1The pages of “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846), in which Edgar Allan Poe details, step by step, the processes by which his poem “The Raven” attained its “ultimate point of completion” (Poe 1846, 163) probably constitute the most famous and representative example of a broader category of writings. Dante’s Vita Nuova (circa 1293-1295), Paul Valéry’s “Au sujet du Cimetière marin” (1933), Thomas Wolfe’s The Story of a Novel (1936), and Thomas Mann’s Die Entstehung des Doktor Faustus (1949) provide other illustrations, belonging to different periods and traditions, of a category of writings characterized by the authors’ detailed description of the genesis of their work. One feature that binds all these works beyond their several differences (diaristic or retrospective perspective, analytical or narrative tendency, etc.) is their suspicious nature in the eyes of readers, especially critics — and even more so if those critics work in the field of genetic criticism.
2Considering them dubious does not mean denying their interest: they are obviously valuable in many ways and provide very precious information to literary critics. Yet, it is precisely by breaking away from the testimony such writings offer that genetic criticism has established itself as a discipline: not by ignoring, dismissing, or censoring it, but by seeking elsewhere the foundations of its methodical approach.
3This essay wishes to consider a category of works that is close to — or rather, contiguous with the one just mentioned, since there are very substantial differences between the two of them. In this category, the authors offer a representation of the genesis of their work, though no longer through a narrative or an analysis, but by publishing the archive of drafts, successive versions, and preparatory notes of the work in question. In other words, they produce something quite close to what genetic criticism calls a “genetic dossier” or an “avant-texte.” I propose to name this category “authorial avant-texte.”
- 1 In the original French: “on appelle dossier de genèse l’ensemble matériel des documents et manuscri (...)
- 2 Originally: “c’est le dossier de genèse rendu accessible et intelligible. L’avant-texte est une pro (...)
4“Avant-texte” and “genetic dossier” are closely related notions. While Almuth Grésillon considers the two terms to be more or less equivalent (Grésillon [1994] 2016, 130–132), Pierre-Marc de Biasi establishes a distinction between them: the genetic dossier refers to the “collection of documents and manuscripts relating to the writing process of the work to be studied” (de Biasi 2011, 67),1 whereas the avant-texte designates, more specifically, “the genetic dossier made accessible and intelligible”; it implies “the transformation of an empirical set of opaque documents into a dossier of ordered and significant documents” (69).2
5I have chosen the term “avant-texte” not so much as a rejection of “genetic dossier” (which would also be quite appropriate for the examples I am about to consider), but because it is one of the most emblematic terms in genetic criticism. However, I must insist that the term “avant-texte” is a singular that conceals a plural. It refers to all the documents belonging to the genetic dossier that have been given a certain order, and therefore, in most cases, designates not one document but a set of documents, often of very diverse nature and content.
6The authorial avant-texte can be defined by three criteria:
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It must be produced by the author himself, and not by a scholar or anythird party. This is probably the most significant condition. The examples of avant-textes we are familiar with imply a non-identity between the producer of the archive — a critic — and the author of the pieces that make up this file, whereas the authorial avant-texte is based on a rigorous identity between the person who assembles the archive and publishes it (even if other people may have participated in this process) and the person who originally produced the drafts and other avant-textual pieces that make up the archive.
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The authorial avant-texte must be published in some form or another, whether in a book, a journal, a review, a website, or a blog. The situation of interest here is not the writer’s compilation of all the documents related to a work, including drafts and minor notes, nor the entrusting of the dossier to an institution for archiving and preservation, nor its opening to the actual or potential examination of a select few. It is the (much rarer) act of delivering it to a more or less indefinite and anonymous public — a readership — through the act of publication. According to the first condition, this act must be decided or at least agreed upon by the author. Whether it results from a personal initiative or from consent or concession in response to a proposal from an editor (or anyone else), the author must play a part in this result.
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The avant-texte constitutes an archive pointing to some form of exhaustiveness. This third condition, unlike the previous ones, must be approached with a considerable degree of flexibility. Firstly, because the concept of exhaustiveness is fraught with difficulties. Additionally, because the authorial dimension of the avant-texte invariably involves certain choices and therefore a particular manipulation of potential forms of exhaustiveness in the cases we are going to examine. The criterion of exhaustiveness will be regarded as a tendency within the authorial avant-texte rather than as a definitive requirement (as it would be for the critical avant-texte). However, this criterion is still worth considering, as it tends to exclude — or at the very least, to categorize as attenuated, diluted, or peripheral — the publication of only one or a few avant-textual documents with sample value. This latter approach is much less common and certainly does not carry the same implications or consequences.
7Two writers, among the very few who have approached it closely, will allow me to examine this curious category that is the authorial avant-texte: the French poet Francis Ponge, and the Belgian novelist and essayist Jean-Philippe Toussaint.
8In this first part, I will attempt to reconstruct the gradual emergence of a literary object that is sufficiently unusual and distinct to make it challenging to assert its existence definitively. The history of what I propose to call an authorial avant-texte is not a program seeking the concrete realization of a clear and definite intention, but a series of attempts that, through their convergence, ultimately sketch out a trend.
- 3 Originally: “les œuvres commencées, terminées en partie, mais non achevées,” and “les ébauches, fra (...)
9Certain events or productions may be regarded as precursors to this authorial avant-texte. One such example is Victor Hugo’s codicil to his will, in which he bequeathed his manuscripts to the Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris. Hugo not only requested the preservation of the whole, but also the publication of the archive, including “works begun, partly completed, but not finished,” as well as “drafts, fragments, scattered ideas, verse or prose, dispersed throughout [his] notebooks or on loose sheets” (Hugo 1881).3 Another interesting instance is the collection of works published between 1924 and 1926 by the Parisian publisher Edouard Champion, which exclusively featured facsimiles of autograph manuscripts by living writers. While several of the authors submitted a fair copy of a published or unpublished work, some provided manuscripts with distinctly avant-textual content (erasures, additions, permutations), offering a glimpse into their creative labor.
10As I cannot delve further into this prehistory or protohistory here, I shall move directly to an author who, through a series of endeavours, takes us into the heart of the issue: Francis Ponge (1899-1988).
- 4 For a broader approach to the manner in which Ponge’s work as a whole is positioned in relation to (...)
11Though many of his works are worthy of comment within this topic,4 I will limit myself to three of them, which are linked by such coherence and unity that it would be tempting to view them as a trilogy. This in no way means that the author is applying the same formula for the three works: each of them represents a novel experiment in a process that may be called genuine research, almost in the scientific sense of the term.
- 5 The exact coincidence between the author and the person who says “I” in a text is very often subjec (...)
12The first book of this series is Le Savon [Soap], (1967). In its initial pages, the author (or he who designates himself as such in his text),5 addresses an audience (the work was written in response to a commission for a radio reading) and says:
Quand me fut proposé d’écrire pour vous quelque texte, une idée aussitôt me vint, une idée très intéressée : celle de profiter de cette occasion pour faire aboutir un ouvrage, très anciennement entrepris, mais dont je n’étais jamais parvenu, malgré de nombreux essais, à venir à bout. […]
Me voici donc, devant ma table, bien obligé d’écrire, et sur cette table, à ma gauche, un dossier.
Le dossier de mes notes pour cet ouvrage, le volumineux dossier de mes notes…depuis vingt-trois ans! […]
Eh bien, maintenant, ce dossier, je vais l’ouvrir.
[When I was asked to write a text for you, an idea came to me immediately: the self-serving idea of taking advantage of this opportunity to bring to completion a work that I had been working on for a long time, but which, despite numerous attempts, I had never managed to finish.
So here I am at my desk, compelled to write; on this desk, to my left, there is a dossier.
The dossier of my notes for this work, the voluminous dossier of my notes…for twenty-three years!
Well, I am now going to open this dossier.]
- 6 Here and throughout the article the italics have been preserved as they appear in the quoted passag (...)
(Ponge 2002, 360)6
13The author depicts himself at the centre of two distinct materials, both implying the act of writing, at two different moments. On the one hand, the act is envisioned in its immediacy or, more precisely, its imminence: “So here I am at my desk, compelled to write.” Captured in its here-and-now, this present summons up and re-actualizes another period of time, materialized by the presence of the dossier on the table: the pages within it are the result and the trace of an act of writing already completed in the past.
14The foreword also highlights another singular feature, one of the most striking characteristics of the work: “Vous serez étonnés, peut-être — car ce n’est pas très habituel en matière littéraire — des fréquentes, des fastidieuses répétitions que comporte le présent texte” [You will perhaps be astonished — for this is not very usual in literary matters — at the frequent, tedious repetitions that the present text contains] (361).
15Obviously, the repetitions the author refers to are quite different from refrains, anaphoras, or other stylistic forms carrying musical enchantment or rhetorical efficiency, which are generally not perceived as tedious and are certainly not unusual in literary matters. The repetitions in the book are, in fact, returns to what has already been written and are taken again to be reworked and rewritten: the successive versions of the same poem. To put it technically: the different moments within a genetic process.
16The broadcasting and publication of Le Savon are considered by the author an opportunity to “bring to completion a work that [he] ha[s] been working on for a long time,” as mentioned above. It is an original and paradoxical completion, though, since the work does not offer a definitive version of the poem but instead opens and displays a dossier containing several versions of it, in which no hierarchy — based on excellence, chronology, or any other criterion — is established to privilege any of them in particular. Each of the versions contained in the volume is on an equal footing with all the others. In a way, what Ponge delivers to his audience and readership is not so much Le Savon (Soap, in the singular form) as promised by the title, but a “dossier-savon” or “savon-dossier” (“soap-dossier” or “dossier-soap”) as the foreword designates the pages to come (366).
17One of the appendices to the book informs us that the published dossier is, in fact, a selection (and represents, as such, a departure from one of the criteria we have laid down): “et qu’on ne croie pas que j’aie donné ici l’intégralité de mes brouillons sur ce thème : de nombreuses coupes voulues y ont été pratiquées” [and let it not be thought that I have given here the whole of my drafts on this matter: many deliberate cuts have been made here](Ponge 2002, 419). Even without this explicit acknowledgment, it could have been guessed easily. While there are numerous repetitions in the book, inevitable in a series of versions of the same poem, there are also very visible differences, sharp contrasts between some versions. In the very first one, Ponge explores the possibilities of free verse (362), while the others adopt a form much closer to a prose poem, made up of paragraphs of several lines. Initially concerned with concrete manifestations or practical uses of the object, his writing then turns to soap as an “abstract theme” (“thème abstrait”) and the possibilities of “intellectual grooming” (“toilette intellectuelle”; 367). At a certain point, the poem is transported into a dialogical form with scenic potential (quite unusual in Ponge’s work): a playlet (“saynète”) or a masquerade (“momon”; 373-378).
18The variants of the poem are written and chosen in such a way that they deliberately become variations, based on the musical model:
ces répétitions, ces reprises da capo, ces variations sur un même thème, ces compositions en forme de fugue que vous admettez fort bien en musique, que vous admettez et dont vous jouissez — pourquoi nous seraient-elles, en matière de littérature, interdites?
[these repetitions, these da capo reprises, these variations on the same theme, these fugue-like compositions that you allow in music, that you not only allow but enjoy — why should they be banned to us, when it comes to literature?]
(361)
19Both “variants,” referring to a series of versions of one text, and “variations,” adopting the musical model, involve an important amount of repetitions — the same expressions and structures recurring — but these repetitions have quite different roles in each case. The theme and variations model repeatedly takes up the same motif to deliberately transport it into new keys, registers, tempi, melodic or harmonic patterns. Each new form does not aim to replace the previous one but to establish a complex relationship with all the variations surrounding it, combining both reiteration and permanence on the one hand and dissimilarities and contrasts on the other, forming an intricate and dynamic balance.
20The very next work published by Ponge, La Fabrique du Pré (1971), was created in response to an invitation by Swiss art editor Albert Skira and his collaborator, the French critic Gaëtan Picon. They approached the poet asking for a work specifically destined for the “Les sentiers de la création” collection, whose publishing line was based on two features: the authors were invited to follow or to show “the paths of creation” mentioned in the collection’s title in any way they intended to; and, as this was an art book with very carefully crafted images, the principle of a dialogue between text and images had to be taken into account.
- 7 For a detailed description of the book, see Depaule (2014), Trouvé (2018), and Ponge (2002, 1517–15 (...)
21Francis Ponge’s book can be said to be singular within a collection that, from the outset, aims to be unique, and succeeds in being so.7 The heart of the work is the facsimile reproduction of 91 manuscripts or annotated typescripts, dated and presented in chronological order: the collection of the drafts of a previously published poem, “Le Pré” [The Meadow]. Another section in the book, noticeable by a change of paper (green laid paper), offers the typographical transcription of the manuscripts. Between them is the final version of the poem, as published seven years earlier in the review Tel Quel, again printed on different paper (brown half-tone) and in typographical form.
22The drafts are given in their facsimile reproduction before they are presented in their typographical transcription: this choice acknowledges the specific substance of the draft, irreducible to a series of alphabetic signs. At the same time, the publication of the transcriptions (not facing the facsimile but presented in a separate section of the book) designates the manuscripts not as mere shapes to be contemplated or objects to be revered in some fetishistic manner, but as documents requiring a form of reading:
Mais enfin, voyez donc ce fatras. Lisez-en ce que vous pourrez en lire. Laissez-en ce qui vous rebute. Qu’ensuite…De ce qui en aura résulté, et que par avance j’assume, chaque lecteur, à son tour, aura l’usage.
[But take a look at this jumble. Read what you can of it. Leave aside what puts you off. And then…From what results, and which I assume in advance, each reader, in turn, will have his own use.]
(561)
23A very specific one, indeed, completely different from any continuous, linear, predictable, and transparent approach, but still a form of reading.
24By publishing the drafts of a poem, both in their facsimile reproduction and their typographical transcription, La Fabrique du Pré seems to match the protocols and requirements of the critical avant-texte as they were being established by genetic criticism in the same years. Still, it must be stressed that it departs from them at least in one respect. The book does not include all of the drafts, the complete genetic dossier of “Le Pré”, but only a selection from the complete archive that Ponge had in his possession:
Il y avait eu un choix fait, d’accord avec moi par Gaëtan Picon. Il n’avait donné qu’environ les deux tiers. Il reste un certain nombre de feuillets qui n’ont pas été utilisés
[Gaëtan Picon made a choice, in agreement with me. He published only about two-thirds of the drafts. There are still a number of drafts that were not included in the book]
(Ponge [1977] 1997, 275)
25Unlike Le Savon, this work does produce the exhaustive effect of a complete collection, though: nothing in it suggests that a choice was made from a wider archive, and this fact could have remained unnoticed for quite some time if not for Ponge’s confession made a few years after the publication. One might assume that one reason for reducing the volume of the dossier was to mitigate the potentially tedious massiveness of the drafts as a whole — which also meant attenuating the radical nature of the choice.
26In other respects, the book also deviates from the strict protocols defining the avant-texte, not by omission but by excess. The compositional dimension — essential to the work — responds to an aesthetic intention that, while not negating its scientific aspect, incorporates and, to some extent, absorbs it.
27So far, we have only addressed the three sections of the book corresponding to the facsimile versions of the drafts, their transcription, and the final version of the poem — materials that have their exact equivalents in an academic avant-texte. However, the book also includes a preface in the form of a diary entitled “Les sentiers de la création” (echoing the title of the collection), a handwritten page entitled “Voici pourquoi j’ai vécu” [This is why I lived], as well as a short but particularly dense afterword (“Prière d’insérer”) printed in the inside left flap of the book. Twenty-three reproductions of paintings, drawings, tapestries, photographs, book pages, or musical scores rhythmically alternate with the facsimile pages. Considering these merely as illustrations and attributing them secondary status would be arbitrary and highly questionable: they are an integral part of the work just as much as any of the verbal elements.
28La Fabrique du pré is an eminently hybrid work, blurring the boundaries between literary research and creation, between artistic exploration and scientific approach. In a way, the very choice of this blurring signifies opting for an aesthetic domain that embraces ambiguity, over a strictly scientific protocol that can only reject it.
29In the foreword to Comment une figue de paroles et pourquoi (1977), Ponge states:
j’ai résolu d’exposer, une bonne fois, à longueur de pages, et, cette fois, sans la moindre retenue, tout le grand nombre de feuillets qu’il m’avait fallu gâter pour mener à son achèvement (je veux dire à son efficacité) […] cette figue sèche
[I have resolved to expose, once and for all, at length and, this time, without the slightest restraint, the great number of pages that I had to waste in order to bring to completion (I mean to its effectiveness) […] this dried fig]
(Ponge 2002, 761)
- 8 Francis Ponge’s assertion in no way implies that he is unaware of the partial and almost artificial (...)
30The author implicitly situates this new publication in relation to his earlier work, La Fabrique du pré, advancing one step further in the continuity of the same line, and now moving towards exhaustiveness. However, this assertion is flawed as it suggests a linear progression, while literary creation is a complex, multidimensional, and ambiguous endeavour, always containing elements irreducible to any singular aim or intention.8
31One characteristic that distinguishes this book from the previous two is its less articulated composition and its less composite content of materials. To such an extent that it seems to be entirely constituted of avant-textual archives. Yet, this is not entirely the case: two discrete but significant elements (which I will discuss later) are added to the transcription of the avant-textual documents that fill most of the pages of the book: a two-page foreword and the title.
32I will now look at the Belgian novelist and essayist Jean-Philippe Toussaint (1957–) through a project that, once again, approaches what I term an authorial avant-texte. One key difference from the previously examined cases is that it is a digital publication, implying a different paradigm than traditional books.
33Like Ponge, Toussaint proposes several initiatives, each time venturing into new choices. However, while the French poet’s books were published in successive, independent editions to be considered different works (even if there is a deliberate consistency between them and they all find a form of unity as a part of the writer’s oeuvre), the Belgian novelist’s successive endeavours culminate together on the author’s website (www.jptoussaint.com). Documents from various periods of writing, working, and publication find a form of synchronicity and unity when the site is accessed by users.
34Although there is no explicit reference to a genetic orientation in the site’s title or any other element on the home page, it appears that genetic exploration forms the central focus of the site’s evolving architecture. “La genèse pour le contenu, la mayonnaise pour la méthode” [Genetics for the content, mayonnaise for the method] (Toussaint 2014, 117), summarizes the author in an interview about the principles guiding the creation of his website. This enigmatic “mayonnaise” suggests not so much an improvised or purely intuitive approach (the website is, on the contrary, the result of a perceptibly mature, considered approach) but rather an experimental dimension, exploring various contrasting (but not necessarily contradictory) directions or methods.
35One of these directions actually bifurcates into a sort of diptych: the website leads us down two corresponding paths, both based on the novel La Réticence (1991): a critical avant-texte and an authorial avant-texte.
36The cat image, one of the icons featured in the site header, leads to “Projet Réticence” [Réticence Project], a page presented with the following words:
Mettre en ligne des brouillons pour permettre à chacun d’accéder aux archives de la création littéraire, de les décrypter, et de s’en emparer pour de nouvelles créations, tel est l’objectif du projet élaboré à partir des brouillons du roman La Réticence (Éditions de Minuit, 1991), que JeanPhilippe Toussaint a confiés à l’Unité Mixte de Recherche Litt&Arts (Université Grenoble Alpes / CNRS).
[Uploading drafts online so that anyone can access the archives of literary creation, decipher them, and use them for research or the creation of new works: this is the aim of the project, based on the drafts of the novel La Réticence (Éditions de Minuit, 1991) which Jean-Philippe Toussaint entrusted to the Litt&Arts Research Unit (Université Grenoble Alpes / CNRS).]
- 9 All web pages quoted in this essay have been listed in a table in Appendix A. The identifier in the (...)
(Appendix A, “projet-reticence”)9
37A further click on “Exploration des brouillons” [Exploration of the drafts archive] takes us to the digitized images of the drafts of Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s fourth novel. Even if this may pass unnoticed, clicking on the cat’s icon has taken the user across a threshold, from www.jptoussaint.com to the website of the Équipe Littératures et Arts Numériques of Grenoble University (https://reticence.elan-numerique.fr). This transition is quite significant, as it moves to a domain outside the author’s control: the 2,700 folios of drafts have been entrusted by Toussaint to a Research Unit, the transformation of the rough archive into an avant-texte is undertaken by scholars (in a work still in progress), using their own protocols and methods, without interference from the author (for a detailed description of the project see Ferrato-Combe 2002).
38Another page, accessed through a different link (Appendix A, “lareticence”), presents documents of avant-textual nature related again to La Réticence, but this time chosen and controlled by the author. An authorial avant-texte is present on the website, complementing the critical avant-texte it also provides access to. However, it should be noted that the authorial production can only be called an avant-texte in a broad and somewhat imprecise sense. The four documents selected by Jean-Philippe Toussaint are a mere fraction of the extensive archive. This introduces a second contrast in the website’s structure: the dichotomy between an anthological and an exhaustive trend.
39The “House” portal (Appendix A, “maison”), accessed via an icon in the home page, displays the titles of various works by Toussaint (including La Réticence) illuminated in neon lights. Clicking on any title opens a dedicated page for that work. Most of these pages begin with a section containing an archive of varying size, showcasing avant-textual documents. Even the few deviations are significant, as shown by these lines, which on the page dedicated to La Salle de bain, serve as a substitute for an avant-textual archive or sample:
Je n’ai gardé aucun des brouillons de La Salle de bain, je les ai tous brûlés avant de quitter l’Algérie, des centaines de brouillons que j’ai brûlés un soir au coucher du soleil dans les poubelles publiques de la Cité d’Aïn d’Heb à Médéa quelques jours avant mon départ
[I didn’t keep any drafts of La Salle de bain, I burned them all just before leaving Algeria, I set hundreds of drafts ablaze one evening at sunset, in the public garbage dump of Aïn d’Heb, on the outskirts of Médéa, just a few days before my departure.’]
(Appendix A, “salle-de-bain”)
40With only very specific exceptions (which I will which look at below), this first section, labelled “Brouillons et manuscrits” or “Manuscrits, notes” or simply “Manuscrits,” clearly reflects an anthological trend: the limited number of documents present in the archive indicates an obvious selection process (based on various criteria) retaining only a very restricted set of elements.
- 10 Fairel’amour (2002), Fuir (2005), La Vérité sur Marie (2009) and Nue (2013) eventually form the “Cy (...)
- 11 While the site has a synchronic existence for the occasional user, it is also destined to evolve: f (...)
41Three of the titles on the page (Faire l’amour, Fuir, and La Vérité sur Marie), to which should be added a fourth (Nue), accessible on another page of the site (Appendix A, “nue”), lead to a much larger archive. In fact, the four novels that make up the “Cycle of Marie”10 have long been highlighted, being the only ones immediately accessible from the home page in the previous version of the site (Appendix A, “home-2023”).11 What distinguishes the works in this tetralogy in particular is the author’s choice to attach to them a comprehensive avant-textual dossier, which links them rigorously to the criteria of the auctorial avant-texte as defined.
C’est un peu comme si mon ordinateur était en verre et que les internautes pouvaient regarder dedans. Il y a quand même un petit travail d’édition, j’ai quand même un peu trié parce que, malgré tout, la masse de documents est considérable
[It’s a bit as if my computer were made of glass and Internet users could look inside. Some editing has been done, and I’ve sorted it out a bit because, after all, it represents a considerable mass of documents]
(Toussaint 2015, 118)
42Although he acknowledges that a selection has been made, the author tends to downplay its impact: the trend of his approach is toward exhaustiveness. An exhaustiveness whose achievement is problematic and almost impossible: not only is the quantity of documents related to the writing of the four novels immense, but the very notion of exhaustiveness becomes difficult to define in the realm of born-digital writing. It cannot be limited to paper printouts and backups made by the authors, however frequent and numerous; the computer and various digital memories are likely to preserve an immeasurable quantity of traces — virtually every single action performed by the writers on their keyboard — that forensic exploration could reveal. In this case, total exhaustiveness would imply direct access to the computers and digital memories or their clones.
43“Mais pourquoi, me dira-t-on, ce genre de littérature ?” [But why, you might ask, a literature of this sort?] (Ponge 2002, 561), writes Ponge in the afterword of La Fabrique du pré. If it is to be considered a form related to literary creation and not simply a specimen of scholarly edition, the publication of an authorial avant-texte is by no means self-evident. It stands in stark contrast to ordinary reading and publishing practices and seems to transgress aesthetic habits and even ethical principles:
Il est évidemment un peu, si l’on veut, contre-nature, un peu comme je le dis de l’exhibitionnisme, de montrer tout; c’est-à-dire que ça a quelque chose de scandaleux. Et, en même temps aussi, en raison du côté fastidieux, les gens qui lisent mal, c’est-à-dire la plupart des gens, peuvent être tout à fait choqués.
[Showing everything as I do here is obviously a bit against nature, a bit like an act of exhibitionism; in other words, there is something scandalous about it. And, at the same time, because it is so tedious, people who don’t read well — that is, most people — may be quite shocked.]
(Ponge 1978, 118)
44The author anticipates reproaches on different levels: from a pragmatic point of view, a tedious reading; in terms of decency, decorum, or, less superficially, artistic ethics, something scandalous, shocking or unnatural. Jean-Philippe Toussaint foresees, for his part, very similar accusations:
Un autre reproche auquel je prête le flanc en donnant à voir mes brouillons est le masochisme. Car, en permettant à chacun d’être témoin de l’ensemble de mes tâtonnements, de mes errements et de mes fautes d’orthographe, je m’expose forcément. Je le sais, et je l’assume. Je prends ce risque.
[Another criticism I’m open to by showing my drafts is masochism. By allowing anyone to witness all my tries and wanderings, my mistakes and my spelling errors, I am inevitably exposing myself. I know it and accept it. I am willing to take that risk.]
(Toussaint 2014, 119)
45The two authors are perfectly aware, as we see, of the probable reproaches to the very singular work they are offering the reader or the internet user, to which they have chosen to respond.
46A defence or plea is deployed by both our authors: outside the work, particularly in interviews; but a part of the explanatory and justificatory argumentation is also inscribed within the work itself — even if, for some of these argumentative components, it may be unclear whether they form an integral part of the “text” or belong instead to the periphery of the paratext.
- 12 See Genette (1987, 8): “[une] ‘[z]one indécise’ entre le dedans et le dehors, ellemême sans limite (...)
47Resolving this question may not be indispensable, given that the very notion of paratext, as defined by Gérard Genette, refers to “an ‘undecided zone’ between inside and outside, lacking rigorous limits either inward (toward the text) or outward (toward the world’s discourse on the text)”.12 In the case of the “Prière d’insérer” for La Fabrique du pré and in the interviews and articles appearing on www.jptoussaint.com, which we will discuss below, these elements are situated in spaces we would more readily associate with the interior of the production — the inside flap of the book or the “Meta Site” page, accessible after three clicks from the home page — rather than with its exterior. In any event, such features undeniably form an integral part of the structure, meaning, and resonance of the work. In this respect, an interesting evolution can be noticed in Francis Ponge’s oeuvre from Le Savon (1967) to Comment une figue de paroles et pourquoi (1977).
48Le Savon is made up of materials of two very different kinds, explicitly marked as such by the typographic distinction between roman type and italics. One of these materials is the series of papers belonging to a dossier, which will be displayed to the eyes of the reader (or to the listener’s ear during the radio broadcast). It should be noted, however, that the archive pieces themselves are encircled by a commentary (printed in italics), playing a constant and active role. In many ways, Le Savon does not correspond to the criteria of the authorial avant-texte — even if it corresponds, to a large extent, to its spirit — and could be considered a hybrid form, somewhere between a Poe-style narrative and the authorial avant-texte strictly speaking.
49The balance shifts considerably with La Fabrique du Pré. The volume of the book is chiefly taken up by the avant-texte in both its facsimile and transcription versions, separated by the published poem. It should be noted, however, that the work cannot be reduced to this avant-texte, even if, in terms of proportions, it accounts for the largest share. A form of meta-discourse commenting on the work itself is present in the preface and in the “Prière d’insérer”. The two elements represent barely more than twenty pages in the 271 pages of the book, with what may seem, for the latter, a peripheral status. Yet, both the factor of quantity and the opposition between a central and a peripheral situation are questionable criteria when reflecting on the actual importance of an element in a literary work.
50A few years later, in Comment une figue de paroles et pourquoi, the commentary shrinks to an even smaller part, to such an extent that it would be tempting to consider this book simply and merely as a genetic edition of the poem “La Figue” fashioned by the author himself. It must still be stressed that two elements of a meta-textual and authorial tenor are added to the archive: the short foreword and the title do not correspond to the “avant” to the text, but to an “après” to the published poem; they do not belong to the neutral enunciation of literary criticism but to the writing by an authorial instance. Despite their being discreet — and for the title, almost unnoticeable — they are not lacking in importance, as I will demonstrate in a moment.
- 13 Including the two interviews cited in the article, originally published in the magazines NRF and Li (...)
51For its part, Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s website contains very abundant avant-textual material but also meta-textual elements — more precisely “meta-” elements pure and simple, since they belong to different media: transcripts of several interviews given at different times and published in various journals, but also links to interviews broadcast on radio programs and making-of videos. One of the pages on the website, called “Meta Site” (Appendix A, “meta-site”), is reserved for a series of documents — the video recording of the launch evening of the website, four published interviews,13 and one radio discussion — where Jean-Philippe Toussaint comments on the www.jptoussaint.com website. Like Francis Ponge, Jean-Philippe Toussaint feels the need to comment and, to a certain extent, justify his work inside his work.
52In a somewhat risky statement, I allege the website’s structure places the commentary in a position such that it is situated after the archive (in a purely temporal or spatial sense that should not be mechanically translated into terms of importance). Reducing the reticular paradigm of the site to a sequential logic based on the two-dimensional model of the page and the book would be a mistake and a misunderstanding, especially if we consider that Jean-Philippe Toussaint very consciously invests in the language and forms specific to the Internet. But a reticular space-time does not mean the mere absence of the categories of space and time. The scrolling of a page on the computer screen implies a before and an after (in what is, punctually, a two-dimensional space). So does (in a temporal rather than a spatial sense this time) the path formed by a series of clicks to a page located in one of the deeper layers within the site.
53By clicking on any title on the “House” portal of the website, we access a page displaying various sections: four sections if we choose to click — quite randomly — on La Télévision (Appendix A, “la-television”). The first one, called “Manuscripts, notes,” contains four sets of documents of avant-textual tenor. The second, “Traductions” [Translations], lists all the translations of the book to date. The third, “video,” is a link to a sequence from Joseph Beuz’s movie Filtz TV (1970). Only in fourth place comes the “Press” section with critics’ commentaries on the book.
54Returning to the “Meta Site” web page, quite emblematic of Toussaint’s lucid and reflective approach, it is worth noting that access to this section is embedded within the “House” page rather than placed in the site’s header. Internet users cannot reach it directly from the main landing page; instead, they are guided through the “House” page, where the neon titles beckon them, like benevolent sirens, toward the avant-textual archives of various works.
55It would be dangerous to draw definitive conclusions about the importance or significance of the different elements from this very concrete observation. I simply wish to stress here that the structure of the site is such that it takes us, almost inevitably, through the archive pages and links before it takes us to the commenting meta-textual documents.
- 14 It is true that a “demonstrative” character could also be attributed to the poem “La Figue” that is (...)
56“Le titre de cette publication signalant clairement son appartenance au genre disons ‘démonstratif’ […]” [The title of this publication clearly signalling that it belongs to the, let us say ‘demonstrative’ genre] (Ponge 2002, 761). By this remark, implicitly emphasizing the two interrogative adverbs in the title, the foreword to Comment une figue de paroles et pourquoi characterizes the book as a demonstrative discourse.14 This is surprising since the part of the commentary has kept shrinking in Ponge’s oeuvre since Le Savon, to such an extent that it is reduced in the 1977 book to the foreword, only a few lines long, and to the few words of the title.
57Unless we consider Ponge’s remark as a false trail, it must then be assumed that the demonstrative discourse is present within the avant-texte itself. This becomes almost an explicit statement in a letter to Gaëtan Picon, in which the author recalls the genesis of La Fabrique du Pré: looking for the best way to honour the request by the editor, for the most exact and satisfying representation he might offer of “the paths of creation,” he comes to this impression: “Il me parut qu’un exemple valait mieux qu’une théorie” [It seemed to me that an example was worth more than a theory] (Ponge 2002, 1519).
58An example instead of a discourse, praxis instead of theory: where are they to be found? “J’avais conservé en cartons un assez grand nombre de feuilles noircies récemment de mon encre […]./ Voilà qui ferait l’affaire.” [I had kept in boxes quite a few sheets of paper, recently blackened with my writing […]./ That would do the trick] (1519). The ambition of “showing writing at work” instead of discussing it [il ne s’agira plus de parler de l’écriture, […] mais de la donner à voir au travail’](1519), stated in the same letter to Picon, will be fulfilled by displaying not the actual act of a hand writing or typing signs, but the whole of the traces left by this act: the series of drafts that eventually led to the published poem. As we see, Ponge is offering the very same response as that given by genetic criticism in the scientific field exactly during the same years.
59Does replacing theory with the example mean replacing discourse with non-discourse? It means, more accurately, replacing it with a paradoxical nondiscursive discourse embodied in the archive.
60What are the motivations or scopes, the ambitions or desires that justify the scandalous exhibitionism, the unnatural masochism, the potentially tedious displaying of hundreds or thousands of repetitive and often opaque pages? In both Francis Ponge’s and Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s oeuvre, the authorial avant-texte is absolutely consistent with a conception of literary and artistic creation, and even with a particular vision of the world and human existence. I can only sketch out here a few directions offering a schematic vision of what, in the poetics of our authors — but also in their ethics or even their metaphysics — calls for the attempts we have examined in this essay.
61Jean-Philippe Toussaint states in an interview:
[J]e devine une angoisse, comme si les brouillons constituaient une menace pour l’image que les écrivains souhaitent donner d’eux-mêmes. C’est comme si on risquait de découvrir, en étudiant les premières versions de leurs œuvres et en y découvrant des faiblesses et des imperfections, que leurs livres ne sont pas sortis ex nihilo de la cuisse de Jupiter. […]/ Pour ce qui me concerne, j’ai toujours eu un goût prononcé pour les coulisses, l’envers du décor, les making of, les esquisses, les plans, les maquettes.
[I suspect a certain anxiety, as if drafts were a threat to the image that writers want to project of themselves. As if these writers fear the risk that those who study the first versions of their works and discover weaknesses and imperfections will realize that their books did not emerge ex nihilo from the thigh of Jupiter. […]/ As far as I’m concerned, I have always had an interest in backstage, behind-the-scenes, making of, sketches, plans, and models.]
(Toussaint 2014, 120)
62The purpose is to dispel illusions, make-up tricks, or cheating, to reveal the true processes in writing, however humble, and even embarrassing they may sometimes be: this intention places the author in a tradition going back to the famous essay mentioned in the opening lines of this article. Unlike “most writers” who prefer “having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy — an ecstatic intuition,” Edgar Allan Poe claims to accept
letting the public take a peep behind the scenes, at the elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought — at the true purposes seized only at the last moment — at the innumerable glimpses of idea that arrived not at the maturity of full view — at the fully matured fancies discarded in despair as unmanageable — at the cautious selections and rejections — at the painful erasures and interpolations — in a word, at the wheels and pinions — the tackle for scene-shifting — the step-ladders and demon-traps — the cock’s feathers, the red paint and the black patches, which, in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred, constitute the properties of the literary histrio.
(Poe 1846, 163)
63Poe’s words are very close to those of Toussaint, or to those of Ponge declaring himself “an experienced professional of unbridled demystification” [un vieux professionnel de la demystification à outrance” ](Ponge 2002, 561), and also claiming consistency and honesty:
C’est ainsi, après tout, que je travaille, c’est ainsi que naissent en moi les développements, c’est ainsi que l’esprit progresse, — et il faut bien, n’est-ce pas ? être honnête, il faut bien ne pas tricher avec le mouvement de l’esprit ?
[This is how I work, after all, this is how developments are born in me, this is how the mind progresses — and one must be honest, right?, and not cheat the moving of the mind?]
(361)
64However, in the 20th century, artists and critics alike have entered the age of suspicion: they have become conscious of the deceptive transparency of narrative, of the doubtful evidence of analysis. Our two writers choose to rely not only on the ductility of ideas but also on the thickness and materiality of the archive.
65Ponge has expressed at various points in his work a “position philosophique et poétique” [philosophical and poetic position] (Ponge 1999, 424) based, among other principles, on a “materialist” conception of the world, leading him to assert “Dieu est matérialiste puisqu’il voulut créer les choses” [God is a materialist since he wanted to create things], just before adding: “– et nous sommes matérialistes aussi” [– and we are materialists too] (Ponge 2002, 735). From this principle, he encourages us to
se montrer assez ‘matérialiste’ en somme pour se concevoir seulement un organisme comme un autre, un ‘phénomène’ de la Nature comme un autre, se proclamer, s’accepter, se vouloir tel.
[show oneself to be ‘materialist’ enough to conceive of oneself only as an organism like any other, a ‘phenomenon’ of nature like any other, to proclaim oneself, to accept oneself, to want oneself to be such.]
(729)
66He envisions words, whether spoken or written, literary or not, as “la véritable sécrétion commune du mollusque homme” [the true common secretion of the mollusc man] (Ponge 1999, 40). A consequence of considering writing as a secretion is that the hierarchies and even boundaries between the finished text and the successive attempts leading to it become indistinct, almost erased. Therefore, Ponge’s desire to publish, through his so-called ‘genetic works’, “pas […] seulement la formule à laquelle on a pu croire avoir abouti, mais […] l’histoire complète de sa recherche, le journal de son exploration” [not only the definite formulation you may think you have arrived at, but the complete story of your search, the diary of your exploration] (426).
- 15 A more literal translation would of course be: “adding form to form”.
67For his part, Toussaint feels no temptation to blur the limits between the draft and the book, between the avant-texte and the text. He considers www.jptous saint.com and his books as two spaces that are in constant resonance, but at the same time very clearly distinct. Rather than offering an extension of his works that dissipates their outline, the website seems to respond to the ambition of “ajouter de la forme à la forme” [adding creation to creation]15 (Ferrato-Combe 2002, 169), to quote his own terms.
68This motto or principle is an incentive addressed to the reader as well as to himself. The novelist has described in an interview the way in which he sometimes draws a passage from his former drafts and attempts a graft, comparable to a surgical operation, by trying to integrate it into a new work:
“Il m’arrive d’aller rechercher des passages déjà écrits […]. C’est comme une greffe, au sens médical du terme. Je vais les chercher, je les place, je les installe”
[Sometimes I go looking for passages that have already been written […]. It is like a graft, in the medical sense of the word. I fetch them, place them, and install them]
(Toussaint 2015, 123)
69The results of this operation are variable, even capricious: in many cases the transplant is rejected; only in a few of them, it is successful.
70Internet users are also invited to draw on the material on the site — which includes thousands of pages of drafts — as possible seeds for their own writing or creation. The most emblematic example of this circulation between the author and the internet user, between what has already been written and what is about to be written or in the process of writing, is the “Borges project.” On this page of the website, a “call for projects” is addressed to all visitors to the site, encouraging them to invent their own short story based on a title borrowed from a page of one of Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s novels. These stories are then added to the page (Appendix A, “borges-projet”)
71The last lines of Made in China (2017), one of Toussaint’s books in which the reflexive and metatextual dimension is most present, read:
Mais la fatalité d’un livre terminé est riche de toutes les potentialités écartées, qui l’habitent et le hantent de façon invisible.
[But the fatality of a finished book is rich in all the discarded potentialities, that invisibly inhabit and haunt it]
(Toussaint 2017, 79)
72Are the examples I have examined mere extravagant attempts destined to remain exceptions in literary and artistic production, or will they give rise to new ventures by other authors in novel forms? The expansion of digital publication and the resources of the Internet make the latter hypothesis more plausible. However, the question is not just a technical and practical matter: just because something becomes possible and almost easy from a technical standpoint does not mean it will be undertaken. What is at stake is the aesthetic or intellectual coherence of this curious object, the authorial avant-texte.
73Venturing a prophecy would obviously be pointless. I will content myself with an observation: the authorial avant-texte presents itself as a new perspective within a broader horizon, as a potential form in one of the dimensions that characterize artistic modernity. One of the great heralds of literary modernity, Charles Baudelaire (and this great admirer of Edgar Allan Poe takes us back, once more, to the “Philosophy of Composition” mentioned at the beginning of this article), considers that “tous les grands poètes deviennent naturellement, fatalement, critiques” [all great poets naturally, fatally, become critics], and even “le meilleur de tous les critiques” [the best of all the critics] (Baudelaire 1976, 793).
74If the examples examined in this article are any indication, the endeavours surrounding an authorial avant-texte do not merely reflect the authors’ desire to exert over the critical discourse surrounding their work a control from the outset, through the production of the archive itself. The affinities between the writing process and the protocols of scientific or critical research are evident, both in Ponge — who espouses a materialist and experimental approach akin to that of a scientist — and in Toussaint — who engages in an ongoing and open dialogue with critics and academic research. However, their research resembles a quest in that it is not aimed at achieving a formula that would constitute a stable truth to be possessed, nor a definitive recipe to be applied. Instead, it involves the invention of new approaches and variations based on existing ones.
75The authorial avant-texte represents one of the possible adventures of the modern poet heralded by Baudelaire — regardless of the form of writing or medium chosen — who has become, in diverse and innovative ways, a critic.