52
PARTISAN REVIEW
sical shape to the poetry of the end of the last century. In his
Faust
(1946), which is the true testament of an epoch, Paul Valery
for the last time asserts, in lines of Cornelian vigor, this refusal to
participate in the world, to be reduced to the rank of a mere creature,
which was dictated by his intellectual pride as well as by
his
lassitude
in the face of existence, the
odium vitae
he had felt throughout life:
M ais mon esprit superbe a detait le desir
.. .
M oi qui sus l'ange vaincre et le demon trahir
J'en sais trop pour aimer, j'en sais trop pour hair,
Et je suis excede d'etre une creature.
The fairies, who had offered him rebirth and were rebuked, supply
Faust with the last word fitting his comedy:
Ton premier mot tut NON
Qui sera le dernier.
Thus falls the curtain on the adventures of this hero, symbolizing
modern Western man. Marlowe's protagonist joins Valery's
reincar–
nation
in the abyss of non-being. But the disdain of the Valery aris–
tocrat now gives way to furious attacks unleashed against a universe
which has become a gigantic prison for man. Violence, disparaging
irony, the burden of despair-these reactions are not new in the
history of modern French poetry, as we are reminded by the example
of Baudelaire, Lautreamont, Corbiere, Rimbaud, Laforgue, Jarry.
However, it is by its excessive tone, its radical hostility towards
all
manifestations of the given world, (poetry and language as well as
nature and society), that our epoch stands out. In this Dadaistic
perspective must be placed the work of liquidation undertaken by
the "anti-poets," "apoets," and "lettrists" who flourished around
1945, at the apogee of Saint-Germain-des-Pres. They were eager, as
Jean Tardieu put it, "to learn the very language of nothingness."
Meanwhile, these wrecking poets launched an assault on the tradi–
tional "beautiful language" of poetry, in which Baudelaire, Mallar–
me, Valery took refuge during the earlier, aesthetic phase of nihilism.
It spells the end of the Ivory Tower, the rejection of the various Arti–
ficial Paradises, of the illusion, still cultivated in the late '30s by
a Patrice de la Tour du Pin, that there could be a "recluse life in
poetry." Song, henceforth, becomes as intolerable as life itself.
