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PARTISAN REVIEW
depuis
1918, and who, several years back, published a series of critical
studies of the American novel under the title
L'Age du roman americain.
The nub of this latter book is roughly that the various technical
innovations of the American novel-analyzed in the works of Faulkner,
Hemingway, Steinbeck and Dos Passos, not to forget the ever-present
Dashiell Hammett-are a direct reflection of the metaphysical predica–
ment of modem man; our time is the age of the American novel. Despite
this suggestive approach, I don't think a literate American will find
much in the book that he doesn't already know-except perhaps that
the University of Montana is in Idaho, as Magny carefully explains to
the French reader. And it's curious, to say the least, to see her working
away at a theological interpretation of Faulkner largely because he called
one of his novels
Sanctuary.
Incidentally, it's sadly typical of the French
approach to things American that Magny doesn't refer to any American
writer or critic who has written on the American novel (there is one
lone reference to Harry Levin's book on Joyce, which has been trans–
lated into French). On the other hand, Magny is a far cry from the
academic French
americainistes
who solemnly discuss a great master
like Louis Bromfield, and who have already labeled Truman Capote
the head of a new neo-Romantic
(?)
school. And Magny's book is worth
reading if only because, along with Sartre's early reviews in
Situations I,
it's the best introduction, on a respectable critical level, to the current
French furore about the American novel.
In writing on the modern French novel, of course, Magny is on
much more familiar territory, and if her succeeding volumes are on
the level of the first one, I think her book may well be a major critical
achievement. Here, she has excellent chapters on Mauriac, Giraudoux,
Proust, Gide, Valery
(M. Test e)
and Roger Martin du Gard, as well as
shorter discussions of minor writers like Jean Schlumberger and Jacques
Riviere. Magny's point of view is largely that of Sartre's in
Qu'est-ce que
la litterature?-Marxist
in what it rej ects (bourgeois values, a literature
of "gratuity"), Existentialist in what it advocates (the creation of
new values, vaguely Socialist, a "permanent revolution," God knows
what all!) . But Magny is more interested in literature than Sartre, whose
criticism, as she rightly remarks, tends to neglect "the intrinsic content of
a work" (the same criticism can be made of Magny's own book on the
American novel). It doesn't apply, though, to her later book, where
she makes a real effort to get at the metaphysical center of each writer's
universe. I thought specially good, though perhaps a trifle oversubtle, the
sections on Gide and Valery, where the problem of the novel as an
art form gets special attention.
