No More Learning

He muses less about glory than he dreams of fraternity. He does not invent his manner against tradition, but for want of one, and in certain ways his most extreme audacities are
nai? vete? s. The world is new in his eyes, everything is yet to be said, no one before him has spoken of the skies or the crops. He rarely appears in New York, and if he goes there, it is only on the way through, or, like Steinbeck, he locks himself up for three months to write and he's quits for the year, a year which he will pass on the highways, in the work-yards, or in the bars. It is true that he belongs to 'guilds' and Associations, but that is purely to defend his material interests. He has no solidarity with other writers; he is often separated from them by the length or breadth of the continent;20 nothing is more remote from him than the idea of college or clerkship; for a while he is feted and then is lost and forgotten; he reappears with a new book to take a new plunge. 21
Thus, at the mercy of twenty ephemeral glories and
? 142 I What Is Literature?
twenty disappearances, he drifts continually between the working-class world, where he goes to seek adventures, and his middle-class readers (I don't dare call them bourgeois; I very much doubt whether there is a bourgeoisie in the United States), hard, brutal, young, and lost, who tomorrow will take the same plunge as he.
In England, the intellectuals are less integrated into the collectivity than we; they form an eccentric and slighdy cantankerous caste which does not have much contact with the rest of the population. The reason is, first of all, that they have not had our luck; because remote predecessors whom we hardly deserve prepared the Revolution, the class in power, after a century and a half, still does us the honour of fearing us a little (very little); it treats us tactfully. Our confre`res in London, who do not have these glorious memories, do not frighten anyone; they are considered quite harmless; and then, club life is less suitable for spreading their influence than salon life has been in spreading ours.
Among themselves, the men speak about business, politics, women, or horses, never about literature, whereas our matrons, who practised literature as an accomplishment, helped, by their receptions, to bring together politicians, financiers, generals, and men of letters. The English writers make a virtue of necessity and by aggrandizing the oddness of their ways attempt to claim as a free choice the isolation which has been imposed upon them by the structure of their society. Even in Italy, where the bourgeoisie, without ever having counted for much, has been ruined by fascism and defeat, the condition of the writer, needy, badly paid, lodged in dilapidated palaces too vast and grandiose to be heated or even furnished, at grips with a princely lan- guage too pompous to be supple, is far removed from
ours.
Thus, we are the most bourgeois writers in the world.
Well housed, decently dressed, not so well fed, perhaps; but even that is significant: the bourgeois spends lesson his food, proportionally, than the workman; much more for his clothes and lodging. All of us, moreover, are steeped
? Situation of the Writer in 1947 | 143
in bourgeois culture; in France, where the school leaving- certificate is a hallmark of the bourgeoisie, it is not per- missible to plan to write without it. In other countries, the possessed, with dreamy eyes, twist and squirm under the sway of an idea which has seized them from behind and which they never manage to look in the face. After having tried everything, they end by trying to pour their obsession on paper and to let it dry there with the ink. But as for us, we were used to literature long before beginning our first novel. To us it seemed natural for books to grow in a Civilized society, like trees in a garden. It is because we loved Racine and Verlaine too much that when we were
fourteen years old, we discovered, during the evening study period or in the great court of the lyce? e> our vocation as a writer. Even before having found ourselves at grips with
a work of our own--that monster, so drab, so smeared with our own sticky juices, such a gamble--we had been brought up on literature already made, and we naively thought that our future writings would issue from our mind in the fin- ished state in which we found those of others, with the seal of collective recognition and the pomp which comes from secular consecration, in short, like national resources. For
us, the ultimate transformation of a poem, its last toilette for eternity, was, after having appeared in magnificent illustrated editions, that it should end by appearing in small type in a hard-covered book bound in green canvas, whose clean smell of ink and pulp seemed to us the very perfume of the Muses, and that it should move the dreamy, inky- fingered sons of the future bourgeoisie. Breton himself, who wanted to set fire to culture, got his first literary shock in class one day when his teacher was reading Mallarme? to him. In short, for a long time we thought that the final des- tination of our work was to furnish literary texts for the French explication classes of 1980. Later on, five years would be just about long enough after our first book for us to be shaking hands with ail our confre`res. Centralization has grouped us all in Paris. With a bit of luck, a busy American might meet us all in twenty-four hours, to know, in twenty-
? 144 I What Is Literature?
four hours, our opinions about U. N. R. R. A. , the U. N. , U. N. E. S. C. O. , the Henry Miller affair, and the atomic bomb; in twenty-four hours, a trained cyclist might circulate --from Aragon to Mauriac, from Vercors to Cocteau, stop- ping off to see Breton in Montmartre, Queneau in Neuilly, and Billy at Fontainebleau--a report of the scruples and moral crises which are part of our professional obligations, one of those manifestoes, one of those petitions or protests to Tito for or against the return of Trieste, the annexation of the Saar, or the use of Vys in future warfare, by which we like to show that we belong to our century; in twenty-four hours, without a cyclist, a piece of gossip goes all about our college and returns, embroidered, to the one who launched it. We all--or almost all--can be seen together in certain cafe? s, at the Ple? iade concerts, and, in certain strictly literary circumstances, at the British Embassy. From time to time, one of us who has been overworking has it announced that he's leaving for the country; we all go to see him; we advise him that it's all for the best, that one can't write in Paris, and we see him off with our envy and our best wishes; as for us, an aged mother, a young mistress, or an urgent job keeps us in town. He leaves with the reporters of Samedi-Soir who are going along to photograph his retreat. He gets bored; he comes back. 'After all/ he says, 'there's only Paris. ' It is Paris to which writers from the provinces, if they are well-off, come to practise regionalism; it is Paris where the qualified representatives of North African literature have chosen to express their nostalgia for Algiers. Our path is cut out for us; for the haunted Chicago Irishman who sud- denly decides to write as a last recourse, the new life which he is tackling is a fearful thing with no point of comparison. It is a block of dark marble which will take him a long time to hew into shape; but we knew, from the time we were adolescent, the memorable and edifying features of great lives; even if our father did not disapprove of our vocation, we knew from the time we were fourteen, in the fourth grade of the lyce? e* how one replies to recalcitrant parents, how much time the author of genius has to remain un-
? Situation of the Writer in 1947 \ 145
known, at what age it is normal for glory to crown him, how many women he should have and how many unhappy loves, whether it is desirable that he mix in politics, and when; everything is written down in books; it is enough to bear it well in mind. Romain Rolland had proved at the beginning of the century in Jean Christophe that one can achieve a rather good likeness by combining the features of a few famous musicians. But one can devise other schemes; it's not bad to start one's life like Rimbaud, to begin a Goethean return to order in one's thirties, to throw oneself at fifty, like Zola, into a public debate. After that, you can choose the death of Nerval, Byron, or Shelley. Naturally, it will not be a matter of realizing each episode in all its violence, but rather of indicating it, as a serious tailor indicates the fashion without servility. I know several among us, and not the least, who have thus taken the pre- caution of giving their lives a turn and an allure both typical and exemplary, so that if their genius remains doubtful in their books, it might at least shine forth in their behaviour. Thanks to these models and recipes, from our childhood on the career of a writer seemed to us magnificent, though
without surprises; one is promoted partly by merit, partly by seniority. That's what we are. In other respects, saints, heroes, mystics, adventurers, angels, enchanters, execu- tioners, victims, as you like. But, first of all, bourgeois. There's no shame in admitting it. And different from one another only in the way we each assume this common situation.
In fact, if one wanted to make a sketch of contemporary literature, it wouldn't be a bad idea to distinguish three generations. The first is that of the authors who began to produce before the war of 1914. By now they have finished their career, and their future books, even though they may be masterpieces, will hardly be able to add to their fame; but they are still alive, they think and judge, and their presence determines minor literary currents which must be taken into account. The main thing, it seems to me, is that in their persons and by their works, they opened the way
? 146 I What Is Literature?
to a reconciliation between literature and the bourgeois public. It should first be noted that they drew the greater part of their resources from something quite other than their writings. Gide and Mauriac have property, Proust had inde- pendent means, Maurois comes from a family of manu- facturers; others came to literature from the liberal pro-
fessions: Duhamel was a doctor, Romains, a teacher, Gaudel and Giraudoux were in the diplomatic service. The reason was that, except for successful tripe, one could not support oneself by literature in the period when they began writing. Like politics under the Third Republic, it could only be a 'marginal' occupation, even if it ended by becom- ing the principal concern of the one who practised it. Thus, literary personnel were drawn by and large from the same milieu as political personnel; Jaure`s and Pe? guy came from the same school; Blum and Proust wrote in the same reviews. Barre? s carried on his literary campaigns and his electoral campaigns on the same front. As a result, the writer could no longer consider himself as a pure con- sumer; he directed the production or supervised the distri- bution of goods or he was a civil-servant; he had duties towards the State; in short, a whole part of him was inte- grated into the bourgeoisie; his behaviour, his professional relationships, his obligations, and his concerns were bour-
geois; he bought, sold, ordered, and obeyed; he entered the charmed circle of courtesy and ceremony. Certain writers of this period have a well-founded reputation for greed which is belied by the appeals which they have launched in their writings. I don't know whether this reputation is justified. It proves, all the same, that they know the value of money; the divorce we pointed out between the author and his public is now in the author's very soul. Twenty years after symbolism he had not forgotten about the absolute gratuitousness of art, but at the same time he was involved in the utilitarian cycle of means-ends and ends- means. A producer and destroyer at the same time. Divided between the spirit of seriousness that he has to observe at Cuverville, Frontenac, Elbeuf, and, when he has to represent
? Situation of the Writer in 194 7 | 147
France, at the White House, and the holiday spirit of con- tentiousness that he finds as soon as he sits down before a blank sheet of paper; incapable of embracing bourgeois ideology without reserve as well as of condemning without recourse the class to which he belongs. What saves him in this embarrassment is that the bourgeoisie itself has changed; it is no longer that fierce rising class whose sole concern was thrift and the possession of goods. The sons and grandsons of successful peasants and shopkeepers are born into money; they have learned the art of spending. The utilitarian ideology, without at all disappearing, is rele- gated to the background. A hundred years of uninterrupted reign have created traditions; bourgeois childhoods in the great country house or in the cha^teau bought from a ruined noble have acquired a poetic depth; the 'men of property* have less recourse in their prosperity to the spirit of analysis; they, in turn, ask the spirit of synthesis to establish their right to govern; a synthetic--thus poetic--bond is estab- lished between the proprietor and the thing possessed.
Barre? s was thefirstto invent it; the bourgeois is one with his property. If he remains in his province and on his estate, something passes into him from the gentle foot-hills of his region, from the silvery trembling of the poplars, from the mysterious and slow fecundity of the soil, from the rapid and capricious changes of mood in the skies; in assimilating the world, he assimilates its depth; henceforth, his soul has substrata, mines, gold-lodes, veins, underground sheets of oil. Henceforth the rallie? * writer has his path cut out for him; to save himself he will save the bourgeoisie depthwise.
Of course, he will not serve utilitarian ideology. He will even be, if necessary, its severe critic, but he will disclose all the gratuity in the exquisite hothouse of the bourgeois soul, all the spirituality which he needs to practise his art with a good conscience. Instead of reserving this symbolic aristocracy, which he won in the nineteenth century, for
* Les rallie? s: 'Royalists and imperialists who have accepted the Republic. ' This term will appear hereafter in the text. --Translator.
? 148 I What Is Literature?
himself and his confre`res alone, he will extend it to the whole bourgeoisie. In about 1850 an American writer showed, in a novel, an old colonel sitting in a Mississippi steamboat; for a moment he was tempted to ponder the innermost recesses of the souls of the passengers about him. He soon dismissed this preoccupation, saying to himself, or approximately, 'It is not good for man to penetrate too far into himself/ That was the reaction of the first bourgeois generation.
About 1900 the machine was reversed in France: it was understood that one would find the seal of God in the human heart, provided one sounded it deeply enough. Estaunie? speaks about secret lives. The postal-clerk, the blacksmith, the engineer, the departmental treasurer, all have their nocturnal and solitary fe^tes. Consuming passions and wild conflagrations dwell deeply within them. In the wake of this author, and a hundred others, we were to learn to recognize in stamp and coin collecting all the nostalgia for the beyond, all the Baudelairean dissatisfaction. For I ask you, why would one spend one's time and money acquiring medallions, were it not that one was past caring
for the friendship of men and the love of women and power? And what is more gratuitous than a stamp collec- tion? Not everybody can be a Leonardo or a Michelangelo, but those useless stamps pasted on the pink pages of an album are a touching homage to all the nine muses; it is the very essence of destructive consumption.
Others saw in bourgeois love a desperate appeal mount- ing towards God. What is more disinterested, what is more poignant than an adultery? And that taste of ashes in one's mouth after coitus, is it not negativity itself and the con- tentiousness of all pleasures? Others went even further. They discovered a divine grain of madness not in the weaknesses of the bourgeoisie but in its very virtues. We were shown that the oppressed and hopeless life of the mother of a family was so absurd and so lofty in its obstinacy that all the extravagances of the surrealists appeared as common sense in comparison. A young author who underwent the influ- ence of these teachers without belonging to their generation
? Situation of the Writer in 1947 \ 149
and who has since changed his mind, if I may judge by his behaviour, once said to me, 'Is there any madder wager than conjugal fidelity? Isn't it braving the Devil and even God? Show me a madder and more magnificent blasphemy/ You can see the trick; it's a matter of beating the great destroyers on their own ground. You name Don Juan and I answer by Orgon; there's more generosity, more cynicism, and more despair in raising a family than in seducing a thousand and one women. You offer Rimbaud, I come back with Chrysale; there's more pride and Satanism in assuming that the chair that one sees is a chair than in practising the systematic deranging of the senses. And so that there will be no doubt about it, the chair which is given to our perception is only probable; to assert that it is a chair, one must take a leap to the infinite and suppose an infinity of concordant representations. Doubtless, the vow of conjugal love also involves a virgin future; the sophism begins when one presents these necessary and, so to speak, natural inductions that man makes against time and to insure his tranquillity as the most audacious defiances, the most desperate challenges.
Be that as it may, that is how the writers I am talking about established their reputation. They addressed a new generation and explained to it that there was a strict equiva- lence between production and consumption and between construction and destruction; they demonstrated that order was a perpetual festival and disorder the most boring monotony. They discovered the poetry of daily life, made virtue enticing, even disturbing, and painted the bourgeois epic in long novels full of mysterious and perturbing smiles. That was all their readers asked for; when one is honest out of self-interest, virtuous out of pusillanimity, and faithful out of habit, it is agreeable to hear it said that one sur- passes a professional seducer or a highwayman in boldness. In about 1924, I knew a young man of good family who was infatuated with literature, particularly contemporary authors. He fooled about when it was the thing to do, gorged himself on the poetry of the bars when it was a` la
? 150 I What Is Literature?
mode, flashily paraded a mistress, and then, when his father died, prudently took over the family factory and followed the straight and narrow. He has since married an heiress; he doesn't deceive her, or, if he does, it's only on the sly, when he takes a trip. In short, the most faithful of husbands. Just about the time he got married, he drew from his reading the formula that was to justify his life: 'One should do what everyone else does', he wrote to me one day, 'and be like no one else. ' You can guess that I regard that as the most abject garbage and the justification of all sorts of dis- honesty. But it sums up rather well, I think, the ethics which our authors sold their public. They justified themselves with it first of all: you've got to do what everyone else does, that is, sell Elbeuf cloth or Bordeaux wine according to the conventional rules, take a wife with a dowry, visit your parents regularly, and your in-laws and the friends of your in-laws: you've got to be like no one else, that is, save your soul and your family's by fine writings which are both destructive and respectful. I shall call all these works an alibi literature. They rapidly supplanted those of the hire- ling writers. Since before the First World War, the governing classes needed alibis more than incense. The marvellous of Fournier was an alibi; a whole line of bourgeois fairies sprang from him; in each case it was a matter of leading each reader approximately to that obscure spot of the most bourgeois soul where all dreams meet and melt in a desperate desire for the impossible, where all the events of the most human everyday existence are lived as symbols, where the real is devoured by the imaginary,
where the whole man is no longer anything but a divine absence. People are sometimes astonished that Arland was the author of both Terres Etrange`res and L'Ordre; but they shouldn't be. The so noble dissatisfaction of his first heroes has meaning only if one experiences it at the heart of a strict order; it is not at all a matter of revolting against marriage, the professions, and the social disciplines, but of delicately going beyond them by means of a nostalgia which nothing can satisfy because at bottom it is not a desire for anything.
? Situation of the Writer in 1947 \ 151
Thus, order is there only to be transcended, but it must be there. There you have it, justified and solidly re-established. It's certainly better to challenge it by a dreamy melancholy than to overthrow it by arms. I shall say as much about the restlessness of Gide, which later became confusion, and the sin of Mauriac, the place from which God is absent. It is always a matter of putting daily life in parentheses and living it scrupulously but without soiling one's hands; it is always a matter of proving that man is worth more than his life, that love is much more than love and the bourgeois much more than the bourgeois. In the greater writers there is, of course, something else. In Gide, in Claudel, in Proust, one finds the real experience of a man, and a thousand directions. But I have not wanted to draw a picture of a period but rather to show a climate and isolate a myth. 22
The second generation came of age after 1918. Of course, this is a very rough classification since we are in- cluding Cocteau, who started before the war, whereas Marcel Arland, whose first book, to my knowledge, does not antedate the armistice, has definite affinities with the writers whom we have just spoken about. The obvious absurdity of a war whose true causes it took us thirty years
to know leads back the spirit of Negativity. I am not going
to enlarge upon this period of 'decompression', as Thi- baudet has so well named it. It was allfireworks;now that
it has fallen, so much has been written about it that we seem
to know it thoroughly. All we need note is that its most magnificent rocket, surrealism, ties in with the destructive tradition of the writer-consumer. These turbulent young bourgeois wanted to ruin culture because they were culti- vated; their chief enemy was Heine's philistine, Monnier's Prudhomme, and Flaubert's bourgeois, in short, their papa. But the violence of the preceding years had brought them to radicalism. Whereas their predecessors had confined them- selves to combating the utilitarian ideology of the bour- geoisie by consumption^ they more deeply identified the quest of the useful with the human project, that is, with the con- scious and voluntary life. Consciousness is bourgeois, the
? i$2 I What Is Literature?
self is bourgeois. Negativity should devote itself, in the first place, to that nature which, as Pascal says, is only a first layer of custom. The first thing to be done is to eliminate the conventional distinctions between conscious and un- conscious life, between dream and waking. This means that subjectivity is dissolved. There is, in effect, the subjective when we recognize, the moment they appear, that our thoughts, our emotions, and our will come from us, and when we believe both that it is certain that they belong to us and only probable that the external world is guided by them.
The surrealist took a hearty dislike to that humble cer- tainty on which the stoic based his ethics. It displeased him both by the limits it assigns us and the responsibilities it places upon us. Any means were good for escaping con- sciousness of self and consequendy of one's situation in the world. He adopted psycho-analysis because it presented consciousness as being invaded by parasitical outgrowths whose origin is elsewhere; he rejected 'the bourgeois idea* of work because work implies conjectures, hypotheses, and projects, thus, a perpetual recourse to the subjective. Auto- matic writing was, above all, destruction of subjectivity. When we try our hand at it, rushes of blood spasmodically tear through us; we are ignorant of their origin; we do not know them before they have taken their place in the world of objects and we must then perceive them with foreign eyes. Thus, it was not a matter, as has too often been said, of substituting their unconscious subjectivity for con- sciousness, but rather of showing the subject as a flimsy illusion at the heart of an objective universe. But the surrealist's second step was to destroy objectivity in turn. It was a matter of exploding the world, and as dynamite was not enough, as, on the other hand, a real destruction of all that exists was impossible, because it would simply cause everything to pass from one real state to another real state, one had to do one's best rather to disintegrate particular objects, that is, to do away with the very structure of objectivity in these witness-objects. Evidently this operation cannot be tried out on things that really exist, which are
? Situation of the Writer in 1947 \ 133
already given with their inde? formable essence. Hence, one will produce imaginary objects, so constructed that their objectivity does away with itself. We are given a first draft of this procedure in the false pieces of sugar which Duchamp actually cut in marble and which suddenly revealed themselves as having an unexpected weight. The visitor who weighed them in his hand was supposed to feel, in a blazing and instantaneous illumination, the self-destruction of the objective essence of sugar. It was necessary to let him know the deception of all being, the malaise, the off-balance feeling we get, for example, from trick gadgets, when the spoon abruptly melts in the tea-cup, when the sugar (an inverse hoax to the one Duchamp constructed) rises to the surface and floats. It was hoped that by means of his intuition the whole world would be exposed as a radical contradiction.
Surrealist painting and sculpture had no other aim than to multiply these local and imaginary explosions, which were like holes through which the entire universe would be drained out. The paranoiacally critical method of Dali was only a perfecting and complication of the procedure. It also professed to be an effort 'to contribute to the total discredit of the world of reality'. Literature also did its best to make language go through the same kind of thing and to destroy it by telescoping words. Thus, the sugar refers to the marble and the marble to the sugar; the limp watch challenges itself by its limpness; the objective destroys itself and suddenly refers to the subjective, since one disqualifies reality and is pleased to 'consider the very images of the external world as unstable and transitory' and to put them into the service of the reality of our mind'. But the subjective then breaks down in its turn and allows a mysterious objectivity to appear behind it.
All this without even starting a single real destruction. Quite the contrary; by means of the symbolic annulment of the self by sleep and automatic writing, by the symbolic annulment of objects by producing evanescent objectivities, by the symbolic annulment of language by producing
? i$4 I What Is Literature?
aberrant meanings, by the destruction of painting by painting and of literature by literature, surrealism pursues this curious enterprise of realising nothingness by too much fullness of being. It is always by creating, that is, by adding paintings to already existing paintings and books to already published books, that it destroys. Whence, the ambivalence of its works: each of them can pass for the barbaric and mag- nificent invention of a form, of an unknown being, of an extraordinary phrase, and, as such, can become a voluntary contribution to culture; and as each of them is a project for annihilating all the rest by annihilating itself along with it, Nothingness glitters on its surface, a Nothingness which is only the endless fluttering of contradictions. And the esprit which the surrealists wish to attain on the ruins of sub- jectivity, this esprit of which it is not possible to have an inkling otherwise than by the accumulation of self-destruc- tive objects, also sparkles andflickersin the reciprocal and congealed annihilation of things. It is neither Hegelian Negativity, nor hypostasized Negation, nor even Nothing- ness, though it bears a likeness to it; it would be more correct to call it the Impossible or, if you like, the imaginary point where dream and waking, the real and the fictitious, the objective and the subjective, merge. Confusion and not synthesis, for synthesis would appear as an articulated existence, dominating and governing its internal contra- dictions. But surrealism does not desire the appearance of this novelty which it would again have to contest. It wants to maintain itself in the enervating tension which is pro- duced by an unrealizable intuition. At least Rimbaud wanted to see a drawing-room in a lake; the surrealist wants to be perpetually on the point of seeing lake and drawing-room; if, by chance, he encounters them, he gets disgusted or he gets scared and gets into bed with the blinds drawn. He ends up by doing a lot of painting and writing but he never actually destroys anything. Moreover, Breton recognized this in 1925 when he wrote: 'The immediate reality of the surrealist revolution is not so much to change anything whatever in the physical and apparent order of things as to
? Situation of the Writer in 1947 \ 155
criticize a movement in the mind/ The destruction of the universe is the object of a subjective enterprise very like what has always been called philosophical conversion. This world, perpetually annihilated without one's touching a grain of wheat or sand or a feather of a bird, is quite simply
put in parentheses. It has not been sufficiently noted that the constructions, paintings and poem-objects of surrealism were the manual realization of the sterilities by which the sceptics of the third century B. C. justified their perpetual epoche? . After which, Carneades and Philo, sure of not compromising themselves by an imprudent adherence, lived like everybody else. In the same way, the surrealists, once the world is destroyed and miraculously preserved by its destruction, can shamelessly give full play to their immense
love of the world. This world, the world of every day, with
its trees and roofs, its women, its sea-shells, and its flowers, but haunted by the impossible and by nothingness, is what
is called the marvellous in surrealism. I cannot keep myself from thinking of that other parenthesis by which the rallie? writers of the preceding generation destroyed bourgeois
life and preserved it with all its nuances. Isn't the marvellous
in surrealism that of Le Grand Meau/nes, but radicalised? Certainly its passion is sincere, as are its hatred of and dis- gust with the bourgeois class. But the situation has not changed: one must save oneself without breaking anything --or by a symbolic breaking--wash oneself of the original contamination without giving up the advantages of one's position.
The root of the matter is that once again one has to find an eagle's nest. The surrealists, more ambitious than their fathers, count on the radical and metaphysical destruction which they are initiating to confer upon them a dignity a thousand times superior to that of the parasitic aristocracy. It is no longer a matter of escaping from the bourgeois class; one must leap out of the human condition. It is the family patrimony that these sons want to squander, it is the world. They have come back to parasitism as to a lesser evil, abandoning everything, studies and professions, by
? 156 I What Is Literature?
common consent; but they have never been satisfied with being parasites on the bourgeoisie; their ambition has been to be parasites on the human race. Metaphysical as it may be, it is clear that they have been unclassed from above and that their preoccupations have strictlyforbiddenthem from finding a public in the working class. Breton once wrote: 'Marx said, "Transform the world. " Rimbaud said, "Change life. " For us, these two orders are one and the same/ That would be enough to reveal the bourgeois in- tellectual. For it is a question of knowing which change precedes which. For the militant Marxist there is no doubt that social transformation alone can permit radical trans- formations of thought and feeling. If Breton thinks that he can pursue his inner experiences on the margin of revolu- tionary activity and parallel to it, he is condemned in advance, for that would amount to saying that a freedom of
spirit is conceivable in chains, at least for certain people, and, consequently, to making revolution less urgent. This is the very betrayal of which revolutionaries have always accused Epictetus and of which Politeer not long ago accused Bergson. And if it is maintained that Breton in- tended in this text to announce a progressive and interlinked metamorphosis of the social state and the intimate life, I answer by citing this other passage: 'Everything leads us to believe that there is a certain point in the mind from which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the communicable and the incommunicable, the high and the low, cease to be regarded as contradictory. . . . One would be wasting one's time looking for any other motive in surrealist activity than the hope of determining this point/ Is this not a proclamation of divorce from a working-class public more than from a bourgeois public? For the proletariat, engaged in struggle, must at every moment, in order to bring its undertaking to a successful conclusion, distinguish the past from the future, the real
from the imaginary, and life from death. It is not by accident that Breton has cited these contraries; they are all categories of action; revolutionary activity, more than any
? Situation of the Writer in 194 7 | 157
other, needs them. And just as surrealism has radicalized the negation of the useful in order to transform it into a rejection of the project and the conscious life, it radicalizes the old literary claim of gratuitousness in order to make of it a rejection of action by destroying its categories. There is a surrealist quietism. Quietism and permanent violence; two complementary aspects of the same position. As the surrealist has deprived himself of the means of planning an enterprise, his activity is reduced to impulsions in the immediate. We find here a heavier and duller version of Gide's moment. That's not surprising; there is quietism in all parasitism and the favourite tempo of consumption is the moment.
Yet, surrealism declares itself revolutionary and offers its hand to the Communist Party. It is the first time since the Restoration that a literary school explicitly claims kinship with an organized revolutionary movement. The reasons are clear: these writers, who are also young people, want, above all, to destroy their family, their uncle the general, their cousin the cure? , as Baudelaire in 1848 saw in the February revolution an opportunity to set fire to the house of General Aupick; if they were born poor, they have also certain complexes to liquidate, envy and fear; and then they are also rebelling against external constraints: the recendy ended war, with its censorship, military service, taxes, army-ridden legislature, and all the general eye-wash; they are all anti-clerical, neither more nor less than Combes and the pre-war radicals, and they are nobly disgusted with colonialism and the war in Morocco. This indignation and hatred can be expressed abstracdy by a conception of radical
Negation which, a fortiori, will bring about, without there being any need of making it the object of a particular act of will, the negation of the bourgeois class. And youth being the metaphysical *%zpar excellencey as Auguste Comte well noted, this metaphysical and abstract expression of their revolt is evidendy the one they are choosing by prefer- ence. However, it is also the one which leaves the world strictly intact. It is true that they also add a few sporadic acts
? i$8 I What Is Literature?
of violence, but at most, these scattered acts of violence succeed in provoking scandal. The best they can hope for is to set themselves up as a primitive and secret society on the model of the Ku Klux Klan. Thus, they get so far as to want others to take upon themselves, on the margin of their spiritual experiences, the forceful execution of acts of con- crete destruction. In short, they would like to be the clerks of an ideal society whose temporal function would be the
permanent practice of violence. 23 In this way, after praising the suicides of Vache? and Rigaut as exemplary acts, after presenting gratuitous massacre ('firing into the crowd') as the simplest surrealistic act, they summon to their aid the yellow peril. They do not see the profound contradiction which opposes these brutal and partial destructions to the poetic process of annihilation which they have undertaken. Indeed, every time a destruction is partial, it is a means for attaining a positive and more general end. Surrealism stops at this means; it makes it an absolute end; it refuses to go further. On the contrary, the total abolition it dreams of does not harm anybody precisely because it is total. It is an absolute located outside history, a poetic fiction. And it brings into the picture, among the realities to abolish, the end which, in the eyes of Asiatics or revolutionaries, justifies the violent means to which they are forced to have recourse.
As for the Communist Party, hounded by the bourgeois police, very inferior in number to the Socialist Party, with no hope of taking power except in the distant future, new, uncertain in its tactics, it is still in the negative phase. Its job is to win over the masses, bore from within among the socialists, and incorporate the elements that it will be able to detach from the collectivity which repulses it; its intel- lectual arm is criticism. Thus, it is not disinclined to see in surrealism a temporary ally which it is getting ready to reject when it will no longer need it; for negation, the essence of surrealism, is only a stage for the C. P. The latter is not willing even for a moment to consider automatic writing, induced sleep, and objective chance, except in so
? Situation of the Writer in 1947 | 159
far as they may contribute to the disintegration of the bourgeois class. Thus, it seems that we have re-encountered that community of interests between the intellectuals and the oppressed classes which was the good fortune of the authors of the eighteenth century. But this is only superficial. The deep source of the misunderstanding lies in the fact that the surrealist is very little concerned with the dictator- ship of the proletariat and sees in the Revolution, as pure violence, the absolute end, whereas the end that com- munism proposes to itself is the taking of power, and by means of that end it justifies the blood it will shed. And then the bond between surrealism and the proletariat is indirect and abstract. The strength of a writer lies in his direct action upon the public, in the anger, the enthusiasm, and the reflections which he stirs up by his writings.
Diderot, Rousseau, and Voltaire were in constant contact with the bourgeoisie because it read them. But the surrealists have no readers in the proletariat; there is just a bare chance of their communicating with the party from the outside, or rather with its intellectuals. Their public is elsewhere, among the cultivated bourgeoisie; the C. P. knows this and uses them simply to stir up trouble in ruling-class circles. Thus, their revolutionary doctrines remain purely theor- etical (since they change nothing by their attitude), do not help them gain a single reader, and find no echo among the workers; they remain the parasites of the class they insult; their revolt remains on the margin of the revolution. Breton finally recognizes this himself and returns to his independence as a clerk. He writes to Naville: 'There is not one of us who does not wish for the passing of power from the hands of the bourgeoisie to those of the proletariat. In the meantime, it is none the less necessary that the experi- ences of the inner life continue and, of course, with no
external control, even Marxist. . . . The two problems are essentially distinct/
The opposition will be accentuated when Soviet Russia and consequently the French Communist Party pass to the phase of constructive organization; surrealism, having
? i6o I What Is Literature?
remained negative in essence, will turn away from them. Breton will then draw near the Trotskyists precisely because the latter, a hounded minority, are still at the stage of critical negation. The Trotskyists, in their turn, will use the surrealists as an instrument of disintegration; a letter from Trotsky to Breton leaves no doubt about the matter. If the Fourth International too had been able to pass to the constructive phase, it is clear that it would have been the occasion of a break.
Thus, the bourgeois writer's first attempt to reconcile himself with the proletariat remains Utopian and abstract because he is not seeking a public but an ally, because he preserves and reinforces the division of the temporal and spiritual and because he maintains himself within the limits of a clerkship. The agreement on principle between sur- realism and the C. P. against the bourgeoisie does not go beyond formalism; it is the formal idea of negativity which unites them. In fact, the negativity of the Communist Party is temporary; it is a necessary, historical moment in its great enterprise of social reorganization; surrealist nega- tivity, whatever one may say about it, remains outside history, in the moment and in the eternal simultaneously; it is the absolute end of life and art. Breton somewhere asserts the identity, or at least parallelism with reciprocal symbolization, of mind in its struggle against its bug-bears and the proletariat in its struggle against capitalism, which amounts to asserting the 'sacred mission* of the proletariat. But the fact is that this class, conceived as a legion of destroying angels, which the C. P. defends against the
approaches of the surrealists like a wall, is really only a quasi-religious myth for the authors, one which plays, for the tranquillization of their conscience, a role analogous to that of the myth of the people in 1848 for the writers of goodwill.
The originality of the surrealist movement resides in its attempt to appropriate everything at the same time: unclassing from above, parasitism, aristocracy, the metaphysic of con- sumption, and alliance with revolutionary forces. The
? Situation of the Writer in 1947 \ 161
history of this attempt has shown that it was doomed to failure. But fifty years earlier it would not even have been conceivable; the only relation a bourgeois writer could have had at that time with the working class was to write for it and about it. The thing that permits dreaming, be it only for a moment, of concluding a temporary pact between an intellectual aristocracy and the oppressed classes is the appearance of a new factor: the party as a mediator between the middle classes and the proletariat.
I understand well enough that surrealism with its am- biguous aspect of literary chapel, spiritual college, church, and secret society2 is only one of the post-war products. One would have to speak of Morand, Drieu la Rochelle, and a host of others. But if the works of Breton, Peret, and Desnos have seemed to us the most representative, the fact is that all the others implicidy contain the same traits. Morand is the consuming type, the traveller, the wayfarer. He nullifies national traditions by putting them into contact with each other according to the old procedure of the sceptics and Montaigne; he throws them into a basket like crabs, and, without commentary, leaves it to them to tear each other apart. It is a matter of achieving a certain
gamma point, highly akin to the gamma point of the sur- realists, whence differences of custom, language, and inter- ests abolish each other in the total indistinctness. Here speed plays the ro^le of the paranoiac-critical method. Gallant Europe is the nullification of countries by the railroad; Nothing but the Earth, the nullification of continents by the aeroplane. Morand has Asiatics go about in London, Amer-
icans in Syria, and Turks in Norway; he shows our customs as seen through these eyes, as Montesquieu did by those of
Persians, which is the surest way of removing their raison d'e^tre. But at the same time he arranges it so that these visitors have lost much of their pristine purity and are already thorough traitors to their customs without having completely adopted ours; at this particular moment of their transformation each of them is a battlefield where the exotic and picturesque and our rationalistic mechanism are being
? IO^2 I What Is Literature?
destroyed by each other. His books, full of tinsel and trinkets and strange, lovely names, nevertheless, ring the knell of exoticism; they are at the origin of a whole litera- ture which aims at doing away with local colour, either by showing that the distant cities we dreamed of in our child- hood are as hopelessly familiar and commonplace to the eyes of their inhabitants as the Saint Lazare Station and the Eiffel Tower are to ours, or by letting us perceive the comedy, trickery, and absence of faith behind ceremonies which travellers of past centuries described for us with the utmost respect, or by revealing to us through the worn-out screen of oriental or African picturesqueness the univer- sality of capitalist mechanism and rationalism. In the end nothing else is left but the world, similar and monotonous
everywhere. I have never felt the deeper meaning of this procedure so keenly as I did one day in the summer of 193 8, between Mogador and Sufi, when I was in a bus which passed a veiled Mohammedan woman who was riding a bicycle. A Mohammedan woman on a bike! There you have a self-destructive object which the surrealists or Morand can equally well lay claim to. The precise mechanism of the bicycle challenges the idle harem dreams which one ascribes to this veiled creature as she passes by but at the same moment what remains of the voluptuous and magical darkness between the painted eyebrows and behind the low forehead challenges, in turn, mechanism; it gives us a feel- ing that behind capitalist standardization, there is some- thing beyond, which, though chained and conquered, is yet virulent and bewitching. Phantom exoticism, the surrealist impossible, and bourgeois dissatisfaction: in all three cases the real breaks down; behind it one tries to maintain the irritating tension of the contradictory. In the case of the travel writers the ruse is obvious: they suppress exot-
icism because one is always exotic in relation to someone, and they don't want to be; they destroy history and tradi- tions in order to escape from their historical situation; they want to forget that the most lucid consciousness is always grafted on to something; they want to effect a
? Situation of the Writer in 1947 \ 163
fictitious liberation by means of an abstract internationalism and to achieve, by means of universality, an aristocratic detachment.
Drieu, like Morand, sometimes makes use of self-destruc- tion by exoticism; in one of his novels, the Alhambra becomes an arid provincial park under a monotonous sky. But through the literary destruction of the object, of love, over twenty years of follies and bitterness, he was pursuing the destruction of himself; he was the empty valise, the opium smoker, and in the end, the vertigo of death drew him into National Socialism. Gilles, the squalid and glib novel about his life, shows clearly that he was the enemy brother of the surrealists. His Na2ism, which also was only an appetite for universal conflagration, proved, in practice, to be as ineffectual as the communism of Breton. Both of them are clerks. Both of them, innocendy and without
ulterior motives, ally themselves with the temporal. But the surrealists are healthier; their myth of destruction covers up an enormous and magnificent appetite; they want to destroy everything but themselves, as is shown by their horror of disease, vice, and drugs. Drieu, gloomy and more genuine, meditated upon his death; it was because of self-hatred that he hated his country and mankind. They all were after the absolute, and as they were hemmed in everywhere by the relative, they identified the absolute with the impossible. They all hesitated between two ro^les: that of proclaimers of a new world and that of gravediggers of the old. But as it was easier to discern signs of decadence in post-war Europe than those of renewal, they chose to be grave-diggers. And to soothe their conscience they restored to a place of honour the old Heraclitean myth according to which life is born
from death. They were all haunted by that imaginary gamma point, the only steadfast thing in a world in move- ment, when destruction, because it is utterly and hopelessly destruction, is identified with absolute construction. They were all fascinated by violence, wherever it might come from; it was by violence that they wanted to free man from his human condition. That is why they joined hands with
? 164 I What Is Literature?
extreme parties by gratuitously ascribing to them apocalyp- tic aims. They were all duped: the Revolution has not come off and Nazism has been beaten. They lived in a comfort- able and lavish period when despair was still a luxury. They condemned their country because they were still insolent with victory; they denounced war because they thought the peace would be a long one. They were all victims of the disaster of 1940: the reason is that the moment for action had come and that none of them were armed for it. Some killed themselves, others are in exile; those who have returned are exiled among us. They were the proclaimers of catastrophe in the time of the fat cows; in the time of the lean cows they have nothing more to
On the margin of the prodigal children of the rallie? s who found more unexpectedness and madness in their father's house than on the mountain footpaths and the trails of the desert, on the margin of the great tenors of despair, of the prodigal youths for whom the hour for returning to the fold had not yet struck, there flourished a discrete humanism. Pre? vost, Pierre Bost, Chamson, Aveline, and Beucler were about the same age as Breton and Drieu. Their de? buts were brilliant; Bost was still a lyce? e boy when Copeau performed his Ulmbe? cile\ Pre? vost, at the Ecole Normale, was already notorious. But they remained modest in their budding glory; they had no taste for playing the Ariels of capitalism. They did not pretend to be either damned or prophetic. When Pre? vost was asked why he wrote, he answered, 'To earn my living/ The phrase shocked me at the time because the last remnant of the great literary myths of the nineteenth century were still trailing in my head. Nevertheless he was wrong. One does not write to earn one's living. But what I took for facile cynicism was actually a will to think toughly, lucidly, and, if need be, disagreeably. These authors, in complete reaction against satanism and angelism, wanted to be neither saints nor beasts, only men. Perhaps they were the first writers since romanticism who did not think of themselves as aristocrats of consumption but rather as workmen in a
? Situation of the Writer in 1947 \ 165
room, like bookbinders or lacemakers. They did not con- sider literature as a trade in order to give themselves licence to sell their wares to the highest bidder, but, on the contrary, to re-establish themselves, without humility or pride, in an industrious society. One learns a trade, and then he who practises it has no right to scorn his cliente`le. So they too launched a reconciliation with the public. Much too honest to believe they had genius and to demand its rights, they trusted much more to hard work than to inspiration. They lacked perhaps that absurd confidence in their destiny, that iniquitous and blind pride which characterises great men. 26 They all had that strong self-seeking culture which the Third Republic gave to its future civil-servants. Thus, almost all of them became civil-servants, administrative officers in the Senate and Chamber, teachers, and curators of museums. But, as they came for the most part from modest backgrounds they were not concerned with using their ability to defend bourgeois traditions. They never en- joyed that culture as a historic property; they saw in it only a precious instrument for becoming men. Besides, they had in Alain a master and thinker who detested history. Con- vinced, like him, that the moral problem is the same in all ages, they saw society in an instantaneous cross-section.
Hostile to psychology as well as to the historical sciences, sensitive to social injustice but too Cartesian to believe in the class struggle, their only concern was to practise their trade, against passions and impassioned errors and against myths, by using--without weakness--will and reason.