The Elegiac Temptation in Char’s Poetry

The Elegiac Temptation in Char’s Poetry Van Kelly Laissons l’énergie et retournons à l’énergie. La mesure du Temps? L’étincelle sous les traits de laquelle nous apparaissons et redisparaissons dans la fable. —René Char, “ Riche de larmes” L IFE AND DEATH VIE FIERCELY in Fureur et mystère (1948), especially in the section subtitled Le poème pulvérisé, which con­ tains a number of texts written from the Munich crisis through the Purge.1Virginia A. La Charité notes that a paradox informs this era in Char’s creation: “ To live is to act, but every act appears menaced by the flux and destruction of the world.” 2 The poems “ Les Trois Soeurs,” “ Donnerbach Mühle,” and “ Seuil” manifest Char’s labor to make his poetry adequate to the dialectic which endangerment and death entertain with life forces. A text from Feuillets d ’Hypnos (1946) expresses the model concisely: “Nous voici abordant la seconde où la mort est la plus violente et la vie la mieux définie” (fr. 90).3 Exceptionally, the poem “ Affres, détonation, silence,” also from Le poème pulvérisé, echibits a traditional elegiac stance: the word is not an inspiring confrontation with danger, it is a memorial of past association and intimacy. Char incorporates the present in his discourse only to instill perspective on bygone tragedy. The focus on mortality renders the poem melancholy.4This conflict—between an elegiac, retrospective link­ age of life and death, and an ecstatic economy where the two sustain a manichean but invigorating battle—remains acute in Char’s later poetry, although differently than in the 1930s and 1940s, and as such furnishes a criterion for evaluating shifts in his artistic profile.5 In “ Riche de larmes,” the opening poem in Char’s last collection, Eloge d ’une soupçonnée, the poet eschews the enthusiasm of poems like “ Les Trois Soeurs,” yet he refuses to furnish an unmitigated elegiac retrospective on his life as it wanes. “ Affres, détonation, silence” explicitly accepts elegiac conventions. The poet laments the demise of the resistance fighter Roger Bernard, executed by the SS near the village of Céreste in the Luberon, where Char commanded a group of partisans.6 Menace and death assume mytho­ poetic guise: “ Roger Bernard: l’horizon des monstres était trop proche de sa terre.’’The poet creates a lack and a deathlike quietness in the land­ Vol. XXXV, NO. 4 59 L ’E sprit C réateur scape: “A leur tour les présages se sont assoupis dans le silence des fleurs.” The future (“ les présages” ) is abolished, so that we may medi­ tate on the past. In a prose eulogy, “ Roger Bernard” (Recherche de la base et du sommet), Char recounts his protégé’s execution: “ C’est durant un aller au P. C. de Céreste, chargé d’une mission de liaison, qu’il tombe aux mains des Allemands, le 22 juin 1944” ; “ Il est fusillé peu après sur la route, ayant refusé de répondre aux questions qui lui sont posées” (646). Char witnessed Bernard’s execution from afar but decided not to intervene, fearing Nazi reprisals against the nearby village harbor­ ing his group (Feuillets d’Hypnos, fr. 138). According to Paul Veyne, the poet carried his conscious abstention heavily: “Après la Libération, René se présenta à la veuve de Bernard pour lui rendre des comptes, qu’elle admit.” 7 Char’s several texts on Bernard attest how difficult it was to resolve the grief.8 In Feuillets d’Hypnos, Char has begun crafting Bernard’s death scene: “ Il est tombé comme s’il ne distinguait pas ses bourreaux et si léger, il m ’a semblé, que le moindre souffle de vent eût dû le soulever de terre” (fr. 138, emphasis added). “ Affres, détonation, silence” amplifies this mingling of body with environs, and, in order to accomplish this, Char raises an empathetic description of the event to the level of intense poetic metamorphosis and formal elegy. Bernard, a breeze among canyons, is changed into storm cloud, then into naïve lightning, unslaked yearning, echoes of friendship, a mourning that cannot be put to...