FRENCH LITERATURE
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to be let loose as if the simplicity itself with which they do their deeds–
deeds which, considered of themselves, are not horrendous-irritated
the collective conscience more than outright defiance.
The obstinacy of the modern novel in depicting such abnormal
creatures has been stigmatized as evidence of the profound decadence
of our literature. And, in fact, under their harmless appearance, they do
conceal a nature alarming enough. The pre-Adamic humanity to which
they belong is not the reassuring type of the "noble savage" of Rousseau.
Critics have availed themselves of their professional right as "watchdogs"
to protest against the scandalous undertaking that is represented by
such an attempt to denude man, to "scrape him clean," so to speak,
and to rediscover the nothingness which is his profound reality beneath
the ready-made clothing of the thoughts and intentions society clothes
him in. Such an effort, moreover, is all the more dangerous in that it
is undertaken in almost absent-minded fashion, and without any apparent
theoretical preconception, by means of the insidious technique of fiction.
The indignation of the critics-and occasionally of the reader--is
a defensive reaction and, as such, as legitimate as the sentence passed
on Meursault by his judges. Man will put up with anything, except
the revelation of the nullity he is and of the vanity of his basic "scheme."
While we find criminals and such Balzacian
arrivistes
as Vautrin or de
Marsay reassuring, because they are strongly positive in their nature,
Meursault and Michel are disturbing because they are literally nothing;
because they are our fellows and we too, doubtless, if we were so naively
transparent, would come to a realization of our nothingness. "Man is a
nothingness capable of God," the
my~tic,
Tauler, said; suppress God
and only the nothingness remains to constitute the human reality. It is
on this "amputation" that Bataille's two books make their disheartening
report; and in the novels of Queneau, Elsa Triolet and Albert Camus we
share in this same experience.
Every man who writes contracts a forced marriage with the language
he uses. Until recently these marriages had almost always been love
matches. Giraudoux's relation to his particular style of rhetoric was
certainly an example of this most successful kind of union. (A study of
Giraudoux might very well be entitled "Giraudoux, or Happiness Through
Language.") His death, which just took place within this last period,
now acquires a symbolic significance. With him disappeared the type
of writer happily married to his methods of expression.
Contemporary writers have an oddly monotonous style: "agony,"
"absurd," "purity" and "nothingness" always keep flowing from their
pens. "Humanity feels safer on the right note than on the ocean-going
vessel," says a character in
Intermezzo .
It is doubtless the trouble they
have in finding the right word that makes contemporary writers feel
themselves defenseless against the world. Brice-Parain tries to express
the malaise he feels toward language by employing a language that is
