De quelques hypothèses sur la joie de L’Oiseau d’or : Brancusi, Mina Loy et Rilke

Abstract

This paper investigates the way poetry considers the « imaginary halo » (Bachelard) emanating from works of art, that is to say, not forms in themselves, but the suggestions, affects and experiences that those forms elicit for their beholders. According to Brancusi, the vocation of his sculpture is to arouse joy. We try to examine this emotion of joy by connecting two poems with remarks and aphorisms by Brancusi: a poem by the American modernist Mina Loy, “Brancusi’s Golden Bird” (1921,) that was published with a photograph taken by the sculptor, and lines written in French by Rilke (1920,) that have been read as an evocation of Brancusi’s sculpture and thus have become a poem about Brancusi. In Loy’s poem, the experience of joy takes the guise of “rapture”, as it is defined by the philosopher Marianne Massin: a feeling of intense pleasure, intermixed with a violent abduction to the sacred, notably triggered by Grecian “agalmata” which might survive in Brancusi’s sculpture. Rapture means movement, constantly evolving. The experience of joy, if we believe the philosopher Jean-Louis Chrétien, springs from a movement of amplification and projection in the future. It is this very movement that animates Brancusi’s sculpture. Poems invent figures for this imperfect movement of enlargement, and they contribute to its momentum, effecting a constant evolution of the work, making it inexhaustible, and refusing to let it come to a completion that would be its end.

Keywords

• affects
• agalma
• imaginary halo (Bachelard)
• joy
• poetry and sculpture
• poetry and photograph