CONTEMPORARY FRENCH POETRY
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Poetry he defines as unity in contradiction, "insurgent order."
If
the
poet's path leads him towards the unknown, the bliss of discovery
cannot be separated from the terror of otherness, the raptured glance
from the waste spaces it encompasses: "Mter the ultimate distortion,
we have reached the crest of knowledge. This is the minute of the
considerable danger: the ecstasy before the void, the new ecstasy
before the fresh emptiness."
Such wisdom hurts. But "lucidity is the wound which is nearest
to the sun." Through the ministry of consciousness alone can life's
right to newness be protected: "I love man uncertain of his ends,
like the fruit-tree in April." Together with the sybilline tone, an in–
clination towards mannerism in the tradition of the
precieux
writers,
one easily detects in Char a Cornelian strain, which sometimes de–
generates into sententiousness. Poet-moralist, he advocates courage,
will,
steadfastness, movement: "Belong to the leap. Do not share in
the banquet, its epilogue." The very boldness of our challenge shall
overcome the adversity inherent in man's condition:
Car rien ne fait naufrage ou ne se plait aux cendres;
Et qui sait voir la terre aboutir
a
des fruits,
Point ne !'emeut !'echec quoiqu'il ait tout perdu.
This brief but triumphant vision of harvest on earth-a gain fully
paid for in human toil and tears-lifts Char's work above the despair
born out of blind historical determinism, which crushed most earlier
modern poets. The secret of all resistance is founded in hope:
"Re_
sistance n'est qu'esperance."
If
Char exalts the poem, a human creation, Ponge insists upon
the importance of the object in his creation. The objects described
in
Le Parti Pris des Choses
under a highly stylised form, "testify,"
states the author himself in his
Proemes,
"to an infallibility which is
a little short." They are apparently devoid of metaphysical intentions,
or even of direct relationship with man. Yet it is man that Ponge
aims at reconstructing through the ministry of these objects. By mani–
festing the complexity and latent vitality of those things which con–
stitute man's universe, he gives us a moral lesson. Recreating through
an effort of lucid sympathy, of passionate penetration, that which
to the bourgeois Philistine, the Christian ascetic, the Cartesian stoic
