Saint-John Perse’s orality is internal and world-diffracted, not public performance

Evidence

It astonishes me to hear people sometimes try to reduce Saint:John Perse’s orality to that of declamation. Yet it could never be produced onstage. Too many broad zones of obviousness stretch out within it, blocked here and there by root stumps, when language thickens into nodules. When the obvious is declaimed, it immediately becomes a tautological transparency. Believing that this poet’s text can fill or define the stage of a theater is a mistake too often made. His sort of orality do es not lead to things of a public nature; it is the equivalent of (alternative to) modesty. Underneath, the inner voice weaves its redundant repetitions. This is an orality that is not spoken aloud but articulated in underground understandings. … There are no torches surrounding his words; there is only a hand stretched toward the horizon that rises up as ocean swells or high plateaus. It is the always possible infinite. The ring made by the voice is diffracted into the world. The orality of Saint:John Perse is not wrapped by rustling shadows suggestive of the surroundings; it greets dawns, when faraway echoes are already mingling with familial’ sounds, when the caravan makes its departure from the undying desert. — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 257

Categorization

• XREF: Two modes of orality — the enclosed night circle of the storyteller versus Perse’s horizon-diffracted inner voice — parallels Glissant’s opposition between rooted/territorial and rhizomatic/Relation identity forms central to the reader’s project. — connects to: Saint-John Perse’s orality is inward and private, not declamatory — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 257

Broader Connections

• Saint-John Perse’s orality is inward and private, not declamatory #corroborates (0.95) — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 257