[In the following essay, Caws discusses expressions of morality in Char's poetry.]

I LIFE AND EARLY TEXT

In his preface to La Nuit talismanique (Talismanic Night) Char describes the psychological atmosphere of his childhood, presenting an unforgettable picture of his parents: “My father had courteous, shining eyes, good and never possessive. … My mother seemed to touch everything and to reach nothing, at once busy, indolent, and sure of herself. The strong lines of their contrasting natures clashed with each other, their intersection catching fire.” (La Nuit talismanique, p. 9)¹ The ten year old saw his father returning more and more exhausted each evening from the family plaster factory: he died after a long illness, in which “a forest of oaks was burned in the fireplace.” From the powerful effect of this page, one gesture stands out: the father laying his hand on the boy's shoulder with a weight which seems to carry into the present. And in one portrait by Hierlé, the father's look seems to show a similar extension into the time of our reading: Char points out “in the present of his gaze a dream which is not his alone, but whose listener we are together” (NT [La Nuit talismanique], 9).

I shall sketch rapidly the few lines of Char's history which are essential, and of which each reader is himself a listener, together now with the poet. Then the poetry takes its own route with its own marked and unmarked points, according to an interior dynamics of its own, in the spirit of Char's definition:

Le poème est l'amour réalisé du désir demeuré désir.
The poem is the fulfilled love of desire as it remains desire.

(Sur la poésie, p. 10)²

For enthusiasts of biographical and geographical anecdote, there is no dearth of detail. For example, the poem “Jouvence des Névons” recounts the poet's childhood in a deserted village where the men are away at war. “The child, a stream, and a rebellious nature converge in one single being, modified according to the years. It shines and fades by turn, according to the event, on the horizon's steps” (Les Matinaux [The Matinals], 1st ed).³ Accompanying the scene, a cricket is still and yet all the more present for its stillness. The tone of that one poem could be considered characteristic of much of Char's writing, whether it deals with childhood, adolescence, manhood, or an advancing age: personal and vaguely mysterious, placed in a distant time and yet informing the moment of writing and all the subsequent moments of reading.

From the next period comes the collection Arsenal, of major importance for the understanding of the poet's future work. A copy of the collection was given to Eluard,⁴ whose enthusiasm caused him to present Char to the Surrealist group, with which Char was associated from 1930-1934, the period of Artine and the poems in Abondance viendra (Abundance Will Come), among others. From this arsenal, where sufficient weapons for all future skirmishes are stored, we might consider just the poem “Voici” (“Here Is”) as an example of the possible interior linking of life and text.

Voici l'écumeur de mémoire
Le vapeur des flaques mineures
Entouré de linges fumants
Etoile rose et rose blanche
O caresses savantes, ô lèvres inutiles!
Here is memory's plunderer
The mist of minor pools
Surrounded by steaming linen
Rose star and white rose
Oh knowing caresses, oh useless lips!

(Le Marteau sans maître [The Hammer with No Master], p. 30)⁵

If we compare this text with a far longer one from Le Tombeau des secrets (The Tomb of Secrets) (an early volume, some of whose few poems are taken up and revised in Arsenal), the difference is startling, seemingly indicative of a sharp reduction in sentimentality. This particular development will determine the course of much of Char's writing and of his life, in both of which the containing force of the personality prevents any prolonged lapse into self-pity or any tendency to shed lacrimae rerum either from nostalgia or from a lucid observation of the world around. As is true of Char's method in general—that “enlèvement-embellissement” or removing-in-order-to-beautify of which one could be tempted to say too much, thus ruining the point—the details of the original anecdote drop away, leaving only a condensed remainder, all the more forceful for the brevity of its trace.

Compare these lines from the longer, unpublished first version (twenty-three lines in all), called “Flexibilité de l'oubli” (“Flexibility of Forgetfulness”), which include the starting point for the poem quoted above:

Sans mille bras pour plonger dans les pores
Tâter le suc de la douleur
O souvenir aigu des soirs sans riposte
Sans le claquement d'un adieu
Chargé à blanc de repentir
Sans l'écumeur de mémoire
Avide de ce qu'il ne comprend pas
Vorace de ce qu'il redoute
Boule élastique ce coeur
Percé de flasques mamelles
Poches soudées sans espoir de déséquilibre
Les putains aux portes cochères
Eteignent leurs ombres
Se lancent leurs linges fumants
Etoile rose et rose blanche
Candélâbres en mains les étreignent
En caresses savantes
O lèvres inutiles
Without a thousand arms to dive into the pores
To try the sap of pain
Oh sharp memory of evenings with no retort
Without the slam of a farewell
Loaded with the blanks of repentance
Without the plunderer of memory
Avid for what he does not understand
Voracious for what he fears
Elastic ball this heart
Pierced with breasts aslack
Pockets soldered with no hope of unbalance
The whores at gateways
Extinguish their shadows
Hurl at one another their steaming linen
Rose star and white rose
Candlesticks in hand embrace them
With knowing caresses
Oh useless lips

As the poem continues, a dead woman's body appears at each ring of the doorbell: all these elements, the picturesque (girls squabbling), the sensual (caresses of meadows, of undergarments), and the sentimental (repentance, farewells, nostalgia in the evening) together with grotesque deformations (the rubber ball and the breasts) disappear to leave only the quintessence of the experience. The presentation, marked as such by the self-reflecting title: “Voici,” gives in fact only that which is sufficiently enduring as a résumé of the past moments: the knowing caresses are generalized beyond the grasp of their original donors, and the uselessness now stretches beyond the domain of the lips alone to imply, or so it would appear, the final futility of language itself.

Not just an example of textual condensation, this definitive alteration can also be seen as a model of the poetic and personal development Char manifests throughout his more than fifty years of poetic production. In each period the raw matter of the future text is observed, explored, and condensed.

Artine, a long prose poem on dream, and the densely beautiful prose poems of Abondance viendra date from Char's Surrealist period, when he was particularly close to Breton and to Eluard: the language of these poems somewhat resembles in image and tone many poems of other Surrealists, for instance, the violent refusal of commonplace diction, and the will to attack, which characterize even the title Le Marteau sans maître, relieved by an occasional lyric gentleness. Furthermore, the crystal transparency of Artine, who is also a river, and all the alchemical themes are familiar to the readers of Surrealism. Char's affection and companionship are deep, once he has chosen his friends, and it cannot have been easy for him to make a formal break with some of his Surrealist companions—but individual conscience and conscious individual work had finally to triumph, for him, over collective production, and commitment even over friendship. In a letter of 1963, he explains: “Because what we were seeking was not discoverable by many, because the life of the mind, a single-strand life, contrary to that of the heart, is only fascinated—in a poetic temptation—by an unapproachable object which shatters in fragments when, having overcome the distance, we are about to grasp it” (Recherche de la base et du sommet [Search for the Base and the Summit], p. 45).⁶

But the “common” or “shared” presence with other poets and other friends which is described in “Commune présence,” the final poem of Le Marteau sans maître, makes it clear that the new urgency is highly individual even though the concern is more general:

Tu es pressé d'écrire
Comme si tu étais en retard sur la vie
S'il en est ainsi fais cortège à tes sources
Hâte-toi
Hâte-toi de transmettre
Ta part de merveilleux de rébellion de bienfaisance
Effectivement tu es en retard sur la vie
La vie inexprimable
La seule en fin de compte à laquelle tu acceptes de t'unir
Celle qui t'est refusée chaque jour par les êtres et par les choses
Dont tu obtiens péniblement de-ci de-là quelques fragments décharnés
Au bout de combats sans merci
You are in a rush to write
As if you were of a slower pace than life
If this be so accompany your sources
Hasten
Hasten to transmit
Your portion of wonder rebellion good-will
In truth you are behind in life
Life inexpressible
The only one you accept at last to join with
Alone refused you every day by beings and by things
Whence you take laboriously here and there a few fleshless fragments
After implacable struggles

(MM [Le Marteau sans maître], 145)

Aware now of his individual task—the neighborly and collective venture of poetry—Char finds even in the center of this common presence, an uncommon singularity: the poet elected both by his peers and by the gods is not unaware of his election.⁷ The necessity of writing and of acting, the choice and the moral urgency combined can be said to involve the man as poet whose presence is unique as well as dominant.

Now the first part of the poem “Commune présence” begins with an illumination quite different from the hermetic and alchemical gleam of the earlier poems—included in Le Marteau sans maître for example, in Abondance viendra. The light is rather open than veiled; in fact, the sun appears as a messenger heralding the coming day: “Eclaireur comme tu surviens tard” (“Light-bearer how late you come”). This poem, with its sense of urgency of a mission felt and accepted, can be seen to play the same role for what we might call the first period of Char's poetic life as does the poem “A***,” written in 1953, for another period.

The “common presence” of the title indicates not only the now renewed present of the poet in the world, and the presence of the poet in the text he shares with us, into which the record of his life is intricately interwoven, but again the exterior companionship developing coextensively with the inner experience—as if, in fact, exterior and interior presence were to depend on each other. And yet as the poem ends, the reader is conscious that this common presence is not to be fully shared after all, that there will always remain a part of mystery: “Nul ne décelera votre union” (“None will divulge your union”). Suddenly the question arises as to what other sort of presence Char may have had in mind, what other union, whose outline we are only permitted to glimpse. This very strong sense of withdrawal is constant in Char's work, where reticence finally prevails over self-expression. As he phrases it elsewhere, the poem is the only refuge of privacy for his “too exposed face.” Thus a poetry opening onto a space common to all although set apart, closed to any facile gaze, may not reveal the secret “union” of the poet, while nevertheless taking its strength from that union.

II SHARED PRESENCE

A poet's moral position may often seem to bear little relation to his work. Discussions of commitment, of political attitude are of value only in specific cases and rarely insofar as concerns the text itself. It goes without saying, furthermore, that the critic's own position can unconsciously influence his attitude, try as he may to prevent any leakage between personal belief and professional analysis. From an outsider's point of view, the comments may thus invalidate themselves. For example, Michel Carrouges, a devout Catholic, author of one of the best books on Breton and Surrealism,⁸ was finally attacked by the Surrealists for venturing to speak of them before an audience of Catholic intellectuals: his “prejudice” may not seem obvious in his remarks, but the Surrealists' viewpoint is consistent with their theory. In general, I would heartily disagree with the narrow-minded position that would have only churchgoers speak of Claudel, only Marxists speak of Marx, and only practicing Surrealists speak of Surrealism—to say nothing of only French critics writing on French poets. In the writing on René Char, a greater openness than usual is felt. For example in the large volume devoted to him by Les Cahiers de L'Herne, the testimonies of his fellow résistants in the Vaucluse are found side by side with those of his fellow poets and writers, and an assortment of critics and students of his works, French and non-French,⁹ of widely differing attitudes.

Poetics is taken here in its widest sense, that of poiein, “to make,” so that the working out of a theory should be valid not just for the writing of poems but for living and acting in general. Much the same extension must be applied to all of Char's statements, which are at once directed toward an individual self—privileged because responsible—and a world of unique beings, themselves chosen by the simple choice they have made to read these formulations and to welcome this kind of poetics. Here, poetry is redefined:

Poésie, la vie future à l'intérieur de l'homme requalifié.
[Poetry, future life within requalified man.]

(SP [Sur la poésie], 10)

In Char's view, a poem is never intended as an ornament to living but is meant to function within its universe. In each successive volume, a few statements on poetry are gathered into a series, so that the definitions accumulate. Elsewhere, we have compared the style of these aphorisms to the éclats or flashes of a luminous whole, furnishing an uneven illumination. What is true of the successive groups of aphorisms on poetry we shall be discussing is true of all the series of brief statements making up what we think of as Char's poetics. Of this aphoristic form compared by Jean Starobinski to the Baudelairean Fusées, spurts of poetic prose,¹⁰ Char says that it is like a button suited to a buttonhole: if it fits, it fits exactly. Or that it is like an answer to an emptiness, individual each time; and finally, that it is like a tiny morsel of bread hardened in the pocket: it lasts, and it nourishes, if it responds exactly to the hunger one has. Somehow, the aphorisms in general seem to answer needs both poetic and moral; each statement made for poetics holds also for morality, hence the title of the present chapter.

The aesthetic judgments Char makes are usually in favor of a contemporary version of the golden mean, to be more closely identified with perfect measure than with puritanical restraint: he terms the process, as we have already seen, an aesthetic trimming (“enlèvement-embellissement”) and compares it to a gardener's task, or to that of a tree pruner. The branch removed permits the others a greater range; the limited number of sprigs on a plant augments their chances. Char's own work, as revealed in his manuscripts, makes this process clear and proves the aesthetic point. When reduced in number from their original profusion, the images lose their possibly “precious” tinge to take on a more necessary character. Writing becomes a moral work also, not merely in its message but in its difficult stylistic being.

The first statement of a consistent poetics appears in Moulin premier (First Mill), appended to Le Marteau sans maître, and so entitled perhaps because it is the first harvest of wheat which must then be processed into flour. It is noticeable that the image includes a human construction, whereas the previous Premières alluvions (First Alluvia) had not. Here in Moulin premier, even if under a different metaphor, the alluvia are gathered up once more, and the harvest yields grains of different sizes and usefulness. Of these, three, which can be extracted and compared, are of particular importance to us and should be considered before moving on to the complete series.

LXIII. We are sure that a poem functions when its formula is found to work, and this is so, in spite of the unknown quality of its dependencies.

LXV. That at any demand a poem can efficiently, as a whole as in fragments, throughout its course, be confirmed, that is, match its divagations, proves to me its ineffable reality. …

LXVI. That at any demand a poem must necessarily be proved implies for me the episodic moment of its reality.

So the poem must be seen as coherent: here we think of Char's later statements on the essential order of its parts, whatever their apparent freedom of disposition. Char will call this an “insurgent order.” How does the poem express itself—to the outside, or only to the inner vision? The successive statements answer this only half-rhetorical question by successive clarification and differentiation, since poem and poetics must adapt themselves, as surely as the poet himself, to circumstance. “You must be the man of rain and the child of fine weather” (MM, 140). It is a matter of knowing how to adjust.

In fact, Moulin premier opens with the lines of a long prose-like sentence with the typographical form of verse, on the subject of a “productive knowledge of the Real.” There we can discern the inexorable geological ordering of certain eccentric island-like formations which obscure the voluptuousness of love, and certain skeletons hinting at ancient epochs of species, geographically scattered, which explains the word play on “espaces/espèces.” The latter is reminiscent of other word plays such as the “sleep washing the placers” in the poem “Croesus” in the Poèmes militants of 1932: the original expression “placer” being at once the ore deposits in a stream (which explains the title figure, Croesus, whom we associate with gold) and the Spanish word for pleasure. Thus sleep is regarded as the bringer of riches and the purifier of carnal pleasures.

The serious point in this opening text is that the knowledge must be collectively satisfying; nevertheless, the text ends with the poet's individual invocation of light as the other member, with him, of a couple to be granted the experience of reality. This opening poem joins immediately with the first paragraph of the prose maxims which follow: “An inhabitant of globes. The childish ambition of the poet is to become a living being of space. Backward from his own destination” (MM, 123). This theme, already present in 1934, becomes, or remains, a major element in the subsequent works, wherein Char will compare himself to a meteor falling to earth, then reabsorbed in the atmosphere as a constellation, of Orion or of Orpheus returned to the heavens: the end of Le Nu perdu (Nakedness Lost) predicts the Orion poems of Aromates chasseurs¹¹ for its texts are clearly arranged like the stars in that constellation. As a first step in the poetic operation, it is essential to accept, even to welcome, a certain fragmentation without permitting this separation of parts to destroy one's own personality. On the metaphoric level, the operation is clear: the invasion of space must be submitted to, as traditionally, the logical coherence of the personality can be invaded by moments of inspiration, as a considered series of acts can be penetrated by a spontaneous flash. For a visual equivalent, we might consider Hugo's celebrated image of the beggar's cloak riddled with holes, through which the stars shine. That is, against—or through—the fabric black like night, comes an intermittent illumination, all the more precious for its contrast with the obscure. Thus the regular is made valuable by the irregular, the constant by the inconstant, and dark by light, in a reversal of expectation closely related by its tone and its meaning to Mallarmé's themes of shipwreck, constellation, and poem. The image of the cloak with holes becomes rich or diamantine, as absence changes to presence, so that the metaphor of reversal has a material and a moral component. In Char's maxim, to “suffer” or permit an invasion such as that of space is to take an active role in one's own deconstruction and reconstruction, while, on the other hand, it is to oppose one's own destruction. Thus the initially active desire is altered to a passive acceptance before a final return to a strongly active mode with a warning attached. The dialectical development is manifest even in the grammar: ambition de devenir r subir r “se démanteler sans se détruire” (ambition to become r to suffer r to take oneself apart without destroying oneself).

If I have gone into such lengthy detail over one maxim, unambiguous in appearance, it is for at least two reasons. First, the systematic positive reevaluation of certain functions which might ordinarily be considered negative ones is characteristic of Char's way of seeing; and secondly, as stated above, the theme itself is stressed in Char's future work. A coherent center is implied within these statements in which, as Char points out in the next part of the maxims, “to impose itself all the more, logic takes on the traits of the absurd” (MM, 124).

On the formal level, appropriately, the seventy prose fragments of Moulin premier themselves resemble the taking apart of the self, the white of the page dividing the verbal matter into segments; the separate statements show up as black holes on a white page or then as partial illuminations against an emptiness. The reversal is akin to the one already suggested in affinity with the poetry of Mallarmé: a constellation interpreted one way or the other, page and sky, writing and stars.¹² Elsewhere, we read: “La quantité de fragments me déchire” (“The quantity of fragments tears me apart”), and we cannot tell whether the poet or the poem is speaking. In either case this negative is more positive than it might seem.

“L'étincelle dépose” (“The spark deposits”). So reads one of the next fragments. The poet can declare martial law, if he so chooses, electrifying or magnetizing the fields of words, like Breton's and Soupault's Champs magnétiques (Magnetic Fields), as if sending to battle the warring partners, the opposition of substance and space, gleam and emptiness, the dark of ink and the white of the page, reflection and, most important, intuition, which wins out by arousing all the echoes and resonances possible, giving birth to all the possible forms of poetry. The referential background is particularly dense here, even more so than in the later statements on poetry. The “occult properties of phosphorus” and the opaque waters, the “transfusion of the sun” and the coffin's “fecundation,” various male and female images, all these betray the poet's fascination with alchemy, while the image of the phoenix nourished on cinders is related to the traditional fire burning the imagination: “the poet needs more to be ‘passionate’ than to be taught” (MM, 132).

Even after Char's Surrealist period, he will continue to prize the imagination above all else for its total grasp of what may seem only passing but which nevertheless conveys the eternal, as opposed to pedestrian reason and its prudence: “To the despair of reason, the poet never knows how to ‘return home …’” (MM, 133). He dwells often in the moment, as if it were an interior place, and the choice of that place over an external one is not without risk, not only of the miscomprehension of others, but also of his own disappointment. For the moment passes also with all other matter into the mill, to be prepared for the eventual nourishment of the poet and of his companions. Thus the image of the “poème pulvérisé,” the poem ground into powder for a future utilization.

III REFUSAL

In 1942, Char (“le capitaine Alexandre”) was in charge of the Resistance movement in the Basses-Alpes region in southern France. The records and the testimonies of this period reveal the intense courage of the men participating at once in the “furor and mystery” of the epoch, developing throughout a series of experiences often recounted.¹³ More significantly for us, the poet's wartime notebook, Feuillets d'Hypnos,¹⁴ describes the state of mind as well as of the surrounding universe, interior and exterior conditions. The tone is now and again bitter (“infernal duties”), quietly despairing (“We wander near well-rims from which the wells have been removed” [FM, Fureur et mystère, 110]), and vigorously determined (“Belong to the leap. Don't belong to the banquet, its epilogue” [FM, 138]).

Above all, the uncompromising nature of the man stands out, somewhat in the same vein as Breton's “Haughty Confession”: “Absolutely incapable of accepting the fate meted out to me … I am careful not to adapt my own existence to the derisive conditions of all existence here.”¹⁵ Char's equally firm statements have a double resonance: “I shall write no poem of acquiescence” (FM, 114). The tone carries through to a later text, of a parallel brevity, called “Contrevenir” (“Contravening”): “Nous restons gens d'inclémence” (“We remain men for inclemency.”) (LM [Les Matinaux] 201). Whether it be the inclement weather of the maquis or the vicissitudes of a poet's life lived in large part against the current of the Parisian mainstream, the statement remains a true description of the poet himself: René Char, who claims even now the position of a marginal poet, found in the climate of the Resistance his definitive tone.

The poems of 1938 to 1944, grouped under the title, Seuls demeurent (There Remain Only …) already a title of monumental isolation, show a profound realization of what will from now on be seen as poetic morality. Initially this is developed against the background of a terrible experience suffered through: “On the ridge of our bitterness, the dawn of consciousness advances and lays down its silt” (FM, 19). Spain's tragedy too is part of the bitter acquisition of experience. “Punishment! Punishment!” As the sensibility of a whole generation is developed during these years, so is a companionship based on continuing collective struggle. “I've traveled to exhaustion” (FM, 45), explains Char in “Vivre avec de tels hommes” (“To Live With such Men”), and he speaks not just for his own wartime experience but for what was to come after. Just so, the ending of another prose poem—called by a title which seems to set us at some distance from an understanding of the text: “Ne s'entend pas” (“Unheard”)—applies to much of the future work: “No renunciation” (FM, 42). Such a tone chooses to annihilate, for the time it lasts, the line commonly thought to hold between text and life: this is not a literary statement, but rather, a moral declaration.

But the “Refusal Song” which marks the “Début du partisan,” or the beginning of a committed personality and action, sketches the outline of what appears to be a retreat from that common presence. “The poet has returned for a long span of years into the naught of the father. Do not call him, all you who love him. … He who worked suffering into bread is not visible in his glowing lethargy” (FM, 48). It is impossible to consider the maquis of the Resistance as only a place of political commitment, where necessary action is carried out. How not to see it also as an image of a necessary removal from the too open sight as in the passage already quoted: “You are, poem, the repository of darkness on my too exposed face.” Moreover, it forms a parallel to Char's conception of poetry itself. A place committed and yet apart, where action and concealment depend on one another and where the difficulty of the moment seems to strengthen the entire duration of the work: it would be hard to find a better definition of the poem as Char conceives of it. This is a privileged example of the exterior and interior geography to be discussed later.

As the “Refusal Song” ends, a collective performance is once more envisaged, at the instant of liberation: the poet calls again for a “shared presence,” stressing the term, lest we take it too lightly as a mere physical manifestation. From now on, creative privacy joins awareness of number; individual refusal and choice reinforce general commitment. The opinions of Char the partisan and of Char the poet are mutually strengthening.

Poetry consists of action, as Rimbaud said: it consists of judgment also, for poetry is neither to be bought nor facilitated. Among Char's comrades, all of them men destined to face inclemency, the poet, like his poem, endures at once “solitary and multiple,” keeping his margin about him and yet joining with others. His paradoxical temperament is apparent here as elsewhere, visible in substance and in style: “We are torn between the avidity of knowing and the despair of having known” (FM, 96). Or again, “Wed and do not wed your house” (FM, 94), a statement reminiscent of the tragic poem called “The Swift,” the bird who circles about the house and yet is not identified with it, in a flight mediating between the sky's freedom and the inner intimacy. He is felled, like the human heart, for even the least imprisoned among us may be a prisoner to something, if only to doubt: “Doubt is at the origin of all greatness. Historical injustice wears itself out trying not to mention it. That doubt is genius” (FM, 140). But here the poet is careful to distinguish between the genius of doubt and the weakness of uncertainty, which he defines as a wearing away of the senses. Doubt seems to imply for him strength and youth, whereas uncertainty is on the side of the jaded, of that which lingers too long.

And befitting that viewpoint on the importance of time, the best poem will be brief, as are the excerpts in this journal, for practical reasons which luckily coincide with stylistic ones. “I write briefly. I can scarcely absent myself for long.” Poetry is rapidity of perception—another lesson from Rimbaud—and a complete absence of that paralysis which overtakes the too self-conscious writer. “Poetry is, of all clear waters, the least likely to linger at the reflection of its bridges,” we read in A la santé du serpent (Here's to the Snake). The tone prepares such images as that of the meteor appearing in the “Météore du 13 août” (“Meteor of August 13”) and thereafter throughout Char's work. The path of the meteor has a brilliance and an ephemeral quality which makes it an appropriate representation, in its passing, of the poet's own version of his being: “La voie d'or du météore” (“The meteor's golden path”) can also be read, by a slight shift, as “la voix d'or” (“the golden voice”). The metaphors are of brightness and speed: “At the second when you appeared my heart had the whole sky to brighten it. It was noon by my poem” (FM, 202). Thus, in Feuillets d'Hypnos (Leaves of Hypnos), the poet observes, records, and preserves the “infinite faces of the living,” all the while protesting against injustice and capitulation. Political attitude and poetics are meant to merge. The stance taken is to be Char's most familiar one: obstinate, concerned, standing against a time of mediocrity.

In this period, Partage formel (Formal Division) is a deeply optimistic ars poetica (“The poet answers each crumbling of proofs by a volley of future” [FM, 78]), which balances Feuillets d'Hypnos, the journal of the embattled poet who writes only briefly, because he does not care to “absent himself” for long (FM, 94). In like manner, the inner and the outer works find no definite dividing line but rather a juncture. In René Char's unbending attention to the combined problems of poetics and morality, there dominates, from the beginning, his refusal of an easy renown: to claim a special monumental position because of one's past heroic acts would be as reprehensible as taking a facile road when the other, more arduous, is there for the choosing. The description attached in 1948 to the collection Fureur et mystère (Furor and Mystery) begins with the words “The poet, as we know, combines lack and excess, goal and past history. Whence the insolvency of his poems. He is in malediction, that is to say, he takes on perpetual and renascent perils, just as surely as he refuses, with his eyes open, what others accept with theirs closed: the profit of being a poet” (RBS [Recherche de la base et du sommet] 35). Poems, he continues, cannot exist without provocation, nor poets without watchfulness, both moral and aesthetic. “The poet is the part of a man stubbornly opposed to calculated projects.” He may not even consent to a poetic martyrdom, will not die necessarily “on the barricade chosen for him.”

The drastic metaphor must not blind us to the real position taken here, lest it be thought that we would situate René Char in one stance, reducing poetic ambiguity. This is a tricky point, and a sensitive one, which bears thinking about. For, reading Char's aphorisms, many of which have a lofty resonance, we might be tempted to consider the poet only in his heroic guise, for instance, in the position of a man tied to his past, filled now with exactly the same fury and searching for exactly the same mystery as formerly, devoted to exactly the same combination of the two: we might thus take the Fureur and the Mystère to be eternal entities, in eternally lasting proportions. Witness a critic writing on Char's aphoristic style recently: he lamented the poet's attachment to his past at the price of his present.¹⁶ Which is to say that he disregarded—or then found that Char disregarded—the other half of the maxim just quoted about the poet who combines his past with his future goal. We must, of course, permit René Char, insofar as he wishes it, to give the precise weight he chooses to his wartime past. The effect on him was great and the memory has proved ineradicable. Having to abandon all nuance, every shade of hesitation in the face of an actual decision, this necessity changed him forever: “… I want never to forget that I was forced to become—for how long?—a monster of justice and of intolerance, a simplifier, shut off and enclosed, an arctic personage without interest in the fate of anyone who isn't leagued with him to down the dogs of hell” (RBS, 10). But then, afterward, the other seasons replaced that limit-situation, that crisis which, while unforgettable, was not to be resurrected.

“After the conflagration, we believe in effacing its marks, walling up the labyrinth. An exceptional climate cannot be prolonged” (RBS, 15). When Char refused to testify at the trials of war criminals, he proved himself to have mastered that “generosity in spite of oneself” (RBS, 14) that he wanted to acquire. And here he gives us the example of a friend who, the evening after returning from two years in a concentration camp, preferred walking quietly with his dog to denouncing the man who had reported him. This man is plainly one of the few beings the poet would always choose to accompany him, among his multitude of friends, present and absent. And this statement, written as a “Note to Francis Curel,” is of such capital importance for Char's moral position—toward poetry as toward life—that we include it in its entirety here. He considers it, in fact, to be “the most complete statement and comment” upon his poetry, and calls it a letter “in which I have defined, at a crucial moment of my existence, my relation to action, to society, and above all, to poetry, a text furthermore addressed to a man who accompanied my youth, and who survived many years in a German concentration camp” (Letter to author, October 23, 1975).

NOTE TO FRANCIS CUREL (1958)

In the months which followed the Liberation, I tried to put some order into my ways of seeing and feeling which—against my will—a little blood had spotted, and I strove to separate the ashes from the hearthstone of my heart. Like the Ascian, I sought the shade and reinstated that memory which was anterior to me. Refusal to sit in the Court of Justice, to accuse my fellow man in the daily dialogue as it was resumed, a reaffirmed decision to oppose lucidity to well-being, a natural state to honors, those evil mushrooms proliferating in the crevices of drought and in corners tainted after the first spattering of rain. The man who has known and dealt violent death detests the agony of the prisoner. Better by far a certain depth of earth, fallen in the fray. Action, in its preliminaries and its consequences, had taught me that innocence can, mysteriously, pierce through almost everywhere: innocence deluded, innocence unknowing by definition. I am not holding out these attitudes as exemplary. I was simply afraid of being mistaken. Yesterday's fanatics, those creators of a new type of “continuous murderer,” still nauseated me beyond all possibility of punishment. I envisaged only one use for the atomic bomb: eliminating all those, judiciously assembled, who had joined in the exercise of terror, in the application of Nada. Instead, a trial¹⁷ and a disturbing qualifier in the texts of repression: genocide. You know all this, having lived for two years behind the barbed wire of Linz, imagining all day long your body scattered into dust; on the evening of your return among us, you chose to walk in the fields of your countryside, with your dog at your heels, rather than answer the summons from the magistrate wanting to expose to your sight the excrement who had denounced you. To excuse yourself, you said this strange thing: “Because I am not dead, he doesn't exist.” In truth, I only know one law which befits the purpose it assigns itself: martial law in the instant of adversity. In spite of your emaciated and other-worldly appearance, you are willing to agree with me. Generosity in spite of oneself, that was our secret wish, measured by the exact timekeeper of our conscience.

There is a meshing of circumstances which must be intercepted at whatever cost: we must practice a cheerless clairvoyance before it becomes the underhanded consequence of impure alliances and compromise. If in 1944 we had, as a general rule, punished rigorously, we would not blush at meeting every day those dishonored beings, ironic wretches not in the slightest discomfited, while a colorless crowd fills the prisons. Someone may object that the nature of the misdeed has changed, since a merely political frontier always lets evil slip by. But we cannot revive the dead whose tortured bodies were reduced to mud. The man shot by the occupant and his helpers will not awaken in the land next to the one where his head was blown to bits. The truth is that compromise with duplicity has been considerably reinforced among the governing class. Those barnacles are laying in provisions. Does the enigma of tomorrow call for so many precautions? We do not think so. But take care lest the pardoned, those who had chosen to side with crime, should become our tormentors once more, thanks to our levity and a culpable oblivion. They would find a way, over time, to slip Hitlerism into a tradition, to make it legitimate, agreeable even!

After the conflagration, we believe in effacing its marks, in walling up the labyrinth. An exceptional climate cannot be prolonged. After the conflagration, we believe in effacing its marks, walling up the labyrinth, and renewing the sense of civic responsibility. The strategists are not in favor of that. The strategists are the scourge of this world, its evil-smelling breath. In order to foresee, to act, and to correct, they need an arsenal which, lined up, would stretch several times around the globe. Prosecuting the past and securing full power for the future are their sole preoccupations. They are the doctors of agony, the boll-weevils of birth and death. They call science of History the warped conscience permitting them to decimate the joy of a forest in order to set up a subtle work camp, projecting the darkness of their chaos as if it were the light of Knowledge. They will new crops of enemies to rise before them, lest their scythe rust and their enterprising intelligence become paralyzed. Deliberately they exaggerate the fault and underestimate the crime. They destroy harmless opinions and replace them with implacable rules. They accuse the mind of their fellow man of sheltering a cancer analogous to the one they harbor in the vanity of their hearts. They are the whitewashers of putrefaction. Such are the strategists who keep watch in the camps and manipulate the mysterious levers of our lives.

The sight of a bunch of little animals demanding the slaughter of a prey they had not hunted, the consuming artifice of a macabre demagogy, the occasional imitation by our men of the enemy's mentality in his comfortable moments, all that led me to reflect. Premeditation was transmitted. Salvation—how precarious!—seemed to lie only in the feeling of supposed good and outdistanced evil. I then moved up a notch in order to mark the distinctions clearly.

For my lack of enthusiasm in vengeance, a sort of warm frenzy was substituted, that of not losing one essential minute, of giving its full value, at once, to the prodigy of human life in all its relativity. Yes, to restore to their natural fall the thousands of streams that refresh men, dissipating their fever. I wandered untiringly on the edges of this belief, I rediscovered little by little the duration of things, I bettered my seasons imperceptibly, I dominated my just gall, I became daily once again.

I did not forget the crushed visage of the martyrs whose look led me to the Dictator and his Council, his outgrowths and their sequel. Always Him, always them, united in their lie and the cadence of their salvoes! Next came some unpardonable wretches whom we should have afflicted in their exile, resolutely, since the shameful luck of the game had smiled at them. Justice invariably loses out, given the conjunction of circumstances.

When a few sectarian spirits proclaim their infallibility, subjugating the greater number and hitching it to their own destiny to perfect the latter, the Pythia is condemned to disappear. Thus do great misfortunes begin. Our tissues scarcely hold. We live on the slope of a mortal inversion, that of matter complicated infinitely to the detriment of a savoir-vivre, or a natural behavior, both monstrously simplified. The wood of the bush contains little heat, and the bush is chopped down. How preferable an active patience would be! Our own role is to have an influence such that the vein of freshness and of fertility may not be turned away from its land toward the definitive abyss. It is not incompatible, in the same instant, to resume one's relation to beauty, to suffer in oneself, and to be struck, to return the blows and to vanish.

One who possesses some human experience, who has chosen to side with the essential, to the extreme, at least once in his life, is occasionally inclined to express himself in terms borrowed from a teaching of legitimate defense and of self-preservation. His diligence, his distrust are relaxed with difficulty, even when his discretion or his own weakness makes him disapprove this unpleasant leaning. Is it known that beyond his fear and his concern, he aspires to an unseemly vacation for his soul?

So Char returned to peacetime existence, readjusting to a daily cycle, understanding its worth: like the narrator in the prose poem “L'Inoffensif” (“The Inoffensive One”), he learned to control his righteous indignation and to accept the turning of the seasons and the change they inevitably bring, as opposed to the one single moment of crisis. Here we think of the harvest poem, “Redonnez-leur …” (“Restore To Them …”), at once a poem of the tragic acceptance of failure and of a sure triumph. “I bettered my seasons”: the cycle assures continuity and a profound awareness.

IV THE MOUNTAIN

Char is, with a few others, one of those who have “chosen the essential, to the extreme …” (RBS, 17). That expression conveys his deepest sense of morality, manifest in his style. Even the terms “essential” and “extreme,” chosen rather than some diluting formula such as “in some measure” or “often,” reveal Char's absolute and unequivocal, unmodified position. As for the metaphors of morality, he speaks usually of mountains, of climbing and rigor, of the ascent in self-denial necessary to an eventual perspective from the peaks. There is a strong correlation between the elevated sparseness of the setting—the upland bareness so often recurring, particularly in Le Nu perdu¹⁸—and this moral refusal of facile accumulation so that the poor and dry land is made equivalent to a rigorous self-discipline. As the climber divests himself of all his heavy belongings before the final ascent, so the poet is seen to have, or at least to acquire, the nature of an ascetic as well as that of a lover of the earth.

The balance of sparse and abundant, of dry and flowing texts, is quite as marked as that between darker and lighter shades, as, for instance, in La Nuit talismanique (Talismanic Night), where the talismanic notion suggests no less mystery than the obscurity of night itself, as opposed to, or rather complementary to, the idea of Les Matinaux (The Matinals) in all its illumination and in its hope of an always new beginning. At last, the moral fervor itself is sufficient to do away with even the metaphors privileged to describe it. Speaking of the volume that includes most of this prose and of its title, which is at the basis of the present discussion—Recherche de la base et du sommet (Search for the Base and the Summit)—Char explains: “Base and summit, provided that men bestir themselves and diverge, crumble rapidly. But there is the tension of the search. …” Now that tension and that search, in their unceasing moral concern, are sensed as the essential elements in the metaphor, and, as we have seen, Char opts for those elements in their most extreme form. Even the metaphor of the mountain parallels the concern and the extreme choice and reinforces their effect. We shall see its profile rising throughout Char's work, standing out literally against the sky of the Vaucluse, but also figuratively, in the effort and in the bareness sought, in the space of a life and of a work.

V INVOLVEMENT

“I am concerned about what is accomplished on this earth, in the laziness of its nights, under its sun we have forsaken” (RBS, 8). As opposed to history, which “ruins our existence with its veils,” the poet chooses the most active contemporaneity. Char in fact appears to identify poetry with presence itself. Thus the duty of the poet is more human than sublime, more present than transcendental: “The poet has no mission; on the whole, he has a task. I have never proposed to build up anything which, once the euphoria had passed, was likely to crash” (RBS, 152).

Which is certainly not to say that poetry operates in forgetfulness of the past. Many texts deal with events of the moment and are meant to consecrate them to memory: for example, such poems as “Par la bouche de l'engoulevent” (“Through the Mouth of the Whippoorwill”): “Children who riddled with olives the sun sunken in the wood of the sea, children, oh wheaten fronds, the foreigner turns away from you, from your martyred blood, turns away from this water too pure, children with eyes of silt, children who made the salt sing in your hearing, how can we resign ourselves to no longer being dazzled by your friendship?” (FM, 44). Or again, the poem “L'Eclairage du pénitencier” (“Lighting of the Penitentiary” [FM, 46]) or, in particular, “Le Bouge de l'historien” (“The Hovel of the Historian”), whose titles are significant in relation to our discussion about the past and remind us of “L'Historienne” in Le Marteau sans maître. The latter poem reads in part: “The pyramid of martyrs obsesses the earth. … Last, in order to love still more what your hands of former days had only brushed lightly under the olive tree too young” (FM, 47). The effect of many of these poems, where the poet's indignation at injustice is combined with a gentle lyricism, is based on certain recurring patterns such as “water too pure,” “olive tree too young”: these elements too extreme, untouched as yet by suffering, therefore innocent as to the ways of grief—the opposite of the furrowed valley of suffering—make up a typical setting in which innocence is threatened and finally defeated. “Mirror of the mureno! / Mirror of yellow fever! Manure of a flat fire held out by the enemy!” (FM, 47). The violence of Char's language is also evident throughout these poems, as in his moral condemnations of an epoch, seen in “Mirage des Aiguilles” (“Mirage of the Peaks”):

They take for clarity the jaundiced laughter of shadows. They weigh in their hands death's remains and exclaim: “This is not for us.” No precious viaticum embellishes the mouth of their uncoiled snakes. Their wife betrays them, their children rob them, their friends mock them. They see none of it, through hatred of darkness. Does creation's diamond cast oblique fires? Quickly a decoy to shroud it. They thrust in their oven, they place in the smooth dough of their bread just a small pinch of wheaten despair. They have settled and they prosper in the cradle of a sea where glaciers have been mastered. Be warned.

(NP [Le Nu perdu], 17)

The language stands out sharply against that of the lighter poems, for instance, those of Les Matinaux, which are traced by only a slight rosy wound, a tinge of suffering, whereas these more violent poems permit no nuance.

The fervent belief in poetry as a moral stance lends a special significance to the tone of Char's poems and to his poetics—whose general outline only we have sketched so far and to which we shall return in the following pages. Few writers have taken greater care to situate their attitude in relation to moral matters: it is perhaps in this care above all that his importance for the majority of readers lies. Char speaks for the poet in general, whose moral purpose we might come to share.

Notes

1. NT—La Nuit talismanique.

2. SP—Sur la poésie.

3. LM—Les Matinaux. Annotation in Doucet library.

4. A—Arsenal.

5. In the Fonds René Char-Yvonne Zervos of the Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet. MM—Le Marteau sans maître.

6. RBS—Recherche de la base et du sommet.

7. As Hölderlin puts it, the gods choose to hurl their lightning toward the being they privilege. See the later discussions on Hölderlin and the gods' election of the poet, in chapter 2 and passim. The information on Hölderlin comes principally from Friedrich Hölderlin, Poems and Fragments (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967), ed. and tr. Michael Hamburger.

8. Michel Carrouges, André Breton et les données fondamentales du surréalisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1950).

9. Cahiers de l'Herne, no. René Char, 1971. For instance, among the most valuable and touching comments are those by William Carlos Williams, who also contributes a poem.

10. Jean Starobinski, “René Char et la définition du poème,” Courrier du Centre International d'Etudes poétiques, 66, Maison Internationale de la poésie, Brussels. Reprinted as the preface to Ritorno sopramonte, Vittorio Sereni's translations of Char's poems under the title Retour amont (Lo Specchio: Mondadori, 1973).

11. AC—Aromates chasseurs. (Not yet translated.)

12. In The Presence of René Char we discussed at some length the transposition of Char's “Parole en archipel” (“word as archipelago”) to its reverse image in the nighttime sky.

13. FM—Fureur et mystère. Originally the title of this volume, perhaps Char's best-known work, was to be translated as Rage and Mystery, but it was decided, by the poet, that fureur has more properly the sense of fury or of furor.

14. Translated as Leaves of Hypnos by Jackson Matthews in Hypnos Waking (New York: Random House, 1956).

15. André Breton, Les Pas perdus (Paris: Gallimard, 1924), pp. 7-8.

16. Pierre de Missac, “Situation de l'aphorisme,” Critique, no. 323 (April, 1974).

17. The Nuremberg trials. The extent of the crime renders the crime unthinkable, but its science perceptible. To evaluate it is to admit the hypothesis of the criminal's irresponsibility. Yet any man, fortuitously or not, can be hanged. This equality is intolerable. [René Char's footnote.] (RBS, 13-18)

18. NP—Le Nu perdu.