Hughes with Barthes: Mytho-poetic Icons

International audienceThere seems to be a logical contradiction between Ted Hughes' early definition of his poetry as "verses of simple observation" (Sagar, The Art of Ted Hughes 243), and his standing out in contemporary British poetry as the myth-making poet par excellence. Paradoxically, his poetry is celebrated at once as being extraordinarily referential and remarkably mytho-poetic. Never has this been underlined as being at all surprising. Yet it may be considered puzzling that the much admired author of Crow, Cave Birds, Gaudete, should provide such advice to pupil-poets as, for instance, "The descriptions will be detailed, scientific in their objectivity and microscopic attentiveness" (Poetry in the Making 64). To would-be novelist he says: "[So] every page in your novel will be a new exercise in observation, till pretty soon, we hope, something approaching photographic observation begins to come naturally to you" (Poetry in the Making 90). It raises no small paradox to show, after Keith Sagar and many others, the opening in Hughes' poetry of a mythical space, a sacred space, as if outside history, where such fallen angels as Gog or Crow do tread. The logical contradiction to be understood, and if possible solved, is that of the apparent absence of any gap between a strict horacian, ut-pictura-poesis doctrine and mytho-poetry, between "scientific objectivity" and myth-making. A solution to this apparent crux is provided by another seemingly far-fetched rapprochement between the British poet laureate and the structuralist French critic Roland Barthes, who both wrote their major works in a period going from the structuralist hayday of the late 1950s to the late 1970s, and both-Hughes in Cambridge and Barthes in Paris-had a very strong interest in language and myth, although from seemingly diverging, and possibly radically opposed points of views. Before diving into the theory, later to re-emerge into a hopefully better-understood surface of pratice, the logical contradiction at stake needs to be shown again and made as graphic as possible. Here are a few examples. A poem like "Dawn's Rose" (Crow 59) may indeed give its reader the impression, no doubt imaginary, of perfectly rendering, of evoking with extreme exactitude, the feeling generated by the crow's cry. However, what is at stake in Crow, The Life and Songs of the Crow is not so much the real crow as an imaginary beast, a mythical being. And yet it is a real crow, very precisely. And this very unscientific vagueness brings us to the heart of the matter indeed. Here is another simple example. About his poem "The Thought-Fox" (The Hawk in the Rain 15), Hughes said "It is a real fox, and as I read the poem I see it move, I see it setting its prints, I see its shadow going over the irregular surface of the snow.. .. It is very real to me" (Poetry in the Making 20). Yet no serious reader in his/her right mind will ever assert that the text is a truthful representation of a fox in a "photographic" way. And those of Hughes' poems which have been published with illustrations, as in Flowers and Insects or River show in a very obvious and dramatic way the radical and irreducible difference there is between the pictorial and the verbal treatment of the same referent. Finally, the whole mimologism of Hughes', namely the way he wishfully wants to think that words imitate things, seems to go against the grain of mytho-poetry. No referent whatsoever can indeed be directly imitated by the sounds of the words of a poem with a mythical or imaginary subject matter. (Words can easily be understood to imitate, say, the song of a bird, but how do they imitate a spirit ?) Hughes' poems depict the real in the way symphonic music can effectively represent a landscape, or the sound of a bassoon in an orchestra, an earthworm in Noah's Arch. A decoder is needed, nolens volens