MYTH OF SIS Y PHUS
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so much abundance the daily passage from hope to distress and from
desperate wisdom to voluntary blindness. His work is universal (a
truly absurd work is not universal ) , in proportion as it represents the
touching face of man fleeing humanity, extracting from his contra–
dictions reasons to believe, reasons to hope from his fecund despair,
and giving the name of life to his terrifying apprenticeship to death.
It
is
universal because its inspiration is religious.
As
in
all
religions,
man is delivered here from the weight of his own life. But if I know
that, if I can also admire it, I also know that I am not seeking what
is universal but what
is
true.
It
is possible that the two do not coincide.
This point of view will be better understood if I say that really
disheartening thought is defined by opposite criteria, and that the
tragic work could be that which, with all future hope exiled, describes
the life of a happy man. The more exalting life is, the more absurd
is the idea of losing it. Here, perhaps, is the secret of that superb
aridity that one breathes in the work of Nietzsche. Within this order
of ideas, Nietzsche appears to be the only artist who has drawn the
extreme consequences of an aesthetic of the Absurd, since his final
message resides in a sterile and conquering lucidity, in an obstinate
negation of every supernatural consolation.
The preceding will have sufficed, however, to reveal the capital
importance of Kafka's work within the framework of this essay.
We are transported here to the confines of human thought. Giving to
the word its full meaning, we can say that everything
in
this work is
essential. In any case, it proposes the problem of the absurd in its
entirety.
If
we wish to connect these conclusions with our initial
remarks, the basis of the form, the secret meaning of
The Castle,
of
the natural art with which it develops, the passionate and proud
search of K., the appearance of daily life
in
which it unfolds-we
shall understand what its greatness can be. For if nostalgia is the
mark of the human, no one, perhaps, has given so much flesh and
relief to these phantasms of regret. But we shall grasp at the same
time what is the singular greatness required by the absurd work,
which is perhaps not found here.
If
the characteristic of art is to
attach the gener to the particular, the perishable eternity of a drop
of water to the play of its lights, it is truer still to appreciate the
greatness of the absurd writer by the separation which he is able to
introduce between these two worlds. His secret is to know how to
find the exact point where they meet, in their greatest disproportion.
And to tell the truth, the pure
in
heart can see everywhere this
geometrical point of intersection between man and the inhuman.
If
