René Char, the Myth and the Poem by James R. Lawler (review)

HUMANITIES 429 de vision. A travers poemes, nouvelles, biographies, romans, Bochner nous fait decouvrir une mythologie dont Ie centre n'est pas constitue par un archetype fige mais par I'experience creatrice elle-mome, car Ia decouverte du monde coincide chez Cendrars avec Ia decouverte de soi, et c'est apartir de cette double decouverte que s'opere Ia re-creation de soi et du monde par l'ecriture. Aucun statisme dans l'ceuvre de Cendrars mais un perpetuel renouvellement, aucune repetition si ce n'est celIe de Ia decouverte elle-meme. Bochner reussit acommuniquer atravers Ia biographie Ie sens d'une prodigieuse vitalite, cette meme vitalite qu'on retrouve tant dans Ies innovations de I'ecriture pOEHique que dans les personnages romanesques . Cette etude etait necessaire: sa documentation solide sera utile aux chercheurs, mais surtout elle saura susciter une recrudescence d'inh?ret pour Cendrars et provoquer une reEvaluation qui s'impose. (MICHEL PARMENTIER) James R. Lawler. Rene Char, the Myth and th e Poem Princeton University Press. xvii, 116. $11.00 This handsomely produced short book has a twofold purpose: first, to outline Rene Char's 'personal myth' through an overview of some of his major poems; secondly, to focus the reader's attention on a set of ten pieces (La Paroi et fa prairie, 1952), introduced as 'typical of their author and paradigmatic of a work that is a summit of French poetry since Apollinaire' (p xvi). Hence the book's title, which refers plainly to the two successive parts, appropriately not presented as chapters but as independent essays (The Myth, pp 3- 48; The Poem, pp 51-107). In fact, the second essay is a modified and expanded version of an earlier study published in 1974 in About French Poetry from Dada to Tef que/: Text and Theory, ed Mary Ann Caws, whereas the first one was written later, under a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation fellowship (1974). The modifications that the author mentions in his preface (p xvii) obviously consist, for the most part, in the relating of his earlier interpretations to the perspectives developed in 'The Myth.' These additions can be easily identified. Whoever is familiar with Char's poetry, whose explicit models are Heraclitus and the Rimbaud of Les Illuminations, will agree that James Lawler's stated purpose is a daring challenge; the patent enthusiasm he shows for his topic wins the reader's sympathy at the outset, but one cannot help wondering, at the end of the book, whether or not his methodological approach has succeeded in catching Char's essentials in its net, as the title and subtitle would suggest. The concept of 'personal myth: borrowed from Charles Mauron's 430 LETTERS IN CANADA 1978 psychocriticism, is watered down to the extent that it means no more than a 'major theme' which is intuitively considered to have a general explicative value for the totality of the work. Char's 'personal myth' is embodied, according to Lawler, in the legend of Orion which articulates 'the encounter ... of violence and temperance, severity and tenderness' (p 51). This thesis is stated very clearly at the beginning of the book: 'Violence, tenderness, death and transmutation characterize the poems just as they mark the fable of Orion, who suffered blindness and defeat despite his strength yet who, in death, shines with stellar splendor' (pp 3-4); and it is expressed in various forms, repeatedly, until the end. The problem inherent in this approach is that the great generality of the 'theme' thus 'identified' makes it suitable for being recognized in practically every poem and enables the interpreter 'to set aside the view of Char's work as fragmentary and to find instead a concrete [?] logic, a unitary imagination' (p 5). But at the same time the claim that the recurring allusions to Orion, both the mythical hero and the constellation which are found in Aromates chasseurs (1975), provide a key that 'not only interanimates this plaquette but reveals in retrospect ... the implicit mythopoeic convergence of the whole' (p 6, my italics) tends to act as a reductive grid for the interpretation of fifty years of intense poetic creation . This is all the more ludicrous since chronological considerations...