INTRODUCTION

Why does one choose a subject? “Because it serves, because you need it”,

answers Ted Hughes.1 To me, the reason to be of writing, the role that writing may have

in life or in a parallel to life answers a need to know why, endlessly and for such a long

time, mankind has distortd reality to create fiction – when they do not create pure fiction

out of the blue, without any link with what is real. What dissatisfaction or what

perversion haunts the writers to push them to constantly doctor the material of life?

What need do they have to rewrite what has already happened or to describe what will

never be? What relationship are they trying to establish between their fictional writing

and the real, unchanging, ungovernable facts of the past life or the life currently

happening?

Faulkner writes in a cynical tone in his novel Mosquitoes: “You do not commit

suicide when you are disappointed in love. You write a book”.2 The American novelist,

speaking through one of his characters, thus taking a sort of distance from its

provocative meaning, seems to suggest, in a rather oblique way and as if he was not

truly sure himself of what he is putting forward – that to writers the whole life is matter,

material. Whether his declaration is spoken by a cold career-minded person ready to

find a good thriller topic anywhere or by a sweet ironical poet who only has as a

resource against grief writing, the conclusion remains the same: to every question life

asks him, the writer will answer with writing. Writing will be his gold-standard to

measure the world.

Following Faulkner, Fernando Pessoa affirms: “Literature, as much as any form

of Art, is the confession that Life is not enough”.3 The profession of faith thus becomes

1 “You choose a subject because it serves, because you need it”. See Ted Hughes's interview by Egbert Faas in 1970, first published in january 1971 in London Magazine entitled: “Ted Hughes and Crow”

(http://escholarship.library.usyd.edu.au/journals/index.php/SSE/article/viewFile/326/299)2 ”On ne se suicide pas pour un chagrin d'amour: on écrit un roman.”. See William Faulkner,

Moustiques, translated by Jean Dubramet, Paris, Minuit, collection Point, 1980, p. 212-213. 3 “La littérature, comme toutes les formes d'art, est l'aveu que la vie ne suffit pas”. See Fernando Pessoa, Fragments d'un voyage immobile, précédé d'un essai d'Octavio Paz, collection rivages poche/Petite Bibliothèque, 1991. p.53: “La littérature, comme toute forme d'art, est l'aveu que la vie ne suffit pas.”

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more precise, more peremptory: the artist, and the writer especially are seen as avid,

voracious beings, to whom life itself is nothing but a delusion that they plan to surpass

thanks to their skill so as to reach a superior intensity of experience.

The study of books confirms this point of view, since books are nothing but a

profusion of life, of invented lives, added to the real amount of tangible lives of plain

mortal? Books' heroes do not die – and even if they do, the reader can go back some

pages to find them as alive as they were. The books' living are not metamorphosed into

dead as they are in reality. Books are a place where their authors have the possibility to

play God's part for a moment, bringing to the world beings whose destiny will remain in

their hands, proportionately to their art and will: the world of books is a world where the

malicious fate exists only if the author creates it and directs it on purpose on a character

– if the author decides to, books' characters can be absolutely exempted from trouble. It

is a world where everything happens according to the author's will. Some writers thus

include some true facts of their lives in their books,4 or conceal others because of the

shame or pain they caused him.

Literature, maybe more than other forms of art, merely because writing allows a

precise formulation and is like language, is the place where everything is possible. The

author, life-hungry, mastery-hungry as well, may either invent a reality or change the

reality that already exists, make it at the same time more intense and more balanced,

correct it to make it more fascinating, more precise, more meaningful. Joyce Carol

Oates, in The Faith of a Writer, evokes an anecdote concerning the genesis of Ernest

Hemingway's “Hills Like White Elephants”: in a Paris Review interview, Hemingway

claimed to have written this short story in one afternoon, shortly after having had the

inspiration. Oates point out that according to his biographer, Hemingway actually wrote

“Hills Like White Elephant” from another short story, and that his work took him a few

days; Oates thus concludes, which sounds extremely significant to me: “but

Hemingway's version makes it a much better anecdote.”5.

This is what it is about: writers' necessity and capacity to rewrite their life, to

draw a richer, quicker, more moving life out of it, as if life itself was just a draft that

they need to bring to a close, if not to translate. This is what writers do, they take life

over and seize it back, whether it is theirs or others, or a half-tone process. Life is not

4 N. B.: Vronski's declaration to Kitty in Anna Karénine by Leon Tolstoi, for example, is the exact reproduction of Tolstoï proposal to his wife-to-be Sonia.

5 “Mais la version d'Hermingway en fait une bien meilleure anecdote”. See Joyce Carol Oates, La foi d'un écrivain (2003), translated by Claude Seban, éditions Philippe Rey, 2004.

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enough indeed, which is why they demand to know it twice, or to endlessly recreate it.

According to William Stanford, who thus validates the hypothesis implying that real life

and its fictional representation have the same value: The world thus happens twice:

One, we see it as it is;

Two, it writes deep its legend,

As it is.6

Those few verses even imply something else: if the world is first what we see, it

then becomes a “legend”, that is to say an eternal story fixed in the immemorial and

collective memory. Books are the only place where time stops, where the past turns into

the present again in its most desirable form. According to Hippocrates: Ars longa, vita

brevis:7 art is long, life is short. Written words are not submitted to the natural laws that

hit the writers – the writers who are doomed to die as much as anyone. Art only imparts

such eternity to things.

Nevertheless, there is an exception to this rule, which makes this speech

obsolete: writers who create a work whose topic is a close relative's death. Pessoa's

declaration then loses all consistency, because if life is not enough, what can now

become the writer hit by death? When life has vanished, what is he left with, what

energy, what illusion, what arrogance may still push him to write? How can he continue

to create fiction when tangible life has collapsed? When reality is so sorely lacking to

him, what can he expect from the lie of fiction? How not to think he has been punished

because he has defied fate when poaching on its territory, creating a parallel world,

competing with reality? What worth may art have when life is not only insufficient but

vanished?

I will question two texts on this point: Birthday Letters, by Ted Hughes, and

Sarinagara by Philippe Forest. Both authors had to face death (of a wife in Hughes 's

case, of a daughter in Forest's) and those two books, one a poetic collection and the

other a novel, deal with what life is when it has become surviving a lost one.

When I read Ted Hughes for the first time, the summer before I entered

University, I only knew him as being Sylvia Plath's widower. The book was the

Birthday Letters, and I perfectly remember that I felt, mostly because of the way words

were set on the page, that it was an exceptional book. Even in the English language

6”Le monde arrive donc deux fois: / Un, nous le voyons comme il est; / Deux, il inscrit profond sa légende, / Tel qu'il est.” See Joyce Carol Oates, La foi d'un écrivain, op. cit., p. 45.7 Latin translation of Hippocrate's first aphorism.

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which was then much more foreign to me that it is now, the solidity, the strength of the

text were, as they still are, obvious at first sight. The stanzas' arrangement, the diversity

of the words, the semantic fields they belong to, everything that makes a book step

outside the common to enter the extraordinary, all this is to be noticed from the book's

very first pages, and gets confirmed throughout the reading.

In a similar way, Philippe Forest's work imposed itself as a comparable work,

because of his books' topics that are close to Hughes's and also because of the peculiar

interest of studying a still-moving work.

In what sense are Hughes's and Forest's bereavement comparable or

incomparable? How to explain the fact that they obviously fail to accomplish their

grieving process in any other way than literature? Which form(s) did they choose and

why? What is their speech and why is this speech foreseeable in such circumstances?

Why did they need to publish these accounts of such an intimate experience? What

consequences has this genesis and this publication had on both writers? What sort of

reception have the books had when they were published and how does it enlighten us

about contemporary society's relationship to death and mourning, as well as to

voyeurism? In other words, what are the writer's resources faced with death and if they

are exerted, how does it show? More roughly: if fictional writing is motivated by

questioning, how to explain the need or the will to reflect an immensely traumatizing

experience in literature?

Ted Hughes provides the beginning of an answer : “It means the world becomes

yours – whereas if you don't do it, it drifts away and takes a whole piece of yourself

with it, like an amputation. To attack it and attack it and get it under control – it's like

taking possession of your own life, isn't it? Otherwise, it means whole areas of your life

stand in front of you and stop you.”8

8 See Erica Wagner, Ariel's Gift, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and the story of BIRTHDAY LETTERS, Faber and Faber, London, 2000, p.27.

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I. CIRCUMSTANCES OF THE BEREAVEMENT

1)Ted Hughes's case

”St Botolph's”9 is one of the turning poems in Birthday Letters, as it describes

Ted Hughes' encounter with his wife-to-be, Sylvia Plath, during a student party in

Cambridge, in 1956. When Hughes gives his own version of the facts, the

circumstances of the legendary couple's meeting have already been revealed in Plath's

Letters (published in 1975), and her Journals (in 1980), and then relayed by many

biographers or witnesses: how Plath, to avenge herself for the scathing criticism

Hughes's literary circle (who had created the Saint Botolph's Review) had levelled

against her poems, learnt some of their poems by heart to get her own back, and stood in

front of Hughes to shout him poetry at the top of her voice; then how Hughes kissed her

and pulled her earrings and scarf off; and last but not least, how Plath, bit his cheeks and

drew blood. Writing about this evening more than thirty years later, Hughes summons

like his predecessors did the mythic kit of objects that did appear that night,10 he

confirms and validates in his own name what has already been written about him.

However, in the last lines of the poems he gives a clue on what happened there,

describing :[...] the swelling ring-moat of tooth-marks

That was to brand my face for the next month.

The me beneath it for good.

Ted Hughes goes further that the description of an erotic seduction fight between

two young writers and decodes what happened to him that night. He depicts himself as

being definitely changed: what he was, “the me”, will not ever be the same, although he

9 Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters (1998), Faber and Faber, London, 1999, p. 15.10 N. B.: The headscarf which was red according to Plath becomes blue in Hughes's poem: “your blue headscarf”. Blue was the color that Plath choose to paint her flat after Hughes's desertion, because she believed that he hated this color (see Plath's letter to her mother on the 21 december 1962, in Sylvia Plath, Letters Home, selected and edited with a commmentary by Aurelia Schober Plath (1976), Faber and Faber, London, 1979, p. 492: “Ted never liked blue”). Hughes also evokes his then-girlfriend, Shirley, which he describes as similar to “a loaded crossbow”.

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still appears too stupefied11 to know it by himself; but the other Ted Hughes, the one

who is writing the poem years later is now able to read in the tooth-mark on his cheek.

The adult Ted Hughes, the Ted Hughes widower who writes in 1998 knows why the

introductory evening of the Saint Botolph's Review has been crucial to his life: that is

the night when the solar system married him to Plath.12 Nevertheless, when he

anticipates the importance and the longevity of this encounter in the last lines of the

poem, he is doubtless alluding only to love, nor to the deciding literary influence that

the American poetess was to have upon him,13 but also, even though silently, to the

mark Plath would leave in his life when she would commit suicide seven years later –

so deep a mark that the title of the Washington Post obituary tribune to Hughes in 1998

would still refer to Plath.14

Oddly, Plath's bite on Hughes's cheek is identical to the scar she herself wears

under one of her eyes since her suicide attempt at age twenty, when she hid herself in

her mother's cellar, swallowed sleeping pills and unconsciously damaged her face

against the floor. In the scar he now wears himself, Hughes grasps the meaning of it all:

he has not just met a women, he has also run into a tragedy,15 and that tragedy will

follow him forever. Throughout their marriage, Hughes was conscious of his wife's

psychological disorders; years after her death, he says : “I accepted her temperament

and its apparent need as a given set of factors, to be tended, humoured, cared for, cured

if possible”,16 Sylvia Plath was born on the 27th October 1932 in Massachusetts. Her

father was German (Otto Plath), and her mother had Austrian roots (Aurelia Schober).

Otto Plath died when Plath was nine years old because of a wrongly diagnosed diabetes;

Plath would never overcome the loss of the paternal figure, so much so that she would

11 ”My stupefied interrogation.”12 ”That day the solar system married us/Whether we knew it or not.”13 “Once I got to know her and read her poems, I saw straight off that she was a genius of some kind. Quite suddenly we were completely committed to each other and to each other writing... I see now that when we met, my writing, like hers, left its old path and started to circle and search. To me, of course, she was not only herself: she was America and American literature in person.”. See The Art of Poetry de Drue Heinz, p. 77, quoted in Elaine Feinstein, Ted Hughes, The Life of a Poet (2001), Weindenfield & Nicholson, London, 2001, p. 59.14 ”The heading on the Washington Post's obituary in 1998 summed up the shadow that hung over him

for most of his life: “British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes Dies at 68; Turbulent Marriage to Writer Sylvia Plath Dogged His Reputation after Her Suicide.”” in This lady spells trouble: Why the story of the evil temptress is endlessly renewable, Robert Fulford, The National Post, 22 July 2003. (http://www.robertfulford.com/2003-07-22-phedre.html)

15 N. B.: Hughes offers the same image of himself in a poem from Howls and Whispers, “Paris, 1954”. He presents himself old looking back on who he was when young and unconcerned, with his whole life still to live (”his unlived life, so ready for anything”). He does not foresee “the cry” that will defintely upset his life. See Ted Hughes, Collected Poems, Faber and Faber, London, 2003, p. 1173.

16 Diane Middlebrook, Her Husband, Hughes and Plath: A Marriage, Vking Penguin, 2003, p. 111.

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deliberately assign that role to her husband17. A young model American girl, athletic,

popular, a brilliant scholar, rewarded with many prestigious studying grants, Plath

reached adulthood in the 50's and struggled between her literary ambitions and her huge

need of social recognition as wife, housewife and mother.18 As a poet, she distinguished

herself because of her precocity (her first poem was published when she was eight years

old) but also because of her addiction to success: all her life she would be obsessed with

magazines prizes and anxious about her own worth, holding up to writing19 as being the

only possible guarantee of her quality.20 This anxiety would haunt her throughout her

short adult life and get even worse when Hughes becomes famous before her. Although

she would then claim to be absolutely pleased with his success,21 the literary critic Al

Alvarez,22 who knew them throughout their marriage and helped to launched Hughes'

reputation describes her as being “under her husband's massive shadow”, and Plath's

own last letters revealed her intact terror: “I shall hear of Ted all my life, of his success,

his genius... I must make a life on my own as fast as I can.”.23 The two writers, who got

married on a sudden impulse only two months after their encounter, would share the

crucial year of poetical training,24 in a closeness they both describe as almost gemellary

(Sylvia Plath: “We have mystically become one”;25 Ted Hughes: “Our minds soon

17 ”Ted fills my hole of having no father.”. See letter of Plath to her mother on the 29th November 1956 in Sylvia Plath, Letters Home, selected and edited with a commmentary by Aurelia Schober Plath (1976), Faber and Faber, London, 1979, p. 289.

18 Plath's often repeated choice to be everything at the same time in especially courageous regarding the social context.

19 Plath was paradoxically much more anxious about her capacity to write prose than poems, as shown by the many novel's plan developed in her diaries. Hughes confirms in his introduction for Plath's Johnny Panic and the Bible of dreams's American edition : “Her ambition to write stories was the most visible burden of her life. [...] top job [...] she wanted the cash, and the freedom that can go with it. She wanted the professional standing, as a big earner, as the master of a difficult trade, and as a serious investigator into the real world. “For me, she wrote, poetry is an evasion from the real job of writing prose.”. See Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (1993), Granta Books, London, 2005, p. 85.

20 ”I remember I was terrified that if I wasn't successful writing, no one could find me interesting or valuable.”. Letter of Plath to her mother on the 29th November 1956 in Sylvia Plath, Letters Home, selected and edited with a commmentary by Aurelia Schober Plath (1976), Faber and Faber, London, 1979, p. 133.

21 ”Strange what vicarious pleasure I get from Ted's acceptances; pure sheer joy: almost as if he were holding the field open, keeping a foot in the door to the golden world, and thus keeping a place for me” in Sylvia Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962 (1980), Faber and Faber, London, 2000, p.345.

22 English writer, poet et and critic, born on the 5th August 1929.23Letter of Plath to her mother on the 9th October 1962 in Sylvia Plath, Letters Home, selected and edited with a commmentary by Aurelia Schober Plath , op. cit., p. 465.24 ”We read, discuss poems we discover, talk, analyse – we continually fascinate each other.”. Quoted

from a letter from Plath to her mother of the 29th November 1956 in Sylvia Plath, Letters Home, selected and edited with a commmentary by Aurelia Schober Plath , op. cit., p. 289.

25 Letter of Plath to her mother sa mère du 8 octobre 1956 in Sylvia Plath, Letters Home, selected and edited with a commmentary by Aurelia Schober Plath, op. cit. p. 276.

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became two parts of the same operation”26), but also proportionately destructive (Sylvia:

“Between us there are no barriers – it is rather as neither of us – or especially myself –

had any skin, or one skin between us and kept bumping into or abrading each other»;27

Ted: “There is no better way to us than as/ Two wolves [...] Even at a

distance/Distracted by the soft competing pulse/Of the other”28 or: “Alone/Either of us

might have met with a life./Siamese-twinned, each of us festering/A unique soul-sepsis

for the other,/Each of us was the stake/Impaling the other”).29 In the beginning, Sylvia

appears as the dominant figure of the association, because of her ambition and the

poems she had already published in the U.S.A. She collected and typed her young

husband's poems to send then to different magazines and poetry contests. Her

promotional initiative achieved its aim when Hughes won the Poetic Center's First

Publication Book contest in 1957 (The jury was composed of Marianne Moore, W. H.

Auden and Stephen Spender). Thanks to the contest, Hughes's first poetry book, The

Hawk in the Rain, was published by Faber & Faber. Ted Hughes would then stand out

as the famous one in the couple, which Plath confirms in her Journals: “He is a genius. I

his wife.”30 or when she confesses to her friend Suzette Macedo: “Ted is a genius [...]

Oh well, I write a bit... but I'm not in the same league.”31 Both were aware of Hughes's

ease to compose poetry, in contrast with Plath's laborious efforts. This situation created

disagreement in the midst of the marriage. Hughes thus describes their organization:

“We assumed my writing would carry on anyway somehow. Our great anxiety was for

hers. And that dated from 1956... Our main programme was her writing. That was

absolutely the dominant theme – it was our big invalid. She thought as I did that mine

could look after itself.”32 Plath's suicide in February 1963, five months after their break-

up (October 62) due to Hughes' affair with Assia Wevill, fix his image as a adulterous

husband, unconcerned with his genius wife's fragility. According to Janet Malcolm: “To

the readers of her poetry and her biography, Sylvia Plath will always be young and in a

rage over Hughes's unfaithfulness”.33 Although this opinion is widely debatable,

26 Erica Wagner, Ariel's Gift, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and the story of BIRTHDAY LETTERS, op. cit., p. 121.

27 Sylvia Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962, op. cit., p. 401.28 ”A Modest Proposal”, Ted Hughes, Collected Poems, op. cit., p. 27.29 ”9 Willow Street” in Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters, op. cit., p. 72.30 The sentence clearly echoes D. H. Lawrence who wrote in Women in Love (a book Hughes and Plath

were constantly admiringly reading during the first years of their marriage): “He would be a Napoleon of peace, or a Bismarck – and she the woman behind him.”. See D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books in association with Heinemann, 1960.

31 Elaine Feinstein, Ted Hughes, The Life of a Poet, op. cit., p. 108.32 See Elaine Feinstein, Ted Hughes, The Life of a Poet, op. cit., p.109.33 Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, op. cit., p. 7.

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because Plath and Hughes' relationship was much more egalitarian and modern that

what has been said, Hughes himself takes the blame, when telling Elizabeth Compton,

one of Plath's last friends, that “it doesn't fall to many men to murder a genius.”34

Sadness excepted, Hughes' main feeling after Plath's death is stupefaction. He says: “I

shall never get over the shock and I don't particularly want to”.35 Later, one of the

hypotheses put forward to explain her suicide at a time when, according to Hughes, they

were both so close to reconciliation, was that her doctor prescribed the wrong

antidepressants for her. It is likely that Plath was allergic to the pills she was taking, and

this intolerance may have exacerbated her bipolar troubles and thrown her into a

suicidal depression.36 The unnoticed publication of her first and only novel, The Bell Jar

(under the pseudonym of Victoria Lucas), in which she romanticizes the electroshock

treatment she went through after her first break-down, but also in which she reveals the

complicated relationship she had with her mother; the trauma caused by Hughes'

desertion, which she had probably never yielded to, as she was always clinging to a

perfectly settled life, but also the rare coldness of 1963 winter (the coldest winter since

1813). Emile Durckheim defines suicide as follows: “Every case of death which is

directly ensued from an positive or negative act, accomplished by the victim with the

full knowledge of its lethal result».37 It is possible to hypothesise that Plath expected

that her baby-sitter would find her in time to save her, or that the ground floor

neighbour would smell the gas and call for help; but the gas, filtering through the floor,

had stunned him too. Whatever doubts one can have concerning Plath's decision to end

her days “that Monday”,38 it is still obvious that during the winter of 1963, she had

every outward sign of a suicidal person; Durckheim indeed highlights two “extra-social

causes to which it is possible a priori to ascribe an influence on the suicide rate: the

organic-psychic dispositions and the nature of the physical environment”39 Plath, alone

in her freezing London flat, waking up in the dawn to write before her babies awoke,

34 See Elaine Feinstein, Ted Hughes, The Life of a Poet, op. cit., p. 149.35 Letter from Hughes to Aurelia Plath, 15 Mars 1963, in Ted Hughes, Letters of Ted Hughes, op. cit., p.

215.36 Letter from Hughes to Stevenson, Autumn 1986 in Ted Hughes, Letters of Ted Hughes, selected and

edited by Christopher Reid, Faber and Faber, London, 2007, p. 523.37 ”Tout cas de mort qui résulte directement ou indirectement d'un acte positif ou négatif, accompli par

la victime elle-même et qu'elle savait devoir produire ce résultat.” Emile Durckheim, Le Suicide (1930), Presses Universitaires de France, 2004, p. 5.

38 ”that monday”, extrait de “Night-Ride on Ariel”, Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters, op. cit. , p. 175.39 “Causes extra-sociales auxquelles on peut a priori attribuer une influence sur le taux de suicide: ce

sont les dispositions organico-psychiques et la nature du milieu physique.” Emile Durckheim, Le Suicide, op. cit., p.19.

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was an easy prey for a depression that had pursued her since her youth.40

Her death left Ted Hughes marked for ever indeed, personally, intimately, in the

first place, but also publicly, because being still legally her husband, he then inherited

all her unpublished work, as well as her personal writings, which revealed her hidden

face to him. This intimate treasure would at the same time upset Hughes and keep him

in touch with Plath's memory; paradoxically, Plath's death revealed her totally to him,

and put her in his care. He mentions it in his introduction to the American edition of

Letters Home in 1982, when he explains that Plath was hiding herself behind masks,

and that she would not show her real personality to anyone else but him;41 he got all the

information he lacked when he read her diaries, letters and manuscripts. During the next

thirty years, by dint of reading, rereading and filing, Hughes would become one of the

greatest readers of Plath,42 and tackle to the heavy task of publishing a work whose

whiff of scandal added interest in the public's mind. Hughes thus becomes the

repository, the representative, but also the smuggler of an autobiographical work in

many respects, and that therefore implicates him personally, since Plath's masterpiece,

the Ariel poems were written during the break-up. Still, loyal to his own faith in his

wife's talent, Hughes embarks on the publication of those texts which hand him in

veiled term to the public opinion, apparently indifferent to the harm they could do him43.

As Erica Wagner recalls very justly, the series of Hughes's publication of the

Plath manuscripts coincide oddly with the rise of the feminism movement44 (as a matter

of fact, Hughes' most ferocious adversary happened to be Robin Morgan, a virulent

militant, teamed up with Valerie Solanas and founder of two feminist organisations.

Morgan is the author of a notorious poem “The Arraignement”, in which she accuses

40 Hughes thus summarizes the situation: “Then suddenly the book about her first depression comes out, fifty other hellish details go against her, she became over agitated, begged me to leave the country because she couldn't bear to live in the same city, my presence was weakening her independance, and so on, then very heavy sedatives, then this.”. Letter from Hughes to Aurelia Plath, 15 mars 1963 in Ted Hughes, Letters of Ted Hughes, op. cit., p.214.

41 ”Though I spent everyday with her for six years, and was rarely separated from her for more than two or three hours at a time, I never saw her show her real self to anybody [...] the self I had married after all, and lived with and knew well.”. See Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, op. cit. , p. 3.

42 ”Hughes spent a great deal of 1981 'in the coils of the Plath Journals' as he put in a letter to KS”. See Elaine Feinstein, Ted Hughes, The Life of a Poet, op. cit.., p. 211.

43 ”Sylvia's image of Hughes as a vampire substitute for her dead father (in Daddy) [...] would live in the minds of readers for nearly half a century,and it says a great deal about the honor that Hughes felt for her genius that he sent the poems out into the world.”. See Elaine Feinstein, Ted Hughes, The Life of a Poet, op. cit., p. 133.

44 See Erica Wagner, Ariel's Gift, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and the story of BIRTHDAY LETTERS, op. cit., p. 8.

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Hughes publicly of murdering Plath and calls to his dismemberment.45) This piece of

bad luck partly explains the vendetta that would rain down on Hughes for the rest of his

life. Having become very ironically an icon of the feminist movement, Plath remains

eternally the young suicidal girl who suffered an electroshock treatment, the abandoned

wife who sublimates her humiliation by beating her husband on his own ground, poetry.

Hughes consequently finds himself locked up in the very critical representations of him

left by Plath at a time when she was possibly trying to exorcize her pain through such

caricatural texts as “Daddy”. This poem, probably one of her most famous, because its

nursery rhyme rhythm as well as its very modern and pictorial references, addresses a

male figure combining Otto Plath, her father, and Hughes. In her Journals as well as in

her letters, Plath links them on many occasions, thus revealing a devastating Electra

complex, with which she still seems to be playing in “Daddy”46 as she already did in

“Electra on the Azalea Path”. Her father having been a German,47 Plath draws the Nazi

metaphor to the famous line “every woman adores a fascist”. Ted Hughes is described

there as the “black man who bit [her] red heart in two” and “the vampire who drank

[her] blood for [...] seven years”. Despite the fact that these images do not justice to the

modern husband, the father48 and the thoughtful colleague Hughes was during their

marriage, nevertheless there are the ones that remain. Knowing in advance that his

defence would not be heard, Hughes retreated into absolute silence concerning Plath for

the next thirty years. It seems that he really banished the subject from his mind as much

as he could, probably as much for himself as because of his third wife.49 The only

exceptions to this line of conduct regard the introductions he wrote for the Journals or

editions of poems and his support (through his sister Olwyn) to Anne Stevenson during

her research for the authorised Plath biography Bitter Fame. The book, rewritten and

corrected too many times (by Olwyn's hand of iron) to ring true, is a failure: however

Janet Malcolm provides another explanation for the book's lack of success, marking that

45 Ibid, p. 10.46 See Sylvia Plath, Ariel (1965), Faber and Faber, London, 2001, p. 48.

47 Elaine Feinstein recalls that Plath affirms in her diaries that her father made the Nazi salute inside his home. (”She reports her mother's description of Otto as such a brute that she was unable to love him, and that Otto had given the salute, Heil Hitler, in the privacy of his home”. See Erica Wagner, Ariel's Gift, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and the story of BIRTHDAY LETTERS, op. cit., p. 87.

48 Plath's diaries reveal how fairly the household was shared in their marriage. The Hugheses had organized themselves so as to have one the morning, the other the afternoon, to write. It also has to be noticed that Hughes attended his children's birth, which was most uncommon in the early 60's.

49 On the contrary, Hughes did not spare Assia Wevill with his despair, and went as far as to accuse her: “you are the dark destructive force that destroyed Sylvia” (according to Fay Weldon, quoted by Elaine Feinstein in Ted Hughes, Life of a Poet, op. cit., p 166. Fay Weldon worked in London in advertising with Wevill when she started her affair with Hughes)

11

“the pleasure of hearing ill of the dead is not a negligible one, but it pales before the

pleasure of hearing ill of the living”.50

Nevertheless, Hughes' silence does not only concern his potential declarations

concerning Plath's death, but spreads to his writing, as for the next three years he would

not write anything of consequence – this might also be due to the new complexity of his

familial organisation, because he suddenly found himself at the head of a tribe including

the two children he had by Plath, his lover Assia Wevill, the daughter he had by her,

Shura, and occasionally his own two (sick) parents. Whatever the reason of that silence,

it ended up in 1966 with the publication of Wodwo,51 when Hughes' style had

considerably changed. On Plath's writing table, in the flat she committed suicide,

Hughes discovered the Ariel manuscript, which he published after having slightly

altered the poems sequence. Uroff writes about those poems that they posthumously

give the advantage (back) to Plath, and that they inspire Hughes so deeply that his

Wodwo poetic persona is identical to Plath's first poems':52 “lost, questioning,

uncertain”;53 this persona would lead Hughes, a few years later, to the unprecedented

figure of the Crow's trickster, which can be regarded at the same time as a poetical

masterpiece and as a poetical grieving process.

This is what has to be remembered about Hughes after Plath's death: first, the

shock of surprise, which would change him in an irreversible way,54 to the point of

writing that her death “[has thrown his] whole nature negative”,55 and also the

overwhelming inheritance that results from that death: the Sylvia Plath Estate's

responsibility, as well as the reputation he finds himself granted with. For the next thirty 50 ”Nobody wanted to hear that it was Hughes who was good and Plath who was bad. The pleasure of

hearing ill of the dead is not a negligible one, but it pales before the pleasure of hearing ill of the living.”. See Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, op. cit., p.24.

51 He writes about this collection: “Wodwo is a transit camp. It's a clearing house, so I can see more clearly about what comes next. Also, it's a record – for me – of a rather baffled time”. (letter from Hughes to Jànos Csokits, 6 august 1967, p. 273) “it was broken up by autobiographical events” (letter from Hughes to Anne-Lorraine Bujon, 16 December 1992, p. 632). See Ted Hughes, Letters of Ted Hughes, op. cit., 2007.

52 ”In Ariel and Wodwo their poetic positions reversed once again: Plath posthumously into prominence with Ariel, while Hughes's work appeared to halt. The persona of her late poems became the defiant spokesman of uncontrollable violence, and when, after seven years, Hughes published Wodwo, his persona was like Plath's early persona – lost, questioning, uncertain.”. See Margaret Dickie Uroff, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Urbana, London, University of Illinois Press, 1979, p. 126.

53 ”But what shall I be called am I the first/have I an owner what shape am I what/shape am I am huge [...]”. The tone is questioning and the punctuation has vanished: the breaking from The Hawk in the Rain 's poems is obvious and brutal. See Wodwo, dans Ted Hughes, Collected Poems, op. cit., p.183.

54 To the extend, weirdly, to act towards Assia Wevill in a radically different way that the way he behaved with Plath. (See Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev, Lover of Unreason: Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath's Rival and Ted Hughes' Doomed Love (2006), Da Capo Press, 2007, p.175.)55 ”Sylvia's death threw my whole nature negative.”. Letter from Hughes to Aurelia Plath, 14 April 1969

in Ted Hughes, Letters of Ted Hughes, op. cit., p.291.

12

years, Hughes would thus have to survive the loss of his wife, the mother of his children

and his colleague; but also to live as if he was two, to protect and continue his own

career when at the same time maintaining the posterity of the “great poet” who was

Plath.56 She wrote once: “I really don't know how I existed before I met Ted”57; one of

the main questions of Hughes' life after her suicide would be to find out how he can

manage to exist after her.

56 “Sylvia was one of the truest spirits alive, and in her last months she became a great poet, and no other woman except Emily Dickinson can begin to be compared with her, and certainly no living American.”, ibid, p. 214.

57 Letter from Plath to her mother, 9 January 1957 in Sylvia Plath, Letters Home, op. cit., p. 290.

13

2)Philippe Forest's case

The case of Philippe Forest is as distant from Hughes's as possible, on paper. On

the 25th April 1996, Philippe Forest, who was then not a writer but a literature

professor, lost his only daughter, Pauline, at the age of four, struck down by a cancer.

The fact that the death was accidental marks a first difference from Hughes; that the

victim was a child, that is to say that their relationship is that of blood, instead of the

intangible links of love (in the meaning of love relationship) or (literary) admiration is

the second one. The third difference between the two authors is that when Plath died,

Hughes already wass a writer, as he still was when he composed Birthday Letters: the

specificity of his undertaking then does not stand in the vector he chose, poetry, which

is all in all the most logical on his part. On the other hand, Forest became a writer only

after his daughter's death;58 as a matter of fact, without this tragedy, as he puts it in his

first novel, L'Enfant éternel, he would never have written, as he did not dream to.59

Nevertheless, as he explained later in the same novel, “le deuil oblige à dire. Auteur ou

lecteur, on cherche des mots car ils sont pour le disparu la seule obole pensable”.60

Though not a writer in the first place, Forest admits having come to writing as a

intellectual; that is to say that deep in his dismay he had only been able to hold on to

what he knew the most, books, though he did not ignore the absurdity of such an

undertaking.61 His novels, as well as his essays, come back to that same point where

literature finds itself confronted with the nonsense of a child's death. “A child died,”, he

writes “and a whole story begins [...] Such a death is necessary and every story starts

with her: with this wrench that reverses the movement of days, and folds it up again on

the same movement of nothingness.”. That sentence seems to imply the following

statement: literature for literature is absurd. To justify literature, there is a disaster

58 Similarly to Primo Levi who became a writer after escaping from the camps so as to witness his experience.

59 ”Je n'aurais jamais écrit, je ne rêvais pas de le faire”Philippe Forest, L'Enfant Eternel, Gallimard, 1998, p. 133.

60 Ibid, p. 191.61 Ibid, p. 216: “Ni l'amour ni la poésie ne triomphent de la mort. Ils font seulement un chemin de

paroles ramenant toujours au cercueil scellé.”

14

needed to validate the flight of a man out to fiction. In other words: “the possible of the

novel can not be conceived without the impossible of the real ».62

On can consider that the whole consistence of Forest's work is contained in this

sentence quoted from his essay Le Roman, le Réel: “I do not consider myself a writer. I

am someone who happened to write novels”63. Forest thus describes his authorial

position as something that has happened to him in the same unpredictable way as his

daughter's death. Further to “the wrench of grief”, he answered to “the call of the real”64

by composing a novel. He has been requested for this task, in a way, and that is why he

quotes Bataille writing: “How can we linger over books to which we know that the

author has not been constrained?”65 He validates Bataille's strictness by explaining in

L'Enfant éternel that “In a somewhat essential way, a book should only exist if it makes

itself despite his author, in spite of him, against him, forcing him to recall the exact

point of his life where his being irremediably breaks.»66.

The sequence of his books does not correspond to a concerted process, since he

explains that he “does not know any more what madness took him when he began to

write”. “En quatre ou cinq semaines,”, he writes, “j'avais fini mon premier roman.

L'Enfant éternel a paru en Janvier 1997. Sept mois seulement avaient passé depuis la

mort de Pauline. Il n'était pas encore sous presse que j'avais commencé un deuxième

livre. Toute la nuit a été publié en mars 1999. Je ne pouvais plus m'arrêter. J'éprouvais

la certitude que chaque nouveau roman appelait le correctif d'un autre livre qui

effacerait la honte du précédent”67. A “corrective”: Forest seems to search for a way to

answer the harshness of death through his repeated attempts; and this notion of

repetition and of the failure that this repetition witnesses is obvious and even formulated

in several books of his. One can think of a sentence by Plath in her poem “The Bee

Meeting”, which reads: “I could not run without having to run forever”.68 This applies

62 Le possible du roman ne se conçoit pas sans l'impossible du réel” Philippe Forest, Le roman, le réel et autres essais, Allaphbed 3, éditions Cécile Defaut, 2007, p. 19.

63 ”Je ne me considère pas comme un écrivain. Je suis quelqu'un à qui il est arrivé d'écrire des romans” Ibid, p. 104.

64 “Le déchirement du deuil” et “l'appel du réel”. Ibid, p. 8.65 ”Comment nous attarder à des livres auxquels, sensiblement, l'auteur n'a pas été contraint?” Ibid, p.

57.66 ”De quelque façon essentielle, un livre ne devrait exister que s'il se fait malgré son auteur, en dépit de

lui, contre lui, l'obligeant à toucher le point même de sa vie où son être, irrémédiablement, se défait” Philippe Forest, L'Enfant Eternel, op. cit., p. 135.

67”Je ne sais plus très bien quelle folie m'a pris quand je me suis mise à écrire.” Philippe Forest, Tous les enfants sauf un, Gallimard, 2008, p. 151.68 ”I could not run without having to run forever.”. “The Bee-Meeting”, Sylvia Plath, Ariel, op. cit., p.

55.

15

quite perfectly to Forest, who runs away from the empty place of his life and never finds

where to stop. Like Malte Laurids Brigge, Rilke's hero, he does something against fear.

He stays seated all night long and writes.69 Writing, he always comes back to the same

point, because “there is no self-writing but put under the sign of the “returning”, the text

becoming that path on which an individual comes back to the deserted story of his life,

as if he was a stranger and in order to find a shelter there.”70

To him, books are only a vector (”a path”) but never a solution or a relief. At

best, there is a “sudden and relentless” necessity,71 because life is fiction; then the book

is only its physical representation. “If I am writing novels,” writes Forest, meaning: if I

dedicate myself to this abstract activity, “it is to make a fresh start”,72 that is to say to

manage to improve in the real at the same time. Forest's goal in literature is precisely to

avoid it, to “tell very straight the events as they took place so as to make heard, without

literature, what, in today's world, a child's illness and death can mean”.73 Considering

the success of his books, and despite the fact that they have been erroneously read as

examples of the mourning literature and encouragement to comfort, one can believe

Forest has probably succeeded in making himself heard. His sober and precise style

reveals the reality of infant illness and death. On the other hand, what he might have

been trying to tell himself while writing those books, that is to say the exact point of his

experience that he was planning to expose, seems to have remained out of reach. There

is something unutterable in what Forest tries to tell on several occasions, and his

different attempts to circumvent what is unutterable lead him to evoke the cases of other

writers who have been through the same ordeal (Shakespeare and his son Hamnet,

Mallarmé and Anatole, Hugo and Léopoldine,74 but also Kenzaburo Oé or Natsume

Soséki). In some parts of the novels posterior to L'Enfant éternel, he also sums up the

events of 1996-1997, as if he was hoping to be able, through the brutal simplicity of

detachment, to encircle, as in a trap, the moving matter of what he fails to express.69 ”J'ai fait quelque chose contre la peur. Je suis resté assis toute la nuit et j'ai écrit”. Rainer Maria Rilke,

Les Cahiers de Malte Laurids Brigge, Seuil, collection Points, 1995.70 ”Il n'est d'écriture de soi que placée soit le signe de la 'revenance', le texte devenant ce chemin même

par lequel un individu s'en revient à la façon d'un étranger et afin d'y trouver un abri vers le récit déserté de sa vie” Philippe Forest, La beauté du Contresens et autres essais sur la littérature japonaise, Allaphbed 1, éditions Cécile Defaut, 2005, p. 285.

71 ”Soudaine et implacable”. Philippe Forest, Le roman, le réel et autres essais, op. cit., p. 59.72 ”Si j'écris des romans, c'est pour tourner la page.” Ibid, p. 196.73 ”Dire très directement les évènements tels qu'ils se sont déroulés de manière à faire entendre, sans

littérature, ce que, dans le monde d'aujourd'hui, peuvent signifier la maladie et la mort d'une enfant.” Philippe Forest, Tous les enfants sauf un, op. cit., p. 10.

74 ”Comment deux des plus grands écrivains du passé avaient fait l'épreuve de l'impossibilité et de l'inutilité de dire au moment de la mort de leur enfant” dans Philippe Forest, Le roman, le réel et autres essais, op. cit., p. 228.

16

In fact, writing books, Forest does nothing but read in reverse what appears to

him as necessary to carry on. Though he asserts that he has never reread his own

writings,75 yet in the writing process each word put on the page can be regarded as read,

at least once, by its author. It is as if Forest was, in a way, reading to himself – reading

the only story that he can and wants to listen to, the only one that speaks to him

personally. He craves for, or rather he feels the urgent need to read something that he

believes no one has written. In order to be “taken back to the exact place of what is

true”, he has to “double” by himself the “fiction” that gives its shape to the “truth”.76

Joyce Carol Oates legitimises and confirms this vision, reporting that “To Nabokov [...]

the experience itself is not authentic as long as it has not been transcribes in a language:

the writer thus gives his imprimatur to his self (historical) through the writing”.77 In

accordance to this statement, one can see Forest's work as a way to validate his

experience and to accept it.

The apparent mildness of Forest's books is that of one who has lost so much he

does not have anything left to lose and thus does not fear anything; in that respect this

softness, this quietness are identical to Hughes's who declared, at a time when he had

not decided yet if he was to publish the Birthday Letters: “It [the Birthday Letters] will

bring the sky down on my head, if I publish it – about 90-100 pieces. But so what. The

sky's fallen anyway”.78 There is a threshold in the fall beyond which everything ceases

to be menacing, and Forest's books get to us from that threshold. Having nothing to lose

makes one sadly invulnerable and release a speech that cannot exist in fear: it is through

this speech and this speech only that Forest becomes an author, if not a writer.

Indefatigably, he asserts his position as absolutely opposite to that of the “poets [who]

are thrilled to see Roma in flames as long as the spectacle provides them with the rhyme

they are trying to find for their verse”.79 He repeats: he was not longing for writing. He

has better things to do. He was a father. Even today, although famous and praised,

following Giacometti who said that in a fire he would rather save a cat than a

75 ”Je ne me suis jamais relu” dans Philippe Forest, Tous les enfants sauf un, op. cit., p. 9.76 ”La vérité a toujours forme de fiction et c'est seulement à condition de se redoubler elle-même que la

fiction (fiction de la fiction) peut espérer nous reconduire vers le lie même du vrai.” dans Philippe Forest, La beauté du Contresens et autres essais sur la littérature japonaise, op. cit., p. 19.

77 ”Pour Nabokov [...] l'expérience elle-même n'est pas authentique tant qu'elle n'a pas été transcrite sous forme de langage: l'écrivain donne ainsi son imprimatur à son moi (historique) par l'écriture.”. See Joyce Carol Oates, La foi d'un écrivain , op. cit., p. 91.

78 “It [the Birthday Letters] will bring the sky down on my head, if I publish it – about 90-100 pieces. But so what. The sky's fallen anyway.”. Letter from Hughes to Sagar, 15 august 1997 in Ted Hughes, Letters of Ted Hughes, op. cit., p. 692.79 “Poètes [qui] se réjouissent de voir brûler Rome pourvu que le spectacle fournisse la rime qu'ils

cherchent à leur vers”. Philippe Forest, Tous les enfants sauf un, op. cit., p. 74.

17

Rembrandt, Forest writes, with a calm so discouraged that it is appalling: “For me,

between the child and the book, if I could have chosen, I would have wished I could

keep the child”.80

Literature has to put up with misunderstandings and Forest's second tragedy,

obviously minor compared to the first one, but maybe more cruel in that sense that it

extend and aggravate the first one, is that his books are understood as examples of a

model consolation or exhortations for grieving process when on the contrary they

denounce how inconsolable is the loss and how vain the books are, as much as any other

supposed form of sublimation of such an experience. “One would wish”, he writes,

“that a book had a therapeutic value and that the grieving process could be fulfilled at

last through its writing”.81 To which he responds, with a palpable rage against this

“consolation society” that accepts only what conforms to its “program”.82 “I do not

know if my novels cured me of the pain of losing my daughter. I do not think so”.83

Doubt here is a lure: Forest knows very well that his books have not cured him of any

pain. The fact that his discourse, which says in substance, as if echoing Hughes “I shall

never get over the shock and I don't particularly want to” is not heard but altered,

relieved, by a society that is unable to take into consideration the human pathos justifies

again its own repetition its sa multiplication. Forest answers the endless echo of his pain

with the endless echo of its expression, since society “does not want to hear what the

literature has to say”.84 “I have been very shocked”, he said, “by the misunderstanding

that surrounded and still surrounds the reception for my books. And it is often because

of a pointless wish to clear up this misunderstanding that I went on writing”.85

Pessoa's sentence,86 when considered here, takes on a very dark meaning, since

literature, far from being regarded as a surplus of life, an exuberance, a luxury, appears

as a pointless activity that neither saves nor restores. Forest writes: “Words do not have

any real power unless they expose their elementary powerlessness to restore anything of

80 “Pour ma part, entre l'enfant et le livre, si le choix m'avait été laissé, j'aurais voulu pouvoir garder l'enfant.”. Ibid.

81 “On voudrait qu'un livre ait une valeur thérapeutique et que par l'écriture s'accomplisse enfin le travail de deuil”. Ibid, p. 156.

82 Ibid, p. 15983 “Je ne sais pas si mes romans m'ont guéri de la douleur d'avoir perdu ma fille. Je ne le pense pas.”

Ibid, p. 161.84 “ne veut rien entendre de ce que la littérature a à lui dire”

85 “J'ai été très frappé,” dit-il, “par le malentendu qui a entouré et continue à entourer la réception de mes livres. Et c'est souvent par désir vain de dissiper ce malentendu que j'ai continué à écrire.” Interview of Philippe Forest by Julia Kerninon.

86 “La littérature, comme toutes les formes d'art, est l'aveu que la vie ne suffit pas.” dans Fernando Pessoa, Fragments d'un voyage immobile, p. 53.

18

the disaster of the world”.87

The powerlessness of words needs to be staged and asserted – to write such

books, to stress so strongly one's relationship to literature in such circumstances means

to denounce literature itself, or rather to put it to the test. Forest's commitment to

literature is nothing but a massive negation of anything he might have believed in when

he “did not know”.88 The fact that Forest puts literature itself into question, that

literature that was undoubtedly, he being a professor, a reader, an intellectual, the most

important thing in his life after his daughter (and still is, since faced with pain, the novel

remains “the only way [he] knows”89) is charged with sense. “One of the side effects of

mourning to me was to make almost all literature unreadable. And especially all

philosophy. I had only one question left, and, because of a old habit, I asked these to

every book”.90 His child's death reveals to Forest the gaping hole left to that painful

topic, and because of his loyalty, he begins to fill in that hole.

Forest's story is then possibly the story of a stupefaction as much as Hughes's, in

that sense that the shock caused by his daughter's death reverses his connection to

literature because it pushed him to the other side of the book – to the side where, as

those he has studied and from who he has learned a lesson that he has possibly then

taught as a professor, Forest now takes action. The books are not worth anything if they

are not connected to the world's reality. Hughes asserts that literature must be able to

write about Hiroshima and Auschwitz – this is what Forest is doing, tirelessly,

desperately, affirming his position by claiming how “ C'est l'art qui n'est rien s'il ne

touche pas à ce dont témoignent [les photographies d'Hiroshima]”91 He writes his

disaster, he takes possession of it through the only language that has always been his:

the language of literature.92 His daughter's death turns him into a writer because facing

such a grief, he cannot content himself with his readership, he feels the needs to become

directly involved. Literature is a donation to the dead indeed. Well-read pay with the

87 “Les mots n'ont de pouvoir véritable qu'à condition de mettre à nu leur fondamentale impuissance à réparer quoi que ce soit du désastre du monde.”. Philippe Forest, L'Enfant Eternel, op. cit., p. 219.88 “Nous ne savions pas” Ibid, p. 13. This idea of a knowledge provided by the experience of death is to

be found also in Hughes's work, for example in “Daffodils”: “We knew we'd live forever / We had not learned” in Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters, op. cit., p. 127.

89 “La seule manière [qu'il] connaisse”. Philippe Forest, Sarinagara, Gallimard, 2006, p. 295.90 “L'un des effets secondaires du deuil fut pour moi de rendre à peu près illisible toute littérature. Et

surtout toute philosophie. Il ne me restait plus qu'une question et, par un restant d'habitude, je la posais à tous les livres.”. Ibid, p. 127.

91 Ibid, p. 304.92 “L'imaginaire a ainsi partie liée avec ce que Kristeva définit comme 'révolte', retournement de l'intime

sur soi-même pour consuire le sujet 'jusqu'au frontière ud représentable, du pensable, du soutenable': jusqu'à la 'possession'” dans Philippe Forest, Le roman, le réel et autres essais, op. cit., p. 68.

19

only money they know, despite the fact that “writing adds a bit more to the shame of

having stayed alive”.93

In spite of it all, he witnesses, because “the witness is the one who goes down to

hell during his life, and 'it does exist' indeed”.94 and it has to be said. Forest becomes the

speaker, he becomes active, someone who comes forward. “The experience of the

impossible”, writes Forest, “forces the individual – moved in his dearest affection – to a

total and immediate conversion of his whole being”:95 he thus moves to the other side of

the book. He settles a debt to everything that his child's death has taught him by force

and that was not told in the books. Since Forest is a great reader of Bataille, one can

think about him in relation with Bataille's theory of the “potlatch”,96 which supposed a

luxurious offering in order to give offence to a tribe leader. Forest may be trying to give

offence to literature itself, adding book after book to lay a offering which could not be

given back, exactly as he cannot be given his daughter back. He tries to formulate, to

express, to control in abstraction the exact meaning of what happened and that he could

not control in reality. Literature is at the time the last and the most hated resort because

it is not one. His work's profusion and diversity is an exercise in style which says: in

any form, literature is not up to the precipice97 of my child's death. When putting

literature in question from the inside, Forest stakes his most personal faith, his identity,

that is to say, everything he thought was his identity before being a father and cruelly

not being one any more. The parental condition is almost the only in the world that is

not revocable; parenthood ends only with parent's or the child's death, and the logical

scheme is that the parent dies first. When the parent stops to be a parent during his life,

he finds himself, beyond his grief, in a very ambiguous situation. Forest writes: “The

experience of mourning is the experience of exclusion. And in the case of parental

mourning, it is intensified”.98 After his daughter's death, Forest does not have the status

93 “Ecrire ajoute encore un peu à la honte d'être resté vivant” Philippe Forest, L'Enfant Eternel, op. cit., p. 228.

94 “le témoin est celui qui descend de son vivant en enfer” et Philippe Forest, Sarinagara, op. cit., p. 290.

95 “L'expérience de l'impossible oblige l'individu – atteint dans son affection la plus chère – à une totale et immédiate conversion de tout son être” Philippe Forest, La beauté du Contresens et autres essais sur la littérature japonaise, op. cit., p. 150.

96 “L'idéal serait qu'un potlach ne put être rendu. [...] Sans doute le potlach n'est-il pas réductible au désir de perdre, mais ce qu'il apporte au donateur n'est pas l'inévitable surcroît des dons de revanche, c'est le rang qu'il confère à celui qui a le dernier mot” dans Georges Bataille, La Part Maudite, éditions de Minuit, 1967, p. 108.

97 “Je ne comprenais toujours pas dans quel précipice m'avait fait tomber la mort de ma fille” dans Philippe Forest, Le Nouvel Amour, Gallimard, 2007, p. 153.

98 “L'expérience du deuil est celle de l'exclusion. Et, dans le cas du deuil parental, elle se trouve redoublée”. Philippe Forest, Tous les enfants sauf un, op. cit., p. 110.

20

of a parent any more but he does not have the status of one who has never had children

neither; he finds himself in a material situation similar to the situation in which he lived

before he had his daughter, except that, and the exception is immense, he cannot get

back to the man he was before. Forest writes about Soseki but one can easily guess that

the speech applies to him as well: “something has been lost with the first child, that

nothing would replace, that ruins any possible confidence put in words”.99 The identity

question is raised here; that is to say a question that is thus formulated: who can one still

be after such an ordeal?

This is the question that Forest answers through his writing – in other words, he

becomes the tireless voice of his “experience de l'impossible”. As he says about Oé: “It

is about surviving a collapse that seems to close the possibility of any future”.100 That is

possibly why he entered literature: to get out of the life where he had the illusion of

having “lived to the end everything he had left to live”.101 He tries to “leave, [...]

disappear in the daylight”.102 In reality, as he puts it himself, he has “walked into a novel

that has no end”.103 The story of Forest is the story of a parent whose child's death

makes, “by chance or deliberately”104 (according to Joyce Carol Oates in La Foi d'un

Ecrivain) at the same time a novelist and a public person, since his books brought him a

certain popularity. Oddly, he never alludes to his celebrity in his books, or to the

confrontation with the media, or to what he can feel when performing public readings or

conferences. Whether famous or not, Forest seems to have fulfilled at least a piece of

his goal in writing: he has succeeded in disappearing. “Faceless, nameless, without any

self-image to reflect now in no mirror, having gone through a certain experience of

death, a writer is a ghost”.105 Thus writing and then vanishing, he had managed to get

close to his daughter, as he became a ghost. He never goes away from that unique topic,

his daughter's death, he has become this subject, he is this voice.106 He explains it in

99 “Quelque chose s'est perdu avec le premier enfant, que rien ne viendra remplacer, qui ruine toute confiance possible placée dans le monde” Philippe Forest, Sarinagara, op. cit., p. 187.

100 “Il s'agit de survivre à un effondrement qui semble clore la possibilité de tout futur”. Philippe Forest, La beauté du Contresens et autres essais sur la littérature japonaise, op. cit., p. 79.

101 “Vécu jusqu'au bout tout ce qui [lui] restait à vivre” Philippe Forest, Le Nouvel Amour, op. cit., p. 17.102 “Partir, [...] disparaître en plein jour” Philippe Forest, Sarinagara, op. cit., p. 25.103 “entré dans un roman qui n'a pas de fin.”. Philippe Forest, Tous les enfants sauf un, op. cit., p. 152.

104”La fiction en prose est aussi un métier, et un métier s'apprend, par hasard ou délibérément” dans Joyce Carol Oates, La foi d'un écrivain , op. cit., p. 97.105 “Sans visage et sans nom, sans image de soi désormais à réfléchir dans aucun miroir, passé par une

certaine expérience de la mort, un écrivain est un fantôme” Philippe Forest, La beauté du Contresens et autres essais sur la littérature japonaise, op. cit.,, p. 310.

106 “Le questionnement de la maladie, de la mort et de la folie”, as he puts it in Le roman, le réel et autres essais, op. cit., p. 15.

21

veiled terms when he asks if “ literature, after all, sets any other question but the one

formulated by Oé in his book: 'Who are we, we who carry on living?'”107 Hughes

apparently wonders as well, as he expressed his feeling of fraud in “Life After Death”,

when he describes how he feeds his son afther Plath's death: the baby's mouth, accepting

food, “betrays” his mother, while Hughes's hand is “disembodied” because it has

“survived” Plath. The scene is uncomfortable, as if unreal. Hughes expressed the

difficulty to carry on living after death has operated such a raid on a life. Trivial habits

have lost their meaning, since Hughes is reduced to dressing up “a wound”. The three of

them (and that number recalls cruelly the disappearance of the fourth member of the

family) have not really been spared, but “thrown thereby life”; and their present life is

nothing but a half-life, a lure, since they can only “rest in [Plath's] death”. In the end,

though Hughes's thought is very similar to Oé's, nonetheless the main question he asks

through the Birthday Letters is not to know who are the living, but instead, addressing

Plath: who were you truly, you are are dead? Hughes does not have anything special to

tell her about the living, excepted for news of their children.

Here we can draw a first connection between Hughes and Forest: apparently

they have both been taken prisoner by death, in many respects. Whether this title came

from the outside or whether they chose it, their name is now inseparable from a story of

death.108 A whole part of Forest's undertaking consists in virtually defending his child

against the modern world which would want, according to him, the deny the infinite

grief of this death so that everything could end up as a “happy end”.109 He quoted

Tsushima who wrote how “in our world, the death of a child or any other cruel death

has become a forgotten thing nowadays, to the point that we have to tell it expressly in

the form of a story”.110 Years after this sentence, in that modern word which has

banished the custom of mourning, where sadness is something that must pass, and

where a child can be replaced by another child,111 Forest recalls, as Tsushima did, book 107 “La littérature, après-tout, pose-t-elle une autre question que celle-ci, formulée par Oé dans son livre:

'Qui sommes-nous, nous qui continuons à vivre?'” Philippe Forest, La beauté du Contresens et autres essais sur la littérature japonaise, op. cit., p. 61.

108 Hughes remains forever Sylvia Plath's widower. The tragedy has so darkened his reputation that although he has been Poet Laureate of the Kingdom, he is not as famous as he would be if no such thing had happened to him. Plath's death has increased the poet's tendency to loneliness and discretion. In North Tawton, the Devon village where he lived for more than thirty years, the villagers ignore almost all of his story and even his profession: “an intellectual”, at the most. Even in universities, his name is not familiar to english students.109 Philippe Forest, Tous les enfants sauf un, op. cit., p 142.110 “Dans notre monde, la mort d'un enfant ou toute autre mort aussi cruelle est devenue une chose

oubliée de nos jours, au point que l'on doive la raconter expressément sous forme de récit” Philippe Forest, La beauté du Contresens et autres essais sur la littérature japonaise, op. cit., p. 150.

111 “Depuis dix ans, la question formidablement indiscrète qui brûle toutes les lèvres et que beaucoup ne

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after book, the importance and the tragedy of this short life. Then, Pessoa's sentence

may also means that life's affirmation that an existence is over is not enough as a proof.

It belongs to art only to decide when, exactly, a name get erased from the living world.

“To consider one's existence as a novel [...],” writes Forest, “so as to keep forever open,

pathetically alive its telling”112 since “the novel makes us communicate again with the

now concealed part of our lives”.113 It is also, paradoxically considering the cheap value

that he pretends to grant literature with, the same bravado that Forest runs through his

books: to recapture his own life, but also his daughter's, using words, “because there is

no reason for a novelist why everything should stop with life.114

parviennent pas à réprimer se formule ainsi: avez-vous eu un autre enfant? Cette question décide de tout aux yeux du monde. Et je sais bien que c'est sur elle que les autres nous jugent. Car si un autre enfant nous était né, alors la société pourrait malgré tout considérer que notre histoire se termine sur le happy end qu'elle demande et que 'tout est bien qui finit bien'”. Philippe Forest, Tous les enfants sauf un, op. cit., p. 142.

112 “Considérer son existence comme un roman [...] afin d'en considérer interminablement ouvert, pathétiquement vivant le récit”. Philippe Forest, La beauté du Contresens et autres essais sur la littérature japonaise, op. cit., p. 97.

113 “Le roman nous [fait] communiquer encore avec la part désormais dérobée de nos vies”. Philippe Forest, Le roman, le réel et autres essais, op. cit., p. 9.

114 “Car il n'y a pas de raison pour un romancier que tout s'achève avec la vie”. Philippe Forest, Sarinagara, op. cit., p. 206.

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3)In both cases: the absence of a grieving process after the deaths

A close relative's death raises the question of mourning, that is to say,

paradoxically, how do those who stay live after, or rather survive?, According to

Philippe Forest in the last pages of Sarinagara, “Survivre est l'épreuve et l'énigme”115;

nevertheless, “possible and impossible, survival happened”.116 Forest wonders endlessly

if there may be a way to overcome his daughter's death. His own image portrayed in his

books shows him “unforgivable and still innocent, [he] who [is] alive”117. The

unforgivable nature of this survival is also familiar to Hughes, concerning whom Alan

Bold asks in the conclusion of his study about Hughes and Thom Gunn:”How long can

he continue to be? That is the question.”.118 It is not trifling either to notice that in the

years following Plath's death, Ted, partly because of Assia Wevill's roots,119 began a to

feel passion for the translation of holocaust poets. He claimed to have felt a real

intimacy with those authors' words, and thus explained it: “[their poetry] seems closer to

the common reality, in which we have to live if we are to survive, than to those other

realities in which we can holiday, or into which we decay when our bodily survival is

comfortably taken care of [...]”120 The message is obvious: to Hughes, entertainment has

become out of question and everything now is about surviving, when at the same time

trying to stay as close as possible to reality, that is to say, in a sense, to the truth, in a

same almost ascetic position as the holocaust poets. “For these poets” (Popa, Amichai,

Zbigniev, Herbert and Miroslav Holub), Elaine Feinstein explains, “the wish to go on

existing was not, as in Beckett's vision, absurd; on the contrary, the wish to continue on

living was in accord with the whole universe. Hughes longed to count himself among

115 Ibid, p. 345.116 “Possible et impossible, survivre a eu lieu” Ibid.117 “Impardonnable et pourtant innocent, [lui] qui [est] vivant” Ibid.118”How long can he continue to be? That is the question.”. See Alan Bold, Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes, Harper and Row, New York, 1976, p. 132 and quoted in Margaret Dickie Uroff, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, op. cit., p. 213.119 Assia's father, Lonya Gutman, was a russian jewish, her mother german, and Assia herself spent mots

of her youth in Tel-Aviv, Israël. (See Yehuda Koren et Eilat Negev, Lover of Unreason: Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath's Rival and Ted Hughes' Doomed Love, op. cit. , 2007.)

120 Caroline Andriot-Saillant, La fable de l'Etre: Yves Bonnefoy et Ted Hughes, éditions L'Harmattan, Paris, 2006, p. 114.

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them. He was a survivor, as they were [...]”.121 What bring Hughes close to those poets

is not a common exhaustion in front of brutality, but the strengthened desire to live. One

can think by extension of the famous hungarian writer Imre Kertesz who left for the

concentration camps at the age of fifteen and wrote later: “I will carry on living my

impossible life”122 Forest and Hughes express the same idea after the bereavement:

Forest explains how his wife and himself had sweared not to survive their daughter123;

Hughes voices a huge shock, which he will appear to have recovered from, but which

he reveals still intact thirty-five years later, since that un-overcome shock is what would

lead him to write and publish the Birthday Letters.

Hughes first expressed the need to forget, and one of the acts that he was the

more reproached for (though it is still unsure if he really did it) is the destruction of

Plath's last two diaries. Hughes thus justifies his gesture: “The last of |these diaries]

contained entries for several months, and I destroyed it because I did not want her

children to have to read it (in those days, I regarded forgetfulness as an essential part of

survival).”124 Besides the very strong meaning of the last sentence, which means that

Plath's death was so devastating that Hughes could only think of forgetfulness as a way

to face it (that is to say he thought he would not be able to live with the permanent

conscience of what happened and that it was “essential” to forget to be able nor even to

live but to survive at least), the second point regards Hughes's concern about his

children: when Sylvia died, Frieda Rebecca Hughes, their eldest daughter, was only

three years old, and Nicholas Farrar Hughes, their son, was one. This is another great

difference between the two authors; Pauline's death leaves alone, released of all sorts of

responsibilities against his will, as if alone in the world, whereas Plath's death makes

Hughes the only parental figure left in a mutilated family.125

This is possibly one of the reasons why Forest, though he violently refuses the

simple idea of a grieving process that is nothing to him but another invention by the

rushing Occident which considers only the future and whose Christian theology,

121Elaine Feinstein, Ted Hughes, The Life of a Poet, op. cit. , p. 175.122 Imre Kertesz, Être sans destin, Actes Sud, 2002, p. 361.123 “Il était de toute façon inconcevable que nous sachions survivre bien longtemps” dans Philippe

Forest, Le Nouvel Amour, op. cit., p. 14.124Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, op. cit., p. 4.125This position will reveal very complex for Hughes to keep. His children will learn the truth by chance,

partly because of an article by Alvarez. See a 2007 interview of Frieda Hughes for detail: http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1598800,00.html

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according to Julia Kristeva, “regards sadness as a sin”126, on the other hand he examines

that dilemma of death which arises constantly before him. He approaches from many

different angles, which is why he wrote such different books (L'Enfant éternel appears

much more as a novel than Sarinagara, for example). He goes even go so far as to study

cancer itself (the bibliohraphy of Tous Les Enfants Sauf Un is expressive). One

sometimes feels Forest is trying to grasp his story, to enter it, and that he is trying to

translate that story through other people's speeches, whether they belong to the medical

world or to the literary one. One can assume that the reason why Forest's way to set his

story in the middle the universal history of private or public disaster was an attempt for

him to turn his pain into a common place so that he could accept it as another example

of the great unfairness of the world which had struck him this once. However, when I

suggested that those many links he highlights between his case and that of other

intellectual or well-read fathers, as well as when he draws a parallel between his

personal tragedy and a collective one such as Hiroshima might be a way for him to

subside, or even to feel justified, he thus answered me: “To me it is nothing more but

the desire to find what is universal in any singular experience so as not to shut oneself

up in a the circle of a exclusively personal meditation. The novel is dialogue. And it is

an imaginary dialogue I suggest with an individual whose story is comparable to mine.

Without any care about subsiding and with an desire of self-justification equal to that

which implies any undertaking one begins. No more no less.”127 This statement first

shows how much Forest's work is turn towards the outside world. Forest is conscious of

the universality of his case and he is addressing others. In order to relieve himself from

grief, he opts for formulation, which then turns into communication. He is the witness

of what he feels does not have any place anymore in such a positivist society.128 He

underlines the disappearance of mourning customs in our society and the difficulty it

thus represents for him to carry out his mourning without any tradition to hold to, no

physical symbol for his pain. In that sense his books can be seen as memorials to the

126 “Fait de la tristesse un péché” Caroline Andriot-Saillant, La fable de l'Etre: Yves Bonnefoy et Ted Hughes, op. cit., p. 102.

127 “Il me semble qu'il s'agit simplement du désir de trouver la part d'universel que contient chaque expérience singulière afin de ne pas s'enfermer dans le cercle d'une méditation exclusivement personnelle. Le roman est dialogue. Et c'est un dialogue imaginaire que je propose avec des individus dont l'histoire est comparable à la mienne. Sans souci d'apaisement et avec un désir d'auto-justification égal à celui que comporte toute entreprise dans laquelle s'engage quelqu'un. Ni plus ni moins.” Interview of Philippe Forest by Julia Kerninon, see in appendice.

128“La civilisation naît, dit-on, du moment où l'homme invente d'inhumer son semblable. [...] L'humanité se construit ainsi dans la dénégation du cadavre auquel elle conduit pourtant. Elle s'arrache à la nuit noire de l'animalité pour élaborer la fiction positive et rassurante d'un monde où se trouve proscrit le scandale qui la menace”. Philippe Forest, Tous les enfants sauf un, op. cit., pp. 90-91.

26

lost one, or commemorative plaques of Forest's path to an healing that does not yet

seem to take place. He writes in Sarinagara, about his state of mind before leaving for

Japan, that is to say after he had already written and published several of his books: “I

had nothing left to wait for, neither from the things in my life nor from the words with

the help of which I had thought I could still find a meaning for them».129

To find a meaning for his life, with the help of words: this is Forest's goal as a

writer. Although he writes on several occasions that he would like to forget,130 like

Hughes, yet what he does is exactly the opposite. Forgetfulness appears as being

impossible, since this death has definitely altered his life and keep on dictating its laws

to him. The experience of death lived by Forest seems to have made him conscious of

life's implacable laws, and now “as a true scholar of death” according to Rilke,131 he

turns somehow it into his main topic. Infantile death has become his territory, although

even inside that territory he is nothing but a prisoner since that continually renewed task

does not appear to have any end nor bring any improvement. One can think again of

Rainer Maria Rilke's famous lines: “Who cares about victory? Overcoming is

everything.”132 Forest has neither hope nor wish to come back to what he was before; he

accepted the irreparable lost of the future he was promised to.

It is at least one of the possible interpretations. However, considering how he

describes his overall approach in the last pages of the Nouvel Amour, one can wonder if

far from being any kind of a grieving process, writing is not in reality to Forest its

absolute negation – a sort of secret disobedience, a book written because he hopes that

his daughter may “read what [he is] writing as she has read, [he] believed it against all

reason, his previous books which he had all things considered written for me, made in

order to maintain the insane fiction that the still existed because something, even as

insignificant as a book, was always addressed to her.”133 Though what he is officially

129 “Je n'avais plus rien à espérer, ni des choses de ma vie, ni des mots à l'aide desquels j'avais pensé pouvoir continuer à donner un sens à celles-ci” Philippe Forest, Sarinagara, op. cit., p.109.

130 “Je m'imaginais que ce que je racontais finirait par prendre la place de ce que j'avais vécu et qu'un jour le moment viendrait où je n'aurais plus pour mémoire que de vagues morceaux de romans. Je sais aujourd'hui qu'il n'en est rien. J'ai tout oublié de ce que j'ai écrit. Je me rappelle tout ce que j'ai vécu”. Philippe Forest, Sarinagara, op. cit., p. 332.131 “En vrai écolier de la mort”, from a letter to Benvenuta, 1 february 1914, quoted in the translator's

notes in Rainer Maria Rilke, Requiem (1996), translated by Jean-Yves Masson, Fata Morgana, 2004.132 “Pour le comte Wolf Von Kalckreuth”, in Rainer Maria Rilke, Requiem, op. cit., p. 42: “Wer spricht

von Siegen? / Überstehn ist alles.”133 “Lire ce que j'étais en train d'écrire comme elle avait lu, je le croyais contre toute raison, mes

précédents ouvrages qu'au fond j'avais écrits pour elle, faits afin de maintenir la fiction insensée qu'elle existait encore puisque quelque chose, même d'aussi insignifiant qu'un roman, lui était toujours destiné.”Philippe Forest, Le Nouvel Amour, op. cit., pp. 161-2.

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looking for through literature is his own disappearance “in daylight”, his writing also

draws, whether he knows it or nor, whether he wants it or not, his daughter's revived

memory, book after book, looked after exactly as a grave. In reality, the first

explanation to why the grieving process cannot be fulfilled is simply found the question

of loyalty: to recover from the loved one's death is a betrayal. Writing may then be the

only means that provides “a soothing that does not exclude fidelity to the tragic nature

of the experience.”134

It is precisely for having not maintained Plath's memory that Ted Hughes has

been so long reproached.135 One cannot deny how singularly surprising it is on the part

of a writer to have remained silent so long about such a thing. It is even more surprising

considering the fact that Hughes made many allusions throughout his life to art's healing

capacities, finally asserting in a 1996 interview that “Art is a psychological component

of the auto-immune system that gives expression to the healing process.”136 While death

triggers the writing process in a non-writer such as Forest, on the contrary it leads

Hughes to a total silence, to the point where it even blocks his current work. The writing

of Crow, interrupted by Assia and Shura's death, will never be carried on as far as he

had planned137. Death mutilates Hughes's creativity while it reveals Forest's. The

difference between their two reactions leads back to the difference between their two

cases: Forest cannot in any way be found guilty nor blame anyone for his grief; as he

puts it: “How to take the cruel and carnivorous order of things, the bare mechanism of

the world, the time's carnivorous action to court? Who would survivors of an earthquake

put the blame on? One may as well bear a grudge against death itself.”138 Hughes

unintelligibly knows that Plath's death was inevitable, because she had been struggling

with psychological troubles for a long time; nevertheless he also knows that he could

have saved her that time in 1963, at least delay the fatal term, because it was his

responsibility in her life (“la soigner, la faire rire, s'occuper d'elle et si possible la

134 “Un apaisement qui n'exclu[e] pas la fidélité au caractère tragique de l'expérience” Philippe Forest, La beauté du Contresens et autres essais sur la littérature japonaise, op. cit., p. 112.

135 Hughes has been reproached to neglect Plath's Heptonstall's grave, in answer to what he wrote a letter to The Guardian 's editor (published on the 20 April 1989; see Ted Hughes, Letters of Ted Hughes, op. cit., p. 552.)

136 “Art is a psychological component of the auto-immune system that gives expression to the healing process.” Ted Hughes interviewed by Eilat Negev, quoted by Keith Sagar in The Laughter of Foxes, A Study of Ted Hughes (2000), Liverpool University Press, 2006, p. 39.

137Letter from Hughes to Richard Murphy, October 1970. See Ted Hughes, Letters of Ted Hughes, op. cit., p. 307.

138 “Quel procès intenter à l'ordre cruel et carnassier des choses, à la mécanique nue du monde, au travail carnassier du temps? À qui s'en prendraient les rescapés d'un tremblement de terre? Autant en vouloir la mort elle-même.” Philippe Forest, Sarinagara, op. cit., p. 342.

28

guérir”). Hughes failed in his duty. Forest was struck by fate. The difference is colossal.

That is what Ted Hughes alludes to when he explains in a letter to Anne

Stevenson what he does not write in his own name about his late wife: “I have never

attempted to give my account of Sylvia because I saw quite clearly from the first day

that I am the only person in this business who cannot be believed by all who need to

find me guilty. I know too that the alternative – remaining silent – makes me a

projection post for every worst suspicion. That my silence seems to confirm every

accusation and fantasy. I preferred it, on the whole, to allowing myself to be dragged

out into the bull-ring and [...] goaded into vomiting every detail of my life with Sylvia

for the [...] entertainment of [...] Eng Lit Profs and graduates [...]”.139 Though Hughes

defends himself in veiled terms of any guilt, he still writes in his letters: “no doubt

where the blame lies”.140 There can be no doubt to the guilt that Hughes might have felt,

even more since Plath's death in 1963 is followed by Assia Wevill's in 1969, who ended

her days in circumstances that appears as a exaggeration to Plath's act, since she also

used gas, but took her daughter Shura (Hughes's illegitimate child)141 with her. Though

the legend focuses on Plath for obvious reasons, Hughes's reality is that of a man

widowed twice of suicide partners in the exact same circumstances, and after the same

lapse of time (seven years) spent with him. Hughes would be cursed for a long time,142

and those two successive shocks paralysed him;143 years later, at a time when he has not

yet published the Birthday Letters, he said: “I wonder sometimes if things might have

gone differently without the events of 63 & 69. I have an idea of those two episodes as

giant steel doors shutting down over great parts of myself-leaving me that much less,

just what was left, to live on. No doubt a more resolute artist would have penetrated the

steel doors.”144 After Assia's death, he writes: “I must in some way put everything

139Letter to Anne Stevenson, November 1989, quoted in Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, op. cit., p. 141.

140 Letter from Hughes to Daniel and Helga Huws, february 1963. See Ted Hughes, Letters of Ted Hughes, op. cit., p. 214.

141 Alexandra Tatiana Elise Wevill (1965-1969). The child has been legally recognized by David Wevill, Assia's husband when she met Hughes. Shura is her nickname.

142 “With two suicides on his back, Hughes felt as though he was cursed. There was something about him that was fatal for every woman who got involved with him. He infected them with his black moods, but they did not have the immunity that he has, and could not cope”. Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev, Lover of Unreason: Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath's Rival and Ted Hughes' Doomed Love, op. cit., p. 215.

143 “Paralysing explosion of pain”. See Keith Sagar, The Laughter of Foxes, A Study of Ted Hughes, op. cit., p. 12.

144 Letter from Hughes to Seamus Heaney, Autumn 1984. See Ted Hughes, Letters of Ted Hughes, op. cit., p. 489.

29

behind me if I'm to carry on at all”.145 The multiplication of Plath's biographies soon

after her death made his silence much more telling, and threw him against his will in the

“bullring” he refers to. This is what also his letter to Stevenson reveals: when Plath

died, Hughes was already famous, which means that he was watched, and he knew it.

From 1963 his attitude would be constantly analysed and commented on, often

slandered as well.

As a conclusion concerning a possible grieving process, one can assume that

Forest learnt quite rapidly that salvation, if it does exist, “is the peace the speech

provides” “est la paix que procure la parole”146 according to his quotation of Kobayashi

Issa. On the other hand, Hughes would take much more time to remember the

momentary peace which is a poem,147 or rather, maybe, more cruelly, to allow himself to

it.

145 Ibid, p. 291.146 “Est la paix que procure la parole”Philippe Forest, Sarinagara, op. cit., p. 90.147 “Momentary peace which is a poem”, Dylan Thomas, letter to Henry Treece, quoted in The Poetry of

Dylan Thomas, by Elder Olson (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, Phoenix Books, 1961), p. 34-35.

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II. FORM

1)The genre itself

To question the literary form of Bitrthday Letters and Sarinagara means to ask

the following questions: in Hughes's case, why poetry and what sort of poetry; in the

case of Forest, why a novel and what kind of novel?

Hughes is a poet above all (one can think of Lupercal (1960, Crow (1970),

Gaudete (1977), Remains of Elmet (1979), and many others) but he is also an author of

radio plays (The Wound (1962), The Calm (1961), The House of Aries (1960), etc...), an

experimental linguist (He worked in 1968 with Peter Brook on Orpheus for the

International Centre for Theatre Research; during their second collaboration in 1971, he

almost invented a whole language which he called Orghast et in which he would write

the Orghast play staged by Brook in Persepolis), a surprising essayist (His essay on

Shakespeare, Shakespeare and The Goddess of Complete Being (1992), though at the

same time uneven and and matchless, criticizes or despised by many academics, is

considered as an audacious and unique initiative; also Poetry in the Making (1970), a

book set aside for initiation to poetry in school); he is also the author of children stories

(How the Whale became (1963), The Iron Man (1968), The Dreamfighter (1995), etc...).

This broad spectrum in terms of literary genres and forms grants him a peculiar

versatility when, at the end of life and consequently in possession of his whole

experience and the literary tools specific to any genre, he wrote the Birthday Letters.

Besides, he started to write in prose,148 as his manuscripts, recently acquired by the

British Library, revealed. The second revelation of those manuscripts is the long

rewriting they had received,149 in spite of the feeling of huge easiness, of freedom in the 148 He had already used this method when he wrote Moortown Diary (1979), first in prose and then

translating it to poetry.149“The archives show the conflicts he was going through – how he worked things out in prose before

31

mastery of art that radiates from those texts. Concerning this matter, it is noteworth that

the reason why the Birthday Letters break away from the rest of Hughes's work is their

readability. Hughes has always been considered an abstruse poet, or a poet of violence;

too subtle at least to belong to popular poetry. The Birthday Letters, though less

exhibitionist or scandalous than what the audience might have longed for150 still appears

as his most readable and most understandable work, probably because it is the most

narrative.

Put together in chronological order, not their order of genesis, but the

chronology of the events they report, these poems can almost be read as a novel, the

continuity of which is to be found in the story's reality. The literary principle of the

coherence of the poetic recollection is exerted here to its furthest point. This is mainly

due to its subject: Hughes writes eighty-eight poems which all refer to the same reality,

his marriage to Plath. This is in itself an isolated example in Hughes's poetry: most of

the time, faithful to his fascination for shamanism, he drifts off into his inspiration and

instinct and lets words that appear to him decide the book's outcome. The Birthday

Letters looks like a odd case in his work because here the conclusion is known in

advance. The texts' coherence that appears thus is the carbon-paper of the – relative –

coherence of real life, in which Hughes searches for trails, clues and associations that

would help him to decode it, since “the primary function of the creative imagination is

to make connections”. This method is found in Forest's work as well: the connections

stated in their books are in fact extended metaphors. Forest describes for example how

he searches for his reflection on the wall after his bathroom mirror fell down, and feels

as if he had lost his image; elsewhere in his books he writes that a ghost is “someone

whose image is missing in the mirror”.151 Similarly, Hughes read signs every now and

then during his life with Plath, the lost scissors (one of their wedding presents)

becoming an anchor and then a cross,152 that is to say, a symbol a lost stability (the

anchor) turning into a dead omen (a death cross). They appeal to the same mechanism

used by Paul Auster in his Red Notebook, where he files all the coincidences he had

working them up into poetry,” explained Rachel Foss, Curator of Modern Literary Manuscripts at the British Library. “It absolutely gives the lie to the idea that the Birthday Letters was a rush, a spontaneous overflow of emotion that he just got out onto the page.” http://www.culture24.org.uk/history/literary+history/poets/art61645150 Joanny Moulin recalls that Birthday Letters have first been read as Hughes's autobiography. See

Joanny Moulin, Ted Hughes, New Selected Poems, Didier Erudition – CNED, 1999, p. 142.151 “Quelqu'un dont l'image manque au miroir” Philippe Forest, Le roman, le réel et autres essais, op.

cit., p. 128.152 “Daffodils” dans Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters op. cit., p. 127.

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ever witnessed and which he had noticed probably because he is a writer and his job is

to make those connections because through them life take on the appearance of novel.

The “short cuts” thus performed decrypt the impervious and confuse material of life and

thus quicken its reading. One of the best examples of those short cuts is the metaphor

created by Hughes concerning the writing table he makes for Plath and which he

interpreted, years later, as being the door of the grave which has given her access to her

dead father: “I did not

Know I had made and fitted a door

Opening downwards into your Daddy's grave.”153

Besides being composed with poems telling one single story, the recollection

offers this singularity to be readable from different angles. The profane may discern the

great lines of the story, while the well-read will note the numerous hidden allusions to

Plath's poems or to other famous texts, and thus enrich his understanding of the book

thanks to its whispered clues. One can think for example of the “nine bean rows” that

Hughes plants in “The Lodger”, which are a direct borrowing from Yeats;154 or of the

last lines of ”18 Rugby Street”, where Plath is compared to “a new world”, a

“wonderful America”,155 both terms being references to John Donne's Elegy XX.156)

More than a poetic collection, the Birthday Letters are also a poet's collection, that is to

say, for who succesfully detects the clues, the unique testimony of a poet who reveals

the major influences of his youth.

In his message read at the Forward Poetry Prize award ceremony, Hughes writes

that he was not trying to write poems when he was writing the Birthday Letters, but to

“open a direct private, inner contact with [his] first wife, not thinking to make a poem,

thinking mainly to evoke her presence to [him]self and feel her there listening.157

153 “The Table” See Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters, Faber, p. 138.154 William Butler Yeats, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”: “Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the

honey bee” http://www.bartleby.com/103/44.html 155 “You were a new world. My new world./So this is America, I marvelled./Beautiful, beautiful

America!”, “18 Rugby Street”, dans Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters, op. cit. p. 24.156 John Donne, “Elegy XX: To his Mistress Going to Bed”: “O, my America, my Newfoundland”. In

this erotic poem, Donne celebrates the nudity in its purity, which provides a new light on Hughes's description of his first night with Plath; for the record, Plath describes this night as : “sleepless holocaust night with Ted” (see Sylvia Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962 , op. cit., p. 552.)

157 Keith Sagar quotes Hughes's message read at the Forward Poetry Prize ceremony: “Writing BL he has “tried to open a direct private, inner contact with my first wife, not thinking to make a poem, thinking mainly to evoke her presence to myself and feel her there listening '”. See Keith Sagar, The Laughter of Foxes, A Study of Ted Hughes, op. cit., p. 83.

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Identically, Forest declare: “The novel makes us communicate a little bit more with the

now stolen part of our lives”.158 Erica Wagner explains the fact that Hughes chose art

and precisely poetry to reveal the experience of his marriage because “the only way for

him to enter that discussion was through the complex structure of his art”.159 the choice

of poetry as bearer to testify at last of his experience (instead of becoming himself the

carrier of a “revealed”160 poetry) can also have its explanation in the freedom poetry

offers, the permission it represents to leave things as if in suspense. The poetry does not

need to justify every affirmation pragmatically, – contrary to the novel in the term's

popular acceptation, of which Forest praises the precision. After all the petty analysis

that has already been written about Plath and himself, Hughes is probably not looking

for precision, but rather emotion, instinctive feelings and memories. Viewed in this

light, poetry permits many more innuendoes and levels of reading. It is accepted as

being complex, so to speak, which enables the author to write more according to his

instinct rather than trying to be readable to the audience. Furthermore, what cannot be

forgotten is that Hughes is writing for the memory of his poetess wife, who was his

working partner throughout his youth – poetry is their intimate language.

However, one must not miss the various accusations made by Hughes against

poetry itself. He expresses a certain defiance towards poetry in those poems sometimes,

as paradoxical as it is. Hughes, who decided to be a poet very early, went through a dark

depression after Sylvia's Assia's and Shura's death during which, according to Elaine

Feinstein, he may “have had that dedication in mind as being the moment he threw up

the chance of an ordinary, happy life”.161 The tragic question he addresses Plath: “What

was it within you had to tell its tale?” recalls the famous lines by Alexander Pope : Why did I wrote? What sin to me unknown

Dipped me in ink, my parents', or my own?162

Hughes questions the sanity as well as the necessity of writing. As Elaine Feinstein puts

158 “Le roman nous [fait] communiquer encore avec la part désormais dérobée de nos vies” Philippe Forest, Le roman, le réel et autres essais, op. cit., p. 9.

159“The only way for him to enter that discussion was through the complex structure of his art”. See Erica Wagner, Ariel's Gift, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and the story of BIRTHDAY LETTERS, op. cit., p. 27.160 “The poem can emerge of a sudden, complete and perfect, unalterable, taking the poet completely by

surprise, as if he had no idea where it came from.”. See Keith Sagar, The Laughter of Foxes, A Study of Ted Hughes, op. cit., p. 87.

161 “In a black moment of depression, much later in his life, he may even have had that dedication in mind as being the moment he threw up the chance of an ordinary, happy life”. See Elaine Feinstein, Ted Hughes, The Life of a Poet, op. cit., p. 16.162 “Why did I write? What sin to me unknown/Dipped me in ink, my parents' or my own?”. See

Alexander Pope, An Epistle To Dr. Arbuthnot, lines 125-126, dans The Norton Anthology: English Literature, volume one (1962), eighth edition, W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 2006, p. 2552.

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it: “Part of the determinism of the Birthday Letters comes from the sense, with

hindsight, that the service of poetry had to take some of the blame for what happened to

their love.”163

Despite it all, Hughes resorts to poetry also as a revealer, since as he says:

“Maybe all poetry, insofar as it moves us and connects with us, is a revealing of

something that the writer doesn't actually wants to say, but desperately needs to

communicate, to be delivered of. Perhaps it's the need to keep it hidden that makes it

poetic – makes it poetry”.164 To get out of the silence where pain and the bullying run

against him by the society, Hughes appeals to poetry's almost magic capacity to bring to

light what the author's mind would try to silence. Hughes trusts poetry once again, since

it has been a major point of his whole life, and because he know that “[Poems] have a

certain wisdom. They know something special... something perhaps which we are very

curious to know”.165

On that matter, one has to notice the huge gap between the Birthday Letters and

Hughes's first poetry collection after Plath's death, Crow, in which he expressed his

inarticulate pain, behind many symbols and the main figure of a trickster.166 Concerning

the Birthday Letters, he said that his model was the letter.167 Contrary to Forest who has

depicted his life in a rather frontal way from the first book, Hughes first tries to bypass

it, until he reached this prose poetry. Sagar writes of Hughes and Crow: “He found it

necessary [...] to find a way to stand outside his own intolerable experience, to hold it at

arm's length to as to it whole, to objectify and systematize it as a myth.”168 Though the

book is dedicated to Assia and Shura, few readers have read Crow as Hughes's

formulation of his distress. However, when one is aware of the context of Crow's

genesis, he has to be struck by their great violence, their fury, so to speak. In a letter he

wrote to his daughter Frieda to give her a piece of literary advice, Hughes notes: “The

163 “Part of the determinism of the Birthday Letters comes from the sense, with hindsight, that the service of poetry had to take some of the blame for what happened to their love.”. See Elaine Feinstein, Ted Hughes, The Life of a Poet, op. cit, , p. 77..164 Erica Wagner, Ariel's Gift, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and the story of BIRTHDAY LETTERS, op. cit.,,

p. 16.165 “[Poems] have a certain wisdom. They know something special... something perhaps which we are

very curious to know”. SeeTed Hughes, Poetry in the Making (1967), Faber and Faber, London, 2008, p. 15.

166 “Trickster, n.m.: Personnage qui, dans des mythologies très différentes, joue un rôle consistant à dérégler le jeu normal des événements, à plaisanter sur les dieux, etc. (C'est le corbeau ou le coyote qui jouent ce rôle dans les mythes amérindiens; Renart, Till Eulenspiegel dans les contes d'Europe.)” http://test.larousse.fr/dictionnaires/francais/trickster

167 “Basically, my model was a 'letter'”. Letter from Hughes to Sagar, 15 august 1997 in Ted Hughes, Letters of Ted Hughes, op. cit., p. 692.168 Keith Sagar, The Laughter of Foxes, A Study of Ted Hughes, op. cit., p. 123.

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emotions of a real situation are shy, but if they can find a mask they are shameless

exhibitionists”.169 It is somehow the impression when had when reading Crow: it is the

trickster's figure, that mask, that provides Hughes with this huge freedom of speech and

a discreet place for his mourning. It recalls in many respects the therapeutic experiences

of the primal scream, which rests on a “beyond language”, or rather a pre-language state

of the individual. In the same way, Hughes tried with Crow to bring to light a “super-

simple and super-ugly language”,170 a sort of inarticulacy. This distance taken from his

own life brought him to an original style which will make the collection's success.

Diane Middlebrook says that “writing Crow 'was, however improbably, the way he was

finally able to write about his own experience of personal devastation.”171 For instance

in the poem “Crow on the Beach” he introduces this veiled allusion to his past inability

to help Sylvia: He knew he was the wrong listener unwanted

To understand or help172

Writing Birthday Letters thus is a way for Hughes to force himself and to

subscribe to Shakespeare's sentence in The Tempest (the play which he and Plath were

constantly referring to): “He that dies pays all debts”.173 In the same way that Forest,

though he writes books closely related to autofiction,174 is paradoxically oddly absent

from those, as if disembodied, Hughes steps aside the Birthday Letters and is content to

testify of a peculiar time, to make himself the carrier of the memory of a lost past. He

almost goes as far as refusing poetry, or at least avoiding it, deadening it, in that

recollection. In one of his letters, he notes about the Birthday Letters: “Poetical effects

incidental. Very self-exposing, I suppose, unguarded – my attempts to write about those

things without aesthetic exploitation or concern for my artistic reputation. I no longer

169Letter from Hughes to Frieda Hughes , 12 February 1995 in Ted Hughes, Letters of Ted Hughes, op. cit., p. 678.

170”The first idea of crow was really an idea of style [...] a super-simple and super-ugly language which would in a way shed everything except just what [the crow] wanted to say without any other consideration and that's the basis of the style of the whole thing”. See Ted Hughes and Crow, interview with Egbert Faas, p.20, quoted by Margaret Dickie Uroff, in Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Urbana, London, University of Illinois Press, 1979, p. 201.

171Diane Middlebrook quoted by Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev in Lover of Unreason: Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath's Rival and Ted Hughes' Doomed Love, op. cit., p. 156: “Writing Crow was, however improbably, the way he was finally able to write about his own experience of personal devastation.'”

172”Crow on the Beach”, in Ted Hughes, Collected Poems, op. cit. p. 229.173 William Shakespeare, La Tempête (1997), translated by Yves Bonnefoy, Gallimard, 2007, p. 256.174 “Autofiction” is a neologism coined by Serge Doubrovsky : “Autobiographie ? Non, c’est un

privilège réservé aux importants de ce monde, au soir de leur vie, et dans un beau style. Fiction, d’événements et de faits strictement réels ; si l’on veut, autofiction, d’avoir confié le langage d’une aventure à l’aventure du langage, hors sagesse et hors syntaxe du roman, traditionnel ou nouveau.” (Serge Doubrovsky, Fils, Paris: Galilée, 1977, cover). An equivalent neologism currently used in English is “faction”, a portemanteau word of “fact” and “fiction”.

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give much thought to that. Except to write clearly and expressively. Simply. No style.

Plain.”175 Whether they resort to novel or to poetry, Forest and Hughes actually look for

the same things: the clearest, most effective and most faithful expression of an

experience whose traumatic nature itself prevents in the first place any formulation.

Though they have written two deeply well-read books, both Hughes and Forest seem to

distrust literature; maybe because, as Hughes states it grievously in “Wuthering

Heights”: Writers

Were pathetic people. Hiding from it

And making it up.176

Because this is what they both first look for through writing: “it”, the reality, or

rather “the unacceptable truth”, according to Forest;177 unacceptable in all likelihood

because, in both cases, they speak against every other speech on the subject.

In Forest, on the contrary, the mourning writing starts with a novel, since he

thinks that “It takes the precision of the narration so as not to lose the lived experience.

This is the reason why I write novels instead of poems.”178 The sentence he repeats with

much conviction stating that the real is fiction and that only the novel can give it its

form back is not a common opinion but a real stand of a writer who, while minimizing

the capacities of literature, still discerns it everywhere and as a great organizing

principle, as well as a possible tool to question one's own life's material.

The book we study mainly in this dissertation, Sarinagara, was written after

several others novels and essays dealing with his daughter's death in a less oblique way

than Sarinagara does. While carrying on his autobiographical or rather “auto-

fictionnal” litany, Forest links his story with others stories, as if he was trying to reread

his own through those. He had already made attempts in that sense in his first novel

L'Enfant éternel, introducing long literary digressions (about Joyce, Shakespeare,

Mallarmé, Hugo). In Sarinagara, he introduces three Japanese artists who have lived

through a trauma which he presents as being equal to his or at least very comparable,

namely: the death of a child concerning the first two, and Hiroshima for the third. Like

the structure of Birthday Letters, this novel's appears remarkable because of its

originality, and also because the originality of the form emerges after several more

classical novels, or rather novels whose structure melting personal experience,

175Letter from Hughes to Sagar, 15 august 1997 in Ted Hughes, Letters of Ted Hughes, op. cit., p. 692.176 “Wuthering Height”, Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters, op. cit., p. 59. 177 “La vérité irrecevable” Philippe Forest, Tous les enfants sauf un, op. cit., p. 153.178 Interview of Philippe Forest by Julia Kerninon (see appendix).

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philosophical reflection and literary history was not as legibly formulated as it is in

Sarinagara, where the chapters cut off a neat architecture: Paris; Story of the poet

Kobayashi Issa; Kyôto; Story of the writer Natsuma Sôseki; Tôkyô; Story of the

photograph Yosuke Yamahata; Kôbe.

This connection of his story with those Japanese artists is consistent to the reader

because of the reality of this connection, which means the real simultaneity of

bereavement and the discovery of Japanese literature in Forest's life. He thus broadens

the speech of his spectrum using examples linked to another part of himself: his position

as a literature teacher, or more generally as a intellectual, a reader. Forest calls the

reader's attention to very specific facts of Japanese (mostly literary) history, minor facts

which have struck Forest during his mourning. As he already put it in L'Enfant éternel:

“I cannot approach literature any more except to find there an echo which resounds for

me only with what I am living”.179 The two writers refer definitely to literature as a

decoder of reality; probably because literature is reality to them.

In the same way that he returns to his personal mourning in all his books, he also

seems to picture things only in relation with these events; to some extent, he now sees

life through this bereavement and he is thirsty for information, examples, accounts on

infantile death. His essays gives the same impression.

One can question Pessoa's sentence: Does Forest gets back to what is a part of

his life, literature which he appears to summon so as to get a valid answer because the

observation of his own life, the tangible reality of his experience, his intimate

knowledge of the ordeal are not enough for him? Is it against himself that he cannot,

like Hughes, comprehend his “impossible life” but through the structure of his art

(”discovered” as a result of the tragedy)? In L'Enfant éternel, he tells how as soon as the

diagnosis has been known he started to devour books about his daughter's illness,

because it was for him the only way to understand, to take possession of his own story:

“When I read, I transfer the bare experience about which I cannot do anything to the

more familiar universe of words and pages that is mine».180 Forest is a talented critic and

academic; words and pages are, as he puts it, his “universe”, his territory. In accordance

with that idea, one can regard his literary undertaking as consciously pointless attempts

to replace the disaster on the familiar ground of the abstract where the skilled professor

179 “Je ne peux plus approcher la littérature sans y trouver l'occasion d'un écho résonnant pour moi seul avec ce que je vis” Philippe Forest, L'Enfant Eternel, op. cit., p. 253.

180 “En lisant, je transfère l'expérience nue sur laquelle je ne peux rien dans l'univers plus familier de phrases et de pages qui est le mien” Philippe Forest, L'Enfant Eternel, op. cit., p. 54.

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will perform his task with his usual maestria. This move appears as a simpler or more

realistic version of Mallarmé's hysterical plan to punish death thanks to his genius.181

Forest only tries to understand, to translate his grief into language he could understand.

This explains and justifies the fact that he denies being a writer. He is more his own

spokesman, his own translator in the hostile world he has been pushed to by his

daughter's death. He did not want to write, he barely wish to testify, in fact, his books

are probably meant mainly for himself. They are also against him, since as he puts is: “a

book should only exist when it makes itself despite his author, in spite of him, against

him, forcing him to reach the extreme point of his life where his being irremediably

breaks.”182 Forest seems to have forgotten everything but this point where his being has

broken, and he wish to remain loyal to this point, to stay at this exact place of his life.

The fact that Forest started to write novels right after his daughter's death and

has not stopped since then is actually not so suspect; he quoted Artaud declaring that

“no one has ever written, painted, sculpted, built, invented but to get out of hell”.183

According to this logic, Forest's approach, even when one considers its endless

repetition, appears as perfectly legitimate. In our Western society where what might be

called “confession” has become an everyday occurrence, whether it is in the literary

area (Christine Angot or Chloé Delaume considering autofiction, but also, maybe in a

more doubtful way, Alexandre Jardin in Le Roman des Jardins or Catherine Robbe-

Grillet in Jeune mariée: journal, 1957-1962) or inside reality shows, Forest stands as

an exception since as Levi wrote about Auschwitz, Forest has had to “pay in the real the

price of his right to speech”.184 This rule also applies in a certain extent to such cases as

Christine Angot (a victim of incest) or Chloé Delaume (who witnessed her father killing

her mother and then committing suicide when she was ten). However, the great

difference between those authors and Forest stands in the topics of their books: while

Forest always remains faithful to the same experience, in any form, Angot and

Delaume, have “exorcized” the experienced trauma in a book (or several) and then

have become able (or have decided) to write on others topics, but also to write books

181 Stéphane Mallarmé, Pour un tombeau d'Anatole, started in 1880, never brought to a close.182 “Un livre ne devrait exister que s'il se fait malgré son auteur, en dépit de lui, contre lui, l'obligeant à

toucher le point même de sa vie où son être, irrémédiablement, se défait.” Philippe Forest, L'Enfant Eternel, op. cit., p. 135.

183 “Nul n'a jamais écrit ou peint, sculpté, modelé, construit, inventé que pour sortir de l'enfer”. Philippe Forest, Le roman, le réel et autres essais, Allaphbed 3, éditions Cécile Defaut, 2007, p. 208. Hughes shares this idea (”In an undated manuscript Hughes confesses that he writes poetry in hope of some catharsis: 'I am not composing poetry,” he writes, “I am trying to get out of the flames.' See http://www.grolierclub.org/ExPlathHughes.htm )

184 “Dû payer dans le réel le prix de son droit à la parole” Philippe Forest, op. cit., p. 253.

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out of autofiction (Delaume in Certainement pas, and Angot in Les Désaxés). In Forest,

this evolution does not occur, which validates his certainty of not being a writer. To

Forest, it would actually be totally unfair if, having come to literature because of his

daughter, he was suddenly to neglect her to create fiction with what was supposed to be

only a way to stay alive. It his necessary to him to “consider the novelist [...] as a dead

coming back to the living” because it “enable to [...] link the literary aesthetic to an

experience of survival”.185

Forest thus never walks out of the sphere of autofiction. Far from being afraid of

being blamed for emotional exhibitionism, he explains that ”when the writer turns his

life into the exclusive subject of his work, he expresses his uncompromising desire of

truth”;186 in others words, since he is staking his whole being, he owes himself the truth

of his narration; to doctor the facts of his life would mean to despise and betray his own

existence. “The novel answers the real and answers for it”,187 Forest enlarges. As for the

interest of such a work for the audience, he recalls that “the only admissible authority

[is] that of personal experience's”.188 This sentence almost penalizes pure fiction, and

presents the novel as being the exclusive representation of reality, its strict literary

transposition. He emphasizes his theory explaining that “the I is not a simple narcissistic

lure which diverts the individual from the real, it can also the authentic support of a

risky strictness of truth and freedom”.189 Trying to distinguish himself from the newly

materialized egocentric literature, Forest insists on recalling that “[the great novels of

the I] express the destruction and the holocaust of the first person”,190 thus underlining

that to get oneself personally involved in writing, to question one's own existence as

lucidly as possible implies much courage.

Forest also specifies his initiative when he fills the different writings of the I in

three categories: what he calls ego-literature suppose implies an individual who chooses

his “me”, his “ego” as a subject, but without any questioning; autofiction is “the 185 “considérer le romancier [...] comme un mort revenant chez les vivants” and “permet de [...] lier

l'esthétique littéraire à une expérience de la survie”. Ibid, p. 102.186”en faisant de sa vie le sujet exclusif de son oeuvre, l'écrivain exprime son désir intransigeant du

vrai”Philippe Forest, La beauté du Contresens et autres essais sur la littérature japonaise, op. cit., p. 19.

187 “Le roman répond au réel et répond de lui” Philippe Forest, Le roman, le réel et autres essais, op. cit., p. 95.

188 “la seule autorité recevable [est] celle de l'expérience personnelle”Philippe Forest, La beauté du Contresens et autres essais sur la littérature japonaise, op. cit., p. 291.

189 “Le Je n'est pas simplement un leurre narcissique détournant l'individu du réel, il peut être également le support authentique d'une exigence risquée de vérité et de liberté”. Philippe Forest, Le roman, le réel et autres essais, op. cit., p. 113.

190 “[les grands romans du je], la première personne, ils en expriment le saccage, l'holocauste”. Ibid, p. 132.

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autobiography given back to fiction writing”,191 including the freedom in invention it

implies; and finally, heterography is “the writing of oneself as it turns out when the

author makes an 'experience' of 'the real' as being 'impossible'”.192 Forest obviously

belongs to this third and last category; the biographical nature of his work is thus

justified by his questioning of autobiography itself in the midst of the book, and also by

the fact that the books exists only because of that questioning. The origin of the book is

nothing but the concrete, established experience of the real as impossible. To Forest it

then consists in “a more complex, more worried, more unresolved expression of the

autobiographical writing”.193

The questioning appears as a central point in Forest's work, as well as a

necessary condition to writing. Whether it is through the narration itself, since “the real

literature has to question endlessly, again and again, the tender place of the truest

affection”,194 or by asking and commenting the texts written previously inside new texts,

Forest indeed does not stop to question his own undertaking and its consequences,

whether positive or negative. There is a reason for this tireless (re)writing of the past

life: “in this wonderful game where living and writing cannot be told apart any more

[...] the invention of oneself in the other's language which is performed by the character

also hold for the novelist who through the book and thanks to it resolve experimentally

the – otherwise insolvable – problem of his life”195 To resolve experimentally a

problem: the novel is seen as a tool, since “the ordeal whch finds itself resumed in the

resumption which only abolish the ordeal”;196 in others words: nothing but the

formulation of a grief enables one to overcome it.

One using the novel, the other using poetry, but both resorting to their well-read

knowledge, Hughes and Forest try to “get out of hell”.

191 “L'autobiographie rendue au romanesque”Philippe Forest, La beauté du Contresens et autres essais sur la littérature japonaise, op. cit., p. 20.

192 “L'écriture de soi telle qu'elle se transforme lorsque l'auteur s'y livre à une 'expérience' du 'réel' comme 'impossible'”. Ibid.

193Ibid, p. 23.194 “La vraie littérature doit questionner sans relâche, encore et encore, le lieu tendre de l'affection la

plus vraie”. Ibid, p. 27.195 “Dans ce jeu magnifique où vivre et écrire ne se distinguent plus, [...] l'invention de soi-même dans la langue de l'autre qu'accomplit le personnage vaut également pour le romancier qui, dans le livre et grâce à lui, résout expérimentalement le problème – autrement insoluble – de sa vie” Ibid, p. 96.196 “C'est l'épreuve qui se trouve reprise dans la reprise qui seule abolit l'épreuve”. Philippe Forest, Le

roman, le réel et autres essais, op. cit., p. 93.

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2)The tone and the initiative

After the form, the substance obviously has to be questioned as well, first

considering the purpose and then the tenor, especially in the case of autobiographical

works such as Birthday Letters and Sarinagara. In other words, what are Hughes and

Forest aiming at when they testify the most intimate part of their life, and what position

do they take?

First, in both cases it seems that the authors feel responsible for a sort of

personal mission. “I very deeply believe that a great writer is always some survivors of

a disaster [...] and that it is because of such a disaster that the literary work undertakes to

rebuild a henceforth lost world”,197 writes Forest, mustering his courage. However, in

both cases, the question is to represent a lost loved one, rather than a lost world198, to

play one's part as a survivor in the sense that one is also a witness to those who cannot

witness anymore in their own name. As much as “chaque vivant a droit à son nom”, also

“chaque mort mérite sa sépulture”.199 To the two authors, the battle against time has a

foregone conclusion, because words do not revive the dead, and can barely protect

them: “too late to salvage who she was”,200 Hughes whispers to his children in one of

the last poems of the collection. Forest, a little bit more optimistic apparently, explains

that “the paternal speech comes to succeed the infant speech so as not to totally consent

to the silence it is giving in”.201 He appears as perpetuating a speech, that is to say a life;

his speech, though his writing, is the last trace of his daughter, which is why it is

197 “Je crois très profondément qu'un grand écrivain est toujours le survivant de quelque catastrophe [...] et que c'est en raison d'une telle catastrophe que l'oeuvre littéraire entreprend de reconstruire un monde désormais disparu”. Philippe Forest, La beauté du Contresens et autres essais sur la littérature japonaise, Allaphbed 1, éditions Cécile Defaut, 2005, p. 168.

198 “L'écrivain devient le témoin de cette agonie au terme de laquelle un autre fait, dans la mort, l'expérience d'une révélation qui lui reste partiellement inaccessible mais qui, imaginairement, se trouve reprise de récit en récit.” dans Philippe Forest, Le roman, le réel et autres essais, op. cit., p. 177.

199 “Chaque vivant a droit à son nom” and “chaque mort mérite sa sépulture” Philippe Forest, La beauté du Contresens et autres essais sur la littérature japonaise, op. cit., p. 80.

200 “The Dogs Are Eating Your Mother”, Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters, op. cit. p. 195.201 “La parole paternelle [vient] prendre la suite de la parole enfantine afin de ne pas consentir tout à fait

à ce silence auquel elle se rend.” Philippe Forest, Le roman, le réel et autres essais, op. cit, p. 227.

42

necessary to him.

Forest's outright refusal to be truly considered as a writer possibly stands in that

major difference between them that might be called triviality. Writers usually write to

write202 – in other words to be published, listened to, maybe paid, or even famous. To

Forest after his daughter's death, writing has become the absolute prerequisite of his

survival, his “getting over”. Writing is a means instead of a purpose, and it is a colossal

difference. “I thought that any telling would deliver me, would take me away from

myself”,203 he writes. One can hardly picture any more careless declaration about

literature; at least, from a writer: “any telling” could displace him. Forest possibly still

reproaches writers for having neglected their task so much that he had to write himself

what, if he could simply have read it, would probably have alleviated him, but because

writers “in their overhang of irony and knowledge, do not represent the society that

dies”,204 Forest has had to safeguard in person his daughter's memory, to protect that

memory.

In the same way, Hughes has not only had to defend himself against gossips that

pictured him as a monster, but also he has had to defend Plath against the distorted

image that her Journals or the many memoirs from close people (Dido Merwin,

Elizabeth Compton) might have given of her (”But she wasn't so difficult, not at all...

Actually, she was quite cheerful, bright, even a bit – how to say this? – diffident? She

always went along with what others wanted. Only when she was jealous was she

difficult.”205) Hughes has to face the fact that, as Alvarez put it in one of his letters, the

world considers that “the death had kind of put [Plath] into public domain”.206 In reply

to what Hughes would reaffirm the private nature of his wife's life and death.207 Hughes

and Forest thus testify not only an experience of life and surviving, but also in the name

of someone. They recall a lost existence, they recall it in their books. “Le vif accomplit

la volonté du mort mais en se substituant à lui, en s'appropriant tout ce qui lui

202 “Je crois authentiquement qu'un livre justifié est un livre qui vise autre chose que la littérature elle-même.” Forest, see interview in appendice.203 “Je pensais que n'importe quel récit me délivrerait, me conduirait loin de moi”. Philippe Forest,

Sarinagara, op. cit., p. 27. 204 “Dans leur surplomb d'ironie et de savoir, [...] ne représentent [pas] la société qui meurt”. Philippe

Forest, La beauté du Contresens et autres essais sur la littérature japonaise, op. cit., p. 70.205Elaine Feinstein, Ted Hughes, The Life of a Poet, op. cit., p. 232.206 Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes op. cit.,, p. 130.207”How can you call it a tribute to her – to make a public spectacle of the one thing she ought to be

allowed to keep to herself if nothing else – her infinitely humiliating private killing of herself?”. Ibid, p. 128.

43

appartenait”208 writes Forest, after he has turned his daughter into a “paper being”.209

Hughes's case is even more surprising because Plath's death made him her executor, her

editor, her spokesman; for lack of appropriating Plath's belongings, he inherited it.

Furthermore, contrary to Forest who as an anonymous author has not suffered any

pressure asking him to represent Pauline, Hughes had to take on Plath's posthumous

manuscript's publication.

”And now at last I got a good look at you”210 Hughes writes in one of the

Birthday Letters's poems. He writes years after Plath's death, also after a lengthy silence

which if not scandalised, at least surprised the public opinion. This distance from the

death explains his playing with the many temporalities (see the poem which reads: “You

are ten years dead”211) and especially explains his soothed or even fatalistic tone (in the

poem which describes the two poet's encounter with Assia Wevill, whose affair with

Ted Hughes would trigger his split-up with Plath, and by extension her death, Hughes

writes that “the Fate she [Assia] carried / sniffed us [Plath and himself] out”;212 which

means that the whole tragedy was inevitable). He tells a closed story, something that

cannot be changed, a reality to which he has had to give himself years ago, however

how much it cost him personally. Anyone who has read Plath's Journals and Letters

might be struck by Hughes's generosity and respect when he describes her, as much as

his immense sadness is eloquent considering his unaltered love213 for this wife who has

been his partner at the time when he was becoming a writer. Plath's death signs the end

of Hughes's youth, of a whole part of his life which can be regarded as his literary

apprenticeship.

The reader might be surprised in the first place of the lack of romanticism (in the

term's popular meaning) of those poems. Hughes says nothing of Plath's beauty, neither

of their frolicking, and he does not use the term “love” on any occasion. Hughes is not

making a memorial to his wife, but to the poet Sylvia Plath. He portrays the writer and

the fragile young woman. The sole desperate parts ask the question of the necessity of

the tragedy: “What was it within you had to tell its tale?”,214 he asks, questioning what

208 Philippe Forest, Sarinagara, Gallimard, 2006, p. 247.209 “un être de papier”. Philippe Forest, L'Enfant Eternel,op.cit., p. 399.210 “18 Rugby Street” dans Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters, op. cit. p. 22.211 “La visite”, ibid, p. 20.

212 “Dreamers”, dans Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters, p. 157.213 “Do not make the mistake of thinking that the way I caused Sylvia to suffer was any indication of my

real feelings for her, which are simply unaltered”. Letter from Hughes to Aurelia Plath, 13 may 1963 in Ted Hughes, Letters of Ted Hughes, op. cit., p. 218

214 “The God”, Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters, op. cit., p. 188.

44

was their only reason to be back then, writing. There is a strong remorse, as a sort of

culpability, in such sentences as: “And we / Only did what poetry told us to do.”215

In his introduction to Vasko Popa's Collected Poems, Hughes writes, possibly

with a light irony: “I think it was Milosz, the Polish poet, who when he lay in a doorway

and watched the bullets lifting the cobbles out of the streets beside him realized that

most poetry is not equipped for life in a world where people actually do die. But some

is.”216 To write for this world, the world where people die, or even, to write for the dead,

is the task that the poet and the novelist settles themself to. In the same way that Hughes

becomes Plath's spokesman (also in the commercial meaning of the term), the surviving

standard bearer of a common literary undertaking, Forest makes himself the tireless

memory of his child, of his child's experience, teaching the lesson that he got from her,

uttering her suffocated speech.

Both say what has not been said: what only her young husband could know

about Plath,217 when they were both “late maturers”218 and were growing up together, a

whole memorabilia of short-sleeved jumpers, literary references and babies; and what

only the father of a child suffering from a shooting cancer can know about the world, so

much so that the medical annals show no other similar case. They are equally absent

from their own telling; although it is a biography (of a wife or a daughter) still it cannot

be an autobiography. According to Forest: “I am not telling my life. Nothing is more

impervious to me. I am trying to go more thoroughly, to set back in motion (thus to re-

start) through the telling a experience of reality of which I am only the staggered and

anxious witness”.219 An auto-fictional writer is rarely as absent from his own telling, and

the word used by Forest many times, “anxious”, partly explains this gulf from other “I-

tellings”. Forest neither tells a pleasant experience (Christine Angot in Le Marché des

Amants, for example), nor does he tell the story of a if not accepted, at least bypassed

trauma (Le Cri du Sablier by Chloé Delaume). He tells his story at face value, he never

walks away from this precise, clear, as if refined, and indeed anxious writing. Forest's

writing is still marked by his experience: it seems it has even got simpler over the years

215 “Flounders”, ibid, p. 66.216 Ted Hughes, introduction to Collected Poems de Vasko Popa (Penguin, 1969), in “Winter Pollen”, p.

222.217””He does what no biographer, however diligent and impartial, could ever do: say what it felt to be

there with her”. See Elaine Feinstein, Ted Hughes, The Life of a Poet (2001), op. cit, p. 234.218 Sylvia Plath, Letters Home, op. cit. p. 308.219 “Je ne raconte pas ma vie. Rien ne m'est plus étranger. J'essaye d'approfondir, de retenir, de remettre en mouvement (de reprendre donc) par le récit une expérience de réel dont je suis seulement le témoin sidéré et inquiet.”. Philippe Forest, Le roman, le réel et autres essais, op. cit., p. 103.

45

between L'Enfant éternel and Sarinagara. Forest has found his voice and does not get

out of the spokesman's role he has appointed himself to.

In the same way, in the Birthday Letters, Hughes appears as having to play his

part (Prospero), and belonging to Plath's myth only because of others, or accidentally.

He has never planned, never wished, in other words, he has not created – in the meaning

of literary creation – what happened in his life and has been told and romanced and even

turned into a movie by others but him. The self-portrait he offers is that of a passive or

even dazed man, carried away against his will in a tragedy he never sensed,220 and

whose “body sank into the folk-tale221 (it is a folk-tale indeed, and before he wrote the

Birthday Letters, Hughes was one of its characters, barely less passive than Plath, at the

mercy of biographers, because as he reminds Andrew Motion: “The main problem with

S. P. 's biographers is that they fail, at the outset, when they embark on the book they

hope will sell a lot of copies, to realize that the most interesting and dramatic part of

S.P. 's life is only ½ her life – the other ½ is me”;222 or also about Jacqueline Rose:

“Miss Rose thought she was writing a book about a writer dead thirty years ago and

seems to have overlook, as I say, the plain fact that she has ended up writing a book

largely about me”.223)

There is something extremely paradoxical in the way that Hughes's poems mix a

never-glimpsed-before intimacy to a huge detachment from the subject. Hughes' tone, in

book dedicated to their children, maybe trying to give back to them the family life they

never had, is also tinted with a filled with wonderment triviality, when he evokes their

many homes (”5 Eltisley”, “9 Willow Street”), their encounter, his fascination for Plath

(”Fidelity”), their babies's births (”Isis”, “Placenta”). The poems are filled with moving

details that give Plath her life, her vitality, her physical characteristics back, with a

unexpected acuteness (because the author has been the lover, the reader might expect, in

accordance to the long tradition of love poetry, an attempt to idealize the lost lover, but

Hughes is apparently not even tempted by such a initiative. When he portrays Plath, he

does not smooth her unusual beauty, he does justice to the “aboriginal thickness” of her

lips, her “nose, / Broad and Apache, nearly a boxer's nose”;224) Hughes describes Plath

220 “When Chaikin finally met Hughes seven years after Assia's suicide, she asked why he was attracted to 'sick and troubled women'. She says Hughes looked at her in wonder and said: 'Sick? troubled? I have no idea what you mean.' She persisted: 'Don't you see the comparison?' Hughes shrugged: 'I never thought of it this way.'” http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/1999/apr/10/tedhughes.sylviaplath

221 “Life after Death”, Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters, op. cit., p. 182.222 Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, op. cit., p. 201.223 Ibid, p. 182.224 “18 Rugby Street”, Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters, op. cit., p. 23.

46

as she really was, beyond her nature as a writer or even her persona in her poems ( to

Hughes, Plath is never the red-haired woman pictured in “Lady Lazarus” who “eat[s]

men like air”,225 but she is the young bride in a pink wool-knitted dress who sobs with

joy and says she “saw the heavens open”).226 However, although he obviously tries to be

as faithful as can be to his memory, Hughes allows himself some modifications which

cannot not be fortuitous: for example the rhododendrons turn into azaleas in “Child's

Park”, possibly to echo “Electra on Azalea Path”. In addition to those modifications,

one has also to note the many allusions that Hughes makes to Plath's poems, by using

the same title (”The Rabbit-Catcher”: “I felt hands round a tea mug, dull, blunt,/Ringing

the white China”,227 writes Plath, in answer to what Hughes writes back: “You saw

blunt fingers, blood in the cuticles,/Clamped round a blue mug”),228 as if answering her

poem, or correcting it; or also when he uses some of her terms, for example in her poem

“Three Women”, Plath writes: “I am a wound walking out of hospital”; Hughes uses

this term in “Your Paris”, noting: “What walked beside me was flayed/One walking

wound [...]”.229 One of the most moving poems of the collection is entitled “A Picture of

Otto”, and starts with the famous “You stand (there) at the blackboard” borrowed to the

painful poem Daddy”230 by Plath. Hughes discussed Sylvia (using the third person) with

her dead father, Otto, and one can notice the sentence: “She could hardly tell us apart in

the end”, which reminds Plath's reader of the numerous parts of her Journals or Letters

linking Ted to Otto, sometimes in a total confusion like in the letter where she writes,

about a dream she has had and in which she has thought she recognized Ted: “What

makes you think it was Ted? It had his face, but it was my father, my mother”.231

While noticing what can be regarded as oracles (the blood stain of the previous

tenant dead in one of their flats, for example), he offers a much more human Plath that

the images she gave herself, much more moving that the eternal obsessional teenager of

her Journals, and more credible that the Madonna wholly built up by feminists and

biographers. However, while piling on pieces of evidence of his unique intimacy with

his subject, Hughes stays at his post as a witness, an assistant. His role is secondary,

225 “And I eat men like air”, “Lady Lazarus”, Sylvia Plath, Ariel, op. cit. p. 10.226 “A pink wool-knitted dress”, Ted Hughes, Birthday letters, op. cit., p. 35. 227 Sylvia Plath, “The Rabbit-Catcher” .http://oldpoetry.com/opoem/show/55410-Sylvia-Plath-The-

Rabbit-Catcher228 “The Rabbit-Catcher”, Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters, op. cit., p. 144.229 “Your Paris”, ibid, p. 37.230 “You stand at the blackboard, daddy/In the picture I have of you”. The photo can be found in many

studies.231 Sylvia Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962, op. cit., p. 447.

47

because as Primo Levi explains (quoted by Forest): “The true witnesses of Auschwitz

are those who died there. The others are nothing but second-hands”.232 Giving his

account of Plath for the first time in his own name, Hughes respects the law of this

declaration: Plath indeed has been the only witness of her total experience of life and

death; he may only recall memories of a common life of which he is the only living heir

left, and of which Sylvia, according to him, was the core. After all, had she not been

there, Hughes would never have got married, he would have moved to Australia to fish

and hunt and he would maybe never have written anything; maybe he would not even

have had children.233

One has to noticed the vast number of subjects examined in the collection, as if

Hughes was trying to leave nothing to chance, writing at the same time about Plath's

youth, her relationship to her father, her reaction to success, the time she spent in Paris

chasing Richard Sassoon – he is not trying to celebrate something under an appearance

of perfection, but to write his truth, taking into account everything that Plath's intimate

writings revealed to him a posteriori (”Ten years after your death / I meet on a page of

your journal, as never before, / The shock of your joy”,234 when Plath learnt that Hughes

and Lucas Meyer had come under her windows to throw clods). What Hughes truly

writes through this collection is Plath's only valid biography.

Doing so, he refuses to grant himself with more importance that he really had: “I

was nursemaid. I fancy myself at that.”235 Hughes appears as a plain assistant happy

with his fate; he is serving Plath, in those texts as much as in the past.236 Is he trying to

underline the absurdity of this destiny that crowned him Poet Laureate when the one

who truly craved for such things passed away? In different poems of the collection,

Hughes presents himself as a naive buffoon: in “The Owl”, he tells how Plath's “frenzy”

232 “Les [véritables] témoins d'Auschwitz sont ceux qui y sont morts. Les autres ne sont que des seconde-mains”.Philippe Forest, Sarinagara, Gallimard, 2006, p. 242.

233 According to Plath in a letter to Ruth Fainlight, 22 october 1962 (quoted in Elaine Feinstein, Ted Hughes, The Life of a Poet op. cit., p. 134): “Ted [told] me he had never had the courage to tell me he didn't want children [...]”. Hughes wrote to his friend W.S. Merwin that Frieda was “about the most interesting thing that ever happened in [his] life”. Diane Middlebrook, Her Husband, Viking Penguin, op. cit. p. 142.

234 “Visit”, Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters, op. cit. p. 8. 235 “Fever”, Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters, op. cit., p. 46.236 His devotion is obvious in the poem “18 Rugby Street”, where he describes how Plath, despaired

because of her breaking up from Richard Sassoon, came to him to console herself (Plath's diaries reveal the weird affinities calculation she made at that time to decide which of the men she knows would suit her). In “18 Rugby Street”, Hughes describes himself as a substitute: Sassoon is “a serious passion”, whereas Hughes is only there “meanwhile [...] for a few hours”, since it was for her “a few pence on the fare, for insurance”.

48

“[wakes up h]is dead, ecstatic boyhood”237 and brings him back close to nature; for the

benefit of this guide-like Sylvia, he imitates a rabbit's cry to attract an owl. “My

masterpiece”, he writes, but the owl mistakes him for a post. Hughes thus appears in the

first place as Plath's follower, and secondly as being unconscious of his own lack of

value. He opposes this almost comic image of himself to the neat, admirable Plath. He

seems to be trying to erase his aura and talent as a famous poet so as to leave vacant

room to his lost wife who died too early to prove herself, though he is sure she would

have surpassed him. In the same way that at the beginning of their affair Hughes has

been Plath's disciple, when she taught him the cogs of the literary world and discipline,

he now steps aside so as to do justice to her image. He steps aside to the point of writing

nothing amorous or sexual about her, as if he was trying to describe her apart from her

whole affection to him: Birthday Letters's Plath is a wife and a daughter, but she is not a

wife; and above all she is a writer. Hughes is deliberately mute concerning his real role

and intimate relationship to her during their marriage. He has nothing interesting to tell

about himself. He has all the time he canted to express himself, he who is not dead. His

role as a widow is now to be a memorial to Plath, although he declared quite soon that

he did not plan to become a “public shrine of mourning and remorse”.238

It is at least how he appears in one of the most heart-rending poems of Birthday

Letters, “The Literary Life”,239 where he reports his encounter, more than ten years after

Plath's death, with the poetess Marianne Moore, who once mortified Plath when harshly

criticizing one of her poems, “Ocean 1212-W”. Hughes does not accuse Moore of

Plath's death; he just discreetly recalls that his wife has not been spared while she was

alive, and that Moore herself, a poetess, is not even able to remember the true title of

that poem (according to Hughes, Moore believes that its title is: “Ocean 1212”), and that

it is easy to ramble about her talent now that it is too late to revive her. The poem's last

lines picture Hughes as a graveyard (”heavy as a graveyard”) where Moore tries to “lay

down her little wreath” on Plath's grave. Hughes regarded himself as his wife's

ambassador and secretary: he appears as receptive, ready to listen (”I listened”),

humble, ready to “kneel and bow [his] face” to collect Plath's posthumous owed

homage.

237 “The Owl”, Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters, op. cit. p. 33: “[Your frenzy] woke up my dead, ectsatic boyhood”.

238Letter from Hughes to Aurelia Plath, 15 March 1963 in Ted Hughes, Letters of Ted Hughes, op. cit., p. 214.

239Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters, op. cit., p. 75.

49

In comparison, Forest appears much less soothed than Hughes. It may be

because, as explained before, Plath's death leaves Hughes with her posthumous

presence, Ariel's manuscript, and two children; while Pauline's death leaves Forest with

nothing but a “hole”240 in which he falls and loses himself.

Although he sometimes describes the events as factually as possible, sometimes

in the form of a summary in his novels after L'Enfant éternel, still he never gives vent to

the obscenity of pain. The reader sometimes gets the feeling that Forest paradoxically

struggles with his own virtuosity. His pathos retains an inexplicable dignity and

readability. One can discern his despair but still it seems weirdly that he manages to

convey his mourning in literary terms, very pertinently, which might be what prevents

him from accomplishing it totally. He might be locked in his well-read position which

pushes him to formulate, to encode, instead of giving in a much more brutal rebellion.

Because Forest's story is to a certain extent the story of a failure; unlike Hughes who

regrets having written the Birthday Letters so late when he realises the release that this

writing and even this publication mean, Forest endlessly repeats that he cannot but

repeat himself, that he never succeeded in reaching the knot of his pain where he could

soothe and heal it. Ted Hughes confirms this powerlessness of writing to solve

problems immediately: “We go on writing poems because one poem never gets the

whole account right. There is always something missed.”241 Forest cannot do anything

but to write although writing does not help him at all, the growing list of his

publications becomes the physical representation of his many attempts to recover from

the bereavement. As he puts it in Le Nouvel Amour: “Writing was an old superstition to

which, not really believing in what I was doing, I entrusted myself. A stupid sorcery of

words and signs, just as the one I had first left myself up to. The charm has once

worked. But now I had become its victim. It was only fair, I suppose. Thinking about it,

I had nothing to say in my defence. Imprudently, I had let write the mental novel I

would not step out of”.242 That is why his novels after L'Enfant éternel deal with his

daughter's death as much as with literature's powerlessness to perform the release he

240“Là où tu étais, un trou est resté dans ma vie. Tout tombe autour et moi je tombe en lui.” Philippe Forest, Le Nouvel Amour, Gallimard, op. cit., p. 11.

241 Margaret Dickie Uroff, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, op. cit., p. 12.242 “Ecrire était une vieille superstition à laquelle, sans y croire tout à fait, je me confiais à nouveau. Une

sorcellerie stupide de mots et de signes, tout comme celle à laquelle j'avais remis autrefois le soin de ma vie. Le charme avait une première fois agi. Mais maintenant, j'étais devenu sa victime. C'était bien fait pour moi, certainement. En y réfléchissant, je n'avais rien à dire pour ma défense. Imprudemment, j'avais laissé s'écrire le roman mental dont je ne sortirai plus.” Philippe Forest, Le Nouvel Amour, op. cit., p. 153.

50

was hoping for.

Hughes sometimes finds answers to his questions, and seems to manage to

persuade himself that this death was hardly avoidable; he understands that to write the

Ariel poems which he knows are what Plath had been desperately aiming for all her life;

that is to say, and whatever price he has paid for it, something has been accomplished,

the literary appraisal makes up for the human tragedy.243On the other hand, Forest

cannot think of any such thing, because there is nothing but injustice in an ill child's

death. His references to Issa and Oé only confirm this idea: pain may generate literature

and even generate literature in an irrepressible way; but the reality of pain will not be

altered neither cancelled. One does not console oneself with printed words. One can at

the most report, formulate, immortalize not a person but the pain of the loss. Forest fails

to appropriate this “nevertheless”244 which is the subject of his book, and which is

possibly the key to solace.

Both authors silently draw a Hiroshima metaphor, unless they refer directly to it.

Hughes writes: “And your words, / Faces reversed from the light, / Holding in their

entrails,”245 which is the typical posture of the atomic bomb victims. Forest goes further:

“In this place [Hiroshima]; for the Occident as much as for the Japan, is marked the

massive, horrified, endless questioning of the suffered, inflicted History”.246 “Suffered”:

Hiroshima to the whole world, his daughter to Forest. Forest eventually gives up

Hiroshima for the Kobe earthquake, because unlike the bomb it does not ask “the

question of human responsibility”,247 and furthermore it took place during his daughter's

illness. Hughes does not draw this distinction, possibly because in Plath's case the

question of the human responsibility cannot be forgotten: an adult's intentional death

differs from that of a child struck by a cancer precisely because of what it implies of

intention, even précarious, even accidental, even momentary. Plath, who said she had a

“concentration camp in [her] mind”248 wears sequels from an education to excellence,

impulsed by a possessive mother who, overtaken by her husband's sudden death,

refused to let her children attend the burials, so much so that Sylvia's first idea when she

243 He also accepts the fact that Plath's talent has dragged her so far, as he writes to Keith Sagar in 1981: “I read those Ariel poems as a climb – not a fall. A climb to a precarious foothold, as it turned out. But she was knocked off by pure unlucky combination of accidents”. Quoted by Keith Sagar in The Laughter of Foxes, A Study of Ted Hughes, op. cit., p. 69.244 “Sarinagara” means “nevertheless” in Japanese.245 “The tender place”, Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters, op. cit., p. 13.246 Philippe Forest, La beauté du Contresens et autres essais sur la littérature japonaise, op. cit., p. 58.247 “La question de la responsabilité humaine”

248 Elaine Feinstein, Ted Hughes, The Life of a Poet, op. cit. , p. 65.

51

visited her father's grave years later would be to dig him up to check if he was really

there, really dead.249 This muted family tragedy stands for Plath's Hiroshima, which

would lead to her suicide which would become Hughes's Hiroshima.250

There is an extraordinary striking sentence at the end of one of the Birthday

Letters poems, that reads: “and everything holds up its arms weeping”.251 It is this

paradox between the energy of the writing, the reaction, even the revolt, through

writing, and the immense familiar and irreparable despair that strikes first in both books.

Hughes and Forest indeed hold up their arms weeping.

249 “My temptation to dig him up” dans Sylvia Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962, op. cit., p. 473.

250 “Having experienced the 'disintegration' – his own personal Auschwitz and Hiroshima – Hughes emerges, annealed [...]”, in Keith Sagar, The Achievement of Ted Hughes (1983), Manchester University Press, 1986, p. 51.

251 “Fate Playing”, Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters, op. cit., p. 31.

52

3)Commented Extracts

I choose to analyse two poems from Birthday Letters more closely, two poems

that seem to be turning poems of the collection, the first one because it refers in many

respects to an especially significant moment of Hughes's and Plath's marriage

(”Epiphany”,252) the second one because it gives a sharp outline of the complexity of the

situation (”The Blue Flannel Suit”.253)

”Epiphany”

The first interest offered by “Epiphany” stands in one single word: fox. Ted

Hughes is famous for his poems featuring animals254 ( the whole collection of Crow is a

most obvious example), and the fox has stood at a central post in his work ever since

one of his very first poems, “The Thought-Fox”.255 The story of the genesis of this text

has become legendary: Ted Hughes, then a literature student in Cambridge, was trying

to write an essay, when he saw a fox entering his room – the fox stood up on its hind

legs and its skin seemed burnt. It walked to Hughes, laid his paw on the page he was

writing on, and told him: “Stop this. You are destroying us”. After the fox left, the print

of its paw remained on the page as a blood stain. Hughes, unhappy with his formal

studies, regarded this apparition as the symbol of his lost teenage as a poacher coming

to call him back to the wisdom of wild nature. To him the fox represented his pure

instincts that were about to be destroyed by the strictness of university. Afterwards

Hughes gave his studies up to anthropology so as to keep contact with this part of

himself which he considered as the most precious.256 Many of his poems recall the

252 Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters, op. cit., pp. 113-115.253 Ibid, pp. 34-35.254 Margaret Uroff, quoted by Susan Bassnett in Sylvia Plath, introduction to the Poetry (Palgrave

MacMillan, 1987), thus comments: “What is Hughes' interest in animals but an attempt to express the submerged life in himself?”.

255 Ted Hughes, Collected Poems, op. cit., p. 21.256 “From that moment [I] abandoned my efforts to adapt myself... It seemed to me not only a foolish

game, but deeply destructive in itself.”. See Hughes's letter to Keith Sagar quoted by Elaine Feinstein

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supremacy of instincts, of what is physical, over literature.

That a fox should reappear in the midst of Birthday Letters thus cannot escape

the reader; the only difference is that this second fox does not address the same Ted

Hughes as his predecessor did. In the first paragraph whose journalistic tone is a bit

surprising, Hughes portrays himself in a few words that say much of the abyss between

him and the disheartened student he was: A new father – slightly light-headed

With the lack of sleep and the novelty.

Between the first fox and the second one, Ted Hughes has got married and has had a

child. He first introduces himself through his exhaustion and his unavailability (”light-

headed”) though his enthusiasm towards “novelty” is obvious. Nevertheless, Hughes's

position is one of vulnerability, if not of weakness, like one who does not yet have his

own situation in hand. This is probably the reason why when he catches sight of the

“young fellow”, he expresses the wish not to have seen, not to have known (”What I'd

been ignoring”). Hughes knows how profoundly his life has changed since his marriage

to Plath, despite how beneficial it might have been, and he senses as much as he fears

the reminder of his own individuality behind this fox-cub shown him by the man, and of

which he writes that its eyes are “so familiar” to him. In Hughes's mythology, the fox is

the animal which knows him better than himself, because it is the animal who first

saved him from the psychic cul-de-sac in which he found himself because of his studies;

the presence of a fox-cub on Chalk Farm Bridge thus cannot be anything but the omen

of a challenge and an upheaval which with Ted Hughes, “light-headed”, fears he will

not be able to cope. The questions he then asks the man about the fox (”Where did you

get it? What / Are you going to do with it?”) betray his own confusion towards his new

life, and also question Plath's desire for him (she is the one who proposed marriage to

him), the presence of Frieda (Plath wanted a child) and also, more generally, the future.

Hughes cannot refrain from questioning the fox through his owner, as he is trying to

guess what might be the new direction, the advice that the fox-cub will eventually

deliver him. While the man announces that the fox (in other words the epiphany itself)

has a price (besides derisory, one pound), Hughes keeps on questioning, as if to delay

the fatal instant: “But / where did you find it? What will you do with it?”. The man's

answers (”Oh, someone'll buy it”) silently reminds Hughes who he was and is not any

more; though the fox is his animal, someone else might get this precise fox, because

in Ted Hughes, The Life of a Poet , op. cit., p. 30.

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what he is now thinking about is: what would Sylvia think of it? Sylvia, the American

wife, obsessed with hygiene and her fridge (to the point of shocking Dido Merwin),

who barely stands Hughes's “dirty hair” and “ragged nails”,257 what would she said of

the fox's smell258 in the tidy flat, with the baby? And afterwards (once again, Hughes

anxiously questions the future) when the fox-cub would has grown up and would ask

for exercise?

Through the whole poem, the fox-cub remains passive, not showing any

preference to Hughes among the other passer-bys on the bridge. Hughes might have

understood that the fox does not recognize him, because he has changed so much. He

has changed indeed, because he had followed the first fox's advice without a word,

whereas he has now become rougher, coarser, more common, his thoughts are “like big,

ignorant hounds / Circling and sniffling around” the fox, as if uncertain of their

affection for “him”.259

The end of the poem develops the meaning of its omen to something darker,

more tragic: Then I walked on

As if out of my own life

In this dreadful sentence, Hughes makes explicit the meaning of the renunciation

accomplished in the refusal of the fox, which he describes later on, filled with remorse,

as something he could have had an effect on: If I had paid that pound and turned back

To you, with that armful of fox

The English language provides a meaning that the French does not render, with the

word “armful” which shows the fox as a substance, a non-numerable thing, which

underlines the symbolic significance of the animal. Hughes eventually decrypts what

happened at that moment on Chalk Farm Bridge when, scared to embarrass or annoy

Sylvia, he renounced who he had been, and thus also renounced who he should have

been:260 257 “Shut eyes to dirty hair, ragged nails”. Sylvia Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962, op. cit.,

p. 420.258”Old smell” but the reader cannot fail to think of the famous words by Hughes about the first fox's

smell in “The Thought-Fox”: “sudden hot sharp stink of fox”, which underline the wild nature of the animal and of what it represents.

259Hughes grants the fox with the pronoun “him” instead of the correct “it”.

260 He thus writes: “I'm aghast when I see how incredibly I've confined and stunted my existence, when I compare my feelings of what I could be to what I am.”. (Letter from Hughes to Olwyn Hughes, end of summer 1962 in Ted Hughes, Letters of Ted Hughes, op. cit., p. 204) Elaine Feinstein recalls in Life of a Poet page 71: “the life Ted had imagined did not include setting up in a House and Garden apartment, which one part of Sylvia kept as a dream.”. .

55

If I had grasped that whatever comes with a fox

Is what tests a marriage and proves it a marriage –

I would not have failed the test.

Sylvia, because of her anxiety, her need of normality, her Americaness, had surely

altered his own life too much for him to recognize it now. Hughes “fail[s] the [second

fox's] test” which, like the first one, has come to tell him that he has to give in to who he

is,261 because a marriage consists in the association of two individuals. This animal

would have been Hughes's contribution to the marriage, his way to offset Plath's well-

groomed flaws with something as real and solid as a fox-cub262 – a fox as young as their

marriage was.

In the last lines of the poem, Hughes nonetheless recreates his duo with Plath, he

addresses her as the second member of their association and asks if she would have

understood and overcome the test. In the end, he repeats and confirms the irrevocability

of his action: But I failed. Our marriage had failed.

This marriage,263 one of the most famous and fruitful marriages of western literary

sphere, about which has been written so much, this marriage which literally produces

two of the greatest anglophone poets of the 20th century, Hughes depicts it as a failure.

An extract of one of his Letters explains this verdict, when he writes: “The particular

conditions of our marriage, the marriage of two people so openly under the control of

deep abnormalities as both of us were, meant that we finally reduced each other to a

state where our actions and normal states of mind were like madness”.264 What Hughes

is saying here as well as in the poem, is the extreme difficulty, the extreme fragility of

the union of two creators265, and a fortiori, two creators both carrying pasts as heavy as

theirs.266 Maybe Hughes is right when he implies that had he been firmer, instead of

261 “Poor old Sylvia! If only I hadn't humoured her, & nursed her lile a patient, & coddled her lile a child – if only I had the guts to carry on just as I was, instead of wrapping my life her in a cupboard, while I tended her. Then maybe she'd have emerged in better shape. And me too.”. Letter from Hughes to Lucas Myers, 14 february 1987 in Ted Hughes, Letters of Ted Hughes, op. cit., p. 537.

262 One may recall Plath's wonder at the beginning of her affair with Hughes, when he introduced her in his poacher's universe. Hughes's solidly earthly nature was favourable to Plath.

263 “Hughes wrote a letter explaining that marriage was originally Sylvia's suggestion: 'Did she sacrifice anything in marriage to me? She wanted to teach, I wanted to go around the world. I didn't even ask her to marry me. She suggested it as a good idea and I said OK, why not?'». See Elaine Feinstein, Ted Hughes, The Life of a Poet, op. cit., p. 60.

264 Hughes's letter to Aurelia Plath, 15 March 1963 in Ted Hughes, Letters of Ted Hughes, op. cit., p. 215.

265 “In many ways she's the most gifted and capable and admirable woman I've ever met – but, finally, impossible for me to live married to”. Letter from Hughes to his brother Gerald Hughes, december 1962 in Ted Hughes, Letters of Ted Hughes, op. cit., p. 209.266 Plath's psychological troubles are quite known, but Hughes, thought he managed to control his

56

“voyaging in” the “liner” of Plath's life supposing “it was all OK”,267 he could have

restored a sort of balance in their life.268

Finally, because of its theme of failure facing a test, “Epiphany” refers to

another poem by Hughes about Plath that was published in a much less famous

collection than the Birthday Letters because it was first published only in a luxurious

limited edition, Howls and Whispers269. The poem we are now considering in one of the

most revealing ever written by Hughes about Plath, and is entitled “The Offers”.270

Hughes tells how the ghost of Plath comes to offer herself to him three times after her

death; the poem presents the same idea of test (”It was the testing moment”) and failure,

since while her third apparition Sylvia tells him: 'This is the last. This one. This time

Don't fail me.'

Hughes's final questioning in both poems, which is also probably the question

that chased him his whole life, is: What has failed? Before Sylvia's death, but after their

break-up, he explains in a letter that “the main grief for [him] is that a life that had all

circumstances for perfection, should have been so intolerable”.271 Throughout the

Birthday Letters, Hughes tracks down the flaw where fate crept in. He hesitates between

his claim that everything was bound to happen (Ted Hughes, as a great amateur of

horoscopes,272 to which he had initiated Sylvia, gives the astrological situation of the

day of their encounter in “St Botolph's” and note that one of their favourite authors,

Geoffrey Chaucer, an astrologer too, would never have gone out that night, for the

conjunction of planets was proving so disastrous: “Our Chaucer would have stayed at

home”) and the exact moment where he made the wrong choices. Hughes's and Plath's

letters also recalls their extreme youth: “both of us feel we are very late maturers”,273

wrote Plath to her mother on the 13th April 1957; “still nomads – still strangers / To our

disorders all throughout his life, still had some: one can evokes for example his mother's preference for his elder brother, or the very cruel way he treated Assia Wevill during their (short) conjugal life.

267 “The Blue Flannel Suit”, Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters, op. cit., p. 67.268 This is what he punctually expresses in “Fever”; facing his feverish wife's exaggerated terror, Hughes

“recoiled, just a little/Just for balance, just for symmetry/Into sceptical patience, a little”.269 Gehenna Press, 1998, with Leonard Baskin's engravings. Hughes's collection dedicated to Wevill,

entitled Cappriccio, was published in similar conditions in 1990.270Ted Hughes, Collected Poems, op. cit., p. 1180.271 “The main grief for me is that a life that had all circumstances for perfection, should have been so

intolerable.”, Letter from Hughes to Gerald Hughes, December 1962 in Ted Hughes, Letters of Ted Hughes, op. cit., p. 209.

272 “He responded to requests of friends to cast their nativities or those of their girlfriends, and he was marvellously entertaining in explaining their significance. Nevertheless, Hughes did not see astrology as a science, more as a vivid expression of intuitive insights”. See Elaine Feinstein, Ted Hughes, The Life of a Poet, op. cit. p. 42.

273 Sylvia Plath, Letters Home, op. cit. p. 308.

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whole possession” affirms Hughes in “Daffodils”274. Every poem of Birthday Letters

gives the same feeling of novelty, of marvelling freshness on the part of two young

lovers who discover together what their life will be / should have been. To a certain

extent, one can assume that Hughes, writing to communicate with his wife, as he put it,

almost magically becomes again the twenty-five-year old man who did not even know

the taste of a peach, and who confesses to be “dumbfounded afresh / By [his] ignorance

of the simplest things”.275 One cannot refrain from thinking that this ignorance might be

what prevented Hughes from understanding in 1963 how much Plath needed him. In the

letters he wrote following her death, he is able to see that “all she wanted to say simply

was that if I didn't go back to her she could not live”;276 but in the Birthday Letters,

returning to who he was then, thirty years before, he painfully admits that “nothing

could make him think [he] would be needed / by anybody”;277 he even insists, pointing

as precisely as possible to the exact moment where everything reversed unwittingly,

placing the reader in front of one of the few minuscule moments which determined all

the rest, according to him: “I had no idea / How I was becoming necessary, or what

emergency surgery Fate would make / Of my casual self-service.”278

The Birthday Letters are also the staggered account of what he failed to see

during his marriage to Plath, and which could have helped him to understand what a

tragedy was brewing – as many things he realized only after her death, when he read her

letters and journals.279 In the poem quoted previously, “The Blue Flannel Suit”, Hughes

portrays Plath on the morning of her first day as a teacher at Smith College (the

university where she had been graduated herself).

274 Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters, op. cit., p 127..275 “Fulbright Scholars”, Ted Hughes, op. cit., p.3.276 Letter from Hughes to Aurelia Plath, 15 march 1963 in Ted Hughes, Letters of Ted Hughes, op. cit.,

p. 214.277 “18 Rugby Street”, Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters, op. cit., p. 21.278 Ibid, page 22279 One can think for example of the following quote from “18 Rugby Street,” where Hughes writes: “I

guessed you were off to whirl through some euphoric/American Europe. Years after your death/I learned the desperation of that search”. The cool and even a bit cynical vision that Hughes had of Plath in 1956, the vision of a American who like so many others wanted to visit Europe, “euphoric”, is reduced to nothing because of the reality revealed “years after her death”, that is to say much too late by her diaries which teach Hughes “the desperation of that search” (as it happens, Plath useless errand in Paris searching for her lover Richard Sassoon whom she would only manage to forget after having met Hughes.)

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”The Blue Flannel Suit”

Hughes starts to state the feelings he has at that time, that is to say how he truly

saw Plath on that precise moment, “that first morning”, when he was still dupe of her

psychic solidity. Maybe to excuse himself slightly, or to lessen his thoughtlessness, he

uses a phrase by Plath, as if trying to prove the immense influence she has on him at

that time, so powerful that he could only believe her. “The polish of her appearance

fooled him”, writes Elaine Feinstein.280 The first words of Hughes's poem tell how he

“let it all grow”, because Plath's life was the “liner [he] voyaged in”. The sentence

expresses a total submission to his wife's will, but the fact that it is actually rewritten

from a poem by Plath is even more significant: in her poem “Tulips”,281 Plath thus

writes: I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat

Stubbornly hanging on to my name and address

The echo is striking, especially as in the collection, most of the time, Hughes

takes on Plath's sentences word for word (”the waters off beautiful Nauset”;282) that he

so easily reformulated and assimilated a whole stanza shed light on their past closeness.

Nevertheless, this poem deals with the silences of their marriage. The next lines of the

first verse reveal what he thought was true back then: he thought that his wife, a brilliant

scholar, had been “fitted out” by her “costly education”. He thought that the “financiers

and committees and consultants” (one can recognize first Aurelia Plath, the widow

going back to work after her husband's death in order to be able to pay higher education

to her children, but also Ruth Beutscher, Plath's psychiatrist, and the best-seller Olive

Prouty, who had financed Plath's scholarship as a literary tutor) had “effaced

themselves” in front of the accomplished Plath, “trembling with the new life” gained

through her studies.

Hughes is wrong. “Now I know, as I did not”, he writes. In spite of his

uneasiness, there are too many things he does not know about his wife to be able to

decrypt the situation, because he is, as much as everyone, mislead by her smile, her

“misfit self-display”. As he puts it in “Fever”, Plath was “overloaded”. He cannot help;

280“The polish of her appearance fooled him”. See Elaine Feinstein, Ted Hughes, The Life of a Poet , op. cit., p. 79.

281 Sylvia Plath, Ariel (1965), op. cit, p. 12.282 “Daddy”, Ibid, p. 48.

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he is, as much as his trickster Crow, “the wrong listener unwanted / To understand or

help-”. The portrait he builds up of Plath now reflects his pain, underlining what he

should have seen, and sees only now with a tenfold increased violence: “What

assessors/Waited to see you justify the cost/And redeem their gamble”. Plath appears as

definitely isolated283 from her husband or from any peacefulness because of the

relationship she fosters with her mentors; she suffers from the same isolation as a

blackmailed victim, in a sense. And her blue flannel suit which gives its title to the

poem is the symbol of her distractedness, since it is a “straitjacket” and the “ugly / Half-

approximation to [her] idea / Of the proprieties [she] hoped to ease into, / And [her]

horror in it”. Plath will never blossom or relax in her job as a Smith's professor;

actually, she would really find her individual voice, that is to say, to be in full

possession of all her opposite energies during the months she would spend in London

before her death and during which she would write Ariel. During those months, maybe

for the first time of her life, Plath would stop wishing to be a perfect young woman to

follow the order Hughes remember to have given her in “The Minotaur”. The poem tells

how Plath destroyed a stool using a hammer, “demented by [Hughes's] being / Twenty

minutes late for baby-minding”. Hughes writes that he told her: “Get that shoulder

under your stanzas”, “that's the stuff you're keeping out of your poems!”.

At the period described in “The Blue Flannel Suit”, Plath has not learnt yet to

use the raw strength of her emotions to write her very peculiar poems; actually, she

accepts a job as a teacher because she suffers from a writer's block and and cannot stand

to stay locked in the flat, facing her powerlessness any more.284 Hughes also recalls the

permanent impact of her depressive past,285 when he alludes to her scar, “the unhealable

face-wound”. Plath is shown as “pathetically tiny”, as if to underline the fact that she is

not yet able to protect herself from “the tweezes / Of the life that judged you”. The

question of the external judgement is crucial in any analyses of Plath's behaviour; the

intimate and very crude revelations that can be found in her Journals are radically

opposed to the happy and smooth image she struggles to offer to others. Hughes sees

“now” (now that he has read the Journals betraying her fear on that first day back to

school), a posteriori, “the lonely / Girl who was going to die”. After Assia's death in

1969, he would write how guilty he feels about her suicide, even more guilty than for

283 “the lonely /Girl”284 It is obvious in Plath's Letters and Diaries that this is a situation that will repeat itself throughout the

marriage years; even during their stay in the Yaddo colony, Plath will shortly find herself shattered by her idleness, despite her numerous plans

285 “terrors that had killed you once already”

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Plath's: “My first wife's death was complicated and inevitable, she had been on that

track most of her life. But Assia's was avoidable”.286 Writing how the blue flannel suit,

“a mad, execution uniform, / Survived [her] sentence”, Hughes might mean that those

who were responsible for this anxiety that leads Plath to suicide are still alive, and

ignorant of their immense part of responsibility in this death.

When he reappears at the end of the poem, Hughes portrays himself as being

“stilled”; first, stilled as he was back then, as Plath too was (the repetition of that word

applied to both of them once again reminds of their extreme closeness about which he

writes in the collection that it is one of two “Siamese twins”), but also stilled

“permanently now, permanently”, thus underlining again the implacable movement of

death. His final posture is all turned to Plath, concentrated on her dead: “bending so

briefly at [her] open coffin”.

In such a sentence, Hughes draws the position which has been his all through the

years following Plath's death, though his silence led people to think the contrary: her

disappearance left him stilled (also on literary matters: “Every circumstance made it so

taboo and unmentionable, had actually blocked my whole inner life”,287) devoted,

faithful and forever questioning the dramatic circumstances that lead to that tragedy.

Sarinagara.

From the very first pages of his novel, Forest compare it with the Japanese

literature, quoting in what can be seen as a prologue a haiku from Kobayashi Issa,

which can be translated as : “world of dew – it is a world of dew – but nevertheless”.288

Afterwards he explains that “the whole novel, everything it says about life stands for me

in the plain reduplication of that last word: “nevertheless.”289

Of all the books written by Forest about the death of his child, Sarinagara is the

one which, while dealing with the same subject, remains distant from it. In reality, at

first sight, only four parts out of seven are autobiographic; the other three are “stories”

286 See Ted Hughes 1996 London interview by Eilat Negev, quoted by Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev dans Lover of Unreason: Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath's Rival and Ted Hughes' Doomed Love, op. cit., p. 215.287 Susan Bassnett, Sylvia Plath, introduction to the Poetry, op. cit.

288 “monde de rosée – c'est un monde de rosée – et pourtant pourtant”.

289 “Tout le roman qui suit, tout ce qu'il dit de la vie tient pour moi dans le seul redoublement de ce dernier mot: cependant.”Philippe Forest, Sarinagara, op. cit., pp. 11-12.

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of three artists: a poet (Kobayashi Issa), a novelist (Natsume Sôseki) and a photograph

(Yosuke Yamahata). In those three parts, Forest turns himself into a biographer, and

tells the life of those three artists as easily as if he was not haunted with his own story

any more. What is even weirder is that in the major part of the four other parts, those

that concern him directly, he manages to keep this same casual tone, becoming his own

unconcerned biographer. It is as if he had succeeded to appropriate the voice he found

to write other stories, and use it for his own purpose too.

Forest comes back to the story of his own life only in the last part, “Kobe”, and

loops the loop when he definitely links his tragedy (his daughter's death) to the tragedy

of a whole country (Kobe earthquake). The connection he makes is similar to the many

little facts reported by Paul Auster in The Red Note Book, or to the small alterations

made by Hughes in his telling of his marriage to Plath, except that Auster's remarks are

only due to his curiosity and his wonder facing fate, and in Hughes it is rather a derived

form of metaphor, allowing to materialize sense a little bit earlier or later that it has

been in reality, while in Forest the simultaneity, not only established, is far more

serious.

Still unconscious of this simultaneity, Forest depicts himself arriving in Kôbe, in

a very factual way, evoking the “aerial highway”,290 the traffic,291 and more generally

the surprising beauty of the town. Later on, he writes that he still feels that something is

“escaping” him about the town: “what this town's name means to all the others”.292

Abruptly, Forest then tells the story of the earthquake, giving the tragedy's

numbers, date, time, number of victims, intensity of the seism, once again stepping out

of his rôle as a novelist to become journalist, historian, or sociologist. His simplified

tone renders the fact in their plain evidence: “for days and days, no one knew where to

shelter the refugee and where to lie the victims' corpses before their cremation.293

Immediately after this story, as if to answer it, Forest admits: “I happened to

have forgotten. There was a blank in my memory where there should have been

Kobe”.294 The whole logic of Sarinagara is to be found in this oversight or rather in the

reason for this oversight. As abruptly as before, Forest then undertakes to recall “to

290 “l'autoroute aérienne”

291 Ibid, pp. 335-326.292 “Ce que le nom de cette ville désign[e] pour tous les autres”. Ibid, p. 327.293 “Pendant des jours et des jours, on ne sut pas où accueillir les sans-abris et où allonger les cadavres

des victimes en attente de leur crémation”. Ibid, p. 330.294 “Il se trouve que j'avais oublié. Il y avait dans ma mémoire un blanc là où aurait du se trouver le souvenir de Kôbe.”

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what his life was inexplicably busy at the very beginning of 1995”295, that is to say:

taking care of his ill daughter. Though he notices having already told this story many

times, without succeeding in turning his memories into “vague pieces of novels”296, as

he says he once hoped to, Forest once again tells the as if quickened story of the illness,

which he closes recalling the date of the tragedy: “thus started the long year of sickness

at the end of which – in summer 1996 – our daughter died”297. Forest tries to impart to

the reader's mind the same slow movement of recollection that he had in Kobe.

To remind the reader that he is not really making literature, but that he is only

reporting the hazards that can help to give sense to his life, Forest admits that he would

like to be able to lie about the place where his memories suddenly reappeared to him,

but this memory is too precious for him to falsify it. That is why he pictures himself

standing in front of an earthquake's commemorative exhibition, slowly recovering his

memory. He studies the movement of memory, explaining how he first recalled the

seism, then he linked it to the peculiar architecture of Kobe, and to the silence of his

Japanese friends on that matter. It is only when he learns the date of the disaster that he

understands why he had forgotten it, he among all others.

He then tries to recall the presumed date of the tragedy, and to reconstruct what

might have been his day in Paris, while he was watching over his ill child, reading the

news in the papers and immediately forgetting it. When he describes the earthquake,

Forest recalls once again, in veiled terms, the physical reality of death and of the

problems it draws (”They counted the dead there and then lie them in the schools, under

the covered part of the playgrounds, in the gymnasium, lying under simple blankets,

their faces hidden in a white shroud, a mere label indicating their names when

identification had been possible”;298) but also the small difference between the dead and

the living (”each collapsed building burying under its debris a few survivors, melting

them to the corpses and crumbs”.299) Forest then develops an hypothesis about man's

impossibility to remember the tragedies that do not have any culprit. “There is not room

295 “à quoi [s]a vie se trouvait inexplicablement occupée au tout début de l'année 1995”

296 “de vagues morceaux de romans”Ibid, p. 332.297 “ainsi commença la longue année de maladie au terme de laquelle – c'était au printemps 1996 –mourut notre fille”298 “là-bas, on comptait les morts et puis on les allongeait dans les écoles, sous les préaux, dans les gymnases, reposant sous de simples couvertures, le visage caché sous un linceul blanc, un simple étiquette indiquant leurs noms lorsque l'identification avait été possible”299 “chaque bâtiment effondré ensevelissant sous ses décombres quelques rescapés, les mêlant aux cadavres et aux débris”

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in memory for such recollections. They are unused 300”, he wrote. It is obvious that

Forest is not simply writing about seisms and others natural disasters, but about all the

guiltless tragedies, thus including his daughter's death and outlining the beginning of an

explanation to his incapacity to comfort himself: his recollections do not have any

room. He is sentenced to remember forever something which he is still unable to

remember, something for which recollection he does not have any solution. This is how

he explains the presence of Japan in his book: not only because of that parallel that he

draws between Kobe and his daughter, of which he writes that he does not “grant it with

more relevance that it truly has”,301 thus refusing once again to give up to the usual

exaggeration of writers; but also explaining that “the Japan was for [his wife and him]

the “after country”, the country where surviving the truth found a new meaning, where

it was not about choosing between memory and forgetting but where forgetting became

the mysterious and new condition of the memory”.302

This is the whole topic of Sarinagara: how to survive the ordeal while remaining

faithful to this ordeal, how to forget it – because one has to forget it to survive it, unless

the implacable nature of the tragedy prevents any survival – without falling into the

obscenity of indifference? To sadness, to illness's injustice, to the outside world too,

Forest answers: “nevertheless”. Things are not as simple as poor writers would like to

think they are, and truth is always uncertain, mixed – “anxious”.

300“Aucune place n'est faite dans la mémoire pour de semblables souvenirs. Ils sont sans emploi”. Ibid, p. 341.

301 “pas plus d'importance qu'elle en a”

302 “le Japon fut pour nous le pays d'après, celui où survivre à la vérité reprenait un sens, où il ne s'agissait plus de choisir entre le souvenir et l'oubli mais où l'oubli devenait la condition mystérieuse et nouvelle du souvenir”. Ibid, p. 344.

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III.MOTIVES OF THE PUBLICATION AND IMPACT OF THIS

PUBLICATION ON THE AUTHOR

1)The author in person.

The process which leads to a book roughly consists in two steps: the first one is

its creation, the second one its publication. This dissertation will now consider the

second one, because especially in the case of such intimate works as the Birthday

Letters and Sarinagara, the publication tables a question. The publication potentially

excludes the work of the sphere of personal initiative; if what matters to its author is

only the formulation of an experience, the repetition to oneself if his own story; then the

publication of such a account seems superfluous. However, though Hughes and Forest

equally pretend to be unconcerned if not resistant to public opinion (Forest:

“clandestine”, Hughes, famous for his shyness and lack of interest in the audience and

even in the celebrity: “he did not like to give interviews; he did love to go fishing on his

own”303) both choose to publish, that is to say to make public, their intimate and

traumatizing experience of loss. The dissertation will now examine the circumstances

and possible motives of this publications, before considering its side-effects, first on the

writer, and then, in a second part, on the outside world.

The first question to ask is that of the lapse of time between the genesis of the

texts and their publication. Ann Skea,304 whom I asked for further information about a

possible dating of the Birthday Letters' poems wrote back to me that the first poem to be

published was “You Hated Spain”. 305A few others were published in the New Selected

303 Erica Wagner, Ariel's Gift, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and the story of BIRTHDAY LETTERS, op. cit., p. 2.

304 Ann Skea is an australian author who wrote her P.H.D. Thesis about Ted Hughes. They became friends during the last years of the poet's life. She is the author of Ted Hughes, The Poetic Quest. (See http://ann.skea.com/)

305 See the Poetry Supplement compiled by Douglas Dunn for The Poetry Book Society, Christmas,

1979.

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Poems 1957-1994,306 but most of it remained unpublished until the Birthday Letters'

collection in 1998. The British Library recently acquired the work's manuscripts, and

should catalogue it very soon,307 but Ms Skea doubts that it will ever be possible to set

up a definite dating because Hughes usually did not date his poems. There is already a

debate concerning the period during which those poems were written; some think

(including Rachel Foss, the Curator of Modern Literary Manuscripts at the British

Library308) that Hughes had written it steadily over twenty-five years. In a letter dated

from 1997, he claims to have written them “at odd times since the early seventies”.309

Erica Wagner notices that the book looks a bit alike Moortown Diary, and thus might

have been begun at the same time, that is to say around 1979; according to Wagner, the

last third of the book would have been written during Hughes' illness from cancer.

According to Ms Skea, most of the poems were written in the nineties; at that time, she

was herself part of Hughes' relatives,310 and he confided in her that he had written

“'about a hundred poems” about things 'he should have written about thirty years ago

but couldn't'”. Ms Skea also told me that according to the Times' article about the

British Library's purchase of the manuscripts, the analyses of Hughes' handwriting

showed that the Birthday Letters' poems were written during the last ten years of his

life. According to her, merely a dozen poems might have been written before. One of

Hughes' diaries reveals the following sentence, dated from 1979: “Writing daily one

passage of memories of S (probably Sylvia)”,311 but he first contemplates publishing

those texts posthumously312.

According to Ann Skea again, the news of his cancer 313 is another reason that

prompted him to publish the Birthday Letters. He had previously postponed their

publication on demand of his second wife Carol, whose feelings about the poems he

understood.314 Hughes was also aware of the spiteful reactions he would expose himself

306 Faber, 1996307 http://www.bl.uk/news/2008/pressrelease20081014.html 308 http://www.culture24.org.uk/history/literary+history/poets/art61645

309 Letter from Hughes to Sagar, 15 august 1997 in Ted Hughes, Letters of Ted Hughes, op. cit., p. 692.310 Hughes and Skea met when Hughes asked Skea to file Plath's papers.311 See Ted Hughes, Letters of Ted Hughes, op. cit., p. 403.

312 “I've been writing out my own version of events... but it will be published posthumously.”. See Elaine Feinstein, Ted Hughes, The Life of a Poet , op. cit., p. 232.

313 The first allusion in the Letters is dated from august 1997 (letter to Sagar previously quoted).314 Carol Orchard was only 21 when she married Hughes in 1970. She had to live with the Plath's

rumour and furthermore she lived in Plath's house, Court Green, in North Tawton, Devon. In one of his letters, Hughes thus expresses his refusal to publish about Plath: “I certainly don't want my private life with Sylvia exposed. Carol feels enough like an also-ran, and I feel quite enough of a second-hand relic husband, as it is.” (see Hughes' letter to Aurelia Plath, 3 april 1975 in Ted Hughes, Letters of

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to by publishing such confessions; he thus wrote to Keith Sagar not to talk about the

book, by fear of a “whole entrenched weaponry be mounted against it. Vulnerable as it

is.”315

Carol Bere explains that due to the absolute position held by Hughes so long

concerning a possible account of his marriage to Plath, “[his] reasons for reversing

position at this time are unclear.”316 Trying to understand and explain Hughes's

initiative, one can only quote his own words, written to his friend Seamus Heaney

shortly before his death. Hughes writes: “I'd come to the point where there seemed no

alternative”. He presents the poems' publication as a need and not a true decision;

actually, he proved a little bit resistant to this necessity since he first published only a

few of them in the New Selected Poems collection. He then explains: “The rest I stuffed

back into the sack. But they wouldn't stay. So I brought them back up & wrote them en

masse for some time - not knowing what I'd end up with or where I'd end. Till suddenly

– between one day & the next – I realized that was it. I couldn't grasp the wholeness of

it but I had the sensation of the whole load of long preoccupation dropping away –

separating itself and dropping away like a complete piece of fruit. The sense of being

released from it very strong and very weird.” 317

Hughes there tells the moment of the genesis of the texts, that is to say how

those poems in some way imposed themselves on him, and also, more mysteriously,

how he did not really decide their completion (”I realized that was it”). It is possible that

the fact that for the first time in his career, he created poems about real facts brought

about the fact that the poems completed by themselves.

This information only tells us about the genesis, and not about the publication.

Trying to find motives for it, Carol Bere assumes that those poems might in the first

place be a way to give back to his children, Frieda and Nicholas, the memories they

were robbed of because of Plath's myth.318 This hypothesis is confirmed in a letter of

Hughes where he explains about his plan: “one notion was – to set down something for

Ted Hughes, op. cit., p. 364) or “If I write love poems to my former love, showing how close we were, it's a kind of adultery.” ( Yehuda Koren et Eilat Negev, Lover of Unreason: Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath's Rival and Ted Hughes' Doomed Love op. cit., p. 226.)

315 Elaine Feinstein, Ted Hughes, The Life of a Poet, op. cit., p. 240.316 “Hughes's reasons for reversing position at this time are unclear.”, Carol Bere, voir http://www.earth-moon.org/crit_bere.html.317 See Stephen C. Ennis and Karen V. Kukil, No Other Appetite: Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes and the

Blood Jet Of Poetry (voir http://www.grolierclub.org/ExPlathHughes.htm)318 “The poems are dedicated to the couple's children, Frieda and Nicholas, both in their thirties, and early reports suggest that they were in favour of the publication – in fact, may even view the volume as a sort of reclamation of their early lives which were 'usurped' to some extent by the Plath myth.”, Carol Bere.

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F & N.”319 Not only is the collection dedicated to them, but also the figure of Plath as a

mother is very present, with two poems evoking their respective births (”Isis” and

“Placenta” ) – although Hughes steps as much as possible aside of his own story, still

the Birthday Letters are, in addition to the portrait of Plath as a young writer, the last

account of a lost family life. From this point of view, the first lines of the poem

“Daffodils” are totally heart-rending: Remember how we picked the daffodils?

Nobody else remembers, but I remember.

Your daughter came with her armfuls, eager and happy,

Helping the harvest. She has forgotten.

She cannot even remember you.

Hughes indeed is not only the witness of the life of one of the 20 th century's greatest

poetesses, but also, of a whole family, the last to remember there was one. When one

considers the difficulty he went through before being able to confess to his children,

years later, that their mother did not die from T.B. as he has previously told them, but

that she committed suicide; or also the numerous publications about Plath that shook her

children as much as they hurt Hughes;320 or, last but not least, the stormy life in which

Plath's death and Hughes' great difficulty to recover from it threw them all, the initiative

is meaningful. For fear that he might die before having talked, before having delivered

his children a complete and real account of what Fate deprived them of, Hughes wrote

the Birthday Letters for them.

In reality, this explanation applies to the genesis much more than the publication

of those texts. If Hughes's intention had only been to answer his children's every

question before his death, he should simply have written to them personally, as he did

thorough his life. One cannot believe that he chose publication to exonerate them (they

who turned, in a fatal overnight, from “babes” into “orphans”), to wash them from any

stain of scandal, of curse, to soothe them; because he could not ignore that any new

publication about Plath, a fortiori by him, would cause a furore which they would have

to face in person if he was not there any more.

He explains in a letter to his son Nicholas his own explanation of why he

eventually published the Birthday Letters: “[...] my daily feeling that I could write

319 Letter from Hughes to Sagar, 15 august 1997 in Ted Hughes, Letters of Ted Hughes, op. cit., p. 692.320One cannot forget the heart-rending letter from Hughes to Al Alvarez: “You tell yourself maybe it is

all literary history, [Plath] belongs to the public, she gave herself to the public, etc... You know that is rubbish. She didn't give her family, and she didn't hand over the inner life of her children.”. See Elaine Feinstein, Ted Hughes, The Life of a Poet, op. cit. , p. 181.

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nothing and hardly even live until I freed myself from the log-jam was blocked and

frustrated all those years – till I got ill. It was when I realised that my only chance of

getting past 1963 was to blow up that log-jam, and assemble whatever I had written

about your mother and me, and simply make it public – like a confession – that I

decided to publish those Birthday Letters as I've called them. [...] I can't care anymore, I

can't lock myself behind this glass door one more week. So I did it, and now I'm getting

the surprise of my life. What I've been hiding all my life, from myself and everybody

else, is not terrible at all.”321

One can understand those last lines as those of a man who has been caught

unaware by the numerous outside comments on a part of life about which he has not had

the time to think himself. Plath's biographies were published before Hughes began to

recover, if he ever did, from her loss, and they gave him the feeling that the situation

was much more tragic that it truly was, except for the suicide that cannot stop from

being of a total sadness. It is a least an opinion reinforced when one reads the collection,

which the reader first regards as the story of a woman, of a poetess and of a family,

much before than the story of a congenial suicidal victim of a sadistic macho. Hughes'

memories, while including the traumatic facts of the event, still are infinitely more

intimist than anything that has been written by others before. To re-appropriate this part

of life, thus to replace the necessary elements which sooth its disastrous impact, has

been a huge relief for Hughes. He had explained that he was sure that poems fixed the

writer in the situation he was desbribing; which might be one of the reasons why he

altered the selection and sequence of the Ariel poems;322 according to the same logic,

one can assume Hughes could not stand the perspective of dying without having

brought a corrective to the wrong image the biographers, the chatterboxes and past time

had built of Sylvia and himself. 323 Ann Skea also told me that Hughes had always used

his poetry as a way to reach people; to move them, to alter them, and also to make

321 Letter from Hughes to his son Nicholas, 20 February 1998 in Ted Hughes, Letters of Ted Hughes, op. cit., p. 713.

322 “Plath's Ariel began – as does the published volume – with 'Morning Song', but it ended with 'Wintering'; so the first word of the book was 'love' and the last 'spring'. This gives the selection a positive, upward movement that the published collection does not have; this ends blackly, with the foreboding poems 'Kindness', 'Contusion', 'Edge' and 'Words'.” . See Erica Wagner, Ariel's Gift, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and the story of BIRTHDAY LETTERS, op. cit., p. 8.323 “I have a superstition that the writer [...] is affected by the mood an final resolution of the poem, in a

final way. [...] If the poem concludes in a down-beat mood, his imagination is to some degree fixed and confirmed in this mood. In the ordinary way his imagination would heal itself, move on to new moods. But the poem stands there permanent, vivid, and powerful, and tries to make him continue to live in its image”. See Keith Sagar, The Achievement of Ted Hughes, op. cit., p. 267.

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some things happen as he wanted them to, magically. However, this magic must not

only heal its writer, but also be published so as to have an impact on its audience. This

might be another reason why Hughes eventually decided to published those texts.

In Forest's case, as seen before, the publication immediately follows the genesis;

his first novel which is thus his first published work about his daughter was published

seven months after her death. Forest threw himself into writing, trying to bury himself

in books, to lose himself.

When I asked him why he wrote, because it obviously was not celebrity that he

was searching for, so what was he trying to find on that path, Forest thus answered me:

“Writing leads to nothing. Not even to celebrity. It is an experience that contains its own

means in the demand of a certain relationship to truth”.324 Maybe Forest made his

reflections public to valid this relationship to truth, to compare it to others'. He also

explained to me that his books “express[ed] a turn against the world anger that

sometimes [took] on the form of a controversial denunciation”.325 To a certain extent,

Forest's books indeed address the world: they claim the acknowledgement of the right to

sadness, they tell the obscenity of the outside comments on his child's death, they also

inform the outside world that this tragedy can happen at any time, to anyone.

When he describes his state of mind before leaving for Japan, Forest writes that

he wishes “that there would be there someone to acknowledge what I had written, what

I had lived”.326 One can assume it is what he has searched for through publication, that

the world should acknowledge him as a broken father, and maybe indicate to him what

status could be his now. Forest often insists on the isolation due to his stays, and on the

way that his wife and himself have willingly exaggerated this isolation, so as to be left

alone with their grief, since no one seemed to understand it. From that point of view,

books are the repeated explanation of that grief.

The reason why he published might have its cause in his numerous explanations

about the role of the witness. Forest answers the real with the fiction and thus answers

the world with the account, and his last novel, Le Nouvel Amour, which appears in the

first place as very different from the others because of its topic, actually forms a new

part of this account. On that matter, Forest alludes to the “bull horn”327 of Leiris, thus

324 Interview of Philippe Forest by Julia Kerninon, see appendice.325 Ibid.326 “qu'il se trouve là-bas quelqu'un pour me donner acte de ce que j'avais écrit, de ce que j'avais

vécu”Philippe Forest, Sarinagara, op. cit., p. 217.327 “corne du taureau”

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implying that to him, having eventually published Le Nouvel Amour meant to take a

risk, probably because it meant to present himself under a less noble form as usual

because much more physical, and to definitely destroy the heroic figure in which he as

been locked. In that novel Forest appears much more as a man who has lost his child

than as an inconsolable father; he corrects his own character in the novel, makes him

grow old, and thus testify on the disintegration of a marriage after such an experience.

Forest never wished to pass himself as a hero, but rather to say what he had the feeling

that it had never been said about the sadness, wrench, injustice of cancer. In Le Nouvel

Amour, he continues his work towards his daughter, witnessing the circumstances of her

disappearance and wondering how she would now judge them, his wife and himself,

lost in their love torments. He speaks of the difficulty to live an affair after a child's

death, but also of the wonder of a new lover. What caused the wrong understanding of

this novel are the very crude sex scenes which could at first sight give a feeling of

similarity to some of the worst books written in the last past years. Nevertheless Forest

once again justifies his initiative through his situation. What he is trying to say is what

has never been formulated: the frenzied libido of the parents of a dying child, for

example. “I am not writing those things because I think they are unique, [...] but because

I have never read them in any book”,328 he writes. His writings holds to its apparent

simplicity to move sometimes to an immense crudeness. He tells all this in the same

pitiless language that has been that of all his previous novels. He repeats endlessly that

no one has ever said such things.

To him, “l'expérience de l'intime a pour horizon l'anéantissement de la

conscience individuelle”329, that is to say, that any tragedy destroys one's feeling of

individuality. He specifies this idea when he explains that “l'expression de soi est bien

destruction de soi mais en vue d'une survie qui transforme le texte en une scène où se

propage seul l'appel d'une parole adressée à autrui”330. One can understand that Forest

assumes that the fact of writing his own life cancels it, makes it disappear in the

impervious world of words, where this story stops belonging to his author to speak only

to the outside world.

In both cases, the obvious goal of both authors is to free themselves from an

328 “J'écris ces choses non pas parce que je les pense uniques [...] mais parce que je ne les ai jamais lues dans un livre” Philippe Forest, Le Nouvel Amour, op. cit., p. 76.

329 Philippe Forest, La beauté du Contresens et autres essais sur la littérature japonaise, op. cit.,, p. 179.330 Philippe Forest, Le roman, le réel et autres essais, op. cit., p. 135

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experience through its expression. “One writes only to erase”,331 Forest claims. In both

cases too, the author is not really trying to make literature; Hughes writes for example

that it is “not altogether a literary matter, more a physical operation that just might

change the psychic odds crucially for [him], and clear a route”.332 The paradox of this

initiative is that it appears at the same time discouraged and vital to the author's

survival. Hughes, already aware of the cancer that would kill him, still writes that

“publication came to seem like a matter of life and death”.333 Forest seems to confirm

this point of view: “I am writing my life in order not to die, I thus shape a picture of

myself that will survive me, but, insofar as every representation implies the destruction

of the real in order to the revival to be performed under the form of fiction, the picture

of myself that I shape would survive me only if I accept to disappear, I have to die in

order to my life to be written. The autobiography always has more or less a testamental

value that the novel ignores.”334

”Finally”, as Hughes puts it, “poems [or novels] belong to readers – just as

houses belong to those who live in them and not to the builders”.335 That is to say that

every story belongs to who understands it. The publication is needed in order to

accomplish the testimonial act that might free the author from his own experience; in

that sense writing may be a way to hand over a baton rather that a testimony.

331 “On écrit à seule fin d'effacer”. Philippe Forest, Sarinagara, op. cit,, p. 332.332 “Not altogether a literary matter, more a physical operation that just might change the psychic odds crucially for me, and clear a route . Letter from Hughes to Seamus Heaney, 1 January 1998 in Ted Hughes, Letters of Ted Hughes, op. cit., p. 703.333 “Given the funny old physical corner I’ve got myself into and the mysterious role in my life that SP’s posthumous life has played – and that our posthumous marriage has played. Publication came to seem like a matter of life and death.” http://www.culture24.org.uk/history/literary+history/poets/art61645334 “J'écris ma vie pour ne pas mourir, je façonne ainsi une image de moi-même qui me survivra, mais,

dans la mesure où toute représentation suppose la destruction du réel pour que puisse s'accomplir sa renaissance sous forme de fiction, l'image de moi-même que je façonne ne me survivra qu'à condition que j'accepte de disparaître, je dois mourir pour que ma vie puisse être écrite. L'autobiographie a toujours plus ou moins une valeur testamentaire que le roman ignore.”Philippe Forest, Le roman, le réel et autres essais, op. cit, , p. 176.

335 “Finally, poems belong to readers – just as houses belong to those who live in them and not to the builders”. Letter from Hughes to Sagar, 23 may 1974 in Ted Hughes, Letters of Ted Hughes, op. cit., p. 349.

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2)The reception of the work

After the question of the relevance and the propriety of such works comes the

question of their reception and possible success – in other words, the question of

voyeurism.

Both works received a rather uncommon success; in Hughes's case because he

wrote poetry and this genre is quite neglected nowadays; in Forest's case, the surprise

comes from the fact that because L'Enfant éternel was his first novel, he of course was

not a famous novelist before its publication. However the Birthday Letters sold over

500 000 copies of which 40 000 in England during the first week of its publication and

received various awards: the Forward Poetry Prize336, the T.S. Eliot Prize,337 the

Whitbread Poetry Award338 and the British Book of The Year Prize.339 As for L'Enfant

éternel, it received the Femina first novel award340 in 1997, while Sarinagara received

the Prix Décembre in 2004341.

Despite the definite qualities of Birthday Letters, part of its success was

predictably due to its scandalous topic. However, Hughes' treatment of this topic, as

distant as possible from what the audience might have been expecting, cancels any

exhibitionist hypothesis on his part.

There exists on Internet a video of the moment when Frieda Hughes,

representing her father (and her mother?), goes up on stage to receive the 1999

336 The Forward Poetry Prize was created in 1991. Its aim is to extend the audience for contemporary poetry and it is currently the United Kingdom's most valuable annual poetry competition.

337 The T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry is awarded to “the best collection of new verse in English first published in the UK or the Republic of Ireland”. The Prize was inaugurated in 1993 in honour of its founding poet, T. S. Eliot.338 The Whitbread Poetry Award is now called the Costa Book Award, because of the new sponsor,

Costa Coffee. The awards, launched in 1971, are given both for high literary merit but also for works that are enjoyable reading and whose aim is to convey the enjoyment of reading to the widest possible audience.

339 The British Book Awards are given annually and promoted by the UK industry trade journal Publishing News. 340The Prix Femina has been created in 1904, thanks to the magazine Femina which gives it its name.

His jury is exclusively feminine and thus opposes to the prix Goncourt which was reproached to award men only. The prix Fémina awards each year the best french work, written in prose or verse.

341 The Prix Décembre is a prestigious award with a 30 000 euros prize created in 1989 by Philippe Dennery – it was then named the Prix Novembre. It is a sort of anti-Goncourt and search to cast the audience's attention on a outsider book.

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Whitbread Award for Birthday Letters.342 The video shows Frieda, extremely moved,

who reads the message her father entrusted to her for such an occasion, which contains

the following words: “How strange that we have to make these public declarations of

our secrets... But we do. If only I had done the equivalent thirty years ago I might have

had a more fruitful career – certainly a freer psychological life”. The hand clapping that

resounds after her speech is somewhat obscene because one cannot refrain from

wondering what the audience is applauding: a tragedy concluded under the form of one

of the most famous 20th century poetry books; or this posthumous message which some

might understand as the confession of a secret man who acknowledges he has been

wrong, understanding only too late that nothing can be performed outside the eye of the

audience. Are those applauding people the dogs Hughes mentioned?343 Are they happy

because he eventually gave up and delivered his secret? What sort of victory do they

hear in Hughes's “we do”?

Frieda Hughes, since she has become after her father's death the public face of

the Hughes' lineage (Olwyn Hughes, the poet's sister, only comes forward occasionally

nowadays, and Nicholas Hughes, Plath's and Hughes' second child, committed suicide

last 16th march) does not delude herself as for the supposed benevolence of the audience

towards her parents, or rather towards their legend. To protest against the movie

recently released (Ted and Sylvia, by Christine Jeff, 2003) in which Plath's part is

performed by the actress Gwyneth Paltrow, Frieda wrote a poem entitled “My Mother”

denouncing the “the peanut eaters, entertained / At [her] mother's death” who “maybe

[will] by the video” since they apparently cannot “imagine the body, head in over /

Orphaning children”.344 This very peculiar obscenity of modern society where a poet's

suicide indeed is a golden opportunity to producers is what Frieda denounces on behalf

of her whole family. Doing so, she reproduces her father's standpoint thorough his silent

years, when he was accusing Plath's various exegetes of creating a scandal where there

was nothing but sadness. Any writing about Plath has indeed had a disastrous impact on

the Hughes' family. Addressing his former friend Al Alvarez who in his book the The

Savage God provides an hypothesis regarding Plath's last days, Ted wrote: “For you it

was something you wrote, no doubt against great inner resistance, for your readers it's

342 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8kvmXvR1pU 343 “The Dogs Are Eating Your Mother”, Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters, op. cit. p. 195.344 http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2003/feb/03/bbc.film : “Now they want to make a film/For anyone

lacking the ability/To imagine the body, head in oven/Orphaning children.” et: “The peanut eaters, entertained/At my mother's death, will go home,/Each carrying their memory of her,/Lifeless - a souvenir./Maybe they'll buy the video.”

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five interesting minutes, but for us it's permanent dynamite”.345 Even when the authors

are more watchful, they still may hurt – one can think of the very understanding letter

from Hughes to Anne Stevenson, Plath's only authorized biographer; also to his feeling

about the fact that Plath's poems were studied at school: “What an insane chance, to

have private family struggle turned into best-selling literature of despair and

martyrdom, probably a permanent cultural treasure.”346

Hughes himself questioned three years before the publication of Birthday Letters

this need of confession: “Why do we have to blab? Why do human beings need to

confess? Maybe, if you don't have that secret confession, you don't have a poem – don't

even have a story. Don't have a writer.”347 Although this declaration is quite surprising

regarding Hughes's image as a recluse, Joanny Moulin recalls that “the last period of his

career is in fact passionately egocentric. And the publication of Birthday Letters as a

last powerful effort of Hughes' at controlling precisely that part of his private life and

literary reputation which had dramatically haemorrhaged with Plath's suicide and its

critical aftermath, out of reach of Hughes' painstaking landscape-gardening of his self-

image” .348

Hughes probably could not foresee that writing the Birthday Letters he would

almost definitely end up Plath's controversy, his accounts cancelling any other.

According to Janet Malcolm, “when [Hughes] writes about Plath, he renders all the

other writings about her crude and trivial”349 To a large extent, Birthday Letters is at the

same time the only book that Hughes could write without aggravating his case, but also

the only book that could reduce any other writing on this topic to nothing. Birthday

Letters are the too-late-found antidote to the vendetta he suffered. There is another

tragedy in this belated writing.

As for Sarinagara, no doubt that its success is equally due to his brilliant and

neat prose, as much as to the unexpected altruism in a book that belongs mostly to the

autofictional genre. Nevertheless, there still is a part of voyeurism in this success.

According to Forest himself, death, real death, is something that is only rarely written;

and sadly, too, the condition of a parent whose child is dead is subject to

345 Letter from Hughes to Al Alvarez, November 1971 in Ted Hughes, Letters of Ted Hughes, op. cit., p. 322.

346 Letter from Hughes to Richard Murphy, 9 march 1965, ibid, p. 240.347 See Elaine Feinstein, Ted Hughes, The Life of a Poet (2001), op. cit., p. 229.348 Joanny Moulin, Ted Hughes, New Selected Poems, op. cit., p. 139.349 Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes op. cit., p. 123.

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inquisitiveness. The serie of Forest's books, in that sense similar to Christine's Angot

that appears as various chapters of an autobiography (except that Angot writes her life

as she lives, while Forest, in any of his books but Le Nouvel Amour, remains stopped in

the midst of 1997 year350) may also have contributed to this success, in the sense that the

audience unsatisfied with the simplicity of L'Enfant éternel, might have thought that

Forest would say more afterwards – that he would work his mourning out and then

deliver more exciting confessions. Le Nouvel Amour almost confirms this impression,

until its reader realised how present Pauline still is in this book, but also how much

Forest's themes here are shocking and unacceptable. However, to say what is considered

as unutterable was part of the literary plan of Forest: “There is a irreversible moment.

This is the moment I have wished to tell. I know that I have crossed the limits of what is

tolerable, that I have even reached the obscene. But I wanted to”.351

His thoughts about this last taboo of death possibly explains his success since as

much as he has trouble to totally understand his daughter's death, the whole society has

trouble to find tools to understand death in itself. Both Forest and Hughes insist on

literature's necessity to express everything. Alluding to the holocaust, or to nuclear

disaster, they attempt to prove to readers that they are speaking of a reality which hits

everyone, a reality which is not the inconfort of what is intimate, and also because it

seems that this literature is the only place where they both found an equivalent to what

they have been going through, to the extend that Hughes once said that he would have

preferred to be Jewish.352

The fact of writing about their experience thus is at the same time a way to

overcome this experience and to seize it. When life has vanished, only literature may

recapture its memory: “such is the task of the novel, a task of memory”.353

Paradoxically, “the bare, crude vision of the real needs the words of literature and their

tricks, their scheme”354 Literature amazingly turns the experience into something

350 “Cela fait donc dix ans très exactement que j'ai écrit les premières lignes de mon premier roman. [...] Je ne pensais pas que dix ans passeraient aussi vite. Et ce que tout ce temps m'aurait laissé inchangé à ce point.”. Philippe Forest, Tous les enfants sauf un, op. cit., pp. 9-10.

351 “Il y a un moment irréversible. C'est lui que j'ai désiré dire. J'ai bien conscience d'avoir franchi les limites du supportable, d'avoir touché à l'obscène même. Mais je le voulais ainsi”Ibid, p. 90. 352”He would have preferred to be jewish. 'It came at a critical point in his own life, and helped him

withstand the traumas of that period'”. See Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev, Lover of Unreason: Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath's Rival and Ted Hughes' Doomed Love, op. cit., p. 166.

353”Tel est le travail du roman, celui de la mémoire”Philippe Forest, La beauté du Contresens et autres essais sur la littérature japonaise, Allaphbed 1, éditions Cécile Defaut, 2005, p. 155.

354”Il faut les mots de la littérature, leurs artifices, leurs calculs, pour que ne se perde pas la vision nue, crue, du réel”. Philippe Forest, La beauté du Contresens et autres essais sur la littérature japonaise, op. cit., p. 150.

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understandable, moving in the etymological acceptance of the term, that is to say that it

moves, more that it touches, who reads it. “How come”, asks Forest, “life's

representation is always more heart-rending than life itself, that one cries because of a

portrait and never because of a face?355 Hughes thus answers him: “Because it is

occasionnally possible, just for brief moments, to find the words that will unlock the

door of all those many mansions inside the head and express something [...]”.356 Pessoa's

sentence then makes sense because life is no more able to explain its own mystery, that

words or art only knows how to decrypt. This operation is effective only through the

readers and this is how it can be favourable, not only to its authors but also to potential

readers. This is why the publication is a necessary condition to such an undertaking; this

is also the reason why those have such an impact on the outside world.

355”À quoi tient [...] que la représentation de la vie soit toujours plus poignante que la vie elle-même, que l'on pleure sur un portrait et jamais sur un visage?”Philippe Forest, Sarinagara, op. cit., p. 300.

356”Because it is occasionnaly possible, just for brief moments, to find the words that will unlock the door of all those many mansions inside the head and express something [...]”. Ted Hughes, Poetry in the Making, op. cit., p. 124.

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CONCLUSION:

Thus two men, in a few years distance, try to accomplish their mourning. It is

hard to say if their position as writers and the specific resources of this position have

truly been of any help in this undertaking, since Hughes refused to write on this topic

earlier precisely because of everything that writing meant to him,357 and also because of

what writing has brought him, celebrity, that is to say the constant attention of the

outside on his every action. As for Forest, though he immediately tools up to writing, it

has nevertheless not provided him with the peace of mind he was expecting. It appears

that he cannot manage to be “clear of his debt”, as he puts it in Tous les Enfants sauf un:

“Maybe I should have remained silent since the beginning. But I knew it was now too

late. [...]. I was writing each new book to make it the last so I could be clear of

everything then. I have not change my mind. I am still writing in order to be able to stop

doing so. But I fail to.”358 If we notice many points of comparison between their

experiences, still we have to signal that only in Hughes' case does writing seem to have

brought the expected solace.

This might be what the sentences from Pessoa and Faulkner were already

evoking: the only difference between writers and non-writers consists in writers' whim,

dissatisfaction, and demand. They write novels out of their love affairs and life itself

does not seem thrilling enough to them. However, as James Crumly humorously recalls

in an interview, the alleged immunity offered by fiction to writers is nothing but a

delusion, since: “writers do not have two personalities, they are blokes to drink beers

with, blokes who have their own successes and failures in life”.359 Although Sarinagara

357 It has to be noticed for example that Hughes had aways been shocked by the way Plath used their arguments as poem's topic. This might even have been the only thing he reproached her for.

358 “Il aurait peut-être fallu me taire depuis le début. Mais je savais qu'il était trop tard désormais. [...] Chaque livre nouveau, je l'écrivais pour qu'il fut le dernier et que je me retrouve, après lui, quitte de tout. Je n'ai pas changé d'idée. J'écris toujours afin de pouvoir cesser de le faire. Mais je n'y parviens pas.”Philippe Forest, Tous les enfants sauf un, op. cit., p. 153.

359 “Les écrivains [n'ont] pas deux personnalités, [ce sont] des types avec qui on [peut] boire des bières, et qui [ont] leurs propres réussites et leurs propres échecs dans la vie”. Propos recueillis par Bryan Di Salvatore et Deirdre Mc Namer en 1988, reproduits dans James Crumley, Putes (1988), traduction de Jean Esch, 1990, Rivages/Noir, p. 145.

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and Birthday Letters are two outstanding books in many respects, still they are

powerless against the real disaster of human death, the unavoidable tragedy of death. In

a way, Birthday Letters are if not a failure at least its symbol, because of all what those

eighty-eight poems contains as regret and remorse; as for Sarinagara, Forest himself

underlines the terrible aporia the books enlightens: the survivor's sentence to be

“unforgivable and still innocent”. The reason why those books move us so deeply, why

they cause such a critical reaction, is not only because of their intimistic nature, but also

because neither Hughes nor Forest deceive themselves about the coldness and

irreversible nature of death. Both refuse to be like those “pathetic” writers Hughes

depicted, those who “hide from it, making it up”. In reality, what both authors

accomplished in those books is nothing but an effort to see more clearly, thanks to the

prism of literature that is their favourite playground. Forest converting himself to

writing, as much as Hughes appealing to a style which he so far dread, carry out a

monumental break from their selves so as to get closer to the dead, to do her (Sylvia or

Pauline) justice, to, according to Hughes”roll her back to the sun”.360

The writer's resources thus consist in this fragile lucidity provided by writing,

which allows, at least for a moment, to fix the legend, make life last, so as not to lose

this moment. Life is not enough to writers probably because it does not appears to

affirm strongly enough its own meaning, and this is the reason why they need to double

it, or even to endlessly multiply it through fiction.

In his recent biography of Faulkner, an author often quoted by Forest and whose

work, because of its mystery and strictness might appears as a novelistic equivalent of

Hughes's, André Bleikasten evokes the “truth of an existence at the same time seized

again, crossed out, reinvented and avenged with the powers of fiction. In its higher

demand, in its most secret purpose, literature does not attempt to represent life. It

questions its mysteries and corrects its deficiencies.”361 I would like to conclude with

those sentences.

360“The Dogs Are Eating Your Mother”, Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters, op. cit. p. 195.361 “Vérité d'une existence à la fois ressaisie, raturée, révinventée et vengée par les pouvoirs de la fiction.

En sa plus haute exigence, en son plus secret dessein, la littérature ne cherche pas à représenter la vie. Elle en interroge les mystères et en corrige les carences.”. André Bleikasten, William Faulkner, une vie en romans, éditions Aden, 2007, p. 13.

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APPENDICE

Interview de Philippe Forest par Julia Kerninon.

Julia Kerninon: Aviez-vous déjà écrit de la fiction avant L'Enfant éternel? Si non, pourquoi vous êtes-vous soudain tourné vers le roman à ce moment précis de votre vie?

Philippe Forest: Non, L'Enfant éternel est vraiment mon premier roman et c'est l'expérience que relate ce livre qui m'a conduit à l'écrire.

J. K.: Avez-vous écrit, ou continué à écrire des romans pour affirmer votre position de personnage public? Avez-vous cherché de cette manière à porter cette voix dont il vous semblait qu'elle n'avait pas de portée significative avant que vos romans soient remarqués?

P. F.: Je n'ai pas le sentiment d'être un “personnage public” et je n'ai jamais eu l'intention d'en devenir un. Si cela avait été mon dessein, j'aurais plutôt fait de la télévision ou de la politique. Un écrivain, dans la société actuelle, est quantité tout à fait négligeable.

J. K.:Quel rapport entretenez vous avez le succès de vos romans? Quelle analyse faites-vous de ce succès?

P. F.: Je ne parlerais pas de succès - même si je suis heureux des signes de reconnaissance qui sont allés à mes livres. Qu'un roman soit lu, primé, traduit, commenté, étudié prouve seulement qu'il a trouvé un écho. Le “succès” est toujours au prix d'un malentendu dans une société qui, en général, ne veut rien entendre de ce que la littérature a à lui dire. J'ai été très frappé par le malentendu qui a entouré et continue à entourer la réception de mes livres. Et c'est souvent par désir vain de dissiper ce malentendu que j'ai continué à écrire.

J. K.: Que pensiez vous de la littérature (des romans) avant d'en écrire? Est-ce que les évènements de votre vie ou le fait d'écrire de la littérature (romans et essais) vous ont désillusionné quant au pouvoir de celle-ci? Vous écrivez à plusieurs endroits que la littérature ne remplace pas la vie mais vous dites aussi: “à la littérature on échappe jamais.”

P. F.: Cette dernière phrase signifie qu'il y a une fatalité de la littérature. Mais je n'ai jamais pensé que cette fatalité fût quelque chose de glorieux. Je déteste la sacralisation de l'écriture. J'ai gardé de mes lectures d'avant-garde l'idée que la vraie poésie est haine de la poésie.

J. K.: Comment expliquez-vous la manière dont vous (il me semble) revenez

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régulièrement à des auteurs dont l'histoire personnelle ou les thèmes se rapprochent des vôtres? Est-ce que votre décision de mêler le drame collectif au drame personnel est une manière de s'apaiser, ou de se justifier? (Spécialement dans le cas d'Hiroshima.) Ou essayez-vous de vous inscrire dans une tradition?

P. F.: Il me semble qu'il s'agit simplement du désir de trouver la part d'universel que contient chaque expérience singulière afin de ne pas s'enfermer dans le cercle d'une méditation exclusivement personnelle. Le roman est dialogue. Et c'est un dialogue imaginaire que je propose avec des individus dont l'histoire est comparable à la mienne. Sans souci d'apaisement et avec un désir d'auto-justification égal à celui que comporte toute entreprise dans laquelle s'engage quelqu'un. Ni plus ni moins.

J. K.: Comment expliquez-vous le fait d'écrire que vous n'êtes pas un écrivain mais quelqu'un à qui il est arrivé d'écrire des romans, alors qu'effectivement, comme vous l'écrivez également, vos romans sont plus justifiés que la plupart de la production française actuelle?

P. F.: Je suis très réfractaire à la pose, à la posture de quiconque se présente comme “écrivain”. Et je crois authentiquement qu'un livre justifié est un livre qui vise autre chose que la littérature elle-même.

J. K.: Est-ce que les thèmes dont vous traitez dans les tomes de l'Allaphbed vous étaient déjà chers ou proches auparavant?

P. F.: Certains, oui: la littérature d'avant-garde, le grand roman moderne. D'autres, non: le Japon. Mais la manière dont j'aborde tous ces thèmes est fondamentalement affecté par l'expérience à laquelle mes romans sont liés. C'est pourquoi, la série d'Allaphbed constitue une entreprise qui relève de ce que j'appelle “la fiction critique”.

J. K.: Concernant l'autofiction, comment vous situez-vous par rapport à des auteurs comme Chloé Delaume ou Christine Angot?

P. F.: Je n'ai pas lu Chloé Delaume. J'apprécie les livres de Christine Angot. Le courage est la principale qualité d'un écrivain. Et de cette qualité, elle ne manque pas.

J. K.: Comment expliquez-vous l'extrême précision de votre narration, par rapport avec des œuvres traitant du même thème qui ont au contraire tenté de contourner la difficulté du sujet en utilisant des narrations plus originales que le roman? (je pense à Crow de Ted Hughes, puisque c'est mon auteur de comparaison, mais je pense aussi plus généralement à la poésie). Vous écrivez que seul le roman peut dire la vie puisque la vie est un roman: pouvez-vous développer?

P. F.: Cette dernière idée est très largement développée dans Le Roman, le réel. Elle en constitue même la thèse principale. Je n'ai pas encore lu le texte de Ted Hugues. En revanche, j'ai beaucoup écrit sur des poètes confrontés à l'épreuve du deuil: de Hugo, Mallarmé à Zeami et Issa. Je ne pense pas que la poésie soit plus originale (ou plus expérimentale) que le roman. Je suis souvent gêné par la poésie du deuil car elle me semble dissoudre l'expérience vécue dans une représentation très idéalisante et esthétisante qui, en exaltant le tragique, conduit à la dénégation de celui-ci. Il faut la précision du récit pour que l'expérience vécue ne se trouve pas perdue. C'est pourquoi

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j'écris des romans plutôt que des poèmes.

J. K.: Comment expliquez vous la publication du Nouvel Amour, qui selon moi représente une voie très différente dans votre trajectoire d'écrivain?

P. F.: J'ai écrit Le Nouvel Amour parce qu'écrire exige qu'on affronte la vérité (la fameuse corne du taureau chez Leiris) et qu'il n'y a pas à reculer devant les aspects les moins recevables de la réalité (notamment tout ce qui touche à la dimension sexuelle). Pour moi, il y a une totale continuité de ce roman à ceux qui l'avaient précédé. Je pense qu'on s'en aperçoit si on lit ce livre sans être embarrassé par son propre rapport à l'amour et à la sexualité.

J. K.: Ne vous relisez-vous vraiment pas?

P. F.: Jamais. Sauf quand je suis obligé de le faire pour la reprise d'un de mes livres: ainsi la réédition en poche ou l'adaptation théâtrale.

J. K.: Dans Tous les enfants sauf un, lorsque vous écriviez “mourir est un art”, aviez vous connaissance du fait que cette phrase exacte se trouve dans un poème très célèbre de Sylvia Plath (”Lady Lazarus”)?

P . F.: Non, je ne connais pas ce poème. Mais cette phrase doit pour moi être entendue par antiphrase. En vérité, mourir n'est pas un art. Ceux qui le prétendent participent à cette entreprise de dénégation et d'esthétisation du cadavre que je dénonce.

J. K .: Considérez-vous votre parcours de romancier réellement comme un parcours en soi, vers un parcours vous menant quelque part ailleurs que vers la célébrité, puisque il me semble que ce n'est pas la célébrité ni la reconnaissance que vous cherchiez ici?

P. F .: Non, écrire ne mène à rien. Et pas même à la célébrité. C'est une expérience qui a sa fin en elle-même: dans l'exigence d'un certain rapport à la vérité.

J. K: Avez-vous conscience de quelque chose qui ressemble a du cynisme dans certains de vos écrits? (je pense à l'anecdote du chat de Giacometti)

P. F.: Je n'utiliserais pas le terme de cynisme. Mais mes livres expriment une colère tournée contre le monde et qui prend parfois la forme de l'humour noir ou de la dénonciation polémique.

J. K.: Que pensez-vous de la phrase de Joyce Carol Oates: “le roman est l'affliction qui n'a que le roman pour remède” ?

P. F.: C'est une belle phrase, assez énigmatique. On dirait une formule de Blanchot. Comme toutes les affirmations paradoxales, elle réfléchit le caractère lui-même paradoxal de l'expérience humaine. Mais je me méfie de toute conception de la littérature qui donne à celle-ci une intention (même contradictoirement) cathartique.

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BIBLIOGRAPHIE

Ted Hughes

Ouvrages de Ted Hughes:

Birthday Letters (1998), Faber and Faber, London, 1999.

Collected Poems, Faber and Faber, London, 2003.

Letters of Ted Hughes, selected and edited by Christopher Reid, Faber and Faber,

London, 2007.

Poetry in the Making (1967), Faber and Faber, London, 2008.

Ouvrages de Sylvia Plath:

Ariel (1965), Faber and Faber, London, 2001.

La Cloche de Détresse, (1987), Gallimard (L'Imaginaire), Paris, 2001.

Letters Home, selected and edited with a commmentary by Aurelia Schober Plath

(1976), Faber and Faber, London, 1979.

The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962 (1980), Faber and Faber, London, 2000.

La Cloche de Détresse, (1963), traduit de l'anglais par Michel Persitz (1972), Gallimard,

L'imaginaire, 2001.

Etudes et Biographies concernant Ted Hughes:

Andriot-Saillant,Caroline. La fable de l'Etre: Yves Bonnefoy et Ted Hughes, éditions

83

L'Harmattan, Paris, 2006.

Bassnett,Susan. Sylvia Plath, introduction to the Poetry, Palgrave MacMillan, 1987.

Margaret Dickie Uroff, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Urbana, London, University of

Illinois Press, 1979.

Feinstein, Elaine. Ted Hughes, The Life of a Poet (2001), Weindenfield & Nicholson,

London, 2001.

Koren, Yehuda & Eilat Negev, Lover of Unreason: Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath's Rival

and Ted Hughes' Doomed Love (2006), Da Capo Press, 2007.

Malcolm, Janet. The Silent Woman, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (1993), Granta

Books, London, 2005.

Middlebrook, Diane, trad. Valérie Rouzeau, Son Mari: Ted Hughes et Sylvia Plath,

histoire d'un mariage (2003), éditions Phébus, Paris, 2006.

Moulin, Joanny. Ted Hughes, La terre hantée, éditions Aden, 2007.

---. Ted Hughes, La langue rémunérée, Editions L'Harmattan, Paris, 1999.

Sagar, Keith. The Laughter of Foxes, A Study of Ted Hughes (2000), Liverpool

University Press, 2006.

---. The Achievement of Ted Hughes (1983), Manchester University Press, 1986.

Erica Wagner, Ariel's Gift, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and the story of BIRTHDAY

LETTERS, Faber and Faber, London, 2000.

Ouvrages de Philippe Forest:

L'Enfant Eternel, Gallimard, 1998.

La beauté du Contresens et autres essais sur la littérature japonaise, Allaphbed 1, éditions Cécile Defaut, 2005.

Sarinagara, Gallimard, 2006.

Le Nouvel Amour, Gallimard, 2007.

Le roman, le réel et autres essais, Allaphbed 3, éditions Cécile Defaut, 2007.

Tous les enfants sauf un, Gallimard, 2008.

Haikus, etc, Allaphbed 4, éditions Cécile Defaut, 2008.

84

Sources secondaires:

Angot, Christine. Sujet Angot, Pocket, 1991.

---. Léonore, toujours, Fayard, 1994.

---. L'Inceste, Stock, 1999.

---. Pourquoi le Brésil?, Stock, 2002.

---. Les Désaxés, Stock, 2004.

---. Le Marché des Amants, Seuil, 2008.

Bataille, Georges. La Part Maudite, éditions de Minuit, 1967

Bleikasten, André. William Faulkner, une vie en romans, éditions Aden, 2007.

Crumley, James. Putes (1988), traduction de Jean Esch, 1990, Rivages/Noir.

Delaume, Chloé. Les Mouflettes d'Atropos, Farrago, septembre 2000.---. Le Cri du Sablier, Leo Scheer/Farragos, septembre 2001.

---. Certainement pas, Verticales, 2004.

Durckheim, Emile. Le Suicide (1930), Presses Universitaires de France, 2004.

Faulkner, William. Moustiques, traduit par Jean Dubramet, Paris, Minuit, collection Point, 1980.

Jardin, Alexandre. Le Roman des Jardins, Librairie Générale Française, Le Livre de Poche, 2007.

Kertesz, Imre. Être sans destin, Actes Sud, 2002.

Lawrence, D.H. Women in Love, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books in association with Heineman, 1960.

Oates, Joyce Carol. La foi d'un écrivain (2003), traduction de Claude Seban, éditions Philippe Rey, 2004

Ôé, Kenzaburô. Dites-nous comment survivre à notre folie (1977), Gallimard Folio Poche, 2008.

Olson, Elder. The Poetry of Dylan Thomas, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, Phoenix Books, 1961.

Pessoa, Fernando. Fragments d'un voyage immobile, précédé d'un essai d'Octavio Paz, collection rivages poche/Petite Bibliothèque, 1991.

Rilke, Rainer Maria. Requiem (1996), traduction de Jean-Yves Masson, Fata Morgana, 2004.

---. Les Cahiers de Malte Laurids Brigge, Seuil, collection Points, 1995.

Robbe-Grillet, Catherine.Jeune mariée: Journal (1957-1962), Librairie Générale Française, Le Livre de Poche, 2006.

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Shakespeare, William.La Tempête (1997), traduction d'Yves Bonnefoy, Gallimard, 2007.

Tolstoï, Léon. Anna Karénine, Folio Classique, 2008.

Sources web:

http://escholarship.library.usyd.edu.au/journals/index.php/SSE/article/viewFile/326/299Egbert Faas, “Ted Hughes and Crow”.

http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1598800,00.htmlInterview de Frieda Hughes par Andrea Sachs le 13 Mars 2007.

http://www.culture24.org.uk/history/literary+history/poets/art61645”Massive Ted Hughes Archive Acquire by British Library”, par Richard Moss le 14 Octobre 2008.

http://www.bartleby.com/103/44.html”The Lake Isle of Innisfree”, William Butler

Yeats.

http://test.larousse.fr/dictionnaires/francais/trickster Définition du trickster.

http://www.grolierclub.org/ExPlathHughes.htm

Stephen C. Ennis and Karen V. Kukil, No Other Appetite: Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes and the Blood Jet Of Poetry.

http://www.bl.uk/news/2008/pressrelease20081014.html ”Saved for the nation: British Library acquires major Ted Hughes archive”, Press Room, 2008.

http://ann.skea.com/)

Le site de Ann Skea.

http://www.earth-moon.org/crit_bere.html.

Carol Bere: “Owning the Facts of his Life: Ted Hughes Birthday Letters” (originally published in The Literary Review , vol. 41, No. 4 (été 1998), pp. 556-561.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8kvmXvR1pULa video de la cérémonie des Whitbread Awards de 1999.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2003/feb/03/bbc.film”Frieda Hughes attacks BBC for film on Plath”, article de Jamie Wilson dans The

Guardian, du 3 février 2003.

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CONTENTS

Introduction.......................................................................................................................1

I. Circumstances of the bereavement.1)Ted Hughes's case......................................................................................................... 52) Philippe Forest's case................................................................................................. 143) In both cases: the absence of a grieving process after the death................................ 24

II. Form.1)The literary genre itself............................................................................................... 312)The tone and the initiative........................................................................................... 423) Commented extracts................................................................................................... 53

III. Motives of the publication and impact of this publication on the author.1)The author in person....................................................................................................652)The reception of the work........................................................................................... 73

Conclusion...................................................................................................................... 78

Appendix........................................................................................................................ 80Bibliography................................................................................................................... 83Contents.......................................................................................................................... 87

87