FRENCH LITERATURE
147
One always hesitates to confess one's ignorance and it is the critic who
is more afraid than anyone else.
This character of unintelligibility that contemporary literature shows
in varying degrees is nevertheless too remarkable to be disregarded.
In pointing it out, there is all the less reason to fear being considered
stupid, since this esoterism is almost always openly avowed and care–
fully fostered; in the case of Maurice Blanchot, for example, it is based
on a new and extreme conception of the literary work's relation to lan–
guage and audience.
Rimbaud and Mallarme now enjoy unlimited reverence, but more
for the sake of what they did not write than what they did-more for
the sake of the enormously wide margins in which they framed their
poems. Similarly, twenty years ago the example of Flaubert's cell at
Croisset and Proust's cork-lined room had more influence than the works
that came out of those rooms. Each age chooses its own saints to express
it. This will-not-to-communicate, which used to be an isolated occur–
rence, has now become a mass phenomenon in contemporary letters.
Only Surrealism, whose stamp has marked, moreover, the majority of
present-day writers from Queneau to Aragon, offers the example of an
equally open contempt for the public, a similar distrust of literature, a
like disrespect for language.
To have the essence of a book consist of its margins and to situate
the meaning of poems in the spaces between the words-these are not
the only innovations introduced into literature these past four years.
The principal philosophic-literary works we have mentioned are often
grouped together-not without some injustice-under the name of
Existentialism. They are all characterized by an atheism that is occa–
sionally aggressive, as with Georges Bataille, whose proud and desolate
lament of a man "bereft of God,"-to use Sartre's phrase-often reminds
one of his master, Nietzsche. But this atheism is usually one of indiffer–
ence, and is easily consoled--or so it would seem-for that "death of
God" which was the great event the late nineteenth century contributed
to Western thought.
In the last few years Existentialism has become so synonymous with
atheism that one remembers with a kind of shock that before the war
the term "Existential Philosophy" had been applied almost exclusively
to such profoundly Christian philosophers as Maritain, Chestov, Berdyaeff
and Gabriel Marcel, whose doctrine represented an effort to think and
live Christianity and whose masters-Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Jaspers–
had been indelibly marked by religion. Some time ago, while accidentally
re-reading
Frontieres de la Poesie
by Maritain, where Arthur Lourie's
music is called "existential" or "ontological music," I was able to see
the extent to which the meaning of the word has shifted, so that one and
the same term has come to designate deeply spiritual, fundamentally
