ISO
PARTISAN REVIEW
and philosophical ambitions and, more generally, to inflated conceptions
of the powers of man-and at the same time intellectual: the recognition
of the insecurity of values, which constituted a philosophical calamity
compared to which the eighteenth century's discovery of the plurality
of worlds and the nineteenth century's discovery of the origin of species
amounted to very little. Kantianism has expended more than a century
in developing its metaphysicial consequences to their limit; the remark–
able distance this development has gone must be recognized.
The fantasy of Henri Michaux, although of a different nature,
makes clear a similar intention to devaluate the world and humanity.
In the
Voyage en Grande Garabagne
and
Au Pays de la Magie,
he seeks
above all to outline a world in which everything is clear, even trans–
parent, where neither things nor men have any "underside" or mystery,
a world which nevertheless has no meaning for us, a universe whose
finality is infinite, or at least beyond our reach.
[
He must escape this fate (in order to know it objectively) and at
the same time must remain involved in it (in order to have direct
experience of it and because, moreover, it is something he cannot
in any case evade). We are therefore far from that easy dogmatism by
which Surrealism hoped to make over man and make him surpass him-
self. The writer was led, however, into these metaphysical blind alleys–
which the work of literature itself portrays without abolishing-by am–
bitions similar to those of the Surrealists.
It is not surprising that literature is despaired of at the same time
that it is immoderately exalted, in a situation so destitute of hope as
ours in which it is the only outcry that is still possible.
2
The works of Albert Camus best reveal the reasons for the peculiar
ambiguity of form that characterizes the literature of these years.
If
so
many writers oscillate between the abstract essay and the novel, sometimes
seeking to unite the two--as with Bataille-at other times keeping them
rigorously separated-as with Camus-it is because the truth they have
in common can be adequately expressed in neither one foTm nor the
other. Gabriel Marcel, before the war, had already put together in one
volume a play,
Le Monde Casse,
and an essay dealing with the onto–
logical mystery, wherein the principal themes of the play are transposed
and justified. The dual character of his work is governed by the same
reasons as Camus'.
[
.
Camus' fundamental attitude, and at the same time that which
makes his book truly existential, is his fixed determination
to
accept as
an incontrovertible fact the contra_diction that constitutes the basis of
existence: he takes the fate of man as his point of departure and recon–
ciles himself to it instead of striving to escape from it, as the religions
