Poetry Criticism | Char, René - Charles D. Minahen (essay date fall-winter 1989)

Charles D. Minahen (essay date fall-winter 1989)

SOURCE: Minahen, Charles D. “Disclosures of Being in René Char's ‘Riche de larmes.’” Dalhouse French Studies: De Duras et Robbe-Grillet à Cixous et Deguy 17 (fall-winter 1989): 55-61.

[In the following essay, Minahen examines the opening poem of Char's Eloge d'une soupçonnée,.]

Char's description of Vincent as “sans abord réel”¹—the phrase is underscored by a change of type in the title-poem of Les Voisinages de Van Gogh²—echoes unmistakably (and no doubt intentionally) the difficulty of access encountered in any attempt to apprehend the phenomenon of being. Vincent's tableaux, like Char's poems, record such attempts and prove the point that the artist must do violence to conventional modes of perception in order to break through numbing clichés of the real, i.e., the experience of everyday things (res), to...

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