154
PARTISAN
REVIEW
itself uneasy. His book sounds much more like the translation of an
intuition, which is destined, therefore, to clumsiness because of its trans–
lated character, than like the direct and adequate expression of an idea.
Its value lies much more in the unquestionable authenticity of this intui–
tion and in all the fully lived experience one senses behind the words,
than in the skill with which the argument is developed. We feel that the
author is speaking because he must, not because he hopes to achieve
success.
If
he does not choose to remain silent, it is because we cannot
dispense with language. Language alone prevents us from losing our–
selves in pride or in humility, from mistaking ourselves for God. Thus
the unhappy union he had concluded with language, largely for the sake
of his thesis, transforms itself in the end into a marriage of convenience.
One perceives here the historically necessary character of this hatred
af
language, a phenomenon without precedent in a collectivity of writers
and which has developed in our literature only in the last four years.
New meanings require new methods. Writers, having voluntarily
abandoned the traditional modes of expression, are seeking by various
means to reconstitute a new rhetoric, a rhetoric of Nothingness, of the
Absurd, of existence-in-one's-situation. But here again literature only
seems
to
be
caught in a blind alley; the case has really been that a few
voluntary victims have had to go all the way in their hatred of language,
had to reach a kind of condition of "aphasia," so to speak, in the same
way as others have gone all the way in their despair at being confronted
with the meaninglessness of the world.
(Translated by Martin Greenberg)
