[Himself on the cusp between “outsider” & “insider”
poetry & art, Chirot, whose work, both verbal & visual, is a great too
often hidden resource, writes from an authoritative if barely visible position in contemporary
letters. The Fénéon selection excerpted
here is from a longer essay/talk, “Conceptual Poetry and its Others,” written
for a symposium at the Poetry Center of the University of Arizona, 29-31 May
2008 & appeared earlier in the blogger version of Poems and Poetics. The depth & breadth of his more recent work
is outstanding. (J.R.)]
from Félix Fénéon’s Faits Divers, circa 1906
Nurse Elise Bachmann, whose day off was yesterday, put on a public display of insanity.
A complaint was sworn by the Persian physician Djai Khan against a compatriot who had stolen from him a tiara.
A dozen hawkers who had been announcing news of a nonexistent anarchist bombing at the Madeleine have been arrested.
A certain madwoman arrested downtown falsely claimed to be nurse Elise Bachmann. The latter is perfectly sane.
On Place du Pantheon, a heated group of voters attempted to roast an effigy of M. Auffray, the losing candidate. They were dispersed.
Arrested in Saint-Germain for petty theft, Joël Guilbert drank sublimate. He was detoxified, but died yesterday of delirium tremens.
The photographer Joachim Berthoud could not get over the death of his wife. He killed himself in Fontanay-sous-Bois.
Reverend Andrieux, of Roannes, near Aurillac, whom a pitiless husband perforated Wednesday with two rifle shots, died last night.
In political disagreements, M. Begouen, journalist, and M. Bepmale, MP, had called one another "thief" and "liar." They have reconciled.
In "The Painter of
Modern Life," Baudelaire is the first to define Modernism and does so as a
conjunction of the eternal and the ephemeral. To find that element of the
eternal in the ephemeral which Baudelaire saw as embodying modernity, he turns
to an emphasis on the particular form of the living art/art as living of the
Dandy. The Dandy is the non-separation of art and life in the conceiving of
one's existence as Performance
Art. The Dandy becomes not an expression of Romantic personality and
individuality, but a form of becoming an animated Other, an impersonator going
about performing the actions of a concept, rather than producing the objects of
a conception.
This stylized impersonating, non-producing figure
begins to appear dramatically" in the works of Wilde and Jarry and in many
ways in the "life and works" of a Félix Fénéon, who "creates at
a distance" via anonymous newspaper faits
divers (discovered to be his and republished posthumously as "Nouvelles en trois lignes" [News/Novellas
in Three Lines]), pseudonymous articles in differing registers of language
(working class argot, standardized French) in Anarchist and mainstream
journals, unsigned translations, and the barely noted in their own pages of his
editing of journals featuring the early efforts of rising stars of French
literature. Quitting his camouflaged and concealed writing activities, Fénéon
works the rest of his life as a seller in an art gallery.
The actual "works"
of Fénéon, then, are not written objects per se, but anonymous actions,
ephemeral pseudonymous "appearances in print," and the works of
others which he affects a passage for in his editorship and translations, in
his promoting and selling the art works of others. This
"accumulation" which one finds "at a distance" in time as
his "complete works," is often unobserved and unknown to his
contemporaries, who know of him primarily via his "way of acting,"
his manner of dressing, his speech mannerisms, and as the public triptych of
images of him existing as a painted portrait by Signac, a Dandy-pose photo and a mug shot
taken when tried as part of an Anarchist "conspiracy." Fénéon's
"identity as a writer" does not exist as "an author," but
as a series of "performances," "appearances" and
"influences," many of them "unrecognized" and
"unattributed."
Ironically, it his most
"clandestine" activity—his Anarchist activities—which brings him the most in to
the public and tabloid spotlight. As one of "The Thirty" accused and tried for
"conspiracy" in a much publicized trial, it is Fénéon's severe mug shot that for a time
presents his "public face."
The severe mug facing the
viewer is actually producing a Conceptual Poetry "at a distance." By not
penning a single line, by simply "facing the music" to which others pen the lyrics, Fénéon,
in doing nothing more than facing the camera "capturing" his
image, proceeds to enact a series of dramas "projected" on to him, a series of
"identities," and "revelations" which use the documentary
material to produce a series of
mass-published fictions.
The possible prison term
facing the "Félix Fénéon" in the inmate-numbered "anonymous" mug
shot, "presents its face" to the viewer, a face "taken," "imprisoned"
and "caught" by the image and its publicity. This publicized face facing camera and viewer
and possible hard time, is "taken to be" the photo of the face of a being from whom
the mask of the clandestine and conspiratorial have been torn off, revealing
"the cold hard truth" of Félix Fénéon.
Facing trial, however,
all that is learned of this imprisoned face is that it is "the wrong man, an innocent
man." This fixed image, acquitted of its "sensational" charges, is revealed not
as a truth, but instead as simply a mask, a mask operating like a screen or blank
sheet of paper, onto which are projected the dramas, fictions and "think
piece" writings of others. Nothing is revealed other than an
"identity" which shifts, travels, changes from one set of captions to
another. It is via these captions written by others under his image in the
papers and placards, that Fénéon continues his "writing at a
distance." Simply by facing the camera, facing charges, "facing the
music," facing his accusers at trial and facing the verdict and judgment, Fénéon
is "writing" a myriad captions, breaking news items, commentaries,
editorials, all of which change with wild speeds as they race to be as
"up-to-minute" as the events themselves are in "unfolding."
The professionals, these
writers, these journalists and reporters of "reality," chase desperately,
breathlessly, after the unfolding drama in which the mug shot is
"framed," and
in so doing produce texts of "speculative fiction," a serial
Conceptual Poetry with as its "star player" a writer whose own texts are deliberately written to
be unrecognized, hidden, camouflaged, unknown. And all the while, this writer
writing nothing is producing vast heaps of writing via the work of others, as
yet another form of camouflaged clandestine Conceptual Poetry, "hot off the
press."
Rimbaud writes of a
concept of the poetry of the future in which poetry would precede action—which
in a sense he proceeds to "perform" himself. If one reads his letters
written after he stopped writing poetry, one finds Rimbaud living out, or through,
one after another of what now seem to be "the prophecies" of his own
poetry. That is, the poetry is the
"conceptual framework" for what becomes his "silence" as a
poet, and is instead his "life of action."
In these examples, one
finds forms of a "conceptual poetry" in which the poetry is in large
part an abandonment of language, of words, of masses of "personally
signed" "poetry objects," "poetry products." One finds
instead a vanishing, a disappearance of both language and "poet" and
the emergence of that "some one else" Rimbaud recognized
prophetically, preceding the action--in writing—in the "Lettre du
voyant," "the Seer's letter"—as "I is an other."
An interesting take on a
conceptual poetry in writing is found in one of Pascal's Pensees, #542: "Thoughts come at
random, and go at random. No device for holding on to them or for having them. A thought has escaped: I
was trying to write it down: instead I write that it has escaped me."
The writing is a notation
of the "escaped" concept's absence, its escape that is a line of
flight that is a "flight out of time" as Hugo Ball entitles his Dada
diaries. Writing not as a method of remembering, of "capturing thought,"
but as the notation of the flight of the concept at the approach of its
notation.
Writing, then, as an
absence— an absence of the concept. A
Conceptual Poetry of writing as "absent-mindedness"!—A writing which
does nothing more than elucidate that the escaping of thoughts "which come
at random, and go at random" has occurred.
This flight of the
concept faced with its notation—indicates a line of flight among the examples
of Rimbaud—a "flight into the desert" as it were, of silence as a
poet—and of Fénéon—the flight into anonymous writing of very small newspaper
"faits divers" items punningly entitled "Nouvelles en trois lignes" (News/Novels in Three Lines), of pseudonymous writings in differing
guises at the same time according to the journals
in which they appear, and as translator and editor as well as
"salesperson" in a gallery of "art objects," a conceptual
masquerader among the art-objects embodying "concepts" and becoming
no longer "concepts' but "consumer items." Fénéon's framed mug
shot on to whose mug is projected a "serial crime novel," written by
others and "starring" the mug in the mug shot, a writer of unknown
and unrecognized texts who now vanishes into a feverish series of captions and
headlines.
Anonymity, pseudonyms,
impersonations, poets who write their own coming silence and
"disappearance" as an "I is an other," the deliberately
unrecognized and unrecognizable poet whose mug shot becomes the mass published
and distributed "crime scene" for police blotters and headlines,
speculative fictions and ideological diatribes, the writing which is a notation
of the flight of the concept, the writing of non-writers who "never wrote
a word," yet whose concepts may be found camouflaged, doubled, mirrored,
shadowed, anonymously existing hidden in plain site/sight/cite—these nomadic
elements which appear and disappear comprise a Conceptual Poetry in which the
concepts and poets both impersonate Others and reappear as "Somebody
Else," an Other unrecognized and unrecognizable found hidden in plain
site/sight/cite.
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