107

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"LATERREUR D'ECRIRE": THE PRIMEVAL
EXPERIENCE OF LANGUAGE IN THE POETRY
OF JACQUES DUPIN
Jacques Dupin mav be viewed foremost as a |}<>et of coiifioniaiion who
seeks to disturb and challenge his reader, constantly lewoiking wit Inn his
writings a number of themes whose ultimate focus o\ei ihe veai> lias been
language iLself Images and actions evoked within his poeirv may be seen, at
times, as obsessional, encompassing ferocious figments which gather upon
the darker fringes of consciousness For him, language is mextricablv linked
to the haunting mysteries of a primeval past, a past which max \ye
resurrected, articulated and exorcised through the troubling dynamic s of the
poem, but not without repeated torment and toil, the two-edged "alle'gresse,
creve-cceur, du recommencement" ' Language, both treacheious in its
present degraded state and miraculous in its infinite raw potential, provides
an "oblique descent"- into the past, into enigmatic usions and impulses
which, embedded in the self, seem to stem from elusive origins and possess
us in the present.
Frequently the images which emerge through this writing from such an
exploration of man's unrecorded roots and his disquieting inheritance (of
which language itself is pail), disturb b\ nature of their nightmarish
intensitv, their ability to con\e\ in an uncompromising manner the more
problematic aspects of a psyche conunualh associated with the incoherence,
the venom, of a monstrous underground world.
This aspect of Dupin's work has been noted in particular bv Jean-Pierre
Richard, who describes the conflicting values of this underworld as a place of
extinction and regeneration, its close association with the darker workings of
language and with the central figure of the woman so frequendy evoked in
the text. According to Richard, the underworld signifies for Dupin "le site
conjugu£ de l'abolition, de l'abri cherche' contre cette abolition, et d'une
possible renaissance",' a place that dislocates, destroys and remakes, vet
without insuring against further rupture and reversal of any final positive
outcome It is, however, in Richard's view, a place through which language
must pass if it is to find "la saveur, l'ardeurd'un nouveau sens", and thus he
develops the notion of a "grande akhimie souterraine", 4 one which, in turn,
he associates with "l'obscurit£ biologique [...] d'une chair amoureuse","' that,
so often present in Dupin's work, of the woman who, inhabiting this
nocturnal underworld, acts as an essenual mediator while bringing to the
fore, as an image, a very real sense of the erotic play, the jubilant life-force,
provided by language.
Our study will develop the important relationship between language, the
underworld and die woman, this in the way it pertains to Dupin's concepuon
 108
of writing as an act and as an art, from his earliest texts right up to his most
recent works. Richard has stressed, as have other critics,6 the constant, at
times frenzied struggle that gives Dupin's texts their distinctive momentum,

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the plunge into the dislocating energy of the primeval, the pursuit of the
woman who has "une vocation bouleversante et n£gatrice",7 the wrestle with
the opacity of language from which these images proceed. We shall focus
further on this struggle, emphasising Dupin's central preoccupation with the
workings of language itself, for it is an insistent and rigorous quesuoning of
the material he uses and of how he uses it that founds his text, a text often
turned in upon itself in derisive self-negation.
We shall see moreover how the link between the creative act and a descent
into a fearful underworld expresses the powerful and very disturbing
emotional impact that Dupin's enterprise exercises on him: the act of writing
becomes one of terror, an almost deadly wager, where the prospect of
renewal and rebirth is continally offset by the threat of total immersion in
chaos andfinalextincuon. Thus in "La Ligne de rupture", a text added to the
joint volume of Grow and L'Embrasure, and also pubLshed in Dehors, Dupin
states his near-enslavement to a process which eludes yet terrifies him:
"simplement la terreur d'£cnre malgre l'inflexion du soir / le signe, qui nous
force a l'ecouter hors de toute saisie".8 And in the more recent De singes et de
mouches, published in 1983, Dupin gives a description of the fear that actually
motivates for him the poetic act, each word acting as a knife with which to
pierce, extract and thus bring forth into expression a state of inner tumult:
. . . j'ecris quand
dans la distance
sous les engrais de l'angoisse
gicle la peur
qui n'a plus que mots
que couteaux
pour £talonner la douleur9
However, throughout his work, Dupin's positive objective is equally clear.
Terror is countered by the possibility of eventual release and recovery.
"Briser le r£seau de nos peurs entrecroisees, monter de notre rire, de notre
mort":10 this is the poet's aim as stated in "Un recit", an important text from
the 1975 volume Dehors. And again in his 1982 book Ujie apparence de
soupirad, Dupin describes a language whose powers are revealed anew, a
language now capable of healing and renewing our very being, "naitre",
"etre" and "lettre" being all tightly associated uhrough careful punning in the
one revitalising process:
Naitre. N'etre que silex. Scintillement du tranchant de la lettre. Edat
de l'etre. A la surface humide des labours."
With this ideal in mind, Dupin seeks to push language to its very limits and,
in so doing, hopes to renew its value as an instrument of regeneration and
 109
immediate ontological exchange with other vital surrounding forces.
However, first he must battle the frightening domain that language in its
present state, opaque and rigidly fixed, seems to construct almost of its own

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accord as a stifling and imprisoning labyrinth of enclosure. Against this he
must react, aggressively and incisively, even though beset with fear and
doubt in the knowledge that his struggle necessitates a loss of all personal
security, an open avowal of, and purposeful affiliation with, all that is
potentially harmful and hateful to the self.12 Indeed, for Dupin, to write is to
envisage the very abolition of self, release oneself from pinioning constraint
by way of direct encounter with, and blinding passage through, the visceral
reality of death.
It is to this side of his writing that we shall now turn, giving careful
consideration to the complexity of separate works and individual texts
therein.
Initially we shall examine in general Dupin's metaphorical account of his
struggle with language, those images and shifting nuances of image through
which he voices die ceaseless wresting of fragmentary yet unhindered pulses
of meaning from the oppressive mass of words inertly stratified through past
and present. Following this we shall more specifically consider three recent
works of Dupin and this from two complementary standpoints: first, from
the point of view of the pragmatics of the struggle in question as regards
actual formal technique and radical stylistic variation utilised to engender
problematic modes of expression and, through these, eventually, a
revitalised "parole"; and second, with reference to Dupin's dramatic
depiction of his creauve onslaught by means of multiple images and
impressions that issue forth from such spasmodic structure and constantly
diversified form. Such is the text that, self-reflexive and self-reductive, it
never ceases to pitch the very act of writing in all its imperfection against an
ideal conception of die written word. The struggle, then, is one that, even as
it brings forth form, questions this form through the flickering trace of
meaning/non-meaning, the discordance of an "illisibilite' chgnotante"'3
which the text is made to embody as an essential and disruptive component
of its figurative constructs, constructs thus rendered enigmatic, ambiguous
or, so the reader must feel, scarcely comprehensible. Yet at die same time,
dirough die inevitable "creve-coeur, du recommencement", certain patterns
of reiterauon and currents of variation may be tentatively grasped, and it is
these that we shall now examine.

From the veryfirstpoems oiCendner du voyage, published in 1950, right up

to die recent texts of Les Meres and Contumace, bodi published in 1986, Dupin
endeavours to evoke, through die torturous process of language, a fearful
underground world associated with a powerful feminine presence. In
Ccndner du voyage, the poet is avid to discover "les secrets des dessous de la
vie",14 life's underside secrets which the woman figure appears to guard; in
 110
her he detects the trembling of "le grand chaos pnmitif",1' a primal
movement rooted in the entropy of terse dislocation, providing the very
foice, the necessary drive, for his own creative impulse. Repressed ancestral

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tensions are unleashed as language unlocks the more unavowed and atavistic
realms of the mind, while the generative process is paradoxically linked to
bloody sacnfice and murderous hbidinal instinct. The text "Qui verra ira",
situated towards the end of this short book, is afineexample of the swarming
and conflicting impressions that surround the central enigmatic presence of
the woman, seen at once as dexourer and life-giver, as source of deadly
venom and ineffable beauty, bringing extinction and renewal in her wake:
[.. .1 la Heur que ta lev re attire en secret, c'est d'une inconnue la bouche
incestueuse qui, pe'ne'trant ta chair et ton refus, te confie les musicales
reticences et unintelligible axeu de sa xoix qui se rdcuse . . .
. . Sa xoix pourtant, elle seule, dans le ddsespoir d'un unique baiser
plonge et meuit - un baiser qui fond sur le cceur comme tine rose
anxieuse et lourde de xenin —, plonge et ne pent mounr.
ARM'S, dans ta patienie poitrine commence de rire et de touniover un
soleil lxre-mort, un chancre trop humain xoue a ta de\ oration, - a ta
renaissance xiolente!"'
The process depicted in this text is dialectical, as "plonge et meuit" gnes
way to "plonge et ne pent mounr", "ta de\ oration" to "ta renaissance
xiolente". Tins is, in fact, an essential mode of Dupin's xvnting, and later, in
De singes et de mouches, he describes this tendencx of his poem to swing
between opposite poles entrenched in consciousness as
un non-oui oscillant
de branche a branche de feuille
h m - e t secouant
le crible du sommeil
In "Qui xeiTa ira", as elsewhere, through the fearful mediator of the
woman, her incestuous dexounng mouth, her xenomous kiss and her abilitx
to intoxicate and transport her x ictim, there is a passage from life to death to
violent rebirth, from knoxdedge to the unknowable, from that which has
been named to that xvhich has no name, or, as Dupin expresses it here, to the
"recueil mforme des choses sans noms", the shapeless gathering of things
unnamed.
We are reminded of Rimbaud, x\hose Illuminations seem to haxe had a
determining influence on Dupin; and indeed L'ne apjxtience de soupnad is
named after a line in "Enfance", a text xvhich also depicts an underground
xvorld xvherein the poet takes refuge only to xvitness die strange intrusion of
the minimal suggestion of light upon this tomblike interior '" In "Apres le
deUuge", the first text of the Illuminations, we learn that only through further
destruction, the second advent of the Flood, can the magical properties of a
primal name-free world be resurrected. As in Dupin's poem, forbidden
knoxvledge is seen to belong to an earthy feminine figure: "La Reine, la
 Ill
Sorciere qui allume sa braise dans le pot de terre, ne voudra jamais nous
raconter ce qu'elle sait, et que nous ignorons".18 The feminine presence,
largely inaccessible, largely unidentifiable - she is "une inconnue" in Dupin's

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text -, holds die key to renewed vigour, but contact with her involves
suffering and horror, the facing of deadi and its hideous manifestations in
order to gain access to die resplendent possibility of an uninhibited,
rekindled life-force.
In his book The Great Mother, Eric Neumann analyses different facets of the
maternal archetype, a dynamic inward image which he sees at work in the
human psyche down through die ages. It is on reading his chapter based on
die negative elementary character of die Terrible Modier19 diat certain
important features relating to die feminine presence in Dupin's works can be
better understood. Neumann relates die symbolism of die Terrible Modier
to die unconscious, characterised as feminine widiin patriarchal society and
opposed to lucid consciousness, experienced as masculine, this symbolic
gender division being true for bodi men and women widiin die one society:
The symbolism of die Terrible Modier draws its images
predominandy from the "inside"; diat is to say, die negative
elementary character of die Feminine expresses itself in fantastic and
chimerical images diat do not originate in die outside world. The
reason for diis is diat die Terrible Female is a symbol for die
unconscious. And die dark side of die Terrible Modier takes die form
of monsters, whedier in Egypt or India, Mexico or Etruria, Bali or
Rome. [. . .] The dark half of die black-and-white cosmic egg
represendng die Archetypal Feminine engenders terrible figures diat
manifest die black, abysmal side of life and die human psyche. Just as
world, life, nature, and soul have been experienced as a generauve and
nourishing, protecting and warming Femininity, so dieir opposites are
also perceived in die image of die Feminine; deadi and destruction,
danger and distress, hunger and nakedness, appear as helplessness in
die presence of die Dark and Terrible Modier.2"
Gadiering specific examples, Neumann proceeds to a detailed descripdon of
die various embodiments of diis archetype in different cultures. For
example, we are told diat in India a function of die modier goddess was, and
still is, as an underworld deity concerned alike widi die corpse and die seed
corn buried beneadi die earth, a goddess who in her hideous aspect
demanded sacrificial sap, die blood of decapitated offerings, so diat, in her
gracious manifestation, she could bestow new life and guarantee a process of
unfailing generation.21
It is this Dark and Terrible Modier who so frequendy haunts die poetry of
Dupin. Images of die dark undenvorld side of die modier abound in his texts
and, widi diem, for example, die associatedfiguresof die vulture, die rat, die
spider, die labyrindi, die number seven. And yet, even as he confronts widi
terror die menacingfiguresand archetypes of an enigmadc prehistory which
die workings of language can so mercilessly stir, Dupin constandy presents
die hope of final deliverance, as in "Ballast", where images portraying die
 112
tortuous passage through the underworld are dispelled by the final promise
of triumphant extraction:
le pic arachne"en de"livre - ou de"tache

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une perpe"tuelle foudre du gisement
vers l'ducidation du labyrindie, ainsi le corps
s'e'loignant des rives, du tumulte,
pour un transparent travail d'extraction . . . ~
Language is for Dupin the privileged medium for exorcism of past
collective experience. It is language which shows itself capable of revealing
the secrets of die Terrible Modier, of die fertilised earth, of die whole
generadve process, as it retains die almost osmotic power to gauge die dark
otherness of ourselves and of the surrounding external world. Dupin's 1975
volume Dehors provides us with an intense reflecdon on language bodi as an
autonomous resistant process (its elements exist prior to individual being
and, to a large extent, are independent of individual human will)23 and as an
essendally human act (it can only articulate itself dirough being and
dierefore is inseparable from all diat drives, and is in turn acted upon by,
being). In "Le Soleil subsume"", die second text of die volume, die poet
describes how language communicates as a magnedsing substance widi
hidden external forces once again linked to an underground world, forces
dius channelled through wridng and made available to being:
Entendre, ou sentir . . . ce qui gronde dans le sous-sol, sous la feuille
de'chire'e, sous nos pas. Et voudrait s'e"lever, - s'e'cnre. Et atdre
l'e"criture, lui injecte son intensity, son incoherence .. ,24
Yet wridng is nofjust a passive act of transcribing or recording. It also
involves die harsh unleashing of die innately destructive forces captured
widiin language, forces against which, if renewal is to take place, die poet
must exert stubborn resistance while being acted upon as vicdm:
Sendr, de'couvrir, ce qui est, ce qui £tait deia, sans etre, la, et qui brule
en nous traversant, qui n'est souffert qu'en s e"crivant, et ne s'e"crirait pas
sans l'ouverture qu'un coup25de folie fore dans l'opacite" du re"el. Sans
l'orgasme et sans la blessure.
In Dehors as in odier volumes, die forces diat language propagates and
reveals to die individual are often characterised 'as part of a threatening
feminine presence. It is as die poet writes diat he perceives, as in "Qui verra
ira", diis odier feminine voice communicating to him fearful mysteries,
overwhelming his very subjectivity as an embodiment of deadi, enclosing
him in her destrucdve womb, in a knot diat direatens to strangle him.
Indeed, die combination of elements such as water, sleep and deadi is quite
frequent diroughout Dupin's works as an image of die imprisoning earth-
womb, from Gravir ("La terreur conduit sous terre ma semence/L'e'claire et
la refroidit")26 right up to Une apparence de soupirail ("L'eau ruisselle, je
m'endors. Notre incursion re'ite're'e' dans la mort")27 and Les Meres ("Toi, le
 113
ventre £norme, extasie, dont la soufflerie expulse un torrent de sable, et la
mort.. . ""J.28 Yet, behind these monstrous images of death and destruction

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evoked through language, remains the will to gather our unformulated fears
which echo through the present as part of a dark heritage, and to renew, by
means of necessarily violent upheaval and exorcism, the broad spectrum of
human possibilities.29
Just as the poet is made to confront the knot of his own death through
language, so too he can use the stranglehold of language to quash the
monstrous voice which, a product of the ages, seems to articulate itself
destructively within his being as part of consciousness. Such is the message of
"Un re'cit" in Dehors:
que faire de sa langue, mel£e, deja, a la mienne, effrayante,
inconnue, — seule vivante encore —
sinon la brancher sur
d'anciennes histoires, l'enraciner a des mottes de terre calcinees et
pretes a reverdir, la conduire aux monstruosites, a des bribes de fictions
rem£morees
- pour la replonger dans la
gorge, l'asservir a la merae jouissance angulaire,
et resserrer
le nceud jusqu'a l'dtranglement30
"Sa langue[. . .Jeffrayante", "anaennes histoires", "bribes de fictions
rem£morees": the voice which sweeps a monstrous past on into the present
is inseparable from these "histoires" and "fictions" constructed through
language. In fact, it is the very product of language itself and thus through
language may be abolished.
Myth, legend and fiction, governed and shaped by the workings of
language, become the medium for the voicing of all past human experience
but, acung as an impasse to all present human progress, must be dismantled
and abolished. The figure of the Terrible Mother is less a presence in itself
than a product of language, inseparable from the present degraded state of
words which, according to Dupin, have lost their revitalising capacities and
have now, mere vehicles for oppression and criminal exploitation within a
reified society, come to signify death in their opacity and inertness. As Dupin
states in "Un reat", rather than a terrible supernatural presence, it is
language itself and its corrupt products which inhabit the underworld and
threaten to engulf the individual in a living death: "Meme sous l'epaisseur de
terre et de rocs, la sedimentation d'ecrits avortes qui font barrage, qui pesent
sur le souffle, demantelent un corps, menacent de l'ensevelir".31 And in "Ou
meurtres", also contained in Dehors, Dupin clearly restates his purpose in
terms of bodily resurrection from a deathlike, tomblike language: "Extraire
le corps / de sa gangue de terre / brulee, de terre /-ecrite".32
The earth-womb which entombs the psyche is one of language, and work
upon language will, according to Dupin, afford collective regeneration. As
 114
the spider spins the verbal labyrinth of the underworld, so the rat will chew
his every thread. The poet is the rat: "Moi, le rat qui ronge le fil, et broudle
la trame";M his objective: to create 'le calque/d'une l£gende rompue",34 the

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copy of a broken legend. From fragmentation and dispersion of language's
morbid fixity, a process pf extraction and transformation can develop and
triumph. '
Let us now look briefly, in the light of this struggle with language, at three
of Dupin's recent works: Une apparence de soupirail (1982), De singes et de
mouches (1983) and Les Meres (1986). However, before proceeding to further
analysis of Dupin's depiction of writing as hellish delving and violent rupture,
we shall concentrate on the formal aspects of diese works and Dupin's
subversive use of language in them, on how he actually wages this struggle
as opposed to what his text tells us about it through image and archetype.
Each of these three works adopts a strikingly different formal approach in
what might be perceived as a tireless effort to shred the least onset of
structural regularity or continuity. Suspended and centred on white, the
short compacted texts of Une apparence de soupirail gather words and phrases
for the most part punctuated and disjointed by periods and trailing
suspension points diat create tension between overall typographical
cohesion and internal pause and dislocation. In contrast, the text of De singes
et de mouches remains resolutely scattered, unevenly interspersed and loosely
punctuated in vertically fragmented segments and sentences of problematic
syntax. Finally, Les Meres proceeds in paragraphs often composed of
substantive, verb or minimal phrase juxtaposed in a kind of jerky
accumulation that is oppressive in its enigmatic gathering of the disparate as
much as it is suggestive of intervening links:
Jusqu'a l'entre-deux des meres. La touffe. La torche. La spirale. La
condensation des figures et de la nuit Avec ton rire. Jusqu'a l'6dat de
la falaise de craie. Le poudrier. La poudriere . . . (p.2o)
In this last example, typical of the work as a whole, Dupin enumerates
various elements whose sequence for die reader remains at once discon-
tinuous and challenging in its progression, demanding an effort on his/her
part to re-piece what may be in effect unpieceable. Linearity is abolished by
the regular incision of periods, and passage from one minimal formal con-
stituent to the next provokes a questioning return to what has preceded
rather than the progressive yielding of meaning or message that would carry
the reader forward. Abrupt and densely elliptical, such writing would seem
to necessitate focus on each word and the possible connotations that could be
derived for it from the overall context, incomplete or imprecise as the latter
might remain. And yet the struggle for writer become struggle for reader is
not a directionless one: the self-referential nature of the text involves
frequent moments of reappraisal by which the writer reviews his goal and his
means before submerging himself once again in the blindness of combat with
 115
the potentially redemptive incoherence, illogic and non-sense of language.
Thus even here, as we scrutinise, for meaningful development, severed
structure and sparse segmentation that exclude bodi adjective and verb, we

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are assisted by the central phrase "la condensation des figures et de la nuit"
which elucidates to a certain extent the linguistic goal being attempted — that
is, the studied combination of the familiar and die unknown, the inter-
mingling of image or figure of speech with that which reverses it, renders it
void as part of accepted linguistic convention and points to its uncodable
odierness if not to its complete inaneness. Night, obscurity and blindness are
common metaphors in Dupin's poetry for die untapped non-meaning in
language which he seeks to release and re-evaluate dirough continual dis-
tortion and disjointing of verbal norm and pattern.
In the quoted paragraph, we become aware of the slippages of sense,
where phonetic association alone might be seen as the main motivation for
die passage from "touffe" to "torche", from "poudrier" to "poudriere", and
where, at least initially, the reiteration of die feminine definite article "la" acts
as a bind as much as any odierlinking element, diis being the same for die
repetition of "jusqu'a", which; as a structuring device, gives the impression of
advance or progress in part contradicted by the final trail of points diat rule
out all decisive conclusion. Added to die list of substantives, rendered to a
large extent impenetrable in dieir isolation as discrete units, is die ambiguity
of the plural "meres" as an identity and the intrusion of an undefined second
person in die form of "ton". No word can be pinned down to a distinct
referent or even reference, but, present as part of a sketch or oudine, allows
absence and encroaching silence to circulate as almost a tangible diing. The
text, in saying, emphasises what it does not say and dius, widi diis, die
possibility of what it might say. The "eclat" of which die poet talks in die text
is re-enacted structurally: just as die explosive passage from chalk diff-wall to
dust particles is suggested by "poudrier" (powder compact, but also he who
tends to die making of gunpowder, a possible metaphor for die destructive
role of die writer) and "poudriere" (powder magazine and also, figuratively,
a site of imminent destruction), so die formal division of die text is such that
a concentrated .whole is ground into smaller resistant panicles and inter-
spaced widi repeated stops diat provoke interrogation of die disjunctive
process established and help delineate what we might see in effect, by
metaphorical extension, as an insistent "entre-deux", die unbridged void
between words diat eliminates neat transition or set association while
allowing die potential of free suggestive expansion. As a state or space
suspended between extremes - nodiing and everything, extinction and
regeneration - "l'entre-deux" referred to in diis passage may thus be
understood as innately tensional and contradictory, drawing in multiple
polarised aspects of language as it extracts from a disrupted whole hidierto
obscured nuances of meaning and modes of functioning.
Quoting George Oppen as an epigraph to De singes et de mouches, Dupin
 116
upholds the statement that "a poem is not made of words" and so emphasises
the importance of all that remains peripheral to his own hesitant
constructions: silence, emptiness and absence acting as source of rupture,

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mediation and possible resuscitation. Wefinallyquestion the typographical
gaps opened as a key in themselves to the words that border and shape them:
the disjointing in-between or "entre-deux" diat at once punctures and
punctuates the text allows for reflection on what precedes and follows it, on
the possible meeting of sense with non-sense, of link, either formal or
semantic, with absence of link or complete vacuity. Thus Dupin's text is
always in die process of being made, each word acting as a kind of pointer to
what lies ever beyond its immediate form and accepted meanings in daily
degraded usage. Even as we endeavour to interpret structure and meaning
we become aware of die impasses encountered, for the text constandy strives
towards what it is not and often the sort of meta-language established, by
means of which it self-critically turns in upon itself, remains distinct, as an
upholder of the ideal, from die admittedflawsand imperfections of die text's
present state:
rien-
rien - sinon
que du fond
du goitre
des dieux
morts
Plunging, derisive and sparse, as here in De singes et de mouches, Dupin's text
will often veer to complete self-negation, refuting die advent of a reformed
and truly revelatory language at one widi die mobility and impulsiveness of
being. Ofttimes Dupin can only indmate what he would like to achieve
dirough language widiout being ever satisfied widi what he does in effect
produce, hence die painful necessity to begin and to begin again. Never-
dieless, repeated efforts at each time bring forth variation of strategy in a
tensed writing as open as it is difficult, as stimulating as it is obscure, so diat
finally, instead of searching for local instances of ideal expression become
textual reality, we may indeed view die "parole" being sought as emerging
from die overall constant shifting and re-shifting of form and meaning
widiin die provisional scraps and shards diat merge and scatter, split and
combine, to form an irreducible and ceaselessly mobile whole.

Let us now look again, on a conceptual level, at die diree books in question
widi respect to statements and images diey embody relating to Dupin's view
of die act of writing. We should keep in mind, however, diat in his work
discussion of die ideal and concrete achievement of it remain largely at odds,
writing being for Dupin a patient striving towards, an at times desperately
strained effort founded upon die promise of language's glimmering potential.
Une apparence de soupirad would seem to contrast widi die later De stnges et de
 117
inmiclies and Les Meres. As a reflection on the functioning of language and an
attempt to derive an ideal mode of expression, this work finally achieves a

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kind of privileged equilibrium, the poet viewing himself as master of die
nocturnal underworld, holding sway over die dark unknown in die space of
an almost timeless instant:
La respirauon des bruyeres la nuit. Toutes choses obscurcies. Le
souffle suspendu. Une nuit. Un instant. Durant lequel je suis le mattre
de l'obscunt£ des choses . . . (p.98)
The text which immediately follows on this and which concludes the volume,
does bring us back to an image of deadi which recalls die menacing earth-
womb — "L'expe'rience de l'infiltration de la mort. Suintements par les
fissures de la roche..." — but this image is juxtaposed with anodier one, that
of a cleansed and revitalised "parole" or mode of living expression, which is
capable of revealing a beneficial and fertile female presence: "Au fond de
l'eau, la parole, £cartant les herbes de ton visage ... ".
In contrast, terser and more troubhngly ellipucal in dieir conception, De
smges et de mouclies and Les Meres retain a greater, more two-edged degree of
ambiguity, and subject die reader to a feeling of unease through the grotesque
and nightmarish images diey repeatedly evoke, images which capture the
abounding chaos and savageness of a terrifying "prehistoire" lodged within
the folds of the mind, widiin die opaque mass of language itself which con-
ditions all consciousness. In these two books Dupin must struggle widi
language to uncover the raw, senseless but regenerative energy hidden
beneath its diickness — "le non-sens enfiligrane/dansl'e'paisseur de la langue"
-, his only guide being a violent circuit of terror: "de la terreur / comme un
rail - avec le vent / / qui l'arrache qui / le recloue".35
Let us focus on the precise nature of this contrast in a little more detail. Une
apparence de scniprrail embodies a quest for a mode of expression
paradoxically freed from die tyranny of words diemselves and their fettered
signifying capacity. Dupin seeks widiin his poetry a state of pre-biith that
would know no fixity of language, none of its categorising or stultifying
tendencies:
Ecrire comme si je n'£tais pas ne\ Les mots ant£rieurs: ecroules,
d£nud£s, aspires par le gouffre. Ecrire sans les mots, comme si je naissais.
(p.22)
In effect, what the poet seems to be calling for is an idealistic, and yet for him
essential, kind of "tabula rasa", writing diat would disengage itself from any
type of set or traditional structure, and thus from die propagation of a con-
straining "mythos". Writing becomes turned in upon itself in an act of critical
self-reflection, working as it were upon its own disintegration in order to
open itself to redempuve realms of experience hitherto unincorporated in its
substance: "L'ecriture se gorge des parfums qui la decomposenL La lumiere
s'ouvre, comme une figue mure, une plaie noire . . . " (p.54). This opening
 118
and self-effacement of the textual structure is associated with the qualities of
light and, in the Mallarmean tradition, with the advent of a musical

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composition devoid of any referential function: "Dessinant une £criture
disparue. Estompe devenue lumiere par un fil. Enonce' musical par sa
brisure" (p.38). Language would no longer be static, opaque, tied to the world
of objects, but infinitely mobile, playfully elusive and refreshingly suggestive:
"Une e"criture e're'mitique et nomade, a la fois. Qui de"place incessamment sa
fixite', sa supplication tabulaire. Aveugle chaque nuit, naissante toujours..."
(p.81).
Rather than hindering human development through rigid demarcation
and set formulation, the word would take on a kind of transparency and un-
predictability, an unprecedented ability to join and be one with the sensuality
and spirituality of being, and this through its material effacement and ener-
getic, suggestive expansion:
MeYiter que chaque mot s'efface a l'instant de son Emission. Qu'il
iaillisse et s evapore. Dans l'dlargissement de son arome et de sa trace,
le de"reglement de son accord, (p.84)
Here, once again, we are reminded of Rimbaud and his "deYeglement de
tous les sens", of his view of a language "de l'ame pour l'ame, re"sumant tout,
parfums, sons, couleurs, de la pens£e accrochant la pense'e et tirant" x
In marked opposition, the very titles of De singes et de mouches and Les Mtres
point to the full weight of a threatening primal past, resurrected here and
emphatically reaffirmed as a restrictive force to be constandy reckoned witii.
The images of monkeys and flies are evidendy regressive and negauve,
leading die poet back to "une pre"histoire/titubante, et louche", a vertiginous
and shady prehistory locked within the folds of body and language. As for
die plural modiers in Les Mtres, diey may be associated widi die dark
mysteries of die Terrible Modier: in Uiis book we find die destrucdve womb
represented by die knot, "le noeud convulsionnaire", and accompanying it,
"le roucoulement de la peur" (p. 13), die flowing sound and modon of fear
diat punctuates die text Reflecdons on die ideal give way to die view of die
poet as a helpless victim of primeval forces, negauve forces locked widiin die
unconscious which besiege him once he enters die liberadng uncharted
world of wridng.
In Les Meres Dupin describes a controlling presence beyond himself which
involves him in a kind of deadly and nightmarish game once he gives himself
over to die domain of language:
Moi, l'esdave, moi le pion. Dans les terrains vagues, et les friches de
l'£criture ... Un daquement, de sabots, de machoires... Et l'encombre
de la langue, avant le passage du Roi. Et le d£couronnement de sa t£te.
Et la defenestration de son Fou . . . (p. 14)
The exploration of die underworld diat language reveals is likened to a terri-
fying game of chess where the writer, as slave and pawn, must constandy
 119
grapple with the undefined and the unexpected, with enigmatic fragments
of the unconscious released through language. The "machoires", the jaws,

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the dethroning of the king and the fatal fall of his "Fou", bishop for us but
also retaining the meaning of jester in French, all form a set of ill-boding
revelations that seem to point to rooted fears, widiin the psyche, of
decrepitude, death and annihilation.
As we have seen, De stnges et de mouches and Les Meres also contrast in style
with Une apparence de smtpirail, their terseness and constantly shifting focus
opposing the more compact and unified centred pieces of the latter. In
accordance with its uneven and disjointed form, De singes et de mouches
deviates radically from any higher view of achieved verbal expression.
Nowhere in this book are die positive light-giving and musical qualities of
language touched upon; on the contrary the poet seeks "la torsion du pus /
de la langue", die twisting of all that is rotten and venomous within language,
and his final measure of triumph seems less idealistic, even grim, as, rather
than effecting the magical transformation envisaged in Une apparence de
souptrail, he forces a language grafted upon the monstrous to bend to his
will: "je dicte aux ^toiles / avec la flexibility d'un idiome /// transpose' du
monstrueux
However, the view of language within Les Meres isfinallymore consonant
with that of Une apparence de soupiratl, as here; while admitting die more
disturbing and problematic aspects of writing, the poet desires a complete
breaking and tearing apart of language so that all expression may be renewed
in a time just beginning. Man would be liberated from die stifling weight of
a past enclosed as myth and fiction within successive writings handed down
dirough the ages, and his conception, even actual perception, of reality
would no longer be dependent upon the narrow constraints of the book:
II e"tait temps que tout s'e"teignlt dans la langue. Et que commence le
temps. Le cycle pervers. Et cette parousie de laves et de percussions.
Horslelivre . . . (p.21)
This wish is reaffirmed more generally a litde further on — "II est temps que
tout se d£sagrege. Et se volatilise ... Et que commence le temps" (p.38) — and
toward die end of the book Dupin confesses "Les mots captifs quej'exhume,
sont la soif d'un monde decompose'" (p-44): die captive words which I
unearth are die thirst for a decomposed (or deconstructed) world.
To attack die intransigent structures of language, which informs all being,
is to change our fixed concepdon of the world and dius engender sure
transformation. Language is seen to condition the psyche, to shape our
concept of time and history, to propagate our most basic fears. Exorcism of
an inherited prehistory, of die rooted regressive visions which possess us and
often take on die form of a terrifying, imprisoning underworld, can only be
brought about dirough stubborn resistance to the present opacity and fixity
of language, through a determined effort to transform it radically by means
of violent opposition.
 120
According to Dupin, we must touch the bottom, dig down through the
dead strata of language, before we can hope to disengage ourselves from our

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fears and rise victorious with a renewed mode of expression perfecdy suited
to our most ambiuous aims: "Touche le fond. Trouve la bouche du poisson.
F.t remonte a la surface" (p 30). In Les Meres he often uses images of elevation
10 depict the triumph of his poetic quest. "On s'enfonce. Dans l'eau surie,
l'encre amere" (p 36), he declares, but this image is followed by one which
expresses extraction from the hideous underworld that language envelops
and a glorious uplifting movement.
LeVitation des meres. Au ras des roseaux. Assomption de l'dcriture
de la folie . Hors de la glu du piege a corbeaux .. (p.37)
The mother figure, plural here (a plural that underlines the many-sidedness
and basic inediicibility of this figure's impact), is unearthed and restored to
a position of posime nurturing m a movement of cosmic ascension. From the
"glu du piege a corbeaux", the fixed deathlike domain of a reified language,
escapes "l'e'criture de la folie", a form of writing which possesses all the raw
and unpredictable energy of an often violent non-conformity, madness
being seen here as a posiuve force —just as it is in Deliors, where Dupin talked
of 'Tom enure qu'un coup de folie fore dans 1'opacite" du re"el" (p.26). The
Terrible Mother, guardian of death and destruction, is succeeded by the
Good Mother, source of nourishment and growth, and diis through an
exploration of the darker dynamics of language and its mysterious potential.
The poet finally anticipates, "plante" entre l'ongle et la chair", directly ac-
cessible, a very part of being, "Le mot qui soule\ e la prairie \ eu\ e, les cailloux
blancs assonance's, l'herbe longue de la ri\e ... " (p.42). It is language which
is capable of instilling new life in the natural world. Resurrected, it marries
itself to the external world, to die "prairie veu\e", in a movement of universal
awakening and renewal, characterised by a triumphant upward surge.

The underworld can be tra\ ersed The Terrible Mother, present in Les
Mires as "Mere me"duse, mere e"pa\ e" (p-29), Mere a\ eugle" (p.28),"Vipere"
(p. 16), "veuve noire" (p.22), "Maratres" (p.40), isfinallyseen to yield to her
opposite in a movement of sublime transformation: "Touchant le fond, elle
se metamorphose, - et s'eMeve . . . " (p.30). Through language and endless
provisional practice of language, the poet confronts the monstrousfiguresof
die unconscious that spring from die fear of death; he enters "la machoire
crayeuse de ma langue-mort", confronts in wriung death as a devouring
presence, only to discover through determined toil and suffering, as promise
and eventual prospect, die life-giving "effervescence des mots de la langue-
mere", a transmuted language experienced as positively maternal and
nurturing. He can thus emerge victorious from his journey dirough die
underworld, believing in die salutary guiding force inherent widiin
language, a-force now identified as a supreme feminine presence:
 121
Une nuit. Avec elle. Absente, envolee, souveraine. Pour apprendre
a negocier les meandres, les demences, les cailloux d'un rauque chemin.
(p.43)

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The act of writing may arouse feelings of terror in its ability to reveal what
we continually seek to repress, either consciously or unconsciously, but it also
offers deliverance and transformation in its endlessly regenerative powers.
Through "la langue-mere", the mother language, the language mother, the
poet has learnt "la mort durant, a hurler, a balbutier, a chanter dehors,
debout, devant la nuit, le soleil . . . ", to persevere with courage and stead-
fastness in the face of death, to pursue a process of perpetual rebirth and
renewal through the sustained expression of all that he is, of all that he can
and will be, the downward regressive pull of the past being repeatedly
compensated, in the tensed "entre-deux" that writing establishes, by an
upward, forward surge ever nascent within language and at one with the
innermost vitality of being in all of its intellectual, sexual and spiritual
potential:
MEMESI...
elles tombent elles se dressent
a chaque instant de ma vie
— et c'est le commencement
du monde
MICHAELBROPHY
Dalhousie,
Nova Scotia

NOTES
1
"La Ligne de rupture", L'Embrasurc, precede de Grauir, Gallimard, Pans, 1971, p 192
5
"Je guide la descente oblique dans les plis d'un langage gluant et macule de sperme, de sang,
d'excr^ments "
"Un reat", Dehors, Gallimard, Pans, 1975,p.lO4
'Jean-Pierre Richard, Onze itudessurlapoesie moderne, SeuA, Pans, 1964, p 284.
4
Ibid., p.286.
5
Ibid., p.287.
6
The following is a list of the principal critical work regarding Dupin
Georges Raillani, Jacques Dupin, Sesfaen, Pans, 1974, Dominique Vizn, L'Ecnture seconde
la pratique pottiquedeJacques Dupin, Galilee, Pans, 1982,Jean-Pierre Richard, Onze ttudes sur
la poesie moderne, Seuil, Pans, 1964; Pierre Chappuis in Critique, 289,janvier 1971, Roger
Cardinal in Sense and Sensibility, Barnes and Noble, Croom Helm, 1977, Robert Greene in
Six French Poets of Our Time, Princeton U P , 1979, Mary Ann Caws in Dalhousie French
Studies, 1, 1979,, Brian Gill in Michael Bishop ed ,The Language ofPoetry. Crisis and Solution,
Rodopi, Amsterdam, 1979, Philippe Denis in Critique, 385-386, juin-juillet, 1979, Jean-
Michel Reynard, preface to L'Espace autrement dit, Galilee, Pans, 1982, Michael Bishop in
his book The Contemporary Poetry of France- Eight Studies, Rodopi, Amsterdam, 1985
For other views on the nature of Dupin's text and mode of wriung, see for example the
following opinions.
 122
The act of writing has become one of fracture and ravage, a destruction aimed at
triumphant renewal, as if the disfigurement of the naked body, of speech, were the only
way to ensure an intensification of poetic insight

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(Roger Cardinal, Sensibility and Creation, p 226)
The text itself forges, out of the very fragmentation and discontinuity that tears it apart,
a gathering, "comme une gerbe efetincelles", a re-creation, a reordering, a
magnetisation of the disparate And it is from the trembling tension of such conflicting
forces that the poem's "mobility" results
(Michael Bishop, 77K Contemporary Poetry of France, p.46)
7
Orae {hides sur la poesie moderne, p.288
6
L'Embrasure prececW de Cravtr, p 194, Dehors, p. 18
9
De singes etdemouches, Fata Morgana, Paris, 1983 Unpaged.
">"Vnr6al", Dehors, pp.105-106
" Une apparence de souptrad, Gallimard, Pans, 1982, p.85.
11
"Je saisis et je rejette avec l'obscur instinct de la bfite avertie des noumtures qui hii sont
neTastes," declares Dupin in "Moraines" (L'Embrasure, p. 144), even though a ktde further on in
the same text he admits that there is no escape, that the poison will have to be swallowed and
vomited as part of what he calls "l'affreux festin labynnthique" (p. 151).
15
"La Ligne de rupture", Dehors, p 14.
14
"La Femme armee", Cendnerdu voyage, G.L.M .Paris, 1950, p.17.
15
Ibid.
16
Cendner du voyage, p.28.
17
Aux heures d'amertume je m'imagine des boules de saphir, de m£tal Je suis mattre
du silence Pourquoi une apparence de soupirail W6mirait-elle au coin de la voOte?
See Poesies I Une saison en enfer I Illuminations, Gallimard, Pans, 1973, p. 159
18
Ibid., p. 156.
19
Chapter 11, The Great Mother, translated by Ralph Manheim, Princeton University Press,
1963,pp.l47-208
I0
Ibid.,pp.l48-149.
11
Ibid., p. 152.
H
"Ballast", Contumacc, P.O.L., Pans, 1986, pp 39-40.
a
"Nous sommes le non-lieu et le non-objet d'une gravitation de signes insenses", he declares
("Le Soled subsume", Dehors, p 27)
14
"Le Soleil subsume", Dehors, p 26.
55
Ibid.
* "L'Angle du mur", Cravtr, p.49
17
Une apparence de souptrail, p.47.
18
Les Meres, Fata Morgana, Paris, 1986, p 23.
19
See for example "Pour cassure de fond" {Dehors, p 138), a text which, while demonstrating
the destruction accompanying the woman, also points to a final surge of life renewed:
quand bien mfime elle fondrait
sur nous, harde
de sangliers, amour, etwulement
de roches lourdes,
devenir, monstruosit^
et son grognement fnvole
un en jaune
de nouveau-ne'
30
"Un reat", Dehors, p. 110.
" Ibid , p 105.
52
"Ou meurtres, Dehors, p 121.
33
Les Meres, p 2 3
54
"Deuil", Contumace, p.67
55
Both quotations are from Desmgeset de mouches.
36
"Lettres du voyant", Rimbaud a Paul Demeny-, 15th May 1871, in Poesies I Une saison en enfer
I Iliummatums, p.204.