Cendrars's Variegated Poetic Persona: Seduction and Authenticity in Prose of the Transsiberian and Nineteen Elastic Poems

Since Cendrars recognizes the protean nature of his personal and public self, it is not surprising that the persona of his poetry escapes easy definition. My essay studies the consequences of this fact on the relationship between the poetic persona and his reader. Seduction, set against a Freudian and transactionalanalysis conceptual background, provides a methodological metaphor for my analysis. In the same way that for Freud the real event of seduction only becomes psychologically effective as a fantasy and eventually as a structural pattern for the male-female relationship, our use of the seduction metaphor takes an initial naive event between persona and reader and transforms it into a characteristic structural relationship. The persona's initial demand of intimacy from the reader is seen to be but one position in a narrative pattern which alternates the persona's attitude vis-a-vis his own narration between intimacy and detachment (or irony). The reader's role in connection with the persona is finally not one of sympathy but one of collaboration in inflecting a reading of the persona's narrated presence. Cendrars's manipulation of the persona-reader relationship is thus a primary component of his literary appeal. This article is available in Studies in 20th Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol3/iss2/5 CENDRARS'S VARIEGATED POETIC PERSONA: SEDUCTION AND AUTHENTICITY IN PROSE OF THE TRANSSIBERIAN AND NINETEEN ELASTIC POEMS EVERETT F. JACOBUS, JR. Davidson College Language is something that's seduced me. Language is something that's perverted me. Language is something that's formed me. Language is something that's deformed me. Blaise Cendrars Speaks' For Cendrars, language is seduction, perversion, formation, deformation. Though a poet of the Cubist period, he nevertheless rejects Cubism for an Orphist artistic credo of depth, time, movement, color and sensuality .(2) And true to this credo, Cendrars's literary persona is like the «variegated plaid* in his Prose of the Transsiberian and Nineteen Elastic Poems, the seduction, perversion, formation, and deformation in which Cendrars's poetic persona is involved. With Cendrars already pointing the way, seduction offers a useful structural metaphor for the relationship between reader and persona. That the very word «persona* offers unsettling ambiguities fits my metaphor. The Jungian meaning of i, persona» informs us: it is the social fagade an individual projects to communicate his role in the world. Consequently, «literary persona* conjures up more than «narrator*: no disembodied voice this, it admits to a fullness of presence which causes us to seek the «real* writer inside. It need hardly be mentioned how Cendrars's writings, combined with what is known of the man, have encouraged biographical interpretations. Let us admit our knowledge of the man as an enriching context for reading the text; then bracket him. My purpose here lies in seeing the persona as a literary strategy. Seduction, then, is a guiding metaphor for this strategy. In all first-person literary discourse, the persona's implicit task is to attach the reader to himself; in a word, to seduce him. This attach153 1 Jacobus: Cendrars's Variegated Poetic Persona: Seduction and Authenticity Published by New Prairie Press 154 STCL, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Spring 1979) ment may involve total identification, total or mixed admiration, sympathy, pity, scorn, hate, or curiosity. As Jacques Lacan formulates it, «Man's desire is the desire of the Other.*(3) American psychology, growing out of a behavioristic context, expresses a similar concept in «stimulus hunger* and its corollary, «recognition hunger. )0(4) Stimulation in the form of attention by others is postulated as a basic need. Without such attention, be it good or bad, people tend to shrivel up* and die. Seduction is a particular form of satisfying recognition hunger: it creates a desire in the Other directed back toward the seducer. The seducer not only satisfies his own recognition hunger; he controls the giver of this satisfaction. For our literary perspective it is the persona who controls the role of the reader. But let us not be ensnared by the apparent reality of what is myth. In Freud's particular development of seduction and the seduction fantasy, it happens that the real event-if there is one-has little immediate psychic effect, but rather develops that psychic effect (and affect) in the form of a fantasy.(5) Eventually, Freud comes to see seduction not as a real event fixed in time, but rather as a structural pattern for the malefemale relationship. Likewise, if the reader's role, at one stage in his relationship to the persona and to the text, is, as it were, staged on the level of a person-to-person interaction, at another level his role vis-a-vis the persona is to use the persona as a structuring device for his reading of the text and, eventually, to read the persona not as person but rather as pattern among the various patterns of the text. Initially, let us not be readers of patterns; let us not be literary analysts. Surely, our first meeting with the text is innocent. We accept the persona as an individual who addresses us, and we allow ourselves to be seduced by the self-image which he bares. With what charms, then, does the persona of Prose of the Transsiberian seek to woo us? Most ingenious, he plays a two-sided game of innocence and mastery: innocence to lower the reader's defenses, mastery the better to ensnare him (or at least to elicit his admiration). The persona, of course, exists in various incarnations, Blaise the hero of the Transsiberian chronicle, Blaise the respondent of Jeanne, and-the one who addresses the reader-Blaise the poetraconteur-chronicler-historiographer-autobiographer. As readers, we cannot help but admire and identify with the ubiquitous traveler of the chronicle and the sexually adept partner of Jeanne. 2 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, Vol. 3, Iss. 2 [1979], Art. 5 http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol3/iss2/5 DOI: 10.4148/2334-4415.1067