SOURCE: Bishop, Michael. “Char's Mysticism.” In Figuring Things: Char, Ponge, and Poetry in the Twentieth Century, edited and translated by Charles D. Minahen, pp. 175-89. Lexington, Ky.: French Forum Publishers, 1994.

Laissons l'énergie et retournons à l'énergie.

(ES [Eloge d'une Soupçonnée] 7)¹

DIFFICULTY, REBELLION, AND INNOCENCE

In a poet whose work has to such a compelling degree stressed actuality and engagement, the difficulties and divisions of history, and the need for ethical, even political intervention à ras de terre, it may seem more than paradoxical to invite consideration of his œuvre as an “act and place” of what I have termed mysticism. Certainly, like Rimbaud—I am thinking of his brouillon from Une Saison en enfer, “Bonr”—Char can swiftly dismiss, as he does in “Eaux-mères” from Le Marteau sans maître, a certain concept of the mystical: “Il n'y a rien de miraculeux dans le retour à la vie de cet enfant,” he writes; “Je méprise les esprits religieux et leurs interprétations mystiques” (OC [Oeuvres complètes] 52). And, of course, behind Char's entire poetic project there lies an important sense of individual difference, heroic resistance and “sovereign” action and telluric re-creation, faced as he is/we are with the “subordination” and “terrors” of those many “totalitarianisms” and other bloodinesses threatening our collective, planetary existence (cf. AC [Aromates chausseurs] 20). His refusals and high revolt seem not, perhaps, to allow readily for some ultimate recuperation by the esotericism and serene contemplation we may imagine pertinent to mystical states and endeavors.²

There is, however, from the outset in Char a level of perception of not only possible modes of being but, much more crucially and immediately, quotidian experience that permits an influx, into this model of radical existential problem and struggle, of factors that significantly shift emphasis away from the kind of one-dimensional morality and philosophy that a strictly and conventionally binary logic of good and evil can generate. Already, in Seuls demeurent, Char thus speaks of “une innocence où l'homme qui rêve ne peut vieillir” (OC 132), an innocence of being and action liberating the mind and the emotions from seemingly rigid existential grills and cumbersome sociological transformations, opening the self to what only appears to be utterly withdrawn but which, in effect, already enjoys a certain status of reality within consciousness. Thus is it that, in “Qu'il vive,” from Les Matinaux (OC 305), Char not only perceives—the initial perception remains part of the unidimensionality evoked, arguably—the earth as a “countertomb,” but brings tumbling down his own edifice of terror, abomination, and “disaster” by insisting, once again, upon the latter's essential lack of malignancy: the inner intentionality, despite external evidence to the contrary and despite our own efforts to act upon such evidence—the inner intentionality of being is not predicated upon some intrinsic mal, but upon—one might presume, based upon other texts of Char—principles of improbable benignity, harmlessness, even love. Does not La Parole en archipel speak of “un mystère plus fort que leur malédiction innocentant leur cœur”? (OC 410). Such a sense of ontic innocence, I should argue, sets Char's poetics at some important remove from platitudinous verification of personal and collective trauma and the inevitable resistance we may seek to apply to such trauma.

KNOWING AND FORGETTING

Should Char turn out to be, in any conceivable sense of the term, a mystic, it seems reasonable to maintain that he would have to be engaged in some process of (self-)initiation. Now, if it is clear that such a search or mental movement in no way propels him towards religious forms and rites—even oriental: I shall return to this—it is equally clear that his work depicts a powerful and generalized impulsion towards what he terms in Moulin premier “la connaissance productive du Réel” (OC 61), towards an encounter with what he has elsewhere called le grand réel (OC 665): being in all its modes, sensory to psychic, phenomena as apparently separate as soupspoons, wind upon wheatfields, dream, feeling, intuition: reality as actuality, felt possibility, achieved creation. The human being, in this process of endless (self-)initiation into what is at once everything and “merely” our individual traversal of something, thus becomes “[cette] lampe de toujours et [cette] torche interrogative” of which he speaks in Eloge d'une Soupçonnée (7). Thus does Char's both pragmatic and cosmically attuned “mysticism” imply a moving, unfixed and unfixing initiation into the known and the given, the received and the imposed. Such mysticism demonstrably demystifies at a certain level, while recognizing the power of myth and symbol at another—and fully appreciating that the entire process of knowing and (self-)initiation remains linked to what, in Chants de la Balandrane, Char emphasizes as a crucial optic according to which specific, systematized search—science, he declares in Le Nu perdu, is no more than “un phare aveugle” (OC 467)—may be distinguished from other modes of consciousness (cf. “Sans chercher à savoir,” CB [Chants de la Balandrane] 67).³

It is here that we can see to what degree Char's (self-)initiatory gesture merges with a certain skepticism or soupçon—“ma réserve,” he succinctly calls it in Dehors la nuit est gouvernée (OC 111)—which renders Char's writings, despite their aphoristic and apophthegmatic high-mindedness, delightfully open, fresh, unpretentious. “Soyons avares de crédulité,” he writes in the same collection, “comment se montrer aux autres et à soi autrement que hardi, modeste et mortel?” (OC 85). The impulse to know, to discover, to live in that light emanating both from within and without, thus remains delicately articulated, anchored in a belief in the virtues of “[les] chemins muletiers,” as Char characteristically puts it in Chants de la Balandrane (72): rocky, rugged, plural paths of knowing, earthy and meandering: paths for all seasons, reversible, unassuming. That said, however, Char never loses sight of the relativity of the real, its malleability, the consequent need for availability in order to distinguish, in what we may think of too hastily as the opaqueness of being, those teeming “births” or creations that, in effect, constitute it (cf. AC 34)—and which, without our precise “seeking to know” (cf. CB 67), constantly found our knowing, constantly initiate. No doubt this accounts for Char's, and our, “faithfulness” in the midst of “excessive vulnerability” (cf. OC 215), the kind of “tacit consent” to what is, to what surges forth, unknown, knowable, of which he speaks in Les Matinaux (OC 311). Such sought/unsought knowledge or initiation into le grand réel is visceral, intuitive, brought about by some “ardor of soul,” as he suggests in Fenêtres dormantes et porte sur le toit (84). This does not mean that effort is excluded: “Il faut souffler sur quelques lueurs,” he suggests in “Rougeur des matinaux,” from Les Matinaux, “pour faire de la bonne lumière” (OC 331); but it does mean that cause-effect thinking is not banally privileged (cf. OC 159) and that some “faith” is given, beyond reservation, to what Char terms, in Fureur et mystère, “une lampe inconnue de nous, inaccessible à nous, à la pointe du monde” (OC 147). Knowing, for Char, is thus always caught up in meaning beyond reductive evaluation: it involves “l'intelligence avec l'ange, notre primordial souci,” as he says in Feuillets d'Hypnos (OC 179). Such (self-)initiatory knowledge and (inner) sensing cannot, of course, result, despite all appearances in Char, in a writing predicated upon absolute truth or revelation. Writing, for him, is rather the blossoming of some exquisite but ephemeral convolvulus, “liseron élevé audessus d'une vie enfin jointe, liseron non invoqué en preuve” (CB 30). Does not Char, already in Seuls demeurent, delightfully deem poetry to be “un point diamanté actuel de présences transcendantes et d'orages pèlerins”? (OC 154): an act and place now, yet both plunged into the movingness of our “pilgrimage” and beyond blatant presence. A “sacred way” of ontic dépense à la Bataille, an initiation into (self-)knowledge predicated upon giving and receiving—and letting go, moving on, “forgetting” so as to remain available to the swarming “births” of (our) being: “Donne toujours plus que tu ne peux reprendre,” Char writes in Le Nu perdu, “et oublie. Telle est la voie sacrée” (OC 446).

HINGING AND EQUILIBRIUM

The late volumes of Char often strike us for their suddenly surging signs of a deep love of life in this “gueux de siècle, ventre et jambes arrachés” (CB 13) and thus seem to apply an apt poetic closure to an œuvre whose beginnings, too, operate endless and precarious equilibrium, shifts, changes, and paradoxical convergence of optics we might think relatively immutable: Le Marteau sans maître speaks from its outset of “l'homme massacré et pourtant victorieux” (OC 3) and evokes that Charian—yet universal—“hésitation” experienced between “l'imprécation du supplice et le magnifique amour” (OC 3). Now, while such complementarity may be readily appreciated at a conceptual level, it is more difficult to live. There can however be little doubt, I should argue, that this early and continuing sense, in Char, of paradox, and the deep meaning of paradox, explains the great and delicate appeal of his work and constitutes a plain but yet subtle further mark of what I am terming Char's mysticism. The phenomenon of wedding “praise” to “mockery” (FD [Fenêtres dormantes et porte sur le toit] 73), éloge to soupçon, or perceiving in the coffin—as in the 1933 “Eaux-mères”—”cet objet creux destiné à être longuement fécondé” (OC 51, Char's italics) may be a phenomenon we all know at some level, but it is also a phenomenon few persist in exploring as a deeply meaningful ontic complementarity, central to our purpose and to our spiritual possibility.

“Evidence mutable,” Char writes in Dehors la nuit est gouvernée (OC 116): being's signs pointing in many directions, always through us, our own individual and collective mutations, infinite in time and in space; being's signs rooted in our thought and emotion (I shall return to this), our sense of fureur, of immanent involvement both political and private, and our sense of mystère, of depth and transcendence albeit in “presence” and “pilgrimage.” And, given the Charian logic of complementarity, slippage, interpenetration, even fury acquires its mysteriousness: exile and fulfilment—“Je suis l'exclu et le comblé,” Char declares in Seuls demeurent (OC 145)—become reciprocally pertinent, caught up in that love of “twin mysteries” he confesses in Les Matinaux (OC 310). The compelling consciousness of death will thus not drown out a sense of equilibrium and equivalence Char can term, after Baudelaire, unity (cf. OC 359), any more than his alertness to hasard and accident will swamp his abiding intuition of life's indefinable meanfulness (cf. OC 228). Such a hinging of absurdity to the resilient (il)logic of love—which we see explicitly in, say, the Chants de la Balandrane—creates a fragile but sure “order” of global completeness, of psychic—and real—“alliance” (cf. CB 23). Sarcasm and “inner fright” do not, in consequence, unhinge a critical residual sentiment of “grace,” as he calls it in Fenêtres dormantes et porte sur le toit (43). Equilibrium, continuity, imbrication, and oneness are never discarded as sadly irrelevant. A mysticism of—an unknowing but intuitive (self-)initiation into—what Bonnefoy might term l'improbable, never ceases to inform Char's thinking and feeling. Reality may be distressing fact, but it is also both improbable enchantment and beset by its intrinsic ontic implications, the very mystery of the being of what may distress or enchant. Existential frailty, ephemeralness, and mortality are underpinned by what I have called elsewhere, “ce qui nous tient éveillé/e/s.” “La Voie où nous étouffons,” as he writes in Les Voisinages de Van Gogh (9), remains a Way, a place of unique, inimitable going through a nearness and an invisibility that, as Char suggests in Le Nu perdu, may well be coincident (cf. OC 459). Such a sense of being merges that persistent demand for the splendors of what, in its broadest perspective, we can call le surréel, and that much admired Reverdyan urge for justesse: distance and proximity, l'intelligence de l'ange and immanence, deep ontic and psychic obscurity flickeringly illuminated and the simple light of ethical consciousness.

FALLING AND BUOYANCY

In the 1979 Fenêtres dormantes et porte sur le toit Char tells us in fairly plain terms that “je vous écris en cours de chute. C'est ainsi que j'éprouve l'état d'être au monde” (52): being or being-in-the-world entails not only what we might be tempted to think of as a classic nineteenth-century obsession—one thinks of poets as divergent as Vigny, Baudelaire, Hugo, and Rimbaud—with original fall and its consequent multicolored ethico-spiritual tensions, but, further, a more radical sensation of unattachment, uprootedness and free fall “down” through the very onticity that, nevertheless, allows Char to speak, in the first place, of being in the world. The sensation, then, is one of undoubted slippage, comparable to the sense of horizontal, temporal movement; it implies an experience, presumably physical and not just psychical—and certainly not purely conceptual, as it turns out was Sartre's “experience” of nausée—of abyss, of hollowness, of crumbling and insecurity. Yet, paradoxically, such falling takes place, is felt as taking place, within something—experience of being-in-the-world—which possibilizes the sensation of falling. And, indeed, falling is feasible only because depth is understood both conceptually and experientially.

Beyond even the ontic spaciousness and depth through which falling occurs, there is in Char's poetics a further critically compensating factor which involves his sense of the buoyancy of being, of those myriad but perhaps synonymous forces that render possible human—and phenomenal—going and doing, feeling and thinking. Buoyancy is the endless, teeming, imbricated surging forth—jaillissement, Jacques Dupin terms it—of being's phenomena, of our consciousness thereof. Buoyancy possesses an implicit and intuitive logic of non-void, of filling, of “birth,” of creation. Buoyancy suggests that absence is purely notional, “replacement” or “filling” being actual. “Il n'y a pas d'absence irremplaçable,” Char writes in Poèmes militants (OC 35); “l'inextinguible réel incréé” constantly flooding in where void might have been thought feasible, imaginable (cf. OC 155)—a logic applicable to all domains, moreover, material, moral, emotional, intellectual, or psychical. Buoyancy ensures a seamless continuity, a possibility where probability may have induced thoughts of rupture, finality, separation. “Cette fumée qui nous portait,” which Char evokes in Les Loyaux Adversaires, from Fureur et mystère (OC 241), seems to be an easily dispelled presence, but rather does it bear up, barely visible in itself, a presence which, intrinsically, it is not—or rather does not seem to be. Like the si peu of “Te devinant éveillé pour si peu” (VVG [Les Voisinages de Van Gogh] 27), Char's fumée is at once mortality and eternity, it is that which constantly and infinitely floods into being, inflating and buoying its possibility and its actuality. It is, therefore, not just the action of “Vert sur noir” that Char so exquisitely conjures up in Aromates chasseurs (39-20); it is, too, that “Haute fontaine” of Chants de la Balandrane (53-54), that source and action of vital onticity ceaselessly spurting forth, emanating from depth and, yet, what we can call abyss, but meeting the “fall” of being, shoring it up, allowing it to float upon its creative possibilizing impulse, letting it be-in-the-world. Buoyancy is, indeed, a force well known to the poet Char. Does he not speak so tellingly in Seuls demeurent of “le glissement des abîmes qui portent de façon si anti-physique le poème”? (OC 159). And does he not call up within himself, both as poet and man, in Fenêtres dormantes et porte sur le toit, that power of fullness of being ever available to him—no matter how the world may be characterized, believed to be: “Si le monde est ce vide, eh bien! je suis ce plein”? (FD 54). And there is, too, that remarkable account of something akin to an out-of-body experience, where, in the midst of a serious accident, Char's entire being, physical and psychical, is caught by that very ontic buoyancy at issue, so that “everything happened outside of me” (OC 211), as being seemingly displaced, absent, yet utterly present, utterly supportive.

GOD, GODS

“Dieu faute de Dieu n'enjambe plus nos murs soupçonneux,” Char declares in Le Nu perdu (OC 466): an individual and collective skepticism—that Char espouses, as we have seen—which shuts off the banalities and the terrors of dogma and fanaticism, and which shuts out, too, the absolutism, the dispossessing monolithism of some reductive and imposable structure of the Divine. Before and after “Dieu l'accrêté,” Char argues more recently, our being was and is (cf. CB 30): the kind of “miracle” or ontic buoyancy referred to in Abondance viendra (OC 52)—his own accident just evoked (cf. OC 211) is equally pertinent—does not need a religiously restrictive grill placed upon it for us to appreciate the delicate workings of grace and marvel at play in being. Any sense of life's divineness may, and should, arise within the self, where it can be honored and meditated in freedom. “[Les] dieux puissants et fantasques qui habitent le poète,” as Char writes in Seuls demeurent (OC 165) are thus neither pure fiction, metaphorical rhetoric, nor elves, dryads, kobolds. They are the recognized energies and modes of being and (self-)creation Char chooses to celebrate, energies he can project—fancifully but purposely, imaginatively but really—into some dreamed world “ému par le zèle de quelques dieux, aux abords des femmes” (OC 186). In this personalized sense of the divine, language's very origins may be deemed to bathe in an energy and a spirituality (cf. OC 255) that, certainly, somehow is locked into his perception of poiesis and whose dispersal writers like Bernard Noël or Yves Bonnefoy or Michel Deguy varyingly denounce. If“les dieux sont dans la métaphore,” as Char says in A Faulx contente (OC 783)—with the metaphor's logic of unity within difference, com-parution, as Deguy would say, compassion, love, and so on—then we should not imagine that Char feels coming immediately a new age of poetico-spiritual (self-)transformation, even though Aromates chasseurs seeks to usher in something of this kind. The “gods,” rather, are retiring, “withdrawing” from our cyclically atrophied grasp, he suggests in Le Nu perdu (OC 467), and those that are fully incarnate, like, for Char, Baudelaire, Melville, Van Gogh, or Mandelstam, retain a “hagard” look about them (cf. FD 17).

For all that, with the “failure” of God, the “gods” of Char remain a “tonic” presence, as he emphasizes in the same “Faire du chemin avec …,” from Fenêtres dormantes et porte sur le toit (18). No doubt this is, in part because Char, the poet of intervention, commitment, and self-assumption, views divineness less as some exteriorized force and not at all as a force utterly removed from the self's collaboration: “Nuls dieux à l'extérieur de nous,” he goes so far as to assert in Aromates chasseurs (25): the self thus becomes the essential locus for all and any divinity upon the earth's human way, for, as Char already writes in La Nuit talismanique qui brillait dans son cercle, such gods as we know, as traverse us, as we are, are the “least opaque expression of ourselves” (cf. OC 502)—though perhaps the expression most difficult to formulate. This does not mean that Char denies the divineness of what Bonnefoy terms “les choses du simple”: “Grimpereau, charmeur des soupçonnée,” he notes in Les Voisinages de Van Gogh, where the notion of charm may be read according to its fullest range of significance; and, in Fenêtres dormantes et porte sur le toit, he speaks of “mes dieux à tête de groseille [qui] ne me démentiront pas, eux qui n'ont figure qu'une fois l'an” (66). Rather may we see divineness as always to be assumed within the self, privately, intimately, simply, unpretentiously; as something to be recognized as crucial to the consciousness of our and all being, but within that center of being—the self—whose esotericism should not concern, but, rather, delight us, confirming our staggering uniqueness of perception of the divine—and thereby multiplying, infinitely, the latter. In “Gammes de l'accordeur,” from Chants de la Balandrane, Char quotes from Hilarion de Modène: “Les dieux, habitez-nous! / Derrière la cloison, / Nul ne veut plus de vous” (58). Char's own text proper goes beyond this deliberately echoed call for our collective assumption of what lies divine within all of being: his further, passing, symbolic call urges upon us a state and action wherein humanity and divinity remain in balance within the optic of what he feels is our brief telluric “apprenticeship” (cf. CB 59). To forget the divineness buried deep in our humanness; to forget our human depths in the light of the remembrance of our divinity: two contradictions, but held in equilibrium by the fact of our merged learning of twinned lessons in the simplicity of our incarnated movement.

GOING, CONTINUITY

Char, poet of presence, as has often been said, and rightly so; poet of “la gloire navigable des saisons” (FD 17), of the sufficiency of going, of this traversal of being and going: “Aller me suffit,” he declares in “La Compagne du vannier,” from Seuls demeurent (OC 131), and it would not be outrageous to articulate a Charian mysticism of immanence, somewhat Hugolian or Nervalian in its root implications but Bonnefidian in its contemporary bareness, its level of understatement. Such a mysticism would reside in the sufficiency of givenness and the self's givingness, the inimitable appropriateness of our—perhaps any: we would return to the earlier logic of innocence—existential traversal. Such a “going” is caught, however, inevitably—it is inherent in the poetics of all movement—between the Charian logic of quest, chasse, rebellion, and desire, which may imply conceptual exceeding of the immanent, and that of strictest adherence to the going at hand and refusal of the prestige of what, in Fenêtres dormantes et porte sur le toit, Char calls, “devant nous, haut dressé, le fertile point qu'il faut se garder de questionner ou d'abattre” (19). The consciousness of our going may thus be immediately focused or it may widen to an intuition still essentially part of this immediacy yet conceptually overflowing it, or even to pure speculation, an avenue rarely appealing to Char. One's going, however, is inevitably seen in the context of origin and end, and is inescapably framed by notions of purpose and absurdity, choice and blockage, temporality and eternity. Going, for Char, clearly fuses these seemingly competing perspectives, as he characteristically indicates in Seuls demeurent: “J'ai, captif, épousé le ralenti du lierre à l'assaut de la pierre de l'éternité” (OC 137): any mysticism here, of course, merges transcendence with immanence and suggests that the interlocking is not merely temporal, linear, sequential, but predicated, too, on factors of equivalence and simultaneity. Thus is it that persistence hic et nunc is synonymous with a movement “beyond” the latter; going is both traversal of, and immersion in, itself, and implicitly, movement towards what such traversal and immersion are not.

In effect, Char's work is shot through with a sense of the continuity of being beyond what we might term life or death. “Mourir,” he writes in La Nuit talismanique, “c'est passer à travers le chas de l'aiguille après de multiples feuillaisons. Il faut aller à travers la mort pour émerger devant la vie, dans l'état de modestie souveraine” (OC 496). The earthly form of our presence would seem, then, to be caught up in the buoyancy of some larger going and presence. In Le Nu perdu, Char similarly argues this more cosmically attuned continuity of being, “notre figure terrestre n'[étant] que le second tiers d'une poursuite continue, un point, amont” (OC 435)—a movement, or so our spatio-temporal imagination would have us believe, always showing us at once the exquisite specificity of ephemeral experience and “la chose qui continuait, / Opposée à la vie mourante, / [Qui] à l'infini s'élaborait,” as Char writes in Les Matinaux (OC 324). Little wonder that he can remind us, as he has also with respect to our fused divineness and humanity, that humankind is to be deemed “neither eternal nor temporal” (cf. OC 460): the privileging of either dimension risks breaking that magic spell that holds us intact—and keeps us on course, in a going for and beyond itself. If Char's sense of being “loin de nos cendres”—a phrase apparently meditated for most of his life (cf. OC 807-18)—seems, then, to plunge his consciousness deeply back into the passingness of présence, it aptly evokes more transcendent modes of being: states and actualities where humankind's eternal “common language” may be perhaps spoken (cf. OC 105); where, as he writes in Seuls demeurent, from Fureur et mystère, “l'évasion dans son semblable, avec d'immenses perspectives de poésie, sera peut-être un jour possible” (OC 169); where some new “visibility” beyond the mere optimism of philosophy may be feasible (cf. OC 269); where “ce qui sut demeurer inexplicable pourra seul nous requérir” (OC 447). For Char's going offers both a lived essentialness of the passing, the endeavored, and the felt essentialness of the unaccomplished (cf. AC 23).

BEING

To speak, as Char does in Seuls demeurent, of “l'éternité d'une olive” (OC 167), is to oblige us to rethink the very structure and quality of (our) being, which, in effect, assumes a “spacious strength” we can often too readily deny it (cf. OC 133). To realize the fullness of our (place of) being, the streaming timelessness that floods through its very ephemeralness, its apparently mere ontic flash or éclair (cf. OC 266), it is helpful to begin with the most modest of steps, allowing us to sense both difference and the non-emptiness, the depth, of what is: “cesse de prendre la branche pour le tronc,” he suggests in Les Matinaux, “et la racine pour le vide. C'est un petit commencement” (OC 331). Our being may be of unknown origin and of unknown end—perhaps absolutely synonymous with going, with an incessant creation-now—but this being of fire is also a being of light, as Char writes in Aromates chasseurs (34), a consumption that is an arising, a passing equally, coincident with, an emergence. Moreover, partly for these reasons but also because our individuality or difference of being is always experienced in situ, being, for Char, is never a being-in-separation: “Je suis parmi,” he affirms in Fenêtres dormantes et portes sur le toit (26). And, in the same volume, he goes even further in articulating the swarming ontic multitudinousness of what might only appear singular, unidimensional: “Cent existences dans la nôtre enflamment la chair de tatouages qui n'apparaîtront pas” (63).

Such elliptical, often decontextualized, yet firm declarations constantly point to a conception—an on-going meditation—of being that is complex, intuitive, visionary in a post-Rimbaldian sense, caught in respected obscurity, yet pushing relentlessly towards (self-)illumination. Certainly, for Char, being exceeds mortality, as we have seen, death offering access, he even suggests in Aromates chasseurs, to a “space” perhaps our primordial locus of being (cf.AC 21). Evocations of Tibetan mystics—and activists—such as Milarepa and Marpa (cf. OC 815-16; FD 32), or of our constant immersion in ontic energy, regardless of our state of being—“laissons l'énergie et retournons à l'énergie,” he writes in the posthumous Eloge d'une Soupçonnée—such evocations prepare us well, as we tack back and forth in our contemplation of Char's mystical proclivities, for the kind of exquisite ontological conundrum we find for example, in Le Nu perdu: “Sois bien, tu n'es pas” (OC 436). Being seems, thus, at once relative and absolute, achieved and unachieved, livable, experienceable, and yet ever future, ever more fully “to be.” Présence seems, thus, at once inviolate, utterly authentic, yet rethinkable as part of existential or ontic dimensions we are, at times, with Char, conscious of, though incompletely. “Les plus pures récoltes,” he notes in Feuillets d'Hypnos, “sont semées dans un sol qui n'existe pas” (OC 195): in a framework or présence that is no doubt a psychic or psychological structure or gestalt. Thus is it that poetry has “nothing in it,” as he argues in Le Poème pulvérisé, “that doesn't exist elsewhere” (OC 247): like life itself, poetry is creation of being: all corresponds to the infinity and depth available in being; all is, and this mysterious isness is at once irreplaceable and imbricated with structures and modes of being seemingly belonging to the realms of pure emotion, pure thought, pure imagination, pure fiction. Thus is it that fiction and reality merge, equal, equivalent, same, in Char's wider perception of being's “spaciousness.” Thus is it, too, that, though life and poetry may be deemed “absurd” (cf. FD 63), being doubly recuperates them: both in the many ways we have seen Char elaborate, but in that mathematics that would have two negatives yield being by virtue of their mysterious and teeming multiplication together.

MYSTERY, EMOTION, THOUGHT

Poetry, Char tells us in Dehors la nuit est gouvernée, is “une marche forcée dans l'indicible, avec, pour viatique, les provisions hasardeuses du langage et la manne de l'observation et des pressentiments” (OC 85): it thus moves through the ineffable, riding upon those multiple mysteries of which we are barely conscious as such: effort, utterance, sensory and mental, especially intuitive, perception. Poetry may, indeed, as already in Le Marteau sans maître Char would stress, not “traffic in sacredness,” to the extent that poetry eschews the pretensions of religious dogma and tendentiousness, seeking its pathos rather within the open attachments of the self; yet it clearly engages “furiously” with “mystery” and its indicible manifestly plunges it into the most secret recesses of (one's) being and the most visionary gestures of (self-)initiation. The mystery of being, for Char, is ever “new” and “sings in your bones”: it is good reason for him to urge us to “develop [our] legitimate strangeness” (cf. OC 160), or, as he puts it in “Encore eux,” from Loin de nos cendres, “make, barefoot, a mystery of [ourselves]” (cf. OC 816). Mystery, meaning, function, and purpose lie deep within, buried in materiality, in geneticity, but available, too, via their assumption within us, by virtue of the further mystery of consciousness, choice, emotion. To “feel awakening the obscure plantation” within, as Char writes in Seuls demeurent (OC 152), is to accept a sacredness, a divineness, without name or creed, rites or conceptual fixity other than those the self might obscurely articulate. “J'aime qui m'éblouit puis accentue l'obscur à l'intérieur de moi,” we read in Les Matinaux (OC 330), and certainly essential to any appreciation of Char's poetics is the persistent desire to develop insight concomitantly with an intense reverence for the obscureness, the mysteriousness, of all manifestations of being. Life is secret (cf. OC 363) and the private though joined (the logic of being-amongst never dissolves) world of the self is infinitely, inimitably deep (cf.AC 43), psychologically, emotionally, intentionally.

Char, I should argue, is one of those rare writers who, caught between naming and unnaming, senses the profound mystery of things being in the first place. Emotions and thoughts, in effect, are not simply remarkable in their diversity or in that flowingness, paradoxicalness, and balance of which I spoke earlier; they are mysterious in themselves, in the very fact of their being (cf. OC 188). Char's “mysticism,” here, may be said to revolve about his, and our, belief in consciousness, impulse, intuition, obscure but lived “truth(s).” Central remains a sense of meaning—sens, going, ontic orientation—not of meaning as specifiable, reducible fact or mechanism, but rather as an inalienable sense—the sense(s) we inalienably have, at once fleshy and psychical—of some infinite project, individual and collective, that buoys us up and constitutes our being. Such a feeling and thinking of the world—and the word, for the poet—may embrace the “meaning” of love and the “meaning” of doubt or skepticism or atheism, for it would imply the essential mysteria of all experience, the lived, at once revealed and undivulged, nature of our being. In this sense, the mysteria of existence are self-generated; whether lived “negatively” or “affirmatively,” all is (self-)creation, (self-)affirmation. “Tu tiens de toi tes chemins,” Char writes in Chants de la Balandrane (78), and mystery, “mysticism”—with any accompanying skepticism or hesitation—arise upon, as, these paths of blinding/illuminated being: emotions, thoughts, well up within us as our sense/sens, our felt and mentally projected goingness. They are the guides, the creators, and the definers of our going; they are our entry to “[le] grand réel”; they can sense and think our meaning, our sens, our sufficiency of going (cf. OC 131). And they are predicated upon a never-closing of themselves, for Char's “mysticism” widens, opens, seeks ever to, as he writes in the liminal 1938 “Argument” of Fureur et mystère, “déborder l'économie de la création, agrandir le sang des gestes, [comme] devoir de toute lumière” (OC 129). Such a self-initiatory seeing, as he emphasizes in Feuillets d'Hypnos, is, if not implacably then crucially, psychological and affective: “Si l'homme parfois ne fermait pas souverainement les yeux, il finirait par ne plus voir ce qui vaut d'être regardé” (OC 189). The mystery of being may be everywhere, but it is nowhere if not within.

Notes

1. The following abbreviations are used in reference to Char's work: ES: Eloge d'une Soupçonnée (Paris: Gallimard, 1988); OC: Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard “Pléiade,” 1983); AC: Aromates chasseurs (Paris: Gallimard, 1975); CB: Chants de la Balandrane (Paris: Gallimard, 1977); FD: Fenêtres dormantes et porte sur le toit (Paris: Gallimard, 1979); VVG: Les Voisinages de Van Gogh (Paris: Gallimard, 1985).

2. Of the recent major Char criticism—I am thinking of: Mary Ann Caws, The Presence of René Char (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981); Mary Ann Caws, L'Œuvre filante de René Char (Paris: Nizet, 1981); Christine Dupouy, René Char (Paris: Belfond, 1987); Danièle Leclair, Lecture de René Char: Aromates chasseurs et Chants de la Balandrane (Paris: Lettres Modernes, 1988); Daniel Leuwers, ed., René Char, Sud (1984); Jean-Claude Mathieu, La Poésie de René Char ou le sel de la splendeur, 2 vols. (Paris: Corti, 1984); Tineke Kingma-Eijgendaal and Paul J. Smith, ed., Lectures de René Char (Amsterdam: Rodopi, CRIN, 1990); Serge Velay, René Char: qui êtes vous? (Lyon: La Manufacture, 1987); Paul Veyne, René Char en ses poèmes (Paris: Gallimard, 1990); Michael Bishop, René Char: les dernières années (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990); Jean Voellmy, René Char ou le mystère partagé (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1989); Eric Marty, René Char (Paris: Seuil, 1990); Philippe Castellin, René Char, traces (Paris: Evidant, 1989); René Char, special issue of Europe (1988); Daniel Leuwers, René Char, dit-elle, la mort (Bourges: Amor Fati, 1989)—few texts broach in a direct manner the issues of Char's “mysticism,” though many implicitly wrestle with elements pertinent to my argument. In particular, I would note Hughes Labrusse's essay in Leuwers (1984), various sections of Marty (1990), as of Velay (1987) and Voellmy (1989).

3. For an analysis of “Sans chercher à savoir,” see Bishop (1990), 56-57.