PARTISAN REVIEW
from its goals, which become blurred, becomes an act of prowess or a dapce.
Nevertheless, however indifferent he might have been to the success of the enter–
prise, the poet, before tfie nineteenth century, remained in harmony with society
as a whole. He did not use language for the end which prose seeks, but he had
the same confidence in it as the prose-writer.
With the coming of bourgeois society, the poet puts up a common front with
the prose-writer to declare it unlivable. His job is always to create the myth of
man, but he passes from white magic to black magic. Man is always presented
as the absolute end, but by the success of his enterprise he is sucked into a utilita–
rian collectivity. The thing that is in the background of his act and that will allow
transition to the myth is thus no longer success, but defeat. By stopping the
infinite series of his projects like a screen, a defeat alone returns him to himself
in his purity. The world remains the inessential, but it is now there as a pretext
for defeat. The finality of the thing is to send man back to himself by blocking
the route. Moreover, it is not a matter of arbitrarily introducing \::lefeat and ruin
into the course of the world, but rather of having no eyes for anything but that.
Human enterprise has two aspects: it is both success and failure. The dialectical
schema is inadequate for reflecting upon it. We must make our vocabulary and
the frames of our reason more supple. Some day I am going to try to describe
that strange reality, History, which is neither objective, nor ever quite subjective,
in which the dialectic is contested, penetrated, and corroded by a kind of anti–
dialectic, but which is still a dialectic. But that is the philosopher's affair. One
does not ordinarily consider the two faces of Janus; the man of action sees one
aad the poet sees the other. When the instruments are broken and unusable,
when plans are blasted and effort is useless, the world appears with a childlike
and terrible freshness, without supports, without paths.
It
has the maximum
reality because it is crushing for man, and as action, in any case, generalizes,
defeat restores to things their individual reality. But, by an expected reversal,
the defeat, considered as a final end, is both a contesting and an appropriation
of this universe. A contesting, because man
is worth more
than that which crushes;
he no longer contests things in their "little bit of reality," like the engineer or
the captain, but, on the contrary, in their "too full of reality," by his very
existence as a vanquished person; he is the remorse of the world. An appropria–
tion, because the world, by ceasing to be the tool of success, becomes the instru–
ment of failure. So there it is, traversed by an obscure finality; it is its coefficient
of adversity which serves, the more human insofar as it is more hostile to man.
The defeat itself turns into salvation. Not that it makes us yield to some "beyond,"
but by itself it shifts and is metamorphosed. For example, poetic language rises
out of the ruins of prose.
If
it is true that the word is a betrayal and that com–
munication is impossible, then each word by itself recovers its individuality and
becomes an instrument of our defeat and a receiver of the incommunicable. It is
not that there is
another thing
to communicate; but the communication of prose _
having miscarried, it is the very meaning of the word which becomes the pure
incommunicable. Thus, the failure of communication becomes a suggestion of
the incommunicable, and the thwarted project of utilizing words is succeeded by
the pure disinterested intuition of the word. Thus, we again meet with the
description which we attempted earlier in this study, but in the more general
perspective of the absolute valorization of the defeat, which seems to me the
original attitude of contemporary poetry. Note also that this choice confers upon
the poet a very precise function in the collectivity: in a highly integrated or
religious society, the defeat is masked by the State or redeemed by Religion;
in a less integrated and secular society, such as our democracies, it is up to poetry
to redeem them.
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