158
PARTISAN R1EVIEW
but what would he have become for us then but just a more intellec–
tually acute Bossuet? On the contrary, it is just because the
Pensees
are
the fragments of his human shipwreck that they are so imperishable.
F: Even if we grant that his shipwreck is the condition of his
vision, can we recommend this course to other human beings? I would
extend the point to all the great neurotic geniuses among writers.
Suppose a man is sent to prison and there writes a book that could
not have been written without that experience. This book is able to
move very powerfully the people who are outside at liberty because
at certain points their experience, alas, must also resemble his. We
will rejoice at this product of incarceration and suffering, but ought
we therefore to recommend that the people outside all go to prison?
And in the case of the writer himself, we ought certainly to advocate,
it seems to me, his pardon or at least his parole. There is, after all,
a world outside his bars. The great neurotic writer seems to me to
be just such a prisoner.
H: Odd that you should have chosen Pascal's image for the
human condition itself: the prisoner in his cell! Was that conscious
or unconscious? Might we not say, stretching the word somewhat,
that man's relation to the world is essentially
neurotic?
That is: we
live in the unstable, on the unstable, and our relation to the world
is one of tension and instability. Perhaps that is why the neurotic
genius, when he still attains lucidity, seems to us so much more pro–
found. At any rate, this seems to be the developing experience o£
n1odern literature. This genius is like a lens that concentrates a ray
into burning intensity; but notice that the ray only passes through,
but is not generated by the lens.
F: The lens, which concentrates, will also narrow and distort.
One thing pays for another.
H: Man, the prisoner, will not be placated. This universe
is
thrust upon him without an answer to his question, and it is taken
away from him at his death. How can he be at peace with this over–
whelming affront? His question and his death have planted in his
flesh for all his days their twin-barbed prong, rankling.
F: Anxieties will remain-if that is what worries you. Man
cannot live in society without repressions. Anxiety at pleasure that
has to be foregone will be the signal he gives himself for repression;
and these repressions in turn will beget anxiety.
If
neurotic anxiety
disappeared, it is true we might have to lose certain qualities of
genius that extreme neuroticism has produced in the past. But there
might very well be other compensations.
