370
PARTISAN REVIEW
narration.
It
does not answer the questions asked by biography, it asks those
that biography does not ask.
The novel saw itself as a river at the very time when the myth of genius
was about to dominate the myth of perfection, which the vast literature sur–
rounding the novel today cares as little about as the novel itself. When the
book takes an event for a hero
(The Longest Day, The Independence of
India,
etc.) the characters, and even more the author, are subordinate to it:
that author's biography is now as uninteresting as that of a violinist or a geo–
metrician. The work no longer calls the writer before the curtain like a
triumphant actor; he no longer has to conform to the formal pattern of the
dance. Novels had converged on biography as intensely as what succeeded
them diverged from it. Publishing, of which
belles-lettres
was only a part,
abandons the image as well as biography. But it does not abandon litera–
ture, it discovers it.
It
transforms the all-enveloping into the all-enveloped,
isolating its particular character, and shows by its place in the front rank how
little "evolution and conditioning" have counted for in its history . The Col–
loquy is no longer challenging biography nor even man himself, at least not
directly.
It
is challenging the world of the written word, whose new organ–
izations and basic metamorphosis it senses, as not long ago it sensed those of
the world of art.
*
*
*
Before the war I had the idea of inviting a number of authors to set
down what they thought of whatever writers of the past they might wish
to
discuss . This collection of essays, published with a preface by Andre Gide,
extended only from Corneille to Chenier. But it showed the metamor–
phosis of literature . I had designed this book with the notion that it would
be done allover again in a hundred years' time; that even if it were not done
again we would have found readers then as passionately interested as we
could be ourselves in such a
Tableau de la Literature Franyaise
written by
authors of 1850. Gide, in part of his preface. described what this would have
meant in the face of academic criticism. The strength of the university lay in
teaching literature primarily as literary history, which supposedly obeyed the
traditional cycle of crudeness, perfection and decadence . But it became clear
that literature tends to turn things upside down rather than bring them
to
perfection, that its history is neither a history of improvements nor a pro–
cession of' 'those who have left their landmarks." Moreover the student sen–
sitive to poetry does not discover the poets "from the origins to the present
