2 - Following Generation: Biological and Poetic Cloning

Summary

You’re reading ‘Autumn Crocuses’, that Apollinaire poem. You didn't notice anything special, you didn't see anything, you passed right by it. There is, in lines 10–11, a small mystery. This mystery is held in the little phrase that runs: ‘autumn crocuses which are like their mothers / Daughters of their daughters’. Now admit that you’ve never asked yourself what this could really mean, these ‘mothers / Daughters of their daughters’. You’re going to do just that right now, you’re going to ask yourself that question now. Now? Yes, now, which is to say, afterwards.

Following in his footsteps, after him, ‘he’ being Lévi-Strauss, one of the first to have felt the need to investigate, concerning ‘Autumn Crocuses’, the mystery of ‘A Small Mythico-Literary Puzzle’ (a text published in The View from Afar). Lévi-Strauss does not present a reading of Apollinaire's entire poem, but only of this ‘detail that has remained enigmatic to commentators. Why does the poet equate with autumn crocuses the epithet mères filles de leurs filles (“mothers daughters of their daughters”)’ (1985a: 211)? You are about to discover this enigma, after Lévi-Strauss.

You are, we are, part of the ‘generation following’ structuralism. The ‘generation following’ structuralism, its ‘following generation’, means, first of all, the descendants, the inheritors, the sons and daughters. Next, it means the process of education [formation], of engendering, of constituting the following itself, the form of posterity. ‘Following generation’ invites a reflection not only on what it might mean to inherit, but also on the shaping [formation] of the inheritance by its inheritor, on the fact that an inheritance – no matter what it may be – far from being entirely constituted, must again, in some way, be engendered, shaped, regenerated to be what it is – to be something given. This double game of passivity and of activity or spontaneity in inheritance will once more evoke the menacing motif of autumn crocuses, the mute cry of these flowers that arrive to interrupt the sequence of filiation and education so as to poison the order of succession.