LITERATURE IN OUR TIME
literary idealism and had presented us with events across a privileged
subjectivity. For us, historical relativism, by positing the a priori equi–
valence of all subjectivities,
2
restored to the living event all its value
md led us back, in literature, to dogmatic realism by way of absolute
subjectivism. They thought that they were justifying, at least ap–
parently, the foolish business of story-telling by ceaselessly bringing
to the reader's attention, explicitly or by allusion, the existence of
an author. We hope that our books remain in the air all by them–
selves and that their words, instead of pointing backwards toward
the one who has designed them, will be toboggans, forgotten, un–
noticed, and solitary, which will hurl the reader into the midst of
a universe where there are no witnesses; in short, we hope that our
books may exist in the manner of things, of plants, of events, and not
seem merely the products of man. We want to drive providence from
our works as we have driven it from our world. We should, I believe,
2
Of course, some minds are richer than others, more intuitive, or better
qualified for analysis or synthesis. Some of them are even prophetic and some
are in a better position to foresee because
they
hold certain cards in their hand
or because they discern a broader horizon. But these differences are a posteriori
and the evaluation of the present and the near future remains conjectural. For
us
too the event appears only through subjectivities. But its transcendence comes
f:rom the fact that it exceeds them all because it extends through them and reveals
to each person a different aspect of itself and of himself.
Thus, our technical problem is to find an orchestration of consciousnesses
which may permit us to render the multidimensionality of the event. Moreover,
in giving up the fiction of the omniscient narrator, we have assumed the obliga–
tion of suppressing the intermediaries between the reader and the subjectivities–
the viewpoints of our characters. It is a matter of having him enter into their
minds as into a windmill. He must even coincide successively with each one of
them. We have learned from Joyce to look for a second kind of realism, the raw
realism of subjectivity without mediation or distance. Which leads us to profess
a third realism, that of temporality. Indeed, if without mediation we plunge
the reader into a consciousness, if we refuse him all means of surveying the whole,
then the time of this consciousness must be imposed upon him without abridg–
ment.
If
I pack six months into a single page, the reader jumps straight out
of the book.
This last aspect raises difficulties that none of us has resolved and which
are perhaps partially insoluble, for it is neither possible nor desirable to limit all
novels to the story of a single day. Even if one should resign himself to that,
the fact would remain that devoting a book to twenty-four hours rather than to
one, or to an hour rather than to a minute, implies the intervention of the author
and a transcendent choice. It will then be necessary to mask this choice by purely
aesthetic procedures, to practice sleight of hand, and, as always in art, to lie
in order to be true.
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