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PARTISAN REVIEW
Catholic works of music and such a novel of barrenness and of world
without grace as
L'Etranger.
(All this is evidence of an important
evolution in thought.) There is, nevertheless, a real kinship between
contemporary Existentialism and the doctrines so designated before the
war; and in their way of posing problems, there is a particular kinship
between Gabriel Marcel's philosophy and certain of Sartre's theses and
c~rtain
principles shared by Camus, Bataille and Blanchot.
It seems as though Sartre, Camus and the rest had wanted to deprive
religion of its basis, wanted to secularize it and organize a kind of anti–
clerical revivalism opposed to contemporary religious revivalism. Present–
day literature and philosophy are developing to its final consequences
that "death of God" heralded by Nietzsche. This is why literature and
philosophy are so affective and emotional today: the writer can hardly
speak with any calmness after having undergone so upsetting an ex–
perience. It is useless for him to pretend to be indifferent and to wish
to confine himself entirely to the abstract plane-metaphysical emotion
obtrudes everywhere; it rises up behind his every word as water rises
to fill footprints left in marshy ground. It colors his entire work and,
by making him stumble in the middle of the most abstruse argument,
gives
his
phrases the stammering quality that Bataille's two works have.
At the same time it is only on the most abstract consequences of
the non-existence of God that it is insisted, whence the icy character
of contemporary atheism, utterly different from the polemical and im–
passioned disbelief-so close, occasionally, to belief--of a Feuerbach.
[
The essential fact on which Sartre insists, and that which is most evident
in his work, is the absolute subjectivity of values; this is the direct con–
sequence of the fact that there is no God to guarantee them. This
proposition, which is apparently so abstract, is nevertheless enough, at
least temporarily, to reduce man to despair.
What we now have, however, is much more a literature of
disillusion
than of despair (as has been only too complacently repeated). The
explanation of this disillusion is to be sought less in contemporary events
than in literature's preceding evolution, particularly in the metaphysical
and poetic ambitions that filled the period between the two wars–
ambitions so extreme that their disappointment was inevitable. The litera–
ture of the last twenty years is obsessed by a will to "challenge" man
(to borrow a word from Jules Romains), at least as far as his knowledge
is concerned, and thereby to enable him to arrive at an extra-human
and absolute vision of things. Proust provided us with the means of
attaining to the Eternal Present and the Ultimate Truth of Being, as
much by the novelistic and stylistic structure of his work as by analysis
and interpretation of quasi-mystical experiences. Giraudoux's novels
offered us a universe cut to our measure, where man is king and his
vision truth.
A similar pride inspires what seem the most disconcerting efforts of
