With Henri Bosco everything comes from “Sweet Kingdom” from childhood. His imagination is particularly permeated by it, he draws impressive memories from it, which he already has “Poetry Manifested on All Pages”. The only son of often absent parents – a talented poet artist father and a mother who accompanies him on his travels – the young Henri takes refuge in contemplation and observation of his environment, sensitive to its variations, climate, elements … “I was very impressed by the strength of the Rhône and later by the dynamism of the Durance. » From this dreamy and lonely childhood he will inherit a strong fondness for nature, which plays a central role in his work. “When you love nature the way I love it, you obviously live in silence and solitude.”which allows “to face oneself (…) meditate well, think well, and thus arrive at a profound investigation of things. » (1)
And that’s what its characters will indulge in, immersed in mysterious and disturbing atmospheres. They undergo trials of initiation in which they live in harmony with the fierceness of the elements and their opposites, undergoing precipitous movements and descents into Hell before returning to the Light: “We are each other and we are the same. deep secret! »remarks the narrator ofA branch of the night. The river, the wind… become impressive beings, a kind of gods. Paganism subtly shapes the land of Provence and Bosco feels connected to the ancient Greeks who worshiped the forces of nature. He also says that he is sensitive to cosmic vibrations. His characters can reach higher states of consciousness and perceive things beyond the outside. Even when they are alone, everything around them becomes dense, the invisible is no longer so. So, inside The boar : “So I waited. I knew nothing of the thing (or being) I expected, but I felt its quality. »
Bachelard-Bosco, A Poetics of the Elements
Mystery, isolation, dream, water, earth, fire, air… all the ingredients are there for Gaston Bachelard and Henri Bosco to “recognize” each other. However, they only got to know each other in 1956, even though they had read each other before, and discovered deep affinities in their “poetic work” – an intensive correspondence followed, which ended in 1962, with Bachelard’s death. (2) “When I read you, I thought I heard myself speaking”Bosco told him in one of his letters.
Outside of science and epistemology, Bachelard actually renews the philosophical and literary approach to the imagination with studies in the Poetics of the Elements (The Psychoanalysis of Fire, The poetics of space, water and dreams, etc.). He quotes Bosco extensively and dedicates an essay to him. (The flame of a candle). With his approach, he gives imagination the power to invent “new spirit” : “This clinging to the invisible, here is the first poetry. (…) True poetry is an awakening function. » Isn’t that also Henri Bosco’s heartfelt conviction when he says that it is poetry? “a means to higher knowledge” (3)? And that a daydream continues so consistently that a written work emerges, adds the philosopher, “So it’s not just a fleeting hour’s vacation”a material element must give it its specific poetics: even more than clear thoughts, “Dreams depend on the four basic elements…”.
And the latter are more than significant in the author’s work. The heroes, who are made to surpass themselves, experience successive phases of discovery, enchantment, even joy, sometimes genuine struggle against an untamed nature. The narrative springs from a logical world and eludes concrete experience. The dreamer sees elsewhere in the here, a stranger in the familiar. Here the vagaries of the air – fog, land ” work “ of winds “frightened”… There, crackling fire – storm “magnetic”Fire … There is again the ambivalence of the earth, fertile, fertile, but also rough and wild … And finally the moods of the water, calm or stormy and insidious, lacustrine places rotten with moisture, swamps in which one encounters primitive chaos as well as other death.
Malicroix etc Le Mas Theotime are dazzling poetic examples of this: the narrators, each having inherited an “island”, will settle there, undergo trials there in order to acquire it, and discover in themselves a previously unknown power. Banal everyday situations become scenes of merciless struggles – disorientation, threatening dissolution or entanglement. Necessary periods of learning for self-knowledge, with the discomfort of adventure and its inevitable destabilization.
“However, a dark uneasiness aroused me. (…) The heavy and somehow stuffy night enveloped my body and soul (…). The sky, the water, the shores merged into one fleeting substance. And then I confused myself »described Pascal in Le Mas Theotime. « (The water) entered me as if a body slipped into my body (…). One could have said that icy and sad water had entered me and that a branch of the river was already moving toward my barely warm heart. (…) I didn’t lose consciousness and both the muddy ground and the water were present to me.says Martial, in Malicroix.
The emergence of a “new” identity
The internalized elements play between shadow and light, violence and softness and unfold their power there in a very relaxed manner. Until you can lose your mind: “There is no area in the world more favorable for wind life. (…) North winds, mistral, tramontanes pouring on the salicornia, tearing down the pebbles, wearing down the roofs, shaking the walls of the sheepfolds at ground level. The whole expanse is but laments, rumblings towards the sea, the rage of the river. »
In the Camargue, the impressive notary Dromiols continues Malicroixthe wind is ” drunk “. He stomps, spins, loses his head. Everything is subject to the law of the wind: water, plants, people, animals… But Pascal and Martial stay on course, unexpected inner resources are revealed to them; They face adversity to better delve into the heart of their roots. The light is never far away, for like mythological heroes, they triumph over obstacles. Then a solid and living facet of their identity emerges.
The Bosquian stories reach their true fullness only when an intimate relationship is established between the space and the characters: the latter actually begin to listen to this material “Self Forces His Presence”. ” Perhaps, says the narrator ofAs a branch of the night, she simply whispers to us that she is there. » This “island” of solitude is not reduced to a place or a landscape, but is a dimension of soul life.
According to Henri Bosco, currents flow between matter and soul, and between soul and the entire universe.; The poet is stationed in the privileged place where these forces cross: “You go through them, move him, and he expresses them. But to be successful, he must have a gift. » (1) Isn’t that what Gaston Bachelard recognizes in one of his many letters: “Will not the day come when you will be put in your place, that of the poet of the human soul? » (2)
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Excerpt: “I felt the first movement of the earth under my feet”
the panty ass, by Henri Bosco (Gallimard Editions)
“But the wind came from beyond. His tablecloth, descending from the plateaus where wild arnica, argelas and hyssop of the scrubland grow, had absorbed all the scents hidden in the small valleys, embedded in the warm hollows dozing in the smallest cracks of limestone, hawthorn, foxglove, Knapweed, Blue Bramble, Privet, Spanish Broom, Sea Frankincense, Saint Veronica’s Herb.
The mountain smelled. I no longer resisted. I walked over the bridge…
And suddenly I trembled because I felt the first movement of the earth under my feet. She went up. A sudden wave from the ground carried me into the oak forest. This wild land lifted me up; other slopes, other tracks held my steps. The dark wood gave off the damp, salty smell of old, dead leaves. I had detached myself from these gently sloping plains of rural meadows that invite rest and stopping. Now everything here became abrupt, abrupt; But from these movements of the ground, from these fallen stones, from these gnarled oaks with twisted roots, it penetrated me like a black subterranean force. The bitter accent that emanated from it made my blood pound with greater beats amidst the shadow of fresh bark and bitter leaves; and I was lifted manly, in spite of the steepness of the curves and the rigor of the climbs, into that vast aromatic zone of hills, a land of wild flowers, trees, and fleeing beasts already trembling through the boughs of oaks, in full light, before me. »
