Four Ways To Meddle With Subjectivity: French Lyric Poetry Since Baudelaire

ROSS CHAMBERS
Flaubert to his friend Ernest Feydeau. It is October 1858, he is referring to his work-in-progress on a novel that he is still calling Carthage:
Depuis que la littrature existe, on na pas entrepris quelque chose daussi insens. Cest une uvre hrisse de difcults. Donner aux gens un langage dans lequel ils nont pas pens. Nous valons plus par nos aspirations que par nos uvres.1

Having invented a modernist aesthetic of the clich in Madame Bovary, he is now dealing with the difculties of a complementary project, the invention of a modernist, exoticizing aesthetic that rewrites ancient Carthaginian thoughts in a modern language, French. I see that; but Im still surprised by Flauberts belief in the novelty of endowing people with a language in which they havent thought. Isnt that quite a good denition of ction? More generally, of everything that comes under the notion of poiesis? Its as if, for Flaubert, something that you and I might think was as old as the hills has suddenly come to seem strange and difcult, even insens. If so, perhaps we may assume that this difference between him and us has to do with a sense of modernity. This modernity, to Flaubert, seems strange, difcult and challenging because he is discovering something that has never previously been noticed, viz. that language can be used in a way that differs from the language in which we think, or to put it in the terms that have become familiar to us since Mallarm, that writing (in the strong sense that is given to the word criture in French) has the power to make us (poiein), and to make us other than what we may be led to think we are by the conventional language in which we are accustomed to do that thinking. It gives people a language in which they havent thought. To me, some generations after Flaubert, his discovery is a discovery of what has always been the case but modernity is always, I suppose, just such an

1 Gustave Flaubert, Correspondance, uvres compltes, t. 2 (Paris: Club de lHonnte Homme, 1974), p. 642.

Four Ways to Meddle With Subjectivity 11 apprehension of something old and previously unnoticed (that is, denied) as new, striking and immensely hard to get ones head around. If endowing people with a language in which they havent thought is a denition of ction, its also a way to think about the lyric, and notably the modern lyric (a genre which, we can safely assume, will likewise prove to be something old suddenly become new). And for today its the French lyric since Baudelaire that is my (wildly over-ambitious) topic. In that respect, I feel a bit like Mallarm making his trip to Oxford and Cambridge in 1894 in order to make his breathless announcement: On a touch au vers.2 You feel that there may have been a certain sense of anticlimax in the audience, even as Mallarm claimed that Mme cas ne se vit encore.3 For you and I can perhaps agree that poets have been meddling with the prosodic conventions that make verse for centuries, maybe even that meddling with verse is as good a denition of poetry as endowing people with a language in which they havent previously thought denes the lyric. Like Mallarms, the news Im bringing is anticlimactic too, if only because it actually concerns a consequence of the fact that theyve been meddling with verse for quite a while now, which is that meddling with verse is the same thing as meddling with subjectivity. For meddledwith-verse is the site where a meddled-with-subjectivity becomes readable, a subject that I want to call ex-centred because its in a relation of difference more accurately, of excentricity not only with who we think we are, but also with the language in which we think of ourselves as centric. One of the guides through the thickets of modern and contemporary poetry whom I most trust is Elisabeth Cardonne-Arlyck. Elisabeth recently published a beautiful and brilliant essay in which she convincingly defends the idea that modern lyric poetry is autobiographical.4 She argues from the constraining character of genre: if we understand modern and contemporary poetry as lyrical, then we must read it as autobiographical since the personal character of lyric expression has been part of its denition for centuries. That is (Im extrapolating now), there is a lyric pact such that an equivalence is assumed between the identity of the poet, as the agent responsible for writing the poem, and that of the lyric subject that is produced by the language of the poem its meddled-with verse by Mallarman denition as the I who speaks in the poem. What Im going to attempt to argue is not the opposite but the complement of Elisabeths position, which is, of course, that writing subject and written subject are not equivalent, but different, in that where one may think up the poem and set it down on paper, the other, as the subject
Stphane Mallarm, La musique et les lettres, in Henri Mondor and G.-Jean Aubry (eds), uvres compltes (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothque de la Pliade, 1945), p. 643. 3 Mallarm, p. 643. 4 Elisabeth Cardonne-Arlyck, Tenir sa langue: autobio vs. nolyrisme, Revue des Sciences Humaines, 263 (juillet-septembre 2001), 234252. Transl. as Mind Your Tongue: Autobiography and New French Lyric Poetry, New Literary History, 33, 3 (Summer 2002), 581601.
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12 Ross Chambers of the (meddled-with) verse the poet produces, is a meddled-with subject, whose subjectivity differs in kind from the centred subject we name as the poet and hence excentres that subject. In other words, its a bit like speaking a language in which one hasnt previously thought and my argument will be, therefore, that genres such as autobiography are not only constraining but also enabling, and that among the things they enable is a certain overcoming or going-beyond of the constraints that are thought to dene the genre or, to put it another way, that to make use of a genre is also to meddle with that genre. Modern lyric, then, is a contestation of the limits of the personal, centred subject; but the lyric is and always has been an ideal generic site for such a contestation, precisely because it has been understood for so long and continues to be appropriately understood as governed by the assumptions of autobiography. What makes an argument such as this possible is the difference between the way conventional language signies and the mode of semiosis that is characteristic of poetic speech, which however also, of course, uses language conventionally. In poetic speech, a number of features of language signify that are not generally held to signify in non-poetic speech: phonetic or phonemic redundancy, for example. But also signifying are the conventions of verse, such as metre, rhyme, enjambement, in short prosody. And nally, there are formal and rhetorical features specic to a given poetic text that can likewise be recognized as signicant. To argue that the lyric is autobiographical is to argue that it can be read according to the signifying conventions of autobiography, conventions that include the assumed equivalence of poetic author and textual subject. Clearly, we all can and do read poems in that way. But to read lyric verse as a function of poetic semiosis, which is not only possible but (I would argue) also necessary, is to apprehend an excentring, or an excentredness, of the autobiographical subject. Im going to try to make my argument through readings of a handful of short French poems that Ive chosen mainly because Ive recently found them productive poems to teach. More or less by accident, they fall into two groups: the rst group consists of two poems by poets whose personal (that is, social) identity is minoritarian: one is bisexual and/or queer, the other a woman. The other group is by two poets whom we can think of as being of the out-and-about persuasion poets of the street, of the city, of public transport by contrast with the stop-athomes (say, from Mallarm to Deguy or Bonnefoy) whom we think of as carpetslippered and domestic; tied to the desk, the easy chair, the soft glow of a lamp. Poetry on the run, composed in transit, as it were, by poets who are neurs and bits of vagabonds, identied with street scenes and public culture, versus poetry that is, well, just composed: thought out at home, with the character of une posie de la demeure, as Heidegger-oriented critics like to say. These last Ill not refer to at all, although and in a way because Mallarm, as the theorist as well as the poet of the disparition locutoire du pote, is probably the crucial case to consider in making any kind of argument about the lyric as autobiography. And, as it happens,

Four Ways to Meddle With Subjectivity 13 Ill not be discussing the archetypal gure of the other tradition either: the poet who claimed that Je est un autre, the demiurge of the out-and-about mode of lyric composition. A bit of a neur myself, I want to explore some slightly

less familiar texts, although my corpus does also include one anthology piece. And at the same time, I want to muddy my own argument a bit, or rather to suggest the larger argument Ive already hinted at, by choosing excentring lyrics among examples that simultaneously demonstrate a strongly autobiographical component. For who other than queer or women poets would one expect to meddle with the centred personal subject? And who more likely to excentre lyric subjectivity than poets unable to stay put or addicted to the street scene? In other words, I dont want to unmake Elisabeth Cardonnes argument, just to meddle with it a bit, by suggesting that another argument is inextricable from hers. * * * Lets begin with a poem by Verlaine, who in fact belongs to both of my categories, as a minoritarian poet who is also a poet of the out-and-about. This is a poem about which it may quite literally be said, as of Salammb, that
it is written in a language (modern French) as well as a langage the language of the queer in which none of its protagonists, including presumably the speaking subject, (who are all ancient Greeks) ever thought. In this, the poem is not unlike a good deal of Parnassian verse, which must therefore have had for its rst readers a strangeness and difculty similar to what Flaubert describes as unprecedented in the writing of Salammb:
Furieuse, les yeux caves et les seins roides, Sappho, que la langueur de son dsir irrite, Comme une louve court le long des grves froides, Elle songe Phaon, oublieuse du Rite, Et, voyant ce point ses larmes ddaignes, Arrache ses cheveux immenses par poignes; Puis elle voque, en des remords sans accalmies, Ces temps o rayonnait, pure, la jeune gloire De ses amours chants en vers que la mmoire De lme va redire aux vierges endormies : Et voil quelle abat ses paupires blmies

Paul Verlaine, Sappho, Paralllement, in Jacques Robichez (ed.), uvres potiques (Paris: Garnier, 1969), p. 442.
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14 Ross Chambers
Et saute dans la mer o lappelle la Moire, Tandis quau ciel clate, incendiant leau noire, La ple Sln qui venge les Amies.5

The subject to whom this poem introduces us is not Verlaine, then, but an eyewitness to events known to have taken place on the island of Lesbos many centuries ago, yet simultaneously familiar not only with the French language but also with the prosodic conventions of French verse, or at least some of them. For this speaker, whose gender we do not know, either tampers with those conventions or else, perhaps, blunders in applying them, in a way that suggests that such departures are natural to a speaker such as this one is. Thus, the poem appears to be a sonnet, except that its tercets are on top and its quatrains, for once, play the role of bottom. Also the rule that prescribes an alternation of so-called masculine and feminine rhymes seems to have been replaced here by a local rule that admits feminine rhymes exclusively. What all this might mean is suggested most pointedly at lines 8 and 9 which, were this an uninverted sonnet, would be the place of its volta or turn:
[]la jeune gloire De ses amours chants en vers []

For whatever reason, the poetic speaker who favours feminine rhyme ignores the rule of French grammar that makes amours in the plural a feminine noun (but masculine in the singular, of course); while a pun is suggested that makes singing of Sapphos love something like inverse singing, singing in verse that is a chant lenvers. Taking our cue from this rather broad hint, we may well be led by this pun to read the poem itself, which is an account of Sapphos loves (in the plural), as itself a case of inverse singing, the kind of singing that is appropriate to Sapphos inverted, or as we might rather say today, lesbian loves. Inverted love as that term was understood in the latter years of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth (Proust thinks like Verlaine in this respect), was the love of a mans soul that found itself in a womans body, or conversely that of a womans soul that found itself in the body of a man. The inverted sonnet has as its subject, then (in the sense of subject-matter) the inverted loves of Sappho while its subject (the subject it makes readable as its speaker) is a linguistic invert Greek thoughts in the French language whose gender and sexual identity is unclear, but whose sympathy certainly appears to lie with les Amies of the last line, and with what in line 4 (which in a right-side-up sonnet would be the last line of the rst quatrain) is referred to knowingly as le Rite. But Sapphos inverted loves are plural and masculine in another sense also, for the events of which the lyric subject is a witness actually concern the switch that has made Sappho, the lover of women, oublieuse du Rite, in that she has fallen madly in love with a young man, Phaon. Meanwhile, the order of events in the sonnet reverses the order of Sapphos switch, since we move from Sappho who

Four Ways to Meddle With Subjectivity 15 (in the tercets) songe Phaon, to Sappho (in the quatrains) who voque la jeune gloire/ de ses amours chants en vers, that is her lesbian loves, before nally leaping into la mer o lappelle la Moire even as the moon, inversely, rises like a pale sun over the sea, as Selene avenging les Amies. Sexual inversion, it seems, is not so much a stable desiring position as it implies the possibility of further inversions and reinversions, so that in the end the identity of Sappho, which is the subject (-matter) of the poem, comes to match the indeterminacy of the gender and linguistic-cultural identity of the poems (speaking) subject. For it is too simple to say that Sappho is torn between homosexual and heterosexual loves, although the poem shows her alternating between these two modes of desire. In order for her to love Phaon as she does, we must understand either that she has become somehow uninverted, and has become the-soul-of-a-woman-in-the-body-of-awoman, i.e. a straight woman (but nothing else in the sonnet suggests that inversion can uninvert), or else we must posit a further twist of inversion, an inversion of inversion, such that she has become the soul-of-a-homosexual-man-in-the-bodyof-a-woman, in which case she will have substituted a version of Greek love (i.e. pederasty) for the Lesbian love of les Amies and le Rite. But Greek love, in the body of a woman, is apparently both equivalent to and indistinguishable from what we would call heteronormativity, and the poem turns the tables on denitions of homosexuality as an inversion of heterosexuality by suggesting that maybe it is heterosexuality that is the inverse of homosexuality. I think we can say, then, that Verlaine has queered this particular sonnet by meddling with the sonnet forms already queer structural properties (about which there would be much more to say, by looking at the implications of its very eccentric rhyme-scheme, for example), and that he has done so, perhaps autobiographically and as a means of personal self-expression, but also as a writerly device for queering the concept of identity itself sexual and gender identity, but also linguistic or cultural identity and nally, I would add, genre identity (is this a sonnet or not a sonnet?). He has done so by making the lyric subject impossible to identify: it can only be recognized and reconnoitred as non-intrinsic, non-self-identical, a mode of subjectivity without a stable centre, such that it can readily morph into its other. And in that sense an outward-turned subjectivity, then, given to moving out and away from itself, as in the extrinsic movement described in the lines that, were this not only an inverted French sonnet but also an inverted English (or Elizabethan) sonnet, would form its concluding couplet:
Et voyant ce point ses larmes ddaignes, Arrache ses cheveux immenses par poignes.

In the absence of an intrinsic identity, inversion can as readily invert into uninversion, like Sappho falling in love with Phaon, as uninversion into inversion, in the way that, in love with Phaon, she regrets les Amies, since as weve just seen, uninversion is itself readable as a further inversion of inversion itself.

16 Ross Chambers So we might say that inversion subjects the subject the ipse, the autos of autobiography to an effect of entropy, entropys Greek etymon corresponding exactly to the Latin etymon of the word inversion. And one of the consequences of inversion as entropy is therefore an extension of the self to embrace its other as well as of the supposed other to embrace the self. The queer can embrace the unqueer because the unqueer is at the heart of the queer, like the lover of Phaon at the heart of Sappho; but similarly the queer is at the heart of the unqueer the straight which must extend in turn to embrace its own other, the queer. Anna de Noailles, I think, is the poet of extension in a similarly embracing sense, as Verlaine is the poet of inversion in its entropic sense.
Il fera longtemps clair ce soir, les jours allongent. La rumeur du jour vif se disperse et senfuit, Et les arbres, surpris de ne pas voir la nuit, Demeurent veills dans le soir blanc, et songent Les marronniers, sur lair plein dor et de lourdeur, Rpandent leurs parfums et semblent les tendre; On nose pas marcher ni remuer lair tendre De peur de dranger le sommeil des odeurs. De lointains roulements arrivent de la ville La poussire quun peu de brise soulevait, Quittant larbre mouvant et las quelle revt, Redescend doucement sur les chemins tranquilles; Nous avons tous les jours lhabitude de voir Cette route si simple et si souvent suivie, Et pourtant quelque chose est chang dans la vie; Nous naurons plus jamais notre me de ce soir6

But Noailles is more particularly concerned with a mutual extension of persons and of things, one that personalizes things while it correspondingly depersonalizes persons, so that in the poem of hers I now move to, the pronoun nous is expanded semantically before our eyes. At line 13, it has its conventional sense (referring to a collectivity of persons) as does on at line 7 and accordingly it is associated with habit, the road often trod. By line 16, nous and by extension notre me are described as changed, and the poem requires us to understand that notre me is now a soul simultaneously human and non-human, social and natural. Moreover, this last line itself is the site of a related semantic extension, since its prima facie meaning is something like: this evenings experience will have been unique and unrepeatable, whereas the thrust of the poem requires us to understand
6 Anna de Noailles, Le cur innombrable (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1901), pp. 6566. This poem has obvious thematic resemblances with the more famous La vie profonde (pp. 7374).

Four Ways to Meddle With Subjectivity 17 it as meaning that the change in the sense of us that has occurred this evening will be permanent, will have transformed our soul forever. So its as if the point of the poem is to make possible the doubly extended character of this nal line: expanded in respect of what nous means, and in respect of the temporal character of notre me de ce soir. Poetry, it seems, is being dened in this poem as a techn that extends language in the way that twilight extends the day, and in so doing forms an existential moment of extended experience that is both unique and permanently transformative. And Noailless achievement, I think, is exactly to have made a poem out of end-stopped lines that both proposes and enacts the idea of the transcendability of limits in an extension of self that in turn extends a moment of time indenitely, if not innitely. Such, most obviously, is the effect of the three lines that are end-stopped in terms of sense, but extended by points de suspension. More subtly, the rst hemistich of the poem has a natural (or conventional) stop at clair but is extended, both by the two syllables of ce soir (after which the comma requires the real csura to be placed), and by the whole of the second hemistich, les jours allongent, which is semantically redundant with the rst. Furthermore, this redundancy is underlined by the fact that the word jour has been avoided in the rst hemistich so that it can be employed without repetition in the second, at the price of a slight sense of linguistic oddity, an almost imperceptible extension of the conventional phrase Il fera longtemps jour, for which Il fera [] clair has been substituted. But clair, or rather longtemps clair is also the mot juste: it strikingly anticipates the illumination of the soul referred to in the poems nal line as a permanently transformative insight induced by a unique privileged moment, while the rst lines other slight extension of linguistic habit les jours allongent where les jours rallongent is more frequent similarly anticipates the fact that, from longtemps in line 1 to plus jamais in line 16, temporal expansion will be a central preoccupation of the poem alongside its concern with an extended subjectivity. But, following the impersonal grammar of Il fera [] clair, les jours allongent is important also, I think, because it highlights the capacity of the French language to express something like the sense of the Greek middle voice (neither active nor passive, neither animate nor inanimate, neither personal nor impersonal) through the employment of normally transitive verbs intransitively (e.g. le magasin ouvre 8 h. et ferme 6 h., or jattends que mes semis lvent, even je meurs, replacing the archaic je me meurs). One might say that the mood of this poem is that of the middle voice applied to the autobiographical experience of a twilight (ce soir at the end of the rst hemistich, as the hemistichs extension, and at the end of the last line of the poem) so as to make that moment of temporal extension into an experience also of existential expansiveness, a generalized allongement for which Les chemins tranquilles and cette route si simple, conventional metaphors for the living of a life that become gures of extension, are the poems most obvious emblems. Twilight creeps as les jours allongent, and similarly there

18 Ross Chambers is a sort of mutual seepage of the human and the natural a seepage explored in some detail in the central part of the poem (lines 312) such that notre me de ce soir comes to embrace both. Notre me de ce soir is the soul of the evening itself, at the same

time as it is the soul we have this evening, because the soul we have is the soul that is shared universally, an innitely expansive, all-embracing soul that extends to merge with the world as twilight extends the day to night, so that we do not really possess it at all. If the poem captures an autobiographical moment its easy to imagine Mme de Noailles sipping coffee with friends or family in the garden after dinner it is the privileged character of the moment, as the text gives us to understand it, that makes the poem something other than an autobiographical text: the trace, in writing, of an extended self. * * * If Verlainean inversion and Noaillean expansion imply an entropy of the subject we are somewhere between on a touch au sujet and quelque chose a chang dans la vie these phenomena also imply, or at least pose as a kind of puzzle, that there can be an intersection through which the entropic meeting of self and other can take the form of an interaction that changes everything. But intersection, in the poetic imagination of modernity, is itself associated with the manifold encounters and engagements of city life, at the polar extreme from Noailless tranquil De lointains roulements arrivent de la ville, as if these distant rumblings had become thunderclaps and lightning strikes. For obviously Im thinking of Baudelaire now, and notably the Baudelaire of the prose poems and of the Tableaux Parisiens section of the Fleurs du Mal, as the poet for whom the city is a place of intersections
and hence of encounters. But Baudelaire also authorizes us to conceive of the poetic text of modernity as itself modelled on the city, as the site of an innity of verbal intersections, and hence of what Gilles Deleuze has taught us to call lines of ight. Taken to one of its extremes the logic of text as a site of unlimited intersections would lead to something like the poetics of the vacant lot better still the terrain vague that one nds in Jacques Rda, where its as if the lines of ight have ed so effectively as to leave nothing at their intersection other than a certain pathos of residuality. But that story Ill leave for another day: it would entail a side-trip through the Mallarman poetics of nothingness and absence the absence of the Master, as in the sonnet en yx, as much as the absence of mastery. For the trajectory Im following, through inversion, extension and intersection, leads in fact to a double outcome: not only to subjectivity as a quasi-void or terrain vague, but also to subjectivity as a plenitude the subject being lled, however, not with

Four Ways to Meddle With Subjectivity 19 itself but, as it were, with everything else, its own exteriority as the Noailles poem already strongly suggests. That second terminus, the one Ill move toward here, is more directly reached through the unmastering of the subject, rather than the subjects Mallarman absence an unmastering that is enacted, at the heart of a Baudelairean poetics of intersection, in a poem like une passante. And thus I come to a version of the poetics of intersection that is worked out via the gure of chiasmus, or crossing (from the Greek letter chi).
une passante La rue assourdissante autour de moi hurlait. Longue, mince, en grand deuil, douleur majestueuse, Une femme passa, dune main fastueuse Soulevant, balanant le feston et lourlet; Agile et noble, avec sa jambe de statue. Moi, je buvais, crisp comme un extravagant, Dans son il, ciel livide o germe louragan, La douceur qui fascine et le plaisir qui tue. Un clair puis la nuit! Fugitive beaut Dont le regard ma fait soudainement renatre, Ne te verrai-je plus que dans lternit? Ailleurs, bien loin dici! trop tard! jamais peut-tre! Car jignore o tu fuis, tu ne sais o je vais, toi que jeusse aime, toi qui le savais!7

I take this poem to be the locus classicus of a Baudelairean poetics of intersection. Baudelaire is clearly exploiting the potential of the sonnet form to produce a chiasmic structure, with its turn at line 9; that is, in the poem at the words, Un clair puis la nuit!, the moment when what English calls eye contact and French an change de regards occurs. In this moment theres a ash of reciprocal understanding between a woman advancing towards the poems speaker then moving away, following her own trajectory and this male bystander, whom the moment of contact leaves electried and devastated, fulgur as by a coup de foudre (in the literal as well as the metaphorical sense of that expression). The quatrains are devoted to a description of the advancing woman an elegant widow in black who is also a walking statue: a gure of death and the attraction she exerts on the bystander. The tercets switch, however, to the latters thoughts and reections as the woman rapidly moves away, thoughts and reections that now include intimate knowledge of the womans own mind, as if the subjectivity represented in the poem

Charles Baudelaire, une passante, in Claude Pichois (ed.), uvres compltes, t. I (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothque de la Pliade, 1975), pp. 9293.
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20 Ross Chambers had become double, fused by the lightning ash at the volta there is a pun about electricity lurking here somewhere that has left the male bystander crisp comme un extravagant. He has been struck to the core, and at the same time extravagated, endowed with an expanded subjectivity. This structure has been foreshadowed by the chiasmic rst line, which stands in a relation of symbolic equivalence with the croisement that is the poems subject. Its rst two and last two syllables, la rue and hurlait, are like a slightly distorted mirror image of each other, so that a symmetry is also implied between the four syllables of assourdissante and the four syllables of autour de moi, describing the noise-lled street as an environment exerting a stressful and damaging effect on the subject (moi). But here there is no electric shock at the point of intersection, just the metrical pause at the end of the hemistich, so that it is as if the line has nothing at its centre but rather enacts the excentring of the subject by displacing the word moi itself (which the semantics of the phrase autour de moi situate at the centre) to the lines tenth syllable. If we read the noise in the street as a manifestation of entropy and hence, like the woman, a gure of death, we can say that the assourdissement of the subject is a muting of the autonomous subject through the excentring of that subject an excentring that amounts to a nantisation of the centralized subject but also to a continuation of subjectivity in a new, excentred and so noisier form. And we can see that at the turn of the sonnet, the central subject (Moi, je buvais) undergoes a similar nantisation, disappearing from the phrase Un clair puis la nuit (or else voided by those points de suspension?) only to re-emerge as a fusion of subjectivities in the tercets. What makes this poem most interesting, though, is that, as a text, it mimes the fused character of muted subjectivity in what Banville would have called the irregularities of its own form, which represent the noise in the channel of poetic communication corresponding to the noisiness of the street. On the page, we see what looks typographically like a classic (or uninverted) French sonnet, quatrains on top, tercets in their normal place below. But the rhyme scheme of the sestet produces the rst-tercet-plus-line-12 as an entity in its own right a quatrain and the last two lines, therefore, as a couplet. This is a relatively unusual disposition of the French sonnet. And if in the quatrains we attend to the phrastic structure of the lines rather than their metrical ordering as verse, we get three units of sense: a monostich, a quatrain, and a tercet, with a linkage of the monostich with the quatrain, and of the quatrain with the tercet by means of rhyme (hurlait/ourlet in the rst case; statue/ tue in the second). une passante is rewritable, then, as a much more modern looking poem, one that has had its verses meddled with, as follows:
une passante La rue assourdissante autour de moi hurlait. Longue, mince, en grand deuil, douleur majestueuse, Une femme passa, dune main fastueuse

Four Ways to Meddle With Subjectivity 21

Soulevant, balanant le feston et lourlet; Agile et noble, avec sa jambe de statue. Moi je buvais, crisp comme un extravagant, Dans son il, ciel livide o germe louragan, La douceur qui fascine et le plaisir qui tue. Un clair puis la nuit! Fugitive beaut Dont le regard ma fait soudainement renatre, Ne te verrai-je plus que dans lternit, Ailleurs, bien loin dici! trop tard! jamais peut-tre! Car jignore o tu fuis, tu ne sais o je vais, toi que jeusse aime, toi qui le savais.

There are thus two poems to be read in une passante, the one a classical sonnet, the other a more modern statement, each joined to the other (at the hip, as it were) by the same pivotal phrase: Un clair puis la nuit! If Baudelaire is meddling with verse, here, in clear anticipation of the developments to which Mallarm was to refer in 1894, he is doing so in a way that gives us to read the intersectional character of modern subjectivity. For can we say that the lyric subjects of these two conjoined poems are the same? They clearly differ; but they are disjoined in a way that inescapably conjoins them at the same time. As in the only chiasmus in this poem (in these poems) that approaches a classical disposition:
Car jignore o tu fuis, tu ne sais o je vais,

they are brought together by their mutual ignorance of each others lines of ight; their intersection is what divides and joins them. Such a poem, as an intersection of trajectories, is all middle. If it has tenants and aboutissants, neither it nor we can say what they are; as a poem, it is out and about in that its classical component has, so to speak, left home-base while the destination of its modern component is not in sight; its a historical in-between or, as perhaps Frank OHara might say, referring to a personage celebrated in gay folklore, its a lucky Pierre (lucky Pierre is the person in a three-way, more generally a daisy-chain, who both penetrates and is penetrated).8 Its poetry on the way, in transit; and its subjectivity, in consequence, is unanchored, excentred, shifting and homeless, like a passenger in the Metro who is neither at home nor at work, somewhere between dodo and boulot, but is borne along, emport, in a tunnel that must lead somewhere, or perhaps hesitates at a correspondance (an

8 On Frank OHaras personism and the lucky Pierre metaphor, see Terrell Scott Herring, Frank OHaras Open Closet, PMLA, 117, 3 (May 2002), 414427. I have found this essay full of valuable suggestions for approaching Jacques Jouets Metro poems. 9 Cited in Marc Aug, Un ethnologue dans le mtro (Paris: Hachette, 1986), p. 98.

22 Ross Chambers intersection) like the passante in the poem by Armand Camargue that Marc Aug takes pleasure in quoting:
Elle descend toujours Svres-Babylone, Et jadmire sa grce indolente et flonne Quand pensive un instant elle marque le pas A langle du couloir de la correspondance Avant de slancer de sa marche qui danse Vers des plaisirs pervers que je ne connais pas.9

With their clear reminiscence of Baudelaire, these lines nevertheless bring us, then, to the Metro poem, invented a decade ago by Jacques Jouet. The Metro poem has been hailed as a rarity: a new xed form in the era of free verse; that is, similarly to the sonnet or the villanelle a form of productive constraint like many other devices that have come out of the Oulipo. You write a Metro poem by taking the Metro; between the station where you got on and the next, you compose a line in your head, which you write down at the halt. The process is repeated until you reach your destination, so the last line of your poem will be noted down on the platform as you leave. A change of Metro lines at a correspondance will be marked by a stanza break; theres a particular convention for handling between-stations breakdowns, involving an alexandrine with a marked caesura. No premeditation is allowed and retouching later is prohibited; there is no requirement of thematic or prosodic coherence; neither the rst nor the last lines have any determinative privilege. Entirely composed in transit, the Metro poem is a middle that starts and stops but has neither an entre en matire nor the sense of an ending. (Of course, thematic coherence and the sense of a beginning and end can occur, as they do for example in Jouets programmatic poem Quest-ce quun pome de Mtro, but the perception of what is called unity is not what the genre of the Metro poem is denitionally about.) No particular subject-matter is prescribed for the Metro poem, but it does turn out, of course, that the Metro itself, as experienced by its passengers, is a recurrent motif. Aug has described the Metro system as a model of social life; he sees it as a criss-cross of possible itineraries along which individuals are emports, picking out pathways of their own that intersect with many others, each parcours being both predetermined by the system and individually chosen, or at least consented to. But in the logic of excentred subjectivity, the self-same model of multiple intersections and itineraries offers itself as a model of subjectivity itself, because the excentring of the subject opens that subject up to the ultimate inversion, whereby the world of externality social, material and natural becomes indistinguishable, as it were, from the subjectivity, which now includes its other to the point of consisting of nothing else. Subjectivity is extended (as in Noailles), becomes the site of innumerable intersections (of the kind explored in Baudelaire), takes inversion (as in Verlaine) to the extreme of its queer logic, and is subjected in

Four Ways to Meddle With Subjectivity 23 short to a kind of evacuation. However, in Jouets work at least, je never disappears into the ambient Metro network completely. The opening up of the excentred subject to exteriority remains a matter of interaction, and the poem that is the record of a certain parcours is also, simultaneously, the product of a personal intention: an intention, that is, of poiesis, that refers to an individually creative poet. Recurring station names, like Austerlitz and Glacire in the example Im about to turn to, mark out the specic parcours. The intention of poiesis is almost as frequently signalled, as in the opening line of the example: Je minstalle pour une strophe de dix vers, etc. Just as it is impossible, in the terms of my argument, for the lyric as autobiographical poem not to meddle (through poiesis) with subjectivity and thus to excentre the subject, so it turns out, in complementary fashion, that the Metro poems evacuation of the subject is replete with nods, such as these, to the poet as subject of the poem: both the subject of a history that the poem recounts (a parcours), and the subject responsible for the poems making (its poiesis). Here, then, is a fairly representative example of Jouets practice:
Je minstalle pour une strophe de dix vers, avec changement au bout en vue dune deuxime strophe d peu prs autant de vers, je nai pas le temps de compter avec prcision. Beaucoup de soldes sur les murs. Inventaire de ce qui est crit sur les parois : loi, conseils, avis publicitaires, noms de stations de ce qui est crit dans les mains des collgues : ticket bleu, livres, journaux (Passions de femmes) ou sur une valise : ORY, et FRAGILE, AIR CANADA. Les nouveaux salaires et les nouveaux voyages. 3617 Salair [sic] et Lima 4 850 F aller-retour de Paris. Le geste courbe de la ligne 5 pour sapprter franchir la Seine avant AUSTERLITZ. Les bureaux clairs, les appartements. Le despotisme mal teint de largent. Tout abus sera puni, mais o trouver assez dinnocents pour tous les postes de juges? Quel wagon choisir, la correspondance? Celui qui moffre la security peluche dun trs petit garon avec sac dos, toute neuve encore, propre et luisante, qui sent le magasin. Je ne suis jamais pass la station GLACIRE sans dire ma compagnie, si jen ai une, sinon moi-mme: Fait pas chaud, tout dun coup Les Amricains sinstallent, journal ma gauche;
10 Jacques Jouet, Pomes de mtro (Paris: P.O.L., 2000), p. 25. Reproduced with the kind permission of the publishers.

24 Ross Chambers
Ils ont oubli le Cameroun, journal ma droite; Qui est celle-l, livre ma droite. Tous les yeux des voyageurs sont certains darriver l o il est prvu quils aillent maigrir aprs les ftes.10

Je minstalle needs little commentary, I think, beyond what Ive said already. So let me just end I hope its obvious why Ill make no attempt to conclude with a few more specic remarks around the paradox it illustrates of an evacuation of subjectivity that does not go unsigned. (1) Notice that the culture of this poem is entirely popular; the cultural reference is exclusively to what Adorno used to call mass culture or the culture industry; and notice too that the poem designates its own genre as that of the inventory. On the face of it, its just a list, a taking of stock, in a world thats made haphazardly of loi, conseils, avis publicitaires, noms de stations or ticket bleu, livres, journaux [...] , where poetrys function is neither to judge nor to interpret, but just to notice and record, as it were mindlessly, to donner de la voix ce qui se promne, as another Jouet poem says.11 I think that at this point we may already be somewhere beyond the conception of poetry that Ive described as modernist meddling with verse, as a kind of critique of the autonomous or autobiographical subject, and have broken through into a new, uncritical, kind of poetic making. But still, (2) The stock-taking function nevertheless implies, in an almost taken-for-granted way, that there be a subject of the verb that poetry has become, the agent of the stock-taking, the maker of the lists. And that grammatical subject, standing for an authorial or poetic presence, also acquires a kind of personal consistency in the poem. So the inventory poem remains a kind of autobiography, the autobiography of a particular Metro-ride, undertaken on a particular day in a particular season by a person whose personality, although it may be banal, does become recognizable to the reader, as different, if not distinct, from the mass the mass of those he calls collgues. We can see for example that this personage is given to making idiotic little jokes and furthermore has a personal memory (Je ne passe jamais la station GLACIRE, etc.) together with a taste for clich-philosophizing along the lines of who will cast the rst stone? There is still someone here, then someone who has personal experience and a personality as well as someone who is capable of making people speak a language in which they didnt think, although it may be called donner de la voix ce qui se promne, and not-thinking has now taken on the very ironic, but still quite Flaubertian, meaning of cultural idiocy. (3) That said, who is it exactly that thinks (or speaks) the last line: maigrir aprs les ftes? It sounds like another newspaper headline, doesnt it? Or something

11

Jouet, p. 24.

Four Ways to Meddle With Subjectivity 25 glimpsed on the cover of someones fashion magazine? But it seems also to be taken on board by the poems je as part of an actual interpretive moment, a moment of reading: Tous les yeux des voyageurs sont certains darriver/ l o il est prvu quils aillent/ maigrir aprs les ftes. It isnt set off by quotation marks, like the immediately preceding quotations from newspapers and a book, that are read only in a mechanical sense and recorded verbatim. Like the lifes-a-voyage metaphor in which it is embedded, it appears to be assumed by an individual subject while being simultaneously so banal that any one of the newspaper and novel readers that he calls his colleagues (referring to them, of course, in the third person) might think it, subscribe to it, say it, or even just mechanically read it in print without intellection of any kind. But crucially, this nal line, especially as it forms part of a three-line sentence, also has a kind of conclusive ring to it; its a sort of summing-up, it even hints at a theme, in much the same way that, say, Baudelaires opening line: La rue assourdissante autour de moi hurlait is thematic both augural and inaugural in une passante. The word composer as in Je descends composer still has a certain force then, still suggests someone whose language might differ (however slightly) from that in which others think, and who might be capable of a reective rather than an evacuated gaze So perhaps I might venture to say that, where Baudelaire announced the history of modern poetry as an aggressive deafening of the subject by the noise of modernity, comparable with the shock of being struck by lightning (an tourdissement as much as an assourdissement, perhaps), Jouet permits us to look back on that history from our present vantage-point and to see that history more as a kind of therapy, a rather strenuous cure damaigrissement du sujet, perhaps, following the feasting on individual subjectivity, on sa majest le moi, that was inaugurated by classical Cartesianism and exacerbated

by Romanticism; but one that has not completely eliminated the poet as individual subject. That would be consistent with my opening remark about the continued possibility of an autobiographical reading of the lyric despite the inevitable calling into question of the assumptions that underlie autobiography through the writing practices, the meddling that is associated with modern verse. If we want to dene the modern lyric as a genre, we will have to take account of the survival of that possibility along with the inevitable erosion, the entropy to which it has been subjected by the noisiness of modern social forces, a noisiness that the lyric, as a living genre, has faithfully echoed. Verse that has been meddled with is still, somehow, verse; indeed, meddling may well

I would like to thank the organizers of the Soi-disant conference (Brisbane, 79 July 2003) both for inviting me to speak and for putting together such a stimulating occasion.
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