A Disintegrating Lyric? – Henri Michaux and Chinese Lyricism

This essay examines the perplexing triangular relation between Henri Michaux's ambiguous and attenuated lyricism, the French lyrical tradition, and Michaux's Chinese-inspired poems. I explore how Michaux's West-Eastern cross-cultural straddling relates to the way he renders the lyric problematic, and how this relation can help us re-read and perhaps unread the lyric (at least, its European understanding) in a comparative way. I first read some poems that are representative of Michaux's uneasy and disintegrating lyricism; then I consider how Michaux's poems that allude to Chinese and Far Eastern sources of inspiration reinstate his lyric voice, but in a new, ‘Asianised’ way. This raises the intriguing question of why there exists a coincidence between Michaux's ‘Chinese-style’ and his lyrical moments. Besides considering Michaux's Chinese influences and the Orientalist stereotyping of Chinese literary style, I argue that a stronger comparative approach to this question is to consider lyricism in the Chinese context and how shuqing (approximately translated as ‘lyrical’) writing – despite its very different conceptual framework – may shed light on Michaux's poetry and dislodge Eurocentric views of the lyric. Finally, I propose that Michaux's poetry marks the point of simultaneous lyric disintegration and reformulation. Although Michaux's Chinese-inspired dimension sustains certain lyrical moments, the transcultural aesthetics of his West-Eastern lyric in fact resists fusion and reconciliation, presenting instead a juxtapositional tension and splintering of poetics between Michaux's French and Chinese sides.