Feuillets d’Hypnos
One of 23 copies on vélin pur fil (no. XX).
A portrait of René Char, contemporary with the book, is included with the volume: a period print by his friend, the photographer Irisson (85 x 125 mm), with a manuscript notation in pencil on the verso by Char, “1944.” Stamp: “photo – ciné Irisson L'Isle-sur-Sorgue (Vaucluse).” It shows the poet in the uniform of “Capitaine Alexandre,” at the Liberation.
The Feuillets d’Hypnos were written between 1943 and 1944, when the poet, known as “Capitaine Alexandre,” commanded the parachute-drop and landing section of the Durance zone of the Resistance. He called himself “Hypnos,” the man who watches over his people through the night, ever alert, like the Resistance itself, ready to wake at any moment.
The fragmentary style of the Feuillets d’Hypnos was dictated by the demands of clandestine life: “I write briefly. I can hardly be absent for long,” Char notes at fragment 312, having abandoned Seuls demeurent in the summer of 1943 to record only brief notations in a notebook. A first typescript of 72 fragments was made at the Liberation, which he revised the following year: “I have set violently to work,” he wrote to Gilbert Lely on 17 July 1945. “It is called Carnet d’Hypnos (Hypnos is a man’s name), 1943–1944. I was fortunate enough recently to recover the journal I kept at Céreste, buried in a hole in a wall when I left for Algiers. It is this journal I am going to publish […]. I am putting it in order, shortening or expanding as needed.” He added in particular fragments 204 and 221, written in Algiers in the summer of 1944. This work resulted in August 1945 in a second typescript, intended for the printer, now preserved at the Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet, with this note: “No other manuscript of the Feuillets d’Hypnos exists. For reasons easy to understand, I destroyed the notebook of originals […] except for one leaf kept as a witness.”
Dedicated to Albert Camus, the Feuillets d’Hypnos marked the beginning of the friendship between the two men, and the collection is not without connection to ideas later developed in L’Homme révolté. It was, moreover, the first title in the “Espoir” series, directed by Camus, which embodied his aspirations: “We are in nihilism. Can we escape it? That is the question forced upon us. But we shall not escape it by pretending to ignore the sickness of our age, or by denying it. The only hope lies, on the contrary, in naming it and taking its inventory, so as to find the cure at the end of the illness. This series is precisely such an inventory.”