56
PARTISAN REVIEW
songs give us a foretaste. In his way,
pf(~vert
makes Rene Char's
motto his own:
"If
you must annihilate, let it be with nuptial tools."
In our time the belief in salvation rests more on the acceptance
of natural and human reality than on a transcendental intuition. To
the tendentious anti-nihilism of extreme left-wing poetry has been
added an "ontological" or "realist" anti-nihilism. This movement is
not without kinship with the rhetorical thinking of Jean Paulhan,
which aims at restoring our esteem for the expressive vehicle flouted
by the nihilistic "terror." To this linguistic interest, however, the
new trend adds a genuine deference towards the world of objects
and man's existential experience. The Romantic flights towards the
infinite, "the unknown good," Baudelaire's Platonizing
Elevation,
are
now replaced by the quest for this nether world, or, as F. Ponge so
strongly put it, this upper world,
l'I ci-Haut.
Whether such poets are
Marxist revolutionaries like Ponge, traditional provincials like Jean
Follain, or liberal humanists like Rene Char, the emphasis is on the
rediscovery of the real world, on sensory awareness, and on the ar–
tist's moral responsibility towards his fellow human beings as well
as the things contained in his universe.
To this is joined a care for verbal perfection, for concision and
personal modesty, of which we had nearly lost the habit after almost
two centuries of Romanticism.
If
language pretends to fulfill its part,
it must rival in fullness of meaning and expressive force this dense,
compact world of concrete existence. Poetry becomes the medium
where the real is at last recovered and shown forth: "0 endless re–
sources of the thickness of things, rendered by the infinite resources
of the semantic depth of words" (F. Ponge,
Proemes).
Weare here
at the antipodes of the nihilistic ivory tower. And yet, through a
paradox comparable to that which was discovered above in the re–
lationships of Queneau and Prevert, the formal searching, the taste
for the rare, the precious, the far-fetched, so conspicuous in the work
of Char and Ponge, remind us irresistibly of the Parnassian jewelry,
of Mallarme's syntactical distortions, of Valery's mannerisms, all the
devices of the masters of nihilistic aestheticism.
«
Et ce n'est pas ainsi
que parle la nature."
There is a contradiction here between the end,
which is new, and the means, largely inherited from the past, which
the generation born around
1900
has not truly overcome. But these
