‘et que faut-il penser | De ces pommes jaunes?’: An Ecocritical Reading of Yves Bonnefoy’s Punctual Colour Work

The sheer number of philosophical and critical accounts of colour that exist can be seen to attest to its slipperiness, to the fact that we are always trying to seize colour, to pin it down in some way, and that it is always evading our grasp. In Histoire des couleurs, Manilo Brusantin suggests that conceptual thinkers look at colour ‘d’un regard méfiant’. Louis Marin writes, ‘Le discours des couleurs est un discours désespéré’. In What Color is the Sacred?, Michael Taussig observes: ‘colors love to betray themselves’. When Michael Sheringham offers a brief history of philosophical, aesthetic, and psychoanalytic theories of colour in ‘Language, Colour, and the Enigma of Everydayness’, he explores how diverse treatises privilege different poles of the human experience. He takes us on a journey through Newton’s laws of optics and Goethe’s reflections on the subjective experience of colour, Kandinsky’s understanding of the spiritually transcendent nature of pure colour and Duhuit’s engagement with the affective properties of coloured material presence, psychoanalytic theories of colour as sublime or conflictual, before he suggests that an essential feature of colour is the way that it inspires us to theorise but nonetheless outstrips our theories, leaving us to try to reconcile or harmonise our contrasting assessments of it.

In ‘Coloursteps in Modern and Contemporary French Poetry’, Susan Harrow suggests that this slipperiness gives colour a special agency. She proposes that ‘the patient work of coming to colour in language’ makes writer and reader more aware of their interactions with the world, attuning them to the manifold ways that human consciousness fluctuates between visual and verbal, conceptual and affective, remembered and imagined aspects of experience. They become aware of ‘the shape-shifting, self-defining experience in which we participate when we appraise colour or allow ourselves to submit to colour’, catalysing new concepts and practices of selfhood. In his anthropological, historical, and literary study of colour, What Color is the Sacred?, Michael Taussig suggests that it is precisely colour’s capacity to reveal this kind of unstable traffic between thought and sensation, the conscious and the unconscious that has led it to be associated with the sacred. Paraphrasing the title of Michel Leiris’ famous essay, ‘Quelle couleur a pour moi la notion même de sacré ?’, Taussig proposes that colour invites a materialist and secular, but nonetheless agential and magical, thinking of the sacred. He proposes that colour has the capacity to ‘change the way we see and hence the way we are made aware of the world at large as a body like the human body’. At a time of environmental degradation and even depletion, he argues that colour can foster immersive practices of looking that reattune the viewing subject to the mysterious and unpredictable nature of material existence, recharging the real with affect and agency, and reawakening our lost sense of fascination and veneration towards it.

As Harrow suggests in ‘Coloursteps in Modern and Contemporary French Poetry’, late twentieth- and early twentieth-first-century French poets engage with particular assiduity with the visual arts (writing ekphrastic poems, practicing art criticism, collaborating on livres d’artiste) and frequently puzzle over how colour might be ‘translated’ into a verbal medium. Of all the poets of this generation who experiment with colour (Philippe Jaccottet, Jacques Roubaud, or Béatrice Bonhomme, to name but a few), Yves Bonnefoy is one of the figures who interrogates its ‘capacities’ most rigorously and most consistently, and who perhaps has the most fervent belief in its agential force, its capacity to jolt new forms of human sensibility into existence. When he experiments with colour in his poetic writings, it most often appears in isolation. In his essays on painting, he often singles out a lone coloured detail that inspires reflection and transforms his understanding of the entire work. This article investigates the punctual dashes of colour that are dotted throughout his collection of poetry Début et fin de la neige, published in 1991, and that manifest themselves with particular force throughout because they are continually thrown into relief by a white backdrop of snow.

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