Academic literature on the topic 'Henri Michaux (1899-1984)'

Henri Michaux nasceu em 24 de maio de 1899, em Namur,Bélgica, e morreu em 1984, com 85 anos, em Paris. Poeta, pintor e viajante, trabalhou também durante a época do Surrealismo, embora essa informação sirva somente para situar sua produção.

The Belgian poet Henri Michaux (1899–1984) visited Argentina in 1936 as guest of honor of the first South American PEN Club Congress. After publishing his impressions of the country in 1938 in an essay that the Argentinean officials considered utterly “undiplomatic” he was denied permission to return in 1939. This article explores the double function of diplomacy as institutional practice and rhetorical gesture by situating Michaux’s essay within a network of interwar textualities, namely, nationalist narratives of the South American landscape and emerging protocols of ethnographic discourse. This approach highlights international channels of circulation of literary texts and imaginaries beyond academia and the market that have not been significantly explored in debates on world literature in the Latin American context.

In the article an attempt is made to reconstruct alcoholic and drug abdiction lines of flight relying on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s reflections and some Lithuanian writers’ insights by asking the question what are the peculiarities of this line looking from the perspective of everyday economy. The author notices that Deleuze connects the everyday regime of an alcoholic style of life with the concepts of limit and threshold, the paradigm of disenchántedness and becoming imperceptible. On the other side, he discerns alcoholism as a social style of life preferred by creative personalities, relying on the mode of life examples of some American creators, John Ford (1894–1973), Jack London (1876–1916), and Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940). Thirdly, the author in this article notices that by connecting the drug users line of flight with the molecular becoming and taking the examples of Henri Michaux (1899–1984) and Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) experiences Deleuze and Guattari discover the paradoxical sticking of this line of flight to the spiral moving not upwards but downwards. In the article the rhetorical question is asked: is it possible that Deleuze and Guattari wax lyrical these destructive modes of life as creative lines of flight? Nevertheless, the final conclusion is that after making the attempt to discover the inner framework of such possible styles of life, Deleuze and Guattari come to the conclusion that the best intoxication is abstinence, and the topmost level of intoxication is reached by pure water.

If you cannot understand my argument, and declare “It’s Greek to me,” you are quoting Shakespeare.Bernard LevinPsoriatic arthritis, in its acute or “generalised” stage, is unbearably painful. Exacerbating the crippling of the joints, the entire surface of the skin is covered with lesions only moderately salved by anti-inflammatory ointment, the application of which is as painful as the ailment it seeks to relieve: NURSE MILLS: I’ll be as gentle as I can.Marlow’s face again fills the screen, intense concentration, comical strain, and a whispered urgency in the voice over—MARLOW: (Voice over) Think of something boring—For Christ’s sake think of something very very boring—Speech a speech by Ted Heath a sentence long sentence from Bernard Levin a quiz by Christopher Booker a—oh think think—! Really boring! A Welsh male-voice choir—Everything in Punch—Oh! Oh! — (Potter 17-18)Marlow’s collation of boring things as a frantic liturgy is an attempt to distract himself from a tumescence that is both unwanted and out of place. Although bed-ridden and in constant pain, he is still sensitive to erogenous stimulation, even when it is incidental. The act of recollection, of garnering lists of things that bore him, distracts him from his immediate situation as he struggles with the mental anguish of the prospect of a humiliating orgasm. Literary lists do many things. They provide richness of detail, assemble and corroborate the materiality of the world of which they are a part and provide insight into the psyche and motivation of the collator. The sheer desperation of Dennis Potter’s Marlow attests to the arbitrariness of the list, the simple requirement that discrete and unrelated items can be assembled in linear order, without any obligation for topical concatenation. In its interrogative form, the list can serve a more urgent and distressing purpose than distraction:GOLDBERG: What do you use for pyjamas?STANLEY: Nothing.GOLDBERG: You verminate the sheet of your birth.MCCANN: What about the Albigensenist heresy?GOLDBERG: Who watered the wicket in Melbourne?MCCANN: What about the blessed Oliver Plunkett?(Pinter 51)The interrogative non sequitur is an established feature of the art of intimidation. It is designed to exert maximum stress in the subject through the use of obscure asides and the endowing of trivial detail with profundity. Harold Pinter’s use of it in The Birthday Party reveals how central it was to his “theatre of menace.” The other tactic, which also draws on the logic of the inventory to be both sequential and discontinuous, is to break the subject’s will through a machine-like barrage of rhetorical questions that leave no time for answers.Pinter learned from Samuel Beckett the pitiless, unforgiving logic of trivial detail pushed to extremes. Think of Molloy’s dilemma of the sucking stones. In order for all sixteen stones that he carries with him to be sucked at least once to assuage his hunger, a reliable system has to be hit upon:Taking a stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, and putting it in my mouth, I replaced it in the right pocket of my greatcoat by a stone from the right pocket of my trousers, which I replaced with a stone from the left pocket of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my greatcoat, which I replaced with the stone that was in my mouth, as soon as I had finished sucking it. Thus there were still four stones in each of my four pockets, but not quite the same stones. And when the desire to suck took hold of me again, I drew again on the right pocket of my greatcoat, certain of not taking the same stone as the last time. And while I sucked it I rearranged the other stones in the way I have just described. And so on. (Beckett, Molloy 69)And so on for six pages. Exhaustive permutation within a finite lexical set is common in Beckett. In the novel Watt the eponymous central character is charged with serving his unseen master’s dinner as well as tidying up afterwards. A simple and bucolic enough task it would seem. But Beckett’s characters are not satisfied with conjecture, the simple assumption that someone must be responsible for Mr. Knott’s dining arrangements. Like Molloy’s solution to the sucking stone problem, all possible scenarios must be considered to explain the conundrum of how and why Watt never saw Knott at mealtime. Twelve possibilities are offered, among them that1. Mr. Knott was responsible for the arrangement, and knew that he was responsible for the arrangement, and knew that such an arrangement existed, and was content.2. Mr. Knott was not responsible for the arrangement, but knew who was responsible for the arrangement, and knew that such an arrangement existed, and was content.(Beckett, Watt 86)This stringent adherence to detail, absurd and exasperating as it is, is the work of fiction, the persistence of a viable, believable thing called Watt who exists as long as his thought is made manifest on a page. All writers face this pernicious prospect of having to confront and satisfy “fiction’s gargantuan appetite for fact, for detail, for documentation” (Kenner 70). A writer’s writer (Philip Marlow) Dennis Potter’s singing detective struggles with the acute consciousness that words eventually will fail him. His struggle to overcome verbal entropy is a spectre that haunts the entire literary imagination, for when the words stop the world stops.Beckett made this struggle the very stuff of his work, declaring famously that all he wanted to do as a writer was to leave “a stain upon the silence” (quoted in Bair 681). His characters deteriorate from recognisable people (Hamm in Endgame, Winnie in Happy Days) to mere ciphers of speech acts (the bodiless head Listener in That Time, Mouth in Not I). During this process they provide us with the vocabulary of entropy, a horror most eloquently expressed at the end of The Unnamable: I can’t go on, you must go on, I’ll go on, you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it’s done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on. (Beckett, Molloy 418)The importance Beckett accorded to pauses in his writing, from breaks in dialogue to punctuation, stresses the pacing of utterance that is in sync with the rhythm of human breath. This is acutely underlined in Jack MacGowran’s extraordinary gramophone recording of the above passage from The Unnamable. There is exhaustion in his voice, but it is inflected by an urgent push for the next words to forestall the last gasp. And what might appear to be parsimony is in fact the very commerce of writing itself. It is an economy of necessity, when any words will suffice to sustain presence in the face of imminent silence.Hugh Kenner has written eloquently on the relationship between writing and entropy, drawing on field and number theory to demonstrate how the business of fiction is forever in the process of generating variation within a finite set. The “stoic comedian,” as he figures the writer facing the blank page, self-consciously practices their art in the full cognisance that they select “elements from a closed set, and then (arrange) them inside a closed field” (Kenner 94). The nouveau roman (a genre conceived and practiced in Beckett’s lean shadow) is remembered in literary history as a rather austere, po-faced formalism that foregrounded things at the expense of human psychology or social interaction. But it is emblematic of Kenner’s portrait of stoicism as an attitude to writing that confronts the nature of fiction itself, on its own terms, as a practice “which is endlessly arranging things” (13):The bulge of the bank also begins to take effect starting from the fifth row: this row, as a matter of fact, also possesses only twenty-one trees, whereas it should have twenty-two for a true trapezoid and twenty-three for a rectangle (uneven row). (Robbe-Grillet 21)As a matter of fact. The nouveau roman made a fine if myopic art of isolating detail for detail’s sake. However, it shares with both Beckett’s minimalism and Joyce’s maximalism the obligation of fiction to fill its world with stuff (“maximalism” is a term coined by Michel Delville and Andrew Norris in relation to the musical scores of Frank Zappa that opposes the minimalism of John Cage’s work). Kenner asks, in The Stoic Comedians, where do the “thousands on thousands of things come from, that clutter Ulysses?” His answer is simple, from “a convention” and this prosaic response takes us to the heart of the matter with respect to the impact on writing of Isaac Newton’s unforgiving Second Law of Thermodynamics. In the law’s strictest physical sense of the dissipation of heat, of the loss of energy within any closed system that moves, the stipulation of the Second Law predicts that words will, of necessity, stop in any form governed by convention (be it of horror, comedy, tragedy, the Bildungsroman, etc.). Building upon and at the same time refining the early work on motion and mass theorised by Aristotle, Kepler, and Galileo, inter alia, Newton refined both the laws and language of classical mechanics. It was from Wiener’s literary reading of Newton that Kenner segued from the loss of energy within any closed system (entropy) to the running silent out of words within fiction.In the wake of Norbert Wiener’s cybernetic turn in thinking in the 1940s, which was highly influenced by Newton’s Second Law, fiction would never again be considered in the same way (metafiction was a term coined in part to recognise this shift; the nouveau roman another). Far from delivering a reassured and reassuring present-ness, an integrated and ongoing cosmos, fiction is an isometric exercise in the struggle against entropy, of a world in imminent danger of running out of energy, of not-being:“His hand took his hat from the peg over his initialled heavy overcoat…” Four nouns, and the book’s world is heavier by four things. One, the hat, “Plasto’s high grade,” will remain in play to the end. The hand we shall continue to take for granted: it is Bloom’s; it goes with his body, which we are not to stop imagining. The peg and the overcoat will fade. “On the doorstep he felt in his hip pocket for the latchkey. Not there. In the trousers I left off.” Four more things. (Kenner 87)This passage from The Stoic Comedians is a tour de force of the conjuror’s art, slowing down the subliminal process of the illusion for us to see the fragility of fiction’s precarious grip on the verge of silence, heroically “filling four hundred empty pages with combinations of twenty-six different letters” (xiii). Kenner situates Joyce in a comic tradition, preceded by Gustave Flaubert and followed by Beckett, of exhaustive fictive possibility. The stoic, he tells us, “is one who considers, with neither panic nor indifference, that the field of possibilities available to him is large perhaps, or small perhaps, but closed” (he is prompt in reminding us that among novelists, gamblers and ethical theorists, the stoic is also a proponent of the Second Law of Thermodynamics) (xiii). If Joyce is the comedian of the inventory, then it is Flaubert, comedian of the Enlightenment, who is his immediate ancestor. Bouvard and Pécuchet (1881) is an unfinished novel written in the shadow of the Encyclopaedia, an apparatus of the literate mind that sought complete knowledge. But like the Encyclopaedia particularly and the Enlightenment more generally, it is fragmentation that determines its approach to and categorisation of detail as information about the world. Bouvard and Pécuchet ends, appropriately, in a frayed list of details, pronouncements and ephemera.In the face of an unassailable impasse, all that is left Flaubert is the list. For more than thirty years he constructed the Dictionary of Received Ideas in the shadow of the truncated Bouvard and Pécuchet. And in doing so he created for the nineteenth century mind “a handbook for novelists” (Kenner 19), a breakdown of all we know “into little pieces so arranged that they can be found one at a time” (3): ACADEMY, FRENCH: Run it down but try to belong to it if you can.GREEK: Whatever one cannot understand is Greek.KORAN: Book about Mohammed, which is all about women.MACHIAVELLIAN: Word only to be spoken with a shudder.PHILOSOPHY: Always snigger at it.WAGNER: Snigger when you hear his name and joke about the music of the future. (Flaubert, Dictionary 293-330)This is a sample of the exhaustion that issues from the tireless pursuit of categorisation, classification, and the mania for ordered information. The Dictionary manifests the Enlightenment’s insatiable hunger for received ideas, an unwieldy background noise of popular opinion, general knowledge, expertise, and hearsay. In both Bouvard and Pécuchet and the Dictionary, exhaustion was the foundation of a comic art as it was for both Joyce and Beckett after him, for the simple reason that it includes everything and neglects nothing. It is comedy born of overwhelming competence, a sublime impertinence, though not of manners or social etiquette, but rather, with a nod to Oscar Wilde, the impertinence of being definitive (a droll epithet that, not surprisingly, was the title of Kenner’s 1982 Times Literary Supplement review of Richard Ellmann’s revised and augmented biography of Joyce).The inventory, then, is the underlining physio-semiotics of fictional mechanics, an elegiac resistance to the thread of fiction fraying into nothingness. The motif of thermodynamics is no mere literary conceit here. Consider the opening sentence in Borges:Of the many problems which exercised the reckless discernment of Lönnrot, none was so strange—so rigorously strange, shall we say—as the periodic series of bloody events which culminated at the villa of Triste-le-Roy, amid the ceaseless aroma of the eucalypti. (Borges 76)The subordinate clause, as a means of adjectival and adverbial augmentation, implies a potentially infinite sentence through the sheer force of grammatical convention, a machine-like resistance to running out of puff:Under the notable influence of Chesterton (contriver and embellisher of elegant mysteries) and the palace counsellor Leibniz (inventor of the pre-established harmony), in my idle afternoons I have imagined this story plot which I shall perhaps write someday and which already justifies me somehow. (72)In “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” a single adjective charmed with emphasis will do to imply an unseen network:The visible work left by this novelist is easily and briefly enumerated. (Borges 36)The annotation of this network is the inexorable issue of the inflection: “I have said that Menard’s work can be easily enumerated. Having examined with care his personal files, I find that they contain the following items.” (37) This is a sample selection from nineteen entries:a) A Symbolist sonnet which appeared twice (with variants) in the review La conque (issues of March and October 1899).o) A transposition into alexandrines of Paul Valéry’s Le cimitière marin (N.R.F., January 1928).p) An invective against Paul Valéry, in the Papers for the Suppression of Reality of Jacques Reboul. (37-38)Lists, when we encounter them in Jorge Luis Borges, are always contextual, supplying necessary detail to expand upon character and situation. And they are always intertextual, anchoring this specific fictional world to others (imaginary, real, fabulatory or yet to come). The collation and annotation of the literary works of an imagined author (Pierre Menard) of an invented author (Edmond Teste) of an actual author (Paul Valéry) creates a recursive, yet generative, feedback loop of reference and literary progeny. As long as one of these authors continues to write, or write of the work of at least one of the others, a persistent fictional present tense is ensured.Consider Hillel Schwartz’s use of the list in his Making Noise (2011). It not only lists what can and is inevitably heard, in this instance the European 1700s, but what it, or local aural colour, is heard over:Earthy: criers of artichokes, asparagus, baskets, beans, beer, bells, biscuits, brooms, buttermilk, candles, six-pence-a-pound fair cherries, chickens, clothesline, cockles, combs, coal, crabs, cucumbers, death lists, door mats, eels, fresh eggs, firewood, flowers, garlic, hake, herring, ink, ivy, jokebooks, lace, lanterns, lemons, lettuce, mackeral, matches […]. (Schwartz 143)The extended list and the catalogue, when encountered as formalist set pieces in fiction or, as in Schwartz’s case, non-fiction, are the expansive equivalent of le mot juste, the self-conscious, painstaking selection of the right word, the specific detail. Of Ulysses, Kenner observes that it was perfectly natural that it “should have attracted the attention of a group of scholars who wanted practice in compiling a word-index to some extensive piece of prose (Miles Hanley, Word Index to Ulysses, 1937). More than any other work of fiction, it suggests by its texture, often by the very look of its pages, that it has been painstakingly assembled out of single words…” (31-32). In a book already crammed with detail, with persistent reference to itself, to other texts, other media, such formalist set pieces as the following from the oneiric “Circe” episode self-consciously perform for our scrutiny fiction’s insatiable hunger for more words, for invention, the Latin root of which also gives us the word inventory:The van of the procession appears headed by John Howard Parnell, city marshal, in a chessboard tabard, the Athlone Poursuivant and Ulster King of Arms. They are followed by the Right Honourable Joseph Hutchinson, lord mayor Dublin, the lord mayor of Cork, their worships the mayors of Limerick, Galway, Sligo and Waterford, twentyeight Irish representative peers, sirdars, grandees and maharajahs bearing the cloth of estate, the Dublin Metropolitan Fire Brigade, the chapter of the saints of finance in their plutocratic order of precedence, the bishop of Down and Connor, His Eminence Michael cardinal Logue archbishop of Armagh, primate of all Ireland, His Grace, the most reverend Dr William Alexander, archbishop of Armagh, primate of all Ireland, the chief rabbi, the Presbyterian moderator, the heads of the Baptist, Anabaptist, Methodist and Moravian chapels and the honorary secretary of the society of friends. (Joyce, Ulysses 602-604)Such examples demonstrate how Joycean inventories break from narrative as architectonic, stand-alone assemblages of information. They are Rabelaisian irruptions, like Philip Marlow’s lesions, that erupt in swollen bas-relief. The exaggerated, at times hysterical, quality of such lists, perform the hallucinatory work of displacement and condensation (the Homeric parallel here is the transformation of Odysseus’s men into swine by the witch Circe). Freudian, not to mention Stindberg-ian dream-work brings together and juxtaposes images and details that only make sense as non-sense (realistic but not real), such as the extraordinary explosive gathering of civic, commercial, political, chivalric representatives of Dublin in this foreshortened excerpt of Bloom’s regal campaign for his “new Bloomusalem” (606).The text’s formidable echolalia, whereby motifs recur and recapitulate into leitmotifs, ensures that the act of reading Ulysses is always cross-referential, suggesting the persistence of a conjured world that is always already still coming into being through reading. And it is of course this forestalling of Newton’s Second Law that Joyce brazenly conducts, in both the textual and physical sense, in Finnegans Wake. The Wake is an impossible book in that it infinitely sustains the circulation of words within a closed system, creating a weird feedback loop of cyclical return. It is a text that can run indefinitely through the force of its own momentum without coming to a conclusion. In a text in which the author’s alter ego is described in terms of the technology of inscription (Shem the Penman) and his craft as being a “punsil shapner,” (Joyce, Finnegans 98) Norbert Wiener’s descriptive example of feedback as the forestalling of entropy in the conscious act of picking up a pencil is apt: One we have determined this, our motion proceeds in such a way that we may say roughly that the amount by which the pencil is not yet picked up is decreased at each stage. (Wiener 7) The Wake overcomes the book’s, and indeed writing’s, struggle with entropy through the constant return of energy into its closed system as a cycle of endless return. Its generative algorithm can be represented thus: “… a long the riverrun …” (628-3). The Wake’s sense of unending confounds and contradicts, in advance, Frank Kermode’s averring to Newton’s Second Law in his insistence that the progression of all narrative fiction is defined in terms of the “sense of an ending,” the expectation of a conclusion, whereby the termination of words makes “possible a satisfying consonance with the origins and with the middle” (Kermode 17). It is the realisation of the novel imagined by Silas Flannery, the fictitious author in Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveller, an incipit that “maintains for its whole duration the potentiality of the beginning” (Calvino 140). Finnegans Wake is unique in terms of the history of the novel (if that is indeed what it is) in that it is never read, but (as Joseph Frank observed of Joyce generally) “can only be re-read” (Frank 19). With Wiener’s allegory of feedback no doubt in mind, Jacques Derrida’s cybernetic account of the act of reading Joyce comes, like a form of echolalia, on the heels of Calvino’s incipit, his perpetual sustaining of the beginning: you stay on the edge of reading Joyce—for me this has been going on for twenty-five or thirty years—and the endless plunge throws you back onto the river-bank, on the brink of another possible immersion, ad infinitum … In any case, I have the feeling that I haven’t yet begun to read Joyce, and this “not having begun to read” is sometimes the most singular and active relationship I have with his work. (Derrida 148) Derrida wonders if this process of ongoing immersion in the text is typical of all works of literature and not just the Wake. The question is rhetorical and resonates into silence. And it is silence, ultimately, that hovers as a mute herald of the end when words will simply run out.Post(script)It is in the nature of all writing that it is read in the absence of its author. Perhaps the most typical form of writing, then, is the suicide note. In an extraordinary essay, “Goodbye, Cruel Words,” Mark Dery wonders why it has been “so neglected as a literary genre” and promptly sets about reviewing its decisive characteristics. Curiously, the list features amongst its many forms: I’m done with lifeI’m no goodI’m dead. (Dery 262)And references to lists of types of suicide notes are among Dery’s own notes to the essay. With its implicit generic capacity to intransitively add more detail, the list becomes in the light of the terminal letter a condition of writing itself. The irony of this is not lost on Dery as he ponders the impotent stoicism of the scribbler setting about the mordant task of writing for the last time. Writing at the last gasp, as Dery portrays it, is a form of dogged, radical will. But his concluding remarks are reflective of his melancholy attitude to this most desperate act of writing at degree zero: “The awful truth (unthinkable to a writer) is that eloquent suicide notes are rarer than rare because suicide is the moment when language fails—fails to hoist us out of the pit, fails even to express the unbearable weight” (264) of someone on the precipice of the very last word they will ever think, let alone write. Ihab Hassan (1967) and George Steiner (1967), it would seem, were latecomers as proselytisers of the language of silence. But there is a queer, uncanny optimism at work at the terminal moment of writing when, contra Dery, words prevail on the verge of “endless, silent night.” (264) Perhaps when Newton’s Second Law no longer has carriage over mortal life, words take on a weird half-life of their own. Writing, after Socrates, does indeed circulate indiscriminately among its readers. There is a dark irony associated with last words. When life ceases, words continue to have the final say as long as they are read, and in so doing they sustain an unlikely, and in their own way, stoical sense of unending.ReferencesBair, Deirdre. Samuel Beckett: A Biography. London: Jonathan Cape, 1978.Beckett, Samuel. Molloy Malone Dies. The Unnamable. London: John Calder, 1973.---. Watt. London: John Calder, 1976.Borges, Jorge Luis. Labyrinths. Selected Stories & Other Writings. Ed. Donald A. Yates & James E. Irby. New York: New Directions, 1964.Calvino, Italo. If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller. Trans. William Weaver, London: Picador, 1981.Delville, Michael, and Andrew Norris. “Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and the Secret History of Maximalism.” Ed. Louis Armand. Contemporary Poetics: Redefining the Boundaries of Contemporary Poetics, in Theory & Practice, for the Twenty-First Century. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2007. 126-49.Derrida, Jacques. “Two Words for Joyce.” Post-Structuralist Joyce. Essays from the French. Ed. Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984. 145-59.Dery, Mark. I Must Not think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2012.Frank, Joseph, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature.” Sewanee Review, 53, 1945: 221-40, 433-56, 643-53.Flaubert, Gustave. Bouvard and Pécuchet. Trans. A. J. KrailSheimer. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.Flaubert, Gustave. Dictionary of Received Ideas. Trans. A. J. KrailSheimer. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.Hassan, Ihab. The Literature of Silence: Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett. New York: Knopf, 1967.Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. London: Faber and Faber, 1975.---. Ulysses. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992.Kenner, Hugh. The Stoic Comedians. Berkeley: U of California P, 1974.Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Narrative Fiction. New York: Oxford U P, 1966.‪Levin, Bernard. Enthusiasms. London: Jonathan Cape, 1983.MacGowran, Jack. MacGowran Speaking Beckett. Claddagh Records, 1966.Pinter, Harold. The Birthday Party. London: Methuen, 1968.Potter, Dennis. The Singing Detective. London, Faber and Faber, 1987.Robbe-Grillet, Alain. Jealousy. Trans. Richard Howard. London: John Calder, 1965.Schwartz, Hillel. Making Noise. From Babel to the Big Bang and Beyond. New York: Zone Books, 2011.Steiner, George. Language and Silence: New York: Atheneum, 1967.Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics, Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965.

Dissertação (mestrado)-Universidade de Brasília, Instituto de Letras, Departamento de Teoria Literária e Literaturas, 2009.
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Esta dissertação apresenta o poeta belga Henri Michaux, de modo a evidenciar que corpo é o ponto de partida e o meio pelo qual a escrita michaudiana se realiza. Portanto, selecionou-se os seguintes poemas, Os olhos, Magia, Circulando dentro do meu corpo e Movimentos, retirados de obras de períodos diferentes da vida desse poeta. Primeiramente, demostra-se a biografia do poeta, entretanto, não há interesse em resumir este trabalho em uma análise biográfica. E sim, provocar o leitor, fazendo que perceba Henri Michaux como um poeta que, de certa forma, desenvolveu sua escrita a partir da consciência de um corpo que experimenta. Assim, o autor por meio da sua experiência de vida prática e existencial criou uma escrita plena de imagens do corpo com o intuito de imprimir em si o mundo, revelando um corpo que sofre e descreve seus sofrimentos. Em seguida, realiza-se as análises dos poemas mencionados. Logo depois, conclui-se pelas análises e traduções que o poeta cria uma escrita singular e imagética em que a relação entre o espaço interno e externo é contraditória e complementar, pois a obra michaudiana mantém essa relação entre o poeta e a experimentação corporal de si mesmo para causar em seu leitor reações súbitas por meio da linguagem poética. Ao final, há as traduções dos poemas como uma forma de leitura complementar para melhor compreender as análises que as antecedem. ______________________________________________________________________________ ABSTRACT
This paper aims to present the Belgian poet Henri Michaux, by means of highlight the body as being the starting point and the way the writing of Michaux is performed. For that reason, there have been selected the following poems “ Les yeux”, “ Magie”, “ En circulant dans mon corps” and “Mouvements” These poems were taken from different periods of his life. Firstly, it explored Michaux‟s biography, but it did not mean to put these words shortened in a biographical analysis. However, it aimed to provoke the reader by making him understand Henri Michaux as a poet who developed somehow his writing from the conciousness of a body he experienced. This way, the writer created a style of writing full of body images, which printed on him the world he had around and revealed such a suffering body and all its descriptions at the moment he experienced his practical and existential life. Then, the poems above were analyzed. It was concluded from the analysis and translations of those poems that the writer forms a unique and imaginal writing where the relation between inside and outside spaces is contradictory and complementary. It is accordingly stated because Michaux‟s work keeps the relation between poet and self body experimentation just to make his readers having such sudden reactions through the poetic language. Finally, there are the translations of the poems as a complementary reading to better understand the precedent analysis. ______________________________________________________________________________ RÉSUMÉ
Cette dissertation présente le poète belge Henri Michaux de manière à évider que le corps est le point de départ et le moyen pour lequel l‟écriture michaudienne se réalise. Alors, on a sélectionné les poèmes suivants « Les yeux », « Magie » « En circulant dans mon corps » et « Mouvements », retirés des oeuvres des périodes différentes de la vie de ce poète. Premièrement, on démontre la biographie du poète, cependant, il n'y a pas d'intérêt en résumer ce travail à une analyse biographique, mais de provoquer le lecteur en lui faisant apercevoir Henri Michaux comme un poète qui d'une certaine manière a développé son écriture à partir de la conscience d'un corps qui expérimente. Ainsi, parmi l'expérience de sa vie pratique et existentielle, l'auteur a crée une écriture pleine d'images du corps avec l'intention d'imprimer en soi le monde, en révélant un corps qui souffre et décrit ses souffrances. Ensuite, on analyse les poèmes mentionnés. Puis on conclut par les analyses et les traductions que le poète crée une écriture singulière et imagée donc la relation entre l'espace interne et externe est contradictoire et complémentaire, parce que l'oeuvre michaudienne maintient cette relation entre le poète et l'expérimentation corporelle de soi-même pour causer aux lecteurs des réactions subites travers le langage poétique. À la fin, il y a des traductions des poèmes comme une forme de lecture complémentaire pour mieux comprendre des analyses antérieures.

La fin du xixe siecle se voit marquer par une perte de transcendance qui ne fait que s'amplifier au cours du xxe siecle. Chez le poete henri michaux cet eloignement du divin a pour consequence un double mouvement : nostalgie de l'un (d'une unite quasi-divine) d'une part et d'attention nouvelle pour le multiple d'autre part. Cette perte de transcendance expose le sujet poetique a un eclatement du sens en meme temps qu'a la perte de l'inspiration, ce qui induit chez michaux une nouvelle approche de la poesie : au lieu d'avoir affaire au mouvement vertical, synthetique de la metaphore, le poete se trouve confronte a l'essoufflement sur l'axe horizontal et mouvant de la metonymie. En effet, l'absence d'unite ne lui permet plus d'acceder a une synthese du monde. Le sujet poetique se situe alors dans une position de fuite, dans une sorte d'hemorragie : toujours protee, toujours se defaisant, il ne peut plus avoir de vision synthetique du monde, ce qui met en peril la mimesis en tant que ressemblance. Cependant, si cette derniere, comme la metaphore, n'est plus possible, c'est l'energie et la vitesse qui la remplaceront pour donner au multiple une place reelle dans la representation poetique et/ou picturale, puisque michaux est aussi peintre. Non seulement l'un ne sera plus objet de nostalgie, mais il sera encore denonce comme source de pouvoir et de domination ; la chute n'est alors plus humiliation mais condition d'un nouvel essor de cette poesie. Ainsi, apres que la depossession de soi a ete vecue comme une soumission et apres qu'il a repousse le multiple, le poete (de)compose avec, se l'approprie pour envisager une poesie autre, une poesie en devenir pour laquelle il reste a trouver la langue qui exprimera au mieux la multiplicite du sujet
The end of the nineteenth century was marked by a loss of transcendence, which has been growing during the twentieth century. This religious decline has two main consequences on henri michaux's poetical works : a nostalgia for unity (almost divine) on the one hand, and a new attention to the multiple on the other hand. This loss of transcendence exposes the poet to a break of sense and to a loss of inspiration, which leads michaux to a new approach to poetry : instead of being in his element with the ascending, synthetic movement of metaphor, the poet is faced with breathlessness on the horizontal, unstable axis of metonymy. Indeed, because of this absence of unity, it is not possible anymore for him to have a synthetic representation of the world. Then, the poet is a led to a leak's movement : always proteus, he cannot have a synthetic representation of the world anymore, which compromises mimesis as resemblance. Nevertheless, even though the latter, just like the metaphor, is no more possible, vigour and velocity will replace it in order to give the multiple a real place in poetic or pictorial works (michaux is a painter too). The one will be no more an object of nostalgia, it will be rather denounced as a source of power and domination ; then the downfall is not felt as humiliation anymore but the condition for a revival of this poetry. This way, after he had suffered his feeling of being dispossessed and after he had pushed away the multiple, the poet comes to terms with it in order to envisage another poetry, for which one still has to find the language that will try to catch at best the multiplicity of the subject

L'aphasie est une "maladie de la langue" qui s'oppose au langage, dont la possibilité poétique est ainsi ignorée ou du moins très peu mise en lumière. D'où la nécessité d'un déplacement théorique jusqu'à sa force métaphorique de la fatalité d'une phase aphasique, qui motive à son tour le critère radical d'un jugement poétique d'aujourd'hui. Il s'agit donc de l'adaptation et de l'application du théorie du rythme de Meschonnic et de Dessons, qui est susceptible de créer une poétique démocratique dans le rapport avec le "poétique-éthique-politique". En ce sens cette thèse est un acte aphasique qui essaie de réécrire et réinventer Michaux : "Poégraphie", "Modernité de Michaux" et "L'écriture aphasique de Michaux et son enjeu". A la fois paradoxale et même contradictoire, la "Poétique de l'aphasie chez Henri Michaux" renvoie ainsi à une quête du "silence" dont l'enjeu poétique multiplie sans cesse la question du rythme, du sujet en mettant en jeu l'infinité du discours
Aphasia is a "disease of langue" that opposes language, whose poetic possibility is thus ignored, or at least very little explored. Hence the necessity of theoretical displacement, until the metaphorical strength of the aphasic phase's fatality, which then motivates the radical criterion of today's poetical judgement. The question is thus the adaptation and application of Meschonnic and Dessons's theory of rhythm, which is liable to create a democratic poetic, in its relation to the "poetic-ethical-political". In this respect, this thesis is an aphasic act which aims to rewrite and reinvent Michaux : "Poegraphy (Poégraphie)", "Michaux's modernity" and "Michaux's aphasic writing and its stake". Simultaneously paradoxical and even contradictory, "Poetic of the aphasia in Henri Michaux" partake in a quest of "silence", whose poetical stake perpetually multiply the questions of rhythm and subject, calling into play the infinity of discourse

Henri Michaux se trouve constamment en mouvement dans un univers fluctuant, avec des limites mobiles et déroutantes qu'il détruit et qu'il re-invente sans cesse. Pour analyser les effets que cette propension constante à se diriger ailleurs a sur le travail créateur, nous avons pris en considération, d'une part, ses voyages dans des espaces (réels ou rêvés) extérieurs à la création proprement dite, et, d'autre part, le déplacement a l'intérieur même des activités créatrice, à savoir le passage du faire scriptural au faire pictural. Notre réflexion sur le processus créateur de l'écrivain-peintre Henri Michaux reprend le modèle de lecture offert par celui-ci au moment où, dans le texte " Aventures de Lignes ", il refait la genèse des tableaux de Paul Klee en partant de leur apparence formelle. La Lecture poïétique/poétique que nous avons proposée dans notre thèse a permis l'analyse des interventions d'un artiste qui transforment les espaces parcourus en fonction des ses besoins et de ses attentes poïétiques et de conclure que, chez Michaux, le travail créateur suppose un échange constant avec le dehors et qu'il est dominé parla sensibilité kinesthésique et visuelle. De plus, nous avons constaté que les déplacements poïétiques engendrent des déplacements poétiques qui déterminent l'apparition, dans les poèmes d' "épreuves, exorcismes ", d'une écriture du cri située à mi-chemin entre la peinture et l'écriture par son instauration ainsi que par sa poétique. Contrairement à la représentation conventionnelle d'un Michaux autocentré, notre thèse met ainsi le devenir du créateur sous le signe des expériences physiques d'un corps sensoriel et de la dialectique de l'introspectif et du perceptif
Henri Michaux is in permanent motion in a fluctuating universe with mobile and confusing frontiers that he permanently destroys and re-invents. In order to analyse the effects that this constant propensity for the elsewhere has upon his poiein, we took into account Michaux's voyages within real and imaginary spaces, which are exterior to creation, as well, as his circulation within creative activities represented by the passage from writing to painting. Our reflection on the creative process of the writer and painter Henri Michaux starts from his own reading pattern identified in “Aventures de lignes”, where he recomposes the genesis of Paul Klee's paintings beginning from their formal appearance. This poietic/poetic approach, suggested by Michaux himself, allowed the analyses of the interventions of an artist who transforms the spaces he traverses according to his creative needs and expectations and led to the conclusion that Michaux's creative process implies a constant exchange with the outside and that it is dominated by kinesthetic and visual perception. Moreover, it became evident that the discussed poietic displacements undergo poetic changes which determine the emergence, in “Épreuves, Écorcismes”, of a scream-writing situated half-way between painting and writing by its instauration as well as by its poetics. Contrary to the conventional representation of a self-centered Michaux, our thesis places his poietic/poetic becoming under the sign of introspective and perceptive actions, physical experiences energising his creative gesture and maintaining its dynamism

Henri Michaux, rationaliste expérimental, approfondit la connaissance du fonctionnement psychique à travers ses expériences à la fois existentielles et artistiques. Il nous a donc laissè un ensemble important de réflexions et d'observations critiques d'où peut partir une littérature soucieuse de mieux comprendre le fonctionnement de l'esprit
Henri Michaux, an experimental rationalist, depens our understanding of the functionning of the human mind through his experiences both existential and artistic. He has left us an important collection of reflexions and critical observations as a basis of furthur study and a better comprehension of the human mind

Cette etude tente d'elucider l'univers mental d'henri michaux qui se deroule autour de ce qu'il nomme << le probleme d'etre >> et ainsi, d'instaurer, suivant ses deux activites principales : l'ecriture et le voyage, un espace privilegie ou le poete et le lecteur pourraient se rejoindre au niveau de l'imagination et de l'obsession. La premiere partie est consacree a son ecriture, qui, prenant sa naissance dans le geste de survie d'un etre face a la condition miserable de l'etre, trouve son meilleur sens dans la creation. Par l'ecriture, le poete est enfin libere de l'emprise de la realite omnipresente, et dans l'ecriture, il essaye de trouver un moyen de realiser son souhait originel, qui est de rompre la barriere de l'individualite et de s'ouvrir a la totalite objective des etres. Dans ce contexte, le poete transgresse souvent les criteres existants de l'ecriture, les poussant jusqu'au point extreme en cherchant un autre medium << universel >>, ce qui est une des ses originalites. La deuxieme partie est vouee aux multiples voyages du poete, y compris une serie d'experiences de la drogue. Michaux concoit le voyage non seulement comme l'epreuve initiatique durant laquelle le voyageur seperd et se retrouve, mais aussi l'occasion de mieux comprendre ce que c'est que l'homme. Mais il comprend finalement que c'est sur soi-meme qu'on doit s'interroger. L'autre et l'ailleurs peuvent bien aider l'etre a se constituer, mais ne peuvent le sauver definitivement. C'est pourquoi il entreprend finalement un voyage a l'interieur de lui-meme a l'aide des pouvoirs << modificateurs >> de la drogue hallucinogene. Il s'agit d'une severe experimentation pendant laquelle l'esprit meme et le probleme de l'ecriture sont en jeu. Heureusement il revient de ces << gouffres >> avec des connaissances sur le mecanisme mental et sur les possibilites et les impossibilites de l'ecriture. C'est grace a ces << connaissances par les gouffres >> que l'explorateur arrive a une maturite spirituelle et en meme temps trouve son ecriture de calme et de serenite.

Une pratique hétérodoxe de la lecture chez le jeune Michaux, ses rencontres avec le mysticisme chrétien et avec les sciences naturelles, ont préludé aux débuts littéraires (1922-1927), souvent négligés par la critique. Une étude diachronique des premiers textes tente d'en montrer l'importance. Les recueils et les textes épars publiés entre 1927 et 1945 mettent en scène une écriture de soi diversifiée, qui refuse le pathos et la confidence autobiographique, traverse tous les genres, et se veut transcription de l'expérience intérieure. Un autoportrait diffracte se dessine dans les récits, les poèmes et les livres de pérégrination. Dans le même temps, une poétique de l'expatriation et de la dérive cherche une voie originale. Confrontée aux monstres de l'histoire, l'épopée du sujet prend, pendant la guerre d'autres formes. Ma recherche a prêté une attention particulière aux textes rares et non repris, à la correspondance et aux projets avortés
After describing the heterodox practice of reading of the early years. Michaux's meeting with Christian mysticism and natural science, I then intend to stress the importance of his often neglected literary debut (1922-1927), through a diachronic study. Between 1927 and 1945, a diversified writing of the self, refusing pathos and autobiographic confidence, means to be a transcription of the inner experience through any possible literary genre, and draws a diffracted self-portrait in the stories, travel books and poems. In the meantime, a poetics of expatriation is trying to find its own original way. Confronted with the monsters of history during the war, it will take new forms. In this study, I’ve paid particular attention to the rare and only once published texts, to the letters and aborted projects

Lire la poésie d'Henri Michaux (1899-1984), c'est le plus souvent se retrouver devant un spectacle. Son théâtre n'est pourtant pas dans ses deux pièces dramatiques mais dans l'informel ensemble de ses textes. Il s'agit du théâtre intérieur. Le dernier est d'abord une posture envers le monde. Le regard du spectateur nie l'absoluité de la réalité. Contre ce réel, l'auteur projette un autre espace imaginaire où apparaissent un grand nombre de créatures qui tiennent le rôle du personnage au sens large du terme. Leur voix constitue un dialogue polyphonique et leur spontanéité protéiforme rend authentique l'expression de l'être en l'empêchant de tomber dans une forme extérieure et figée. L'opération théâtrale sert d'une sorte d'exorcisme qui apprivoise la manœuvre du sort. Les œuvres de Michaux sont une mise en scène de ces inventions que le poète laisse incomplète, inachevée, sans dénouement et en attente afin de s'approcher au plus près de l'essentiel de la vie qui se dérobe toujours à l'appréhension langagière
Most often, when reading Henri Michaux (1899-1984)'s poetry, the reader finds himself facing à scene. However, the essence of his theatre is not to be found exclusively in his two dramatic plays but actually in the informal integrity of his various works. It concerns the inner theatre which is firstly an attitude towards the world. The spectator's attention denies the absoluteness of reality. Against it, the author projects another imaginary space in which a great number of creatures appear, each acting as a protagonist in the broadest sense of the word and whose voices compose a polyphonic dialog. Also, the multi-aspect spontaneity of these creatures under many guises gives authenticity to the expression of the being, thus preventing it from falling into an external and fixed form. The dramatic process acts as a kind of exorcism taming the movements of fate. The works of Michaux are a stage production of these inventions, left unachieved, incomplete, without denouement and in expectation by the poet so as to get closer to the essence of life unseizable with words

Née de la crise intellectuelle de l'Europe, l'oeuvre de Michaux, vouée dès le départ à l'aventure intérieure, devait trouver en Orient un puissant ferment à sa quête. L'étude de l'oeuvre, qui tient compte de tous les aspects de son activité artistique, est envisagée selon les grandes étapes de son cheminement, et met en évidence le rôle que l'Orient a joué dans la dynamique de sa création. La relation de Michaux à l'Asie, ayant connu diverses phases, ne peut être établie seulement en terme de convergence de vues. Plus fondamentalement, elle a servi son expérience poétique, en maintenant son attention dans la région de l'Essentiel et dans la préoccupation de ce qui sauve le poète du Néant, la mise en oeuvre de sa Parole
Michaux's works, sprang from the intellectual crisis in Europe, dedicated from the start towards an inward adventure, could not but find in the Orient a powerful ferment in his search. .

L'ailleurs est une notion primordiale en poésie et Henri Michaux, à la suite de Baudelaire et de Rimbaud en est l'un des principaux représentants. La notion d'un ailleurs spécifique à la création poétique et artistique est utilisée pour analyser comment le poète transforme la poésie. Les ailleurs réels de ses voyages et les ailleurs imaginaires de sa poésie s'unissent alors dans un voyage intérieur qui permet au poète de se réconcilier avec lui-même. Henri Michaux utilise sa volonté d'impuissance pour s'extraire de la tradition classique et du romantisme artistique et pour résister au monde qui l'entoure. Mais l'exploration de son intériorité et la modification de l'espace qu'elle impliquent le confrontent à l'universelle douleur de l'existence humaine. Le poète s'attache alors, malgré les blessures de sa vie, à apaiser son espace intérieur. Il s'inspire des philosophies asiatiques et de l'ancienne magie chamanique pour enchanter le monde. Il parvient à un art de guérison qui renouvelle la poésie par le recours aux déplacements et aux mutations de l'ailleurs poétique
Being "anywhere out of the world" as a poetical space, is a central concept of poetry. Henri Michaux, following Baudelaire and Rimbaud is one of the main explorers of the poetical space. The notion of a specific space of poetic and artistic creation is used to analyze how the poet transforms poetry. The real space of travel and the space of imagination in his poetry join together for a journey in which the poet reconciles with himself. Henri Michaux uses his will of weakness to escape the classical and romantic tradition and resist to the world around him. The exploration of his interiority, and the modification of space that it requires, make him confront to the universal pain of men. The poet, despite the wounds of his life, wants his inner space to be in peace. He bases his art on Asian philosophies and the ancient shamanic magic. He reaches a healing art which renews poetry by using of shifting and mutations of the poetic space