De-aestheticization of Violence. Notes on Sonnets of Death by Bernard Noël

Abstract

Bernard Noël’s Sonnets of Death, whose title echoes those of Jean de Sponde, deal with the tortured body, with the extreme violence to which it is subjected in the age of modern techniques for afflicting pain. In these poems, violence is only evoked in a dismemberment, a disarticulation, and it is poetry itself that is tortured, in a “de-aestheticization” of the sonnet in which all the traditional elements are disfigured. It seemed to the author that only short notes could convey the violence of this unachieved – and terrible – book of sonnets.