The North Face of Nicolas Pesquès
Claire Moran talks to Ian Maclachlan, winner of this year's Modern Language Review article prize.
CM. Ian, the whole jury was very impressed by your winning article and the way it navigates the idea of human and non-human relations in Pesquès’s poetic text. Why did you choose this text and this approach?
IM. I was grateful to the editors of the Modern Language Review to begin with, for taking an article where I felt I was heading into territory that was pretty unfamiliar to me; so I’m even more gratified and taken aback by the jury’s kind response to what I’ve written. As far as I recall, the name of Nicolas Pesquès first came up for me in passing, during a conversation with my colleague Emily McLaughlin, who has done such terrific work recently on the poetic journal. As soon as I began to read Pesquès’s work, I was gripped by this obsessive quest, over volume after volume of the Face nord de Juliau series, to forge a poetic relationship with the single feature in the landscape that gives the series its title: the hill or mountain, Juliau, which is a constant presence, acting as a kind of gravitational force for the experience of writing, and therefore of reading, but often receding into the background, where it continues to act as a discreet catalyst for a remarkably varied poetic expression. From the start, I was intrigued by Pesquès’s project as a distinctive mode of life-writing in which the weave between human subjectivity, physical environment, and other non-human life-forms is a crucial dynamic. It struck me that the type of ‘distributed personhood’ that emerges from this textual weave is familiar ground for much anthropological investigation. So, I was keen to move my discussion towards an encounter with a handful of anthropological studies, and especially one by the late Alfred Gell, which we’ll come to later; but it was also important to me, in doing so, that I should seek to set up a reciprocal relationship between Pesquès’s writing and these anthropological works, rather than merely using the latter as an interpretative tool for the former.
CM. What do you like about Pesquès’s writing?
IM. I think what I admire above all is the way in which what is ostensibly a single-minded pursuit, spanning multiple volumes, gives rise to writing that is so richly heterogeneous, both formally and thematically. La Face nord de Juliau moves between free verse, prose poetry, essayistic fragments, and entries in a poetic journal; as it does so, it also ranges across evocations of the changing seasons on the slopes of Juliau, bringing shifting palettes of colour; the relationship between language, sensation, and the world; and experiences of both desire and loss. I’m also struck by the way in which Pesquès holds apparent opposites in a restlessly productive tension: affirmation and negation; interiority and exteriority; proximity and distance; identity and difference; life and death.
CM. Partridges, hares, mountains and caves feature in sections of your article. Which of these did you enjoy analysing the most?
IM. Tough choice, but I’d have to go for the partridge! It was intriguing to follow the twists and turns of the various paths through Pesquès’s work taken by that bird, and above all by its French name, of course: la perdrix. This word-bird first appears in the fifth book of the Juliau series, where Pesquès’s narrative skill is particularly evident, as he relates the ‘story of the partridge’ in a way that vividly enacts, at a story-telling level, the near-death encounter that a female partridge, brooding its clutch of eggs, has with a grass-clearing scythe. Thereafter, the perdrix becomes a key verbal resource for Pesquès’s virtuoso poetic performance, as the word — right down to its constituent letters, and above all its initial ‘p’ — is disseminated across several books in the series, flitting in and out of the linguistic thickets, sometimes in plain sight, sometimes almost indiscernibly camouflaged; and as it makes its way, it carries with it traces of birth, death, motherhood, mourning, vivid colouring and near invisibility, as well as various forms of autobiographical inscription (it’s not for nothing that this bird bears the same initial letter as its author!).
CM. Meditations on art and artists underscore your scholarship. Why is visual art such an important thread?
IM. The treatment of visual art in my article is entirely driven by Pesquès’s work. The painterly backdrop to his Juliau project is heralded by the very first volume in the series, the subtitle of which declares it to be a poetic tribute to Paul Cézanne (Tombeau de Cézanne), whose many paintings and drawings devoted to the Mont Sainte-Victoire find a counterpart in Pesquès’s own obsessive pursuit of a poetic writing inspired by Juliau. The visual dimension, and especially the evocation of colour, will indeed be central to Pesquès’s enterprise, but as was the case with the word-bird perdrix we were just talking about a moment ago, this painterly dimension will also prove to be an intensely verbal experience: when Pesquès attends to the blaze of yellow of the flowering broom (genêt) on the slopes of Juliau, for example, he does so in a way that mobilizes, in multiple, subtle and unexpected ways, the linguistic resources of the word jaune. I should add that Pesquès is also the author of some fascinating essays on modern and contemporary art; several of these, often reflecting particularly on relationships between the visual and the verbal, are collected in his 2017 volume, Sans peinture.
CM. Your article delves into the language the poet uses to draw out key ideas and concepts. As a scholar of French, do you think you could have written this article without this linguistic expertise?
IM. No, I can’t imagine working on someone like Pesquès without being able to attend closely to his French expression, and that’s one of the reasons why seeking publication in a journal that allows extensive quotation in the original language was important to me.
CM. Can you give some examples?
IM. I’ve already said a little bit about the significance of words such as perdrix and jaune in the Juliau series. To those, one could add another example that I touch on in the article, namely the French word for ‘hare’: le lièvre. In the twelfth ‘book’ of Juliau, the appearance of this animal-verbal companion quickly triggers a series of associations: with the ‘book’ (livre) itself, of course, but also with ‘lips’ (lèvres) that may be those that utter the words we’re reading, but may also be those of a lover, for instance. Further associations with lièvre evoke the ‘place’ (lieu) where all of this transpires (whether that be in the world, or on the page), and indeed the ‘connections’ (liens) running between all the life-forms in the landscape and the words that refer to them. So, when you come across a phrase that packs several of these verbal associations together — to turn to another example I mention in the article: ‘Sur le bout des lèvres: le lieu, le livre, le lièvre’ — then you soon realize there’s enough there to keep an English translator busy for hours!
CM. Have you visited Mont Juliau yourself, or might that break the spell?
IM. No, I haven’t been there, but I would like to see the landscape for myself. That said, I’d be fully expecting Juliau itself to appear pretty unremarkable. It’s clear from Pesquès’s writing that this is not a mountain that impresses with a kind of sublime grandeur. Its relative ordinariness as a hill is part of the point for Pesquès as he weaves his poetic text around it.
CM. Could you give us a little background on how your research has evolved over your career? Have there been twists and turns?
IM. It took a while to dawn on me that I’d always been interested in unusual modes of life-writing that have something open-ended, perhaps even interminable about them. In terms of publication, that has ended up taking the form of a career-long association with the MHRA, as it happens, since my first book, based on my doctoral thesis, was published with Legenda: Roger Laporte: The Orphic Text (2000). That study traces Laporte’s attempt to script a kind of ‘life-in/as-writing’, which he suggests might constitute a new genre of ‘biography’ (biographie — which one could quickly gloss as ‘autobiography’, with the personal self (autos) bracketed out). In my teaching and my own reading, poetry has always mattered more to me than any other mode of writing, but one more recent development has been to harness that passion more in my own research. That began with another Legenda volume, devoted to a body of work that is once again an intrinsically open-ended experiment in life-writing, this time spanning verse poetry, prose poetry, and fragmentary prose. In Louis-René des Forêts and Inner Autobiography (2020), I examine a project that began in the mid-1970s and continued till the end of its author’s life in 2000, and to which he gave an overall title, aptly evoking the obstinacy of his literary quest: Ostinato. That same interminability characterizes Pesquès’s Juliau project, but things took an unexpected turn for me when, as I was putting the finishing touches to my article, I came across the announcement of the nineteenth and final book in a series that its author still describes as, in principle, defying completion. I could only mention what was then an impending publication in a footnote added late to the article; subsequently, La Face nord de Juliau, dix-neuf (Flammarion, 2024) has indeed appeared. I’ll have to try to take stock of that in a longer piece that I’m writing on Pesquès, which will form a chapter of a book I’m planning on modern and contemporary ‘life-poetry’ in French. I’d like to be able to talk about the poets I’ll examine in that, but I don’t really know yet! All I can say is, right now I’m in the middle of writing a chapter on the very different figure of Danielle Collobert. In terms of influences on what I do, there are many, but on some level, everything I do, read, think, or write bears the traces of the profound impact on me of the work of Jacques Derrida. My article on Pesquès is no exception to that, since it is framed by some reflections emerging from Derrida’s late work on the ‘autobiographical animal’.
CM. Your article reflects on the limits of autobiography. Is there an autobiographical aspect to your own academic writing?
IM. Ooh, nice question! Well, on the one hand, I could say that there’s an ongoing process of self-inscription accompanying everything we do, but in so far as it’s always ongoing and evolving, that self-inscription is always also self-differing and self-deferring. In other words, we are always in what Derrida once described, catchily, as ‘an auto-bio-thanato-hetero-graphical scene of writing’. But I can also give a much more concrete, specific answer as far as this article is concerned. I doubt I would ever have managed to draw anthropology into the frame of my analysis without the help of many conversations with my partner, Elizabeth Hallam, who is a brilliant anthropologist (usual caveat: any shortcomings in my own dealings with anthropology remain entirely my responsibility!). It was also through Liz’s post in the Anthropology Department, when we were both working in Aberdeen, that I had the pleasure of getting to know one of my interlocutors in this article, her colleague Tim Ingold. But above all, I’d long known that one of Liz’s most treasured anthropological studies is Alfred Gell’s 1998 book Art and Agency. I read it over one Easter Vacation and it completely blew me away! I immediately knew I had to try to weave a discussion between Gell’s account of artworks as temporally extended objects bearing parts of their creators’ personhood and Pesquès’s undertaking in the Juliau series. I should also add that, as a study of creativity and personhood that Gell was hastening to complete in what he knew were the final months of his life, there is also something movingly autobiographical about Art and Agency.
CM. Your article makes a beautiful case for the importance of studying poetry. How do you see the teaching and research of French poetry evolving on these islands?
IM. Thank you for saying that. There is a particularly vibrant community of researchers and teachers of poetry in French in the UK and Ireland. Even if I just think of the institution where I’m fortunate to work, the range and depth of such study is remarkable, and that’s also true for poetry in German, Italian, Russian, and so on. As our universities in general, the study of literary humanities within them, and in particular the study of literature and culture in languages other than English, are under unprecedented pressure, I think it’s vital to foster and promote the reading and study of poetry. Poetry is where the language with which we sustain our relations with each other and with the world is given its most intense and scrupulous scrutiny, and where encounters within and between idioms are at their most varied and unexpected. We cannot afford to be without the resources of poetry.
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