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

—Les actions du poète ne sont que la conséquence des énigmes de la poésie.—Le poète ne jouit que de la liberté des autres.

René Char

Spanish-born writer Jorge Semprun, in his memoir of deportation to Buchenwald, L’écriture ou la vie (1994), tells how in spring 1945 he first came to read what is arguably René 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 liberté,” 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 carrière, 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 mid-April 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’écriture, 79-87).