."" . . And now, dear reader, for your intellectual toilet, here is
a little piece of soap. Well handled, we guarantee it will be
enough. Let us hold this magic stone.""
The poet Francis Ponge (1899-1988) occupied a significant and
unchallenged place in French letters for over fifty years,
attracting the attention and admiration of generations of leading
intellectuals, writers, and painters, a notable feat in France,
where reputations are periodically reassessed and undone with the
arrival of new literary and philosophical schools.
"Soap" occupies a crucial, pivotal position in Ponge's work. Begun
during the German occupation when he was in the Resistance, though
completed two decades later, it determined, according to Ponge, the
form of almost all his postwar writing. With this work, he began to
turn away from the small, perfect poem toward a much more open
form, a kind of prose poem which incorporates a laboratory or
workshop, recounting its own process of coming into being along
with the final result. The outcome is a new form of writing, which
one could call "processual poetry." Ponge's later work, from "Soap"
on, is a very important tool in the questioning and rethinking of
literary genres, of poetry and prose, of what is literature.
There is a blurring of boundaries between "Soap" and soap (which
was hard to come by during the Resistance and is also, of course,
metaphorical for a larger social restitution). "Soap" contains the
sum of Ponge's aesthetics and materialist ethics and his belief in
the supremacy of language as it becomes the object of the text. In
the words of Serge Gavronsky, "this work, perhaps one of the
longest running metaphors in literature, slowly unwinds, bubbles in
verbal inventions, and finally evaporates, leaving the water
slightly troubled, slightly darker, but the hands clean, really
clean. . . . Out of murky literary habits, Ponge has devised a way
of cleaning his text, and through it, man himself, his vocabulary,
and as a consequence, his way of being in the world."
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