No More Learning

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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
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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
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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,
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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. The attitude of the world's masters is in no way disposed to cure us of it. We recall our past greatness, and we are told that it is, precisely, past. On only one score have we surprised foreigners: they have never stopped admiring the
vitality of our literature. "How can it be? " they ask. "You were beaten, occupied, ruined, yet you've written so much! " That admiration is easy enough to explain: if the English and the Americans have produced few new works, it's because they were mobilized, and their writers dispersed to the four corners of the globe. We, on the contrary, though persecuted, hunted, and in many cases threatened with death, at least were in France, in our homes; our writers could write, if not in broad daylight, at
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least in hiding. And then Anglo-Saxon intellectuals, who form a caste apart, cut off from the rest of the nation, are always dazzled upon rediscovering in France men of letters and artists who are intimately involved in the life and affairs of the country. Finally, many of them share the opinion recently expressed to me by an English lady. "The French,,, she said, "are suffering in their pride. They have to be persuaded that they have friends in the world, and thus for the time being one should speak to them only about what one admires in them--for example, their literature. " As a result of that admiration, which is both spontaneous and accommodatingly displayed, the United States, England, and twenty other countries are showing a profound interest in our writers. Our novelists and poets have never received so many invitations--to be seen, to be heard, and also to be fed. Switzerland has fattened up a few, as has America. Great Britain will do its best. At
which point we too are beginning to take our literature seriously. Those who previously saw in it no more than a pastime for the idle or a guilty activity have now come to realize that it is an instrument of propaganda. People cling to its prestige, since it is recognized abroad. Many would prefer that we be admired for our industrial might or the number of our guns. But we are so in need of esteem that they make do in the end with an admiration of our literature. They have not stopped wishing in their hearts that France might again become the country of Turenne and Bonaparte, but in the meantime they fall back on Rimbaud or Vale? ry. In their eyes, literature becomes a surrogate activity. It was permissible to treat the writer as accursed so long as the factories were working and the generals had soldiers obeying them. Today they hastily gather up young authors and shove them into an incubator in order to transform them rapidly into great men to be sent on missions to London, Stockholm, or Washington.
Never has literature been threatened by a graver danger: formal and informal powers that be, the government, newspapers, perhaps even the central banks and heavy
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industry have just discovered its might and are about to turn it to their profit. If they succeed, the writer will be able to choose--to devote himself to electoral propaganda or to enter into a special section of the Ministry of Information. Critics are concerned no longer with appreciating his works but with calculating their national importance and effectiveness; as soon as they learn how to manipulate statistics, their discipline will progress rapidly. The author, henceforth a functionary and overcome with honors, will be discreetly eclipsed by his work. At the very most, mention will be made of "Malraux's" or "ChamsonY' novel the way one speaks of Fowler's liquor or Ohm's law: as a mnemic device. On the outskirts of large cities are factories whose job is to retrieve trash; old rags burn well, provided the temperature is sufficiently high. Expanding that effort, society wants to retrieve materials for which until now it has scarcely had any use: its writers. We should be careful: among them are some rather superb
specimens of trash. What would we gain by allowing them to go up in smoke? That is not our understanding of literary commitment. There is no doubt that the written work is a social fact, and the writer before ever taking up his pen should be deeply convinced of it. He should, in fact, imbue himself with his responsibility. He is responsible for everything: lost or victorious wars, rebellions and repressions. He is the accomplice of the oppressors if he is not the natural ally of the oppressed. But not simply because he is a writer: because he is a man. He should live and desire that responsibility (and, for him, living and writing ought to be the same thing--not because art redeems life, but because life expresses itself in one's undertakings and his is to write). But he should not look back and consider his activity in order to discern what it will mean to his nephews. For him it is a matter not of knowing whether he will orient a literary movement, an "ism," but of committing himself in the present; not of foreseeing a distant future from which he would be able to
pass judgment on himself after the fact, but of desiring,
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one day at a time, the immediate future. The historian may determine that the armistice of 1940 allowed the war to be won. He may say that Germany never would have attacked the Soviet Union--which was the beginning of its defeat--if the English had already entrenched themselves by 1940 in Algiers and Bizerte. Perhaps. But these considerations could not intervene in 1940: no one could predict the German-Russian conflict in the short term, and consequently, given the actual information at our disposition, // was imperative to continue the war. In this the writer is no different from the statesman: he knows little, and he is obliged to decide on the basis of what he knows. The rest--that is, the fate of his work throughout the centuries--is the devil's part. And one ought not to play with the devil. Let us acknowledge that there is an aspect of our books that will escape us forever. Love, a career, a revolution--we begin so many undertakings in ignorance
of their outcome. Why should the writer elude the common fate? Thus it is that he ought to accept running the risk, losing himself. He is told on all sides that he was awaited. Let him know unequivocally that it's not ture. People were awating an ambassador of French thought, not a man struggling to express in words a new thought. His current notoriety is based on a misunderstanding. A great man is always awaited, because it is flattering for a nation to have produced him. But a great thought is never awaited, because it offends. Let him then accept industry's motto: create needs in order to satisfy them. Let him create the need for justice, freedom, and solidarity, and strain to satisfy these needs with his susbsequent works. Let us hope that he will be able to shake off the numerous tributes raining down on him and rediscover within himself the strength to scandalize; let him blaze paths rather than embark on national highways, even if he is furnished with a racing car. I have never believed that good literature can be made with bad sentiments. But I think that the right sentiments are never given in advance; every man has to invent them in turn. Perhaps criticism might help save
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literature if it concerned itself with understanding works rather than consecrating them. In any event, we in this forum are firmly committed to literary deflation. W e probably won't make many friends. But literature is falling asleep. The right passion--even anger--will have the good fortune perhaps to awaken it.
Translated by Jeffrey Meblman
? Black Orpheus
? Black Orpheus
wHEN YOU REMOVED the gag that was keeping these black mouths shut, what were you hoping for? That they would sing your praises? Did you think that when they raised themselves up again, you would
read adoration in the eyes of these heads that our fathers had forced to bend down to the very ground? Here are black men standing, looking at us, and I hope that you--like me-- will feel the shock of being seen. For three thousand years, the white man has enjoyed the privilege of seeing without being seen; he was only a look--the light from his eyes drew each thing out of the shadow of its birth; the whiteness of his skin was another look, condensed light. The white man--white because he was man, white like daylight, white like truth, white like virtue--lighted up the creation like a torch and unveiled the secret white essence of beings. Today, these black men are looking at us, and our gaze comes back to our own eyes; in their turn, black torches light up the world and our white heads are no more than Chinese lanterns swinging in the wind. A black poet-- unconcerned with us--whispers to the woman he loves:
Naked woman, black woman
Dressed in your color which is life . . .
Naked woman, dark woman,
Firmfleshedripe fruit, somber ecstasies of black wine
and our whiteness seems to us to be a strange livid varnish that keeps our skin from breathing--white tights, worn out at the elbows and knees, under which we would find real human flesh the color of black wine if we could remove them. We think we are essential to the world--suns of its harvests, moons of its tides; we are no more than its fauna, beasts. Not even beasts:
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These gentlemen from the city
These proper gentlemen
Who no longer know how to dance in the evening by moonlight Who no longer know how to walk on the flesh of their feet Who no longer know how to tell tales by thefireside. . .
Formerly Europeans with divine right, we were already feeling our dignity beginning to crumble under American or Soviet looks; Europe was already no more than a geographic accident, the peninsula that Asia shoves into the Atlantic. We were hoping at least to find a bit of our greatness reflected in the domesticated eyes of the Africans. But there are no more domesticated eyes: there are wild and free looks that judge our world.
Here is a black man wandering:
to the end of
the eternity of their endless boulevards with cops . . .
Here is another one shouting to his brothers:
Alas! Alas! Spidery Europe is moving itsfingersand its phalanxes of ships . . .
Here is:
the cunning silence of Europe's night . . .
in which
. . . there is nothing that time does not dishonor.
A Negro writes:
At times, we will haunt Montparnasse and Paris, Europe and its endless torments, like memories or like malaises . . .
and suddenly France seems exotic in our own eyes. She is no more than a memory, a malaise, a white mist at the bottom of sunlit souls, a back-country unfit to live in; she has drifted toward the North, she is anchored near Kamchatka: the essential thing is the sun, the sun of the tropics and the
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sea "lousy with islands" and the roses of Imangue and the lilies of Iarive and the volcanos of Martinique. Being [l'Etre] is black, Being is made of fire, we are accidental and far away, we have to justify our mores, our technics, our undercooked paleness of our verdigris vegetation. We are eaten away to the bones by these quiet and corrosive looks:
Listen to the white world
horribly weary of its immense effort
its rebel articulations crackling under hard stars,
its steel-blue stiffnesses piercing mystical flesh
listen to its exhibitionist victories trumpeting its defeats listen to its wretched staggering with grandiose alibis Have pity on our nai? ve omniscient conquerors.
There we are,finished;our victories--their bellies sticking up in the air--show their guts, our secret defeat. If we want to crack open this finitude which imprisons us, we can no longer rely on the privileges of our race, of our color, of our technics: we will not be able to become a part of the totality from which those black eyes exile us, unless we tear off our white tights in order to try simply to be men.
If these poems shame us, however, they were not intended to: they were not written for us; and they will not shame any colonists or their accomplices who open this book, for these latter will think they are reading letters over someone's shoulder, letters not meant for them. These black men are addressing themselves to black men about black men; their poetry is neither satiric nor imprecatory: it is an awakening to consciousness. "So," you will say, "in what way does it interest us, if it is only a document? We cannot enter into it. " I should like to show in what way we can gain access to this world of jet; I should like to show that this poetry--which seems racial at first--is actually a hymn by everyone for everyone. In a word, I am talking now to white men, and I should like to explain to them what black men already know: why it is necessarily through a poetic experience that the black man, in his present condition, must first become conscious of himself; and, inversely, why black poetry in the
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French langauge is, in our time, the only great revolutionary
poetry.
It is not just by accident that the white proletariat rarely uses poetic language to speak about its sufferings, its anger, or its pride in itself; neither do I think that workers are less gifted than our bourgeois sons: "talent"--the efficacious grace--loses all meaning when one claims that it is more widespread in one class than in another. Nor is it hard work that takes away their capacity for song: slaves used to drudge even harder and yet we know of slave hymns. It must therefore be recognized that it is the present circumstances of the class struggle that keep the worker from expressing himself poetically. Oppressed by technics, he wants to be a technician because he knows that technics will be the instrument of his liberation; he knows that it is only by
gaining professional, economic, and scientific know-how that he will be able someday to control business manage- ment. He now has a profound practical knowledge of what poets have called Nature, but it is a knowledge he has gained more through his hands than through his eyes: Nature is Matter for him--that crafty, inert adversity that he works on with his tools; Matter has no song. At the same time, the present phase of his struggle requires of him continual, positive action: political calculation, precise forecasting, discipline, organization of the masses; to dream, at this point, would be to betray. Rationalism, materialism, positivism--the great themes of his daily battle--are least propitious for the spontaneous creation of poetic myths. The last of these myths--the famous ''Upheaval*'--has with- drawn under the circumstances of the struggle: one must take up the matter that is most urgent, gain this and that position, raise this salary, decide on that sympathy strike or on some protest against the war in Indochina: efficiency alone matters. And, without a doubt, the oppressed class must first find itself. This self-discovery, however, is the
exact opposite of a subjective examination of oneself: rather, it is a question of recognizing--in and by action--the
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objective situation of the proletariat, which can be deter- mined by the circumstances of production or of redistribu- tion of property. Unified by an oppression which is exerted on each and every one, and reduced to a common struggle, workers are hardly acquainted with the inner contradictions that fecundate the work of art and that are harmful to the praxis. As far as they are concerned, to know themselves is to situate themselves within the context of the great forces that surround them; it requires them to determine both their exact position in their class and their function in the Party. The very language they use is free from the slight loosening of the screws, the constant frivolous impropriety, the game of transmissions which create the poetic Word. In their business, they use well-defined technical terms; and as for the langauge of revolutionary parties, Parain has shown that it is pragmatic: it is used to transmit orders, watch- words, information; if it loses its exactness, the Party falls apart. All of this tends more and more rigorously to
eliminate the subject; poetry, however, must in some way remain subjective. The proletariat has not found a poetry that is sociological and yet finds its source in subjectivity, that is just as subjective as it is sociological, that is based on ambiguous or uncertain language, and that is nevertheless as exalting and as generally understood as the most precise watchwords or as the phrase "Workers of all countries, unite" which one reads on doors in Soviet Russia. Lacking this, the poetry of the future revolution has remained in the hands of well-intentioned young bourgeois who found their inspiration in their personal psychological contradictions, in the dichotomy between their ideal and their class, in the uncertainty of the old bourgeois language.
Like the white worker, the Negro is a victim of the capitalist structure of our society. This situation reveals to him his close ties--quite apart from the color of his skin-- with certain classes of Europeans who, like him, are opposed; it incites him to imagine a privilege-less society in which skin pigmentation will be considered a mere fluke. But even though oppression itself may be a mere
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fluke, the circumstances under which it exists vary according to history and geographic conditions: the black man is a victim of it because he is a black man and insofar as he is a colonized native or a deported African. And since he is oppressed within the confines of his race and because of it, he must first of all become conscious of his race. He must oblige those who have vainly tried throughout the centuries to reduce him to the status of a beast, to recognize that he is a man. On this point, there is no means of evasion, or of trickery, no "crossing line" that he can consider: a Jew--a white man among white men--can deny that he is a Jew, can declare himself a man among men. The Negro cannot deny that he is Negro, nor can he claim that he is part of some abstract colorless humanity: he is black.