Suffering and Expenditure: Baudelaire and Nietsche in Char's Poetic Territory
[In the following essay, Kelly analyzes Char's poem, “Baudelaire mécontente Nietzsche.”]
René Char's poem “Baudelaire mécontente Nietzsche” (“Baudelaire Irritates Nietzsche”), which appeared in the 1972 collection La Nuit talismanique, begins with a contrast:
C'est Baudelaire qui postdate et voit juste de sa barque de souffrance, lorsqu'il nous désigne tels que nous sommes. Nietzsche, perpétuellement séismal, cadastre tout notre territoire agonistique. Mes deux porteurs d'eau.
(Char OC [Oeuvres complètes] 495-96)
[Baudelaire from his boat of suffering postdates and sees things with justice when he describes us as we truly are. Nietzsche, ceaselessly earthshaking, maps out all our strife-ridden land. My two water-bearers.]1
Paulène Aspel noted in 1968 that Char had devoted pieces to Rimbaud, Camus, Heraclitus, and others, but not to Nietzsche, with whom the poet seemed to “entertain, to prolong an intimacy” (1968, 166).2 “Baudelaire Irritates Nietzsche” thus fills gaps in a longstanding chronology of influences.
Other texts imply that Char's two “water-bearers,” or provisioners, flank and complement Rimbaud at the confluence that defines modernity.3 The essay “In 1871” clarifies Rimbaud's middle position in this series of partial intersections. Char associates Rimbaud's poetic revolution with the fall of the Second Empire: “A contemporary of the Commune, and with a similar vengefulness, he punctures like a bullet the horizon of poetry and of sensibility” (Char OC 727). Rimbaud breaks the dam standing against modernity, while Baudelaire and Nietzsche inhabit opposite sides of the divide: “Romanticism has dozed off and dreams aloud: Baudelaire, the entire Baudelaire, has just died after he moaned with true pain. … Nietzsche readies himself, but he will have to return each day a bit more lacerated from his sublime ascensions” (726). In “1871,” Baudelaire lingers behind, straddling the divide between Romanticism and modernity, whereas Nietzsche, yet to arrive, represents futurity. “Baudelaire Irritates Nietzsche,” by contrast, asserts that Baudelaire “postdates” rather than just completes a dying era.4 In this version, he survives Romanticism's catastrophe and accompanies Nietzsche into the future.
Char's temporal perspective on Baudelaire and Nietzsche is thus paradoxical, as is the case for Rimbaud. There is a “before” life and an “after” life through philosophy or poetry. Char states enigmatically that “Nietzsche détruit avant forme la galère cosmique” (“Nietzsche, destroyed prior, forms the cosmic galley” [“Page d'ascendants pour l'an 1964,” Char OC 711]). If Baudelaire postdates, Rimbaud is “ahead of the wave.” He is temporally unfinished, “the first poet of a civilization yet to materialize” and cannot be defined precisely, but he is crucial to Char's poetic vein: “If I knew exactly what Rimbaud meant to me, I would know what poetry remains ahead of me, and I would no longer need to write it” (732). Char's characterization of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Nietzsche as radically forward-looking responds to what de Man sees as the prototype of modernity: “Modernity exists in the form of a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope of reaching at last a point that could be called a true present, a point of origin that marks a new departure.”5 Commenting specifically on Baudelaire's essay The Painter of Modern Life, de Man notes that modernity has a predilection for ideas and representations that “illustrate the heroic ability to ignore or to forget that this present contains the prospective self-knowledge of its end” (158-59). This general propensity is quite evident in Char's poetry—“Action is virgin, even when repeated,” (Feuillets d'Hypnos, no. 46, in OC 186)—but his grands astreignants (great models who include, significantly, Heraclitus and Georges de La Tour) also tend to annul duration and deny the erosion of newness within his own works, through the mechanism of an artistic, philosophical, and poetic community situated paradoxically as if it were entirely in the present, despite the passage of time. De Man argues his definition of modernity along similar lines: “This combined interplay of deliberate forgetting with an action that is also a new origin reaches the full power of the idea of modernity” (162).
Unlike de Man, Char incorporates Baudelaire hesitantly into his modern continuum, as the title “Baudelaire Irritates Nietzsche” implies. The displeasure or irritation signals a conflict, yet the qualities that Char attaches to Baudelaire and Nietzsche in the opening stanza of the poem seem complementary rather than mutually exclusive: lucidity amid suffering does not necessarily annul a vigorous struggle to conquer adversity. Char deepens the enigma when he mentions explicitly neither Baudelaire nor Nietzsche in the rest of the poem, creating thereby a gap that our interpretation of the poem must bridge: the title implies a conflict of influences, but the opening stanza implies their compatibility. This opening gambit or paradox creates more problems than it solves, but it conceals, too, the defense of a position on modernity which the rest of the poem plays out stylistically and allegorically.6 What does Baudelaire's skiff of suffering, and Nietzsche's seismic mapping or registry, represent for Char?
SKIFF OF SUFFERING
Claude Pichois depicts Baudelaire as “plagued throughout his life by what he called his guignon—the evil spirit of misfortune and disaster,” and Baudelaire is certainly an icon of personal misfortune in Char's view (Pichois and Ziegler 1989, xi). This offers the basic outline for an interpretation, yet the skiff of suffering which postdates and sees things with justice leads to a rich zone of Baudelairean imagery. Cargo's concordance to Les Fleurs du Mal lists no use of the word barque (“bark,” as in Charon's bark or ferry), whereas vaisseau/vaisseaux (vessel/vessels) occurs nine times, navire (ship) four times, and the synecdoche mâts (masts) five times. The various usage of boat images form a neat dichotomy as well. In one set of Baudelairean poems, woman is represented as a ship on a trip toward pleasant, idyllic countries as in “La Chevelure,” where the lover's hair, at first a “noir océan” (black ocean), becomes a “pavillon de ténèbres tendues” (shadow-filled sail), or in “Le Serpent qui danse,” where she is compared to “un fin vaissseau / Qui roule bord sur bord” [a gossamer ship, / Swayed by ocean swell] (OC 1:26-27, 29). “L'Invitation au voyage” and “Parfum exotique” prolong this idyllic utopia. By contrast, the vessel, like woman in Baudelaire's world, has strong contrastive associations, and they are more pertinent to Char's “barque de souffrance.” “L'Héautontimorouménos” pointedly echoes the line from “Le Beau Navire,” where desire, “[like] a beautiful … vessel putting out to sea,” finds not an idyllic land but the victim or self-torturer's experience (OC 1:78). This establishes the double, antithetical register of the ship: symbol of pleasurable exoticism or hellish journey.7 “Le Voyage” refers insistently to the suffering that inner enemies or complexes inflict. The soul, “un trois-mâts cherchant son Icarie” [a three-master seeking its utopia], encounters at home and abroad “le spectacle ennuyeux de l'immortel péché” [the monotonous spectacle of immortal sin].8 Baudelaire concludes: “Amer savoir, celui qu'on tire du voyage” [Journey's bitter fruit], but he departs in Death's ship, heedless of good or evil. Suffering does not postpone the trip.
The elements associating vessel and suffering coalesce in Baudelaire's “La Musique,” where the figure of the poet becomes a ship:
Je sens vibrer en moi toutes les passions
D'un vaisseau qui souffre,
Le bon vent, la tempête et ses convulsions
Sur l'immense gouffre
Me bercent. D'autres fois, calme plat, grand miroir
De mon désespoir.
(OC 1:68, emphasis added)
[I feel tensed within me, like passion, all the lurch and tremblings of a ship that suffers, the downwind, the storm and its convulsions lull me over the vast abyss. In other moments, flat seas, endless mirror for my despair.]
Other poems drift from ideal toward spleen. In “L'Irrémédiable,” all sense of adventure has disappeared from the image of the ship: “Un navire pris dans le pôle, / Comme en un piège de cristal” [A ship immobilized in polar ice, / As in a crystal trap] (OC 1:75). Char states, by contrast, that Baudelaire sees things justly despite suffering (“voit juste de sa barque de souffrance,” emphasis added): in this sense his vessel encounters despair but elation, too, in a less fatal mix of spleen and ideal than in “L'Irrémédiable,” something closer to the melancholic if harsh adventure in “La Musique” and “Le Voyage.”
Char strongly connects creation and suffering. Poets of all eras, from his perspective, have purveyed harsh truths and have been persecuted (before and after 1857):
Think about the suspicion and torture to which Villon, Baudelaire, Nerval, Rimbaud, Mandelstam, or Maria Tsvetaeva were subjected … Do not forget that poets have always received fireworks in the chest, their internal and external enemies having placed them in a target zone.
(Sous ma casquette amarante, in Char OC 856)
For Char, poetry is conspiratorial yet triumphant: “From the Inquisition to modern times, temporal evil clearly did not get the better of Theresa of Avila nor of Boris Pasternak … The statute of limitations has expired there where poetry flares up, resides …” (“Arthur Rimbaud,” OC 727-28).
When Char comments on the image of suffering offered by Baudelaire—“I am the wound and the knife, / The victim and the executioner”—he infers the lesson that “at such a degree of suffering and flight, the poet is brother to all the earth and its misfortune” (OC 858). Poetry espouses a lucid violence that resists all compromise with oppressors: (“One of the noble aspects of violence … is its ability to pay off the victim's debt and deliver him from that plague: false knowledge, the nursemaid of shipwrecks, of capitulations,” OC 857.) Char echoes this ethical reading of “L'Héautontimorouménos” with a stylistic one. Competing moments of lucidity and frenzy inform poetry. Char finds the “ardent Nuance” (his own aesthetic ideal) in Baudelaire's poetry, too:
Nuances and violence are in close combat. Through their mediation, the conflicts and tempers slowly but steadily counterbalance, and through them poetry disseminates, like water through limestone … Nuance and ardor raise and lower the horizon line, morning and evening, stimulating the spectrum.
(OC 857)
Nuance is another form of violence, because it battles ardor to form poetry: “Poetry likes that double, mad violence and its double taste which listens at the doors of language” (OC 858), a violence in which Baudelaire's poetry shares. Char, significantly, interprets “L'Héautontimorouménos” not as a depiction of Baudelaire's psyche but as an allegory of poetry itself and of the poet's role in history.
The positive meaning of the skiff of suffering in “Baudelaire Irritates Nietzsche” becomes clearer: struggle is a necessary ingredient of self-accomplishment, and the good struggle (to write the poem or to resist oppression) elates the poet. Char associates the ship or the boat with the exhilarating struggle in his poem “Faction du muet,” where the word barque confirms but diversifies the Baudelairean images of suffering. The shift from Baudelaire's vaisseau, navire and mâts to Char's bark may be explained partly by the effort to translate a marine image, reminiscent of Baudelaire's journey to the Indian Ocean, into a fluvial world centered around representations of the Sorgue, the river that flows through Char's native town. A barque is a smallish vessel, used on inland waterways or employed in seaports to unload merchandise from a larger ship. In “Faction du muet” (Le Nu perdu, 1971), the poet, reminiscent of his counterpart in Baudelaire's “La Musique,” becomes a skiff gliding over the transparent riverbed of human experience. The journey enriches poetry, sometimes violently through the shock of life's contradictions, at other times sympathetically through identification with human foibles and tragedies: “Je me suis uni au courage de quelques êtres, j'ai vécu violemment, sans vieillir, mon mystère au milieu d'eux, j'ai frissonné de l'existence de tous les autres, comme une barque incontinente au-dessus des fonds cloisonnés” [I allied myself with the courage of some people, I have violently lived out my mystery among them, never aging, I have trembled to the existence of all others, like a boat shifting above the cloisonné of a riverbed] (OC 429, emphasis added). The experience of the Other stimulates the poet and energizes him. This kind of ecstasy contrasts with the desperation of Baudelaire's leave-taking in “Le Voyage”—“Pionger au fond du gouffre, Enfer ou Ciel, qu'importe?” [Plunge to the bottom of the abyss, whether it is Hell or Heaven]. Suffering often appears in Char's poems, but a mysterious exhilaration usually gives it tone. Something resembling exhilaration fills the poet's sails in Baudelaire's “La Musique” (“I feel tensed within me, like passion, all the lurch and tremblings / Of a ship that suffers”), though there is only partial satisfaction: Baudelaire's “good winds” die to reveal the “calm mirror” of his despair. Char and Baudelaire become allegorical vessels of Poetry, each “shivers” or “suffers” in the wind, but each to different effect.
Differing attitudes toward despair, self-doubt, regret, and remorse furnish Char's rationale for placing Baudelaire on the near side of modernity, as its precursor, rather than at its point of origin:
Baudelaire is the most humane genius of all Christian civilization. His song incarnates that civilization in its conscience, in its glory, in its remorse, in its malediction, at the moment of its beheading, of its loathing, of its apocalypse. “Poets,” writes Hölderlin, “are usually revealed at the beginning or the end of an era.”9
This remark occurs in the essay “Arthur Rimbaud,” but it is crucial to Char's view on poetic modernity, and it attaches a caveat to the reception of Baudelaire's work: Baudelaire brings a premodern era of poetry to its end and represents an apogee prior to modernity's clean slate and new inscription. What survives the tabula rasa is Baudelaire's empathy with human suffering, less sin and remorse which are foreign to Char, who would certainly be irritated by the sense of guilt and self-deprecation in the conclusion of “Un voyage à Cythère”: “—Ah! Seigneur! donnez-moi la force et le courage / De contempler mon cœur et mon corps sans dégoût!” [Oh Lord! Give me the force and courage / to consider my heart and body without disgust!”] (OC 1:119). In moments of suffering, Char does not feel remorseful but anxious, as in “Baudelaire Irritates Nietzsche”: “What is, our greatest cause of suffering? Worry” (OC 496); in other words, our anxiety lacks a religious, eschatological foundation in God's redemptive or damning gaze. Personal instinct or difference, rather than belief, founds resistance to the world's weight, to its thrusts and currents: “We are born in the same torrent, but we roll differently amid frenetic stones. Worry? Follow instinct” (496). Char sees suffering not as an apocalypse that reveals or subverts godhead, but as a self-affirmation and instinctive resistance to phenomenal change.
Baudelaire's sense of suffering as Char portrays it in “Baudelaire Irritates Nietzsche” implies a religious sense, even if that sense manifests itself as Cain's revolt against God. Char rejects the postlapsarian aspect of Baudelairean suffering, and through this rejection the figure of Baudelaire begins to migrate through the poem, after the initial stanza introducing the two precursors. Humanity is part of a purely materialistic universe: “Sons of nothing and destined to nothing. … What we hear during sleep is our heartbeat and not the outbursts of our soul at leisure” (496). The only redemption and rebirth is in the poet's work. “The work, unique, in the form of a broken shutter” is the sole agent of “the sense of its own renewal” (496).10 Suffering pervades the house of poetry with its broken shutter, yet this results not in divine transcendence but only in the renewal of our participation in a world that is either a chaos or an impersonal determinism: “Whether we defy order or chaos, we obey laws we have not intellectually ratified. We approach with the step of a mutilated giant” (496). We struggle violently, as if Titans, against the assault of senseless material forces—this is one of the lessons that underlies Char's fragmentary style—but here mythology evacuates theology and relegates it to the realm of metaphor for the blind forces of nature.11 Char's poetry, which cultivates rupture and discontinuity, cannot assimilate Baudelaire's “ardent sanglot qui roule d'âge en âge” [ardent sob that rolls from age to age] and which dies—futilely or with redemption—at the feet of God's eternity (“Les Phares,” OC 1:14).
Char willfully effaces the divine, but his fragmentary style also saps the poetic conventions of wholeness and unity that typify Baudelairean verse (the open-ended succession of quatrains and artists of “Les Phares,” for instance, or the interweaving typical of the sonnet and pantoum). “Baudelaire Irritates Nietzsche” typifies Char's fragmentary style. The poem consists of eight prose stanzas, and the links from one to the next are “eluded” if not “burned,” to use Char's own terms for describing transitions.12 His poetry points through its form to the lack of an overarching principle, immanent to the universe and to language, which would make the movement from moment to moment and stanza to stanza self-evident. The poet presents fragments without apparent coherence, or with a unity that the poet senses incompletely, and the reader must join in this search beyond catastrophe for renewed wholeness. Char confirms the idea that poetic modernity, in the lineage of Rimbaud, is joined to the annulment of theology, since poetry is “toujours en chemin vers le point qui signe sa justification et clôt son existence, à l'écart, en avant de l'existence du mot Dieu” [always in transit toward the point that signs its verdict and closes its existence, well ahead of the existence of the word God].13 Deprived of religious finalities, the poem crafts and imposes an immanent linguistic justification upon the surrounding chaos or oppressive order of things. Char's poetry, by its form, indicts the coherence of a universe it confronts and intends to conquer.
Char's version of poetic modernism is founded on the death of god, or, as Virginia La Charité says, “Poetry has the position that religion assigns to God” (1974, 57). Char suggests this again, but elliptically, in “Faire du chemin avec …” (Fenêtres dormantes et porte sur le toit, 1979): “Baudelaire, Melville, Van Gogh are haggard gods, not readings of gods” (OC 580)—that is, Baudelaire's poetry of misfortune and resistance to spleen inspires Char, but he rejects the detour through religious finality that Les Fleurs du Mal implies. Baudelaire survives the collapse of Romanticism but in a secular, de-Christianized form: “Baudelaire forges the wounds of the heart's intelligence into a pain that rivals the soul” (“Page d'ascendants pour l'an 1964,” OC 711).
THE SEISMIC REGISTRY: NIETZSCHE
What then does Nietzsche carry on Char's journey? Nietzsche, too, signals the existence of oppression and suffering, since he plots Char's “territoire agonistique,” but pain derives in this case from a voluntary struggle and from the swords of battle. Commenting on “Baudelaire Irritates Nietzsche,” Paul Veyne interprets the “séisme nietzschéen” as the destruction of social conformity, or “valeurs établies,” and this includes conformist institutions and conventional language.14 Critics have also pointed out that Char appropriates Zarathustra's eagle to symbolize the poetic summit, sovereign independence, and human overcoming without the aid of God or gods (Aspel 1968, 180-81; Mathieu 1984-85, 1:121 n. 75). Char adopts Nietzsche partially because of the latter's rejection of the divine: “Creation—that is the great redemption from suffering, and life's growing light”; “Away from God and gods this has lured me; what could one create if gods existed?” says Zarathustra (Nietzsche 1968, 199), echoing the madman in The Gay Science: “Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him” (Nietzsche 1974, 181). Char's journey, too, is an ascension instead of the sea voyage that informs his interaction with Baudelaire. The ascension of man involves the annulment of God—“God, the arranger, could not but fail,” Char declares—yet this lays the ground for a modern humanism, namely the cultivation of the “intermittent gods” who “pervade our mortal amalgam without ever going beyond us.”15 Char uses the philosopher-poet Nietzsche against the poet-philosopher Baudelaire, because in Nietzsche the philosophical and poetic project replaces religious teleology.16
As Aspel remarks, Char's “open attitude toward chance” echoes Zarathustra's claim that he has liberated the world from “the slavery of goals or ends.”17 Otherworldly redemption, or even blasphemy, gives way to an affirmation of the intrinsic value of the world and of the individual's path through it: “Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth! I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth,” says Zarathustra, although it could just as well have been Char, so close are the thought and instinct (Nietzsche 1968, 125, author's emphasis). Although he praises Baudelaire and has more indulgence for pity than does Nietzsche, Char's version of self-renewal closely emulates Zarathustra's praise of going under in order to overcome adversity:
Man, says Zarathustra, is a rope tied between beast and overman—a rope over an abyss. A dangerous across, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous shuddering and stopping.
What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under. I love those who do not know how to live, except by going under.18
In “Baudelaire Irritates Nietzsche,” Char likewise denies otherworldly redemption while he espouses renewal through strictly human creativity. The human condition demands neither faith nor salvation but self-reliance. Char emphasizes renovation and a despiritualized transcendence, where the beginning point is the self and the culmination a self refashioned through its agonistic contact with this world: “To die is to go through the eye of the needle after several burgeonings. One must traverse death in order to emerge in front of life,” but “in a state of sovereign modesty” as an individual self-sufficient, content to live without the self-importance imparted by notions of divine providence or of revolt against divinity (OC 496). Ascension toward personal sovereignty and elation also entails a plunge into the deepness of the world. Nietzsche's dialectic of overture and going under harmonizes with Char's supreme indifference to the divine, unless divinity is redefined as the vitality of nature, the ceaseless shock and metamorphosis of contraries without any transcendence beyond process.
Nietzsche's depiction of secular agony differs fundamentally from Baudelaire's striving between spleen and ideal. For Char, as for Nietzsche, risk and endangerment are fundamental categories. Life is a dangerous crossing over the abyss. Poems from the collection Fureur et mystère, published in 1948 but written from roughly the Munich crisis onward, grant an important place to these ideas and explain why Nietzsche, for Char, is “perpétuellement séïsmal.” The idea that going under may result in destruction and not rebirth is accentuated in the poem “Les trois sœurs,” where the poet beseeches the earth to safeguard “that child on your shoulder,” whose allegorical sense is not yet clear—endangered innocence? human vulnerability? Disaster strikes, however, and a volcanic eruption engulfs the child, yet the child is poetry and the cataclysm only ignites the olive tree on the slope, here a symbol of the poetic image itself and its renewal through creativity (OC 250-51). In “Seuil” (“The Edge”), the Nietzschean denunciation of metaphysics and the images of cataclysm conjoin. The human figure in the poem confronts “the gigantic fault line of the abandonment of the divine,” which has broken down the “dam of humanity.” The reaction to catastrophe is not a political philosophy, or a philosophy of the will, but a language: “distant words, words that did not wish to be lost, mounted a resistance to the exorbitant thrust” (OC 255). Paul Veyne interprets this as a rejection of the Nietzschean overman in favor of the poet who sees in language, and not in metaphysics, the only valid project (316-17), but the ecstatic, wide view of “Seuil” suggests a reform of the ontological environment: when the downfall of God threatens humankind, the poet steps forth to await new words but also to remake the universe out of the surrounding chaos. Being, and not just language, is at risk here, though language, to be sure, is the agent of salvation. The dawn after the catastrophe signals the birth of a new poetic language, but the consequences surpass language and poetry alone, indeed this enriched threshold alludes to all of life—“life, immense limit,” as Char asserts (“Donnerbach Mühle,” OC 252). The world is not an expiation for the sin of existence (“le châtiment du devenir,” in the terms Bianquis uses in 1938 to translate Nietzsche's evaluation of Anaximander). It is, rather, “la justification de l'être” (Nietzsche's synthesis of Heraclitus: the sanctification of being), an apt description of Char's poet in “Seuil,” who, his belt “full of seasons,” stands before the flood to welcome the rebirth of poetry after the quake, amid change.19 As Aspel says, “Char's poetry sings reality, ‘noble’ reality, and seeks to attain it beyond the very idea of the unknown, and one may accurately call this exaltation Dionysiac” (172; see also 182).
Char's poetry in general, takes noble endangerment as its unspoken ground.20 From violent risk issue words with the hard edge and urgency that contemplation of death imparts, and this is the sense of the characterization in “Baudelaire Irritates Nietzsche”: “Nietzsche, always earthshaking, maps out all our strife-ridden land” (OC 495-96). The devastated site, traversed by flood, volcanic eruptions, and tremors, produces, through struggle against the tragic sense of life, poetry at its most intense and its most exhilarating.21 Against this background, and with reference to Baudelaire's remorseful apocalypse, Char espouses a Nietzschean “gaspillage sans frein,” a relentless going under in order to overcome the world's resistance to poetry, philosophy, and justice.
THE ANAGOGICAL SENSE: BAUDELAIRE'S RETURN
The end of “Baudelaire Irritates Nietzsche,” however, should cause hesitation. Baudelaire is not easily repressed; he returns despite Nietzsche's displeasure.22 Once Char rehearses his two provisioners' itinerary, he suddenly cannot choose between the two. Poetic language trembles in the confrontation:
Qui appelle encore? Mais la réponse n'est point donnée.
Qui appelle encore pour un gaspillage sans frein? Le trésor entrouvert des nuages qui escortèrent notre vie.
(OC 496)
[Who calls out once more? But no answer is given.
Who calls out once more for a relentless expenditure? The open treasure of the clouds that escorted our life.]
“Relentless expenditure” is the Nietzschean release of the poet's and Zarathustra's “wild dogs” (1968, 155), of his Dionysian urges toward fusion, toward the testing of limits, and toward devastated orders and sites. The closing sentence of “Baudelaire Irritates Nietzsche,” however, could be read as an allusion to Baudelaire's prose poem “L'Etranger” (Le Spleen de Paris): “Well then, what do you like, extraordinary stranger?—I like the clouds that are passing! down there! down there! the marvelous clouds” (OC 1:231).23 Char opposes this “open treasure” to “relentless expenditure,” not as retention opposes prodigality, since the treasure, too, is opened up/“entrouvert,” but as serene contemplation and recollection contrast with, and nuance, an ecstatic and tragic vision of life—in other words, as Apollonian serenity tempers Dionysian frenzy in Nietzsche's early works on the origins of philosophy and tragedy (one of Char's early contacts with Nietzsche's work).24
Char's “open treasure of the clouds” echoes the interplay of distance and intimacy that marks not just “L'Etranger,” but Baudelaire's “Harmonie du soir,” too, with its concluding metaphor of the sunset and a memory:
Un cœur tendre, qui hait le néant vaste et noir,
Du passé lumineux recueille tout vestige!
Le soleil s'est noyé dans son sang qui se fige …
Ton souvenir en moi luit comme un ostensoir!
(OC 1:47)
[A tender heart, that hates the vast black nothingness, / from the shining past collects all remainder! / The sun has drowned in its clotted blood … / Your memory glints in me as if a gilded monstrance!]
By contrast, a Dionysian sunset—one that insists on violence and expenditure rather than on retention and nostalgia—marks Char's “Le Visage nuptial”: “The eagle's claw funnels high the blood” (OC 151), an aggressive painting of the crepuscule that clashes with the more serene, contained violence of “Harmonie du soir,” where the clotted sun of the penultimate line is held by coming darkness just as the poet captures the ray of memory.25 The union of disparate parts, and an inner distance or serenity essential to contemplation, are even more evident in “Correspondances,” where the mix of elements moves toward unity, not toward clash and disintegration. A number of Baudelaire's poems do focus on dissolution (“Une charogne,” “Le Masque,” “La Destruction”) or Orphic mutilation (“L'Albatros,” “L'Héautontimorouménos”), but poems that accent disruption often occur against a background of calmness, as in “Harmonie du soir” and similar poems that convey Baudelaire's predilection for a simultaneous picture of spleen and ideal. “La Cloche fêlée” establishes the poet's flaw through such counterpoint: the soul's broken moaning (“râle épais”) punctuates an Apollonian vastness (“faraway memories” and bells that sing through the mist). In “Baudelaire Irritates Nietzsche,” Char's own conclusion among the “open treasure of the clouds,” however, accentuates what suffering could not annul in Baudelaire's poetic vision, namely serenity and contemplation as in “Recueillement”: “Ma Douleur, donne-moi la main … / … Vois se pencher les défuntes Années, / Sur les balcons du ciel …” [My Pain, give me your hand … / … See the dead Years lean over / The balconies of the sky …], a serenity set against (and despite) the frenetic search for pleasure taking place in the city streets below.
At the end of “Baudelaire Irritates Nietzsche,” when Char evokes both the philosopher's “relentless expenditure” and the poet's “open treasure of the clouds,” he reaffirms his need for a contrast between ecstatic violence and serene contemplation, distance and fusion. Char refuses to exclude from modernity either Nietzsche or Baudelaire, furor or mystery, fusion or distance, dismemberment or order. This poem is not a Nietzschean monologue. Baudelaire postdates Nietzsche: he remains a valid marker and companion on Char's poetic journey through the desert or through the archipelago, and he is not brutally annulled. Instead Baudelaire contests, by his ennui and pessimism, but also through his sense of passive contemplation, Nietzsche's harsh yet enthusiastic going under. Baudelaire is put under erasure but returns in Char's poetry as the supplement of suffering that maintains pity on the horizon, though this does not lead Char to remorse or to condemnation of the self's deep urges.
I have left for last the second strophe of “Baudelaire Irritates Nietzsche,” because we must seek the true rather than the apparent place of each of Char's stanzas within the heterodox and fragmented order of his poem. This stanza demonstrates, too, Char's inclination to adopt a worldview more fundamentally Nietzschean than Baudelairean, though the Nietzschean element never governs uncontested. Encounter, conflict, and influence renew poetic language and assure its continuity: “Duty, before one takes another breath, to rarify and hierarchize people and things that impinge on us.” Pollen, deprived of a future, “smashes into the rocky partition.” Char allows Baudelaire and Nietzsche, suffering and untold generous expenditure, to inflect his poetry. Pollen, or the word, is thus triple—Baudelaire and Nietzsche interact with Char, constrain him momentarily with their own original limits, pollinate his poetry, open it to change and growth beyond his solitude. Char's praise for his provisioners is not funerary rhetoric or banquet praise—it is not eulogistic or elegiac properly speaking—so much as it is a creative stimulus for further poetry. Nietzsche justifies, in similar terms, his own search for models of thought and life among the Presocratics. “Let us leave the tombs in peace, but make ours whatever is eternally lively. Humanity grows only when it venerates what is rare and great.” “Adopter un style de rêve ou de légende,” says Nietzsche in a French version which Char had read (Nietzsche 1985, 168, 171; Mathieu 1984-85, 2:90 n. 4). The poet has taken this advice and crafted a dialectic of Baudelairean clouds and Nietzschean dam breaking, but within the hidden design of a Nietzschean genealogy of influences.26 Char's choice of clouds to symbolize Baudelairean poetics should be read as an allusion both to strophic poems such as “Harmonie du soir” (where the pantoum relies on the obsessive return of sentences and images in order to evoke the memory of lost love) and to the prose poems like “L'Etranger,” freed from rhyme and strophic measure. In Le Spleen de Paris, Baudelaire attains a modernity and a freedom from convention that tie more directly to Char's vein of formal experimentation.27
In Char's poetry, Baudelairean stasis, ambiguity, and suffering contest alternative moments of vertigo, frenzy, and empowerment. Baudelaire remains a veiled reference in Char, although Nietzsche retains preponderance as the more modern one, less attached to a past morality and style. “Dans la marche” (La Parole en archipel) anticipates “Baudelaire Irritates Nietzsche” and illustrates the bind: “We can only live in what is opened up, precisely on the hermetic dividing line of shadow and light,” says Char. This is stasis, penumbra, calm before dawn or dusk. “But we are irresistibly thrown ahead. All our person aids and spins this thrust” (OC 411). Expenditure indicts stasis but cannot avoid its moment.
Notes
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Subsequent references to Char OC are to his Oeuvres complètes, 1995. No further page references will be given for “Baudelaire Irritates Nietzsche.”
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Char, in successive editions of his Recherche de la base et du sommet, first published in 1955, systematically developed the cult of his “grands astreignants.” “Pages d'ascendants pour l'an 1964” contains a later list of “astreignants” and of “alliés,” the latter term reserved for the beaux-arts (OC 711-12).
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Prose texts in Recherche de la base et du sommet make it clear how central Rimbaud is to Char's view of the modern. See Char, “In 1871,” “Réponses interrogatives à une question de Martin Heidegger,” but especially “Arthur Rimbaud,” an essay which originally served as Char's preface to the edition of Rimbaud published in the 1956 by the Club de l'Honnête Homme (OC 726-36). For a thorough analysis of Char's writings on and attitude toward Rimbaud, see La Charité, “The Role of Rimbaud.”
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Char states this banally in his response to a poll of contemporary poets (“Pour ou contre Baudelaire,” Les Nouvelles littéraires): “Baudelaire's place in contemporary knowledge and sensibility is that of a very great poet whose genius and meaning have not stopped growing in the last one hundred years. Only today can we measure the degree of his undeniable sovereignty and universality.”
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Blindness and Insight, 148. For Char, Rimbaud remains unique, nevertheless, in that he represents life's supremacy over poetry (see Char's poem “Tu as bien fait de partir, Arthur Rimbaud,” in Fureur et mystère). De Man ties the possibility of surpassing or abandoning literature to the concept of modernity: the “continuous appeal of modernity, the desire to break out of literature, toward the reality of the moment” is how the writer shows that literature exists in history, within time, instead of in the contradiction of endless newness (1983, 162).
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For two more recent views on Baudelaire's modernity, see Compagnon 1990, 7-78, 177-80, and Meschonnic 1995, 469-82.
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See Compagnon 1996 on Baudelaire's images of the good and bad seas.
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The expressions “trois-mâts barque” and “la barque de Charon” are noted in Heath's Standard French and English Dictionary, 2 vols. (London: D. C. Heath, 1959).
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OC 731-32, author's emphasis. The idea of a Baudelaire still enmeshed in Christianity corresponds to Breton's views in the 1930 Second manifeste du surréalisme, which Char signed. Char also clearly shares Breton's rejection of Claudel's Christian reading of Illuminations (without following Breton's shift toward a rejection of Rimbaud on the grounds, more or less, of religious ambiguities; see Breton 1988, 782-87). On Baudelaire and religion, see Ruff 1955, especially 281-366; L'Année Baudelairie 2 (1996), devoted to death and spirituality, but especially, in that issue, Milner, “Le paradis se gagne-t-il?,” who critiques Ruff's Jansenist thesis; Lawler, Poetry and Moral Dialectic, who offers a balanced view of the place of the crucial section “Révolte” in Les Fleurs du Mal (16-25, 153-57, 182-88).
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The broken shutter also appears in the poem “Le Ramier” (Le Nu perdu 1971): “Nous rallions nos pareils / Pour éteindre la dette / D'un volet qui battait / Généreux, généreux” (OC 448). On Char's linkage of creativity and transcendence, see Marty 1990, 159-228.
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Char's mutilated giant also refers to another “grand astreignant,” Poussin, through the figure of Orion, who is the protagonist of Char's 1975 Aromates chasseurs (OC 507-28).
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“[J]e ne brûle pas les relais, mais je les élude,” referring to his own remarks to the interviewer, but very pertinent to his poetry (OC 854-55). On Nietzsche and Char's aphorisms, see Aspel 1968, 168-70, 173.
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“Réponses interrogatives à une question de Martin Heidegger,” OC 734. See also Char's “A la question: ‘Pourquoi ne croyez-vous point en Dieu?’” (“To the Question: ‘Why do you not believe in God?’”): “If by some rare chance death did not end it all, we would probably find ourselves in front of something other than this God invented by men, in their image and adjusted for better or worse to their contradictions. Imagining a square of white linen, traversed by a sun ray, is nostalgically childish” (OC 658).
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Veyne 1990, 318, and see for further comment his entire chapter, entitled “Héraclite, Heidegger et Nietzsche” (302-32).
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“Faire du chemin avec …,” Fenêtres dormantes et porte sur le toit, in OC 580; “Peu à peu, et puis un vin silcieux,” La Nuit talismanique, in OC 494. On Char's secular and metaphorical use of imagery of the gods, see Starobinski 1992.
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Plouvier (1997) compares Nietzsche and Char as to their common rejection of history in favor of art.
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Aspel 1968, 174, see also 179, on the “nécessité bienfaisante du hasard” in Nietzsche and Char. The article appeared before the publication of “Baudelaire Irritates Nietzsche” but is still very useful.
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Nietzsche 1968, 126-27, author's emphasis. See also Zarathustra's speeches against suffering and pity in Nietzsche 1968, 143, 287.
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Nietzsche 1985, 44. The English translations of the French are my own. See also Plouvier, who remarks on Nietzsche and Char's common sense of “lightness” and “marvel” in their confrontation with the world (1997, 218, 221-22).
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See “Riche de larmes” (Rich with tears), one of Char's last poems: “Art is made of oppression and tragedy, themselves punctured occasionally by the onslaught of a joy which floods art's site, then leaves again” (Eloge d'une soupçonnée, OC 841).
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See Char's “Nous avons” (La Parole en archipel, 1962), where a volcanic cataclysm kindles the poetic image and instills tension within freshness: “Notre parole, en archipel, vous offre, après la douleur et le désastre, des fraises qu'elle rapporte des landes de la mort, ainsi que ses doigts chauds de les avoir cherchées” [Our word, in the form of an archipelago, offers you, after pain and disaster, strawberries that it brings back from the moors of death, fingers still warm from the picking] (OC 409).
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Historically, Nietzsche approved of Baudelaire in a way, as his letter to Peter Gast, dated 26 February 1888, makes clear in the context of the public reception of Wagner's music: “Wagner himself … surpasses a thousand times the understanding and the comprehension of the Germans. Does he surpass that of the French as well?” Nietzsche had often mused that the Frenchman most likely to appreciate Wagner “was that bizarre, three-quarters lunatic Baudelaire, the poet of Les Fleurs du Mal. It had disappointed me that this kindred spirit of Wagner's had not during his lifetime discovered him; I have underlined the passages in his poems in which there is a sort of Wagnerian sensibility which has found no form anywhere else in poetry (Baudelaire is a libertine, mystical, ‘satanic,’ but, above all, Wagnerian)” (author's emphases). Nietzsche then tells Gast of his discovery of the existence of a letter from Wagner to Baudelaire (see Nietzsche 1996, 286-88). See Delesalle, who refers in passing to this letter (“Eugène Crépet,” 8 n. 16). Char seems unaware of these documents, but the thrust of “Baudelaire Irritates Nietzsche” goes to other issues.
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Contrast “L'Etranger” with another poem in Le Spleen de Paris, “La Soupe et les nuages” (OC 1:298), where the poet becomes a useless “marchand de nuages” (cloud merchant). Remorse and self-deprecation return, like obsessions, to line the clouds.
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See Veyne 1990, 313; Mathieu 1984-85, 1:121 n. 75, 2:90 n. 4. See also Nietzsche 1992, 63, among many other passages on the Apollonian and the Dionysian.
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See La Charité on the crucial interplay of night and day in the collection La Nuit talismanique: “While light imagery may indeed tend to dominate Char's work, the creation of the active diurnal text is dependent on the order and prestige of night” (1973, 278). Some of the poems in the original edition of La Nuit talismanique were illustrated by Char, though not “Baudelaire Irritates Nietzsche.” On the relation of image to text in this collection, see La Charité (1976), “Beyond the Poem.”
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We find an aesthetic pantheon in “Les Phares,” but the notion of verse as sacrifice or defiance laid at God's feet goes against Char's impulse.
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See de Man 1983, “Lyric and Modernity,” 184.
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