ekleksographia

Claude Royet-Journoud
Kardia 
Marseille: Eric Pesty Editeur, 2009.
In French.

Claude Royet-Journoud’s Kardia is the eighth chapbook to appear from Eric Pesty, éditeur[1]. Each book is 8-32 staple-bound pages with a red-lettered letterpress cover printed on a grey background. Royet-Journoud’s collection opens with the striking image of a forgotten body ("corps oublié") surfacing to be exposed, uncovered where it has lain hidden among the forgotten trash. Thus, in the thirteen lines which make up the first page of Kardia, Royet-Journoud tumbles the reader headlong into the mysterious uncovering of something/someone accidentally exposed, and into the entanglement of perception: linguistic, physical, role-taking, theatrical, involving mis-hearings, death/life, a doll/body. This is played off subtle word-puns, such as "ordure" "corps" "ordre" where we see the repeated "or" as well as hear it, a sound pulling us through as we descend the first part of this page. On both sound and narrative level, the text passes from what emerges from the trash or as trash (ordure)—the body (corps)—to a perceived search for order (ordre)—reason? logic? that which is absent? All of this tumbling the reader, the writer, towards a sense of varied role-playing, the text falling towards the role, as in a play, that the body will now take on, or for which the body has always been destined. There it is, again, at the center of a Royet-Journoud text: a body. It is the plot pursued.

A drowning. 

A resurfacing.

Silence—word/language/voice.

The body’s role as art, model, victim, piece of a puzzle (the enigma): what’s to solve for. And this time, also, it is photo/photographic evidence.

The text is/as photo of photo, a photo whose perspective is only partially revealed/revealing. So the spectator must keep rereading for more. Such as on page 8 where I am struck by the flash. In the black and white image of my mind I see the limbless, headless bust. Marbelesque. Pieced body from a surrealist’s photo, circa 1935 perhaps, where only the torso is visible in silvered light. Shadow—as in Max Ernst, Man Ray, De Chirico works—replaces limbs, neck, head. The body is being erased by surfaces. At first death in art, in image, the—as p. 9 states—twin or double of the self is parasitical. It is eating away at you. But then, p. 9, the body swells and takes on the dimensions of a lake, thus becoming immense rather than cut into minimal bits. The body is at once fragmented, segmented, to be autopsied, its life taken away, its articulations immobilized by an inexplicable force, and yet, as we pursue it, an understanding of it, we find it is so immense we may drown there.

The text is paradoxical, the image paradox—as in all of Royet-Journoud’s books thus far.

Similarly, the line, the image Royet-Journoud invites us to see pulls us into it with its commingling pronouns. The image escapes the gaze, shrinks, expands. Shifting, the unreliable pronouns skew vision, scramble the trail: il, tu, elle, je, nous (he, you, she, I, we). The dizzying array of pronouns (and body parts) slows the way the reader reads, takes in the image, seeks perspective, believes what he or she sees before him. This technique shatters then re-establishes distance between the seen and the onlooker. The language refuses to speak for itself—like the body (that of the victim, the only clue). Tweaked, turned, the poem/body examines and flees its own enunciation while we (the reader) peruse/pursue the text (and body, its clues, its need). Round and round we read, as if turning the body over, as if attempting to learn from the exhumed immobile form the nature of what is seen—the gazed at. A photo? A statue? A name or nameless line of the forgotten living? 

            Just as the body only comes in parts (head, back, bust, shoulders, torso, forehead), the poem refuses to deliver itself to us. The parts which might allow for identification are often mutilated, such as the face, described as swollen or smashed up from a fall ("visage tuméfié" or "ton visage marqué par une chute"). Until it is as if we are speaking to it, seeking, staring, up-ending the body, until that voice at the end, in the final three dense pages could very well be the body speaking to us, to our efforts, our seeking, or even addressing the poet’s writing, when it says casually "j’aime quand tu me parles." (I like it when you talk to me, p.20). 

        As in former works by Royet-Journoud, Kardia continues to explore an immobilized, pieced-apart, silenced body. His writings are forms of getting at speech, existence and perhaps a "real" (as p.20 indicates). Yet, as in his other works I wonder, in the end, whether we are after the body or the poem? Is the poem body, body poem? If so, how do we take the fear and the anonymity implicit in the numerous references to the erasure of a name? The name as overtaken by number. For what also is to be left locked or to unlock are the reference to an "economy", for example "l’économie du mur" and "l’économie de Dieu" ("the economy of the wall", and "…of God"). Questions of number dot the text, lines like "un chiffre élimine le nom" where the name, thus the self, is erased by statistics. The text appears to echo the fact that we live in an economy of numerical erasure. This statistical evidence therefore can be taken at face value—a number eliminates, thus erases, replaces, the name. Statistics do overtake the personal at death—X number of people are shot, X get heart attacks at age 35, and we go in search of Jane Doe number X. There is a numerical facelessness in statistics that the text is hinting at, like this faceless, unrecognizable corpse.

          This text also startles because it is monochrome. This reinforces both its photographic qualities and this faceless erasure. Everything appears colorless, despite potential for bright fluorescents. The one moment where one might encounter a color—red—comes out as a black pool. This takes place on p.11 where the shock of blood is blood as false, faked, a role player’s effect: "le sang comme une manoeuvre nocturne". This line, potentially red, is lost in a "nocturnal manoeuvre", painted black because it’s only seen at night. Even blood is relegated to the monochromatic scheme of the rest of the poem, which refers to drained colors, functioning on a black and white spectrum with shades of silver-tinted greys. This accentuates the anonymity, blankness, of the found body, as well as the experience, and the nameless difficulty of perceiving events, while at the same time adding a vibrant police-novel quality, rather like André Breton’s photo use in L’Amour fou, evocative without the clarity of evidence.

        Complex simplicity has always been a mark of Royet-Journoud’s finely wrought poems, and this short book is no exception. Made up of seven prose poems and nine pages which contain poems of 7-13 lines per page organized into 1-4 irregular line length stanzas, even the prose poems vary in length, style, voice, and punctuation. The first, on page six (the second page of text in the collection) is untitled and is about one third of a page long. Then there are three titled prose poems in a row, about a third way along. Finally, 3 longer, denser, rhythmed and energetic prose poems in brackets complete the book, and have a most surprising effect on the reader. They almost sound like they come from another voice, and a new or energized poet as well—these dense, dynamic page-long paragraphs almost address some interlocutor, an anomaly in a long career of minimal stanzas and where the object of address is in constant flux.

          As in many of Royet-Journoud’s works, this chapbook is a poem about "parole" (speech) and "regard" (gaze) while also exploring a need to be recognized, a desire to find order ("ordre"). And a sadness, nostalgia and suffering. As such, this poem moves away from Royet-Journoud’s early works and towards a rejuvenated voice stretching out past its practiced, perfected tropes towards a denser, wider range of linguistic surfaces, both minimal—the gems we expected to find here—and the maximal, voluminous density which startled me on the final pages of this collection. A read to re-read again and again, the enigma still puzzling, still intriguing, still demanding. We must turn it over and over. The body of work still has more surfaces to reveal here, and it anticipates promising texts to come.