BOOKS
429
desire. And lest it be objected that there is no need to probe history,
provided we have a sufficiently poetic imagination, I hasten to add that
Mr. Calas is also a professed and determined materialist·marxist-monist.
He is like one of those readers of
Towards an Understanding of Karl Marx
who, only a few years ago, were intoxicated by the notion that they might
make the past come true--if only in the approved textbooks of the Com–
missariat of Education; and if we win the future what other textbooks
will there be?
The genial and patient American reader may, in all modesty, be con–
founded, but he cannot help thinking that Mr. Calas has made a tactical
mistake.- For if a work of art, like the past, means what we want it to
mean, and if successful art is a function, not of achievement, but of inten–
tion,
i.e.
of what the poet
commands,
then obviously the reader is expected
to want what the artist wants. For every sadist must there not be at least
one masochist? "When man does not know what he wants,'' says Calas,
"it's just as well that someone should want in his place. Liberty is for
those who know what they want." But what if we anti-poets maintain our
own intentions? This conspirator preaches rebellion, and yet he really
wants
us
to obey!
But it would be unfair to suggest that a large part of
Confound
the
Wise
is devoted to the study of intention. For the most part the poet for·
gets what he intended in order to study whatever comes to mind. He has
a passion for all those studies and problems and
task~
which are "imposed
upon us" by the solutions or failures of the (as recent as possible) past.
His book has seven pages of bibliographical notes; and he is constantly
reminding us that since Freud or Einstein or Whitehead, Nothing is the
Same Anymore. "In times of non·Euclidean geometry and of relativity
it is necessary to reeducate ourselves in all fields, and not only does the
quantum theory require if it is to be properly understood men of a new
mer.tality, but the Mendelian theory also ... obliges us to adopt a revolu·
tionary conception of time and space." This would seem to be obligation
enough for one small volume, but alas, "Today our knowledge of dreams
is comparable to Euclid's cognizance of geometry and one of our tasks
now shall be to discover the non-Euclidean age." Or again (Patience! said
Panurge):
"It
is one of the
tasks
of literature to describe the anxiety felt
by the loss of the image. . . . Chamisse has succeeded with his Peter
8chlemihl to make us feel the gravity of this
problem."
(my italics)
I cite these passages, not in the spirit of irritation which they engen·
dered, but simply to prepare a point I shall make about the attitude o£
Calas and the surrealists to the values-science, history, revolution-which
they are concerned to defend.
Confound
the
Wise
is frankly presented in
the "spirit of the church." It would be interesting to examine the progress
we have made between the Euclidean Nicolas (of Cusa)-who also set out
to confound the wise--and this embattled and non-Euclidean Greek. But
Calas is more closely related to another, more militant, church. "Sur·
realism," he tells us, "fights with passion and obstinacy all those who, in
