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of fiction; the attitude to which its hero is gradually brought-that
absolute existence is the only thing to be taken in earnest, while all the
specific, contingent forms of existence are but so many ludicrous or
"obscene" lies-is too general (also too arrogantly general) and at the
same time too partial to justify itself as the resolution of a novel: it
belongs at the end of a chain of reasoning rather than of a chain of
acts and emotions.
In my opinion Mlle. Magny not only exaggerates the seriousness of
the situation-in a way she actually creates that seriousness by taking
certain claims, among them those of the Existentialist writers in France,
too much at their face value. The shortcomings of Sartre's art or of
Kafka's philosophy are not enough to constitute the crisis she sees. (There
is a crisis indeed but it is a different one.) True, the German Romantics
and Rilke, George, the Surrealists and such critics as Roland de Reneville
have expounded the notion that art is a means of attaining to experience
of the absolute. But no thinkers, as distinct from artists and critics, have
ever made or taken this claim as seriously or as literally as some mem–
bers of the Parisian avant-garde now seem to think-not even Schelling.
The novelist-philosophers at whom Mlle. Magny aims her book do
not, in any case, write the way they do simply because they lay claim
to the wider province of philosophy; but rather because literature, like
all other contemporary art, is on the hunt for a set of oecumenical
be–
liefs more substantial than those with which society--or religion-now
supply it. It does no more good to tell literature to call off this hunt
than it does to exhort poetry-Roger Caillois did somewhere----to stop
striving for purity. The hunt, as well as the purity, is socially, politically,
philosophically, aesthetically-in short, historically compelled.
Mlle. Magny's failure to pose the problem correctly is owed, like
Caillois' similar failure, to neglect of the historical factor. It is this
neglect that accounts for much of what I venture to call the backward–
ness of recent French criticism. The problems of literature are never
historical in themselves, but history does determine which of them are
to
be
placed on the order of the day. And unless history is taken into
account they cannot be adequately understood.
CLEMENT GREENBERG
POET AND/OR COMMISSAR
ARAGoN: PoET
OF
THE FRENCH RESISTANCE.
Edited by Hannah Joseph-
son and Malcolm Cowley. Duell, Sloan and Pearce.
$2.00.
W
HATEVER ELSE Louis Aragon's position may have been in the
. French Resistance, this book makes it clear that he was not-as
the title would have us believe-the "poet of the French Resistance."
The poems principally represented in this collection of translations
