Joe Bousquet, On the threshold of the unsayable. Reading journal
Jean Paulhan Joë Bousquet Paul Éluard Paul Valéry Pierre-Jean Jouve Louis Aragon Henri Michaux Antonin Artaud
Fabula, Marc Escola, 20 novembre 2024
Texts collected and presented by Claude Le Manchec
Like late Proust enclosed in his cork-lined room, Joe Bousquet (1897-1950) is an emblematic figure of the writer. Deprived of the use of his lower limbs and bedridden from age 21, his entire life passed through writing and reading.
On May 27, 1918, at age 21, Joe Bousquet was struck in the spine by a German bullet. He lost the use of the entire lower half of his body. What to do with such a life? He first thought of suicide, before understanding that his task was to "build the universe around him" and that this life was "the most precious, the deepest, probably the only one that is real."
From 1925 to 1950, all the major works then being written arrived in this room with shuttered windows. "I sometimes envy," Paulhan wrote to him, "your divination and that strange rapidity with which you cross in one stroke what remains opaque to me." Until his death in 1950, Bousquet would be the most lucid witness of the literature of his time. At a moment when some of the greatest works in literary history were flourishing, he perceived better than anyone - thanks to his total availability and extreme sensitivity - their secret lines of force.
But by writing about others, he was also writing his own life: these readings, dispersed across various journals, constitute - when read together year by year - a true "reading journal." In all books, what he seeks is one and the same: "the foreboding of a higher silence, unsayable" (as he writes while reading Daumal).
Recovered in their deep unity, these readings that Bousquet published in journals form both the true year-by-year logbook of this solitary, raw-nerved man and a fascinating panorama of literature in the making - from Aragon to Michaux, from Jouve to Artaud, but also from Milosz to Kafka, from Daumal to Char, from Queneau to Simenon.
In this very original "reading journal," one finds both Bousquet's deepest truth and one of the best panoramas of twentieth-century French literature.