The poet as engineer of truth: Pierre Jean Jouve

Entering into language, according to models of various provenance and vintage, is an entry into the world of disunity, of distance, of distress. Yahweh invented the curse of Babel to punish man’s pride – the bar of mutual incomprehension is the biblical answer to the mad notion of global intelligibility between human subjects. The history of the Bible itself, as a series of translation upon translation, points to the human drive to re-establish this intelligibility via the written text. It represents a myth of wholeness through language. In Lacan, developing Freud in the question of language, the entry of the child into the ordre symbolique initiates the demise of a subjective personal unity and with it the intelligibility to the subject of the ‘self’. Language in these and other versions is a necessary, tragic alienation for those who would live socially. As lived experience this alienation has classically been expressed as a descent from some, other, Reality: Le poète est semblable au prince des nuées Qui hante la tempête et se rit de l’archer; Exilé sur le sol au milieu des huées, Ses ailes de géant l’empêchent de marcher. (L’Albatros)