RENÉ CHAR: THE POEM AND ACTION

Review par Catherine Dufour

February 8, 2019

Volume 47.3 of the journal Études littéraires dedicates a dossier to Fureur et Mystère (1948) by René Char, which brings together texts written from 1938 to 1947, gathered after the war in five collections: Seuls demeurent (1945), Feuillets d'Hypnos (1946), Les Loyaux adversaires, Le Poème pulvérisé and La Fontaine narrative (1947).

Engaged in the maquis and refusing all publication during the duration of the war, René Char seemed to confirm the incompatibility between action on the ground and action through poetry, "derisorily insufficient". However, the in-depth reading of Fureur et Mystère encourages us to nuance such assertions. The questions addressed throughout the articles allow us to identify the characteristics of a resistant poetry that refuses to call itself "Resistance poetry". It deals notably with the relations between action and the verb, the recourse to poetic silence and obscurity, the choice of forms (prose, feuillets, aphorisms), the role played by the figure of Sade.

This dossier is completed by an analysis of La Case du commandeur by Édouard Glissant and an interview with Le Clézio, followed by an article on his "seismographic" writing, which extend, in their own way, the question of engagement in literature.

Bertrand Marchal, "Action and the Verb in Feuillets d'Hypnos"
The confrontation between the "loyal adversaries" (allusion to the title of the third collection of Fureur et Mystère) that are "the man of action" and "the man of the verb" serves as a long preamble for B. Marchal, supported by a close study of the inaugural Argument of Seuls demeurent and the metaphors, biblical or agropastoral, that characterize these two protagonists. It emerges that opposing them would be a misunderstanding and that their contradiction is not of a "Hegelian" nature, but "Heraclitean".

The rest of the article is organized around the three principles that structure this action/verb duality: the suspension of speech, the ethics of action and the invention of a "poethics".

Clandestine action supposes a "crossing of the desert of speech", which refers to the biblical exodus. The poet is a child (in-fans: the one who does not yet speak). The drying up of the Sorgue is a privileged image of this suspension. But Hypnos watches in the night like the Magdalene at the nightlight by Georges de la Tour.

An "ethics of action", which refers to stoicism, fills the place left empty by the suspension of the verb. The poetic "return to self" prepares for action, which must be reduced to the essential, through "self-pruning" and learning freedom against all determinisms, Darwinian, Marxist or Freudian.

The "poethics" has the mission of reconciling action with the asceticism "of the highest silence". The poet is in turn a pruner of dead branches, a switchman, a water diviner, a baker of the "new eucharist", a nomadic shepherd chief of maquis, antithesis of sedentary farmers (the generals of Algiers).

The poetry of the Season in Hell of the years 1943-1944 is "ahead" (Rimbaud). Incarnated, it must not give in to mysticism. It is rebirth after a painful "prenatal regression": was Char not named René? Poetry is living truth and not denatured sun like the swastika. It is an "infanta" (feminine of child) below speech. But it is not triumphant: it says "in a low voice" the language of sensation against abstraction, of subjective evidence, of imagination. It irrigates action and opens the horizon of a pagan hope, while the "paradoxical fecundity of the night" takes the opposite direction of Hitlerian darkness. The angel, or the Woman of the Prisoner by Georges de La Tour, are privileged allegories of this metapoetic mystery: poetry is at the "enigmatic service" of man, not through its hermeticism, but through the homage it pays to the very mystery of his condition.

Olivier Belin, "The 'Ink Voice' of René Char. Poetry and Silence in Fureur et Mystère"
Olivier Belin's article completes that of Bertrand Marchal by studying the multiplicity of silence configurations in Fureur et Mystère. He shows how René Char makes "silence sing", rethinks the poet's "editorial mutism" and analyzes the characteristics of an "asymptotic poetry of silence".

Silence is a poetic act in its own right. Speech must be left in suspense for a moment before being relayed by action. Char's poetry is at the antipodes of Aragon's, epic, "bel canto" or "carmen". If silence and "entangled speech" are constitutive of a certain modern poetry, in Char they testify to a consented violence to escape rhetoric and the gratuitousness of images. Silence is resistance against Nazi propaganda, but also against literary chatter.

Char's "editorial mutism" was not as radical as legend would have it: the poet in 1940 proposed to Gallimard a version of his first collection, which was refused, and it was only gradually that he renounced all publication. The intensification of the summer 1943 battles in any case only allowed hasty notes, scraps of speech torn by Hypnos, vigilant twin brother of Thanatos, from gagged speech. The metaphors of fire and battering ram illustrate the "fury" of the pen.

Silence has several faces. It can be stupor, bewilderment, or fragmentation of the written in the Feuillets d'Hypnos. Saint-Just's mutism upon learning of his death sentence is a victorious reappropriation of self through silence. The sacred recollection of man or the "vixen", who commune with nature, relieves the ambient asphyxiation. The murmuring speech is imbued with religiosity, like that of the angel, but without Christian connotation. At dawn or dusk, one sometimes crosses the silhouette of a fairy-woman, "rural and Provençal heir of the Baudelairean passerby and the surrealist enchantress", whose collected mutism it would be sacrilegious to disturb. The erotic experience sublimates the silent communion with nature.

No cult of the ineffable however in Char's writing: silence is the prerequisite of authentic speech, poetry is the "not yet formulated", the refusal of fixed form. Resistant poetry is "inchoative speech", childhood speech, emerging speech. The "ink voice" never speaks except at "the asymptote of silence".

But conversely silence can be cry, paroxysm and "white fury", "throat knotted by the unnamable, hesitating between howl and mutism". It is sometimes the visual intensity of the eyes, alone capable of crying. Or on the contrary, in Georges de la Tour, the halo of an inner nightlight.

In all cases it is political and poetic, not deprivation, but promise of speech, not "absence of language", but waiting for the "unknown of all language". Poetic mutism is an art of war conforming to the precepts of Sun Tzu and martial arts more than to the Western tradition of war, despite the resistance name of the fighter Char (Alexandre).

Laure Michel, "Obscurity of René Char"
Char has always defended himself against the reproach of poetic hermeticism. Laure Michel prefers to speak of obscurity rather than hermeticism, a term reserved for a philosophical meaning. After analyzing the particularities of a poetic reading contract that presupposes obscurity, she studies the resulting stylistic particularities and proposes a reading guide for Char's poetry.

The question of obscurity did not arise in Char's first collections, so much was the restricted circle of his readers committed to the idea of the mystery inherent in poetry. It only manifests itself after the Resistance, when reading Fureur et Mystère, at the same time as the idea of poetry for all progresses (Eluard). Char's obscurity does not coincide, however, with an elitist hermeticism in the manner of Mallarmé or Valéry.

Surrealist inspiration is still perceptible in Fureur et mystère, but Char tends to distance himself from it, also taking leave of the verbal aggressiveness of his beginnings, influenced by Sade. A poetry of amorous exchange appears, conducive to communication, although still dependent on a certain esotericism, amorous encryption in the manner of Eluard, and the tradition of the marvelous of the encounter. Laure Michel notes the presence in many poems of a cosmic, biblical, even gnostic dimension, of a desire to decipher the hidden meaning of the world. The figures of mystery (the angel, the passerby) are frequent in the Feuillets d'Hypnos and the theme of correspondences is represented there, diverted however from its primary meaning, for poetry is no longer limited to knowledge, but prepares the future.

But why translate the mysteries of the world through obscurity? It is, Laure Michel answers, because obscurity reveals by questioning. The symbol, myth or enigma at the heart of poetic activity are guarantors of an indefinitely open meaning.

Obscurity is also linked to action, for it combats another obscurity: the darkness of Nazism. It is the night of the maquis, the night of Hypnos, the chiaroscuro and the candle of Georges de la Tour, enemy of the totalitarian sun of the Nazis. The night contains all possibilities, like the black of alchemists.

If all poetry by definition cultivates gaps, in Feuillets d'Hypnos the referent constantly surfaces, but does not always suffice for the clarity of statements, disturbed by the unexpected choice of forms or the absence of a referential common to all readers.

Laure Michel shows well that seeking to elucidate the meaning of the numerous metaphors and enigmatic figures, sometimes trivial in appearance, sometimes disguised as maxims, would lead to an impasse. In this sense, Char's obscurity still has some affinity with surrealism. More interesting however is the coherence that is woven through the poet's beloved words and their specific meanings: almond, torrent, source, fountain, velvet, frost, etc.

Obscurity can come from the semantic and syntactic complexity of prose poems as well as from the brevity of feuillets, ellipses, isotopy breaks, parataxes.

This "foreign language" requires patient and open commentary. But the essential thing is emotion, privileged by Char himself.

Laure Michel concludes on the necessity of entering with confidence into poetic obscurity, of familiarizing oneself with it, without fascination, and of mobilizing the collective poetic heritage to tame it.

Anne Gourio, "The Prose Poem, Form of 'Counter-Terror'"
Anne Gourio was interested in the major place of the prose poem in Fureur et Mystère.

A brief history of this form reveals its "uncertain" character, symptom of the modern crisis according to Valéry. In René Char, it cultivates an "exalting alliance of opposites".

After placing the prose poem in the overall logic of the work, and of Fureur et mystère in particular, Anne Gourio attempts to qualify its particular lyricism and understand what it tells us about action.

It must be noted that the prose poem, which imposes itself in Char's surrealist period as oniric overflow, only takes its full scope from Seuls demeurent onwards, precisely when the poet distances himself from surrealism. In contact with the Resistance, it becomes more "massive" and corresponds to what the poet calls "the combat of perseverance".

The prose poem dominates in sections I and III of Fureur et Mystère, those of "resistant compactness"; section II (Feuillets d'Hypnos) generally prefers the "cutting edge" of the fragment. It is nevertheless the detailed analysis of a prose poem from this section (feuillet 141) and its metaphor of the valley open to the hope of a "counter-terror" that leads Anne Gourio to assimilate the very structure of Fureur et Mystère to a valley, of which sections I and III would be the edges, and the Feuillets d'Hypnos the hollow. From this analysis she draws the interpretative paths necessary for reading all the prose poems of sections I-III (the vivifying and creative space of counter-terror against the suffocating precipitate of the Nazi threat) and highlights a double formal opposition: prose/verse, prose poem/aphorism.

René Char made different use of verse according to periods: lyrical and harmonious in the surrealist period, it then dislocates and becomes jarring. Then it evolves toward song or chanson. In Fureur et mystère, the prose poem, hostile to Baudelairean prosaism, proposes a "minor lyricism", which mixes traditional procedures of musicality (refrains, anaphoras, scansion, internal rhymes, invocations) with procedures of attenuation of lyricism: tone breaks, concrete evocations of nature – unlike surrealist onirism or the hideous metaphors of Nazism. Poetry tends toward stripping down and rejects "regressive legends" and the marvelous. Char privileges the space of the sensible, simple gestures of daily life, individual memory. These themes intertwine in prose poems: in section I they are the beauty of natural space, daily life, artisan gestures; in section III, vegetable motifs, links to the past, elements, night, inscriptions in stone.

The atypical use of the inchoative imperfect expresses the promises of the future patiently sought in the past, of which the resurgence of Fontaine de Vaucluse is the symbol.

Anchored in the imaginary of earth and memory, the prose poem is often organized around a man or a place, and refuses the temporality of the "great national narrative". Dotted narration, breaks induce presence, incantation, call to action. Dereferencing offers the reader the possibility of an active recreation of the world. In filigree is woven a "latent narrative", of which the "vegetable lamp" or the candle of Georges de la Tour constitute seminal images conveying a "counter-utopia". Against the grain of the unilateral meaning that History seems to impose, a "subterranean resistance" is built in the shadow.

Often constructed in two parts around a tipping point and stylistic breaks, prose poems qualify action: they say the passage from an old state to a new state, while performative endings seem to prefigure reconquest. But the prescriptive value proper to the aphorism is always attenuated: by referential blur, polyphony of voices and enunciations, and the distance sought from events.

Char undeniably flees the "chauvinistic" style: the prose poem is lightened despite the gravity of the subject. The numerous occurrences of the weightlessness motif translate the refusal of any dictated morality, in the name of a Nietzschean conception of freedom. Obeying only its own rules, this form coincides with a "morality of uprising, autonomy, transcendence". The resources proper to poetry attenuate the seriousness of the sentence, while maintaining intact the enunciation of an ethics of revolt. Hostile to any resolution of opposites, the prose poem lives on mystery, ambiguity and hybridity.

If it marked the entry into modernity by refusal of an order, here, paradoxically, it tends toward an equilibrium in the chaos of the world and announces a counter-terror "in hollow".

Jean-Michel Maulpoix, "'You cloud pass before'. The Resistant Writing of René Char"
The word "resistance", inaugural term in Char's work from 1927, is not synonymous with "engagement", for the poet sees further than the intellectual who expresses himself on the public stage. Poetry is on the contrary "disengagement", independence and vision of the future.

It is both "proximity" to the real and "distance". To resist is to stand "apart". It is to fight in the maquis, but it is also to produce "resistant" writing, difficult to access unlike that of Aragon or Eluard. No heroic grandiloquence, no national lyricism.

The Feuillets d'Hypnos, often brief and fragmentary, coincide with an availability battered by events. Epic, satire or pamphlet, genres traditionally devoted to war, are excluded. Poetry, like combat action, must find its own rules. Feuillets d'Hypnos is a poetic art.

The poem is neither complaint, nor consolation, nor "charm", nor entertainment, nor mannerism, nor quest for a debased sacred, nor gratuitous rhetoric. Poetry is a doing that, working with the resistance of language, produces "accesses of meaning" comparable to "fever attacks", fulgurant, aphoristic.

Resistant writing is organized around three motifs: action, instinctive like that of the animal, hunter or strategist, mission in quest of meaning, and insubmission to any order, political or poetic.

The word "fury" reflects violence in war and writing. "Furor" in Latin designates anger, amorous passion, poetic inspiration. In Char, the three are linked, nourishing and destructive at the same time.

To carry this fury, words become flint, they are "dazzling landmarks" or on the contrary dreamy, obscure, disturbing. Place of a tightened experience, writing must be precise and effective like maquis shots. But it also deploys in "extension", adopting all possible forms and enunciations. Harshness, antagonisms, insecurity prevail. Fluid metaphors, musical lyricism have no place there. The Feuillets d'Hypnos are rapid notes, intermittent like action, adjusted to it, at the most precise, at the most brief. Parallel to this are claimed, from the liminary text, the highest moral exigencies for the future.

Willingly injunctive, writing enunciates the commandments of combat and poetic ethics. It addresses the reader, as a sign of fraternity. It is sentence, metaphorical aphorism or enigma of the Pythia. Metaphors of combustion or passage are frequent. Speed, discontinuity, condensation, unexpected explosion produce a "pulverized" poem – "spray of sparks" or "swarm of bees" – which contrasts with the peaceful flow of the Sorgue...

Fureur et Mystère declines several forms of temporality. The long time of war, of which the five great sections follow the chronology, is conjugated with salient instants, taken in their "immediacy". The combatant's sensitivity and great History meet. There is finally the time of nature, vast, tenacious, tranquil, permanent. War more than ever allows men to commune with the earth of origins.

Poetic action establishes a new relationship to the world according to three instances: "attention" opposed to diversion, "testimony" which leaves traces and enunciates truths, finally "warning" which sees far. But the visionary gaze is high and wide: it refuses vengeance and vain patriotic honors.

Char's poetry is in solidarity with a handful of men gathered in a well-localized landscape of Vaucluse, both battlefield and refuge. Complicit nature personifies and suffers. The poet advocates a "terrestrial" engagement, sensory and pagan despite his thirst for infinity. Silent, pure, precarious presence is exacerbated by the idea of finitude. Villagers, shepherds, artisans, vagabonds, mimosa gatherers, "princes" of the earth, are the defenders of a threatened nature and world, and the poet is the "conservator of the infinite faces of the living". The man who struggles is double, lucid and suffering, thirsty, but hoping indefinitely, able to transform defeat into victory.

J.-M. Maulpoix concludes by commenting on the image of the "resistance cloud", already used in 1927, this smoke cloud that goes before, sign of a salvific poetic fire. Writing, Char said in 1929, is "drowned man's respiration", which struggles in the unbreathable, but dispenses regenerative oxygen. Resisting is an ordeal that can count on solid supports: the Provençal landscape, its inhabitants, poets, philosophers and painters, Georges de la Tour and his Magdalene at the nightlight. Poetic "presence" is essential, incarnation of "true life" according to Rimbaud. Resistance carries the idea, "physically experienced", that this life has meaning. It is in this capacity that Char declares it "invulnerable".

Éric Marty, "Hypnos with Sade"
The figure of Sade, of which Éric Marty cites several encrypted occurrences, invites itself from the first page of Fureur et Mystère. But the author seeks to tear it from the clichés that await it. It is true that this reference, commonplace of the 20th century, resonates in Feuillets d'Hypnos as a provocation, in the context of Nazi barbarity and in view of the poet's engagement, described in the epigraph of the collection as "the resistance of a humanism conscious of its duties".

Éric Marty's article consists essentially of an in-depth analysis of feuillet 210, devoted to this unsavory character, excluded from Resistance poetry and confined to works on the margins of historical horror, of Bataille and Breton in particular (1942-1943).

The allusion to the criminal lord in feuillet 210 takes the significant form of a parenthesis, in which Char remembers a charcoal burner affirming that the Revolution had purged the region of "a certain Sade" throat-cutter of young girls. From his exegesis Éric Marty concludes that the criminal lord, twice excluded from the region, by the Revolution and by the Resistance, is reintegrated by the poet on the battlefield... with incontestable empathy! Masterful provocation against resistant doxa! Refusing to consider this rehabilitation only as the "mean thumbing of the nose of a former surrealist", and relying on the stylistic study of a "generalized fluctuation of meaning", Éric Marty analyzes this provocation as Char's personal implication in a trial, conducted against Sade and against himself, in the name of their criminal ambiguity, expressed in the first sentence of the feuillet by the metaphor of the "wart". Char would therefore take upon himself the condemnations made by Resistance ideologues against the poets of the night. The confrontation between the charcoal burner's lie (Sade did not kill) and the truth of the Marquis's desire, which arouses the poet's enthusiasm, allows light to be shed on a deeper truth: Sadean desire does not need crime to exist. The charcoal burner, of a "mountain avarice" – allusion to the dogmatism of 1791? – would know nothing of the Lacanian logic of "discordantial" desire and would embody the obtuse political scientists of the time. Sade's sexuality is interpreted by Éric Marty as an allegory of writing, which allows one to say, in all innocence, legitimately recognized desires, even if they are criminal. Feuillet 174 seems to give him reason by taking the side of "evil, not depraved, inspired, whimsical" against "the oppression of this directed ignominy that calls itself good".

The reference to Sade in feuillet 210 is therefore not anecdotal: it leads us, through a work of memory in the space of combat and in time, to contradict the doubt expressed at the beginning of the feuillet on the validity of action. The enunciative and semantic blur of the parenthesis, the interweaving of true and false, real and imaginary, political and erotic, creates a rupture which, devoid of dialectical will for resolution, produces a new register of discourse "provisionally without closure", thwarting the false semblances of false or bad conscience, and agreeing with the name of Sade.

In this article as in the entire dossier, it is very precise and detailed textual analyses that reveal the concrete repercussions of war on a writing in affinity with maquis strategy. Enunciative, formal (the prose poem) and figural (the character of Sade) distancing testifies to a disagreement with any dogmatic poetry of the Resistance. Obscurity, silence, suspension of the verb, underground work of oppressed, paradoxical and open speech, constitute its tactical elements. Fury and mystery are the attributes of Hypnos, Heraclitean divinity of fire and creative energy, but also of protective night, promise of Renaissance against darkness.

ANALYSIS

Yasmina Sévigny-Côté, "Narrativity and Rewriting of History in the Novel La Case du commandeur by Édouard Glissant"
In La Case du commandeur Édouard Glissant put fictional narrative at the service of a rewriting of Caribbean history. It is evident, from the incipit, that the true narrator is the people – divided body in the image of the insular territory of the Antilles – whose dispersion caused a loss of memory, which reconstitutes itself little by little through a shattered narration. To bring out the specificity of the "act of synthesis" accomplished by the novel grappling with "the heterogeneous", Yasmina Sévigny-Côté refers to Paul Ricœur's analyses in Time and Narrative.

The first stage of the "act of synthesis" is called by the philosopher "prefiguration of the temporal experience of the subject", that is to say experience of time in its obscurity and heterogeneity. Discursive narrativity, a sort of mosaic, allows the figuring of forgetting. A multiplicity of stories relates a multiplicity of destinies, at various times and in various places, with returns and similarities that say a beginning of coherence. The first part attempts to go back the course of four generations, to the beginnings of slavery, but failing memory does not always find the words to express pain. An irrational cry supplements it, uttered from the incipit, "Odono", which punctuates the narrative.

The novel interrupts itself at the "Mitan of time" to comment on its own experience and attempt to undo its obsessive opacity.

The second part consists of scraps of the past gradually rising to consciousness. One jumps from one to the other, "in the mode of starburst". Memories resurface, witnesses of a History omitted by school textbooks.

To thwart collective amnesia and track the occulted past, narration becomes archaeological excavation. The third part is devoted to Marie Celat, in obstinate quest of the furious wind carried by the slave trade. Eager for "traces", the search progresses in geographical space, epochs, generations, to the rhythm of Caribbean tales and legends. This new History is told by a polyphony of voices, including that of the narrator. The rage of questions explains the abundance of hypothetical forms. The narrator's address to the reader, commenting on the narration in progress, produces a metatext.

A singular configuration of History then emerges, second stage of the process defined by Ricœur, thanks to "emplotment" which synthesizes the subject's experience through embedded narratives and a mise en abyme of "broken stories", of which the collective voice reconstitutes the pieces.

La Case du commandeur chose sensitive subjectivity against the pretense of objectivity of the colonizers' lying History. The disorder of oral, imaginative and multiple memory opposes official written and ordered History. Only the poetization of language, of which Yasmina Savigny-Côté studies the figures in detail, allows one to say the trauma.

The people will henceforth be able to recognize themselves in the founding narrative that emerges, authorizing individual projections toward the future. Collective reconfiguration, which involves the reader, constitutes the last stage of the synthesis process defined by Ricœur. "All the history of suffering cries vengeance and calls for narrative".

INTERVIEW

Xu Jun (Zhejiang University), "The Poetic Adventure: A Dialogue with J.M.G. Le Clézio on Literary Creation"
During one of his stays at Nanjing University (2015-2016), Le Clézio had the opportunity to converse with Xu Jun, and to revisit with him his entire journey.

The interview opens with the evocation of the great existential rupture of the 1980s that momentarily distanced the writer from writing to bring him closer to a forest people. This rupture coincided with a distancing from the "new novel" and the formal games of the avant-garde – except for the anti-academic audacities of the Anglo-Saxons, Joyce, Dos Passos, Kerouac, Ginsberg or Pound – and with a return to the simplicity of the tale, short story and novel, to a writing in quest of "Cratylean" immediacy, in harmony with the richness of Panamanian myths.

Le Clézio evokes the Old World of ink and paper and the Mallarméan belief in an absolute Book, maintained by a lineage of writers who wanted to reconcile Western heritage with Zen thought, as Michaux also did, adventurer of silence and admirer of oriental painting and its poetry of emptiness.

Le Clézio was therefore born to literature between the linguistic obsessions of the avant-gardes and John Cage's silence, which he was able to deepen through experience with Amerindians, far from the cacophony of the web. From this moment his writing was essentially in search of equilibrium. Orality plays a very great role, as does linguistic and cultural polyphony, in resonance with that of the moderns, Pound, Joyce or Sarraute. Literature, singular and rich at the same time with all the world's influences, is a contribution to the unofficial History of humanity, inscribed in the wake of those whom the Chinese call the "Great Masters". Like Édouard Glissant, Le Clézio rejects cultural hierarchies in the name of an open, poetic work, pre-existing any form, and political, in the broad sense of the term.

Is the mixing of genres dear to the writer a quest for the absolute, deconstruction, dialogism in Bakhtin's manner, stylistic métissage? To Xu Jun's questions Le Clézio answers that he has always refused compartmentalization, as experimental literature and cinema had done, to excess. But it is globalization that put an end to authority debates: everything is permitted today in the novel, which evolves with techniques and networks. The multiplicity of voices is the great richness of the contemporary world, of which this "bastard genre" participates. But perhaps it will not be eternal? The traditional Anglo-Saxon novel seems however to agree well with the constraints of "globalization"...

At this stage of the dialogue, Xu Jun questions the place of the arts in Le Clézio's work, who explains that his writing has passed from imaged expression (graphics, symbols, drawings) to greater interiorization. The novelist, unlike the poet who aims for perfection, is a "bricoleur", and the novel is always imperfect, unfinished. The time is over of "bronze culture", dethroned by "ephemeral culture", of malleable document, consumption and forgetting. And these two cultures are "irreconcilable"... The total book is the canvas; to literature remains the straw, the scraps, the gleaning, the lost dreams, the synesthesias, the sensation of living.

When Xu Jun requests details on the drawings seen in his works (drawings on skin, constellations, children's drawings) and on the urban landscape he favors, quasi-cubist, Le Clézio answers that writing and drawing have always been the same thing since a certain drawing of his childhood, first witness of his love of writing. Often still he draws notebooks to write, sometimes included in his narratives. Poetry is looking at and drawing a mountain, until becoming mountain oneself, as Tang literature teaches. Le Clézio appreciates oriental painting more than occidental painting – with exceptions like cubism – often individualistic, commercial, little sensitive to emptiness.

Literature has points in common with all the musics of the world. "Rhythm" is essential, rhythm of the heart and cycles of nature, of the cosmos, of the moon, of the feminine. The writer describes the emotion he felt listening to his pianist mother, imagining magnificent stories in her music. In high school he invented "sympoetic polyphony", a sort of simultaneous poem in several voices, whose research he transposed into the novel.

Le Clézio finally tells of his apprenticeship, from childhood, thanks to an improvised screen and small reels cobbled together with bits of film, of "cinema grammar", its techniques, its specific gaze, and its atmospheres, which were very precious to him for learning writing. But cinema is also the magical intimacy of the dark room, similar to the laborious complicity that forms with a novel reader, very far from the "collective incantation" proper to poetry or theater. Returning to the intellectual terrorism of his youth, Le Clézio says he preferred the jubilatory freedom of Salinger, Godard and the new wave. The "camera-pen" was spontaneity, freedom to dabble, at the time of early Maoism, Zen Buddhism, and his discovery of Michaux and Lautréamont. At his beginnings, he immersed himself in great American and Japanese cinema, Ozu notably, and even co-founded a journal, Pyramide. This era of mixed writing and cinema was that of the publication of great works: Géants, L'Inconnu sur la terre, La Guerre.

Simon Levesque, "The Seismographic Writing of J.M.G. Le Clézio (1963-1975): Toward a Leclézian Politics of Literature"
Simon Levesque analyzes the indexical (or indicial) dimension of Le Clézio's language between 1963 and 1975, correlated with the political question. His approach is not a sociological study of the writer's positioning, but a locating, in his discourse, of a theory of "writing-action". The author relies notably on one of his articles, "The Seismograph" (1970), a true manifesto for realistic writing with ethical aim, founded on a language in adequacy with the world.

The reference to the seismograph comes from Michaux, who, like Le Clézio, dreamed of a language not circumscribed to the sole function of communication. Both tracked, at the very heart of common language, a forgotten archaic language, non-utilitarian, in which words fused with the world, a language that was dance, swim, flight, movement. Le Clézio's L'Extase matérielle (1967) considered this language as "a being in itself", while Michaux's "poiesis" participated in the divine creation of the world. Such conceptions of course went against Saussurian semiology and the structuralism of the 1960s, notably the theory of the arbitrariness of the sign, which made impossible any idea of continuity, and a fortiori of unity, between language and the world.

In poetic language, words, by their material presence, are the reality of things. They do not address the intellect, but the senses. Made of flesh, blood and affects, they are rooted in "ethos". Poetic writing henceforth has no function of representation, it is "indexical": it acts in the world, it is a "moral act". The introduction to Le Procès-verbal (1963) already pleaded for an "effective novel", which would act physically on the reader and oblige him to adopt a new gaze, a more intense, more conscious life.

Writing thus conceived is a "realism" of the beneath words, fruit of arduous work like the realism advocated by Lukacs. For reality is never given... as the obscurity of Le Clézio's first writings attests.

The hand that writes is the seismograph recorder of the world's "tremors", from the original earthquake of creation, and writing is only "the signal". The writer lights a "tungsten filament that comes from far away, goes elsewhere". It is the language of the forest or of "liberated poetry", of Rimbaud, Artaud, Lautréamont...

But writing, like Revolution, is also foundation of a new community, adherence to collective rites. It is similar to the ritual chant of sorcerers of Mexico and Panama where Le Clézio stayed. It is an incantation, sometimes at the limit of readability, and a "medicine".

The seismograph is the metaphor of a "moral writing", of an active realism in adequacy with the world, of an indexical poetry that traverses the writer's body to transmit the world's vibrations to a shaken reader. Rites and myths can then circulate freely among men.

Yasmina Sévigny-Côté, Le Clézio and Simon Levesque have proposed an analysis of writing traversed by the world's breaths, poetic and political, and by existential experiences, personal and collective, that act on it and transform it. It is in this capacity that they have their full place in this issue of Études littéraires devoted to René Char's resistant poetry.