Ripostes
Exit Transition
To signalize its tenth anniversary,
Tran–
sition
has put out a Spring, 1938, number
of almost four hundred pages. The cover
design by Kandinsky is exceptionally pleas–
ing, the typography is readable, but after
going through the volume, I asked: tran–
siton to what? In an editorial foreword,
Eugene Jolas answers :
"Transition·
was
founded in 1927 as a more or less eclectic
organ, with the basic aim of opposing to
the then prevailing photographic natural–
ism a more imaginative concept of prose
and poetry. It was the first modern review
published in Europe or America to recog–
nize the 'malady of language'. It sought the
de-banalization of creative language by en–
couraging the phantasmatic metaphor and
the exploration of neologistic possibilities."
An admirable program- ten years ago. But
today, after a decade in transit, the
T ran–
sition
group seems no closer to either of
their two great goals: the integration into
literature of the 'night mind' and the
'revolution of the word'. It begins to appear
that they have been building a bridge out
into a great emptiness.
The only contributions in this latest–
and, I venture, last-issue of
Transition
which seemed to me of any importance were
the final instalment of Kafka's "Metamor–
phosis", a new fragment of Joyce's "Work
in Progress", and Max Brod's article on
Kafka. But a contemporary magazine can
hudly base itself on Joyce and Kafka. As
for the rest, I constantly had the feeling I
had read it all before. For ten years
Tran–
siti~
has been printing such things as
Samuel Beckett's "Ooftish", Henry Miller's
"The Cosmological
Eye",
and Barzun's
" Fragment de I'Universelle Poeme", the
last being printed horizontally on a three–
foot insert which unfolds like a road map.
By now this sort of thing has become as
routinized and formu' o- rized
a~
the con–
ventional literary style
Transition
was
founded to fight. The revolution of the
word is finding its Thermidor. The frag–
ment of Joyce presents much the same ap–
pearance (and serves much the same pu r·
74
pose) among these contributions as the
sanctified corpse of Lenin among the epi–
gones o£ the Kremlin.
Why is this? The philistine will say
that you can't keep a gag on ice for ten
years; the Dadaists at least knew enough
to shut up shop when the joke grew stale.
But for all its bombast and affection,
Tran–
sition
cannot be dismissed as a curiosity
of literature. Its attack on outworn literary
forms, its analytical study of language, its
attempt to bring the findings of psycho–
analysis into contact with literature--these
were, and still are, undertakings of the first
importance. Yet it has failed to develop
its approach beyond the experimental stage,
and the whole movement is now pretty
clearly petering out. Again one asks, why?
Mr. Jolas concludes his foreword:
"Throughout its ten y_ears of existence,
Transition
has faithfully adhered to a belief
in the primacy of the creative spirit. Nor
did it climb on the band-wagon, when a
split occured in the ranks of writers every–
where simultaneously with the world-de–
pression in 1930, but took its stand on the
side of a metaphysical, as opposed to a
materialist-economic, interpretation of life.
In 1932 it announced : 'Poetry is vertical'.
The bankruptcy of sociological literature
and art should now be fairly obvious even
to the most zealous activist of the arts."
Just what the verticality of poetry-which
I am willing to grant, for the sake of the
argument-has to do with the bankruptcy
of what Mr. Jolas calls 'sociological litera–
ture' is not clear. But it would be dis–
ingenuous to deny that such literature, if
not actually bankrupt, is at least due for
a reorganizing committee. The great hopes
of the 1929-1933 period in this country and
of the Auden-Spender-Lewis movement in
England have been deflated almost as badly
as
Transition's
program. These defeats
seem to me explicable, basically, only on
economic, social and political grounds. The
decay of
Transition
is symptomatic at once
'of the decay of bourgeois culture. even in
its most 'advanced' strata, and of the im–
possibility of maintaining an above-the.
battle attitude in a period of great social
