Robert W. Greene
With few exceptions, René Char's poems start out at a high pitch of intensity, which they rarely relax and in fact usually increase. Char, moreover, maintains his extremely tense, vigorous style at least as consistently in his prose poetry as he does in his verse poems. That this should be so is quite remarkable given the inherently discursive, muting tendency of prose as compared with the more paratactic possibilities of verse, hence its greater potential for dramatic, polarized juxtaposition. Because of the tension that obtains between the eruptive texture of his poems and the smooth prose vehicle that he often elects to use, Char seems both more impressive and more authentically himself as a prose poet than as a poet in verse. In either form, however, his unfailing capacity to energize to the utmost degree the individual words and phrases of what are in the end thoroughly organized structures suggests that a convulsive paradox throbs at the heart of his poetry, that in Char the forces of total anarchy, if not utter destruction, are constantly at war with those of complete control, absolute order.
The striking incongruity between texture and structure in Char, while it is doubtless responsible for the almost palpable vitality that his texts possess, also reflects the poet's abiding commitment to the principle of contradiction. Char rejects one of the fundamental premises of Western thought, Aristotle's principle of identity (a thing cannot at the same time be itself and something else), in favour of the belief in the identity of opposites espoused by Heraclitus, whom Char admires enormously. Nevertheless, despite the convergence of views between the two men in this basic area and despite Char's growing predilection over the years for a Sibylline, Heraclitus-like aphorism, the unique qualities of his poetry, especially his prose poetry, would scarcely emerge from a comparison of that poetry with the pre-Socratic's fragments. On the other hand, because of their philosophical affinity, linking the two men's names does constitute a useful point of departure.
Char's adherence to Heraclitean contradiction is felt throughout his oeuvre, from titles of collections through poetic technique to the deepest level of vision. The title of one of his recent plaquettes, for example, joins two semantically opposed but phonically similar nouns, L'Effroi la joie …, a coupling that sums up Char's whole quickened, apparently ambivalent and yet ultimately affirmative response to life. 'Commune présence', a poem of major importance for Char and a relatively early text (1936), comprises a number of paired contraries that shed light on both his technique and his vision. Its last eight lines are particularly significant in this regard:
Tu as été créé pour des moments peu communs
Modifie-toi disparais sans regret
Au gré de la rigueur suave
Quartier suivant quartier la liquidation du monde se poúrsuit
Sans interruption
Sans égarement
Essaime la poussière
Nul ne décèlera votre union.
In tone and substance the first two lines contradict each other. After a gentle exhortation in which the poet informs someone, doubtless himself, that he must be ready to rise to exceptional occasions, he then says, in effect, 'Adjust and fade away without a murmur'. Line three completes the sense of line two and resolves or at least recognizes the conflict between that line and the first. The key phrase here, virtually a contradiction in terms, is 'rigueur suave', ['harsh softness'] whose first word captures the essence of line one, while 'suave' picks up line two. Like the title L'Effroi la joie, the phrase 'rigueur suave' exemplifies one of Char's basic techniques, that of juxtaposing semantically incompatible words for a specific effect. The phrase also conveys, in its context, Char's attitude towards life, which seems to be an unsynthesized combination of total resistance and total acceptance. The surface tension he creates by lining up mutually exclusive terms is thus mirrored at the poem's depth, where Char's fundamental, paradoxical stance is adumbrated.
The next three lines also contain a contradiction, if in a slightly less obvious way than the first three lines. The fourth and fifth lines quickly present the entropic view of the world's destiny that haunts so many twentieth-century writers (Beckett being perhaps the most overtly obsessed by it). But Char's variation on this deeply pessimistic theme comes with line six, which both parallels line five and diverges from it drastically. The final decline of all and everything into formlessness is already in progress and it is relentless, but that does not or at least should not create égarement, inner disorder. The inevitability of cosmic chaos need not undo spiritual order. The lines 'Sans interruption/Sans égarement' [without interruption/without mistake'] thus embody a contradiction that is not unlike those contained in the phrases 'rigueur suave' and 'fright joy'.
The last two lines of 'Commune présence' are set off from the rest, and rightly so because they contain a climactic command—'Essaime la poussière' ['Swarm the dust']—and its reward if heeded—'Nul ne décelera votre union' ['No one will decelerate your union']. With the first of these lines we have yet another contradiction in terms; a swarm of bees and a cloud of dust are only visually analogous (just as l'effroi and la joie are only phonically similar). In essence they are contraries, the one suggesting fragments vitalized, unified, about to move up and away, and the other connoting destructive explosion followed by drift into ever greater dispersion and eventual nothingness. The injunction and its promise assert that the final, centreless settling of the particles is not to be denied but seized and turned into a swarm, and that if this is accomplished a state of at-oneness with the world will be attained. Once again by establishing a verbal polarity the poet reveals his moral vision. In terse, elliptical and imperious language he enjoins his listener (himself and now his reader too?) to accept the fact of entropy but to resist the inner paralysis that can accompany such lucidity.
'Les premiers instants', a prose poem belonging to a group entitled, significantly La Fontaine narrative (1947), typifies Char's poetry in ways that take us beyond Heraclitus and 'l'exaltante alliance des contraires'. But even before we read the poem, we see in the group title an internal contradiction. For a fountain, even as it arcs into being, also and at every instant disappears, its myriad droplets resembling so many scattering specks of dust. But the adjective 'narrative' gives this fountain's perpetual disintegration a form that saves it, that of duration and continuity. The bead-droplets are as strung out on a rosary and told, narrated. Here, as in the case of the rising swarm, a violent burst or explosion is held together, a split second of perception prolonged. What at first seemed the inappropriate union of discordant terms ('fontaine' and 'narrative') now appears as a truly exalting alliance of contraries.
The text of 'Les premiers instants' offers similar harmonious discords. (pp. 802-04)
In a sense the entire text is devoted to defining its first word, 'Nous'. Paradoxically, it accomplishes this task not through delimitation or exclusion, the usual methods of definition, but by a gesture of opening up, of inclusion. The self (already expanded somewhat by the choice of 'Nous' over 'Je') is rapidly and thoroughly effaced as a subject that stands apart from and gazes upon a scene as object. Rather, it is invaded and given identity by a series of ineffable perceptions, which it nonetheless formulates and in so doing endows with existence. Subject and object thus create each other through a fruitful dialectic. (p. 804)
As it moves from its first word to its last, Char's poem dramatizes phenomenology's notion of intentionality. Perceiver and perceived fit into an overarching scheme that both exceeds them and permits the experience of dévoilement, the unveiling of being, to occur. For the 'subject' in this case ('Nous') exists only to the extent that it is annihilated as a private, closed entity and reborn in each and every one of its 'objects', where it finds its only real delineation. Furthermore, for Char poetry and truth are synonymous, while an individual poem is 'lumière, apport de l'être à la vie' ['light bringing being to life']. What 'Les premiers instants' shows us is that poetry can be the means by which we lose our separate selves and accede to the fullness of being, to truth….
[In the poem 'Front de la rose'] time, in a way peculiar to Char alone perhaps, is suspended, the present instant isolated. What is specifically lopped off is the past, and we are totally at one with our immediate perception of the rose. But present time in Char, if it obliterates past time, always implies future time, or, more precisely, a leaning or a straining toward the unexpected not yet ordered gift of the unknown, toward 'l'inespéré' ['the unexpected']. Also, Char's present is not stillness but movement, not concentration of the self in frozen recollection, but headlong dispersion of the self throughout the endless pathways of experience, be they rosy or thorny, wild or tamed. (p. 805)
In Char's poetic universe the true opposite of light, especially sunlight, is rain. But here too the polarity is slippery. In 'Front de la rose', for example, the walking figure at the beginning of paragraph two, a positive presence in Char, goes far toward neutralizing the menacing associations of 'sur la terre des pluies' ['on the ground of the rains']. The title of a recent collection by Char offers an even more striking case of harmonious discord involving rain: Dans la pluie giboyeuse…. A cloud bursts and then rain falls, thereby losing its once great height and unity. Rainfall as centreless settling toward formlessness diametrically opposes the image of the rising swarm that is central to Char's poetry. But by modifying his noun with 'giboyeuse' ['full of game'] the poet counterbalances the negative weight of 'pluie'. To be in the game-rich rain is perhaps not such an unhappy fate after all.
One prose poem in Dans la pluie giboyeuse ['Bienvenue'] has an exceptionally high density of subtly interwoven and revelatory contradictions. The poem's title alone, 'Bienvenue', strongly hints that a heightened, future-oriented moment has been reached, the importance of which eclipses all past time or at least relegates it to a purely waiting or prefatory status. As in the case of 'Les premiers instants' and 'Front de la rose', the present instant, cut off from what has been and turned toward what is to come, will in all likelihood focus on itself. (pp. 806-07)
The poem's basic conflict involves order and disorder, with Char clearly favouring the latter. Under the rubric disorder we find lack of symmetry, youth, future orientation, rising flight, joy, a fervent ode, forgetfulness, and the sun; while under order we see hatred, gigantic rot, hard fixity, reductive shaping, descent into the abyss of hell, and, by implication, the past. Though totally schematic, this two-way breakdown does not fundamentally misrepresent 'Bienvenue', which seems to dramatize Char's own admission that 'l'obsession de la moisson et l'indifférence à l'Histoire sont les deux estrémités de mon arc' ['the obsession of the harvest and the indifference to history are the two extremities of my bow']. The poet would rather harvest the peak of the here and now than mould what has gone by into History.
'Bienvenue' ends as it begins, with a hortatory command. But now it is wished that concrete and abstract, material and moral, merge, that written immortality (the fervent ode?) be both the stone in which it is inscribed and the lesson it conveys. Yet leading into and undermining whatever optimism the wish may generate is the implicit avowal of a total context of falsehood, a global war of lies: 'Mentons en espoir à ceux qui nous mentent' ['We lie hoping to those who lie to us']. On examining these words closely, however, we note that the symmetry between liar and liar is not perfect. The phrase 'en espoir' ['hoping'] destroys the statement's balance and dilutes its pessimism by introducing, literally, the element of hope, hope that a lie will become a truth, that contradictions will cease to exist as such, that order and disorder will become one and the same.
The vitalizing imbalance that the phrase 'en espoir' injects into an otherwise perfectly balanced statement actualizes the poem's second sentence: 'L'asymétrie est jouvence' ['asymmetry is youth']. This brief remark, moreover, provides us with a major key to Char's poetry. His contradictions, never balanced, always gravitating toward identity, have a dynamism, an electric élan, as if they did indeed spring from 'la fontaine de jouvence' ['the fountain of youth']. Char's present, for example, stands between past and future, but it pulsates precisely because it lists in the direction of the future, because of an imbalance without which there would be only stasis, paralysis.
The first sentence in 'Bienvenue' also resonates far beyond its immediate context: 'Ah! que tu retournes à ton désordre, et le monde au sien' ['Ah, that you return to your disorder, and the world to its own']. Char, we now see, begins this poem the way he ends 'Commune présence', accepting entropy as the inevitable fate of all and everything. At the same time, however, and again as he does in the closing lines of 'Commune présence', the poet transforms that dreadful knowledge into something positive. (pp. 807-08)
In 'Commune présence', and in one way or another throughout all of Char, poetry and life are not distinct but coextensive, the former being simply the tragic, contradictory sense of the latter. If in this poem Char expresses both disgust with the idea of submission … and commitment to it …, he does so because the two responses co-exist in him. Such contradictions abound in his work, giving it a steady pulse beat and an immense tensile strength, just as they abound in life, causing it to breathe and making it impregnable to any sure penetration, impossible of any definitive sorting out. His poetry creates not symbols which distance us from life but contradictions which draw us ever closer to life's mysterious core, to that leap, that contact and that spark which, paradox of paradoxes, form the vital centre of cosmic disintegration:
Dans le chaos d'une avalanche, deux pierres s'épousant au bond purent s'aimer nues dans l'espace. L'eau de neige qui les engloutit s'étonna de leur mousse ardente.
(p. 808)
Robert W. Greene, "René Char, Poet of Contradiction," in The Modern Language Review (© Modern Humanities Research Association 1971), Vol. 66, No. 4, October, 1971, pp. 802-09.
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