50
PARTISAN REVIEW
In the course of human history it is possible to distinguish be–
tween minor and major cycles, to discover, beyond the stretches of
continuity and internal evolution, great discontinuities, basic revo–
lutions embracing all activity and opposing it to that of the preceding
age. It appears that we find ourselves today in such a split between
two systems of culture and life-experience. Instead of transition, then,
another term, that of liquidation, might prove more useful in speak–
ing of our time. However, as in any disruptive moment of history,
this negative description covers but half of the truth. The quest for
a new sense of reality constitutes the other facet of this harsh double
process, revealing itself not only in the making of poetry, but in
all present-day occupations of man, practical as well as intellectual:
modern man paradoxically searches for birth only through death,
which he therefore deals out and receives with an equal eagerness.
We find ourselves in a period of breakdown, with which even the
established nihilistic literature has been late in catching up. How
shall the Yes ever be uttered by a despairing, rebellious Faustian
mouth, trained to say No by a century-old cultur.al and social mechan–
ism to which we have become accustomed as to a second nature?
((Tu ne sais que nier,"
say the fairies to Valery's disdainful Faust,
who refuses to be reborn. Moreover, to which object, to which uni–
verse would this problematic "Yes" become attached, in the midst
of "the universal decay of all life-contents"
(G.
Benn) ?-in an at–
mosphere which the contemporary French poet Lucien Becker
summed up in the significant title
Rien
a
Vivre?
Our legacy is that
of a dead God, a dead world, and an ineffectual power of speech.
On the one hand liquidation of the already classical heritage be-
.queathed by the nihilistic sensibility of the last hundred years and
on the other the quest of a real world where man can at long last
live with his song instead of adopting
la chanson du neant
as a sub–
stitute for life-between these polar opposites, the tension-ridden
French poetry of the forties and fifties develops its difficult span.
As
a reaction against these two almost impossible tasks there
are inevitably movements seeking to return to the multiple Western
tradition. Some of them appeal once more to classical formalism;
others suggest a return to the nihilistic aestheticism of the late nine–
teenth century. Inasfar as they escape the grip of orthodox nihilism,
our poets are often divided among these regressive temptations bring-
