58
PARTISAN REVIEW
scendental orientation, they attempt to renew their alliance with the
concreteness of Creation, the mystery of immanence and of divine
unity within the boundaries of human experience, which illuminates
the world of the Old Testament as well as certain parts of the
N~w.
This is the meaning of the forceful poetry of Jean Grosjean, a de–
frocked priest who started on a quest for the true Abraham, the
earthly Son of Man eternally reincarnated among us. Luc Estang,
while more orthodox in his theological views, begins his vast hymn
to the four elements with a
Poem of the Sea.
Refusal, difference as–
serted as defiance, yield to a reconciling, and truly Franciscan, hu–
mility. To the fragmentation of life caused by frantic individuation,
to the multiplicity which is mother of nothingness, the destructive
principle from which rose the present-day Tower of Babel, Pierre
Emmanuel now opposes "Simplicity, the mother of being."
For Rene Char, as for W. C. Williams, the mission of the poet
is "through metaphor to reconcile/ the people and the stones." Char,
himself a disciple of Heraclitus, puts the emphasis upon the poem,
a spiritual measure regulating the relationship of man with the world,
mutually restored in the act of verbal creation. The poem itself
is
the place where the reconciliation takes place. Through a difficult
miracle of the human language, which both reveals and conceals the
truth, a mediation sometimes occurs between man and the earth:
they suddenly discover a forgotten brotherhood. Thus beauty will
conquer "the whole place," instead of being content, as in the past,
with the limited domain of art. According to this conception the
poem, defined as an architecture of incarnate essences, will unite a
freer self to a nature redeemed from the utilitarian exploitation which
degrades and isolates men.
The ecstatic joy found in the blaze of the elements emanates
from the work of Char, as well as from that of his disciples Rene
Menard, Jean Senac, Armen Tarpinian. Abandoning closed indi–
viduality, they tend towards recapturing the primordial unity of love.
Such a purpose, however, can be achieved only if the poet accepts
total responsibility for his exacting nuptials with life. Self-imposed
discipline and necessary suffering, then, must needs precede any
moment of fulfilment or fruition. Char has no illusions about the
somber side of existence. The proper function of beauty, precisely,
is "to kindle that which must be kindled in our sheaf of darkness."
