Hamóthen, contingency and path in poetic creation
Responding to the invitation to give four lectures as part of a reflection on Artistic creation, we have explored, under the title "ἁμόθεν, contingency and path in poetic creation", and in a comparative way, representations of poetic creation in archaic Greek poetry as well as in modern poetry.
Starting with the adverb ἁμόθεν in verse 10 of the first song of theOdyssey, meaning "from any point", i.e., in the set of traditional themes specific to Odysseus' return, the "point" that the Muse will choose for the aede who asks for her assistance, we wanted to indicate the point of articulation between contingency and path. It is the Muse's choice that will guide the composition of our odyssey, until then an "open affair" that could have been realized in a different way, without contradicting the traditional theme of Ulysses' return.
A number of twentieth-century French poems have been introduced to put into perspective the open field where the Muse and the blank page of the modern poet come into play, notably Desnos, Ponge, or Apollinaire with Le Musicien de Saint-Merry, recounting the journey of a blind flautist in the Beaubourg district, a journey guided not by the impulse of a religious authority like Homer's Muse, but by what Apollinaire calls the "joy of wandering", thus situating his enterprise under the sign of contingency and demonstrating a solid faith in creative chance.
We then sought to explore the concept of the path as it relates to creation. TheHomeric Hymn to Hermes, studied by Norman O. Brown (1947) and Laurence Kahn (1978), was approached as a narrative mapping Greece, from Olympus to Arcadia. From ancient Rome, we turned our gaze to twentieth-century capitalism and, following Walter Benjamin, to the world of Parisian passageways, meccas of triumphant capitalism. It was in this world that Lautréamont penned one of the most famous images of the surrealist "chance encounter", an encounter that expresses beauty here: "Beau comme la rencontre fortuite entre une machine à coudre et un parapluie" ("Beautiful like the chance encounter between a sewing machine and an umbrella") The image originates from Rue Vivienne, since the "handsome" young man is precisely there, not far from Lautréamont's own address: 15 Rue Vivienne. If Lautréamont's "chance encounter" places him on the side of contingency, it is perhaps more surprising to find him under the sign of the journey. Yet a rereading of the first sentence of Les Chants de Maldoror confirms that this is the case. The Songs are seen by their author as traversed by a path; a path advised against by the Old Crane, whose caution is no less great than that of Asunção's Diomedes. At the start of theOdyssey, it's up to the aede, aided by the Muse, to "choose"; at the start of Maldoror's Songs, it's up to the reader, rescued by the Old Crane, to do so - to avoid the dangers of a distant point of arrival.