Claudel's Poetic Art (II)

Extract

Fully to understand Claudel’s theory of poetic-expression we must follow his analysis of movement. Being, self-existent, is motionless; created things, both matter and spirit, are in movement. This motion imprinted on them by the Creator-Spirit gives them their sense : we have seen how much Claudel means by that word. He uses the metaphor of flight (/wife) to express their movement out from the Creator; but their origin is also their end (fin, goal and limit) and they are moving back thither. ‘Now every movement results in the creation or maintenance of a state of equilibrium’ (p. 75), but only through a constant tension because everything other than complete and self-sufficing Being is in a condition of ‘interplay and contradiction’ (p. 147). Man, like other creatures, is perpetually in movement for ‘there is movement wherever there is variation in existence’.14 It may be a movement of inner vibration tending to produce the form; or a movement of efference or outward process.

That the whole of creation, even inanimate, is in a state of alternating movement is also a hypothesis of modern science. But while its materialist exponents ‘observe the working of a machine’, the Christian thinker ‘enjoys the use of an instrument’ (Art Poetique, p. 28). For these changes, contacts, responses, man has, in common with the animals, senses: sensation is the first phenomenon of our activity, but we are not, like the animals, passive under it. Our senses are our tools: ‘as we learn the use of a tool by apprenticeship so we educate our senses’ (id. p. 91).