Claudel Poet of Night

Author(s): James Lawler

Source: Dalhousie French Studies, Vol. 8 (Spring-Summer 1985), pp. 36-44
Published by: Dalhousie University
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40836553
Accessed: 25-04-2018 14:12 UTC

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms

Dalhousie University is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Dalhousie French Studies

This content downloaded from 150.182.146.145 on Wed, 25 Apr 2018 14:12:21 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
36

Claudel Poet of Night

James Lawler

Certains Peaux-Rouges croient que Tame des enfants

mort-nés habite la coque des clovisses. J'entends cette
nuit le choeur ininterrompu des rainettes, pareil à une
elocution puérile, à une plaintive récitation de petites
filles, à une ebullition de voyelles.
- J'ai longuement étudié les moeurs des étoiles. Il en
est qui vont seules, d'autres montent par pelotons. J'ai
reconnu les Portes et les Trivoies. A l'endroit le plus
découvert gagnant le point le plus haut, Jupiter pur et
vert marche comme un veau d'or. La position des astres
n'est point livrée au hasard; le jeu de leurs distances
me donne les proportions de l'abîme, leur branle participe
à notre équilibre, vital plutôt que mécanique. Je les täte
du pied.
- L'arcane, arrivant à la dernière de ces dix fenêtres,
est de surprendre à l'autre fenêtre au travers de la
chambre ténébreuse et inhabitée un autre fragment de
la carte sidérale.
- Rien d'intrus ne dérangera tes songes, tels célestes
regards n'inquiéteront point ton repos au travers de la
muraille, si, avant de te coucher, tu prends soin de
disposer ce grand miroir devant la nuit. La Terre ne
présente pas aux astres une mer si large sans offrir plus
de prise à leur impulsion et son profond bain, pareil au
révélateur photographique.
- La nuit est si calme qu'elle me paraît salée.1
The terror but the beauty of night; the loneliness but the breadth:
four generations of poets from symbolism to the present time,
from the author of Les Fleurs du mal to that of Dans le leurre du
seuil, pursue a contemplation whose ambiguities already appear in
Baudelaire's "cauchemar multiforme et sans trêve." Among these
poets are some that find a talismanic image of renewal like the
Apollinairian phoenix of loss and gain. But the prevailing
atmosphere is one of anguish, the resonance of what Char calls

This content downloaded from 150.182.146.145 on Wed, 25 Apr 2018 14:12:21 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 37

the "ciel tragique" of modem French poetry; and of this,

surprisingly, none has spoken better than Paul Claudel in his
reflexions on lgitur. It is useful, when criticism is otherwise inclined,
to take up again his reading of the spiritual drama at the source
of two of his masters.

***

For him Baudelaire and Mallarmé and

are poets of metaphysical night which
néant mais le silence de la lumière."2 By w
the clarity of those who have gone t
experience as on a death-bed or in priso
as poetic intelligence scrutinizes a glas
mirror - which, possessing no sense oth
brings the glance to sharpest focus. "Il
tain derrière le cristal du regard pour qu
sa pureté." A bitter complicity with sh
of Hamlet by which the modern write
d'anglais" - becomes the vain hero of a
lucid recluse who realizes he has nothin
magician with nothing in his hands -
of their own absence which the poem tra
of words. In this perspective lgitur app
of its age ("un drame, le plus beau, le pl
siècle ait produit") and Mallarmé as the cu
quest for number and definition. One ma
that in the year of Claudel's essay, and usi
linked the Pyrrhonic and aesthetic aspe
inaugural lecture at the French Academ
"mène à la forme." But Claudel, unlike Va
"cette attitude écrasée"; he turns in his co
of the vision that makes objects into si
own absence but also of a hidden prese
continue to learn from those that went before but the essential
has changed, his night is over: "Le soleil est revenu au ciel, nous
avons arraché les rideaux."
We know that his credo is the expression of one poet alone
and not of century that lives with its daemons. Yet what of
Claudel's own work? Can we say that his poetry and theatre,
if intertextually fused with Symbolism, are given over to solar

This content downloaded from 150.182.146.145 on Wed, 25 Apr 2018 14:12:21 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
38

triumph? Are they in fact identified with the jealousy of day,

'Ta journée. ..plus dure que l'enfer/7 the sun's "inexorable baiser'?3
On the contrary: from the beginning - for example from his
Fragment d'un drame published in 1892 but written two or three
years earlier - the theme of night is elaborated with poignancy;
likewise in the Premiers Vers and Vers d'exil ("Mes yeux sont pleins
de nuit et mon coeur est plein d'eau../')4; and later, in "Ténèbres,"
when Ysé has left her lover once and for all:

Rien que la nuit qui est commune et incommunicable, La

nuit où Ton ne fait point d'oeuvre et l'affreux amour
impraticable.5
Night is charged with a pathos so strong it will express itself
in the Wagnerian finale of Partage de midi where love and death
unite in the mystery of sacrifice.
There is, however, another side to Claudel's treatment of the
theme, complementary rather than antagonistic, which assumes
baroque ordeal: he achieves the reversal in a series of pieces that
include what I take to be the twin summits of his poetic work,
"La Muse qui est la Grâce" and La Cantate à trois voix. Saint-John
Perse refers to Claudel's physical and mental mutation in the few
years following his marriage when, as Perse puts it, he became
"ce visiteur nocturne."6 A nocturnal visitor possessing a new scope
and power: in a real sense he is different since morally composed.
Passion is not dead, but felt with a kind of cosmic sensuousness,
a fresh, panerotic, yet as it were decorporealized, desire.
Hors de moi la nuit, et en moi la fusée de la force nocturne

Ah, ce soir est à moi! ah, cette grande nuit est à moi! tout
le gouffre de la nuit comme la salle illuminée pour la jeune
fille à son premier bal!7
The language of day is words, that of night a music that holds
seeming fragments in a momentary accord, a darkness alien to
anguish.
Nuit sans aucune nuit. . .
Pleine d'oiseaux mystérieux sans cesse et du chant qu'on
entend quand il est fini. . .
De feuilles et d'un faible cri, et de mots tout bas, et du
bruit. . .
De l'eau lointaine qui tombe et du vent qui fuit. . . 8

This content downloaded from 150.182.146.145 on Wed, 25 Apr 2018 14:12:21 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 39

The mould has been broken: the verse escapes from meter, the
line from regularity, imagination from discourse. Signs follow one
another in the gradual spelling out of a freedom without casuality
or logic for sound sustains the pattern, instills the sense. Claudel
had to overturn classical prosody in order to write such numbers
that are born of a measure - caesura, rhyme, alliteration - both
melodic and visionary.
Silence is an integral factor of this art, which Claudel brought
to maturity about his fortieth year. By silence I mean, not the
silenzio della luce of which he speaks after Dante, but the space that
implies a continuum, the hiatus that enhances the sense:
"Comprends cette parole à l'oreille de ton âme qui ne résonne
que parce qu'elle a cessé/'9 The poetic referent is no doubt Rimbaud,
the author of the Derniers Vers but also of Illuminations where
"Phrases" - if we put aside the recently argued case for the intrinsic
fragmentary intention of Rimbaud's poetics - can be read as a
group of isolated sentences that are also the melodic phrases of
a composition. Thus, between "Phrases" and La Cantate à trois voix,
Claudel moved to create his distinctive night music which I find
to be a literary achievement of the first order; and the most striking
step in this long modulation by which night was variously realized
is, I think, an early prose-poem unlike anything he had done before.
Published in September 1898, it stands apart in Connaissance de l'Est f'ts
technique and design overtly tributary to "Phrases"; at the same
time, viewed with hindsight, it offers a counterpoint, modest yet
strong, to the stellar calculation of Un Coup de dés which appeared
a few months later.

***

"La Nuit à la verandah" was written in Hankow in the summer

of 1896. The five paragraphs, as discrete as separate thoughts,
convey the impression of dispersion: the reader does not
immediately make his way to an idea or governing argument.
"Verandah", "Peaux-Rouges", "clovisses" at the beginning of the
text emphasize the exoticism. Structure and theme work to effect
an artistic estrangement, which is the theme of this night, familiar
yet unknown like the passage of a dream. Are we in Asia, North
America, Europe? "La nuit nous ôte notre preuve, nous ne savons
plus où nous sommes."10

This content downloaded from 150.182.146.145 on Wed, 25 Apr 2018 14:12:21 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
40

Discontinuity also marks the opening paragraph. The two

sentences are not joined grammatically but juxtaposed, and it is
such ellipsis that is the key to the pattern. For Claudel does not
fix internal relationships; the space between the periods is a silence
undelimited by reason.
Certains Peaux-Rouges croient que Tame des enfants mort-
nés habite la coque des clovisses. J'entends cette nuit le choeur
ininterrompu des rainettes, pareil à une elocution puérile, à
une plaintive récitation de petites filles, à une ebullition de
voyelles.
An item of learnt knowledge is given alongside an immediate
sensation and we are led to make the connection, to interpret
the pause. Here both sentences are marked by naivety; both
concern children; both refer to nature. But the hidden link is deeper:
on the one hand, we have the picturesque belief concerning still-
born children and clams (Claudel originally wrote "bivalves" but
later found "clovisses" with its special savor and phonetic marker
of closure)11; on the other hand, we have the auditory image of
tree-frogs like a classroom of children, their chorus sad when heard
in the distance but bubbling with vowels. The first sentence is
short, the second more than twice as long in accordance with
the accumulated emphasis of "elocution", "récitation", "ebullition",
the insistence of feminine endings; the iambic stress. And this
serves to suggest, as Indian belief has apprehended, that nature
is a living companion, more, a constituent part of the same single
encompassing organism in which nothing is lost and nothing dies
but participates in the uninterrupted poem of creation.
The dash that introduces the second paragraph, like those that
follow, points up discontinuity. The self begins its poem anew,
as it were, by a statement that turns to the past and to personal
observations but ends on a note of sudden concreteness.

-J'ai longuement étudié les moeurs des étoiles. Il en est qui

vont seules, d'autres montent par pelotons. J'ai reconnu les
Portes et les Trivoies. A l'endroit le plus découvert gagnant
le point le plus haut, Jupiter pur et vert marche comme un
veau d'or. La position des astres n'est point livrée au hasard;
le jeu de leurs distances me donne les proportions de l'abîme,
leur branle participe à notre équilibre, vital plutôt que
mécanique. Je les täte du pied.

This content downloaded from 150.182.146.145 on Wed, 25 Apr 2018 14:12:21 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 41

The stars have their customary habits and ways, like so many
humans, some solitary, others gregarious; the sky has gates and
crossroads, its movements accorded to a law; regal Jupiter has
pride of place. The mode and level of expression are quite different
from those of the opening lines and in the fourth sentence they
find the generality of a scientific principle. Yet, as the last four
words pithily indicate, the self does not exist in an abstractly
formulated universe, but in playful, intimate touch with the forces
of night.
So, if apparent death and true continuity was the motif of the
first paragraph, apparent chance and true necessity is that of the
second. The short third paragraph adopts a changed manner: the
connection is tenuous, the syntax impersonal.
-L'arcane, arrivant à la dernière de ces dix fenêtres, est de
surprendre à l'autre fenêtre de la chambre ténébreuse et
inhabitée un autre fragment de la carte sidérale.
After the group of straightforward sentences in the second
paragraph, this period stands apart with its Latinate mode yet
its sequence of feminine endings like the rhythm of expectancy.
The motif now entails "surprendre", not "entendre" or "prendre".
There is a mystery and it must be approached with the tact of
ritual. Nothing is left to chance: the ten windows of the verandah
are a complete series like the fingers of both hands that provide
the fullness of a count; but if the room is dark and uninhabited
in the image of night, this is not cause for despair since the count
does not end, the windows on each side open to the sky, the
stellar map is continuous. The contemplative glance observes a
solemn process or arcanum, discovers the alchemical gold as it
traces and retraces a festive circle. Apparent end is answered by
true endlessness.
Similarly, in the fourth paragraph, a second ritual corresponds
to the mystery of night. But the voice and mode of address have
changed: the first sentence is a promise and assurance made to
the self by way of the doubling of consciousness, the second the
affirmation of a physical law that is also a lesson. As in the opening
paragraph, thought does not follow logically, so that the reader
deduces the link.

-Rien d'intrus ne dérangera tes songes, tels célestes regards

n'inquiéteront point ton repos au travers de la muraille, si,

This content downloaded from 150.182.146.145 on Wed, 25 Apr 2018 14:12:21 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
42

avant de te coucher, tu prends soin de disposer ce grand miroir

devant la nuit. La Terre ne présente pas aux astres une mer
si large sans offrir plus de prise à leur impulsion et leur profond
bain, pareil au révélateur photographique.
Two mirrors welcome the night: first, the soul lays itself bare,
celebrates its exposure to an occult influence; then the oceans,
as they respond to the moon, develop in themselves the reflected
likeness of the stars, which is a complementary image. Apparent
disturbance becomes true communion, for the soul, like the earth,
shows a higher intention, answers the promptings of night.
The poem ends on a pirouette, both surprise and riddle.
- La nuit est si calme qu'elle me paraît salée.
The syntax is direct but the last work contains a deferred
recognition, the méprise or semantic discrepancy we have come to
recognize in the order of the poem. Claudel's ellipsis is imaginative
resonance: the adjective calls up the multiple values of liquidity
implicit in the previous language - not only the huge "abîme"
but tender oysters, bubbling vowels, openhearted ocean ("une mer
si large"), photographic bath. The night is a sea, with a marine
swell. But "salée" is also the clarity of a summer night (Claudel
first wrote: "L'air est si blanc qu'il me paraît salé"12); no less
importantly, it is the taste of purity, in respect of which we
remember Dona Musique when she speaks of Don Rodrigue:
Oui, je veux me mêler à chacun de ses sentiments comme
un sel étincelant et délectable qui les transforme et les rince!13
Night, salt, ocean are not reduced to a strict analogy but placed
side by side. The textual space, in avoiding definition, discovers
the suppleness of creation through a composed balance of forces.
"La Nuit à la verandah" is, then, one of the richest poems of
Connaissance de l'Est. The title leads us to anticipate a description
or meditation in the manner of any other of the earlier pieces
in the collection but here each of the paragraphs suspends the
progression, refers to past and future only insofar as they inscribe
this time apart. For the poet brings together simultaneous images,
his linking imaginative and not rational. The prose poem finds
an achieved spaciousness: having done away with verse, it frees
itself from the servitudes of linear prose. As Claudel wrote: "Je
veux donner aux hommes l'ignorance, la bienheureuse certitude
que les choses sont vraiment ineffables, qu'elles ne nous feront

This content downloaded from 150.182.146.145 on Wed, 25 Apr 2018 14:12:21 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 43

pas défaut. . . ."14

Thus, in his effort to corne to terms with the nineteenth century,

Claudel was drawn to the theme of night. He could not but be
fascinated by Poe, Baudelaire, Mallarmé as well as by another
less mentioned ancestor, Victor Hugo, in whose late poetry panic
darkness played a dominant role. But if on occasion he brought
this theme to a somber point of anguish, he also transformed
it by the imaginative renewal that we see to have been inseparable
from a conviction: the sky is no longer an unbreakable glass or
hall of mirrors but a place of ellipsis, exorcism, buoyant
juxtaposition. Such poetry, in a sure if hidden way, leads across
our own century to Bonnefoy's grand drifting cloud - "La dérive
majeure de la nuée" - since hope exists, however threatened,
since lépars can hold the concrete and immediate apprehension
of l'indivisible. "Ce n'est pas de vérité que Ton a besoin," Claudel
writes, Vest de réalité"15; and Yves Bonnefoy:
L'éternité descend

Dans la terre nue

Et soulève le sens

Comme une bêche.16

In his "Page d'ascendants pour Tan 1964" Char describes Claudel

as irresponsible.17 The word as a term of praise must astonish
us; it is, however, pertinent: irresponsible Claudel is in the fashion
of a prince - "Le Prince est irresponsable" - that is, unaccountable,
beyond reason, and at the same time at furthest remove from
the earth-bound, quasi-elephantine image of his popular legend.
He is, I believe, the prodigal poet unbound and in a sense out
of range, like the night-sky that, in rare moments of his work,
became his model and text.

University of Chicago

This content downloaded from 150.182.146.145 on Wed, 25 Apr 2018 14:12:21 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
44

NOTES

1. Connaissance de l'Est, ed. Gilbert Gadoffre (Mercure de France, 1973), pp

200-201.

2. 'Ta Catastrophe d'Igitur," Oeuvres en prose (Gallimard, 1965), p. 50

3. Oeuvre poétique (Gallimard, 1957), pp. 67, 68.
4. Ibid., p. 9.
5. Ibid., p. 422.
6. Saint-John Perse, Oeuvres complètes (Gallimard, 1982), p. 483.
7. "La Muse qui est la Grâce/' Oeuvre poétique, p. 264.
8. "La Cantate à trois voix," Oeuvre poétique, p. 321.
9. "Cent Phrases pour evantails, Oeuvre poétique, p. 724.
10. Connaissance de l'Est, p. 333.
11. Ibid., p. 202.
12. Ibid., p. 202.
13. Le Soulier de satin, Oeuvres: Théâtre (Gallimard, 1965), vol. 2, p. 6.
14. Cahiers Paul Claudel, 1, p. 174.
15. Correspondance Paul Claudel - André Suares (Gallimard, 1949), p. 32.
16. Yves Bonnefoy, Poèmes (Mercure de France, 1978), p. 283.
17. René Char, Oeuvres complètes (Gallimard, 1983), p. 712.

This content downloaded from 150.182.146.145 on Wed, 25 Apr 2018 14:12:21 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms