LITERATURE IN OUR TIME
the uncertainty and the risks of the present, as well as their irreducible
density.
We were not unaware of the fact that a time would come when
historians would be able to survey from all angles this stretch
oi
time which we lived feverishly from minute to minute, when they
would illuminate our past by our future and would decide upon the
value of our undertakings by their outcome and upon the sincerity of
our intentions by their success. But the irreversibility of our age
belonged only to us. We had to save or lose ourselves gropingly in
this irreversible time. These events pounced upon us like thieves and
we had to do our job in the face of the incomprehensible and the
untenable, to bet, to conjecture without evidence, to undertake in
uncertainty and persevere without hope. Our age would be explained,
but no one could keep it from having been inexplicable to us. No one
could remove the bitter taste, the taste it will have had for us alone
and which will disappear with us.
The novels of our elders related the event as having taken place
in the past. Chronological order permitted the reader to see the
logical and universal relationship, the eternal verities. The slightest
change was already understood. A past was delivered to us which
had already been thought through. Perhaps two centuries from now
an author who may decide to write a historical novel about the war
of 1940 may find this a suitable technique. But if it occurred to us
to meditate on our future writings, we were convinced that no art
could really be ours if it did not restore to the event its brutal fresh–
ness, its ambiguity, it unforeseeability, if it did restore to time its
actual course, to the world its rich and threatening opacity, and to
man his long patience.
We did not want to delight our public with its superiority to a
dead world.--we wanted to take it by the throat. Let every character
be a trap, let the reader be caught in it, and let him be tossed from
one consciousness to another as from one absolute and irremediable
universe to another similarly absolute; let him be uncertain of the
very uncertainty of the heroes, disturbed by their disturbance, flooded
with their present, docile beneath the weight of their future, invested
with their perceptions and feelings as by high insurmountable cliffs.
In short, let him feel that every one of their moods and every move–
ment of their mind encloses all mankind and is, in its time and place,
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