RESPONSIBLE LITERATURE
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minds of many writers. They suffer from an uneasy literary con–
science, and no longer quite know whether it is laudable or grotesque
to write. Formerly, the poet thought of himself as a prophet, and that
was respectable; later, he became an accursed pariah, and that was
still endurable. But today he has fallen from the ranks of the special–
ists, and it is not without a certain uneasiness that he writes 'profes–
sion-man of letters' after his name in hotel registers. Man of letters:
the combination of words is in itself enough to discourage one from
writing: it brings to mind an Ariel, a Vestal, an
enfant terrible,
or
an inoffensive maniac comparable to an exercise fiend or a numis–
matist. All this is rather ridiculous. The man of letters writes while
others are fighting: one day he may be proud of the fact, feeling him–
self to be the recorder and guardian of ideal values; the next day he
may be ashamed, finding that literature resembles a kind of special
affectation. With the bourgeois, who read him, he is conscious of his
dignity, but when confronted with the workers, who do not read him,
he suffers from an inferiority complex, as we saw at the Maison de la
Culture in '36. This complex is certainly at the root of what Paulhan
calls
terrorisme,
and it led the Surrealists to despise the literature which
had called them into being.
After the last war a peculiar lyricism appeared; the best and
purest writers publicly confessed that which could most humiliate
them, and expressed satisfaction when they had brought on them–
selves the opprobrium of the bourgeoisie: they had produced writings
which, in their consequences, somewhat resembled action. These
isolated attempts did not prevent words from depreciating more every
day. There followed a crisis in rhetoric, then a crisis in language.
At the eve of this war, the majority of literary men were content to
be nothing but nightingales. Eventually, some writers appeared who
carried this aversion from production to the extreme: outdoing their
predecessors, they considered that they would not be doing enough
by publishing a book which was merely useless; they maintained that
the secret aim of all literature was the destruction of language, and
that to attain this end it sufficed to speak without saying anything at
all.
This inexhaustible silence was fashionable for some time, and the
Messageries Hachette distributed to railway bookstalls manuals of
Silence in the guise of voluminous novels. Today, things have come
to such a pass that there are writers who, when reviled or punished
for having hired out their talents
to-
the Germans, have been known
to register grieved astonishment. 'Why,' they say, 'is one responsible
for what one writes?'
