Jules Renard's Journal describes the route to the end of his life. It is tragic yet surprisingly light.
The premise is that he is doomed right from birth.
Thus, he writes: ‘I was born tied up and nothing will tie the knot’, followed by a kind of resignation of getting older or dying, there is not much difference in his view: ‘I foresee very well that I too will have hours of old age in which a shot to the head will no longer do me any harm’.
Could it be black humour, it could be, however it is brought with deep seriousness. And as he writes, he struggles with writing: ‘I feel like I am getting nowhere’ and his harsh assessment of the theatre: ‘In the theatre, there is always something mechanically planned that is unbearable for me.’
He seeks peace with death in preparation for dying: ‘Why should it be harder to die, that is, to pass from life to death, than to be born, that is, to pass from death to life?’
You could say he was made to write (without the self-confidence), so much so that the words seem to flow as if from a spring. He seems tormented under it.
‘My brain becomes like a spider's web: life can no longer pass through it without being caught’.
I think he is aware of his worth but at the same time he is beset by doubts. It is about trees and clouds, he is lover of the moon, he loves animals and those who are struggling, it gives a kind of underlay.
He is a poet who ultimately seeks only silence.
I would say this is how he reveals, besides his talent, his own human weakness - ours - and helps us live that way.
He is known for wanting to be a tree. It's a bit more nuanced than that.
He describes it, ‘I cannot look at a tree leaf without being crushed by the universe. As time passes, his words become rarer and rarer, not because everything has already been said, but because nothing can be said: ‘The best of us is uncommunicable.’
I feel I am only at the edge of the truth. What separates him from that is precisely what makes him a writer: the word.
Fleeing the silence of his youth? (‘In the Lepic household, we made silence as others make conversation’). Renard returns to it, through the silence of the land, the animals and the people. The loss of a cow is described with compassion. And the dialogues with the farmer, or his cousin, are very funny and subtle.
I think they stigmatise the gap between the intellectual and the man, or woman, of little means...but how can you make a living by writing?
He says ‘It's the only profession where you don't border on the ridiculous if it doesn't earn anything,’.
As a poet, he has bouts of insight. His definition of a writer: ‘You were created and put into the world to be the conscience of everything that has no conscience (...)
The sentences become so thin that all of life is seen through them.
It is that writing carries its own condemnation within it (...) A written thought is dead. It used to be alive. It is no longer alive. It was a flower. And then we let it speak.
That last one...we let a flower speak? I think to myself: writing is also a way of not being interrupted.
‘Writing has made the artificial, that is, immutable. The truly wise, the truly great, are those who do not speak, who write nothing.’
To the end of the end. ‘If I could make a deal with God, I would ask him to turn me into a tree, a tree that would look down on my village from the Croisettes. As the shapes of the black trees gradually dissolve under the snow, the word finally falls silent.
It is over. I have nothing more to say. It is a disaster. It's a disaster of silence. Snow on water : silence on silence. Or as he says in French : neige sur l'eau : silence sur silence.’
--
And then it was silent. And then it was silent?
How do you know when a playwright has succeeded in his or her theatrical performance?
When he or she puts the text, and the writer of course, on the back burner. When he or she seems to be playing just for you, without overdoing it. But especially when he or she makes you want to (re)read it. To (re)discover it.
Can I save Jules Renard for a moment or again from silence?
I let the sound of his soul be heard, right down to the sound of a tear.