No More Learning

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. They liked the common people, the Parisian workmen, the crafts- men, the petty bourgeois, the clerks, the tramps, and the care they took in telling the stories of these individual destinies sometimes led them into flirting with populism. But this sequel to naturalism was different in that they never admitted that social and psychological determinism formed the web and woof of these humble existences. And, differing from the point of view of socialist realism, they did not want to see their heroes as hopeless victims of social oppression. In each case, these moralists applied themselves to showing the ro^le of will, patience, and effort, presenting deficiencies
? 166 I What Is Literature?
as faults and success as merit. They rarely took an interest in exceptional careers, but they wanted to make people see that it is possible to be a man even in adversity.
Today several of them are dead; others are silent or pro- duce only at long intervals. By and large it can be said that the writers whose de? buts were so brilliant and who in about 1927 were able to form a 'club of those under thirty' have almost all fallen by the wayside. To be sure, individual accidents must be taken into account, but the fact is so striking that it requires a more general explanation. Indeed, they lacked neither talent nor inspiration, and from the point of view which concerns us, they must be regarded as pre- cursors: they renounced the proud solitude of the writer; they liked their public; they did not attempt to justify the privileges which they acquired; they did not meditate upon death or upon the impossible; rather they wanted to give us rules for living. They were widely read, certainly much more than the surrealists. Yet, if one wishes to mark the chief literary tendencies between the two wars with a name, it is of surrealism that one will think. What is the reason for their failure?
I believe it is explained, paradoxical as it may seem, by the public which they chose for themselves. About 1900, on the occasion of its triumph in the Dreyfus affair, an industrious and liberal petty bourgeoisie became conscious of itself. It was anti-clerical and republican, anti-racialist, individualistic, rationalistic and progressive. Proud of its institutions, it was ready to modify them but not to overthrow them. It did not scorn the proletariat, but it felt itself too close to it to be conscious of oppressing it. It lived moderately, sometimes uneasily, but it aspired not so much to wealth, or to inac- cessible greatness, as it did to improve its way of life within very narrow limits. Above all, it wanted to live. To live: by that it meant to choose a trade, to practise it conscientiously and even passionately, to maintain a certain initiative in its work, to control effectively its political representatives, to express itself freely in state matters, and to raise its children with dignity. It was Cartesian in that it distrusted improve-
? Situation of the Writer in 1947 | 167
ments which were too abrupt and in that, contrary to the romantics who have always hoped that happiness would burst upon them like a catastrophe, it dreamed rather of mastering itself than of changing the course of the world. This class, which has been happily baptized 'average', teaches its sons that there is no need for too much and that the best is the enemy of the good. It is well disposed to- wards the demands of the working-class provided that these remain on a strictly professional level. It has no history and no historical sense, since, unlike the upper bourgeoisie, it has neither a past nor traditions, nor, unlike the working class, does it have immense hope for the future. As it does not believe in God, but needs very strict imperatives to give meaning to the privations which it endures, one of its intel- lectual concerns has been to establish a lay morality. The university, which belongs completely to this average class, strove for twenty years without success to achieve this through the writings of Durkheim, Brunschvicg, and Alain. Now, these professors were, directly or indirecdy, the masters of the writers we are now considering. These young people, born of the petty bourgeoisie, taught by petty- bourgeois professors, prepared at the Sorbonne or in the great schools for petty-bourgeois professions, returned to their class when they began to write. Better still, they never
left it. They carried over this morality--but improved and refined--into their novels and short stories, a morality which everybody was familiar with but whose principles no one has ever discovered. They dwelt upon the beauties and the risks, upon the austere grandeur of the profession; they sang not of mad love but rather of conjugal friendship and that enterprise in common which is marriage. They founded their humanism upon profession, friendship, social solidarity, and sport. Thus, the petty bourgeoisie which already had its political party, Radical Socialism, its mutual aid society, the League for Human Rights, its secret society, Freemasonry, and its daily paper, UOE$wre9 had writers, and even a literary weekly, which was called symbolically, Marianne. Chamson, Bost, Pre? vost, and their friends wrote
? 168 I What Is Literature?
for a public of civil-servants, university people, higher clerks, doctors, and so on. They made literature Radical Socialist. Now Radicalism has been the great victim of this war. By 1910 it had realked its programme. For thirty years it has lived on its momentum. By the time it found its writers it was already living on its past. Today it has definitely dis- appeared. When the reform of the administrative personnel and the separation of church and state had been accom- plished, Radical Socialist politics could become only a matter of opportunism; in order to maintain itself for a single moment it presupposed social and international peace. Two wars in twenty-five years and the aggravation of the class struggle have been too much for it; the party has not resisted, but even more than the party it is the Rad- ical Socialist spirit which has been the victim of circum-
stances.
These writers, who did not fight in the first war and who
did not see the second one coming, who did not want to believe in the exploitation of man by man, and who rather bet on the possibility of living honestly and modestly in capitalist society, whom their class of origin--which had become their public--deprived of the feeling for history without giving them, in compensation, a metaphysical abso- lute, did not have a sense of the tragic in one of the most tragic of all eras, not of death when death threatened all Europe, nor of Evil when so brief a moment separated them from the most cynical attempt to debase them. They limited themselves, in all honesty, to stories of lives which were ordinary and without greatness, while circumstances were forging careers which were exceptional in Evil as well as in Good. On the eve of a poetic springtime-- more apparent, to be sure, than real--their lucidity dis- pelled within them that double-dealing which is one of the sources of poetry; their morality, which could support the soul in daily life, which perhaps had supported it during the
First World War, was revealed as inadequate for great catas- trophes. In such times man turns towards Epicureanism or Stoicism--and these authors were neither Stoics nor Epi- cureans27--or he asks for help from irrational forces, and
? Situation of the Writer in 1947 \ 169
they had chosen to see no farther than the boundary of their reason. Thus, history stole their public from them as it stole voters from the Radical Socialist party. They remained silent, I imagine, out of disgust, lacking power to adopt their wisdom to the follies of Europe. After twenty years of plying their craft andfindingnothing to tell us in the time of misfortune, they have wasted their labour.
So there remains the third generation, our own, which began to write after the defeat or shortly before the war. I do not want to talk about it before saying something about the climate in which it appeared. First, the literary climate: rallie? s, extremists, and radicals peopled our sky. Each of these stars exerted, in its way, its own influence upon our world, and all these influences, combining, managed to form about us the strangest, most irrational, and most con- tradictory idea of what literature is. We breathed in this idea, which I shall call objective, with the air of our time. Whatever the effort these writers did actually make to dis- tinguish themselves from one another, their works were reciprocally contaminated in the minds of the readers where they co-existed. Moreover, if the differences are sharp and deep, their works have common traits. It is striking, at first, that neither the radicals nor the extremists were concerned with history, although one side aligned itself with the pro- gressive left and the other with the revolutionary left. The
first were on the level of Kierkegaardian repetition; the second were on that of the moment; that is, the aberrant synthesis of eternity and the infinitesimal present. In an age when we were being crushed by the pressure of history the literature of the rallie? s alone offered some taste for history and some historical sense. But as it was a question of justifying privileges they envisaged only the action of the past on the present in the development of societies. Today, we know the reasons for these refusals, and that they are social: the surrealists are clerks, the petty bourgeoisie has neither traditions nor future, the upper bourgeoisie has done with conquest and aims at maintaining itself. But these diverse attitudes were compounded to produce an objective
? 170 I What Is Literature?
myth according to which literature had to choose eternal subjects or at the very least those which were not of the moment. And then our elders had only one fictional tech- nique at their disposal, the one inherited from the French nineteenth century. Now, there is none more hostile to a historical view of society.
Thus, rallie? s and radicals have used the traditional tech- nique; the latter because they were moralists and intellec- tuals and wanted to understand matters by their causes, the former because it served their purpose. By its systematic denial of change it was better able to bring out the peren- niality of bourgeois virtues. Behind the vain, forgotten turmoils it let us catch a glimpse of that fixed and mys- terious order, that motionless poetry that they wished to reveal in their works. Thanks to this technique, these new Eleatics wrote against the age, against change; they discouraged agitators and revolutionaries by making them see their enterprises in the past even before they had begun.
We learned it by reading their books, and at first it was our only means of expression. About the time we were beginning to write, good minds were calculating the 'op- timum time, at the end of which a historical event might be the object of a novel. Fifty years--that, it appeared, was too much; one no longer enters into the thing. Ten--that wasn't enough; one does not have enough perspective. Thus, we were gently led to see in literature the kingdom of untimely considerations.
Moreover, these hostile groups made alliances among themselves; sometimes the radicals became reconciled with the rallie? s. After all, they had in common the ambition of reconciling themselves with the reader and of honestly serving his needs. Doubtless their publics differed appreci- ably, but one passed continually from one to the other, and the left wing of the public of the rallie? s formed the right wing of the radical public. On the other hand, if the radical writers sometimes went along for a way with traditional politics, if, when the Radical Socialist party joined the
? Situation of the Writer in 1947 | IJI
Popular Front, they all decided together to collaborate in Vendredi, they never concluded an alliance with the extreme
literary left, that is, with the surrealists.
The extremists, on the contrary, have this in common,
though reluctantly, with the rallie? s, that they both hold that the object of literature is a certain ineffable beyondness which can only be suggested and that it is essentially the imaginary realization of the unrealizable. This is particularly obvious when we are dealing with poetry. Whereas the radicals banished it, so to speak, from literature, the novels of the rallie? s were steeped in it. This fact, one of the most important in contemporary literary history, has often been noted; the reason for it has not been given. What the bour- geois writers really wanted to prove was that there is no life so bourgeois or so humdrum that it has not its poetic
beyondness. They considered themselves catalysts of bour- geois poetry.
At the same time the extremists identified all forms of artistic activity with poetry, that is, with the inconceivable beyondness of destruction. Objectively, this tendency was expressed at the moment we were beginning to write by the confusion of genres and the mistaken notion of what the novel is essentially. And it is not rare, even today, for critics to accuse a work of prose of lacking poetry.
This whole literature is literature with a thesis, since these writers, though they vigorously protest to the con- trary, all defend ideologies. Extremists and rallie? s profess to despise metaphysics. But how shall we name those endlessly repeated declarations that man is too large for himself and, by a whole dimension of his being, escapes psychological and social determinations?
As to the radicals, while proclaiming that literature is not made with fine feelings, their chief concern was moralizing. In the objective mind, all this is translated by tremendous oscillations of the concept of literature: it is pure gratuit- ousness--it is teaching; it exists only by denying itself and being reborn from its ashes; it is the exquisite, the im- possible, the ineffable beyond language--it is an austere
? ij2 I What Is Literature?
profession which addresses a specific public, tries to clarify its needs, and strives to satisfy them. It is terror, it is rhetoric. The critics then come along and try, for their convenience, to unify these opposite concepts; they invent the notion of the message, which we spoke of earlier.
Everything, to be sure, is a message. There is a message in Gide, in Chamson, in Breton, and of course, it is what they were unwilling to say, what criticism made them say in spite of themselves. Whence a new theory is added to the preceding ones; in these delicate and self-destroying works where the word is only a hesitant guide which stops half- way and lets the reader continue on his way alone and whose truth is quite beyond language, in an undifferentiated silence, it is always the unintentional contribution of the writer which has chief importance.
A work is never beautiful unless it in some way escapes its author. If he paints himself without planning to, if his characters escape his control and impose their whims upon him, if the words maintain a certain independence under his pen, then he does his best work. Boileau would be com- pletely dumbfounded if he read this kind of statement, which one frequendy finds in the articles of our critics: 'the author knows too well what he wants to say; he is too lucid; the words come too easily; he does whatever he wants with his pen; he is not dominated by his subject'.
Unfortunately, everybody is in agreement on this point. For the rallies, the essence of the work is the poetry, and therefore the beyond which, by an imperceptible gliding, becomes what escapes the author himself--the Devil's share. For the surrealist the only valid mode of writing is auto- matism. Even the radicals, following Alain, insist that a work of art is never finished until it has become a collective representation and that it then contains, by virtue of all that generations of readers have put into it, infinitely more than at the moment of its conception.
This idea, which, moreover, is correct, amounts to making evident the reader's ro^le in the constitution of the work; but at the time it helped to increase the confusion.
? Situation of the Writer in 1947 \ 173
In short, the objective myth inspired by these contradictions is that every lasting work has its secret.
Well and good, if it were a secret of fabrication; but no, it starts at the point where technique and will leave off. Something from above is reflected in the work of art and breaks like sunlight on the waves. To put it briefly, from pure poetry to automatic writing the literary climate is Platonism. In this mystical epoch which is without faith, or rather dishonesdy mystical, a major literary current leads the writer to surrender before his work as a political current leads him to surrender before the party. It is said that Fra Angelico painted on his knees; if that is true, many writers resemble him, but go much further than he; they think that it is enough to write on one's knees to write well.
When we were still schoolboys on the lyce? e benches or in the Sorbonne amphitheatres, the leafy shadow of the beyond spread itself over literature. We knew the bitter and deceptive taste of the impossible, of purity, of impossible purity. We felt ourselves to be in turn the unsatisfied and the Ariels of accomplishment. We believed that one could save one's life by art, and then, the following term, that one never saved anything and that art was the lucid and desperate balance sheet of our perdition. We swung between terror and rhetoric, between literature-as-martyrdom and litera- ture-as-profession. If someone were to amuse himself by carefully reading our writings he would doubtlessfindthere, like scars, the traces of these varying temptations--but he would have to have time to waste.
That is all very far away from us now. However, since it is by writing that the author forges his ideas on the art of writing, the collectivity lives on the literary conceptions of the preceding generation, and the critics who have under- stood them twenty years late are quite happy to use them as touchstones to judge contemporary works.
The literature of the period between the wars has a hard time of it these days. Georges Bataille's reflections on the impossible do not have the value of the slightest surrealistic
? 7 74 I What Is Literature?
tract. His theory of expense is a feeble echo of great days which are past. Lettrism is a substitute product, a flat and conscientious imitation of Dadaist exuberance. One's heart is no longer in it; one feels the application and the haste to succeed. Neither Andre? Dhotel nor Marius Groult are worth Alain Fournier. Many former surrealists have joined the Communist Party like the Saint Simonians who, in about 1880, turned up on boards of directors of big business. Neither Cocteau nor Mauriac nor Green has any challengers;
Giraudoux has a hundred, but all mediocre. Most of the radicals are silent. The reason is that the gap has been re- vealed not between the author and his public--which, after all, would be in the great literary tradition--but between the literary myth and the historical reality.
We started feeling this gap about 1930, quite a while before publishing our first books. 28 It was about this time that most Frenchmen were stupefied on discovering their historical character. They had, of course, learned at school that man plays and wins or loses in the womb of universal history, but they did not apply it to their own case. They thought in a vague sort of way that it was all right for the dead to be historical. The striking thing about lives of the
past is that they always unfold on the eve of the great events which exceed forecasts, disappoint expectations, upset plans, and bring new light to bear on the years that have gone by. We have here a case of trickery, a perpetual juggling, as if men were all like Charles Bovary who, discovering after his wife's death the letters she had received from her lovers, all at once saw twenty years of conjugal happiness which had
already been lived slipping away.
In the century of the aeroplane and electricity we did not think that we were exposed to these surprises. It didn't seem to us that we were on the eve of anything. On the contrary, we had the vague pride of feeling that it was the day after the last disruption of history. Even if we were at times dis- turbed by German rearmament, we thought that we were moving on a long, straight road and we felt certain that our lifetime would be uniquely woven of individual circum-
? Situation of the Writer in 1947 \ 175
stances and marked by scientific discoveries and happy reforms.
From 1930 on, the world depression, the coming of Nazism, and the events in China opened our eyes. It seemed as if the ground were going to fall from under us, and suddenly, for us too, the great historical juggling began. The first years of the great world Peace suddenly had to be regarded as the years between wars. Each sign of promise which we had greeted had to be seen as a threat. Each day we had lived revealed its true face; we had abandoned our- selves to it trustingly and it was leading us to a new war with secret rapidity, with a rigour hidden beneath its nonchalant airs. And our life as an individual which had seemed to depend upon our efforts, our virtues, and our faults, on our good and bad luck, on the good and bad will of a very small number of people, seemed governed down to its minutest details by obscure and collective forces, and its most private circumstances seemed to reflect the state of the whole world. All at once we felt ourselves abruptly situated.
The detachment which our predecessors were so fond of practising had become impossible. There was a collective adventure which was taking form in the future and which would be our adventure. That was what would later permit our generation, with its Ariels and its Calibans, to be dated. Something was awaiting us in the future shadow, something which would reveal us to ourselves, perhaps in the illumina- tion of a last moment, before annihilating us. The secret of our gestures and our most intimate designs lay ahead of us in the catastrophe to which our names would be attached.
History flowed in upon us; in everything we touched, in the air we breathed, in the page we read, in the one we wrote; in love itself we discovered, like a taste of history, so to speak, a bitter and ambiguous mixture of the absolute and the transitory. What need had we patiently to construct self-destructive objects since each of the moments of our life was subtly whisked away from us at the very time that we were enjoying it, since each present that we lived with gusto, like an absolute, was struck with a secret death,
? 176 I What Is Literature?
seemed to us to have its meaning outside itself, for other eyes which had not yet seen the light, and, in a way, to be already past m its very presence? Besides, what did surrealist destruction, which leaves everything in place, matter to us, when a destruction by sword andfirethreatened everything, surrealism included?
It was, I believe, Miro^ who painted a Destruction of Painting. But incendiary bombs could destroy the painting
and its destruction together. We would no longer have dreamed of crying up the exquisite virtues of the bour- geoisie. To do that we would have had to believe that they were eternal, but did we know whether the French bour- geoisie would exist tomorrow?
Nor of teaching, as the radicals had done, the means of leading in peace-time the life of an honest man, when our greatest care was to know whether one could remain a man in war-time.
The pressure of history suddenly revealed to us the inter- dependence of nations. An incident in Shanghai was a snip of the scissors in our destiny, but at the same time it re- placed us, in spite of ourselves, in the national collectivity. We very soon had to realize that the travelling of our elders, their sumptuous voyages abroad, and the whole ceremonial of travel on the grand scale, was an illusion. Everywhere they went they carried France with them. They travelled because France had won the war and the exchange was
favourable. They followed the franc. Like the franc, they had more access to Seville and Palermo than to Zurich and Amsterdam.
As for us, when we were old enough to make our world tour, autarchy had killed off the novels about the grand tour, and then, we no longer had the heart to travel. With a perverse taste for standardizing the world, they amused themselves with finding the imprint of capitalism every- where. We would have found, without any difficulty, a much more obvious uniformity--cannons everywhere. And then, whether travellers or not, in the face of the conflict which threatened our country, we had understood that we were not citizens of the world since we could not make
? Situation of the Writer in 1947 \ 177
ourselves be Swiss, Swedish, or Portuguese. The destiny of our works themselves was bound to that of a France in danger. Our elders wrote for idle souls, but for the public which we, in our turn, were going to address the holiday was over. It was composed of men of our sort who, like us, were expecting war and death. For these readers without leisure, occupied without respite with a single concern, there was only one fitting subject. It was about their war and their death that we had to write. Brutally reintegrated into history, we had no choice but to produce a literature of a historical character.
But what makes our position original, I believe, is that the war and the occupation, by turning us into a world in a state of fusion, perforce made us rediscover the absolute at the heart of relativity itself. For our predecessors the rule of the game was to save everybody, because suffering is atoned for, because nobody is bad voluntarily, because man's heart is unfathomable, because divine grace is shared equally. That meant that literature--apart from the Sur- realist extreme left which simply spread mischief--tended to establish a sort of moral relativism. Christians no longer believed in hell. Sin was the place devoid of God; carnal love was love of God gone astray.
As democracy tolerated all opinions, even those which aimed expressly at destroying it, republican humanism, which was taught in the schools, made tolerance the primary virtue. Everything would be tolerated, even intolerance. Hidden truths had to be recognized in the silliest ideas, in the vilest feelings. For Le? on Brunschvicg, the philosopher of the re? gime, who all his life assimilated, unified, and inte- grated, and who shaped three generations, evil and error were only false shows, fruits of separation, limitation, and finiteness. They were annihilated as soon as one over- threw the barriers which compartmentalized systems and collectivities.
The radicals followed Auguste Comte in this, that they held progress to be the development of order; thus, order was already there, in posse, like the hunter's cap in the
? i y8 I What Is Literature?
illustrated puzzles. It was only a matter of discovering it. That was how they passed their time; it was their spiritual exercise. They thereby justified everything--starting with themselves.
The Marxists at least recognized the reality of oppression and capitalist imperialism, of the class struggle and misery. But the effect of dialectical materialism, as I have shown elsewhere, is to make Good and Evil vanish conjoindy. There remains only the historical process, and then Stalinist communism does not attribute so much importance to the individual that his sufferings and even his death cannot be redeemed if they help to hasten the day when power is seized.
The notion of Evil, which had been abandoned, had fallen into the hands of some Manichaeans--Anti-Semites, fascists, anarchists of the right--who used it to justify their bitterness, their envy, and their lack of understanding of history. That was enough to discredit it. For political realism as for philosophical idealism Evil was not a very serious matter.
We have been taught to take it seriously. It is neither our fault nor our merit if we lived in a time when torture was a daily fact. Chateaubriand, Oradour, the Rue des Saussaies, Tulle, Dachau, and Auschwitz have all demon- strated to us that Evil is not an appearance, that knowing its cause does not dispel it, that it is not opposed to Good as a confused idea is to a clear one, that it is not the effects of passions which might be cured, of a fear which might be overcome, of a passing aberration which might be excused, of an ignorance which might be enlightened, that it can in no way be diverted, brought back, reduced, and incorpor- ated into idealistic humanism, like that shade of which Leibnitz has written that it is necessary for the glare of daylight.
Satan, Maritain once said, is pure. Pure, that is, without mixture and without remission. We have learned to know this horrible, this irreducible purity. It blazes forth in the close and almost sexual relation between the executioner and his victim. For torture isfirstof all a matter of debasement.
? Situation of the Writer in 1947 \ 179
Whatever the sufferings which have been endured, it is the victim who decides, as a last resort, what the moment is when they are unbearable and when he must talk. The supreme irony of torture is that the sufferer, if he breaks down and talks, applies his will as a man to denying that he is a man, makes himself the accomplice of his executioners and, by his own movement, throws himself into abjection. The executioner is aware of this; he watches for this weak- ness, not only because he will obtain the information he desires, but because it will prove to him once again that he is right in using torture and that man is an animal who must be led with a whip. Thus, he attempts to destroy the human- ity in his fellow-creature. Also, as a consequence, in him- self; he knows that the groaning, sweating, filthy creature who begs for mercy and abandons himself in a swooning consent with the moanings of an amorous woman, and who yields everything and is even so carried away that he im- proves upon his betrayals because the consciousness that he has done evil is like a stone round his neck dragging him still farther down, exists also in his own image and that he--the executioner--is bearing down upon himself as much as upon his victim. If he wishes, on his own account, to escape this total degradation, he has no other recourse than to affirm his blind faith in an iron order which like a corset confines our repulsive weaknesses--in short, to commit man's destiny to the hands of inhuman powers.
A moment comes when torturer and tortured are in accord, the former because he has, in a single victim, sym- bolically gratified his hatred of all mankind, the latter because he can bear his failing only by pushing it to the limit, and because the only way he can endure his self- hatred is by hating all other men along with himself. Later, perhaps, the executioner will be hanged. Perhaps the victim, if he recovers, will be redeemed. But what will blot out this Mass in which two freedoms have communed in the des- truction of the human? We knew that, to a certain extent, it was being celebrated everywhere in Paris while we were eating, sleeping, and making love. We heard whole streets
? i8o I What Is Literature?
screaming and we understood that Evil, fruit of a free and sovereign will, is, like Good, absolute.
Perhaps a day will come when a happy age, looking back at the past, will see in this suffering and shame one of the paths which led to peace. But we were not on the side of history already made. We were, as I have said, situated in such a way that every lived minute seemed to us like some- thing irreducible. Therefore, in spite of ourselves, we came to this conclusion, which will seem shocking to lofty souls: Evil cannot be redeemed.
But, on the other hand, most of the resisters, though beaten, burned, blinded, and broken, did not speak. They broke the circle of Evil and reaffirmed the human--for themselves, for us, and for their very torturers. They did it without witness, without help, without hope, often even without faith. For them it was not a matter of believing in man but of wanting to. Everything conspired to discourage them: so many indications everywhere about them, those faces bent over them, that misery within them. Everything concurred in making them believe that they were only insects, that man is the impossible dream of spies and squealers, and that they would awaken as vermin like every- body else.
This man had to be invented with their martyrized flesh, with their hunted thoughts which were already betraying them--invented on the basis of nothing, for nothing, in absolute gratuitousness. For it is within the human that one can distinguish means and ends, values and preferences, but they were still at the creation of the world and they had only to decide in sovereign fashion whether there would be anything more than the reign of the animal within it. They remained silent and man was born of their silence. We knew that every moment of the day, in the four corners of Paris, man was a hundred times destroyed and reaffirmed.
Obsessed as we were by these tortures, a week did not go by that we did not ask ourselves: 'Suppose I were tortured, what would I do? ' And this question alone carried us to the very frontiers of ourselves and of the human. We oscillated
? Situation of the Writer in 1947 \ 181
between the no-man's-land where mankind denies itself and the barren desert from which it surges and creates itself. Those who had immediately preceded us in the world, who had bequeathed us their culture, their wisdom, their cus- toms, and their proverbs, who had built the houses that we lived in and who had marked the roads with the statues of their great men* practised modest virtues and remained in the moderate regions. Their faults never caused them to fall so low that they did not find others beneath them who were more guilty, nor did their merits cause them to rise so high that they did not see other souls above them whose merit was greater. Their gaze encountered men farther than the eye can reach. The very sayings they made use of and which we had learned from them--'a fool always finds a bigger fool to admire him/ 'we always need someone smaller than ourselves'--their very manner of consoling themselves in affliction by telling themselves that, whatever their un- happiness, there were others worse off, all goes to show that they considered mankind as a natural and infinite milieu that one could never leave and whose limits could not be touched. They died with a good conscience and with-
out ever having explored their condition.
Because of this, their writers gave them a literature of average situations. But we could no longerfindit natural to be men when our best friends, if they were taken, could choose only between abjection and heroism, that is, between the two extremes of the human condition, beyond which there
is no longer anything. If they were cowards and traitors,
all men were above them; if heroic, all men were below them. In the latter case, which was the more frequent, they
no longer felt humanity as a limidess milieu. It was a thin flame within them which they alone kept alive. It kept itself going in the silence which they opposed to their executioners. About them was nothing but the great polar night of the inhuman and of unknowingness, which they did not even see, which they guessed in the glacial cold which pierced
them.
Our fathers always had witnesses and examples available,
? 182 I What Is Literature?
For these tortured men, there was no longer any. It was Saint-Exupe? ry who said in the course of a dangerous mission, *I am my own witness/ The same for all of them; anguish and forlornness and the sweating of blood begin for a man when he can no longer have any other witness than himself. It is then that he drains the cup, that he ex- periences his human condition to the bitter end. Of course, we are quite far from having all felt this anguish, but it haunted us like a threat and a promise.
Five years. We lived entranced and as we did not take our profession of writer lightly, this state of trance is still reflected in our writings. We have undertaken to create a literature of extreme situations. I am not at all claiming that in this we are superior to our elders. Quite the contrary. Bloch-Michel, who has earned the right to talk, has said that fewer virtues are needed in great circumstances than in small. It is not for me to decide whether he is right or whether it is better to be a Jansenist than a Jesuit. I rather think that there must be something of everything and that the same man cannot be one and the other at the same time.
Therefore, we are Jansenists because the age has made us such, and in so far as it has made us touch our limits I shall say that we are all metaphysical writers. I think that many among us would deny this designation or would not accept it without reservations, but this is the result of a misunderstanding. For metaphysics is not a sterile discussion about abstract notions which have nothing to do with ex- perience. It is a living effort to embrace from within the human condition in its totality.
Forced by circumstances to discover the pressure of his- tory, as Torricelli discovered atmospheric pressure, and tossed by the cruelty of the time into that forlornness from where we can see our condition as man to the very limit, to the absurd, to the night of unknowingness, we have a task for which we may not be strong enough (this is not the first time that an age, for want of talents, has lacked its art and its philosophy). It is to create a literature which unites and reconciles the metaphysical absolute and the relativity
? Situation of the Writer in 1947 \ 183
of the historical fact, and which I shall call, for want of a better name, the literature of great circumstances. 29 It is not a question for us of escaping into the eternal or of abdicating in the face of what the unspeakable Mr. Zaslavsky calls in Pravda the 'historical process'.
The questions which our age puts to us and which remain our questions are of another order. How can one make one- self a man in, by, and for history? Is there a possible synthesis between our unique and irreducible consciousness and our relativity; that is, between a dogmatic humanism and a perspectivism? What is the relationship between morality and politics? How, considering our deeper inten- tions, are we to take up the objective consequences of our acts? We can rigorously attack these problems in the abstract by philosophical reflection. But if we want to live them, to support our thoughts by those fictive and concrete ex- periences which are what novels are, we have at our disposal the technique which I have already analysed here and whose ends are rigorously opposed to our designs. Specially per- fected to relate the events of an individual life within a stable society, it enabled the novelist to record, describe, and explain the weakening, the vections, the involutions, and the slow disorganization of a particular system in the middle of a universe at rest. But from 1940 on, we found ourselves in the midst of a cyclone. If we wished to orient ourselves in it we suddenly found ourselves at grips with a problem of a higher order of complexity, exactly as a quadratic equation is more complex than a linear. It was a matter of describing the relationship of different partial systems to the total system which contains them when both are in movement and the movements condition each other reciprocally.
In the stable world of the pre-war French novel, the author, placed at a gamma point which represented absolute rest, had fixed guide-marks at his disposal to determine the movements of his characters. But we, involved in a system in full evolution, could only know relative movements. Whereas our predecessors thought that they could keep
? 184 I What Is Literature?
themselves outside history and that they had soared to heights from which they could judge events as they really were, circumstances have plunged us into our time. But since we were in it, how could we see it as a whole? Since we were situated, the only novels we could dream of were novels o? situation, without internal narrators or all-knowing witnesses. In short, if we wished to give an account of our age, we had to make the technique of the novel shift from Newtonian mechanics to generalized relativity; we had to people our books with minds that were half lucid and half overcast, some of which we might consider with more sympathy than others, but none of which would have a privileged point of view either upon the event or upon
itself. We had to present creatures whose reality would be the tangled and contradictory tissue of each one's evalu- ations of all the other characters--himself included--and the evaluation by all the others of himself, and who could never decide from within whether the changes of their des- tinies came from their own efforts, from their own faults, or from the course of the universe.
Finally, we had to leave doubts, expectations, and the unachieved throughout our works, leaving it up to the reader to conjecture for himself by giving him the feeling, without giving him or letting him guess our feeling, that his view of the plot and the characters was merely one among many others.
But, on the other hand, as I have just pointed out, our very historicity reinstated us because from day to day we were living that absolute which it had seemed at first to take away from us. If our plans, our passions, and our acts were explicable and relative from the viewpoint of past history, they again took on in this forlornness the uncertainty and the risks of the present, their irreducible density.
We were not unaware of the fact that a time would come when historians would be able to survey from all angles this stretch of time which we lived feverishly minute by minute, when they would illuminate our past by our future and would decide upon the value of our undertakings by their
? Situation of the Writer in 1947 \ 185
outcome and upon the sincerity of our intentions by their success. But the irreversibility of our age belonged only to us. We had to save or lose ourselves gropingly in this irreversible time. These events pounced upon us like thieves and we had to do our job in the face of the incomprehensible and the untenable, to bet, to conjecture without evidence, to undertake in uncertainty and persevere without hope. Our age would be explained, but no one could keep it from having been inexplicable to us. No one could remove the bitter taste, the taste it will have had for us alone and which
will disappear with us.
The novels of our elders related the event as having taken
place in the past. Chronological order permitted the reader to see the logical and universal relationship, the eternal verities. The slightest change was already understood. A past was delivered to us which had already been thought through. Perhaps two centuries from now an author who may decide to write a historical novel about the war of 1940 mayfindthis a suitable technique. But if it occurred to us to meditate on our future writings, we were convinced that no art could really be ours if it did not restore to the event its brutal freshness, its ambiguity, its unforeseeability, if it did not restore to time its actual course, to the world its rich and
threatening opacity, and to man his long patience.
We did not want to delight our public with its superiority to a dead world--we wanted to take it by the throat. Let every character be a trap, let the reader be caught in it, and let him be tossed from one consciousness to another as from one absolute and irremediable universe to another similarly absolute; let him be uncertain of the very uncertainty of the heroes, disturbed by their disturbance, flooded with their
present, docile beneath the weight of their future, invested with their perceptions and feelings as by high insurmount- able cliffs. In short, let him feel that every one of their moods and every movement of their minds encloses all mankind and is, in its time and place, in the womb of history and, despite the perpetual juggling of the present by the future, a descent without recourse towards Evil or an ascent
? 186 I What Is Literature?
towards Good which no future will be able to contest. This is what explains the success we have accorded Kafka's works and those of the American novelists. As for Kafka, everything has been said: that he wanted to paint a picture of bureaucracy, the progress of disease, the condition of the Jews in eastern Europe, the quest for inaccessible transcendence, and the world of grace when grace is lacking. This is all true. Let me say that he wanted to describe the human condition. But what we were particularly sensitive to was that this trial perpetually in session, which ends abruptly and evilly, whose judges are unknown and out of reach, in the vain efforts of the accused to know the leaders of the prosecution, in this defence patiently assembled which turns against the defender and figures in the evidence for the prosecution, in this absurd present which the characters live with great earnestness and whose keys are elsewhere, we recognize history and ourselves in history.
We were far from Flaubert and Mauriac. There was in Kafka, at the very least, a new way of presenting destinies which were tricked and undermined at their foundation, which were lived minutely, ingeniously, and modestly, of rendering the irreducible truth of appearances and of making felt beyond them another truth which will always be denied us. One does not imitate Kafka. One does not rewrite him. One had to extract a precious encouragement from his books and look elsewhere.
As for the Americans, it was not their cruelty or pessimism which moved us. We recognized in them men who had been swamped, lost in too large a continent as we were in history and who tried, without traditions, with the means available, to render their stupor and forlornness in the midst of incomprehensible events. The success of Faulkner, Hemingway, and Dos Passos was not the effect of snobbery, or at least, not atfirst. It was the defence reflex of a literature
which, feeling itself threatened because its techniques and its myths were no longer going to allow it to cope with the historical situation, grafted foreign methods upon itself in order to be able to fulfil its function in new situations.
? Situation of the Writer in 1947 \ i8y
Thus, at the very moment that we were facing the public, circumstances forced us to break with our predecessors. They had chosen literary idealism and had presented us with events through a privileged subjectivity. For us, historical relativism, by positing the a priori equivalent of all sub- jectivities,30 restored to the living event all its value and led us back, in literature, to dogmatic realism by way of absolute subjectivism. They thought that they were justifying, at least apparently, the foolish business of storytelling by ceaselessly bringing to the reader's attention, explicitly or by allusion, the existence of an author. We hope that our books remain in the air all by themselves and that their words, instead of pointing backwards towards the one who has designed them, will be toboggans, forgotten, unnoticed, and solitary, which will hurl the reader into the midst of a
universe where there are no witnesses; in short, that our books may exist in the manner of things, of plants, of events, and not at first like products of man. We want to drive providence from our works as we have driven it from our world. We should, I believe, no longer define beauty by the form nor even by the matter, but by the density of being. 31
I have shown how Retrospective* literature denotes the taking of a position from which one surveys the whole of society and how those who choose to narrate from the viewpoint of past history seek to deny their body, their historicity, and the irreversibility of time. This leap into the eternal is the direct effect of the divorce which I have pointed out between the writer and his public. Vice versa, it will be understood without difficulty that our decision to re-integrate the absolute into history is accompanied by an effort to confirm this reconciliation of author and reader which the radicals and the rallie? s had already undertaken.
When the writer thinks that he has pathways to the eternal, he is beyond comparison. He has the benefit of an illumination which he cannot communicate to the vulgar throng which crawls beneath him. But if it has occurred to him to think that one does not escape one's class by fine
? 188 I What Is Literature?
sentiments, that there is no privileged consciousness any- where, that belles-lettres are not lettres de noblesse^ that the best way to be bowled over by one's age is to turn one's back on it or to pretend to be above it, and that one does not transcend it by running away from it but by taking hold
of it in order to change it, that is, by going beyond it towards the immediate future, then he is writing for every- body and with everybody because the problem which he is trying to solve by means of his own talents is everybody's problem. Besides, those among us who collaborated in the underground newspapers addressed themselves in their articles to the whole community. We were not prepared for this kind of thing and we turned out to be not very clever; the literature of resistance did not produce anything to get excited about. But this experience made us feel what a literature of the concrete universal might be,
In these anonymous articles we practised, in general, only pure negativity. In the face of a manifest opposition and the myth it was shaping from day to day to sustain itself, spirituality was dissent. Most of the time our job was to criticize a political action, to denounce an arbitrary measure, to warn against a man or against propaganda, and when we happened to glorify someone who had been deported or shot, it was for having had the courage to say no. Against the vague and synthetic notions which were crammed into us day and night, Europe, Race, the Jew, the anti-bolshevik crusade, we had to reawaken the old spirit of analysis which alone was capable of tearing them to pieces. Thus, our function seemed a humble echo of the one which the eighteenth-century writers had so brilliandy fulfilled. But as we could not address the oppressor, as Diderot and Voltaire
could, except by literaryfiction,be it only to have made him ashamed of his oppression, as we never had relations with him, we did not have the illusion of these authors that we were escaping our oppressed condition by practising our profession.