Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy

Les chats puissants et doux, orgueil de la maison,

Qui comme eux sont frileux et comme eux sedentaires.^6

Bénabou joins the ¤rst hemistich of each line to the second of another: the
¤rst alexandrine thus selected (#8) is the opening line of Rimbaud’s “Bateau
ivre”: “Comme je descendais des ®euves impassibles.” The second (#107) is
Phèdre’s disclaimer in Racine’s great tragedy: “Ah, que ne suis-je assise à
l’ombre des forêts”; the third (#163) comes from Baudelaire’s own “Corre-
spondances”: “Il est des parfums frais comme des chairs d’enfant”; and the
fourth (#162) from Baudelaire’s “Chanson d’Automne”: “Bientôt nous plon-
gerons dans les froides ténèbres.”
Here, we might argue, is the Schoenbergian “12–tone” fantasy par excel-
lence. For by fusing Baudelaire’s lines with Racine’s or Rimbaud’s, something
very interesting happens. The “new” poem is by no means absurd; it makes
perfectly good sense, for example, to compare soft cat fur to the skin of small
children. The cat lovers in this version are not those who are aging and hence
sensitive to the cold, but those, like the Rimbaud of “Bateau ivre,” who are
lovers of those impassive rivers that will take them far away. But the shadows
of the forests (here Phèdre’s lament comes in) are also threatening—of a
piece with the cold darkness of Baudelaire’s “Autumn Song.” Then, too, the
Oulipo game is an eloquent homage to the French poetic tradition in general
and to Baudelaire in particular, testifying to the continuity of a tradition that
in French letters has never been surpassed. Bénabou and Roubaud allow
us to see that poetry is always intertextual, that even the strongest urge to
“Make It New!” involves familiarity with what came before. Indeed, to take
the hemistichs apart, as we would a musical phrase, is to see how complex
and intricate a form the alexandrine really is. There need be nothing passé
or dated about its use, provided its mathematical variability is honored.
In Oulipo Compendium Harry Mathews gives us some English examples
of Bénabou’s perverses, this time in iambic pentameter, which is to English
what the alexandrine is to French. For example, from Shakespeare’s “They
that have power to hurt and will do one,” and Milton’s “They also serve who
only stand and wait,” Mathews produces the couplet:

They also serve who hurt and will do none

They that have power to only stand and wait

Or he invents a sonnet like “the Maoist’s Regrets,” which begins

Shall I compare thee, China to Peru?

That is no country! Amid the alien corn,

Procedural Poetics of Bök and Bergvall 209