But at the same time, just as on the sun-filled plains, this black point solidifies vast beaches of fight around itself, light in which faces are stripped bare. At the center of the Poème pulvérisé, for example, there is a mysterious hearth around which torrents of warm images inexhaustibly whirl.
This is also why Char’s poetry is so completely satisfying. At the heart of the obscurity through which we advance, the fixed, round light of Paul Valéry’s skies would be of no use. It would bring nostalgia, not relief. In the strange and rigorous poetry René Char offers us, on the other hand, our very night shines forth in clarity and we learn to walk once more. This poet for all times speaks accurately for our own. He is atthe heart of the battle, he formulates our misfortunes as well as our renaissance: “If we five in a lightning flash, it is the heart of the eternal.”
Char’s poetry does indeed exist in a flash of lightning—and not only in a figurative sense. The man and the artist, who go hand in hand, were tempered yesterday in the struggle against Hitlerian totalitarianism, and today in the denunciation of the rival but allied nihilisms that are tearing our world apart. Char has accepted sacrifice but not delight in the common struggle. “To leap not in the festival, but in its epilogue.” A poet of revolt and liberty, he has never succumbed to complacency, and never, to use his own words, confused revolt with ill temper.
It can never be said enough, and all men confirm it every day, that there are two kinds of revolt—one that conceals a wish for servitude, and another that seeks desperately for a free order, in which, as Char magnificently puts it, bread will be cured. Char knows well that to cure bread means to restore it to its rightful place, to place it above all doctrines, and give it the taste of friendship. This rebel thus escapes from the fate of so many noble insurgents who end up as cops or accomplices. Char will always protest against those who sharpen guillotines. He will have no truck with prison bread, and bread will always taste better to him in a hobo’s mouth than in the prosecuting attorney’s.
It is easy to understand, then, why this poet of revolutionaries has no trouble being also a poet of love, into which his poems sink fresh and tender roots. A whole aspect of Char’s ethic and his art is summed up in the proud phrase of the Poème pulvérisé: “Bow down only in order to love.” For him, love is a question of bowing down, and the love that runs through his work, however virile, has the stamp of tenderness. This is again why Char, caught up as we all are in the most confusing history, has not been afraid to maintain and celebrate within this history the beauty for which it has given us so desperate a thirst. Beauty surges from his admirable Feuillets d’Hypnos, burning like the rebel’s blade, red, streaming from a strange baptism, crowned with flames.
We recognize her then for what she is, not some anaemic, academic goddess, but the sweetheart, the mistress, the companion of our days. In the middle of the struggle, here is a poet who dared to shout at us: “In our darkness, there is no one place for beauty. There is space for beauty everywhere.” From that moment on, confronting the nihilism of his time and opposing all forms of betrayal, each of René Char’s poems has been a milestone on the path to hope.
What more can one ask of a poet in our time? In the midst of our dismantled citadels, by virtue of a generous and secret art, are woman, peace, and liberty hard to maintain. And far from diverting us from the fray, we learn that these rediscovered riches are the only ones worth fighting for. Without having meant to, and simply because he has rejected nothing of his time, Char does more than express what we are: he is also the poet of our tomorrows.
Although he remains alone, he brings us together, and the admiration he arouses mingles with that great fraternal warmth within which men bear their best fruit. We can be sure of it; it is in works like his from now on that we will seek recourse and vision. Char’s poems are messengers of truth, of that lost truth each day now brings us closer to, although for a long time we were able only to say that it was our country and that far away from it we suffered, as if in exile.
But words finally take shape, light dawns, one day the country will receive its name. Today a poet describes it for us, magnificently, reminding us, already, to justify the present, that this country is “earth and murmurs, amid the impersonal stars.”
Preface to the German edition of René Char’s Poésies, written in 1958 and published in 1959
1 René Char, a close personal friend of Camus, was born in Provence in 1907. He was initially associated with the surrealist movement, but broke with it in 1937. During World War II he fought as a member of the Resistance. References to his experiences, which also inspired his book Feuillets d’Hypnos in 1946, can be found in Carnets II, pp. 216–17; Alfred A. Knopf edition, p. 170. —P.T.
On Jean Grenier’s Les Iles
I was twenty in Algiers when I read this book for the first time. I can do no better than compare its overwhelming effect, its influence on me and many of my friends, to the shock a whole generation in France received from Les Nourritures Terrestres.
But the revelation offered by Les Iles was of a different order. It suited us, whereas Gide’s glorification of the senses left us at once full of admiration and puzzled. We really had no need to be freed from the winding sheet of morality, or to sing of the fruits of the earth. They hung on our doorstep in the sunlight. All we had to do was sink our teeth into them.
Some of us knew, of course, that poverty and suffering existed. We simply rejected them with all the strength of our youthful blood. The truth of the world lay only in its beauty, and the delights it offered. Thus we lived on sensations, on the surface of the world, among colors, waves, and the good smell of the soil. This is why Les Nourritures, with its invitation to happiness, came too late. Happiness was a faith that we proclaimed, insolently. We needed, quite the opposite, to be diverted a bit from our greed, to be torn, in fact, from our happy barbarity.
Of course, if gloomy preachers had stalked across our beaches hurling anathema at the world and at the creatures who enchanted us, our reaction would have been violent, or sarcastic. We needed more subtle teachers, and a man born on other shores, though like us enamoured of light and bodily splendors, came to tell us in peerless language that these outward appearances were beautiful, but that they were doomed to perish and should therefore be loved in despair.
Immediately, this great, eternal theme began to echo in us like an overwhelmingly new discovery. The sea, the light, people’s faces, from which a kind of invisible barrier suddenly separated us, receded, but still exercised their fascination. Les Iles, in short, had just initiated our disenchantment; we had discovered culture.
Without denying the physical reality that composed our realm, this book coupled it with another reality that explained our youthful uneasiness. What Grenier did was to remind us that the moments of bliss, the instants when we said “Yes,” which we had experienced only obscurely and which inspire some of the finest pages in Les Iles, were essentially fleeting and would perish. Immediately, we understood our sudden melancholies.
The man who labors painfully between a harsh earth and a somber sky can dream of another world where bread and the sky will both be light. He hopes. But men whose longings are fully satisfied every hour of the day by the sunshine and the hills have ceased to hope. They can only dream of an imaginary elsewhere. Thus men from the North flee to the shores of the Mediterranean, or into deserts of light.
But where can men of sun-drenched countries flee, except into the invisible? The journey Grenier describes is a voyage into imaginary and invisible lands, a quest from isle to isle, such as the one Melville, using other means, illustrates in Mardi. Animals take their pleasure and die, man marvels and he dies—where is his harbor? This is the question that echoes through the book. It is answered only indirectly. Grenier, like Melville, ends his voyage with a meditation on the absolute and on God. Speaking of the Hindus, he writes of a port that can be neither named nor situated in any particular place, of another island, but one forever distant, and in its own way deserted.
Once again, for a young man brought up outside traditional religions, this prudent, allusive approach was perhaps
