No More Learning

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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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-
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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-
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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.