Planet Literature

Jacques Prévert’s Poetic Play with the Structures of Everyday Life

In his poetry, Jacques Prévert wanted to cultivate what is systematically driven out of children on their way to adulthood: an unbiased view of things. For him, this also went hand in hand with a conscious distance from high culture.

Quicksand

Angels and demons
winds and tides
gliding in glimmering distance
your sleep-shrouded eyes
stars fallen into the sea

Angels and demons
winds and tides
in the quicksand of rippling sheets
your dream-dabbed eyes
octopuses circling unseen

Angels and demons
winds and tides
a swirling a gentle sinking
in the abyss of your ocean eyes
drifting a dreamed drowning

Jacques Prévert: Sables mouvants from: Paroles (1946)

Poem as video with music

The Childlike World View as a Prerequisite for Prévert’s Poetry

Prévert’s poems about childhood and school leave no doubt about his critical attitude towards traditional education. According to him, the point of school (and the understanding of education for which it stands) is not primarily to teach children intellectual content and skills. The main purpose of school, in his view, is rather to deprive children of their intellectual independence. For him, the latter is also reflected in the special look of children, which permeates the masquerade of everyday social life and thus causes feelings of embarrassment among adults:

„I have often heard people say to their child, ‚Lower your eyes!‘ – the look of children almost always produces shame in adults“ [1].

He himself, Prévert says in an interview, has therefore tried to maintain this special gaze of children – and with it the „tears“, the „laughter“ and the „happy secrets“ of childhood. In this way, he states, he has also retained the ability to ask childlike questions – questions that lead to alienation effects through their distance from everyday life and thus enable a new view of it [2].

Poetry as an „Epithet of Life“

Prévert’s poetic ideal can be derived directly from this attitude. In essence, he is aiming for a poetry that is committed to truthfulness, i.e. a poetry that, precisely because it remains a part of everyday life, has an effect on it. In the final analysis, poetry thus appears only as another term for life or for a certain view of it:

„Poetry (…) is what you dream, what you imagine, what you wish for and what, as a consequence, often comes to pass. Poetry is everywhere, just as God is nowhere. Poetry is one of the truest, one of the most fitting epithets of life“ [3].

Rootedness of Poetry in Everyday Life

In terms of language, Prévert’s conception of poetry is expressed in the fact that he rejects the weighty gesture of high-cultural works [4]. As part of everyday life or as a particular form of expression of life and human existence, poetic language should, according to him, not hover over people’s heads and convey the impression of omniscience. Prévert therefore prefers for his works the „language created by the people“, the „language of all“, which „sticks its tongue out“ at the sophisticated mode of expression [5].

The use of simple forms of expression is thus the linguistic equivalent of Prévert’s deliberate adoption of a child’s view of the world. But of course, Prévert does not simply adopt everyday language and thus reinforce its affirmative effect. Rather, everyday language is restructured in many respects in his poems. To this end, he operates with a wide variety of word plays in which, for example, idiomatic expressions are taken literally or seemingly unrelated things are transferred into a new context of meaning in enumerations [6].

Playfully Dissolution of Encrusted Patterns of Language and Thought

Prévert himself compares this kind of poetry to the concentric circles a child initiates with a stone thrown into water. In a similar way, poetic images might penetrate the „imposed thoughts“ of everyday life and thus contribute to their dissolution [7].

This poetic approach can be illustrated by the poem Sables mouvants (Quicksand) reproduced above. Here, the main theme of sinking into the „ocean of love“ produces a series of images that complement each other and thus develop their own poetic language. At the same time, the resulting impression of wave motion picks up on the motif of death and rebirth in love.

The poem appears as a harmonious counterpart to the poem Pour toi, mon amour, which ends disharmoniously. While Sables mouvants evokes the fulfilment of love, the blissful sinking into its sea, Pour toi, mon amour thematises the painful awakening from the frenzy of love:

The Course of Love

In the swallows‘ glittering sky
a whispering wing has carried you
in the hollow of my heart.

In the fragrant garden of the earth
the inebriating breath of the hawthorn
has blown your love into my heart.

In the rose garden of our nest,
an invisible chain of thorns
has wrapped itself around your heart.

Between the shadowy ships of the night,
sadly moored to the quay wall,
I have lost you. [8]

Poetic Undulations

A similar compositional principle as in Sables mouvants is used by Prévert in the poem Chez la fleuriste (In the Flower Shop). In this case, the associative fields „coins/money“ and „flowers/scent“ are set parallel to each other. They both generate new images on their own, but also through contact with the other field of association.

The sharp contrast between the cornucopia of fragrant flowers on the one hand and the useless coins rolling across the floor on the other vividly visualises the central message of the poem. The innovative, fresh form of expression allows a well-known wisdom to be revitalised: All the money and gold in the world cannot buy the most important things in life. The beauty of flowers is just as fleeting as the highest good symbolised by them: love.

In the Flower Shop

Red and blue and yellow flowers
a bath in a sea of scents
for a few counted coins
rolling over the flower shop counter
rolling onto the flower-dotted floor
around a fallen body
the sallow body of a man
among the fragrant flowers
a body with a broken heart
encircled by the jingling coins
while the flowers wither
like the sallow man
between the rolling coins
the incessantly rolling coins. [9]

The Creative Process in Prévert’s Work

How strongly Jacques Prévert’s poetry is rooted in everyday life is also shown by the way in which it was created. For example, Prévert had a large collection of newspaper cuttings, which he repeatedly turned into poetic works or incorporated into them [10]. In addition, there are several examples of how he developed poems directly from or even parallel to a conversation [11].

His second wife, Janine Fernande Tricotet, to whom Prévert had been married since 1947, once described this fusion of poetry and life in the following words:

„At the beginning of our relationship, I was often afraid of disturbing him: We were sitting in a café and he suddenly started writing while continuing to talk to me at the same time“ [12].

This again shows the deliberate proximity of Prévert’s poetry to everyday life and everyday language. André Pozner, who had several intensive conversations with Prévert over the years and experienced his working methods at first hand, characterised the poet against this background as a „bavard particulier“, a „very special conversationalist“ [13], for whom every fragment of a dialogue could suddenly turn into poetry:

„He chats, he chats, [but] that’s just not all he is capable of doing. Jacques Prévert also writes, but his writing remains closely linked to chatting“ [14].

The processual nature that characterises Prévert’s writing to a particular degree was probably also one of the reasons why he long opposed the publication of his poems – which initially only appeared in magazines – in book form. It was not until 1946 that they were summarised in the now legendary volume Paroles („Words“), which was later followed by eleven further volumes of poetry (two of them posthumously).

However, the title of this book once again shows that Prévert was not interested in joining up with high culture, but rather in rooting his poetry in everyday language. By emphasising the authenticity associated with the latter, he also wanted to sensitise his readers to the processes of standardisation, euphemistic distortion and social labelling through language. His poetry thus always had an emancipatory claim.

References

[1]      Cf. Prévert’s statement in an interview with André Pozner: Prévert/Pozner: Hebdromadaires (1972), p. 62. Paris 1982: Gallimard.

[2]      Ibid.

[3]      Ibid., p. 102.

[4]      Ibid., p. 151.

[5]      „La langue vulgaire tire la langue à la langue distinguée“ (ibid.).

[6]      On the stylistic device of enumeration in Prévert’s poetry, see his poem Inventaire/Inventory. The poem is included in Paroles (1946), pp. 208 – 210. Paris 1949: Gallimard.

[7]      Prévert in Hebdromadaires (see above: 1), p. 153.

[8]      Cf. Prévert: Pour toi, mon amour; from: Paroles (1946).

[9]      Cf. Prévert: Chez la fleuriste; from: Paroles (1946).

[10]    Cf. Hebdromadaires (see above: 1), p. 28 und 102 ff.

[11]    Cf. Ibid., p. 52 f., 104 f. and 131 f.

[12]    Janine Fernande Tricotet in ibid., p. 108.

[13]    André Pozner in ibid., p. 77.

[14]    Pozner, ibid., p. 177 (see also p. 151).

Image: Hans Makart (1840 – 1884): Faun and Nymph (1865/66); Wikimedia Commons