LITERATURE AND SOCIETY
37
The point I would make is, it is not by prolonging, but by opposing
this past culture that literature, culture and civilization may go on devel–
oping and expanding. The author of the article I have just quoted takes
me to task, and would make of me an enemy of culture, for the reason
that I am an apostle of sincerity. Our quarrel, however, is not with culture
itself, but with its artificial and conventional aspects; and I say, the
enemies of culture are those who serve as apologists for mendacity and–
for it all goes back to that-for the lying social system under which we
live.
"Between civilization and sincerity, a choice must be made," the
author of the article in question concludes. Once again, no
I
I cannot
admit that civilization is in essence insincere (and we know only too well
what that means), or, if you choose to put it that way, that man can only
become civilized through a process of lying. The concept of sincerity is,
as I see it, an extremely important one; for it is one that I refuse to limit
to the individual. I say that society itself is insincere, when it sets out to
stifle the voice of the people, to take away from the people the opportunity
and even the possibility of making themselves heard, when it keeps the
people in such a state of subjection and degraded ignorance that they no
longer so much as know what it is they would say to us, which culture
would so greatly benefit from hearing.
At the beginning of my literary life, I took my stand against the
nationalists of yesterday, when they declared that "Man has said everything
that he has to say; all that he can do it to go on repeating himself."
I~
it not, I ask you, a remarkable thing that, two centuries after La Bruyere,
who held that "We have come upon the scene too late,"-is it not a re–
markable thing that we today are able to look about us and behold a
valiant, young and fresh humanity, as it faces a future that is filled at once
with danger and with promise?
But let me retrace my steps a little. Inasmuch as literature signifies
communion, the question arises, With whom is it that the practitioner of
literature holds communion? In certain literatures, and especially in the
French, a strange phenomenon sometimes occurs, and we have a first-rate
writer who, during his lifetime, finds absolutely no audience. Are
w~
to
say, then, that he is writing for himself alone? No. That commuP.:on
which he is unable to achieve at once and in the realm of space, he hopes
to attain in the realm of time; his audience lies scattered in the future.
The result is that at first he remains a weird and esoteric figure, and
his qualities, his strength go unperceived by others. I am thinking of
Baudelaire, of Rimbaud, and of Stendhal, as well, who asserted that he
wrote for the few, and that his real readers were not yet born. This was
