[Horrible Day! I was witness, some hundred meters away, to the execution of B. I had only to press the trigger of my Bren gun and he could have been saved! We were on the heights overlooking Céreste, arms enough to make the bushes creak and at least equal in number to the SS. They unaware we were there. To the eyes around me everywhere begging for the signal to open fire I answered no with my head...The June sun slipped a polar chill into my bones.

He fell as if he didn't make out his executioners and so light, it seems to me, that the least breath of wind could have lifted him from earth.

I didn't give the signal because this village had to be spared at any price. What is a village? A village like any other? Did he perhaps know at that ultimate instant?]

Playing on the themes of what can be "seen" and what lies beyond any individual's physical sight or memory of it, the three short paragraphs describe the final moments of the historical Roger Bernard, Char's young friend, partisan and poet, as witnessed by the resistants. Imagery of the natural world, at odds with itself in the antithesis "soleil de juin—froid polaire," depicts a moment of contradiction, desperately out of joint, while references to B's lightness and the “souffle

de vent” that almost lifts him point to the mystery and to the “almost resurrection” implicit in the terrible events described. The final lines provide the “explanation” of the poet-witness: the execution, otherwise preventable, could not be interrupted, since the village had to be saved. But they end with questions to the reader: What is the value of the village, this or any other, compared with a single life? And had Bernard somehow understood his sacrifice at the "ultime instant"? The questions must remain unanswered, poised in the anguish of the speaker's responsibility, the mysterious complexity of memory, and the appeal to the reader to continue the meditation. Such questions, related with the profound lightness attributed to B's fall, and scattered in the leaves of Char's text, transform the experience of the maquis into an intense dialogue engaging both poet and reader.

As I suggest above and as this brief prose poem emphasizes, the "Feuillets" provide a record that, while witnessing a traumatic historical event, draws the reader, like a cinematic lens, into the realm of individual memory. Here we find exclamations and a first-person perspective, dramatized in passion, recollection, and rumination. The effect is heightened by an omission of the simple past, the tense reserved for history, in favor of the passé composé and imperfect, that tie each remembrance to the linguistic present. Moving in the end to address the reader in explanation and questions, a dialogue between poet and reader holds to the zone of discours rather than récit. Char thus recalls a lived moment and engages the reader as directly as possible in this effort to "pass on" a traumatic experience.

Such deliberately subjective and dialogical diction is hardly limited to #138, cited above. It accumulates throughout the collection where events, though pointing to the referential world of the past, are rendered in discours and often, in phrases without verbs at all, for which the reader must provide the temporal framework.

Each moment is itself a zone of intense complexity, and necessary interpretation. The subjective lens of Char's prose poems discloses some of this complexity, indeed the mystery and plurality, of poetic memory. We find, for instance, that references to Bernard's passing recur elsewhere in Char's oeuvre, suggesting the need to repeat, in therapeutic fashion, the traumatic memory of a death and a decision. But even the single text quoted above emphasizes the multiple perspectives from which any given event is seen and remembered: the SS sees Bernard but not the partisans surrounding them; the partisans have their sights on Bernard, but also on the SS and their leader, the poet as witness; Bernard appears not to see the SS (“comme s’il ne distinguait ses bourreaux”) but perhaps, the last line suggests, focuses on an interior vision; the witnessing poet physically sees not only the SS, his men, and Bernard, but also mentally "sees" the nearby village, and speculates upon Bernard's inner vision; he also "sees" in the important section two, that Bernard is almost transported, or that he ought to have been, transported; in the final questions, the reader is asked to view these various layers. In this hallucinating play of perspectives, one "sees" a tragic historical event but, equally important, one "sees" the difficulty of seeing, and the limits of interpreting.

For what is the reader given to observe? The event narrated is as absent as present. Inscribed as a painful metonymy in which the cause is suppressed in favor of the result, the one thing the poet does not describe, and that the reader cannot see, is the execution itself, which remains hidden in the blank of the page separating the first paragraph from the second. The "original" from which the poet works is a memory refracted through several perspectives. Recalled explicitly and in some detail, the event emerges as both multiple and opaque, incomplete even when so brilliantly etched. Nor is Bernard monumentalized through the fullness of his name. Though his complete name is provided in other texts, here we find only the initial “B.,” the mere synecdoche of the referential anchor normally afforded by the proper name.

As is evident from this one example, the poet’s words do not pretend to lift an integral and cognizable past into language. Rather, they disseminate an awareness of the human complexity of events witnessed, while tracing the keenness of loss and intensity of an instant’s decision. As the body of Bernard was almost, but never quite, transported by a “breath” of wind, the human breath of the poet’s own words do not in fact transport the past “original” into poetic history. Any such complete transposition is impossible—and ultimately unsought. His words do figure a “translation,” but a poetic and therefore not fully “relevant”one, in the usual sense of the word. A subjective mourning, a memory transcribed in the present, it lives on in the different, more exemplary “materiality”of poetry where it survives “otherwise,” able to affect the future. A later poem in the collection (#228), referring to this and the deaths of many others, describes this afterlife in words that echo the passage on Roger Bernard: “La grandeur réside dans le départ qui oblige. Les êtres exemplaires sont de vapeur et de vent”(Greatness resides in the departure that is binding. Exemplary beings are of vapor and wind).