Henri Michaux: 'Belge, de Paris'

Henri Michaux (1899-1984) left his native Belgium almost as soon as he began to write, and rapidly estranged himself from the Belgian nationalists who had first published him. Despite representing himself as a self-made 'French' writer, his problematization of his creativity challenged his reinvention by questioning the possibility of individual authorship. Representing the stable self as a musk behind which dissonant voices, Latinicity, Nordicity, the conscious, and the unconscious, compete to be heard, Michaux undermined his claim to authorship while questioning the cohesion of his identity. At the same time, he established his aesthetics in the subversion of the French language and canon by the conflicting voices and cultural identities at play in his works.