PARTISAN REVIEW
Because of this, their writers gave them a literature of
average
situations.
But we could no longer find it
natural
to be men when our
best friends, if they were taken, could choose only between abjection
and heroism, that is, between the two extremes of the human condi–
tion, beyond which there is no longer anything.
If
they were cowards
and traitors, all men were above them; if heroic, all men were below
them. In the latter case, which was the more frequent, they no longer
felt humanity as a limitless milieu. It was a thin flame within them
which they alone kept alive. It kept itself going in the silence which
they opposed to their executioners. About them was nothing but the
great polar night of the inhuman and of unknowingness, which they
did not even
see,
which they divined in the glacial cold which trans–
pierced them.
Our fathers always had witnesses and examples available. For
these tortured men, there were no longer any.
It
was Saint-Exupery
who said in the course of a dangerous mission, "I am my own wit–
ness." The same for all of them; anguish and forlornness and the
sweating of blood begin for a man when he can no longer have any
other witness than himself. It is then that he drains the cup, that he
experiences his human condition to the bitter end. Of course, we are
quite far from having all felt this anguish, but it haunted us like a
threat and a promise.
Five years. We lived entranced and as we did not take our pro–
fession of writer lightly, this state of trance still reflects itself in our
writings. We have undertaken to create a literature of extreme situa–
tions. I am not at all claiming that in this we are superior to our
elders. Quite the contrary. Bloch-Michel, who has earned the right to
talk, has said that fewer virtues are needed in great circumstances
than in small.
It
is not for me to decide whether he is right or whether
it is better to be a Jansenist than a Jesuit. I rather think that there
must be something of everything and that the same man cannot be
one and the other at the same time.
Therefore, we are Jansenists because the age has made us such,
and insofar as this has made us touch our limits I shall say that we are
all metaphysical writers. I think that many among us would deny
this designation or would not accept it without reservations, but this
is the result of a misunderstanding. For metaphysics is not a sterile
discussion about abstract notions which have nothing to do with
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