FlAUBERT
53
the sense of a universe somehow adequate to a noble (if suicidal)
consciousness of it. The hero may be aware only of futility, but even
the futile and the meaningless become tragic, that is, richly stimulat–
ing facts about the world for Oberman and Rene.
If,
say, Hugo and
Vigny often seem didactic, it's because they think of the poet's anguish
not as an inexplicable fact of consciousness, but as an historical cir–
cumstance which an enlightened society could change by heeding its
prophets. And even in the most radical irrationalists of French litera–
ture - think of the ambitions of Nerval, Rimbaud and Breton - the
world of dreams can, in a sense, be salvaged; it is as if there were
no mental experience which is by nature absolutely impermeable to
any kind of intelligible discourse. Only in writers we have begun to
listen to rather recently - most notably, Georges BataiIIe and
Maurice Blanchot - do we find in French what might be called an
insistent allusiveness to something more extreme than irrationality, to
a mode of being which, unlike the irrational, is inaccessible to reason
and which literature may take as the invisible subject it attempts
not
to express.
The neutral, impersonal language which Blanchot dreams of
would not be psychologically descriptive; ideally it would be entirely
devoid of any particular personality. But perhaps the origins of such
startling ambitions lie in self-dramatizations so hyperbolic that they
tend to abstract personality from its environment and make imagina–
tion appear autonomous. Literature's apparent function of making
life intelligible perhaps begins to be subverted as soon as it takes
for a subject an agitation neither adequately projected on the world
nor adequately accounted for by the world. There is already some–
thing of this in the
Lui
of Diderot's
Le Neveu de Rameau,
which is
perhaps why that work strikes us as more modem than the swarm of
romantic books it seems both to announce and to mock. The
Lui's
manic restlessness, for all his brilliance, is comical and disturbingly
trivial, but that is his originality. The character is interesting not for
the reasons he behaves as he does (his laziness, deliberate hypocrisy,
self-disgust, failure as a composer), but for the essentially absurd
inventiveness which his idleness makes possible. For the reasons are
inadequate to the range of invention, as indeed the setting (the ter–
race of the Cafe de la Regence) seems inappropriate to the perform–
ance. The contrast between this extraordinarily turned-on or ex-
