Gerard Macé

 

Gerard Macé, as far as I can tell, is an unknown in the Anglophone world. He is, on the other hand, revered in French literary circles. In France, there is a certain line of poetics that goes from the French moraliste tradition through prose poetry into an expanded field of the aphorism – the aphorism as insight and lyric – which doesn’t quite have an equivalent in the Anglosphere. Thus, a poet like Georges Perros, whose  series Papiers collées is one of the important twentieth century texts, was not translated, and then in a selection,  into English until 2021 - https://www.seagullbooks.org/paper-collage/.

I prefer Macé to Perros, but both writers are best understood against the background of the moraliste tradition. It is a tradition which was seized and remade by Nietzsche in the 19^th century, The poetics of Emerson and Thoreau are both recognizably shaped by the moralistes of the 17^th century, plus of course the enormous weight of the sermon.

I came across this bit in Macé’s The map of the empire – simple thoughts 2:

“The liquid element is the closest one to the Dao, which teaches us that we must forget water if we want to swim well. In the same way, we have to forget words to write well, which is not the same as being unconscious of them. But let them come instead of looking for them, and choosing them as thought they were posing before us.”

Now, you either like this kind of thing or you don’t. Myself, I’m a fan. Jules Renard, in his journal – a strong influence on this tradition – records the remark of a friend that he saw, in Renard’s work, a lot of fallen leaves, but no tree. The lack of a masterwork – some central novel or poem – is the starting point for the 20^th and 21^st century moraliste. Proust stands as the counter-example – the one writer who, after the pastiche and the essays, actually created a masterwork about a man who aspires to write a masterwork.

Proust is an example of Macé’s writer: the one who forgets words. It is a highly specific form of forgetting. The critic, you might say, is the bad conscience who only remembers words. But this would make the dialectical game all too simple, don’t you think?