BEHIND THE VICTORY IN THE SHADOW OF WINGS OF STANISLAS RODANSKI, OR THE PROBLEMATIC RECEPTION OF A LIMIT TEXT AND ITS CONTEXT

par Benoît Delaune

Born in 1927, died in 1981 in a Lyon asylum, the poet Stanislas Rodanski published almost nothing during his lifetime. It was not until 1975 that François Di Dio published, at Éditions du Soleil Noir, in a collection of the same title, the text La Victoire à l'ombre des ailes, written almost 30 years earlier. By its apparent banality, by the crushing of the poetic text passed through the grinding machine of the most insignificant paraliterature, La Victoire à l'ombre des ailes poses, on the one hand, the problem of its reception in terms of complicity with a more or less reduced readership, and on the other hand the problem of the generic status of this paradoxical text.

The "innocent" reader who would venture into reading La Victoire à l'ombre des ailes without knowing anything about Rodanski, his biography and his writing, in short the context, would have many surprises: indeed, this text presents itself in the apparently banal and flat form of the adventure novel, mixing exoticism, sentimentalism and spy story. Apart from a writing that is at times singular, poetic, and some barely comprehensible allusions, nothing in the text suggests a masterpiece of 20th century poetry! It is indeed the quasi-obligatory reading of Julien Gracq's superb preface that allows, on the one hand to break a "naive" reception of the text, and on the other hand in the same paradoxical movement, to receive the text for what it must be for a reader in complicity, that is to say a poetic text disguised as paraliterary text. But this singular reading, this problematic confrontation (which I had for my part with Rodanski's text, which fell from my hands for almost 10 years) seems significant and symptomatic of the reception questions posed by certain 20th century authors. We can imagine moreover that the rediscovery of Lautréamont-Ducasse by (among others) the Surrealists must have posed a certain number of similar questionings: what is this text? Where does it come from? How does it work? Why this writing? Who was this quasi-anonymous author? The extremely lacunary knowledge that we had a century ago of Isidore Ducasse has, not hindered its reading, but contributed to creating a complex and multiple reception of the author of Les Chants de Maldoror.

La Victoire à l'ombre des ailes thus presents itself under the appearance of a spy novel mixed with sentimental romance and noir novel and stuffed with underground, secret references, on the one hand to real people and friends of the author, on the other hand to authors like Rimbaud or Isidore Ducasse. We can divide the direct and indirect references into several distinct categories:

First of all the American novel, and especially the paraliterary genre of the noir novel:

– "I discovered in myself the characteristics of Faulkner's hero" (Bourgois p. 51, first page of the text!)

– "Jim drove insolently à la Carol Blandish" (p. 62), reference to the novel La Chair de l'orchidée by James Hadley Chase published in France in 1948, the supposed year of writing of La Victoire à l'ombre des ailes.

– "Kiss me hard, passerby, whoever you are [...] I am the flesh of the orchid' (p. 84). Double reference, to Chase's novel and to the lexicon of the epitaph.

Then the references to Afro-American jazz: on the radio pass successively, according to the narrator, Superman by Miles Davis (p. 62), pieces by Charlie Parker, Bed Room Storm by Dizzy Gillespie (p. 90), the jazz standard Solitude (p. 93).

Last elements of what could be qualified as "Americanization" of the text, the indirect references:

– "might as well interview the Metro Goldwyn Mayer lion", p. 56.

– One of the characters is compared to actor Alan Ladd, p. 60.

– The narrator, knocked out by "a real Statue of Liberty punch", wakes up in a car, surrounded by movie sets, "fake torch" and "huge fake marble book" (p. 61-62): the torch and the book are the attributes of the Statue of Liberty.

– One of the characters tells the story of Frank Capra's film Lost Horizon, p. 80-81.

Then come some elements proper to the sentimental novel:

– the narrator is called Lancelo Glucksman (Glucksman is Rodanski's real name); the beloved woman, Maria, is compared p. 88 to "The Lady of the Lake".

– Less direct and implicit element, most of the love scenes take place on a beach, in a doubtless underlying reference to the myth of Tristan and Isolde (this reference is more explicit in the later text Lancelo et la chimère). We return to this below.

Also come the references to Rimbaud, Lautréamont or Nerval, more or less implicit:

– The reference to the "marvelous scintillation of the Ocean" (p. 57) is doubled by the fact that one of the bars in the short story is called "l'Océan Club" (p. 57). The rapprochement with Lautréamont's "Vieil Océan" is doubtless not haphazard...

– Page 82 the narrator compares himself to a "chimera". The reference to Nerval is doubtless implicitly constant (the text Lancelo et la Chimère confirms us in this vision).

– "The whole bar is café au lait: the walls, the carpets, the leathers. A long aluminum I goes across the open bay" (p. 56): the oblique reference to the vowel sonnet seems obvious in view of the other texts where Rodanski brings together the advertising slogan "Omega, the exact time for life" with the last verse of this sonnet, "Ô l"Oméga, violet ray of His Eyes"

– The love scenes, taking place almost all on the beach, perhaps refer to Rimbaud's Une Saison en enfer:

"Here I am on the Armorican beach [...] Women care for these fierce invalids returned from hot countries. I will be mixed up in political affairs. Saved.

Now I am cursed, I have horror of the homeland. The best is a well-drunk sleep, on the shore ↑"

On this change of perspective in Rimbaud"s text, the "Armorican beach", Jean-Luc Steinmetz notes "this curious displacement from the East (land of the Gospel) to the West (Brittany of pagan blood)" and attributes it to "romantic memories and doubtless an allusion to Chateaubriand's René ↑". It is not impossible that Rodanski saw in this "Armorican beach" the beach of Penmarch, where Tristan agonizes waiting for Isolde the Blonde. As the other texts by Rodanski refer in an emphasized way to the legend of Tristan and Isolde, we can suppose that the poet superimposes on Rimbaud's text this overinterpretation. The reading of the third stanza of "Mauvais sang" is in any case troubling: we find there a large part of the elements of La Victoire à l"ombre des ailes: the "return from hot countries" would be the return from the exotic setting of the short story, the island where the characters have been stranded; being "mixed up in political affairs", "saved", having "horror of the homeland", can refer to the last scenes of La Victoire: the "well-drunk sleep, on the shore", that"s what the characters live on the island; their rescue, as well as the short story, ends with these words: "Relieved, I sink into the cushions. I am certain with Maria of being able, at the mercy of this band of lunatics, to finish disgusting the amateurs. We have been to the end of the program, there is nothing left but to look infinitely at things until the end, our fate is played out". Or how to be "mixed up in political affairs" while having "horror of the homeland", since the "program", the aviators' mission, has turned to disaster.

Elements very marked by spy or detective novels (and more broadly by paraliterary genres), but not acting under the regime of direct borrowing like the direct reference to Lancelot, Chase or Faulkner, also appear throughout the narrative: the main characters are American aviators, reflections on the Cold War scatter the book, alcohol and cigarettes (the cigarette brand "Kool') are also ostentatious elements of paraliterary genres; finally, the narrator himself qualifies his narrative as a "spy romancero" (p. 82), or compares the characters to "actors paid to play a porn film". (p. 78, we will return below on the metalepic effect of these two intrusions of the narrator).

Another constitutive element of La Victoire à l"ombre des ailes, and which goes in the direction of complicity with a reduced group of readers, the reference to real people, like the name of the character "Mac Borgé", which we know today is a tribute to Jacques Borgé, Rodanski's friend. We should then question the names of the other characters, Ted, Jim, Frank: are they references to real people, from the poet's entourage?

La Victoire à l'ombre des ailes thus deliberately inscribes itself under the sign of the false (false spy novel, false romance, etc.) and complicity. Stuffed with allusions, the text functions according to references that can seem to us, we who are more or less non-initiated readers, not part of Rodanski's circle of friends, implicit or even incomprehensible. After all, the "innocent" reader that we postulated earlier could read this text as a short spy novel or a short noir novel, not so different from a James Bond, an OSS 117 or a Chase book ↑. It is precisely for this reason that, publishing this text almost 30 years after its writing, François Di Dio of Soleil Noir had it preceded by Julien Gracq's long preface which provides strong explanatory elements of the text, such as:

"this taste anyway, like a drug, for all the provocative frippery of the era which, playing at every moment in transparency as under a glaze, gives to Rodanski"s short story its unstable lighting, both attractive and irritating, of false daylight. ↑"

This notion of "transparency" and "glaze" could be brought closer to the notion of "surface" used by Gilles Deleuze in Logique du sens. In chapter 13, Of the Schizophrenic and the Little Girl, the philosopher compares Lewis Carroll, who would play with his portmanteau words to lift the surface of meaning, to Antonin Artaud (the "schizophrenic") whose language, on the other hand, makes us see in a terrifying way, in its excesses and madness, the hidden depths of meaning, in an abolition of all surface by collapse. Rodanski's text indeed plays on these surface effects. Indeed, almost nothing in the short story lets the depths of the meaning process show through explicitly; on the contrary the signifying "surface" of the text, this transparent "glaze" of which Gracq speaks, this language that we could qualify as flat multiplies formulas, clichés and references to noir novel, spy novel, exotic romance. It is only in some chiseled language effects, always at the limit of the poetic formula, that one can feel that behind the flat surface of words, behind this insignificant literature hides a depth of the text.

This depth and this collapse of meaning, we can feel them explicitly in certain places, by the use of metalepsis ↑; page 78 the narrator, speaking of the characters, tells us:

"we are the actors paid to play a porn film, who loyally acquit themselves of their task, while drawing from it the legitimate satisfaction that well-done work provides, but with this sort of supreme detachment that responds to the abstract demands of the scenario. And then, people pay taxes' (p. 78)

And further on, page 82: "This spy romancero is losing its blood, in the milk-bathed night the bonds are coming undone".

These judgments, intrusions of the narrator, are one of the signs that under the smooth, flat surface of the short story a deeper drama is playing out, responding to these "abstract demands of the scenario".

Other signs of the narrator's presence, the narrative transgressions (in the form of incoherence, non-respect of referential codes): page 74, the narrator calls "Maria" this woman he has just met and who has never told him her first name. Page 89, the narrative failures amplify:

"I say words of silence from the corner of my lips.

– It smells like the hour of crime, we are united for better and for worse.

She says:

– It's well us who will have wanted it... and an eventful life was opening up to them.

I gave a steering wheel turn as a sign of assent."

The abrupt passage from reported speech to heterodiegetic narrative speech, or to put it another way the integration into the reported speech of a speech attributable to a heterodiegetic narrator (while the narrator of La Victoire is indeed a homodiegetic or autodiegetic narrator to use Genette"s classification) here reinforces the artificiality of the clichés employed ("the hour of crime", "and an eventful life"...).

These indices, and we could say that it is doubtless the proper of any text with problematic reception, are interesting for us because they allow, in an ostentatious way, to inscribe the text in a reception horizon, they signal to the reader. Without the presence of the two metalepses and without this string of clichés page 89, La Victoire à l'ombre des ailes would pose serious reading problems: nothing or almost nothing would differentiate the text from any spy or adventure novel. Through metalepses and narrative transgressions especially, the narrator makes us see the limits of the surface that the text deploys: it's a way in sum of lifting a flap of the surface of meaning (like some of Dali's paintings lift the surface of water) to indicate to us the presence of a depth of the text.

Paradoxically, in a reversal, by lifting the surface of the text through transgressions, Rodanski in fact designates a "transparent" surface, which tended to fade before the vertigo of a supposedly poetic text but presenting all the characteristics of paraliterature. In fact, without these desacralizing interventions of the narrator, the extreme flat surface deployed by the text would make the reader lose footing, in this "central and creative collapse ↑" which is according to Deleuze the characteristic of Artaud's writing. Finally, by dint of playing the game of flat and barely signifying paraliterary text, Rodanski, instead of constructing a well-determined, stable surface of meaning, lets the reader sink into a sort of black hole, a bottomless pit, of a text with deceptive reading: one expects a poetic text and one falls face to face with a station literature text. What Rodanski himself inscribes, doubtless deliberately, in his text: "the mirror was ending in flame tendrils'.

We can say that in the case of Rodanski's text, the figure of metalepsis thus has a reassuring role, it signals to the reader with an ironic wink, a complicity. By desacralizing the banal and innocuous aspect of the text, metalepsis shows the aside of the text, an "off-screen" that breaks (but with relief for the reader!) the referential illusion. Without the metalepses and various transgressions, Rodanski's text could really give vertigo: how to understand, receive a poetic text that is disguised to this point? We are indeed under the surface of meaning, an absolute surface, almost smooth, which in the same movement plunges us into the depths of paraliterary or even a-literary text.

This play between the surface and the "abstract demands of the scenario", it is in fact the (posterior?) text Lancelo et la Chimère, text at first glance autobiographical, which provides the user manual:

"All these days, I had made my delights of the landlady's library. With Flo, flirt novel, and a very brief story of sentimental error – whose title I have forgotten – of a style so clearly purified that it had the effect of an ether whiff, I had taken pleasure in imagining the advantage that could be drawn from the narrative of a devouring, absolute passion, in the language of flat nullity." (Lancelo et la Chimère, in Écrits, p. 110-111).

Another text also provides us with an essential key, it is André Malraux's preface to Faulkner's Sanctuary, which ends with this formula: "Sanctuary, it's the intrusion of Greek tragedy into the detective novel. ↑" A similar formula could be applied to Rodanski: La Victoire à l'ombre des ailes, it's the intrusion of poetry into the spy novel... Moreover, we must note the great similarity of plot (the young girl prisoner of marginals) between Sanctuary and No Orchids for Miss Blandish by James Hadley Chase. Rodanski explicitly citing La Chair de l'Orchidée in his text, he has probably read Chase's novel, whose first version was published in 1946 in France.

Beyond these very enlightening references, we can find a very strong implicit model in Rodanski: Isidore Ducasse. What Alain Jouffroy notes in his book Stanislas Rodanski – une folie volontaire:

"more secretly [...] he identified with [...] Jacques Vaché [...] but also with Isidore Ducasse-Lautréamont, whose writing he knew almost as well, rather well than badly, how to parody ↑".

This identification with Ducasse, we find it in the blurred reception of the work. Everything in La Victoire à l'ombre des ailes seems to be allusion to a meaning of which we would not have the key, in the manner of Les Chants de Maldoror, whose reception has long posed problems. Another element of rapprochement: Ducasse's text, which begins under the form of epic poetry, ends on the popular form of the serial in the sixth chant. Is this the reason that pushed Rodanski toward paraliterary forms?

Also, we have known for several years that Les Chants doubtless signaled to the reader of their era, by the integration into the fiction of fragments "borrowed' from Doctor Chenu's encyclopedia. This sign, which contributed to a complex and lacunary reception, detected late (in 1952 – therefore after the writing of La Victoire? then arises the problem of the true dating of Rodanski's text), this sign therefore takes in my view the same importance as the use of metalepsis in Rodanski in La Victoire. What in our era, in Rodanski's text, can appear as an encryption, a difficult reading of the text, is doubtless also an admiring complicity with Ducasse's text. We could almost think that Rodanski fabricated all his life his own Ducassian legend: by disinteresting himself from any will to publication, by sowing fragmentary texts, by ending his life in a madhouse, Rodanski has perhaps constructed an image of the writer as enigmatic passerby, in the manner of Ducasse-Lautréamont whose biography and construction of a contextualized reception still largely escape us. As if La Victoire à l'ombre des ailes functioned on the same type of founding incomprehension as Les Chants de Maldoror, considered and received by the surrealists as a sort of noir novel put into poetry, whereas they must be brought closer to the genre of epic poetry.

We can then wonder if Rodanski had been able to detect in Les Chants these elements of reception, the "borrowings' from Doctor Chenu, the use of epic poetry. If he had no knowledge of these facts, we can say that Rodanski had so penetrated Ducasse's universe that he succeeded in appropriating certain of the characteristic traits of the author of Les Chants, by reinventing them under the form of this doubtless eternally enigmatic text that is La Victoire à l'ombre des ailes.

NOTES: ↑ Rimbaud, "Mauvais sang", 3rd stanza, in Une Saison en enfer, p. 109.

↑ In Une Saison en enfer, note, p. 196.

↑ For example, Chase's novel Le Zinc en or offers similar elements, with the presence of former American army aviators and mechanics as main characters. Reading all these paraliterary texts would doubtless teach us more about the stereotypies used by Rodanski in La Victoire à l'ombre des ailes.

↑ Julien Gracq, preface, p. 34.

↑ We take up the term metalepsis from Gérard Genette, who spoke of it as early as Figures III ↑, and even made a book of it: Métalepse ↑. We use the term to designate the procedure which consists, for the narrator, in crossing the framework of his narrative to show its fictional aspect. The most striking example of metalepsis is found in Jacques le fataliste, where the narrator constantly plays with the reader by interpellating him and showing in an emphasized way that he does what he wants with his narrative.

↑ Logique du sens, p. 102.

↑ Sanctuaire, Gallimard (coll. "Folio"), Paris, 1972, p. 11. Malraux's preface was published as early as the first edition of the novel, in 1938.

↑ Alain Jouffroy Stanislas Rodanski — une folie volontaire, p. 10.

BIBLIOGRAPHY, GENERAL TEXTS: Joseph BÉDIER, Le Roman de Tristan et Iseut, 1900. Edition used: Paris, UGE "10/18", 1981 (It is doubtless under the form given to the texts by Joseph Bédier that Rodanski knew the myth).

James Hadley CHASE, Pas d"orchidées pour Miss Blandish, Paris, Gallimard, "Série noire", 1946.

James Hadley CHASE, La Chair de l"orchidée, Paris, Gallimard, "Série noire", 1948.

James Hadley CHASE, Le Zinc en or, Paris, Gallimard, "Série noire", 1974.

Isidore DUCASSE, Les Chants de Maldoror, Paris, GF, edition presented by Jean-Luc Steinmetz, 1990.

Isidore DUCASSE, Les Chants de Maldoror, Paris, Le Livre de poche, edition presented by Patrick Besnier, 1992.

Arthur RIMBAUD, Une Saison en enfer, Paris, GF, edition presented by Jean-Luc Steinmetz, 1989.

Stanislas RODANSKI, Écrits, Paris, Christian Bourgois, 1999.

BIOGRAPHY, THEORETICAL TEXTS: Gilles DELEUZE, "Thirteenth Series, of the schizophrenic and the little girl", chapter 13 of Logique du sens, Paris, Minuit, "Critique", 1969, p. 101-114.

Gérard GENETTE, Figures III, Paris, Seuil, "Poétique", 1972.

Gérard GENETTE, Nouveau Discours du récit, Paris, Seuil, "Poétique", 1983.

Gérard GENETTE, Métalepse, Paris, Seuil, "Poétique", 2004.

Alain JOUFFROY, Stanislas Rodanski — une folie volontaire, Paris ? Jean-Michel Place ? "poésie", 2002.