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University of Oklahoma

Francis Ponge: Visual TextsAuthor(s): Haroldo De Campos and Maria Ins R. da SilvaSource: Books Abroad, Vol. 48, No. 4 (Autumn, 1974), pp. 712-714Published by: Board of Regents of the University of OklahomaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40128158

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Francis Ponge: Visual TextsBy HAROLDO DE CAMPOSThe expression"visual texts" {visuelle Texte) has been used by Elisabeth Waltherto characterizecertain poems by Francis Ponge, "the creative process of which can-not be separated rom their actual typography."1Max Bense explains: "Here we havetexts which are necessarilydeveloped on a two-dimensionalplane; texts whose flowof signs and information has to be considered as a phenomenon on the surface,noton the line. Therefore,they requireto be looked at or rathercontemplated in orderto be properly perceived and understood."2 n 1958,under the title Visuelle Texte,Bense and Walther organized an exhibition in Stuttgart,dedicatedto Ponge's work.Besides the documentaryand bibliographicalitems, a poster-poem,L'araignee miseau mur (The Spider on the Wall), was presented.This poem is the most representa-tive of that experimental tendency in Ponge's writings, although some analogoustraits have long since entered his poetry, at least as far as detail is concerned. In1959,when I paid a visit to Ponge in Paris, I had the opportunityof introducing tohim some experimentsof the Brazilianconcretepoetsand, at the sametime, of hearinghis opinion on the visual (ideogrammatic) handling of texts. Ponge showed me sev-eral poems in which the optical datum was to a certain extent submitted to elabora-tion: a soap-shapedoval text, for instance, as if carved on stone; a short reversiblepoem ("signe significant igne"); anotherone bringing out the nuclear word "soleil";and still another in which all vowels were dealt with like bullets shot at a body ("etvoici ce qui l'a tue") Some of these texts ("Architexte,""Le soleil") were publishedin a Belgian magazine, Disque Vert (1953), as partof a seriescalled"Fableslogiques."In spite of his emphasizing the episodicnature of these experimentsin his own work,Ponge pointed out to me his lifelong familiaritywith the written form of words, with"l'ecriture" s a visiblereality.He was born in the south of France, in Montpellier,Languedoc, in 1899,into afamily settled between the Pyrenees and Provence. Having spent part of his schoolyears in Avignon, he was brought up among stelae and lapidary inscriptions, andsince his childhood was in intimate contact with written charactersengraved onstone. Is that perhaps the reason why critics remark on his "sculpturalstyle" (F.Meyer) or his "positive-and-negativeverbal technique, as of a lithographer" (E.Walther) ?In 1957, in a theoretical article "Proclamation et Petit-Four,"published in themagazine La Parisienne (a special issue devoted to typography), Ponge stated:

Pointde douteque la litterature ntreen nousde moinsen moinsparles oreilles,sortede nousde moinsen moinsparla bouche. . . Point de doute qu'elle passe(entreet sorte)de plusen plusparles yeux, . . . Maispointde doute,non plus,ilme semblequedevantnos yeuxelle passede moins en moinssousla forme manu-scrite.Pratiquement,es notions de litteratureet de typographica presentserecouvrentnon du tout, evidemment,que toutetypographicoit litterature:maisrinverse,oui, c'esttres sur). . . . je crois aussique dansnotre sensibiliteactuellecntrentde plus en plus en composition avec les qualit.essonores celles qui

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DE CAMPOS 713tiennenta l'apparence u a la figuredes mots. . . . Pourfinir, il faut bien que jedise encorequ'ona beaucoupuse ces tempsderniers(Mallarme,Apollinaire,esdadai'stes) es artifices ypographiques our parvenira des effetsplus ou moinssignificatifs.

Here we could bring into focus other relevant issues of Ponge's poetics "Le poete nedoit jamais proposerune pensee mais un objet, c'est-a-direque meme a la pensee ildoit faire prendreune pose d'objet" Proemes, 1948)."Quellecreation?Le texteT ". . .creer des objetslitteraires."". . . Plus de sonnets,d'odes,d'epigrammes la forme memedu poeme soit en quelque sorte determineepar son sujet"(My CreativeMethod, 1949).In her book on Ponge, E. Walther makes a careful analysis of L'araignee? Firstshe envisages it as a "generativetext," i.e., a text which discloses the process of itsown production.It typifies what I would rather call a "metalingualpoem" (a poemabout the poem or a self critical poem). Next she studies the principle of "comple-mentariness," hat is, the mutually dependent relationshipbetween that text's seman-tics and its typography. For that purpose, she introduces the semiotic notion of"super-sign" Superzeicheri) A super-sign s the end productof an "iterative" emioticprocess ("signs which producesigns"); therefore,it overcomesthe linear, one-dimen-sional flow of words. Here it seems necessary to discuss the question of poetical"physiognomy,"as in the case of L'araignee, since the resulting "super-sign"hasan imitative nature (to the same class we must assign Apollinaire's calligrams andGreco-Latin"picture-poems,"arminafigurata) On the other hand therearedynamic,non-imitativetextual super-signsworking directly on the perceptionby means of aninterplayof words arrangedin a constellation.To this class belongs Mallarme'sUncoup de des (and many exhibitsof concretepoetry) ElisabethWalther herselfequatesPongeanvisual textswith concretepoems:

It is opportune o remarkthat Ponge, with his generative,complementary ndvisualtexts,seemsto approachhe neighborhood f the so-called on\rete Texteof the \on\rete Poesie.We mustn'tforget,however,that in the practicaluse oftypography ongedoesnotgo as far astherepresentativesf concretepoetry.WhilethePongean exts arealwayscomplementary,heconcrete neshardlyever are.Be-sides,Pongenever abandons he semanticdimensionwhereasconcretepoetry,al-most asa rule,does.For my part I would like to suggest that the complementariness n a concrete

poem is not normallya questionof imitation (mimetic reinforcementof its "content"),but rather of dynamic iconography (Peirce's "mode of diagrammatization"). Thesemantic dimension, at least as far as Brazilian concrete poets (Noigandres Group)are concerned, has always been considered fundamental. In spite of undergoing afunctional reduction (in terms of vocabularyand general conciseness), semantics isthe actual keystone which supplies "significance" or the poem as a whole. In thissense, Brazilian concrete poetry is definitely opposed to "sonorism"and "lettrisme"and their presentdevelopmentsin European poetry. Going deeper, the discussion ofthe semanticaspectof poetry gives rise to another issue : the question of the so-called"discursivenature" of language. In spite of dealing with the text in its materiality,isn't Ponge's poetry still too much stuck to traditional, "discursive"syntax? Whenasked, the poet answered me: "Yes, perhaps, but in L'araignee I broke it up intofragments, ike running 'slobber.'"In fact, this poem'smetaphorical"work of slobber"

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714 BOOKSABROAD("ouvrage de bave") is at once the string of poetic thought made visible and thespider's issue.Uaraignee is composedof five parts, arrangedby analogy with a musical score:1. "Exorde en courante";"Proposition"(saraband'stheme); 3. "Courante en sensinverse"(confirmation): 4. "Sarabande"(the woven thread; the insects'flying "jig");5. "Fugue en conclusion."In "Sarabande," onge undertakesa textual dialogue withRabelais,both throughthe lexical items he selectsto integratethe choreographicvisualgroups (the "gigue d'insectes volant au tour") and through the stylistic device calledelsewhere by Spitzer "chaotic enumeration."On a more essential level, however,syntacticallyas well as semantically, Uaraignee can be read as a virtual "homage toMallarme"and his constellation-poemUn coup de des (1897). We have only to com-parethe following extract from "Fuguein conclusion" "Jusqu'ace qu'elle coiflfe nfin,de maniere horribleou grotesque,quelque amateurcurieuxdes buissons.. . ."with thefollowing from the "Coup de des" "Saufe / que la rencontreou l'effleureune toquede minuit . . . quiconque / prince amer de l'ecueil / s'en coiffe comme de Fheroique."Or this "postludial"passage:"De ce repugnant triomphe, paye par la destructiondemon oeuvre, ne subsisteradans ma memoire orgueil ni affliction. . ." with the fol-lowing from the "Coup":"RIEN / de la memorable crise / N'AURA EU LIEUQUE LE LIEU." Even as an ontological prospectwe can make the Pongean spiderretrace the way of a Mallarmean ancestralArachnid:

J'aivoulute direque je venais de jeter e plan de mon oeuvreentier,apresavoirtrouve a clefde moi-meme, lefde voute,moncentre, i tu veux,pourne pasnousbrouillerde metaphores, centrede moi-memeou je me tiens, comme une arai-gnee, sacree, ur les principauxils dejasortisde mon espritet a l'aidedesquels etisseraiaux pointsde rencontrede merveilleusesdentellesque je devine et quiexistentdejadans e seinde la Beaute." LetterfromMallarme o Aubanel,1866.)To accomplish this outline of convergences,I would like to quote a Brazilian

poet, also a born "objectivist," ngaged in the building of a poem as a thing of words.I am talking of Joao Cabral de Melo Neto. In his "Serial"poems, 1959-1961(part ofhis book TerceiraFeira [Third-Day Fair]), Cabralresumes the Spider and its cob-web as a topic ("Formasdo Nu" [Forms of Nakedness]), and at the same time payshis homage to Francis Ponge ("O sim contra o sim" [Yes against yes]), whom hecalls "cirurgiaode coisas"(a surgeon of things) with "dez mil dedos de linguagem"(ten thousandfingersof language). Sao Paulo,Brazil

Translated rom the PortugueseByMaria Ines R. da Silva and the Author

1 Elisabeth Walther, Francis Ponge AnalytischeMonographic, Stuttgart, 1961.2 Max Bense, Programmierung des Schoenen,Baden-Baden nd Krefeld,1960.

ZL'araignee (1942-48) was printed in 1952 bythe publisherJean Aubier as a posterpoem ("L'a-raigneemise au mur"). The painterAndre Beaudincollaboratedwith Ponge in the "mise en page."