ART AND REVOLT
279
The American noveF seeks to find its unity
III
reducing man
either to the elementary, or to his external reactions and behavior.
It does not choose a feeling or passion of
which
it will give a priv–
ileged image, as in the French classic novels. It reject:; analysis and
the search for a fundamental psychological lever that will explain
and sum up the conduct of a character. This is why the unity of
the American novel is nothing but a unity of lighting. Its technique
consists in describing men externally
in
their most unimportant
gestures, in reproducing their speech
without
commentary even
1.0
its
repetitions,3 in acting as if men were entirely defined by their
everyday automatisms. At this mechanical level, in truth, men re–
semble each other; and we can thus explain this curious univcrse
where all the people seem interchangeable, even to the particulari–
ties of their physique. This technique is called realist only through
a misunderstanding. Aside from the fact that realism in art is an
incomprehensible notion,
it
is clear that the world of the American
novel does not aim at the pure and simple reproduction of reality;
it aims at the most arbitrary kind of stylization. The unity thus
obtained is a degraded unity, a leveling of beings and of the world.
It seems that, for these novelists, it is the interior life which deprives
human actions of their unity and which alienates beings from each
other. In part, this suspicion is well-founded. But the revolt at the
source of this art can only find its satisfaction, not by denying the
interior life completely, but by constructing a
unity
that uses the
interior
life
as a starting point. To deny it completely is to have
recourse to an imaginary man. The pitch-black novel is also a rose–
colored one, and it has the formal pretensions of the latter.
It
too
edifies, after its fashion! The life of the body, reduced to itself,
paradoxically produces an abstract and gratuitous universe, in its
tum constantly denied by reality. This novel, purged of inner life,
and in which man seems to be observed as if under glass, finishes
2. Naturally, I am dealing with the "tough-guy" novel of the thirties and
forties, not with the admirable blossoming of American literature in the nine–
teenth century.
3. Even in Faulkner, the great writer of this generation, the interior mono–
logue reproduces only the outer covering of thought.
4. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and the Marquis de Sade, in different registers,
are the creators of the propaganda novel.
