Written in the bleakest years of the war (1943–44), Char's wartime journal, “Feuillets d'Hypnos,” began as a notebook kept on the maquis. He describes its material history in a letter to Gilbert Lély, “J'ai été heureux pour retrouver récemment ce journal que je tenais à Céreste, enfoui à mon départ pour Alger dans un trou de mur. C’est ce journal que je vais publier (une sorte de MarcAurèle!)” (I was pleased recently to recover this journal that I used to keep in Céreste, buried in a hole of a wall when I left for Algiers. It’s this journal that I am going to publish [a sort of Marcus Aurelius!]). Supplementing this between 1945 and 1946 with a number of other poems similarly reflecting upon the experience of the war, Char underscores its material connection with the historical events it records—and his reaction to them—in his introduction to the published collection:

Ces notes n'empruntent rien à l'amour de soi, à la nouvelle, à la maxime ou au roman. Un feu d'herbes sèches euˆt tout aussi bien été leur éditeur. La vue du sang supplicié en a fait une fois perdre le fil, a réduit à néant leur importance. Elles furent écrites dans la tension, la colère, la peur, l’émulation, le dégouˆt, la ruse, le recueillement furtif, l’illusion de l’avenir, l’amitié, l’amour. C’est dire combien elles sont affectées par l’événement.

[These notes owe nothing to love of self, to chronicle, to the maxim or the novel. A fire of dry grass might just as well have been their publisher. The sight of tortured blood once made me lose their thread, reduced their importance to nothing. They were written in tension, anger, fear, emulation, disgust, guile, furtive contemplation, the illusion of a future, friendship, love. Which is to say how much they are affected by event...]

Situated between the reality of the empirical experience and its recollection in the prose poems to follow, this preface prepares the reader well for the text as a whole. The contingent event—the grass fire that could have served as editor, the spilled blood that caused him to lose the thread—sparks the reactions of the author who writes. These individual texts, short poems in themselves, in no way claim to be transparent windows to the "original" acts taken or suffered. They are a dense poetic "living on" of events inscribed in memory and suffused with human affect. Like other histories of traumatic events, they emerge from a past no longer directly accessible, and at the same time reach toward a future where a cultural survival is sought.

As poetic memories, Char's poems preserve a significant number of referential details. Of the 237 entries that together make up the "Feuillets d'Hypnos," a number reflect upon particular historical incidents or persons. Some of the most notable include Char’s careful list of orders for his lieutenant, Leon Zingermann (#87); Roger Bernard’s execution by the Nazi SS (#138); the torture and death of a farmer near Vacheres (#99); the aerial dropping of munitions (#97) and men (#148); the forest fire that once ensues (#53); the SS’s search for Char himself in the village of Céreste (#128) and his eight-meter fall and injury while on a nocturnal mission near German guards (#149); the mourning for Francis Curel’s capture and deportation (#11); the remembered murder of friends and fellow resistants such as Emile Cavagni, Roger Chaudon, Gustave Lefèvre (#157, #231, #94).

Such references testify repeatedly to the history of the French Resistance, specifying the uniqueness of the moments witnessed and the role that poet and reader have in their afterlife. They thereby accentuate the complexity entailed both in remembering lived experience and in "translating" it into a poetic language that is able to bear witness. Char's are "haunted" texts, haunted by event, by the poet's own affect, and by other texts in this collection. Several announce

themselves as acts of mourning and clearly reveal the subjectivity, complexity, and strange temporality that characterize them. Take, for example, the remembered execution of Roger Bernard (#138):

Horrible journée! J'ai assisté, distant de quelques mètres, à l'exécution de B. Je n'avais qu'à presser la détente du fusil-mitrailleur et il pouvait être sauvé! Nous étions sur les hauteurs dominant Céreste, des armes à faire craquer les buissons et au moins égaux en nombre aux SS. Eux ignoreant que nous étions là. Aux yeux qui imploraient partout autour de moi le signal d’ouvrir le feu, j’ai répondu non de la tête . . . Le soleil de juin glissait un froid polaire dans mes os.

Il est tombé comme s’il ne distinguait pas ses bourreaux et si léger, il m’a semblé, que le moindre souffle de vent euˆt duˆ le soulever de terre.

Je n’ai pas donné le signal parce que ce village devait être épargné à tout prix. Qu’estce qu’un village? Un village pareil à un autre? Peut-être l’a-t-il su, lui, à cet ultime instant?