Passages Beyond the Resistance: Char's Seuls demeurent and its Harmonics in Semprun and Foucault

Abstract

Spanish-born writer Jorge Semprun, in his memoir of deportation to Buchenwald, L'criture ou la vie (1994), tells how in spring 1945 he first came to read what is arguably Rend Char's first influential book of poetry, Seuls demeurent, and to recite on the liberated camp's assembly ground one of the keynote poems of the collection, La libertd, as an emblem of his survival. Although Char had published several collections prior to World War II, Seuls demeurent was a major sign that something had changed in his poetry and politics, that he was about to entrer dans la carriere, to borrow the phrase that historian Olivier Wieviorka uses to describe the political and cultural ascension of French resisters in the postwar era.1 A Gaullist officer, Marc, present at the liberation of Buchenwald in midApril 1945, gave a copy of Seuls demeurent to Semprun, who had been deported for resistance activities in France. Semprun immediately felt that this book transcended what better-known writers had published from the late 1930s through early 1944, when he lost contact with a French literary scene he knew well (L'Ucriture, 79-87). Indeed, Seuls demeurent resonated so strongly in the post-Liberation years that it furnished a major reference point in Foucault's preface to his Folie et diraison (1961), where the philosopher links his own critique of social repression with Char's Partage formel, the poetic sequence of aphorisms that concludes Seuls demeurent. Without mentioning his source (either poet or title of the poem), Foucault quotes from aphorism XXII, where Char praises the uncanny murmur he calls dtranget6 lgitime,2 and where we might hear the whispers of the Resister's legitimate revolt against repression as well as a legitimate strangeness or new self-assertive idiom within poetry.