Char (from Le marteau sans maître [The Hammer with No Master]):
Artine gardait en dépit des animaux et des cyclones une
intarissable fraîcheur. A la promenade, c’était la transparence
absolue.
(In spite of animals and cyclones, Artine retained an
inexhaustible freshness. On outings, this was the most absolute
transparency.)
Paul Eluard (“La terre est bleue” [“The Earth Is Blue”]):
La terre est bleue comme une orange
Jamais une erreur les mots ne mentent pas
(The earth is blue like an orange
Never an error words do not lie)
Breton (“Toujours pour la première fois” [“Always for
the First Time”]):
Il y a
Qu’à me pencher sur le précipice
De la fusion sans espoir de ta présence et de ton absence
J’ai trouvé le secret
De t’aimer
Toujours pour la première fois
(There is
That leaning over the precipice
Of the hopeless fusion of your presence and absence
I have found the secret
Of loving you
Always for the first time)
Philippe Soupault (“Georgia”):
Le feu est comme la neige Georgia
La nuit est ma voisine Georgia
J’écoute les bruits tous sans exception Georgia
Je vois la fumée qui monte et qui fuit Georgia
(The fire is like the snow Georgia
The night is my neighbor Georgia
I’m listening to every single sound Georgia
I see the smoke rising and flying off Georgia)
Was Desnos making up his “dreams” in his “trances,” as some have alleged? It little matters. The point is that joining of the perhaps seen to the “actually perceived,” of the interior to the exterior, was the case of all the surrealist endeavors under the aegis of Breton, the “Pope” as the denigrators would call him. In any case, no Breton, no surrealism, and that is a cliff-fact, despite another fact, which is that Salvador Dalí said of himself, “Surrealism is me.” He was not lacking in a sense of entitlement.
To such extent was Breton a controlling force that, when he came with his wife, Jacqueline, and daughter, Aube, to the United States in 1941, earning his living by broadcasting for the Voice of America in French, he refused to learn any English, fearing that it might damage his native language. When, in 1944, he returned to France, the atmosphere had gravely changed, and during an encounter at the Sorbonne, the former Dada leader, Tristan Tzara, accused Breton of still believing in an outdated movement: blows were exchanged, in a famous episode about what was now relevant and what was not. Surrealism had wanted, still wanted, to change the world, but that world had indeed changed on its own. The initial hope in political involvement—surrealism in the service of the revolution—was allied with the female spirit of the mermaid Melusina, demonstrating the shape-shifting freedom of the un-rational. Here, contraries were free to merge and communicate, while the belligerent male force was to be softened by the pacifying and liberating mermaid. But the metaphor seemed too optimistic for the times.
Breton’s relation to the exterior world always had something in it of the aesthetic. Longing for the marvelous, the observer was able to perceive not just the mysterious meaning of an object, but its material magic: we have only to contemplate his extensive collection of objects from near and far, now making up an entire wall in the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges-Pompidou. His daughter, Aube, in her own generous reach, not only endowed the museum bountifully, but made a voyage to Vancouver in order to return to a tribe of the First Nation what Breton had collected from that region and tribe: so she is called “The One Who Gave Back.”
Breton knew how to see not just created objects, but those about him, as he always had been able to do. The excitement over the finding of an object that held in itself, by “objective chance,” the answer to a question you did not know you had—as Breton put it—was a magnificent one. The many wanderings about of the group or individual participants, looking for the unlooked-for and the unexpected, continued apace, from antique stores in Paris to pebbles in the river Lot, near Breton’s discovered summer place in Saint-Cirq-la-Popie. Besides these discoveries, only the proclamations and person of Breton’s lifelong hero, Marcel Duchamp, could awaken in Breton that sense of excitement. What you might come across, and had not dreamed of, was what mattered, and in this the exterior and interior worlds were joined. Creation and encounter were both essential.
All description was to be eliminated, as it was shown in Le manifeste surréaliste (The Manifesto of Surrealism) to be idiotic. Nevertheless, Breton’s apperception of the world about him could be—as it was in the world of art—sharp and steeped in emotion. A somewhat surprising witness to this is found in his epic Fata Morgana (1940): “For me, no work of art is worth this little square made of dappled grass of the vision of life.” We think, as Breton surely did, of the Proust passage in which the artist Elstir fixes his last gaze on the patch of yellow roof in Vermeer’s View of Delft.
The place names counted: as for René Char, the places would be those familiar ones in the Provençal Vaucluse, so for Breton, they would name Paris: cafés, the Hotel des Grands Hommes, the Conservatoire Renée Maubel, the Tour Saint-Jacques, and Nadja’s parallel in the advertisements for the lamp Mazda. The place of their encounter was the Café à la Nouvelle France, at the angle of rue Lafayette, 92, and 91 rue du Faubourg-Poissonnière. The situation matters: its placement and its moment.
Take 1930, the year in which Breton, Eluard, and Char met in Avignon and wrote together Ralentir travaux (Slow Down Men Working) in the Rich Tavern on the Place de la République, near the Hotel Regina. In Char’s recounting of it, Breton was the only one of the three who would have liked his texts to be signed, ironically. In a car, they went all around the Vaucluse, visiting Char’s family home, Les Nevons, and familiar places in L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, in Gordes, in Chateauneuf du Pape. The title “Ralentir travaux” came from a road signal, on the way to Caumont-sur-Durance. So all experiences were to be used, like each encounter.
The relations between Breton and Char were of a complicated sort: Char felt closer to the poet Paul Eluard, who left surrealism for the Communist Party, but Breton’s wife who had occasioned Mad Love, Jacqueline Lamba, found Char to be the “eternal poet,” and took her paintings down to L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue to visit him. That she forgot them there showed her, as she said, how important he had been and was to her.
Char and Breton both had a feeling of a message to be carried on and shared with others, albeit the difference in the message that each man felt crucial to his beliefs. For Breton, literature or writing was living; for Char, living was what led to the writing itself. For both, the feeling of the message they had to bear provided the one essential task, whether it was to be an open and political message, like that of Char’s involvement in the Resistance, or a statement whose at least partial obscurity was willed, as in Breton’s conclusion to the bitter and aggressive second manifesto of 1930, in a time marked by his demoralization and lack of self-assurance: “Public approbation is the first thing to flee. … I DEMAND THE DEEP, TRUE OCCULTATION OF SURREALISM.”
But his heroic voice comes back. The end of Le surréalisme et la peinture (Surrealism and Painting) has a joyous feel to it, and one of comradeship: this is Breton’s voice at its most optimistic: “Surreality is contained in reality itself, is not superior or exterior to it. … We are very far along, whatever anyone says, very high, up, and not at all ready to return or descend.”
Born in 1907 in L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, where he lived most of his life, as well as in an apartment on the rue Chenaleilles, which had earlier been occupied by the writer Alexis de Tocqueville, René Char incorporated both the Mediterranean Provençal and the sophisticated and l
iterary Parisian. He had different accents in both his living and his writing, adapted to the situation and the place. Best known for his activities as the Capitaine Alexandre in the Resistance, part of the Armée Secrete and head of the section Durance-Sud in the Basses-Alpes de Provence, he oversaw parachute landings in that region and, in 1944, served as liaison in Algeria with De Gaulle and the Allied forces. His wartime journal, Feuillets d’Hypnos [Hypnos Waking], published in 1948, tells, in aphoristic style, of his daily meditations and actions: this includes the terrible story of the time Char had to permit the shooting of his young friend Roger Bernard, in the village of Céreste, in the Basses-Alpes, by the Nazis, because otherwise the location of the maquisards (Resistance fighters) would have been betrayed, and the villagers massacred. Understandably, he refused ever to return to that town, and the action haunted him for the rest of his life.
His poetic works, numerous and influential on other poets, not only in France but in the United States and elsewhere, include, among other volumes, his surrealist writing: Le marteau sans maître (The Hammer with No Master, 1934), famously set to music by Pierre Boulez (as was his later poem “Le visage nuptial” [“The Nuptial Countenance,” 1938]); the all-encompassing Fureur et mystère (Furor and Mystery, 1948), which includes the Feuillets d’Hypnos (Leaves of Hypnos, 1946); Les matinaux (The Transparents, 1950); La parole en archipel (The Word as Archipelago, 1962); Le nu perdu (Nakedness Lost, 1970); La nuit talismanique (The Talismanic Night, 1972); and the late poems infused with the scent of herbs: Aromates chasseurs (Hunter’s Aromatic Herbs, 1975). Each title exudes a particular flavor, from that hammer, so forcible and so unmastered, to the poetic landscape in the separate islands of the archipelago, those fragmented parts of writing and living—continuous and yet distinct, exactly parallel to the style of Char’s aphorisms, condensing much into a small space. One of René Char’s most meaningful references is to the poetry of Hölderlin, and especially his poems to the mountaintops that correspond to each other, like so many aphoristic peaks.
Char’s writing is intensely regional: we think not just of those daunting bare heights of the Mont Ventoux or the “windy mountain” in the Vaucluse (that “closed-in valley” honored by Petrarch because of his young muse Laura and the fountain where he saw her, thus the Fontaine de Vaucluse), near which Char grew up, on which he welcomed the parachutes of the partisans during the Resistance, and up which Petrarch climbed, clutching his volume of Aristotle, and which was climbed later by Thomas Jefferson, in honor of Petrarch, reminding us of another poet, Pablo Neruda, and his epic poem, Les hauteurs de Macchu Picchu (Heights of Macchu Picchu). The classical past of the Vauclusian region remains to inspire its present poetics. And indeed, in Char’s country, “mon pays,” the customs are foundational as well as metaphoric: the poem “Qu’il vive!” (“Long Live”) refers to this land, even as it is “only a wish of the spirit, a counter-sepulcre.” It summarizes, in its brief aphoristic space, the moral basis of this poet and, moreover, those who have chosen to live near him and his spirit, whose pays it becomes in turn:
Dans mon pays, les tendres preuves du printemps et les oiseaux mal habillés sont préferés aux buts lointains. …
Dans mon pays, on ne questionne pas un homme ému.
…
Bonjour à peine est inconnu, dans mon pays.
On n’emprunte que ce qui peut se rendre augmenté.
Il y a des feuilles, beaucoup de feuilles sur les arbres de mon pays. Les branches sont libres de ne pas avoir de fruits.
…
Dans mon pays, on remercie.
(In my country, tender proofs of spring and badly-dressed birds are preferred to far-off goals. …
In my country, we don’t question a person deeply moved.
…
A cool greeting is unknown in my country.
We borrow only what can be returned increased.
There are leaves, many leaves, on the trees of my country. The branches are free to bear no fruit.
…
In my country, we say thank you.)
The region is rife with folklore: take the early morning risers of Les matinaux—the impoverished inhabitants of the Vaucluse to whom, when they called at your door, you would give bread and salt and water, and who would exchange their clothes for those on the scarecrows—such are the inherited tales of the region, passed on from family to family. Another of them is told in this way: in order to give one of the mentally less well-endowed something to do, to keep up his dignity, the town would appoint him to make a clacking noise by the water, to frighten away the frogs. The central core of much of Char’s poetry is the assurance of dignity, explicit or not.
So wonderfully and terribly immersed in the daily, in wartime and peacetime, René Char somehow seems heroic in every sense of the word. Immensely tall and prepossessing, with a voice as mountainous as his person and his vision, he was the creator of a poetry, both in prose and in verse, close to the natural: the trees, the mountains, the wheat fields with their poppies, the lavender, the winding roads so particular to Provence. And yet his poetry has the tensile strength suited to its moral stance, always underlying its simplest appearance. As he wrote about we might think of as his calling, in the preface to his best-known collection, Fureur et mystère of 1948, “The poet, we know, mingles lack and excess, the goal and the past. From this, the insolubility of his poem.” What above all he would always refuse was “the profit of being a poet.” For that label would undercut his constant rebellion against any calculation, and his moral position kept him from accepting any position of ease—never becoming part of those whom his predecessor, Arthur Rimbaud, called “les assis” (the comfortably situated). Thus the “insolubility” or, indeed, the unsolvable nature of his poetry. When we contrast this with the discovery in the early days of surrealism by Breton of the “man soluble in his thought,” we do not only meditate on the complexity of all poetry, but on the dissolving of all that does not matter in the universe of such men. And this is—despite what might seem to be the opposition of the terms “unsoluble” (or “unsolvable”) and “soluble”—one of the strange links of the vocabulary as indicative of this kind of confrontation with the world of the conformist.
We can certainly say about both these poets that they were, in every possible sense of the word, nonconformists. In their chosen dif ferences, both writers were deeply involved in a world beyond the bounds of the ordinary, in a revolt against the very notion of conformity. Their selection of images and metaphors already betokens this: Char’s stated affection for “the cloud and the bird” or “fate and the primrose” is precisely a refusal of the expected: say, a cloud and a sun, a refusal that parallels Breton’s insistence on imagining he might not find a pear alongside an apple in a fruit dish, but rather, say, a horse galloping on a tomato. The inventive mind is necessarily in revolt against the expected, like the surrealist denial of what has been already seen, thought, digested.
But of course, from this stems a certain pessimism, piercing through the writings and the lives. Char’s poem “Wrestlers” shows both the comradeship and the burden of the metaphoric heroic deed he takes upon himself:
Dans le ciel des hommes, le pain des étoiles me sembla ténébreux et durci, mais dans leurs mains étroites je lus la joute de ces étoiles en invitant d’autres: émigrantes du pont encore rêveuses, j’en recueillis la sueur dorée, et par moi la terre cessa de mourir.
(In the sky of men, the bread of the stars seemed to me shadowy and hardened, but in their narrow hands I read the joust of these stars calling others: emigrants from below deck still dreaming; I gathered their golden sweat, and through me the earth ceased to die.)
Living in both places, Provence and Paris, René Char had in his makeup, then, both the sophisticated and the rural, and even had accents in his life as in his poems, of both—this bears repeating, since his poems are marked by place names, even though he wished and believed them to be as wide-ranging as the constellation of Orion, with which h
e so closely identified himself. That L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue should be so close to Mont Ventoux, the windy mountain that so frequently appears in his writing, feels like no happenstance, but some sort of appropriate territory. His writing, both in wartime and in calmer times, has a feeling of rise about it. Like something overcome, surmounted, and ongoing, like a vanquishing of the heights of the Ventoux.
His moral insistence, which I am insisting on, was itself ongoing. The aphoristic mode that is recognizable in everything he ever wrote and said—that mode of tension and condensation—is responsible for what many have found “hermetic” in his poems, a term he rejected. It was instead exactly what was deliberately and yet naturally insoluble—so very much the opposite of Breton’s “man soluble in his thoughts”—unsolvable, mysterious but the very opposite of mystical, which would be rather Breton’s side of things. The images Char selected were themselves often difficult to put together: the cloud and the bird, rebellion and the primrose. Yet once they were there, a certain kind of sense was there also. If I dwell on the moral side of his writing, it has to do also with the part of reading, not just with the creating of it. From this point of view, his poetic theory, if you like, is similar to that of the surrealists: the double creation of the text by writer and reader. And, equally, from this point of view, both writers, Char and Breton, provide sustenance for the contemporary gaze as it has been determined by Roland Barthes and other theoreticians of literature and philosophy.
The prose texts that Char felt most strongly about, and that were the nearest to what he wanted his friends, critics, and translators to communicate, were the Billets à Francis Curel (Letters to Francis Curel), dated from 1941 to 1948. They were addressed to the son of that worker in the fields whom Char called “Louis Curel de la Sorgue,” a noble title the family had inherited far back in time and that Char restored to this upright man, whom he pictures always standing in the distance, that working laborer: “Il y a un homme à présent debout, un homme dans un champ de seigle, un champ pareil à un choeur mitraillé, un champ sauvé” (There is a man now standing, a man in a field of rye, a field like a machine-gunned chorus, a field redeemed). It is perhaps worth noting that when the poet was carried out of his house, Les Busclats, in his last sickness, he was carried standing upright, as befitted his moral stance.
A History of Modern French Literature Page 68