While practicing "pure and simple abstention from themes imposed by ideologies of the time," Ponge has been embraced by the existentialists in their time, and by the structuralists in theirs. Only human, and French, he too has devoted his requisite pages to the Absurd. Still the bloom does not wear off. This genial life's-work will outlast the ideas by which it is judged….

Ponge, in ["Things" and "The Voice of Things"], restores l'azur and le vide papier que la blancheur défend, all that rare, magnetic emptiness so prized by Mallarmé and Valéry, to a backdrop for something common, modest, real.

And elsewhere: "It's a question of the object as notion. Of the object in the French language (an item, really, in a French dictionary)."

For a thought is after all a thing of sorts. Its density, color, weight, etc., vary according to the thinker, to the...