54
PARTISAN REVIEW
guage in poetry than at the mores of bourgeois society, which are
perhaps even less edifying. Revolt here turns against the existence
and contradictory pretentions of Art (with a capital
A),
which in–
sists on surviving amidst an absurd universe. A sneering poet, past
master of caricatural effects and farcical mummery, Queneau raises
derision to the status of religion. The god one reveres in this strange
liturgy is "this lugubrious imbecile/ who will harvest me on his
toothpick's tip/ when, defeated, I shall with a vague and placid eye/
have surrendered all my courage to the rodents of the present"
(Les
.(iaux).
The Latin of this church is a truly extraordinary invention,
made up in equal parts of mocking grandiloquence, standard faked
naivete, hallucinatory metaphors coldly concerted to ridicule this
stock device of modem poetry, pedantic buffoonery, and slang. Never
did the metaphysical and cosmic refusal present itself in a more rol–
licking manner. But under the mask of clever tricks of the
Exercices
de Style,
the dry jokes and puns of Si
tu t'imagines
or
La Petite
Cosmogonie Portative,
one detects more often than not the face of
despair.
However, a reaction had set in during the war in favor of a
restoration of the dignity of poetic language, if not of man and the
world. It is noteworthy and regrettable that this attempt took place
in general on two distinct planes, in separate and mutually exclusive
phases. At one moment the intention was to restore respect for the
inherited tongue, for its revised and concretized commonplaces, and
for literary art as such, which the nihilistic revolt had put into ques–
tion. This task was undertaken by Jean Paulhan, who is preoccupied
with forms, conventions, problems of rhetoric. He is an acute critic
of what he labeled "the terror in literature." But Paulhan carefully
avoids challenging the metaphysical foundations of that "terror," the
ideological premises and the sociohistorical justification of nihilism,
to which modem "terroristic" poetry is heir. Thus Jean Paulhan,
with his customary nimbleness, does away with the main problem,
which is of an ethical and political nature. He would have the end
without wanting the means.
In some other quarters, however, it is the question of restor–
ing man, degraded by an evil social system, or by the blindness
of the mechanics of nature, which is dominant. To the formal arti-
