The Logic of Secular Sense in Cendrars’ Epic Trilogy

Abstract Engaging with Graham Ward’s contention that literature can never be entirely secular, I argue that some pieces of literature can, in fact, tell us a great deal about the conceptual logic of the secular. I turn, in particular, to three poems by Blaise Cendrars—Les Pâques à New York, Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jeanne de France, and Le Panama ou les aventures de mes sept oncles, written during the years of 1912 and 1914, so as to reconstruct the ways in which the poems themselves are entangled in a dispute over the very possibility of a purified secular plane. That is, Cendrars’ trilogy dramatises both the attempt to write secularly and the difficulty—even impossibility—of accomplishing precisely that task. Hence, I offer a reading of the journey traversed in Cendrars’ early trilogy that focuses on the desacralising movement at work in this journey, as well as the various resistances such movement encounters. On the one hand, the three poems tend towards a becoming-secular of poetry: the Christian regime of sense in Pâques is quickly replaced by a series of ‘any-spaces-whatsoever’ where secular figures are perpetually produced. On the other hand, this secular hero-narrative ends in tragedy, such that the poetic text ends up being figured as a utopia, an impossible space that offers compensation for the impossibility of performing secularity in life.