No More Learning

Thus do we have recourse, against the spirit of analysis,
to a synthetic conception of reality whose principle is that a whole, whatever it may be, is different in nature from the sum of its parts. For us, what men have in common is not a nature but a metaphysical condition--by which we mean the totality of constraints that limit them a priori, the necessity of being born and dying, that ofbeing finite and of existing in the world among other men. In addition, they constitute indivisible totalities whose ideas, moods, and acts are secondary, dependent structures and whose essential characteristic lies in being situated, and they differ from each other even as their situations differ in relation to each other. The unity of those signifying wholes is the meaning which they manifest. Whether writing or working on an assembly line, whether choosing a wife or a tie, a man constantly manifests . . . He manifests his professional surroundings, his family, his class, and ultimately (since he is situated in relation to the world in its entirety) the world itself. A man is the whole earth. He is everywhere present,
? Introducing Les Temps modernes | 261
everywhere active. He is responsible for all, and his destiny is played out everywhere--Paris, Potsdam, Vladivostok. We adhere to these views because to us they seem true, because to us they seem socially useful at the present time, and because to us a majority of people seem to intuit them in their thinking and indeed to call them forth. We would like our journal to contribute in a modest way to the elaboration of a synthetic anthropology. But it is not, we repeat, simply a question of effecting an advance in the domain of pure knowledge: the more distant goal we are aiming at is a liberation. Since man is a totality, it is indeed not enough to grant him the right to vote without dealing with the other factors that constitute him. He must free himself totally--that is, make himself other, by acting on his biological constitution as well as on his economic condition, on his sexual complexes as well as on the political terms of his situation.
This synthetic perspective, however, presents some grave dangers. If the individual is the result of an arbitrary selection effected by the analytic cast of mind, doesn't one run the risk, in breaking with analytic conceptions, of substituting the domination of collective consciousness for the domination of the person? The spirit of synthesis cannot be apportioned its mere share: no sooner is he glimpsed than man as a totality would be submerged by his class. Only the class exists, and it alone must be delivered. But, it will be objected, in liberating a class is one necessarily freeing the men it comprises? Not necessarily. Would the triumph of Hitler's Germany have been the triumph of every German? Where, moreover, would the synthesis stop? Tomorrow we may be told that the class is a secondary structure dependent on a larger totality which will be, say, the nation. The great attraction which Nazism exercised on certain minds of the left undoubtedly came from the fact that it pressed the totalitarian conception to the absolute. Its theoreticians also denounced the ill effects of analysis, the abstract character of democratic freedoms; its propaganda also promised to forge a new man and retained the words "revolution" and
? 262 I Introducing Les Temps modernes
"liberation. " Except that for a class-proletariat a proletariat of nations was substituted. Individuals were reduced to mere dependent functions of their class, classes to mere functions of their nation, nations to mere functions of the European continent. If, in occupied countries, the entire working class rose up against the invader, it was undoubt- edly because it felt wounded in its revolutionary aspirations, but also because it felt an invincible repugnance to allowing the individual to be dissolved in the collectivity.
Thus does the contemporary mind appear divided by an antinomy. Those who value above all the dignity of the human being, his freedom, his inalienable rights, are as a result inclined to think in accordance with the analytic cast of mind, which conceives of individuals outside their actual conditions of existence, which endows them with an un- changing, abstract nature, and which isolates them and blinds itself to their solidarity. Those who have profoundly understood that man is rooted in the collectivity and who want to affirm the importance of historical, technical, and economic factors are inclined toward the synthetic mode, which, blind to individuals, has eyes only for groups. This antinomy may be perceived, for example, in the widely held belief that socialism is diametrically opposed to individual freedom. Thus, those holding fast to the autonomy of the individual would be trapped in a capitalist liberalism whose nefarious consequences are clear; those calling for a socialist organization of the economy would be requesting it of an unspecified totalitarian authoritarianism. The current mal-
aise springs from the fact that no one can accept the extreme consequences of these principles: there is a "synthetic" component to be found in democrats of good will, and there is an "analytic" component in socialists. Recall, for instance, what the Radical Party was in France. One of its theoreti- cians wrote a book entitled The Citizen versus the Powers That Be* The title sufficiently indicates how he envisaged politics: everything would be better if the isolated citizen,
* Alain published Le Citoyen contre les pouvoirs in 1926. Translator.
? Introducing Les Temps modernes | 263
the molecular representative of human nature, controlled those he elected and, if need be, exercised his own judgment against them. But the Radicals, precisely, could not avoid acknowledging their own failure. In 1939 the great party had no will, no program, no ideology; it was sinking into the depths of opportunism, because it was intent on solving politically problems that were not amenable to a political solution. The best minds were astonished. If man was a political animal, how could it be that in granting him political freedom his fate had not been settled once and for all? How could it be that the unhampered interaction of parliamentary institutions had not succeeded in eliminating poverty, unemployment, and oppression by monopolies? How could it be that a class struggle had emerged on the far side of the fraternal competition between parties? One would not have to push things much further to perceive the limits of the analytic cast of mind. The fact that the Radicals consistently sought an alliance of leftist parties
clearly indicates the direction in which their sympathies and confused aspirations were taking them, but they lacked the intellectual technique that would have allowed them not only to solve but even to formulate the problems they intuited obscurely.
In the other camp, there is no less perplexity. The working class has made itself heir to the traditions of democracy. It is in the name of democracy that it demands its liberation. Now the democratic ideal, as we have seen, has manifested itself historically in the form of a social contract among free indi- viduals. Thus do the analytic demands of Rousseau frequently interfere in many minds with the synthetic demands of Marxism. Moreover, the worker's technical training develops his analytic propensities. Similar in that regard to the sci- entist, he would resolve the problems of matter by way of analysis. Should he turn toward human realities, he will tend, in order to understand them, to appeal to the same reasoning that has served him in his work. He thus applies to human behavior an analytic psychology related to that of the French seventeenth century.
? 264 I Introducing Les Temps modernes
The simultaneous existence of those two modes of expla- nation reveals a certain uncertainty. The perpetual recourse to the phrase "as though . . . " indicates sufficiently that Marxism does not yet have at its disposal a synthetic psychology adequate to its totalitarian conception of classes.
Insofar as we are concerned, we refuse to let ourselves be torn between thesis and antithesis. We can easily conceive that a man, although totally conditioned by his situation, can be a center of irreducible indeterminacy. The window of unpredictability that stands out within the social domain is what we call freedom, and a person is nothing other than his freedom. This freedom ought not to be envisaged as a metaphysical endowment of human "nature. " Neither is it a license to do whatever one wants, or some unspecified internal refuge that would remain to us even in our chains. One does not do whatever one wants, and yet one is responsible for what one is: such are the facts. Man, who may be explained simultaneously by so many causes, is nevertheless alone in bearing the burden of himself. In this sense, freedom might appear to be a curse; it is a curse. But it is also the sole source of human greatness. On this score, the Marxists will agree with us in spirit, if not in letter, since as far as I know they are not reluctant to issue moral condemnations. What remains is to explain it--but this is the philosophers' business, not ours. We would merely
observe that if society constitutes the individual, the individual, through a reversal analogous to the one Auguste Comte termed "the transition of subjectivity," constitutes society. Without its future, society is no more than an accumulation of raw data, but its future is nothing other than the self-projection beyond the status quo of the millions of men composing it. Man is no more than a situation; a worker is not free to think and feel like a bourgeois. But for that situation to be a man^ an integral man, it must be lived and transcended toward a specific aim. In itself, it remains a matter of indifference to the extent that a human freedom does not charge it with a specific sense. It is neither tolerable nor unbearable, insofar
? Introducing Les Temps modernes | 265
as a human freedom neither resigns itself to it nor rebels against it--that is, insofar as a man does not choose himself within it, by choosing its meaning. And it is only then, within this free choice, that the freedom becomes a deter- minant, because it is overdetermined. No, a worker cannot live like a bourgeois. In today's social organization, he is forced to undergo to the limit his condition as an employee. No escape is possible; there is no recourse against it. But a man does not exist in the same way that a tree or a pebble does: he must make himself a worker. Though he is com- pletely conditioned by his class, his salary, the nature of his work, conditioned even in his feelings and his thoughts, it is nevertheless up to him to decide on the meaning of his condition and that of his comrades. It is up to him, freely, to give the proletariat a future of constant humiliation or one of conquest and triumph, depending on whether he chooses to be resigned or a revolutionary. And this is the choice for which he is responsible. He is not at all free to choose: he is implicated, forced to wager; abstention is also a choice. But he is free to choose at the same time his
destiny, the destiny of all men, and the value to be attributed to humanity. Thus does he choose himself simultaneously as a worker and as a man, while at the same time conferring a meaning upon the proletariat. Such is man as we conceive him: integral man. Totally committed and totally free. And yet it is the free man who must be delivered, by enlarging his possibilities of choice. In certain situations there is room for only two alternatives, one of which is death. It is necessary to proceed in such a way that man, in every circumstance, can choose life.
Our journal will be devoted to defending that autonomy and the rights of the individual. We consider it to be above all an instrument of inquiry. The ideas I have just presented will serve as our guiding theme in the study of concrete contemporary problems. All of us approach the study of those problems in a common spirit, but we have no political or social program; each article will commit its author alone. We hope only to set forth, in the long run, a general line.
? 2 66 I Introducing Les Temps modernes
At the same time, we will draw from every literary genre in order to familiarize the reader with our conceptions; a poem or a novel, if inspired by them, may well create a more favorable climate for their development than a theoretical text. But that ideological content and those new intentions may also influence the very form and techniques of novelistic production; our critical essays will attempt to define in their broad lines the--new or ancient--literary techniques best suited to our designs. We will attempt to support our exam- ination of contemporary issues by publishing as often as we can historical studies, when (as in the efforts of Marc Bloch or Pirenne on the Middle Ages) they spontaneously apply those principles and the method they entail to past centuries; that is, when they forsake an arbitrary division of history into histories--whether political, economic, ideological, the history of institutions, the history of individuals--in order to attempt to restore a vanished age as a totality, one that they will consider as the age expresses itself in and through individuals and as individuals choose themselves in and through their age. Our chronicles will strive to consider our own era as a meaningful synthesis and will consequently envisage in a synthetic spirit the diverse manifestations of our contemporaneity--styles and criminal trials as well as political events and works of the mind--
always seeking to discover in them a common meaning far more than to appreciate them individually. Which is why, contrary to custom, we will no more hesitate to pass over in silence an excellent book which, from our point of view, teaches us nothing new about our era, than to linger, on the contrary, over a mediocre book which, in its very medioc- rity, may strike us as revealing. Each month we will assemble, in addition to such studies, raw documents which will be selected in as various a manner as possible, simply requiring of them that they clearly demonstrate the inter- relation of the collective and the individual. We will sup- plement those documents with polls and news reports. It strikes us, in fact, that journalism is one of the literary genres and that it can become one of the most important of
? Introducing Les Temps modernes | 267
them. The ability to grasp meanings instantly and intu- itively, and a talent for regrouping them in order to offer the reader immediately comprehensible synthetic wholes, are the qualities most crucial to a reporter; they are the ones we ask of all our collaborators. We are aware, moreover, that among the rare works of our age destined to endure are several works of journalism, such as Ten Days That Shook the World and, above all, the admirable Spanish Testament . . . * Finally, in our chronicles we will devote a good deal of space to psychiatric studies, when they are written in the perspec- tive that interests us. Our project is obviously ambitious: we cannot implement it by ourselves. At the start, we are a small crew, who will have failed if, in a year, we have not increased our numbers considerably. We appeal to all men of good will; all manuscripts will be accepted, whatever their source, provided they be inspired by preoccupations related to our own and provided they possess, in addition, literary merit. I recall, in fact, that in "committed litera- ture/' commitment must in no way lead to a forgetting of
literature, and that our concern must be to serve literature by infusing it with new blood, even as we serve the collectivity by attempting to give it the literature it deserves.
Translated by Jeffrey Mehlman
* Written respectively by John Reed and Arthur Koestler. --Translator.
? The Nationalization
of Literature
? The Nationalization of Literature
IN THOSE SPLENDID YEARS of anarchy following the Versailles Treaty, authors were ashamed of writing and critics disliked reading. In literary salons, one met few writers any more--only professionals at eroticism, crime, despair, revolt, or mystical intuition who consented, once or twice a year at the behest of their publishers, to deliver themselves of a message. Since they were not at all worried about their readers and it was agreed, in addition, that words could not express thought, many books were bought but rather little reading was done. When a chronicler, out of professional scruple, devoted a few hours to his craft, his gaze passed through the text like sunlight through a windowpane and tackled the man directly. For terrorism was the rage in those days. One pretended that authors had never written, if their works were considered, it was solely
as an assemblage of diverse bits of information about their mores. Their techniques and rhetoric were discussed as though it were a matter not of artifice and frills but of piquant and licentious details about their intimate lives. Of Giraudoux it was said not that he published Bella or Eglantine but: "He takes us with him by the hand and bids us accompany him in his pirouette; we think we're following him to Bellac, and there we are in China; he shoots at a target in Berlin, and a bird of paradise comes tumbling from the sky in Milwaukee," so great was the contempt in which the literary thing was then held.
Today, the wind has shifted: literature and rhetoric have been restored in their dignity and their powers. It is no longer a matter of lighting a fire in the brush of language, or marrying off "words on fire" and achieving the absolute through the combustion of the dictionary; it has become a matter of communicating with other men by modestly
? 272 I The Nationalization of Literature
making use of the means available. Since pride is no longer taken in separating thought from words, one cannot even conceive how words might betray thought. Sufficient pro- bity has returned for there to be no desire to be judged on some unspecified ineffability that neither words nor actions might exhaust; intentions are said to be known only through the acts that realize them and thoughts only by the words that express them. Whereupon critics have begun to read again. All would be well did one not discern in the tone they adopt in speaking of works of the mind the omen of a new fashion that is still more disquieting than the previous one. To be sure, the author is no longer looked on as a madman, a murderer, or a miracle worker--that is, as a buffoon; no occasion is missed to remind him of his greatness and his obligations. But ultimately I am unsure whether it is not better to pass for a buffoon than for a subprefect; for the respect accorded the writer is strangely reminiscent of that displayed toward charitable benefac- tresses and government agents. An official once said to me,
concerning Dullin, "He is a national treasure. " It didn't at all make me laugh: I fear that at present some subtle maneuver will be sought to transform writers and artists into national treasures. No doubt we should be happy that there is less talk of their loves and more of their works. But the talk is too deferential. Not that criticism has become more indulgent or more generous in distributing bouquets, but it situates differently the works it discusses. There was a time when simply daring to publish a book--after Racine, Fe? nelon, or Pascal--was regarded as a rare impertinence, and an author needed, at the least, all his talent in order to be pardoned for writing. Today it's quite the opposite, and new works, even before appearing, benefit from favorable prejudice. But that benevolence is not directed at the author's invariably solitary and uncertain effort to express his feelings. It stems from the fact that every new text is considered an official ceremony and, in the last analysis, a beneficial contribution to the festivities of the Fourth Republic.
? The Nationalization of Literature \ 273
It is received not as one would receive an unripe fruit that needs time to mature and to evolve its full meaning, but simultaneously as a veterans' banquet and a gala car show. The literate public has followed suit. In certain circles, one no longer says of a novel or a poem that it is beautiful or amusing or moving. One adopts a rich, concerned tone and advises, "Read it; it's very important. " Important, like an interview with a labor leader, or like a speech by Poincare? defining his monetary policy on the occasion of inaugurating a monument to the war dead. Imagine Madame de Se? vigne? writing to her daughter, "I have seen Esther; it's very important. " Are litte? rateurs about to become important?
How can one determine the importance of works that have just begun their careers? Is it not a hundred years later, through their effects and their offspring, that such impor- tance can be recognized? We can grasp here, in the act, the tactic of the critic and the refined public: they are less concerned with appreciating the value of a text than with calculating from the start its effects and its posterity. They define point-blank the literary trends it will determine, and analyze the role it will play in such and such a social movement that has not yet seen the light of day. Has Monsieur Julien Gracq published Un Beau Te? ne? breux? There go our critics talking about a ''return to Surrealism. " A return by whom? For, after all, Monsieur Gracq had never left it. Indeed, if we refer to Au Chateau d'Argol, he seems, on the contrary, to have moved quite far from his early style. But our clever readers are not at all concerned with throwing into relief the continuity of views or the slow evolution of an individual transforming himself while remaining faithful to a general line. They consider the work in itself, as though cut off from its author. In 1945, six months after the Liberation, a "surrealist demonstration" took place: this is what interests them. They proceed similarly even before the war, when upon the appearance of Saint-Saturnin they said, "An important landmark. This novel marks the return of order within literature. " What a strange sentence! For Monsieur Schlumberger, there was no separation between
? 2J4 I The Nationalization of Literature
being born and enrolling in the party of order. And as for the fomentors of disorder--the Bretons and the Cocteaus-- I am not at all aware that Saint-Saturnin had much influence on them. They may even have neglected to read it. But the critic cannot be bothered by such trifles; each year, each new publication signifies to him a departure, a return--a coming or going. Here is one of our chroniclers predicting that we will have twenty years of famine--no great works for twenty years. At the same time, another bets on prosperity: he explains quite well how tomorrow's literature has been fertilized by the sufferings of the Occupation. A third denounces the danger to French letters posed by American influence. Twenty years of American novels. But a fourth one reassures us: the publication of I forget which novel has sounded the death knell of that nefarious influ- ence. A fifth, sixth, and seventh detect literary schools in the current confusion: there is Existentialism, which ex- tends, we are told, as far as the graphic arts, since there are
known Existentialist painters and artists. And even musi- cians. It appears--my apologies for speaking of myself-- that I have something to do with all this. No, not quite, since (if we believe another critic) I am the leader of Neo-Surrealism, counting in my ranks Eluard and Picasso (of whom I ask forgiveness, having not forgotten, thank God, that I was still in short pants when they had already acquired self-mastery). And here is the last to surface, the Miserabilist school, which is so new that it has not yet, to my knowledge, acquired any representatives. There are other games.
Some critics, for example, delight in depicting the book we are waiting for. They see it as Geoffroy Rudel saw his distant princess and find such persuasive accents to speak to us of it that we see it along with them. Here then is the world in wait: already the future and oh-so-hoped-for novel takes on the dignity of a sacred ceremony. We rediscover it in our features, our hopes, and our furies. After which, all that remains is to find a volunteer to write it. We are in revolution, claims another. Consequently, our liter- ature has all the traits of a revolutionary literature. And he
? The Nationalization of Literature \ 275
enumerates them. Who could fail to understand his scorn when he subsequently observes that young writers are so frivolous that they do not bear out his prophecies? That's because they are false writers, saboteurs, maybe even Trotskyists. Another, referring last month to a very good French novel about the Polish partisan forces, wrote se- renely, "This is the novel of the Resistance. " Formerly, one would have held the future in reserve; one would have given
an opportunity to the Russians, the Belgians, the Dutch,
the Czechs, the Italians, and even the Poles, as well as to some two thousand Frenchmen who have a work in store on
the subject. The contemporary critic cannot be bothered by such inane prudence: his pleasure lies in extrapolating. After each new work he takes stock, as though that work marked
the end of history and of literature. Balance-Sheet of the Occupation, Balance-Sheet of the Year 1945, Balance-Sheet of Contemporary Theater: he adores balance sheets. In order to
produce them more conveniently, he halts careers with a stroke of his pen. Several journalists, after L'Invite? e, after Enrico, decreed that Simone de Beauvoir and Mouloudji would write nothing more. I am reminded that Monsieur Lalou was concerned to know whether La Nause? e, which was my first work, was not also my "literary testament. ,, It was a discreet invitation: an author who knows how to live draws up his literary testament at age thirty and sticks to it. The scandal with those compulsive workers who produce a book every two years is that the critics each time are obliged to call their previous judgment into question. Failing to guess with any certainty the careers of new writers, they find themselves before every beginner in the situation of that "reader" for a large publishing house who wrote, after reading a manuscript recommended to him by Pierre Bost, "Ask Pierre Bost if the author has any talent. " Talent, which means in the language of publishers: How many books does he have in him? In Mouloudji, the critics decided that there was only one. That is, they overtook the young man with blinding speed and were there waiting for him in the future, at the end of his long life. From there,
? 276 I The Nationalization of Literature
solidly entrenched in that privileged instant in which Mouloudji would breathe his last, and in which, according to ancient wisdom, it would be possible to decide whether he was happy or unhappy, foolish or wise, they looked on Enrico, the dead man's sole literary production, which no subsequent work had called into question, and rendered a definitive judgment. After that, you will say, Mouloudji wrote a second book. Agreed, but he was wrong to do so, and the critics have certainly let him know as much.
What does this mean? And what is there in common among the various comments we have just made? When a newspaper article infuriates you, it is rare for you to think of its author. Were you to think of him, your indignation would be disarmed unless he was a famous individual. But if the article seems like a task imposed on some poor bugger who wrote it at night amid the confusion of the newsroom, your anger will turn to pity. And that is because you will not consider the words that irritate you as signs traced on the sheet you have in your hands; you seem to hear them repeated by a thousand mouths, like the murmur of the wind in the reeds. Each of them is a social event, since it has passed from one person's lips to another's ears, since it has been the occasion of repeated contacts among different members of the community. And finally, the article no longer has anything in common with the nocturnal lucu- brations of an irresponsible journalist; it's an immense collective representation spreading through a hundred thou- sand heads. It's as a collective representation that it strikes you as nefarious and sacred. Today, critics and men of letters agree in considering a book as though it were the editorial of a daily newspaper. They are not concerned with what the author meant, and in truth they envisage it as though it didn't have an author. It interests them only as a slogan with which to rally an army of readers for a few days or a few months. They see in it a spontaneous production of the collective consciousness, something like an institution. In order to better account for that institution, to plot its fate and enumerate its repercussions, the critic chooses to
? The Nationalization of Literature \ 277
observe it with the eyes of his grandchildren and to expatiate on it as a literature manual might on a text a hundred and fifty years old. Only a manual, in fact, can appreciate the influence exercised by a production of the mind; it alone can explain its fortune and judge its posterity because it alone is qualified to write its history at a hundred years' distance. In
a hundred years, we will be able to decide for good if Surrealism made an offensive comeback around 1945, if L'Education europe? enne was or wasn't the book of the Resis- tance. In a hundred years we will nail down the literary trends of this postwar period; in a hundred years, well be able to give an appropriate description of the novelistic form we have been waiting for--if, indeed, we are waiting for it--by comparing the diverse degrees of success that the novels about to appear in this decade will have had. But we are in a hurry. We are in a rush to know and to pass judgment on ourselves. And that is because during the last twenty years Western consciousness has made significant
progress. Under the pressure of history we have learned that we were historical. Cartesian mathematics conditioned the various branches of knowledge and letters in the seventeenth century; in the same way, Newtonian physics conditioned them in the eighteenth century, Claude Bernard's and Lamarck's biology in the nineteenth, and history in our own. We know that the most intimate of our gestures helps constitute history, that the most subjective of our opinions helps form what the historian will call the public opinion of 1945; we know that we belong to an era that will later have a name and a physiognomy and whose broad features, principal dates, and deep meaning will be easily deciphered. We live in history like fish in water; we have an acute awareness of our historical responsibility. Were we not told in San Francisco that the fate of civilization would be determined in the coming years? Didn't Hitler repeat that the war he had just lost would fix human destiny for a thousand years? But the more exquisite our historical awareness, the more we are irritated at floundering in the dark, at being subject to a jurisdiction that we will never
? 278 I The Nationalization of Literature
know, at sensing that we are caught in a Kafkaesque trial whose outcome will elude us and which will perhaps never end. Is it not offensive that the secret of our era and the exact appreciation of our errors belong to individuals who have not yet been born and to whom our children and grandchildren will still be giving spankings long after we have died? We would like to snatch the rug from under the feet of those snot-noses and establish immediately and forever what they should think of us. If we could turn back toward ourselves and sift out the historical import of our deeds at the same time we accomplish them, it seems to us that we would close the circle and offer our nephews so complete and so pertinent an appreciation of our era that they could do nothing but concur. Thus it is that we spend our time circumscribing, classifying, and labeling the events we are living, writing for posterity a history manual of the twentieth century. There was much laughter at the moment in that melodrama when the author has his soldiers from Bouvines say, "We knights of the Hundreds Years' War. " Which is fine, but in that case we should be laughing at ourselves: our youth were calling themselves the "in- terwar generation" four years before the Munich Pact. They should be laughed at even though events proved them right,
for they had chosen to speak to themselves as if they were their own grandchildren. Which is yet another way of conferring importance on that odious ego we were taught to conceal: one always respects one's grandfather. We should imbue ourselves, on the contrary, with this austere truth: from whatever heights we pretend to judge ourselves, a future historian will judge us from an even greater height; the mountain on which we believe we have built our eagle's nest will be but a molehill for him. The verdict we have delivered concerning our era will figure as only part of the evidence of our case. In vain would we attempt to be our own historians: the historian himself is a historical creature. We are obliged to be satisfied with forging our history blindly, one day at a time, choosing from all the options the one which seems best to us at present. But we can never
? The Nationalization of Literature \ 279
hold, concerning history, those cavalier views that helped make the fortunes of Taine and Michelet. We are inside. The same can be said of the critic. In vain does he envy the historian of ideas. Hazard can speak of the intellectual crisis of 1715, but we cannot at all pretend to treat the "crisis of the novel in 1945. " Do we even know whether or not the novel is in crisis? We can clearly discern what each author or school intends to do, and we can also judge whether in their works they remain faithful to their purpose. We can sift out certain secret aims, certain hidden intentions. But we cannot discover the figure the work will cut for the readers of tomorrow; we cannot consider it already as an acquisition of the objective spirit of the era. Its objective physiognomy is still veiled for us, for it is nothing
other than the aspect it will take on in the eyes of others. We cannot be simultaneously inside and outside. In treating the productions of the mind with the kind of respect formerly reserved only for the distinguished dead, one runs the risk of killing them. There is not a single petty novelist who is not discussed in tones Lanson used for Racine and Be? dier for La Chanson de Roland. Some may feel flattered by this, but not without a measure of resentment, for it is ultimately not very agreeable to be treated during one's lifetime as a public monument. We should be cautious. This literary year, which is not particularly distinguished for the quality of its works, is already studded with monuments; it's like the Appian Way. We have to relearn modesty and reacquire a taste for taking risks. Since we cannot step out of subjectivity--not individual subjectivity, but that of the era--the critic ought to renounce passing judgment with complete assurance and share the uncertainty of authors. After all, a novel is not first and foremost an application of the American technique, or an illustration of Heidegger's theories, or a Surrealist manifesto. Neither is it
an evil action, or an event heavy with international conse- quences. It is the precarious undertaking of a single man. To read as would a contemporary of the author's, caught up in the same historical subjectivity, is to share the risks of the
? 280 I The Nationalization of Literature
undertaking. The book is new, unknown, without impor- tance; it must be entered without a guide. Perhaps we will let the rarest qualities pass without noticing them. Perhaps, on the contrary, a superficial brilliance will lead us astray. Perhaps we will find, negligently cast at the bottom of a page, one of those ideas that suddenly cause the heart to beat faster, as happened to Daniel de Fontanin when he encoun- tered Les Nourritures terrestres. And then, after all, one has to wager. Is the book good? Is it bad? Let us bet; it's all we can do. Out of fear, out of a taste for social consecration, today's critic reads the way one rereads. If I were in his place I would fear that the pe? trification caused by his Medusa's eye might be an omen of the death of Art foreseen by Hegel.
But why, it may be asked, does he proceed in this manner? Why is the critic, who affected twenty years ago to grasp the most idiosyncratic virtues of an author through a quasi-Bergsonian act of intuition, solely preoccupied at present with collecting the social resonances of a work? It's because the author himself has been socialized. He no longer appears to the world's gaze like the white blackbird he used to be; he now serves as an ambassador. Formerly, a new writer felt superfluous on earth: he was not awaited. The public never awaits anything. Or rather, yes, it awaits the next book by the novelist it already knows, whose style and way of viewing things it has assimilated. But between the problems of any particular era and the random or traditional solutions they are given, for better or worse, a certain balance is invariably reached, and any newcomer arrives on the scene as an intruder. No one was waiting for Freud; the psychology of Ribot and Wundt sufficed as best it could to explain everything except one or two little rebellious points, which people hoped would soon be absorbed into the reigning order. No one was waiting for Einstein; it was thought that the Michelson-Morley experiment could be interpreted without abandoning Newton's physics. No one was waiting for Proust or Claudel; Maupassant, Bourget,
and Leconte de Lisle sufficed to ravish sensitive souls. Today ideas or styles are not awaited any more than previously, but
? The Nationalization of Literature \ 281
one waits for men. One goes to search out the author at home; he is solicited. With his first book, people say to themselves, "Well, now! This could be our man. " With his second, they're sure of it. With his third, he is already reigning: he presides over committees, writes for political newspapers, is already thought of as a candidate for the Chamber or the Academy. What is essential is that he be consecrated as quickly as possible. We already have a habit of publishing a writer's posthumous works during his lifetime; before long we may be casting his statue before he is dead. This is, in the strict sense of the term, literary inflation. In periods of calm, there is a normal and constant gap between fiduciary circulation and the gold which covers it, between an author's reputation and the works he has produced. When the gap grows, there is inflation. At present it has grown to an extreme. It is as though France had a desperate need for great men.
Such a need is first of all a function of the difficulties of maintaining our cultural continuity. Normally, this is ensured by the continual infiltration into the oldest strata of elements from the younger generations. As a result, changes are not particularly perceptible, and the old, who tend to hold on to their privileges, put a more than sufficient damper on the ardor of the newcomers. After 1918 the balance was broken to the benefit of the elders: the young stayed on at Verdun, and the Marne and the Yser. Nowadays, the inverse tends to occur. To be sure, France has lost many young men. But the defeat and the Occupation hastened the liquidation of the earlier generations. Many an old star strayed off course; others sought refuge abroad and were quite willingly forgotten; still others elected to die. A poet, who was nevertheless quite famous, observed sadly one day after seeing the-- incomplete--list of collaborationist writers, "Our glory does not weigh much when compared with theirs. " Traitors or suspects: Montherlant, Ce? line, Chardonne, Drieu, Fernandez, Abel Hermant, Andre? The? rive, Henri Bordeaux. Forgotten: Maurois, Romains, Bernanos (who
? 282 I The Nationalization of Literature
are presently doing whatever they can to recommend themselves to our memories). Dead: Romain Rolland and Giraudoux. When Maritain returned to New York after a brief trip to France, he was asked of his impression of the Fourth Republic. He replied, "France lacks men. " By which he meant, it goes without saying, "She lacks men of my age. " But it is no less true that this sudden slaughter of the deans has left enormous voids. We are at present making hasty efforts to fill them up, just as in certain countries, when a new party seizes power, it usually outlaws half the senate and creates as an emergency measure a new crop of senators to fill the gaps. Peerdom or the field marshal's baton has thus been conferred on writers
who, in normal times, would still have a long time to wait for such honors. There is nothing in this that deserves blame. Quite the contrary: when, during the Occupation, the public, disconcerted by the disloyalty of several great writers, turned toward men who were younger and more sure, gave them its trust, and in the process, in order to counterbalance the weight of the traitors, conferred on the newcomers a glory they did not yet deserve on the basis of their works, there were, in that surge of feeling, a moving greatness and energy. I know some who have been elevated--not morally, as might be expected, but literarily--by their silence. That is proper; the duty of the man of letters is not only to write but also to know how to keep silent when he should. But now that the war is over, it's dangerous to fish for great men on the basis of the same
principles. With collaborationist authors temporarily forced into retirement, there is not a single writer practicing today who did not cooperate directly or indirectly with one resistance movement or another; at the very least he had a cousin in the underground. As a result, in literary circles, writing and having resisted are now synonymous. No author offers up his new book bare as a newborn babe: new works come with a halo of courage. A rather singular form of fraternity has resulted. "How could I," the critic wonders, "a member of the Resistance, tell
? The Nationalization of Literature \ 283
this former Re? sister that I don't find his last book on the Resistance any good? " He tells him so nevertheless, because he's honest; but he implies that the book, although unsuccessful, contains a rarer and more exquisite quality than it would have had it succeeded--something like the fragrance of virtue. The slightest bit more pressure and that inevitable confusion between a soul's value and talent accrues to the benefit of politics. And why stop midway? Why should he who in all purity has chosen to love such and such a novelist because he resisted the enemy not choose to love some other one who is his comrade in the same party? Occasionally, judgments will interfere with each other: this bourgeois, Catholic writer should have no talent in the eyes of the leftist critic; and yet, yes, indeed he has, since he was in the Resistance. The critic will extricate himself by assigning proportions. A quivering cordiality reigns in the world of letters. Which is why I won't accuse those who compensate works on account of their political meaning--rather than the real value of their content--of cowardice. We are all more or less at this juncture now and I am not sure that those who protest the most against this state of affairs are not themselves also inspired by political motives. An author thus selected, and
promoted (occasionally in spite of himself) to the first rank, represents the underground or the prisoners of war, the Communist Party or the Christian-Democrats, everyone except himself. And how is one to know whether his prestige accrues to him from his years of exile, prison, deportation, clandestine activity, or, quite bluntly, from his talent? On that basis, to be sure, the parties consume great men at a frightening rate. In 1939 the Communist Party won Paul Nizan the Prix Interallie? ; he was the great favorite, the challenger to Aragon. He left the Party at the time of the German-Soviet Pact. He was wrong, I'm willing to admit; moreover, that doesn't concern me here. But consider: first of all he died in combat, and then he was a writer of the first rank. Today there is silence around his name; those who speak of our losses mention Pre? vost
? 284 I The Nationalization of Literature
and Decour, never Nizan. Need we conclude that if Aragon left the Party (an absurd hypothesis, I realize), after having been Be? ranger, he would abruptly fall to the level of De? roule`de?
The entire public is an accomplice. We have just discovered to our humiliation that France will no longer play in tomorrow's world the role it played in yesterday's. In point of fact, no one is guilty: our country didn't have enough men; our subsoil was not sufficiently rich. The slippage of France, accompanied moreover by that of Western Europe, is the result of a long evolution. Had we perceived it gradually, there is no doubt that we would have adapted to it with courage; the role we are given to play remains quite fine. But the truth was revealed to us in a moment of disaster. Until 1939 our previous victory-- which had only precipitated things by decimating our population--and the brilliance of our intellectual and artistic life had papered over our actual importance. We have trouble tolerating so brutal a revelation; the shame of losing the battle of 1940 and the pain of giving up our hegemony over Europe fuse in our hearts. At times we are tempted to believe that we buried our country with our own hands; at others, we raise our heads and affirm that eternal France will never perish. In other words, in five years we have acquired a formidable inferiority complex.