152
PARTISAN REVIEW
parison with which those of moral consciousness which have been so
much exploited-are as nothing.
Camus looks sane, healthy and almost simple next to Blanchot. One
has the impression that Camus will never return to the absurd again,
having said everything he was able to say about it in his novel and his
essay. Recognition of the absurd has only been a point of departure for
him, even if an indispensable one; having exposed himself "to the
world's tender indifference," as his hero says, and got rid of God, thanks
to his pitiless verification of the fact of universal incoherence, he will
be in a position to rediscover man. Camus plays a role in literature
similar to that of Holophernes in Giraudoux's
Judith-the
atheist whose
efforts will make a godless world shine more brightly, add fresh luster
to earthly things, once they express a reality entirely their own, and make
men's affection warmer for the condemned ones of this earth.
By a curious coincidence the two or three remarkable novels that
have appeared in these last few years offer heroes of a similar type. In
Pierrot Mon Ami
by Raymond Queneau (but already in
Un Rude
Hiver)
and in
Le Cheval Blanc
by Elsa Triolet, the foreground is
occupied by characters who are apparently non-entities. Pierrot, Leha–
meau and Michel have no proper reality or irmer life. We come to under–
stand them by means of a description made essentially from the outside
(although their method is less implacably strict than the one Camus
uses). Such a description strips these personages of all the pretenses
by which the traditional psychology
of
the novel attempted to invest
its characters with the appearance of subjective reality. Like Meursault
in Camus'
L'Etranger,
they live an apparently pointless life, as if indif–
ferent to everything that concerned them. Things happen that make no
impression on them because they themselves are nothing. They never
know whether it is love or despair that they are in, not to speak of
ever engaging in reflection or making any effort to think of themselves
in social terms according to "accepted ideas." The sole reality to which
they occasionally attain is a mythic one. The same is true of Pierre
Kougard in Queneau's two satirical and poetical
works-Gueule de
Pierre
and
Les Temps Metes;
and it is also true for Michel, whose entire
inner being is made up of a heroic revery on comic strip [
imagerie
d'Epinal]
about a white horse (hence the novel's name).
As in the case of Queneau's hero, all these characters really ought
to be called Pierrot, the most appropriate name for this simple-minded
kind of person. They all possess the same strange innocence. They are
not beyond good and evil-at least as society so defines them-but by a
curious paradox, and in spite of their complete lack of aggressiveness,
they have had the same effect on orthodox criticism as Meursault had on
his judges. They have been called abnormal, unnatural and unfeeling
beings who would be considered intolerable if they were not, happily,
psychologically impossible. They have caused such a flood of indignation
