PARTISAN REVIEW
in the womb of history and, despite the perpetual juggling of the
present by the future, a descent without recourse toward Evil or an
ascent toward Good which no future will be able to contest. This is
what explains the success we have accorded Kafka's works and those
of the American novelists.
As
for Kafka, everything has been said:
that he wanted to paint a picture of bureaucracy, the progress of
disease, the condition of the Jews in eastern Europe, the quest for
inaccessible transcendence, and the world of grace when grace is
lacking. This is all true. Let me say that he wanted to describe the
human condition. But what we were particularly sensitive to was that
in this trial perpetually in session, which ends abruptly and evilly,
whose judges are unknown and out of reach, in the vain efforts of
the accused to know the leaders of the prosecution, in this defense
patiently assembled which turns against the defender and figures in
the evidence for the prosecution, in this absurd present which the
characters live with great earnestness and whose keys are elsewhere,
we recognize history and ourselves in history.
We were far from Flaubert and Mauriac. There was in Kafka,
at the very least, a new way of presenting destinies which were tricked
and undermined at their foundation, which were lived minutely,
ingeniously, and modestly, of rendering the irreducible truth of ap–
pearances and of making felt beyond them another truth which will
always be denied us. One does not imitate Kafka. One does not
rewrite him. One had to extract a precious encouragement from his
books and look elsewhere. ·
As
for the Americans, it was not their cruelty or pessimism
which moved us. We recognized in them men who had been swamped,
lost in too large a continent as we were in history and who tried
without traditions, with the means available to render their stupor
and forlornness in the midst of incomprehensible events.•The success
of Faulkner, Hemingway, and Dos Passos was not the effect of
snobbism, or at least, not at first. It was the defense reflex of a .litera–
ture which, feeling itself threatened because its techniques and its
myths were no longer going to allow it to cope with the historical
situation, grafted foreign methods upon itself in order to be able to
fulfill its function in new situations.
Thus, at the very moment that we were facing the public, cir–
cumstances forced us to break with our predecessors. They had chosen
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