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Michaux, Displacement, and Postmodernism

JUST A FEW MONTHS after Michaux’s death in October 1984, Gallimard brought out the last in a long series of books by Michaux. This book, entitled Déplacements, Dégagements, is, like many before it, a collection of shorter pieces gathered together—pieces with no real unifying theme, no stylistic continuity, no structural coherence among the parts forming the whole. And yet, with its juxtaposition of different genres and fragmented discourses, Déplacements, Dégagements is quintessential Michaux in its very form: the refusal of unified or unify­ ing discourse. The various sections of Déplacements, Dégagements treat themes already familiar to Michaux’s readers: mysterious beings emerging from the void, a travel adventure, a meditation on music, poems about tem­ poral and spatial movement, an essay dealing with the development of children’s drawings, two pieces about experimentation with drugs, and poems ostensibly generated from four different body positions during meditation. Most of these subjects and techniques involve more tradi­ tional sorts of displacement: the person under the influence of mescaline experiences mental displacement, the traveler undergoes physical dis­ placement, the person meditating experiences spiritual displacement, and all forms of displacement serve to disrupt habitual modes of perception. Most of Michaux’s works situate the self in an unknown context with the purpose of disorienting, disturbing, and disrupting the very sense of self that would inevitably (and falsely) begin to emerge in the absence of such disruption. Accepting fragmentation and disunity as the true state of things, if one can speak of such a thing as the “ true” state of things with­ out falling into an essentialism, Michaux continually dislodges his sub­ ject by inserting him into far-off lands with different customs and con-