Papers by Olivier Hercend
Trans(in)fusion and Contemporary Thought: Thinking in Migration, 2023
One of the most thought-provoking ideas within Ranjan Ghosh's Trans(in)Fusion is a certain vision... more One of the most thought-provoking ideas within Ranjan Ghosh's Trans(in)Fusion is a certain vision of conflict, not in a dichotomy, against conciliation or communication, but as an essential part of the uninterrupted flux of exchanges taking place within the “liquid concrete”. Rejecting theories of chaos or general laissez-faire, Ghosh weaves intercourse and conflict together in a web of “cooperation with antagonism, stealth but within law, engagement with stress, commitment with contradiction, love, but not without the quarrel”, ultimately leading to a specific set of values and a form of praxis. I wish to argue that this provides an original intervention in the larger debate over the question of conflicts in interpretation and reading. Indeed, while Ghosh implicitly rejects the “utopian caprice” of Habermassian communicational ethics, he also asserts that construing conflicts over meaning as simple, well-defined struggles between different “sides” is an abusive simplification. I would like to argue that this reflection harmonizes with recent Marxist thought, especially with Jean-Jacques Lecercle's theory of “counter-interpellation” and ALTER model: both Ghosh and Lecercle work from the middle outwards, and theorize conflict within the very framework of exchange, rather than treating it as a subversion of the model. This perspective shifts the ethical implications of interpretation, from a system based on fidelity towards the original message and intersubjective good faith, towards a more complex notion of “decision making” and responsibility which “disowns the neutrality of understanding”. I would like to propose that the notion of “agonistics” and the conceptualisation of âgon help us better understand this specific plane, wherein the praxis of interpretation confronts the unruly fluctuations of the “liquid concrete”.
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Arts of War and Peace, 2023
Although war haunts the two authors in very different ways, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce concur... more Although war haunts the two authors in very different ways, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce concur on one fundamental point: they both endeavour to expose the ideological forces that divide people and prepare them to accept conflicts, with all their injustice and barbarity. Boys and young men in particular are taught to order and obey, to thrive on antagonism and self-identify through opposition to other groups. Drawing from the descriptions of Stephen’s and Jacob’s education in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Jacob’s Room, I will analyse how this subterranean yet pervasive influence is handled in both novels. As a matter of fact, from a very similar starting point, I will argue that the interactions which Joyce and Woolf choose to depict, and in particular the way in which their protagonists react to social pressures, beckon them in different directions. Faced with a war-torn Europe and a battered, divided Ireland, their denunciation of pre-war society highlights distinct artistic and social voices as poles of resistance, and these in turn underlie their stance towards reconstruction, on a personal as well as political plane.
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Études anglaises, 2022
Drawing on a distinction theorized by Bruno Latour, this article focuses on how modernist texts t... more Drawing on a distinction theorized by Bruno Latour, this article focuses on how modernist texts tend to divert attention from climactic actions toward the more complex networks of human and non-human agencies that underlie these actions. This trend encompasses very different processes, both narrative and poetic, which break up the centrality of characters. Instead of being defined by their choices, these are construed as focal points, reflexive nodes where influences collide. Using Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s concepts of “interpellation” and “counter-interpellation,” I argue that the strength of modernist characters lies in this decentred status: they are forced to construct their identities in a never-ending movement of interpretation and reappropriation of external agencies. Hence the reading scene, a moment of confrontation with written texts as well as other readers and social conventions, constitutes a paradigmatic trope: it epitomizes the tension inherent to reception, but also the potentialities for creative readings and self-expression, which modernist characters harness to come into their own.
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The Rhetoric of Literary Communication, 2022
The novels of James Joyce echo with voices of authority. From Father Arnall’s sermon overwhelming... more The novels of James Joyce echo with voices of authority. From Father Arnall’s sermon overwhelming the narration in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to the exhaustive catechism in the “Ithaca” episode of Ulysses, rhetoric and narrative devices direct the reader’s attention, framing scenes and questions which they seem to answer unfailingly. This has led some critics to construe a Joycean author-figure, like Lee Oser’s “mature Stephen,” directly interpellating the reader. However, upon closer inspection, this model reveals its permeability. Though they seem omniscient, the narrative voices leave parts of the world of Ulysses outside of their ken: for instance, when they depict Bloom standing in front of his door, having forgotten his key, he uses a “subterfuge” to enter, passing through a hitherto unmentioned window. Likewise, intertexts, wordplays and untold emotions teem at the margins, multiplying the possibilities for new interpretations, and highlighting the limits of explicit narrative directions. Within the Daedalian maze of Ulysses, authorial figures reveal the ambivalence of their interpellations. For instance, in the turmoil of Dublin’s night-town, Elijah’s prophecies dissolve in the laughter of a casino-croupier calling “faites vos jeux,” which resounds as an invitation to play with summons and authorities. Rather than accepting the addresses, I will argue that Joycean narratives, through laughter, ambivalence and undecidability, invite us to “counter-interpellate” them, in the words of Jean-Jacques Lecercle, that is to adopt other roles than that of addressee, and reshape their meaning. Following Jean-Michel Rabaté, I will focus on one such potential role for the readers: that of post-boys and girls, deciphering addresses as we roam through the text. Instead of being caught in the web of authoritative discourses, we can re-contextualize them, uncover their origins and subvert their trajectory. As such, though the rhetoric of the novel may be already written, we may choose how – and where! – to take it.
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Miranda, 2021
In this article, I will argue that, far from trying to prove or actualize Stephen's exceptional s... more In this article, I will argue that, far from trying to prove or actualize Stephen's exceptional status, Joyce's narrative in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man focuses instead on the process which this character undergoes, his intimate and complex drive to “except himself” from those around him, and the challenges which he faces in his endeavour. Through this progression, Joyce delineates a specific dialectics between the individuals and the powers that surround them, which ties in with his conceptions of literary authority as a whole. Against the worshippers of the Artist and the Author as a demiurgic character, he offers up a figure of elusiveness, always caught in a productive dialectics between the desire for transcendence and the irreducible multiplicity of common experience.
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Textual Practice, 2021
In Between the Acts, Virginia Woolf exposes a bleak and chilling vision of the police. Bulge, an ... more In Between the Acts, Virginia Woolf exposes a bleak and chilling vision of the police. Bulge, an actor disguised as a policeman, presents his work as a ‘whole-time, white man’s job’ supervising the toil and suffering of the oppressed. The violence of this statement begs the question: what was Woolf’s own attitude towards the police? In this respect, it is possible to find a certain continuity in her fiction. Although they mainly appear as banal, sometimes reassuring, background presences, policemen are also keepers of the social order. Their actions are shown to buttress ideological forces, especially those of patriarchy and Empire. However, this paper argues that Woolf’s understanding of the role of the police in relation with these powers evolved throughout her works – from a mere analogy in Jacob’s Room, to a much more concrete system of rituals and interpellations, resembling those theorised by Louis Althusser and Jean-Jacques Lecercle. Furthermore, this change in style accompanied a change in stance: as she realised the extent of ideological power on individuals, Woolf’s notion of resistance also shifted, from a focus on wandering and personal evasion to a more communal and political approach, which crystallised in a form of artistic ‘counterinterpellation’.
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Miranda, 2020
Within the canon of postwar “high” modernism, the question of the obscene is often framed in term... more Within the canon of postwar “high” modernism, the question of the obscene is often framed in terms of the artistic freedom to talk about sexuality and the body, and the status of indecency within literary works. However, this narrow focus only deals with the more visible facet of a broader tension, which pervades modernist aesthetics. Indeed, though such central works as The Waste Land or Ulysses are haunted by references to sexuality, scatology, perversity and violence, their relation to the obscene plays just as much on what is left hidden as on what is shown. Indeed, the word “ob-scene” may also refer to the boundary between the “scene” and its margins, between what is presented and what remains out of sight, and blurring such boundaries constitutes a fundamental modernist strategy. Artists such as Joyce and Eliot, but also the supposedly primmer Virginia Woolf, play with narrative or poetic framing, as well as the ambivalence of language, to signal towards what escapes the social and cultural boundaries of representation. Their works teem with veils and innuendos: cracks echoing behind closed doors (Woolf 1923, 124), cries disguised as the chirping of a bird (Eliot 1969, 58), or gasps and releases covered by the symbolic explosion of fireworks (Joyce 1922, 478), leaving traces from which another scene, another facet of the text, can be reconstituted. The obscene then becomes a form of appeal: through hints and enigmas, readers are called upon, led by curiosity or voyeuristic impulses to delve into sometimes fearful depths, where they can be confronted with mental suffering, alcoholism, rape and sexual aggression or the horrors of war, and made to reflect on their own blindness to these untold counter-narratives, hidden in plain sight. Without forcing these things upon us, the modernist aesthetics of the obscene break away from traditional framing, opening up the perspective towards what people want to hide, but also, crucially, to what we might have decided not to see.
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Angles, New Perspectives on the Anglophone World, 2020
From Michel Picard’s La lecture comme jeu to Umberto Eco’s model of the “game of chess”, reading ... more From Michel Picard’s La lecture comme jeu to Umberto Eco’s model of the “game of chess”, reading has often been compared to a kind of game. Games serve as a useful template of interaction, highlighting both the exterior set of rules governing an activity, and the agency that these rules leave to the individual. Yet games are also a constitutive human activity, with myriads of variants, from the free play of children to the gambler’s thrill to the highly ritualized sets of actions and reactions seen in martial arts or chess. This article proposes to review classical and contemporary theories of reading based on their specific use of the metaphor of reading as a game. It first presents the structuralist and phenomenological approaches, which tend to define reading as a performance based on pre-established rules, like a game of chess. It then delves into theories that instead choose to highlight the incalculable aspect of every new reading, the possibility for the reader to go off the beaten path. These tend to see reading more as a game of chance than a game of chess. This does not mean, however, that they construe reading as licentious: gambles involve stakes. Theories like Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s Marxist pragmatics are most specific in explaining what the reader is actually committing to. The stance we take, our interaction with texts as “interpellations”, are part and parcel of our lives as social and political beings. They are the products of a certain context, but they may in turn influence or call into question the very structures that make them possible. This is why this article suggests reading be examined through the notion of agonistics. Taking up the ancient Greek word “agôn”, which implies that games are forms of trial made to reveal something of the player’s nature, the agonistics of reading posits that reading must not be seen as an isolated phenomenon. On the contrary, the challenge that texts pose, to confront them or to accept them, is fundamental in the construction of our identity as readers and as human beings. This dialectics of self-revelation and self-construction, through the interaction with texts, is the often unspoken yet decisive game that every reader plays.
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Etudes Britanniques Contemporaines, 2019
A defining trait of post-war modernism is its newfound awareness towards the ambivalence of readi... more A defining trait of post-war modernism is its newfound awareness towards the ambivalence of reading. Authors such as T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf analyse and dramatise the potential for subversion which underlies the interaction with written texts. From Stephen Dedalus’s youthful passion for novels to Burbank’s Baedeker or the poems that Mrs Ramsay reads in To the Lighthouse, reading is construed as an instance of interaction, going beyond rational exchange and potentially eluding all control. This resistance towards programmed reception fosters a form of “danger”, inherent to the act of reading, which can be liberating, but also destabilising. Moreover, it highlights the question of a form of textual violence, which is apparent in the subversion of codes, but also in the mechanisms of institutional control that limit interpretation. Modernists authors, though conscious of these risks, respond by integrating danger in their aesthetics, leaving it up to readers themselves to confront the bewildering, yet nonetheless fascinating, mysteries of their writings.
Le modernisme d’après-guerre se caractérise par une prise de conscience vis-à-vis des ambivalences de la lecture. Des auteurs comme T.S. Eliot, James Joyce ou Virginia Woolf analysent et mettent en scène le potentiel subversif du rapport au texte. De l’intérêt du jeune Stephen Dedalus pour les romans au Baedeker de Burbank ou aux poèmes que lit Mrs Ramsay dans To the Lighthouse, la lecture devient une instance d’interaction, dont le potentiel dépasse le simple échange rationnel et peut échapper à tout contrôle. Cette capacité à résister à la programmation, ce « danger » inhérent à la lecture, peut alors être libérateur, mais aussi déstabilisant. En effet, il fait apparaître une forme spécifique de violence textuelle, qui sous-tend la subversion, mais aussi les mécanismes de contrôle institutionnel de l’interprétation. Conscients de ces écueils, les auteurs modernistes choisissent chacun à leur façon d’intégrer le danger à leur esthétique, et de laisser le lecteur se confronter de façon autonome aux déroutants, mais aussi attrayants, mystères de leurs écrits.
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Etudes Anglaises, 2015
Taking up David Trotter’s Cinema and Modernism, this article emphasises the strong links that exi... more Taking up David Trotter’s Cinema and Modernism, this article emphasises the strong links that exist between Virginia Woolf’s thoughts on cinema and the new techniques and notions that she develops in “The Mark on the Wall.” Indeed, her depiction of the mind’s process fosters the image of a fragmented world, a succession of images that come under no authoritative order or meaning : a mere montage. But cinema also contains the promise of an artistic answer to the fragmentation of the modern condition. Through a renewal of textual co-operation, Woolf opens her reader to the possibilities of what I choose to call an “aesthetics of juxtaposition.”
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Conference Presentations by Olivier Hercend
La Lecture littéraire dans tous ses états, 2019
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock offre à son lecteur une forme de défi pragmatique : comprend... more The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock offre à son lecteur une forme de défi pragmatique : comprendre qui, ou ce qui, parle. Car derrière le foisonnement de marques indiquant des prises de parole autoritaires, The Love Song décrit un personnage effectivement incapable d'assumer l'acte de parler. Prufrock veut s'exprimer, atteindre une interlocutrice par la force des mots. Mais il se heurte à la peur d'une « contre-interpellation » (“The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase”). Confronté à l'incompréhension, à la possibilité d'être caricaturé (“how his arms and legs are thin!”) ou réduit à l'absurde (“Almost, at times, the Fool”), il semble paralysé. Et pourtant sa voix résonne dans l'espace du poème.
Incapable de se risquer à prononcer une seule parole, Prufrock choisit d'en faire jouer plusieurs, de les animer dans l'espace du non-dit et de l'hypothétique. Les incises, les digressions, les élans soudains qui dans l'énonciation seraient signes de faiblesse deviennent alors les ressorts d'un jeu poétique résolument moderne. Ils redéfinissent en particulier la situation de réception du poème : à la parole proférée et autoritaire de la poésie classique, The Love Song oppose une parole élusive, un jeu de pistes face auquel la lecture doit se construire par ses propres choix. La parole poétique est narrativisée, départie de son aura d'inspiration météorique et ramenée à la prolifération muette d'où elle surgit vraiment.
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Written for the International T.S. Eliot Society Conference in Rapallo, June 2016
As Hugh Kenner... more Written for the International T.S. Eliot Society Conference in Rapallo, June 2016
As Hugh Kenner remarked in The Invisible Poet, Eliot's criticism is closely related to his poetry in that it created appropriate conditions for the reception of his own works. This concerns the inscription of every poem within a wider cultural framework, paving the way for the web of quotations and collages in The Waste Land. I wish to argue that The Sacred Wood also beckons its readers into adopting a new stance towards their cultural heritage. Far from advocating blind respect towards the past, Eliot asserts the right of the writer, critic and reader alike to play an active part in the construction of its meaning. In doing so, he implicitly suggests a certain vision of the act of reading, which I will endeavour to expose.
With this goal in mind, I will focus on three figures that appear in The Sacred Wood. The first is Blake, whose “genius” comes from his untamed constructive ability. The comparison of his poems to “home-made furniture” fosters the question of re-appropriation, of “bricolage” in Eliot's reflection on poetry. But such “bricolage” is by no means arbitrary. The preference for Dante over Blake stems from the systematicity of the latter's web of images and the cultural depth of his underlying world-view. This explains the choice of Aristotle as the model critic: by defining his intelligence as the creation of links between sensations and principles, Eliot does two things. He gives sanction to his own theory of the poet's synthetic ability, under the heading of the concept of “intelligence”. But most of all, he asserts a new reading of Aristotle, against the dogmatic reading of his “sectaries”. In the light of his re-reading of tradition in The Waste Land, such an appeal to intelligence, as a free but grounded relation to the past, synthesising it in new, original ways, should in my view be interpreted as a statement of intentions.
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Book Reviews by Olivier Hercend
Arts of War and Peace, 2023
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Etudes britanniques contemporaines, 2023
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Études britanniques contemporaines
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Transatlantica, 2018
Compte-rendu de la journée d’études internationale OVALE, Sorbonne-Université - 28 mai 2019
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Conference Organization by Olivier Hercend
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Books by Olivier Hercend
Ellipses, 2023
Monument de la poésie anglophone, pilier du modernisme et figure incontournable de la critique, T... more Monument de la poésie anglophone, pilier du modernisme et figure incontournable de la critique, T.S. Eliot reste, un siècle après la publication de son œuvre la plus connue, The Waste Land (1922), une des pierres angulaires de la littérature anglophone. La richesse et la complexité de son œuvre ont nourri un dialogue à travers les pays et les années, dont le foisonnement ne se dément toujours pas. Le défi pour celles et ceux qui tentent de le découvrir est alors double : il s’agit à la fois de s’immerger dans des textes d’une profondeur parfois labyrinthique, en résistant à la gêne et à la perplexité qui peuvent naître de ce périple, et de se retrouver dans un corpus secondaire immense, où chaque détail de l’œuvre peut mener à d’ardentes controverses. Néanmoins, le jeu en vaut la chandelle, pour la perspective sans égale qu’Eliot apporte sur une époque, littéraire autant qu’historique, de basculement dans la modernité, mais surtout pour l’expérience esthétique unique qui surgit de cette quête de sens toujours renouvelée.
Ce livre, destiné en premier lieu aux agrégatifs, offre une porte d’entrée dans l’univers de T.S. Eliot, à travers le prisme des poèmes du recueil Collected Poems 1909-1962, jusqu’aux Unfinished Poems. Il propose une approche panoramique, alliant des synthèses sur les points les plus importants de la vie et de l’œuvre d’Eliot, y compris sur l’intertexte inépuisable de ses poèmes, des réflexions élargies sur les problématiques critiques, génériques voire philosophiques que soulèvent ses textes, et des considérations pratiques, pour permettre d’entrer de façon autonome dans la lecture et l’analyse, en dépassant les obstacles qui ont valu à Eliot la réputation d’être un poète difficile. Car en définitive, l’important, pour quiconque cherche une véritable rencontre avec cette poésie, n’est pas d’accumuler le savoir acquis par les autres, mais de s’en armer pour entreprendre sa propre lecture.
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Classiques Garnier, 2023
By examining James Joyce’s, Virginia Woolf’s, and T. S. Eliot’s relationship to reading, this stu... more By examining James Joyce’s, Virginia Woolf’s, and T. S. Eliot’s relationship to reading, this study brings together a historical reflection and a revival of theories on reception, hermeneutics, and post-structuralism, in order to envisage a properly modernist economy of reading.
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Papers by Olivier Hercend
Le modernisme d’après-guerre se caractérise par une prise de conscience vis-à-vis des ambivalences de la lecture. Des auteurs comme T.S. Eliot, James Joyce ou Virginia Woolf analysent et mettent en scène le potentiel subversif du rapport au texte. De l’intérêt du jeune Stephen Dedalus pour les romans au Baedeker de Burbank ou aux poèmes que lit Mrs Ramsay dans To the Lighthouse, la lecture devient une instance d’interaction, dont le potentiel dépasse le simple échange rationnel et peut échapper à tout contrôle. Cette capacité à résister à la programmation, ce « danger » inhérent à la lecture, peut alors être libérateur, mais aussi déstabilisant. En effet, il fait apparaître une forme spécifique de violence textuelle, qui sous-tend la subversion, mais aussi les mécanismes de contrôle institutionnel de l’interprétation. Conscients de ces écueils, les auteurs modernistes choisissent chacun à leur façon d’intégrer le danger à leur esthétique, et de laisser le lecteur se confronter de façon autonome aux déroutants, mais aussi attrayants, mystères de leurs écrits.
Conference Presentations by Olivier Hercend
Incapable de se risquer à prononcer une seule parole, Prufrock choisit d'en faire jouer plusieurs, de les animer dans l'espace du non-dit et de l'hypothétique. Les incises, les digressions, les élans soudains qui dans l'énonciation seraient signes de faiblesse deviennent alors les ressorts d'un jeu poétique résolument moderne. Ils redéfinissent en particulier la situation de réception du poème : à la parole proférée et autoritaire de la poésie classique, The Love Song oppose une parole élusive, un jeu de pistes face auquel la lecture doit se construire par ses propres choix. La parole poétique est narrativisée, départie de son aura d'inspiration météorique et ramenée à la prolifération muette d'où elle surgit vraiment.
As Hugh Kenner remarked in The Invisible Poet, Eliot's criticism is closely related to his poetry in that it created appropriate conditions for the reception of his own works. This concerns the inscription of every poem within a wider cultural framework, paving the way for the web of quotations and collages in The Waste Land. I wish to argue that The Sacred Wood also beckons its readers into adopting a new stance towards their cultural heritage. Far from advocating blind respect towards the past, Eliot asserts the right of the writer, critic and reader alike to play an active part in the construction of its meaning. In doing so, he implicitly suggests a certain vision of the act of reading, which I will endeavour to expose.
With this goal in mind, I will focus on three figures that appear in The Sacred Wood. The first is Blake, whose “genius” comes from his untamed constructive ability. The comparison of his poems to “home-made furniture” fosters the question of re-appropriation, of “bricolage” in Eliot's reflection on poetry. But such “bricolage” is by no means arbitrary. The preference for Dante over Blake stems from the systematicity of the latter's web of images and the cultural depth of his underlying world-view. This explains the choice of Aristotle as the model critic: by defining his intelligence as the creation of links between sensations and principles, Eliot does two things. He gives sanction to his own theory of the poet's synthetic ability, under the heading of the concept of “intelligence”. But most of all, he asserts a new reading of Aristotle, against the dogmatic reading of his “sectaries”. In the light of his re-reading of tradition in The Waste Land, such an appeal to intelligence, as a free but grounded relation to the past, synthesising it in new, original ways, should in my view be interpreted as a statement of intentions.
Book Reviews by Olivier Hercend
Conference Organization by Olivier Hercend
Books by Olivier Hercend
Ce livre, destiné en premier lieu aux agrégatifs, offre une porte d’entrée dans l’univers de T.S. Eliot, à travers le prisme des poèmes du recueil Collected Poems 1909-1962, jusqu’aux Unfinished Poems. Il propose une approche panoramique, alliant des synthèses sur les points les plus importants de la vie et de l’œuvre d’Eliot, y compris sur l’intertexte inépuisable de ses poèmes, des réflexions élargies sur les problématiques critiques, génériques voire philosophiques que soulèvent ses textes, et des considérations pratiques, pour permettre d’entrer de façon autonome dans la lecture et l’analyse, en dépassant les obstacles qui ont valu à Eliot la réputation d’être un poète difficile. Car en définitive, l’important, pour quiconque cherche une véritable rencontre avec cette poésie, n’est pas d’accumuler le savoir acquis par les autres, mais de s’en armer pour entreprendre sa propre lecture.
Le modernisme d’après-guerre se caractérise par une prise de conscience vis-à-vis des ambivalences de la lecture. Des auteurs comme T.S. Eliot, James Joyce ou Virginia Woolf analysent et mettent en scène le potentiel subversif du rapport au texte. De l’intérêt du jeune Stephen Dedalus pour les romans au Baedeker de Burbank ou aux poèmes que lit Mrs Ramsay dans To the Lighthouse, la lecture devient une instance d’interaction, dont le potentiel dépasse le simple échange rationnel et peut échapper à tout contrôle. Cette capacité à résister à la programmation, ce « danger » inhérent à la lecture, peut alors être libérateur, mais aussi déstabilisant. En effet, il fait apparaître une forme spécifique de violence textuelle, qui sous-tend la subversion, mais aussi les mécanismes de contrôle institutionnel de l’interprétation. Conscients de ces écueils, les auteurs modernistes choisissent chacun à leur façon d’intégrer le danger à leur esthétique, et de laisser le lecteur se confronter de façon autonome aux déroutants, mais aussi attrayants, mystères de leurs écrits.
Incapable de se risquer à prononcer une seule parole, Prufrock choisit d'en faire jouer plusieurs, de les animer dans l'espace du non-dit et de l'hypothétique. Les incises, les digressions, les élans soudains qui dans l'énonciation seraient signes de faiblesse deviennent alors les ressorts d'un jeu poétique résolument moderne. Ils redéfinissent en particulier la situation de réception du poème : à la parole proférée et autoritaire de la poésie classique, The Love Song oppose une parole élusive, un jeu de pistes face auquel la lecture doit se construire par ses propres choix. La parole poétique est narrativisée, départie de son aura d'inspiration météorique et ramenée à la prolifération muette d'où elle surgit vraiment.
As Hugh Kenner remarked in The Invisible Poet, Eliot's criticism is closely related to his poetry in that it created appropriate conditions for the reception of his own works. This concerns the inscription of every poem within a wider cultural framework, paving the way for the web of quotations and collages in The Waste Land. I wish to argue that The Sacred Wood also beckons its readers into adopting a new stance towards their cultural heritage. Far from advocating blind respect towards the past, Eliot asserts the right of the writer, critic and reader alike to play an active part in the construction of its meaning. In doing so, he implicitly suggests a certain vision of the act of reading, which I will endeavour to expose.
With this goal in mind, I will focus on three figures that appear in The Sacred Wood. The first is Blake, whose “genius” comes from his untamed constructive ability. The comparison of his poems to “home-made furniture” fosters the question of re-appropriation, of “bricolage” in Eliot's reflection on poetry. But such “bricolage” is by no means arbitrary. The preference for Dante over Blake stems from the systematicity of the latter's web of images and the cultural depth of his underlying world-view. This explains the choice of Aristotle as the model critic: by defining his intelligence as the creation of links between sensations and principles, Eliot does two things. He gives sanction to his own theory of the poet's synthetic ability, under the heading of the concept of “intelligence”. But most of all, he asserts a new reading of Aristotle, against the dogmatic reading of his “sectaries”. In the light of his re-reading of tradition in The Waste Land, such an appeal to intelligence, as a free but grounded relation to the past, synthesising it in new, original ways, should in my view be interpreted as a statement of intentions.
Ce livre, destiné en premier lieu aux agrégatifs, offre une porte d’entrée dans l’univers de T.S. Eliot, à travers le prisme des poèmes du recueil Collected Poems 1909-1962, jusqu’aux Unfinished Poems. Il propose une approche panoramique, alliant des synthèses sur les points les plus importants de la vie et de l’œuvre d’Eliot, y compris sur l’intertexte inépuisable de ses poèmes, des réflexions élargies sur les problématiques critiques, génériques voire philosophiques que soulèvent ses textes, et des considérations pratiques, pour permettre d’entrer de façon autonome dans la lecture et l’analyse, en dépassant les obstacles qui ont valu à Eliot la réputation d’être un poète difficile. Car en définitive, l’important, pour quiconque cherche une véritable rencontre avec cette poésie, n’est pas d’accumuler le savoir acquis par les autres, mais de s’en armer pour entreprendre sa propre lecture.