Nature Writing as a Frontier of Twentieth-Century Poetics: The Case of Francis Ponge and René Char

Abstract

Although it has never constituted itself as a genre within the French sphere, within the cannon of twentieth-century "Literature" are many texts that share the characteristics traditionally associated with “nature writing” (first person observational prose infused with a consciousness of natural history), including those of Francis Ponge and René Char. While ecocriticism has expanded to examine many different types of literature, these two authors represent a strain of nature writing in France, through dialogue with ancient Greek philosophy and the use of poetic techniques that create space for the autonomous existence of non-human entities, anticipate the dismantling of the human/nature divide. Their work also, just as crucially helps to break down the division between ecological writing and ecological action.

Keywords:

• Nature
• poetics
• philosophy
• materialism
• posthumanism
• avant-garde

Notes

1 Scholarship on Ponge has often insisted on the importance of reconciliation or non-separation to his poetic project: “Ponge refuses any notion of the poet’s role […] that would distance him from his material and social surroundings; and thus, just as we, his readers, are neither more nor less a part of the pronoun nous than he is, he is neither more nor less an inhabitant of this world than we are. In that others are as important to his existence as he is to theirs, such a poet may be understood as a reconciler” (Meadows 4, emphasis added); “The key to this poem is the opposition between duration and instant, massive horizontality and vertical takeoff. Actually it is a poem about poetry. […] This rare day, this instant, reconciles weight and lightness, submission and transgression, the dive and the flight, or again the oceanic spread and man’s freedom. The docile sea and man in revolt belong to each other in the poem. The entire poem hastens the union of the two dimensions […] ‘Épouse et n’épouse pas ta maison’ (FM, 99)” (Schürmann 517, emphasis in the original).

2 See Carus T Lucretius and Anthony M. Esolen, On the Nature of Things: De Rerum Natura, Johns Hopkins UP, 1995.

3 See Lucy Alford, Forms of Poetic Attention, Columbia UP, 2020, pp. 57–58.

4 On this subject, see Beugnot in the introduction to Ponge I, XVII.

5 “Opposant aux pensées progressistes son pessimisme radical, répétant son refus des idéologies tournées vers un avenir chimérique, René Char n’a cessé jusqu’à la fin de sa vie d’exprimer sa méfiance envers l’esprit de l’utopie, de le juger incompatible avec ses exigences éthiques” (Morin 10).

6 See C. A. Hackett, “René Char and the Aphorism.” World Literature Today, vol. 51, no. 3, 1977, pp. 369–373., doi:10.2307/40131891.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gina Stamm

Gina Stamm is Assistant Professor of French at The University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. She is a specialist of Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century French literature with specific areas of research interest including ecocriticism, object relations psychoanalysis, and theories of literary creativity. Some of her recent publications include “Cannibal Plants: Tropiques and Martinican Aesthetics” and “Inventing a Vegetal Post-Exotic in the Work of Antoine Volodine.”