The woman explains, the prisoner listens. It makes your heart bleed, yet how refreshing it is! For two years now, not one réfractaire has stepped through that door without his eyes smarting at the evidence of that candle. “The colour reproduction of The Prisoner by Georges de la Tour, which I have pinned to the whitewashed wall of the room where I work, seems, with time, to reflect its meaning back on our predicament. And yet, no matter how much evil we do, something else is happening. This world witnesses common cruelties most intimate, abuse and rapacious control, played over and over in the dark. What’s left to us: to learn faith amid the viscosities and stubborn invisibility of goodness. A painting of Job’s mocking wife contains the opposite truth. The goodness of God works its way into visibility under its opposite. In his mistaken, yet more deeply true, reading, Char demonstrates the Lutheran principle of sub contrario. I take this personally, and it sums up the world-system of madness catastrophizing under the inscrutable gaze of a good but hidden God-Who is hidden above all in our failures to care for each other, our failures to reconcile, our failures to forge a world hospitable to children. We now know that the painting depicts Job Ridiculed by His Wife. What he says stands.īut there is an irony in his ekphrasis that cuts to the bone. Char knew the painting as The Prisoner, and thus read it hopefully. We are mad and dazed: mindless, heartless, gutless.Ĭhar describes a painting by the great seventeenth-century artist Georges de la Tour. We live in a time when eros and polity are dying, in Church and world, where hypnotism has seized the soul, as we drown in comfort or the privation of comfort. Thus I think it edifying to share some of the poet René Char’s provocations, having just finished working through his Hypnos (in Mark Hutchinson’s translation), a collection of poetic aphorisms from a member of the Maquis, the French resistance to the Nazi occupation of France. The whole system of unchecked power, operative both inside and outside of the Church (personally, interpersonally, communally), must be resisted, but we must do so without becoming partisans of some other partial and scapegoating interest.
Georges de la Tour, “Job Mocked by His Wife,” 1630s, Musée Départemental des Vosges, Épinal