Michel Deguy and the Problem of Allegory

Poetry has become problematic to itself more than it has perhaps ever been (Deguy 1969:182).1 This statement of Michel Deguy in his 1969 work Figurations aptly summarizes the state of the art for many in France within the last few decades. The increasing tensions and conflicts that have arisen within the structure of contemporary French poetry and are manifest to some degree in nearly all the various art forms of the twentieth century are a reflection of what Deguy and others see as a much larger cultural and epistemological crisis. This crisis stems in part from the view held by a growing number of philosophers, artists and literary critics that all human knowledge is fundamentally ideological, that order and meaning are not immutable principles inherent in the physical or spiritual universe but are, in reality, artificial constructions imposed by man and by the ordered syntax of his language in his effort to make sense of what he experiences or perceives. The loss of faith in the reproductive powers of language, in particular, and the conviction that language has a major role to play in systematizing and organizing the reality it is meant to transcribe has affected poetry at its very core, according to Deguy, shattering all our assumptions about its nature and purpose, for not only does the poem cease to perform its traditionally mimetic function as a reflection of an ordered reality but it fails to realize the presumably more modern aims of the

Allegory · Art · Literature · French Literature and Critical Theory · French Literature and Criticism · French Literature and Poetry · Philosophy