Daniel Blanchard died on May 3, 2024, the day of his 90th birthday and
his 58 years of life together with Hélène Arnold, his companion in life,translation and fighting. Hélène who reminds us that he avoided tributes
and did not like people talking about him, but that he would have liked
people to talk about his books. What we will try to do, even if it is
difficult to distinguish in Daniel the work from the experience, the
words from the places, the reflections of times lived or to come.
Daniel Blanchard was driven by two passions: writing, and particularly
poetry, and philosophical and political questioning. The latter led him
to participate from 1957 to 1965 in the group Socialisme ou Barbarie
where, under the pseudonym P. Canjuers, he wrote in 1960 with Guy Debord
the Preliminaries for a definition of the unity of the revolutionary
program. After 68 and his meeting in Paris with Murray Bookchin, he
stayed in Vermont, one of the most fertile centers of the American
"counterculture". At the same time, he published poems on several
occasions in "L'Éphémère" texts included in a volume, Cartes, in Mercure
de France. He then composed a set of prose and poems, Table claire,
which he printed and published himself during his participation in the
adventure of the La Quotidienne printing company. A series of poems,
Ideal portrait, appeared in 1984 by P.O.L.
From his American experience he draws a novel, Stop on the eastern
shore of Lake Champlain, Vermont (Julliard, 1990). Followed in 1993 and
1994 by a series of poems, La Conversation resumes, and another novel,
Fugitive, by Deyrolle publisher. In 2000, Sens and Tonka publishers
published a brief essay, Debord in the noise of the cataract of time as
a prelude to a reissue of the "Préliminaires" of 1960, soon followed by
a story Here in 2001, a first autobiographical investigation of a rather
pessimistic content. This was followed by a collection of short prose
and quotations, Vide-poches (2003) and a series of poems Battant,
dormant (2005).
In 2008 Daniel published with Sens et Tonka a new novel structured by
biographical elements, These bursts of freedom, Courant Alternatif made
this review:
"It's a big novel, 567 pages, with dense, beautiful and precise writing.
A journey through the century, a story of memory and loyalty, of comings
and goings between the Southern Alps, Paris, Italy, Africa, Eastern
Europe, and finally Poitou. Comings and goings between great History and
that of singular beings who pass through it. A novel about the search
for oneself, through the memory of commitments, encounters that mark
forever, where we meet resistance fighters, the echoes of Italian
anarchists, post-war anticolonialists, the long shadow by Breton, by
Bataille, then the explosion of May 68. These bursts of freedom is a
real novel, very constructed, with several levels of possible reading, a
dense narrative framework, three main characters, the narrator, Émile,
who turns around about his life while relying on an original narrative
pretext, the discovery of Lucien's diary, the one who was like a father
to him, and thanks to which he will rediscover him in a new light. And
then, there is, younger, the irreconcilable Geoffroy, in a permanent but
quixotic war with the world.
A text which unfolds like a song as attentive to the places, to the dry
stones and wild grass of an abandoned house, to the wind which rustles
in the deciduous trees, to the close and familiar mountain, to the
atmospheres, to the silences, to the descriptions impressionists which
are always those of a feeling, the expression of an inner state, of a
reflection on oneself, of a remembrance where regrets are elegantly
formulated with irony.
In this existential novel, where it is about love, friendship, jazz,
politics, which is also a kind of novel of the century, from the
artistic avant-garde movements of the 1920s to in the 90s, it is the
journey of a life marked by political, intellectual commitment, art,
enthusiasms and disappointments, but also a very great attention to
things, to beings, to the words that writing fine, musical, restrained,
with great precision, sometimes hesitant, magnificently renders, between
the rhythmic basis of the story, itself marked by introspective backs
and forths and the complex narrative device, and more melodic motifs of
impressions, memories, images and their colors. Throughout this story
there are almost Proustian moments or accents, this suspended time, this
time of life which is the very material of the story, a work which
imposes on the reader a time outside of time, a parenthesis with its own
temporality, a certain state availability.» (CA n° 200, May 2010, text
by JF)
In 2014 Daniel will give a sequel to These Shards...: Memory poisons my
wells, the novel of a vivid reflection on age, on memory, on time and on
a bygone era
In 2012, Editions du Sandre published Crise de mots, a collection of
texts resulting from two experiences, that of critical theory and that
of poetry, which have in common the experience of freedom and the search
for emancipation. in and through language. He insists in this work on
the necessary unity between theoretical criticism and singular speech
but he also points out what threatens to break this problematic link, to
bring to light this crisis of words, this crisis of the perception of
reality through words when those -they become cluttered with dry
concepts, overwhelming abstractions, lose contact with the lived world
and sensitive experience to the point of petrifying language,
impoverishing it with stereotypical, meaningless machinic codes and
tipping it into a purely instrumental functionality.
In 2013, again at Sens et Tonka, A l'air libre, a new collection of
poetry, was published. In these short texts, the aim is to grasp the
quality but also the structure of a moment of life - how the mourning of
a close person acts, or the influence of the mountain on the spirit, how
the rustling of leaves or the river and human speech... And this outside
of any pre-established formal or conceptual framework - "in the open air".
In 2023 there will be a final autobiographical essay, La Vie sur les
Crestes, published by Editions du Sandre. A political and literary
testament which explores his life and "treats reality - nature, other
human beings with "sober senses" as Marx would say", and which
tirelessly asserts itself against the "machinic delirium of capital
which ignores, which represses our mortality" and in doing so denies
life. We chronicled it in Courant Alternatif n° 334 of November 2023.
Daniel was not just a poet, novelist, or essayist. Translator with
Hélène Arnold of their friend Murray Bookchin, whose thought they
introduced to France in 1974, with a first brochure distributed by
Parallèles, then taken up and completed in 1976 by Christian Bourgois
Éditeur in Pour une société ecologiste. In 2019 he will preface the
edition of "Power to destroy, Power to create" which he coordinated with
Hélène Arnold, Renaud Garcia and Vincent Gerber at l'Échappée.
Remaining faithful to his "socio-barbaric" commitments, he also prefaced
an Anthology of the journal Socialisme ou Barbarie, published by Acratie
editions in 2007 by a collective including former members of the journal
group, then actively contributed since then to the circle of "Soubis"
reflection resulting from this initiative. His contributions to
political or artistic journals were numerous, and as far as we are
concerned more particularly we can recall that in 2008, on the occasion
of the 40th anniversary of May 1968, he contributed to the special issue
May Encore! jointly published by Courant Alternatif and Offensive, as
well as in the Réfractions magazine, with an article entitled Actualité
de Mai.
Insatiably curious Daniel also liked to wander around the shores of
cinema and in addition to scripts for television, we owe him, for
example, a translation (with Claude Orsoni) of Film Theory, the
Redemption of Material Reality by Siegfried Kracauer, a book which
questions the relationships between cinema, history and memory.
Because in the bibliography of Daniel Blanchard there is a common thread
a reflection based on his experience of places, time, the materiality of
things, beings and words, as well as on the faculty of humanity to pour
into the love and beauty as in horror and barbarity. With the definitive
choice, that of poetry and association with simple people, mountain
dwellers or Poitevin peasants, who remain the best bulwark against "the
permanent crisis which is (...) the deep compulsion which has driven
capitalist society since His origin ".
Philip
https://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article4228
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