THE NEW NIHILISM
585
ment from them. Reading Camus is like watching a man plunge over a
precipice and then grab the edge of the cliff with his nails and hold on
by God knows what miraculous instinct to survive. It hardly matters
that this instinct is inarticulate, that Camus's solutions (submitting to the
knowledge of the predicament, sharing the burdens of the oppressed)
are no solutions-or at least nothing more than individual solutions.
What matters is that he has looked upon the face of death and lived,
that he has visited chaos and returned with the message that all we can
do is try to
think
our way back into a world of meaning, to create a
new world of meaning that makes no concession to the bankrupt philos–
ophies of church or state.
What Sartre calls the "anti-novels" of Nathalie Sarraute seem, so
far as I can make out from the only one as yet published in thiS' country,
Portrait of a Man Unknown,'
to represent a total submission to the
meaningless of existence. Mme. Sarraute has plunged over the
cliff,
landed on her feet, and then begun to stroll calmly through the void as
we watch dimly and incredulously from above. There is something
rather horrible in this coolly presented picture of nothingness, this ab–
solute taking for granted that life is a Chinese box and that as you pain–
fully pry open each successive lid you are rewarded with yet another
vacuum. What appears at first to
be
the insanity of the narrator, who
speaks paranoically of "They" and who for no reason whatever becomes
obsessed with a shadowy couple, an elderly man and his spinster daughter
living together in hatred and mutual contempt, turns out to be intended
as a picture of the actual state of affairs in our world. There are no
characters in the book, for individuality is an illusion that can no longer
be
maintained; no communication between persons, for there is nothing
left to communicate except, as Sartre points out in his introduction, the
most generalized of commonplaces. No other writer, not even Beckett
or Ionesco, has gone quite as far as Mme. Sarraute, and further than
this it would be impossible to go, since her extraordinary novel is written
at the point where literally everything, including the six senses them–
selves, are just about to dissolve into thin air.
Thomas Hinde's interesting novel,
Happy as Larry/
provides a good
illustration of how the new nihilism is being treated in England. Here
again we have a hero who is shiftless, irresponsible, and unable-with
justification, given what we see of the possibilities for engagement in
the novel itself-to get interested in anything. Larry Vincent
is
also
capable of horrendous behavior: he
nms off
pretending Jlot to have
5. Braziller. $3.50.
(i,
O,riterjpn.
~3.9~,
