64
PARTISAN REVIEW
ished by Ii terature and itself a nurturer of
Ii
terature, denouncing and
insul ting it as "bourgeoi s."
If
you admit, as I do, that this literature continues to have a natural
place in a country like ours, which has been
Ii
terary for centuries, it is dif–
ficult not to feel that the literary realm has shrunk considerably. This is
very serious for the heal th of the spiri t and the nation - even if it does not
playa role in the agendas of our various political parties. Vi co called lit–
erature "humanity's jurisprudence." What he meant is that humanity is
not an object for scientific study as matter is, but has experiences that
extend through time. Only literary forms resistant to the passage of time
can record precedents that illuminate our immediate experience, by com–
paring and contrasting it to the extreme diversity of past experiences. The
fact that France has developed this "jurisprudence of humanity" in its
own language since the sixteenth century - with highs and lows, but in a
sustained fashion - plays a significant part in the prestige it enjoys today.
I hesitate to cast a shadow over the optimism of book fairs, and I also
recognize that literature in France retains both its value as a brand name
and a measure of distinction. Given our circumstances, we still have a sur–
prising variety of writers of great quality. But when one returns from a
long voyage back in literary time as I have, it is tempting to believe that
we have entered a new world which coldly plans to do without literature,
yet pays it noisy and formal homage all the same.
When did the diminution of French literature begin? Certainly not
before 1940. My own reading in the classics includes works published up
until that time. Like all of us, I was raised on Proust who, among others,
gave me a taste for ranging far and wide in literary time. To understand
Joyce, I discovered Vico. We were already in the "Glorious Thirties" when
I read Celine, and his early novels helped me gain some distance from that
era and to recognize its spiritual atrophy, even though they had been writ–
ten well before the war. Reading the
Nouvelle Revue
Fran~aise
anthology of
the years 1908 to 1940, edited by Pierre Hebey, is enough to understand
that the literary arts in France until 1940 were, from a mainstream per–
spective, well in the center of the spiri t of the time.
In
my view, the star of French literature began to pale even as Sartre
and Aragon seemed to make it shine brighter than ever upon the world.
These two rivals subordinated
Ii
terature to ideology, and thus impercep–
tibly moved it from the center to the margins. A short time later, a new
generation of this school appeared, and new disciplines emerged, noisily
taking center stage. They announced that so-cal led modern linguistics,
semiology, psychoanalysis, anthropology, and sociology were more scien–
tific than poor literature. And to prove their claim they spread an
insufferably fashionable jargon that suddenly outdated all preceding liter-
