68
PARTISAN REVIEW
and admirable tirade fed by his medical experience, I came across this
phrase: "You, fertile in black artifices!" There's a textual note stating that
"fertile in black artifices" is taken directly from Saint-Simon, in his por–
trait of a duchess. Celine takes up the phrase and integrates it perfectly into
the flow of his style. This is just to point out that literature has a subter–
ranean history that should not be underestimated. A completely disruptive
modern writer lives by revitalizing the classics. In Proust we find: "That is
modern which is called on to become classic." People don't want to
understand right away that Baudelaire is one with Racine; so there is an
uproar. There is a certain reticence in society when it comes to recogniz–
ing that the same thing resurfaces in very different forms, that history is
not a succession of eras, but a single proximity to the same....
MF:
La Bruyere wrote: "Everything has been said, and we come too late
in the more than seven thousand years that man has existed and thought."
These are the first words of his
Characteres
and are themselves an extreme–
ly new variation, applied to a thoroughly modern society, on the
Characters of Theophrastes from the fourth century
13.C.
ps:
Yes, but no one ever says enough. Allow me to quote ])ucasse in his
Poesies:
"Nothing is said. We come too early in the more than seven thou–
sand years that man has existed. We have the advantage of working after
the ancients, the most gifted of the moderns." There's a good example,
admirably rhetorical, giving the classics new life by using or subverting
them (in this case La Bruyere). Literature's real continuity is also present,
in this subterranean history that communicates in a strange way, in breaks
or fissures, with apparent or official versions of history. It is there to be
read and never completely reaches us.
Finnegans Wake
will always remain
enigmatic. In these works by Proust, Kafka, Joyce, Celine, I find a para–
doxical proof of the continuity of literature's great vitality.
I agree with you, on the other hand, in your characterization of our
present era. I don't know of any better words to define it than Heidegger's:
"the rise of the technical and its world-wide reign." We must ask what
effect our society will have on the diversified language of
Ii
terature. In this
scenario, the death of literature is in fact preprogrammed, as is the death
of man as you have defined him. In 1951, Heidegger made some aston–
ishing statements in
Overcoming Metaphysics,
if you consider how very few
biological experiments had been done up to that time: "Literary engi–
neering in the cultural sector will correspond more and more to
engineering in matters of conception." What disappears, what tends to be
stifled
in utero,
if I may, by the conjunction of technical sovereignty and
market forces is the depth of
Ii
terary language as we understand it. A novel
that does not sell in three months has very little chance of being reissued
