The Autobiographical and the Real in Apollinaire's War Poetry

Author(s): Susan Harrow

Reviewed work(s):
Source: The Modern Language Review, Vol. 97, No. 4 (Oct., 2002), pp. 821-834
Published by: Modern Humanities Research Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3738614 .
Accessed: 15/09/2012 20:11
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Modern Humanities Research Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access
to The Modern Language Review.

http://www.jstor.org

THE
REAL

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL
IN

APOLLINAIRE'S

AND
WAR

THE
POETRY

[. . .] man goes only perpendicularly against

his fate. He was neither formed to know that
other nor compiled of its conspiracy.
(Djuna Barnes, Nightwood)1
The historical dislocation produced by the outbreak of war in 1914 poses a
radical challenge to the ahistoricity assumed in Modernist writing.2 The sense
of a sudden break in the experiential narrative of human lives seeks consolation
in textual narratives which are unbroken, monological, and chronology-bound:
narratives in retreat from experimentalist
values of spatiality, synchronicity,
plurality, and inwardness. The richly textured war poetry of Apollinaire is a
striking example of Modernist writing engaging with history and exploring
its representability.3 In the 'Poemes de la guerre' of Calligrammes (1918) the
pressure to account for the historical, to reconstruct the realities of soldierly
project which situates the
experience, is confronted in an autobiographical
fiction ofthe writing/written self in the nexus of history viewed, not as objective,
transparent, and absolute, but as subjective and provisional.4
a consistently strong identity
Classic autobiographical
writing presupposes
between the extratextual writer and the writing/written self. This identity equation surfaces in instances of explicit self-signature (the naming of 'Gui', 'Guillaume Apollinaire')
and extends through references to known friends, close
comrades, and distant lovers.5 But identity textualized is identity enacted and
in writing which denaturalizes,
fragments, and spatializes its
problematized
subject. Thus, the poem 'Merveille de la guerre' offers a consciously performative instance in which the writing self ('je') signs the narrative of a third-person
1
(London: Faber and Faber, 1936), paperbackedn (1963), p. 78.
2 The
ahistoricityof Modernism manifestsitselfin the prevalenceof mythicstructures,where
cyclical and achronologicalpatterningprevails over diachronic,linear,and chronologicaldevelopment. Apollinaire's 'La Chanson du mal-aime' (fromthe 1913 collectionAlcools) is a salient
example of mythicalpatterning,presentingcompelling points of comparison with Eliot's The
Wasteland(1922).
1 The editionconsultedhere is
ed. by Marcel Adema and Michel
Apollinaire,CEuvrespoetiques,
Decaudin (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliotheque de la Pleiade, 1965). This volume makes available the
other,(still) criticallyunderexposedsequences of war poetry:Poemesa Lou, Poemesa Madeleine,
and Poemesa la Marraine. Claude Debon's GuillaumeApollinaireapres Alcools', 1, 'Calligrammes'
(Paris: Minard, 'Lettres Modernes', 1981) offersa sensitive and authoritativediscussion that
rangesover the historical,biographical,and textualaspects ofApollinaire'sprincipalcollectionof
war poetry See also Debon's finecriticaledition: Guillaume Apollinaire,Alcools et Calligrammes
(Paris: Imprimerienationale,1991).
4 The materials of autobiographicalwriting,like those of Modernism, are eclectic. The war
poetryof Calligrammes,respondingto both autobiographicaland experimentalurges, combines
document, dream text,art, allegory,the epic, fantasy,irony,pathos, and humour. See Michael
Devices and Desires(Oxford:OxfordUniversityPress, 1993),
Sheringham,FrenchAutobiography:
on hybridityas a generic,structural,and stylisticfeatureof autobiographicalwriting(pp. 12?14).
5 Apollinaire's mistress'Lou' is inscribed in 'Saillant' and in 'C'est Lou qu'on la nommait'.
Referencesto his fiancee 'Madeleine' (in 'Veille') and to his friend'[Andre] Rouveyre' (in 'La
Petite Auto') furtherhighlightthe strongreferentialbasis of the autobiographicalwar poetry

822

The Autobiographical

and

the Real

self constructed in memory and the imagination.

narrator and narratee is thus fractured:

in Apollinaire
The

illusory

'oneness'

of

Je legue a l'avenir l'histoire de Guillaume Apollinaire

Qui fut a la guerre et sut etre partout
(OP, p. 272)
This transparent affirmation of a self-life-writing project raises key issues in
current autobiography theory: it affirms the process of turning the collective
narrative (histoire) into a personal fiction ('l'histoire de Guillaume Apollinaire');
it alludes to (succumbs to?) the irresistibility of self-fetishization. Crucially, the
disjunction between narrating subject ('je') and narrated self ('lui, Guillaume
reminds us that, in autobiographical
Apollinaire')
writing, as in Modernism,
identity focuses not on the holistic, autonomous, stable subject of humanistic
interpretation, but on a self constituted in language, a self 'in process', at
once shaped by and straining against material, historical, cultural, linguistic,
and narrative containments. As 'Merveille de la guerre' makes explicit, the
narrator works to constitute a mythical and timeless identity. This struggle has a
biographical source in the onomastic fluctuations between 'Wilhelm Apollinaris
de Kostrowitzky' (the poet's civil identity; he is always known as 'Wilhelm' by
his mother and brother) and 'Guillaume Apollinaire' (the pseudonym he chose
in 1899 as he embarked on his writing career). Let us look more closely now
at the 'birth' of the self in the autobiographical
war
project of Apollinaire's
poetry.
The mobilization
of Tintrepide
bleusaille'
('A Nimes') offers exceptional
conditions for the self coming into being. In the opening poem of the war
poetry of Calligrammes, 'La Petite Auto', the soldier-narrator aligns his personal
with a surge in the collective
anticipation of war (on the eve of mobilization)
consciousness, with the admixture of euphoria and dread that floods perceptions
of social and political upheaval.6 Here, a fiction of origins, intertwining personal
and collective fates, unfolds through apocalyptic visions of the unknowability
of war, its extreme otherness. Unnatural stirrings across the human, animal,
and mythical worlds shudder into visions of cataclysm and dystopia.7 But the
same traumatic awakenings and quickening life forms break through scenarios
of subjugation to intimate a new era of epic human potential:
Nous dimes adieu a toute une epoque
Des geants furieux se dressaient sur l'Europe
Les aigles quittaient leur aire attendant le soleil
Les poissons voraces montaient des abimes
Les peuples accouraient pour se connaitre a fond
Les morts tremblaient de peur dans leurs sombres demeures
Les chiens aboyaient vers la-bas ou etaient les frontieres
Je m'en allais portant en moi toutes ces armees qui se battaient
Je les sentais monter en moi et s'etaler les contrees ou elles serpentaient

6 The collection
Calligrammesis subtitledPoemesde la paix et de la guerre.The firstsixteen
poems constitutethe 'Ondes' series and are, withthe exceptionof 'Les Collines', productsofthe
intenselyexperimentalistpre-warphase (1912-1914).
7 Visions of monstrous
liquefactionand scenarios of self-dissolutionand drowningreturnin
powerfulevocationsof theprecariousnessofthe dug-outand the barelynegotiablesea of mud that
is the battlefield('Dans l'abri-caverne','Ocean de terre').

SUSAN

HARROW

823

Oceans profonds ou remuaient les monstres

Dans les vieilles carcasses naufragees
Hauteurs inimaginables ou 1'homme combat
Plus haut que l'aigle ne plane
L'homme y combat contre 1'homme
Et descend tout a coup comme une etoile filante
Je sentais en moi des etres neufs pleins de dexterite
Batir et aussi agencer un univers nouveau
(OPy pp. 207-08)
vision of multiplied powers subsides and the mythic
Unanimist-inspired
'je' is displaced by the discourse of an ordinary human subject whose destiny
will be shaped by the forces of history:
The

Nous arrivames a Paris

Au moment ou l'on affichaitla mobilisation
Nous comprimes mon camarade et moi
Que la petite auto nous avait conduits dans une epoque Nouvelle
Et bien qu'etant deja tous deux des hommes murs
Nous venions cependant de naitre
(OP, p. 208)
opening text of the war poetry engages directly with the coming-intobeing of the self and illuminates the crucial relationship of individual to collectivity in radically altered ideological and material conditions. Their impact is
registered in the destabilizing play of competing styles. The discursive shifting between personal and collective narratives, between mythic agents and a
human subject, has implications for what Michael Levenson, with reference
Modernist writing, has called the Tate of individuality'.8
to Anglo-American
Here, subjective fate is viewed, retrospectively, as determined by the percepand by the experience of the historical
tion of time as radically discontinuous
moment as life-engendering ('bien qu'etant deja tous deux des hommes murs |
Nous venions cependant de naitre').
The oneirico-mythical vision of mobilization as a traumatic and energizing
moment of self-birthing is the inaugural moment of the autobiographical
project which concludes, some fifty-seven poems later, with the testamentary text
'La Jolie Rousse' ('Ayant vu la guerre dans l'Artillerie et lTnfanterie | Blesse
a la tete trepane sous le chloroforme | Ayant perdu ses amis dans l'effroyable
lutte | Je sais d'ancien et de nouveau autant qu'un homme seul pourrait des
deux savoir'). The fixing of the narrator's symbolic rebirth and his anticipation
of his own death as the liminal points of the self-writing project invite us to
reconstruct the intervening texts as a poetic narrative lived in and through war
in which subjectivity is shaped by and actively shapes the representation of
history: put simply, I am in history and history is in me.9
This

8 Michael
Levenson, Modernismand theFate ofIndividuality(Cambridge: Cambridge Univer?
sityPress, 1991).
9 Paul JohnEakin, Touchingthe World:Referencein Autobiography
(Princeton,NJ: Princeton
UniversityPress, 1992), explores the fraughtinterrelationof public and privatein autobiography
in termsof 'the tensionbetween the intractable,broken realityof twentieth-century
historyand
the irrepressibledriveof the poet's imagination'(p. 175).

824

The Autobiographical

and

the Real

in Apollinaire

The broadly chronological ordering of the war poetry in terms of the successive phases of the soldier-narrator's real-time experience responds to the need
to impose diachronic structure on the unordered flow of experience, to map that
experience developmentally as a 'history of self from initiation and the raising
ofthe standard in 'Etendards', through participation in artillery action and the
vicissitudes of soldierly experience in 'Case d'armons', to increasing interiorization, fantasizing, and dream work, processes that coincide with Apollinaire's
transfer from artillery duty to front-line infantry service in November 1915.
These processes are marked by the overtly poetic titles of the later sections:
'Lueurs des tirs', 'Obus couleur de lune', 'La Tete etoilee'.
war poetry raises compelling questions about the relationship
Apollinaire's
of the writing/written self to history, and, by extension, to the real, the signs
(hard objects, language, culture, contingency, individuality, ideology) by which
that self comes into being. Referential grounding is key to the authentication of
writing, a function assumed here by the initiated soldier-poet
autobiographical
the
roles of participant, ethnographer, and memorialist of war,
who, combining
authority over the uninitiated reader. Indeed, it does not
enjoys epistemological
detract from the referential intention that, occasionally, the soldier-poet may
misremember or misrepresent the actual or the factual, for the test lies not in
his aptitude for local or technical accuracy, but in his power to communicate
a sense of the real and create the aura of authenticity.10 This aura or sense
war poetry as a kind of 'thickening' of
of the real translates in Apollinaire's
the textual world.11 This thickening involves importing and re-presenting the
form in
extratextual, and emerges most strikingly in pictorial (calligrammatic)
the postal franking marks and the handwritten message reproduced in 'Carte
postale' (Figure 1).
The textualizing of sensory experience, lived and remembered fragmentally
and sporadically, seems to demand the random texturing of writing that only a
conspicuously eruptive use ofthe calligramme can produce. Thus, in 'Du coton
dans les oreilles' the graphic eruption of (mainly) auditory signals is an attempt
to 'materialize' experience in writing that simulates the shuddering impact of
exploding shells, the instantaneous burst of sound and light, and the ghostly
diminuendo ofthe loudhailer (Figure 2). These visible or visualized instances of
textual thickening consolidate the more generalized experimentalist techniques
10 Commentatorson the war
poetryof Calligrammeshave identifledvarious instancesof error
and misrepresentation
in thetechnicalvocabularydeployedbyApollinaire.See e.g. Claude Debon,
Apollinaireapres Alcools', and Apollinaire,Calligrammes:Poemsof Peace and War (igij-igi6),
trans.by Anne Hyde Greet,withcommentaryby Anne Hyde Greet and Ian Lockerbie (Berkeley:
Universityof CaliforniaPress, 1978; rev.edn 1980, paperback edn 1991). Althoughthe soldiernarratorseems not ahvays to have full possession of the lexicon of soldierlyactivity,this rarely
disruptsthe aura of authenticityforthe readeruninitiatedin the specificitiesof trenchwar.
11 The
metaphorof thickeningis appropriateto the materialembeddingof 'real signs'?postal
frankingmarks,signatures,and graffiti?inthe ideogrammaticpoems. This is a variation on
the normativeconstructionof the textual/extratextual
relationshipin termsof permeabilityand
transparency:see Philippe Hamon's essay 'Un discours contraint',in Litteratureet realite,ed. by
R. Barthesetal. (Paris: Seuil, 1982), pp. 119-81 (p. 150). Andre Bretonexpresseshistransparency
ideal, in Nadja (1928), in termsof textual/extratextual
'stepping' and vitreouspenetrability:'Je
persiste[. . .] a ne m'interesserqu'aux livresqu'on laisse battantscomme des portes,et desquels
on n'a pas a chercherla clef.[. . .] Pour moi, je continueraia habiterma maison de verre[. . .] ou
je repose la nuit sur un lit de verreaux draps de verre'(Paris: Gallimard, 1964, pp. 18-19).

SUSAN

HARROW

825

t^W*CORneSPONOAKCE

LUL

on

its

aura

Fig. 1. Apollinaire, Calligrammes (Greet and Lockerbie, paperback edn), p. 154

which fracture the structures of memory, desire, and language across the warpoetry texts. What interests me at this point is to look, inside the discontinuous
structures ofthe war poetry, at the 'surfacing' ofthe real and its subject ivization
in discrete linguistic and lexical instances.
The relation of the writing/written self to the world of war is materialized
in multiple references to military structures and functions, to ranks and hi-

826

The Autobiographical
Tant

cTexplosifs

sur

and
le

the Real

in Apollinaire

point
YIF!

Ecris

EGAPhoNi
OM
Fig. 2. Apollinaire, Calligrammes (Greet and Lockerbie, paperback edn), p. 288
erarchies, to the sectorization of space, to equipment, accommodation,
food,
pastimes, camaraderie, and the soldierly sociolect (songs, puns, jokes).12 These
references are the building-blocks out of which the narrator?and
the reader?
will construct the illusion of an ordered world where men have their roles, places
their strategic value, and objects their functions. Let us stay for the moment
with objects. An extensive, entirely predictable inventory of weapons and munitions can be reconstructed from isolated references to 'obus', 'fusants', 'mar12 The referential
pact as a crucial componentof autobiographicalwriting,coextensivewith
the autobiographicalpact, has been probed by Philippe Lejeune in his pioneeringstudyLe Pacte
(Paris: Seuil, 1975), pp. 36-37. The histoire(in both senses) of the self-writing
autobiographique
subject is imbricatedin the verifiableand historicallyspecific.In the war poetryof Calligrammes,
the relationshipofthe soldierlyselfto the materialityofwar takesthe formof representedobjects,
sensations,events,memories,and discourse,which constructthe referentialpact in termsof the
and partial,provisionalreconstitution.
subjectivecriteriaof selection,relativity,

SUSAN

HARROW

827

mites', 'grenades', 'mitrailleuses',

'pieces contre avions', 'revolver', 'canons',
'gaz asphyxiant', 'fils de fer'. The writing focuses not so much on the actual
deployment of munitions (the weapons themselves are only partially described
but rather on the cultural and linguistic processes
and rarely contextualized)
of differentiating and discriminating between the components of the military
arsenal. The obsessive naming of parts is a lexical diversion from the unrepresentability of the abstract truth of war and an intimation of the intractable
resistance of front-line experience to representation.13 The effect of this is to
and readerly focus from the large-scale, technologidisplace autobiographical
cally complex, to the unofBcial, personal 'inventory' of a soldier's life (kit-bags,
photographs, button-cases, rings, letters, newspapers, writing paper, pipes, tobacco, wine). It is here in these accessory objects and subsidiary substances
that the relation of the soldierly self to the real is most visibly imprinted.
The narratorial fixation with the small-scale, the trivial, and unspectacular
details speaks of the need to interiorize experience, to invest material things
with private meaning: there is the finely engraved ring he makes out of shrapnel as a love-token for Lou and the 'Petit sifHet a deux trous' that afFords endless
enjoyment, both objects recovered in 'Oracles'. Glimpses of ordinary existence
reveal in this way a strong sense of the pleasure to be found in the most prosaic objects: 'la trousse a boutons' in 'Echelon' with its comforting ethos of
repair and restoration. The shared, comradely enjoyment of treats like 'tacot',
'pinard', 'gros\ which figure repeatedly in the poems, expresses the same longand substances?which
the self can possess, relish, and
ing for things?objects
transform.
This willing immersion in small things implies a contraction of the soldier's world as human experience is naturalized or domesticated; this produces
and to de?
references to 'Des allumettes qui ne prenaient pas' in 'Mutation'
tails of mealtimes in *A Nimes'. The process of naturalizing and morsellizing
experience finds its discursive analogue in the anecdotes, puns, snatches of conversation, and songs which surface throughout the texts. It may be tempting to
construct this withdrawal into minutiae as a retreat from the world and from
history, a diversion from the public, wholesale horror of war. But that would be
to lose sight of the autobiographical
purpose. In the context of a self-writing
the
shift
from
the
narrative
of history to micro-history (that of
great
project,
individual experience) is a means of resisting the pressure to abdicate the per?
sonal and subjective in favour of a collectively inflected ethics of war.14 At the
same time, the sustained poetic focus on the material and the everyday presents
an implicit counter to the bombast and the abstractions purveyed in the patriotic poetry and journalism ofthe time ('ces milliers de blessures ne font qu'un
article de journaP, the soldier-poet reflects ironically in 'Ombre').
The proliferation of small objects in the war poems speaks urgently of a
13 On the unrepresentability
of war see Philippe Dagen, Le Silence despeintres:Les Artistesface
d la guerre(Paris: Fayard, 1996).
14 Microhistoryis definedbyAntoineCompagnon in 'Biography,Prosopography,Microhistory'
(New Comparison,25 (Spring 1998), 71-82) as the post-Annales'historyof minutiae[. . .] symptomatic of the state of a discipline aftertheory,that is afteryears of taboo against subjectivity'
(P. 76).

828

The Autobiographical

and

the Real

in Apollinaire

need to imprint the world with private desire and longing, to alter its surface.
Material signs reveal the struggle of the soldierly self to affirm individuality
under conditions of extreme pressure.15 Objects may be already present (possessed and cherished by the soldier-self); objects may be created (the postcard
is written, the slogan is framed and hung, graffiti are produced on a blank wall);
objects may be transformed into other objects (aluminium is turned into rings
and whistles). Materials are shaped, carried, contemplated,
consumed, preserved by the self who, in turn, seeks in the 'friendly' object a reflection of his
own passage through the world; it is the empathy between human subject and
the material world that comes through in Apollinaire's
war poetry. Through
reveals
the
and
the
of
self in the world and
things, poetry
presence
performance
the
in
world.
The
circulation
of
the
textual
upon
things
economy reflects thus
a therapeutic commodification of war where the recycling and transformation
of materials is an analogue to writerly activity and speaks of the same desire
to compensate for the unknowability of war. By salvaging familiar fragments,
the soldier-self can begin to assuage feelings of powerlessness.
Recreation is
properly re-creative, leading not only to new objects but to a reaffirmed sense
of individuality.
As autobiographical
war poetry re-enacts the coming-into-being
of the self
through material things, 'hard' objects and sensations, it recovers?salvages?
the discursive and linguistic components of everyday soldierly experience. I
want now to consider the role of language?personal
discourse and the warrior sociolect?in
constructing the real. The linguistic flotsam of comradely
and memory, resurfaces in fractured,
exchange, filtered through consciousness
eclectic
of raw, unmediated contact with
the
illusion
forms,
strikingly
creating
the real:
snippets of song (in the refrain As-tu connu Guy au galop' in 'Les Saisons');
fragments of conversation or personal correspondence ('N'est-ce
pas rigolo' in
'On ne peut rien dire | Rien de ce qui se passe | Mais on change
'Echelon';
de secteur' in '14 Juin 1915'; 'On est bien plus serre que dans les autobus' in
'Les Saisons'; 'Et vous savez pourquoi' in 'Loin du pigeonnier');
pleas,prayers, cries of distress (Triez pour moi Bon Dieu je suis le pauvre Pierre'
in 'Chant de l'horizon en Champagne');
nicknames ('Guy [. . .] l'artiflot' in Les Saisons), code-names (Allo la truie' in
'Du coton dans les oreilles');
robust rallying-cries (reproduced in slogan form in 'Saillant' ('vive le capiston')
and in graffiti transcription in '1915' ('Soldats de Faience et d'Escarboucle,
O Amour');
allure
nom de dieu'
energetic oaths and insults ('sacre nom de dieu, quelle
in
the
form
of
a
boot
in
canonnier
'2eme
reproduced
spurred
conducteur');
official instructions, technical descriptions, commands and orders (Allongez le tir'
in 'Fusee',
'rameau central de combat', 'des bruits entendus' in 'Guerre',
'Halte la I Qui vive [. . .1 Avance au ralliement' in 'Venu de Dieuze\
Aux
15 The soldier-subjectcannot
change the world but he can indent and shape its surfaee by
fashioningsmall objects fromthe detritusof war. On imprintingthe world see Elaine Scarry,
ResistingRepresentation(Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1994), especially ch. 2, Tarticipial
Acts: Working?Work and the Body in Hardy and Other Nineteenth-Century
Novelists'.

SUSAN

HARROW

829

creneaux Aux creneaux Laissez la les pioches' in 'La Nuit d'avril 1915' and
'Pour lutter contre les vapeurs | les lunettes pour proteger les yeux | au moyen
d'un masque nocivite gaz | un tissu trempe mouchoir des nez' in 'SP');
sounds and onomatopoeia ('Pan pan perruque' in 'SP'; 'Pif', the sound of a shell
exploding, in 'Saillant');
superstitions ('Le riz a brule dans la marmite de campement | ?a signifie qu'il
faut prendre garde a bien des choses' in 'Fusee').
and Modernist imperatives coincide, visibly, in the recyAutobiographical
cling of the language and the sounds of war. The process of shoring up the
demand for
text with fragments ofthe discursive real satisfies autobiography's
referential grounding while the papier colle technique integral to that process
stresses the materiality of language, lending contour and density to the repre?
sentation ofthe real. The Modernist autobiographical
project encompasses and,
at the same time, radically exceeds the representational, for it exposes, actively,
in the context and
the role of language in forming the individual consciousness
culture of war. The comradely sociolect shapes the notions of power, courage,
ruse, division, nationalism from which the soldier-self configures his image
within the group.
The participatory ethos of war comes through in 'A l'ltalie', where the use
ofthe colloquial register, punctuated by the repeated, cohesive 'nous', focuses
the seemingly untroubled, even euphoric, identification of the individual with
the homosocial group. The survivalist acumen of the group is sustained by the
heroic ideal and the collective enjoyment of material pleasures:
Nous avons le sourire nous devinons ce qu'on ne nous dit pas nous sommes demerdards
et meme ceux qui se degonflent sauraient a Toccasion faire preuve de l'esprit de sacrifice
qu'on appelle bravoure
Et nous fumons du gros avec volupte
(OP, p. 276)
The language of the soldierly 'nous' unwraps its ideological content, revealing
the encoding of predictable responses of hubris and hostility towards the enemy,
and foregrounding the role of camaraderie in mobilizing concepts of courage
and national pride. The participatory discourse reveals a sharpened perception
of the pure difference represented by the enemy, the other, which is conveyed
in the robust threat 'on les aura' in 'Carte postale'. The language of soldierly
interaction constructs an unnegotiable, dualistic world-view, and exposes in the
process the limited range of ideological positions available as the self confronts
and implicitly critiques the structures of the collective real.
The inevitable ideological requisitioning of individuality comes into sharpest
focus in overtly masculinist representations of Woman; war's eternal absentee
is repeatedly objectified in the soldierly culture which Apollinaire's poetic nar?
rative uncovers and reproduces. The urgency of compensating for the inaccessibility of women is assuaged in idealizations of the feminine which sustain the
collective values of men at war. Woman figures, commodified, among the spoils
of war, an object to be prized and possessed in the utopian vision of post-war
colonization and hubristic world conquest unfolding in 'Guerre':

830

The Autobiographical

and

the Real

in Apollinaire

Ne pleurez donc pas sur les horreurs de la guerre

Avant elle nous n'avions que la surface
De la terre et des mers
Apres elle nous aurons les abimes
Le sous-sol et l'espace aviatique
Maitres du timon
Apres apres
Nous prendrons toutes les joies
Des vainqueurs qui se delassent
Femmes Jeux Usines Commerce
Industrie Agriculture Metal
Feu Cristal Vitesse
{OPy p. 228)
Woman is here linked to a futurist, imperialistic vision of modernity that affirms the collective purpose and destiny of the warring male. But, the value of
idealized femininity is not exclusively prospective, nor is it so (apparently) unproblematically amrmative. 'La femme' is conflated with 'la patrie' in allegorical
representations of France, where a heroicized and eroticized representation of
sacrifice fills the void left by the unrepresentability of death (in 'De la Batterie
de tir'):
Nous sommes ton collier France
Riviere d'hommes forts et d'obus dont l'orient chatoie
Diamants qui eclosent la nuit
O Roses 6 France
Nous nous pamons de volupte
A ton cou penche vers TEst
(OPy p. 232)
If sacrifice and dying are eroticized, the traffic goes in the other direction too,
where the erotic is identified with fatal seduction. In 'Chant de l'honneur' the
fantasized union turns into a death-giving lure:
la tranchee
O jeunes gens je m'offre a vous comme une epouse
Mon amour est puissant j'aime jusqu'a la mort
Tapie au fond du sol je vous guette jalouse
Et mon corps n'est qu'un long baiser qui mord
(OP, p. 305)
Allegories of femininity, whether identified with national integrity or with pervasive perversity, compete with representations of women grounded in the real
and the everyday. Cutting across such radical shifts in register and stylistic
mode, the masculinist discourse of the comrades revisits constantly the interrelation of sex and death and this informs gossip, cliche, and everyday fable, as
much as it does mythical and allegorical visions. Woman perceived as too close,
too physical, too fleshly, risks debilitating the soldierly body. Thus, 'la putain de
and moral?of
the male collectivity
Nancy' threatens the integrity?physical
in the calligrammatic represen?
by her sexual proximity and is 'denounced'
tation of the rifle in '2eme canonnier conducteur'
(Figure 3). The prostitute
joins the ranks of the bogey 'Boches', held at a therapeutic distance through

SUSAN

HARROW

83 I

storytelling, humour, oaths, and jokes. Delight in puns and polysemous play
reveals sexual abstinence as inevitable or desirable as in the ironic, homophonic
conflation of the concepts of monastic chastity and military continence, 'Les
Cenobites tranquilles', in 'Du coton dans les oreilles'. Woman threatening, or
herself threatened in some way, raises the spectre ofthe uncontainable, that will
disrupt soldierly activity and destabilize idealized, consolatory representations
of femininity: Lou in 'C'est Lou qu'on la nommait' is the dangerous, vulpine
figure threatening the warrior (the military adventure demands Tceil chaste',
not an eroticized gaze); the sick wife back home evoked in 'A Nimes' represents
emotional distraction from military objectives ('Le territorial se mange une
salade | A l'anchois en parlant de sa femme malade').

ASTU CON
*&$*

t ARTItlERlE
A FOUTU LA VXXXXX A TOUTE

Fig. 3. Apollinaire, Calligrammes (Greet and Lockerbie, paperback edn), p. 124

Whether outwardly meliorative (in the 'ennobling' instances of allegory) or
depreciative, the soldiers' discourse on Woman is made to bolster normative
representations of military masculinity. The discourse of feminine objectification in turn anticipates and legitimates a solipsistic concern with masculine
potential and performance, as evidenced in 'Desir' in the repeated conflation of
desire and soldierly violence:
Mon desir est la region qui est devant moi
Derriere les lignes boches
Mon desir est aussi derriere moi
Apres la zone des armees
Mon desir c'est la butte du Mesnil
Mon desir est la sur quoi je tire
(OP, p. 263)
A Nimes' allegorizes the displacement of erotic energy from the private sphere
to the war zone, where exploding shells perform the relentless thrust of soldierly
dit Reste ici Mais la-bas les obus | Epousent ardemment et
ardour ('L'Amour
sans cesse les buts'). At times the relation between military violence and priapic
desire exceeds the confines of analogy. Thus, in 'Fusees' the entire soldierly ad?
venture is staged as an erotics of combat where canons are 'Virilites du siecle
ou nous sommes'. Here, Woman is 'captured' metonymically in a series of corporeal instances overwritten by the signifiers of war ('Tes seins sont les seuls
The erotics of combat reveals a scopophilic dynamic which
obus que j'aime').
works to afhrm the masculine (visual) prerogative in a situation of diminished
of anxiety where the
individual authority. This brings about a displacement
gaze projects, onto the feminine and fractured, fears about the dislocation of
the male body. The process of conjuring up an imaginary feminine body-object
promises sublimated pleasure and fictive power at the point where masculine

832

The Autobiographical

and

the Real

in Apollinaire

physical agency is under greatest pressure. As the gaze approaches, seizes, then
veers away from the represented feminine body, this process of deferral and
displacement mimes the 'highs and lows' of desire as the gaze moves fetishistically among a series of discrete part-objects (breasts, hips). By fragilizing and
fracturing its object, this atomistic viewing practice ensures that the feminine
other, denied any corporeal integrity, can never impede the viewing subject's
project of self-affirmation. Any sense of a living woman evaporates into the
mute other against whom representational violence is
symbolic Woman?the
turned with the double purpose of shoring up male homosocial identity and of
blocking yearnings after a more profound self-scrutiny.16
If these discrete instances appear to support the ideological frames of war, or
at least not explicitly to dissent from those frames, one can point to numerous
other instances where the autobiographical
project runs against the ideological
grain, where the self resists the real as constructed by the prevailing military
culture. I want now to trace the lines of that resistance in writerly and phantasmatic desire, that is, in the forms of desire that surge against male homosocial
containments. Desire, unfulfilled in the real of soldierly experience, may find
consolation in actual or sublimated self-pleasuring ('Je flatte de la main le petit
canon gris | Gris comme l'eau de Seine et je songe a Paris': 'A Nimes'). More
often, however, it is to forms of mental self-pleasuring?dreaming,
fantasizing,
the soldier-self turns to assuage frustration and anxiety. 'Dans
imagining?that
l'abri-caverne'
narrates the experience of an inner void filling with apprehenand
the
sion,
contrastively therapeutic activity of the imagination:
Moi j'ai ce soir une ame qui s'est creusee qui est vide
On dirait qu'on y tombe sans cesse et sans trouver de fond
Et qu'il n'y a rien pour se raccrocher
Ce qui y tombe et qui y vit c'est une sorte d'etres laids qui me font mal et qui viennent
de je ne sais ou
[???]
Dans ce grand vide de mon ame il manque un soleil il manque ce qui eclaire
[...]
Les autres jours je me rattache a toi
Les autres jours je me console de la solitude et de toutes les horreurs
En imaginant ta beaute
(OPy p. 259)
Anxiety demands
comes an enabling
of his own within
In the unresolved

to be compensated, alleviated, even transformed. Thus, it be?

force, empowering the soldierly subject to create narratives
the lived and thought space of the male homosocial world.
structures of the war poems, individuality?subjective
and

16 The
ofthefeminineotheris mirroredin thefracturedtextualityof
fragmentary
representation
thewar poetryof Calligrammes.It is temptingto read thisspecularidentitybetweensubstanceand
formas betokeninga deeper complicitybetweenmasculinist(ideological) and Modernist(writerly)
preoccupations.Indeed, such a readingwould not be at odds with the perceived silencingof the
femininevoice in mainstreamModernismand thedefiningtendencyofliteraryexperimentalismto
promotesurfaceoversubject. However,ifModernisttextualpracticesappear to repeatmasculinist
ways of seeing, the same practicesactivelyexpose the morsellizationof the otheras part of the
broader strategyof self-affirmation
which Apollinaire's autobiographicalwritingproblematizes
and whose veryfluctuations(structural,stylistic,semantic)block everyattemptof the subject or
the readerto fastenonto?far less to endorse?any singleinterpretative
position.

SUSAN

HARROW

833

itself through dream work that has its origin in the ma?
creative?regenerates
terial world in rarefied sensory experience. The short text 'Fumees' traces the
filtering of the exterior world, the destructuring of physical sensation, and the
escape into the private space of desire:
Et tandis que la guerre
Ensanglante la terre
Je hausse les odeurs
Pres des couleurs-saveurs
Et je fu
m

e
du
ta
bac
zeoNE

Des fleurs a ras du sol regardent par bouffees

Les boucles des odeurs par tes mains decoiffees
Mais je connais aussi les grottes parfumees
Ou gravite l'azur unique des fumees
Ou plus doux que la nuit et plus pur que le jour
Tu t'etends comme un dieu fatigue par l'amour
Tu fascines les flammes
Elles rampent a tes pieds
Ces nonchalantes femmes
Tes feuilles de papier
(OP,p.2io)
As swirls of smoke and licking flame trace patterns of desire, the real of collective
experience dissolves into the symbolic of individual phantasmatic creation in
the form of dream fragments and dream narratives. The same process is at work
in 'Les Feux du bivouac', here linked to an exclusively visual experience:
Les feux mouvants du bivouac
Eclairent des formes de reve
Et le songe dans l'entrelacs
Des branches lentement s'eleve
(OP, p. 250)
Like the metal which is recycled into the love-token ring, the personal symbolic
is material too (albeit of a dematerialized kind) for the self-writerly consciousness as it works to generate new texts of desire. In 'L'Inscription
anglaise'
the soldier-self conjures up the memory of his beloved 'apparition' in terms
which imply the potential for semiotic production in the interior space of longing. Desire is inextricable from language and writing, it informs structure and
substance, flooding signified and signifier:
Sur un petit bois de la Champagne [. . .] un soldat s'efforce
Devant le feu d'un bivouac d'evoquer cette apparition
A travers la fumee d'ecorce de bouleau
[? ?].
Tandis que les volutes bleuatres qui montent
D'un cigare ecrivent le plus tendre des noms

834

The Autobiographical

and

the Real

in Apollinaire

Mais les noeuds de couleuvres en se denouant

Ecrivent aussi le nom emouvant
Dont chaque lettre se love en belle anglaise
Et le soldat n'ose point achever
Le jeu de mots bilingue que ne manque point de susciter
Cette calligraphie sylvestre et vernale
(OP, p. 258)
If so many of the war poems evoke the desirability of inwardness, and construct
memory and the imagination as sites of private resistance to the collective
culture of war, any sense of passive self-recuperation
is displaced by active
of
the
self-world
the
regeneration
relationship through
production of texts of
desire.
By generating fictions of desire, the soldierly subject narrates his struggle to
transform, or at least alleviate, a situation of extreme disenchantment and alienation. Antony Cascardi's observations on the relation ofthe fictional subject-inthe-world to 'other texts' are pertinent for our understanding of the creativity
of the narrating self in Apollinaire's war poetry. Semiotic production, however
private and inwardly focused, is no less a means of working on the world:
while in principle rejecting the claims of art to serve as a vehicle for the transmission
of values or the legitimation of truth, the subject continues to look in art for the authentication of an experience that has otherwise been degraded, divided or rendered
corrupt. Hence the notion that art may serve to 'compensate' for the disenchantment of
the world.17
Loving and dreaming, desiring and writing are the generous, luminous actions
of a subject impelled to rethink the relation of self to the real, and, by interweaving physical sensation and psychic material, to begin to heal the rift
between exterior and inner worlds. And so, in those very instances of phantasmatic creation where resistance to the actual and the contingent would seem,
on the face of it, to imply an anguished retreat from history and material pressures, the production of fictions of desire provides a means of reconnecting
self and the world?urgently
and expansively. In Apollinaire's
war poetry the
self
less
as
a
construct
than
as
a
autobiographical
emerges
process in writing?
complex, often contradictory, and endlessly fluid. It is a process which engages
sometimes affirmatively, sometimes more critically, with 'culturally sanctioned
models of identity',18 but it is also a process which more actively resists and
seeks other forms of self-production in private fantasy. The disrupted, endlessly
open structures of Modernist writing take forward this process of self-situating,
registering the play of self-writerly desire in ways which are typically autobio?
graphical,
University

typically Apollinaire.

of Wales Swansea
Susan Harrow
17 Antony J. Cascardi, The
Subject of Modernity(Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress,
1992), p. 73 (on Don Quixote).
18
Eakin, TouchingtheWorld,p. 103.