A Textual Analysis of Aimé Césaire's Poetry and Knowledge

Everything leads us to believe that there exists a certain mental point from which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived contradictorily. And one would search in vain for a motive in surrealist activity other than the determination of that point. –André Breton

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Content

The main focus of the essay is the difference between poetic knowledge and scientific knowledge. Poetic knowledge is spiritual and whole, whereas scientific knowledge is “half-starved”. Scientific knowledge is incomplete, but because of its shortsightedness, it is unable to recognize its flaws. For much of modern history, science has been given a kind of sacred status and the result is a depersonalized and impoverished humanity. Poetic knowledge, on the other hand is based on “an astonishing mobilization of all human and cosmic forces” (p. xlvii). What is important is “not the most lucid intelligence, or the most acute sensibility, but an entire experience”. (p. xlvii). Poetry is the union of all experience, including things that scientific knowledge finds incompatible. “In the image, A can be not-A” (p. lii).

The highest ambition of poetry, according to Césaire, is to locate a point “from which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived contradictorily.” (Breton, p. xlvii). The resolution of apparent contradictions is wisdom. That which appears contradictory is actually exposing the limits of the system in which it is expressed. Poetry is not bound by any system. “In the image, A can be not-A” (p. lii). “[An] original handling of the word can make possible at any moment a new theoretical and heedless science that poetry could already give an approximate notion of.” (p. xlix). Science is derivative of poetry, because poetry contains everything. “modern science is perhaps only the pedantic verification of some mad images spewed out by poets” (p. lii). A poem is an incarnation of Truth in some smaller truths.

Form

Césaire wrote Poetry and Knowledge in an essay format, but he frequently breaks the rules of standard grammar. He makes statements and allows one to judge them as one judges a work of art, not by what convincing evidence he presents, but rather by experience, by its verisimilitude. Césaire frequently makes use of repetition. He sometimes does not finish his sentences but allows them to trail off: “It was both desirable and inevitable...”, “Poetry ceased...” (p. xliv). A particularly formal expression is made in his list of propositions about poetry (p. lv).

There are many contrasting pairs in Poetry and Knowledge, such as judgment and image, man and nature, Mallarmé and Apollinaire, Dionysus and Apollo, poetry and prose, poetic knowledge and scientific knowledge, precision and feeling.

Conclusion

The paired form suggests analogous relationships among the pairs. On one side is scientific knowledge, based on the principals of precise measurement and logical judgment; it is best conveyed in prose. Poetic knowledge is a knowledge of all of nature, of feeling and imagery. Of course it is better expressed in poetry. The process of analogy is what links these pairs together. Analogy is the creative process of unification. It is the means by which art interacts with life.

This essay is composed of prose and poetry, and is thus whole. It contains rationality, to be certain, but not “the most lucid intelligence”, rather, the “entire experience”. The most logically structured element of this piece are the concluding propositions, but there is an ironic contrast between the highly structured form of the proposition, and the content of those propositions, which are made up of poetic language, and thus cannot be used for argument. Whether or not one has been established as the “living heart of [oneself] and the world” (p. lv) is not a falsifiable proposition.