Marie Étienne, les couloirs de la langue

“I am a nobody displaced in a country at war.” “I was getting used to being elsewhere, the unnamed.” So it reads in Marie Étienne's book of poetry Roi des cents Cavaliers (2002). A subject defines himself in and through the absence of any bearings: geographic, historic, or linguistic. The original displacement paradoxically constitutes him within the split—as geographic as linguistic—that he operates in himself: the “person” so defined is precisely somebody only because he is nobody on a purely un-speakable land... Henceforth, Marie Étienne's writing turns out to be a pur-suit of these original “unnamed” and “elsewhere,” that yet she never tries to reduce to the understandable absolute of a territory that frontiers and definite words would mark. Here I offer an examination of three privileged “territories” that deeply in-form Marie Étienne's poetry: the frontier, the canal, and the corridor. This will lead me to find a progression within the work: from the fontier to the corridor, via the canal. Thus, from the split to the distribution via the irrigation. The task would be this one: to replace the frontier by the corridor, the cut by the connection, and the asyndeton by the “like.” The utopia would be to make a corridor of the frontier, to make the edges of the wound meet—without ever going up to mixing them up: it is question of maintaining the difference. That is, to inhabit the prose as a poet. Keywords: Territories Language Exile Frontier Canal Color Topographic art Notes 1. On se reportera, par exemple, à « La disjonction », dans Poésie & Philosophie, pages 275–284. 2. Ainsi du rapport entre « soi » et « quelque part » : « L’absence ne vaut rien, quand on est de retour, qu’il s’agit à nouveau de se poser la main dessus, c’est vraiment difficile, mais on essaie quand même, on revient en arrière et on récapitule, voyons, voyons, je me trouvais à tel endroit à tel moment, il faut se rendre à l’évidence, on a dû s’oublier quelque part. Mais où ? Il doit bien exister un tas de linges dans un coin et ce linge c’est soi » (Les Passants intérieurs 27). 3. Les citations de tout le paragraphe sont prélevées dans ces pages

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