De l’archive au poème : métamorphoses de la mémoire dans Paterson de William Carlos Williams

Abstract

This paper studies the way William Carlos Williams resorts to archives in Paterson and explores whether the transformation of archives into poetry metamorphoses memory. The numerous instances of censorship indeed trigger a system of memorial obliteration. Yet, this phenomenon is counterbalanced by poetic techniques aimed at recreating memory. As a result, the memory at stake in Paterson is reminiscent of Paul Ricoeur’s theory according to which memory is a reappropriation of the past. Public archives (referring to the history of the city of Paterson), private documents (such as medical notes on patients) or even personal archives (correspondences) are juxtaposed to verse. In the end, if Paterson is an object of memory, it is not because it contains archives but because it generates them to eventually become a poetic archive that is less oriented towards the past than towards the present, if not the future, as Williams transforms his own death into an archive in the final book. Such passages convey autothanatographic undertones that anticipate the future while challenging the linearity of memory: memory is less related to the past than to the present and the future at the end of Paterson.