as in picturesque poetry—suddenly opens onto the plight of all lost beings … It is the here and now, our limitation; which poetry must ceaselessly rediscover in a pure and violent crisis of the feelings and of the mind. For this act which we expect of poetry, and which we finally achieved by the poet of Les Fleurs du mal, is primarily an act of love. (107). Baudelaire possesses the ability to love, Bonnefoy claims. In his poetry, in his encounter with the exterior and his building of connections even in the transience, though Baudelaire speaks aloud the poverty of the world, “admit[ing] defeat … and was always acting and thinking on the very verge of exhaustion and anguish,” still he “seems to glimpse a gleam of light and to identify the perishable object, in spite of its profound precariousness, with something precarious,” with the performative act of poetry, of love (108). Rimbaud, following the lead of Baudelaire, inspired the future generation of “know[ing] that poetry must be a means and not an end” (109). The brief reflections given by Bonnefoy has already implied the focus of his poetic pursuit, which is to establish a profound, keen interconnection between the other and the self, between the real and the abstract, between poetry and speech.. II. Bonnefoy’s Poetics and Spatial Inclination. To see Bonnefoy as a faithful successor of symbolism would greatly simplify the situation; major social and political changes between the late nineteenth and twentieth century should also be counted in as decisive factors for Bonnefoy’s poetry characteristics. The most influential ones were the Surrealist movement occupying the inter-war years of France, and Existentialism. Serving as an emotional as well as a radical response to World 7.

(17) War I, Surrealist movement called for “unleashing desire and its forms of expression against the rationalist ideologies” which they thought would have “constrained or censured freedom;” surrealists believed such freedom “would enable a new fusion of the real and the imaginary, a surreality, to be created to transcend the system of oppositions and hierarchies which this discredited Western ideology sustained” (Birkett 243). Bonnefoy was shortly obsessed with the freedom and possibility Surrealism granted, which he once believed to be a realizable path for Rimbaud’s idea of true life. However, after gradual realization of the Surrealists’ fundamental contradiction of being “simultaneously hopeful and pessimistic, to act and to refuse,” Bonnefoy broke with the Surrealists in 1947 (Bonnefoy, “The Feeling of Transcendency” 136). According to Li Jianying, Surrealists had overemphasized the transcendental experience to the extent that they doubt the certainties of simple things. Transcendental qualities were, in Rimbaud’s poems, a means to rediscover the real; nonetheless, in Surrealists such feature overlapped and even formed the real (134). The difference between Surrealism and Rimbaud’s idea of how real life can be achieved was, Li Jianying claimed, the main factor in Bonnefoy’s break with Surrealists. After a temporary association with the movement, Bonnefoy launched his first poetry collection Douve (1953), following which he firmly established his poetics. What Rimbaud longed for was now shared by Bonnefoy, urging the poet to start his own quest for true life and even true place. Existentialism was another decisive influence that shaped Bonnefoy’s poetry characters. Bonnefoy studied mathematics and philosophy instead of literature at the University of Poitiers; in his early fifties, he had “worked at the Académie de Paris and Studied Philosophy with Bachelard, Jean Wahl, and Hyppolite (on Hegel)” (Naughton 7). This experience “explain[ed] … his predilection for a precise philosophical vocabulary” such as “Being-in-the-world,” “presence,” “plenitude,” and “immanence” (7) used in both essays and poems, which made him, as claimed by Aubyn, the “first existential poet” (118). In her work Introduction to French Poetry, under the catalog of “Poetry and Philosophy,” Shaw 8.

(18) made an analogy between Bonnefoy’s 1958 essay “The Act and Place of Poetry” and Heidegger’s negative theology, suggesting that “presence, or being, can only be seized in this world through the articulation of its absence, or withdrawal” (166). To understand being, “presence” became one of the central themes in Bonnefoy’s poetics. Yet, to understand the idea is itself a challenging task since Bonnefoy explicitly demonstrates a struggle to conclude the idea “between Heidegger’s (and Mallarmé’s) ‘nothingness’ and Plotinus’s notion of ‘the One,’” according to Naughton:. It is clear that Bonnefoy is both profoundly aware of the principle of destruction of being, of emptiness and meaningless, of the void, and, at the same time, sensitive to an ineffable and luminous, a fracturable unity. (7). The realization of nothingness and the One, along with Bonnefoy’s purposeful detour between the two, is responsible for a series of dynamic rivalry that predominates over his poetry. As Joseph Frank foreworded in The Act and the Place of Poetry (1989), Bonnefoy’s poems “explores … all the harrowing uncertainties of the human condition in its oscillation between hope and despair” (viii). Such ambivalence also penetrates the poet’s dealing with spatial themes, himself being simultaneously driven to search for other places or cling to the here and now. Naughton had noticed the wrestling between the two conditions in Bonnefoy’s poems, along with the poet’s obsession with elsewhere, or the search for the possible salvation poetry oriented:. And repeatedly this demon’s lure will be in the direction Bonnefoy calls excarnation—that call away from the situation at hand, the dream of another, better world, the refusal of time and death, enclosure in formal systems. Salvation will 9.

(19) depend on the opposing principle of incarnation: the discovery and celebration—in spite of limitation and death—of the sacred in the hic-et-nunc. (11). The words surely have theological denotations, yet they do not point toward the search of God; rather, Bonnefoy demonstrates his determination to find the divine in this world, this earth, as the poet “once wrote that ‘the really modern act … is to want to establish a ‘divine’ life without God”’ (10). Naughton later elaborates:. [Bonnefoy’s] deepest desire is to join the real, to find the simple order of life, and to convert the nostalgia for a better world or a transcendent deity into a celebration of earthly, mortal presences: “I would like to bring together,” he declared more than twenty years ago, “I would like almost to identify, poetry and hope.” (10). Poetry, therefore, becomes the poet’s very device in search of such the “divine life:” it becomes a means for the poet to place the two desires, and a particular gesture to reunite the opposition; “it is toward a reconciliation, an ‘alliance’ of l'ici et l'ailleurs—the ‘here’ and the ‘there’—that Bonnefoy will strive” (Naughton 29). Bonnefoy’s early work, the highly autobiographical L'Arrière-pays (1972) describes exactly the ambivalence when facing the two yearnings of excarnation and incarnation, and the painful process in reconciling the two. Much similar to his predecessor Rimbaud, Bonnefoy’s poetry demonstrates a strong yearning for true life and true place. The poet purposely invested a great number of “elemental words” such as water, wind, snow, fire, stone, tree, etc., to show his “long and patient contemplation of the concrete real, of the earth;” true life for Bonnefoy is to affirm the fact that “[t]he earth is our reality” (Naughton 3). What is meant by true place, to be precise, is a realization of true life through the manifestation of poetry: poetry seeks to reflect upon the essence of life, enabling people to contemplate their intimate relationship with life itself. 10.

(20) Poetry then visualizes and fulfills the fundamental eagerness of the poet’s longing for a real place and life; it is itself a structure, a form of true place in which the reality of earth can be fulfilled. As early as in his first poetry collection Du mouvement et de l'immobilité de Douve (On the Motion and Immobility of Douve, 1953), Bonnefoy had managed to exemplify the real through “the dialectical paradigm of being,” of life and death, absence and presence (Stamelman 46). This attempt becomes more or less a fundamental concern that penetrates Bonefoy’s later works, as seen in Hier régnant desert (Yesterday’s Empty Kingdom, 1958), Pierre écrite (Written Stone, 1958), and Dans le leurre du seuil (The Lure of the Threshold, 1975). What Bonnefoy envisions of real life and place is a certain positioning of poetry in between the worlds, and the poet seems to be confident in accepting their various appearances. Walter Albert had made clear Bonnefoy’s poetic structure and its relation to the poet’s yearning for real life and place. What Bonnefoy tried to achieve with his first three poetry collections, Albert claimed, is “to build an edifice,” which is “not an independent structure, but a part of an evolving, cyclical concept … a place in which the poetic identity can endure” (590-91). To be precise, as this poetic structure continues to grow and expand in later writings of Bonnefoy, it becomes the visualization of the poet’s faith in poetry. Bonnefoy’s oeuvre is where the poet anchors his poetic being.. III. Aims and Objectives. The purpose of this thesis is to present the structuring process of Bonnefoy’s poetic space with the close readings of his four late works published between 1991 and 2011, aiming to build with such examination an evolving character of Bonnefoy’s poetics. The reason in so doing as well as my choice of Bonnefoy, despite my personal interest as previously stated, results mainly from the lack of related literature. Bonnefoy is 11.

(21) unquestionably recognized and greatly revered by Francophone readers; yet, shockingly enough, the poet is rarely valued in Taiwan. No related academic output regarding Bonnefoy is found; even till now only one translation of Bonnefoy is obtainable in Taiwan, translated by Taiwanese poet Kuei-Sian Li [李魁賢] with his selection of twenty poems published by Guei Guan company in 2002. Though seven of Bonnefoy’s poetry have been published in China, they are still unattractive to Taiwanese readers due to the employment of language which is the simplified Chinese. The most valuable resources to be found at the moment is the one translated by Li-Chuan Chen [陳力川] published by Oxford University Press in Hong Kong in 2014. The reasons for its usefulness are multifold: written in traditional Chinese, the context is much more acquainted to Taiwanese readers; it too provide a broader range of spectrum of Bonnefoy’s poetics with its collecting poems and prose from Pierre écrite (Written Stone, 1958) to L'Heure présente (The Present Hour, 2011). Another reason for the insufficiency of the study of Bonnefoy’s late poetics results greatly from the unobtainability of the translation: Bonnefoy’s late works had not been fully translated until the publishing of the anthology Second Simplicity: New Poetry and Prose, 1991-2011 translated by Hoyt Rogers and published by Yale University in 2011. Due to this reason, even though there had been abundant journal articles on Bonnefoy in western academia, they were limited to study Bonnefoy’s early works. On the other hand, even the book publication in English on the poet is comparatively low, and they too focus only the early work. The most fundamental and essential one, The Poetics of Yves Bonnefoy, is written by John Naughton published by The University of Chicago Press in 1984 in which the early four volumes (Douve, Hier régnant desert, Pierre écrite, and Dans le leurre du seuil) were explicitly examined with the abundant reference to Bonnefoy’s own remarks. The recent publications include Jennifer Reek’s A Poetics of Church: Reading and Writing Sacred Spaces of Poetic Dwelling (2017) and Emily McLaughlin’s Yves Bonnefoy and Jean-Luc Nancy: Ontological Performance (May, 2020), both examine Bonnefoy with the comparison 12.

(22) with other thinkers: the former puts Bonnefoy’s works in the lens of Cixous’ feminine writing (écriture féminine), the later probes into Bonnefoy’s late writings (Dans le leurre du seuil, Début et fin de la neige, and Les Planches courbes) with the philosophical discourse of JeanLuc Nancy. Though McLaughlin’s interpretation will surely be helpful for my analysis in Bonnefoy’s late works, by the time I was composing my thesis her work had not yet published. To conclude, by systematically examine Bonnefoy’s late writings and build in them an evolving feature of the poet’s poetic, I not only present the gradual structuring of poetic space but also set my research apart from theirs. Regarding the underestimation of Bonnefoy in Taiwan, the most urgent and significant purpose this thesis endeavors to achieve is to introduce Bonnefoy’s poems as well as poetics to Taiwanese audience, with the hopes that this thesis would arouse the reader’s interest to further advance the future research on Bonnefoy.. i.. Methodology and Hypothesis. Considering the poet’s poetic characteristics as previously mentioned, it is almost unavoidable for anyone who studies Bonnefoy to shy away from the theme of “presence” and its working in Bonnefoy’s works. My thesis too covers the topic of presence only through another trajectory: unlike many scholars who saw the poetic feature of Bonnefoy’s dialectical oscillation between oppositional pairs as a means to express presence, I see it as a certain movement that energizes the formation and reformation of Bonnefoy’s poetic space. With my illustration of how poetic space is established I too prove the existence of the poet’s presence. To delineate this poetic space, the foremost methodology this thesis inclines is the exceptionally close readings of Bonnefoy’s poems and prose, sometimes even through French, to better show how the poet gives the poetic details to the encountered placial and spatial experiences. Since these experiences of place and space are founded to the great 13.

(23) extent on the poet’s real, geographical crossings, Gaston Bachelard’s discourse on imagination, dynamism, and dialectics shown mostly in The Poetics of Space serves as a theoretical frame to this thesis to demonstrate the particular uplift of Bonnefoy’s experience of geographical place and space to that of imaginative and poetic. Though Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space is the most cited works to which this thesis clings, other early works of his are also cited to enrich his theoretical discourse. The reason for the need of Bachelard’s theory in interpreting Bonnefoy is multifold: apart from the importance of Bachelard’s dynamic discourse on imaginative openings to help rationalize the idea of poetic space, his poetic understanding as well as reading of the primitive house also bears high similarities to Bonnefoy’s ways of structuring his poetic space. To illustrate, the childhood house is seen by Bachelard in The Poetics of Space “as a primal space that acts as a first world or a first universe that then frames our understandings of all the spaces outside,” described by Cresswell (24). Bachelard chose the image of the childhood house to be the foundation of his poetic discourse due to its centrality as well as profundity. Such an image completes its fullness and perplexity: the house’s interior is composed of spatial partitions with different functions and implications, such as the stairs of positive and descending features and the attic or the cellar storing the menace of the house. With the multiple characteristics aggregated and merged into a single image, the house becomes the literary tool for Bachelard to exemplify the depth of human beings’ mind.. In Bachelard, the life of the mind is given form in the places and spaces in which human beings dwell and those places themselves shape and influence human memories, feelings and thoughts. In this way, the spaces of inner and outer—of mind and world—are transformed one into the other as inner space is externalised and outer space brought within. (Malpas, Place and Experience 5). 14.

(24) To describe the poetics of this house, Bachelard investigates different places such as corners, miniature, attic, drawers, wardrobes, shells, etc., to illustrate that the house is an accumulation of memories, affection, and imaginations; it is also the congregation of different, primitive values of human beings, and is indeed the oneiric house that revitalize our capacity for dreaming as well as imagining. True to what Malpas described as “inner space [made] externalised and outer space brought within,” the house indeed reflects the being’s imagining ability as well as the depth with its continuous exchange of inner and outer. This poetic imagining of the house, in Bachelard’s discourse, truly manifests being. My proposed structure of poetic space greatly finds its root in Bachelard’s imaginings of the house; the two are not exactly identical, though. I propose that this poetic space is a collective unity of different matters and places, or to borrow Martin Heidegger’s saying, a collective construction with distinctive buildings. The structure of poetic space is first shaped by the poet’s preferences for places and spaces, then motivated and energized by the poet’s particular employment of imagination. Bonnefoy’s poetic opening of places and spaces are similar to Bachelard’s, yet the poet takes a step further by including even the imaginings in negative contexts. The co-workings of imagination in both positive and negative context have given the greater spatial potential as well as the transformative ability to Bonnefoy’s poetic space, advancing even its formation, deformation, and even reformation. Through this process, the poetic space shapes its form, and by shaping its form it gradually becomes: it becomes the very manifestation of the poet’s imagining depth and being. Moving from subject to object, the imagining being to the imagined places and spaces, the poetic space is indeed an evolving structure which corresponds to the poet’s evolving attitude toward his poetics. Since the construction of this poetic space sprouts primarily on the poet’s own creative mind, with its manifestation of the poet’s being it too returns to itself meanwhile fulfilling “the idea of closure” which is “part of [Bonnefoy’s] quest for centrality, for the true place” (Naughton 35). Such an idea of closure and returning to itself accords with what 15.

(25) Bachelard termed as roundness, “being at once established in its roundness and developing in it” (Bachelard, PS 255).. ii.. Proposed Structure of Chapters. Apart from Introduction and Conclusion, this thesis is divided into three major chapters to show an evolving structuring of Bonnefoy’s poetic space. Each chapter has a distinctive theme to pursue, namely temptations, venture, and confidence: they reflect respectively Bonnefoy’s particular stance and changing attitude in his late years when exploring different places and spaces. English translations used in this thesis are Second Simplicity: New Poetry and Prose, 1991-2011 (2011), The Anchor’s Long Chain (2006), and The Present Hour (2013). Major translators are Hoyt Rogers and Beverley Bie Brahic. Chapter One examines Bonnefoy’s 1991 collection Beginning and End of the Snow, probing first into geographical experiences of place and space the poet encounters, then moving on with Bachelard’s lens of dynamic imagination and poetic image to further present their imaginative opening of poetic space. The space presented in this poetry collection is, I argue, a temptation for Bonnefoy: it not only explores the real landscape of and the walking experience in the snowy Williamstown but also, with the overall-prevailing snow image, blurs the boundary between internal and external world. Since the space presented in this volume possesses the ability to alter and extend, fanning out even to multiple plains of the geographical, historical, mental, psychological, and imaginary, it is essentially luring, abundant in its numerous possibilities to swell. At the current phase, I present how Bonnefoy captures its tempting character with the movement of snow and how the poet contours the poetic space. Chapter Two continues the idea of poetic space by looking into Bonnefoy’s 2001 poetry volume The Curved Planks. Following the previous discourse of Bachelard’s 16.

(26) imagination, this chapter particularly emphasizes the duality of the imagination’s working to stress the dynamism embedded even in a negative context. The chapter first focuses on the negative imaginings of the placeless space and the deserted house to present in them the possible poetic openings which is dynamic. I then turn to particular poetic images of stones and the boat to delineate the spatial growth and positiveness, which too imply the poet’s poetic stance and will in venturing into the places/spaces that seem inert or hostile. Even though the presented textual spaces are fundamentally pessimistic, the poet illustrates how one can still audaciously and fearlessly venture with his/her active imaginings. In Chapter One only the positive working of imagination is introduced, whereas in this volume it is the salient wrestling of oppositions such as positive and negative imaginings that solidifies and further fortifies the structure of poetic space with its intrinsic momentum. Chapter Three delves into two poetry collections The Anchor’s Long Chain (2008) and The Present Hour (2011) to demonstrate the poet’s confidence in poetry, and how the poet resides in his poetic creation. Since I see Bonnefoy’s poetic space as the manifestation of the poet’s being, I present in this chapter how the relationship between the inner and outer as well as the imagining subject and the imagined object reconcile, which lead collectively to the depth of the being. The first section demonstrates the reconciliation of oppositions to indicate from such convergence the depth of the imagining being. The convergence, however, does not suggest the annihilation of the differences but the dynamic correlations instead. Based on Bachelard’s discourse on dialectics as well as the exchange between outer and inner, I illustrate how the poet, despite his intrinsic turbulences to search outwardly, is still capable of keeping his confidence with relentless returning to his center. Such is the homecoming of Bonnefoy; with that returning he also ensures the roundness and completion of his poetic space. Indeed, this poetic space is the ultimate home for Bonnefoy which, with its embodiment of the poet’s evolving attitudes toward and faith in poetry, anchors his soul.. 17.

(27) Chapter One: Temptation Beginning and End of the Snow, 1991. Originally published in 1991, Yves Bonnefoy’s Début et Fin de la Neige (Beginning and End of the Snow) was first partially selected and translated into English in the collective work of Bonnefoy Second Simplicity: New Poetry and Prose 1991-2011 by Hoyt Rogers in 2011, in which twelve poems were introduced. A year later, in 2012, a complete translation of this volume was brought to light by Emily Grosholz. Consisting of two parts, this volume introduces the phenomenon of snow with all its imaginative correlations and philosophical inspiration by series of snow poems, while the other section consists of a longer prose poem “Where the Arrow Falls” that narrates an allegorical event of a person losing his direction in life and also the connection to words. Bonnefoy was inspired extensively during his winter walks in a forest near Williamstown, Massachusetts, where at the time he was invited as a visiting professor. Being both physically and mentally engaged with the external world, Bonnefoy was bedazzled by the ample performances that snow achieves, along with its imaginative and transformative potentiality. The particular phenomenon of snow’s various movements of falling, shifting, and scattering were employed as disparate co-relations, ranging from “the shifting, inchoate motions inherent in the movement of imagination and dream,” to “the human impulse to internalize the moment in a breathless swirl of words that then necessarily dissolve” (Signorelli-Pappas 70). In this volume, with the overall immersion of snow’s physical performance and imaginative associations, Bonnefoy proposes how space is an expanding and a tempting object, penetrating even to multiple plains of the concrete and the abstract, the real and the imaginary, and the external and the internal; with such an extensional quality, Bonnefoy contours a poetic space that comes to full closure in later volumes: the structure with potential kinetic quality, and collective unity of different matters, sensations, and spatial features. To pursue the idea of how space expands and is given poetic 18.

(28) qualities, the investigation of this volume is divided into two major parts, namely, the experiencing of place and space, and the imaginative opening of poetics of space by snow’s various performances.. 1.1 Experiencing Place and Space. The sense of space is perceived through the comparison with the place, the two “require each other for definition” (Tuan 6). In such saying, if space is experienced to be free, immense, and undifferentiated, then place brings about feeling of attachment, fixation, and belongingness. Place, according to Tuan, “is a concretion of value;” whereas space “is given by the ability to move” (12). Movement, in this context, brings about the transition from place to space. The interchangeability between place and space is illustrated by Tuan with the shape of a triangle and Warner Brown’s theorizing space through the walking of a maze. The triangle, according to Tuan, is “at first ‘space,’ a blurred image. Recognizing the triangle requires the prior identification of corners—that is, places” (17). The corner functions crucially: it is a concrete, identifiable object, upon which the concept of space is designated. A maze, on the other hand, suggests a correlational connection between place and space. The entrance stands as a centrality, beyond which is space. Tuan explains: “[t]he integration of space is an incremental process during which the appropriate movements for the entrance and the exit, and for the intermediate localities, continue to expand until they are contiguous” (72). As a person ventures forth in the maze and gradually recognizes the landmarks, the particular experience is bestowed on these encountered localities: “[w]hat begins as undifferentiated space ends as a single object-situation or place” (72). In fact, Tuan’s illustration of place and space not only applies to the discipline of human geography but suits the most general understanding. Based on Oxford English Dictionary’s illustration, space denotes either time of duration or area of extension; in 19.

(29) whatever circumstance, it is explained as the distance in between two definitive points, events, or objects. Place, on the other hand, is used in a more specific, particular, or definitive context. Tuan also gives his demonstration that time has a particular function in man’s understanding of place and space, which can be taken as the further illustration of OED’s statement that space has temporal elements. Tuan claims, for instance, that in the flow or motion of time, “place is pause,” and space as continuity (198). To be more precise, since place is understood as a center of values to which one is attracted, place is “time made visible, or … memorial to times past” (179). The following sub-sections sequentially examine the sense structuring of place, and the interchangeability of place and space in Bonnefoy’s works to better understand how the experience of the external world is placialized or spatialized, and how the poet persistently crossing the boundary of placial and spatial experiences through the employment of imagination as well as literary techniques.. 1.1.1. Sense Structuring. As previously mentioned, the place is related to the familiarization and the concretization of value; contrary to space which is seen “as an open arena of action and movement,” place “is about stopping and resting and becoming involved” (Cresswell 20). To be involved with the external world, or to concretize the fleeting experience, the working of sensory organs is fundamental. “The senses are geographical,” Rodaway claims, “they contribute to orientation in space, an awareness of spatial relationships and an appreciation of the specific qualities of different places;” the effect created by senses are also timeless, “both currently experienced and removed in time” (37). Indeed, senses lead to the establishment of geographical understanding, and very often the spatializing of our experience is multisensual, involving a cooperative performance of different senses in hierarchical sequence. However, “[a] certain sense may appear to play a dominant role in characterising a specific 20.

(30) experience and other senses may appear to be subservient” (Rodaway 36). In Bonnefoy’s case, it is vision that principally spatializes the geographical experience. Bonnefoy has no difficulty describing the bedazzled phenomenon of snow’s movement with his self-sufficient vocabularies. These descriptive, visual words are divided into three categories based on their referential, spatial context. The most basic one points simply to the formation of snow, delineating the process of bits of dirt being carried off by the wind, colliding and binding each other when the air temperature reaches proper demand and falling eventually onto the ground due to the weight. Phrases such as “Snowing / Unravels from the sky” (SS 5), “this / Flake that alights on my hand” (SS 9), and “Snow / You’ve stopped giving, / Stopped arriving” (SS 21) are used by the poet to describe this straightforward, vertical movement. Another subdivision deals with the potential performance of snow driven by outer forces, presumably wind, resulting in the mischievous route of seemingly “lost: it wanders off, / Spins around, and then comes back” (SS 23), or “flakes that swarm and weave / Until they bind” (SS 29). Snow in such a performance widens its potential: it not only is vertical-oriented but self-rotates, creating in itself an even larger spatial capacity which also sinuates snow’s agency. The third category displays an overall covering of snow with its prevailing whiteness, “[s]nowflakes whirl, blurring the line / Between the outside and the inside” (SS 33), or through more aggressive and intrusive indication, “the snow had triumphed there” (SS 27). Since to see is to understand, seeing “is a selective and creative process in which environmental stimuli are organized into flowing structures that provide signs meaningful to the purposive organism” (Tuan 10). Bonnefoy’s various descriptions of snow are indeed an intentional performance, aiming to further delineate snow’s metaphorical potential in opening up multiple spaces, particularly the ones that are identified as poetics in Bachelard’s discourse. Such poetic opening of poetic space(s) will be thoroughly discussed in section two.. 21.

(31) 1.1.2 The Interchangeability of Place and Space. With the visual structuring of place, this section continues to explore how the overall placial and special experience is established with the reading of Bonnefoy’s snow poems, and how the two experiences constantly replace each other in a single work. In “First Snowfall,” for instance, the narrator’s interaction with the external, observed object is revealed in a lucid and tranquil environment.. First snowfall, early this morning. Ochre and green Take refuge under the trees.. The second batch, toward noon. No color’s left But the needles shed by pines, Falling even thicker than the snow.. Then, toward evening, Light’s scale comes to rest. Shadows and dreams weigh the same.. With a toe, a puff of wind Writes a word outside the world. (SS 3). Consisting of four stanzas, the poem is fairly persistent with its descriptive emphasis on the landscape’s changing appearances through different periods till the last two lines—the action makes its appearance through the absence of its performer, toeing the snow to swirl. The first three stanzas cover varied effects made by a snowfall of different times, early this morning, 22.

(32) toward noon, and toward evening. The landscape beneath which the snow descend should be identical, yet Bonnefoy visions the variation in such a monotone. During the first snowfall, snow does not cover every life form, and it particularly spares the color of “ochre and green” to discover (3). Then arrives “[t]he second batch” which falls even harder, concealing all and leaving “[n]o color’s left / But the needles shed by pines / Falling even thicker than the snow” (3). The sense of place is established through the assemblage of objects that occupy or accumulate and is further experienced through the optic organ. The third snowfall arrives when the night descends, yet no clue of its appearance is displayed, only the same-weighed “shadows and dreams” (3) are found. Since in darkness man’s “visual geography is far more impoverished” (Rodaway 117), the referential points are lost, and the familiar becomes strange, turning the former recognizable place into an undifferentiated space over which darkness prevailed. With the particular mentioning of a dream, a form of mental activities, Bonnefoy intentionally brings in human interference to the picturesque landscape, meanwhile raising the tension between the activity of man and nature as seen in the final stanza (“With a toe, a puff of wind / Writes a word outside the world”). The immobile snow along with the serene landscape is intruded by the subjective, impulsive action, leading to the imaginary space to open up. The transitional process from place to space is also referred to in “A bit of Water” by defamiliarizing snow.. I long to grant eternity To this flake That alights on my hand, By making my life, my warmth, My past, my present days Into a moment: the boundless 23.

(33) Moment of now.. But already it’s no more Than a bit of water, lost in the fog Of bodies moving through snow. (SS 9). The first stanza depicts a sense of place by the fixation of accumulative sensations and values. This fixation starts with a fairly concrete context, of the I-narrator sees the flake alighting on his hand as a form of eternity, which is consisted of “the boundless moment of now” (9). The time denotation in understanding place and space is mentioned beforehand with Tuan’s illustration. Since the I-narrator yearns for condensation of his past to be manifested into this particular moment of the snowflake that alights, the sequence of time is made spatialized through this snowflake, which creates in itself a sense of place. Such a placial structuring is also visible in the poetic form: since in the seven-line stanza only a single, independent sentence is introduced, it is, formally, a rendition of concretion. Yet again, with the physical change of water being brought to light in the second stanza, the once concretized place is reduced to an undifferentiated space: this particular flake is “no more / Than a bit of water,” and is “lost” (9). The value bestowed on this unique experience of alighting is defamiliarized, manifested in the flake’s diminishing process of turning into water and in its loss of placial particularity with the deprivation of the deixis this. Clearly enough, the congregation and dispersion of place and space are seen throughout by the sharp contrast (with “eternity” and “the boundless moment” contrast with “no more than”) and the physical change of snow (from “flake” to “water”). “Just Before Dawn …” illustrates the similar, transitional correlation between place and space. Importantly, space in this poem is greatly emphasized by its imaginary potentiality and is even viewed as an entity that invites and includes. 24.

(34) Just before dawn I look through the window: the snow Must have stopped. A swath of blue, Gleaming in front of the trees, Laps at the walls of night.. I go outside, Picking my way down the wooden steps, Caked high with the new-fallen snow. My ankles are ringed by the piercing chill; It seems to clarify the mind, Which starts to hear the silence of things.. I wonder if the chipmunk, Our simple neighbor, is still asleep— Or has he already left The tangled woodpile by the sill To rove through the crackling cold? I notice tiny tracks before the door. (SS 19). The sense of place is structured manly on the sensory organ and the corporeal engagement of the I-narrator with the external world. Four particular phrases (“I look through,” “I go outside,” “I wonder,” “I notice”) stand out as the I-narrator’s subjective, voluntary gesture which leads further to the shaping of an overall placial and spatial experience. First, a distinction of interior and outer is brought to light with the I-narrator’s outward gaze (“Je 25.

(35) regarde”), upon which a spatial experience also starts to frame. Since “[s]eeing has the effect of putting a distance between self and object,” the distance created in between marks exactly how the sense of space takes its shape (Tuan 146). Following this visual spatializing, the Inarrator sets out (“Je sors”) to actively engage with the surroundings; with that participation, the undifferentiated space has become place since it is now made thoroughly familiar to the narrator (Tuan 73). The next subjective gesture, “I wonder,” however, demonstrates the oscillation between placial and spatial experience, and it starts with a rather concrete reference: “the chipmunk, / Our simple neighbor” (19). Although the creature’s possible behaviors is merely speculation, they are still concretized providing sufficient visual (“tangled woodpile,” “rove through”) and tactile-and-auditory-combined (“crackling cold”) details. These aspects of concretization have constituted the placial character. Yet, they might be given spatial quality as well since the chipmunk’s exact performance remains unknown and is only the speculation of the narrator (“is still asleep— / Or has he already left …?”). Such uncertainty is the feature of space: it “lies open … suggests the future and invites action” (Tuan 54). After the placial-spatial co-constitution, the line ends with the concrete place again with the claim “I notice” (“Je vois”). The simultaneous placial / spatial structuring of the final stanza is also formally displayed: it first begins with the interrogative sentence which consisted of five enjambed lines, then ends abruptly with a single declarative and end-stopped line (“I notice tiny tracks before the door”). Even in such a closed statement, however, the unexpected “tracks” are still found to render the closure provocative. Importantly, this poem also brings about Bonnefoy’s humanistic listen and care that will continue appearing in his later works. It is obvious that in the first and the second stanza, only the performance of the speaker is noticed; however, with the coldness that “seems to clarify the mind,” the speaker starts to hear, and the chipmunk appears (19). The affirmation made in the second stanza (“to hear the silence of things”) is fundamentally important: it not only welcomes and invites the exchange of the self and the otherness, but also celebrates the 26.

(36) intertwining of different life forms and relationships. Immediately followed is the interaction made between the two species, man and the chipmunk; the tracks that lead to multiple places (if being trodden, experienced, and familiarized) and spaces (if being unrecognized and untouched) are also brought to light because of such an encounter. In another word, it might be said that owing to the speaker’s care for the surrounding natures, the harmonious space that includes and welcomes all the species appears.. 1.2 Imaginative Opening of Poetics of Space. In this section I continue discussing place and space by focusing on their poetic qualities through the theoretical lens of Gaston Bachelard, emphasizing mostly on the imagination and its intrinsic mobility to further bring out how Bonnefoy imaginatively transforms and opens up his poetics of space. The transformation from the geographical experienced place and space to that of poetic requires an individual’s creative, associative power and the most intimate sensibility. What poetics suggest, according to Kearney, is. a two-way process: we are made by material images that we remake in our turn. We are inhabited by deep imaginings—visual and verbal, auditory and tactile—that we reinhabit in our own unique way. Poetics is about hearing and feeling as well as crafting and sharping. It is the double play of re-creation. (PS xix). This approach to poetics along with its re-creating aspect has brought in multiple topics of Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space this thesis explores, such as the working of poetic image and its newness and novelty, the associative reading of these images, and a particular dynamism brought by such an interaction that refreshes our understanding of the familiar. Throughout the process, the imagination plays a decisive role due to its tendency to invite or 27.

(37) open up: it enables the transmutation from the geographical experience of place and space to the imaginary experience of space, one that is creatively and subjectively constructed. This particular shift is essential in analyzing Bonnefoy’s poetics since the poet’s employment of poetic images very often represents his particular stance on poetry, which too reveals his subjective depth of being an imaginative, active subject who constructs his home-like structure to secure his poetic being as we shall discuss in Chapter Three. The purpose of the present stage is to generally delineate the transformation from the geographical to the imaginative by probing into Bachelard’s discourse on imagination and mobility, the imaginary opening of snow’s metaphors, and the tentative structuring of poetic space with snow’s overall immersion.. 1.2.1 Bachelard’s Imagination and Mobility. Bachelard’s passion for the dynamism of imagination had inaugurated since his early studies on elemental analysis; particularly in Water and Dream (L'eau et les rêves, 1942) and Air and Dream (L'air et les songes, 1943), Bachelard illustrated clearly the working of imagination as well as its intrinsic, kinetic quality which was later developed in The Poetics of Space (La poétique de l'espace, 1958). Imagination for Bachelard is “to realize the unrealized potential of the world,” the performance of opening up (PS xx). In Water and Dream, the imagination is said to orient toward two directions: the external and the internal. It either gains its “impetus from novelty … tak[ing] pleasure in the picturesque, the varied, and the unexpected,” or it “plumbs the depth of being … seek[ing] to find there both the primitive and the eternal” (1). Bachelard then mentioned two ideas of imagination: the formal and the material. The formal imagination deals with the formal structuring of the image, including their various patterns and concepts, while the material imagination, also the one valued by Bachelard, probes into images “that stem directly from matter” to discover their 28.

(38) projective quality working on the subject, cultivating in the recipients “an open imagination” with the working of two values: deepening and elevating (1-2). To illustrate, deepening suggests an inward exploration of the possible essence, or a permanent prototype of an image, meanwhile elevating is a gesture of transcendence, of “forming images which go beyond reality, which sing reality” (16). Apart from clinging to Plato’s idea of seeing imagination as “a mimetic act of mirroring, representing, copying,” or to Kant and other romanticists’ idea as “a productive force;” Bachelard, however, sees the reciprocity between two axes: “imagination was at once receptive and creative—an acoustic of listening and an art of participation. The two functions, passive and active, were inseparable” (Kearney, PS xx). The receptive ability is crucial in bringing about the spatial aspect embedded in the imagination: it not only builds a mutual relationship between the observing subject and the perceived object but also denotes “a psychic ‘elsewhere’ and a place of human habitation” (Thiboutot and Martinez 10). Such a primitive and intimate experience of the dwelling experience of humankind is what Bachelard focused on in The Poetics of Space; it is also the focalization of the present research which will be further illustrated in Chapter Three. As mentioned earlier, imagination is intrinsically built with the dynamism to open up. “[B]y virtue of its freshness and its own peculiar activity, [the imagination] can make what is familiar into what is strange,” Bachelard claims, “[w]ith a single poetic detail, the imagination confronts us with a new world” (PS 152-53). To be more precise and consistent with Bachelard’s theoretical context, what sprouts the imagination’s working is “a single poetic detail,” a poetic image. Not all of the images in the poetry is taken as “poetic,” however; it requires the specific functioning of the image on the being to literally poeticize the image. Bachelard had long noticed the differences between common images and the ones that affect in Air and Dream. The regular or common images are “stereotypes that have already become well defined … a conventional touch that … have lost their imaginative power;” whereas the literary images (Bachelard would use the term poetic image later in The 29.

(39) Poetics of Space) “add hope to a feeling, a special vigor to our decision to be a person, even have a tonic effect on our physique” (2). The idea was sharpened in The Poetics of Space, in which Bachelard illustrates that “[t]he poetic image is a sudden salience on the surface of the psyche,” which points at the most intimate vibrations of our interior (PS 1). The poetic image, intrinsically related to the imagination, is dynamic; it not only structures the recipients’ ways of observing the external world but further encourages the imagining subject to perceive his/her own depth. For Bachelard, poetic images “are not just vision, but the cosmos itself as it expands and amplifies from the minute to the magnified” (Kearney, PS xxv). Thanks to the partial expansion and way of establishing relationships with the external, a “concordance of world immensity with intimate depth of being” is founded (PS 207). With its novelty, poetic images continue reshaping the former experience by speaking in us through our persistent encounters with the world. Snow’s imaginative performances and its copious opening of poetic space are presented as follows.. 1.2.2 Snow Image and Its Poetics. To begin, the associative quality of snow image is immediately seen in the short poem “It’s like …” with both its title and the content:. It’s like a phrase with lots of mute e’s. You feel you only owe them Shadows of metaphors.. When the snow falls thicker, It’s like Hands pushing other hands away 30.

(40) But playing with the fingers they refuse. (SS 15). Although the poem begins with a false subject (“It’s like”) and an indefinable description, the reference to which the description denotes is implied in the following line (“When the snow falls thicker”). The poem indeed contains two layers of simile, each helps to better spatialize the performance of snow. The first layer is explicitly demonstrated in the second and third stanza, in which the heavy snow is visualized as circuitous and mischievous. The second layer refers to the simile made at the beginning of the poem, of how snow resembles “a phrase with lots of mute e’s” (15); in such descriptive sentence, a sensory mechanism is being raised to contribute to a meaning-making process, and it too directs the reader’s attention to the metaphorical opening of snow’s performance. The possible way for comprehending or rationalizing the mute sound, a potentially perceived object, is through association, and, as Bachelard puts it, through the “consideration of the onset of the image in an individual consciousness” (PS 4). Since only the “shadow of metaphors” is needed, the narrator brings in the importance of accepting the image’s variational quality, instead of reducing their diversity by conceptualization. A mute object is therefore heard and sensed if the images are in a state of growth. Such is a cognitive process illustrated by Bonnefoy with the exemplification of metaphors. It is worthy of consideration that even in a seemingly negative context (“mute e’s,” “shadow of metaphors,” “hands pushing other hands away,” and “playing with the fingers they refuse;” emphasis added), a spatial positiveness is gained: spaces of different adumbrations are ultimately “playing” together, indicating a co-shared bound and values, even though their denotations have not yet actualized. The noticeable metaphor in this volume is fundamentally the snow-word analogy as seen from the last stanza of the previously examined poem “First Snowfall…;” this analogy not only displays co-shared qualities of the two matters but also presupposes certain 31.

(41) structuring of both the actual, linguistic space and the imaginative, poetic space. Such a direct encounter is narrated in “Summer Again.”. I walk on, through the snow. I’ve closed My eyes, but the light knows how to breach My porous lids. And I perceive That in my words it’s still the snow That eddies, thickens, shears apart.. Snow, Letter we find again and unfold: The ink has paled, and the bleached-out marks Betray an awkwardness of mind That makes their lucid shadows just a muddle.. We try to read, but we can’t grasp who this is In our memory who’s taking such an interest In ourselves, except it’s still summer; and we see The leaves behind the snowflakes, where the heat Still rises from the absent ground like mist. (SS 13). Countless messages are given in this relatively short poem, delineating the speaker’s deepening awareness of the word’s unachievability and the self-world relationship. The first and second stanzas depict how the sensual experience of snow overlaps the production of words, juxtaposing the erratic course of snow and the arbitrary or chaotic qualities of words to indicate the betrayal of mind and “lucid shadows just a muddle” (SS 13). Ultimately, the 32.