Loss and Presence in Three Poetic Texts of Mourning
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In Truinas, le 21 avril 2001 Philippe Jaccottet recounts the funeral of André du Bouchet, which took place in Truinas on that day.1 He describes the extraordinary non-ceremony; there was no liturgy, only a reading of du Bouchet's poem L'Avril, and informal addresses by friends and writers, including Jaccottet himself.2
I shall discuss Jaccottet's text in conjunction with two others: "Tübingen, le 22 mai 1986," in which du Bouchet responds to the work of Paul Celan, who died in 1970, and Yves Bonnefoy's "L'Étranger de Giacometti," published in 1967 shortly after the death of Alberto Giacometti.3
There are a number of connections between these figures, but the most important are ties of friendship. Jaccottet went to Truinas on the 21st of April 2001 to mourn his friend. Similarly, du Bouchet was a friend of Celan, as well as a translator of his work into French. Bonnefoy was not friends with Giacometti in quite the same way because he was born thirty years later than the artist, but Giacometti is famous for his friendships and associations with writers. Many writers considered they had affinities with him, and several of them collaborated on the journal L'Éphémère, the first issue of which was dedicated to his work. All issues would carry a Giacometti drawing of a standing nude on the front cover. Bonnefoy's text was published in this first number, alongside other tributes that included a piece by du Bouchet, although this is less easily described as a text of loss. Du Bouchet worked with Bonnefoy on the editorial board of L'Éphémère, and Jaccottet contributed occasionally to the journal.4
With friendship, however, came difference. Bonnefoy is writing about an artist who worked in a different medium—plastic art—a medium that is other to language. Du Bouchet is discussing a writer to [End Page 137] whom he felt very close, but who wrote in a foreign language that du Bouchet considered he did not know well. Conversely, Jaccottet and du Bouchet are usually viewed in similar terms, as poets of the natural world and the impersonal poetic subject. It is in Jaccottet's text, moreover, that we note the greatest sense of loss. In those by du Bouchet and Bonnefoy, otherness, or strangeness, paradoxically brings the lost person closer to the writer.
Mourning is discussed in contemporary theoretical works as a realization of absence; the specter of loss haunts texts and shows presence to be an illusion. In this paper, I shall consider how these texts by Bonnefoy and du Bouchet work to nuance that conclusion.
Mourning Presence
Freud's distinction between mourning and melancholia has been questioned in recent work. Freud argues that mourning that is not successfully completed leads to melancholia, in which the subject is unable to detach him-or herself from the person s/he has lost and is therefore caught in a fixed attachment to an absent person.5
Derrida considers whether "successful" mourning is possible or even desirable.6 He refuses discussion of whether someone who was present can be successfully accepted as absent, because he insists that people are never present to one another in the first place. In Mémoires: pour Paul de Man he writes that the other might only fully come to us as other after his or her death, through the experience of mourning.7
The subject of mourning is especially pertinent to Derrida's later work, including his tributes to friends published as The Work of Mourning.8 In their introduction to this volume, the editors stress that, for Derrida, loss was inherent in friendship; friends always know that one of them is bound to lose the other (1). They also discuss his dilemma over whether, and how much, to quote his friends' own words in these addresses. Derrida writes in his piece on Roland Barthes:
Two infidelities, an impossible choice: on the one hand, not to say anything that comes back to oneself, to one's own voice, to remain silent, or at the very least to let oneself be accompanied...
