PARTISAN REVIEW
435
cross-fertilization, decay of old forms - in short, a natural occurrence
such as comes about, simultaneously and spontaneously, in the history
of an art without anybody's knowing quite why. Very quickly, however,
it transformed itself, perhaps sensing power in the offing, and turned
into a weapon wielded by a programmatic group acting in concert,
issuing decrees and manifestoes, behaving as a disciplined political unit,
recruiting new militants and fellow travelers.
The whole operation may have been modeled on the Surrealist
putsch of the pre- and post-war years, led by Andre Breton, which
failed to achieve its revolution but remains a sacred memory, like the
Commune. In a sense, the
Tel Quel
group (now Maoist as well as
echt–
structuralist) is closer to the Surrealist tradition of guerrilla warfare.
It
is more doctrinaire, constantly tightening the inner circle of its
adherents, whereas the
nouveau roman,
which it is displacing, resem–
bled a large party machine.
Hence, with
Tel Quel,
the splits to which grouplets are prone.
When a new line is laid down, those who do not conform are excluded,
and the status of the elite spearhead is measured by the number of liv–
ing authors (often former friends ) whose death sentence is promulgated
by the party heralds. This was the spirit but not the public practice of
the
nouveau roman
where nobody, so far as I know, was officially read
out of the movement. It was a question of passing the word that such–
and-such a writer, who had fallen by the wayside, no
lo~ger
existed.
Behind all this (it is clear) is a rationale of art as history conceived
in the Bolshevik style. Since the literary artist must make history, not
merely record or mirror it, membership in the vanguard group is es–
sential; power is not seized by isolated individuals but by groups with
leaders, a program, a plan of action, and more or less regular purges.
Of
course you can take your chances of being discovered, like Joyce in
France today, by a subsequent vanguard, i.e., by what was formerly
called posterity, but the French seem to prefer collective insurance, with
immediate benefits.
Of course it's possible that a reaction will set in. Around
Tel Quel,
there is certainly an ominous smell of Thermidor, and I don't know,
between Sollers and Ricardou, which is fated to be Danton and which
Robespierre, and what first consul may be waiting to pick up the pieces.
Yet it is hard to imagine a literary turn.to the right without a big polit–
ical change, and now I mean real politics, not the play
gauchiste
kind
of Sollers and his friends nor the literary power-maneuvers of Robbe–
Grillet: I mean Brezhnevism with some French Furtseva enforcing so–
cialist realism or else a neo-fascist take-over which might abolish cul–
ture all together. Failing such developments, a cultural backlash seems
impossible here; the mystique of progress is too strong. A silent majority
may well resent the provocations of the avant-garde, but, as I've said,
it has no spokesmen.
There was the case of
Nouvelle critique ou nouvelle imposture
(1965 ), in which a traditional watchdog of culture, Professor Ray–
mond Picard, took a nasty bite out of Roland Barthes and the struc–
turalists, the bone of contention being the proper reading of Racine.
Picard, I thought, had the better arguments (and this was privately
