On Faulkner
In his preface to Sanctuary, André Malraux wrote that Faulkner had introduced the detective story into classical tragedy. This is true. There is, moreover, something of the detective story in every tragedy. Faulkner, who knows this, didn’t hesitate to choose his criminals and heroes from daily newspaper stories. In my opinion this is what makes his Requiem one of the very few modern tragedies we have.
In its original form, Requiem for a Nun is not a play. It is a novel in dialogue form. But it has a dramatic intensity. First of all because it gradually discloses a secret and sustains throughout an expectation of tragedy. Secondly, because the conflict that brings the characters face to face with their destiny, centering around the murder of a child, is a conflict that cannot be solved except through the acceptance of this destiny.
Faulkner has contributed then to hastening the time when the tragedy at work in our history can also take its place in our theater. His characters are our contemporaries and yet they are confronted with the same destiny that crushed Electra or Orestes. Only a great artist could attempt to introduce the noble language of pain and humiliation into our public rooms this way. Nor is it accidental that Faulkner’s strange religion is experienced in this play by a Negro woman who has been a prostitute and is a murderer.
On the contrary, this extreme contrast summarizes the human grandeur of the Requiem and all Faulkner’s work. Let me add in conclusion that the great problem of modern tragedy is language. Characters in business suits cannot talk like Oedipus or Titus. Their language must at the same time be simple enough to be our own and lofty enough to reach the tragic. In my view, Faulkner has found such a language. I have tried to recreate it in French, and to betray neither a work nor an author I admire.
1956
Program note to the Camus adaptation of Requiem for a Nun.
Excerpts from Three Interviews
I
“I had to put the form back in, to prune the text; it is not a play, it’s a world into which I introduced logic. For the French public, the theater is inconceivable without unity.…
I like and I admire Faulkner; I believe I understand him rather well. Even though he did not write for the stage, he is in my opinion the only truly tragic dramatist of our time.… He gives us an ancient but always contemporary theme that is perhaps the only tragedy in the world: the blind man stumbling along between his destiny and his responsibilities. A simple dialogue must be found, acceptable for people who are simple too, [but] who have access to grandeur despite their coats and ties. Only Faulkner has known how to find an intensity of tone, of situation, intolerable to the point of making the heroes deliver themselves by means of a violent, superhuman act.”
Combat, 1956
II
The Requiem was not a play, but a novel in great dialogued scenes filled with a historical-poetic accent and a psychological climate that I have taken pains to preserve.…
I wanted to clear the way for a more theatrical than fictional progression.… I developed only the role of the husband which I find admirable.… The play poses no racial problem. Faulkner is too great a creator not to be universal. In the Requiem, the religion of suffering, notably in the seventh scene, becomes one with the catharsis, that ancient purification.”
Nouvelles littéraires, 1956
III
Is the meeting of Albert Camus and William Faulkner equivalent to a first modern tragedy? The stage setting will already have told you that the detective element in this tragedy plays a strong role. It does in all tragedies for that matter. Take Electra or Hamlet. Faulkner, who has never been reluctant to look for his characters in news items reported in the newspapers, knows this well. A secret, then. And a conflict. Something which sets the protagonists against their destiny and is resolved with their acceptance of this destiny.
These are the keys to ancient tragedies. Faulkner used them to open the way to modern tragedy. Even though it was not written for the stage, his work, whose intensity is wholly dramatic, seems to me one that most nearly approaches a certain tragic ideal. This problem of modern tragedy, I believe, has always interested you. Is this the reason you agreed to produce the Requiem?
It is precisely the reason. Together with the admiration that I plainly hold for someone I consider the greatest American novelist. You see, we are living through a highly dramatic time that does not yet have a drama. Faulkner permits us to catch a glimpse of the time when what is tragic in our own history can at last reach the footlights. Doesn’t the whole difficulty consist of making contemporary people speak a tragic language?
Without a doubt, but I hope to have surmounted it. Faulkner’s “breathless” style, that I did my utmost to imitate, is the style of suffering itself. The basis of his whole religion …
Just so. A strange religion, more clearly expressed in his latest work, A Fable, whose symbols give a glimpse of the hope for redemption through pain and humiliation. Here, Nancy Mannigoe, murderer and prostitute, is his message bearer. This is not accidental. And the meaning of his title: Requiem for a Nun, did he explain it to you?
He? Not at all. I saw him for only ten minutes and he didn’t say three words to me. No, the title takes on its meaning when one knows the role that bordellos and prisons play in Faulkner’s universe. Nancy and Temple are two nuns who have entered the monastery of abjection and expiation. As diffuse as it is, doesn’t Faulkner’s faith run counter to your own agnosticism?
I don’t believe in God. that’s true. But I am not an atheist nonetheless. I would even agree with Benjamin Constant that there is something vulgar … yes … worn out about being against religion.
Should one see in this the sign of a certain evolution in your thinking, and doesn’t this interest in Faulkner foresee an eventual rallying to the spirit if not the dogma of the Church? Certain readers of The Fall seemed to hope for this. Nothing really justifies them in this. Doesn’t my judge-penitent clearly say that he is Sicilian and Japanese? Not Christian for a minute. Like him, I have a good deal of affection for the first Christian. I admire the way he lived, the way he died. My lack of imagination keeps me from following him any further.
There, in parentheses, is my only similarity to the Jean-Baptiste Clamence with whom people stubbornly insist on identifying me. I would like to have called that book “A Hero of Our Time.” Originally it was only a short novel, meant to appear next January in a collection that will be called Exile and the Kingdom. But I let myself get carried away with the idea: to paint a portrait of a small prophet like so many today. They proclaim nothing at all and find nothing better to do than accuse others in accusing themselves.
Le Monde, August 31, 1956
René Char1
One cannot do justice in a few pages to a poet like René Char, but one can at least place him in the right context. Certain works justify our seizing any pretext to testify, even without shades of meaning, to what we owe them. And I am happy that this German edition of my favorite poems gives me the opportunity to say that I consider René Char our greatest living poet, and Fureur et Mystère to be the most astonishing book French poetry has given us since Rimbaud’s Les Illuminations and Apollinaire’s Alcools …
The originality of René Char’s poetry, actually, is startling. He came to it by way of surrealism, no doubt, but by lending rather than giving himself to that movement, staying just long enough to realize that his step was firmer when he walked alone. Since the publication of Seuls demeurent, a handful of poems have been enough to set a free and virgin wind blowing through our poetry. After so many years devoted to the manufacture of “inane trifles,” our poets relinquished the lute only to put the bugle to their lips, transforming poetry into a salubrious funeral pyre.
It blazed, like those great bonfires of grass which in the poet’s own country give scent to the wind and richness to the earth. At last we could breathe. Natural mysteries, with living waters and sunlight, burst into a room where poetry still lay spellbound in echoes and shadows. I am describing a poetic revolution.
But I would have less admiration for the originality of this poetry if its inspiration were not, at the same time, so ancient. Char rightly lays claim to the tragic optimism of pre Socratic Greece. From Empedocles to Nietzsche a secret has been passed from summit to summit, and after a long eclipse, Char once more takes up this hard and rare tradition. The fires of Etna smoulder beneath some of his unendurable phrases, the royal wind of Sils Maria irrigates his poems and makes them echo with the sound of clear and tumultuous waters.
What Char calls “wisdom with tear-filled eyes” is revived here, at the very height of our disasters. His poetry, at once both old and new, combines refinement with simplicity. It carries day and night in the same impulse.
