PARTISAN REVIEW
ourselves at
grips
with a problem of a higher order of complexity,
exactly as a quadratic equation is more complex than a linear. It
was a matter of describing the relationship of different partial sys–
tems to the total system which contains them when both are in move–
ment and the movements condition each other reciprocally.
In the stable world of the prewar French novel, the author,
situated at a gamma point which represented absolute rest, had
fixed guide-marks at his disposal to determine the movements of his
characters. But we, involved in a system in full evolution, could only
know relative movements. Whereas our predecessors thought that they
could keep themselves outside of history and that they had soared
to heights from which they could judge events as they really were,
circumstances have plunged us into our time. But since we were in
it, how could we see it as a whole? Since we were
situated,
the only
novels we could dream of writing were novels of
situation,
without
internal narrators or all-knowing witnesses. In short, if we wished to
give an account of our age, we had to make the technique of the
novel shift from Newtonian mechanics to generalized relativity; we
had to people our books with minds that were half lucid and half
overcast, some of which we might consider with more sympathy than
others, but none of which would have a privileged point of view either
upon the event or upon themselves. We had to present creatures whose
reality would be the tangled and contradictory tissue of each one's
evaluations of all the other characters-himself included-and the
evaluation by all the others of himself, and who could never decide
from within whether the changes of their destinies came from their
own efforts, or from their own faults, or possibly from the course
of the universe.
Finally, we had to leave doubts, expectations, and the unachieved
throughout our works, to give the reader the feeling that his view
of the plot and the characters was simply one among many others,
leaving it to him to conjecture for himself without guiding him or
letting him guess our feeling.
But, on the other hand, as I have just pointed out, our very
historicity restored us because from day to day we were living that
absolute which it had seemed at first to take away from us.
If
our
plans, our passions, and our acts were explicable and relative from
the viewpoint of past history, they again took on in this forlornness
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