FRENCH LITERATURE
149
Surrealism. Surrealism has attempted by means of drugs, dreams, auto–
matic writing, the simulation of clinical delirium and by logomachy to
push back indefinitely the boundaries of thought and human imagina–
tion, to extend, at least mystically, the ascendancy of man over things.
'It wanted to transcend the human by human means.
In the work of a poet like Michaux, the publication of whose
L'Espace Dedans
has shown him in his stature at last, the smallest parti–
cularities of rhyme, syntax and moral fable reveal a stubborn will to
view the world as if man had no part in it.
Not·only is the vanity of ambitions inevitably doomed to frustration
apparent here, but also their extreme ambivalence. It is indeed strange
that man, through love of self, should wish to exclude himself fro!p
the universe, even
if
it were to rid nature of the deforming influence of
his presence. Once deceived, moreover, the wish to deify man transforms
itself by a natural dialectic into a passionate detestation of the human
condition, which suddenly seems like a prison. Humanism becomes, at
least temporarily, anti-humanism. This is a stage through which most
of today's writers seem to have passed, even those who
~now
the most
determined humanists, such as Ponge or Camus.
Michaux, in
Ecce Homo,
does not exactly engage in what one would
call the exaltation of human nature. The i'nhumanity running through
his works from beginning to end, from the tales of cannibalism in
Fables des Origines
to the exploits of the headsman and assassin, Plume,
over-balances love of mankind.
Sartre seems to have gone through a phase of passionate anti-hu–
manism whose marks are more or less apparent everywhere in his earlier
works. It is this anti-humani m that inspires those vehement pages of
La Nausee
that mock those who "love man," as if it were something
pathetic and derisory. The frequency with which the adj ectives "obscene"
and "unclean" are applied to the human hand, nose or face testifies,
if not to a hatred of the human form as firm as that expressed in certain
Surrealist paintings and sculpture (Hans Arp's works, for example), at
least a resolve to deny all metaphysical and aesthetic prerogatives to
what is human.
But the meaning of Sartre's work is seriously misjudged if judged
solely on the basis of its first examples. They had to be written in order
that Sartre, disburdened by literary creation of hatred of the human,
might rediscover an authentic humanism. Man needs years in which to
despise himself and his fate, his knowledge must
be
made to appear a
lie, his loves a mockery and his values illusory, before he can come to
self-reconciliation and the possibility of again loving himself and his
fellow men.
All this represents probably the most severe crisis undergone by the
irrepressible anthropomorphism of our species. It was produced by
causes emotional in origin-the rebuff administered to inordinate literary
