THE POEM AND THE CRISIS OF HISTORY IN RENÉ CHAR'S WORK

par Laure Michel

Laure Michel presents here the conclusions of the Doctoral thesis that she defended before the University Lyon II-Louis Lumière on November 21, 2005 before a jury composed of: Jean-Yves Debreuille (professor at the University Lyon II, thesis director), Michel Collot (professor at the University Paris III), Jean-Pierre Martin (professor at the University Lyon II), Jean-Claude Mathieu (emeritus professor at the University Paris VIII).

The relationship of Char's work to the history of his time is often posed as an evidence that is supported by the author's participation in the Resistance battles and the writing of Feuillets d'Hypnos. But if history occupies a determining place in this work, it is to the extent that the latter has itself placed the ordeal of the Second World War at its center. Now the war is present there both as an exemplary period and as a closed parenthesis. This paradoxical situation, which sets in during the post-war crisis period, never studied as such by criticism, signals the singular relationship that Char's poetry has elaborated with one of the major historical events of his time and, beyond, with the very idea of history.

To understand the relationship that is forged between writing and history at the time of the Second World War and just after, it proved necessary to determine the moment when history appears as the horizon of denounced events, the moment when poems, in the first collections, modify their polemical relationship with society and the values of their time by inscribing the events they denounce in a historical temporality. This change is remarkable. It appears with the Spanish Civil War and the "Dedication" of Placard pour un chemin des écoliers. Linked to the nature of the event, to its gravity and to its unprecedented character, the denunciation of the "Dedication" inscribes the event in the time of history in order to affirm a responsibility in the face of it. The war collections, L'Avant-monde and Seuls demeurent, confirm the subject's engagement in a history conceived as the possibility of acting to change the fate of men. The poems show this engagement and play a role for action, while simultaneously seeking to escape the grip of circumstances. The post-war period is the true moment of a crisis of history in the work. The hopes born from the maquis combat are progressively called into question in the journalistic texts, partly taken up in Recherche de la base et du sommet. It appears that the evil incarnated by Nazism does not cease and takes other forms after the end of the conflict. The crisis opened by the war does not close and leads the author to a sharp critique of the ideals placed in history. In this period, Char's interest in cinema and theater takes on its full meaning: it first shows, with Le Soleil des eaux, the confidence in history born from the maquis struggle. Gradually, these works become the place of a reflection on action and a space of resistance to the oppression of the present time. They reveal the disappointments and the post-war crisis. The poetic collections, with Le Poème pulvérisé and Les Matinaux, elaborate on their side a singular position which is not, as has been affirmed, a disengagement, but the maintenance, at a distance, of a vigilance and a responsibility toward contemporaries. Char's originality is to found these on a relationship to time which is no longer that of history. The collection À une sérénité crispée is emblematic of this repositioning of the subject and poetic discourse, after the disappointments of the immediate post-war period. The rest of the work is then to be considered in this perspective of a maintained relationship with the era and the political defining a poetic engagement that owes nothing to history.

The framework of this study is that of a commentary on Char's work. This work seeks, by relying on the analysis of enunciation and taking into account the system of the work, to bring to light the relationships of the poem with its era and the conceptions, historical or not, of the latter which are its corollary. Through a sustained and chronological analysis, it is a question of insisting on the historicity of the work, against the grain of its Heideggerian reception, of understanding the post-war turning point and of nuancing the idea, transmitted by the author as well as by criticism, of a disengagement of writing and the subject after the war. It is also a question, through the analysis of the forms proper to this work, of contributing to the question of poetic engagement.

The conclusions of the study can be summarized as follows:

When Char in his first collections mentions history, it is to better oppose to it, in the context of a virulent denunciation of contemporary society and its values, the force of a counter-history. Taking on the Christian idea of history, perceived as an instrument of political and religious domination, the poet relies on an imaginary of geological mutations and telluric upheavals to retrace a history of the earth which, from deluges to cataclysms, carries to its paroxysm a Sadean desire for universal destruction. The violence of poetic writing targets several targets, familial, political and social, but always seeking to keep at a distance from circumstances, it erases the referential dimension of the poems, while excluding inscribing their action in the perspective of a historical change. The separation with surrealism in 1935 progressively brings to the fore the question of a responsibility of the poem itself.

History bursts into the work as soon as the written word itself takes charge of denouncing a contemporary event. With the "Dedication" of Placard pour un chemin des écoliers, a poetic collection is placed entirely under the sign of a political refusal. If the poems remain non-referential, the text of the "Dedication" signals the introduction into the space of the collection of a responsibility of speech and action hitherto maintained outside. A subject poses itself in the work as responsible before events. The appearance of a historical temporality is linked to the affirmation of this responsibility. The destructive power of the Spanish Civil War event, its exorbitant character, lead to the affirmation of history as a space of reparation and justice.

History however does not fully impose itself until L"Avant-monde. It becomes not only a theme of the poems, but it underlies a way of organizing the collection and configuring its temporality. L"Avant-monde shows the passage from a personal time to a collective time, taken charge of by an I who enunciates its engagement. The poems show this engagement, but they themselves are not "engaged", in the sense that their addressee is not the whole of a collectivity on which they would try to act. A distance toward circumstances is even carefully preserved. Partage formel as well as Le Visage nuptial come to remind, by their place between L'Avant-monde and Feuillets d'Hypnos, the necessity of subtracting poetry from the continuous grip of history.

With Feuillets d'Hypnos, one can speak of a true crisis. All the work of configuring a historical temporality, of organization, unification and narration, visible in L'Avant-monde, is overturned. In this note writing, each statement surrounds itself with a silence which, on one side, suggests, without making it disappear under the too illuminating light of an analysis, the inconceivable of the situation and, on the other, leaves its place to an unnamed that makes possible an unprecedented outcome. The unheard of this time without comparison is glimpsed in the detour of a metaphorical discourse becoming the name of the crisis "impossible to describe". As for poetry, it experiences both its fragility and its necessity. The collection"s warning announces the grip of circumstances on the writing of the leaflets, the derisory character of the latter in the face of the gravity of the situation. But these notes find at the same time their legitimacy, in an ethics founded on the relationships that govern the maquisards community, and their necessity, in the relationship to action that they establish. The writing of Feuillets d"Hypnos reintroduces, indeed, a temporality of historical type where a failure of the time of history has been revealed. This "historical present", limited to the time of action, supports a confidence in the future that the post-war period will call into question.

After the war, the subject progressively abandons the hope that nourished its action in the maquis. The critical texts collected in Recherche de la base et du sommet as well as the press articles not retained in the work testify to this loss of confidence in the possibility of changing the course of things by action in history. The observation of an inevitable return of evil, the absence of profound modification in the situation of men lead to an evolution of the subject's attitude toward history. The post-war texts show a collective time conceived as a succession of "excessive slices' ("Note sur le maquis'), from which have disappeared the order, direction and unity that make a sequence of events can be constituted into history. History itself is named in these texts as a presupposition of action that must be pushed back in favor of other forms of time. In this rejection of history, one must also hear the rejection of a mode of political action that pushes back to a distant future the promise of a happiness of which it makes an instrument of domination.

Char's interest in cinema and theater from 1946 is not without connection to the confidence in history born from the maquis experience. Le Soleil des eaux shows the necessity of the historical becoming of communities, the illusion there would be in believing oneself outside of history. The reflections on action that run through the whole of the plot recall several of the Feuillets d'Hypnos and testify to the proximity of the two works. But while Feuillets d'Hypnos has no other addressee than the subject itself during the time of action, then a reader in a situation of shift with the events reported in the statements, Le Soleil des eaux, in its filmic as well as theatrical version, gathers the public in a community contemporary with the discourse of the play. By its project of acting on addressees perceived as a collective entity, Le Soleil des eaux is Char's most visibly political work. It is also the one where the political dimension of writing – and of representation – is inseparable from a historical conception of the time in which the community of spectators is situated. Char's second scenario, Sur les hauteurs, develops a plot apparently distant from any historical and social stake. But by this very detachment, by the distancing created by the deployment of an enchanted imaginary, the film, then the play, play the role of a counter-power opposed to the present time, denounced, it, as "hostile" and enslaving, in the manuscript prologue. The original relationship that the scenario establishes with the past proposes an alternative to traditional conceptions of the time of history. Rid of nostalgic seduction, the past delivers its ferments of future: it can be "ahead of us'. It is in reference to art, pictorial in particular, that Char proposes in this film a new relationship to time. With Claire, Char seems to return to a social and political subject. The references to a recent past, that of the war and the Liberation, plunge the film's spectators into their own history. The modifications brought afterward in the versions for theater attenuate the collective character of the told history and bring to the fore the succession of individual scenes. This evolution echoes that of the critical texts of the same era: the "personal drama" and human diversity are preferred to a collective time threatening to be alienating. Attention to the concrete world, to the universe of sensation found a resistance to abstraction that dominates, according to Char, the political conceptions of his time and the representations of history that are attached to them.

From 1947, Le Poème pulvérisé announces, on the side of poetic writing, the separation of the subject with the men of his time. The direct or indirect references to the war period place the collection at a pivotal moment, between the continuity of a memory and the abandonment of collective hope. The war itself is presented as a decisive caesura, a catastrophe after which it falls to the poet to reconstruct hope, outside of any reference to the time of history. The war is presented as a disaster on the scale of Creation, as an experience of death and rebirth on the scale of the subject. It is through the image of pulverization that the latter finds in the collection the means to integrate the experience of finitude to the pursuit of forward movement. Against a linear time, destructive because relying on the loss of the past and leading to death, pulverization opposes the image of a dissemination in space that inverts the negativity of dust into affirmation of renewal and possibility of transmission. Through this image, Char invents the possibility of opening the future without denying the disaster.

The publication of Fureur et mystère in 1948 comes to put an end to the war period. The gathering in a single volume of the collections written from 1937 to 1948 provides a term and confers a unity to these ten years. A period closes and this effect of closure gives reason to the reception of the work that insists on the circumscribed place of the war. A path is drawn, from the subject's engagement in history, in Seuls demeurent, to the final division between a personal destiny and a collective destiny, in La Fontaine narrative. But one would not understand Les Matinaux nor the persistence of references to the war in the rest of the work if one interpreted this turning point as a disinterest of the poet for his era. The abandonment of a confidence in history does not prevent the maintenance of a responsibility of the poem toward its contemporaries.

With Les Matinaux is elaborated a new position of the subject, while the relationship of the poem to its era is redefined. A discourse of opposition, explicit or figured, runs through the collection and gives it a political stake more visible than in the previous work. The allusive turn of the condemnations of the surrealist period limited their reception, and the positions taken in Fureur et mystère addressed the subject itself more than a collective addressee. One finds in certain sections of Les Matinaux a social aim similar to those of Le Soleil des eaux and Claire. The insertion of L'Homme qui marchait dans un rayon de soleil, with its address to the public and the theme of its argument – the opposition between an individual and the collectivity –, is significant in this regard. The denunciation of the era in Les Matinaux is accompanied, however, by a claimed independence toward society. The poet subtracts itself from the useful exchanges that regulate social relationships. Idleness and "carelessness" are its watchwords as well. Like the mason character in L"Homme qui marchait dans un rayon de soleil, it is "apart". This distance is however what allows it to "construct" according to the word of the play. In response to the persistence of evil and oppression, toward which it continues to take position, the poet only distances itself to better work at "a health of misfortune", made of vigilance and lucidity on the era.