Going on, or Achieving Interruption

Abstract

This reading of Jacques Roubaud’s Quelque chose noir explores how poetry helps the poet to grieve for his young wife and enables him to go on. The issue for him is how to begin living again, how to put an end to the deathly paralysis that immobilised him following her death. Analysis of the relationship to time in the poems shows that Roubaud is concerned not just to render the passing of time but to make time pass. Particular attention is paid to the structural anomaly of the four poems in the collection that do not have nine verses and the use of hyperbaton in order to argue that Roubaud’s concern is to interrupt the stillness, so that the ending of his wife’s life will not be the final ending.