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Intention and Performance in the poetry of Claude Rayet-Journoud

     The question of intention versus primary experience in literature is operative in both the construction and reading of a text. Both writing and reading are focused. ideological activities which seek to expose meaning through the assertion of understood terms, that is, through the articulation of intention. During the 20th Century an aesthetic has evolved, especially in painting and music, which stresses reading as an affective, interpretive experience with a text, as opposed to the decoding of a writer s intentional message. The question of meaning so framed becomes a question of primary experience based on the interaction of a reader with a written text.

     The work of Claude Royet-Journoud, published in two books in France during the past decade, has provided a new depth to this issue. Royet-Journoud’s poetry is the result of a long and intricate process carried on by the writer, though it is less useful to read his intentions as personal will reinforced by words than to read them as performance in a theatre of concretion, abstraction and obstacle. The subject of this theatre is the process of thought as it emerges and constitutes actual experience. Royet-Journoud’s texts do not describe thought, they embody it; he does not reify the conceptual process with images and metaphors, but rather exposes cognition on a bare fiat stage of experience.

     La renversement, published in 1972, sets forward both the initial terms of his investigation and its form. Largely blank pages are interrupted by short clusters of words or phrases, implying both the expansive temporal and spatial margins of the work. These spaces are critically integral to the functioning of the poems which are, nevertheless, not about the loss of language. To the contrary, each text is charged with semantic and syntactic content. Royet-Journoud’s words resonate in an open field of tension dynamics in which the reader weighs and measures the relationship of every particle to its contextual space. Words and phrases strike each other with an intensity and variousness that yields narrative movement by interactive perceptual cohesion; the reader enters the construction of the text and “performs” it by his/her process of reading. Through this form of syllogistic linkage, Royet-Journoud suppresses the reader’s prior expectations and literary demands and brings him/her to his/her own mind where thought is activated, not illustrated.

     Both Royet-Journoud’s books are self-consciously concerned with this process though approach it in different, albeit sequential, ways. La renversement poses the initial question “Will we escape analogy” and addresses various reflective devices of thinking and writing. Royet-Journoud attempts to eliminate metaphor and analogy, though the writing is not completely devoid of images in favor of linguistic abstraction. Interested in what he calls a mobility between images, he presents the tension of surface and depth, and the dialogue of words themselves. This gives the work a translucent aspect. The reader is between objects, as if in transit.

     Part of Into This Act in Le renversement states these terms:

a)
at her approaches
the operation of breathing
is overcome with the intention
its excitement the periphery
of language like an irritable
pull
towards things
attended to

While this is not simply language about language, it is language focused on the process and performance of language. The possibility of reflection is sublimated to the more dramatic possibility of an act of cognition.

     As Mathieu Benezet has written (Shearsman 2), there is a language within language which is ultimately the object of this writing. From Reversed Images:

a book into which
a thought opens the door

and at the bottom of the same page:

to bring everything back to the cold
the table                            the call

this friction more essential than number

There is continual momentum towards and away from opacity but the “friction” of passage is more essential than the eventualities of the image.

     La notion d’obstacle (1978) continues the dialectic between image and passage, though the field of the page is larger and the points of focus are sharper. The obstacles are not only physical blocks to movement, but the barriers of the mind attempting to engage itself. Here again the question of intention and performance is raised, as the book, more conceptually unified than his first, struggles with its own propositions. It is useful to consider the manner of composition used by Royet-Journoud for these texts in order to understand the relation of intention to act. Each piece - they average five to ten pages — is drawn from four to five hundred pages of prose originally written in a notebook. Presumably this prose serves the function of both skimming the surface and probing the depths of the writer’s consciousness in a seemingly exhaustive manner. The prose texts are written over long periods of time, thus reinforcing the temporal dimension of the fina1 work. The poems in both books are made from extractions from this larger text; they are in a sense distillations of a much larger, more traditionally continuous, process of thinking.

     Even without being aware of the complexity of this process, the reader can sense the activity of the poet encountering himself; the poems are derivations from an external source, though the source, though the source is of the same mind. The final texts have an extensive. more-than-present tone which leads the reader into an open field of attention. This process, as evidenced in La notion d’obstacle, serves to unite the writer’s intentions with the reader’s act of participation and syllogistic involvement. But the obstacles of language remain visible. From Tie Beam:

back of the image

to get to description

he picks up the book again
a piling up of stones

mouthing a
dead tongue

The subjective voice which emerges from La notion is that of a skillful, though hampered, navigator. By setting out to engage the notion of obstacle the writer has himself become an obstacle. In his interview with Matthieu Bénézet (Shearsman 2) Royet-Journoud says: in order to become act, thought must first be arrested. The release from obstacle becomes the pivotal act, as the page which ends the book demonstrates:

the voice that descends is no longer
its own history
the angle
at which the beast is kept at a distance

women bring in food

the effort of their hands

If Claude Royet-Journoud is concerned only with abstraction, his books would result in theory; if he believed that experience is attainable through images, the work would appear much the same as surrealist and post-surrealist poetry. It is the engaging and dynamic interplay of these forces which propel Royet-Journoud’s books into significance. Moreover, his work presents aspects of the complex relationship of intention and performance on the flat stage of language. By drawing the reader into a cognitive space where abstraction and image resonate together, a space where the performance of the language act constitutes the perception of reality, the intentions of both writer and reader are made subject not to interpretation of subject, but to the living actualization of language.