for us to realize the full expectations of our desire, and our accomplishments are all the less significant since they are made in the obscurity of private, individual lives, “à l'insu de notre âge” (1). The bitter fact is that “La Passante-Servante, tantôt frêle tantôt forte” (2), Char's metaphor perhaps for the fleeting passage of life and of a poet's intermittently strong and frail service to an ideal of enlightenment of being through art, can only hope to “perce[r] l'ombre”, sparkle briefly in a flash of brilliance before fading back into the vast oblivion of the dark.

Not only do we find ourselves caught between opposing postulations, symbolized here and ubiquitously in Char by light and dark and the mountain's summit and base, but our movement through time is frustrated by a nostalgia for the past (an impossible desire to return to the source) and a fear of the future's only certain promise, death, or, as the poet puts it in strophe 3, “nous nous tenons, notre existence durant, à mi-chemin du berceau séduisant et de la terre douteuse”. Moreover, the self itself is divided (“nous nous tenons”), and the human dilemma of living on “l'entrouvert” (OC [Oeuvres complètes] 411)⁴ between antinomous forces of the exterior world is further aggravated by an inner dichotomy and estrangement, since “Je” indeed “est un autre”.

But there was a primordial epoch, the poet suggests in the closing strophe of part one, when divisions were not merely antagonistic and man was wondrously one with himself and the world, like Lascaux's hunter-artist wedded to the beasts he stalked through the intimacy of mortal combat and sacred symbols of reverential awe:

Merveilleux moment que celui où l'homme n'avait nul besoin de silex, de brandons pour appeler le feu à lui mais où le feu surgissait sur ses pas, faisant de cet homme une lumière de toujours et une torche interrogative.

(4)

Modern humanity, alienated from production by the very instruments of technology meant to ease the burdens of survival, can only marvel at this enigma of synthesis and fulfillment. Contact with nature was not mediated, like flint to the production of the flame. Fire, Heraclitus' primary element, was in and of man, inseparable from the Logos; matter and spirit emanated brilliantly and harmoniously in this magnificant creature so innocent and authentic in his curiosity about the world. That golden age has passed, irretrievably, a paradise lost never to be regained.

As if to sublimate his sense of loss and recuperate it through the sonorous beauty of the lyric, Char opens the second part of “Riche de larmes” with two verse strophes that transform the poetic vision articulated in the first part into pure symbol and sound. In one of the strophes, a dialectic of “Dépliement” and “Repli” is evoked in the image of a branch from which the cracked bark (“this mortal coil”) seems on the verge of being blown off by the wind. In the other, the opposition is incorporated in the juxtaposed images of wet dew and parching salt:

Lacrymale la rosée;
Vespéral le sel.

(6)

The antithetical structure of the couplet is underscored by the contrasting feminine and masculine grammatical modes, but the water of the dew combines with the salt to produce the synthetic admixture of tears shed in the vesperal twilight of a waning life. Nonetheless, the richness of the sonorities, brimming with assonance and alliteration, embues the lament with the plaintive beauty of a requiem (“Lacrimosa dies illa”).

These and all the ensuing strophes are marked by a preoccupation with dialectical antithesis and synthesis, always typical of Char, but presented here with an unrelenting sense of urgency. The fragmented, aphoristic nature of the discrete utterances, replete with oxymorons, also casts them in a decidedly Heraclitean mold. If one theme predominates, it is the motif of “souffrance” intimated in the poem's title, hinted at in part one and now thematicized overtly in strophes 6-10, from the evocation of lachrymal dew through allusions to suffering associated with time: “cette souffrance a duré toute ma vie” (7). In all cases, the suffering is related to a fragmenting and frustrating disunity, involving self (“à mon corps et à mon esprit défendant”), otherness (“à l'écoute de l'interlocuteur”) or the experience of time:

Nous sommes désunis dans nos mille motifs.
Demain ne nous suffit pas,
Demain devrait suffire.
Douloureux sera demain,
Tel hier.

(8)

In this indictment of sheer endurance without satisfaction, underscored by the three repetitions of demain (“tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow …”) with the drumbeat of repeated d's sounding a dirge, the poet situates human being at the juncture of two infinities, past and future, the one receding irretrievably, the other approaching relentlessly and uncertainly and always “before its time” (3). No mention of the present, for it, like the consciousness that inhabits it, is merely a site, continuously occupied and abandoned, a catch-all of becoming ineluctably wedged between intangible and uncontrollable extremes. Strophe 14 very pithily sums up the poet's cynical opinion of “la condition humaine”:

L'homme n'est-il que la poche fourre-tout d'un inconnu postnommé dieu? Pressenti, jamais touché? Tyran et capricieux?

If, in its pitiful state, humanity harbors intimations of immortality and an absolute divinity, such a whimsical tyrant, the poet implies, is neither knowable nor worth being known.

In Char's Heraclitean cosmos of flux and contradiction, however, the dialectic must produce occasional, if fleeting, expressions of the one. In fact the poet celebrates, in an earlier work, the presocratic philosopher's “exaltante alliance des contraires”, adding that

Il voit en premier lieu en eux la condition parfaite et le moteur indispensable à produire l'harmonie … Le poète peut alors voir les contraires—ces mirages ponctuels et tumultueux—aboutir, leur lignée immanente se personnifier, poésie et vérité, comme nous savons, étant synonymes.

(“Partage formel”, OC 159)

In “Riche de larmes”, the outlook is much less enthusiastic and optimistic. The exalting alliance personified as truth in the poem has become “La brusque alliance de l'âme avec des mots en butte à leurs ennemis” (10). When soul and words come together to produce the poem's burst of harmony, the alliance is “brusque”, that is, rude, brutal, unexpected, the product of toil, suffering and an all-too-fickle muse. It does provide a release from the prison of contradictions and from all the obstacles that block and frustrate the creative act, but “Cette levée d'écrou n'est qu'un passage” (10). Poetry for Char has always been a deliverance (“La seule liberté, le seul état de liberté que j'ai éprouvé sans réserve, c'est dans la poésie que je l'ai atteint” [19]), but it is the brevity of the reprieve that the poet emphasizes in this late work.

Consider the following two strophes:

L'art est fait d'oppression, de tragédie, criblées discontinûment par l'irruption d'une joie qui inonde son site, puis repart.

(17)

Laissons l'énergie et retournons à l'énergie. La mesure du Temps? L'étincelle sous les traits de laquelle nous apparaissons et redisparaissons dans la fable.

(18)

In Char's pessimistic presentation of the human plight, lack of freedom (“oppression”) and inescapable fatality (“tragédie”) are the givens that are ironically “riddled” by scattered and spontaneous invasions of quickly dissipating joy. So it is with human being, caught in the cycle of inviolable natural laws like “the conservation of energy”, a fully determined process in which lives are mere sparks of electricity flashing and fading in an electromagnetic field of constant kilowattage. And it is the poet's painful awareness of his own waning, cracking, deteriorating self—“le front souffrant, strié, comme un tableau noir d'école communale”—that gives urgency to his desire to create, even in the face of impending doom: “Vite, il faut semer, vite, il faut greffer, tel le réclame cette grande Bringue, la Nature; écoeuré, même harassé, il me faut semer” (9). Time presses, is running out (“Un sablier trop belliqueux se coule” [30]), but seed once sown still needs time to germinate, take root, mature. Production of the text, moreover, is arduous (“La zone d'écriture si difficile d'accès” [20]), an “unending combat” between the referent and the sign, reality and its representation (“le nom sans la chose” [24]); and the poetic consciousness, a nothingness (“Je suis cet absent”) seeking being, inhabits that gulf, a threshold of relentless present becoming, where future meets past and the idea the thing, to spark the poem's sudden illumination of being.

It is not surprising, then, that the aging poet, for whom “le deuil est à peu près constant” (29) and whose paranoia amid hostile forces has made him feel “entouré d'ennemis” (25) and thus suspicious of others, turns inward (“Je me suis immergé” [23]), seeking solace in sleep: “Terre arable, sommeil intelligent et prodigue jusqu'au sang, s'il désire s'échapper” (22). This sleep, though, evinced repeatedly in the closing strophes, proves not to be an escape, but rather a slow and steady surrender to extinction, as death indifferently and inexorably takes hold. The poet, helpless and yet painfully conscious, can only wait and watch nervously, suspiciously, as the body clings to life, slipping in and out of sleep, until it finally fails to awaken: “J'endure lorsque j'étouffe et que tu rentres au sommeil. Epiage” (27). This penultimate moment is symbolized (in the penultimate strophe) by one last allusion to fire, which contrasts markedly with the earlier celebration of ancient man's enlightening torch: “la bougie s'écoeure de vivre” (29). It's not enough that the flame must flicker and die unwillingly before its term, but consciousness must also witness the decline and the body suffer through the agony of its undoing, until a point of utter disgust with living is reached that yields astonishingly, if inevitably, to a pain-relieving thanatos.

“Riche de larmes” thus involves not only disclosures of being but, in particular, of being-toward-death and of its concomitant anxiety. Although one of Char's darker introspections, it does illuminate the decline toward death, the poet valliantly transmuting his own raw experience into an essence-revealing epiphany. It is in this sense a testament, not only to the tragedy of human entrapment in time and bewildering uncertainty, but also to the tenacity of the creative will that turns adversity into verses and finds richness in tears.

Notes

1. René Char, Les Voisinages de Van Gogh (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), p. 39. Numbers appearing in parentheses not preceded by a siglum are to the thirty strophes of René Char's “Riche de larmes”, Eloge d'une soupçonnée (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), pp. 7-11. The other works cited in this article are identified by sigla. OC: René Char, Oeuvres complètes, Ed. Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1983); V: Jean Voellmy, “Comment lire René Char”, in three parts, Les Lettres romanes 34, 1 and 2-3 (février, mai-août 1980): 3-191.

2. Michael Bishop's study of this volume, “Ce peu qui nous tient éveillés: Les Voisinages de Van Gogh”, Europe 66, 705-06 (janvier-février 1988): 112-19, is highly recommended. This issue features several other interesting pieces devoted to Char, including Daniel Leuwers' “Repères chronologiques” (120-24), which updates the poet's life and works to 1987. Another recent and important contribution to Char studies is the special issue of Sud, “Actes du colloque de Tours” (1985), which joins the well-known special numbers of L'Arc (1963), Liberté (1968), Cahiers de l'Herne (1971) and World Literature Today (1977). In addition to the established studies of Char by Blanchot, Bataille, Rau, Richard, La Charité, Caws, Lawler, Cranston, et al., the following are some notable recent analyses: Nancy Piore, Lightning: The Poetry of René Char (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1981); Jean Voellmy's article cited in the previous note; Jean-Claude Mathieu, La Poésie de René Char ou le sel de la splendeur, 2 vols. (Paris: Corti, 1985), which contains an excellent bibliography; Roger Payet-Burin, René Char, poète de la poésie (Paris: Nizet, 1985).

3. Since the text is a hybrid of verse and prose poetry, a problem of vocabulary arises concerning the appropriate term to describe the individual sections. The term “paragraph” is obviously inadequate, since there are versified stanzas, and even the French “aliéna” (“aliena” in English would seem to be the obvious neologism for it), although certainly preferable to “paragraph” for the description of the indented units of a prose poem, is not appropriate for the non-indented verses. For lack of a more adequate general term, I shall use “strophe”, which stresses the poetic nature of the divisions. Prose poetry since Rimbaud is decidedly more poetic than prosaic, as Voellmy affirms in his description of modern poetry as “antiprose”: “Il y a belle lurette que nous savons que tout ce qui n'est point prose est vers, et tout ce qui n'est point vers est prose. Mais le fait que la poésie moderne est l'antiprose, un discours où le code de la langue est violé pour fonder un nouvel ordre linguistique sur les ruines de l'ancien, n'est pas encore entré dans tous les esprits” (V 8).

4. In “Dans la marche” the poet writes: “Nous ne pouvons vivre que dans l'entrouvert, exactement sur la ligne hermétique de partage de l'ombre et de la lumière”.