I MATINAL LIGHT

Throughout the course of Char's work, the poet's personal involvements find their texts, grave or joyous, quiet in tone or more ringing, as reflections of his own moral commitment: they mirror the changing perception of the work undertaken, are determined or depressed, according to the mood of the speaker. Of his Resistance poems—“resistance” taken in all its senses—Char says:

“Il te fut prêté de dire une fois … les chants matinaux de la rébellion. Métal rallumé sans cesse de ton chagrin, ils me parvenaient humides d'inclémence et d'amour.

Once it was granted to you to recount the matinal songs of rebellion. Metal ceaselessly relit from your sorrow, they came to me damp with inclemency and love.

(AC [Aromates Chasseurs], 43)

As for later “events”—those occurrences supposed to be marked in capital letters in one's life and in one's biography—after 1944 and the end of wartime, their external profile would have to include Char's reactions to the postwar political trials¹ and his praise of the Resistants, his friendship with poets and philosophers and artists,² his defense of various positions concerning natural preservation,—all of which are consistent with his general outlook of a “marginal” thinker. As an example in his later years, he has participated in, and led, a movement whose focus was both political and ecological, protesting atomic installations on the plain of Albion in the Vaucluse (see “La Provence Point Oméga”) and endeavoring in general to save whatever sites mark a rich heritage.

This is perhaps after all the point: that a poet's protests and involvement count for all of us, that his considered and passionate positions matter for the vigor of their intention, in spite of their local interest and their apparent practical “uselessness.” In the long run, the fact that old Catharist sites like Thouzon are vandalized or that trucks can literally carry away the stones forming the old bories—those prehistoric stone dwellings found on the land near the poet's home—represents a larger concern.

René Char himself mentions a dividing line in his life at the moment when he was forced to kill another human, becoming “a monster of justice and intolerance, a simplifier …” (RBS [Recherche de la base et du sommet] 10). The fury of those years is unforgettable, even if the poet refuses all acts of revenge, and it lies unceasingly at the heart of all his perception in the same way as the “absent brother” in the poem of the same name resides like a crucible burning “at the center of unity.” Impatience is frequently sensed in the man as in the writing: to what extent it originates in the war experience we would not hazard a guess. But the incontrovertible evidence remains, in the text as in the life: an extreme tenderness alternates with irritation, a tragic and benevolent perception is balanced by anger. The inner outline and the outer continue to correspond.

A. ROUGEUR DES MATINAUX (REDNESS OF MATINALS)

Now Char takes up again the image of the meteor, glimpsed this time in a negative light: “I have fallen from my brilliance …” (LM [Les Matinaux], 81). Or perhaps it is simply that the dawn's redness has subsided. Nevertheless, in spite of such moments (which he refers to elsewhere as the “low cycle”), the characteristics of Char's meteor remain unchanged: first, its intensity with its accompanying mystery. “Intensity is silent. Its image is not. (I am fond of what dazzles me, then accentuates the obscurity inside me)” (LM, 76). Here we think of Tristan Tzara's statement of 1917, in a “Note on Poetry”: “Obscurity is productive if it is a light so white and pure that our neighbors are blinded by it.”³ And second, even more important, the uncompromising uniqueness of the passage in which each profile is preserved as distinct from all others: Char warns us again against a too great resembling, grouping our uniqueness with the crowd's similarity: “Wisdom is not to conglomerate, but, in the creation and the nature common to us, to find our number, our reciprocity, our differences, our passage, our truth, and this bit of despair which is its goad and its moving mist” (LM, 76). We might compare the image of the mountain peaks, separate in the morning crimson, with the poet's acerbic statements against a town in which the least folds have been smoothed out, and all citizens conform. In such a “ville sans plis,” only a coward would choose to live. (See also the poem “Mirage des aiguilles,” in which Char attacks the idea of a civilization free of enigma, where even the snakes lose their mysterious coils.) The meteor—or “the cock's enemy”—remains mysterious; a useful mystery, as Valéry might say.⁴

B. LA BIBLIOTHèQUE EST EN FEU (THE LIBRARY IS AFIRE)

The poet wills himself sufficiently alone to preserve his space, his freedom, and his passage: he should leave traces of his passing, Char says, but no proofs. The insistence on the obscure remains constant. “Free birds do not permit us to observe them,” he remarks, and, in another text bearing witness to the same spirit: “Birds do not sing in a bush of questions.” Poets leave a margin about them, that demanded by Hölderlin's Empedocles who dismisses Pausanias, by Rimbaud as he “requires everything of us,” and even that we take leave of him (“Tu as bien fait de partir, Arthur Rimbaud”; “You did well to leave”), and by Gide, dismissing his reader (“Et maintenant, Nathanaël, jette mon livre”; “And now, Nathaniel, cast my book away”). It is finally of all of us that the poet will require this necessary distance.

From meteor to constellation, the solitariness of the poetic work persists as essential. Here we read a statement which will recur in the series of poetic aphorisms called Sur la poésie (On Poetry). “The constellation of the Solitary is taut” ([JG], LM, 146). The image of the constellation is that of the poet, singular in his setting and yet collective, an object of general perception and nevertheless unique, solitary like a diamond, or like a star, even when extended against the heavens. We think of the constellation of the hunter Orion as we see it first suggested in the poem “Seuil” (“Threshold”)—“I have run to the outcome of this diluvian night. Standing firm in the quavering daybreak, my belt full of seasons … [JG]” (where the belt of Orion might be seen) and then, less obviously, in La Nuit talismanique.

The same vision links the poems of the recent Aromates chasseurs, where the myth of Orion blinded by Diana (as in Poussin's famous canvas, Orion aveuglé) and turned to a constellation, forms the background, and occasionally the foreground, for the entire work. A meteor and the king of the bees, Orion (in “Réception d'Orion”) makes his honey of the earth and then ascends once more to the heavens, so that the myth of blinding and radiance, or descent and ascent, merges with the celestial and mysterious figure of the meteor and the useful animal presence of the bee, whose buzzing is felt here in a poem of the morning, intense and strident like a red color.

Equal attention is given to the actual art of writing. A meditation on the advantages of error, of ambiguity, leads to a eulogy of multiplicity: for the greatest diversity of interpretation depends on an initial imprecision, which poetry will not try to eliminate. And then, on the other side of the paradox, Char insists that his work is one of precision, of the point and the prow: his intricate, often ambiguous, and yet essentially clear poetry confirms this. Once the library of ancient works is set afire, as in the title, we can start over in our recreation of literature, as in our re-reading it.

C. LE NU PERDU (NAKEDNESS LOST)

The first text of poetic aphorisms in this volume opens with space or pause like that suggested in its title “Pause au château cloaque,” with another consideration of time, a fascination at the very heart of the volume, which treats returning upland as a temporal climb, in which the past unobtrusively supports us. The determination to throw off useless baggage which might weigh us down for our final climb toward bareness does not entail the absolute exclusion of memory; it only insists on jettisoning a useless nostalgia: “The past would retard the blossoming of the present if our eroded memories did not sleep there ceaselessly. We turn back to one while the other has a fresh spurt of energy before leaping on us” (NP [Le Nu perdu], 22). The climb is clearly marked, even in this pause near the beginning: “Race. First mountain pass: clay weathered away” (NP, 22). Others have been here before, using up the earth, on this rise which is also interior for each of us. We remember Char's frequent descriptions of the poet as mountain climber, to whom there is granted an exceptionally aggressive breathing. The ascent leads finally to the tomb dug in the air, that “dry house” built again, further up, like the dwelling constructed further upstream in “Recours au ruisseau.” The profound series called “Lenteur de l'avenir” (“Slowness of the Future”) begins with a climb characterized as both mental and physical by its juxtaposition of nouns: “You have to scale many dogmas and a mountain of ice.” Next, verbs of triumphant action: “I have demolished the last wall,” echoed a few poems later by the definitive motion out of the confines of a dwelling: “Without ceremony, I step across this walled-up world” (NP, 46), and concludes with another statement concerning the three ages of past, present, and future, arranged vertically: “Our terrestrial figure is only the second third of a continuous pursuit, a point, upland” (NP, 38). The climb represented by the retour amont is slow, lasting a lifetime. But at the lookout points along the way—these pauses like the “Pause au château cloaque”—the bare upland is seen as illuminated: “amont éclate” (“upland breaks forth”). In his notes to the Italian version of the volume, Ritorno sopramonte, Vittorio Sereni comments that a reddish brightness is always seen above the peaks toward which the movement leads. He reminds us of Char's expression: “un brisant de rougeur” (“a breaker of redness”), a presence of light which is, in fact, felt throughout the darkest of visions.

The climb which the poetry represents is not intended only for the poet alone, and not only for one season; it takes place, no matter what the conditions (“we remain men for inclemency”): “Where shall we spend our days at present? … Let us stay in the quarried rain and join to it our breathing” (NP, 51). The aggressive respiration of the mountain climber joins the animal breathing of those continually exposed to downpour, snow, and sun: “we shall hold together under the storm become forever familiar” (NP, 51). Sereni points out a passage in which the poet identifies himself with the plant and animal life in answer to the alienation of contemporary affections. “Aliénés” begins: “From the shadow where we were …” (NP, 110). Thus in the following poem whose title we have already commented upon, “Buveuse” (“Drinker”), the plant absorbing endless water is allied also to the poet who has been discouraged with the devastation of nature by the warlike installations of men: “why should we still liberate the words of the future of the self now that every speech soaring upward is the mouth of a yammering rocket, now that the heart of every breathing thing is a stinking cascade?” (NP, 53).

In “Le Terme épars” (“The Scattered Term”), each of whose flashes is brief or sparse, Char reminds himself, and us, of our commitment to generosity and forgiving, on this upward path which is also that of the mind: “Give always more than you can take back. And forget. Such is the sacred path” (NP, 55). “The evening frees itself from the hammer, man stays chained to his heart” (NP, 55). Compare another text from Le Nu perdu: “Generosity is a facile prey. Nothing is more frequently attacked, confused, defamed. Generosity creates our future executioners, our retrenchments, dreams written in chalk, but also the warmth which receives once and gives twice” (NP, 91). The text ends on a streak of red light in the distance, representing the future, a silence free from our present doubt and misgivings as they are tied to our words: “How uncurious truth would be bloodless if there were not this breaker of redness in the distance where the doubt and the saying of the present are not engraved. We advance, abandoning all speech in promising ourselves that sight” (NP, 56). The profound silence is, like the space the poet demands about him, a denial of everyday triviality at the final height. Significantly, the next series of fusées has to do with both silence and motion: “we would have only liked to answer mute questions, preparations for movement” (NP, 58). In the title the poet includes Maurice Blanchot, a well-known critic whose advocacy of silence and the poetic mystery are closely associated with Char's own. Char speaks for them both, then, in this ascent at once temporal, spatial, and moral: “The time is near where only that which could remain unexplained will be able to summon us” (NP, 58). That ideal bareness we cannot really recreate is akin to silence and to mystery: all three converge in the poetry and the “irresolute and misunderstood infinite” which is said to surround it (NP, 58).

As we look in succession at the texts of Le Nu perdu, the distance up the mountain seems measured out like the “Tide Ratio” of Les Matinaux; here the flux is no longer only that of water, but also of space and time. From the “Pause” and the “Slowness” we arrive at the “Tables of Longevity,” where we read, still in relation to the infinite, a future couched in a present tense: “When there is less and less space between the infinite and us, between the libertarian sun and the prosecutor sun, we are aground on night” ([JG] NP, 61). But it is some time before the “bell of pure departure” will signal the triumphant end of the battle upland: “True victories are only won over a long time, our forehead against the night” (NP, 65). The struggle is again that of upstream as well as upland and is openly marked as being so. A beautiful series of aphorisms called “La Scie rêveuse” (“The Dreaming Saw”) moves from an initial line of understatement and blossoming (“To be sure of one's own murmurs and to lead action as far as its word in flower”) through an invocation to the river to whose modest murmur we were listening (“Law of the river …, of losses compensated but of torn sides, when the ambitious house of the mind crumbled, we recognized you and found you good” (NP, 69) to the final statement of persistence in spite of difficulty, toward the recapturing of a true identity (“Alone among the stones, the stone of the torrent has the reverie-like contour of the face finally restored”) (NP, 70).

This text comes from the collection Dans la Pluie giboyeuse (In the Quarried Rain), from whose heavy and nourishing fall the torrent was created, to whose animal intensity the poet hunter or the poet as his own prey has joined his breathing and his fate: that hunter who is associated with the flower called Orion's dart, with the unicorn in “L'anneau de la licorne” (“Ring of the Unicorn”), as well as the poem “Seuil” (“Threshold”), as we have seen, will later appear in a “mute game,” then at last in his own constellation before redescending to earth in Aromates chasseurs as Orion Iroquois. The path upland leads through all the texts, for in the constellation glimpsed within the poem “Possessions extérieures” (“Exterior Possessions”) traces of many myths might be seen to merge, for example, Orion the hunter, changed to a dove, a bee, and then a star, and Orion blinded—as in Poussin's canvas Orion aveuglé, already mentioned, which telescopes two legends⁵—but by his own radiance. The blinding or the self-blinding ray resembles the single horn of the animal in “The Ring of the Unicorn,” in La Nuit talismanique. Here Orion, not named but no less present, chews a leaf of a virgin flower, a hunter never satisfied with his prey: “He had felt jostled and lonely at the border of his constellation, only a little town shivering in tempered space. To the questioner: ‘Have you finally met her? Are you happy at last?’ he did not deign to reply, and tore a leaf of guelder-rose” (NT [La nuit talismanique], 83). But this Orion remains as tragic as he is lucid; “The more he understands, the more he suffers. The more he knows, the more he is torn. But his lucidity has the measure of his pain and his tenacity, that of his despair” (NP, 89).

Orion will reappear, assuming in himself all the rising of a return upland and the falling of a meteor, all the scattered brilliance of La Parole en archipel (The Word as Archipelago) and the clustered radiance of his own constellation, bridging the heavens and the earthly streams for both senses of the return upland, human as well as mythic. To the path of the return, a mystery is still assigned. “The roads which do not promise the country of their destination are the roads most loved” (NP, 91). Upland in all its bareness must remain open to interpretation; it will never be reduced to one landscape, neither that of the Vaucluse nor that of the heavens. Similarly, to join the figure of Orion, already the convergence of so much legend and of so many myths, there now comes another hero, Hölderlin's Hyperion—“The best son of the old solar disk and the nearest to his celestial slowness” (NP, 95).⁶ Hölderlin himself, stricken with madness by the gods as if by a lightning bolt, and thus singled out as a poet, is a chosen figure of René Char. Heidegger's essay on Hölderlin (“Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry”) comes close to the spirit of Char's poetics, as do many of Heidegger's writings, with their emphasis on being-toward-death and its relation to being-in-this world. (Some of Char's most moving prose has to do with his friendship with Heidegger, which can be called poetic as well as philosophic.)

The breaker of redness has now become a crepuscular light, itself said to be bare like older times, magnified like a torrent swollen with rain, and as peremptory as the lightning which apparently chooses the poet. These terms are used by Char to describe his night of fire, resembling Pascal's terrible night to whose brief, jagged, and unforgettable “mémorial” Char's most intense passages now bear such a strong likeness.⁷ These texts have about them a suddenness and yet a gravity which set them apart. The very violence of that night marks the culmination of the path upward toward what is no longer a simple line of daybreak, magnetic in its attraction, but a passionate light of conflict, where even the word brisant becomes active rather than descriptive, changing from a noun (“the breaker”) to a verb: “se brisant de toutes ses artères contre nous” (“breaking with all its arteries against us”) (NP, 97).

That passionate vision prepares a quieter illumination. After the breaking down of walls and the scaling of heights, the poet goes once more inside, having acknowledged all along that the path of returning was interior, as the summit is finally an invisible one: “I have lived outside, exposed to all sorts of inclemencies. The hour has come for me to return, oh laughter of slate! into a book or into death” (NP, 106).

II OUTLOOK: RECHERCHE DE LA BASE ET DU SOMMET (SEARCH FOR THE BASE AND THE SUMMIT)

Often, as we know, a poet's theory is most clearly seen in his essays on other writers or artists—more clearly, indeed, than in his essays centering on his own poetics. Char's recently published volume of commentary on the major artists whose world he values—Le Monde de l'art n'est pas le monde du pardon (The World of Art is not the World of Pardon)—shows a range of writings from diverse epochs and concerning equally diverse creations. His comments, for instance, on Georges de La Tour, Mirò, Braque, de Staël, Vieira da Silva, as well as on Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Nietzsche, together with his conversations with Heidegger and his remarks on Camus, indicate the ways and depth of his thought. Even the intonation can prepare us for Char's own poetry. For instance, in describing Mirò's achievement, Char finds the evocative phrase: “the taste of springs and of their flight,” (RBS, 83), a formulation applicable to many of his own poems. The elements of water and air, the motions of beginning and soaring, the suggestion of an entire cycle—all are complete in that one line. Mirò, says Char, indicates, without spelling out or proclaiming: that is also a good description of the essential concern characteristic of his own work in the graver moments. “We recognize the painter's gesture by that gravitation toward the sources which, as they appear, turn the images aside from their end. As if breathed in by the movement seizing them, they contract” (RBS, 83). The description might well be that of the intense expectation and occasional massing of Char's own images, under the sometimes hidden weight of an idea, felt to press even on the movement of the poem itself.

Or a passage on Nicolas de Staël, which by chance serves as a useful reference point for Char's own play on the abominable snowman. Char, in discussing the illustrations of de Staël for some of his poems, writes that they “appear for the first time on a field of virgin snow that the sunlight … will try to melt” (RBS, 93). De Staël and he are not, he says, abominable snowmen, “but we sometimes come nearer to the unknown than is permissible, and to the empire of stars.” Like that of Char, de Staël's art is the contrary of long-winded; it is rather, like his, of a lapidary simplicity and shows a natural ellipsis. Of all the artists with whom Char has been allied, de Staël seems—to this reader—the closest to him, along with Braque.

Concerning theory, the latter seems of the closest temperament:⁸ we have only to read their conversations, as Char relates them here, or to consider the similar humanity of their characters. Indisputably, André Breton's writings on and his admiration of Picasso or Matta reveal Breton's way of thinking as nothing else can, for instance, Breton's essays in Le Surréalisme et la peinture on Picasso's venture across the abyss or on his juxtaposing of objects, and on Matta's reshaping the entire universe to fit his own vision and to make way for chance. Just so, Char's writings on Braque further our understanding of the poet as much as of the artist. To take an example corresponding to the one just related from Breton and Picasso, Char says of Braque the following: “Children and geniuses know that there is no bridge, only the water allowing itself to be crossed. Thus in Braque's work the spring is inseparable from the rock, the fruit from the soil, the cloud from its fate …” (RBS, 57-58).

Char describes in his work the “incessant going and coming from solitude to being and from being to solitude”: this sure convergence of the natural, the human, and the universal on one hand and of this alteration from the one being to the being-in-the-world is constant in Char's writing. We have only to think of his essay on the artist Sima, in which he discusses the junction of the four elements and the situation of man-in-the-world: “I am not separated; I am among” (Se Rencontrer paysage avec Joseph Sima).⁹ Braque knows how to “judge an enigma, how to revive for us its fortune and its benumbed brilliance” (“son éclat engourdi”) (RBS, 67). When the poet despairs, as in the phrase already quoted: “Je suis tombé de mon éclat …,” the artist, above all others, can render to him his inspiration. For he symbolizes continuity: Braque's work of one day, maintains Char, if it were to be suspended over the abyss in the evening, would carry over like a projection toward the morrow's work. Char finally likens these germs of the next day's work—“a multiplier in the expectation of its multiplicand” (RBS, 87)—to a threatened candle which the sun would soon replace. In La Nuit talismanique, the poet warns us not to substitute for the flickering chiaroscuro of candlelight, its flame rich in imaginative possibilities and ambiguities (that “éclat nourri de sa flamme”), the steady brightness of day.¹⁰

Braque, like Char, “recreates his candle” every evening, never sacrificing the indispensable mystery in favor of what is at best only clear. The candle in several of La Tour's canvases around which the other masses are grouped,¹¹ makes a fitting image for an observation as quiet as the flame: “Action is blind, it is poetry that sees.” Similarly, we might observe the lighting in Char's major poems as an example of poetic interiority. These two kinds of light serve to nourish one another, like Breton's image of the communicating vessels of day and night; for Char, poetry and action will be the interdependent “vases communicants.” So the contemplation of the flame and the daytime motion (“Emerge on your surface …,” RBS, 168) are joined.

Among the philosophers whose poetics are close to Char's own, Heraclitus seems one of the nearest. The fragments which have survived from his writing are like poems, each chosen by chance to endure above all that has been submerged. For Char, convinced that our only certainty for the future is an ultimate pessimism (“the accomplished form of the secret where we come to refresh ourselves, to renew our watchfulness and to sleep,” RBS, 117), Heraclitus represents a solar eagle. He is a profound predecessor, and an uncompromising one: “He knew that truth was noble and that the image revealing it is tragedy.” Likewise, Char's own poetry is not sad; it is exhilarating, complicated, forceful, and often tragic.

Two other poets—for Heraclitus is, for Char, as much a poet as a philosopher—lend a psychological strength and a nourishing unrest to his language: Baudelaire and Nietzsche are Char's “water-carriers,” sources of his poetry and of his disquiet. He defines poetry now as “the wound that shines where the sentence effaces itself” (RBS, 139) and finds Nietzsche's “seismic anguish” close to his own.

Rimbaud is a significant predecessor as many critics have pointed out. “But if I knew what Rimbaud meant for me, I would know what poetry is before me, and I would no longer have to write it …” (RBS, 130). One of Char's numerous commentaries on Rimbaud indicates sufficiently his particular importance: “we must consider Rimbaud in the single perspective of poetry. Is that so scandalous? His work and his life are thus revealed to be of an unequaled coherence, neither because of, nor in spite of, their originality. … We are fully aware, outside of poetry, that between our foot and the stone it weighs upon, between our gaze and the field traversed, the world is null. Real life … is only found in the body of poetry” (RBS, 127). Poetry has, for Rimbaud, for Char, possibly for all true poets, no other reason for being than being. Rimbaud's famous statement quoted by Char is infinitely applicable to the latter's own poetry: “I meant to say what it says, literally and in all senses” (RBS, 127).¹² Rimbaud was, like Char, a lover of nature, seen as a luminous force, joining with the language of the poem for a lasting creation. His spirit pervades Char's notion of the three ages, recurring in the title of Le Nu perdu and in a text of Aromates chasseurs, which are, respectively, the story of simplicity and unfeigned spiritual nakedness—that is, the golden age—as they are lost in an industrial age, and that of a middle time we must find again, by retaining the value of the past and predicting the future. “Rimbaud escaping¹³ locates his golden age in the past and in the future. He does not settle down. He has another epoch come forth, either in the mode of nostalgia or in that of desire, only in order to fell it instantly and to return to the present, that target with the center always hungry for projectiles, that natural port for all departures.” This spatial description of past and future and present serves to map the three ages, already mentioned; Rimbaud's rhythm, many of his conceptions, and his dynamics are Char's also: “In the motion of an ultrarapid dialectic, so perfect it does not arouse panic, but rather a whirlwind, fitting and precise, he pulls us along, he dominates us, carrying everything with him … as we consent” (RBS, 131). Not only is there to be no settling down in comfort for poetry, but no permanent attachment to what we have most loved: “The urgency of his word and its scope espouse and blanket a surface that language before him had never attained nor occupied.” In fact, Rimbaud is perhaps best known, in Char's works, for his uncompromising departure, to which we have already referred. Char defines poetry as “the song of departure”: how, he asks, could such a poet as Rimbaud have been satisfied with less than complete separation? For “poetry is the distanceless solitude among everyone's bustling, that is, a solitude which has the means of expressing itself.” Our aloneness, even our loneliness should be as refreshing for us as the fountain nourishing the brutality of a poet: “To drink shivering, to be brutal, restores” (NP, 82).

III NIGHT AND REFLECTION

The volumes now to be discussed are turned towards an inner realm: towards a “talismanic night,” a gathering of reflections about the deepest aspects of poetry, and, finally, a constellation.

A. LA NUIT TALISMANIQUE (TALISMANIC NIGHT)

These texts are each a witness to solitude and to a contemplation both cosmic and minute. Some add or strengthen aspects which we had not clearly seen before: for instance, concerning the importance of the small and the minimal, less as a plea for modesty than as an insistence on our perception and on our reordering of values. In line with this attitude, Char praises the man who takes care of his working instruments, in full knowledge of their value. We must assign the proper place to things and gather about us all we might use, in time of drought. (The importance of water in the austere landscape of the Vaucluse can hardly be overstated: thus the chosen images of scarcity and aridity.) This volume is turned toward the interior, as a kind of challenge to the mind. Since no movement in Char's work is entirely simple, there will be an extension outward subsequent to this introspective stage: “The night brings nourishment, the sun refines the nourished part” (NT, 15). Just so, this talismanic night provides the temporary halt and the renewing source for later works.

Again we hear the plea for space to be created about the poet: “The obligation, without pausing to breathe, to rarify, to hierarchize beings and things intruding on us” (NT, 72). The multilated giant who will finally take on the traits of Orion is subject to laws outside himself over which he has no intellectual command, but here he controls the space of his own contemplation, choosing its light and “inventing” his own sleep. He concentrates on the flickering of one candle, on its circular dance, triumphing over the partitioning of days (as in the “divided” time or “cloisons” of an earlier poem, “Faction du muet”): “As night asserted itself, my first task was to destroy the calendar viper knot where the start of each day sprang to sight. The aboutface of a candleflame prevented me. From it I learned to stoop over and to straighten quickly in the constant line of the horizon bordering my land, to see, nearing, a shadow giving birth to a shadow through the slant of a luminous shaft, and to scrutinize it” (NT, 87). The text is called “Éclore en hiver” (“To Blossom in Winter”), and the deepest meditation in its inward flowering is encouraged by just this close scrutiny of a minimal event, requiring careful attention.

One of the more interesting lights to cast on this volume is a light of difference, in a comparison of these texts with the brief opaque splendor of Mallarmé's Igitur, built around the expectation of one gesture, the breath which will extinguish a candle at midnight. The consequence of that annihilation of being by the breath is ambiguously positive: the creation of shadow and the union of word and act. For here the breath which has served in speech serves then as destruction; the observation is of especial interest for us, in view of the wide scope and extraordinary frequency of the images of breathing in Char's writing, from the earliest volumes. The complex awareness of certain extremes (“the presence of Midnight,” the absolute presence of things) and of absolute emptiness (a “vacant sonority,” “reciprocal nothingness”) is echoed by another violent contrast shared in the common space of the two poets. The poles of dark (“shadows disappeared in obscurity”) and of a flame, of chance and necessity, of ancestral apparitions hanging over the quiet yet lucid meditation of an open book on a table surrounded by mystery, all these find their place within the shadows of Char's talismanic night.¹⁴ Both texts depend on a temporary suspension of breath before the candle is extinguished, with the extinction of the text as its necessary corollary. Even the old gods storming outside the room where the poet plagued by insomnia keeps watch over the candle and the page remind us of Mallarmé's “dieux antiques.” It is as if René Char had assembled his writing and drawing instruments on the table where Igitur's book is open, in a space no less haunted by presences: “Another hand protects the oval flame,” and the presence is as mysterious as that other presence of midnight. “The heart of night was not to be set afire. The obscure should have been the master where the dawn's dew is chiseled” (NT, 16). Valéry points out “The usefulness of mystery.” “The best work is the one that keeps its secret longest.”¹⁵

The volume bears witness to the “desert sand” of insomnia, where the waters of night nourish like the redemption by water in “Le Visage nuptial” (“The Nuptial Countenance”). Igitur closes the book and blows out the candle “with his breath that contained chance,” while the poet stands fast in his nocturnal quiet, until the daybreak described earlier in the poem “Seuil,” where the figure of Orion may be seen to make his appearance against the horizon. Yet that interior meditation retains the hospitality of the hearth:

J'ai couru jusqu'à l'issue de cette nuit diluvienne. Planté dans le flageolant petit jour, ma ceinture pleine de saisons, je vous attends, ô mes amis qui allez venir. Déjà je vous devine derrière la noirceur de l'horizon. Mon âtre ne tarit pas de voeux pour vos maisons. Et mon bâton de cyprès rit de tout son coeur pour vous.

I have run to the outcome of this diluvian night. Taking my stand in the trembling dawn, with my belt full of seasons, I am waiting for you, my friends who will come. Already I divine you behind the black of the horizon. My hearth's good wishes for your homes never dry up. And my cypress walking-stick laughs with its whole heart for you.

([JG] FM [Fureur et mystère], 181)

Char's nocturnal meditation accommodates all of the landscape outside, taking within its range harvest, sun, the wind of the mistral, the river, and the land beyond. From the candle he watches, this “sedentary flame” itself containing the household gods propitious to our contemplation, he moves to an observation of the stars, of the human sky as it is matched to the universe beyond man. Thus the talisman, whether held by the poet's hand or that of another, serves as a guide to whatever is beyond the contemplation of any one night or any series of texts with its single or multiple source.

B. SUR LA POéSIE (ON POETRY)

In Sur la poésie Char collects several previous statements on poetics written between 1936 and 1974. The statements will be referred to according to their proper order, so as not to falsify the evolution once chosen, which is then reexamined by the poet in his reprinting of these texts. They begin by an echo of Moulin premier: “I admit that intuition reasons and gives orders from the moment that, as a bearer of keys, it does not forget to set the embryonic forms of poetry in motion, crossing through the high cages where the echoes are sleeping, those elect precursors of miracle which, as the forms pass by, steel and fecundate them” (SP [Sur la poésie] 71). As in the text En trente-trois morceaux (In Thirty-three Pieces), the fragments chosen and reassembled, taking on a different order, find a new coherence; the definitions of poetry itself may appear differently lit in this rereading of poetry as the realized “love of desire remaining desire” or as the future life of “requalified man.” Now the previous image of wool strands extended (“laines prolongées”) joins with that of a spiderweb on the same page, form replying to like form, as well as with the other images of making and of long enduring, through a dialectic of presence and passing: “The vitality of the poet is not a vitality of the beyond but an actual diamantine point of transcendent presence and pilgrim storms” (SP, 13).

And this dialectic is balanced by another, that of the torment and the happiness of the poet as they are always intransitive, the poet drawing “unhappiness from his own abyss” (SP, 17). It is important here to make a distinction between the writer in general and the poet in particular, for Char's morality and poetics are specifically fitted to the “métier du poète,” his chosen location in space and time to the “logement du poète,” his passion for life to the “vitalité du poète.” For example, the following statements do not start, and could never have done so, in Char's universe, with the words “Être écrivain” (“To be a writer”), but rather, with the words “Être poète.” Near the outset Char reconsiders the poet's own place (“The poet cannot remain for a long time in the stratosphere of the Word”) (SP, 8) and his mission (“The poet, keeper of the infinite faces of the living”) (SP, 9). “To be a poet is to have an appetite for an unease whose consummation, among the whirlwinds of the totality of things existent and intimated, provokes happiness just at the moment of conclusion” (SP, 13). The poetic function actively liberates, at its source, the only wealth found valuable: the verb tourmenter carries perfectly in both languages the double sense of a creative disturbance strong enough to arouse and of an inspiration sufficient to realize all that was only potential. In short, it indicates a troubling activity, both positive and negative: “The poet torments with the help of immeasurable secrets the form and the voice of his fountains” (SP, 14). It will be noticed that even the source is individual, not general.

Above all, these statements manifest a vivid faith in continuity, even when the poet leaves whatever he might consider as the base of his too prosaic safety for the risk implied in this conception of the poetic. He does not choose to remain untouched by his involvements: “Lean over, lean over more,” he reminds himself—and us (SP, 15). Typically, rather than merely speaking the “truth,” he maintains that he must live it (SP, 19). Now he takes advantage of the miraculous enduring of the smallest things, like the poor man profiting from an olive's eternity, as he phrases it elsewhere. Or again, at every disappointment in the expected—for in a “profession of risk,” nothing can really be counted on but the certainty of that risk—this “magician of insecurity” (SP, 18) responds with a confidence whose foundation is often far from evident to us, and all the more affecting: “To each crumbling of proofs, the poet replies by a salvo of futures.” And later: “Poetry will steal my death from me” (SP, 20).

The situation of the mind turned-toward-the-future is closely allied to the metaphors of climbing toward a height from which the poet, called a “summit of breath in the unknown” (SP, 16), can see forward and around at a great distance, leaving behind him the feats already accomplished of which he is no longer a simple reflection. He is no longer to be compared to others since he fits neither their norms nor their hopes, neither is he tied down to possessions. He thus occupies a perfect position for superior or future action. “The serene town, the unperforated village is before him” (SP, 16). The statements surrounding this one are noticeably full of increase and of upward growth. Everywhere the relation of the exterior or the physical to the moral and mental is clear, as in our chapter title “exterior and interior architecture.” The text directly following the one just quoted begins with a simultaneous description of the poem and of its poet: “Standing erect, increasing throughout its course, the poem …” (SP, 17). The initiator of verbal action is also the arranger, not of a placid still life, but of an “insurgent order” which is inscribed in the future, rebellious to past tranquillity and even to past truth. “You cannot begin a poem without a parcel of error about yourself and the world …” (SP, 21). So the spirit of contradiction or at least of ambivalence remains. Many of Char's more profound statements are structured along those lines: for example, “poetry is the fruit we hold, ripened, joyously in our hand, at the same moment it appears to us on the frosted stem, within the flower's chalice, of an uncertain future” (SP, 21). Living amid truth makes one a liar, claims Char (SP, 19), and exactly that spirit of ambivalence and dialectic moves us beyond individual pettiness and pride to a certain impersonality. There is, however, no coldness to the term, rather a feeling like that in the poem “The Extravagant One,” in which a frost grazes the surface of the wanderer's forehead, “without seeming personal” (FM, 182).

The perception of contrasts is often a matter of outlook and of patience in examining detail: “… il est permis enfin de rapprocher les choses de soi avec une libre minutie …” (“… we are finally permitted to bring objects near us with a free exactness …”) (En trente-trois morceaux, April 8, 1956).

By a paradoxical twist, just as the aphoristic generalizations which we discuss here under the heading of morality may seem to have a particular application, so the observation of the smallest objects, the juxtaposition of which composes the universe of Char's daily observation, may appear to find the widest scope. To give only one example of the rapid expansion of perspective, let us take, in La Nuit talismanique, the line: “Fourche couchée, perfection de la mélancolie” (“Pitchfork laid down, perfection in melancholy”). The eye, and with it the mind, travels from the object to its announced position, to the representation of the mood or its emotional effect, and then to an implicit question as to situation. Why the halt? Will the work halted continue? The answer is, in all probability, positive, and the reason, temporal: “Successives enveloppes! Du corps levant au jour désintégré, … nous restons constamment encerclés, avec l'énergie de rompre” (“Wrappings, one after the other! From the rising body to the day disintegrated … we remain constantly surrounded, with the energy to break off”) (NT, 65). The phenomenon is somewhat reminiscent of Pascal's celebrated statement on the meeting of extremes: Char's contrasting wide and narrow focus are equally important for our understanding of his overall perspective. We might compare this stretching of the imagination to other mental exercises: first to one of Char's own observations on vertical extremes, already quoted, applicable to these roughly horizontal extremes of focus: “Base and summit … crumble rapidly. But there is the tension of the search. …” Here the value is placed on an effort surely as much moral as physical, in this “Recherche de la base et du sommet.” The ability to take in the distance between two extreme points and to juxtapose them nevertheless, to grasp the complex relation between them, all that is essential for poetic understanding. Moreover, we might see in the extraordinary proliferation of all varieties of contrasts the same mental athletics required of the reader, if he would follow the work with any fidelity.

Now the balance of opposing terms requires a movement between the components of the individual statements which can properly be called dialectic, in that the statement itself serves as the final term. In turn, a series of statements can be seen as moments in the temporal advance toward an integral statement on poetry, necessary movements in themselves, whose individually contradictory and yet eventually resolved terms accumulate in a balance sensed as delicate and complete.

We saw above an example of the relation of one moment to the next, where a description of the poet as the “summit of breath in the unknown,” whose being cannot be tied down or measured, led to the expression: “Standing erect, increasing throughout its course …” by way of the metaphors of height and increase, and an earlier example, where the “prolonged wool strands” into which the poet transforms each potentially dying object led to the image of a spiderweb hung in the sky—or with its concentric circles reaching from line to line. Such relations can often be traced through a few moments in succession, each adding to the preceding information without altering its own dialectical progress. For example, a series of three statements on death makes up a whole, evidently related to other statements and yet still sufficient unto itself. Each statement shows its own obvious exterior and interior contradiction and subsequently, its own more subtle resolution; it should be noted, parenthetically, that we are still following Char's own order for these aphorisms, so that the sequence of discussion is first of all controlled by his arrangement of texts.

To make a poem is to take possession of a nuptial beyond, which is found well within this life, closely attached to it and nevertheless in near proximity to the urns of death.

Poetry, unique ascension of men, which the sun of the dead cannot obscure in the perfect and burlesque infinite, perfected and ludicrous.

Poetry is at once speech and the silent, desperate provocation of our being, exigent as it is (“être-exigeant”) for the advent of a reality which will be without rival. It is incorruptible—imperishable, no, for it is exposed to common dangers. But the only one which visibly triumphs over material death.

(SP, 24-25)

The moments are not only joined together in theme—what conquers death and gives value to life?—but also, in form. The construction is strong, or, to use a musical description, the opening attack is vigorous. The set of three terms is joined to the subsequent fragment by implication of the death theme: “The only signature at the bottom of the blank sheet of life is traced by poetry” (SP, 26), and to the preceding parts by such definitions as the following: “Poems are incorruptible bits of existence which we hurl toward death's repugnant muzzle, but high enough so that, ricocheting onto it, they fall into the nominative world of unity“(SP, 22). (This concept is closely related to Heideggerian thought.)

Since poetry is necessarily a situation of disquiet, value attaches not to calm but to unrest, to the rebellious intellect, “refractory to calculated projects.” For, “Poetry lives on perpetual insomnia” (SP, 26). The contradictory attitude itself corresponds perfectly to that state of unease and nonprogression which it magnifies. It is genuinely an exciting venture: not a pseudoheroic escapade, but rather one to be taken seriously, or not attempted at all. “In poetry, you only dwell in the place you leave, you only create the work you are detached from, you only obtain duration by destroying time” (SP, 28). Again, on the next page: “The act of writing, poignant and profound when anguish raises itself on one elbow to observe and when our happiness thrusts itself uncovered into the wind of the path” (SP, 29). The play of one concept against another, while it allows both stability and flexibility, prevents stagnation.

In the most recent part of the book, some previously unpublished statements are gathered under the dedication: A Faulx contente (To Your Scythe's Content). We think, in reading this title, of the opposite melancholy of the pitchfork laid to rest at evening in La Nuit talismanique. The image of the scythe serves as a metonymy for the ideal of pruning and trimming, for the sacrifice of what is unessential; it is therefore, unlike the pitchfork, not laid to rest.

We are still following a marked path along Sur la poésie, that of the contradictory and finally resolved terms of much of Char's writing, exemplified in another image of anguish: a path chosen by the poet leads, he says, only “to one's own bloodied heart, the source and the sepulcher of the poem” (SP, 33). Above all, the point of a poem, its beginning and end, is not exterior representation, which Char would associate with prose. The poet is of a sensitivity such that the extremes touch within each text, occasionally far inside: sometimes his writing expresses a quiet ambivalence, sometimes the clash of opposing forces. The next to the last statement reads: “the poem lays us in a postponed grief, making no distinction between the cold and the ardent” (SP, 34). The adjectival terms even in their opposition show a slight unbalance, for we would expect either frigid/ardent or cold/hot. But “ardent” is precisely the term which matters here, for a multiplicity of reasons. A poem is, for Char, ardor expressed or suggested, intuition at its highest point; yet it is at the same time the product of a clearheaded and rational process; it thus represents emotional weight and imaginative spirit.

The complexities and ambivalencies of the opposing terms are seen with some of their prolongations in the final statement of the volume, where the role of the poet now assumes the functions of freeing and joining: “The poet bursts the bonds imprisoning what he touches; he does not teach the end of linking,” reads the last statement in the book (SP, 35). The linking of element to element can be perceived in a form identical with the essential and traditional double nature of all profound relationships. The relations of poetic elements will not be simple, and therefore continue despite the conclusion of each poem, or of each series of statements, each slight imbalance encouraging the extension of thought.

From each twist of the “prolonged strand” of the poet's thought, there comes another possible one, joining a literal to a figurative, a physical to an emotional term. The same bifurcation can be seen in many words: for an example, the French word source has an extension far beyond its English usage, as seen in the double definition: “source and sepulcher of the poem.” For the source is equally the liquid origin and the inspirational spring, at once figurative and geographic, moral and actual. Thus the specific word “source” renews itself, in one more prolongation, by its own ambivalence, through all the endless links a poem creates. We read, in a retrospective extension from “A Faulx contente,” the title of the poem “La Faux relevée (“Scythe Lifted Again”): “Fontaine, qui tremblez dans votre étroit réduit, / Mon gain, aux soifs des champs, vous le prodiguerez” (“Fountain, trembling within your narrow nook, / My gain you'll spread bounteous to fields athirst”) (LM, 184), as if this were also a source, a spring of poetic ambivalence and abundance, of poetic enduring, in correspondence with the poetics which always underlies it. Finally, all Char's meditations, whether on aesthetic or moral matters, could be entitled: Sur la poésie.

C. AROMATES CHASSEURS (AROMATICS HUNTERS)

These poems follow an inward path, made up of meditations on political and moral problems, on poetry and survival in the present world, and yet the path remains in direct and strongly sensed correspondence with one constellation in the sky, that of Orion. The volume takes up and expands the brief texts from Le Nu perdu on the relation between poet and destiny, expressed by the image of stars against blackness, with the play of bright and dark fully as complex as that of Baroque poetry. The architecture, with its columns leading from earth to sky—four corresponding texts of Orion—will be referred to again in the chapter on “The Elements of the Poem,” since each has its own element. This architecture seems particularly close to that of Mallarmé.

The four great Orion poems which form the pillars of the volume are inserted in the constellation, at once the archipelago from which Orion descends because of a thirst for earth in the initial poem, “Evadé d'archipel” (“Escaped from the Archipelago”), and the sky to which he finally returns, garbed in an “infinity” of luminous points. They are set in the series of radiant islands as a structure—visible and implied—to whose light each bears a brief witness. The volume itself joins all the elements, as the aromatic smoke returns the hero to his heaven, to build there the giant pontoon bridges under which we can pass safely, after our swim “in the icy waters” connected to the earth. Orion Iroquois, a builder in steel and at great heights, is the figure corresponding to the hunter Orion blinded and received on high (“Réception d'Orion”), these two figures forming the two central pillars or columns of the book, the first and last poems of Part II. Just so, the first and last poems of the volume correspond, for in “Evadé d'archipel,” Orion has put down his arrow and his sickle, and in his meteoric fall, his traits are blackened with crude celestial ore, like those of the laborer in the early poem “Fréquence” or those of the maquisards in the Resistance poems, all in Fureur et mystère. And the last poem, “Eloquence d'Orion,” will answer this one, by its own resistance songs: “les chants matinaux de la rébellion. Métal rallumé sans cesse de ton chagrin, ils me parvenaient humides d'inclémence et d'amour” (“matinal songs of rebellion. Metal relit ceaselessly from your pain, they came to me damp with inclemency and with love”) (AC, 43). The suffering and the fire are implicit, merged with the morally unforgiving nature: we remember the earlier refrain: “We remain men for inclemency” from “Contrevenir.” In this last moment of eloquence, Orion would choose to be, in all simplicity, by a river and in a poem, before his departure:

Tu t'établirais dans ta page, sur les bords d'un ruisseau, comme l'ambre gris sur le varech échoué; puis, la nuit monté, tu t'éloignerais des habitants insatisfaits, pour un oubli servant d'étoile. Tu n'entendrais plus geindre tes souliers entrouverts.

You would settle in your page, on the bank of a river, like ambergris on the seaweed adrift; then when night had risen, you would depart from the unsatisfied inhabitants for a forgetfulness serving as a star. You would no longer hear your half-open shoes complaining.

(AC, 43)

Notes

1. See the “Note to Francis Curel” in Chapter One.

2. For example, see the large volume of original works by his friends the artists and the accompanying texts: Le Monde de l'Art n'est pas le monde du pardon (Paris: Maeght, 1975). Preface by Jacques Dupin.

3. Tristan Tzara, “Note sur la poésie,” in Sept manifestes Dada, suivis de lampisteries (Paris: Pauvert, 1963).

4. Paul Valéry, Oeuvres, vol. I, Pléiade edition (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), p. 862.

5. Ibid.

6. E. H. Gombrich, “The Subject of Poussin's Orion,” in Symbolic Images: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (New York: Phaidon, 1972), in particular, pp. 121-22. See also Claude Simon, Orion aveuglé (Geneva: Skira, 1970).

7. See Sereni, (Chapter One, note 10). All the notes in this book are invaluable.

8. Thomas Hines, “L'Ouvrage de tous les temps, admiré: Lettera amorosa/René Char and Georges Braque,” Bulletin du Bibliophile, no. 1, 1973.

9. Se rencontrer paysage avec Joseph Sima, exhibition Château de Ratilly, June 23 to September 16, 1973.

10. Mallarmé's Igitur, referred to above in the same connection, is an excellent example of the shadowy play of ambiguity. The comparison with the table and its open book, the candle about to be snuffed out, and the atmosphere of midnight is worth considering. “Cest le rêve pur d'un Minuit, en soi disparu, et dont la Clarté reconnue, qui seule demeure au sein de son accomplissement plongé dans l'ombre, résume sa stérilité sur la pâleur d'un livre ouvert que présente la table …” (Pléiade edition, p. 435). In Char and in Mallarmé, the figures of the unicorn and the ancient gods, and in both breath and life play against the dark, as speech against silence and chance against necessity: “Il ferme le livre—souffle la bougie—de son souffle qui contenait le hasard …” (Ibid., p. 442).

11. Sereni, p. 217: “Le Tricheur à l'as de carreau,” “Rixe de musiciens,” “La Diseuse de bonne aventure,” “Le Vielleur,” are the four works of Georges de La Tour to which Char refers here. “For the oppositions and on the cohabitation of a ‘diurnal’ painter and a ‘nocturnal’ one (two times, two manners and thus two languages) the scheme of distinctions essential in the art of Georges de La Tour …,” Sereni refers us to the catalog of the La Tour exhibition in the Orangerie (May 10 - September 25, 1972).

12. This statement is a response to and consolation for any translator or critic about to lose one of the meanings of a poem: Char uses it in just that way.

13. See “Evadé d'archipel” in Aromates chasseurs, in which Orion represents the figure of the poet, who escapes eventually both from his constellation and from our earth; he is essential, and not to be pinned down to one locality.

14. See note eight above.

15. Valéry, p. 562.