Jules Supervielle (1884-1960)

JULES SUPERVIELLE (1884–1960)

NOLINI KANTA GUPTA
Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry

Jules Supervielle is a French poet and a modern French poet. He belongs to this century and died only a few years ago. Although he wrote in French, he came of a Spanish family being born in a Spanish colony of South America (Montivideo). He came to France early in life and was educated there. He lived in France but maintained his relation with his mother-country.

His poetry is very characteristic and adds almost a new vein to the spirit and manner of French poetry. He has by-passed the rational and emotional tradition of his adopted country, brought in a mystic way of vision characteristic of the East. This mysticism is not however the normal spiritual way but a kind of oblique sight into what is hidden behind the appearance. By the oblique way, I mean, a sideway to enter into the secret of things, a lateral passage opening tangentially as it were. The mystic vision has different ways ofapproach–one may look at the thing straight, face to face, being level with it in a penetrating gaze, piercing a direct entry into the secrets behind. This frontal gaze is also the normal human way of knowing and understanding, the scientific way. It becomes mystic when it penetrates sufficiently behind and strikes a secret source of another light and sight, that is, the inner sight of the soul. The normal vision which I said is the scientist’s vision, stops short at a certain distance and so does no possess the key to the secret knowledge. But an aspiring vision can stretch itself, drill into the surface obstacles confronting it, and make its contact with the hidden ray behind. There is also another mystic way, not a gaze inward but a gaze upward. The human intelligence and the higher brain consciousness seeks a greater and intenser light, a vaster knowledge and leaps upward as it were. There develops a penetrating gaze towards heights up and above, to such a vision the mystery of the spirit slowly reveals itself. That is Vedantic mysticism. There is a look downward also below the life-formations and one enters into contact with forces and beings and creatures of another type, a portion of which is named Hell or Hades in Europe, and in India, Paathaalaand Rasaathala. But here we are speaking of another way, not a frontal or straight movement, but as I said, splitting the side and entering into it, something like opening the shell of mother of pearl and finding the pearl inside. There is a descriptive mystic: the super-sensuous experience is presented in images and feeling forms. That is the romantic way. There is an explanatory mysticism: the supersensuous is set in intellectual or mental terms, in parables and allegories, making it somewhat clear and meaningful to the normal understanding. That is, I suppose, classical mysticism. All these are more or less direct ways, straight approaches to the mystic reality. But the oblique is different–it is a seeking of the mind and an apprehension of the senses that are allusive, indirect, that move through contraries and negations, that point to a different direction in order just to suggest the objective aimed at. The Vedantic (and the scientific too) is the straight, direct, rectilinear gaze–the Vedantin says: “May I look at the Sun with a transfixed gaze?”–whether he looks upward or inward or downward, the eyes are wide open, winkless, steady. But the modern mystic is of a different mould. He has not that clear absolute vision, he has the apprehension of an aspiring consciousness. It is a gaze askance as it were, yet ardent and wistful. His is not religious poetry for that matter, but it is an aspiration and a yearning to perceive and seize truth and reality that eludes the senses, but seems to be still there. It is the agnostic trying to be a believer. We shall understand better by taking a poem of his as an example. (An English translation follows each original poem in French.)

ALTER EGO

Une souris s’echappe
(Ce n’en etait pas une)
Une femme s’eveille
(Comment le savez-vous?)
Et la porte qui grince
(On l’huila ce matin)
Pres du mur de cloture
(Le mur n’ existe plus)
Ah! Je ne puis rien dire
(Eh bien, vous vous tairez!)
Je ne puis pas bouger
(Vous marchez sur la route)
Ou allons nous ainsi?
(C’est moi qui le demande)
Je suis seul sur la Terre
(Je suis la pres de vous)
Peut-on etre si seul
(Je le suis plus que vious,
Je vois vetre visage
Nul ne m’a jamais vu).

ALTER EGO

A mouse runs out
(It was not there)
A woman wakes
(How do you know?)
And the squeaking door
(It was oiled this morning)
Near the cloister wall
(There is now no wall)
Oh! I can’t say a thing
(Well, now you’ll be quiet!)
I cannot move
(You are walking along the road)
Does all this get us anywhere?
(I’m asking you)
I’m alone on Earth
(I’m here beside you)
Can one be so alone?
(I’m more alone than you,
I can see your face,
No one has ever seen mine.)

It is a colloquy between “I” and the “other-I.” The apparent self sees things that appear so concrete and real but in the other, they vanish and become airy nothings. Still if things have any reality it is there in that other self.

We are reminded of a parallel experience and imagery found in another French poet, the famous romantic Alfred de Musset who speaks of someone accompanying him, shadowing him, pursuing him constantly without respite, sharing his joys and sorrows throughout his life, who looked almost like his own brother, someone unknown yet so close:

Un etranger vetu de noir
Qui me ressemblait comme un frere *

Or again, take this:

LUI SEUL

Si vous touchez sa main c’est bien sans le savoir,
Vous vous le rapplelez mais sous un autre nom,
Au milieu de la nuit au plus fort du sommeil,
Vous dites son vrai nom et Ie faites asseoir.
Un jour on frappe et je devine que c’est lui
Qui s’en vient pres de nous a n’iporte quelle heure
Et vous le, regardez avec un tel oubli
Qu’il s’en retourne au loin mais en laissant derriere
Une porte vivante et pale comme lui.

HE ALONE

If you touch his hand it is quite without knowing,
You remember him, but he had another name.
In the middle of the night, in the depth of sleep,
You speak his real name and ask him to be seated.

One day there comes a knock and I guess it is he
Who comes to be beside us at any time
And you give him such an empty stare
That he turns and goes far away, but leaving behind him
A living door, as pale as he himself.

The reality is so real that it is always there and it is not always altogether intangible, invisible. You touch it often enough but you do not know that it was the reality. You give it another name: perhaps imagination, illusion, hallucination. Yes, at the dead of night when you have forgotten yourself, forgotten the world, nothing exists, youcall out his true name and set him in front–O my soul, O my God!

In the next poem that I quote, the mystery is explained, that is to say, described a little more at length.

SAISIR

Saisir, saisir le soir, la pomme et la statue,
Saisir, l’ombre et le mur et le bout de la rue.

Saisir le pied, le cou de la femme couchee
Et puis ouvrir lei mains. Combien d’oiseaux laches
Combien d’oiseaux perdus qui deviennent la rue,
L‘ombre, le mur, le soir, la pomme et la statue.

Mains, vous vous userez
A ce grave jeu-la
Il faudra vous couper
Un jour vous couper ras.

Grands yeux dans ce visage
Qui vous a places la?
De quel vaisseau sans mats
Etes-vous l’euipage?

Depuis quei abordage
Attendez-vous ainsi
Ouverts toute la nuit?

Feux noirs d’un bastingage
Etonnes mais soumis
A la loi des orages.

Prisonniers des mirages
Quand sonnera minuit
Baissez un peu lei cils
Pour reprendre courage.

Saisir quand tout me quitte,
Et avec quelle mains
Saisir cette pensee,
Et avec quelles mains
Saisir enfin le jour
Par la peau de son cou,
Le tenir remuant

Comme un lieure vivant?
Viens, sommeil, aide-moi,
Tu saisiras pour moi
Ce qae je n’ai pu prendre,
Sommeil aux mains plus grandes.

TO SEIZE

Seize, seize the apple and the statue and the night
Seize the shadow and the wall and the end of the street

Seize the foot, the neck ofthe lady in bed
Then open your hands. How many birds released
How many lost birds that turn into the street,
The shadow, the wall, the apple, the statue, and the night?

Hands, you will wear yourselves out
At this dangerous game.
You will have to be cut
Off, one day, off at the wrist.

Great eyes within this face, who
Placed you there?
Of what vessel with masts of air
Are you the crew?

Who boarded your decks,
That you must ride
The darkness, open wide?

Black flares on the bulwarks,
Astonished, you complied
With the law of storms and wrecks.

Prisoners of a mirage,
When the strokes of midnight settle,
Lower your lids a little
To give yourself courage.

Seize when all else fails me,
And with what hands
May I seize that thought,
And with what hands
Seize, at last, the daylight
By the scruff of the neck,
And hold it wriggling
Like a live hare?
Come, sleep, and help me,
You shall seize for me
What I could not hold,
Sleep, in your larger hands.

These hands do not grasp that thing, these eyes do not see that. Try to capture through the senses that tenuous substance, you find it nowhere. You cannot throttle that reality with your solid fist. Chop off your hands, pluck out your eyes, then perhaps something will stir in that darkness, something that exists not but wields a sovereign power. The eyes that see are not these winkless wide eyes, blank vacant and dry, before which blackness is the only reality. One must have something of the bedewed gentle hesitating human eyes; it is there that the other light condescends to cast its reflection. The poet says, “man with his outward regalia seems to have lost all traces of the Divine in him, what is still left of God in him is just the ‘humidity’ of his soul** –the ‘tears of things’ as a great poet says.

The sense that seizes and captures and makes an object its own is not any robust material sense, but something winged and vast and impalpable like your sleep–the other consciousness.

The poet speaks obliquely but the language he speaks by itself is straight, clear, simple, and limpid. No rhetoric is there, no exaggeration, no effort at effect; the voice is not raised above the normal speech level. That is indeed the new modern poetic style. For according to the new consciousness prose and poetry are not two different orders, the old order created poetry in heaven, the new poetry wants it upon earth; level with earth, the common human speech, the spoken tongues give the supreme intrinsic beauty of poetic cadence. The best poetry embodies the quintessence of prose-rhythm, its pure spontaneous and easy and felicitous movement. In English the hiatus between the poetic speech and prose is considerable, in French it is not so great, still the two were kept separate. In England Eliot  came to demolish the barrier, in France a whole company has come up and very significant among them is this foreigner from Spain who is so obliquely simple and whose Muse has a natural yet haunting magic of divine things:

Elle leve les yeux et la brise s’arrete
Elle baisse les yeux la campagne s’etend.

She lifts her eyes and the breeze is stilled,
She lowers her eyes and the landscape rolls on.

* A stranger robed in black
Who resembled me like a brother.
** God says to man: “L’humidite de votre ame, c’est ce qui vous reste de, moi.”