Le retour de « Blaise-sans-bras » dans les aventures de la main coupée
p. 83-96
Texte intégral
Chapitre I
1« Blaise-sans-bras… » témoigne des premiers rencontres entre Claude et moi. Cette communication, présentée voici maintenant plus de 23 ans, au « International Colloquium on Twentieth Century French Studies » qui se tint dans les divins « colleges » de Claremont, en Californie, ne fut jamais reprise en volume. Nous sommes en 1988, du 5 au 7 février plus précisément, six mois après la première grande rencontre des cendrarsiens à Cerisy-la-Salle, et on peut lire mon compte rendu anecdotique sur ce paradis californien et son colloque dans Feuille de Routes n° 18 : les lieux étaient si paradisiaques, disais-je, que « you could imagine we should all be naked » (« on pouvait imaginer que nous devions tous être nus »). Il y eut, à Claremont, deux sessions Cendrars : j’ouvrais moi-même les travaux du colloque avec la communication qui suit, venaient alors Claude avec « La Nuit des Lémuriens » et Michèle Touret, « Roman et métalangage dans Moravagine » ; dans la deuxième session, Yvette Bozon-Scalzitti proposa « Le “Crach” du Panama » et Georgiana Colvile, « Feuille de houx/oil de fou ; le Hollywood de Blaise Cendrars ». Jean-Carlo Flückiger devait aussi présenter un texte mais, à la dernière minute, il ne put venir. Je crois bien que seule ma communication était en anglais. Pourquoi ? Je ne m’en souviens pas précisément, peut-être parce qu’elle servait d’ouverture au colloque, dans un site américain. La conséquence est que ce texte, avec ses jeux de langage, ne devait pas être facile à comprendre au fil de la parole pour mes collègues français et que, par la suite, il était diablement difficile à traduire pour une publication sans trahir tout un réseau nécessaire de relations que je m’étais obstiné à tracer, en trois temps distincts, chez Dan Yack, dans Dan Yack, et entre Blaise Cendrars et ses lecteurs. Pourtant, Claude, avec sa thèse soutenue depuis juin 1987 et toutes les discussions autour de la main de Cendrars, qui volaient dans l’air quand il était des nôtres, ce Claude-là aurait dû être mon lecteur, mon interlocuteur privilégié. Ici-bas, enfin, l’occasion de se rattraper.
2Le sujet du « Sans bras », au sens le plus large et le plus anodin, était l’Autre, sujet qui était à la mode dans le travail de la critique du moment, à moins que la mode déjà ne fût en train de passer. Dans le monde anglophone, cela retrouvait un grand sujet obsessionnel américain, celui de l’individu et de ses angoisses liées à la société moderne, et la tentative de déplacer l’accent du « je » trop narcissique vers des considérations plus attentives à ce qui l’entoure. Néanmoins, outils psychanalytiques à l’appui, la critique continuait de frôler dangereusement un solipsisme peu productif. Mais le dispositif freudien, puis lacanien, winnicottien, pouvait quand même fournir une grande et nouvelle ouverture sur le monde dans ce qu’il avait à nous montrer dans les relations d’objet. Retours multiples de répressions de l’Autre – mère, père, famille et étrangers, et jusqu’aux véritables objets : jouets, corps et machines, dont bien sûr ceux, menaçants ou réconfortants, qui étaient fortement marqués des signes de la modernité.
3Pour moi, si on pouvait apporter de la lumière sur Cendrars en puisant dans de larges concepts théoriques il fallait toutefois veiller à ne pas être tenté d’y enfermer cet inclassable, à prendre Cendrars comme excuse pour démontrer la validité d’un modèle. Le cas Cendrars était exemplaire, il cassait le moule. Une théorie de l’Autre n’était pas à démontrer chez Cendrars, mais à reconstruire, une voie non pas à suivre mais à découvrir, sinon à frayer. Dans « Blaise sans bras » je voulais suivre le jeu de Dan Yack et ses figures dans trois enceintes imaginaires successives, des arènes d’action que je traçais d’après le concept d’« objet transitionnel » du psychanalyste D.W. Winnicott (ce n’était pas la seule idée que j’adoptais de cet analyste, dont le travail sur le visage de la mère m’offrait plus de possibilités de développement pour mon texte que le célèbre stade du miroir de Lacan). Pour Winnicott il y avait dans la vie de l’enfant des objets privilégiés, ni dehors ni dedans mais qui faisaient le pont – le nounours, le doudou – et je prenais certaines arènes textuelles comme des traductions de doudous en lieux, des sites transitionnels où se débattaient personnages, œuvre, et écrivain avec chacun leurs Autres, qui n’étaient jamais tout à fait autres. Dans les luttes de la possession, de la dominance, et de la libération avec la mère, le père, la femme, le glacier, la baleine, les hommes qui travaillaient et le phonographe qui tournait, le héros du roman et le raconteur de sa vie s’affirmaient mais avec des gestes à double tranchant. Ces trois arènes étaient, dans l’ordre croissant et dans l’ordre de ma discussion, le site de rencontre de Dan Yack et ses Autres, Blaise Cendrars et le roman de Dan Yack, et le lecteur aux prises avec Cendrars tel qu’il se débattait dans, ou avec son roman. Cette troisième arène ne reçut qu’un très bref regard le plus souvent implicite, faute de temps dans l’efficace paradis de Pomona ; cette partie était censée attendre le placement du texte dans un ensemble, mon deuxième volume sur l’œuvre de Cendrars dont la ligne principale devait être, justement, la réception. Or, ce volume ne vit pas le jour.
4Claude avait soutenu sa thèse l’été précédent, mais je n’avais pu y assister et je ne l’avais pas lue : on ne put découvrir la version réduite de 1 200 pages dactylographiées à 350 imprimées qui lui coûta tant de peine qu’en 1996 – mais son travail sur La Main était partout présent, à Cerisy comme par la suite en Californie. Pour profiter de la main de Claude sur Dan Yack je n’avais que son article de 1977, « Figures de Dan Yack – le jeu dans l’île », où les relations du « je » et du « il » sont annoncées dès le titre. Mais un autre élément déclencheur de mon propre texte provient sans doute – c’est aujourd’hui que je puis dire « sans doute » – de notre rencontre à Cerisy en 1987. J’étais le président sortant de l’AIBC (Association internationale Blaise Cendrars), Claude entrait dans cette fonction. Lors d’un repas, comme mon état de gaucher entravait le passage efficace des plats à table, il se précipite pour voir comment mangeait un gaucher. Or, ensemble, nous constations que le problème pour Cendrars n’était pas, au premier chef, les contraintes du gaucher, mais celles du manchot. Le passage à la main gauche, qui apparaît principalement à la fin de mon essai, y est moins important dans l’évolution de mon propos que l’histoire du bras manquant, car celui-ci devient – on ne saurait faire mieux ! – l’objet transitionnel par excellence, le pont entre moi et non-moi, ou plus-seulement-moi : moi-peau et le corps de l’Autre qui ne cessera jamais de m’appartenir.
5J’ai choisi de peu réviser ce texte, pour ne pas oblitérer ce qu’il était – ce que j’étais moi-même à cette époque : inutile de cacher son passé, ni le parcours de sa pensée. D’ailleurs, il y a des passages que je n’ose retoucher, par crainte d’être aujourd’hui moins affûté ! Je me contenterai donc de quelques éclaircissements ici et là. J’ai surtout restitué des explications que j’avais biffées pour satisfaire les limites de nos séances californiennes. Destiné à la présentation orale, ce texte sans notes ne se dispensera pas de citer ses sources les plus importantes : Jung sur l’alchimie, l’« otobiographie » de Derrida, Bettelheim sur les contes de fées, The Divided Self de R.D. Lang, le bien remarquable The Image and Appearance of the Human Body de Paul Schilder, quelques ouvrages médicaux de Weir Mitchell et Oliver Sacks sur les membres coupés ainsi que ce texte étonnant de Robert Hertz qui écrivit sur la main droite et la mort – et qui fut tué à Marcheville en avril 1915. Je me souviens encore de la belle correspondance de la main gauche de Lord Nelson, après qu’il perdit son bras droit à Tenerife. Quant au maître Winnicott, j’avais eu l’occasion de le lire, en français avant même la publication française de Playing and Reality (Gallimard, 1975), dans les numéros de la Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse au comité de rédaction de laquelle siégeait mon beau-père Victor Smirnoff…
6Un seul ajout fut fait qui me semble important : il a son histoire, quelque peu prochronique pour ma propre pensée. L’épigraphe que je plaçai en tête de ma communication quelques années après, faisait déjà fonction d’épigraphe à un roman, Justine, de Lawrence Durrell. Il est identifié par Durrell comme venant d’une lettre de Freud, plus précisément il est extrait d’une lettre à Fliess, datée du 1er août 1899 et, en l’adoptant, le romancier anglais pensait à ses quatre personnages bien distincts, pour ainsi dire « réels ». Pour moi, bien sûr, ce sont les projections de Dan Yack et de Cendrars qui se bousculaient dans une première lecture de cette citation ; mais alors, pourquoi nécessairement quatre, et pas six, ou encore combien d’autres et dans quelle mise en abîme ? Aujourd’hui, quand je remonte par curiosité à la source, il devient tout à fait clair par le contexte immédiat qu’il s’agit de la bisexualité, proposée précédemment par Fliess : « Et maintenant, voyons la bisexualité. Je suis certain que vous avez raison à cet égard », disent les phrases de Freud qui précédent la citation. Plus remarquable encore pour notre propos, un peu de recherche supplémentaire nous apprend que, pour Fliess, la bisexualité est en relation étroite avec le choix de la main, gauche ou droite. Freud ne retiendra pas cette relation de la bisexualité à la main gauche ; mais en 1899 il ne pouvait savoir que Cendrars apprendrait à jeter sa main droite dans l’arène transitionnelle de l’imaginaire pour la repêcher, comme le dieu Tangaloa, avec sa gauche.
7Claude se souvient-il de notre petit débat parodique, après le déjeuner à Pomona ? Pour un film étudiant nous posions tous les deux à table parmi bouteilles et verres (Ah ! ces Français !) et nous discutions face au cameraman semi-professionnel le sens profond du genre grammatical. Où est ce film ? Près de La Vénus noire ? Revoici, en tout cas, l’essai qui engendra ce joyeux échange d’antan.
Chapitre II Blaise-sans-bras et le sexe de l’Autre
Je commence à croire que tout acte sexuel est un processus dans lequel quatre personnes se trouvent impliquées. Il faudra que nous reparlions de cela, il y a beaucoup à dire là-dessus. (Freud, Lettre à Fliess).
8I begin with Blaise Cendrars’often reiterated quote from Nerval, « Je suis l’autre », which has naturally fascinated critics no end ; nor will this necessarily short paper provide an end. The phrase evokes its close double by Rimbaud, it raises the specter of a threatening invasion from the world outside of « moi-peau » ; it calls out for dialogic analysis as well as interpretation in light of Lacan’s « stade du miroir ». Nerval, via Cendrars, also invites us to suspect a monumental narcissism at work – or at play – a whale-like swallowing-up and digestion of the whole world ; at this stage the phrase may be neatly flipped to dove-tail with Cendrars’reiterated quote from Schopenhauer, « Le monde est ma représentation », a phrase which he invoked in his own description of the « outside-in, inside-out » functioning of the double-volume Dan Yack which is my subject today ; it would then be difficult to say whether the two quotes are close doubles or mirrored opposites. In both cases Cendrars has swallowed, introjected his whole « monde entier » through the words of others ; the other text replaces his own, his voice has been turned over to Nerval or Schopenhauer, as much as to say : « Je suis le texte de l’autre ».
9But I don’t want to confuse the two pirated statements. I would like to take « Je suis l’autre » as the call for the performance of a decidedly anti-narcissistic act in which the Other has a face, a body and a sex. So often such an Other is merely and no other than, not-me. It leads a faceless, negated existence as not-me, locked outside of a room labeled me which is the only life we really care to describe. In this paper I would like to give the Other most all my attention so we may see what happens when it comes flying through the window, or through the mirror in one or the other of its fabled interpretations.
10There are three versions of « Je suis l’autre », each inscribed in the one to come, and dependent on who says « je ». First for us is Dan Yack, and the operations in his fictional world of everything which is not him. Outside of that envelope, the whole fiction itself, including the hero and his Other, is a relived or exorcized Other as it impinges upon the author saying « je ». Cendrars has taken on his own Autre, but in an arena of his own making where he may consider himself master of ceremonies. The figure of Dan Yack is his intermediary, but so is the whole fiction itself his intermediary, in a serious game our pirate has chosen to play with his Other. That is the second envelope. In the third, most encompassing envelope, I myself am « je ». The silent and self-contained reader has an Other which, in the act of reading, is mediated by the text and its hero and its author, all three together. For the talking reader that I am before you, performing interpretations, you also are the Other. Lucky for us, I shall have no time here to address this third envelope, which includes those in my audience I have stolen from to get here.
11As our premise – and certainly not as our conclusion – we see the Other live as a person, first and last a version of mother or father, and this is true in each envelope. In the first, the fictional envelope where we feel the most secure as critics, the Other is, as a first indication, all other men and women, and then, ultimately, the world at large, a whole, gendered landscape Dan Yack throws himself into. While we may find it simple enough to recognize the actual sexes of the people who surround Dan Yack, that does not mean their functions are so obvious to delineate. For a start, we might summarize that the first volume, Le Plan de l’Aiguille, puts only men on stage but that all of the action is dominated by absent women, one in particular who, at the outset, gives up Dan Yack for another man ; and that the second volume, Les Confessions de Dan Yack, puts only Dan Yack on stage, and all of the action –inaction in fact – is dominated by an absent woman, a dead woman who is alive through the book in the shape of text, since it is as much her confessions as his. Les Confessions are, then, the mixing of his voice and her writing, in fact of her voice as read into the machine by him, so that he plays both voices and you might say their virginal marriage is consummated in his voice in the book in our hands. Furthermore, Hedwiga, who abandons Dan Yack at the outset of Le Plan, may be carrying his child ; in Les Confessions, Dan Yack is told of her death and he proceeds to end the novel and his sequestration in the mountains by adopting a boy who will stand in for Hedwiga. So volume two brings to presence and to life two women who are absent and dead ; the books mirror each other, and are no doubt the Other for each.
12As to landscape (and, again, summarizing), in both novels Dan Yack is, in a way, nowhere ; he is packed away in ice and snow. It is the exterior form of what he calls his chastity. If ice is death, what is its gender ? Derrida, in his Otobiographies on Nietzsche (published in Canada as l’Oreille de l’autre) argues that the father is both le mort and la mort ; the mother is life. However for Dan Yack, both parents are dead, but everything that is Other in the novel is very much alive, vibrant, violent and, typically of Cendrars’work, markers of creative and created worlds even within the very deep freeze which is the overriding metaphor. Neither chastity nor ice have to imply death, only a profound stoppage, a suspension. I am reminded of Bruno Bettelheim’s analysis of Snow White, in which he shows that the girl’s mother does not kill her but that, burying her in a glass coffin, she arrests her development, her growth into sexuality. So, as the year rolls out of hibernation into the budding sexuality of Spring, Dan Yack rushes into the freezer and the permanent night of the South Pole, which conveniently reverses the seasons. But it is also the sex of the parent which is in abeyance in the encircling glace. As to which of the two sexes is frozen in the mirror, it may be male or female, though myth tells us the earth is mother, and the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott writes : « the precursor of the mirror is the mother’s face ».
13The birth of the fiction Dan Yack takes place under the sign of the loss of Hedwiga, his lover who loves him still but who chooses a serious Prince over the playful and playing Dan Yack. It is remarkable how many times Dan Yack is reborn in the first few pages : he witnesses two branches of the river like legs in the air give birth to the sun ; he inherits a fortune and a new life in the telegram of his uncle’s death, he rises from a stupor under a café table to offer himself and three lost men an exploration of the world ; and at every turn he recites The Ave Maria, « Blessed be the fruit of thy womb… » The father is always given short shrift, as mother and mother earth work alone ; but no one seems to play with Dan Yack. Later Dona Heloisa reincarnates the beloved Hedwiga when Dan Yack frees himself from the ice-pack, but she also is unattainable, married to another, and pregnant. When we get to Les Confessions, by the magic of discourse the absent Mireille lives on in her cahier. The virgin girl and the « mariage blanc » are preserved on the machine turning in another snow-bound cabin. This woman is mis-directed in three films as the dying and lost woman (including the female « machine célibataire » of L’Eve future) until Dan Yack suggests she plays Gribouille, and that transformation into a boy is what finally kills her, in the Spring. In memory Dan Yack, frozen out by his own choice, talks the virgin girl – who is also a virgin boy – into existence. As well, Dan Yack’s own dead mother appears, as a spectre in the snow outside his cabin window. He looks like her, shares her eyes, of which the left looks and the right listens. He says he would have loved her. Is that to say he did not, or rather that she did not love him ? In her place he loves, or would hope to love Mireille, without touching. What a poignant doubling of the untouchable, as he reads her book of memories, her voice, through his own voice and then listens back, as if to use both his mother’s eyes, seeing and hearing himself in the other.
14The father who has been denied paternity is also present, thanks to the negation. He appears late in Le Plan merely to commit suicide after gambling at baccarat ; he exists only, at this point, as a player’s failure at chance. The father is always secondary, and it fits him that he thus bequeath a fortune and a new future to Dan Yack in the displaced figure of an uncle who, also, to be on the safe side as it were, must die (as a parenthesis I would like to point out the surprising name of this uncle : Carlos Yack William, of the firm of William and William ; Cendrars appears to be knocking off more than one poet in Le Plan). It is also difficult not to see the negated father in the Plan. It is, also, difficult not to see the negated father in the persons of the men who take away (and of course sleep with) the women Dan Yack loves. These are the serious men, better fathers who do not play games. On the other hand, the three artists who accompany Dan Yack to the Balleny Islands are not fathers at all ; they appear more as split-off, aborted fantasies, creators incapable of creating, making or doing. They are dangerous, destroying lovers of him in himself ; a servile sculptor who idealizes him as an abstraction, a masochistic writer who offers him his mutilated face, and a syphilitic (thus sexual) musician who hates him and destroys his globe, his time-pieces and his vivres. After they serve their purposes in the mind-numbing freeze, and on the very first day of Spring, they die, virtually kill themselves off in self-mutilation, flames, blizzards, ice-floes, a kind of cleansing of Dan Yack’s playing field.
15Looking back at Dan Yack from the vantage point of these Others, we see him survive without his third eye, his monocle, – or his uncle – and with his cake, which he can eat. He survives to be the solitary and self-sustaining male in a barren kingdom with only his chastity to disturb him. Then he is the party-maker on the island of Chiloë, then the builder of industry at Port Deception, which is another island. He has become Man, « Il dans l’île ». He leads the manly life, killer of worlds, of sea-lions and whales by the hundreds, in order to supply and cure, to save other worlds, the children, for example, who will eat his little liver pills stamped with children’s faces on one side and the company initials on the other, S.B.C. (Societad Ballenera Chilotes, but also doubling for Société Blaise Cendrars). He kills, baths in blood as he tells us, but also created, builds, provides for all his men, though he forgets to recruit women. He believes he is the Father, the boucher as he calls all his fathers before him. But with all this he is dispondent in his newly acquired role ; he sees himself in his little pills as le père nourricier, and when he brings women in he plans to be the parain of all the children born into the community ; he is always aspiring to be the beneficent uncle, the second man, always motheringly benevolent rather than the oppositional, and engendering father.
16When we move to Les Confessions Dan Yack is frozen again, with his voices. At war he had continued to kill, under the orders of an English commanding officer named Butcher. Again he is the boy : he says into his machine : « Il a fallu la guerre pour changer ma vie. Non, il a fallu la guerre pour me retrouver tel que j’étais, tel que j’ai toujours été, c’est-àdire innocent et plein d’enfantillages ». As the novel draws to a close, as Mireille dies, as the sound of the train invades the mountain air, as the ice melts and the announced return to Paris is prepared for, suddenly a comical, incongruous old man appears, Max Hyène, « le plus grand ingénieur du xixe siècle », a man who has done everything : « éventrer les cinq continents… conquérir les Alpes, perforer les Andes, enjamber le Niagara. » This magnificent phallic force is « l’ami le plus fidèle de mon père », is close enough to have in fact shared mistresses, horses, speculation and even baccarat ! Dan Yack cannot hope to take over from this man, who even planned his Port Deception factory, and who receives inkwells by the thousands from all over the globe, as if to monopolize all the sources of writing. The modern Dan Yack must live on the margins of this outdated monster, of this « Voix de son Maître », a man who is explicitly identified as belonging to the previous century who and considers his wife a childish joke. Hyène argues that Dan Yack should have forced Mireille to sleep with him ; more male violence which shocks our hero. She no longer eats and will not conceive, and I am reminded of the odd tale Cendrars tells in the contemporaneous Une Nuit dans la forêt, of the frog who waylays a woman, leaps into her mouth to enter her womb, devours her baby in order to replace it and be reborn in its stead but, it would seem as the son of a mother and himself. All of life is, more and more, a sexual violation to her.
17Clearly Dan Yack is on the margin of the Other which is to say close up against it without wishing or daring to usurp it. Michèle Touret has written about the circles of the novel, but from the point of view of my argument Dan Yack fully accepts being relegated to zones just outside of such symbols of wholeness and repetition. In Le Plan, he is on an island just outside of the polar circle, and yet he is frozen with it. In Les Confessions he is not at the summit, not at « l’Aiguille » but at « le Plan », moving back into the other novel in a way – this no doubt why the site of the second novel is the title of the first – and even his confessions are at the margins of Mireille’s notebooks. The geography of the novel therefore leads us to see two frozen adult figures, one at the South Pole, the other in the mountain peak, as places best left to be desired. In Le Plan de l’Aiguille this near Other is the mother, whose ability to love is permanently arrested. Dan Yack initiates himself into an acceptance of her failure, then goes on to show off for her, with boyish bravado, that he can be the terrible destroyer of worlds he despairs of her admiring. In Les Confessions de Dan Yack, the pointed aiguille above, and no doubt also the companion Mont Blanc with its storied ninety-kilo telescope lens, comprise together the Other as father, distant, towering and judgmental. Yet this older man is a failure, with his own wife and with games of chance ; and still Dan Yack can neither emulate not supercede the authority of the father ; he must remain, respectfully, the chaste father-lover of a chaste daughter who is dying for a lover. Dan Yack is made sad by realizing, as Spring blooms, that the valley is like a vulva while « les pics impudiques [...] la dominent et […] se dressent vertigineusement en l’air ». Caught between the two sexes, he desires, by means of a prodigal giving to Mireille, a virgin birth out of himself. That is the stasis at one point late in Les Confessions, after he has been a boy for the ice-mother and a girlas-boy for the snow-father. He has been working at creating a myth of himself in order to offer to Others a place to come alive in, all to no avail.
18I close the envelope around Dan Yack and his Other to see what I might make of this proffering of bisexual chastity, as it were, in Blaise Cendrars’ relation to his own Other. The novel is the author’s child, in this case twins. But is it a grouped twins Cendrars might wish to be or twins he hopes to rid himself of (as he once said of Moravagine), or again, one of each ? If it is one of each, the full, double volume, entitled simply, singly, Dan Yack, would be their marriage, one which would not have been consummated/published until 17 years later (in 1946). For my purposes this cliché of the book as the author’s child should be combined with the even more cliché idea of the novel as the author himself ; this is to say, the novel is the author as child, at play. Cendrars generates himself as a new-born, and in two versions ; one as male child badly mirrored by its mother, the second as female child badly mirrored by its father. Dan Yack, character and novel, are a part of Cendrars which he has put outside of him, yet cannot find its existence anywhere but inside him. The art object is this paradox which Winnicott calls the transitional object, an « illusory » experience between the subjective and objective. As such, the novel is not itself quite l’Autre, since it is shared ; somewhat « l’il en je », a claim upon the Other to play a game in which « I » is determined to be in charge, creator of rules and relations.
19What is happening to Cendrars in this playground of his ? First we cannot but stop at the split, into two fictions which he himself set up for us as dichotomies of a two-part, antipodal movement. He also ascribed action to the first, reflection to the second, doing and being, which are the respective male and female elements as Winnicott describes them in his Playing and Reality. The novel, not being really the Other, need not have a gender ; but a double novel may function as fictionalized Others in a conflict over their proper functions. As I see it, the subject of Le Plan is a frozen doing – braving, conquering, acting, making – and the subject of Les Confessions is, partially, a frozen speaking, but to a far greater degree, being spoken through.
20Feminist criticism has accustomed us to the idea, inscribed in patriarchy, that man arrogates to himself the right to write upon a virgin, thus female page, the active acting upon the passive, to which the female writer may only re-act, respond by spreading her own blood upon her own projected, or even actual body. Indeed, the female is the body, the male the head and hand with « le droit à l’écriture ». History is male, orderly and rationalized writing by the male to fix meaning good and dead, Derrida tells us ; he then quotes Nietzsche in translation : « Or, notre langue maternelle est un domaine dans lequel l’élève doit apprendre à agir […] correctement […] », in which « agir correctement » reads in the original « richtig handeln », or handle rightly. The frog story from Une Nuit dans la forêt can be glossed again : the male-who-will-be-prince is swallowed by the mother tongue and, from inside her, choosing the right way, is born to his language or discourse. The right handling of the mother tongue makes for male discourse, a purposeful action ; what is left is, in a way, everything, or everything that does not do but merely is (and in an earlier view, everything that doesn’t count or make sense).
21Perhaps through a mis-hearing, perhaps as some sort of joke, the dancing troupe in the Ballets russes would call Cendrars « Blaise Sans Bras ». With no doubt much more purposeful irony, Picasso is said to have quipped that Cendrars had returned from the war « avec un bras en plus ». Interesting contradictory projections : has he none or three ? For my purposes, however, the question is not how many he had, but which one he lost, to which we might add the question, How lost was it ?
22Paul Schilder, writing on phantom limbs, says the hand is the part of the body « in the closest relation to the external world ». There is, of course, a question of castration here, but that is a theme sufficiently dealt with by other critics. I am more concerned with Cendrars’s loss of the power to handle his language rightly, to enact the man writing. Cendrars lost his right arm at war and, in a magical coincidence we cannot but marvel at, at the very moment (as Cendrars remembered it) of the death of his literary father, Remy de Gourmont, so that at the instant he might have displaced the writing father he lost his means to do so, and, if he planned to continue to write nevertheless, he would have to pursue with the left, the sinister, the irrational, the female hand, the Other one. Thenceforth he would have to write with the – no doubt mystical – body and blood, always with the second voice, the irrational and subversive subtext beneath historical linearity. The ancient father is not required to give up the inkwells, and Cendrars would write later, precisely when he began to write again after the hiatus of the second war : « Je ne trempe pas ma plume dans un encrier, mais dans la vie », a phrase to which I hope my paper is giving new meaning. At the beginning of the same book, L’Homme foudroyé, he describes it as a « récit », and writes : « écrire c’est brûler vif », thus bringing writing away from the hand to a voice and a conflagration of the body. You recall that all of Les Confessions is purported to be dictated and recorded, not written.
23Once Cendrars becomes the voiced mother of his text, la voix de sa maîtresse as it were, through his left hand, that one is not really autre anymore. Meanwhile the right hand, lost at war, becomes other, or more other. Yet studies of amputation like that of Schilder and many others tell us that this part of one’s body, « in closest relation to the external world », is never quite gone. Most all amputees depend, in fact, upon the definite presence of this phantom, and they cannot function if it is not « there », with the pain and even the last remembered gesture constantly felt. The position, the act, the potential for acting, the pain all remain, frozen forever in the phantom as they were, and so the arm and the « droit à l’écriture » are not gone at all, or not all gone, but remain both out there and in the body, in the « illusory space » Winnicott reserves for the transitional object. The right, controlling, dexterous hand has a role, but it is not so much producing as it is appealed to produce, and ultimately to produce through the body of the female hand that is left. It is missed, at the antipodes (in Une Nuit dans la forêt Cendrars writes : « le pénis marque le Nord ») ; he purposely sends Dan Yack the « wrong » way because the father’s hand has to be searched out on the mother’s body. We might summerize Cendrars’game : into nothingness, a frozen void of no help from incommunicative mother or father – what must look like Donnet and Green’s « psychose blanche » – he thrusts his father-arm, frozen in its moment of loss ; he then reclaims it with the mother-arm (I could say his m’other arm), drags into existence a world which is his own virgin birth : « je suis né le texte de l’autre main ». Cendrars is personified in Mireille as a child who, playing the naked baby Christ in the Christmas pageant, obstinately crosses herself with the left hand when it comes time for the benediction, the time for speaking well of oneself and others.
24The whole two-part novel is the story of the gendered hand as missed : in Le Plan it is claimed in a play staged for the ice-mother, it is won from her, as a toy, but only in exchange for the hero’s childhood fantasies of being artist, writer and musician, three somewhat feminized split-offs to whom she deals icy deaths ; and so the arm is regained, though only to be wielded with equivocal authority. In Les Confessions the arm has been lost again, as our somewhat retired « parfait maboule » toys with a female self-expression under the eyes, eagle eyes in fact, of the father with his 90-kilo monocle ; then it is reclaimed once more, finally, after another Spring kills the child-like virgin mother he has no chance of sufficiently protecting, but in two disappointing ways : first, he trains his own, much small « lunette » on the eagle, climbs the thawing peak to kill it, and finds nothing left except the animal’s « fiente » – quite an image for the residual of the melted-away father, whose power of interdiction has been dissolved by the death of the woman he was forbidding ; secondly, he adopts a son who, it is clearly expressed, replaces his and Hedwiga’s lost one, as well as replacing Dan Yack himself since he will carry his unique, virgin name. At the end we see Cendrars move boldly into Dan Yack’s illusory space, as the boy is adopted on Cendrars’real birthday ; and Dan Yack awaits the rightly armed son in a curious fashion ; he smokes on his balcony and, to stay in the sun, « glisse imperceptiblement à gauche ». What Cendrars has also staged, as the necessary corollary, must perforce go without saying ; the sun must be going the other way.
Auteur
Claremont Colleges, février 1988 - Outremont, septembre 2010
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
À la rencontre...
Affinités et coups de foudre
Marie-Paule Berranger et Myriam Boucharenc (dir.)
2012
Imaginaires de l’Amérique
Les écrivains français et les États-Unis dans l’entre-deux-guerres
Alexis Buffet
2018