SOURCE: LaCharité, Virginia A. “The Conflicts of Art: René Char's Placard pour un chemin des écoliers.” In Rewriting the Good Fight: Critical Essays on the Literature of the Spanish Civil War, edited by Frieda S. Brown, Malcolm Alan Compitello, Victor M. Howard, Robert A. Martin, pp. 185-97. East Lansing, Mich.: Michigan State University Press, 1989.

Poetry … goes forward in order to indicate the movable road.(1)

The Spanish Civil War is the artistic and historical event that definitively marks the end of René Char's affiliation with Surrealism and the beginning of his adoption of a poetics of response. Char's identification with the events in Spain in 1936 and early 1937 is both personal and aesthetic. Among Char's close friends in the Surrealist group were the Spanish painters Picasso, Miró, and Dali,² and he had visited Spain three times, twice in 1931 with the poet Paul Eluard and again in 1932 with his childhood friend, Francis Curel. Familiarity with Spain, admiration for the Spanish avant-garde, a growing awareness of the ominous political events in Europe, and a life-threatening case of blood poisoning came together for Char the man with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War and confronted Char the poet with the conflicts of art.

As an active member of the second generation of Surrealists, Char participated enthusiastically in their artistic and political activities in the early 1930s in order to place Surrealism “at the Service of the Revolution.” His own work during these years, collected in the volume Le Marteau sans maître (1934), is characterized by an aggressive language, provocative images, a hatred of absurdity in the world, hostility toward all forms of authority, explosive phrases, even violence. Nevertheless, Le Marteau sans maître is a disturbing work, for underlying the tone of insolence and rage, especially in the section Poèmes militants, there is the suggestion that the Surrealist demand for revolution is not a synonym for action but is rather the embracing of an attitude which separates action from art, an attitude which exalts scandal, insists on an aesthetic of emotionalism, ignores the social response value of language, denies common sense, and favors total revolt—the utopian dream of a world in which anything and everything is potentially marvelous and the pleasure principle reigns supreme. While the Surrealists were avowedly against external authority in all forms (anti-fascist, anti-religious, anti-bourgeois)—stances which led them to celebrate the establishment of the Spanish Republic in 1931 and then later, in 1936, to identify with the anarchists (the POUM and FAI factions)—during the 1930s they gradually abandoned their original attitude of revolt as insubmission and moved closer and closer to a somewhat mythical concept of the self: revolt in the name of absolute freedom, disorder, and fulfillment of desire. Marx's “transform the world” and Rimbaud's “change life,” the two basic tenets of Surrealism, nearly cease to be constructive rallying cries in the Surrealists' efforts to effect their “revolution” through political commitment. In fact, they were openly viewed as dilettantes by the very political group they sought to join and “serve.” The basic Surrealist love of the irrational borders on nihilism and is astutely analyzed by Albert Camus in his Actuelles I and L'Homme révolté.³

As the Surrealists themselves disagreed over how to accomplish their own revolution, they found themselves electing Rimbaud over Marx, choosing to defend an attitude of all or nothing and refusing in the process a historical response to the human condition. While André Breton always insisted that love was the value and the moral, that the freedom of the individual would somehow lead to that of all of society, he, nonetheless, viewed art as the expression of man's inner self and desires, not as a response that confronts reality in the name of mankind. The problem of the Surrealist “personal self” in opposition to the non-Surrealist “collective self” is a leitmotif in René Char's Moulin premier (1936), a group of seventy aphorisms and two poems which subvert the Surrealist aesthetic of separating art from action, history from revolt. Throughout this work, Char begins to view poetry as a possible response to history: “Earth, becomingness of my abyss, you are my bathtub for reflection” (OC [Oeuvres complètes], 62).

Moulin premier is marked by a vocabulary and phraseology of reflection, control, rationalism, responsibility, and lucid protest. Char refuses total revolt or revolt for the sake of revolt; instead, he indicates that language can correct the world, lead to order, even alleviate moral suffering; the poet has the responsibility not to confront a real which is a construction of the mind but to classify the real and refuse to accept its arbitrary conditions: “The Poet precedes the man of action, and when he encounters him, declares war on him. the parvenu had at least promised to be present in his perilous fights!” (OC, 67).

Char's aesthetic and personal movement away from Surrealism evolves gradually and naturally. He never had an outright break with Breton or with the group. Yet, his selection of the title of his first theoretical writings on the role of poetry in the contemporary world, Moulin premier, strongly suggests by the numerical term first that he has already passed beyond Surrealism although he has not yet identified a second mill for his writing. At this moment of artistic transition, Char was taken dramatically ill with a nearly fatal case of blood poisoning. The illness brought Char the man face to face with his own mortality and made him intimately aware of death as an inalienable historical aspect of the human condition.

During the months of his recovery, he corrected the proofs for Moulin premier, which offered him a review of his Surrealist adventure, and he read Nietzsche, whose nihilism and lack of a human value system repudiated Char's admiration for the Heraclitean theory of flux and becomingness. At the invitation of René Roux, an aspiring young poet and painter who was the schoolmaster at the Collège de L'Ile-sur-Sorgue, Char's native town, Char spent the month of August 1936 in Céreste, “a village lost in the hills of Provence” in Haute-Provence (OC, 1116). René Roux had three younger brothers, “small schoolboys from 12 to 14 years old” (OC, 1116), who accompanied Char every afternoon on long walks in the area. Describing at length the youths' joys at spending so much time with Char, Georges-Louis Roux testifies to Char's interest in children and adolescents, the marvelous stories he related, and how the summer of 1936 must have been for Char a “moment of relaxing and of happiness, a fleeting respite” (OC, 1122). It was shortly after this period of respite and reflection that Char undertook Placard pour un chemin des écoliers, which he dedicated to the children of Spain and had illustrated by Valentine Hugo.⁴ The effects of his recognition that he had evolved aesthetically away from Surrealism and his personal period of recuperation, of contact with nature and the Roux family children in Céreste, undeniably form the underpinnings of Placard.⁵

The theme of childhood which characterizes much of Char's work does not emerge as one of his major subjects until the publication of Placard in 1937. Prior to this work, Char tends to treat childhood in a typical Surrealist fashion: the child is not yet tainted by societal inhibitions and prejudices, the child enjoys using freely his imagination and intuition, the child believes that creations of the mind are real. With Placard, and, indeed, since 1937, the child for Char represents innocence, health, happiness, and human potential for rising above man's terrestrial circumstances. Like the poet, the child precedes the man of action—a form of matinal light and a source of illumination.

Written during the winter of 1936-37,⁶Placard consists of an introductory prose text, “Dedication,” and seven verse poems which are written in a language and style that directly oppose Char's former Surrealist practice. The texts of Placard are basically conventional in form and share a sense of anguish and social protest against suffering. Throughout the small volume, the tone is one of a melodic continuum, which consistently expresses a poetic belief in the potential of the text to respond to objective reality. In many ways, Placard reflects the moral and spiritual crisis experienced by Char the man and Char the poet in 1936. In a letter written to André Breton, explaining why he cannot participate in the Surrealist exhibition in 1947, Char observes that “I am not the one who simplified things, but horrible things made me simple” (OC, 660).

Awareness of the horrors wrought by the events of the Spanish Civil War is summarized for Char in the suffering of the children of Spain, and yet these very same children offer him insight into man's refusal to be reduced to his historical circumstances. In an introduction written in 1949 to the second edition of Placard pour un chemin des écoliers suivi de Dehors la nuit est gouvernée, Char expresses his personal and aesthetic agitation over the events in Spain that foreshadowed World War II and its atrocities: “I ran” (OC, 85). Indeed, the highly personal tone of this 1949 text dramatizes Char's awareness of the importance of the inner crisis he experienced in 1936. And this 1936 crisis, which was physical, moral, aesthetic, and spiritual, continues to resurface throughout his work. In 1956, for example, his preamble to En trente-trois morceaux recalls Placard as one of four capital poetic turning points in his work (OC, 772). In 1979, his attack on nuclear weapons echoes the events that triggered Placard: “How many [people] fall in love with humanity and not with man!” (OC, 578). Telescoping the human tragedy of the Spanish Civil War into an evocation of the children in only seven texts in Placard becomes a preferred Char structure of condensation in his poetry, as the fragment bears witness to the whole: “Since the operation of totalitarianisms we are no longer tied to our personal self but to a collective self assassin, assassinated” (OC, 579).

The shift to an optic beyond the self and the recognition of the need to become involved responsibly with the outer world are expressed by the word placard of the title: a written opinion publicly posted to make a specific announcement. The phrase, “a road for schoolboys,” is typical of Char's post-Surreal period. While the Surrealists frequently and humorously used proverbs and clichés in their effort to purify language and return it to its original source, Char's adoption of common phrases and terms goes beyond the confines of the page to create new exchanges between words, lines, poems, and the experience of poetry. On the literal level, the phrase evokes a roadway frequented by schoolboys, not unlike the path taken each afternoon in Céreste in the summer of 1936 by Char and the Roux children. The warm, fraternal, and innocent image of a peaceful scene is not disrupted by the public posting of a sign along this particular road. But, écolier in French does not refer only to a pupil or schoolboy; it also refers to anyone who is not skilled in his profession, a learner, one who is at the beginning of a given experience. The very choice of the word écolier takes the title and the volume beyond the confines of a single event and opens up the volume to a more universal level of meaning. On the figurative level, the French expression for the longest road is “le chemin des écoliers” [“the road for schoolboys”], and, with this reading, the title takes on its ultimate significance. It is an announcement that reality is harsh, history limits human activity, and the poet must protest against his time, give it form, and bear witness to the future. The title is a conscious declaration to revolt against all limitations, but it also recognizes that such an action will not be without its hardships, struggles, setbacks, and sacrifices. The nature of that revolt is not clearly outlined in Placard, but the reasons for that revolt are the subject of the volume.

The “Dedication,” written in March 1937, is provocative in its use of capital letters to describe the children of Spain as victims of the war around them: “RED.” They are dead, thrown into a common ditch and covered with mud, in contrast to the poet's memories of his bucolic childhood, which was marked by World War I. But that war took place on the frontiers and in distant battle zones; it did not disrupt and overturn his everyday existence. By contrast, the Spanish Civil War affects the daily lives of children, whose “école buissonnière,” or playing hooky, is a school of death, not of life. The “Dedication” ends with a second address to the “Children of Spain” and a salute to their “matinal eyes,” which is the earliest appearance of the term matinal in Char's work. Char the man begs for their forgiveness; Char the poet cries out that he has written the work “With my last reserve of hope.”

The discovery of hope in the atrocities suffered by children ties together the seven poems that make up Placard. Each poem bears witness to love as the only possible means for dealing with the oppressiveness of daily horror. Daytime is evoked as bitter, a time of schism, deception, distress, and anguish, while night is seen as a time of peace, renewal, unity, and promise. The historical determinism of day is countered by the affirmative reconciliation of night. The nihilism of Nietzsche is already giving way to Char's postwar predilection for Heidegger and a poetics of pulverization and crispation. The “loyal adversaries” of Char the man and Char the poet emerge in their first form in the seven texts of Placard.

In a very real sense, Placard is a volume of a poetry of circumstances, inspired by a specific external event and written to deal with the particular circumstances of that event. But, as an examination of the title alone shows, Placard is not circumstantial in its attitude of response. Throughout Char's subsequent work, Placard reemerges in different forms, as Char the man and Char the poet accept the world as it is and find in it values worthy of admiration and expression. To the redemptive quality of love, which is perhaps the most important carryover from his Surrealist days, Char will later add the redemptive quality of courage (Feuillets d'Hypnos, 1946). Still, in Placard there come together for the first time in his work the two ends of his poetic bow: “obsession with the harvest” takes the form of the value of mankind as represented by the children of Spain, and “indifference to history” is affirmed in commitment to the artistic value of creation. Placard refutes the agony of the historical circumstances in a blunt declaration that hope is possible only through poetic action: “my last store of hope.”

The question that continues to confront the reader of Char's work in general and Placard in particular is: why Spain? Why did the Spanish Civil War serve as such a catalyst for Char the man and Char the poet? The answer does not lie in Char's trips to Spain nor in his deep friendships with Spanish painters, but it is clearly articulated by Camus in Actuelles I, which is dedicated to Char: “The first weapons of the totalitarian war were soaked in Spanish blood. … We delivered to Franco, on Hitler's order, Spanish Republicans … who raised his voice? No one. … We are responsible” (244-46). Char's physical condition prevented him from directly participating in that war, but among his Surrealist contemporaries only one, Benjamin Péret, actually took up arms in an effort to prevent the Nationalists from delivering Spain to an oppressive dictatorship. The French Surrealists were notably absent from the war despite their admiration for the Republican cause. Writing in L'Amour fou in 1937, Breton expresses regret that he did not join Péret and participate in the war because he was waiting for the birth of his daughter: “I did not have the courage.”⁷ Yet, reason, not the irrational, demanded a response in 1936. It may very well be that the Surrealist movement lost its momentum because of the Spanish Civil War, that the breakup of the group, which occurred in 1940 and 1941 at the onset of World War II, was already underway in 1936. Certainly, those Surrealists who remained in France and joined the Resistance were never able again to embrace the Surrealist election of the pleasure principle over reality. In point of fact, those who did not go into exile had aesthetically moved beyond the Surrealist attitude by the mid-1930s. It may even be speculated that without World War II the events of the Spanish Civil War would have sufficed to trigger in Paul Eluard, Robert Desnos, and others what Louis Aragon had already determined and what René Char would later describe as the discovery that “It must be admitted that poetry is not sovereign everywhere. … The poet, susceptible to exaggeration, evaluates correctly in agony” (OC, 207, 212).

In Placard, the text becomes for Char a dialectic between “a subjective assessment” and “an objective choice” (OC, 162). The poem is no longer situated in inner space, “intimate space in which our imagination and our feelings play,” but it is instead situated in time, what Char describes as circular space, “that of the concrete world” (OC, 509). What was lacking aesthetically in the texts of Le Marteau sans maître, time or circular space, becomes the structuring principle of Placard pour un chemin des écoliers: “Terror surrounds us and an artistic anti-life takes possession” (OC, 700). Poetry must “indicate the mobile road” (OC, 734).

While the image of chemin pervades Char's work, nowhere does it more fully bring together a volume of poems than in Placard. The word chemin indicates the process of artistic creation, the promise of “the next” vista, turn, a very human form of Char's notion of the immediate future. A road suggests motion, the probable encounter with others, a common concrete space that exists in human terms. A road occupies space, yet it denies the limitations and restrictions of that space, actually contradicts the confines of that area in its invitation to advance, continue, all the while never abandoning the notion of redistributing those limits. A road is an element of life, not death, and offers the possibilities of better pursuits. A road summons up human values in space and in time and the creative process beyond all time and place: circular space. A road bears witness to man's refusal to die, to his lucid revolt against fixity in the name of freedom and opportunity to travel, seek happiness, and respond to a need to continue to live. A road is a corrective to a given terrestrial condition.

The road in Placard is an apt image for the poet's physical, mental, spiritual, and artistic journey. Each text contributes to his discovery that historical terror, suffering, and injustice may be effectively opposed through artistic counteraction. The poet should not serve history, but refuse it. Hence, in Placard, Char's obsession with the harvest, a filtered and refined Surrealist pattern, encounters on the road of his own inner turmoil and conscience the need for becoming indifferent to the limitations of history.

Placard pour un chemin des écoliers is by no means representative of a mature René Char, nor can the work be considered one of his major volumes of poetry. However, in looking at all of Char's writing, the volume is pivotal for an understanding of his self-distancing from Surrealism and the adoption of a poetics that will risk its very existence and expression in order to be provocative in its refusal to acquiesce. In Placard, the Char poem is not pulverized, crisped, or matinal. It is not a double that tautly balances “fury and mystery,” hope and anguish, the immediate and the essential, word and silence, fragmentation and unity, prose and poetry, “the child of beautiful weather and the man of rainy weather” (OC, 76). The tension between incompatibilities, which characterizes the mature Char text, is almost jarringly absent in Placard, perhaps explaining why most Char studies tend to overlook the work, causing the volume to fall unfortunately into the misleading and rather pejorative category of circumstantial poetry. Yet, examination of the work reveals that it is in tone, subject, and aspiration pure Char—it simply is not written in what we have come to identify as the indisputable Char text of the archipelagic structure in language and form. Placard is not a work of poetic traces; it cannot even be described as a work of proaction, for the texts are firmly rooted in personal and poetic reactions. But all of Char's texts are in some way a form of reaction and protest; all of his poems combine elements of the man and the poet, elements which provide the basic tension in his poetry from Le Marteau sans maître to the present, especially La Nuit talismanique (1972).⁸ It is in the recovery of these elements, recognition of the inner crisis in which Char the man and Char the poet confront each other for the first time, that the reader grasps just how pivotal to Char studies and to contemporary French poetry in general these seven texts and their introductory poem are.

In L'Homme révolté, Camus pays homage to Char as the “Poet of our rebirth” (127). As the twentieth century begins to draw to a close, it becomes increasingly evident that René Char towers over contemporary French poetry. The clues to how and why Char is the poet of man's renaissance are in Placard, the work which places Surrealism in a finished perspective—poetic activity and reaction—and opens the way to matinal poetic action and proaction in his World War II resistance participation and the texts of Fureur et mystère (1948), leading eventually to La Parole en archipel (1961), in which the mature Char poem holds together apparent contradictions by creating a new totality in the present, what “We have” (OC, 409-10). The humanly alive poetry that marks Char's work is not descriptive, but evocative and provocative—the fragments or word clusters that result create the text of maximum reader freedom and response in a “formal sharing.” On every page, there is a road to follow, a path that links extreme reference points, and on that road is a warning sign that risk lies in the adventure. It is never a safe, secure, complacent journey. It is always a difficult poetic quest, a non-ending search for contact. The Char text is a process to evoke response, a “common presence,” never a procedure to manufacture a given product.

Accordingly, Char's language is elemental, drawn from the familiar outer world of people, places, and things, especially nature. His structures repress transitions, as he rejects traditional discursive elements of language. The text sets relationships, enacts them, and gives the reader a new way of participating in the world. Encounter and exchange take the form of union through words: word with word, poet with poem, man with woman, man with men, reader with text. To think is to feel, to share is to participate in the direct comprehension of absolute reality. The base is the summit, as Char links together the concrete and the abstract, the solid and the emerging, the object and the emotion. The impossible is possible. As the flower justifies the plant, poetry justifies man's existence in its affirmation that man's nobility is discovered in art, not in history. Poetry as creative action can determine the quality of life.

A major key to the Char text, thematically and stylistically, is love: love on the erotic level, love of mankind, love of nature, love of written expression in all forms, love of plastic art. While love as beauty, freedom, and truth may have its roots in Surrealism, love, for Char, is not limited to the expression of individual desire. Rather, it is an action that conjoins opposites, brings about an order, and unifies the whole of human experience. Love is not restricted to the individual level, but is the principle of human and aesthetic cohesion. Love is life, and the Char text is always a lived poetry, lived in the present, the eternal moment experienced along the road.

Love is the principal theme in Placard. The ugly reality of the historical events of the Spanish Civil War, vividly evoked in the “Dedication,” are effectively juxtaposed, nearly contradicted, by the poetic discovery that love offers hope—hope for all. Love ends isolation, brings about a sense of immediate fulfillment, makes the intolerable present acceptable, and cannot be limited by time, space, or history. Love is not a state of being, but an action which links together contradictions and opposes all restrictions. Love will not be denied, not even by brutality and cruelty. Love is the concrete world at its best, circular space. Love testifies to man that he is alive and that his life is worth living. Art confers value and offers assurances of “a fervent dawn” (OC, 92).

The seven texts end on the word “resistance,” which only the act of love is able to posit in a world in which children suffer, bleed, and die. The schoolgirl of “Schoolgirl's Company” denies her father's fears; she is confident that her lover's eyes hold “the promise / Which I made to myself / I am mad I am new” (OC, 99). The queen in “The Queen's Bearing” recognizes how only “the couple entwined with the word heart” refuses to acknowledge a bleak and hostile environment and time. Even in “Exploit of the Steam Cylinder” and “The Sea Urchins of Pégomas,” love is viewed as a “valid revolt” (OC, 97). In the text “The Confidant's Alley,” Char finds that “Daring little girls, / It's good to be imprudent / But for love” (OC, 93), while “Four Ages” expresses sadness over the isolation of the individual when he lacks love.

The final text, “Provisions for the Return,” completes the “Dedication” in its demonstration of how the love act during the darkness of night prepares for the bitterness of day and prefigures the beneficent role of night in Dehors la nuit est gouvernée (1938). Love renews, revitalizes, and inspires; it strengthens through its moment of union for the coming diurnal struggle, the longest road of living through a historical catastrophe, all the while offering dignity and nobility to those who must travel that road.

Throughout Placard, language takes the form of a social response. The emotional is social in that the indignant tone of the “Dedication” gives way to the confident declaration at the end. Hope is transmogrified into resistance, as action and art fuse. To write is to act and to requalify the reader. Faith in man to resist his historical circumstances, belief in the text to discover, reveal, and communicate value, and confidence in poetry to justify man's existence in a continual process constitute the ultimate testimony of Placard pour un chemin des écoliers. The exchange of energy between the terms hope and resistance takes place only under the aegis of Poetry, as Char the man and Char the poet resolve their conflicts and merge into the master architect of twentieth-century man's renaissance: “Art ignores History but makes use of its terror” (OC, 651).

Notes

1. René Char, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), 743. All Char quotations are taken from this edition, identified in the text as OC. The translations are my own.

2. Picasso illustrated Char's Dépendance de l'adieu in 1936, “Enfants qui cribliez d'olives” in 1939, and the second edition of Le Marteau sans maître in 1945. Dali illustrated Artine in 1930, while Miró has illustrated nearly a dozen of Char's works.

3. Albert Camus, Actuelles I (Paris: Gallimard, 1950); L'Homme révolté (Paris: Gallimard, 1951); quotations from these editions are identified in the text. The translations are my own.

4. Valentine Hugo was a member of the inner circle of Surrealists from 1930 to 1940; best known for her black and white illustrated visions, she visited Spain in 1928 and is described by Char as able to capture “fire under the snow.”

5. For a detailed account of this episode in Céreste in 1936, see Georges-Louis Roux, “René Char, Guest in Céreste,” in OC, 1115-31.

6. It must be remembered that Char wrote Placard before the bombing of Guernica and the incarceration of the poet Machado, events which deeply disturbed the French avant-garde.

7. André Breton, L'Amour fou (Paris: Gallimard, 1937), 137.

8. La Nuit talismanique was also triggered by a personal crisis and posited for Char the man and Char the poet another series of conflicts of art. See my “Beyond the Poem: René Char's La Nuit talismanique,” Symposium30 (1976): 14-26.