2023-08-09 18:58:38
At Henri Bosco, everything comes from “sweet kingdom” from childhood. His imagination is particularly impregnated with it, he draws from it striking memories where, already, “poetry was manifested on all sides”. The only son of often absent parents – a talented lyrical artist father and a mother accompanying him on his travels – the young Henri takes refuge in the contemplation and observation of his environment, sensitive to its variations, climate, elements… “I was very marked by the strength of the Rhône, and later by the momentum of the Durance. » He will keep from this dreamy and solitary childhood a pronounced taste for nature, which plays a capital role in his work. “When you love nature as I love it, you obviously live in silence and solitude”which allows “to put oneself face to face with oneself, (…) to meditate well, to contemplate and thus arrive at a profound investigation of things. » (1)
And this is what his characters will indulge in, immersed in mysterious and disturbing atmospheres. They go through initiatory ordeals that they live according to the impetuosity of the elements and their antagonisms, passing through movements of fall, kinds of descents into hell, before a return to the light: “We are each other and we are the same. Deep mystery! »remarks the narrator ofA branch of the night. The river, the wind… become formidable beings, sorts of gods. Paganism subtly colors the land of Provence and Bosco feels ties to the ancient Greeks, who deified natural forces. He also says he is receptive to cosmic vibrations. His characters can reach higher states of consciousness, of perceiving things beyond appearance. Even if they are alone, everything becomes dense around them, the invisible is no longer so. Thus, in The Boar : “So I was waiting. I knew nothing of the thing (or of the being) that I expected, but I sensed its quality. »
Bachelard-Bosco, a poetics of the elements
Mystery, isolation, dream, water, earth, fire, air…, all the ingredients are there for Gaston Bachelard and Henri Bosco to “recognize” each other. However, they did not meet until 1956, even if they had previously read to each other, and discovered deep affinities in their “poetic work” – a rich correspondence followed which ended in 1962, on the death of Bachelard. (2). “Reading you, I thought I heard myself speak”Bosco told him in one of his letters.
For Henri Bosco, contemplation and observation of his environment are refuges. / Jean-Francois Jung
Outside of science and epistemology, Bachelard indeed renews the philosophical and literary approach to the imagination with studies on the poetics of the elements (The Psychoanalysis of Fire, The Poetics of Space, Water and dreams, etc.). He cites Bosco extensively, and dedicates an essay to him. (The Flame of a Candle). In his approach, he gives the imagination the power to invent “new spirit” : “This adhesion to the invisible, here is the first poetry. (…) True poetry is an awakening function. » Is this not also the intimate conviction of Henri Bosco when he says that poetry is “a means of higher knowledge” (3)? And for a daydream to continue with enough consistency to give rise to a written work, adds the philosopher, “so that it is not simply the vacation of a fleeting hour”a material element must give it its specific poetics: even more than clear thoughts, “Dreams are dependent on the four fundamental elements…”.
And the latter are more than significant in the work of the writer. The heroes, brought to surpass themselves, successively experience phases of discovery, of bewitchment, even of delight, sometimes of real struggle against an untamed nature. The narration comes out of a logical world, escaping concrete experience. The dreamer sees an elsewhere in the here, a stranger in the familiar. Here the whims of the air – mists, country ” work “ of winds “frightened”… There, crackling fire – storm “magnetic”fire… There again, ambivalence of the earth, fertile, fertile but also harsh and wild… There finally, moods of the water, calm, or tempestuous and underhanded, lacustrine places rotten with humidity, swamps where one brushes against both primitive chaos and death.
Malicroix et Le Mas Theotime are dazzling poetic illustrations of this: the narrators, having each inherited an “island”, will settle there, undergo trials there to appropriate it and discover in themselves a force unknown until then. Banal situations of everyday life become scenes of merciless combat – loss of bearings, threat of dissolution or engulfment. Necessary stages of learning towards self-knowledge, with the discomfort of the adventure and its inevitable destabilization.
“However, an obscure uneasiness agitated me. (…) The heavy night, and somehow stuffed, enveloped my body and soul (…). The sky, the waters, the shores, melted into an elusive substance. And I confused myself there »described Pascal in Le Mas Theotime. « (The water) invaded me, like a body slipped into my body (…). One would have said that an infiltration of icy and sad waters had insinuated itself into me, and that I already had a branch of the river moving towards my barely warm heart. (…) I did not lose consciousness, and both the muddy ground and the water were present to me.says Martial, in Malicroix.
The emergence of a “new” identity
The elements, internalized, play between shadow and brightness, violence and softness, and deploy their power there at their ease. Until you can lose your mind: “There is no expanse in the world more favorable to the life of the wind. (…) North wind, mistral, tramontane, which rush on the salicornia, tear off the pebbles, wear down the roofs, shake the walls of the sheepfolds crouched at ground level. The whole expanse is nothing but complaints, rumblings towards the sea, the anger of the river. »
Inside the bastidon, where Henri Bosco wrote some of his works. /MAXPPP
In the Camargue, continues the formidable notary Dromiols of Malicroixthe wind is ” drunk “. He stamps, spins, loses his head. Everything bends to the law of the wind: water, plants, man, animals… But Pascal and Martial stay the course, unsuspected internal resources are revealed to them; they face adversity to better delve into the heart of their roots. The light is never far away because, like mythological heroes, they triumph over obstacles. Then emerges a solid and living facet of their identity.
The Bosquian stories only reach their true fullness when an intimate relationship is established between the space and the characters: the latter in fact begin to listen to this material which “itself imposes its presence”. ” Maybe, says the narrator ofA branch of the night, she whispers to us simply that she is there. » This “island” of solitude is therefore not reduced to a site or a landscape, but it is a dimension of psychic life.
According to Henri Bosco, currents pass between matter and the soul as well as between the soul and the whole universe.; the poet is stationed at the privileged place where these forces intersect: “They go through them, move him, and he expresses them. But to succeed, he must have a gift. » (1) Isn’t that what Gaston Bachelard recognizes in one of his many letters: “Won’t the day come when you will be put in your place, that of the poet of the human soul? » (2)
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Excerpt: “I felt under my feet the first movement of the earth”
The Panties Donkey, by Henri Bosco (Gallimard Editions)
“But the breeze came from beyond. Its tablecloth descending from the plateaus, where wild arnica, argelas and hyssop of the scrubland grow, had picked up all the perfumes hidden in the small valleys, nestled in the warm hollows dozing in the smallest limestone cracks, whitethorn, foxglove, knapweed, blue bramble, privet, Spanish broom, sea frankincense, Saint Veronica herb.
The mountain was fragrant. I resisted no longer. I crossed the bridge…
And suddenly, I trembled because then I felt under my feet the first movement of the earth. She was going up. A sudden surge from the ground carried me into the oak woods. This wild land uplifted me; other slopes, other tracks took hold of my steps. The dark wood exhaled the damp, salty smell of old dead leaves. I had detached myself from these gently sloping planes of country meadows which predispose to serenity, to halts. Now everything here was becoming abrupt, abrupt; but from these movements of the ground, from these fallen rocks, from these gnarled oaks with twisted roots, passed through me like a black subterranean force. The bitter accent which emanated from it made my blood beat in larger swells, in the midst of the shadow, the fresh bark and the bitter leaves; and I was carried away, despite the steepness of the bends and the severity of the climbs, virilely, towards this immense aromatic zone of the hills, land of wild flowers, trees and fleeing beasts, which already, through the branches of the oaks, trembled , in full light, in front of me. »
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