Violence and Magic: Aspects of René Char's Surrealist Apprenticeship

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Though it never took the form of a whole-hearted commitment, René Char's participation in the surrealist movement is, nevertheless, a fact of literary history, a fact which, furthermore, played a decisive role in the development of the poet and the man. (p. 2)

During his brief surrealist apprenticeship, Char gained, I believe, two important insights: (1) the realization that the existing socio-political order was in need of re-examination and with it the consecrated canons of art, and (2) the certainty that violence and destruction would not solve the problems faced by his generation…. The investigation of the outer world had to lead [the] poet back to a re-examination of his inner universe. There René Char sought the answer to the apparent contradictions of a world shared by partisan and poet, violence and magic. (pp. 2-3)

The key-notes of Char's poetry of 1930–1934 are given by words such as attentat, barbare, brutal, cadavre, carvan, cataclysme, catastrophe, coup, couteau, crasse, crénau, crever, crime, cruel, égorger, fer, gratter, matraque, meutre, offensant, pourriture, rage, résistance, révolution, rude, saigner, sang, sauvage, scandale, sévère, suicide, tomber, trancher, tuer, viol, violence, violent….

A poem from L'Action de la Justice est éteinte [a volume dedicated to Breton], "Les soleils chanteurs", mentions the kinds of violence—natural catastrophies, accidents, suicide, sickness, crime—which, to the mind of the young surrealist poet, must be called upon to revitalize poetry…. (p. 3)

Another text from the same collection, titled simply "Poème" … adds to the previous list "le crime passionnel, le viol, l'attentat à la pudeur, sources authentiques de la poésie" ["the passionate crime, rape, outrage on decency, authentic sources of poetry"]…. It is believed, at this time, that poetry may best be accomplished in a "climat de chasse" ["climate of the hunt"] that will favor the "Meurtres productifs" ["productive murders"] of the poet…. Crime is not only honorable, but desirable, if it can lead to new conceptions of art….

This new poetry requires a new language. Gone is the melancholy tone of "Ce Soir" (Char's first published poem, written at school), gone the hesitant efforts of the young Char to establish a dialogue with the world around him. Words now are like hammers that can kill…. (p. 4)

In the best surrealist tradition (and following Lautréamont, whom he read at this time), Char speaks of revolt against the order of nature, against the established order of society, and against the ethic and aesthetic codes imposed by man upon both. Hence references to sickness, suicide, fratricide, matricide, regicide, and to the generally unaccepted forms of love….

Char finds his most suitable metaphors for the alliance of violence and magic in the world of the mineral. (p. 5)

References to chemicals, metal and machinery are … "in the air" during the early years of surrealism, used by the surrealists and modernistas in their praise or condemnation of our 20th-century environment. In the poetry of René Char, they represent a farewell to romantic verse and its endless hymns to nature…. (pp. 5-6)

In Char's post-surrealist poetry, references to metals and chemicals are rare. There are the notable exceptions of the "coq de fer" in La Parole en archipel …, and the "abeille de fer" of "Apparition d'Aerea", first published in 1962. Both of these are symbols of war. However, evocations—or rather, provocations—of violence of any type diminish in Char's poetry after 1938. At least, violence and aggression are no longer seen in the same light. It is no longer the poem or the poet that is "offensant d'agression", but the world around them. (p. 6)

The songs and fables of Placard pour un chemin des écoliers are among the most haunting poetry Char ever wrote, and one would have to go back all the way to the Spanish romances of the 15th and 16th centuries to find a poem that would equal the mysterious beauty of such poems as, for example, "Compagnie de l'écolière"….

Where once the natural world was condemned to death through calcification, [in the poems of 1934–1936] we now see even the mineral world come to life….

The poet achieves an extraordinary swiftness in these poems which show all matter in perpetual motion. The roads run along more quickly than the children on their way to school; autumn loses its breath….

Preference is now given to vegetable matter. The stars have a "tige émoussée" ["blunt stem"]; even metal grows like a flower…. The human body itself is made to partake of the vegetable world. All heaviness is taken from it…. (p. 7)

In these poems of 1934–1938, the poet—"apprenti de la combustion" ["apprentice of combustion"]—is concerned with the breaking up of dead matter, with the revitalization of poetry no longer through outward violence and arbitary aggression upon nature (practiced by the sorcerer's apprentice of Le Marteau sans Maître), but by means of critical re-examination of his own inner universe, his own past…. Man cannot relate to nature by destroying it. Rather, he must adjust his vision so as to bring the apparent chaos of the universe into proper focus…. Stars become flowers painted on a child's bedroom wall. The machine, like a dog, lies down at the feet of man. Nature is no longer the enemy, above and beyond man. It has come down to his level and accepted man as its master…. Though once a hostile element, [Nature] now partakes of the healing power of sage and comes to the aid of poet and partisan. In Feuillets d'Hypnos all of nature participates in the quest for harmony….

Everything heavy and destructive now becomes light and life-bearing. In Poèmes militants, even the grass was made of lead and stone. Now lead is melted, it flows like oil and is ultimately transformed into the alchemist's gold…. (p. 8)

As the body takes on the properties of vegetable matter, so the mineral assumes human form. Char now sees in the rock the protective form of an eyelid …; the forge becomes "la forge des reins"…. Everything is taken down one step (judged by Char's original scale of values), so that the mineral world completely disappears or else is subjugated to the animal will. (p. 9)

Then came World War II. Violence and aggression, once the intellectual prerogatives of an artistic élite, now became the ugly reality of everyday and every common life. (p. 13)

Though Char continues to write, he publishes nothing during the difficult years of the Resistance (1940–1943). When Fureur et Mystère comes out in 1948, it contains no hymns to victory. There is not in all of Char's poetry or prose of this time any of the joy and exuberance of Apollinaire's Calligrammes. To this day, what Char admires most in "Guy au galop" is precisely this seemingly carefree poetry written by Apollinaire during his service at the front, where his sense of wonder was not troubled by the fear of annihilation. Char is of a very different nature, and he is fighting a different kind of war. The notations in his war-journal, Feuillets d'Hypnos, "écrites dans la tension, la colère, la peur" (Preface), consist of cold tactical calculations, philosophic meditations, short lyrical intermezzi and angry outcries against the senseless violence of war. (pp. 13-14)

In the midst of death and destruction, caught up by the machinery of war, Char forgets the lessons of surrealism and the songs of Maldoror. He denounces the murderous world of the machine…. The poet now rebels against his intellectual heritage, against the easy and comfortable superiority of the pessimist whom he had once imitated….

Violence and aggression are no longer gratuitous, sickness and death no longer the subject matter of sophisticated poetry. Face to face with the reality of war, Char seeks to return to childhood innocence and peace, to the world of health to which his first post-war aphorisms, gathered under the title of A la Santé du Serpent (1945–1947) are dedicated. The collection opens with the cry: "Je chante la chaleur à visage de nouveau-né, la chaleur désespérée"…. (p. 14)

Humility is not only a new word, but a new attitude in Char's poetry. The aggressiveness, the revolt, the violence of Le Marteau sans maître do not recur in his post-war verse. Though Char will never again recreate the carefree atmosphere of the "Cylindre à vapeur" and never again write with that lightness of touch, some of the texts he publishes in Les Matinaux (1950) recapture—if in a more subdued key—themes of the Placard pour un chemin des écoliers. (pp. 14-15)

By means of the "glorieux mensonge" ["glorious lie"] poetry, René Char has come to terms with the inner and outer chaos of his world, with the contradictory existences of partisan and poet. Magic has taken from violence the sting of destruction and death. The phosphore meurtrier gives way to the ignis fatuus. The eyes of the dying man are sealed by amber, "ayant l'expansion des choses infinies" ["having the unreservedness of infinite things"]. As he dies, man is magically transformed. All earthly heaviness is taken from him. He is made light as a ray of sunshine, he is lifted from the earth and rejoins the … mythe millénaire [myth of the millennium]. (p. 16)

The poet has lifted the laws of man and burst the narrow confines of a man-made reality, for which he has substituted the "glorieux mensonge". Not through violence …, but through the magic of poetry he has changed the established order of things, solved the apparent contradictions of nature. He has recaptured the original harmony of the Heraclitean universe, has recreated "Les premiers instants" where shark and seagull could live together as loyaux adversaires, where earth and sky were united and man still believed in the promise of the rainbow…. (pp. 17-18)

The destructive forces of nature have been put to creative use. They have torn man away from his house of low doors, lifted him beyond the modicité quotidienne, forced him into the open, where he will join the bête ineffable whose victory shall have no end….

In his new humility, René Char has found the poem for which Lautréamont—and the surrealists—looked in vain. (p. 18)

Mechthild Cranston, "Violence and Magic: Aspects of René Char's Surrealist Apprenticeship" (copyright © by Forum for Modern Language Studies and Mechthild Cranston), in Forum for Modern Language Studies, Vol. X, No. 1, January, 1974, pp. 1-18.

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