SubStance

SubStance 29.1 (2000) 157-159

Book Review

Francis Ponge:
De la connaissance en poésie

The working hypothesis of Sydney Lévy's Ponge is that poetry may help us come to know the world of phenomena, and that it may in some cases articulate that knowledge in a manner that might be called "scientific." This is a notion that will confound many readers of contemporary poetry--though it would surely have seemed utterly apt to Lucretius. Lévy is interested in the ways in which Ponge attempts to reduce the distance between experience and its representation, elaborating a textuality that does not offer a mere account of experience, but rather strives to produce experience through an experimental poetics. Reading Ponge's oeuvre as a synchronous whole, Lévy sees therein a profile of what he terms "une théorie de la connaissance plus ou moins explicite" (14).

He suggests that much of the originality of Francis Ponge's approach lies in his choice to focus his epistemological lens on the singular, rather than on the general, and he will argue that Ponge's rhetoric differs from traditional models precisely by virtue of that. Where classical rhetoric is general and generalizing, Ponge constructs a rhetoric that is specific to the object, changing terms each time his gaze embraces a new object. This idiosyncratic strategy permeates Ponge's writing, and affords it in turn a striking singularity of its own. Yet it is also methodical, rigorous, boldly heuristic--in a word, "scientific"; and Lévy will ask his reader to imagine [End Page 157] what a "science du singulier" might look like (15). It occurs to me that such a science might have a distinctly 'Pataphysical cast to it. Early in this century, Alfred Jarry's Faustroll remarked that "la pataphysique sera surtout la science du particulier, quoiqu'on dise qu'il n'y a de science que du général"; and Ponge's project, along with Lévy's reading thereof, mark them both as 'Pataphysicians malgré eux.

Such an impression is accentuated in Ponge's work by his insistence on the quiddity of the text, that is, by the way he proposes a cognition of the thing in a poem that itself pretends to thing-ness. Thus, he labors to create a poetic vocable which, in naming the thing, might become the thing that is named. Clearly, that's a very tall order; and all the more so since Ponge recognizes better than anyone that the linguistic sign is arbitrary, at least at the outset. Clearly, too, his literary vision is a literalist one. So is Sydney Lévy's vision, much to his credit, for in this study he has opted to follow the meanders of Ponge's literalist poetics with a tactful, canny literalism of his own, reminding his reader on several occasions that we must take Ponge's words "à la lettre" (16, 88, 95, 100, 134).

Conceiving Ponge's work as a vast, organic network of dialogical interconnections charting a passionate engagement with the real world of phenomena, Lévy borrows mapping metaphors from Jorge Luis Borges and Gregory Bateson in order to suggest what kind of shape that network might assume. Like Bateson, Ponge realizes that the map of the territory is not the territory; like Borges, he is aware that a wholly faithful map of the territory would be just as vast as the territory itself. Yet he senses that it is possible to work one's way toward such a map in good faith, if one agrees to keep two conditions in the foreground. First, the notion that any decent map must in some way account for its own presence on the territory it proposes to chart; second, that a good cartographer should try to get something of the territory--of the real, that is--into the map. Sydney Lévy's reading of Ponge proceeds according...