W. H. Auden [England/USA]
foreword
to chazal’s sens-plastique
M. Malcolm de Chazal is a poet,
though he writes in prose (not, thank God, in free verse). His chosen literary
form is the aphorism. This is an aristocratic genre. The aphorist does not
argue or explain: he asserts. At the same time, however, he addresses his
reader as an equal, not as a pupil in need of instruction. It is for the reader
to decide, on the basis of his own experience, whether an aphorism be true or
false. For example, when Valéry says,
“Consciousness reigns but does not govern,” I do not feel I have been told a
fact hitherto unknown to me, but rather, that I have been made conscious of a
fact which, unconsciously, I have always known. On the other hand, reading
through Sens Plastique, I came upon
one statement, only one, “the insect can fathom the lowing of the cow,” which
seems to me false, that is to say, my reaction is, “What scientific reason is
there to supposed that the insect can? Such observations of insects as I have
made incline me to think it cannot.”
French literature is famous for aphorists, but, both in style
and content, Chazal’s are a quite new phenomenon. The language used by most
aphorists is abstract and deliberately avoids metaphor and visual imagery:
Chazal’s is always metaphorical and charged with images. For example, two of
the commonest topics for aphorists have been self-love and the difference
between the two sexes. Typical “traditional” statements on these topics are:
We would rather run ourselves down than to speak of
ourselves at all.
(La Rochefoucauld)
A man keeps another’s secret better than he does his
own.
A woman, on the other hand, keeps her own better than
another’s.
(La Bruyère)
How different is Chazal’s
treatment of the same matters:
The egoist’s feelings walk in Indian file.
Women eat when
they talk, men talk when they eat. At table men
talk longer between mouthfuls, women while eating.
Women preside
at breakfast when the courses are negligible and
hurried. Men’s voices
dominate at suppers and banquets when there are long
waits between
courses.
Even more striking is the difference between the dominant
concerns of the French aphoristic tradition and his. Most of them have occupied
themselves either with the behavior of Court or High Society, like La
Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère, Chamfort, Vauvenargues, or with political life, like
de Toqueville, or with the life of the mind, like Pascal and Valéry. Of French
literature in general I do not think it unfair to say that while there have, of
course, been distinguished French professional naturalists, French poets and
novelists, with the notable exception of Colette, have shown relatively little
interest in what in English is meant by “Nature,” namely, first, our human experience
of all beings, mineral, vegetable, or animal, which we recognize as being
“other” than ourselves, and, secondly, those aspects of our own nature which,
as sentient creatures, made of matter, who are born, eat proteins, defecate,
reproduce sexually, and die, we share with the rest of created beings. In this
sense Chazal is a “nature” poet. He has, like all writers, his forebears, but
in his case most of them belonged to other literary cultures than his own, and
it does not follow that he must necessarily have read them. For example, here
are some observations which one might easily have found in Sens Plastique, but happen to have been written by others, the
first two by Novalis, then three by Thoreau, and the last by Ruskin:
Are not plants, perhaps, the product of a feminine nature
and a masculine
spirit, animals the product of a masculine nature and a
feminine spirit?
Are plants, as it were, the girls, animals the boys, of
nature?
As we manure the flowerbeds for the plants, so they manure
the airbeds
for us.
The song-sparrow is heard in fields and pastures, setting
the midsummer to
music—as if it were the music of a mossy rail or
fencepost.
A turtle walking is as if a man were to try to walk by
sticking his legs and
arms merely out of the windows.
The heavens and the earth are one flower. The earth is the
calyx, the heavens
the corolla.
The Swallow: it is an owl that has been trained by the
Graces, it is a bat
that loves the morning light, it is the aerial reflection
of a dolphin, it is the
tender domestication of a trout.
 Chazal is a practicing painter as well as
writer. (I was, incidentally, for introduced to his writings in the early
Fifties by another painter, the late Pavelec Tshelitchev.) Every painter is a
lover of “nature” in the sense in which I have used the word, since his primary
concern is with the visual appearance of things, including human beings. If what
distinguishes us from all other beings is a consciousness of having a Self,
this property is not visually manifest. All that can be “seen” are our
expressions and our gestures, which all things, animate and inanimate, exhibit
likewise. Anybody, however, who, like a painter, is preoccupied with sensory
experience of the world knows that this is rarely, if ever, the experience of
one sense only. Rarely, if ever, do we see without at the same time hearing,
smelling, tasting, and touching. To testify to this, we have to have recourse
to speech: the painter can only record the seen, the musician only the heard,
but the writer, thanks to the metaphorical and analogical resources of
language, can at least indirectly record our synaesthetic experience of the outer
world. As a painter turned writer, Chazal is, as one might expect, a marvelous
physiognomist.
The leaf is all profile; the flower can never be
anything but full face,
no matter what angle you view it from. If both were profiles,
the flower
would seem to be riding the leaf like a horseman; and
if both were full
face, the whole plant would flatten out into a kind of
tapestry. So long
as the leaf’s flatness is wedded to the flower’s
fullness, we tend to
see flowers superimposed on leaves even when the
foliage is in the
foreground. Because of this, a plant’s leaves never
“drown out” its
flowers. The full face always seems nearer than the
profile even at the
same distance.
Roses on the bush are sisters on the plant and first
cousins in the vase.
As one might expect, something of their common
character has passed
into the vase, thinning out their kinship.
The gestures of
the feet are perhaps the most “artificial” part of our
step. Our feet have no “natural” gestures except in
water. The watery
element is the greatest of simplifiers of gesture. All
the gestures of
the fish are
infantile.
The man uses his fingers more than a child, who depends
on his palm.
These are, respectively, the carpentry and masonry of
gesture.
But he is at his most impressive
in his descriptions of experiences which involve more than one sense.
A voracious sense of smell leans forward on its
nostrils like a glutton
eating with this elbows on the table.
Fog several all spatial connections of resemblance or
sympathy in nature.
Trees wander
like lost sheep until the air currents that nip at their heels
herd them together. Fog sends each plant off to search
its own soul
alone in the infinite corners of the schoolroom of
space, and puts a
dunce’s cap on
light itself. Fog is the water’s “detention room.”
Wind is vocalic, water consonantal. A blast of humid
air is the essence
of all diphthongs. Squalls stutter while hurricanes
swallow their words….
The noise of
water is sound riding horse on sound. The noise of wind is
an infantry march of sound. So: a cavalcade of water
and the hurricane
shifting its feet.
Any collection of aphorisms, especially one as extensive as Sens Plastique, cannot and should not be
read as one reads a novel or even a volume of poems. There is no need to read
the pages in their printed order, and one should not read for too long at a
time: fifteen minutes is, perhaps, the maximum. On the other hand, if the
author is talented enough, there is no literary genre to which one can return
more often and be sure of finding something exciting and thought-provoking
which one missed on earlier readings.
Sens-Plastique has
now been a companion of mine for nearly twenty years, and so far as I am
concerned, Malcolm de Chazal is much the most original and interesting French
writer to emerge since the war.
Reprinted from the 1971 edition
Copyright
©1971, 2007 by W. H. Auden.
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