456
PA RTISAN REVIEW
the eternal validity of the adventurer's revolt against
la condition hu–
maine.
Sartre stresses this dilemma by comparing the adventurer to the
militant, the good Party man, who has no personality because, in theory,
he knows himself only
in
terms of the Party. Sartre says: "I would
want the adventurer to be really defeated, that is,
I
want the militant
to win: it's only justice that the militant triumph (and besides, it con–
forms to the historical process)." But he adds: " ... after having ap–
plauded the victory of the militant, I would follow the adventurer into
his solitude." Why? Because the adventurer "bears testimony at one and
the same time to the absolute existence of man and his absolute
im–
possibility." It's this kind of thing, translated on a day-to-day political
level, that accounts for the grip that "neutralism" has on Sartre and
his followers. Torn between a blind faith in the historical process and
the absolute existence of man in freedom-not being able to have
both, except in the bewildering sleight-of-hand of their dialectic-they
choose neither in concrete political terms.
No literary letter from Paris the£e days would be complete without
some mention of the latest intellectual fad-occultism. The most recent
literary movement that was any fun,
Lettrisme,
fizzled very quickly (the
lettristes
believed that words in poetry don't have to make sense, since
only the sound of the letters is important). Occultism has now taken
its place, but I'm afraid that it's no laughing matter; the best all–
round French literary magazine,
La table ronde,
had a special occultist
issue last fall and its success was so great that the issue had to be re–
printed.
What's all the fuss about? Well, not being an
initie
I really don't
have a very clear idea, but the way for occultism seems to have been
cleared by Surrealism, with its attempt to make poetry a source of super–
natural knowledge, and also by the studies made of occult influences in
writers like Balzac, Baudelaire, Nerval, Rimbaud and Mallarme. This
has been combined with all sorts of Oriental and Hindu lore,
a
la
Aldous
Huxley, as well as the influence of a French writer who died in Egypt
a couple of months ago, Rene Guenon. Guenon was a convert to
Islam, and so far as
I
can gather has done some valuable scholarly
work on Oriental mysticism; but he also wrote a good bit on the
occult Tradition (with a capital T) that, in his opinion, lies behind all
the great religions, and which has come down to us poor moderns only
in garbled snatches. His little book on this subject,
La crise du monde
moderne,
can be seen everywhere, and Gallimard- never a publisher to
be left behind-has started to publish a new series of books on occultism
called
Tradition.
