BOOKS
THE END OF MODERN LITERATURE
We are told that this is the century when man has become
for the first time fully and thoroughly problematic to himself.
If
so,
it would only seem natural that literature too should be posed as a new
and extreme kind of problem for literary men. Natural and inevitable too,
that this problem should be raised particularly by the French, whose
literature, whatever its rank, has always been the most programmatic of
all literatures, and the most self-consciously attached to critical theory.
For some time now French critics have been talking about a "crisis" in
their literature. "Crisis" is a violent word, and there has possibly been
some over-dramatization in its use; but there can be no doubt about the
seriousness of the situation that has evoked this word: French literature
suggests a countryside overrun by generations of industrious cultivators
until the point of diminishing returns seems reached, where the soil
continues to yield crops only after exacting very much more drastic
methods of cultivation and ever more painful labor. By the turn of the
century some traditional genres already looked exhausted, and recently
some French writers have been declaring that the language itself (so
much narrower in its range of effects than our protean English) de–
mands new means of expression. American literature is very far from
reaching this stage, and perhaps we are wrong to bother our heads at
all with asking any extreme or ultimate questions of literature; we are
primitives and perhaps for the time being we shall do better to remain
such; but if we do choose to think about the problem of literature as a
total one, then we can learn much from seeing this problem raised
within the French context, which may very well represent the extreme
state toward which modern literature, so long as it still remembers its
ambitions, is tending everywhere in the world.
The background of Sartre's book* is this continuing crisis in French
literature. But he is also beset by another and much more urgent crisis-
*
What Is Literature?
By Jean-Paul Sartre. Philosophical Library. $4.75.
