L’inachèvement comme forme et comme position : le cas Pammrová

Overview & Synopsis

Anna Pammrová, a Czech poet and philosopher of the early twentieth century, has long been read through her life, as the "friend" of the Symbolist poet Otokar Březina, rather than through her work. That work is hard to access: she published only six short books in her lifetime, only one of which was reissued, and no collection is held in the National Archives in Prague. The paper draws on the scattered ego-documents (letters, diaries, notebooks) in which she reflects on her own writing, and which stand in for lost or inaccessible works, to examine her discourse on loss and unfinishedness. The first part shows how Pammrová experienced loss as something imposed on her. Family opposition, poverty, years in a forest hut and repeated rejections by publishers in three languages prevented her from writing and publishing. Her first book appeared only in 1917, from a provincial publisher whose limited means resulted in poor editions. Because she wrote by hand and sent out her only copies, manuscripts were delayed, withheld or lost: Écho du giron de la création (Echo from the Womb of Creation) was returned and self-published, while the voluminous Manque de lumière (Lack of Light) was never found. Her letters to Březina were exhibited by his executors against her wishes. The second part argues that she gradually turned this suffered loss into an aesthetic choice. She burned her first story after Březina called it "embryonic", and repeatedly announced that she would destroy the rest. She turned the insult into a programme, with "embryonic" appearing in the subtitle of Alfa, and defended a raw, spontaneous writing that rejected literary form, which Xavier Galmiche calls crudivorisme verbal ("verbal raw-foodism"). Critics had put the fragmentary form down to lack of education, but her ego-documents show deliberate intent. The third part shows how this unfinishedness is built into her philosophical and feminist project of antiévaïsme ("anti-Eve-ism"), a transformation of humanity through a new, cosmic Woman. Her work presents itself as a mere introduction to a theory yet to be defined, and as an attempt to make audible a cosmic voice and a women's language yet to be invented. Loss thus becomes the condition of a work turned toward the future.