Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures

ISSN: 0039-7709 (Print) 1931-0676 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vsym20

Writing (at) the Limits of Genre: Danielle

Collobert's Poetics of Transgression

John C. Stout

To cite this article: John C. Stout (2000) Writing (at) the Limits of Genre: Danielle Collobert's
Poetics of Transgression, Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures, 53:4, 299-309,
DOI: 10.1080/00397700009598530

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00397700009598530

Published online: 02 Apr 2010.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 25

View related articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=vsym20
 JOHN C. STOUT

WRITING (AT) THE LIMITS OF GENRE: DANIELLE

COLLOBERT’S POETICS OF TRANSGRESSION

“L‘impossible de dire, une ‘mutilation incisive du corps’, passe par l’th-iture:

c’est dans cette contradiction que se meut une partie de la p d s i e contemporaine.”
Liliane Giraudon. “Jean Daive: Le neutre dans
une chambre immobile”’

“Le rkcit d6figurC qui fut mortellement frappe par le rCalisme ne p u t plus
que Mgayer son manque, dire son effort malheureux vers la parole.”2
Mathieu BtnCzet, ?
.L Roman a2 la langue

THERECENT ANTHOLOGIES Pohies en France depuis 1960: 29 femmes, edit-

ed by Liliane Giraudon and Henri Deluy, and Six Contemporary French
Women Poets, edited by Serge Ga~ronsky,~ indicate the strong contribution by
French women poets to the development of an experimental poetry and poet-
ics from the 1960s to the present. The women whose work is featured in these
anthologies have almost all published in such leading avant-garde literary
journals as Action poktique, Tel Quel, Change, Digraphe, and Banana Split.
Their texts reflect the urgency and the ambitious scope of the project of poet-
ic renewal that these journals helped to activate and sustain.
A number of the overarching concerns of the postwar French avant-garde
(a term that presents some problems, but which I shall use for the sake of con-
venience) find expression in the poetry selected by Gavronsky, Giraudon, and
Deluy for their anthologies. The texts they have chosen can be characterized
first and foremost by their linguistic and formal innovativeness. A radical
questioning of language, and of poetry as a genre, grounds the writing of all
of these women. The startling and intriguing transmutations of language and
of literary form that they have effected are never gratuitous or superficial. On
the contrary, their experiments with typography, punctuation, textual space,
and syntax have furthered the project of reinventing poetry. By breaking with
the constraints of the traditional lyric (constraints such as use of fixed forms
like the sonnet, rules of rhyme and rhythm, and the centering of the poem by
means of the perspective of a first-person subject), they have aided in the cre-
ation of what Jean-Marie Gleize has called “la poCsie aprbs la pdsie.” Min-
imalist, impersonal, discontinuous, and playful, these contemporary women’s
texts continually force the reader to face the “violence of the white page” and
the instabilities of a verbal representation whose conventions and foundations

299
300 SYMPOSIUM Winter 2000
are threatened with dissolution. These preoccupations derive in part from the
intense theoretical renewal that defined intellectual culture in France in the
1960s and 1970s, as the human sciences were challenged and revitalized by
the work of Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, Barthes, Kristeva, Deleuze, and others.
The impact of their theories led to significant changes in dominant views of
language, of representation, and of the constitution of the human subject.
French poets then-and now-had to come to terms with these changes and
their implications for poetic practice.
The difficult and painful struggle with language, with form and genre, that
French poets since the 1960s have faced is central to the work of Danielle Col-
lobert (1940-1978). Although nearly all of her texts are out of print,6 Col-
lobert is nevertheless generally regarded by other poets as a highly gifted and
original writer. Anne-Marie Albiach, Jacques Roubaud, and Emmanuel Hoc-
quard, among others, have paid tribute to her powerful talent.’ Furthermore,
during the past several years, her writing has been published in several new
anthologies of recent French poetry, which demonstrates the increasing inter-
est in her work.*
What makes Collobert’s achievement outstanding within the history of
twentieth-century experimental writing is her continuous, defiant transgres-
sions of both poetry and prose. Her texts, when read sequentially, disclose her
evolving transformations or deconstructions-of the boundaries of genre as
such. They enact a succession of breaks with the formal features of the novel,
poetry, the dramatic monologue, and so on. Collobert repeatedly abandoned
forms and genres after exploring them daringly and iconoclastically.She pro-
duced a writing traversed by the negativity of its own inception in the need to
go beyond what had been said, beyond what could be said. She dismantled
discourse, syntax, “subjectivity” in Ianguage.
Like Sylvia Plath’s, Collobert’s poetry has often been framed by critics in
light of suicide. (Collobert killed herself in 1978, on her thirty-eighth birth-
day.) I wish to acknowledge and to resist this critical assimilation of a bio-
graphical act outside her texts to the inner, driving force behind the texts
themselves. I will not postulate that suicide is the “theme” or secret center of
her oeuvre. Rather than metaphorizing suicide in that way, I will consider it-
read it-as part of a general movement toward transgression that assumed
many different forms for her.
Beginning with Meurtre (1964) and concluding with the poem “Survie,”
Collobert’s texts reiterate the impulse to have done with genre, to move
beyond the conventions of genre by turning them inside out. By pushing nar-
rative, then poetry, to their very limits, she challenged the epistemological
frameworks implicit in these genres. Throughout her life, her engagement
with literature was anything but frivolous or ludic. As Jacques Roubaud
explains, Collobert experienced a sense of extreme alienation from the con-
straints and boundaries of genre:
Stout SYMPOSIUM 301
Avec le temps, pour elle, la prose... Ctait devenue poCsie. Mais comme
la prose du k i t , pour elle, Ctait nCe d’une mort, d’une impossibilitt de
poCsie, c’est de la mort du rCcit qu’est venue plus tard, pour elle, de nou-
veau, la pdsie: I’extrzme bord de sa mort, B elle.9
Though usually categorized as a poet, she maintained a conflictual rela-
tionship with the institution of Poetry, as Roubaud remembers:
“Je ne peux pas” disait-elle “la pdsie. Je ne sais pas ce que c’est” . . .
“avec la poCsie” disait-elle,” ce que j’kcris n’a qu’une ressemblance.”’O

Decisive as they were, her formal and generic concerns did not constitute
the sole motivation behind her literary experiments. Gender, the body, and the
struggle for expression against a kind of chilling impersonality of language
(or “le ‘on’ de la langue” in Mitsou Ronat’s words)” shaped the evolution of
her oeuvre. Above all, Collobert needed to do violence to literary forms in
order to force language out of its rigid boundaries so that it might express the
inexpressible. She invented jarringly unconventional uses of language in her
re-ordering of narration and description.
In her youth, Collobert wrote a collection of poems that she had published
privately, then later destroyed. Following this gesture of the refusal of poetry,
she turned to narrative with Meurrre, published by Gallimard in 1964.Meurtre
proceeds as a series of vignettes written in quite conventional sentences and
pararaphs. Yet these vignettes are curiouslydisturbingly-marked by ambi-
guity, impersonality, and an implied violence. Like many of the nouveaux
romunciers, in Meurrre Collobert combines an obsessively acute attention to
surface detail with a deliberate indefiniteness and remoteness. Despite the
closely observed detail of her descriptions, no “plot” or “characters” emerge
from this text. The reader remains uncertain of the nature and meaning of the
events evoked, as no stable first-person narrator controls the unfolding of
these events. Although the sketches are all narrated in the first person, the per-
sona observing the action seems inexplicably removed from any clear under-
standing of what he or she is seeing.
The “content” of Meurtre remains shadowy and mysterious, despite a gen-
eral emphasis on pain and torture (“11s m’ont torturC, pttri, dilapidC, pittid,”
M 35); on the loss of identity (“Je ne peux plus dire mon nom,” M 41); and,
most frequently, on death (“Nous sommes quatre autour de lui. I1 est mort,” M
76; “le jeune mort est en militaire,” M 92). Old people repeatedly attract the
narrator’s attention, for reasons never clarified. These instances of aging, sta-
sis, death, and loss suggest a negative poetics but never fully affirm it.
Throughout, the coolly impersonal tone and the refusal to tell a coherent story
link Collobert’s text to the early work of Alain Robbe-Grillet and that of
Nathalie Sarraute-particularly her Tropismes, which is also written as a
series of impersonal, fragmentary, and disturbing vignettes. Collobert’s pro-
302 SYMPOSIUM Winter 2000
ject in Meurtre depends on a defamiliarization of subjectivity and of experi-
ence that causes the reader to question how, and how much of, the world can
be known, as in these examples:
Comment sommes-nous arrivts 18, apres cette Ctrange vie que nous
avons mente, sans Ctonnement, mCme dans les situations les plus inso-
lites, les plus imprtvisibles. Nous avons accept6 tout, comme une chose
ntcessaire. (M 16)
La difficult6 que j’ai de me rappeler les histoires, arrivtes 2i moi-mCme,
m’empikhe d’y croire, d’y retrouver leur prtsence. (M 16-17)
Here narrative ceaselessly undercuts itself, in the very process of its enact-
ment. For example, towards the end of Meurtre a male narrator, having lost
his female companion in a crowd, discovers the uselessness, even the impos-
sibility, of narrative:
Redire tout, et enfin ne plus raconter. Se rappeler tout ce qui s’est passt,
mais pas comme ga. Tout devient flou, tellement inexact. Plus d’aven-
ture, pas de rtcit. (M 122)
Her textual landscapes accentuate this impression of nothingness and futility:
On apergoit un dernier village en mine au pied d’un tas de charbon, et plus
rien. Parfois un pan de mur dCcouvre une grande plaine stCnle. (M 33)
The title Meurtre refers to an act of murder that is never witnessed, but that
appears already to have occurred, as so many of the vignettes focus on dead
bodies (a dead crab lying on the beach, an old woman’s corpse discovered in
a room, a man apparently burying a body on the shore, and so on). The con-
fession regarding murder made by the narrator early in the text underscores
the disquieting, even maddening function of the title:
Je m’y connais dans le meurtre. J’en invente chaque jour quelques-uns.
Je fais mourir diffirentes personnes, des vieux pour la plupart,je ne sais
pas pourquoi exacternent. (M 18) (emphasis added).
The ending of Meurtre provides metanarrative reflections that clarify the
insistence on death, murder, and endings. These reflections echo Collobert’s
oppositional stance toward narrative per se:
On ne meurt pas seul, on se fait tuer, par routine, par impossibilitk . . .
Si tout le temps, j’ai parlt de meurtre, quelquefois h demi camouflt,
c’est h cause de cela, cette fagon de tuer. (M 141)
“Routine” and ‘‘impossibility’’ have, by now, come to define the content
and textual processes of this antinarrative, in which the same sorts of actions
are endlessly repeated but impossible to interpret. The “murder” in question
Stout SYMPOSIUM 303
may thus be the death of the realistic novel, done in by its own inadequacies
and contradictions as a genre.12
If, as Meurrre suggests, the realistic novel is dead, what can lie beyond it?
With Dire I-II and I1 donc Collobert will attempt to find an answer to this
question. Dire I-II is a “roman de la langue,” in Mathieu BCntzet’s critical
formulation. I3 It is a text centered on language that demands that language
transform itself, pull itself apart, witness its own undoing. The formal shifts
between Dire I and Dire II, and toward the end of Dire II, demarcate Col-
lobert’s increasingly violent engagement with genre conventions and with
representation. Dire I evokes a story whose specific events remain out of
reach; the narration proceeds in dense paragraphs of prose separated from one
another by brief blank spaces. In Dire II this first type of narration is replaced
by blocks of single words or a few words joined by dashes. Toward the end of
Dire If these groups of words are, in turn, replaced by pared-down vertical
strings of single words. Whereas Dire I is written in sentences, Dire II gives
us language in a more “raw,” uncontrolled state. As BtnCzet notes, “Dire I-II
de Danielle Collobert, d t s I’entiime, se pr6sente comme un rkcit minimal,
rkcit d’une extrsme pauvretk, et, nous poumons dire aprts Maurice Blanchot,
rkcit d’un extreme dksoeuvrement ..’I4 One should add that, while challenging
the standard notions of a literary work, Collobert also violates conventions of
gender in language in Dire I-II. The description of the text offered on the back
cover of the 1972 Seghersnaffont edition emphasizes the importance of her
unusual transformations of gender:
Ce rkcit-ce roman?-
se divise en deux volets, ou deux vols.
Dans le premier, la voix se change,
presque imperceptiblement:
homme et femme s’emparent en elle
tour ? tour,
i et dans la meme phrase,
du pouvoir de parler.
Ajoutant simplement h la syntaxe
certains accords du fkminin.
Dans la voix se touchent les mouvements
du corps, de I’Crosion, du dCsir.
Le second n’admet qu‘une seule voix, la langue devenue toute
indivise entre la femme et I’homme.
Vie du corps de la mort: la dissolution
du rapport au langage se fait
avec une discrition violente.

Collobert’s insistent transgressions of gender representation in Dire I-II

act as the counterpart to her dislocations of narrative. There are numerous
304 SYMPOSIUM Winter 2000
shifts in this text from masculine to feminine adjectives, ostensibly referring
to the same second-person pronoun figure (“tu”) or to the narrator him- or
herself (“je”). Such unpredictable shifts in pronoun-adjective agreement
generate a fundamental instability, making the identities of both “je” and
“tu” indeterminate. For example, a female “you” (“Tu es passte ici,” D I 11)
is replaced by a male “you” (“Tu t’es assis glace,” D I 12), who may or may
not be the same “character.” As these shifts continue, sexual difference
breaks down: whether a person is male or female seems arbitrary, unsettled.
Collobert thus subverts gender hierarchies as much as she subverts the rules
of narration.
Throughout the text, the need to tell (“dire”) a story is undermined by a
concurrent impulse to evade its painful content: “Ne plus rien dire de toi, mais
j’avais envie pourtant. Echapper seulement maintenant aux prtcisions
coupables, aux volontCs” (D I 21). In a sense, the content of the story echoes
the indefiniteness of the language of Dire I , as the principal event to be told
is a loss, a drowning: “Longue histoire que cette perte de toi” (D 122); “Noyte.
Tu t’approches de moi. Recherche h tbtons” (DI 33); “disparition d’histoire”
(D I 33). Can one “tell” a story whose climax and meaning are missing, are-
literally-lost? Collobert uses loss as a metanarrative trope here.
The nearly constant pronominal shifting in Dire I-11 further complicates
the writing of desire, as this switching introduces a complex movement
across sexualities. In certain passages the narrator appears to refer to an erot-
ic encounter between two men; in others, between a woman and a man.
These erotic transpositions cannot be classified according to the usual cate-
gories of homosexuality, heterosexuality, and bisexuality, for each of these
categories implies a fixed sexual identity that Collobert’s text problematizes,
as in this passage:
Je te cherche toi vivant, vivante, sans equivoque. Qui es-tu. Te trans-
former coment. Appartenir deja aux contradictions. (D I 36)
Dire I concludes with an impression of silence, speechlessness, and death.
The monotonous, continuous repetition of waves sounding on a shoreline sug-
gests an ironic rejection of language and representation:
Silence du monde autour-tin des sensations-rien ne respire

Simple articulation, fin des mots de I’effort, un son envahi par son pro-
pre tcho-la rtsonance d’une vague sur I’autre-l’ondulation h l’infini.
(D I 109).
The breakdown of language-f the sentence, at least-as a vehicle for
narration determines the writing of Dire 11, which is dominated by the gaps
and the incoherences between words. This writing is shattered, aporetic, a sort
of impersonal stammering:
Stout SYMPOSIUM 305
des mots pour raconter-inventer-dtcrire-non-rien li faire de ce
c6tt-lii-aller peut-btre vers une sorte de collage-les mots les uns prks
des autres-les assembler-par surface he-par couleur-musique.
(DII 144)

This verbal wreckage seems fated to “devenir peu h peu un souffle qui
s’tteint” (D I1 145). Indeed, the final segment of the text (pp.156-194) records
in telegraphic style the displacement of prose narrative, now no longer possi-
ble, by a depersonalized, minimalist poetry:
corps muet-pas de signe
aucun appel
suite
suite de mots-tenus-silences-tenus
Parler-ne parle plus
dire
n’amve pas h dire-n’arrive pas
se taire-taire
n’arrive pas (D I1 166)

Collobert has thus moved from the attempted representation of an absent

story to the discontinuous utterances of a “voice” laboring to overcome
speech in order to attain silence. This voice has nothing left to tell but
appears unable to stop speaking. As Mathieu BCnCzet observes, the breath-
less flood of words in Dire I t is intended to overwhelm the reader: “Nous
nous enfoqons dans cette voix qui semble ‘seulement une distance figCe’ . .
. , apurte ou vidte de la prCsence du locuteur ou d’un corps vivant.”I5
Through an excess of words that fades into silence, Collobert registers her
intense drive to question and recast literary forms and, consequently, their
potential to represent consciousness and desire. With I1 donc she will proceed
even further in this direction.
Btntzet concludes his discussion of Dire /-It with the remark that “la force
de ce texte est de nous dCrober li nous-mbmes.” l6 If donc, published in 1976,
carries this process of estrangement to its limits. Many critics consider I1 donc
to be Collobert’s masterpiece. It is the text of hers that is most often antholo-
gized. It is also the only one to be translated in its entirety into Eng1i~h.I~ I1
donc can be taken as the outcome of her experiments with narrative textuali-
ties in Meurtre and Dire 1-It.‘8With I1 donc she has moved beyond genre in
any conventional sense, as the opening passage shows. This passage reads as
a kind of mode d’emploi for the text as a whole:
I1 donc-Il-abandon de I’impersonnel-de I’infinitif-enfin rCsignC
-incarner-de la chair douloureuse-s’incarner comme I’ongle du
pouce-I1 donc. (ID 7)
306 SYMPOSIUM Winter 2000
In performing them, this passage highlights the roles of repetition and of
techniques of impersonality that are characteristic of I1 donc.By emphasizing
the infinitive here (“incarner,” “s’incarner”), the author undercuts any tenden-
cy by the reader to project a first-person “narrator” onto the words. “11” func-
tions as a nonsubject. It casts a neutral, personless shadow across the words.
The adverbial conjunction “donc” would normally work to connect two sepa-
rate actions by linking them in a sequence. Here, however, “donc” signifies an
abstraction of action or plot.
Throughout I1 .donc Collobert avoids all punctuation, except for dashes,
which she uses over and over, to disarming effect:
amalgame-reprise-tous les cris-gtmissements
et voix-lambeaux dans sa dte
laisser dans l’imprtcis-ne pas chercher la forme-
assemblage indistinct-ngrenage des voix-l’une
dans l’autre-dtveloppement unitaire-homogkne-
d’un discours parcellaire4tranger. (ID 75)
As Nadia Saleh notes, this use of dashes “dtclenche I’effet de dtviation et
de neutralisation dans l’organisation du pdme; chez Danielle Collobert, on
pourait dire qu’on est en prtsence d’un spectacle performatif du ‘choc.’ C’est
que non seulement I’usage particulier du signe de ponctuation du tiret est
dtvit de son rale normatif mais plus encore cet emploi fig6 est port6 2 I’excbs
par le biais d’un ressassement visuel du tiret d’un bout ?I I’autre du p ~ k m e . ” ’ ~
The dashes act as a constant obstacle to comprehension; they shatter coher-
ence, leaving the reader to stumble uneasily from word to word without a def-
inite sense of the connections between these words. The dashes generate a
visual alienation effect, distancing the reader from the text.
In its “content” as well as in its punctuation and mise en page, I1 donc is a
very physical text. The relationship between language and the body, between
writing and pain, motivates it at every level:
son corps irrigut
corrosion sourde-imprtcise
corps humilit-battu sans cesse par les mots-rCcif
boufft par I’eau-rongt de partout4branlC par
les secousses au coeur-livrt 21 la douleur sans fin-
va mourir-se dtsintkgre-dtsespirt. (ID 25)
Collobert’s focus on the body in pain is purposeful. David B. Morris
asserts in his book The Culture of Pain that to be in pain “is often to be in a
state of crisis. It is a state in which we experience far more than physical dis-
comfort. Pain has not simply interrupted our normal feeling of health. It has
opened a huge fault or fissure in our world.”20Morris regards pain as a terri-
fying elsewhere or netherworld:
stout SYMPOSIUM 307
Pain takes us out of our normal modes of dealing with the world. It
introduces us to a landscape where nothing looks entirely familiar and
where even the familiar takes on an uncanny strangeness. 21
The world of the body in pain also implies unlimited isolation. “We are
probably never more alone than when severe pain invades us,” Morris writes2*
Part Three of I1 donc reveals most clearly the goals of Collobert’s textual
experiment. In this segment, which is the least prolix and the most metapoet-
ic of the three, all that remains are “mots dispersts-images-relent d’im-
ages” (ID 98). Writing can achieve only a “parcours des hachures/ description
du discontinu”(1D 99). Signs have become “intraduisibles” (ID 101); they
have been replaced by “toutes les formes du nkgatif-ou btance-l’informel”
(ID 101). Concurrently, the body becomes completely identified with lan-
guage: “sa chair/ les nerfs de l’tcrit” (ID 103);“l’encre-vitale/ l’incision/ de
quoi tcrire”(1D 105). Writing resembles a flaying of the body, a journey
through acute suffering. The result of this process is described as follows: “11
doncAmigr&anscrit” (ID 126). By this final, elliptical formulation, Col-
lobert leaves us with an impression of a transcendence of physical suffering
through writing. Still, the meaning of this “transcription” may not be para-
phrasable; the writing of I1 donc is so radically experimental that it must,
finally, resist critical paraphrase.
When she had completed I1 donc there was, perhaps, nowhere left for Col-
lobert to go. She seems to acknowledge this impasse in the ironically entitled
“Survie,” composed of six fourteen-line poems that she published a few
months before her suicide. Here is a short excerpt from “Survie”:
serrt le cou par la corde rtveil
trernblement rtveil
brOlt consumt bonze
crkve corps
hors des mains caresse
loin des li5vres bu
souvenir du corps
laissant aller prtsent l’instant survie
sans savoir sur quoi ouvrir l’tnergie ti I’imaginaire rtpondu
( S 53)
The frenzied, chaotic atmosphere of this passage has been consciously
shaped by the poet. Her insistent use of past participles without a subject or
auxiliary verb (“serrt,” “bfilt,” “consumt,” “bu”) gives a truncated and
ambiguous cast to the actions evoked. Who is performing these actions?
When? Where? What sorts of relationships link each line to the lines that pre-
cede and follow it? Collobert makes these questions unanswerable.The world
of “Survie” lies in shattered fragments. She presents individual body parts in
308 SYMPOSIUM Winter 2000
isolation from a perceiving subject. The poet does include the first-person
pronoun “je” in several lines. However, this first-person pronoun becomes
curiously depersonalized: “je temps de quoi”(S 49); “je dit ardent tnergie le
cri ou comme brOle jamais dit” (S 49); “je d’insecte vivant clout au mur” (S
50); “je parole s’ouvrir bouche ouverte dire je vis 2 qui” (S 53). Punctuation
is completely absent here. All the usual grammatical connections that one
would expect in a sentence have been severed. An agrammatical, dissonant
flow of words constitutes the poem. Half-formed images of intense suffering
assault the reader’s imagination. Of all her texts, “Survie” is the most extreme,
the most painful to read.
Collobert’s oeuvre displays a series of increasingly daring experiments
with form and language. Some readers regard experimental writing primari-
ly as a ludic activity, as an exercise in wordplay. However, in The Savage
God: A Study of Suicide, A. Alvarez cautions that ”for the more serious
artists, experiment has not been a matter of merely tinkering with the
machinery. Instead, it has provided a context in which he explores the peren-
nial question ‘What am I?’ without benefit of moral, cultural or even techni-
cal s e ~ u r i t i e s . ”In~ ~such work, the stakes for the writer can be extremely
high. Alvarez notes that “Technical exploration . . . implies a degree of psy-
chic exploration; the more radical the experiments, the deeper the responses
tapped.”24Danielle Collobert would surely have understood the importance
of these remarks.
Collobert’s sex is certainly also of the utmost relevance to a discussion of
her achievement as an artist. In its challenge to genre boundaries and to lin-
guistic conventions, her oeuvre stands as a defiant, disobedient gesture toward
the cultural institution of Literature. This rebelliousness was particularly dar-
ing for a woman poet, given that until very recently poetry in France has been
a male preserve-r a “FratCrie” in Liliane Giraudon’s words.2s American
poet Kathleen Fraser has written of the enticements and the risks of experi-
mental writing for women. Her perspective is pertinent to a discussion of the
work of French women poets:
Breaking rules, breaking boundaries, crossing over, going where you’ve
been told not to go has increasingly figured in the writing of the con-
temporary woman poet as a natural consequence of the restraints placed
upon her as a child being socialized to the female role her class and cul-
ture prefer. The poem becomes her place to break rank: her words, her
line lengths and placements, her “stuff.”26
Writing androgynously, traveling around the world for much of her adult
life, defying established codes and canons of literary representation, Danielle
Collobert remains a courageous and exemplary experimental writer.

McMaster University
stout SYMPOSIUM 309
I. Liliane Giraudon, “Jean Daive: Le neutre dans une chambre immobile,” Critique, No.
385-386 (juin-juillet 1979) 537.
2. Mathieu BtnCzet, Le Ronurn de la langue (Des tuntans: 196&1975) (Paris: U.G.E., 1977)
143.
3. Henri Deluy and Liliane Giraudon, eds., Pobies en France depuis 1960: 29 fenimes, une
antholvgie (Paris: Stock, 1994). Serge Gavronsky, ed., Six Cvnreniporary French Women Poets:
Thevry, Practice, and Pleasures (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1997).
4. Gleize uses this term in various of his sudies of contemporary French poetry. See, for
example, his Le ThP2tre du poPnw: vers Anne-Marie Albiach (Paris: Belin, 1995).
5. The expression “violence of the white page” was chosen as a representative trope to intro-
duce experimental texts by French poets in translation to American readers in a special issue of
the poetry journal Tyuvnyi. See Stacy Doris, Phillip Foss and Emmanuel Hocquard, eds., Violence
of the Whire Page: Cvnteniporary French Poetry: Tyunoyi nos. 9-10 (1991).
6. To my knowledge, only the posthumous text Recherche (Paris: Fourbis, 1990) remains in
print at present.
7. See Anne-Marie Albiach, “L‘Amour s u p r h e ” in her Anawratha (Paris: Spectres familiers,
1984) 21-24; Jacques Roubaud, “Danielle Collobert: ‘cri ou comme b d e jamais dit,”’ Critique
Nos. 385-386 (juin-juillet 1979) 533-536; and Emmanuel Hocquard, Tout le monde se ressern-
ble: Une anthologie de pvisie confemporaine, (Paris: P.O.L., 1995) 61-69.
8. The following is a list of Collobert’s published texts: Meunre (Paris: Gallimard, 1964);
Dire I-II (Paris: Segherskaffont, 1976); I1 dvnc (Paris: Segherskaffont, 1976); “Survie” in Henri
Deluy, ed., L’Anrhologie arbitmire d’une nouvelle pvksie 1960-1 982 (Paris: Flammarion, 1983).
47-94; Cahiers 19561978 (Paris: Segherskaffont, 1983); “Polyphonie” in Fig. 2 (1990); and
Recherche (Paris: Fourbis, 1990). References to these texts will be made in parentheses after each
quote. (Meurrre = M; Dire I = D I; Dire II = D 11; I1 donc = ID; “Survie”= S).
9. Roubaud 533.
10. Roubaud 533.
11. See Mitsou Ronat, “Le on de la langue,” Action podtique No 63, 124-125.
12. I am thinking. for example, of Susan Sontag’s remarks on the failure of the (realistic) novel
as a genre in her Against Inrerprerarivn (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966) 1 W 1 0 4.
13. Mathieu BCnCzet, Le Roman de lu langue (des tunians: 196@1975), (Paris: U.G.E., 1977).
14. BCnCzet 141.
15. BCntzet 142.
16. BCnCzet 142.
17. Danielle Collobert, I f Then, Norma Cole, trans. (0Books, 1989).
18. At this point, one should note the importance of “Polyphonie” (in Fig. 2, 1990) and
Recherche (Paris: Fourbis, 1990). two recently published works that Collobert left in manuscript
form at her death. These twu texts help u s to trace the formal and stylistic evolution separating
Meurtre and Dire 1-11 and her later work. Recherche is divided into three sections. The first two
sections focus on actions and events from an exterior perspective, as in Meurtre. In the third sec-
tion, Collobert shifts to a more lyrical view, immersing the reader in a subjective “consciousness.”
In addition to this movement from an outward perspective to an inward one, she relies through-
out Recherche on a constant use of dashes, as in Dire II and I1 donc. So, “Polyphonie” and
Recherche (as well as a third text that followed them and is still unpublished, as far as I know)
are transitional works that shaped Collobert’s development as an artist, written initially for radio
broadcast, that also explme the aesthetic possibilities of sound and image.
19. Nadia Saleh, “L‘Ecriture comme performance textuelle dans les h i t s pdtiques contem-
porains des femmes pdtes,” talk given at the 1996 NEMLA Convention in Montreal, Quebec.
20. David 6. Moms, The Culture of Pain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991) 31.
21. Moms 25.
22. Moms 37-38.
23. A. Alvarez, 7’he Savage God: A Study of Suicide [ 197 I ] (NY Random House, 1972) 240.
24. Alvarez 239.
25. Liliane Giraudon, quoted in Gavronsky, 82.
26. Kathleen Fraser, quoted in Linda A. Kinnahan, Poetics of the Feminine: Authority and Lir-
erary Tradition in William Carlos Willianis, Mina Lay. Denise Levertvv, and Kathleen Fraser
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) 183.