I hadn't considered the pagan angle, which is probably just as well.
The point about Celine is just that if anything like Kristeva's notion
of poetic language as tapping into some maternal well of semiotic
flux-energy is in play, then one ought to consider that her canonical
examples are not exclusively users of fixed metre (or women, for that
matter), hence that there's no particularly Kristevan justification
for a link between verse formalism and, say, "female embodiment". But
one is not obliged to give a damn about Kristeva, either way...
I'm still trying to get clear of "the pentameter" myself, and there
are two things that I want to believe about that attempt: i) that it
can be done, and ii) that when you have done it, you are not then in
some kind of metrical free-fall, but dealing with a wider and more
demanding set of rhythmic choices, which might be made "by ear" but
require that the ear in question be carefully trained and somewhat
supernaturally attentive. Consequently I will tend to bridle at
anything that sounds like a suggestion i) that it can't be done,
because traditional metre will always remain the reference point
against which any "deviations" will be assessed, or ii) that if one
did succeed in doing it, one would then be writing "without metre",
playing tennis with the net down, and would thus have arrived at the
happy (or foolishly irresponsible) state of never having any
"particularly meaningful" decisions to make about the rhythmic
weighting or pacing of one's words.
My anxiety, in other words, is that formalism denies me a destination:
either I stay on the straight-and-narrow, or turn away from it into
the wilds, but there is little sense there that there might be other
roads.
Dominic
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