The autobiographical and the real in Apollinaire's war poetry.(Critical Essay)

Publication: The Modern Language Review

Publication Date: 01-OCT-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 Modern Humanities Research Association

[...] 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 experience, is confronted in an autobiographical project which situates the fiction of the writing/written self in the nexus of history viewed, not as objective, transparent, and absolute, but as subjective and provisional. (4)

Classic autobiographical writing presupposes a consistently strong identity 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 problematized in writing which denaturalizes, fragments, and spatializes its 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 self constructed in memory and the imagination. The illusory 'oneness' of narrator and narratee is thus fractured:

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 arms 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 Apollinaire') reminds us that, in autobiographical 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 project of Apollinaire's war poetry.

The mobilization of 'l'intrepide 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 anticipation of war (on the eve of mobilization) with a surge in the collective 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

[...]

Oceans profonds ou remuaient les monstres

Dans les vieilles carcasses naufragees

Hauteurs inimaginables ou l'homme combat

Plus haut que l'aigle ne plane

L'homme y combat contre l'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

(OP, pp. 207-08)

The Unanimist-inspired vision of multiplied powers subsides and the mythic 'je' is displaced by the discourse of an ordinary human subject whose destiny will be shaped by the forces of history:

Nous arrivames a Paris

Au moment ou l'on affichait la 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)

This opening text of the war poetry engages directly with the coming-into-being 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 to Anglo-American Modernist writing, has called the 'fate of individuality'. (8) Here, subjective fate is viewed, retrospectively, as determined by the perception of time as radically discontinuous and by the experience of the historical moment as life-engendering ('bien qu'etant deja tous deux des hommes murs | Nous venions cependant de naitre').

The oneirico-mythical...

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