PARTISAN REVIEW
"No ... you are
not
wrong." Rieux accepts ·equally Tarrou's explanation:
"I loathe men's being condemned to death," his resolution to be always
on the victims' side, and his final admission, "It comes to this . . . what
interests me is learning how to become a saint.... Can one be a saint
without God?-that's the problem, in fact the only problem."
As for Rieux himself, like Camus' stoic Sisyphus, he does his duty,
"what had had to be done," he wins the Sophoclean "knowledge through
suffering," "all a man could win in the conflict between plague and
life . . . knowledge and memories."
These departures from the universal myth-form seem to me defects.
They can readily enough be explained as a response to the overwhelming
plagues of our time-though are they really more terrible in historical
fact, when we remember ·how many more weapons we have, or might
use, to fight them? I regret especially that Camus, who
is
so fine an
artist, felt the need to make the moralizing so explicit (and therefore
somewhat banal)-though it was perhaps just the cloudiness of the
lessons that spurred the need. He could have had more confidence in his
myth which, if the artist's work is completed, is able, in its own way, to
speak for itself.
James Burnham
BOGS ALONG THE MIDDLE PATH
A STUDY OF LITERATURE FOR READERS AND CRITICS.
By
David
Daiches. Cornell. $2.75.
David Daiches suffers from none of the more spectacular
vices of current criticism. He is not portentous, willful or self-indulgently
erudite; he does not confuse his own ideas with those of the writer he
happens to be discussing; he is sufficiently worldly to realize that no
single critical notion or catchphrase can serve as a magic lever to lift all
works of literature into transparent glory; and he avoids stylistic man–
nerisms, affecting neither the style of constipated profundity nor of
elegaic disenchantment. Considering himself a humanist in the more gen–
erous sense of the term, he follows "the middle path" in criticism, and
does so with intelligence, breadth, and tolerance. Yet, for all these
considerable virtues, one feels a certain dissatisfaction after reading this
book, a dissatisfaction, I think, worFh looking into.
Exactly what
A Study of Literature
is supposed to be, or do, is
something of a problem. Offhand, it seems intended for students. Daiches
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