Emmanuel Fruteau: un mémoire en anglais avec les poèmes de Henri Meschonnic

Emmanuel Fruteau

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Such stuff as we are made on

Exploring the non-narrative quality of cultural memory through the

poems of Henri Meschonnic

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MA Cultural Memory

Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies

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Supervised by Dr Hector Kollias (King’s College)

Submitted on 8 September 2008

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................. ii

Abbreviations .......................................................................................................................... iii

Introduction: Such stuff as we are made on ............................................................................... 1

Part 1 — Re-membering Orpheus: towards a relational poetics of memory ................................. 7

Part 2 — Suspending memory: a walk on absent gravestones in search of our intimate selves .. 16

Part 3 — Listening to the gesture of memory in the silence of the voice .................................... 26

Conclusion ............................................................................................................................. 37

Works Cited ............................................................................................................................ 43

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Introduction: Such stuff as we are made on

We are such stuff

As dreams are made on; and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep. Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act IV- Sc. 1 - 157-8 (Prospero)

The fact that ‘we are made of our memories’ (Casey 2000, 290) has become an adage for many who turn a lens on memory as raw material or object of study (Radstone 2000, 12-3; Radstone and Hodgkin 2006, 2). One may wonder about the stakes this assertion places on memories —the products of our remembering— and their relationship to both the formation of subjectivity and the (self-)reflexive practices deployed to get a hold on (how we came to be) who we are, either as groups or individuals, in the multiplicity of forms these processes entail. The kind of ‘memory work’ I refer to acknowledges that any sense of immediacy is always already lost whenever and however we “experience” the past in the present and that the process of working memory over and meandering through its intricacies and vicissitudes is at least as important as what our memories contain. However, it tacitly roots both memory and its relationship to self-knowledge in ‘story, projection, and their powerful combination in parable’, which Mark Turner (1996, 168) takes to be the source of all our cognitive processes. Narration, in one form or another, is the omnipresent premise to our critical and creative endeavours with memory, seeking to make sense of ourselves in such way as to foster an element of disciplined choice, to regain some sense of agency over our lives, and hopefully to lessen our chances of repeating our sore past.

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http://sas-space.sas.ac.uk/dspace/bitstream/10065/1796/1/Fruteau_Emmanuel+Dissertation+Final.pdf