LITERATURE IN OUR TIME
experience. It is a living effort to embrace from within the human
condition
in
its totality.
Forced by circumstances to discover the pressure of history, as
Torricelli discovered atmospheric pressure, ·and tossed by the cruelty
of the time into that forlornness from where one can see our condi–
tion as man to the very limit, to the absurd, to the night of unknow–
ingness, we have a task for which we may not
be
strong enough
(this is not the first time that an age, for want of talents, has lacked
its
art
and its philosophy). It is to create a literature which unites
and reconciles the metaphysical absolute and the relativity of the
historical fact, and which I shall call, for want of a better name,
the literature of great circumstances.
1
It is not a question for us of
escaping into the eternal or of abdicating in the face of what the un–
speakable Mr. Zaslavsky refers to in
Pravda
as the " historical
process."
The questions which our age puts to us and which remain
our
questions are of another order. How can one make himself a man
in, by, and for history? Is there a possible synthesis between our
unique and irreducible consciousness and our relativity; that is,
be–
tween a dogmatic humanism and a perspectivism? What is the rela–
tionship between morality and politics? How, considering the quality
of our intentions, are we to take up the objective· consequences of our
acts? We can rigorously attack these problems in the abstract by
philosophical reflection. But
if
we want to live them, to support our
thoughts by those fictive and concrete experiences which are what
novels are, we have at our disposal the technique which I have already
analyzed here and whose ends are rigorously opposed to our designs.
Specially perfected to relate the events of an individual life in the
bosom of a stable society, it enabled the novelist to record, describe,
and explain the weakening, the vections, the involutions, and the
slow disorganization of a particular system in the middle of a universe
at rest. But from 1940 on, we found ourselves in the midst of a
cyclone.
If
we wished to orient ourselves in it we suddenly found
1
What are Camus, Malraux, Koestler, etc. now producing if not a literature
of extreme situations? Their characters are at the height of power or in prison
cells, on the eve of death or of being tortured or of killing. Wars, coups d'etat,
revolutionary action, bombardments, massacres. There you have their everyday
life. On every page, in every line, it is always the whole man who is in question.
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