La Pluralité Des Mondes De Lewis: Poésie

by Jacques Roubaud

"Ces méditations s'inscrivent dans la continuité du dernier livre de Jacques Roubaud, Quelque chose noir, qui était inspiré par un deuil intime. La première partie de l'ouvrage fait penser à la récente exposition de ces natures mortes "philosophiques" qu'on nommait, au XVIIᵉ siècle, des Vanités. Le titre du livre fait référence à un ouvrage anglais de logique mathématique de David Lewis. On pourrait avancer l'hypothèse de lecture suivante : Encore en proie à la souffrance et à la perte de l'être aimé, le poète cherche un refuge possible à la solitude du malheur dans les ressources que peut offrir à l'être acculé au mur de la mort la possibilité (logique et logiquement exposée dans le livre de David Lewis) de l'existence d'autres univers, à l'envers ou dans un ailleurs de ce mur de la mort. Chaque texte - de méditation - tourne, et retourne, comme un mathématicien maniant des théorèmes, les possibilités d'une délivrance de l'enfermement douloureux du deuil. La qualité de ces textes, souvent énigmatiques, c'est que le fonctionnement de l'intellect et la douleur affective y sont indissolublement liés. La seconde partie, La maladie de l'âme, abandonne la réflexion logique et mathématique. La troisième, Cercles en méditation, conduit à un climat plus apaisé, un retour de l'âme non vers une "happy end", mais vers le vide vivant de la vie." Bulletin Gallimard, oct. 1991.

Genres: Poetry, Philosophy, Literature, France

Paperback

Published October 24, 1991

About the author

Jacques Roubaud was a French poet, writer and mathematician.

Reviews

[Geoff · Rating 4 out of 5]

These poems are a continuation of the elegiac exploration of the death of Roubaud’s wife Alix begun in Some Thing Black, but move beyond grief and sorrow to a kind of reacquaintance with the world. David Lewis’s On the Plurality of Worlds, a treatise on modal realism (the theory that there are multiple, even infinite universes and worlds) serves as the skeletal structure of the first two sections of the book; but the third section, “Circles in Meditation”, prose poems about vegetable and mineral structures, weather, clouds, cities, natural and imagined forms, reflections on the self and the lost other, this is where the real gems of the collection are found. “Cartwright Gardens: A Meditation” is one of the most exquisite pieces of writing I have encountered in a long time. Not as submersed in the immediate aftermath of the loss, the poems in this collection tend toward a more abstract language and composition and allow a more contemplative distance than those of Some Thing Black, but the two volumes taken together are a remarkable representation of the power and powerlessness of art to sustain a human being through great personal tragedy.

Lyrical

swaying line of leaves

the tops of seven English poplars in the distance

beyond the blue and green space

concede your dissolution.

unlikely that I thought, in June,

when those far tree tops and your bush, peak

of nudity, waved to me under the warm

tongues of windows filling with sun,

how brief those mornings were, and how equivocal.

I knew it, I remember, a beautiful day,

with that beauty of air that says nothing,

puts hours in our hands and vanishes.

how warm the smell of short grass, crushed

and covered

by your legs.

[Jonfaith · Rating 3 out of 5]

why not

against my face, the angel's, the black shadow face itself,

but all the seats are taken, all the worlds

unavailable

Strange cubish stanzas, reminiscent of Crane yet glistening with loss. Mournful shadows rule this roost. Agency leaks a cry when it finds the length of the tether. There is pause when these limits are considered. Cue the pain.

Roubaud utilizes a theoretical point of departure to imagine an innumeracy of worlds, yet finds the imagination insufficient for any transport away from his grief. His own feeling disallows the possibility of abstraction. The face must be scaled.

[Barbara · Rating 3 out of 5]

The death of Roubaud's wife unhinged, unmoored, and alienated him, and he's grappling with his intangible memory of her, the inescapable fact of her death, and his own continued existence in this world. Overall, a moving, if uneven, collection. I would give it somewhere between 3 and 4 stars.