— Lucie Lequin
The poetic voice in Un homme de trop conveys a world to be explored, an adventure at the intersection of life and words. This troubled, often tormented voice, that of the unwanted man, is the voice of the man who has no place but still capable of loving in spite of the many obstacles life can bring. Love is the redemptive force that makes death, abandonment, solitude and exile bearable. This “bien-être innommé”2 transports the poet to a place where he experiences “les gambades d’un monde enchanté”3 far from “la frontière du terrible isolement.”4 Thus, the poetic voice is rooted in two worlds: one where love — though often fleeting — reigns, the other where unwanted solitude or bondage, in one form or another, is rampant. It evokes both the poetic vision of things seen, of experiences lived, and the profound scrutiny of the world he lives in.
Antonio D’Alfonso’s work is often viewed through the lens of the problem of cultural identity and belonging. One may consider, for example, the pages in a chapter on Italo-Quebecois writers that Joseph Pivato dedicated to D’Alfonso in 1994: “After exploring the many problems of the divided self: dual lives, different languages, split personalities, doubleness, self-deception, duplicity and death [D’Alfonso] tries to resolve this fragmented condition by embracing his duality.”5 Domenic Beneventi perceives D’Alfonso’s writing as re-inscription “within the spatial frame of Italy” which also “seeks to find the linkage between his [D’Alfonso’s] personal history as an ethnic Canadian and the Italian diaspora of the 1950s.”6
These two researchers begin then with ethnic and cultural belonging in order to discuss D’Alfonso, but in their respective studies, they move away from this position primarily to study duality (Pivato) and the state of flâneur (Beneventi). We can also consider Louis Bélanger’s article, or the chapter Simon Harel devotes to the author in Les passages obligés de l’écriture migrante. Bélanger only comments on Avril ou l’anti-passion, a novel where, he feels, D’Alfonso puts forward a particular kind of cultural identity — namely a cultural identity in solitude manifesting itself as a “modèle existentiel aux confins de la solitude et de la conscience entre le réel et le fictif.”7 For Harel, who has studied this author’s work from L’autre rivage to Comment ça se passe, D’Alfonso’s writing has an underlying ambivalence that is both “désespoir”8 and “moteur de la création.”It expresses an attachment to place that is both difficult and painful for only a shared solitude “ouvre sur le contact de lieux habités.”10
These studies, though quite different, concur on the dominant recurring theme of solitude, be it esseulée11 or partagée.12 Though contradictory, these words powerfully render the paradox that is so characteristic of D’Alfonso’s work. For Denise Brassard, it is a matter of antithetical preoccupations. According to her, D’Alfonso the lyric poet both consents to “la dimension transitoire” and resists chaos. It is especially the “expression de cette résistance”13 that plays itself out in the geographic spaces that she studies; D’Alfonso is a writer of the city, which he approaches as a palimpsest that “suppose une subjectivité en déplacement, en perpétuelle projection”14. However, D’Alfonso’s writing clearly goes beyond the topic of cultural and political identity, either imagined or lived; in Un homme de trop and elsewhere in his poetry, the primary identity, the way of being of the self, of the I, is grounded in poetry seen from the point of view of the man, the son, the son of immigrants and the contemplative poet.
Un homme de trop, a book of poetry, focuses on preoccupations present in earlier works, be they poetic or meditative, even political, but it also conveys a refracted voice bent on understanding the fragile yet insistent experience of beauty, and on facing head-on the ugliness of the world. Although some poems in the collection were previously published in English, I consider Un homme de trop a recent work, since the poet has chosen to translate some poems, rewrite others, and add some poems that were previously unpublished.15
I will attempt to understand D’Alfonso’s poetics as it appears in Un homme de trop, a collection that plays at ambivalence. First, I will consider why the poet vacillates between his own decline and a certain conception of beauty so as to understand who he is, even if he intensely refuses all static definitions. Second, I will attempt to understand his relationship to the world, which he perceives primarily as dehumanizing. And yet, despite this perceptible contemporary landscape that is rough and often cruel, the poet seeks to create a place of beauty, where life is possible. In understanding his relationship to the world, I will examine this duality or doubled gaze: that which sees an inhuman, materialistic world where even culture is an industry, and that which sees the world is luminous, where life is truly “habitante.”16
This collection, composed of fifty-three poems, echoes the voices of Leonard Cohen, Dante, Roland Giguère, Homer, Gaston Miron, Shakespeare, Rimbaud, Inuit Mayan, Aztec and Greek mythology, composers, film producers, actors and artists such as Mozart, Fellini and Bogart, and Modigliani, among others; influencing the whole of the writing, these intertextual voices (and sounds and images) suggest, with a brief nod, a history of creative thinking, and more intimately, the history of his literary and artistic affinities. As brief as these references are, they spatialize his writing in time and space, suggesting amplification rather than dislocation and disorientation, and thus reaffirming that his intertextual and inter-artistic affections are not restricted by a strictly geographic sense of belonging, nor by the multiple traditions he carries with him, nor by the passage of time or the creative style. Even the form of the collection does not suggest coherence, as the texts are “de facture et de contenu fort disparates.”17
Some poems contain only a few lines and are limited to one page, while others are multiple pages in length, and are not so much shaped by heterogeneity than by an uninhibited creative intuition that resists norms, preferring to risk the disparate that reflects ambivalence impervious to any limits or boundaries. The collection would then be a series of encounters between the arts, history, geography, forms, and his words and personal history which includes that of his family.
Throughout the collection, the poetic voice emerges without, however, daring the final period. In this sense, the recurrent cathartic, and repeated phrase “je suis” suggests a perpetual self-questioning, essentially an ongoing and open-ended process: “oui à cette nouvelle attitude, cette nouvelle aventure / cette marche vers la fin qui sera remise plus tard / en doute, comme le premier, comme le dernier movement.”18 This abiding self-doubt thus keeps the poet alive and fully aware. Nothing can be taken for granted, nothing is ever certain. The underlying, haunting question he asks himself is “qui suisje?”19 He ultimately wants to “dépasser la frontière de [s] on identité”20 and be completely and utterly free — but is this stripping of the self possible? This desire becomes a task; aware of the danger of closure and complacency in the comfort of the known, he must pierce or striate all certainty and forever ask the question of selfhood.
This task of mulling things over, of getting down to essentials, of letting go of the self takes place through contemplation and reflection. Right from the start, in the opening poem “À mes parents,”21 the repetition of the phrase “Laissez-moi prier”22 in each stanza creates a place of prayer where the poet’s urgent requests are heard. In addition to its role of opening the collection and reiterating his commitment to his parents, the dedication is a confession that highlights the passage of time between generations, as well as the crucible of affections rendered into image.23 This prayer is also the fruit of courage, thought, forgiveness, anger, fear and trembling, disenchantment, madness and the desire for friendship and serenity, all of which are sentiments found throughout the book. Not religious per se, this incantatory prayer leads to the “vérité inaccessible”24 where all known reference points cease to be relevant: “Je prie sans savoir à qui à quoi / je prie.”25 This meditative stance is meant to be a way of being in the world. It implies a moment of respite, cut off from the hectic pace of daily life, where the poet raises questions about the self, the other and the world. Finally, it is a way of coming to terms with the passage of time, of measuring one’s past, one’s present and, sometimes, of preparing for a future that is not necessarily better.
The poet here invites this solitary reflection in order to restore and re-establish himself. Prayer is, in effect, the place of initiation, the place where he begins his quest, the search to explain human anguish, guilt, love and death, and the essentially ongoing quest for self, even though it is hindered by his own weaknesses and the inevitable surrounding darkness.
It is in this spirit of prayer that the poet attempts to understand himself, the self who is this complex and contradictory voice. At times, he is that “poète inutile”26 who is no longer master of his destiny: “J’appartiens à un autre, / À mon voisin qui prie, à mon cousin le tueur, / À quelque fondation occulte, à un comité extraterrestre?”27. Thus, stripped of his identity, he is in turn “le putain en rouge,”28 “le piéton aux dents d’or,”29 “le vassal muet,”30 a “charogne.” 31 This self-deprecation, this sad and obvious truth of the I facing itself, is interconnected with a much richer image touching on imagination and dream, and elsewhere, with that of the son. The point of view thus shifts back and forth between two poles — self-derision and the hope of attaining beauty.
The recurring self-derision expresses, among other things, the loss of innocence — underscored by the image of the putain — and also the shame of bondage; in other words, he has become wise: “La prudence écrase / l’exubérance / du primitif. Non, je ne connais pas le sublime.”32 Exercising caution, the self has compromised and lost its spark. In this way he enters the ugly comfort associated with the “page déformée / par le poids de l’évidence, / poids de promesses gelées [. . .] Poids de la raison, / poids de la paresse.”33 Allowing himself to be deluded by life, the poet has followed the line of least resistance; he has fallen prey to the forces of dehumanizing materialism, thus becoming “une tonne de vide solide, une masse insignifiante, sans énergie.”34 He lacked vigilance, so his imagination is now tamed and shackled. This self-derision translates above all into how hard it is to attain truth and beauty, forever beyond one’s reach. The poet is afraid of being caught up in the mundane, in a life that is “prête-à-porter,”35 all thought out and planned, no doubt. Transcending the self through words seems impossible. As a result, the poet is assailed by doubts about his work and his quest: “Est-ce de la poésie ou le grognement d’un esprit malade?”36 Can he recapture, rediscover, even for a brief moment, the creative spark of the past? The crucial step to undertake for this reconciliation, and perhaps as well as an achievable reappropriation of the self, is in the poet’s struggles with himself in the face of doubt that he feels about his art, in his attenuated but perhaps chimeric desire, and in his indignity. L’homme de trop feels excessive in poetry, as so eloquently expressed in his disparaging words.
In order to better answer the question of “qui suisje?”, the fallen and inutile poet also attempts to be rooted once again to his cultural identity. This explains and justifies his existence, yet against which he struggles, in spite of the fact that familial space is the space of emotional understanding. Needless to say, the son is the “Fils d’émigrants, / fils de fils d’émigrants à la recherche / d’un corps fort et brave pour ce sang / de contadino.”37 D’Alfonso here recalls that well-known autobiographical fact, which however does not totally describe either the son’s identity or that of the poetic voice. This is one of the key underlying elements of this work. According to Ricœur, the body is the “lieu d’ancrage du soi,”38 the place one can call home, what is played out in suffering. Among the “formes plus dissimulées du souffrir: l’incapacité de raconter, le refus de raconter, l’insistance de l’inénarrable.”39 The desire for a “corps fort et brave” resembling the bodies of ancestors cannot be separated from the poet’s desire for a return to proud, bold words and for the son’s return to original filial affection. We know that the poet underestimates himself, suffers and questions the value of his poetry which he still persists in writing, in his long and arduous quest. Obviously, the desire of a contadino’s body is the melding of his peasant heritage and his poetic voice, a legacy that cannot be circumvented. Possibly it is also a reference to Rimbaud, who played on both these images and who finally, in the end, admitted to being simply a “peasant”: “Moi! Moi qui me suis dit mage ou ange, dispensé de toute morale, je suis rendu au sol avec un devoir à chercher, et la réalité rugueuse à étreindre! Paysan!”40
Negotiation with lineage always presents itself as compromise, a sorting out and interpretation. The son wants to go his own way, without his father, and be his own person: “Père, c’est fini / je ne te ressemble plus / c’est fini / je me suis défiguré.”41 Thus crippled, he cannot say who he is. This new “Œdipus” implies a patricide that is symbolic here. The son has destroyed any resemblance to the father, has totally denied it, yet by doing so, he has blotted out his identity, worse still, he admits to having disfigured himself. Given this fact, how can he demonstrate who he is? He is not his father, but he would not be who he is — the man, the son, the poet — without this father. In “L’ombre”42 the “enragé”43 and “maudit”44 son becomes a spineless “he” who “se dégrise et vomit”45; this he who is a poet can no longer master the silence that inspires words: “Notre héros engourdi, pétrifié, trébuche / Son esprit se disperse.”46 The poet’s anger, though sometimes healthy, is often misdirected. Instead of jolting the he out of his anguish and putting him at the edge of words, rage instead generates indecision, making him “timoré.”47
We would also like to point out the distance established by reverting to he and the sarcastic our, which includes a return to the I. This I is in fact but “l’ombre” of himself, a distant he who can not seem to get a grip on his real self. However, in most cases, the I is at the very heart of the confusion and dismay that haunts Un homme de trop, he who is “L’étranger”: “Je suis faible, somnolent. Je suis tronçon de bouleau sec. [. . .] Je suis dépossédé de ma quiétude. Je n’arrive plus / à contrôler mon agonie. Je suis un cri [. . .] Je me noie dans l’âpreté.”48 Here the I is essentially a stranger unto himself, unfulfilled and alone. He does not speak, his scream is wordless. His pain cries out, the pain of the man, the son and the poet who cannot find the words to express who he is. Finally, it is the recognition that he must sort through his father’s heritage; he cannot simply refuse his humble origins, for prolonging that rejection weakens or even destroys it. This unavoidable question “introduit l’altérité dans l’identité du sujet responsable; elle problématise le sujet.”49
Where does this anger come from, that stands in the way of give and take between generations or even of sorting out one’s legacy for that matter, a task that the youngest born must always attend to? Of course, like any youngest born, the son has “la responsabilité de réouvrir la tradition autrement, éventuellement de briser sa complaisance à elle-même,”50 but instead of negotiating with those who have gone before him, he wears them out, looks down on them, even denies their very existence. Thus, the anger emerges, at least in part, from the son’s guilt. It is therefore also the son, guilty of being hard-hearted, who writes: “Je suis un homme maudit et méchant / pour avoir haï les gens qui m’ont donné / toute leur dignité lorsque donner les rendait / faibles et vulnérables; pour avoir demandé / un monde irréel à ceux dont les mains sont / des figures de soleil.”51 This man who regrets what he has done, this son who begs for forgiveness, this inadequate poet is compelled to admit his mistakes in order to end the silence. He thus breaks with the shame of his past, with a painful generational problem that impeded him. This admission and this plea for forgiveness bring about the process of change: “Le pardon est un acte historique parce qu’il arrête le passé. Du coup il rouvre la possibilité de vivre ensemble le présent,”52 as well as the future.
The recurring leitmotiv of the poet’s self-derision and of his admission of being the son of a peasant are closely connected with his quest for beauty, forever evanescent, that survives in spite of the self-chosen dismay and vulnerability. The fallen poet, like the damned son, still has access to it. Yet beauty cannot be achieved at will, for experiencing the beautiful is always left to chance. At certain unforeseen and unplanned moments, the poet emerges from his sense of defeat and sadness and once again experiences beauty: “Je suis l’imaginaire / Je remue avant l’action [. . .] Je vacille à l’intérieur des grilles rouillées de l’âme. / Je combats l’âme. Je deviens l’âme.”53
Thus poetic meditation also touches upon the sacred. Beauty is captured not through the gaze, but through his sensitivity as a poet. Or is it rather the contrary, that is, the poet allows himself to be captured by beauty? This unexpected beauty does not come from the light, but rather from the darkness: “Nous émergeons du même reflet rocailleux, / de la même obscurité essentielle, / où les formes les plus infimes / de l’émerveillement, sans inhibitions, / se disputent doucement comme des enfants.”54 Here beauty, in the form of the imagination, is something that suddenly appears, not out of what is grandiose, but out of what is obscure and hidden; beauty is pleasure and the return to childlike spontaneity. Belatedly, he admitted having known beauty while he was still a peasant’s son, when he was not a poet, and had not yet been initiated into the hierarchical rankings of class and official knowledge. Let us note that throughout this book, a semantic field of twilight and night is clearly present, sometimes associated, it seems, with the Eros side of life, be it simple pleasures or erotic gratification; beauty therefore participates in obscurity. Living in obscurity is another step towards self knowledge that, if found, can be exposed to light.
The idea of beauty gives rise to multiple manifestations. Apart from the imagination, one also finds the representation of friendship, the kind that brings a consistent sense of self: “Que serais-je sans les yeux / de ton amitié, moi qui ne suis pas un dieu?”55 Of course, all beauty is fragile, and with its interruption, its demise, the place of art is deflected to a secondary role: “La polémique sur le sens de l’art a alimenté / la haine qui dénoue les bras de notre étreinte. / Que l’art meure. Que l’art soit un simple passe-temps.”56
Lived emotions thus take precedence over art that emerges and takes shape. Yet the affective experience inspires words to touch, reach out, share, in a sense to give an almost concrete form to the intangible, to the energy of an emotion: “lis c’est pour toi lis c’est pour toi / je t’aime vraiment lis c’est . . . / regarde-moi tomber tombent / tombent ces lignes synonymes je t’aime.”57 The poet in love can write about beauty and describe it in words, along with chaos and the absurd; the world, in other words. Positive emotions thus bring him back to the essence of his view of the world, no matter how negative it may be; sources of life and sustenance, they are what allow the poet to survive and continue his artistic work.
Beauty also flows from contemplating nature. In particular, the poem “Le premier mars”58 describes how, on the shore of the Pacific, the poet and his friends fall speechless before such exquisite and unexpected beauty: “Étourdis par ce mouvement de grandeur, / sans parler, nous sommes complices, // notre vie est un miracle d’amour, / une avalanche de lave et d’étoiles, // un débordement de générosité. Nous sommes plus petits que la poussière // [. . .] Nous sommes quatre silhouettes devant le sublime qui craque.”59 The scope of the landscape inspires a lesson in humility; for the space of an instant, all life’s uncertainties are swept away and these friends commune with the breathtaking beauty they are witness to. All that matters is their shared contemplation. A moment of overpowering intensity, a fleeting experience of beauty that rekindles the belief in beauty, rare but still possible, even in a world where ugliness is the norm. The gaze becomes one with words, for without words, it cannot take on substance and become real.
The fallen poet and dark son are therefore also a being-in-the-world capable of experiencing beauty and poetry: “Je suis celui qui manipule les substances / Incertaines du sens et de la couleur. // Je suis celui qui parfois se noie / Dans les éclaboussures du rêve.”60
Throughout this work, a rich palette of colours marks the poet’s wordless, questioning journey, filling it with visual images; meaning thus becomes clear through colour; by the multifocal gaze that moves between places, objects and people in order to keep the dream open and active. This solo voice attempting to find out “qui suisje?” is simultaneously that of the dark son, the lover, the fallen poet, the contemplative man who seeks beauty, who loves all things sensual. These identities are interconnected, yet separate; the single voice is also plural. By plunging into his inner self — note the recurring verb “noyer,”61 the poet rediscovers who he really is, yet without coming to a definitive, cut-and-dried conclusion. The process is more of an open-ended and ongoing selfinquiry, and part of the mystery necessarily remains. But this lack of definition does not cut him off from the world that he is attempting to come to terms with.
The world D’Alfonso speaks about in Un homme de trop is located in the vastness of the Americas. The poet travels to several places in Mexico and reflects on the ancient cultures of the peoples of South America. The inhabited space remains unnamed. The named places (Saskatchewan, Montreal and Hull) in Canada are either associated with a border between people or to the power of money. The affiliation D’Alfonso speaks about is neither political nor territorial, but rather cultural, and straddles borders, shown by intertextual references and affinities of meaning. Harel’s discussion of D’Alfonso’s other work applies also to Un homme de trop: “À sa manière, le parcours personnel d’Antonio D’Alfonso est la mise en jeu d’une trame migratoire qui exclut d’office toute reterritorialisation.”62
If allusions to family history and grander History are developed across time, D’Alfonso’s travels in geographic space privilege non-contiguous spaces, focussing on the miserable plight of “little people” that repeats from one place to another, and from one nation to another. For Brassard, the dispersal of sites in D’Alfonso “serait une façon d’actualiser le sujet multiple sans le réduire à une seule identité.”63
Before speaking about the concrete world represented in Un homme de trop, one must note the abundance of cosmic language, as though the palpable and tangible earth limited the understanding of the world. The repetition of the words sky, sun, moon, stars, clouds and especially weather events such as thunderstorm and rainbow64 structure the emotions. Sometimes, it is “l’amour vif comme soleil”65 or a cosmic sign as in “Oisel de proie”66 in which a person descends from heaven to give him a book to eat and, through this Surrealist gesture, this communion, nourishes his intellect or the conventional, outdated celestial image in “Antigone,” transformed by the political stance of resistance: “Défier les lois de l’état / Nourrir le désordre là où règne le pouvoir.”67 By pushing the limits, the cosmic language foregrounds the desire to reconfigure the world every day, which is often strangled or even rendered meaningless. Below, it is the dream of excess, overflow, and vastness.
The poet casts a sombre gaze on the concrete world and the role he plays in it: “Que la terre puisse pardonner ces mains / qui moulent la cécité de mes peuples.”68 He is inherently involved and contributes to the alienation in the society in which he lives. In fact, the intentionally vague word “ces” puts the poet himself in the wake of evil, even if he also feels a close affinity with beauty. There is no clear boundary between good and evil, vigilance alone preserves one from yielding to the insidious power of evil. Elsewhere, the poet rejects life driven by mere efficiency: “Toi, qui invente la passion télécommandée. Notre liberté sourit et montre ses dents électriques. // Je veux de l’information à tout prix. / Je veux mon plaisir à bon marché. / Je veux un dieu à l’histoire rentable. Mais qui emportera la victoire? Qui emportera la victoire?”69
What remains of life when passion, intellectual curiosity, pleasure, even one’s notion of God are inextricably caught up in efficiency? For the poet, irony is the only escape from this totalitarian logic. But being completely immune to its ruthless power is nearly impossible: “Marchons / ensemble vers ces passions alourdies par la comptabilité.”70 The spirit of unbridled mercantilism, though blatantly present, also has a way of seeping into the hearts and minds of people, without their knowing it. Everything is measured by the yardstick of money, and risks killing the passions, the imagination, and meaning through prudence and conformity.
In effect, the poet focuses mainly on a world where there is a widespread trivialization of evil: for instance, the hatred and indifference experienced in “La Mexicaine,”71 the poverty, “le manque est sans nom”72 in “Nuit déjà,”73 the complete powerlessness of marginal outcasts: “les culs des gens sans paroles / sans mots / un silence armé / un bruit de silence,”74 the conditioning due to exposure to generally accepted images, like those of young girls who “n’attendent qu’à être / Dévorées par la fortune et la renommée.”75
D’Alfonso’s depiction of the world is thus the result of an all-pervasive malaise rooted in an authentic humanism, that is, a real human concern with the ability to truly inhabit the earth and not simply exist, and a resistance to capitalism’s hold. It also means remaining alert for celestial signs both in indulging in prayer and in giving attention to the heavens, which structure one’s days. In this sense, Mallarmé spoke of the “séjour authentique”76 in this world.
The literary landscape in Un homme de trop is influenced by the renewed thirst for social and collective meaning, but political as well. The world that is falling apart77 is a global one; he thinks of Mexico, for example, but it is also local. The poem “Hull” in particular recognizes Quebec’s political problems, levels of government, the status of immigrants, based on social class: “Nul baiser pour Hull la Pauvre / Sauf le baiser du maître // [. . .] Sauf le baiser de l’argent / Que les immigrants partagent / Derrière les murs de béton / leur dictant quand rire et pleurer.”78 Yet his main focus is on humanity and the human condition. This explains why he refuses to submit to preconceived notions or to an imposed silence. He denounces a truncated version of reality, too often used by the powers that be; he’d like to open people’s eyes. Do we all live like the taxidermist, in a “jardin mort”79 and bury our heads in the sand? Or rather without knowing it, one of those “Prisonniers / au vin affamé [. . .] Derrière des barres d’acier”80? The mere fact of denouncing inequity is an expression of dissent, a refusal to submit. In this sense, he is something of a social rebel, yet by no means does he see the world as perfectible: “dans cette absurdité / on se perd dans une forêt / on se jette sur des javelots / on pleure / comme s’il y avait de la lumière // les sots! / ils ne savent pas / que l’ampoule est brûlée / et qu’elle est irremplaçable.”81
But, as we noted earlier, out of darkness can spring beauty, albeit fragile. The poet still believes in the power of poetry and summons other poets to action: “Poètes, chantez / notre coup d’état.”82 Poetry will thus become the place where the battle for self and for the world takes place. It is a place where pleasure too is found: “Que ces mots fatigués remplissent mes espaces vides. / Dévoilent les plaisirs qu’écrire me procure.”83 In this way, the poet sees ambivalence and paradox as the very basis of his relationship to himself and to the world. The ugly and the beautiful, hatred and love, light and darkness are inseparably interconnected, two sides of the same reality. It is this shift of emphasis that keeps the poet vigilant and perhaps also stops him from being locked in a negative stance. He tends toward a rather dark definition of the world, but the lack of definition, often ambivalent and constantly put forward, is what makes the thought that flows from writing so fruitful. Seemingly, therefore, the quest can never achieve its final end.
Antonio D’Alfonso speaks of shifting, multifarious and immemorial evil without becoming dogmatic and prescriptive even though he calls to poetic action. He apprehends what Pinson calls la poéthique and seeks, for himself and others, to make the world more habitable, “Car habiter (exister) n’est pas simplement vivre. Il nous faut des livres [. . .] pour inscrire notre habitation dans un monde commun plus durable que la simple vie. Mais pas n’importe quels livres: des livres qui fassent signe à la vie.”84 D’Alfonso’s book beckons to life despite a deadly evil rendered through image. I have deliberately chosen the reflective aspects of D’Alfonso’s poetry because according to Pinson, the poet seems anxious to live as a poet or combine life and words so as to be engaged in the real. Speaking of D’Alfonso’s passion, Harel affirms that it is not always “délire et déraison. Elle est aussi un passage, [. . .] même un droit de passage,”85 passage toward another place where the immigrant peasant condition vanishes. For Brassard, as I said, D’Alfonso refuses a unique identity. Indeed, the two elements — the idea of passage and the refusal of a unique identity — are still present in Un homme de trop; by the recovery of several poems first published thirty years ago, D’Alfonso reiterates his concerns.
This emphasizes that the poetic trajectory, that the road out of . . . is not yet fully traced. Finally, the last poem in the collection, “Où on fête ce soir?”86 is not very interesting from an aesthetic point of view, and it is puzzling. It is the only poem in the collection where D’Alfonso’s language emerges from slang, a poor language, broken, damaged and limited — the language of the poor, a sort of growl as he himself describes his poetry when he disparages himself. This “clausular poem,” although short, demonstrates once again his condition of homme de trop, a man broken by life, often incapable of true beauty; but this uneducated man speaks the disfigured language of the country of his childhood and not the dialect of his parents. The farmer in him is not only a contadino, but also the local man, broken, and in his death throes.
(Translated by Rachelle Renaud)
1Antonio D’Alfonso, Un homme de trop, Montréal, Editions du Noroît, 2005. Adapted from two other books by the author: Queror, Montreal, Guernica Editions, 1979 (henceforth referred to as QR) and Black Tongue, Montreal, Guernica Editions, 1983 (henceforth referred to as BT). Un homme de trop will be referred to as UHT and each quotation will be accompanied by a translation, most often by D’Alfonso himself. The title Un homme de trop is borrowed from a 1967 French-Italian movie by Costa Gavras.
2UHT, 19; “unwonted bliss”: BT, Elegy of the Alcove, IX, 26.
3UHT, ibid.; “a mundane charm frolics”: BT, Elegy of the Alcove, IX, 25.
4UHT, ibid.; “Beyond the dreadful limits of solitude”: BT, Elegy of the Alcove, IX, 25.
5Joseph Pivato, Echo. Essay on Other Literatures, Toronto, Guernica, 1994, 231.
6Domenic A. Beneventi, “Ethnic Heterotopias. The construction of ‘Place’ in Italian-Canadian Writing” Adjacencies. Minority Writing in Canada, Lianne Moyes, Licia Canton and Domenic Beneventi, ed. Toronto, Guernica, 2004, 228.
7UHT, 107; an existential model at the confines of solitude and awareness between the real and the fictitious.
8Despair.
9a creative force.
10Simon Harel, Les passages obligés de l’écriture migrante, Montréal, XYZ, 2005, 192; opens onto the experience of inhabited places.
11Individual.
12Shared.
13Denise Brassard, “Résister à l’éclatement”, Denise Brassard et Evelyne Gagnon, dir., États de la présence. Les lieux d’inscription de la subjectivité dans la poésie québécoise actuelle, Montréal, XYZ, 2010, 82. It should be noted that Brassard does not discuss Un homme de trop in her analysis, nor does she discuss D’Alfonso’s ideological or political positions at any length. In addition, in her analysis she also examines the writing of Elise Turcotte, whom she also sees as an urban poet, but for whom the city is more interiorized.
14Ibid., 88.
15Noële Racine (voir note 17) parle aussi d’Un homme de trop as recent work.
16I borrowed the idea from Jean-Claude Pinson, who speaks of the desire to Habiter en poète in a number of landmark contemporary poets, desire which he calls a poéthique (poésie et éthique) that is la “puissance à former une existence à la fois lyrique et éthique.” Jean-Claude Pinson, Habiter en poète. Essai sur la poésie contemporaine, Seyssel, Champ Vallon, 1995, 16.
17Noële Racine, “Donne à voir”, Canadian Literature, Spring 2010, no 204; Racine states that a more effective classification would have reduced the impression of lack of uniformity. htttp://www.canlit.ca/reviews.php?id=13248
18UHT, 99; “yes / to that new choice, that new attitude, that / fresh jet of movement ending in a new / start of another end, that end too put / to question, like the first, like the last choice”: BT, Movement of Choice, 35.
19who am I?
20UHT, 16; “tear the fence of solitary experience”: BT, Elegy of the Alcove, VI, 24.
21Transfiguration, whose dedication reads “For Mother and F a t h e r ”: BT, 45.
22UHT, 7–8; “Let me pray”, Transfiguration: BT, 45–46.
23Without speaking directly of this collection, Simon Harel sees in D’Alfonso’s writing a certain desire for putting down roots : “L’enracinement fait référence à une cartographie affective qui identifie le lieu énonciatif où le sujet décrète les formes variées de son appartenance. L’enracinement refuse la désaffection et la désaffectivation qui caractérisent une pensée éthérée à propos de la différence.” “Poétique de la politique” in La transculture et ViceVersa, dir., Fulvio Caccia, Montréal, Triptyque, 2010, 119. In my opinion, this also concerns Un homme de trop.
24inaccessible truth.
25UHT, 50; I pray without knowing to whom or what / I’m praying.
26UHT, 104; “Useless poet”: BT, Life of Cross, 43.
27UHT, 37; in English, rendered as: “These vain desires are not their own, belong to / Another, to some other prayer or sinner, to some / Disgraceful occult committee”: QR, Queror II, 43.
28“The whore dressed in red”: QR, Queror II, 44.
29In English, rendered as: “That aluminum city”: loc. cit.
30UHT, 37–38; in English, rendered as: “Dumb servants”: loc. cit.
31UHT, 11; “crippled carrion”: BT, Elegy of the Alcove, III, 20.
32UHT, ibid.; “The massive burden of prudence / has crushed my primitive / exuberance. No, I do not / associate with the sublime.”: BT, loc. cit.
33UHT, 21; “this page warped by weight, / crushing weight of nothingness, / weight crammed by more weight, / weight of frozen limbs [. . .] Weight of reason, / weight of sloth”: BT, Elegy of the Alcove, XI, 27 & 28.
34UHT, 27; “a ton of solid emptiness, / no energy, / just meaningless [. . .] mass”: BT, Foco d’amor, III, 62.
35UHT, 11; “factory-built”: BT, Elegy of the Alcove, III, 20.
36UHT, 36; “Is this poetry? or is the rumble of sick / Mind?” (sic): QR, Queror II, 43.
37UHT, 104; “Emigrants’ son / an emigrants’ son’s son in quest / of strong brave flesh for this blood of / contadino.”: BT, Life of Cross, 43.
38Paul Ricœur, Soi-même comme un autre, Paris, Seuil, 1990, 370; the anchoring place of the self.
39Ibid.; more hidden forms of suffering: the inability to express oneself, the refusal to express one’s experience, the conviction that experience cannot be expressed in words.
40Arthur Rimbaud, “Adieu”, Œuvres poétiques, Paris, Flammarion, 1964, 140.
41UHT, 73; “It’s over, Dad / my resemblance to you / it’s over / I disfigured myself”: QR, (Untitled), Suite, 29.
42The Shade: QR, 39.
43“a ngr y ”: loc. cit.
44“dark”: loc. cit.
45“Slowly [. . .] sprawls and angrily spews”: loc. cit.
46“The soul benumbed, petrified, / Is absorbed.”: loc. cit.
47UHT, 40; “fearful”: loc. cit.
48UHT, 9; “I am weak, sleepy, parched, and brittle. / Dry broken birch stump [. . .] Bereft of quietude, still grappling to / subdue this agony, I am a scream. [. . .] steep in asperit y.”: BT, Elegy of the Alcove, I, 19.
49Olivier Abel, L’éthique interrogative. Herméneutique et problématologie de notre condition langagière, Paris, PUF, 2000, 172.
50Ibid., 164; the responsibility of reinterpreting tradition, of possibly throwing it into question.
51UHT, 7; “I’m one hell of a sinner, / for loathing those who gave me / their soul’s worth when the giving / left them weak and vulnerable, / for demanding an unreal world / from those whose hands were figs of sun”: BT, Transfiguration, 45.
52Abel, op. cit., 163; Forgiveness is a historic act because it destroys the past. All at once, it reopens the possibility of living together in the present.
53UHT, 14; “I am now imagination. / I bestir before action develops. [. . .] I reel within soul’s rusty grates. / I fight the soul. I become the soul.”: BT, Elegy of the Alcove, V, 22.
54UHT, 15; “We have emerged from the same rocky reflection, / from the unique darkness of life / where finest forms of passions, / uninhibited, vie like soft children.”: BT, Elegy of the Alcove, VI, 23.
55UHT, 34; “what would I be without the looks / of your friendship, I who am no god?”: BT, A Friendship, II, 37.
56UHT, ibid.; “Polemics of art have nourished the hate / gnawing at our armholding; let art then die, / or let it be a mere private pastime”: loc. cit.
57UHT, 55; read this it’s for you read this it’s for you / I truly love you read this it’s. . . / look at me I’m falling falling / falling these lines synonymous with I love you.
58The First of March, 1980: BT, 74 –75.
59UHT, 118; “Stunted by the movement of grandeur, / without speaking, we agree // that life’s a miracle of love. / an avalanche of lava or of star, // an overflow of generosity. / We’re smaller than the speck of dust // [. . .] Our profiles [. . .] gape at the swerved sublime.”: loc. cit.
60UHT, 39; “I am the one who dares [. . .] To manipulate the uncertain substances / Of colour and meaning. // Yet I feel I will drown / In muddy reflections.”: QR, Traces, 41.
61to drown.
62Simon Harel, “Les lieux dits de la trahison. Un imaginaire frontalier”, Jean-François Côté et Emmanuelle Tremblay, dir., Le nouveau récit des Amériques, Québec, Les presses de l’Université Laval, 2005, 129.
63Denise Brassard, op. cit., 88.
64Antonio D’Alfonso, op. cit., voir entre autres les pages 17, 18, 23, 24, 29, 32, 35, 36, 37, 39, 50, 61, 62, 64, 74, 75, 76, 107, 117.
65Ibid., 29.
66Ibid., 35.
67Ibid., 74.
68UHT, 88; “Forgive these iniquitous hands / That helped mould the blindness of a nation.”: QR, The Christmas Light, 64.
69UHT, 38; In English, rendered as: “their masters’ hands / Who invent distant love / Love without empathy, / Mechanical liberty with arrogance smiles. / You want information / You want godless pleasures / You want unthrifty sex / You want financially feasible love affairs. / Who wins the victory? Who wins the victory?”: QR, Queror II, 44.
70UHT, 39; In English, rendered as: “You can now follow me / Across passions slandered by reason.”: QR, Traces, 41.
71In English, this four-part poem has four distinct titles: Retrato de una dama, The Surrender, The Union, Lover of Essence: BT, 67–70.
72“Want has no name.”: BT, Life of Cross, 42.
73UHT, 104; in English, the poem is called Life of Cross: BT, 40–44, but begins with: “Night already.”
74UHT, 57; the down and out poor who have no say / no words / an armed silence / a silence you can hear.
75UHT, 83; “Anxiously imagining to be devoured by fortune and fame.”: QR, Mouths in Awe, 51.
76Jean-Claude Pinson, op. cit., 63.
77UHT, 100; see the English poem, Canuto: Blind Black Dog: BT, 33–34.
78UHT, 77; “No kisses in poor Hull / Just the kiss of money / Which hungry workers give / With mere envious stare. // Just the kiss of money / Dirty immigrants share / Behind brown concrete walls / Teaching them how to live.”: QR, Hull, 57.
79UHT, 82; “dead garden”: QR, (Untitled), Suite, 28.
80UHT, 85; “Prison / With hungry wine [. . .] Souls like moss / And iron bars.”: QR, Prison, 60.
81UHT, 59; in such an absurd world /people can’t see the forest for the trees / they’re armed to the teeth / they weep /as if there were a way out, a light at the end of the tunnel // idiots! / they don’t know/ that the light has been snuffed out / and that a dark truth awaits them.
82UHT, 42; “Poet, / Chant // Our / Coup d’état.” QR, The Savage Incantation, 40.
83UHT, 95; “Let my weary words once the blank spaces control, / Reveal what discoveries upon me life has bestowed.” QR, For the New Year, 1978, 68.
84Jean-Claude Pinson, op. cit., 16.
85Simon Harel, 2005, op. cit., 137.
86Antonio D’Alfonso, op. cit., 122.
Abel, Olivier. L’éthique interrogative. Herméneutique et problématologie de notre condition langagière, Paris, PUF, 2000.
Bélanger, Louis, “L’appartenance esseulée: Avril ou l’anti-passion d’Antonio D’Alfonso”, Appartenances dans la littérature francophone d’Amérique du Nord, Larry Steele et al, ed., Ottawa, Le Nordir, 2005, 101–109.
Brassard, Denise and Evelyne Gagnon, eds. États de la présence. Les lieux d’inscription de la subjectivité dans la poésie québécoise actuelle, Montréal, XYZ, 2010.
Caccia, Fulvio, ed. La transculture et ViceVersa, Montréal, Triptyque, 2010.
D’Alfonso, Antonio. Un homme de trop, Montreal, Éditions du Noroît, 2005. (Adapted from two other books by the author: Queror, Montreal, Guernica Editions, 1979 and Black Tongue, Montreal, Guernica Editions, 1983.)
____. Avril ou l’anti-passion, Montreal, VLB, 1990. (In English, in a slightly different version, Fabrizio’s Passion, Toronto, Guernica Editions, 2000.)
____. L’autre rivage, Saint-Hippolyte, Éditions du Noroît, 1999. (In English, in a slightly different version, The Other Shore, Toronto, Guernica Editions, 1986 and 1988).
____. Comment ça se passe, Montreal, Éditions du Noroît, 2001. (In English, in a slightly different version, Getting on with Politics, Toronto, Exile Editions, 2002.)
Harel, Simon. Les passages obligés de l’écriture migrante, Montreal, XYZ, 2005, 169–193.
____. “Poétique de la politique” in La transculture et ViceVersa, ed. Fulvio Caccia, Montréal: Triptyque, 2010, 113–131.
____. “Les lieux dits de la trahison. Un imaginaire frontalier,” Jean-François Côté et Emmanuelle Tremblay, dir., Le nouveau récit des Amériques, Québec, Les presses de l’Université Laval, 2005, 129–144.
Pinson, Jean-Claude. Habiter en poète. Essai sur la poésie contemporaine. Seyssel, Champ Vallon, 1995.
Pivato, Joseph. Echo. Essay on Other Literatures, Toronto, Guernica, 1994.
Racine, Noële. “Donne à voir,” Canadian Literature, Spring 2010, no 204. htttp://www.canlit.ca/reviews.php?id=13248
Ricœur, Paul. Soi-même comme un autre, Paris, Seuil, 1990.
Rimbaud, Arthur. Œuvres poétiques, Paris, Flammarion, 1964.