The Endless Theory of Days: The Art and Poetry of Gerard Titus-Carmel (Chiasma 22)

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The Endless Theory of Days

Chiasma 22 General Editor Michael Bishop Editorial Committee Adelaide Russo, Michael Sheringham, Steven Winspur, Sonya Stephens, Michael Brophy, Anja Pearre

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007

The Endless Theory of Days The Art and Poetry of Gérard Titus-Carmel

Michael Bishop

Chiasma seeks to foster urgent critical assessments focusing upon joinings and criss-crossings, single, triangular, multiple, in the realm of modern French literature. Studies may be of an interdisciplinary nature, developing connections with art, philosophy, linguistics and beyond, or display intertextual or other plurivocal concerns of varying order.

Cover illustration: Gérard Titus-Carmel: Quartier d’Hiver II. Cover design: Pier Post The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence’. Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions de "ISO 9706:1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents Prescriptions pour la permanence". ISBN-13: 978-90-420-2165-5 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007 Printed in The Netherlands

TABLE OF CONTENTS Foreword ............................................................................................. 7 Chapter 1: From Hot Dogs and Bananas to Deterioration and Alteration: Form, Idea, Being ...................................................... 9 Chapter 2: Joaquin’s Love Affair ...................................................... 17 Chapter 3: The Cryptic and the Necessary, Deambulation and Sticks........................................................................................... 21 Chapter 4: From Coffins to Italiana and Riggings, Shop Curtains and Narwa .......................................................................... 27 Chapter 5: Accompanying the Other: From Chardin, Goya and Caillebotte to Bonnard, Crane and Roud ................................... 39 Chapter 6: Falling and Flowing ......................................................... 57 Chapter 7: The Self Accompanied: From Robbe-Grillet, Rossi and Roche to Commère, Bancquart and Bonnefoy.................. 65 Chapter 8: Excavation and Forgetting, Embankment and Abyss ......................................................................................... 75 Chapter 9: From Shadows, Interiors and Seasons to Cairns, Forests and Nielli .............................................................................. 95 Chapter 10: Questions of Presence and Manners of Darkness ........ 109 Chapter 11: Leafings, Jungles and Herbarium ................................ 135 Chapter 12: Today .......................................................................... 155 Selected Bibliography...................................................................... 159

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FOREWORD “Ce monde de rosée est un monde de rosée pourtant et pourtant” Issa “… là où se nomme la beauté” Gérard Titus Carmel “Je jouerai tout ce que je possède, et quand j’aurai tout perdu, je jouerai jusqu’à mon être même” Tagore

To speak today of the at once plastic and written work, that continues apace, of Gérard Titus-Carmel, is to plunge into a vast and complex universe of both turbulence and serene elegance, of intense self-doubt and persistent affirmation of an improbably residual purpose underpinning “the exhausting narrative of dying to which I remain alone in testifying”. It is, moreover, a universe that has drawn the attention of major critics and writers, this particularly, and from the beginning, with respect to its plastic dimension, but also, increasingly from 1987, when Titus-Carmel’s first volume of a now very considerable poetic oeuvre appeared. To argue that Gérard Titus-Carmel is today not only one of France’s most distinguished and original artists but, too, one of her most powerfully moving and eloquent poets, involves no hyperbole: it is a fact recognised by some of (post)modernity’s finest writers and thinkers, from Jacques Derrida, Yves Bonnefoy and Alain Robbe-Grillet to Pascal Quignard, Jacques Dupin and Marie-Claire Bancquart. And, if Titus-Carmel’s path may seem to have been lived and trodden in an at once fatal and necessary solitude, we should not forget the immense pertinence, both for himself and for others, of his numerous collaborative creations, his critical essays and books devoted to the work and thought of major artists and writers, and those freely meditative pieces, now plastic, now written, where affinities and exchanges are subtly and delicately pursued.

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The Endless Theory of Days: The Art and Poetry of Gérard Titus-Carmel

The pages that follow, written in English in a deliberate embrace of an anglophone world so often eager to discover and entertain distinct originalities not its own, seek, then, to set forth the case for the special, multiple genius of a man who, despite the experience of a biting melancholy resulting from loss, despite an “indefectible feeling of estrangement from the world” (PA) 1, despite, too, the corrosive sense of art’s, of language’s, deceptiveness, has never lost sight of a curious duty to the shadows that haunt and that, with now a strangeness that smiles, yet beckon towards “the very place, finally clarified and recognized, of pure evidence. // [The place] that is, where beauty is named” (PA). This place, Gérard TitusCarmel may feel, lies no doubt impossibly beyond the locus of his art and his writing, but it is a place that he has struggled with dignity and unceasingly deployed energy to bring to a semblance of incarnation in an oeuvre that has stirred, and will continue to stir, the minds and hearts of all those who have witnessed its exquisitely solemn unfolding over, today, more than forty years.

1

Gérard Titus-Carmel, “Portrait de l’artiste en profil perdu”: see Selected Bibliography for all abbreviations and details of publication.

I FROM HOT DOGS AND BANANAS TO DETERIORATION AND ALTERATION: FORM, IDEA, BEING

The artwork of Gérard Titus-Carmel that principally focuses my attention in this opening critical foray, all of it drawings – 25 variations sur l’ídée de rupture (1970), 20 variations sur l’idée de détérioration (1971), 17 exemples d'altération d'une sphère (1971) and some other pieces – is not the very earliest evidence of an originality that will quickly draw the attention of critics, philosophers, poets. It does constitute, however, with the work that proceeds – Nourritures culturelles (1968-70), La grande bananeraie culturelle (1969), the three “Olfactive operations” (1970-72) and other work undertaken in 1970 – a powerfully and coherently woven knot of (self-)exploration and (self-)initiation that will singularly mark both the art and the poetry of the next thirty-five or so years. Whilst it is true that all of this early work may involve a radical and fertile exploration of form via a manner, or manners, that would seem to evacuate flagrant authorialness and bestow on art an autonomy and a sobering ambiguity of purpose, it is useful to bear in mind a number of other factors at play from the outset. Firstly, and most significantly – we shall shortly return to this in greater detail –, forme and fond are never thought through in separation: to explore form for Titus-Carmel is to question the very nature and feasibility of our relation to being, our being-in-the-world, with others, things, via the capacity to feel and meditate this relation. Nothing here, in short, should be held to be dry, abstract, unlived, remote. Secondly, just as Gérard Titus-Carmel’s drawings, despite their refusal of a hyperrealist orientation, designate factors of manifest realness, so, despite the chasm between his own and conceptual art, all of TitusCarmel’s work is a profoundly thinking, self-conscious and terrestrially, ontologically conscious gesture. Thirdly, if it is undoubtedly true that certain of Titus-Carmel’s creative “mechanisms” hinge on “dismantling”, “disarticulation” and deconstruction, the latter reminds us of the degree to which, equally, his efforts, whether plastic or verbal – and, from the outset, the two may be said to combine – involve a dramatic rethinking, an exalted

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though discreet (re)constructive, (re)inventive démarche of broad philosophical and psychological dimensions. Yes, then, a “reflection, as Jean-Marc Tisserant argues, on the functioning […] of form” (JMT, 5), but an oeuvre not as an alienated absolute folded inwards upon itself, but as a door onto the conceivable depths of a tragi-comic presence that form at once reveals and occults. The Nourritures culturelles pieces of the 1968-70 period may be said to launch Titus-Carmel’s work simultaneously in various directions, various potentialities of his emerging (self-)exploratory, (self-)creative life enterprise: 1. these are drawings and no longer paintings; 2. their logic is not at all simply mimetic, reproductive, despite that rigour and meticulous precision that will come to mark his drawings of the next fifteen years or so; 3. rather do these drawings offer a pointing to the phenomenal world (of edible things) via a consciousness of art’s ever inwardly pointed self-pertinence: drawing is above all drawing, self-referencing and not a transparent, self-erasing representational gesture offering merely what seems already to be; 4. as such, Titus-Carmel’s traces are doubly cultural, voicing, to be sure, the already culturally inserted nature of the things we eat, raw and cooked, whilst never forgetting the hand, the eye, the mind that are behind, indeed at the heart of, these “cultural foods”; 5. in consequence, we may see here a satirical urge, perhaps even a derisiveness, but no doubt also something of a jubilatory humour, half-dadaesque, that, together, peer at both a public culture: eating, and a private way of being: art – all of this bathed, one suspects, in that surrealist sense of the marvellousness of the real, as well as the capacity of poetry, art, to penetrate, live even, something of the strange and wondrous human and non-human intertwinement; 6. to operate this penetration is to enter a visual, formal, and mental space of openness, polysemia, whereby the “still life” of the hotdog, the fruit, the steak tartare – any object will do to designate the universe “out there”, “other”, coming into art’s space of (no-)self – and, in this act of open designation, a signing / de-signing takes place, one at once underlining and undercutting self’s signature, in an allembracing theatre in the round, where subjectivity squeezes itself into the forms of an improbable alterity. The 1969 Grande bananeraie culturelle clearly offers an opportunity to explore further some of these early instincts and fascinations. Sixty bananas are mounted on small individual shelves

From Hot Dogs and Bananas to Deterioration and Alteration: Form, Idea, Being

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in the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris: fifty-nine plastic fruits, one “real” banana. Whilst we might be tempted to see in this some bold prank or a lighter provocation, at once satirical and phantasmagorical – and, it seems to me, this early work does indeed contain a freedom that would not wish to deny its own exaltation, an exaltation which will persist in the face of both traumas experienced and challenges to come –, La grande bananeraie culturelle engages equally and quite beyond any ludic gratuitousness with major aesthetic and ontological questions: the relationship of art to the real, of falsehood to truth, of copy to model, of reality’s constancy to its becoming, and so on. And, in all of this, as Jean Clair has remarked 2, Titus-Carmel continues to dig – without response, for these are questions that circle about, begging a resolution which, in a sense, art already enacts, relatively, relationally – into those Platonic issues of the relations between things, their ideas and their figuration. In addition one might note that the question of the uniqueness of copies, the unrepeatableness at the heart of repetition, and, even, the erasure of the real (banana model) through its fated self-erasure – all of this, too, takes much further any conventional exploration of the art/reality dialectic. Three most interesting and audacious “Opérations olfactives” follow in the next couple of years, as well as the 1970 Construction d’Osaka and the eighteen Mausolées stemming from a 1970 stay in New York. The first of the “olfactive” works, the Giant’s Causeway, erases the model proper, reduces it to the pure suggestivity of language (: the title) and odours released in the Daniel Templon gallery space in Paris. Here, the “reality” that “art” proposes borders upon the purely visual, demanding and, indeed, staging the imaginative projection of a relation between non-existent model or “reality” and the emergence of an “artistic” real rendered feasible through the workings of a capacity to smell fused with idea. Just over a year later, in March 1971, the second of these “operations”, Gérard Titus-Carmel’s Forêt vierge/Amazone, is “performed” at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Of course, in no normal sense is this theatre, performing art. But the creation does engage an audience become less spectator than thinker, sensing, projecting, living illusion as a form of reality. Again, the “model” becomes pure olfactive trace; 2

See his article in Chroniques de l’art vivant, 31 July 1972, and quoted by JeanMarc Tisserant (JMT, 13).

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it is de-natured, re-presented, occulted and suggested simultaneously in a “play” of interference offering at once the disappointment of absence and the satisfaction of creation. The third of these gestures, coming a year later in Aachen, is titled Reconstruction olfactive d’un paysage romantique. « Juste après la pluie. » (Hommage à Caspar David Friedrich). It is a title emphasising a number of additional factors: that the effaced yet implicitly present “model” can be anything, including an art object; that the authorial relation to any model is implicitly affective, laudatory, appreciative; that (, therefore), although Jean-Marc Tisserant may be correct in arguing that such “work always bears upon the destruction of a mental image” (16), the latter equally involves a multiplication of potential imag(in)ed relationships to the absent model, i.e. a deconstruction of specificity privileging freedom, yet loosely oriented feasibility. All of this being, of course, a profound exploration of both aesthetic and ontological experience, whereby self de-signs its relation to the other. Of the two other works of this early period that interests us here – the Construction d’Osaka (1969) and the Mausolées (1970) –, the former would seem to offer, for the French Pavilion at the Expo ‘70-Osaka, a further meditation on food, culture and form’s projections onto the real, a meditation at once monumentally concretised in the cascading heap of painted and varnished staff food and developed more notionally, abstractly in the photographed drawings accompanying and attached to the large “sculpture”. Closure, tomb, for the earlier creations? Quite possibly; for the Mallarméan idea of art as the “minute tomb of the soul” seems to be slowly developing here, the eighteen Mausolées offered, three each, to six New York cab drivers engaged over a three day period, provided a demonstration, to the (erased) self, that art may provide a space of repose, closure and rebirth to a banal, quotidian experience. Furthermore, each of the pieces of this series, involving drawing, gouache and occasional materials such as fur, on paper, provides no referential trace (other than the unsituatable and pseudo-anonymous naming of the given taxi driver), no even vaguely manifest clue as to what has been laid to rest: “the primordial clay of creation”, as Jean-Marc Tisserant most aptly remarks, is utterly masked if, by “creation” we imply the circumstances out of which art arises. For, of course, such a masking simultaneously reveals the emergent transformation operated upon the real – the “decanting” of what has been distilled, Pierre Reverdy


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would write, the lees of dailiness thrown on life’s immense compost heap. And, to shift to the perspective of another great modern French poet (and “theoretician” of poetry), Francis Ponge, the creative act seen in this light moves us not only from object (: model), to obplay (: the “play” of art’s forms), but also, from the possible frustrations of the relation to the object to the greater or lesser satisfaction of objoy (: art as affective and ethical transcendence). Yes, a removal from the real, its reduction to ash, but the raising, too, of a tiny memorial stela to experience’s oddities. Art as epitaph. A remainder and, oddly, a radical renewal, cognizant of a delicate, precarious relativity yet willing to make a leap of faith. 25 variations sur l’idée de rupture is clearly immersed in much that precedes. Drawing now reaffirms itself as Gérard TitusCarmel’s primary early mode and it is perhaps worthwhile insisting upon the inherent fragility of such a technique, its delicacy, its erasableness, its suspension over its own mortality. (Titus-Carmel has written quite tellingly about drawing’s technique and logic, especially in his Notes d’atelier, published in 1990 but dating back as far as 1971.) Drawing, too, may be deemed closer to writing than, say, painting, sculpture, installation work, photography and other modes, and, of course, we have already seen Titus-Carmel’s alertness to language in the care, the discretion and the explicitness, given to the titles of his plastic work. This said, what precisely do we find in these twenty-five “variations”? I shall summarise as follows: 1. tubes, beams, bars are drawn with seemingly mimetic rigour, tilted left or right, floating in the paper’s void, uncontextualised, uninserted into any narrative frame, partly corroded, ruptured; 2. we have here objects of construction, assembly, connection, which are plunged into an unexplained (but natural, mortal) state or process of (self-) transmutation, deterioration, (self-)de-construction; 3. to the question “What is on display here?”, we can answer, with Gérard TitusCarmel, the “idea of breakage” and an idea revealed in a series of exemplary aspects, but we should not forget to add that on display too is the implicit gesture and process of art, as well as the final reality of a work of art “relating its own creation”, as Todorov has written; 4. the broadly implicit narrative of mortality, of an inherent mortal fatality that arguably implies a fundamental otherness of what is, is counterbalanced by the discreet laconicalness of the entire series: the discourse on corrosion is itself “corroded”, muted, by the very

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corrodedness – incapacity, limitedness, mere mortalness – of discourse itself; 5. we witness, with the series, a psychodrama of utter referential obliqueness to do with the observable life of physical things, their relation to self (only seemingly retreated over the horizon) and to themselves. A year later, in 1971, Gérard Titus-Carmel exhibits, in Rome, then Aachen and Lodz, 20 variations sur l’idée de détérioration. A powerful, insistent, obsessive continuation of the work on “the idea of breakage”, these twenty drawings on paper persist in drawing the equation between, on the one hand, dream and ideality, no doubt felt to be illusory yet remaining emotionally compelling, and, on the other hand, loss, the seeming and felt experience of the inaccessibility of origin, purity, of “un-loss”. Thus, the ideality of form, Form (: here exemplified by parallelepipeds), seems only thinkable in its “negative”, deteriorated modes and images, but, although the deterioration involved does not appear to be recuperable as a mode of ontological perfection – the way a leaf falling, crinkling and finally rotting may be deemed embedded in a logic of mortality and renewal – such a dialectic may be implicit in a work thus readable as simultaneously incipient mausoleum and an act of breaking open the tomb of being, revealing its unfinished “discourse”. Form, here, at all events, leaps beyond those banal, but insistent equations of flat truth, simple mimesis and adequation, and may be understood to be a “place” of relativity, projection, humanisation, anthromorphism. As such, Titus-Carmel dismantles the illusions at the heart of our epistemology of the real, the distinctions between outside and inside, other and self, presence and “absence”. The serial “variations” upon the “idea” at issue offer us the pure music of the relativity of all projection of relationality, twenty exquisitely rigorous and refined traces of the tensions of figuration, the absence/presence of representableness, naming and unnameableness. The 17 exemples d’altération d’une sphère and the VI sphères, both exhibited in 1972, continue to demonstrate two things: the extraordinary draughtmanship of Titus-Carmel, allied to the innovativeness of his conception and purpose, and the deep, felt and meditated fascination with ideality, unity, perfection, and what would seem to transgress the latter. “Imperfection is the summit”, Yves Bonnefoy wrote in his 1958 L’acte et le lieu de la poésie, to pull himself into the fullness of his own temporal incarnation and


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thus resist the temptation to live the “excarnations” of “image”, pure conceptualisation, their repose and their prestige, far from the tribulations and the joys of daily existence and its visceral, affective experiences. The sphere, in these works, is certainly the emblem of ideality, origin, an all-containingness whereby all phenomenality and all discursivity related to anything that is may be housed. To represent the sphere is to alert oneself to its iconicity, to sense its capacity to become an object of uncritical, idealised devotion, an emblem of a sublimeness, an ineffableness within being. To alter the sphere, to redraw it, collage a supplement onto it, is arguably to deform it, rethink it, re-form it, query the logic of unity, whilst at the same time maintaining the icon as central feasible notion: Jean-Marc Tisserant points to the thinking of both Parmenides and Heraclitus in this context (cf. JMT, 39) and shows that the “transgressions”, alterations and becomings of (an icon of) totality do not notionally deplete or disfigure in any way such a totality: being thus cannot be in contradiction of itself. The seventeen “examples” Titus-Carmel offers us do not resolve these matters, but place them in a space, the place of (altered, new, newly created) being, where, arguably, not only has no loss occurred, but also no “resolution” is required: they are absorbed into a place of being which is the place of all imaginable logos or discursivity on all imaginable ontic change or evolution. The six spheres of the other 1972 work, shown first in Paris and then at the 36th Venice Biennale, along with photographs of some of the seventeen earlier spheres, show art to continue to draw its power from itself, its own avatars, this not as a purely self-absorbed, autophagous gesture, but as an activity understanding that a reflection upon one’s being-in-the-world and one’s doing and making therein can take as its model anything whatsoever: it is a doing that adds to, reflects on, remakes, re-draws, and is in no way a gesture of imitative reproduction. In this sense, VI sphères continues to subvert, engage us dynamically with a dialectic of sameness and difference, alteration and paronymy, ontological loss and addition, erasure and re-drawing/re-doing.


II JOAQUIN’S LOVE AFFAIR After the 1969 Paris Biennale at which Gérard TitusCarmel’s painting has represented France, the artist determines to plunge into what will become a very long exploration of the world of drawing we have just seen him begin to immerse himself in. And then he leaves for Japan, where he spends two months which will lead to the writing of the curious book Joaquin’s Love Affair, published the following year, in 1971. A curious book: its short, eight-page text reduced to the point of illegibility, occupying a tiny postage stampsize space at the exact centre of each otherwise bare page. Jean-Marc Tisserant speaks of the “perversity” of such a gesture, the “irritation” it can cause the reader who may, or may not, wish to resort to a powerful magnifying glass in order to seek a decipherment retreated beyond his grasp. Certainly, this is a bold, arguably provocative and thoroughly ungratuitous step for a beginning author. But its minimality is a construction, no doubt playful, ludic, in both the Mallarméan and the Pongian perspectives, and requiring, if not that intellectual effort Mallarmé demanded of his readers, at least an effort of global appreciation of what is potentially at stake: the text becoming visual image; its occultation by the latter; the fragility, indeed “invisibility” and “unreadableness” of all meaning; the compensatory mathematics of the textual/visual construction; the provision of a concrete, lettriste poem reminiscent of, but very different from, work by Mallarmé, Apollinaire, Reverdy; and so on. In effect, there are a good number of reasons to regard this, with Eddy Devolder, as “an essential text, comparable to a founding gesture whose energy will run through his work for several years” (ED, 57). A major one of such reasons hinges on that audacious innovativeness I have already alluded to. There is no effort to respect the conventions of the book that have persisted since its invention. As with the artwork we have just examined, from the Nourritures culturelles to VI sphères, Titus-Carmel vigorously, jubilantly, yet seriously shakes up our appreciation of available cultural and aesthetic equations. Joaquin’s Love Affair tests limits and finds none other than those the mind either settles for or freely creates. The book thus frees us from imagined constraints and offers a conscious articulation of such freeing via its title, its accompanying photographs

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and short film, as well as a self-analysis subsequently provided (to which I shall return). Titus-Carmel may be said broadly to endorse Michel Deguy’s sentiment: “a certain atheoreticalness I find painful”3, but there is elegance and discretion here, no theoretical excess of any kind. This remains, certainly, a book of meditated visual, formal and semantic experiment, but it is equally a book of affective experience, of the kind that will subtly but surely leave its mark on all of the writing to come. Joaquin’s Love Affair is a theatre of occulted subjective life: deeply felt personal loss, new-found emotional intensity and upliftment, the tensions of such interweaving, a sense no doubt of the half-derisory tragicalness of human destinies, yet, equally, a powerfully continuing knowing of the transgressive and even transfigurative dimension of a creativity that can blend the provocation of melancholy and the purposefulness of resurgent and repossibilising energies. To create, out of loss and continuity, a “dossier” – book, film, photographs, notes – that can become a locus of theatrical self-referentiality, a “case”, a puzzle, a play of mirrors beyond fixity, determinableness – this is to enter the realm in which life mutates into art, in which art retains, too, osmotically, its vibrant connection with the raw emotions and experiences buoying up an art yet never flagrantly naming themselves. This is the space and the act via which self senses its insertion within a vaster, cosmic theatre of Selfness, where nomination is understood to be purely relative, all narrative reductive. To peer with the help of a magnifying glass into the postage stamp of a text is not merely to play the voyeur, but it is to experience directly, as a reader, both the “illegibleness” of all being, all (our) profound otherness, and one’s never-ceasing urge to see into and finally decipher the mystery of the latter. If there is, in Joaquin’s Love Affair, as there was in Dada, some greater or lesser element of bravado, provocation, minimality, underpinning all, there remains unquestionably that “quest for an absolute” that Tzara deemed central to Dadaist “nihilism”. To transgress is to advance, to self-interrogate, to seek beyond the marks of givenness. Joaquin’s Love Affair may be the first published book by Gérard Titus-Carmel, but it is worth noting that it is preceded by a 1966 text never finally appearing in print, Tombeau de Pauline de T***, “a kind of wild, Anglo-Norman revery that Breton will read with interest”, its author reveals (cf. PC2, 9). Memorialising, in line 3

Jumelages, suivi de Made in USA, Paris: Seuil, 1978, 156.

Joaquin’s Love Affair

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with the essential logic of the mausoleum, centred on feminine presence/absence, it is easy to see a train of continuity connnecting this unpublished work not just to Joaquin’s Love Affair, but to the most recent titles such as Ici rien n’est présent (2003), Manière de sombre (2004) or Jungle (non-lieu) (2005). Moreover, very early paintings by Titus-Carmel also show an arguable affinity with aspects of Joaquin’s Love Affair, this, to the extent that the text constitutes the initial creative gesture – statement, narrative, argument, etc. –, only to be masked by the painted image. Eddy Devolder is no doubt right to see in this manner an implicit aggressiveness aimed at the spectator of such work. But we may reasonably deem this masking to represent an attack upon the self’s capacity to narrate its own complexities, perhaps a pudeur, even, to do so. Or, again, a sense of the deep, endless layeredness of all meaning, a layeredness that does not lend itself, despite desire and effort, to an excavation and a (self-) revelation of ontic depth. Almost twenty years after the publication of Joaquin’s Love Affair Gérard Titus-Carmel, completing his study of Bonnard’s L’indolente – a study I shall look at subsequently –, comes to the realisation that between the logic of his own book-film-exhibition and that of Bonnard’s painting there are strangely significant affinities which may well account for his being drawn to Bonnard’s canvas for the purposes of an invited lecture at the Musée d’Orsay. What is most essentially at stake in Joaquin’s Love Affair for Titus-Carmel, is a radically frontal, face-on narratorial and observational experience of perspective for writer, artist and spectator. Textually, filmicly and spectatorially, the narrator Joaquin, the artist himself, the spectator too, all must assume this experience, faced with the silent, naked reclining Léa who imposes that distance Joaquin/Titus-Carmel senses equally in Manet’s Olympia, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, as well as, now, in Bonnard’s L’indolente. What remains central, then, is the tensional relationship between self and other (narrator and Léa, writer and text, cineast and filmed actress, spectator and full-size photographs of Léa upon the gallery floor). Titus-Carmel does not dwell on the implications, at once sexual and ontologically absolute, of that phantasmatic Surrealist encounter with the naked other in the depths of some forest, nor do scenes such as those in, for example, Marguerite Duras’ Les yeux bleus cheveux noirs seem to break the surface of his exploration of the idea of “a young naked woman on a

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bed as an argument for a same and necessary distance in relation to the work [: writing / painting/ film]” (IND, 81). But it remains that the relationship to the other, whether person, world, text, painting, model, figure theatricised or projected in some other fashion, constitutes the radical enigma and haunting issue confronting all great writers, artists and thinkers.

III THE CRYPTIC AND THE NECESSARY, DEAMBULATION AND STICKS

The early 1970’s continue to bristle with fertile, ever expanding creative exploration. No fewer than eight series of complex and unusual drawings are produced in 1972-1973 and it is important to recognise that, increasingly for Gérard Titus-Carmel, the imbrication of art and writing, language, continues to develop in subtle and conscious ways: pertinent short oral or written commentaries, the beginning of those jottings that will eventually appear as the 1990 Notes d’atelier, the allusion to written materials in works such the 15 incisions latines, the intimate physical connection felt to exist between the inscriptive act of drawing (as opposed to painting) and that of writing. Cryptiques (1972) offers what Jean-Marc Tisserant terms “phantasm-objects” (51), forms that provide no direct reference to the real, their meaning swallowed up in the white void of the paper, enigmatically, unspeakably encrypted, entombed within the space, the matter, the mind that have yet given them birth. The nineteen drawings of the Usage du nécessaire series (1972) seem less an evocation of a laconicalness buried within itself, than a reminder of all those sources and resources, kits, sets, tool boxes, that speak of our using, their usedness, some reciprocal usefulness of things that exist and which may intersect with a desire to do, to make, to play, to decrypt and encrypt, to use (and wear out, exhaust: user, also) intelligence and physicality, making microworlds from the real’s macroworld. And, of course, the notion of necessity floats about constantly in this reflection on, and actual creation of, art: to make is simultaneously to “wear out” that very act – or series – of making, to move through the “customs” (usages) of doing to their point of completion, exhaustedness. The 1972 Démontages pursues such an implicit logic in offering a series in which, as Tisserant has well put it, “each composition is a piece of stage(d) machinery whereby the operator, like the apprentice-sorcerer, is operated on by what he sets in motion: dismantling is a montage in reverse” (JMT, 72). Mimesis, in consequence, yields once again to transformation, a re-and-de-

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structuring that plays with the underbelly of the object, a betweenstate that takes away as it gives, as it, thus, gives differently. The 1973 15 incisions latines offers what Titus-Carmel himself terms “a suite (a funereal procession)” (in JMT, 79) of what we may take to be masks designating fifteen Latin poets, masks that “hide” the paper (as does all inscription), shrouding it by virtue of their remainder, the names of the poets, being inverted, either cutting off the spectator from an inner, entombed reality, or obliging him or her to leap through the non-mirror into the space of art’s/reality’s sepulchral self-containment. An imaginary in continual, serial transmutation is at work, providing viscera, foetus, quartz, mushrooms, bark, brains, vegetal moss, and so on: proliferating forms of matter that offer the invisible, illegible (non-)spectacle of death as proliferation of drawnness itself, of drawn form without, finally, any overt representational function, purely or at least dominantly selfgenerating, self-referential – this, despite a pseudo-honouring of the poets, and despite, too, a symbolic enactment of tensions opposing/linking past and present, “dead” culture and creation-now. Both H.I.O.X (1973) and Carta tinta (1972) offer more compact series, of four compositions each, and both continue to demonstrate a hypersensitive conceptualisation, accompanied by different verbal articulations, of an act at once utterly material, absorbed by its emergent forms, and implicitly metaphorical, though open-endedly so. The four pencilled and collaged pieces constituting H.I.O.X thus draw to themselves and in a sense become inseparable from TitusCarmel’s dense yet pointed text: H: Joining. Bridge idea (jetty). (casting, being made, being unmade). I: Blocking off. ( – verticalness – ). The way, tenuous segment idea. (Fomenting one’s own discontinuity.) O: Encircling, outlining. Nucleus of resistance. Manoeuvre so as to break the spell (magic circle). X: Crossing out (excising). Sign of the unknown. The drawing becomes a crossing out – material stroked through – displayed on the spot (immediately).

To observe the drawing without the text is to be struck by the finesse, the scrupulousness, the self-imposing creation of an enigmatic drawn presence; whereas to read the accompanying text is to plunge into the flaming lived tensions of doing and undoing, creation and erasure,

The Cryptic and the Necessary, Deambulation and Sticks

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fullness and disallowance – the “letters of fire [writing] the story of [Titus-Carmel’s] destiny” (86), as Tisserant aptly puts it – the psychological, emotional and mental destiny of an ontos in the (un)making. As with Carta tinta, form thus dissolves its own privilege at the very moment it constructs its fabulous illusion. Works such as these play seriously with factors – gestures and lived notions – of repetition, substitution, memory, anticipation, development, erasure, correction and exhaustion, and, in so doing, render simultaneous figuration and disfiguration, firmness of (drawn) meaning and the seeming unravelling of all feasibility of the latter’s gatherment. But why “seeming”? Certainly, each figure, exquisitely surging forth in its erasure of purity, origin, black perfection, is a mask, an imago, an arguably utterly relative trace of a practice Tisserant can deem to be “without a God or a master, unstoppable, lawless” (90). But this is to bypass a deeper pertinence within all doing, it is wilfully to erase the buried meaning of all capacity to do or undo (: all is doing), to constitute one’s doing-thinking-sensing as an act and place of being inevitably beyond all figuration except that we choose or “unchoose” (: all is choice) to offer it. Ultimately, there is no lawlessness here, no lack of meaning, no undoing, no implicit nothingness. H.I.O.X and Carta tinta – but the logic is generalisable to my mind – are the figures of an unrevealed but self-assembling mean-ing4, a slowly deployed sens: a direction, orientation, ontic purpose unfolding, beyond platitude or reduction, in the infinity of its strange “thatness” 5. 1973 still reserves for us further traces along the way, of the Way, of this peculiar yet exhilarating – lest we imagine Titus-Carmel to be working out of pure masochism – infinity. Pourtours offers three drawings, all involving some collage as does the Déambulatoires series which in varying ways manifests connection to Pourtours: the use of white space, the consequent destabilisation of our sense of centrality and limit, the tying of cloth (drawn or real) to stick-like frames and the resultant metaphor of bandaging-joininghealing (of unseen breakage, wound), and so on. As so often, 4

That is to say, not a revealed signification, but a forever unfurling meaningfulness not circumscribable. 5 One might, without tendentiousness, see this notion in the light of the Chandogya Upanishad’s allusion to Reality as being that ubiquitous “thatness” inhabiting, beyond further specification other than its revealed form, all that is or is made to be.

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sobriety, austerity, even a raw primitiveness combine with a strange emptiness or invisibility – perhaps, we may feel, an arbitrariness – of subject, and thus meaning. The rigour of Cartesian totalising rationality is replaced by a new rigour, that of accomplishment subverting and constantly problematising its gesture whilst never yielding up a kind of blinding pertinence of its (un)doing. Pourtours and Déambulatoires, like other work by Gérard Titus-Carmel we have seen and will see, possess something of a quasi-Mallarméan aesthetics of self-sufficiency and that pure interiority of “a circulation and verification of forms in relation to one another” (Tisserant, 94), yet they lack that flagrant will for ontological transcendence in the midst of a sense of failure, that “former movement of hope of poetry [and art]” that Yves Bonnefoy sees central to the gesture of the author of Un coup de dés. Transcendence, perhaps not; but a visible and energetic taking up of art’s/being’s pressing immanence. TitusCarmel tells Michel Troche, in a 1971 interview quoted by Tommaso Trini, that it is “not possible to conceive of a form outside its own functioning, and working on the functioning of forms amongst themselves is working on their relationship with what produces them” (TT, 88): energy, pulsion, impulse, body-mind (– the soul is cut off, crossed out…) vitality and its accumulated “logic” at a given moment of personal incarnated evolution, a logic both blinding and engaged in a struggle of consciousness, lucidness with one’s emergent doingness. Titus-Carmel, in an interview with Bernard Lamarche-Vadel devoted to his Déambulatoires, evokes two notions of significance in his production of the forms of this series: that of “aimless going forth, wandering” (BLV, 94), and that of (movement through) a cathedral’s “wings”, its peripheral space – this allusion, however, being “not Zen, not metaphysical, nor mystical,” he hastens to add (BLV, 94) – although such denial, like an André Frénaud’s lay metaphorisation of the Magi Kings narrative or Yves Bonnefoy’s seemingly agnostic deployment of the figure of God in much recent work, inevitably includes within the meditatable equations of the work that which it seeks to exclude – but cannot, for consciousness is free, ever probing, every becoming. To study Titus-Carmel’s thinking on the Déambulatoires (NA, 27) is to realise moreover that its space and its figures are ever mutating. Verticals and horizontals mingle their energies with oblique lines, structures, crosses; the deambulatory spaces are thus complicated, even arguably deleted. And then there is

The Cryptic and the Necessary, Deambulation and Sticks

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the insistent bandaging, the hiding and “wrapping” of the “convulsive”, so that what is offered, revealed, is equally a mask, a necessary “façade”, as Titus-Carmel puts it himself (cf. NA, 27). Such work, and the sheer physicality of drawing, Catherine Millet is right to perceive as founding, beyond the seemingly formalistic debate engendered, a deep onto-logy, a language of or discourse upon being: desire, pleasure, newness, becoming, discovery, etc. And opting for serial production is to enlarge the field of an “investigation” (CM, 103) into the teeming, infinite and interconnectable forms of self and other, selfness and otherness – this investigative gesture paradoxically and reciprocally problematised by the poetics of change, palimpsest and masking it entails. In 1974-1975, from summer solstice to summer solstice, Gérard Titus-Carmel produces the rightfully celebrated series of thirty-three drawings-cum-collagings he will name, in English, the Four Season Sticks. One could argue here the “modal” distinctions displayed from “season” to “season”, but there is also great homogeneity throughout: coating, bandaging of sticks onto drawings, use of tracing paper as a veiling mechanism, drawing and model exchanging, fusing roles, model being created, then disassembled, offered as a second residual trace, etc., so that what generally is produced is: a created model above the paper + drawing on paper as an “ashen” residue of the “model” rather than its “copy” + the triste broche below the drawing, a further “trace” of the above creations, minimal, reconstituted, residually other. Alfred Pacquement writes that Four Season Sticks “radically disturbs the model-copy relationship” (AP, 133), and this is no doubt a continued intention, though I incline rather to Irmeline Lebeer’s view that this intention is now giving way to other preoccupations (cf. IL, 139): the relationship between obsession and order; the desire to make spontaneously chosen mathematics (: solstice to solstice, for example) “work”; the knowledge, yet, that the latter mathematics is at once “the mark of my lucidness and my despairingness” (IL, 135); the developed sense that, within any series, the next piece is always the provisional centre of all resolution of a becoming problematics; an increasingly firm consciousness of the psycho-physiological factors at play: pleasure + expansion + exhaustion, etc.; the feeling that such work, coextensively with the psycho-physiological dimension at the centre of its production, is a vast epistemological and ontological operation,

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a rhythm of beingness synonymous with doingness. Speaking with Irmeline Lebeer in a particularly buoyant exchange, Gérard TitusCarmel expresses his happiness at the baroque, exuberant air of Four Season Sticks compared with his earlier rather geometric forms, at, too, his matured sense of “complicity” with his doing, of its “necessity” and the various subtleties and subdued implications thereof, “presenting things not head on but in their slippage, their hiatus, drawing lack rather than meatiness, an interest in the crack rather than what is around it, preferring unveiling to exhibiting, dissimulation to omission” (cf. IL, 141). All of this, which is certainly true of Four Season Sticks but will remain a sure mark of Titus-Carmel’s insistent discretionary mode to the present day, belongs to the realm of what he terms l’inter-dit: the act and place of a speaking between its imaginable clarity and its felt provisionality, between a glimpsed self-knowing and a profound sense less of reigning taboos masking such knowing than of an inherent veiling upon the surface of what is, yet, revealed. It is precisely this living of the aesthetics/ontology of l’inter-dit that pushes Titus-Carmel – as it inclines us – to distrust overt and reductive narration of the breakage, binding and so on we witness in the Four Season Sticks: all is possible, of course, as art enters the public arena, but, as with, for example, Charles Mauron’s psychoanalysis of Mallarmé, the ice of critical musing can become thinnish at times. Titus-Carmel’s comments on his use of “sticks” is informative in this regard: “the willow branch gives tone and firmness to the drawing. It stops it from curling up. It redefines the pencil” (IL, 144). I am reminded of Jean-Pierre Faye’s pertinent observation in connection with the work at hand: “Thought moving with ease via the materiality of its objects, its instruments, and thinking therein, not from the outside, with aesthetic, structuralising notions, existential projects, psychoanalytic, surrealising presuppositions” (JPF, 148). The willow branch of the Four Season Sticks thus constitutes in the eyes of Titus-Carmel “a righter of wrongs, … a truthfulness” (cf. IL, 144): it pulls us away from the neatness of imposable hermeneutics towards the perfect intrinsicalness of things that are – just as drawing itself “fills in its/one’s chasms whilst singing their very dizzyingness”, as he finally puts it to Irmeline Lebeer.

IV FROM COFFINS TO ITALIANA AND RIGGINGS, SHOP CURTAINS AND NARWA In the summer of 1975 Titus-Carmel’s work takes a further radical turn in its intense and ever becoming self-development and self-meditation: The Pocket Size Tlingit Coffin, with its 127 drawn and engraved versions, a year-long wrestling with pleasure and exasperation ending only seemingly arbitrarily in July, 1976. Not uncharacteristically, a short, powerfully alert, and alerting, text accompanies the finally revealed ensemble of creations that constitute the coherent and accumulated whole that is The Pocket Size Tlingit Coffin now held in the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris. Much can be, and has been, said about this, possibly Titus-Carmel’s most well-known work, and so I shall centre my own remarks around Titus-Carmel’s own text, and proceed with ten compact observations, picking up, afterwards, on some of the elements of Jacques Derrida’s celebrated swarming and at once fulfilling and disconcerting experience of writing (himself) into and out of Titus-Carmel’s coffins: 1: the original model does not preexist: it is fabricated, intricately, consciously, quasi surreally, phantasmatically, and thus constitutes an integral part of the work as a whole: 1→127, 1=127, 1+127; it is pocket-size, transportable, possessable, processually liberating, immediately examinable, meditatable, anywhere; its designation as a Tlingit coffin is no doubt simultaneously arcane, esoteric, mystifying, ludic, and highly conscious: the Tlingit people live along the south-east coast of Alaska, as well as in northern British Columbia (where they are often considered by the coastal tribes as “foreigners”, more like Athabaskan peoples); they are an ancient, at least 8000 year-old civilization, with complex shamanistic and ceremonial traditions, burial rites embedded in potlatch usage allowing for exchange via an “excessive” self-expenditure that captures the imagination of an Artaud or a Bataille or a Michaux; 2: the work is parenthentically subtitled: “or: Of lassitude considered as a surgical instrument” 6. It reveals the subtext of a process of self-exploration, exploration of the self’s means, tools, of 6

See Joan Robinson’s translation of Titus-Carmel’s text published with Baudoin Lebon/SMI in 1976.

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self-continuation, to a point of felt definitive exhaustion of such means and process: a kind of anti-catharsis, more Flaubertian in its clinical dissection of a body simultaneously of (self-)creation, (self-) resurrection, and (self-)burial, its laying to rest of the remains of self’s doing; 3: the creation of the “model” / initial artwork is not fortuitous nor gratuitous: it is “carefully thought out”, though arguably beyond both flagrant, fixable referentiality and significance – other than that of its intrinsicalness, the energy inherent in its fabricated emergence; 4: the potentially ritualistic, ceremonialising dimensions of the Tlingit coffin are well understood by Titus-Carmel, as is the swarming phantasmatic virtuality of the object and its drawn masks, their rootedness in our conscious life as well as our unconscious pulsions; 5: in this perspective, the artist can also speak of, or imply, the work’s many, often metaphorical functionings: fire, smoke, mirroring, reflection, speculation, specularity, symmetry, structure, binding, object anthropomorphized (hair, lips, head, slobber, hands, etc.), coffin as Pandora’s box, resultant fears, intertextuality of aspects of the work: personal link to Grünewald’s Crucifixion, etc; 6: the extreme portability of the original box means that both the work of art and its further developmental process are no longer confined spatially or temporally: art and its production are “mobile”, ubiquitous, in the pocket and not just the head of the artist: they break free from privileged space to roam the banal, inhabit and transform the quotidian: in a sense art and life interlock, found a place, a “theatre” of intercourse, oneness, a “circus” wherein Bakhtin’s carnavalesque can unfold its infinite dialogy; 7: over and above all self-exegesis, exegesis metaphorical, allegorical, psychoanalytic, mythical, of the work-as-object, TitusCarmel sees his work as a “work of harassment and wear”: it bothers, shakes, disturbs, contests and worries (like a dog with a bone) the very process of its own emergence, wearing itself thin as it paradoxically amplifies, exhausting – in a year’s labour – its at once gestural, plastic, and psychical, energetic stock of feasibility to a point of fused nothingness and vast accumulation; 8: going further, the emerging work is seen as a work of “reconnaissance of the subject”, a recognition of and gratitude for its

From Coffins to Italiana and Riggings, Shop Curtains and Narwa

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matter, its matteringness, also, if I can put it that way, in a process that, via its very expansion day by day draws (in) its own “circle of boredom” about itself, as itself. If, then, the work may be said to unfold a meaning, an orientation, a full-bodiedness, it does so via a simultaneous process of (self-)“dismemberment”, an action biting into “the meat of its [own] meaning”, autophagous, masochistic; 9: the entire creative process, then, is lived at once as a surgical operation on the “giant body” of its production, an operation tensionally caught between breakage, fragmentation, analysis, and reforming, gathering of dismembered tatters, synthesis of sorts; 10: the paper on which are inscribed / incised the 127 Tlingit coffin drawings / engravings, also has its “insidious” mode of functioning: from benevolence and innocence it moves implacably towards a “burdensomeness” as it accepts deposit after deposit, its neutrality yielding to its “markedness”, its stained, sullied state of marred (non-)being. “Like a carnivorous flower”, Titus-Carmel writes, changing metaphor as fluidly as his work endlessly changes its figuration, the paper closes over and consumes the box-coffinmodel(s), burying it / them “without mercy”: loss, death, entombment by virtue of long, creative (self-)narration of the component parts of the work’s “object”. Titus-Carmel’s text is a text of insight, wit, play and, at once, self-fascination and self-release. It offers itself as part of a work it confirms as a labyrinth-cum-“puzzle” to which only its abandonment can offer escape and resolution. Jacques Derrida’s celebrated Cartouches, reprinted in La vérité en peinture, opens up a diary of reflection on Gérard Titus-Carmel’s Pocket Size Tlingit Coffin, a diary which swarms with flashing, impulsive insights of its own and in which Derrida finds himself caught in a contemplative labyrinth of his own making, one he, exhaustedly, in a sense mimetically, manages to escape on 12th January, 1978. These daily jottings and self-interrogations convey both the freely osmotic relationship of thought to object of thought – here Titus-Carmel’s exhibited work –, and the veritable infinity of paths opened up between two doing, making, poietic subjectivities. In principle as in practice, such reflections are incomplete, unfinishable. Like Titus-Carmel’s creation, Derrida’s Cartouches is fraught with, as well as implicitly and infinitely amplified by, its “remainder”. The analysis provoked is understood to be “interminable”, ceaselessly querying and

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supplementing its own projections (cf. VP, 216), implacably caught up in the weaving of its own deferral. “The differently [or otherwise] of ‘and so on’ thus becomes my theme”, Derrida writes (VP, 222), and his diary closes with the confession “And so with what remains – and differently” (VP, 284). The tension of such writing and endless re-writing resigned to re-signing flows both from the hermeticism, the encrypted secrecy and mutism of The Pocket Size Tlingit Coffin, and from its remaining, ever renewed “transparency” (cf. VP, 214). Whilst this can lead to Derrida’s sense of “discouragement” – “I’ll never get to the bottom of it all, never be free of it” (VP, 229) –, it equally urges writing to move in the direction of a relative exegetical feasibility yet known to be plunged into the “impossibility” of meaning’s stabilization: writing becomes thus a “mourning over [Titus-Carmel’s own emblazoned] mourning” (cf. VP, 243). Derrida wonders early on as to what he is engaged in talking about: the “thing” that is The Pocket Size Tlingit Coffin, language itself, or, again, fatally, “the remainder” (cf. VP, 214)? The title he gives to his diary meditations reflects multiplicity, indeterminancy: cartouche, scroll, ornamental “frame”, space for extra-textual / extraplastic inscription, commentary, contextualisation, (re- / de-) signing; cartridge (as cartouche cross-genders, from masculine to feminine), container (of light, fire, powder, etc.), ink cartridge, etc., etc. And then the mathematics of the prime number 127 draws much speculation, causing further reflection on factors such as the unity of the whole (despite two discarded drawings, despite the impossibility of defining this unity: the place of the created “model”? that of TitusCarmel’s own text-cartouche? Derrida’s? and so on) and, inevitably, the uniqueness of each constituent “part” serially buried as the whole emerges into its larger self-burial. Analysis swarms, branches, a plurality implicitly endlessly rerooting itself in its own deployed writtenness, “drawing” itself out from the deep, bottomless “drawers” of thought’s / language’s origin. Paradigm, parergon, “necessity” and contingency, work – Derrida’s, Titus-Carmel’s – as “theatre and theoria, the rationing out of the remainder” (VP, 231), a shared poiein ever weaving its becoming in the context of the philosopher’s own conjoined, ongoing “serial” thinking and the artist’s massively deployed serial processes explored to this date. If Derrida deems The Pocket Size Tlingit Coffin to be “beyond classification” (VP, 281-4), despite – it is essential to remember – his valiant efforts to describe


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the parameters of the problematics at play (cf. VP, 273-81), and if he opts for an articulation of his Cartouches that spirals and convolutes, unravels and re-ravels in an infinite process of reflective, specular / speculative supplementarity, it is no doubt because he feels, he realises, that his diary discourse “should leave you alone with the thing looking at you, leave it alone with you, remain silent finally, pass by it in silence, like another theory / procession, another series, say nothing of what it represents for myself, nor even for [TitusCarmel]” (VP, 216-17). After the intense, the obsessive and finally fatigued, selfexhausted dynamics of the Tlingit coffin, Gérard Titus-Carmel gives himself over, in the next few years, to a good number of much shorter series, and occasional single pieces, some of which only I can look at here: V dessins, Suite italienne, Agrès & biffures, Huit notes d’octobre, Agrès, Notes d’hiver, Noren, Fragments, Dessin (all in the 1976-1977 period), and on, to work such as Suite Narwa and 9 constructions frêles. Gilbert Lascault sees a conscious shift from concentration to “dispersal” and diversion, a scattering, a wider dissemination of creative perspective and exploration. After stubborn “perversity”, a release and loosening of energies, despite a continued rigour of attention. Suite italienne, for example, turns to a partial use of red hematite in the top drawing; an original use of tracing paper as a veiling device; an incorporation of language into the figural space, with names of certain Italian poets presented en miroir, readable, as it were, only from the quasi-Mallarméan “tomb” of their textual, interior space; a disconnection – yet inevitable connectedness in the same pictorial space – of language and drawings; the offering of a second drawing, given below, this time unveiled, more rigorously defined than its sanguine counterpart above (which was drawn more freely and virtuosically, de chic), with the poet’s name now written legibly. Endless factors are at work here 7, precisely working together to constitute a product, a producedness which yet supersedes them in that strangely discreet, withdrawn, unspoken flagrancy of the drawings themselves: the play of legibility and illegibleness; an honouring and memorialisation of poets, yet without contextualization; the interlocking fascinations with death, the poietic, artistic “tomb” and the feasibility/illusion of “resurrection”, 7

In his Notes d’atelier Titus-Carmel also dwells upon notions of time in connection with Suite italienne (cf. NA, 41).

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of a beingness beyond Mallarmé’s “nothingness of everything”; the continuing remaking, re-posing of the question of the “model”’s relation to the “final product”, and the incorporation into the latter of implicit questions of its own process: the veiled, shrouded, “dreamed” sanguine leads Titus-Carmel to create a model which, before its destruction (for it is not a part of the final displayed work though it will be recycled later), leads in turn to the second drawing; tactics of revealing and masking, and thus issues of presence and absence, perhaps even, implicitly – for this will emerge as an often interrogated issue in Titus-Carmel’s poetry, soon to burst upon the scene of his poiein – parallel issues of autobiography and fiction; tensions of tradition – drawing de chic – and its refusal at the heart of its yet ludic embrace; use of the red hematite which may be said to hint at blood, bloodiedness, violence, and Titus-Carmel showing himself extremely sensitive to such phantasmatic factors in future writings and plastic creations; and so on. Agrès & biffures offers a series of twelve drawings created in September and October of 1976 and its fascinations are pursued further and brought to some level of finality with the single and very large Grand Agrès of late 1976. To give oneself over to the serial drawings of riggings, nautical tackle, the apparatus of builders’ hoists and blocks, may at first blush seem an arbitrary choice. It is strongly arguable that it isn’t, however: sticks and cloth are again at play; the structures have both essentially symmetrical and freely transmuting features; Titus-Carmel has drawn before his Azimuth Circle, finds fascination in seafaring, its literature, its scapes and its lived experience, at once personal and vicarious: Cartier, Magellan, etc. And, of course, such a choice of subject-matter, if arbitrary, in the sense that it intends to convey no symbolic philosophical message – like Madame Mallarmé’s fans, let us say –, remains deeply motivated, magnetized in the Surrealist sense of arising from levels of (un)consciousness that reveal a mystery of desire, dream and being the rational mind can freely feed on, play with, in a profound yet unspecifically meaningful reinvention of self’s relation to (the complex and marvelous oddities of) what is. The poiein, the sheer doing, of Agrès & biffures is at the same time wonderfully original, exploratorily originating, in a number of ways. Each work in the 12-part series (a number dear to the poet soon to be, as to all poets of the French tradition) is bipartite,


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even implicitly tripartite: the upper part of the work gives a “reduced” drawing emanating from a model made by the artist but no longer existing; the lower part offers a further reduced, miniaturized object/“copy”, predicated on the above drawing of the unshown, disappeared model. In this way Titus-Carmel further develops his already intricate equations of model and copy, whilst drawing (…) our attention to the fact that the very act of drawing is an act of tensional (non-)convergence of the two, as well as a reductive, compacting, down-scaling of the what, the is-ness art’s gesture turns into art – and, thus, a new beingness in further tensional relation to what we think to be raw being. Drawing and making, upon the virgin surface of art’s support, as that erasure, that cancelling and crossing out that the title Agrès & biffures evokes and that Titus-Carmel’s various notes on drawing and writing can meditate…: art between presence and absence, making-doing-knotting and unmakingundoing-“notting”. Gilbert Lascault comments intelligently on the arguably unusual use of colour in this series, where the miniaturised “object” constructed from the drawing above receives various colourings not as harmoniously decorative or mimetic gestures but so as to better reveal the combinatory structure of the elements of the whole – this in contrast with the black and white of the drawing (cf. GL, 26). And, then, we are alerted to the shifting use / deployment of the backgrounds throughout a series which offers the void of pure paper white to heavily worked, shaded and pseudo-textured, back “walls”. The Grand Agrès constitutes a vast pinnacle of achievement in relation to these serial explorations, but is equally connected to the intervallic series, Huit notes d’octobre, no doubt especially to the eighth and last, which seems to have been amplified and rethought in that endless process of transmutational (non-)repetition that TitusCarmel espouses as an avenue of (self-)fructification and (self-) exhaustion. No “erasure” here, except for the implicit erasure of drawing itself; no dramatizing of blackcloth: form, being, silhouetted against pure voidedness / potential / origin; an exquisite finesse of line in the two outer verticals, the central string yet lightly masked with tracing paper and thus, for the artist himself, “collapsing” any supposition of absolute, firm, mimetic, construction of order, being: “displacement” and “hiatus” reaffirm themselves and insert authorial (self-)consciousness (cf. GL, 27).

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And so, through the once more twelve “winter notes”, to the six “shop curtains” of the spring Noren (1977), Gérard TitusCarmel’s orientalist and particularly japonophile side emerging once again… The mathematics of these drawings (pencil with watercolour and, once, gouache) is not just a matter of numbering (1-6), seriality, model-copy factors, but also one of the geometry of art’s forms. Here, the horizontal plane may be said to dominate via a long rail or stick stretching across the generous metre-wide paper. Yet this horizontality is somewhat attenuated, masked even, by the short vertical cloth hangings (one rolled up) with their strings that move both vertically and horizontally, the number three dominating here (though complicated by the strings and even, at times, other, larger backcloths). There are no absolutes here, finally, no stable equations, for there is no need for them, nor for their conceivable symbolics. Gilbert Lascault (cf. GL, 61) has rightly argued the relationship to Leonardo da Vinci and his fascination with cloth’s textures, foldings, the play of light and shadow on the latter – this, whilst pointing out that Da Vinci’s obsession is with clothing, material intimately connected to the human. It is not that the human is absent here: Noren “are” shop curtains and, of course, there is the sensuousness of the drawing itself; but the context remains floating, strangely detached like the description of debris floating in river water in Alain RobbeGrillet’s Gommes, at bottom inessential, given over to itself. Cloth, in effect, and in and for itself, has long fascinated Titus-Carmel: the Four Season Sticks, the Notes d’hiver (also 1977), the Agrès & biffures, the Suite italienne, etc. And it will continue to do so in the Fragments he will soon do (January-September 1977: one destroyed: 7-1=6) and the Suite Narwa we shall now look at. The Noren are exquisite creations predicated on a lived minimum, a banality one might (inappropriately) say (for all is astonishing): they honour the latter, however, as they honour and celebrate too – in a kind of brief jubilatory exhaustion of such seeming minimalness – the very gesture and process of their production. A dream of some “absoluteness”, as Tzara said of Dada; “found objects” meticulously, yet intuitively pursued to some relative point of “marvellousness”, Breton might have observed. Werner Spies has offered to date the most coherent discussion of Titus-Carmel’s remarkable Suite Narwa, a series, produced over a year, of twenty-six drawings with a large object,


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together with a smaller object and five engravings. The critic dwells on the “rhythmic” orchestration of the six sub-series that compose the 26 drawings; the symmetry and asymmetricalness that inform such rhythmicalness; the usual question of the relationship of drawings to the created “model” or object (which remains a part of the whole), a relationship that is fluid in the extreme; the tensions between what some might regard as minimalism, a kind of arte povera drawing its inspiration from the “banal”, the “insignificant”, and a rare and high technique, an “astonishing virtuosity” (WS, 8); the supposed implication of a series, whereby, despite its “necessity”, the artist articulates “a real protest against the possibility of definitively expressing content or form” (WS, 2); the broad question of (TitusCarmel’s) art as an incitement to debate its being, its purpose, its place in the world; the undoubted fact that drawing, here, “incarnates obsessions, spiritual and psychic obsessions” (ibid., 8), but well beyond any rationalisable narrative impulse. To these factors, I should like to add eight compact considerations inevitably overlapping with the excellent analysis of Werner Spies: 1: the title is characteristically enticing and unexplained, uncontextualised: allusion to the Narwa river, on the border of Estonia and Russia?; from the Old High German word meaning scar, and thus relating to Titus-Carmel’s broad poetics of crucifixion, crossing-out, incising, wound, bandaging?; the semanticomorphological relation between narwa and narrow, with the teeming polysemia of the latter term: slender, limited, prejudiced, meticulous, tense, etc. – all depending precisely on a context refused?; 2: the series of 26 drawings – which include watercolours and charcoals – constitutes a kind of alphabet of drawing and TitusCarmel groups his six-part, pseudo-hexagonal work in microsuites of 3 (Liminaires), 5 (Pierres noires), 2 (Assemblages du loup), 5 (Grands arcs), 5 (Extraits / Craie carrée), and 6 (Dérives), opting equally for an “un-numbering”, if I may call it that – the earlier pieces had been numbered – as follows: AA-AC, AD-AH, AI-AJ, AK-AO, AP-AT, AU-AZ. The virtue of this alphabetization of the suite resides in the fact that, whilst the serial movement from A to Z demonstrates this immersion of production and process in time, in a development and exploration of difference, the maintaining of the letter A throughout the designation sharply reminds us that this plurality is

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equally a singleness, a unified gesture, a gathered work, always A at the same time a given drawing may be AD or AP; 3: whilst it is true that the swirling yet coherent forms Suite Narwa offers us may be said to eschew all feasible hermeneutic codification, it is important not to view this refusal and consequent elusiveness as problematic, either for artist or for spectator: what, most fundamentally, is thus theatricised, is freedom, a spontaneity of generation that yet may be termed, as Titus-Carmel tends to see it, a “necessity” giving birth to its own variable emergence, explored and developed with an ever-mutating consciousness of its own power, urgency, “rightness”; 4: the Suite Narwa, like other series, may plunge us / the artist into what may be deemed the banal, the barely significant, but modern art has not hesitated to do this – Mallarmé’s fans, Monet’s haystacks, Braque’s candlestick, the surrealist quotidian, Vautier’s treasured found or created “kitsch”, Hollan’s oaktree, and so on, and Michel Deguy’s powerful L’insignifiant confirms the utter relativity of attached, rationalized, structured meaning 8 – ; and, more importantly, we understand here that the fundamental purpose, meaning, of these drawings is in the pleasure of a doing, a making, a drawing out from the “insignificant” of an energy of marvellousness synonymous with, coincident with, the productivity of all poiein, all making: Suite Narwa is at the visceral centre of unsayable, unlimitable being; 5: whilst the previous two points remain significant, Spies is right to argue that “in the Suite Narwa […] the fascination produced by the theme of lashing, binding, strangulation and bandaging attains to a power of evocation which links the artist’s destiny, the anxiety endlessly inciting him to attack this theme, to the myths of journeying, searching for treasure and the ghost ship” (ibid., 7). This said, however, and recognizing the lack of gratuitousness of the “subject matter”, none of the pieces of the Suite Narwa whole could be said to constitute a subject in any normal sense of the term, and certainly the forms offered are cut adrift from any autobiographical or morally, sociologically, emotionally motivated intention. Knotting, therefore, by way of example, may be said to convey a primordial fascination with entanglement, com-pli-cation, involutedness, enigma, interconnection, securing, binding, etc., but the fascination is 8

See Figurations, Paris: Gallimard, 1969, 9-20.


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pursued in the void, as a pure, discreet though urgent and flagrant epistemology; 6: because of this, each “portrayal” possesses a hieratic quality, presents the sacredness not just of itself as “portrayal”, as art, nor of the object thus figured / unfigured / refigured / transfigured, but of the process of (un)portrayal – the sacredness of all caress, of other, of self, of their exchange, the beauty of doing in the (non-) place of art’s being; 7: implicit in this gesture, then, is no doubt the dream – tattered, exhausting, disillusioning as it may simultaneously be held to be – of acceding, via the adherence to form, to some truth of being. Yet the sheer seriality of Suite Narwa, as elsewhere – but the logic applies to all poiein, as Reverdy has suggested9 –, would seem to show that truth is not available in any fixable space or gesture or mode: it is multiple, self-multiplying, paradigmatic (as Derrida suggests in his Cartouches), endlessly deferred, endlessly chased in the fleeing of its imaginable forms, the latter mirages of dreamed finality, forms that are mirages precisely because they are form (as Bonnefoy might write) – and even though truth does not seem situatable outside thereof. The pursuit itself contains truth’s germ, but the dream of a gestation offering closure seems condemned to inhabit the place of desire, which is that, too, of void, lack, absence, and thus of the experience of a profound non-coincidence of purpose and achievement, dream and reality; 8: if narrative there is, then, in Suite Narwa, it remains the saga of the self’s incessant incarnation in / as its dreamed forms of a deferred truth of being. Werner Spies hints at this (cf. ibid., 8), but I should suggest further that the ontos, the story of the being of self and other pursued, “recounted” and “incarnated” here, as elsewhere, lies not in any single or collected form, but rather in this non-situatable “unspace” of being / non-being that is the energy of the pursuit itself.

9

En vrac (Monaco: Edns du Rocher, 1956, 190-91) where Reverdy argues the endless circularity of the creative gesture: zero → creation → zero (of recommencement) → (further) creation → zero, and so on.


V ACCOMPANYING THE OTHER: FROM CHARDIN, GOYA AND CAILLEBOTTE TO BONNARD, CRANE AND ROUD

Despite his furiously focused and dedicated commitment to his own at once plastic and written work, Gérard Titus-Carmel has persistently, eagerly and scrupulously given himself to the accompaniment of the creative and meditative gestures of many major artists and writers both consecrated and contemporary. He has illustrated the writings of Mathieu Bénézet, Louis Aragon, JeanPierre Faye, Denis Roche, Pascal Quignard, Jean Frémon, Henri Meschonnic, Jacques Dupin, Bernard Vargaftig, Yves Bonnefoy, Pierre Courtaud, Philippe Jaccottet, and others, and, whilst such journeying with the other is based so often on the warmth and beauty of friendship, it is predicated too on admiration, fascination and, often, subtle affinity. One could readily sketch out the teeming delicacies of such implicit interweavings, from the early exhilaration and still the deep gravity of a surrealist sense of consciousness and glimpsed cosmic meaning at the heart of the quotidian (Aragon) to the swirling interminglings of grounded narration and a free-flowing discourse on desire, fascination, love and art itself (Quignard); through the taut rebelliousness before the poetic of a Denis Roche who yet knows the allurement of art’s / writing’s magnetic pull upon the real; through, too, the fine-boned readings and writings of a Frémon (: witness his superb latest Gloire des formes), the vast poetic scholarship of a Meschonnic, the searing, tragic deconstructions of a Dupin yet just perceiving through the fog of melancholy the energy, the persistent glimmer of a tiny feasibility almost righting the ontological balance; and on to, for example, the stark challenges of a Vargaftig swimming against the tide of his “unknowing” towards a shimmering horizon of some minimality here and now, in one’s very poiein; or the vast complexities of the work of a Bonnefoy thrusting the depletions and fragmentations of “image”, all gnosis, language, up against the bruised face of “the One” they yet may, if not restore, then not forget; or, finally – but such accompaniments and convergences still proliferate and I touch here on a very few instances

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–, there are the hesitations and at times profoundly anguished tensions of a Jaccottet, caught, as in his beautiful Cahier de verdure, between requiem and poetic oratorio, the inadequacy of words and the singing self-fructification of the earth, a felt finality of death and the blinding transcendent logic of “groundsel, cow-parsley, chicory” 10. The accompanying of the other, then, is vast, generous and yet, of necessity, interested, authentic, that is, magnetizing and meditating connection and exchange: illustrations, short texts, essays, full-length books, not to mention the countless epigraphs that adorn Titus-Carmel’s writing: Leiris, Coleridge, Emily Dickinson, Blake, Du Bouchet, Jouve, Cernuda. In the few pages that follow I have chosen to focus, most compactly, upon a small number of Titus-Carmel’s written accompaniments of the other, some elegantly pithy, others astonishingly ample, ever so finely caressed and cherished. Picasso The 1923 Tête de femme de profil gauche that Picasso offers is produced, almost out of thin air, from blotting paper and ink. What impresses Titus-Carmel is the masterly yet throw-away manner in which such a creation unfolds at the intersection of minimal interference and “that cheeky easy with which [Picasso] rethinks systems in a perpetually displacing and unhinging movement” (QIM, 14). Distance and vigilance. A technique drawing its genius as much from an intuitive knowledge of life’s / art’s materials as from an action upon them. Thus, Titus-Carmel affirms for himself, living the other, does art stage an inseparableness of vision, of the presence proposed, and the means and process of this proposal. The tension between desired coherence (of facial features) and the fatally limited and quickly indelible “tattooed inscription” ink on blotting paper entails, seems, moreover, emblematic of a larger poetics of doing and undoneness, dreamed and pursued absoluteness and relativity, that haunts Titus-Carmel’s tensionality yet in no way disallowing wonder and exaltation. Goya Almost at the end of his fine 1992 book on the art, better, the experience, of etching and the print, La leçon du miroir, Titus-Carmel 10

Cahier de verdure, Paris: Gallimard, 1991.

Accompanying the Other: From Chardin, Goya and Caillebotte to Bonnard, Crane and Roud

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takes us, and himself, on an excursion into the engraved world of Goya’s Colossus. He is, again, ever sensitive, much practised and highly alert engraver as he is himself, to the inextricableness of technique, process and product of which Goya’s work inevitably speaks. The piece he thus consciously titles Un colosse d’aquatinte: if this is a portrayal of man and cosmos, darkness and flickering light, it remains too an emergence of form via process and selected matter. In effect, Titus-Carmel’s “reading” of Goya’s piece moves seamlessly from the materio-formal dimension of its production and presence to the implicit anthropomorphic meaning, symbolics, of dark and light, largeness and emptiness, the geometry of human posture, and the relation of all these to Goya’s other two hundred and eighty-seven engravings. The nudity of the giant, the light playing across his thus exposed back and, dazzlingly, upon part of his face, exercise, in this way, a fused formal and ontological fascination. Form reveals its fond, the latter oozing its potentialities from the heart of the former. Resignation, exhaustion, blindness too perhaps, seem to reign, as do stoical presence, the silence of Vigny’s wolf – or Goya’s world of deafness. Exile, in short, in the place of being and making. And an exile, for Titus-Carmel, beyond the residual or even fierce Romantic transcendence available to the Blake or the Young he admires; an exile beyond grace and the redemption or, say, those voices and visions a Moreau or a Redon might still hear in the midst of their ideal symbolist withdrawal from the world… Ultimately Goya’s colossus is seen as “a figure almost emblematic of the work of the engraver himself” (LM, 99). Why? Because, most essentially, “clinging to a measure of night, not letting go of the shadows [– of being, doing, self’s relation to the real, (self-)creation –] for any old supposed gain – at whatever cost” (LM, 100) 11, the colossus / engraver accepts the fatality of his condition, his processual / existential choice, the torment of his Orphic plunge into the unknown, the forbidden other side of being and the graven image. Chardin The exceptionally fine and revealing set of perceptions Gérard Titus-Carmel first offered to Chardin’s 1738 La raie on the occasion of an invited lecture at the Louvre. They now form the second half of his book, Premier sang (1994), where he also speaks 11

My parenthesis.

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of Philippe de Champaigne’s circa 1639 Portrait de Richelieu, whilst adding a third volet to his reflections, whereby he seeks to identify the critical elements of his instinctive conjoining of these two hauntingly influential, indeed initiatory, paintings. My observations here are, of necessity, extremely telescoped: 1: Chardin’s still life, Ray, is seen as conveying, in its bloodied violence, an image of “the vaster mortal nature of the world” (PS, 53), its characteristic and celebrated lighting revealing the “insidiousness” of death (cf. PS, 58); 2: the tension between colour and form, the structuring, compositional, aesthetic emotion they engender, and the subject matter they depict via their models – such tension remains primordial, unresolved, pitting unrevealed circumstance with its yet flagrant contents against the “central role of the mind” (PS, 61) and its secret, quasi-dehumanised “fascinations” (cf. PS, 62); 3: La raie thus becomes, in the midst of its coldly exposed viscerality, the place of “a brilliant exercise in the “rendering” of matter” (PS, 71), a place of formal orchestration that once allowed Proust to admire “the beauty of the vast, delicate architecture (of the strange monster), with its blood-red tints, its blue nerves, its white muscles, like the nave of some polychromatic cathedral”; 4: if Titus-Carmel avoids sexual interpretations manifestly available here, it is because he is above all struck, fascinated in turn, by the painting’s metaphorising of torture and martyrdom (cf. PS, 734), by what, in the introduction, he terms the ceremonial and sacrificial implications generated – this in a long tradition of such representation, though “in La raie, there is a quality of placid horror not found anywhere else” (PS, 75); 5: what “saves” painter and spectator, including TitusCarmel, from feelings of utter repugnance, is artistic “talent”, the art of painting: “Drowning the fish in (and via) paint(ing), in other words”: the gaping wound inflicted upon the fish’s flesh thus reveals the “innards” of painting itself; 6: this said, Titus-Carmel does not neglect the role of memory, visceral experience, in such depiction, and he will go so far as to see Chardin’s Ray as a self-portrait (cf. PS, 115): yet, to see this painting as self-portrait, if it implies penetrating into the shadowy and most real though unspeakable realms of Chardin’s / the human psyche, implies too that La raie reflects, portrays, and no doubt


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principally, the painter’s “constant concern with painting and the visualisation – the forming – of what is represented, and with the credence its models are ready to grant it, and, paradoxically, the credibility painting offers them in return” (PS, 114); 7: in his ongoing engagement with the questions of the relationship between model and painting (or drawing; all forms of plastic or written art), Titus-Carmel dwells finally on the question of the absence generated by the creative act, an absence resulting from the “disjunction” between respect for the model and the demands of freedom, the “excess” claimed by the creative act. If, in consequence, one may speak of the radical “failure” of art, its “dis-figuring” of figuration (cf. PS, 121), our “incapacity to access the uncontemplatable element in painting [is] what makes the latter still more beautiful” (ibid.): it is, Titus-Carmel concludes, the “luminous but hopeless [task of painting] to give [– as has Chardin –] a bearable face to Beauty” (PS, 126). Caillebotte Les raboteurs de parquet that Caillebotte painted in 1875 Titus-Carmel light-heartedly confesses to liking, for, arguably, all the wrong reasons – which might have to do, he suggests, with the subject matter itself, or with some meaning emerging against the grain, as it were, of the painting proper –, reasons yet lacking neither in pleasure nor in logic. In a nutshell, what Titus-Carmel fancies here is, beyond the scraping and planing of the apartment floor, the planing and potential refinishing of (the) painting itself. Caillebotte’s work thus becomes the self-reflexive space of (a) painting, the act of painting, ready to be begun again. No doubt endlessly. The artist of modern seriality wonders to what degree Caillebotte sensed he was offering the allegorical scene “of this infinite labouring in a place closed to the world” (QIM, 34) – the workers have their backs turned away from the public space, their energies entirely given over to their artisanal gesture, “endlessly preparing the desirable and perfect surface of some impossible painting” (ibid.). Alert as he is to the formal echoes Caillebotte’s work develops within its aestheticised structure – the shavings the men produce and the curlicues of the iron window railing –, Titus-Carmel’s mind remains finally absorbed by the whimsical – but sharply felt – thought of the artist’s scraping and hollowing through to “the other side of painting” (QIM, 35): the other

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side of all doing and being. A (possibly hellish) passing through the erased mirror of (self-)creation to the dreamed face of Creation. To “grace”, finally, Titus-Carmel surmises, beyond struggle, doubt, anguish, relativity… To, perhaps, curiously enough, something not far from the grace, the light charm, the affinitary caress the poet of Forge and Instance de l’orée achieves here12. Schwitters The closing chapter of Gérard Titus-Carmel’s 1992 “Elle bouge encore” is entitled Bris and devoted to Schwitter’s 1944 Two Black Angles which offers a broken photograph frame, itself framed, the whole thus assembled being in turn framed. We are thus quickly immersed in a poetics of brokenness, dislocation, absence and silence, which draws and fascinates the creator of 25 variations sur l’idée de rupture and the soon to come Travaux de fouille et d’oubli, a poetics intensified, moreover, by the mise en abyme of its bare yet flagrant “thematics” – and, of course, its coffin-like framing effect. This said, Titus-Carmel is equally impressed by what one might think of, in Reverdyan manner, as that compensatory reharmonisation of the ontological equation whereby the implicit trauma of shatteredness is offset by the gesture, which, too, is a poetics of gathering via a stunning and audaciously elegant modal economy. The latter, laconic, discreet, predicated on a simple giving of the minimum, allows for what has been “withdrawn” by brokenness and consequent loss to become subtly recuperated via its very revelation, its exhibitedness – an aesthetic, but, too, ontological, transformation of absence into infinity, of implicit poverty into oneiric wealth. This wealth and this infinity, however, should not be thought to represent a specifically identifiable set of intelligible, intellectualisable gains, firm significations, for, as Titus-Carmel himself affirms, Two Black Angles conveys rather “an a-signifying transparency” (EBE, 96). It remains, nevertheless, that this transparency – at once restraint and virtuality – is “the act and the place”, as Bonnefoy might write, the process and the product, of a tense and terse beauty which, in and of itself, constitutes meaning. The gravity, the serenity, the extreme simplicity of Schwitter’s piece Titus-Carmel sees as the work of a mature artist, and mind. Produced at the very limit of aesthetic – and, 12

For an analysis of Instance de l’orée see my essay in the Irish Journal of French Studies, 2003.


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no doubt, ontological – feasibilty, “this assemblage, Titus-Carmel suggests, becomes, via its very gapingness, an illustration of that impossible painting that, at the furthest distance from himself, the painter pursues in his work” (EBE, 98-9). Art as a place of nothingness and a window onto an absent and infinite something. Crane L’élancement appears in 1998 in Denis Roche’s exceptional Fiction & Cie Collection, and is subtitled Éloge de Hart Crane. A spiritual biography of sorts, Gérard Titus-Carmel’s beautifully penetrating and empathetic “life” of the American poet, author of White Buildings (1926) and The Bridge (1930) is the story of human poietic energy, imaginative ambition and vision, the turmoil and anguish than can beset such vision, the surging, spurting, (self-) transgressive force that yet impels a Crane, as it impelled a Rimbaud, an Artaud – and rare creative souls today. Titus-Carmel’s meditative study is rich and full, and I cannot here do more than explore in much compacted form something of its wealth and significance in the context of our global concerns: 1: the chosen epigraph is a stanza from the work of Emily Dickinson, lines that peer through the darkness of death – Crane commits suicide at the age of thirty-three, seemingly leaping from the deck of the S.S. Orizaba on the 27th April, 1932 – into the dream of resurrection and celebration; 2: somewhat in harmony with this epigraph, a brief liminal, though parenthesised (Oration) is offered, an oration that sees the poet as a “black angel”, questing after the “lost unity” of body and soul, discovering, singing, giddily soaring, meteoric – a poet whose trajectory provides “at least the bitter happiness of joining some of our parched desires with his” (LE, 11); 3: Titus-Carmel’s lived “fiction” then divides itself into three parts: “Une âme à la peine”, “Une ombre à la fenêtre”, “Un ange à la mer”, which, if scrupulously centred upon readings of pertinent primary and critical works, inevitably harmonise with the world experience and emerged Weltanschauung of the author if Ici rien n’est présent: the angst that can cloud the azure skies of the soul’s seeing and dreaming; the shadowiness of being’s flickering illuminations, and the veritable “shades” that can haunt the mirrors into which we peer; that “angelicalness” – of self, at the centre,

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perhaps, of that “nothingness of everything” that pushed Mallarmé to dream of his own radical alterity – this, despite consciousness of dangers entailed and seemingly fatal failure; 4: the accomplishment of poetry is thus seen, with Crane, but essentially so also, as plunged into deferral, ever that Rimbaldian “future Vigour” whereby truth – Truth – might imaginably be attained to “in a body and a soul”, a synthesised total of (self’s) meaning; 5: just as Michel Deguy has fancifully but purposedly toyed with the implications for his life’s work of the name of the poet Pierre Reverdy13 – and Pascal Commère has performed the same operation on the name of Titus-Carmel 14 –, so, here, does the latter reflect on the conceivable (inter)pertinencies of the words Crane / crâne (skull / bold); and Hart, the poet’s mother’s maiden name: there is much that could be added here, of course, to do with the hart / heart homonymy or the symbolics of the stag, dear to the Flaubert of Trois contes, but Titus-Carmel is drawn to the poet’s self-appellation of Harold Hart Crane, seeing in the Harold both Hart and old, and, once again, a symbolics of death – and resurrection: Golgotha, “the place of the skull”; 6: where we might deem the unfinishedness of one’s work as failure, Titus-Carmel sees this not just as (in 4 above) a sign of the fatal futurity of all poiein, all doing and its meaning, but as constituting in itself a beauty: “a work eternally suspended, and beautiful in its very frayingness” (LE, 22) – André du Bouchet thus prefers the teeming fragments Hugo piled up in dusty drawers, to the perfected forms of his published collections; 7: Titus-Carmel shows himself sensitive to that high tensionality in Crane and in a good deal of writers, philosophers and dreamers Crane himself admired, a tensionality between affirmation of “the reality of their belonging to the world” and a distrust undermining this affirmation, destabilising their “belonging” (cf. LE, 23); 8: thus does the utopian dream lock horns with disillusionment, the mystical dimension of Crane’s, of all, high vision risk being met, whether one is poet or saint, or Vigny’s Christ 13 See the edition of Pierre Reverdy’s Sources du vent, précédé de La balle au bond in Gallimard’s Collection Poésie, prefaced by Michel Deguy. 14 See Selected Bibliography for details.


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himself, with a “burning sense of failure” (LE, 29), even impotence, betrayal: the “wound of [one’s] own infiniteness” thus leaves its scar on the most exquisitely beautiful skin, and Titus-Carmel quotes Ruskin’s view that the limit of one’s own failure is the limit of the greatest creative accomplishment (cf. ibid.); 9: it is not without a felt pertinence, no doubt, that TitusCarmel argues Crane’s occasional return to the discipline of classical forms “as a last rampart against disenchantment” – not a ludic gesture, a toying diversion, but form as an “object” to cling to in the midst of psychic and spiritual turbulence and intangibleness; 10: equally striking is the regular apostrophizing of Crane by his French counterpart – “O Hart…!”, “You will go down the long staircase that leads to the monster’s suffocating belly, seeking to complete the construction of your mystical harp”, “Sleep, Hart, shut your eyes to the world that could not offer you welcome”, – an address, with the delicate intimacy of the French tu, manifestly revealing a certain deep sharedness, a moving affinity which the materially vaster accomplishments of Titus-Carmel in no way alter; 11: Hart Crane’s description of his own work and their linguistic quirkinesses as “incunabula of divine grotesqueness” resonates with Titus-Carmel no doubt in some larger way, revealing at once Crane’s own dividedness over his own originality, and that feeling so empathetically experienced by those writers and artists whose wings take them close to the searing blaze of their glimpsed alterity, their blinding divinity; 12: what then does Crane hope to achieve? Titus-Carmel argues as follows: “visionary and debauched, [he] did not aspire to a transcendent world order; he wanted to annihilate within himself the burning consciousness of his fatal crumbling and, too, the irrepressible dislocation of all consciousness, in his vision of the One, sealed by the inaccessible image around which all great seers have built their work, before their dreams wilt within it” (LE, 60): the language of poetry as the tool of a dream nourished by “a kind of inner divineness” (LE, 66) thus offers, in its seeming miraculous selfsufficiency, the vision of a healing-cum-unifyingness that, yet, in colder light, with the swinging motion of time and mood, is felt lesser, inadequate to the vision, grotesque even. The body, of course, its reimmersion of self in matter, is the other lived side of l’élancement: if the latter is surging mystical aspiration, it is, too,

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simultaneously or alternatingly, sharp pain shooting through one’s experience: the hauntingness of death, the “catastrophe” (cf. LE, 70) of this very rivenness; 13: somehow bridging this widening crack, this potential chasm, between dreamed personal transcendence and dire selfimmanence, there is Crane’s poetical oeuvre: unfinished, in-finite, yet self-constituting, in a sense “monumental” (LE, 79), this oeuvre is the emerged tip of a vast submerged ontic “structure”. Crane’s dilemma, as that of other ardent modern seekers, involves “living an experience of God outside of God – exiled from God”, Titus-Carmel argues (LE, 80): if the poet’s Bridge seems to become too precariously stretched between ecstasy and despair (cf. LE, 12), between Ascension and Fall, it nevertheless remains that moving place of relative Grace that suggests the angelicalness of Crane’s final plunge. Munch The short text devoted to Munch’s prints appears in Gérard Titus-Carmel’s La leçon du miroir (56-63) and is, perhaps inevitably, initially centred on the play of light and shadow the techniques of the engraver tend to emphasise. A viscerally felt symbolics of blackness and shadow is, however, what quickly appears to overtake anything of an aesthetic analysis: the sheer form chosen by Munch becomes synonymous with a fond, a meaning, of sweeping psychological, even ontological dimensions: sooty ink constitutes a “funereal drapery”, pallid, washed out features – in self-portraits or faces of sister or friends – cannot emerge into either the light of their potential or the intimacy of a larger connection to the world. Munch, then, offers a being, an ontos, locked within itself, thrust into its unspokenness, perhaps its unspeakableness: “Images imbued with a sense of silent fright and overwhelming solitude” (LM, 57), Titus-Carmel first argues, relating them to a “Nordic ethos” of “placid, though unresigned, despair” (LM, 58); yet images, he then, halfrecuperatively, suggests, which, whilst maintaining their fascination with nothingness, yet recover their power of structural, aesthetic orchestration of this affect. The lived and intense drama of darkness – Titus-Carmel cites the example of Puberty – is thus made manifest via a consciously manipulated technique and formal arrangement. Space explored and exploited, wittingly, intuitively, instinctively, to correspond with the swirling psychology of stiflement, entrapment


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and marginality – Titus-Carmel’s essay is post-titled Abords d’Edvard Munch –, such a space is well understood to be plastic, designed, drawn, carved out of wood or metal, every bit as much as we might be tempted – say, in The Sick Child – to see it as a space of pure thematicalness. Thus meld into an inseparable gesture the pure poiein of the artist and the complex immersion of the man in his tense experience of limit and finitude. Bram van Velde The fourth and final text of Quatre images mémorables is devoted to Bram van Velde’s 1923 oil on canvas Snow – sometimes titled, Titus-Carmel pointedly reminds us, Snow Landscape: snow become landscape become painting’s very matter and substance in its blanking, all-present, all-subduing, -silencing, -effacing monolithicalness. Somewhat as with Munch’s Sick Child or his Puberty, the space of pure plasticity melds with, melts synonymously into, that of the ontology or psychology it seems “fatally” – the essay is titled Bram, fatalement – to be drawn to convey: a bleak hereness that, despite perspective and the path trailing off into the village, remains inescapable, stifling, beyond, as Titus-Carmel perspicaciously argues, narrative and song. If, moreover, he is prepared to see traces of the work of others, from Ensor to Van Gogh to Kirchner, he sees most importantly to what degree Bram is already supremely – modally and moodily – present in this painting: modally in his orchestration of space, line, colour, perspective; in the mood simultaneously oozing from each conscious or unconscious – the mind emerges whole, total, not in dribs and drabs – plastic gesture and sign. If Reverdy finds in the painterly manner of a Braque, the vrai lieu of his being – “This painting is Braque”15 –, and if Titus-Carmel seems to echo this (: “But Bram is there, I have said”, QIM, 43), he appreciates equally to what extent this world, the ontos it paints, is shared, equally “yours” (ibid.) as one gazes upon it. Snow, thus, as, at once, a portrait of self, become other, perhaps always other, exiled within the very being of the self, and lost, quasi-effaced by the landscape / the painting of whiteness; other, too, through the gaze of the figures meeting that of the spectator of this doubled space of erasure and confinement and silence: you, me, caught in, drawn into, the mood-mode that is Bram’s and that, as Titus-Carmel notes, is triply intensified by the 15

See the essay on Braque in Note éternelle du présent, Paris: Flammarion, 1973.

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three mutually mirroring, unified black forms that haunt the eye in the midst of their snowy half-burial. A near-voidedness Bram paints, a silence painting out so much, leaving “Bram fatally alone before that thing called painting” (QIM, 48), close to emptiness, beyond speech. And plunging us, and Titus-Carmel, into the bare speakableness of such alterity. Painting’s process, layer upon layer, touch after touch, like the fabrication of a psyche: one day, fatally definitive, “unpardonable”, “a beyond-painting” (ibid.). Bonnard There is again great subtlety and immense sensitivity in Gérard Titus-Carmel’s full-length study of Pierre Bonnard’s 1899 L’Indolente, which is meditated, lived even, along with its “little avatar, the Blue Nude” (IND, 11), and contextualised with regard to various related studies, Bonnard’s illustrations for Verlaine’s Parallèlement, certain nudes by Manet (Olympia), Cézanne (Une moderne Olympia), Delacroix’s Mort de Sardanapale, as well as the various titles Bonnard juggled with before acquiescing to L’Indolente. I shall proceed economically, highlighting five factors at the heart of this powerful affinitary fascination: 1: Titus-Carmel is finally drawn to speak of this work by a secret anxiousness at the heart of Bonnard’s creative gesture yet rarely acknowledged: the “quality of pleasure” required by TitusCarmel prior to commitment and analysis comes to coincide with Bonnard’s own requirement to “draw one’s pleasure – paint one’s pleasure – strongly express one’s pleasure” (IND, 15), at the same time as it complexifies our whole conception of the act and place of pleasure – Adorno is epigraphically quoted to this effect alongside Bonnard: “Art is the promise of a happiness that breaks”; 2: not unlike Yves Bonnefoy in, say, his studies of Rimbaud or Giacometti or Mallarmé, Gérard Titus-Carmel simultaneously interrogates life, the (auto…)bios driving all graphy, as he delves into pure plasticity, offering us something of a Bonnefidean biographie de l’oeuvre, and certainly a meditation on the relation of art to the real, the body, the phantasms that haunt and mould it; 3: if the various photographs taken in 1899 of Marthe naked are of interest in the above context, they relate too to Titus-Carmel’s understandable attention given to the perspective employed by Bonnard in L’Indolente: height above subject, distance from it, a


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positioning of the creative / emotive self in that ambiguous threshold allowing seeming dominance of lived hesitations in relation to the subject / object of fascination. Titus-Carmel points out, so vitally, the world does not play favourites in what if offers the eye: “it is the work of the painter [faced with the virtual elements of existence], to give them meaning” (IND, 34), and thus the “dislocated space of the bedroom” is, as it were, body language, a logos of relationality, just as it is an affirmation of pure painterly authority; 4: the tensionality thus deployed in the portrayal at once of intimacy and distance theatricises, in Titus-Carmel’s eyes, a deferral of affect which perhaps constitutes the originality of Bonnard’s work as a whole. It creates a space of enigma simultaneously constituted by simplicity and gravity, density. And Titus-Carmel sees something of this same deferral – which Reverdy would detail as that tension between raw emotion and aesthetic emotion, between emotion external to art and that utterly dependent on its forms – in his discussion of the yellows (of sheets and body) at potentially symbolic, affective, ontological play in L’Indolente, yellows yet so (consciously or intuitively) aesthetically orchestrated that “there is, decidedly in the end, only room for painting, which, without distinction, will saturate [both yellows] with the same pleasure” (IND, 59). If there is drama in L’Indolente then, it is the hidden drama of Bonnard’s relation to painting and what painting, here, specifically, leaves silent, unsaid: the “event”, that “anecdotalness” Reverdy banishes from poiein. “No pleasure other than that of painting”, Bonnard tells us – even if this suppression betrays a nervousness, fear and remorse that remain a veiled psycho-drama as implicit as that on the other side of the canvas of, say, Delacroix’s Mort de Sardanapale; 5: nevertheless, if the principal pleasure of (Titus-Carmel’s gaze upon [Bonnard’s]) painting can be said to be painterly, aesthetic, orchestrational, processual, he remains supremely alert to the pyschic energies that promote and invest such artistic process. Thus is it that his mind refuses neither the impulses of his imagination, his impressions, his feelings in reading art’s forms: L’Indolente thus becomes the portrait of death become beauteous, embraceable; yet anguish equally surges forth before the vision of flesh’s exquisite ephemeralness; and the artist, “in his or her endless dealings with the model – whoever or whatever it may be – [may be said to experience]

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something of the desperate force which gives certain major works of art a particular sense, both of exhaustion and eternity” (IND, 73). Needless to say, nothing could be more precious to Gérard TitusCarmel, more precariously yet essentially attuned to his own ontological-cum-aesthetic sense. Roud As I complete my telescoped pages on Pierre Bonnard, Gérard Titus-Carmel’s book on Gustave Roud reaches me and demands its place alongside what precedes, and, in something of a privileged position of closure thereof, I offer six brief reflections on what is clearly a book intimately lived and meditated with a grace we have come to recognise as synonymous with that maturity of penetration, intersubjectivity and harmonising embrace characterising all of Titus-Carmel’s incursions into the life’s work of the other. Firstly, the title: Gustave Roud. Une solitude dans les saisons, and the epigraph: “Oui, tu contiens le monde; il n’y a plus d’ailleurs pour toi dans l’étendue”. Titus-Carmel’s long essay is centred on a man, his life, his bios, his psyche, and, of course, his written work which fronts body and mind upon a strange implicit silence of renunciation of world and its mise en langage which, together, had seemed like feasible objects of pursuit and accomplishment (cf. GR, 4). The title speaks, too, of an enterprise of living and writing increasingly spun from that painful minimalism of a felt solitariness caught in the cyclical drift of a time experienced as a place at once of loss and renewal, exhaustion and freshness, even ripeness, death and eternity. The epigraph is from Roud’s 1967 Requiem, a book seeking to lay to rest the beloved maternal other: “Yes, you contain the world; there is no longer any elsewhere for you in the vastness” (GR, 4). Here, too, and throughout Requiem, the accent is upon the taut and haunting relationship between the hic et nunc that so draws the gaze of Gustave Roud and an intermittently intuited and truly ecstatically lived experience of some profound otherness, some elsewhere, at the very heart of the flagrantly manifest. Secondly, and emerging from this latter point, the tensions and what we may think of as the interwovenness of the immanent and the transcendent carry with them emotions of desire and anguish travelling freely from pole to pole of Roud’s consciousness. Thus


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does the desiring self, “as it were posted in the deep shadows of its being”, as Titus-Carmel writes (GR, 11), at once exaltedly and disturbedly gaze upon the real and its deep alterity. No idealisation, no mawkishness thus attach themselves either to the space of meadows and flowers or to that “unspace” the latter wordlessly implies for Roud16. The precariousness and impermanency of the phenomena of nature plunged into time are thus matched by, fused with, the continuity of their seasonal cycles, and this provides, in the midst of a melancholy pertaining both to time’s erasure and the hesitations of visionary desire, an ““access to the eternal” in a cosmic vision of the world” (GR, 18). Through the crack at the joining of the immanent and the transcendent, Roud thus views, feels and writes the pain of incarnation and a “closer union with self” (Roud: GR, 17) which provides a “deep accord with the inexhaustible Universe” (ibid.). If Roud can write that “all is presence, calling out to me; all has meaning” (GR, 20), it remains, as Titus-Carmel suggests, that “only being self beyond the certainty of appearances” (GR, 11) imposes upon daily living and its writing an ontological tension to which the writer of Ici rien n’est présent is extremely alert. At the centre of the third matter Titus-Carmel brings to light yet remains Roud’s “sharp, deep feeling of eternity, sudden and biting as a whiplash” (GR, 27). Yet, if Roud is a mystic, he is unconcerned with either salvation or renunciation of sensual existence: the summer is a time-space of luscious production and sensuousness, a kind of original Eden at its apogee. But it is, too, a time-space of gruelling work, extreme fatigue with the briefest respite, an emblem at once of continuity, achievement, exhaustion and loss (as seasonal “finality” brings closure and voidedness). And, of course, it is difficult not to see connections here with Titus-Carmel’s own creative processes and the psycho-poetics they represent: Roud, Titus-Carmel, those that tirelessly tend the sacredness of the earth, become “figure[s] of eternity to the extent they translate in [their] docile [though anxious] acceptance of the work [they] accomplish, in the humility and repetitiveness of the same tasks, their gestures ever identical – and thereby revealing their secret beauty – [their] deep accord with the inexhaustible Universe” (GR, 17).

16

The term “unspace” is Titus-Carmel’s, suggested by him for the title of my translation of his Jungle (non-lieu).

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Fourthly, Titus-Carmel is, unsurprisingly, sensitive to Roud’s tone and style: his merging of elegy and hymn, melancholy interrogation and lyricism, the polyphonic manner of the long proses with their contrapuntal italicised passages, the role of photography in his textually intensifying descriptive manner, the reference to the window as a “recurring metaphor of [Roud’s / the writer’s] separation from the world” – not unlike the photo, moreover, a micro-death of the real for a Denis Roche, and, like all aesthetic gesture, arguably a necessary, fatal exile 17. Fifthly, no doubt ever conscious of his own intersubjective manner (whereby Roud’s essential poetics merges with his own), Titus-Carmel seeks the dynamic centre of Roud’s poiein: how do we inhabit the world, poetically?: “the only, essential question [being] that which, via its demand upon self and its very insistence, founds an oeuvre” (GR, 32). Elements of a response to this question have already been limned and they lead to a fundamental ontological paradox, in Roud’s case, perhaps in all creative manners: a simultaneously forced and elected renunciation of the world loved in order better to engage with it. Titus-Carmel thus speaks of a “kind of inner exile whereby one chooses the reality of writing [/art] to speak one’s presence to the world” (GR, 4). Renunciation is thus “luminous and calm” (ibid.); if it entails exile, its ambition is what Reverdy called “consubstantiation”, a reaching through to some deeper serenity of connection, symbiosis, improbable presence. A connection movingly felt to be available via a gesture of writing which is not a farewell, a hostile, horrified refusal, but an inner move “at that point of transparency with the world where we can still believe that even silence allows us, in our own way, to seal with it an act of presence” (GR, 33). The last matter I should like to emphasize is Titus-Carmel’s view of Roud as the “definitive wanderer” (ibid.): he who is merely passing through, his very errancy depriving him of (illusory) possession, permanency. Hence the experience of grace in its intermittency (cf. GR, 38), the poet ever inhabiting the faille, the hiatus, the between-space that allows life and its written traces to move forward between reality and dream, absence and presence: 17

A not dissimilar reading of Munch’s window occurs in the text we have seen devoted to him in La leçon du miroir. See also Denis Roche: La disparition des lucioles, Paris: Edns de l’Étoile, 1982.


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there, writes Titus-Carmel, Roud “will confess the ambition of his “vast prayer”, seeking ever to push further back its limits, beyond the intractable horizon, far beyond the pure space of disappointment through which we are merely passing” (GR, 40).


VI FALLING AND FLOWING

A long poem of falling, but implicitly, and, as it were, despite itself, caught up in a fascination with the alternation of the diurnal and the nocturnal, Gérard Titus-Carmel’s first book of poetry, La tombée (1987), presents itself, under the sign of a reflection of Donne’s on the difficult duty of forgetting, as a triptych allowing each panel to explore and harmonise a network of resonances at once material, plastic and psychological: chalk, lead and ink: friableness and whiteness, heaviness and dullness, inscription and liquidness. And let us straightaway note that each of the book’s three panels is articulated in quotation marks. Perhaps to mark the impermanency of poietic traces, the texts’s non-infallibility, that value the poem floats forth as an act of provisional, ephemeral, mortal speech and which a Francis Ponge equally espouses. A fragile voice, implicitly, rather than some indestructible textual monolith. Here is the collection’s liminal poem: I. A l’heure d’huile du matin un matin d’huile et d’os pilé tombant du ciel opale une lumière blanche ruisselante déjà du jour à venir toi qui tardes à choisir tes ombres que peux-tu quitter que tu regrettes vraiment et laissant derrière moi la ville de mon père son nom oubliant le salpêtre l’éther l’odeur tétanisante du camphre le dessin géométrique les poings serrés des mélodies 18

(LT, 11)18

At the oily hour or morning

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Fragmented, elliptical but dialogised, theatricising an internalised exchange that is thus somehow monological and understood to be a locus of coherence, this is the poem of both a visibly desired discretion and an affective intensity seeking to coil up within such discreetness, compact and implicit. If one may speak of an interplay of shadow and light, of desire that is no longer and desire remaining, of, too, a stubborn consciousness and the will to forget, there is, here, no ludic manner, no effort of textual scintillation: all is solemnity, experience of the earth in which speech, partly folded back upon its unsayableness, yet persists in inserting its naming within the bosom of an ontos that surpasses it, leaves its grieving. The drama La tombée deploys, a drama manifestly lived, but magnified, mythified, for never contextualised, thus develops its allegorical manner – beyond the “Pour Elle, justement” which the dedication offers (with its triple need for ontological justice, expressive justesse, rightness, and emotive exclusiveness?) – by means of certain personas, Sei, Taïeb, vaguely identifiable but never stabilised in relation to a narrative which, as Du Bouchet will say of the “narrative” in Poussin’s Orion, remains endless, ever-flowing. This, because La tombée’s narrative, “addressing [its] silence / interrogating it” (LT, 15), thus becomes a Jabesian-like narrative of (self-)questioning, unstable in its dance of roman and italic lettering,

a morning of oil and crushed bone falling from the opal sky a white light streaming down already in the dawning day you who linger over your choice of shadows what can you take leave of that you will truly miss and leaving behind the city of my father his name forgetting saltpetre ether the tetanising smell of camphor geometric drawing fists clenched melodies

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rich and flickering in a seeming multiplication of voices barely attributable in a writer who, finding it “very difficult not to say I” (LT, 16), endeavours to soften any subjective – self-subjecting, one might say – flagrancy. It will not then surprise if exile affirms itself, and doubly so, as a central preoccupation: the exile of “nonchalance” (LT, 13), of a nascent, resurgent melancholy, of, in brief, a manner of thought and emotion untransmuted, on the one hand; on the other, the exile of speech, of a language insufficient to its ideal purpose, naturally exiled, and which furthermore, one seeks to depersonalise so as not to fall into the trap of what Michel Deguy terms “selfstory”. Texts 7 and 8, “ô vies fouettées” and “disant le jour” respectively (LT, 17, 18), are fairly exemplary in this regard: a rooting of feeling in the concreteness of a known earthiness – Inisheer, Teampall na Seacht n-Inghean, distance and intimacy emblematically fusing, bruisedness and death “every day in [their] name”, in the spatio-temporal limits that earth endlessly lives out, “convulsion”, “fear” and “remorse” that despite “the glory of ultimate moorland”, drown out any idea of a happy coincidence of subject and object, the said and the sayable. The whole of this first poetic panel, De craie, thus reveals, in spectral fashion even if Titus-Carmel insists upon being-there (cf. LT, 22), the need not to “lose memory of names & places” (LT, 24), that vast ceaselessly becoming psychic panorama with its frequent contrasts and even contradictions: violence and friendship, despair and inestimable grace, glory and unsatisfiedness, a desire to forget and a desire to keep intact, autofictional fragments, as a Robbe-Grillet might say, for that extraordinary encounter with self which, in Reverdy’s eyes, motivates all poiesis, and a horror of “fables / [and] fiction” (LT, 30) – that fiction which may be deemed absence, naming of the void, pure representation, that fatal, mere être-comme cut off from onticity, any true beingness. And so, implicitly, in spite of the power of imagery and a range of rhetorical tactics that render the poem possible and embellish it, despite too the intense need to establish a locus of osmosis and permeability, the text becomes suspect in the mind of its creator, refusing symbiosis and coincidence, setting up instead a “dismaying [textual] crack” which mimics that of lived time (cf. LT, 32). The second panel, De plomb, of this already carefully mathematised triptych (3 x 24 texts) immediately takes up again (cf.

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LT, 37) the tension arising from a “rhapsody” which, listening to its own speech, song, writing, and, thus, in the very midst of its poiesis and inserted into a here and now yet lived in its urgency (“here is the afternoon coming to be”, LT, 37), cannot rid itself of a feeling of absence at the heart of its quasi-epicalness: “and these words are now but ash” (ibid.). It is a tension that will not flag throughout this second sheaf of poems, the twenty-second text ending up (sensing) “grey speech / upon the threshold of my mouth exiled / rejected by my own words” (LT, 58): a divorce of voice and body, of reality observed and an intention in principle transmuting this reality… That said, everywhere tension is such that the discourse of “your illusory construction / & unhappily uttered speech” (LT, 48) remains unable to block the ever spurting will to say, to speak – the entire book, tombal, of course shows this, but the awareness of it is strong: “and I shall say the disturbing beauty of mercury / of lead the grave gentleness / of fingers passed / like slow grey rakes / through cold ashes” (LT, 42), and the sense of a possible (though spectral) transfiguration saying may offer never disappears: “o the perfect construction of your songs / your narratives” (LT, 41). To seek to say, to name the other, render it incarnate, even illusorily, “before stasis” (LT, 45), and yet knowing full well, or thinking so, that pure, unconscious lyricism, that “the wingless angel” the poet is, “enemy” of his own flight (cf. LT, 44), cannot manage this accomplishment – here we have a most delicately orchestratable gesture moving between a dreamed maximum – an initiatory orphic traversal of the mirror – and an anguishing minimum swarming with the terrors and disappointments of a symbolics of shadow (cf. LT, 51), of “the cruel descant of the caterpillar”, “the death rattle of the forest” (LT, 46), “the world & the sentence [that] shackle my movement” (LT, 51). To find oneself at this intersection is to constantly be thrust up against the “despair” of the comme, the spectral like or as, of mere figuration, and the “energy”, Deguy can argue, yet paradoxically devolving therefrom. All the beauty, all the strength, as well as all feelings of devastation and futile dissemination (cf. LT, 46, 56), come from the consciousness of these converging yet irreconcilable factors. The “what shall I tell you then” of poem 21 of this second panel of La tombée is the sign par excellence of this lived dilemma. “[To] remain // as if listening to your veins / of marble” (LT, 43), is to give oneself over to the impossible, to fatally position

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oneself at the heart of an expressive subtlety deemed an ontological failure. All the ironic violence of this linguistico-existential game can be seen in the effort to, for example, de la pâle sanguine des roses des sables des déserts en jouer comme d’un sistre ou d’un hochet puis leur faire rendre gorge (LT, 54)19

The poetic act: a music-like, a figured, figuring infantilism, simultaneously ingurgitation and regurgitation, and, despite everything, that strange imponderable encouraging, urging on “the consciousness of yet ever being there / amongst its names displayed in the breech / of its names scattered” (LT, 56). This ventriloquism, coming about by virtue of its figurative markers (ainsi, comme, etc.), the doubling or tripling of voice, via too, the entire symbolic play of language’s stratagems, is reaffirmed from the outset of the final panel of Titus-Carmel’s poetic triptych (cf. LT, 63). To write is always in some way to “choose shadow unhesitatingly & / beyond regret” (LT, 65) – despite the hesitations and regrets that proliferate. To write is, as for Sei’s name, to raise high – one thinks of the great poetics of modernity: Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Michaux, Frénaud, Noël, Bonnefoy – “your simple name above the abyss” (LT, 78). A gesture of reduction and schematic articulation, certainly, but too, a gesture of purification, plunging into “the most beauteous waters of your silence” (LT, 79), strangely rehabilitated by that mysteriousness, that blinding alterity, to which, in this way, all articulation makes itself available (cf. LT, 77). “Language’s outlinings / language’s outsideness”, yes (LT, 80), and yet, throughout the final poems of La tombée, persist the flickering emblems – mélodie, sagesse, orée, repos de la langue – of a residual gentleness transcending all that fractures. Le motif du fleuve appears in 1990, in the same year as Instance de l’orée and two years after L’entrevue (1988). In many 19

pale sanguine roses sandy reaches deserts play with them as with a sistrum or a rattle then disgorge them

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respects it is a poem – for, as generally with Gérard Titus-Carmel, what is offered is a single poem, fragmented / cohering into its moments – quite different from other collections, for avowedly contextualised via its postscript, Armant-Le Caire, Printemps 1989: it is the poem of a specific, identified experience, that of descending the Nile to its Mediterranean delta. As the title suggest, Titus-Carmel has nevertheless avoided the autobiographical, the anecdotal, though his preference for writing the river – the ancient Egyptian name given to what the Greeks came to call the Nile meant simply “the river” – as motif, pattern, principle, does not at all disallow living, seeing, smelling, breathing and hearing the river: the river as pure experience. Two other initial matters should not be neglected: this book of the river is framed between (the banks of) two etchings with their vegetal motifs; the book’s epigraph, taken from Luis Cernuda – “ante las puertas bien ceradas, / Sobre un río de olvido, va la canción antigua” –, sees the river as a symbol of oblivion in its ceaseless passing before the gates of civilisation, themselves closed to the desiring gaze after absolute knowing of the other, song and poetry flowing by such traces of being, caught no doubt in the tensions of memory, seeking and unknowing the river equally experiences. Here is the first of the 43 sizains that form Le motif du fleuve: Ici parle l’étranger s’évertuant à la rive le coup sec de la trique au garrot de la mule quel bruit d’os ourlant le fleuve (MF, 11) 20

The one and only capital of the entire book thus launches the boat of the poem, one long (dis)continuous prosodic movement, unpunctuated save its final period mooring it at the close of its fortythird stanza. Unrhymed and metrically free as throughout – the predominant syllabic count is 4-8, with a mere handful of lines dipping to 2 or 3, or rising to 9, 10 or 11 –, this opening stanza hovers 20

Here speaks the stranger exerting himself upon the river bank the dull thud of the cudgel against the mule’s withers what sound of bones hemming the river

Falling and Flowing

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between concrete, sensual evocation, a good remove from any firm descriptive manner, and an abstracting, mythifying, only vaguely contextualising mode that inserts poet and reader into life’s ontic solemnity, that heroic drift of human action on the unnameable stage of the earth. Thus does Titus-Carmel give us, from the outset, the poem of struggle, effort, coercion in the midst of our individual and collective flow, with its paradoxical easefulness. Thus does he generate for us, in harmony with both his world view and this specific, singular and symbolic experience, the poem of our lived, so often fused, antitheses: desert and luxuriance, the woundedness of the earth with its “violence of nights” (MF, 18) and the “glory” of what is despite the “discouragement of words” (MF, 29), the “vestiges dreams / vanities of ancient men” (MF, 36) amidst the eternal flow of some cosmic grace whereby the creation and the crumbling away of human trace attains to a transparency oddly transcendent of its opaqueness, the ghostly yet living emblems of life and death mirroring each other on the facing banks of this river of experiencenow and (Cernuda’s) soon-forgottenness. Le motif du fleuve is not, then, the accumulated jottings of some journal, though it too traverses time and the shifting gaze it offers. It is penetrated with a desire to reach some principal centre of this traversal. The language of a conceivable logic thus regularly breaks the surface of the poem’s flow: ainsi, ou, c’est, comme, voilà que, mais, car; a logic and a centre yet understood less to be attained to, for caught themselves in the fluviality of meaning, its fatal continuity (: ing), than bathed in the flickering light of their contemplation: the action of the gaze in the templum of / with the gazed-upon. No, language cannot stop the river of being upon which it itself floats and casts its nets. “Meshes too loose / for [the river’s] waters”, however, Titus-Carmel confirms (MF, 29), thus almost equating the accomplishment and memorialising of his own poiein with those that tower along the banks of the Nile: almost, for Le motif du fleuve ultimately – right from its epigraph – verbalises its own precarity and mortalness, rather than imagining their transcendence. This said, if the poem is beyond possession, having, an absolute nomination, it remains that its non-having, its non-definitiveness, is caught in the eternal, principial flow of being, may, indeed, be said to be synonymous with it. This strange insufficiency, if I may term it so, yet remains that heroic glory of, arguably, all human doing,

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reminiscent of Saint-John Perse’s vision of humanity’s building and erasure in Anabase.

VII THE SELF ACCOMPANIED: FROM ROBBE-GRILLET, ROSSI AND ROCHE TO COMMÈRE, BANCQUART AND BONNEFOY

Just as Gérard Titus-Carmel has amply and purposefully given himself to accompanying the great work of many artists and writers, so, implacably and eagerly, has his own work, plastic and poetic, drawn the fascination, admiring appreciation and analysis of a significant array of what Daniel Leuwers prefers to call, instead of critics, accompagnateurs21. We have already seen something of the insights and inquiries of a good many such accompaniers – JeanMarc Tisserant, Alfred Pacquement, Jean Clair, Pierre Léonard, Eddy Devolder, Catherine Millet, Jacques Derrida, Tommaso Trini, Gilbert Lascault, Werner Spies, Irmeline Lebeer, Jean-Pierre Faye, Bernard Lamarche-Vadel – and it is my intention here not to evoke in more detailed fashion their critical perspectives, but rather to give some sense of a further range of critical accompaniment to an oeuvre of an increasing complexity and great and divers beauties that yet gathers to itself coherence and perceptible global vision. A broad companionage, then, in turn briefly accompanied. And Robbe-Grillet’s 1981 Cathédrale mémoire du monde to begin with. Assuming the voice of the other, and “co-signing” his text that accompanies Titus-Carmel’s, the author of Les gommes and his auto-bio-fictional Romanesques insists initially upon the material minimality of the artwork, its conceivable connection with personally lived experience, its clearly obsessional depth (: “Vieilles ficelles […], vieilles manies”). He appreciates, too, how the sheer “obstinacy of one’s gaze” can offer to the fragile and the ephemeral, the fragmentary and the minimal, a consistency and “the beginnings of some possible firmness” that pulls them out of their “coming death”, just as it does the same to the self (i.e. Robbe-Grillet doubling as Titus-Carmel). Such a gesture fronts upon the metaphysical in the very moment of its dizzying plunge into matter and form. The self thus rescues, saves the world via its inscription, just as the artist’s hand gives “its solution to the puzzle, with the desired amphibology 21

Daniel Leuwers, L’accompagnateur: essais sur la poésie contemporaine, Marseille: Sud, 1989.

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of the possessive “its”” (ARG, 4). The cathedral (of art) which is the world’s memory, is thus, within itself, its own solution – one thinks of Les gommes once more, and indeed of the entire poetics of the New Novel –, yet this (Mallarméan, too) interiority or self-reflexivity does not disallow an honouring of the earth’s offerings. Alert, then, to the borrowing and ultimate destruction / recycling of the model created by the artist, Robbe-Grillet finishes with a beautiful flourish, playing with the letters RGT, “key to the combinatory seriality” (ARG, 15) at work, and (co-)signing: ARG RGT GTC

where RGT becomes, in its seventh avatar, “Ritual. Gesture. Theory” (ibid.). Paul Louis Rossi’s elegant essay, L’arbre rouge, is devoted to Titus-Carmel’s seemingly antagonistic yet finely complementary works Feuillées and Memento mori, which together supply the title of his 2002 book amply illustrated from the artist’s 1999-2001 creations. Rossi’s reading of the Feuillées dwells upon the tensions of a dual figuration offering us simultaneously growth, luxuriance, lush and spreading leafings, and yet thorax, ribcage, skeletal denudation, something of Grünewald’s crucifixion – the latter elements thus in noticeable vibrational harmony with the series of simple skulls constituting the Memento mori. In what becomes a freely ranging meditation on Titus-Carmel’s constantly reincarnated “art of painting”, with allusions to other works such as Sables (1998-1999), Quartiers d’hiver (1999-2000), Dopo Como (1992), Rossi privileges factors such as the paradoxical gentleness of the depiction of mortality; the teeming interconnections with other artists and writers of the mortal, interconnections which yet serve to emphasise TitusCarmel’s singularities, “order, investigation, invention, the determined construction […] of his own universe, [one that nevertheless offers our world] its depth of obscurity, doubt, questioning, silence” (PLR, np); the manner in which this art, of collaging especially, pulls the spectator away from “the sign’s chasm” towards a “new dynamics of seeing”, a contemplation, if I may put it that way, of art’s pure epiphanic, and alethic power. Nielle: a rare and curiously polysemic word with which Titus-Carmel titles each of his small or occasionally massive

The Self Accompanied: From Robbe-Grillet, Rossi and Roche to Commère, Banquart and Bonnefoy

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paintings from the 1996-98 series, and a word which Denis Roche, in his free-wheeling, quasi-oniric meditation, Ciel de nielle, explores both in its technical pertinence and for its ludic, more fanciful potential. Written in a consciously parallel series of journal entries – one thinks back to Jacques Derrida’s Cartouches –, Roche’s text floats between observation and memory of Titus-Carmel’s perhaps essentially, though by no means exclusively, black-dominated works, his manner of concentration and persistency, his technical consciousness, too, and an awareness at once of his own act of writing and of the cosmic space – the sky, its clouds, its everbecoming colours and light – in which he is plunged, day after day: a fusion of spontaneously surging thoughts that gives us Roche’s title. Seeing Titus-Carmel’s “golden arm of the imaginary” (DR, 10) as engaged in a process of desire wherein the unconscious and meaning deploy their unnameable cloud-like drift anchored only by the stubbornness of the hand, Roche dreams of that “harmonics” (ibid.) at play in the Oulchy studio, a harmonics somehow rendering synonymous the “disenchantment” of the obsessive Nielles’ splayed torsos and the “voiding, down to the invisible colour of the bone, of misfortunes, injuries, wrongs, ugliness: ni eux, ni elles!” (DR, 13). Of the late Patrick Casson’s various explorations of Gérard Titus-Carmel’s work, the fine essay, À part entière, prepared for the superbly illustrated Gérard Titus-Carmel: la part du livre, may serve as an emblematic memorial. Casson’s evaluation here offers both a chronological survey of the artist’s evolution as writer and poet, and thoughtful insights into the interweavings of Titus-Carmel’s dual démarche. He is alert to an ever present mathematics at play in the establishment of order, beauty (not merely aesthetic, for ontologically symbolic also, and more importantly), and in its relation to time and daily / seasonal / mortal rhythm. He sees the true pertinence of Derrida’s comments on the parergon “coming up against, besides and in addition to the ergon, work done, the madeness, of created oeuvre, but no falling off to the side” (PC2, 13), this not dissimilarly from the relation between “illustration” and, say, Young’s or Coleridge’s poetry – an accompaniment, as I have termed it, contemplatively connected with the work selectively accompanied. He emphasises, too, those writings self-accompanied where – Non point la trace mais la frappe (1975) is an example – artwork highly reminiscent of major plastic series finds its place alongside, “up against”, writing of his

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own, neither finding utter independence any more than it may be said to eschew all element of mutual dependency. And he argues that the book allows for additional “experimentation” of plastic “techniques practised elsewhere” (PC2, 21). As for Titus-Carmel’s poetry proper, Casson is sensitive to its obsessive centring around certain deeply emblematic terms – shadow, etc. – and “scenes”, all connected with questions of identity, deep ontology, and creating a rhetoric of ever shifting emotive value, a rhetoric of what Titus-Carmel himself calls, in “Elle bouge encore”, “a monument of collapsings” – a broken monument yet testifying to a triumph of “Beauty” (cf. 30, and NA, 146). En présence de ces “Feuillées” is the title of Yves Bonnefoy admirably attentive essay published along with reproductions of Titus-Carmel’s drawings and acrylics from the 2000-2003 period. The essay dwells – in a spiralling coherence that can take us back to Suite Narwa and even beyond and right up to the very recent Feuillées series and Titus-Carmel’s Ici rien n’est présent, which we shall shortly look at in detail –, upon the following issues and factors: 1: the contemporary sense of language’s emptiness, its constitution of a space of pure autonomy and intransitive meaning; 2: the yet lingering vision, espoused in differing ways by moderns such as Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Breton, of a symbiotic interpertinence allowing language, all poiein, to “repatriate existence in the bosom of a [reality] which is good” (F, 14); 3: Titus-Carmel may offer “witness to “the negative”” whilst “broadening the aims [of such witness and] seeking the foundations of a new poetry” (F, 19); 4: Titus-Carmel’s initial decision to draw rather than paint supposedly derives from the fact that “drawing allows one to live out, in the closest of ways, from the inside as it were, any real or conceivable crisis in the relationship between mind and language” (ibid.); 5: if the Suite Narwa or the Constructions (frêles, éphémères, régulières) speak of “everything upon the earth [as] a machine for self-contained being, and therefore even nothingness” (F, 21), Feuillées may be said to “perhaps still [offer] thought of absence, but this time steeped in colours and a seemingly diurnal light” (F, 22); 6: hope and beauty and even “happiness” thus seem to be implicitly figured, however illusory, utopian, they may be felt to be – though, in another turn, a sense of time’s flow and personal “destiny” appears to emerge from these “leafings” (cf. F, 25, 27, 32); 7: this said, colour, that, say, of the


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Dédicaces or the Égéennes, cannot reclaim its ancient deep representational powers: always, somehow, Bonnefoy maintains as a long-held conviction naturally pertinent here too, “there is, alas, reciprocal exclusion of formulation and presence” (F, 45); 8: and yet, precisely because in Titus-Carmel form does not seek representation, Bonnefoy “wonders whether the simple epiphanic quality of [Feuillées’ images], allowing anguish to dissipate, may not be evoked even in Titus-Carmel, whose work had beauty from the outset, though tragic beauty” (F, 48); 9: Titus-Carmel’s recent work, Forêts, Quartiers d’hiver, Feuillées, it is argued, deals with “emergings”, “quiverings, rhythms”, moments and phenomena and forms in their living continuity, their surging into and through being, presence – all of this revealing an artist caught up with “the only [problem] that counts: the relationship of artist to life as the artist rediscovers it on leaving his studio, once more beneath the sign of time, the aleatoriness of place, personal destiny” (F, 56); 10: all of this, in Titus-Carmel, “a debate, unresolved”, but which, in Bonnefoy’s gaze, is tilted ever so slightly more towards what lies at the root of TitusCarmel’s statement: Cet arrière-fond de nuit A tant dévasté ma langue Qu’il ne m’est plus alliance avec le monde Que dans les seuls mots Ciel et lilas22

– and, as Bonnefoy writes, ““ciel et lilas”, is nevertheless a great deal”: the presence / non-presence tensions remain an open book. Jean-Marie Perret’s essay, Secret, labyrinthe, “voie du milieu”: structure et symbole dans la poésie de Gérard Titus-Carmel, begins by questioning certain of Yves Bonnefoy’s claims and hopes in his Feuillées essay: perhaps there is, in the poet of Ici rien n’est présent, rather a disavowal of, than a tentative clinging to, a poetry of presence: “a methodic assuming of the multiple” (DFS), rather, and a creation of a poethics of the “middle way”? Three main observations 22

This backcloth of night Has so shattered my language That no alliance lingers with the world But via the two words Sky and lilac

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ensue: 1: essential is the generative power of a deep secret intimacy founding its labyrinthine unveiling / veiling – which offers its own truth rather than a finally revealed, decoded meaning, an art of the blason with its “ambivalence of dissimulation and designation” (ibid.); 2: because naming is at once “mourning, desire, encounter”, its essential secrecy becomes that “Petrarchian place of all subjective receiving of the world [and], too, a place of acceding to oneself” (ibid.), beyond all narcissism; 3: the Celtic dimension of TitusCarmel’s work sparks attachment, memorialisation and secrecy, whereas the Japanese dimension encourages aestheticism, atemporality, a sense of one’s obscure inner forces. Le puits à l’oeuvre, is the title of Christian Doumet’s elegant, compact essay, also in Autour de Gérard Titus-Carmel. It deals exclusively with the eight 17-line near-perfect textual squares constituting Le puits, in Travaux de fouille et d’oubli, the marked plastic caress perhaps to “calm, if possible, the tension between attraction and haunting obsession, vertigo and fascination”. The well tends to disappear as referential object, caught in an elliptical narrative of the euphoric and the dysphoric. Doumet speaks of a “dramaturgy of presence”, where shadow, death, absence, desire and pleasure are the principal actors. He pursues Freudian avenues whilst arguing that “poetry is [nevertheless] in what detaches the text from [such] explanation more than in what connects it to it” (DFS). Poetry, Titus-Carmel’s, refuses sclerosis, preferring a tempo agitato founded in a tension of the sacred and the profane and generating an “allegory out of everything offered us in the light of the absolute, and that life condemns us to profaning, scattering, wasting” (ibid.). Envoilements de mémoire: les peintures de Gérard TitusCarmel is the title of Dominique Viart’s insightful essay in L’art français et francophone depuis 1980. It deals with the painterly theatricisation of the “functioning” of memory, proceeding firstly to examine the logic of a figural seriality which, as Viart points out, is not just a feature of the work of Monet and Cézanne, but, in different ways, of Giacometti, Bram van Velde, Pollock, Rothko and other moderns or contemporaries. The particular serial nature of TitusCarmel’s painting, it is argued, means that memory “solicits new forms, projects itself into a forward movement: a kind of exploratory surging forth” (DV). This, in turn, involves tactics of layering and collaging that bring about a “slow sedimentation of one’s own


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memory” (as the artist writes himself, in “Elle bouge encore”). The covering over of the self’s mnestic traces is equally complicated by the process of using fragmented, “mutilated” papiers collés which, whilst offering a type of restitution, also functions antilyrically, “breaking the wings of painting”, as Titus-Carmel writes in his Le retrait, le surcroît. The logic of the “violence of melancholy” is thus discussed and lodged finally in that of “patience”, with its fused suffering and “seeming serenity… covering up”, veiling over, such suffering. Pascal Commère’s densely teeming essay Un coin du voile et alentours, also in the 2006 Autour de Gérard Titus-Carmel, dwells in turn on the imbrication of truth and mask, veiling, deferral and allegorical narration. Beauty has a “heaviness”, a burdensomeness to it, given the solemnly assumed weight of the name of the lost father, a weight doubled by the mourning of the woman first loved. If absence is the prime motivator, it yet leads to a “draping of oneself in one’s own absence” (DFS). The fragmentation, collaging and seriality of Titus-Carmel’s work suggest the impossibility of any definitive respite from “fall” and struggle and solitude, since all “building includes deconstruction, withdrawal, loss” (ibid.). Writing and art may thus offer grace and tight, conscious mathematics, but they remain equally errance, “disorder” (as Bonnefoy has recently suggested himself), a beauty perhaps implacably flawed, even illusory, though ever perseveringly pursued. Lieu du premier effroi, by Claude Adelen, deals with that preoccupation which is a sign of the deep ontological pertinence of Gérard Titus-Carmel’s work: its “grave questioning of being, [a] watchful[ness], in its double posture, at once bent over the abyss of time and raised up before the space calling out to him” (DFS). This interrogation of emergence and reabsorption, birth and death, creation and loss, is “perhaps… what gives [Titus-Carmel’s poetry] its highest dignity”. Le puits thus becomes a powerful “metaphor, at once chthonian and narcissistic, of the origin of poetic speech”, a plunge into darkness and death in the hope of an orphic return to the light, to regeneration. Adelen sees here a Hegelian working through of the negative, an inseparable exchange of the seemingly polarized. Poetic sculpting, like all formal manipulation, thus constitutes a force resisting “disaster”, the crumbling and dizzyingness of being and

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language. A force giving back to being’s darkness a fundamental sacredness. Thus does fright, improbably, risk becoming awe. Marie-Claire Bancquart’s Une lecture de Manière de sombre argues the “errancy and shadowiness” of Titus-Carmel’s necessarily unfinishable, in-finite deployment of the poetic “subject”. She points thoughtfully to that fine and discreet way in which form – with, here, the complexities of the 12-line alexandrine poem, its rampant enjambments, yet its further disarticulating use of capital letters at the beginning of each line – already tells us much about the constitution of the subject. She speaks of language’s lived malaise, that sense of a certain vertiginous and paradoxical futileness Titus-Carmel’s writing oozes in the very act that founds it. Refusal thus becomes a seemingly contradictory “race to the death”. If childhood would seem to offer no consolation, revealing rather a rupture and the still raw wound of absence, Bancquart insists yet upon the role of the tu – the other, the unspokenness yet urging self to embrace its poiein; and she notes too the persistent awareness of light, that never dead dream of serenity and renewed presence, that stubborn hoisting up of self into an exchange with “a shadowy subject become glorious and luminous through [and despite] language” (DFS). Antoine Émaz, known for his striking collections such as C’est, Boue or Os, has offered two elegant essays on Gérard TitusCarmel, the first Notes sur les Nielles et le Temps (2003), the second a study of Ici rien n’est présent (2004/2006). In his 2003 essay on the 1996-98 Nielles series Émaz is particularly concerned with various pertinent temporal factors: the slow tempo of serial painting: the seemingly violent, abrupt gesture involved with an individual piece; the long gestatory period between seeing Grünewald’s lsenheim Altarpiece in 1986 and beginning Nielles, with its radically transformed and de-historicised memory of the crucifixion panel: the time of “personal and affective memory” (AE, [2]); the time in which motifs such as those in Nielles – crucifixion and vegetal inflorescences – may develop also in other series, at times via TitusCarmel’s particular collaging mode allowing for “intertextual” or interfigural memory to surge forth as “witness” in the here and now; finally, the “evolution” (AE, [3]) of the series via what I shall call an intrafigural process Émaz seeks to detail, a process neither preplanned nor “blind”. He quotes Titus-Carmel in conclusion:


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“Everything, in poetry, opposes the opus incertum of select bits and collections on the fly. The same for painting” (AE, [4]). Bernard Vargaftig’s essay provides a fit conclusion to this brief excursion into the ample realms of critical thought devoted to Gérard Titus-Carmel – an excursion I should have liked to extend with allusion to the work of, say, Yves Peyré, Jean-Michel Maulpoix, Alain Lance, Jean Frémon, Daniel Abadie, Abdelkébir Khatibi and others –, lacunae in part about to be remedied by the publication of various gathered essays of critical accompaniment in Le geste et la mémoire. Bernard Vargaftig’s essay, Un cri fendu par le milieu, is paradoxically authorized, at its threshold, by an ever surging sense of unknowing in the face not only of art, but too of one’s being-in-theworld. He speaks, simultaneously of Gérard Titus-Carmel and himself, as being immersed, poetically and existentially, in a “movement of presence” which is an “unnamed gaping hole”, seemingly definitive absence. Yet, despite this and his reading of fougère as fou, j’erre, Vargaftig appreciates that the artist’s / writer’s “black manner” (DFS) – felt to be emblematically at work in Manière de sombre – allows for a drawing out of whites and greys from the inscribed mathematics of engraving, a drawing out which is “elevation”. It is in this perspective that Vargaftig perceives a music – with its phonemic insistencies and its prosodic power – ever propelling and no doubt transcending writing’s narrative of loss, disaster, unknowing.


VIII EXCAVATION AND FORGETTING, EMBANKMENT AND ABYSS

Between the time of publication of Le motif du fleuve, 1990, and that of the two books I shall now examine, eight other poetic collections appear, a number of them quite compact – Forge (1991), Feuillets détachés des saisons (1991), Obstinante (1995), and Nielles (1997) – others altogether more ample, such as Instance de l’orée (1990), Ceci posé (1996) or De corps et de buée (1997), the first two of which I have looked at in some detail elsewhere 23. Travaux de fouille et d’oubli and La rive en effet both appear then in the spring of 2000, their respective periods of composition overlapping: 22 nd May 1996 – 15th June 1998 and 10th October 1997 – 26th June 1999, this overlapping being doubled by the various plastic creations of this three-year period, from Forêts to Nielles. It would, of course, be possible, and revealing, to examine Travaux de fouille et d’oubli in the light of other contemporary poetical work of the same period – Olivier Barbarant’s Odes dérisoires say, Michel Deguy’s L’énergie du désespoir, Robert Marteau’s Registre, Marie-Claire Bancquart’s La paix saignée, JeanClaude Pinson’s Abrégé de philosophie morale, Esther Tellermann’s Pangéia, or Jean-Michel Maulpoix’s Domaine public. Such comparisons and contrasts that may emerge may shed light on the originality of Gérard Titus-Carmel’s own writing, but for all their well-intentionedness they can side-track, leave us with a sense of relativity and partiality, disallow the kind of close reading and intimate penetration for which I have opted here. There may come a time for swirling multifacetted generalisation, but this is not to be it. The title and the book’s seven sections, firstly. If the “work” undertaken here is inevitably verbal, textual, perhaps even tonal, stylistic, structural, aesthetic in a very broad sense, it remains that Travaux de fouille et d’oubli is, perhaps foremost, an act and place of “self-work”, work upon the self, its relation to the other, a particular other, a lost other with all of the profound otherness of experience, of being, this loss – and remembering – implies. The work undertaken 23

See Selected Bibliography.

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thus entails a scouring of the self’s memory, the deep recesses of the psyche, writing’s excavation of what is salvageable. And, one may be inclined to think, it entails too either a wilful forgetting of the now surfaced traumatic fragments, a going-beyond, or the recognition of the fatality of oblivion, and thus writing as a now possible and necessary, even ineluctable, farewell. If the title suggests such elements of difficult fascination, the book’s seven section titles reveal a firm consciousness of the degree to which loss, death, forgetting remain in tense relation to the structuring and emblematic containment a recueil make be held to yet render feasible: the opening section may offer itself as a series of “fragments”, but they do form a “first precinct”, offer some initial walling up of what would otherwise slip into utter disorder; the seventh and closing section, Fragments de la deuxième enceinte, suggests both a firm awareness of a further enclosing the volume allows, something of a temporary closure, one walling mirroring the other, protecting memory and loss, the fragments of the (self-)work’s process which, curiously, are the building blocks of the enclosed whole; the middle section, too, Cippe, seems perfectly placed at the centre of this double “sacred” precinct: it is there that the poem raises its memorial column, the emblem of the book’s / writing’s larger cippus; around the central column, sections II, Le puits, and III, Autres exercices d’ombre, then V, Chronique, and VI, La chambre d’or, offer scenes – the “well”, the “golden chamber” – of dramatic psychic and discreetly autobiographical character, as well as indications as to manner, style: such (self-)work as “exercise”, ongoing praxis, writing-of-the-self-inrelation-to-the-other not as achievement, absolute act and place, and writing, not dissimilarly, as “chronicle”, a daily affair, ever renewable, yet centred upon the shifting story of the psyche’s unfoldment. As for the seven sections of Titus-Carmel’s raised stela, I shall look at each in turn, in compacted form. I. Fragments de la première enceinte: the epigraph from Novalis shows Titus-Carmel to be sensitive to the paradox of writing in “fragments”: the latter match the fatal incompleteness of being and its inscription, and thus provide a “bearable” harmony with them. The poetic gesture is understood to entail the contradiction of its violence, its negatoriness and destruction, set against a constructiveness (cf. TFO, 13) producing “dust and glory” (TFO, 9). This construction depends in part upon cumulative memory (cf. TFO 10) and the elan –

Excavation and Forgetting, Embankment and Abyss

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Hart Crane’s élancement, one feels – which, in its “upstream dream” (TFO, 17), drives back upwards, so to speak, towards source and origin. Loss, if it pushes memory to function, inevitably implies forgetting, and this dilemma lived by Titus-Carmel parallels that of his consciousness of ever available beauty which, yet, is “heavy” (TFO, 22, cf. 85) – for, if being and art ever self-create, they seem, too, constantly plunged into ephemerality, loss, oblivion. Unsurprisingly, then, factors of innocence and remorse tussle together, this reflected perhaps by the contrapuntal use of italicised passages offsetting those in roman. The motif of shoreline or river embankment, which we shall shortly have occasion to look at in connection with La rive en effet, and which implicitly was meditated throughout Le motif du fleuve – this blason, if I may call it that, continues to play its role in the imagination of emotional and ontological “space” (cf. TFO, 36). Lastly, it is important to note the poem’s implicit interwovenness with a larger poiein – no doubt plastic art’s, but, too, that of the self’s total insertion into being –: “that stump of colour / [which remains sovereign” (TFO, 34): an emblem Yves Bonnefoy picks up on in Titus-Carmel’s painting, but which has broad metaphorical implication. II. Le puits: Christian Doumet and Claude Adelen have given insightful readings of this section of Travaux de fouille et d’oubli, as we have seen, and thus I offer but a few additional remarks. Shadow and darkness, the blackness of night assert themselves as powerful elements of a dialectics staging equally the demands of light and the freedom the latter promises – a dialectics perhaps finding its only feasible synthesis via the poem, as poem. The “unsubmissiveness” evoked from the outset (cf. TFO, 43) no doubt authorises this synthesis; it engenders the poem wherein a sense of peril and an impulse, yet, of love find their taut harmony: “o dangerous beloved and tender friend” (ibid.). Poetry, it is implied (cf., TFO, 46), is continuous self-interrogation, a gazing down onto / into the world (: being, the other, self) as dark well – womb, origin –, a searching for face and figure, in the midst of shadow, blackness, muteness, “in a time of elegy” (ibid.). The gesture is synonymous with hope, the hope of some self-world, self-other reconciliation. Mourning is the place of self’s woundedness, it is a gapingness, the very hole into being into which self’s gaze plunges – hence the need to “cling to self […] and the wound of my mourning” (ibid.): here is the only (un)space, the

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only path felt as possibly leading to a synthesis, a resolution of the tensions of non-being, non-having, and some conceivable indivision and reharmonisation. III. Autres exercices d’ombre: following upon the eight nearperfect, 17-line 3-inch cubes of text constituting Le puits, these twelve poem-exercices opt for an entirely different formal challenge, at once freer and yet requiring of discipline. Lacking all punctuation (as with Le puits) except for the poem’s final full stop – indeed, once again, twelve make one, the ensemble opening with its only capitalised letter and offering final closure, entombment, via the full stop which, in a sense, halts sentence, exercise and all impression of leaking “shadowiness” – what shadow there is, one might say, is thus embraced and enclosed within the space of its self-exercising. As for the metric and stanzaic mathematics of this single yet multiple exercise – there are only two instances of rhyme, – we can note the following: the couplet dominates, with only two one-line stanzas and only one with four lines, there being a number of tercets; the total line-length of each poem-exercise ranges from 5 to 9; the syllabic count is quite variable, though offering no massive discrepancy, the first text showing 7-6/3-2/7-5/2-3, the last of the twelve 8-6/5/5-8. In short, intuitive control within a range of mathematical orders never at radical variance, and a sequence or series constituting a whole, only very loosely aetheticised – as if beauty and order in the context of the elegiac, the tombal, were, at times, considered too ironic to bear: thus do loss and forgetting seep into poiein, eroding memory, construction, formal memorialising. These “exercises”, indeed, are caught in the swirling mists of shadow and its multilayered emblematicalness, and the epigraph from Denis de Rougement seems there to remind us of the fact: “Shadow is the humiliating proof of flesh” (TFO, 51). This perception of shadow is, nevertheless, but a partial one, for, fleeting, elusive, mortal as “shadow” may be felt to be, it can still offer, as one reaches for it, “grasp[ing] it / for a second or two / an eternity in one’s hands” (TFO, 55). This paradox is constantly lived. One could say it lies at the heart of all elegy, all of the tensions of loss and memory, not-having and ever-having. “My dearest my death / my leech my shadow”, Titus-Carmel writes (TFO, 57). And the final of the twelve texts reads as follows: j’ai enjambé ombre et courant me voici parvenu


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mais là d’où j’écris rien décidément ne ressemble plus à un corps. (TFO, 64) 24

If shadowiness, the place of shadow and shade(s), can be negotiated, the character of that space to which one attains, the (un)space of writing, remains that of the disembodied, the disincarnate, the metaphysical – this, despite the intensity with which it is lived. At the core of life, nothing carnal, nothing strictly temporal or spatial. IV. Cippe: Here, in seven textually narrow increments, rises (if it were not for the page, that causes repeated “falling” and relaunchings) the funerary column of poetic inscription of the other by the self, of the self for the other. The poem begins thusly: “Writing / or constructing this / building / page / after page / a work in stages / that I could / dedicate to you” (TFO, 67): the poem as gift, an ancient yet so terribly modern tombeau never adequate to the other’s reality, “never reach[ing] / as high as your lashes” (TFO, 69), an assemblage shrouded in a silence of the world that, in a kind of vicious circle, urges the return to the spectrality, the pure metaphysicality haunting writing, that strange (un)space where the echo of the voice of the lost other persists, calls out endlessly to an only nominally present self. At one time – when time was lived in time – self and other inhabited “that same shoreline of the world” (TFO, 70); now – in no-time, in eternity –, the other inhabits the temporal dream-space, the place of pure thought, of the self: “ô ma promeneuse / ma soeur”, we read, the other caught between the phantasmal soeur of Baudelaire’s Invitation au voyage and his mesmerising passante, real and inaccessible, gone and there forever in the mind, from the eponymous poem. V. Chronique: Twelve poems once again forming a whole: begun by a capital letter, ending with a full stop, lacking all other signs of discontinuity other than the framing of each constituent text in its own white space. Mirroring III in this, then, but also in its free 24

I have stridden over shadow and flowing waters And here I am but from where I write absolutely nothing now resembles a body

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but relatively constant stanzaic and metric orders, its essentially unrhyming manner, Chronique tends to offer very slightly longer poetic forms. Its epigraph, this time from Segalen, suggests that the impact of time affects the worker rather than the work – the latter, one can reasonably surmise, offering (the hope, the dream of) that eternal “Forbidden Violet City” Segalen ever sought in his own stelae and Tibetan odes. Here is the eighth of Chronique’s twelve parts: J’ai choisi l’absence comme tu choisis un fruit à l’épaule du monde j’ai préféré mon coude la saignée de mon bras et prenant mes quartiers à cet angle du corps je me suis ployé là où rien ne fait mouvement ni repli ni fiction

(TFO, 86) 25

A discreetly teeming text that marks out the nature of the self’s ontology, its assumed relation to world, other and, indeed, the self, it rapidly reveals the following: the natural choice of “absence”, a remoteness where, seemingly, “nothing is present” (– but the intangible, the critically insubstantial and unsubstantiatable); the 25

I have chosen absence as you choose fruit to the world’s shoulder I have preferred my elbow the bleeding of my arm and taking up my quarters at this body angle I have bent and yielded where nothing offers movement or recess or fiction


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consequent preference for a self-reliance, no matter its pain, which continues, despite “absence”, to be felt physically; the taking up of “quarters” – one cannot help thinking of both Titus-Carmel’s Quartiers d’hiver and the motifs of quartering and crucifixion commonly recurring – in that body angle that, conceivably, is that formed as the elbow joint in all poiein, all written and plastic doing; the bending and plying of self in a space / unspace – art’s, writing’s, no doubt, though both are in ever intimate relation to being (: “Attaining high and … / Being”, Segalen prefers) – beyond “movement // … retreat / … fiction”: an absolute gesture plunging self paradoxically into an experience barely describable except in negatives: aspatial, atemporal, beyond fictionality for offering something like pure mental, emotive realness, pure truth. VI. La chambre d'or: And immediately one asks oneself what this golden chamber might be: the tomb of the other, become the tomb of writing, like some ancient Egyptian construct, built with the sweat and blood of (self-)enslavement? The chamber as purely dreamed as some golden age? A space light-filled like one of Bernard Faucon's Chambres d'amour? Whatever it is, it offers simultaneously brilliance, an emblem of light, and a fatal unravelling of its own dream (cf. TFO, 33). Such tensions are everywhere evident, moreover, the self plunged into its own diversion “at the bedhead of your eternity [where] I shall join my face / to the obstinate face of your icy strangeness” (TFO, 94). To write the dream of the “golden chamber” of self and other is to embrace the simultaneousness of “trial” and “weddedness” (TFO, 97); to speak the other’s name – in the sacredness of all naming – yet causes the tongue, language itself, to bleed (cf. ibid.); to focus obsessively on the self’s dream yet brings about the realisation that it is “a dream utterly set in darkness”, despite its goldenness (cf. TFO, 100). The radiant face of the other deploys its synonymy with an “effigy of pure central death” (TFO, 98). VII. Fragments de la deuxième enceinte: If La chambre d’or mirrors Le puits in its position within Travaux de fouille et d’oubli’s heptagonal structure, in the number of pieces (8) composing the section, in its differently but still rigorously mathematised orchestration, the relationship between the first enceinte and the second shows a similar mirroring, yet one which, arguably, is finally broken, as if to reflect both the irony of such aesthetic factors and the

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actual desire to conclude upon a gesture of disharmony in the context of loss and forgetting. Thus is it that this closing volet of the poem’s complex retable – whilst offering the harmonics of a seeming formal and symbolic (en)closure, the poem enacting its own containment, even entombment – chooses a “dislocating” total of 31 fragments to set against the opening enceinte’s “rational” 32. The closure / enclosure that Travaux de fouille et d'oubli finally accomplishes via its magical seven volets thus lies in that relation to its avowed purpose of “exhum[ation of] shining splinters and fragments” of emotional memory. The poetic chronicle, with its evens, its nevers, its thuses, and so on, may unearth, bring to light, but its reseals such discoveries in the very place of their revelation, reburying them within itself, providing a (non-)place of provisional oblivion and adieu. As poiein awakens to its dawn, the dignity of its fatal release (cf. TFO, 104), so does it simultaneously understand “the darkness gained” (TFO, 112), the depth and coal-blackness of the place of loss, of absence (cf. here Bonnefoy's verse quoted epigraphically: TFO, 101). The poem, then, is confirmed as “stela and dwelling-place”, fragilely constructed by “memory’s slow decanting” (TFO, 122). But memory is “gutted” (TFO, 121) and the poem’s arisenness does not erase “this death I carry around within” (TFO, 113), being ultimately nothing more than one of many “ icons of absence” (TFO, 126). This said, absence is countered by expectancy – via the logic of the writing of one’s consciousness –, and exile meets its curious match in the poet’s sense of his lodging within himself of cette demeurante (cf. TFO, 113): the remaining, indwelling one, that, by virtue of emotion, consciousness, even tattered memory, yet is, accompanies. Here is the twenty-ninth fragment of the closing enceinte: Derrière la porte une jonchée de nuits et fouillant cette cendre c'est soleil encore que je réveille soleil et braises couvées au dormant de son nom (TFO, 130) 26 26

Behind the door


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Reverdy-like in its anti-anecdotalness, its floating non-contextuality, its aerated simplicity that yet speaks, discreetly, ontological volumes, the poem hinges on its present participle, with its notion of ongoing excavation and stirring of self’s psyche (its (non-)place of mirroredness), and the verb être, with its insistence on being-nowagain (via the self’s bootstrapping of self into the contents of its being). A dialectics of darkness and light, warmth, of ashenness and sunshine gives the poem its dynamics and energises the implicit equation of loss-absence-minimum-nothingness and beingawakening-conscious intervention-creation. The latter notions feed into the pertinence, the deep symbolics of name, as of the act of naming of what is, who is – and here, despite the endless hesitations over the relational logic of language and being (the quatrième de couverture argues that the name emerging is “offered to the wind, to the memory of the exhausting sea – to silence, ultimately”), nomination does seem to imply being, arisenness, something like an improbable resurrection in the midst of crucifixion. The very last of the 31 Fragments de la deuxième enceinte (TFO, 133) echoes such tensions, situating the book and the she-name it articulates ontologically, psychologically, in that between space of arisenness and fallenness, angelicalness and woundedness, formal achievement (: “ this perfect memory cube”) and that sense of absence pure thought, pure memory, may be said to generate. Appearing in the same year as Travaux de fouille et d'oubli and almost at the same moment, La rive en effet orchestrates itself as a more classical, tripartite retable, its opening volet entitled Si durer est cette fraction, its central panel Ce qui entaille, its closing set of figures Une guerre à la bouche: continuity, survival via minimality, a fracturedness that yet remains a mathematical unit; cutting and notching action that suggests perhaps less the flagrant glory of artistic a strewing of nights and rummaging through the ashes it is again sun that I rouse sun and brooded live embers in the sleeping frame of its name

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gesture than the basic, patient, day-by-day chipping away at the block of time and memory, being and the sense of its absence; language, speech, finally, not as some serenely flowing process, but as violent war waged both against the incapacities of themselves, and, paradoxically, in accordance with the book’s liminal epigraph from Blanchot, so that that silence “we all want, writing”, may be maintained (RE, 7). The latter paradox may be related to a deep pudeur at the heart of all chronicling of self-other relations, and may equally account for the fusing, in Gérard Titus-Carmel’s work, of factors of revelation, exhumation, memory, on the one hand, and entombment, reburying of the rebirthed (in Mallarméan terms), a désoeuvrement of the produced œuvre (in more Blanchotian terms), on the other hand. Si durer est cette fraction: as we move from title to text proper, we are immediately struck by what turns out to be a vigorous formal self-discipline that yet grants a significant measure of prosodic freedom: each of the section’s constituent texts offers four quatrains, for a total of 24 texts x 4 quatrains (which will match the stanzaic mathematics of the other two sections), the section concluding, as will its successors, with an Envoi, all three envois adopting a loosely identical dialogical structure. If, however, the 24 x 4 quatrains thus deploy a kind of serial harmony, each is free to develop the metricity and typographical layout of each constituent line – though, here again, a spontaneous discipline disallows excessive length. An antiphonal effect involving an italicised prose passage in quotation marks, following a short prose in roman, gives a special character to Envoi, I, an effect echoed in the envois of the book’s two other sections. The imaginative ontological world of Si durer est cette fraction unsurprisingly betrays continuity and constancy, yet ever emerges into a poetic freshness and vigour that are exceptional without suggesting any desire for the conspicuous. It is a world of song and raucousness inseparable (cf. RE, 12), a world become language and thereby “freezing / […] presence” (RE, 16), a world, too, of ever haunting shadowiness. The inhabitants of this world, so frequently compacted into a nous that would speak both of an intimacy of je/tu and, perhaps occasionally, of a generalized collectivity, a more broadly shared human experience – these somehow connected inhabitants “are merely repetition / and infinite


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awaiting” (RE, 16): plunged into a sameness that yet looks, halfexpectantly, to their transformation, caught, too, between a mutual whispering and a true “miracle of joining (cf. RE, 20). Yet, just as the opening section’s title hinges on pure conditionality (si…), so, commonly, do questioning and surmising constitute the dominant sign (“could it be we are whispering // […] / could it be we are miracle to this degree”: ibid.) and undermine all assertiveness – both positive and negative. Thus is it, one might feel, upon reading these beautiful elegies, that the “shore, indeed” – la rive en effet – is a place providing no absolute departure, no resolving journey, no launching of self (and other) into an ontic space other than that, purely ontological, of language, poetry, itself. “The lovely name of arrow, TitusCarmel writes, riveting us to the shore” (RE, 22). And this rivetting to the rive opens up the circularity of the logic of a wound ironically never to be “cleaned”, but ever “cared for”: caressed, loved, dressed in the forms of art, yet beyond cure, remedy, ever oozing (cf. RE, 23, 31). And thus, too, fatally, it results that “of this endlessly reiterated elegy / we are remains and tomb” (RE, 24): the movement operated by the poem allows for no ultimate release, its only liberation coming about, paradoxically, by the very containment, entombment, of existence’s, presence’s residual energies (which, again, in pure circular motion, permit and lead to such entombment). Here is the nineteenth of the 24 poems composing Si durer est cette fraction: Quant à la part ténébreuse de soi où réside cette douleur sa devise déroulant le seul nom assombri de nuit tenace à la fois tranquille et menaçante lorsque berçant corps et sommeil entre les côtes disjointes elle élit sa demeure parfois nous sentons frémir cette insoumise comme fauve guettant le moindre mouvement ou soubresaut froissant l’immobilité à l’affût de quelle proie de quel accomplissement d’être quand le plus léger tremblement

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The Endless Theory of Days: The Art and Poetry of Gérard Titus-Carmel nous est croc et brûlure et réveil (RE, 29) 27

As ever one is struck by the syntactic coherence that may seem to hesitate at moments, but which allows for a perfect fusion of swirlingly complex thought and a form implacably circling in on the completion of the latter as the fourth quatrain reaches the poem’s point of final rest. As for the thought itself that is thus orchestrated, it centers on the depth of penetration of pain into the body and the unconscious, a conjoined place where “dislocated ribs” are reminiscent of plastic works such as Nielles, and, of course, ideally, protect the heart, a place where she-it-linguistic emblem-pain“tenebrous part of self” installs “herself” – seemingly beyond the self’s control, moreover. For this she-force, with its free-ranging connotations (for, if the poem’s syntax is immaculate, its conveyed meanings twist and quietly writhe), remains beyond subjugation, wild, like Blake’s tyger Titus-Carmel will evoke in his epitaph to the 2005 Jungle (non-lieu), disruptive, ever alert, preying, within the space of self. The use of the pronoun nous – “we can feel quivering the untamed she-force” – yet gives the reader pause: are both self and other to be understood to be conscious of such wild inner movements? Is the nous an allusion to the multiplicity of the self’s being in relation to this invasive she-force? Is Titus-Carmel enlarging the pertinence of his experience, seeing it as commonly shared, 27

As for the tenebrous part of self where the pain dwells its motto unfolding the sole name darkened by clinging night at once tranquil and threatening when cradling body and sleep between disjointed ribs it elects its place of dwelling

at times

we feel the shudder of its wild animal-like insubordinacy watching for the slightest movement or startlement rumpling the stillness lying in wait for what prey what accomplishment of being when the softest trembling is to us fang and burning and waking


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though not necessarily commonly recognized, spoken, avowed? What does remain clear, however, is the questioning of the deep purpose of such possible lived human experience. Why such feeling, physical, emotional? Why such inner stirring of our being when all ontic / ontological accomplishment remains but a deep, lingering painful question? And, if we ordinarily might have been tempted to read here a “reawakening” thus “accomplished” via such inner rumbling, how can we justify this in the context of the biting and burning that lie in apposition to it? Blanchot’s silence might understandably be preferable to this violent, seemingly futile birthing. Something of an answer Titus-Carmel would appear to offer (himself) a little later in this newly fashioned serial chronicle: the place of this inner turmoil remains, womb-like, one of expectancy, of an “awaiting / for grace and forgiveness” (RE, 31). The language is strong, natural, solemn, spiritual. And, indeed, the poietic language of engagement with self(’s deep visceral, half-unconscious trauma) allows for the “breath that delivers from numbing” (RE, 33), just as, via other metaphors and blasons, it can offer “vertigo of innocence blowing fresh” (RE, 34). As the Envoi, I suggests, however, to plunge into the depths of such pain as loss and resultant solitude may occasion, is to delve into the very center of the “madness of birth and death” (RE, 35) and to realize that the doing, the making self seeks to eke out from loss, is caught in the loop of an eternally beginning moment – where accomplishment is but a word in the midst of an unspeakable immenseness. Ce qui entaille: The first of the 24 poems of this central panel of La rive en effet makes clear that Gérard Titus-Carmel’s work ever remains centrally inspired by a compact number of factors: absence; its transmutation into a work of absence via the channels of body, consciousness, memory; language and the tensions of the name and the endless renaming of the lost other; the latter’s viscerally and emotionally felt presence in self; the role of certain suddenly spurting realities / figures – here: lilacs and irises and wind – around which memory, emotion and language temporarily congeal. I should like to look immediately, if briefly, at a beautiful sample of the newly conceived mode of Ce qui entaille, the third poem of the section (RE, 47): (J’écrirai l’absence ce lent désoeuvrement du jour où fatalement ton nom heurte ce qui commence et s’attarde

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: ce me sera chronique de vivre ainsi je serai blanchi et tout autant dispensé d’attente et de veille c’est dire quel bâillon posé sur les lèvres lourdes de mots et ce ruban de mots restés dans la gorge au passage chaque fois la langue le refoule quand bien même aurais-je pu le soumettre au travail d’un autre deuil comme second miel)28

Six remarks will have to suffice: 1. The poem, like all the others of Ce qui entaille, with one exception, is composed of eleven lines, orchestrated, as so often elsewhere (but not exclusively: 1-, 4-, 5- and even 6-line stanzaic structures are used), in tercets and couplets. In addition, the poem’s italicized form, echoed in precisely 12 of the 24 poems, sets up a secret antiphonal music, whispering asides together with the more “flagrant” roman articulations. Such mathematics and aestheticising demand a discipline that no doubt works to offset the sheer pain of melancholia and mourning, but the nineteenth poem, with its 12-line structure equally serves to deconstruct any notion of absolute aesthetic temple we might have been tempted to read into a perfectly mathematised ensemble. But, of course, the line-length, free, metrically irregular, intuitive, at times broken with white space as new thought arises, is a reminder that mathematics / aesthetics requires no constraints of would-be perfection to lay its offerings of beauty upon the tomb of being.

28

(I shall write absence that long unworking of the day in which fatally your name clashes with beginnings and lingerings : it will be my chronicled living thus will I be cleared and freed too from expectation and vigil this to say what gagging upon lips heavy with words and the ribbon of words stuck in the throat at each passing the tongue thrusting it back down even if I could have set it to work upon another mourning like a second honeying)


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2: Writing, here, implies both an articulation of absence, of silence, of aporia, again along Blanchotian lines, and yet, no doubt paradoxically, a determination (: the future tense: “I shall write”) to persist in such aporetic articulation. 3: Writing becomes, and will continue to be, a life’s work of chronicling of this self-other hiatus, a hiatus equally splitting apart conceptions and feelings of presence and absence, oeuvre and désoeuvrement: all doing, all poiein, thus becomes an un-working, a malfunctioning, an unworkableness, at the same time as it founds the very poem/book we are now looking at and which persists in holding out the dream of a future “disculpation”. 4: Writing, too, is lived as a substitute for the expectancy we have seen cause so much pain, for, too, the felt need to stand vigil over the impossible body of the other. (Of course, as a substitute, this is what writing nevertheless fatally does.) 5: The latter paradox is well understood: writing is a stifling, a gagging – for, no matter what the oeuvre/poem may articulate, that endless ribbon of the unspeakable chokes, and language/the tongue cannot release the absolute formulae d’outre-tombe that, only, could, perhaps, give true presence and spirit where none are felt, none, to be – despite, precisely, the poem and its process, its poiein. 6: The poem, already elegy, poem of mourning, even were it to become, as it does, the elegy of its own elegy, a recognition of mourning over its own incapacities, a second, honeyed (, honeymooning) consolation – even this would remain – remains, in effect (: the title), inadequate to the deep needs of self: an onto-logy (of sealing over the incision, the breach) cannot play the role of a lived ontos. Much of Ce qui entaille continues this self-reflexive mode that allows for, just as it seems implacably drawn to, a meditation on the relativity of the power and purpose of writing itself. The poem as icon gives but disembodied, remote, pure mentation (cf. RE, 43). The page is alive, but with the noise “of all impossible speech” (RE, 44). What, Titus-Carmel asks, can be writing’s valid objective, given its self-veiling, self-dreaming process, its near-pure fictionality (were it not for its insistent images that impact the mind, the body) (cf. RE, 47)? Language, he again asks, “is it not the whispered announcing in the ear of death as the subject of writing” (ibid.). As such, as obit, if it may be deemed a memorial celebration, it is, equally, “a space of

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disappointment” (RE, 50), forever immersed in felt non-coincidence, non-attainment, fatally obsessive morbidity, only minimally “containing the advance of shadow” (RE, 52), knowing this to be, perhaps, its summum. If writing – of the self, of the other-lying-atthe-voided-heart-of-self – can thus provoke high fear, for it is ever dealing with the other-as-the-unknowable, as death, we should not be blind to the fact that such an abandonment of self also is desired, constitutes a death-wish of sorts, and, in this sense, it is that profound will to Blanchot’s silence that is, indeed, enacted as writing traverses the veil of fear masking other(ness). For these reasons, writing’s/death’s domain strangely fronts upon a suavity, a sweetness beyond the remorse that it yet deals with (cf. RE, 56). In effect, on the shore – one thinks of Nevil Shute – of writing, the view of being and its relation to language is at once ever shifting and essentially constant. I quote, without commentary, leaving the reader to meditate it freely, the following exquisite nineteenth poem of Ce qui entaille as evidence of Gérard Titus-Carmel’s capacity to raise a stela of the highest order of beauty and memorial honouring at the same time as such a raising is visibly undermined by an undying, unflinching consciousness of its own high, indeed, absolute relativity: dispersal, stifling, betrayal, at best some “brutal surprise” only faintly reminiscent of the dreamed “nectar”. The poem is, moreover, with perfect emblematicalness, the one that – with its 12 lines – cracks the walls of Ce qui entaille’s otherwise ideally mathematised aesthetics: (Au long des jours les heures émoussent cette certitude d’être elles perdent ce fil qui nous permettait d’admettre l’aube sur la page également les mots essaiment qui prétendaient en extraire suc et nectar dirait-on qu’ils tombent comme mouches sur cette étendue de voix et quelle voix d’ailleurs d’infinie solitude et trahison cherchent-ils à étouffer qu’ils maintiennent ainsi sous leur loi la rumeur des vagues l’aveuglante blancheur de l’écume toute dentelle et toutes griffes dehors quand à l’orée de lassitude on délivre cette peine cette brutale surprise de dire (RE, 57) 29 29

(Daylong the hours blunt the certainty of being losing the thread that let us admit dawn


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“Images, Titus-Carmel will write immediately afterwards, shattered signs and icons // of our impermanency ungraspable dreams / in the face of night” (RE, 58). Ultimately, writing cannot build that bridge that haunted Hart Crane’s own gesture, hollowing it out, disassembling in the heart and the mind what the page yet patiently, and with impetuous persistence, ever assembles. “Too much space, Titus-Carmel, will conclude, in the midst of his fatal, elegiacal, dogged continuity, already has slipped between us / and us which cuts deep” (RE, 53). Une guerre à la bouche: the poem, its making, its teeming beauties, as a war endlessly waged upon its own utterance, for its bouche d’ombre is inevitably the blason of the beloved mouth of being’s lost otherness… If, then, the shoreline (of daily existence and its writing) is a place of disunion (cf. RE, 70), it yet remains – remaining being a crucial factor in Titus-Carmel’s poetics 30 – that place where the strategies (as well as the felt impossibilities) of bridging, crossing, joining, are lived out. “On the other side of self / already we await each other, the poet dreams, we shall leap across / go towards our meeting” (RE, 72). To be on the shore is to open oneself to the memory of a voice now only an echo with self and “desire for its inexhaustibleness” (RE, 74), so that “shame / and remorse” somehow may be exorcised by the terrible beauty of the “building of a monument of nudity” via a creative “scream” not unlike that of the Munch Titus-Carmel has purposefully written on (cf. RE, 75). That the search for the bouche d’ombre from which both memory and scream emerge involves a “denial of azureness”, an experience of woundedness and that “tumult” André du Bouchet too upon the page words too swarm having claimed to extract therefrom sap and nectar ought we say they fall like flies upon this expanse of voice and what a voice moreover of infinite solitude and betrayal if they seek to stifle they thus hold in their power the roaring of waves the blinding whiteness of foam lacy and claws full-bared when at the very rim of lassitude is delivered up this grief the brutal surprise of speech) 30 See my essay for a discussion of this factor in relation to Demeurant.

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speaks of in his last days, of this we have ample evidence at this point. But, as with Munch, the scream is a silent, at once inner and black-on-white written phenomenon: in truth it cannot ever be spoken: it is “that which cannot be translated / into any language any dialect” (RE, 69). This is the dilemma of what remains, whatever indwells – demeure (cf. RE, 80) –, for the poet pits language against itself, knowing that naming is the silent naming of death and the memory of the “mortally wounded in the midst of smiling” – a smiling dancing only “at the lacy rim of dream” (RE, 81). Oh, how, in rare moments, Titus-Carmel can snatch at this dream, plunge reader and himself into the vicarious living of a dead but flickering intoxication: nous étions devenus vitesse et éclat également essoufflés et limpides de l’absolue légèreté de l’air de nos corps aussi de l’apaisement qui s’ensuivit une paix conquise le calme enfin dans un repli de pénombre (RE, 84) 31

Life and death conjoined in the lightness of being, in the flicker of a memory soon seemingly swamped by resurgent fear, futility, selfdenial. And yet – and this oscillation appears inevitable given the intensity of those lived paradoxes we have detailed – and yet, if “a leafing of lost / names has grown about our mouths / we [yet] remain” (RE, 89); if the “shore” of remaining and indwelling seems abandoned for “the abyss / we now recognise” (RE, 90), yet persists a sense that it is not a question of “[having] that but [moving] towards that / not [a question merely of] absence but [of] a path / a ceaseless dream unfurling its rings / in exhausting self-watchfulness” (RE, 89). And language’s “convulsiveness” – how can we not think of the Breton admired by Titus-Carmel and the poem of Nadja? – yet 31

We had become speed and lustre equally breathless and limpid from the absolute lightness of our bodies’ air from the soothing too that ensued a peace conquered calm at last in a recess of half-light


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remains, so beautifully, “our singular way of staying wild and permanent”, as Envoi, III indicates (RE, 91). It restores a being and doing in the midst of loss, and it restores them to a sufficient relationship with “the swirling origins of our dreaming, the inborn necessity of the wind” (ibid.).


IX FROM SHADOWS, INTERIORS AND SEASONS TO CAIRNS, FORESTS AND NIELLI

IX Ombres pour STC (1984) and Nuits (1984) may be said to mark, with their use of oils, the return of Gérard Titus-Carmel to painting, though, as Patrick Casson rightly argues (PCI, 81), the slightly earlier work of the Caparaçons, the Eclats and the Casque de Nikko well prepare this return with their watercolours, various inks, coloured chalks and pastels. Yet what a return it is, inspired by two great poets, Coleridge and Edward Young and offering two series spectacularly crowned by, in the first case, the Grande Ombre I, in the case of the second series, the Grande Nuit I. The huge (245 x 320 cm) oil painting offered Samuel Taylor Coleridge is a superbly and boldly structured composition with a central circle-mirror-hole allowing the eye to gaze “through” into the indescribable visionary infinity teeming within. This central “world” is framed in various ways, via square, arched, oblong and oblique structures, themselves floating in swirling space which would seem both to have its further contents and to be silhouetted against yet vaster, more open space merging into some outer framing. The colours, especially given the emergence of Grande Ombre I from the earlier largely penciled, black, grey and white worlds Titus-Carmel has espoused, are nothing short of astonishing: creams, yellows, warm browns and rusty reds, plus a whole range of hues from grey to blackish brown, off-white to green. If echoes of Noren, Agrès and even Four Season Sticks can be observed, it remains that Grande Ombre I plunges us into a sensuously transformed world of texture, tone – and, inevitably, symbolics. Titus-Carmel himself speaks of the paradox involved in a return to what Yves Michaud properly terms his increasingly “glorious” deployment of colour (cf. YM, 33), given a seeming requirement to privilege darkness, obscure depth, shadowiness (cf. PCI, 81). But the paradox felt arguably reveals itself on a yet larger, though more subtle scale: Titus-Carmel’s work enacts a consciousness – and a symbolics – precisely of tensionality, darkness and light, death and energy, finitude and cosmic mystery, the

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shadowiness of being yet flecked with the light and beauty that do not cease to abound, and which confound and uplift, indivisibly. Grande Nuit I, from the series emerging from Titus-Carmel’s reading of the pre-Romantic Edward Young, “the admirable and funereal poet of Night Thoughts” (cf. PCI, 81), is an oil of the same striking dimensions as Grande Ombre I, and is equally painted on vellum paper paste-mounted onto canvas. Whilst maintaining a not dissimilar range of colour, Grande Nuit I radically reorchestrates the distribution of its components: two large black circles dominate, albeit flecked with whites and yellows, greens and blues. They are “framed” both by vertical poles, struts and seeming cords, and by a high horizontal bar from which they even conceivably hang. As do, in all likelihood, other suspended forms running through the centre of each black circle. The entire complex structure floats upon / is silhouetted upon / is perhaps connected to a swirling, largely grey space. No single painted object, as with Grande Ombre I, is firmly identifiable as an object belonging to the daily, lived real. We are, once more, plunged into a space of freely, unrootedly symbolic process producing a whole composed of a set of forms and colorations not dependent upon any functional relation to what lies outside them and only relating amongst themselves in a purely aesthetic sense. Painting as painting, then, as, certainly, a visionary, psych(olog)ical act and place, process and product, but beyond hermeneutic reduction, any intellectualizing appropriation limiting its strange emergent mystery 32. The next couple of years sees a further flurry of important developments as Titus-Carmel’s painterly manner mutates and further affirms its complex modal imbrications and originalities. Suite Chancay (1985) is an excellent example of the latter: there are the series of fairly large oil on canvas paintings with their airy, unsituatable spaces, vaguely reminiscent of the studio itself or some other “interior” with their seeming portals or windows, poles, perhaps even sheets, spaces half human, half cosmic in their leaping beyond finitude into zones of formal and psychic otherness. There are connections to, continuities with, the 24 compositions autour de l’X (1986), where we can dream similar “representations” whilst 32 Yves Bonnefoy’s La stratégie du l’énigme (Paris: Galilée, 2006) deals with such issues in the context of Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation du Christ, though his perspective shifts appreciably.

From Shadows, Interiors and Seasons to Cairns, Forests and Nielli

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understanding that none truly exist, that what is at stake once more is the producing of form, of composition, via the discreet but intense release and deployment of visceral, corporeal, mental and emotional energies into the various matters, i.e. material substances, that allow art to become itself. Suite Chancay pursues this deployment, moreover, in characteristically multiple ways: dry points, engravings, aquatints, in addition to the oil paintings, some of the work destined to accompany the writings of Henri Meschonnic’s Voyageurs de la voix (1985) and Jean Frémon’s Rhétorique (1987). Once more one may be tempted to “read” into these various pieces “portrayals” of recognizable spaces or phenomena, but any such reading would pervert the purity of their intention and their reality: blasons – crosses, erasures, ribbings, framings, darknesses, shadowinesses, and light, and so on – may abound, but they remain as “semantically” ungroundable as their form remains structurally, aesthetically eloquent. As for Titus-Carmel himself, his insistencies, offered in Notes d’atelier, dwell upon the way collaging at once “dismembers meaning” and allows for a subterranean “permanency of drawing” – the latter coherence being bolstered by an emerging unity that permeates the conglomerate work. He can speak too of the willful energies at the heart of all surging form, the latter in a sense compensating for the non-development of endless narratives and meanings that yet secretly underpin painting – for, finally, TitusCarmel is ever conscious of the fact, painting’s own structures are what is at work, beyond and in addition to, even at times in discreet homage to, their multiple conscious or barely conscious rootings. What Gérard Titus-Carmel achieves in, particularly, Suite Chancay’s oils echoes on in the 1986 Boréales – both the elegant harmonies of the Petites Boréales, with their black chalk, sanguine and papiers collés, and the vaster (again, 245 x 320 cm) oil and canvas Grandes Boréales. Nothing, however, is static in these continuities, colours shift, recombine, as do the main structures, still powerfully connected, moreover, to the art(s) of the drawer, the engraver, with their bold, thick black horizontal and vertical linespoles-sticks-supports. Grande Boréale 2, for example, gives us the soaring and enigmatic geometries and atmospherics of mind freely engaging with the materiality of plastic art and revealing at once the limitations and the symbolic infiniteness of this process. It is a painting that uses the flat space of painting to yet open the mind to

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the impenetrable, indefinable mystery of space, of the contained and the uncontainable; of the limitless humanized symbolics of colour, too – “celestial” blues, “solar” yellows, “pure” or graying, “sullied” whites, and so on; of the marks humankind can overlay onto “reality’s space”, barring it, measuring it, constructing and limiting it, even though its enigma is never lost to us. New work flows and flows. These are stunningly creative years, though there has not truly ever been, from the earliest moments to the present, a lessening of productive intensity, and, indeed, with the giving over of himself to his poetic writing, the latter intensity arguably doubles from this point in time on. The teeming fertility of the plastic imagination will thus lead to the Intérieurs series of 198788, that of Peinture in 1988, of Palmes in 1989, Extraits & Fragments des saisons in 1989-90, and, again in 1990, the Chanfrein work. Beyond, we shall see, by 1992, the emergence of two further major series, Dédicaces and Dopo Como, followed by the last cascading production we shall look at here: Égéennes (1993), Cairn (1994), Forêts (1995-96) and Nielles (1996-97). As we have observed already, and as most major critics such as Casson or Piguet, Baudry or Hindry, Michaud or Spies, tend to affirm, the connections between one series and another remain significant and striking, but this should not blind us to the aesthetic specificities and particular originalities of a given series, just as, with the latter, each piece unfolds its separateness, its newness. When Ann Hindry argues that the global characteristics of Gérard Titus-Carmel’s art – this, in the context, of discussing Intérieurs, Extraits & Fragments des saisons and Dédicaces – are “latency, recurrence, variation, rupture, repetition, proliferation” (AH, 11), we need to not forget that, strictly speaking, no repetition occurs: each piece is caught up in an obsessive, rhythmic, ever renewed gesture of self-exploration in relation to time, its slippage through time, memory, forgetting, vision and psychomaterial feasibility. To gaze upon the various component pieces of the Intérieurs series is to doubly appreciate Hindry’s notion of “latency”: the everbecomingness of form, aesthetic emotion, via the slippage through themselves of certain central blasons; but, too, the lack, the impossibility, of any monovalent relationship both aesthetically, to the individual painting or lithograph – due to its insertion into a large suite –, and symbolically, with respect to its “meanings” we may feel


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emerging via the blasons that yet form a product and process called painting which remains the central “meaning” of itself. TitusCarmel’s analysis of Intérieurs is revealing here: the work comes, most fundamentally, from a desire to “get back to the workshop”, (NA, 173), to “pay homage” to its space, all it has represented and continues to mean; secondly, a strong desire is recognized to “recentre [, verticalise] around myself (and within) my relation to painting” (NA, 173-74); simultaneously, this desire – far from feelings of exhaustion or melancholy or fragility of being and purpose, meaning – is hyperconscious of the energy it represents: this will be painting “bursting forth, expansive, jubilatory even” (NA, 174), after the Boréales, “pale, hieratic, almost fragile in their sovereign solitude” (ibid.); and, as for the space to be honoured, Oulchy-le-Château’s vast atelier, the space, precisely, of the infinite, ever shifting emotion and mentation of plastic process, TitusCarmel’s notes are extensive: this is the place of “easels, stools, racks, frames, canvases, workhorses, planks, rows of electric lamps” – the list goes on and on, focusing finally upon “the forest of lamps” that turn out to be Intérieurs’ main blason, with yet their fluid associativeness, a fluidness that will not stop light from remaining a central meditation, as Titus-Carmel’s final parenthesized remark on the creation of Intérieurs, with its use of papiers collés, would confirm: (I like to think that these diaphanous bits of colour came to spread over the drawings like pools of light upon the atelier’s wooden floor when, in summer, the sun finally sets in the direction of Paris.) (NA, 178)

The meaning of Intérieurs, then, may be said to reside in the production of its own component gestures, processes, materialities, steeped in the energies of the poietic desire, the desire to do, make, and honour the place of such a doing, knowing that the latter unfolds as an integral part of all visualness, all corporeal, physical doing, all emotion and thought, inevitably emerging from the mystery of our ontic immersion. If painting is painting, it comes from having fingers, eyes, senses, ever self-transforming desires, impulses mental, visceral and affective, in a world that can make us cry or jubilate in the light without which, nothing. If the various Peinture pieces of 1988 and the Palmes of 1989 would seem to point, respectively, to the sheer interiorness, the self-

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supporting, self-sustaining nature of art, as well as the connection to the real, trees, vegetation, which equally seem to “represent” the vertical upsurging of all vital energy, its magnetic, tropistic connection to light and its warmth, Extraits & Fragments des saisons characteristically achieves a fine synthesis of these perspectives which, in effect, Gérard Titus-Carmel’s poetics never dialecticises. The series of “dense, compact and intensely unified” drawings and paintings, as Yves Michaud puts it (YM, 43) – 1 large painting, one large drawing and 56 other drawings – does not, in effect, dialecticise, either, its modes of production: the large acrylic on canvas may not use charcoal, sanguine, collaging, chalk, pencil, bistre, but many of the drawings do use, in addition to the latter materials, acrylic paint or washes. There are curves, triangles of varying proportions, crosses, ribbings and trellisings, hangings, cathedral-like seeming windows. The power of the black line is everywhere felt, as, in differing measure, that of “light”. The “atmospheric”, aesthetico-affective sense emerging from the series is both diffuse and bold, complex and concentrated. Certainly, mood may be said to change as the Winter pieces mutate into those of Summer, though, of course, as Jean-Louis Baudry suggests, we are very far, here, from any mimesis: the series moves through the four seasons, but no representation occurs, just a brushing of colour against time, upon a backcloth of shifting but relatively constant form. The exquisitely harmonized structures, textures and colours of, by way of example, Extraits de Printemps II or IV will echo on into the work Gérard Titus-Carmel will now do for Jacques Dupin’s 1990 Chanfrein. Extreme simplicity would seem to reign in the beautiful equilibrium of curved, more linear and blocked forms and the subdued tones – sanguine and bistre, black and white chalks for Extraits & Fragments des saisons, acquatint and dry paint on TitusCarmel’s cream vélin d’Arches paper for Chanfrein. As ever, there remains visible here the essence of Reverdy’s aesthetics – much admired and deeply felt by Dupin himself – of justesse, ever reigning over chaos and phantasmagoria, of a static yet dynamic network of plastic relationships exuding sereneness where turmoil might otherwise have triumphed. 1992 sees the creation of two aesthetically eloquent, bold and vigorous series, the Dédicaces and Dopo Como. The former, with its large painted canvases sometimes using chalks and papiers collés,


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constitutes a gesture of recognition of affinities and significant interpertinencies – a good deal of Titus-Carmel’s work may be said to emerge from such an impulse: all his collaborations and accompaniments of the other, his extensive critical writings, work such as that honouring Coleridge or Young, and so on –, this in relation to a very broad range of cultures and intellectual exchanges. Identification of the dedication is elliptical, however, essentially private, intimate – Franz M., Hugo W., Alvaro D., Tahoser, Payatamu, Awantachu, Giambittista P., for example – and, with respect to his own work produced, does not determine its form, its contents: art retains its autonomy in the midst of recognizing the artist’s insertion in the rich philosophical, sensual, affective and aesthetic life of ambient cultures. The Dédicaces celebrate and express subtle gratitude to the other via powerful forms with what Ann Hindry terms their “emblematic frontal, dominant silhouette, now alone, at times doubled, affricate, casting us around and about, beyond the avatars of its lines, into the many areas of our memorized identification maps – face? sexual organ? cupped hands? nucleus? basin? mandorla?” (AH, 11). And, as Jean-Louis Baudry has argued – and it is an argument applicable to all the dominant formal structures in Titus-Carmel’s many series –, this mandorla, or “shield, blason” as he will also call it, brings order and balance to what he regards as “the impulsiveness of [the individual painting’s] strokes and patternings” (JLB, 43) – and, let it be added, the centring of a given series on a given forceful form is also what gives aesthetic order, harmony, relative constancy to a series that could otherwise be threatened by dispersal, collapse, incoherency. The palette of Dédicaces is luscious, though never indiscreet, again ever instinctively bound into inner tonal equilibrium both within the large individual pieces and in regard to the global, serial aesthetic impact such individual pieces create. This is true of the Dopo Como work with its 7 paintings and papiers collés, and its sérigraphies: though the tonal register changes from that dominating in Dédicaces – as do the major structuring forms –, coherence and harmony are everywhere palpable despite difference, becoming, individualized originality. The large Grande grise, of Dopo Como, with its acrylic and papiers collés on wood, offers a play of strong black forms, lit by one major yellow form and a few white, red, cream and yellow streaks or touches, all these defined but un-self-

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defining structures silhouetted upon a nuanced grey backcloth. Horizontal or obliquely horizontal forms, made discontinuous through the collaging process, vie with, yet seem easily to marry, the vertical up and down thrust of those oval forms of Dédicaces here become, in the Dopo Como work, rather more triangular, heartshaped. A stark, tensional consonance reigns, with a sobriety generally greater than that yet characterizing the Dédicaces – though some other Dopo Como pieces (acrylics I, III, IV or the powerful sérigraphie III) reveal a wilder energy and even a heightened tonal exuberance (acrylic IV). Égéennes (1993), part of the last group of works (with Cairn, Forêts and Nielles) that I shall look at at this juncture, may be said to emerge form the Dopo Como series, but into a new consciousness of the feasibilities of the latter’s aesthetics and psychic underpinnings. The Grande Égéenne I – sanguine, charcoal, ink and acrylic on paper –, may thus be compared with, say Dopo Como IV, but, quickly, we are sensitive to its uniqueness: the rust-red downward sweep of its “principal” – though there is no center to what is a formal totality – torso-like, shield-like structure, one which, moreover, sawn off at the bottom, stands stela-like also, or vase-like: as usual, representation is not sought, rather the sheer psycho-aesthetic force of the form’s emergence and free presence. Other viscerally spurting, yet instinctively rhythmed, forms are characteristic: the hanging grey, holed extended triangular form “shadowing” the “principal” rusty blood-reminiscent form; the black struts, vertical and horizontal, viscerally energized in their quick slashing, now forever tranquil structuring; the cross or X, half-suspended in the pallid white of the paper’s infinity: a sign, like all forms, yet despite its elemental flagrancy, beyond our – and, no doubt, the artist’s – definitive decoding; the short yellow band down the lower right-hand side of the tall, “principal” sanguine form, a sign of difference, of deferral of all reductive interpretative equation, the quick stab of a brilliance unsayable, to which we have yet given a name – which cannot, however, dull its infinity; the framing of all forms within the space of the papery backcloth, itself ineffable matter drawn into the play of that “necessity” the coagulation of psychic, corporeal and aesthetic forces founds and stabilizes; the latter process shadowing but never imitating the artist’s earlier work and knowing itself to be developing in the context of its avatars-to-be, ever on the edge of its own


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abandonment as serially deployed energy and consciousness mutates and becomes: to “read” Égéennes - Peinture 10 or again, Égéennes Peinture 11, both of larger format even than Grande Égéenne I, is to experience and, perhaps, be tempted to decipher, such becoming: black asserts its presence; the cross both remains as an individualized “sign” and is multiplied as a grill or trellis of X’s; the blood- or rustreds shift in intensity of deployment; yellows hang and streak their quick darting movements, both vying with blacks and merging with whites that can, yet, in Peinture 10, utterly disappear; and then there are the dabs of brilliant red and the one streak of a blue-green yet never purely offered; and so on. And we understand we have traversed the unfathomable symbolic painted space of a complex of energies struggling and astonishingly succeeding to articulate, in and as beauty, the ceaseless mental and affective knottings and unknottings of a selfness only truly knowable and livable in such absolute, “raw” and “cooked” terms. Philippe Piguet has spoken of an oeuvre that “approaches as closely as possible the very truth of painting” (PP, 12), and, if we allow ourselves now to gaze “back”, within the totality of the Égéennes series, upon the two acrylics on paper, Égéennes I and II, that truth can be fully felt in the contrastive and harmonized plenitude of its silent and limitless beauty. The Cairn series of 1994, like the shorter Vagho work with its five sérigraphies accompanying Gérard Titus-Carmel’s own poetic text, pushes to new limits the exploration of the “forms of self” Égéennes has deployed. The acrylics and papiers collés seem to break radically with the often strangely lush, almost fruit-like, hanging torsos-hearts-shields-curtains of Égéennes – which persist in the at once stark elegance and yet, at times, either greater complication or utmost simplification of Vagho. Yet the acrylic colours chosen and the visceral spurting forth of the psychic energies they carry – much here remains essentially continuous whilst achieving the goal of laying bare, in blacks and yellows, creams or stabs of vermillion, the collaged interlockings of an aesthetico-affective newness. The exquisite aesthetically self-supporting series of 12 sérigraphies on the subtly rich cream of the BFK Rives paper, as well as Cairn II’s wilder black and cream dynamics on a greyed vélin d’Arches, shows how rapidly and boldly self-renewal, the self’s ever sprawling, difference-within-its-sameness, is genially and instinctually accomplished by Titus-Carmel. The series of 12 sérigraphies takes us

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into a world at once almost primal in its bareness and yet hauntingly structured by forms and spaces one feels to be groping towards, significations half-hinted at by the capacity of such forms – rough inverted V’s or A’s unbarred, part or full tall ovals, hanging fruitstorsos, etc., silhouetted against the largely emptied cosmic space of the unpainted support – to edge themselves towards the symbolics of some minimal language. This is equally felt in the sérigraphie Cairn II, where W’s, O’s, M’s, A’s, N’s and the persistent X, none truly becoming language and certainly not offering any decipherable message, perform their wildly dynamic close-ranked dance of a meaning, energetic, psychic, visceral, both buried in the enigma of its own unspeakableness and born into and revealed as that very enigma. I shall be relatively brief in what follows with respect to both the various Forêts series, which together constitute a most remarkably beautiful accomplishment, and the Nielles work, this brevity due to the facts that I shall later have occasion to mention Forêts and that the critical writings of Antoine Émaz and Denis Roche devoted to Nielles I have already had occasion to evoke. The 1996 Forêts may be seen as one vast macrocreation musically partitioned and symphonised in a number of microseries, each having a distinction and an originality multiplied by the number of the serial constituent “parts”. There are the large Forêts acrylics on prepared papers glued onto canvas: these can be as big as 245 x 320 cm and vary in shape, either oblong or squatly vertical. There are then the Forêts - Petites peintures using the same materials yet gluing the prepared acrylic papers onto the paper and then onto canvas. Both these “microseries” deploy a renewed palette allowing blues and soft blue-greys a significant presence. In addition we are given 12 Forêts noires, acrylics all, all black, all compositions created via prepared papers collaged and glued onto vélin d’Arches; 6 Forêts grises, of the same dimensions as for the Forêts noires (50 x 40 cm), again mounting and collaging prepared papers onto paper, but this time using – with the utmost finesse – pencils, charcoal and chalk; and 12 Forêts bleues, identical in dimension once again, reverting to acrylic painted papers glue-mounted onto vélin d’Arches. And, completing the macroseries, we have the grace of six aquatints, simply titled Forêt I to VI, where the dominant tones are dark, black, grey, bluegrey, green-grey, purple-black, with occasional collaged insets of yellow, yet all papers allowing to breathe through their forms


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(palmate growths, ribcages, an X, some hanging V’s, bars, hashed oblique lines) the varying white light of the unpainted papers. In total, we have here an oeuvre of astonishing continuity and endless supplementarity, involving expansions and contractions, realignments and reconfigurations, tonal and formal renewal that reveals the infinity underpinning the seeming finiteness of its produced constituents. It is an oeuvre that testifies, also, to, not merely – if I may use such a banal term – the ceaseless activity of the mind’s conjunction with a matter it instinctively seizes upon to blason its complex, teeming becoming, but also the determination of the artist that is Titus-Carmel to persist in the self-discovery that, obliquely, at the heart of its obscurely lit symbolics, such work inevitably, exhaustingly yet exaltingly, offers. The Nielles work, which begins in 1996 and ends in 1998, may, like Forêts, be viewed as a vast microprocess and symphonic product composed of various microprocedures and microseries. Once again, the tonal, formal, processual range is very great, and, if Nielles may be said to flow in a continuous stream from the work of Forêts, as indeed of other of Titus-Carmel’s series, it quickly affirms its (many) singularities and uniquenesses. Nielles offers prints; acrylic paint “drawings”; aquatint engravings; the massive Grand Nielle, 3 x 10 m, with its Bristol paper glued onto ten wooden panels then mounted seamlessly onto a supporting chassis; preparatory drawings; acrylic paintings on prepared and paper collaged onto canvas; the great square acrylic on canvas Nielle et sanguine I and the vaster still Nielle et sanguine II (2.90 x 4.90 m); the further series of Grand Nielle 1 and 2, sérigraphies on vélin d’Arches; and the 1998 acrylic on canvas Dernier Nielle. And, in the midst of this abundance, in January 1997 (though dating back to the previous summer), appears the short, at once sobering and self-uplifting poetic volume with its 18 compact texts framed by two black prints: Nielles. Much of the Nielles work seems to hesitate between death and growth, between the obsessing crucified torso and the same form burgeoning forth upon paper or canvas like some complex vegetal upsurge, between bareness, voidedness, and a residualness, even a virtuality in the midst of denudation. If, too, art here “portrays” vulnerability and mortality, it remains that trace of vital energy speaking, blazoning the former. The title Nielle(s) attached to individual pieces, each microseries and the entirety of this production,

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including the book of poetry, evokes many things. The black, compound termed niello is used principally in engraving and usually for “decorative” effect, i.e. as a means of embellishment, of seeking beauty where some insufficiency, some felt absence, may be said otherwise to reign. Such produced beauty, or work, is, in turn, called niello: a dark, black, but silver-lined beauty. Nielle, too, in French, is the term to designate that malady attacking many plants: smut or bunt; but it is to the Nigella or Lychnis agrostemma, the corncockle growing relentlessly in wheat fields and known for its five claw-like petalled corolla, that Titus-Carmel’s forms may urge our dreaming. And yet other musings invite and perhaps convince. As Denis Roche says, however, referring to all of the both etymological and psychological implications available: “ni eux, ni elles”: none suffice, reductive attribution is illusory, we are, here, at the generative heart of meanings not truly available, at best suspended, mutually potentiating but strangely empty. The Grand Nielle of 1997 snatches us abruptly from any such self-satisfaction: it plunges into raw, primary, primal space and energy and transgresses all equations we may have built up in our gaze upon all preceding Nielles work – from which it is not separate but which it demands we revisit in a greater purity of vision. The two large Nielle et sanguine acrylics of 1998 equally and still further require revision and re-visioning. Echoes go far back to other work whilst simplifying and radically, explosively renewing the forms and combinatories of the previous Nielles. And the same may be said of the two 1997 Grand Nielle prints and Dernier Nielle, where both the psychic energies and the structures they deploy continue to peel off their ceaseless deferral of fixity, definitiveness, affective and aesthetic, semantic and morphological self-accomplishment. A few quick remarks on Nielles, the poem, or gathered series of versified poetic texts, in conclusion: 1: writing senses the “desert” in which it operates, and this sense “forever ruins / any pride of residence”; 2. if distance, alienation, is thus experienced, so too is the paradox of using this separation as a (non-)place of sheltering (without any object – other than its own doing) (cf. N, 9); 3. the unspace of dream allows for an improbable but real (i.e. mental, spiritual) “building” (cf. N, 11), yet this mode of being / non-being can be lived as a “closed field and scandal”, a void or open wound “in the midst of the sky” (cf. N, 13); 4. this mode is, too, one of waiting –


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no doubt caught between expectancy and disbelief, even despair – and it dreams of a wind offering at best “horizon”, at worst abyssal uncertainty (cf. N, 14); 5. language’s response may be filled with “vacancy”, with “muteness and suffocation”, but it etches that potential other city which the poet expelled can only create, he feels, out of such minimality, such absence (cf. N, 15); 6. thus is it that the traumas of “shame and memory” wall in the self, in the very place of self-creation (cf. N, 18) – the “withdrawal” is conscious, chosen, the “pure wildness / wilderness / of my dreams” is preferred to “history” (cf. N, 22), but this is not felt to engender catharsis (cf. N, 20), nor clarity (cf. N, 21); 7. if this unspace of waiting bears “the bitter name of limbo”, to choose another word, “forest”, to name Forêts, constitutes yet a disavowal of the self’s disempowerment (cf. N, 25); 8. the self’s (poetico-plastic) “citadel” may be built “upon air”, but it remains, for the self, impregnable: “and it is victory this air / ruffling my hair this breath // that has so / worn bare my language” (N, 26).


X QUESTIONS OF PRESENCE AND MANNERS OF DARKNESS

The front cover of Gérard Titus-Carmel’s 2003 Ici rien n’est présent – the first of two exceptionally fine poetic collections I should like now to examine – gives us a collage, of the artist’s own creation, entitled Hic et nunc. It is composed of six melded panels, black, grey and white except for the top central section which is blood-red on white. Without delving into what might reasonably seem like a symbolics of night, death, bloodiedness and purity, exposed ribcage and a simultaneously black leafing, informing the collage, one is struck perhaps most of all by, firstly, the sheer overall beauty of the complex yet elegantly simple creation, and, secondly, the potential tensions sparked off by the coming together of a title insisting on absence in what is here and a collage naming the here and now and offering the evidence of what is, what remains, available therein: work, poiein, this collage, by way of example. I shall have occasion to return to this shortly, but the epigraph from Pierre Reverdy, “La poésie, c’est le lien entre moi et le réel absent” 33, clearly is chosen to show that, if reality eludes and escapes one’s grasp, establishing in self a feeling of exile and absence, poetry, art, are capable of ensuring a compensatory feeling of joinedness whereby self and world can achieve a measure of what Reverdy terms “consubstantiation” – this, in what seems like a here and now, but which is manifestly a non-lieu of complex ontological status. Ici rien n’est présent is composed of seven suites, or volets, of a yet even more complex retable than those seen hitherto: Droit de silence with its 24 free verse texts; L’entaille with 10 dense free verse sonnets; Angle mort with its 24 prose poems; Le temps renonce, as the central panel, with 12 free verse sonnets: the eponymous Ici rien n’est présent, displaced from what we might have expected to be its central position, but perfectly integrated in the global structural mathematics of the volume with its 24 dizains; Portée pour mémoire, with 10 free verse sonnets, as densely offered as the other sonnets; and Affût with its expected closure of 24 free verse texts. 24-10-2412-24-10-24, with sonnets and particularly subtly woven dizains: 33

“Poetry is the link between myself and absent reality”.

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discipline, order, self-control, the creation of structures, large and small, of beauty, predicated on that elegiacal filling of the void Reverdy again speaks of34, a filling, a pseudo-presence, relative, emblematic, never of the order of another beauty, an ongoing presence lost yet dreamed still. What follows can only scratch the surface of the many complexities and elegances of this most fine collection, and the same, I hasten to add, will be fatally true of the second volume, Manière de sombre, densely exquisite in its own raising of, this time, a classic tripartite retable, that I shall discuss also in the present chapter. Droit de silence: Written in short stanzas of various length, with free metrical orchestration, these 24 poems never exceed 15 lines nor drop below 6, this to say that freedom can attain to infinity within impulsively self-imposed constraints sensing a need for what Reverdy – again – termed justesse35. The principal silence evoked here is not that of language itself in its unspeaking of what is, but rather, that of the world itself in the midst of its bustle, its confusion, “the vastness of the day to come” (RP, 13) – a silence that can lead to a “confess[ion of] the impreciseness of being” (ibid.), the latter’s ambivalence that leaks into the self’s sense of being-present-to-theworld. The “dismaying history of men” clearly does nothing to improve this state of affairs: the tumultuous voidedness of things only gives greater weight to the self’s sense of death (cf. RP, 14), as an inner collapse eliminates “all certainty of being” (RP, 15). The highest signs of lingering presence –which we can already understand as being interpreted as signs of emptiness – can be held to be anger and a mild animal-like foaming solitude (cf. RP, 17), and the silencing of the self’s natural presence can be so intense as to give a sense of “undeniable” self-mummification (cf. RP, 18). To turn to language is to seem to turn one’s back upon the world, its flowers, its spring, what remains being nothing more than a strange self-ravaging “ferocity of living” (RP, 21), not really equatable with real living: “is that life tell me”, Titus-Carmel can cry out, and elsewhere, like André 34

See Note éternelle du présent, Paris: Flammarion, 1973, 68, or Cette émotion appelée poésie, Flammarion, 1974, 42. 35 In, for example, his famous definition of the image, taken up by Breton in his (first) Surrealist manifesto, though barely understood in its implications as his correspondence with Reverdy over the role of conscious intervention shows. See “Pierre Reverdy’s conception of the image”, Forum for Modern Language Studies, January, 1976.

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Breton, yet perhaps without the vision of surreal upliftment: “who am I” (RP, 24, 25). Language’s alliance is henceforth with that “shadow ravaging / body and soul” (RP, 29) and, as with Rimbaud, one feels, perhaps only some “future Vigour” can allow for the seer’s full seeing to be restored. The choice, moreover – for, if we can be tempted to see here, and throughout Titus-Carmel’s work, a vast elegiacalness somehow imposed from the outside, désabusons-nous, all is consciously, if painfully, assumed – the choice, then, is for selfabsenting “in the privileged place of solitude / and disaster” (RP, 33). This choosing of self’s place/unspace, the pure, silent though ever troubled and anxiously self-reflective non-lieu of poetry and art, can however never involve an absolute division, a perfected absence: there remain the “single words / sky and lilacs” (RP, 27), as TitusCarmel confesses, and, as Yves Bonnefoy has suggested, the whole equation of absence and presence is arguably revisitable thereby. L’entaille: We are plunged here, intertextually – or, if one prefers to see Titus-Carmel’s entire oeuvre, as did André du Bouchet with his, as one long continuous text, then, intratextually – into the swirling factors governing, as we have seen, the central panel of La rive en effet: Ce qui entaille, factors I shall not therefore seek to restate here. From a formal point of view, of course, we move from 24 11-line poems to 10 sonnets; just as, from a semantic point of view, we move from the notion of what creates incision, notch, rent, cleavage (: all terms, along with other similar ones, commonly found in the poetic oeuvre at large) to the incision or notch(ing) itself. This nicety, simply to emphasise the serial, obsessive, repetitive, yet ever self-modifying, mutating, becoming character of the energies producing the ceaselessly reinvented originality of both poetic and plastic gestures of a writer-artist knowing full well the infinity lying at the heart of the seeming minimum tirelessly (un)lived. If it is true that L’entaille never can release the consciousness of a “rustiness [that] has in effect insidiously settled in between the nerves / And like congealed blood forces upon us confession work & loss / Of all identity” (RP, 43), it is equally true that the extraordinarily engineered single-sentence sonnets seek to affirm the elements of a conceivable self-upliftment not always so decisively articulated. Thus is it that it is argued that “we must throw salt in great fistfuls of light / In the midst of shadow and [that] will be glorious to our mouths” (RP, 31). Thus is it that “fire will become our ally” (ibid.), that “we

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may hoist beauty skywards / Without knowing in return the bitterness of brightnesses too sharp” (RP, 44), that the exhaustion of speaking the body may reach “far beyond our bodies” (RP, 45). And, of course, thus is it that these lovely poetic emblems of a love that any person experiencing deep loss may share are raised with solemn vigour and undying blind trust, or that, listening to Titus-Carmel speak of his plastic creation, we are immediately alert to a dynamic enthousiasmos that blows through his every gesture. In this sense the “erosion of our bodies” is in perfect harmony with “the world’s impermanency” and to “kill time” by endlessly proffering “this weighty bouquet of roses in the night” is no more than a human, a particular, psychology laid upon being, yet in no way obviating that sacrificial expenditure of an energy that, finally, produces rather than annihilates, seeking via an “ardent desire for absence” a strange “sweetness” of unthinkable, perhaps unsituatable yet still lived, for imagined, presence (cf. RP, 45). Angle mort (Récit): The 24 proses offered here, ever compact, usually organised into 2 or 3 short paragraphs – though, again, freedom prevails –, have a strong yet subtle confessional narrative feel, without ever being tempted by an anecdotalness or even some firm verifiable contextualisation. The real context is double: poetic, expressive, rhetorical, on the one hand, and, on the other – but both hands are firmly clasped together –, emotive, psychological, ontological. The opening text is finely characteristic: J’appuie le front contre ma paume, le coude bien planté au bord du monde et, les yeux grand ouverts, je disparais lentement en moi. Pourtant ma mémoire pèse de tout son poids, cherchant un point d’équilibre entre ce qu’elle tisonne infiniment et ce qu’elle s’obstine à oublier. La conque amie de la main devient alors tiédeur et confidence, que la nuit seule parvient à distraire. Mais déjà au silence de mon corps j’ai gagné une contrée, une terre d’innocence. Et j’attends. (RP, 49) 36 36

I rest my head against my palm, elbow well planted at the edge of the world and, eyes wide open, I slowly disappear within. Yet my memory weighs down heavily, seeking a point of equilibrium between what it endlessly rakes over and what it persists in forgetting. The friendly shell of the hand then becomes warmth and whispered intimacy, that night alone manages to distract. But already in the silence of my body I have reached a demesne, a land of innocence. And I wait.


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If there is, here, self-absorption, it involves no idle narcissism. To dwell upon the deep country of the self is to turn the mind and the heart away from the clutter and noise of a world thrust upon us by the media or by our own self-insertion into the tumult of the banal; it is to re-turn the self, via a diary of intimacy and recovered innocence, to that so often neglected no-space and no-time of silent inner contemplation – that, in different ways, a Lamartine, a Mallarmé or a Michaux, a Reverdy, a Du Bouchet, have always explored. And, as Titus-Carmel suggests, the second step is that waiting, that expectancy the Surrealists understood so well in the quest for their otherness, the first being that of a perfect availablility, an opening of self to its bouche d’ombre et de lumière. Angle mort is the flickering, distilled narrative of a childhood “widowing” and “orphaning” (RP, 63), of a lost father, of solitude and motherless imprisonment in spaces – a summer garden, a bedroom – that, in other circumstances might have afforded a plain measure of joy. The overall effect is of a plumbing, via failing memory, of almost womb-like, originary depths, seeking self-knowledge and self-illumination in the fastclosing night. And, in addition, the self seems to recognize the degree to which, though still a young child, the world is dissolving about him, presence is sliding into absence, time is giving way to an experience beyond age (cf. RP, 69, 71). If the concluding prose (RP, 72) speaks of the achievement entailed in overcoming a sense of shame in order to “name the void that since lies within”, an achievement that, yet, in ripping off the mask of death, succeeds only in covering the self’s face with it, it is no doubt important to appreciate that the entire foundational experience recounted in Angle mort brings to self a compassion for the teeming phenomena of existence – “the quivering of leaves and the forms of the real world” (RP, 69) – that, conceivably, constitutes a great gift, otherwise received with difficulty, perhaps not at all. It is not possible to delve into the full range of implications and poetic subtleties of each of Ici rien n’est présent’s seven suites, but I should like to dwell a little, for obvious reasons, on the eponymous section before offering in open-ended conclusion, a compact reading, of one of the ten sonnets of Portée pour mémoire. The fifth of the volume’s seven panels, then, would seem to gather to itself the entire poetic logic of the question of presence-as-

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nothingness in the experience of being-here. We have seen elegy attach itself to the experience of the absence of the other – the loved woman, the spectral father (: the mother, too, arguably, for she cannot even attain to namedness), the friend and companion artist (Pierre Crommelynck: cf. the central panel, Le temps renonce), the phenomena of the remaining world and its harsh and often empty temporality – and we have seen how memory at once struggles to memorialize (: to build upon absence, to justify the self’s continuing, to interrogate the origins of current psychic states, etc.) and yet wills, through mourning itself, a forgetting, an oblivion, that Blanchotian silence that, perhaps alone, can catapult self out of the endless loop of its oeuvre into a désoeuvrement beyond dialectics and its aporias. A sample of the 24 intricate dizains is in order: où fuir devant soi l’air résonne de nos désordres jusqu’à nos corps nous qui devenons aveugles reniés dans l’alliance et dans cette image d’effacement que macèrent vide vains sommeils hérissés et solitude comme poignée de clous (RP, 92)37

Titus-Carmel’s work is, of course, far from adopting Oulipian poetics and the above dizain, like all the others, does not opt for the constraints of its articulation – which allows for both two vertical parallel readings and an intertwined one of a standard order – in order to provide a space of pure textual ludicity. Le plaisir du texte may emerge from language, but the ultimate purpose of chosen formal constraint has here an ethical, emotive and more solemn ontological 37

where to escape to the air rings with our disorders deep into our bodies we who fall blind denied in weddedness and in this image of erasure steeped in emptiness vain bristling sleep and solitude like a fistful of nails


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dimension, offsetting the broad poetics of ontic absence by virtue of a mathematics or form demanding a gift of the memorializing energies of self’s yet remaining and struggling beingness. An examination of the lexicon of this dizain reveals the great depth of existential disarray that no linguistic play could hope to correct: self-questioning, desire to escape, assumed collective disorder, shared blindness, sense of annulment or denial at the very heart of a joining, erasure, void, futility, loneliness, language as at best but an être-comme (as Michel Deguy argues), self’s presence thus reduced to a “fistful of nails”. The above shows what it means, metaphorically, to experience presence as absence as a result of loss – various losses. It is not that presence evaporates – all that is may reasonably be defined as presence –, but that presence, here, is filtered through a sense of nothingness, radical deprivation, “dispossession / discouraging what swells within” (RP, 97), dysfunction, a sense of the impossibility of remedying mal-être. An affective nothingness thus bestows upon presence a lived metaphoricalness of ontic hollowness. “Being merely bone and desert” (RP, 90) remains an experience of being, but fearfully degraded. To be “exiled in language” is fatally to transform figuration into disfiguration, to “produc[e] meaning” (RP, 95) and thereby an orientation of the self’s being at the same time as one affectively, mentally disables such production. The “destiny” of self and other may have undergone what is said to be “the betrayal of being”, but it is ultimately this saying, whereby writing becomes a “death knell”, that plunges presence and being into their refiguration as nothingness (cf. RP, 99). Hence, no doubt, once again, the paradoxical beauty of a dreamed silence. – Though the “threnos or elegy” (RP, 98), carriers of the melancholia of absence, continue to stand as stelae to the regretted presence of the other, as to the emptied, voided, metaphorically disabled presence of the speaking itself. In most provisional conclusion of our examination of Ici rien n’est présent, here is the second of the ten sonnets composing the penultimate volet of the volume, Portée pour mémoire: Il n’est rien que la pluie claire de ton nom tombant le jour Entier sur mes épaules et sous l’ondée voilà qu’il nous faut encore Aimer pour enfin avoir une âme et pour découvrir la peur l’effroi Car nous ne connaissons d’autre fraîcheur que ce grésil battant le coeur Que courbent les saisons quand le temps ne cicatrise même plus

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The Endless Theory of Days: The Art and Poetry of Gérard Titus-Carmel Les mots qui continuent à ravager nos lèvres insoucieuses Comment pouvons-nous accorder un reste de beauté à cette guerre dis-moi Soupire crie lamente-toi ne laisse pas la mort conquérir ta bouche Nous empêcherons le monde de tourner sur son axe nous garderons un peu De givre sur le miroir j’inscrirai ton image au centre de la buée Comme précipice ou émail d’absence et là je te dirai mon adieu Retenant ton haleine dans le creux de mes paumes où toujours coule La soie de ta voix rouge ô combien rouge & douleur (RP, 116) 38

A cascade of linked metaphors, rain, shower, hail; others such as those of the beautiful closing lines with the clear sense we have that they are not some gratuitous aesthetic feu d’artifice, the tension between the émotion poétique and the émotion brute39 being palpable and critical to their effect; the gentle personifications that animate time and language; the apostrophizing of the other – or is it the self? – and the gathering of unrevealed yet urgently lived identities in the pronoun nous; the so characteristic orchestration of all of the poem’s knots of meaning and emotion into one vast unpunctuated sentence that turns out to offer the age-old elegance of a sonnet – these are just some of the factors of the complex interwovenness of a strictly poietic, rhetorical beauty slowly and seemingly effortlessly clustering its constituent elements into their perfect totality. The ontological thesis conveyed, if we can speak thusly in the light of both the volume’s title and that of this particular suite of sonnets ( Portée pour mémoire), might be said to turn around the following factors: 1: presence, beingness, is again seen as nothingness – or almost so; for it is a nothingness but: there is residue, remainder, remanence, and it is critical, of central ontological pertinence; 2: the name of the other 38

There is nothing but the clear raining of your name all Day long upon my shoulders and in the downpour we must yet Love to end up with a soul and discover fear and awe For we know no other freshness than this icy sleet against the heart Bent by seasons when time no longer even heals Words ravaging on and on our heedless lips How can we grant a scrap of beauty to this warring tell me Sigh shout out wail do not let death conquer your mouth We shall stop the world from spinning on its axis keep a little Frost on the mirror I shall inscribe your image at its foggy centre Like a precipice or glazed absence and there I shall bid you farewell Holding your breath in my cupped palms where there flows Still the silk of your reddened voice o how red what pain 39 Again crucial Reverdyan distinctions: see, for example, Cette émotion appelée poésie, Paris: Flammarion, 1989.


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raining down assumes brilliance, brightness, and attains to a fullness, an “entirety” of impact which, whilst so commonly experienced as utterly painful and the closing line confirms this, yet, here, is associated with factors intimating an ongoing embraced, desired, intimacy of contact; 3: the necessity referred to here ( il faut) is not that of a terrible external fatality, but rather a shared chosen decision; 4: this decision demands a commitment to love, and the purpose behind this is to attain to one’s soulness, if I may put it that way: the central energy of the self’s and the other’s separate and shared being; 5: concomitantly, this choice leads to experiencing the fullness of our emotions, fear arguably lying at the opposite pole to that of love – but, of course, all is a vast continuum and to “lose” love and plunge into the fright of such loss is merely to move with lightning speed within this continuum of endless différance or deferral of difference; 6: the question lying at the center of the sonnet, “How can we grant a remnant of beauty to this war tell me”, is, perhaps, the great question Gérard Titus-Carmel ceaselessly wrestles with: the desire for beauty, can it be reconciled with the turmoil, the disorder, the sheer pain of the elements (of felt [in]existence) that, inevitably, will be drawn upon to create such beauty?; 7: this desire is accompanied by a selfexhortation/exhortation of the other: a further, complementary desire and determination to step outside of time in order to satisfy the primary desire: the creation of beauty in the teeth of pain and dismay by the inscription of the image, the figure, the pure poiesis of the other in the (un-)place of art, as a gesture of (yet impossible?) farewell, bringing (yet impossible?) closure to mourning. This farewell, in effect, seems only capable of occurring, as the final poem of the collection’s seventh suite, Affût, suggests (cf. RP, 150), as a definitive adieu to physical existence itself. “After having washed myself of living”, Titus-Carmel writes, a falling into sleep “in a fog of signs” can come about, oblivion of the self’s language will be effected. A final farewell this will be to self, to “what I was”: that voided beingness of presence that yet was beingness. Death, then, as a conceivable ultimate reconciliation, and an adieu that may or may not be a recovery of the other, but that would exit self from the grief of separation and absence as now lived. The 2003 Ici rien n’est présent was composed over a seventeen-month period from 17th December 2000 to 21st May 2002,

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the 2004 Manière de sombre following close on the heels of this significant work and requiring a very marginally longer period of gestation: 26th June 2002 to 10th December 2003. 33 12-line poems, written in perfect alexandrine metre, form the first volet titled Fougères. The central panel of the triptych, Serré dans le jour offers a long contemplative prose text, in turn divided into 3 numbered sections with their respective 16, 18 and 18 constituent “fragments”. The third volet mirrors perfectly the first: 33 12-line alexandrine poems, unpunctuated, the first word of each line capitalized, however. In total, a remarkably dense, concentrated and yet elegantly articulated and finely constructed retable. I shall look, firstly, at the volume’s title and then its subtitles, as well as the Wallace Stevens epigraph under whose sign is written the book’s central panel. Secondly, I shall examine each section from a different angle: Fougères for its development of a rationale of writing; Serré dans le jour in order to dwell upon various elements of the rhetoric of its poiesis; Ronces to offer a broad sweep of the swarming paradoxes and tensional articulations lying at the heart of affirmation and selfinterrogation. The title of Manière de sombre clearly links the book’s preoccupations to the poetics of melancholy, death, absence and ontological darkness we have seen proliferate throughout Gérard Titus-Carmel’s oeuvre from, say, The Pocket Size Tlingit Coffin or Memento mori to La Tombée, Travaux de fouille et d’oubli, Ici rien n’est présent. But it is a title that, as do the manners and modes of articulation deployed by such works, plastic or poetic – and one would be hasty in not including here the critical essays and books on a Schwitters, an Ernst, a Crane, a Roud – a title, then, that, too, firmly orients us towards that powerful consciousness Titus-Carmel ever displays of the endlessly shifting, shiftable, meditatable ways in which raw emotion may be distilled into the finer, polished, aesthetically caressed memorialising figures of art. In a brief dedication to the copy of Manière de sombre sent to me, TitusCarmel writes of “cette planche d’un paysage, tirée en manière de sombre”: the book becomes inner landscape yet seen too as a print, a technically (demanding and) subtle creation which remains but a figure, an art form of lived interiority. Not, of course, a mannerism, but that complex, styled and (con)figured trace all great art leaves upon the page / the plate of its fabrication.


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The first of the three titles attributed to the book’s respective panels is Fougères. It is a title that clearly associates itself with other work by Titus-Carmel, Palmes, Forêts, Feuillées, Jungle(s), and even the soon to appear Jonchaie: the vegetal, natural world, with its freely leafing and branching fronds, that greenness which Char contrasted with the symbolics of blackness 40 (yet which could enter the blackon-white of poetry), the sheer simple beauty of the fern’s intricate self-patterning, and so on. In the text itself, the fern slowly emerges as a major motif and it is only in the final ten or twelve poems that its full range of connotations becomes clear: ferns as a bed readied for death; the solitude, the peace, the light they evoke; fern as page, as language itself, as, ultimately, this precise poem/suite (: belle fut fougère are its final words); the fern as symbol of friendship, love, and final return to the sweetness of earth, lived earlier by the lost beloved, by the we of the poem, and now emblematized by Fougères itself: tomb, memorial, ever leafing stela. Serré dans le jour, the title of the central panel of proses, affirms, of course, that sense of fatal “immobileness of being” (MS, 80) that lies at the centre of Titus-Carmel’s poetics of absence: a felt absence of manoeuvrability, leeway, option, freedom, an absence arguably utterly transformed by the endless faire of art and poetry produced, but an absence precisely felt to be eating away at such poiein. The ontic “caughtness” turns out to be a double bind. Its taking place – better its felt non-event, for it is entrapment – in the midst of time, day, light, is a further irony: the self is caught, jammed, in what seems like a time-space of ever dawning feasibleness. The epigraph to this central panel of Manière de sombre, taken from Wallace Stevens reads as follows: Not less because in purple I descended The western sky through what you called The loneliest air, not less was I myself.

Evoking the insertion of self in time and light and, thus, seemingly in synonymity with a (pure, natural?) solitude at the heart of the being they allow or at least accompany, Stevens yet asserts what only implicitly Titus-Carmel’s work admits: the self yet stands fully in the light of its sense of tightness, absence, loss, doggedly assuming them 40

See Aromates chasseurs, Paris: Gallimard, 1975, 39-40.

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as figures of its eroded being. In the third section of the tripartite panel over which Stevens’ lines reign, Titus-Carmel confirms this, writing that “I await you caught in the day, my heart rubbing at my shadow to the point of attrition, and I persevere in my patience” (MS, 74). Ronces, the title of the third volet of the present retable, brings to mind two poems from Yves Bonnefoy’s 1985 Ce qui fut sans lumière, which is not to suggest at all any overt connection; indeed, rather the contrary: Bonnefoy’s Le puits, les ronces urges us to see in the midst of the abandoned, the overgrown, the seemingly insignificant, an exquisite brilliance of presence, of livable experience, so unnameable we might deem it to be, as John Naughton suggests in his translation, “nothingness scratching nothingness in the summer’s light”. His second poem, Le mot ronce, dis-tu, whilst speaking of poetry as that which “like[s] to open up / The almond of absence in speech”, yet sees this gesture as curative, sublimely shepherding us back to the profound mystery of light and the experience of presence. Gérard Titus-Carmel’s 33 poems do not unfold with such preoccupations, though it is reasonable to assume that the experience and general conception of brambles carries a certain constancy: their density of growth, their growing wild in hedgerows or hinterland, their relative impenetrableness, their fruitbearing yet thorny nature, etc; and it is clear that, if Titus-Carmel’s Ronces can reveal a pleasure taken in the delicate order of gardens, he is most sensitive to the sheer wildly generative energy of the plant that here lingers in his mind and, somewhat as with Bonnefoy, “this song [is in part offered] / To the sole glory of blackberries and brambles” (MS, 97). The motif, however, is centrally connected to the experience of childhood: we read of the “jumbled brambles of childhood” itself (MS, 93), as if its penetration, difficult, perhaps often painful, involved entering an entangled and thorny mass; elsewhere of “that bright child of death [you were] / abandoned to lamp and brambles (MS, 98), where the imagination fuses various obsessions – death, solitude, light, abandonment – with that of the new dominant motif; and the fusion of childhood and all that is conveyed by the current metaphor is complete when we read of “the brambles child” (MS, 102). Moreover, whilst we may feel the identity of the child is certain, the poet-narrator, this remains unverifiable: as elsewhere, the je-tu-nous interplay floats and hovers and requires no


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absolute anchoring. What we do know is that the connotations of bramble multiply and relate not just to the child, but to the other, the relationship between self / other / world, and that the emotional value the bramble carries is variable – because essentially metaphorical, swirlingly plastic, intrinsically plural, even infinite. Thus can TitusCarmel speak of “a silence [offered you] / That has grown in me like a wild bramble” (MS, 101). And, if “this narrative today [is] buried in brambles” (MS, 106), it is there too that “our story has redeemed itself” (MS, 103). The bramble becomes one of the poet’s blasons, a lived and living emblem of complex experiential, psychological, ontological and aesthetic factors, only resumable, in the way Fougères was finally “summarised” (: telle fut fougère), in the last words of the closing poetic panel: telle fut la ronce (MS, 121). “Nettles brambles all adornments of our path” (MS, 109), TitusCarmel writes: blasons of the real, adornments of the silent path of language, of art, images of the “backwards march / Along the brambled path” (MS, 111) of memory and memory’s silent, mortal, mortiferous lexicon. Fougères, amongst the many things it may be said to accomplish, offers a clear insight into the poetics, understood as an ontology, of its writing. Here are fourteen compact remarks: 1: Writing occurs to “quench the thirst for your image before / its total dispersal” (MS, 10): it is thus desire and a gesture of provisional retention of the ultimately unretainable; 2: writing is a gesture “polishing [the] bones” of the lost other (MS, 13): it is a caressive engagement with death, a “hoisting up of death / Into a nameless light” (MS, 14), whereby language thus struggles with its own inherent intransitiveness; 3: writing has something of a visceral automaticity to it, “cascading from my mouth” (MS, 15), a strange minimalism almost in defiance of any logic or purpose we may elsewhere attribute to it; 4: “To be dying to say” (MS, 17) something in connection with the desire linking self and other, yet shows the tight imbrication between writing and death, silence, erection of the tomb of self/other; 5: writing may be experienced as a visceral, physiological outpouring, a kind of fatal logorrea, yet it also is lived as a “slow absorption of my body / In the shadow’s matter” (MS, 18), a strange loss of one’s corporealness as the matter / the subject of one’s

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shadowiness (: one’s mortal & purely linguistic otherness) begins to dominate; 6: writing, not dissimilarly (: body → language’s silent shadow), creates a newness, seeks a narrative metamorphosis of the other, gives the other (and, thereby, also the self) that otherness, that “story”, unrealised by existence lived as a quotidian, unwritten, insufficiently adorned and caressed phenomenon (cf. MS, 20); 7: writing, relying on memory, being memorialisation, yet knows itself to be caught in the “estuarial” ebbing of memory, itself governed by a time that writing’s erected memorials endeavour to resist (cf. MS, 23); 8: Writing involves a “plastic” modification, a “slight twisting of the design of [those] wild volutes [of flowers / And boughs stretching in the vast shadow / Of language]” (MS, 25): a movement from fern and leaf lived, remembered, tightly imprisoning, to the “deliverance” (cf. MS, 23) of art’s/poetry’s blasons; 9: writing, due no doubt to this transmutational mode, this manière, can attain to a “calmness” and that “silence” we have seen Titus-Carmel evoke on various occasions, his mind going to the texts of Blanchot, and, perhaps, beyond them, to Mallarmé and Baudelaire (cf. MS, 27) – “the quietened light, he writes elsewhere, That the single word fern imposes upon the night” (MS, 30); 10: writing may develop the essential blasons, the individual figurative flashes and the global sweep of its figuration, as a site of beauty (no matter the hesitations, even the disillusions, that may beset the poet), but language’s relation to the real remains equally essential: the beauty of the earth itself, the sense the poet has thereof (again, no matter similar hesitations), is fundamental to the very feasibility of the blason: “I endlessly / Mingle the memory of you with the beauty / Of the wind that laid us down upon the pregnant / Earth bent low by the ferns washed / In the long summer rains” (MS, 33); 11: writing is steeped in the will to last, to continue, to be, but, for Titus-Carmel – here surges forth the primary hesitation we may deem to reside at the heart of his work and to be most powerfully conveyed in Ici rien n’est présent –, such a desire merely “prolong[s] the illusion of being in the world / Still standing in the humble language of roses” (MS, 34): once more, we are made aware that all ontology is simultaneously a psychology, fluctuating, affective, having no absoluteness other than the expression of the felt moments;


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12: if writing is stela, erected memorial monument, it is, no doubt because it remains a tomb of loss, lostness, as well as hoped-for provisional gathering, a place / non-lieu where, via an ultimate paradox, “I shall widen the breech in which words / Have been swallowed up in pure loss of meaning” (MS, 36): to write, thus, is to throw language into a black hole the poet himself seeks not to remedy but to embrace: writing-as-agreed-loss, as a long unwriting of all it may seem to patch up, build, counter: its ultimate celebration will be its merging with a meaning, if one is found to exist, beyond all lostness, in the breach of being and its saying; 13: such a strange tenuous celebration may be related to the perception of the writer’s / artist’s “redesigning” of the world “as the drafting of some great wing / On which I hang each time your name / Weighs down my flight” (MS, 37): putting aside the mixing of metaphors (: widening the breach / the drafting of a wing), both images generate the idea (: offer figures of a feeling) of moving beyond what is, or is not, to an unspace beyond language’s limits and form’s preciseness. This said, however, the “recogni[tion of the other – but in the other’s ethereal otherness] in [the] nets” of worldy doing and making seems inalienably tied to Titus-Carmel’s oeuvre / désoeuvrement (cf. MS, 38); 14: this kind of tautly drawn and multifaceted logic of writing is echoed in the final poem of Fougères: (MS, 41): saying, it is hoped, can manage to “exhaust language”, but at a frontier “at which words only address the mirror held / Up to the infinite in the hope of some image in return”: a dream once more far beyond our conception of language as a strictly finite tool meant for everyday practical exchange based on a logic of the confirmable; writing addressed not to Stendhal’s mirror, but to that of the infinite, and thus the ineffable, the unspeakable. Serré dans le jour may be one long, though tripartite prose, but it possesses very many of the elements of a poietic rhetoric that informs and renders dynamic all of Titus-Carmel’s versified work. What follows seeks to draw attention to a number of these characteristic elements of a powerful poiesis ever at work – and, as often elsewhere, I have chosen to proceed compactly: 1: The epigraph: this is a favourite tactic, and flourish, of many writers of course, and one commonly espoused by Gérard Titus-Carmel. It broadens the sphere of pertinence of what follows; it

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usually carries semantic value rather than stylistic comparability; whilst demonstrating the interwovenness, the radically intertextual nature of all thought and language, the epigraph need not be seen as absolutely and globally determining with respect to what is to come, nor suggestive of some dependency: it is affinitary, recognizing shared passages of experience, and it is a kind of pure blason of the poetic itself; 2: Structural elegance: to read the opening paragraph of part I of Serré dans le jour is immediately to enter that space of splendidly elegant construction of the written that is a hallmark of TitusCarmel’s writing whether poetic or critical. This, as with, for example, a Flaubert or a Hugo or a La Fontaine (admired by TitusCarmel, and superbly recited too, alert to every twist and turn of a language breathing its own immaculately assembled beauties); 3: Continuity and fragmentation: if Titus-Carmel has shown himself eminently sensitive to the structural fragmentation of both his plastic and written work, its serial or collaged character, its unfinishableness and its obsessive repetitive nature, and if we can constantly observe, here, in Serré dans le jour, the use of the asterisk to mark breaks, shifts of orientation in the flow of emerging thought – if all of this is true, two factors remain to be stressed. Firstly, thought does not, cannot, reveal itself in absolute continuity, it writes or draws or paints itself in temporal blocks, in forms finitely constrained, constrained too by spontaneously shaped aesthetic considerations impacting on structure and meaning. Secondly, all form whether broken or seemingly whole, is but partial: it is caught up in the larger continuities of sentence, paragraph, section, panel, book, total (final) oeuvre, each of these possessing its individual structure, rhythm, music. In brief, all is fragment, though all is enveloped in a vast continuous sweep of both conscious and unconscious, instinctive orchestration; 4: Sentence length: it would be instructive to do the mathematics of the length of sentences in the work of Titus-Carmel, this ideally in comparison/contrast with other poets and writers. One would need to introduce into the equations factors such as absence of punctuation, the blatant paratactic fragment proffered as sentence, and those dashes commonly favoured here and ever relaunching the sentence as subtly as Titus-Carmel’s use of the conjunction;


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5: Pronouns: tu, je, elle, occasionally only here, nous: to what persons do these pronouns refer? If the je seems, because narratorial, almost inevitably autobiographical, this, equally inevitably, is an assumption, even if the common one in poetic context. But dédoublement can occur, tu seemingly addressed to the narrating self. Yet, here too, shifts appear: the tu becomes the (implicit) (lost) other – but, even, at times, one feels, the reader herself, himself. The nous, equally, whilst we have become accustomed to reading it as the amalgam of poetic voice and voice of the lost, grieved other, can appear at times to seek a much wider fusion with some unnamed collectivity. At play, overall, is, precisely, a swirling interplay of naming and unnamedness, perhaps unnameableness: that freedom, obscurity and multiplicity lying at the heart of all poiesis; 6: Anaphora: a structural, rhythmic mode of repetition occupying conspicuous beginning space, anaphora is unsurprisingly a major device in organizing and developing a continuous flow of focused meditation. And, of course, it is intimately connected with various tactics adopted by both the plastic and poetic work of TitusCarmel: seriality and collaging, which may be deemed largely anaphoric in character; the choice of “repetitive” poetic rhythms, metres and other mathematics; the ceaseless attacking of central ontological and affective issues from collection to collection; 7: Parentheses and italics: both usages allow variance, shift of perspective, even change of tone; they challenge the reader in mild ways; they complicate and render more intricate, even ambivalent, the unfolding narrative. They also constitute new ways, arguably fragmenting (in their modal difference), of continuing, ever kickstarting that “despairing” (cf. MS, 47) (non-)epic which is not merely Serré dans le jour but Titus-Carmel’s entire oeuvre; 8: Metaphors: these are abundant and assume different figurative intensities, all predicated on a Reverdyan criterion of justesse rather than the wild phantasmagoria, provocation and aesthetico-ethical indifference the Surrealists inclined to favour. Here is a short characteristic paragraph from part I of Serré dans le jour, which, without my belabouring the point or plunging into rhetoric’s jargon, shows finely the ease, the naturalness, the unpretentious authenticity of Titus-Carmel’s figuration: Comme semblablement le feu de l’été lancine la nuque & les tempes à l’approche des champs trop jaunes et moutonnants. Ou quand, au bord du

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The Endless Theory of Days: The Art and Poetry of Gérard Titus-Carmel soir, les peupliers font tumulte de leurs feuilles, pliant l’ombre entière dès le pied, si tu veux bien comprendre pourquoi l’espace clos d’un jardin a toujours courbé mon écriture dans le sens de mon coeur, comme les blés dans le grand frais. (MS, 49) 41

Each of the phrasings I have underlined functions in a slightly different manner, now giving a sharper aesthetic twist to the real, now a twist we had forgotten was a twist until we encounter it in a larger figurative context where the imagination reigns more royally. And, of course, the entire paragraph depends upon the previous paragraph, with its particular figurative rhetoric and, especially, its image of “the young general with his disempowered lips, cut through with pain firing his innards & his reason” – and the story of this general going back a couple of pages and recounted in parenthesised italics; 9: Dialogue and monologue: if it can be granted – though I should not be inclined to do so: it is Bakhtin’s contention – that poetry is monological, the novel dialogical, it remains clear from reading almost any page of Titus-Carmel’s poetry that the essence, the purpose, of the monologue is, in effect, dialogical in nature. One could, of course, maintain the opposite: all dialogue is monologue, but it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the “conversation” and “calling to witness” of the other (cf. MS, 50, for example) at the heart of this writing of and by the self is as “dialogical” as anything in Balzac or Stendhal or Zola – despite obvious modal differences. Moreover, this dialogical-monological manner is the dynamo producing the energy and the light of Titus-Carmel’s work: all the rest, whether metaphors or pronominal interplay, anaphora or all those poietic elements still to be evoked – all result from the dynamic power and root pertinence of this manner; 10: Future tense: whilst it is true that a full range of tenses is deployed in Serré dans le jour as elsewhere, the future tense catches the eye frequently, confirming desire and intention, determination and dream. To sketch out the future, however, whilst often marking vision of accomplishment and something of a conclusion to actions committed to – “I shall reach the end of my narrative where…”, “you 41

How in like measure summer’s fire shoots pain down the nape & temples as fields draw near too yellowed, too frothing. Or when, upon the edge of evening, the poplars are in leafy uproar, furling their full shade from the root up, so you may understand why the closed space of a garden always has curbed low my writing in the direction of my heart, like wheat in the chill air.


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will agree to letting go, to the dyke breaking apart, to collapse” (MS, 51, 55) – , also inscribes that coincidence with death which spells a finality yet conceivably opening upon rejoining or, at minimum, a kind of just immersion of self in the non-being and place of loss of the other; 11: (Auto)biography: we have seen the poietic power of pronominal interplay in the work of Titus-Carmel and we have seen the aesthetico-ontological tensions that thereby manifest themselves. In effect, throughout his written work, we are caught between the confessional, which relates both the intimacy of strict interiority and “stories” of the other / the world (and implicitly or explicitly the relationship to self), and a tactic of non-contextualisation which allows the (auto)biographical to float free of all flagrant anecdotalness and thus attain to the universalness of its poiesis. To convince ourselves of this we need only open any traditional (auto)biography to observe the radical distinctiveness of Serré dans le jour – or, conversely, attempt the impossible task of providing this central panel of Manière de sombre with any spatio-temporal anchorage. Instead, Titus-Carmel so frequently gives us inner, discreetly and densely metaphorised landscapes such as the following, chosen at random: Les lourdes pluies, gonflées de sel, et venues depuis l’autre côté de la houle se perdre à l’étage de mes épaules, frappant entre les chairs un nom logé là, comme induré dans une autre chair, et chauffant à vif ma jeune gorge, surprise par la cendre qui brouille le regard, et le grise. (MS, 53)42

12: Intertextuality, intratextuality: we have seen something of the intertextual richness of Titus-Carmel’s work in our emphasis upon the role of the epigraph. If we multiply this poietic effect by the very large number of critical or creative exchanges bringing critics, poets and artists to the work of Titus-Carmel or taking him to honour and meditate that of many others, then we can have a better sense of the vast intertextual poiesis at play. And then, of course, we must add into this equation the effects of the many overt or oblique references 42

The heavy rains, salt-swollen, reaching across from the far side of the surging sea to be lost against my tiered shoulders, striking amongst the flesh a name there-dwelling, as if built firm within another flesh, and burning raw my young throat, stunned by the ashes watering the eyes, intoxicating them.

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to historical or fictional figures – Zeno, here, “the young general of dark & most distant times”, the “City”, for example. And, even more subtly, but yet palpably, from an intertextual standpoint, there are those passages that, stylistically – and how can any great writer divorce himself or herself from powerful precedents? – make us think of Lautréaumont or Reverdy or Du Bouchet. But when the poetnarrator of Serré dans le jour writes that “you will not be surprised by the flood of carmine that, at times, cascades from us, carrying us off like lava” (MS, 55), we may read into this powerful image of bleeding and destruction a characteristic effect of intratextuality, evoking Titus-Carmel’s fascination with Philippe de Champaigne’s portrait of Richelieu, so beautifully examined in the 1994 Premier sang, along with Chardin’s La raie. After Premier sang, all poetic allusions to redness are changed and re-charged forever, as are all the drawings and paintings involving the use of sanguine43; 13: Psychology, philosophy recontextualised: whilst it is clear that much of Serré dans le jour, like many other poetical works of Titus-Carmel, generates and turns about teeming psychological and philosophical motifs themselves sewn into a pseudo-narrative expressive fabric, none of these motifs may be said to belong to a rationally systematic argument: all are decontextualised in order to be richly recontextualised, metaphorised, metamorphosed into, precisely, that discourse from which we do not expect exposition, argument and conclusion, and which we term poetry, with its own distinctive effects of poiesis; 14: Et cetera…: the latter effects, in a work of high poetry, are inevitably innumerable, arguably at play in every word and sign. In a purely nominal conclusion to this briefest of discussions of the poietic, I shall detail eight other factors eminently visible in Serré dans le jour: i: the melding of strategies of disciplined punctuation with those of their utter absence; ii: the use of quotation without reference or other context; iii: the frequent apostrophising of other / self; iv: the further animation of dialogue / monologue via the use of questions; v: the adroit use of blank space, especially where (vi:) prose unravels into Du Bouchet-like or Hart Crane-like free verse; vii: the use of the ampersand in conjunction with the et; viii: the final 43 Endless other intratextual elements are, of course, identifiable: l’orée, l’ombre, la jungle, les ronces and so on, ever shifting and churning the specificities of their application and pertinence.


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dash (MS, 85), which leaves what, perhaps hoping against hope, we thought might yet offer a collected flourish of summation, hanging on the precipice of unfinishedness, indeed, unfinishableness. Ronces, like much of Gérard Titus-Carmel’s written work, whilst developing its intensities and relative clarities, its affirmations and global consistencies, remains a work, a closing volet to the richly adorned retable of Manière de sombre, that swarms with paradox, ambivalence, tensional articulation of its densely ranked and fused obsessive motifs. It is to these paradoxes and tensions that I should like to pay attention in dealing with Ronces. Nine examples, with remarks, follow: 1: a constant tussle occurs between the “seal[ing of] the story / Of night” and the possibility of “illuminat[ing] this leafing and thereby nam[ing] / What every time weighs down further my shoulders” (MS, 90), this, in the context of an oeuvre that has largely “chosen shadow in opposition to the open window” (MS, 104), the darkness of the tomb rather than the light of day or of symbolic or metaphysical revelation. The “designat[ion] of your shadow in the tremblings” in the same poem is thus paradoxically, though unsurprisingly, the occasion to “maintain my fire purely from [the shadow’s] embers” (MS, 90); 2: that the body generates “gestures and words / Becoming pure effigy detached from the world” (MS, 91) may seem a strange and paradoxical manner of perceiving the artist’s / writer’s poiein, which we have seen at times to be held to constitute an act of (Reverdyan) consubstantiation reattaching alienated self to alienating world. But of course, once more we must insist upon the affective shifting of ontology, as well as its metaphoric plasticity. Language and art may now be effigy, now “the great / Golden book of your names” (MS, 116). 3: the conditional tense commonly serves to heighten the ceaseless paradox of the felt abyss separating the dreamed speech of actualisation and what is deemed the absence thereof: “Inaccessible beyond figuration I would say / How you have come to be lost…”, we can read (MS, 99); or elsewhere: “I would write of this / Were it not for the slow numbing of language” (MS, 92). And, of course, the paradox is all the more poignant as this conditionality represents a dismissal of the fact that the reader himself or herself feels a deep and moving saying has come about;

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4: a similar paradox is at the centre of the question of the order / disorder of what is dis/accomplished via the act and place of poetry and the myriad effects of its poiesis: on the one hand, the poet can feel himself “hostage to words when the wind / that dishevels narrative and legend blows” (MS, 93): the impact of harsh reality on art’s delicacy can destroy what sense of liberation the poet may have briefly experienced; on the other hand, broken form may be held to correspond to the poet’s intimate intention: Je me suis prononcé pour les formes rompues Pour les fragments et les tessons tous bris d’images Où j’identifie ma peine de n’accorder Certain crédit qu’à notre histoire éparpillée (MS, 96) 44

But, if there seems to be a rightness about this choice, there remains too the (perhaps even bitter) irony of memory’s and language’s felt impotence: the fundamental gesture of the poet, as is immediately paradoxically reaffirmed, is that of “recomposition” (ibid.): “reassemble yourself in this disorder”, the self orders the other, and, thereby, the narrating self; 5: in the midst of the relative sense of impotence that can thus be generated, there surges forth constantly – poem 15 of Ronces is a moving example (MS, 103) – an intensity of desire and address that seems to contradict all reservations the self may entertain: poem 15 concludes as follows, and, further paradox, offers redemption (in/as the bramble of the poem) where, so often, terrible guilt, shame or remorse appear incapable of such a leap: … ô miroir des larges fleuves plats Et gris comme l’acier ô ruisseaux agités Aux brillants remous battant mon front comme un sang Ô lacs et abers ô exsudations du monde Souterrain où tu te reposes sans savoir Que notre histoire s’est rédimée dans la ronce 45 44

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I have opted for broken form For fragments and shards all shatterings of image Wherein I recognise my grief at granting Credit but to our scattered story … o mirror of broad flat rivers Grey as steel o troubled streams Eddying glittering beating upon my brow like a bloodiness O lakes and deep inlets o exudings of the world


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6: the tensions of meaning and purposelessness, of ontic intensity known through its absence, of, too, beauty striven after but felt only to reign in an elsewhere even art cannot adequately establish – these linked paradoxes penetrate the entire fabric of Ronces as Titus-Carmel speaks of “the pallidness of believing / I am still alive amongst the stones / Of my path and that moving forward still has meaning” (MS, 107); of the lapsed “recognition in the splendour / The rules [of world and word] of the trace of having been” (ibid.); of the “beauty [that is] absence / And desert [in the cities of sand]” (MS, 104) – and, as ever, we are conscious of the predominant paradox of a poetry of exquisite artisanship and deeply stirring ontological pertinence struggling to keep its head above the waters of a selfdenial, a self-annulment that all but – yet here is the final turn: all but – drown out the ontic elevation and advance surely achieved; 7: when the poet writes, at the close of poem 20, that nous ne sommes que combustion Et ne tenons langage que pour faire échec À la beauté derrière nos paupières closes (MS, 108) 46

we once more are faced with the contradictions of memory and willed forgetting, beauty seen and beauty suppressed, creation and destruction. If we can explain the desire for the obliteration of remembered “beauty behind our closed lids” – the ever lancinating pain of loss –, we are still faced with the quandary of serial writing, an entire oeuvre, in fact, that remembers so as to forget, thereby erecting a memorial to lived dilemma, to the double bind of raw beauty’s irreparable destruction and the felt impossibility of its textual supplement; 8: in many respects central to the numerous interwoven tensions and paradoxes we have detailed, there is that particular dilemma modern literature continues diversely to wrestle with: the why of being, of events, the felt unknowableness of the logic of existence’s unfurling. Poem 24 begins with this issue (MS, 112):

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Below where you lie not knowing Our story has found redemption amidst brambles We are but combustion And we hold forth but to doom The beauty behind our eyes shut tight

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Je me suis tant brûlé la langue à la question De savoir pourquoi la violence innée du jour S’est à ce point déchaînée au seuil de l’été Que ce soir je souffle comme fauve assoiffé Tapi à la source de l’ombre…47

We may illusorily resolve the paradox of unknowing by assuming death, accident, surge forth from an ample store of natural, intrinsic “violence of the day”, thereby deeming all to be ill-motivated randomness, rather than Breton’s universe of blinding yet real interconnected, ultimately appreciably unified “opposites”. Of course, the issue remains a question and it does not rob the self of acknowledged choice – even if the choice of making, doing, poiein does not resolve the unknowing: no transfiguration through figuration, though an exquisite figuration that yet can dream through the veil that shadows it; 9: this latter paradoxical turn in poetry’s long saga of selfperception surprisingly is limned in the closing lines of the final poem of Manière de sombre (MS, 121), as the retable withdraws into its ultimate place of swarmingly configured lacings and unlacings of affect and meditation: Ah imagine le matin recommencé Un nouveau réveil où je te retrouverai Réunie aux premiers blêmissiments de l’aube Pour terminer notre lointain labour d’enfance Et montant au coeur disant telle fut la ronce 48

If, figured here, is a rebirth not unreminiscent of Mallarmé’s via the “minute tomb of the soul”, it is certainly one that would appear to move beyond that “say[ing of] the true midnight mourning” poem 16 47

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I have so often burned my tongue seeking To know why the innate violence of day Has so let loose upon summer’s threshold That tonight I pant like a thirsting beast Cowering by the fount of shadow… Ah imagine morning begun anew A fresh awakening in which I shall find you Joined with the first blanchings of dawn To end our distant tilling of childhood’s soil And climbing to the heart saying such were brambles


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describes. Here, surely, is a dream of newness, of fresh dawning, of emotional recovery, a movement beyond the dilemma of trauma, the tumult of unknowing, the disorder of (un)being: a pure leap of that imagination that has given us / self / other the tangled paradoxes and, perhaps, their brief closure, via the mind’s and the heart’s Ronces.


XI LEAFINGS, JUNGLES AND HERBARIUM

“Recently, writes Gérard Titus-Carmel in his 2002 Au vif de la peinture, à l’ombre des mots, an unknown flora has slyly developed in the workshop. Particularly favourable conditions have probably helped its strong, almost monstrous growth: supple and languorous palm fronds, sharper leaves finishing off a riot of twisted stems one senses to be elastic and not at all brittle, thorny bunchings and wild bushings have stormed up the walls, already half-covering them” (NP). If this is written in 2001 in the midst of the Feuillées series and not long after the Quartiers d’hiver, it should not be forgotten that as far back as 1987, with Palmes, and again, in 199596, with Forêts, such leafings and bushings were already transforming the imaginative space of Titus-Carmel’s plastic production. Palmes, indeed, with its geometry and its not uncommonly charcoaled forms is at once emerging from, overlapping with, various structures, tones and blasons of the Boréales and the Intérieurs – the Grande palme of 1989 bears well such comparisons whilst ever establishing its freshness – and yet, perhaps especially via broad hashings and its various, often slightly rounded triangular forms and its more marked vertically thrusting energies, lays down other affinities with the 1989-90 Motif du fleuve work. The 1989 Petite palme jaune offers in many ways, to my mind, a sign of the teeming factors, at once nostalgic, anamnestic, and anticipatory, ever newly exploratory, that distinguish such imbricated seriality as is at play here: the old, firm blasons of the X, of the rib-like or otherwise ribbed shapes, the sheer multiplicity of forms embedded into a unified and often strangely harmonised spatiality; and then the sudden relative newness of the yellow and white light tensionally caught up in the drawn blacks, the “floating” white stretched oval, the unusual green triangle tucked into the top left corner of the canvas, puzzling and yet emblematically inviting, and, of course, the leafing and sprouting flower of a palm. Forêts, with that earlier evoked wide-ranging microserial manner of proceeding that yields a vast and varied macrocreation, opts more definitively, on the other hand, for the surging branchings

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and foliations, as well as the densities and occasional clearings, that we may associate with those ever gathering energies of woods and leafy glades. Patrick Casson is understandably struck by the streaming light penetrating the forms deployed and the very colours the latter employ – he is thinking principally of the larger acrylics, it seems: blues and orange-yellows and touches of green. Both he and Philippe Piguet rightly relate these choices – though they are not the sole choices made in Forêts’ macroseries – to the impact on TitusCarmel of Moroccan gardens, their brilliant mosaical ceramics in the context of enclosed secret vegetal profusion. The fact that the frondlike forms seem to blend with expectations stemming from the series title, yet persist in evoking, simultaneously, the leaves of open books, fountains, ribcages, is a reminder of what Patrick Casson terms the residual “muteness” of painting (PC3, 5), that arepresentationality that, as Piguet nicely argues too, counters explicitness of meaning (PP, 8) and affirms painting’s fundamental self-investigatory mode of being. In this way, art’s way of relating to the real and its forms, whilst everywhere visible and, indeed, avowed, gives back to what we may deem to be the ordinary, the elemental, a renewed splendour that takes the “humbleness” of being’s forms into the realm of a glorious and infinite ineffableness of purely plastic beauty. The profusion of leafings, branchings, streamings, curvings, openings, interweavings, maskings, revealings, etc. that is offered by Forêts, thus, via its blazoning of such “doings” as the world’s phenomena are capable of, both reveals the latter and yet shies away from any reductive interpretation of them: an unknowing yet deeply and exuberantly honouring of preexistent and personally lived ontic energy thus comes about as art at once “errantly” (cf. PP, 12) and “rectifyingly” (cf. PC3, 8) deploys its own equally enigmatic profusions. What strikes Patrick Casson most, in the final analysis, is the “calm, freshness [and] light” radiating from Forêts. If Baudelairian poetics come to mind, so too does Reverdy’s reading of Matisse’s work as a realm of “happiness and light”. And although the Forêts grises and the Forêts noires might seem to caution us, and Casson, here, they too, it seems to me, sweep us up in a “jubilation” (PC3, 10) that is aesthetically rooted, rooted, that is, in the exquisite equilibriums, harmonies and delicacies of being’s feasible forms, whether blue and yellow or grey and black: through them all streams

Leafings, Jungles and Herbarium

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the white light of a further, larger feasibility beyond form but against which both trees and charcoals silhouette their strangenesses. The notion, then, of “recent” production Titus-Carmel evokes in Au vif de la peinture, à l’ombre des mots, whilst undoubtedly referring to the spectacular leafings, branchings and quasiblossomings of the acrylics and charcoals of the Feuillées series – and perhaps even to some of the Mememto mori pieces dating from the same period and which can occasionally incorporate similar motifs – such a notion, then, may also be understood to reflect a larger span of aesthetic development and imaginative, affective obsession, “the series [being] constituted as much in mourning for earlier works […] as in announcement of those to follow” (AVP, np). From Palmes to Forêts to Quartiers d’hiver to Jungles, in consequence, one long creative swath is cut through the infinite feasibilities of the plastic. And yet it is a swath interwoven with many others, more strictly poetic – from La tombée to Feuillets détachés des saisons to Travaux de fouille et d’oubli to Manière de sombre to Jungle (non-lieu) –, or critical – all the way back to The Pocket Size Tlingit Coffin text, Quatre images mémorables, L’indolente d’Orsay and back up to Épars and Gustave Roud. For, of course, if our attention will now turn to the relative specificities of, firstly, Feuillées and, to a lesser extent, Jungles, then Jungle (non-lieu) and, finally, L’herbier du seul, the swaths, endlessly interwoven amongst themselves, remain swaths cut, as Blanchot wrote, in their “respective newness” (cf. AVP), through the body and the mind of a man wielding now paper, glue, paint and pencil, now that only half-palpable matter of words on white or near-white pages. The constancy, in itself ever reweaving itself, is, finally, muscular, mental and affective, in its relationship with what “is treated in and through painting, in its specific language and with the help of painting’s instruments alone, [… just] as, in parallel fashion, what is involved in writing resolves itself in the exclusive work of language” (AVP, np). To look at the various pieces that constitute Feuillées requires therefore that we hold in mind these niceties, but the latter equally remind us that the single drawings of leafings or flowerings, like the immense Grande Feuillée (321.5 x 402.5 cm), form a whole, interlace their different shapes, modes and moments, to found that “totality” that is Feuillées in its network of interconnected component volets, a wholeness Jacques Derrida evokes in his parallel conception

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of the book (cf. VP, passim). And, of course, this same logic is at work in the collaging and layering that occurs here, in Feuillées, as in Jungles, and as so frequently in Titus-Carmel’s paintings of the past almost twenty years: a wholeness is generated in its shining newness from the fragments and remainders, at times layered over into nearoblivion, yet ever present in the current totality either via the sheer implicitness contained in the knowledge of their technique of assembly, or via the still visible traces of fragments buried beneath others and telling the tale of an ever vaster wholeness elsewhere utterly veiled. The whole process of creative production remains, clearly, as obsessional and as technically ritualistic as with early work such as The Pocket Size Tlingit Coffin, for the principle of seriality, which is a giving of oneself to poiein in time, through time, to a point of simultaneously aesthetic, corporeal and semantic or symbolic exhaustion, demands a thorough exploitation of the spontaneously emerging motifs and the ceremonies that dramatise them. Sameness is constantly overruled by renewal, variance, or, if one likes, is only operative at the level of poiein’s pure différance, whereby one knows one is engaged above all, beyond all specificities, in that endlessly self-supplementing doing that, for Titus-Carmel, somehow manages to remain a being despite the melancholia of his equations of presence. In the beautiful 2005 Paysage au revers, containing a unified hybrid of prose, poetry and untitled, unnumbered “leafings”, Titus-Carmel evokes his habit of “pointlessly number[ing] these fragments torn from distant places, as if you were marking out an ever new territory, or one fresh-saved from oblivion” (PR, np) – a self-critique reminding himself of the total continuity and indivisibleness not just of a given series but of his oeuvre understood to be one great theatre of poiein despite the separation imposed by the titles and numberings of the latter – and the temptation to see therein distinctions, radical newness, a multiplication of one’s “salvagings”, rather than one massive unified obsessive gesture. It is impossible to gaze upon the drawings and paintings of Feuillées, and, to some considerable degree, those of the slightly later Jungles, and not be impressed by their energy, the dynamic, often kaleidoscopic (due to the collaging effect) growth patterns they engender. The fusains are lush, vigorous, large yet delicate, they occupy the entire space, only prevented from their seeming


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willingness to leap beyond the latter’s confines by the acrylic bands across top and bottom “endowing these young shoots, now deprived of all memory, with an earth and a sky” (AVP, np). The acrylic paintings develop differently this luxuriance, partly through colour and the luminous whites shining through the fused and teeming fronds (Feuillée 8 is composed of no less than 23 collaged pieces, despite its relatively modest size of 80 x 163 cm); partly through the effect of dense, though light-filled entanglement of motifs of leafing; partly, too, by virtue of the unfinished nature of the frond-like forms, which, therefore, spill over the edges of the vélin d’Arches into that unpainted, ever-to-be-painted, perhaps, too, unpaintable time-space of some absolute totality art’s fatally fragmented moments can only dream of. Impossible, nevertheless, not to see in the Feuillées paintings, rather than the fusains, motifs – which carry over into the Jungles series (2004) – that, if they emblematise vigour, excess, energy and emergence, can and must achieve this emblematisation of “formidable vitality” only in intimate connection with an ontology of the body: “In other words, it is my body I have taken measure of in fathoming this exuberant garden” (AVP, np). Exuberance and limit, the flooding lush growth of potential infinity and aesthetic, mental, physical finiteness; life and mortality… For the traces of limit and finitude are equally everywhere manifest in these leafings and buddings and jungle-like emergings. Are not the ubiquitous fronds of so many densely ranked paintings equally emblems of those skeletal ribcages that so fascinated the work of Titus-Carmel in, say, series such as Nielles? In the Feuillées 8 discussed above are we not brought down to earth from our musings of symbolic light and vegetal lushness, when our eye catches that bare, blood-red form right of centre, with all of its swarming emblematicity we have been willing to allocate to it in earlier work? And the Feuillées, do they not merge, in time and with respect to the blasons they may be said to generate, with the flagrant offerings of Titus-Carmel’s Memento mori? Paul Louis Rossi argues this intimacy and does not one of the Feuillées carry also the title of Memento mori 2? To measure the energy spurting forth from body and mind is inevitably to be aware of the context of physical, psychical and emotional exhaustion such expenditure entails, of a context known and ever lived as a mortal

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framing of the wild, at times desperate vital forces Feuillées and Jungles spew forth. It is in the light of this doubled consciousness of an excessive spurting life force giving the ironical measure of the self’s mortality, that Titus-Carmel can so often speak of the need to bridle and control what is sensed to be not just an aesthetically troubling growth, disorder, jungle of form, but also a psychically, more broadly ontologically disturbing explosion of energies and emblems. Au vif de la peinture, à l’ombre des mots (np) reads us carefully through this logic, emphasising the instinctive aesthetic drive and emotional need to “prune, trim the tops off, cut up and equalize” the mass of palmand fern-like growth emerging from pencil and brush. The forests and jungles that threaten to run mind and body ragged will be harnessed into some “straight, well trimmed hedge” allowing the self to “breathe”. Even, as we have seen, the elegant bushing and budding black forms of the fusains need to be topped and tailed, as it were, and thus framed by purely notional bands of “sky” and “earth”. Construction, creation – and we are very much at the centre, here, of a formal logic of poiein – becomes a matter of taking apart larger created pieces and reassembling and realigning them. “Think painting in pieces, Titus-Carmel writes, in the hope that, finally, things hold together”. The painting now becomes design, form redrawn, a matter of that “exhausting trial of insertion and montage” – and this to the point, which seems far from Yves Bonnefoy’s focus of attention: the meaning of colour and the emblematicity of Feuillées’ signs of a presence, perhaps denied, yet glimpsed too in Ici rien n’est présent – to the point, in fact, where Titus-Carmel can suggest that what holds his attention is, more precisely than the component fragments themselves, the “lines that break apart and solder together” the fragments. But, of course, if this is to say that art’s doing takes over as something like a pure poietic preoccupation, it is not to mask the psychological, affective need to eke out order from disorder, to supply shape to excess, to give pure symbolic meaning, orientation to an existence where their presence can be felt to be dubious or utterly lost. The “urgency” the artist speaks of is thus always qualitatively different from that wildly leafing energy that yet emerges from his gesture: it seeks, diligently, tirelessly, an orchestration, a type of aesthetic-cum-ontological certitude, the very opposite of an “ opus incertum”, a sense of things having taken shape in the midst of


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seeming chaos. An appropriation and a consubstantiation, too, as Reverdy argued, where alienation and exile, “un-presence”, otherwise prevail. And all of this taking place according to a logic of personal, ever spontaneously orchestrated discipline that can have no absolute shareable rationale, but can be lived and felt by artist and, hopefully, spectator: Titus-Carmel quotes, still in Au vif de la peinture, à l’ombre des mots, André du Bouchet: À qui ne voit rien, je ne peux rien donner à voir 49.

Four short remarks to complete this discussion emerging from, principally, the Feuillées series, before turning our attention to the powerful poetry of Jungle (non-lieu) and, finally, Titus-Carmel’s latest series of paintings, L’herbier du seul: 1: painting, drawing, writing has as its primary purpose a bringing together, “otherwise, of fragments saved from the disaster” (AVP, np): it salvages, it transmutes, aesthetically, ontologically – even though, everywhere, disaster, chaos, unmeaning, float about the oasis that defies them – and even though a radical questioning persists of the ultimate value, “the time of accounting once come, of this bouquet of leaves picked out from amongst the disorder of forests” (PR, np); 2: just as painting, especially as practised via Titus-Carmel’s art of collaging, has its depths, fully or partly erased, but known to be there, so does poetry with its words refused, crossed out, its blanks and syntactic-semantic chasms: it too is a kind of archive, only partly legible, researchable – of body, mind, of doing and being; 3: whilst there is no doubt that, for Titus-Carmel, the making of Feuillées and Jungles, as with all processes of the self’s poiein, occasions pain, discomfort, even felt torture – “A tangle of branches has knotted itself around your throat / And you writhe and struggle” (PR, np) –, this situation yet is never deemed inimical to self, it is a “wound of friendship” (AVP, np). Titus-Carmel quotes Genet’s essay on Giacometti as epigraph to Au vif de la peinture, à l’ombre des mots: Il n’est pas à la beauté d’autre origine que la blessure, singulière, différente pour chacun, cachée ou visible, que tout homme garde en soi, qu’il 49

“To s/he who sees nothing I can reveal nothing”.

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The Endless Theory of Days: The Art and Poetry of Gérard Titus-Carmel préserve et où il se retire quand il veut quitter le monde pour une solitude temporaire mais profonde 50.

And he is explicit: “There we have named the space in which I paint and draw. Where I write, too…” (AVP, np). The paradox of beauty emerging, of necessity, only from wound and pain is an old one, but it is not quite Titus-Carmel’s: the equation is not an absolute one, merely recognized as his own, and, moreover, desired because it allows access to the self’s Weltinnenraum. To turn from the mundane to the intimacy of the self’s depth explains the desire for an exile that, too, allows for an “oeuvre de patience” (PR, np) to reveal itself: patior: to endure, to suffer, to submit to, to experience. And here, in this (life’s) work, which is one, as we have seen, of mortal, tombal désoeuvrement, a strange, improbable “pride” is felt (due to self’s “application” and “implication”) – and simultaneously questioned –, as Paysage au revers confirms (np); 4: as these paradoxes accumulate, yet are absorbed into what is lived as a natural personal logic, Titus-Carmel is sensitive to the fact that it is not possible to speak what, for example, Feuillées or Jungles, or else Ici rien n’est présent or Manière de sombre, painting and poetry, are saying. To know that would obviate the need to paint and write: Car il est clair qu’autant la poésie, finalement, ne dit rien d’autre que ce secret et vertigineux creusement au coeur du langage – ce qui relève, à proprement parler, de l’in-dicible – la peinture, pareillement, n’“exprime” pas autre chose que l’impérieuse nécessité à laquelle elle soumet le regard – et les moyens qu’elle sait se donner pour mettre en mouvement cette urgence. (AVP, np)51

To theatricise, render symphonic and constellated – as Mallarmé aspired to do, with his particular means and manners which are not 50

51

Beauty has no other origin than wound, particular, different for each person, hidden or visible, kept by us all close within, preserved, a place to withdraw to when we want to leave the world for some temporary but deep solitude. For it is clear that just as poetry, finally, speaks nothing other than that secret, dizzying digging away at the heart of language – which, strictly speaking, belongs to the domain of the unsayable – painting, similarly, “expresses” nothing else than the imperious necessity to which it subjects the gaze – and the means it can offer itself so as to launch this urgency.


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Titus-Carmel’s – the “inventory of the tale of a body” (AVP, np), and of an ever dreaming and ever lucid mind, is to ceaselessly engage in that quest for something lost, precious, of intimate value and possible (re-makable) beauty, something thus sensed to be available, there, absent-present in the unspeakable (un)place of (un)being (cf. AVP, np). To find between the paintings of Jungles (2004) and the writing of Jungle (non-lieu) (January 13 – April 16, 2004) significant affinities and interweaving can come as no surprise. This is not to suppose either that the texts, offering a mixture of 23 versified and prose poems, adopt an ekphrastic manner – though there are clearly elements of ekphrasis –, or that the paintings choose some tactic of “illustration” of the written texts. No such flagrancies are at work. The motif of the jungle, with its implications of dense growth and entanglement, of stifling and confusion, of chaos and imprisonment, and so on, pertains with ease and naturalness to the global ontology that dominates Gérard Titus-Carmel’s imagination at this point in time: the poiein flowing from hand and mind draws upon the metaphor or blason – whose obsessiveness connects it to the logic of seriality – as an efficient figure of lived affective pertinence, the gestalt emerging being freely poetic, textual, or plastic, visual. The title of Jungle (non-lieu), moreover, with its parenthesis, seems to wish to make clear that what is offered in this book of poetry can in no way be understood literally, in some flat referential perspective: the term used in the translation of non-lieu (which, being parenthesized, is suggestive, tentative, rather than absolutely constative) is unspace – rather than non-place, unplace or other terms discussed with Titus-Carmel in an effort to capture not only the impossible coincidence of word with world, of thought and language with reality, but also the legal, judiciary flavour of the expression. The epigraph from Blake’s famous poem, whilst evoking the dark, disturbing space of dense vegetation at night – with its conceivable metaphoric tributaries of death, the unconscious, blindness, etc. –, is clearly more predicated on the sheer mystery of being, its unthinkable origins, its own founding poiein, as well as notions of light, brilliance, in the midst of the arguable menace of blackness. There is no need – or possibility? – to pin down the precise interweavings of Blake’s imaginaire with Titus-Carmel’s, to attribute to the latter, for example, some naïve equivalence of spiritual belief: God,

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immortality, etc. To read Blake, or gaze upon his admirable plastic works, is to enter, as with Titus-Carmel’s Jungle (non-lieu), or his Jungles acrylics, a world of that unspeakable mystery both poetartists have evoked, can only evoke, via their own figures, forms and blasons. If Blake is quoted at the outset of Jungle (non-lieu) it is in fraternal admiration and in recognition of a mutual living of this mystery and the will to figure it, à sa guise. I should like now to do three things, to quote firstly and then discuss poem 1 of this exceptional volume; to pass, secondly, to a broad analysis of its dominant imaginative motifs (of difficulty, anguish, absence); to conclude by examing the rhetoric of poeticity in this oeuvre de patience, that émotion appelée poésie, as we have seen Reverdy call it, capable of bringing beauty to what would seem to defy its feasibility. Here, then, is poem 1 of Jungle (non-lieu): Déployée sans retenue sur le grand mur des métamorphoses puis entée par défaut De pièeces sourdes posées là en aumône comme blasons ou repentirs (Bribes de quelque voeu qui toujours la défie) M’enveloppe dans son fouillis une jungle où se perdre Parmi les bleus foncés & acides les verts et les mastics brossés dans l’impatience quant à délaver l’ocre et la poussière Les deux également réduites à ton corps tenu à bout de bras Et la princerie des feuilles par-dessus Sur la terrasse le jour est venu s’échouer Lanières tant lui-même a divisé l’ombre

Ô mémoire effrangé en mille

et soumis mon regard dans le sens Du pli où le monde s’allonge je dirai sa touffeur irrespirable L’empreinte de mon dos sur la terre grasse mon rêve aussi De passer le doigt sur le grain de cette écorce je m’éventerai De tous les mots souples & élastiques comme sont les palmes Dans la hauteur Et je m’engourdirai dans l’air Car tu sais qu’il ne suffit pas de nommer l’ailleurs au centre de soi trop enclin à la dispersion À d’autres étendues encore faut-il décourager le fol espoir D’une grève sans début à parcourir Alors que déjà l’échine s’assombrit d’une mort qui s’y vautre et paresse Et qu’il nous reste bien peu de temps


145 pour élargir l’espace de notre tente

Ainsi que nous en instruit le Livre Ah balancements vertiges & mouvements de fauche La nuit se vertèbre de ces heures effarées toutes usées jusqu’à l’âme Comme en pareil dénuement je dissiperai le doute ô ma riveraine Avant qu’il ne finisse par me ronger je creuserai le silence et te trouverai toujours vivante & mobile Dans l’entrelacs compliqué des lianes (J, 11-12) 52 52

Unfolded unconstrained upon the great wall of metamorphoses grafted then by default With muted pieces placed there by way of alms like blazons or afterthoughts (Snippets of some votive offering still in defiance) There wrap me round the entanglements of a jungle wherein to lose oneself Amongst the dark and acid blues the greens and mastics brushed impatiently toning down the ochre and dust Both equally reduced to your body held at arm’s length And the princeliness of the leaves above O memory Upon the terrace daylight has beached itself frayed In a thousand thongs so has it divided up shadow and forced my gaze along The fold in which the world stretches forth I shall speak its unbreathable fugginess My back pressed against the thick earth my dream too Of fingering the roughness of the bark I shall seek air In language supple & elastic as palms In the upper space And I shall find numbness in the air For you know it is not enough to name the elsewhere at the centre of self too given to dispersal To other expanses still must be discouraged the wild hope Of a timeless shore to travel While already the spine darkens with a death wallowing and lazing within And we have so little time left to broaden the pitch of our tent As the Book tells us

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We are immediately captivated by the sheer ampleness of rhythm, the elegant interlacement of enunciative units, the fluid movement of the entire poem, articulated as one graceful unified sweep with a couple of brief pauses or points of slight mental reorientation. If, clearly, there is an ekphrastic turn to the poem, it remains that the latter is simultaneously centred upon its own constitution, the deposition of signs on the great page of language, with its own “suppleness” and “elasticity”, its own density and potentially ensuing stiflement, the need to impose upon its ever possible jungle-like dérive order, discipline, effort and shaping. For the long poetic sweep of poem 1 achieves its inner grace and harmony via the rigour of its margins, the pertinence of its spacings, its thinking and italicised parenthesis, the major structuring of its global “argument” via the use of conjunctions (puis, et, car, alors que, ainsi que, comme, avant que), the justesse (rather than the needless [if potentially exhilarating] phantasmagoria) of its metaphors, and so on. Its “collaging” of language is conscious, aesthetically and semantically approved, however spontaneously emerging the process will no doubt be. The poem, perhaps due to the nature of the tensionality of this very process, is ever caught between doubt, its supposed lucidness with regard to the poem’s/art’s own capacity to adequately name, and, yet, a determination, mirrored by the use of the future tenses, and a sense of achievable accomplishment. The exclamation, ah, and even perhaps the exclamatory apostrophe, ô mémoire, emphasise the fact that articulation, doing – painting and poetry – occur at the intersection of intense address and a sense of unsayableness. If, too, we might argue that the future tense does not imply any guarantee of completion, attainment – this despite its aura of firm purpose and intention –, it is to be noted that poem 1 nevertheless does not offer a narrative of Ah wavering dizziness & scything movements Night is vertebrate with such bewildered hours worn down to the very soul As in such destitution I shall dispel doubt o riparian mine Before it finally eats me away I shall dig deep into silence and find you still alive & fluid In the complex lacework of the lianas


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past, lost, perhaps regretted event: it opts for the present and, though predicated on memory and memorialisation of the other – ô ma riveraine –, a future in which self may “find you still alive & fluid / In the complex lacework of the lianas”. The overall thrust of the dominant imaginative motifs pervading Jungle (non-lieu) may be fairly said to be affectively, ontologically “negative”. The narrating self can speak of the “monstrous bulging of the foliage / In which I busy myself” (J14/51)53, of “an effigy [that] has suddenly shot forth from the rinsings / Ocellated with tassels and whorls of no value” (J16/56), of “this forest [in which] I have been cleft apart” (ibid.). The pain of creation of that unspace in which self and other are lodged “in bonded letters” is palpable (J17/57). Carnivorous flowers gape wide (cf. J19/.59); trees ooze with pus (cf. J21/61); the jungle “eat[s] feverishly at me” (J22/62); the “chippings of your fraught body [are cut and laid out] in the craze of branches” (ibid.). The deep “indifference” of “the impeccable high boles” of art as well as of reality (J28/68) and the matching felt senselessness of “a rose without purpose [that] blossoms in the stomach / When at the bend of darkness poisonous fruit hangs in bunches” (ibid.) – such seems the reigning psychic logic of doing and being, one that, if any certainty at all is to be gleaned from the latter, is that of “absence” (cf. J30/70). None of the firmly asserted perturbations, however, can prevent, paradoxically, the self’s continued questioning and the search for measures allowing opening, “clearing” and “soaring” (J15/55). Memory remains too of a vegetal luxuriance – “seamless grasses / Horsetails and great-eagle ferns along the paths / Of childhood” (J35/75) –, not without menace, it is true, yet “light-filled in our watching”, or of the more ordered space of “the endless yesterday of gardens still flowing under the skin” (J19/59). Of yet greater significance are those moments, initially barely noticeable but gathering some counter-power towards the end of Jungle (non-lieu), where the force of “future” vision and determination is better sensed by the narrating self: (“… Je m’emparerai de ce royaume, me dis-je, les yeux tournés vers le large singulier qui partout déborde, grattant la rouille de mes couteaux, affûtant les lames, le soleil à portée de ma salive. Je me ferai un abri de la

53

The double reference is to the original and to the translation.

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The Endless Theory of Days: The Art and Poetry of Gérard Titus-Carmel douleur et me découperai une patrie dans l’abondance de cette jungle entravée par les lianes […”)] (J 37)54

Perseverance, repossession of the realm of excess, disorderedness and pain, transmutation of this recalcitrant space into a “homeland”, art’s protective tombal unspace… The closing, unnumbered poem of Jungle (non-lieu) confirms this relative serenity finally attained after, via, the intense struggle with the powerful and threatening overpowering forces released in the creation of both Jungle and Jungle (non-lieu). It is a serenity, ever provisional, visibly pertaining to the notional summum any creative completion may be said to represent; a serenity, too, coming from that persistent dream of some radical ontological alterity, “beyond the tip of tall trees, yonder” (J45/85), to which the name of “absence” may be given, so remote Titus-Carmel senses it to be both from daily being and from art itself. I shall conclude this part of our discussion of Jungle (non-lieu) by quoting its final text in full without further commentary in the direction of what precedes, but, trusting that it will serve well as the focal point in our remaining analysis of what I have termed the rhetoric of poeticity of this most beautiful book: (Les cris maintenant retombés et la parole totalement évidée, comme absorbée par le récit, m’entends-tu encore, ô ma pétrifiante enfant, toi à présent si tranquille & claire dans la clarté générale? Nageant dans la porosité du monde, tu assistes à mes manoeuvres, tu vois comment, moi aussi, je retiens mon pas sans pour autant le céder; et, quoique assujetti à l’inexorable loi des saisons, de quelle manière j’agence selon mon gré les plaques découpées dans la sylve brouillonne autour d’un centre toujours plus fuyant. Mais tu te doutes bien à quelle épreuve cela me soumet: j’entraîne à ma suite, par pans entiers, ce qui me reste de mémoire au bord même de cette échancrure où le vertige de finir broute et se fractionne en mille éclats, chacun diffracté en autant de séquences toutes semblables, toutes différentes. Ainsi, reconduisant sans faillir notre accord, je me perpétue dans l’émiettement, dans les saccades, dans la parcimonie des jours 54

(“…I shall seize hold of this realm, I tell myself, gazing out towards the strange open scape everywhere brimming over, scratching at the rust on my knives, sharpening the blades, the sun within reach of my saliva. I shall make myself a shelter from the pain and cut out a homeland for myself from the abundancy of this jungle shackled by lianas […”)]


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laiteux, cassants telle la craie. Avec cependant le rêve fou, plus que jamais chevillé au corps, de gouverner l’ombre depuis le seuil où je demeure, et qui désempare l’oubli – autrement dit, dans l’amitié sans remède d’un jardin viride & inégalable, débordant jusqu’à l’ailleurs. Ah qu’une fois dépassée la cime des grands arbres, là-bas, et enfin affranchi de la stupeur régnante, j’inscrive le nom propre de l’absence sur cette frange de ciel, en épargne des vents!) (J, 45)55

Without wishing in any way to transform a poem of such grace into a graveyard of rhetorical jargon, I should nevertheless like briefly to emphasise the degree to which poetic or aesthetic emotion manages to compensate the often harsh and raw emotion with which Jungle (non-lieu), globally, as we have seen, has struggled. Poem 13 speaks of, precisely, this struggle, and the dream ever pursued via the artist-poet’s gesture and beyond: “Ah will there be no other refuge to find our infinity / Than these traces than this dovetailing of peeled figures / saved from disaster and forced into flatness” (J30/70). The fact is that no “beyond” is felt to be lived or livable – other than via the paradoxical dream of death: what “infinity”, transcendent beauty and ineffable grace are imaginable, can only be made possible in the very (un)space felt to defy this possibility: the poietic beauties of language in the language of existential tribulation and non-accomplishment. And the first beauty that strikes in (Les cris 55

(The shouting now stilled, and speech totally gutted, absorbed as it were by the narrative, can you still hear me, o my petrifying child, now so quiet & bright in the general brilliance? Swimming in the world’s porousness, you witness my manoeuvrings, you see how I too keep things in check without letting them overtake me; and, though subject to the relentness law of seasons, in what way I dispose according to my liking sheets cut from rough woodlands around an ever more elusive centre. But you must suspect what an ordeal this is: I drag along behind me whole pieces of residual memory at the very edge of a concavity where vertigo browses, shattering into a thousand splinters, each diffracted in as many sequences, both alike and different. And so, extending without fail our agreement, I live on crumbling away, in fits and starts, in the parcimoniousness of milky days, as brittle as chalk. With yet the wild dream, more than ever pegged to my body, of handling shadow from the threshold of my being that disables oblivion – in other words, in the uncurable friendship of a peerless, verdant garden, brimming over into otherness. Ah, once beyond the tip of tall trees, yonder, and at last free from reigning stupor, may I inscribe the true name of absence upon that fringe of sky, safe from winds!)

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maintenant…) is that of the poème en prose, with its aesthetics of surprise reinforced by its italicisation and parenthesising, as if, simultaneously, both emphasis and whispered confidentiality were at stake. And this beauty is immediately doubled by that rhetoric of ambivalence and mild obscurity dominating the opening sentence, as we ask ourselves what narrative, precisely, has been unravelled in the previous 22 poems, what is the precise identity of this pétrifiante enfant, what can this clarté générale be, precisely, for a narrator, and a poet, only ever most barely hinting at a transcendence other than death’s “absence”, its void. Many other rhetorical beauties manifest themselves in this concluding poem of Jungle (non-lieu). I shall content myself by featuring five more only: 3: The fluid, seemingly effortless and elegantly harmonious structuring of each sentence, where, unlike in the free verse poems, punctuation rather than blank spaces marks out pace and pause: here, it is noteworthy that metric balance remains so often classical, the first sentence offering syllabic units of 8-12-8-12-17 (divisible), the second 10-8-4-2-12-1+15-35 (divisible). Constancy, and variance, order and freedom, in short, offering a rhythmic grace in accord with poetry’s mission to musicalise meaning. And we should not overlook, as with poem 1 discussed earlier, that other tactic of structural harmonisation evident as ever here: the articulation of the poietic pseudo-narrative thesis or argument via the strategic use of, in particular, conjunctions: mais, ainsi, avec cependant; 4: The dialogical rhetoric that is common to a good deal of Titus-Carmel’s poetry – and, of course, it is arguably another mode of his critical and collaborative engagements with the other – gives energy and drama, intensity and moving intimacy to the writing, its rhetoric of obscured, uncontextualised address oddly reinforcing the power of the dialogical manner; 5: The sheer delicacy of Titus-Carmel’s self-reflexive vision often finds subtle and graceful expression, “speech [being] absorbed as it were by the narrative”, or “a peerless, verdant garden, brimming over into otherness”; 6: The rhetoric of paradox we have seen elsewhere persists too, in statements such as je me perpétue dans l’émiettement or the allusion to the self’s rêve fou, plus que jamais chevillé au corps: a rhetoric, not of provocation or mystification, but of that natural


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engagement with the tensions and uncharacterisable mysteries of being (: what words exist to speak simultaneously one’s continuing existence as disintegration? What is the relation of dream to body?); 7: And, of course, the beauties of metaphors that exist not to decorate, embellish, that are neither gratuitous, showily superficial, nor purely experimental in their psychological probings of self. Justesse, ontological pertinence, reigns here, the desire to say things as they are, a desire inevitably frustrated by the very ontology of figuration – its être-comme –, but a desire unwilting, solemn, strong, true, centred. Thus do we read of ma pétrifiante enfant, hinting simultaneously at the death of the loved one and at art’s own “petrification”, seemingly coldly remote monumentalisation as fed by the other’s death; or of the lost other nageant dans la porosité du monde, in improbable dialogue and participation with self, in some improbable space/unspace of movement, of living-in-death – via art, via thought, via feeling, in some other manner only dream may allow?; or, again, we read of la parcimonie des jours laiteux, cassants telle la craie, where the potentially, perhaps in reality, milky fullness of time is lived as minimality, as that brittleness rendered palpable by one of Titus-Carmel’s creative tools. Endless, in effect, are the unassuming but lovely rhetorical nuances of this closing poem, as of all that lead to its delicate and moving dénouement: Ah une fois dépassée…: the closing quatrains of Lamartine’s celebrated Le lac may build longer to their expressed desire, but the exquisite and liberatedly classical harmony (16+12+18+6) of this terminal poetic meditation of Jungle (non-lieu) shows Gérard Titus-Carmel to be a poet amongst the very great. To witness the discreet flowing of the solemn energy of Gérard Titus-Carmel unveiling in his studio the complete series of the 25 large paintings composing his 2006 L’herbier du seul is to understand both the deep and very considerable commitment of solidarity and patient effort such production represents, and the inalienable yet barely describable raw pertinence it generates in the life of a man not given to exaggerate the very possibility of meaning in a private and planetary world where loss and deterioration are felt to reign. It is, nevertheless, with unassuming vigour and the subtle but sure pleasure of exchange, that the artist into whose clothes TitusCarmel has now slipped speaks of the evolution of the series, the

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global coherence and continuity, spontaneously emerging though scrupulously tracked and orchestrated, of the 25 collaged paintings. He speaks, too, of the recycling of materials employed in his vast oeuvre de patience, the intratextuality, better the intraplasticity, of the series itself, but also its notional and material imbrication with other work both preceding it and, no doubt, to come. Above all, one is struck by the artist’s consciousness of being, in the production of L’herbier du seul, constantly immersed in matter, means and manner – even though matter, in turn, ever plunges the self into the haunting questions of being, of ontos; even though means can never be isolated from the question of purpose; even though manner implies no mannerism, no yielding of self’s action to some automatism, some acceptance of self’s aesthetic or psychic fixity. And, as if one needed a reminder of the latter, Titus-Carmel offers his thoughts on the possible consequences of the title finally chosen for this massive work about to tour, with other material, Tunis, Rome and Paris. L’herbier carries of course, many implications: the gathering and mounting, framing of specimens of the things of nature (: of being); the possible dream of absolute totality and the sobering reality of partialness, unfinishableness, infinity even; the illusion or trompel’oeil of identification, naming in such archiving; etc. Titus-Carmel’s herbal is not, of course, to be confused with that of the botanist, amateur or professional: it is art, herbal- or herbarium-like, a shimmeringly pertinent figure via which to gather further self-created samples of the range of blazons that have preoccupied the artist’s mind, on and off, for some twenty years. That the plastic herbal is du seul evokes for Titus-Carmel three principal factors: the unifiedness of the series both in time and in manner, in means and in content, and, of course, the solitary character of the act of production involved. Two main elements may be said to dominate the material creation of L’herbier du seul: leafings and branchings somewhat similar to those we have found in Gérard Titus-Carmel’s recent plastic work, and the use of newsprint traces exploited equally in the Jungles series. This latter use we may perhaps be inclined to see as an appropriation of the world: its events, its infinite discourses, its many languages. We are not, however, invited to enter the specifics of such trace-discourses: the print size is often small, the traces are fragmented, collaged, and very often the newsprint is overlaid with the bushing fronds of an herbier whose texts, we already see, do not


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interact with the leafings except aesthetically, formally, as selfdefining art, centred upon its interiority. The use of language, then, is not that found, say, in Ben Vautier’s Bizart Bazart, or in Philippe Favier’s Géographie à l’usage des gauchers, and we are far from Annette Messager’s Lignes de la main. This said, it is difficult to resist the sense of being placed in the context of, in relation to, the world’s words and meanings, even though some major reapplication has come about, radically subverting their usual mode d’emploi. The self-world exchange is thus at once highlighted, yet shown to be transmuted, its teeming everydayness, its massive socio-economic coloration completely modified to the extent that the poietic self demonstrates its need of deep, significant (even though indescribable) ontological creation whereby both self and world can perceive something of their lost, or so easily losable, freedom and beauty. As for the leafings and palm-like foliations that give movement and suppleness to L’herbier du seul and that, in large measure, overlay the residual newsprint, three points might be made. Firstly, we are fatally drawn back to the skeletal ribs of earlier work with their avowedly crucifixional overtones, so that, once again, growth is placed in intimate relation to mortality, exuberance becomes impossibly synonymous with melancholy, fullness with minimality. Secondly, the colours of the fronds/ribcages, whilst varied, are predominantly black. Yves Bonnefoy had seen in the Feuillées, we recall, and in larger context in Titus-Carmel’s resumption of painting, an upsurge of the energy of the self’s immersion in the mystery of “presence”, and certainly there are, here, watery yellows, beiges and browns, occasional touches of barely spring-like greens. But black reigns, bushes and branches, darkening and half-obliterating – with splashes, too, of bloody red, even a palm/chest-like sprouting of that long-favoured sanguine. And no blues, such as those so rare, so celestial, of Titus-Carmel’s Quartiers d’hiver II. Thirdly, to read into the deployment of such use of colour some symbolic progression would be, to say the least, a hazardous affair: L’herbier du seul is a collection of forms and their inevitably trailing and tenuous symbolics; its progression is temporal and formal, rather than a development of thought leading to some conceivably rationalisable summum or conclusion; it archives in this way the movement of body and mind through the available matter and modes of art’s poiein, this process moving through its moments and phases

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to that point of its own exhaustion constituting its essential “progress” and relative achievement. Which brings us to the question of the ultimate value and purpose of these 25 paintings of L’herbier du seul, and which I shall suggest may best be summarised as follows: 1: the series practises and reveals the tensions of an aesthetics-cum-ontology of beauty and one of the questionableness, the unpretentiousness, the non-selfdeclaredness of such beauty; 2: the related desire to stage, perform, live the question of the meaningfulness of the creative act, poiein, and its actual concrete production – this is a central motivation and value in itself; 3: the work thus conveys the continuingly felt paradox centred on the fact that, regardless of the answer to the preceding question, essential past, present and even future value and purpose are understood to reside in creative process, in the self’s day-by-day, minute-by-minute doing, its “music”, its “symphonic”, serial, yet free, though spontaneously disciplined composition; 4: value and purpose flow, in this way, despite all reservations expressed (which, in effect, are an essential part thereof), from the ceaseless, ever changing “repetition” – rehearsal – of the self’s traversal of its own perceived capacities of mind, body, feeling, as projectable via forms not possessing reducible, hard meaning, but generating an intimate and infinite questioning of their onto-logy, the logic of their very being.

XII TODAY

2006 finds Gérard Titus-Carmel solemnly yet explosively engaged in a creative meditation of that fundamental relation of self to other his earliest work, from Nourritures culturelles to Joaquin’s Love Affair, saw him bold enough to accept to explore. The vast series of L’herbier du seul seems complete56, as is his study of the life and work of Gustave Roud. As I write this, new plastic work is begun; his book Munch entre chambre et ciel awaits publication, as does La jonchaie, and work on Pierre Reverdy continues. Little wonder that Le geste et la mémoire, an important selection of major critical pieces devoted to Titus-Carmel’s work over the last thirty years will soon appear with Deyrolle. And the mails of May bring the very latest poetical collection, the triptych titled Seul tenant. I shall not seek, here, to offer the latter the detailed discussion its art and its intensity of articulation merit and will no doubt soon amply receive. But it is a book that confirms the delicacy and the subtleness, the aesthetic power and the authenticity of perseverance, the ever surging freshness and the constancy, the root fidelity, of a difficult vision, that ceaselessly drive Gérard Titus-Carmel’s entire life enterprise. The back cover of Seul tenant suggests the solitariness that, despite the instinctive warmth, generosity and grace of the man, implacably besets the artist and writer – though never deflects from that determined, and determining, effort to “claim, in some fashion, to be still present to the world”. L’herbier du seul clearly intersects this essential ontological positioning of self and the self’s doing in relation to the world, all “otherness”, including that of self and its creations. And if Titus-Carmel can see Seul tenant as a “long black band” – of continued mourning, though perhaps equally a protective band, even a royal one, and, as he equally implies, that litre, that funereal ornament simultaneously festooning its unfurled images and dessicating the very language source from which such ornamental festooning flows (cf. ST, back cover) –, it remains a textual band(age) 56 A fine reproduction of the full series of 25 pieces constituting L’herbier du seul has just appeared with Rencontres accompanied by the elegant presentational text of Yves Peyré, Orchestration végétale.

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held high, offered to the other, all others, as testimony to his (k)nightly struggle with all that assails him. Seul tenant is, in and of itself, the defender of (blind but lucid faith in) a process and a phenomenon, art, poetry, endlessly undercut yet buoyed up by their own articulation – one that, knowing and living its paradoxes and tensions, determines to hold to them, instinctively and unflinchingly enmesh them and see them as authentically “of a piece”, as fused as the mystery of allness, offering no proof other than its upheld total constitution. That Titus-Carmel continues to demonstrate, in Seul tenant, a remarkable sensitivity to, and capacity for, symphonizing the teemingly upsurging fragments of his sensibility will not surprise us. Not that we should be tempted to see in his high structural and prosodic mathematics – the complex intrications of the volume’s first and third volets, with their 48 texts apiece, are identical; the central eponymous panel offers 24 previously unpublished sonnets, 12 halfsonnets and 12 other previously published sonnets (Recitativo obbligato I-XII), all interwoven to form six identically orchestrated spirals – some commitment to the pure play of form: such harmonies are fragile rails to cling to faced with the vertigo induced by those terrible beauties endlessly tussled with primally, viscerally, psychically. To read sonnet 7 of the central panel of Seul tenant – which I offer the reader by way of adieu and without commentary, leaving it to the strange and exquisite purity of its swirlingly intense articulation – is to realise fully the beauty not merely of art but, bound up intimately, inextricably with the latter, the yet higher beauty of a consciousness engaged in the exploration and the expansion of its own emergence, and the means thereof: Or battant en brèche les promesses de l’aube comme mourir nous sied Nous abandonnons les mots au fort courant que la bouche entraîne Et délivrant ces fleurs de première brassée avouant au dernier pétale Je n’ai fait que passer j’ai ridé l’eau de ma nage sans mesurer Mes efforts j’ai inscrit bord pour bord ma traversée dans cet instant Du monde qui ravive sur ma joue la blessure dormante jamais fermée D’un ancien affront ah quand cesserons-nous donc de prétendre Que parcourir cette distance émeut le corps que la rive est à portée De lèvres et que c’est à ce prix seul que s’ouvre en nous le jardin car L’immobilité a plombé nos membres à jamais nous singeons le squale Géant mais les flots se sont usés sous nos ventres et nous découvrent Vains & amers raclant les grands fonds l’utopie fidèle au coeur Et la mort en balance qui leste tous nos rêves de sa large ombre plate

Today

157 & souriante dans le miroir irrédimée & souriante toujours recommencée (ST, 70)57

57

And so battering away at the promise of dawn how dying suits us We abandon words in mid-current swept away by the mouth And setting free the first flush of flowers confessing to the last petal I have merely slipped by rippling the water as I swim not measuring My efforts I have inscribed edge to edge my crossing in this moment Of the world reopening upon my cheek the sleeping never closed wound Of an earlier slight ah when then shall we cease to claim That going this distance stirs deep the body that the riverbank lies in Lips’ reach and that only at such price does the garden open within for Motionlessness has leadened our limbs forever we ape the giant Shark though the waters have worn away beneath our bellies and reveal us Futile and bitter scraping the dark depths utopia heart-true And death in the balance balasting our dreams with its broad flat shadow Yet smiling in the mirror smiling & unredeemed ever begun anew


SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY58 Adelen, Claude. “Lieu du premier effroi”, in Autour de Gérard TitusCarmel, numéro spécial de Dalhousie French Studies, 77, 2006. (DFS) Bancquart, Marie-Claire. “Une lecture de Manière de sombre”, in Autour de Gérard Titus-Carmel, numéro spécial de Dalhousie French studies, 77, 2006. (DFS) Artaud, Évelyne. “Spéculations d’été”, in Titus-Carmel, Toulouse: Espace Ecureuil, 2001, 5-6. Baudry, Jean-Louis. “Une oeuvre mesure du temps”, in Gérard TitusCarmel: oeuvres 1984-1993, Amiens: Fonds régional d’art contemporain de Picardie, 1993, 9-24. (JLB) Bayle, Corinne. “Gérard Titus-Carmel à livre ouvert”, in TitusCarmel: une décennie, Quimper: Editions Palantine, 2000, 925. Bénézet, Mathieu. “G.T.-C.”, in Gérard Titus-Carmel: dessins: suites & séries 1971-1979, Paris: Maeght, 7. Bishop, Michael. “La poésie de Gérard Titus-Carmel: minima et maxima”, The Irish Journal of French Studies, 3, 2003, 1-19. Boddaert, François. “Choses verticales et tremblantes qu’un souffle agite”, in Gérard Titus-Carmel: Feuillées, Jungles et autres frondaisons, Compiègne: Saint-Pierre des Minimes, 2005, 37. Bonnefoy, Yves. “En présence de ces « Feuillées »”, in Feuillées, Cognac: Le Temps qu’il fait, 2004, 9-58. (F) Casson, Patrick. “À part entière”, in Gérard Titus-Carmel: la part du livre, Creil: Dumerchez, 1995, 7-33. (PC2) ___. “À plus d’un titre”, in Gérard Titus-Carmel: oeuvres 1984-1993, Amiens: Fonds régional d’art contemporain de Picardie, 1993, 81-113. (PC1) ___. “Coupes claires”, in Titus-Carmel: Forêts, Issoudun: Musée de l’Hospice Saint-Roch, 5-10. (PC3) ___. “Jalons”, in Titus-Carmel: une décennie, Quimper: Editions Palantine, 2000, 39-63. Commère, Pascal. “Un coin du voile et alentours”, in Autour de Gérard Titus-Carmel, numéro spécial de Dalhousie French Studies, 77, 2006. (DFS) 58

Key to references given after entry.

160


Derrida, Jacques. “Cartouches”, in Gérard Titus-Carmel. The PocketSize Tlingit Coffin, Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1978, 671. Also in La vérité en peinture, Paris: Flammarion, 1978, 211-90. (VP) Devolder, Eddy. “L’écriture, la peinture, ensemble”, in Gérard TitusCarmel: la part du livre, Creil: Dumerchez, 1995, 47-69. (ED) Deyrolle, François-Marie, ed. Le geste et la mémoire. Regards sur la peinture de Gérard Titus-Carmel, Comp’Act, 2006. Contains essays written over the period 1973-2005 by Gilbert Lascault, Jean-Pierre Faye, Jacques Derrida, Werner Spies, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jean Frémon, Jean-Louis Schefer, Paul Louis Rossi, Marc Le Bot, Jacques Henric, Daniel Abadie, Yoshio Abé, Jean-Louis Baudry, Yves Michaud, Patrick Casson, Abdelkébir Khatibi, Denis Roche, Daniel Dobbels, Antoine Emaz, Emmanuel Laugier, François Boddaert, Yves Bonnefoy, and Marc Blanchet. Dobbels, Daniel. “Coupes rêvées”, in Titus-Carmel: Sables, CergyPontoise: SAN de Cergy-Pontoise, 1999. Doumet, Christian. “Le puits à l’oeuvre”, in Autour de Gérard TitusCarmel, numéro spécial de Dalhousie French Studies, 77, 2006. (DFS) Emaz, Antoine. Pour Gérard Titus-Carmel. Notes sur les Nielles et le temps, Châtellerault: Association Cardinaux, 2003. (AE) ___. “Gérard Titus-Carmel: Ici rien n’est present”, in Autour de Gérard Titus-Carmel, numéro spécial de Dalhousie French Studies, 27, 2006. (DFS) Faye, Jean-Pierre. “The Four Season Sticks: entretien avec Alain Pomarède”, in Gérard Titus-Carmel: dessins: suites & séries 1971-1979, Paris: Maeght, 147-50. (JPF) Frémon, Jean. “Du cercueil de poche au caparaçon de deuil”, in Gérard Titus-Carmel: dessins 1975-1981, Les Sables d’Olonne; Cahier de l’Abbaye Sainte-Croix, 1981. Hindry, Ann. “Gérard Titus-Carmel: une peinture sans trêve”, in Gérard Titus-Carmel: oeuvres récentes 1988-1992, Fécamp: Centre culturel du Palais Bénédictine, 1992, 9-13. (AH) Lamarche-Vadel, Bernard. « Les “Déambulatoires » de Titus-Carmel: entretien”, in Gérard Titus-Carmel: dessins: suites & séries 1971-1979, Paris: Maeght, 93-4. (BLV)

Selected Bibliography

161

Lascault, Gilbert. “Gérard Titus-Carmel: 61 dessins annotés”, in Gérard Titus-Carmel: 61 dessins, Paris: Musée national d’art moderne, 1978. (GL) ___. “Titus-Carmel: dessiner, c’est penser”, in Gérard Titus-Carmel: dessins: suites & séries 1971-1979, Paris: Maeght, 8-9. Lebeer, Irmeline. “Titus-Carmel ou le fléau de la balance”, in Gérard Titus-Carmel: dessins: suites & séries 1971-1979, Paris: Maeght, 39-43. ___. “À propos de « The Four Season Sticks »”, in Gérard TitusCarmel: dessins: suites & séries 1971-1979, Paris: Maeght, 134-45. (IL) Léonard, Pierre. “9 constructions frêles: entretien”, in Gérard TitusCarmel:dessins: suites & séries 1971-1979, Paris: Maeght, 239-43. Metken, Günter. “Les constructions possibles de Gérard TitusCarmel”, in Gérard Titus-Carmel: das druckgraphische Werk, Düsseldorf: Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, 1979. Millet, Catherine. “Sur le dessin, sur les « Déambulatoires »”, in Gérard Titus-Carmel: dessins: suites & séries 1971-1979, Paris: Maeght, 100-106. (CM) Michaud, Yves. “La peinture, celle avec qui on n’en finit pas”, in Gérard Titus-Carmel: oeuvres 1984-1993, Amiens: Fonds régional d’art contemporain de Picardie, 1993, 33-51. (YM) Noël, Bernard. “Entretien avec Gérard Titus-Carmel”, in Gérard Titus-Carmel:dessins: suites & séries 1971-1979, Paris: Maeght, 151-5. Pacquement, Alfred. “Modèle/copie”, in Gérard TitusCarmel:dessins: suites & séries 1971-1979, Paris: Maeght, 69-70. ___. “Dessins/modèle”, in Gérard Titus-Carmel:dessins: suites & séries 1971-1979, Paris: Maeght, 131-133. (AP) Perret, Jean-Marie. “Secret, labyrinthe, ‘voie du milieu’: structure et symbole dans la poésie de Gérard Titus-Carmel”, in Autour de Gérard Titus-Carmel, numéro spécial de Dalhousie French Studies, 77, 2006. (DFS) Peyré, Yves. “Orchestration végétale”, in L’herbier du seul, Rencontre, 2006, 7-16.

162


Piguet, Philippe. “Titus-Carmel: la peinture archipel”, in Gerard Titus-Carmel: lisières, Cannes: Musées de la Ville de Cannes/Nice: Grégoire Gardette, 1999, 7-12. (PP) Plazy, Gilles. “Mystique, fandango, notes pour Gérard Titus-Carmel”, Recherches poiétiques, 1-94, 1994. Robbe-Grillet, Alain. Cathédrale, mémoire du monde, Derrière le miroir, 1981, 1-15. (ARG) Robinson, Joan. “Bio-bibliographie”, in Gérard Titus-Carmel: la part du livre, Creil: Dumerchez, 1995, 137-60. ___. “Un itinéraire”, in Gérard Titus-Carmel:oeuvres 1984-1993, Amiens: Fonds régional d’art contemporain de Picardie, 1993, 115-130. ___. “Gérard Titus-Carmel: une chronologie”, in Titus-Carmel: une décennie, Quimper: Editions Palantines, 2000, 171-188. Roche, Denis. “Ciel de nielle”, in Gérard Titus-Carmel: Nielles 1996-1998, Soissons: ADAC, Musée de Soissons, 1998, 713. (DR) Rossi, Paul Louis. “L’arbre rouge”, in Feuillées et Memento mori, Cognac: Le Temps qu’il fait / Saintes: L’Abbaye aux Dames, 2002. (PLR) Spies, Werner. “La « Suite Narwa » de Gérard Titus-Carmel”, in Derrière le miroir, 1978, 2-8. (WS) Tisserant, Jean-Marc. Gérard Titus-Carmel ou le procès du modèle, Paris: SMI, 1974. (JMT) Titus-Carmel, Gérard. Joaquin’s Love Affair. Paris: Éricart, 1971. ___. The Pocket Size Tlingit Coffin. Paris: Baudoin Lebon/SMI, 1976. ___. Le casque de Nikkô. Paris: Daniel Lelong, 1984. ___. Temps de parole. Caen: L’Échoppe, 1986. ___. Quatre images mémorables. Montréal: Nbj, 1987. (QIM) ___. La tombée. Saint-Clément: Fata Morgana, 1987. (LT) ___. L’entrevue. (Blandain): Brandes, 1988. ___. Lumières, Point de chute. Caen: L’Échoppe, 1988. ___. Ombre portée. Caen: L’Échoppe, 1989. ___. Le motif du fleuve. Saint-Clément: Fata Morgana, 1990. (MT) ___. Instance de l’orée. Saint-Clément: Fata Morgana, 1990. ___. L’Indolente d’Orsay. Caen: L’Échoppe, 1990. (IND) ___. Notes d’atelier & autres textes de la contre-allée. Paris: Plon, 1990. (NA) ___. Feuillets détachés des saisons. (Blandain): Brandes, 1991.

Selected Bibliography

163

___. La leçon du miroir. Caen: L’Échoppe, 1992. (LM) ___. “Elle bouge encore…”. Arles: Actes Sud, 1992. (EBE) ___. Premier sang. Caen: L’Échoppe, 1994. (PS) ___. Gris de Payne. Saint-Clément: Fata Morgana, 1994. ___. Obstinante. (Blandain): Brandes, 1995. ___. Ceci posé. Saint-Clément: Fata Morgana, 1996. ___. Nielles. La Souterraine: La Main courante, 1997. (N) ___. De corps et de buée. Montigny: Edns Voix/Richard Meier, 1997. ___. L’élancement. Éloge de Hart Crane. Paris: Seuil, 1998. (LE) ___. Travaux de fouille et d’oubli. Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2000. (TFO) ___. La rive en effet. Sens: Obsidiane, 2000. (RE) ___. Demeurant. Sens: Obsidiane, 2001. ___. 101 questions posées au pérégrin. Charleville-Mézières: L’Étoile des limites, 2001. ___. Ici rien n’est présent. Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2003. (RP) ___. Épars. Cognac: Le Temps qu’il fait, 2003. ___. Manière de sombre. Sens: Obsidiane, 2004. (MS) ___. Jungle (non-lieu) / Jungle (unspace). Halifax, Canada: Edns VVV Edns, 2005. Tr. Michael Bishop. (J) ___. Gustave Roud. Une solitude dans les saisons. Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 2005. (GR) ___. Seul tenant. Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2006. (ST) ___. “Fragments & tesselles relevés au pied du mur, I”, in Le Mâchelaurier, 23, 2005, 135-43. ___. “Fragments & tesselles relevés au pied du mur, II”, to appear in Sorgue. ___. Recitativo obbligato. Villeneuve-sur-Yonne: Bibliothèque municipale, 2004. ___. “Le retrait, le surcroît”, in Titus-Carmel, Toulouse: Espace Écureuil, 2001, 9-47. ___. Au vif de la peinture. Douarnenez: Ville de Douarnenez, 2002. (AVP) ___. “Portrait de l’artiste en profil perdu”, to appear in Le jardin des épargnes. (PA) ___. Paysage au revers. La Garde Adhémar: Éric Linard Edns, 2005. (PR) ___. L’herbier du seul. L’Échelle : Edns Rencontres, 2006. Presented by Yves Peyré.

164


Trémeau, Tristan. “Le perpétuel à-venir de la peinture”, in TitusCarmel: une décennie, Quimper: Editions Palantine, 2000, 67-76. Trini, Tommaso. “La stratégie du dessin”, in Gérard Titus-Carmel: dessins: suites & séries 1971-1979, Paris: Maeght, 85-89. Vargaftig, Bernard. “Un cri fendu par le milieu”, in Autour de Gérard Titus-Carmel, numéro spécial de Dalhousie French Studies, 77, 2006. (DFS) Viart, Dominique. “Envoilements de mémoire: les peintures de Gérard Titus-Carmel”, in M. Bishop & C. Elson, L’art français et francophone depuis 1980. New York/Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005, 15-30. (DV) Weiner, Andrew D. and Sonja Hansard-Weiner. Forging the Real: Gérard Titus-Carmel and the Art of Renewal, Madison Wisconsin: Spaightwood Galleries, 1992.

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