Le parti pris des choses
Encyclopedia
Le parti pris des choses is a collection of 32 short to medium-length prose poems by French poet and essayist Francis Ponge
first published in 1942 (see 1942 in poetry
). The title is often translated into English as The Voice of Things, The Way Things Are, or The Nature of Things (perhaps to echo Lucretius
, though the book's philosophical underpinnings are more often associated with phenomenology).
, France. He started writing at a relatively young age, gaining notice even in the early 1920s. Like many French writers of his time, he was also politically associated, joining the ranks of the Socialist Party
in 1919. As a writer, he joined the Surrealist movement
for a short time during the 1930s; this also had political ramifications, influencing him to join the Communist Party
. However, his most notable works were to come later in his life.
He fought in both World Wars, and it was after his stint in the army in World War II that he decided to leave the Communist Party. It was at this time, in 1942, that he joined the French Resistance
and also published what is considered his most famous work, Le parti pris des choses. This text was in fact written over the span of 15 years, from 1924 to 1939.
After his publication of Le parti pris des choses, Ponge was not unnoticed in the literary world. He was praised heavily by literary heavyweights Albert Camus
and Jean-Paul Sartre
in the early 1960s. Furthermore, the French literary magazine Tel Quel
also touted his work during this time period. While he has only recently gained more popularity in the United States, he also spent the later part of his years lecturing across the country and also was a visiting professor at Barnard College
and Columbia University
.
Francis Ponge won several prestigious awards late in his career. This included the Neudstadt International Prize for Literature in 1974.
, a literary critic, noted about the intentions of his works, "He seeks a balance of equivalences, an equation between the order of things and the order of words".
Ponge was also influenced by the ideas of his time. He has his own ideas about the absurd, influenced by Albert Camus in a number of ways. Ponge himself wrote in the Tome Premier that he believed in the unreliability of language and criticized Camus’ views of the search for a single principle as opposed to a number of principles. Many of his writings can be seen as a way to both return to the concrete values of language while also revealing its absurdity.
" through his works , an aim readily apparent in poems like "Le Galet" which is a miniature cosmogony all by itself. Each of the works in the collection explores some object in the corporeal world, "borrowing the brevity and infallibility of the dictionary definition and the sensory aspect of the literary description". Lee Fahnestock, one of Le parti pris des choses’ translators, describes the work as "construct[ing] a new form of definition-description". The style shown in Le parti pris des choses was Ponge's first foray into what would become his definitive trademark.
, sibilance, and paronomasia) as well as images that delight all the senses. He anthropomorphized his animal and arboreal subjects to make them more relatable . According to Fahnestock, the objeu allowed him to "say several things on several levels at once, while unobtrusively demonstrating the particular nature of words and things".
However, though Ponge attempted to evoke the feeling of the object he was describing by any possible means, he simultaneously believed that good poems were "the most structured, the most uninvolved, the ‘coldest’ possible". To him, the employment of the objeu was rote enough that the evocation of emotion could still be "cold" and "uninvolved." It comes as no surprise that Ponge admired the art of such artists as Cézanne, Braque, and Picasso – Post-Impressionists and Cubists whose mission was to capture the feeling and significance in addition to the form of their subjects – for Ponge shared their goal.
Though the objeu was prominent, creative interpretation and plays on words never took the reins: description was always the primary goal. When discussing "Le Galet," Ponge stated that "most important for the ‘health’ of the contemplator is the naming, in the course of his investigations, of all the qualities which he discovers: these qualities, which ‘transport’ him, must not transport him beyond the limits of reasonable and accurate expression". To step out of this realm would be to submit to subjectivity and self-indulgence, qualities which Ponge looked down upon above all.
The style of description and calculated subconscious evocation that Ponge established in his early writings starting with Le parti pris des choses was emulated by later French poets, notably Yves Bonnefoy
, Jacques Dupin
, and André Du Bouchet, the first two of whom employ the "old master's" techniques of subtle wordplay. Du Bouchet, by contrast, has taken Ponge's style of conveying sense impressions and made it his own. These poets are by no means Ponge devotees, but each has drawn something from their predecessor.
In addition to the motif of science, it is Ponge's dissection of every aspect of the snail's life that is critical to this poem's unique nature. Perhaps controversially, Ponge calls snails stoic, methodical, noble, heroic, arrogant, mythological, and angry, so that the snail emerges from the poem less like a lowly creature and more like a character from a novel, personified in its description. All this exemplifies Ponge's favorite strategy of giving human characteristics to non-human things, or, in Lucretian language, "taking the side of things."
, all the way down to the pebble itself, or the "kind of stone that I [Ponge] can pick it up and turn it over in my hand", the pebble comes to stand for rock as a species or entity. The metaphor
not to be missed in this poem is the stone as Time, where the "great wheel of stone" rolls ever on as "plant life, animals, gases and liquids revolve quite rapidly in their cycles of dying". This then can be taken as Ponge's view of humanity, as he himself in an essay on "The Pebble" compares looking within himself to telling the story of the pebble. For Ponge, it is best to "consider all things as unknown, and to ... begin again right from the beginning".
" is ingeniously juxtaposed with "glob of spit", again exemplifying Ponge's preferred technique of poetic, or real life, dictionary definitions. It has been said of Ponge's recasting of ideas in Le Parti pris des choses that it is not merely meant to be another way of thinking about and viewing objects or concepts, but an attempt to redefine how language is used, as human speech is wittily compared to the secretions of a mollusk.
A major theme throughout the collection blatantly expressed in "The Mollusk" is that of the transience of life, which parallels the vanitas
motif in still-life painting. Running through other poems like "La Bougie" ("The Candle") and "La Cigarette" ("The Cigarette") as well, death is viewed as an all-powerful entity, against which any struggle is futile, as both the candle and the cigarette are consumed by their own flames, and as Ponge echoes in "The Mollusk", "There's no way to get it [the mollusk's secretion] out alive".
, and author Beth Archer Brombert are notable.
, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Francis Ponge. Fahnestock's translation of Le parti pris des choses is entitled The Nature of Things. While she admits that a more exact translation of "le parti pris des choses" would be something more like "taking the side of things" or "the side taken by things" (implying that the things in the poems speak for themselves without humans), Fahnestock argues that humanity "is never absent from the page." She believes that Ponge gives his subjects human qualities, and she incorporates this idea into her translations. She also argues that when translating Ponge's work, it is sometimes best to incorporate things like rhythm, sound, and puns
rather than purely literal translations of the original. Thus, she says that her goal in her translation was to maintain these effects in the English rather than always keeping the exact meaning of the words themselves. She admits that any text by Ponge is challenging to translate because of his use of colloquialisms and puns, and that while something is inevitably lost in translation, enough can be retained to demonstrate the beauty of his ideas across the language barrier.
, Tomas Tranströmer
, Rainer Maria Rilke
, Rolf Jacobsen, and Francis Ponge. Bly's work has been heavily influenced and inspired by Ponge's "object" poems, in which he finds a kind of observation of the world that is neither objective nor subjective. For Bly, Ponge is the master of close observation of objects in poetry. He says, "Ponge doesn’t try to be cool, distant, or objective, nor ‘let the object speak for itself.’ His poems are funny, his vocabulary immense, his personality full of quirks, and yet the poem remains somewhere in the place where the senses join the objects." His work on Ponge is embodied in his book titled Ten Poems of Francis Ponge Translated by Robert Bly and Ten Poems of Robert Bly Inspired by the Poems of Francis Ponge.
Francis Ponge
Francis Jean Gaston Alfred Ponge was a French essayist and poet. In many ways, he combined the two — essay and poem — into a single art form.-Life:...
first published in 1942 (see 1942 in poetry
1942 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* George Oppen forces his induction into the U.S. Army....
). The title is often translated into English as The Voice of Things, The Way Things Are, or The Nature of Things (perhaps to echo Lucretius
Lucretius
Titus Lucretius Carus was a Roman poet and philosopher. His only known work is an epic philosophical poem laying out the beliefs of Epicureanism, De rerum natura, translated into English as On the Nature of Things or "On the Nature of the Universe".Virtually no details have come down concerning...
, though the book's philosophical underpinnings are more often associated with phenomenology).
Life and career
Francis Ponge was born in 1899 in MontpellierMontpellier
-Neighbourhoods:Since 2001, Montpellier has been divided into seven official neighbourhoods, themselves divided into sub-neighbourhoods. Each of them possesses a neighbourhood council....
, France. He started writing at a relatively young age, gaining notice even in the early 1920s. Like many French writers of his time, he was also politically associated, joining the ranks of the Socialist Party
Socialist Party (France)
The Socialist Party is a social-democratic political party in France and the largest party of the French centre-left. It is one of the two major contemporary political parties in France, along with the center-right Union for a Popular Movement...
in 1919. As a writer, he joined the Surrealist movement
Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....
for a short time during the 1930s; this also had political ramifications, influencing him to join the Communist Party
Communist party
A political party described as a Communist party includes those that advocate the application of the social principles of communism through a communist form of government...
. However, his most notable works were to come later in his life.
He fought in both World Wars, and it was after his stint in the army in World War II that he decided to leave the Communist Party. It was at this time, in 1942, that he joined the French Resistance
French Resistance
The French Resistance is the name used to denote the collection of French resistance movements that fought against the Nazi German occupation of France and against the collaborationist Vichy régime during World War II...
and also published what is considered his most famous work, Le parti pris des choses. This text was in fact written over the span of 15 years, from 1924 to 1939.
After his publication of Le parti pris des choses, Ponge was not unnoticed in the literary world. He was praised heavily by literary heavyweights Albert Camus
Albert Camus
Albert Camus was a French author, journalist, and key philosopher of the 20th century. In 1949, Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons within the Revolutionary Union Movement, which was opposed to some tendencies of the Surrealist movement of André Breton.Camus was awarded the 1957...
and Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the leading figures in 20th century French philosophy, particularly Marxism, and was one of the key figures in literary...
in the early 1960s. Furthermore, the French literary magazine Tel Quel
Tel Quel
Tel Quel was an avant-garde magazine for literature, founded in 1960 in Paris by Philippe Sollers and Jean-Edern Hallier.-Overview:...
also touted his work during this time period. While he has only recently gained more popularity in the United States, he also spent the later part of his years lecturing across the country and also was a visiting professor at Barnard College
Barnard College
Barnard College is a private women's liberal arts college and a member of the Seven Sisters. Founded in 1889, Barnard has been affiliated with Columbia University since 1900. The campus stretches along Broadway between 116th and 120th Streets in the Morningside Heights neighborhood in the borough...
and Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
.
Francis Ponge won several prestigious awards late in his career. This included the Neudstadt International Prize for Literature in 1974.
Motivation
Ponge's works often describe mundane objects – for example "The Pebble" or "The Oyster" – extensively, but in such a way that his works are categorized as prose poetry. Robert W. GreeneRobert W. Greene
Robert William Greene, Sr. was a pioneering investigative journalist, who uncovered corruption in Arizona and twice helped Newsday win the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. He spent 37 years as a reporter and editor at Newsday....
, a literary critic, noted about the intentions of his works, "He seeks a balance of equivalences, an equation between the order of things and the order of words".
Ponge was also influenced by the ideas of his time. He has his own ideas about the absurd, influenced by Albert Camus in a number of ways. Ponge himself wrote in the Tome Premier that he believed in the unreliability of language and criticized Camus’ views of the search for a single principle as opposed to a number of principles. Many of his writings can be seen as a way to both return to the concrete values of language while also revealing its absurdity.
Contemporaries
Ponge was well respected by his contemporaries in France and they often helped drive his literary career. An example of this was Tel Quels praise for Ponge's works throughout the 1960s. Camus and Sartre both respected his work immensely. The philosophical movements of the time in which both Camus and Sartre were leaders in turn influenced Ponge's own work. For instance, Ponge used Camus’ ideas about absurdity to form his own views. It was in fact partly due to Sartre's praise of Ponge that he was able to win the prestigious Neudstadt Prize.Style
Ponge stated that his overarching goal was to create a "single cosmogonyCosmogony
Cosmogony, or cosmogeny, is any scientific theory concerning the coming into existence or origin of the universe, or about how reality came to be. The word comes from the Greek κοσμογονία , from κόσμος "cosmos, the world", and the root of γίνομαι / γέγονα "to be born, come about"...
" through his works , an aim readily apparent in poems like "Le Galet" which is a miniature cosmogony all by itself. Each of the works in the collection explores some object in the corporeal world, "borrowing the brevity and infallibility of the dictionary definition and the sensory aspect of the literary description". Lee Fahnestock, one of Le parti pris des choses’ translators, describes the work as "construct[ing] a new form of definition-description". The style shown in Le parti pris des choses was Ponge's first foray into what would become his definitive trademark.
The Objeu
Much of Ponge's poetic style reflects his idea of the "objeu," or the "objective play of the mind". The objeu is the act of pointedly choosing language or subject matter for its double meanings, hidden connections, and sensory effects on the reader. Indeed, his attitude toward the depiction of objects is neatly summed up by the saying "Parti Pris des Choses = Compte Tenu des Mots," which translates loosely to "taking the side of things = taking into account the words." Indeed, where pure description is inadequate to truly capture the spirit of an object, Ponge employs auditory effects (e.g. assonanceAssonance
Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds to create internal rhyming within phrases or sentences, and together with alliteration and consonance serves as one of the building blocks of verse. For example, in the phrase "Do you like blue?", the is repeated within the sentence and is...
, sibilance, and paronomasia) as well as images that delight all the senses. He anthropomorphized his animal and arboreal subjects to make them more relatable . According to Fahnestock, the objeu allowed him to "say several things on several levels at once, while unobtrusively demonstrating the particular nature of words and things".
However, though Ponge attempted to evoke the feeling of the object he was describing by any possible means, he simultaneously believed that good poems were "the most structured, the most uninvolved, the ‘coldest’ possible". To him, the employment of the objeu was rote enough that the evocation of emotion could still be "cold" and "uninvolved." It comes as no surprise that Ponge admired the art of such artists as Cézanne, Braque, and Picasso – Post-Impressionists and Cubists whose mission was to capture the feeling and significance in addition to the form of their subjects – for Ponge shared their goal.
Though the objeu was prominent, creative interpretation and plays on words never took the reins: description was always the primary goal. When discussing "Le Galet," Ponge stated that "most important for the ‘health’ of the contemplator is the naming, in the course of his investigations, of all the qualities which he discovers: these qualities, which ‘transport’ him, must not transport him beyond the limits of reasonable and accurate expression". To step out of this realm would be to submit to subjectivity and self-indulgence, qualities which Ponge looked down upon above all.
Ponge and the Poetry World
While Ponge's work is most often classified as prose poetry, he publicly rejected the moniker of "poet" , stating that he "uses poetic magma… only to get rid of it". While much commentary is focused on this, it appears from his writing style that Ponge's issue was more with the self-indulgent lyricism of some poets than with the concept of poetry itself . Ponge appears to have a very conflicted relationship with poetry. Though he made such statements as "ideas are not my forte," his works abound with ideas: he stated early in his career that "it is less the object that must be painted than an idea of that object," a statement which can be accepted alongside even his later works. Though he looks with disdain upon personal involvement, his own concept of the objeu points to great personal investment in his work.The style of description and calculated subconscious evocation that Ponge established in his early writings starting with Le parti pris des choses was emulated by later French poets, notably Yves Bonnefoy
Yves Bonnefoy
Yves Bonnefoy is a French poet and essayist. Bonnefoy was born in Tours, Indre-et-Loire, the son of a railroad worker and a teacher....
, Jacques Dupin
Jacques Dupin
Jacques Dupin is a French poet, art critic, and co-founder of the journal L'éphemère.A resident of Paris since 1944, he is director of publication at Galerie Maeght.- Jacques Dupin's poetry in English :...
, and André Du Bouchet, the first two of whom employ the "old master's" techniques of subtle wordplay. Du Bouchet, by contrast, has taken Ponge's style of conveying sense impressions and made it his own. These poets are by no means Ponge devotees, but each has drawn something from their predecessor.
Poems
Of the poems of Ponge's self-proclaimed "poetic encyclopedia", "Snails", "The Pebble", and "The Mollusk" are often subject to scrutiny. Each displays a characteristic Pongian theme or themes.Snails
"Snails" is a prototype poem for Ponge, as it displays many distinct aspects of his style: Ponge likes to use scientific language, referring to snails by their species name, Gastropoda (although some critics like Allain Robb-Grillet, author of Pour un nouveau roman, point out scientific inaccuracies in Le Parti pris des choses, and deem the role of science in Ponge's work as "negligible").In addition to the motif of science, it is Ponge's dissection of every aspect of the snail's life that is critical to this poem's unique nature. Perhaps controversially, Ponge calls snails stoic, methodical, noble, heroic, arrogant, mythological, and angry, so that the snail emerges from the poem less like a lowly creature and more like a character from a novel, personified in its description. All this exemplifies Ponge's favorite strategy of giving human characteristics to non-human things, or, in Lucretian language, "taking the side of things."
The Pebble
"The Pebble", or "Le Galet", is easily the longest poem in the collection, being exceptionally long for the genre of prose poetry on the whole. To describe a pebble, Ponge starts at the beginning, literally, the beginning of time itself, diverging from his usual trend of descriptions and assertions. Instead, the reader gets a condensed cosmogony, describing the formation of the first rock, (the Earth, or however the reader wants to interpret it) as a sort of allegory of The Fall. Venturing through the "expulsion of life", "cooling", large tectonic platesTectonic Plates
Tectonic Plates is a 1992 independent Canadian film directed by Peter Mettler. Mettler also wrote the screenplay based on the play by Robert Lepage. The film stars Marie Gignac, Céline Bonnier and Robert Lepage.-Plot summary:...
, all the way down to the pebble itself, or the "kind of stone that I [Ponge] can pick it up and turn it over in my hand", the pebble comes to stand for rock as a species or entity. The metaphor
Metaphor
A metaphor is a literary figure of speech that uses an image, story or tangible thing to represent a less tangible thing or some intangible quality or idea; e.g., "Her eyes were glistening jewels." Metaphor may also be used for any rhetorical figures of speech that achieve their effects via...
not to be missed in this poem is the stone as Time, where the "great wheel of stone" rolls ever on as "plant life, animals, gases and liquids revolve quite rapidly in their cycles of dying". This then can be taken as Ponge's view of humanity, as he himself in an essay on "The Pebble" compares looking within himself to telling the story of the pebble. For Ponge, it is best to "consider all things as unknown, and to ... begin again right from the beginning".
The Mollusk
In "The Mollusk", or "Notes pour un coquillage", the scientific term "protoplasmProtoplasm
Protoplasm is the living contents of a cell that is surrounded by a plasma membrane. It is a general term of the Cytoplasm . Protoplasm is composed of a mixture of small molecules such as ions, amino acids, monosaccharides and water, and macromolecules such as nucleic acids, proteins, lipids and...
" is ingeniously juxtaposed with "glob of spit", again exemplifying Ponge's preferred technique of poetic, or real life, dictionary definitions. It has been said of Ponge's recasting of ideas in Le Parti pris des choses that it is not merely meant to be another way of thinking about and viewing objects or concepts, but an attempt to redefine how language is used, as human speech is wittily compared to the secretions of a mollusk.
A major theme throughout the collection blatantly expressed in "The Mollusk" is that of the transience of life, which parallels the vanitas
Vanitas
In the arts, vanitas is a type of symbolic work of art especially associated with Northern European still life painting in Flanders and the Netherlands in the 16th and 17th centuries, though also common in other places and periods. The word is Latin, meaning "emptiness" and loosely translated...
motif in still-life painting. Running through other poems like "La Bougie" ("The Candle") and "La Cigarette" ("The Cigarette") as well, death is viewed as an all-powerful entity, against which any struggle is futile, as both the candle and the cigarette are consumed by their own flames, and as Ponge echoes in "The Mollusk", "There's no way to get it [the mollusk's secretion] out alive".
Translations
Le parti pris des choses has been translated into English many times. In particular, translations by translator Lee Fahnestock, poet Robert BlyRobert Bly
Robert Bly is an American poet, author, activist and leader of the Mythopoetic Men's Movement.-Life:Bly was born in Lac qui Parle County, Minnesota, to Jacob and Alice Bly, who were of Norwegian ancestry. Following graduation from high school in 1944, he enlisted in the United States Navy, serving...
, and author Beth Archer Brombert are notable.
Lee Fahnestock
Lee Fahnestock is a well-known translator. She has translated many French works, including those by Victor HugoVictor Hugo
Victor-Marie Hugo was a Frenchpoet, playwright, novelist, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights activist and exponent of the Romantic movement in France....
, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Francis Ponge. Fahnestock's translation of Le parti pris des choses is entitled The Nature of Things. While she admits that a more exact translation of "le parti pris des choses" would be something more like "taking the side of things" or "the side taken by things" (implying that the things in the poems speak for themselves without humans), Fahnestock argues that humanity "is never absent from the page." She believes that Ponge gives his subjects human qualities, and she incorporates this idea into her translations. She also argues that when translating Ponge's work, it is sometimes best to incorporate things like rhythm, sound, and puns
Puns
Puns may refer to:*Partido de Unión Nacional Saharaui, the Sahrawi political party* Pun, figure of speech* Phoenicians...
rather than purely literal translations of the original. Thus, she says that her goal in her translation was to maintain these effects in the English rather than always keeping the exact meaning of the words themselves. She admits that any text by Ponge is challenging to translate because of his use of colloquialisms and puns, and that while something is inevitably lost in translation, enough can be retained to demonstrate the beauty of his ideas across the language barrier.
Robert Bly
Robert Bly is very famous for own original poetry as well as his translations. His famous collections include Loving a Woman in Two Worlds, Silence in the Snowy Fields, The Morning Glory, and many more. He has translated the works of many famous authors including KabirKabir
Kabīr was a mystic poet and saint of India, whose writings have greatly influenced the Bhakti movement...
, Tomas Tranströmer
Tomas Tranströmer
Tomas Gösta Tranströmer is a Swedish writer, poet and translator, whose poetry has been translated into over 60 languages. Tranströmer is acclaimed as one of the most important Scandinavian writers since the Second World War...
, Rainer Maria Rilke
Rainer Maria Rilke
René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke , better known as Rainer Maria Rilke, was a Bohemian–Austrian poet. He is considered one of the most significant poets in the German language...
, Rolf Jacobsen, and Francis Ponge. Bly's work has been heavily influenced and inspired by Ponge's "object" poems, in which he finds a kind of observation of the world that is neither objective nor subjective. For Bly, Ponge is the master of close observation of objects in poetry. He says, "Ponge doesn’t try to be cool, distant, or objective, nor ‘let the object speak for itself.’ His poems are funny, his vocabulary immense, his personality full of quirks, and yet the poem remains somewhere in the place where the senses join the objects." His work on Ponge is embodied in his book titled Ten Poems of Francis Ponge Translated by Robert Bly and Ten Poems of Robert Bly Inspired by the Poems of Francis Ponge.