René Char
Char, René (1907-88). French poet. Dense and often hermetic, but also intensely lyrical and impassioned, Char's work reflects the rugged beauty and radiant light of his native Provençal landscape. Born at L'Isle sur la Sorgue (Vaucluse) he retained traces of l'accent du midi and remained resolutely unmetropolitan despite long periods of residence in Paris. The names of cherished sites: Thouzon, Le Thor, Buoux, Richerenches, Les Névons (a family domain sold against Char's wishes after his mother died in 1954), recur frequently in his work, where a sense of the world's threatened beauty is omnipresent (Char campaigned against nuclear installations in the 1960s). Yet it would be wrong to see him as a regional or nature poet. Char's concern with place, which was to be echoed by many poets of the post-war generation, is ultimately ethical in character and relates to the question of how we should ‘dwell’ (in the German philosopher Heidegger's phrase) on earth. A correspondence with Heidegger, who shared Char's interest in the pre-Socratic philosophers and their affirmation that all phenomena were in permanent flux, led to seminars held at Le Thor in the 1960s. Yet, if the Char-Heidegger encounter represents a vital convergence of poetry and philosophy, Char's poems are not potted treatises and require no specialized knowledge.
He is none the less a difficult poet, for a number of reasons. First, the forms Char favoured—the prose poem and the aphorism—are not the most easily accessible. Secondly, his poems are often elliptical, seemingly alluding to events in his life without supplying specific detail. Thirdly, readers sometimes feel a discrepancy between the power and urgency of Char's rhetoric and its lack of clear purport. His discourse appears to remain close to its initial inspiration and thus to make a certain necessary obscurity part of its message: ‘j'aime qui éblouit puis accentue l'obscur à l'intérieur de moi.’
Between 1930 and 1935 Char participated in the Surrealist movement (Le Marteau sans maître, 1934), his early poems having attracted the attention of Éluard. Although he mistrusted automatic writing and found it hard to toe a party line, Surrealism suited his natural combativeness and disdain for authority, and the promotion of poetry to the centre of human existence made a lasting impression. The Occupation marked a turning-point for Char. He played a leading role in the Resistance, becoming, under the pseudonym Capitaine Alexandre, ‘chef départemental (Basses-Alpes) des Forces françaises combattantes’, and leading many dangerous missions. He chose not to publish during the war but never stopped writing, and the works which emerged after the Liberation are among his most widely admired (Fureur et mystère, 1948).
Seuls demeurent (1945) initiated a lasting friendship with Camus, who in 1946 published Char's Feuillets d'Hypnos—notes and reflections written in the maquis—in his collection L'Espoir for Gallimard. In different ways both works show how for Char the urgent interrogation of the nature of poetry, and in particular the role and credentials of the poet, was the pathway towards unveiling more general truths. Indeed, poetry, in his writing, becomes the embodiment of the irreducibly enigmatic nature of human experience as disclosed in such diverse fields as love, eroticism, political aspiration, art, and philosophy. Many of his most resonant aphorisms—‘L'Éclair me dure’, or ‘Le poème est l'amour réalisé du désir demeuré désir’—stress the provisional, fragile nature of poetic truth, placing the emphasis on possibility rather than actuality. Poetry is a disruptive force, a form of violence which questions the status quo: ‘la réalité sans l'énergie disloquante du poème, qu'est-elle?’ The poet's role is to keep open the door to a transformed future: ‘A chaque effondrement des preuves le poète répond par une salve d'avenir.’
In Char's hands the prose poem, poised between abstract discourse and narrative, harks back to Rimbaud's Illuminations, and his mastery of the form, in Les Matinaux (1950) or Le Nu perdu (1971), is consummate. One should not neglect, however, his many poems in free verse where, as in his haunting plays (Trois coups sous les arbres, 1967), a certain musicality relieves the fragmentary abruptness of his manner. The visual arts were of paramount importance to Char and he counted many painters among what he called his ‘alliés substantiels’: from Georges de la Tour, Poussin, and Braque to Nicolas de Staël and Viera da Silva. In La Nuit talismanique (1972) he reveals his own talent for visual creation.
[Michael Sheringham]
Bibliography
- M. A. Caws, L'Œuvre filante de René Char (1981)
- J.-C. Mathieu, La Poésie de René Char ou le Sel de la splendeur, 2 vols. (1984-5)
- E. Marty, René Char (1990)
