Portraits of Alienage in Saint-John Perse

Abstract

According to the diplomat, Alexis Le-ger, as well his chosen alter-ego Saint-John Perse, “doors open on exile” and forbid all strictly established forms of identity. Adopting the unaccustomed principle, so dear to the poet, to his work, the Stranger and its reincarnations draw out a singular thread which in return outlines a diffracted portrait, a characterization close to a sketch which tends to universalize and raise a constituting statement which questions its conditions, both deliberate and assumed. In this radical otherness, and the gaze on which it is originally based, much more than an “incentive from somewhere else” comes an acute poetic phrase which seems to illustrate the miscellany of the world but also offers a condition of existence to this other in us, the Stranger.