BISHOP, MICHAEL. JACQUES PRÉVERT, FROM FILM AND THEATER TO POETRY, ART AND SONG

Book Review par Peter Read

The critical fortune of Jacques Prévert in English-speaking countries is relatively limited. Let us recall, however, the works of William Baker (1967), Anne Hyde Greet (1968), and that of Claire Blakeway, devoted to theater and cinema texts (1990). Michael Bishop's new book will therefore find a good reception in Anglo-Saxon university libraries, and among all those who seek a presentation in English, both compact and panoramic, of Prévert's entire work. This is therefore a critical synthesis, the first to benefit from the recent publication of the poet's Complete Works, and from the critical apparatus that accompanies the two volumes of the Pléiade.

Michael Bishop, a Canadian academic, is the author of numerous works devoted to French poetry of the last two centuries. He also directs, at Rodopi, the "Chiasma" collection, devoted to studies that have an intertextual, transgeneric and interdisciplinary character, and in which he publishes the book in question here. This one adopts a thematic and synchronic approach to Prévert's poetry, illustrated with extracts and brief quotations chosen throughout the work, before approaching other domains: writings on painter and sculptor friends, theatrical and cinematographic works, collaboration with photographers, the poet's collages, songs and the setting to music of his poetry. Bishop therefore proposes a kaleidoscope-book, somewhat fragmentary, made of suggestive juxtapositions, in the image of a work he qualifies as "heterogeneous and heteroclitic." Studded with neologisms and gallicisms, Bishop's style is also in the image of his purpose, for he cheerfully aligns, within a sentence, the numerous bifurcations, pirouettes and parentheses that the vivacity of his spirit dictates to him. If he devotes a few pages to the lexical field and wordplay of the poet of Paroles, he displays his refusal of any formal or prosodic analysis, because such a reading would be, in his opinion, too mechanical and reductive, would risk betraying Prévert's spirit, poet of presence and spontaneity...

Bishop hardly has time to linger on a poem, or even on a collection. He rather seeks to emphasize the essential and constant qualities of the poet's imagination, his freedom of spirit, his availability as an urban flâneur, his sensitivity as an ecologist before the letter, the ever-renewed freshness of his gaze, and the mistrust that opposes him to all technocrats, mandarins and other master thinkers, to all forces that tend to disenchant the world. It results, nevertheless, in a somewhat sanitized Prévert, because the author explains that the poet should not be qualified as an anarchist, unless anarchism is only associated with the values of childhood, truth, peace and happiness. As for his anticlericalism, this would be animated by a purely playful spirit, which never implies a desire to offend or to hurt. The song "Marche ou crève," which accompanied the performances of the October theater troupe, would, according to Bishop, belong to the same philosophy as the slogan "Live free or die," which adorns numerous American license plates. The dunce of a poet is thus topped with an American cap, in order to reassure young readers of the United States, raised in politically and religiously correct thinking.

The quotations are bilingual, well translated by Bishop, the book ends with a selective bibliography, and everything is thus done to encourage the reader to push further his exploration of the work of the protean poet, who preferred the eye of the sparrow to that of the "pen people" of "la Nouvelle Oisellerie Française."