Pierre Alferi and Jakob von Uexküll

Pierre Alferi and Jakob von Uexküll: Experience and Experiment in Le Chemin familier du poisson combatif Michael Sheringham (bio) This article focuses on Alferi’s second book of poetry, Le Chemin familier du poisson combatif, published in 1992. It is a companion piece to my article, “Pierre Alferi and the Poetics of the Dissolve” which examines his 1997 collection, Sentimentale journée. 1 The notion of the dissolve links two things that are crucial in Alferi: first, the way sense keeps forming and dispersing in his poems through a variety of means mirrored by frequent references to cinema and other technological media: as in cinema, rupture and continuity are both essential to the process. Second, the way his poetic language, working through processes of disruption or interruption, and favoring a thematics of cognitive experiment and bewilderment in everyday contexts, offers an image of subjective experience or identity that stresses the pleasures and pains of self-dissolution. What I call a “poetics of the dissolve” is bound up with the consistently experimental—or fauxexperimental— bias of Alferi’s work, its play with procedures and modes of conjecture associated with different kinds of scientific inquiry. Devising or simulating an experimental situation can be seen as recapping—with a few twists of irony—aspects of the avant-garde tradition, including the project of questioning not only the division between various art forms in favor of a more generalized set of practices, but also the border between art and life, art practice and the everyday. Alferi works in ways that fit with the recent prevalence of an “art of the project,” where the artwork is the residue of an experiment, a setting up of certain conditions, a report.2 The back cover text of Le Chemin familier du poisson combatif reads as follows: Le narrateur se soumet à quatre expériences. La première est de sortir. La deuxième, de passer le temps. La troisième, de rentrer chez soi. La quatrième, de regarder. Récit d’une aventure. At the end of the book a note informs us that it draws on information from the Oxford Companion to Animal Behavior, that it cites a definition from a book on wild mammals, and a sentence from Henry James, and that it borrows four diagrams and their captions from a book called Mondes animaux [End Page 105] et monde humain, suivi de Théorie de la signification, by Jakob von Uexküll, published in 1965.3 This helps explain why the four parts of Le Chemin familier have titles relating to animals. In each case the title is followed by a strange diagram, evidently borrowed from Uexküll, followed, in the first three parts, by an italicized preamble set out as a poem, beginning with the words – “pour faire cette expérience,” and outlining a bizarre set of practical instructions. In the first part instructions relate to the arrangement of a fish-tank and the likely responses of a Siamese fighting fish when confronted with a barrier constructed in a certain way. In part four this preamble is omitted, but the text begins with the words “Pour faire cette expérience il n’est besoin d’aucun procès / technique ...” (Chemin, 79). Following the preamble, each of the book’s parts consists in some twenty pages of text divided into unnumbered and untitled sections, where every other section begins with a first line in capital letters that serves as a sort of title and, along with other features, notably a switch from the first-person je to the anonymous on, marks these as more autonomous poems.4 A note at the beginning identifies these segments as “Reprises”—reruns, revivals, or repeats. It reads as follows: Les “reprises” sont faites pour être lues deux fois de suite. Leur premier vers est en capitales; dans la dernière séquence, leur fin est signalée par un tiret. (ibid., 7) At the end of the book we find an index of all the “reprise” texts or poems, in alphabetical order, which accentuates their different status. As we read the four parts of the poem, we may or may not follow the instruction to read

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