Francis Ponge, Le Savon, and the Occupation

The reader, right off, is kindly asked (he will very soon understand why) – I mean to say: for taking off – to give himself, in his imagination, German ears.

– (Francis Ponge, Soap 3)

FRANCIS PONGE’S 1967 POEM LE SAVON HAS A SPECIAL PLACE in the poet’s oeuvre. The work occupies a pivotal position in the development of Ponge’s writing from Douze Petits Ecrits (1926), Le Parti pris des choses (1942) and other collections of short pieces, to more “theoretical” works such as Proemes (1948) or Mithodes (1961). It further marks the poet’s turn toward the “book-poem,” or “dossier-poem,” the form he adopted in Pour un Malherbe (1965), and Le Savon (1967), and continued to favor in La Fabrique du pré (1971), Comme une figue de paroles et pourquoi (1977), L’Atelier contem porain (1977), Nioque de l’avant-printemps (1981), and Pratiques d’écriture, ou l’inachèvement perpituel (1984). Le Savon appeared at precisely the moment Ponge’s writing shifted focus away from the objectal poetry of the early years toward the metapoetic concerns that preoccupied him from Pour un Malherbe onward.2 Begun in 1942, the year Le Parti pris des choses was published (the work for which he became known as “the poet of things”), but not completed until 1965 (the year his first “book-poem” Pour un Malherbe appeared), Le Savon links the two extremities of Ponge’s writing career. It is a vital document in that it allows critics to trace step by step the evolution of his poetic vision.