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PARTISAN REVIEW
whereas in the West the Baghavad Gita remains closed to all but specialists,
even in Gandhi's translation . No Indian or Chinese myth-not even the life
of Buddha, sublime as it is- comes alive for us like the life of Tristan . We
think of Saadi as a rival to Keats , whereas he was a rival of La Fontaine ; he
owes his fame to our poets, not to his own poems . In the postromantic era,
our Imaginary Museum of sculpture had the whole earth to choose from, but
our Imaginary Museum ofliterature did not .
For the museum of poetry symbolized by Baudelaire is as distinct from
Victor Hugo's as Hugo's was distinct from Ronsard' s. It is up to the reader
to
reach the poet who no longer imposes himself. The best translation of
Hoderlin, of Keats, of Pushkin, does not give us the shock that we get from
Rimbaud . Beauty had given place to genius, and genius to art. So each kind
of literature mingles its two Imaginary Museums . The one inspired by the
experience of mankind and what is noble in the world, the other by what we
call art. Both founded on the will to create something enduring . But in
literature, as in painting, a form of art which derives its values from itself no
longer gives rise to an aesthetic; it gives birth to a whole set of problems.
No new aesthetic is accepted, each of us imagines his own anthology,
the collection, and these, put together though refuted are admitted to our
Bibliotheque de la PIeiade . If those who come after us-and who will most
probably read our writings in the light of metamorphosis-find in them
values which give them a sequential meaning, let them be sure that it is a
thing which escaped us.
The next poet of genius will change the function that poetry assumed
under the reign of Baudelaire, Rimbaud or Mallarme. The profound change
is not in the procession of schools which led from Baudelaire to Mallarme or
from Apollinaire to Verlaine, but in the replacement of Victor Hugo 's utter–
ances by Baudelaire's reverie, even if we later rediscover the ineffability of
Victor Hugo . In order for this metamorphosis to take place, our very con–
ception of poetry and the value given to it had to be erased, as was the
conception of Greek tragedy, in fact the concept of literature itself. Chal–
lenge does not kill an art; what destroys it is the question : "So what?"
Our time has known an unprecedented development of biography, in
everything that is biographical in history.
It
seems to see in it a literary genre
as eternal as the fantastic, and to consider the relationship of a writer to his
work as manifestly privileged . "The lives of exemplary or exceptional men"
have been widely studied and recorded: the richness and the scope of what we
call the Great Biography dominate; it becomes clearly one of the major liter-
