l ]ow is I'iterarure Possúlc?

contenr, that is to say, the fictlon rto think up a.subject, an exrernal

trIn every way identical ro the one rnlm e languas y ranglast by whrilons are so numerous as to be inex-

E

Translated fu Rotand_Frangot Lack

7

How is Literature Possible? (Í942)*

I

We read the book which Jean Paulhan has just devored to lirerature andlanguage, Les Fkurs de Tarbes {The Flowers oJ Tarbes), with a srangefeeling. Ve enter unwarily into the analyses he formulates, not reallysensing the perils towards which the charming, precise sentences, rheirtight construction a gualantee of safety and order, are precipitated.Everything about ít is clear, ingenious, straightforward. Just as the wordsfollow on effortlessly from one another, so a series of sound reasons iselaborated, which seems intended to dispel equivocations and to ensurethat any wrirer is able to proceed with his writing. !ťe calmly witness thedisempowering of a cenain critical conception, whose defeat, ir seems,we can scarcely regret, since it was by nature hostile to convenrions andrules. However, an initial feeling of uneasiness begins to emerge. Themovement of rhe rhought we would like to follow, all the while remainingmarvellously coherent and regular, reveals at the same time a number ofdiscontinuities and allusions, whose meaning is somewhat threatening.Where is this author, who appeared to be quietly carrying out his policeduty wirh exquisite artfulness, taking us? Is he not talking about some_thing orher rhan what he was supposed to be saying? Could there be,hidden within his refutations and argumenrs, a kind of infernal machinewhich, invisible roday, will one day explode, overwhelming literature andrendering its use impossible? This is the anxieťy that Jean Paulhan is ab|eto produce. !(re read his book unsuspectingly, but when we reach theend, we suddenly see that he has put into quesrion not only a certaincritical conception, not only all ofliterature, bur also the mind, its powersand means, and we look back in horror at the abyss we have just crossed _but have we really gone over it? - and which a succession of veils hadskilfully hidden from us as we crossed over. Jean paulhan has given twotitles to his work: The Flowers of Tarbes or Terror in Literature. Thisambiguity accurately expresses some of rhe games he employs in order tomanipulate the reader's mind.

. otiginally publisb€d as Comfu.nl h líttéraluru .sF.lle po$ibl.? (Padš' Jo|é coni, l942)'

50 lfow is Literaturc l,ossiblc?

To the question: 'what is riterature?, the criticism Jean paulhan callsterrorist gives the following answer: there is only literature when there areno commonplaces, when a poem or a novel is not bound by ao.ruaartio.rr,arrifices, or the traditionar figures of siyle. This terror, whose decreeshave dominated the world of letters for the past 150 years, expresses aneed for purity, a preoccupation with rupture, which goes as far asforgetting the accepted conditions of languag.. Wi,h ;;. Hugo itrejects 'rhetoric', with Verraine 'eroquence', with Rimbaud ;poetic ordhat'; but with more recent writers, driven by a distaste for clichés andtormented by an obsession with revolt, it claíms to break with all formsof discourse and even with all languagá, seeking in originality the provi-sional refuge of a rebellion whose-. "deprivation of words, the povermistrust of technique, of well_dthese are the effects of terror whiclRomantiwhere it

traPs literature i

Tarbes o ,. At the entran

the gard lliYil?:*'entrance to literature. young writers canunadorned by the decorations with which' ÍaelÍ;in the past and in all the urittiance aná hichaspires, in vain, to a primitive state of being.

why this fear of commonpraces? It is because, according to terrorisrcritics, clichés are a sign of laziness and inertia. The writer who takesndolence which subordinates him tohe is thinking for himself; this is his

f words which imposes a fixed orders thoupl

how degradingly all-powerful that force is. If we reflect on certain words,such as freedom, democracjt, order, and on the disorderliness that can resultif they are used careressly, it becomes .r.". ,o us that writers have goodreason to be vigirant in preventing a facile subservience. Apparentry givenover ro ricence and anarchy, they are in fact engageaii-..p,rai"ti.rgchance, darkness, confusion, destroying idors and battling with mon-sters.Terror, in brief, as the enemy of commonplaces and rules, is engagedin a fight against a sickness ort"ng.rag.,

""1 i" the fear that words, left to

How is Literature Possible? 5l

themselves and freed from their meaning, might exert over the minds andhearts of men a formidable power' this terror attempts to restore toinspiration and creative force a boundless empire. Jean Paulhan notesrhat this conception has found in Bergson's philosophy the privilegeddoctrine which has led it to self-awareness. Following Bergson's advice,it has invited writers continually to resist practical' ordinary language inorder to rediscover the fluid forms of a deeper life. It goes beyondapparent logic, fixed by everyday words, in search of an unexpressed andprobably inexpressible reality; it strives to break the network of conven-tions in order to get through to a world that is still innocent; it lays claimto a virginal contact, to brand-new meanings, finding within this aspira-tion towards an extreme purity the justification for the imperious decreeswhich cause it to regard with suspicion the sauoir-faire and techniqueproper to all usages oflanguage.

This then is terror, its claims, its hates, its secrets. \What are we to thinkof it? If we look a little more carefuIly at its grievances' we notice ťtrst ofall that they don't correspond to the simplest obsenrations and then thatthey are based on a remarkable kind of illusion. It would be rash tobelieve that the use of commonplace expressions always presumes lazi-ness or leads to verbalism. There are times when a writer invents hisclichés, rediscovers them through a personal effort and uses them as ameans of expressing a freshness of sensibility or a naíveté of the imagina-tion. Then there are times when the author knows he is using common-place expressions, but uses them wilfully precisely because for him theyonly represent forms of language that are as common as any other wordtthat are well-suited to their meaning and unable to stand in its way.Clichés are intended to go unnoticed; far from giving the sentences thatinclude them the appearance of verbal excess' they rather have the effect,by dint of their banality, of making them transparent and invisible.

Terror's entire accusation in fact relies upon an optical illusion. Itsattention is focused on the author, whom it reproaches for giving in towords, whereas it is the reader, as he comes to grips with commonplaces,who is wholly engaged with words, a prisoner of an uncertain languagewhose intention escapes him. When the writer uses a cliché' whoeverreads it may well ask himself at least a double question: is this, hewonders, a picturesque and empty expression, which translates an im-portant thought with added colour, or is it on the contrary an impressive-looking word which corresponds to nothing? It is this ambiguity whichunsettles the use of conventional words and ultimately makes using thema perilous activity. The reader, disturbed and worried, wondering whatthese words freedom, order and democracy which are put before himmean, ends up accusing the author of verbalism, as if the latter wereguilty of having been too preoccupied with words, when in fact he is

52 I Ittzr is Literatura posstblc?

guilty of having neglected them; far from being too concerned wirhcombinations of language, he pays roo little attJntio., io t.oulems ofform, whose sorution he leaves io hi. ..ao.r, who is thereby condemnedto these words and possessed by them.The drawback' then, of commonplace expressions, of clichés, of a tritesequence of images, is rhat they subject the reader io .q,riuo."tion andmove him further away from the thought to which rr.'o"grrt to havea.ccess' From this perspective, we see how the conception which accusesrhetoric is right to recommend that

why it has good reason to denourwhich, instead of acquitting itself hinterpreter, on the contrary fosterswe also see how incomplete this corquick to consume figures of speechcontent to act after the damage has been done, hunting down clichéswhen they have a|ready carrieďout t

,ression, is to take away the latter,sof clarity and self_evidence, in short.

tr]rs co?fl?kofl1 since their main flaw, as

express,ons,nevernxedo,.o--L:,"tllttTl"fi :'^*1il:::'illi:",rJ:of other conventions, rules,. laws and figures of speech. The writer whouses them as advised, who is ready to fárm them by virtue of a flawlesstechnique and not just to submit tá them, is blessejwiti tr'. g.""" or".,a language in contact with things. Rletoric, oraulhan says.sappointment to read The Flowers of Tarbeslevels of meaning of the thought expressed init, whose enigmatic existence is hinted at in murmurs, in a number oflightning-quick reversals,or, conversery, in several srow allusions. Do notthink that this book is,what ir appears'io t., tt. analysis, guidcd bythesubtlest, the rarest and the mosiielicitous of mínds, of a certain criticalconception and a proposed ingenious solution ,o

"-p".,i.,.,tu. probtem.$7e.are in fact dealing with a-fundamental lu.stion concerning the narureof the mind, its profound division, this the Same andthe Same, which is the means of its powe its apotheosis.It will become apparent to anyone who real book thatJean Paulhan has written, and whose se d, that behindthe ironic reserye whlch is his art, by means of a seriousness whichchallenges itself and which puts itseíf tá the test in this cha|lenge, he has

How is Literature ltossible?

posed, in a form that calls to mind the famous Kantian revolution, theíbllowing problem: how is literature possible? But since such a question,through the debate into which it draws language and the mind, involvesa hypothesis about the nature of the most extreme human darkness, wecan catch a glimpse of some of the paths he takes to get to authenticthought and contemplate its native purity, which is also made up ofstereotypes, of commonplaces and conventions. These thoughts cannotbe summed up in a few words. It is no easy task to try and capture, in amirror such as this, an image which goes beyond appearances and ac-counts for them; but once we have made this discovery, when we havelearnt to read this book, we realize that we also know how to read almostall others. We will, then, as we retrace our steps and watch the invisiblefootprints left in the sand, attempt to see how this essay puts intoquestion, through a fundamental doubt, everything that can be writtenand thought with words.

II

There are two ways of reading The Flowers of Tarbes. If we contentourselves with accepting the text, following its signposts and enjoying thefirst series of reflections it offers, we will be rewarded with a reading thatis most pleasing and stimulating to the mind. l0 hat could be moreingenious or more immediately satisfying than turns and detours ofjudgement when confrented with a certain literary conception which it atthe same time watches, captivates and demolishes? $7e leave this spec-tacle delighted and reassured. (Jnfortunately, after several allusionshidden by their self-evidence, a number of formal problems and amysterious conclusion little by little give us pause for thought. Is thebook we have just drawn near to the real work we should be reading? Isit not merely its appearance? Might it not only be rhere ro hide ironicallyanother, more difficult and dangerous essay, whose shadows and ambi-tions we are dimly aware of,) At this point we have to take up our readingagain, but it would be futile to think that Jean Paulhan ever gives awayhis secrets. It is only through the uneasiness and anxiety we feel that weare authorized to communicate with the larger questions that he poses,and he is prepared to show us these questions only by their absence.

The first book, the apparent book, is devoted, as we have seen, to thecritical conception Paulhan calls terrorist. Let us recall its conclusion:

It is that clichés would no longer be lacking anything if they alwaysappeared to writers as clichés. All we need to do, says Paulhan, is to makecommonplaces common, and to restore to their proper usage the rules,figures of speech and all the other conventions which suffer a similar fate.

53

54 llout is Literarurc possible?

If a writer uses images, unities, rhymes, that is, rhetoric,s renewedmeans' as he is supposed to, he will be able to rediscover the impersonaland innocent languag-e he is searching for, the only one which allows himto be what he is and ro enrer into lontact with the virgin newness ofthings.This is' more or less, Jean paulhan's concrusion. But having reachedthis ending, the reader has the choice between two possibre courses ofaction' He can stop at this text he has understood, which is importantenough to engage his. mind. Is not everything perfectry clear nowT Is theresome remaining doubt' which has not been cleared up? What can we askof an author who has foreseen everything, even that we w'l ask nothingmore of himT Indeed' rhis same reader, irn. i, attentive, *,itin.ra r,,rr.end of the work, just when he is completely satisfied, a few words ofretraction' which disturb him and fo.ce him to retrace his steps. so herereads, and little by little, convinced that there is, behind the initialassertions he had contented himserf with, a secret he has to find, he triesro go further, rooking for the combinati,on by which he will be able toopen the true book that is offered to considers raising

spel the apparentis one objection

fter all? How has

opposed in almost 1ver1

w'av? ^. '.i,.-,ff,:,;:1.JT:j.1Í'::..Til:terrorists, as paulhan calrs them, ,."o .",.io.ies of writers who seem veryfar from having a common understanding about language. For somewriters, language's mission is to express thought.oi...ity, to be itsfaithful interpreter, to be subse*i..rt to it as if to a master whom itrecognizes. But for other writers, expression is merery the prosaic func_tion of everyday language; language;s true role is not to express but tocommunicate' not to translate butio be; and it wourd be absurd to see itas nothing but an intermediar

quality *t i.t it is the wrirer's s a peculiar

Here are, then, what seem to be and restore.

one anorher. vhat could they possib ly foreign toA lor more, no doubt, than one would think at first. Let us come backto classical writers. writing for them is expressing thought by means of adiscourse which should not hold our attentio.,, *Íi"h ,řo.,tj even disap-pear the moment it appears, which should nor at any rate cast a shadowover this profound life which it revears. Art consequently has onry oneobjective: to bring to light this inner world, wh'e keeping ii .r.rtorr.n.aby the crude and generar ilrusions with which

"n impeifec, 1u.rg.r"g.would dishonour it' But what else do alr the other ..ia... want, whorefuse to ask literary language to do the same things as everyday lan_

ÍIow is Literature Possible? 55

guage; and do they want it by some other means? For them too, writingis cxpressing a secret, profound thought, all the while making sure thatthcy rid language of everything which could make it look like ordinaryl:urguage, expressing oneself, in other words, through a language whichis not an instrument of expression, in which the words could show noneol' the wear and tear, and the ambiguity, of ordinary life. In both cases,thcn, the writer's mission is to impart an authentic thought- a secret or:r trufh - which an excessive attention to words, especially to the well-worn words we use every day, could only imperil.

tf(/hat confirms the similarity of these rwo kinds of mind is the identityo[ their fate. Each of them, carried along by rhe movement of its ownrrecessity fexigence), ends up criticizing language as such, literature assuch, and would waste away into silence if it were not saved by a constantillusion. Jean Paulhan has clearly shown what becomes of the ťrrst kind.\íanting to make language the ideal site of understanding and self-cvidence, they gradually remove from it the commonplace expressionswhich hamper communication of thoughts, extract from it conventionalwords, finally rid it of words themselves and, in a futile pursuit of clarityin a language which would say everything without being anything, theydie having attained nothing. They end up, in short, cancelling out lan-guage as a means of expression, precisely by having demanded thatlanguage be nothing other than a means of expression. As for the secondkind, they end up feeling the same hostility, because they saw words firstof all as having no value in terms of expression, but great value in termsof communication. So they expelled from language those words, figuresof speech and turns of phrase most likely to make it resemble a means ofexchange or a precise system of substitution. But this necessity fexigencefinevitably ended up being all-consuming. If it allowed Mallarmé torestore to certain terms the value of an event, if it gave him the means toexplore their inner space to the point of appearing truly to invent ordiscover them, it forced those who came after him to reject those sameterms as already corrupted by usage, to repudiate this discovery as havingbeen vulgarized by tradition and rerurned to common impurity.

It is quite apparent that in this exhausting search for a power, which asingle application will necessarily corrupt, in this endeavour to rid wordsof their opacity or banality, language is very precisely exposed to its ownruin. And the same can be said for literature in general. Commonplaceexpressions, the obiect of ruthless ostracism, have their equivalents inliterary conventions, which appear as worn-out rules, these rules them-selves, like any form, being the result of previous experiences and, assuch, remaining necessarily foreign to the personal secrer they should behelping to reveal. The writer has a duty to break with these convenrions,which are a kind of ready-made language, even more impure than the

)() Ilora ts Lilcrulurc posstblc?

othcr kind' If he can, he shourd free himserf from at the intermediatelayers which usage has built up and, enrapturing the reader, put himdirectly in touch with the veired worri he wants to uncover for him, withthat secret metaphysics and that pure religion, the pursuit of which is histrue vocation.At this point in the analysis, which Jean paulhan is guiding us throughwith a hardly visible yet sure hand, we will allow Ň.,"tuJs two fairlyserious comments. The first is thát this conception which we havelearned to recognize as rerror is not just any aesthetic or critical concep_tion; it covers almost the entire realÁ of letters; it i, rit.."t.,.", or at leastits soul' so that when we put terror rnto question, refuting it or showingthe frightening consequences of irs logic, it is literature itself we arequ,estioning and gradually annihilatrng. wt u, is more, ''. ".. forced toacknowledge that, apart from a few falo.rs examples, writers of one orthe other type' even th.ose most rigorous and most devoted to theirambition, have neither given up la.rgJage nor rhe form of their art. It is afact, literature exists. It continue. L u-., in spite of the inner absurditywhich inhabits it, divides it and .end..s it properly inconceivable. Themoment has come, then, to ask the fundamentar question: how is lit-erature possible?

III

How is literarure possibre? It is to this supreme question that we havebeen led in studying Jean paulhan,s book. W. .u."io.," .u..y *.i,.., o.r,of a concern that he should nor say anything which did not expressperfectly his thought, was condemned to reject not only commonpraceexpressions but also language and the cexpression. This is rhe necess lut:."ttwhich paulhan has named terro ceptlon

ich oneonly writes out of a hatred of words, is the soul of literature. There isdeep in every wrirer a logical demon which urges him to deal a morralf his ctignity as a writer byshort to put into question,FIow can literature exist

orher men bv the sore ract that he ."x,.J::;',[*":;ii,]T]i""tffffi:,':i:all of whose energy should be directed at preventing a written work fromtaking shape' end up creating a work oi literature? How is literaturepossible?

In order to answer this question, to see in other words how paulhananswers it, we have to follow the movement which can lead to a reÍuta-

How is Literature Possible? 57

t ion of terror. 'we saw that some writers fought against language becauser hcy saw it as an imperfect means of expression and because they wantedit to be completely and perfectly intelligible. !ťhere did this ambitionlcud them? To the invention of a language without commonplace ex-prcssions, that is, a language apparently without any ambiguity, or alanguage that in fact no longer offers any common measure, entirelyrcmoved from understanding. And we also saw that other writers foughtugainst language considered as a means of expression that was toocomplete or too perfect, and consequently like a non-literary language,and that through their ruthless demands fexigence), their concern for aninaccessible purity, they arrived, by hunting down convenrions, rules,genres, at a total proscription of literature, satisfied bnly when they wereable to intimate their secret outside all literary form. We must now add,however, that these consequences - a rejection oflanguage, a rejection ofliterature - are not the only ones which both kinds of writers resignthemselves to accepting. It also turns out, necessarily, that their cam-paign against words, their desire not to take them into account so as rogive thought its full weight, their obsession with indifference, all give riseto an extreme preoccupation with language, one of the effects of which isverbalism. This is a significant inevitability, at once regrettable andfortunate. In any case, it is a fact. Anyone who wants, at every momenr,to be absent from words, to be present only at the ones he reinvents, isendlessly preoccupied with them, so that of all the aurhors, those whostrive most keenly to avoid the reproach of verbalism are also preciselythose who are most exposed to this reproach. Run away from language, itcomes after yoil, says Paulhan, go after language, it runs away from you. Wemight think of victor Hugo, the writerpar excellence obsessed with words,who indeed did everything he could to triumph over rhetoric, and whosaid: 'The poet must not write with what has already been written (thatis, with words) but with his soul and his heart.'

The same is true of those who, by prodigious ascericism, deludedthemselves into thinking that rhey set themselves apart from all literature.Because they wanted to rid themselves of conventions and forms, inorder to be in direct contact with the secret world and the profoundmetaphysics that they wished ro reveal, they were ultimately conrent touse this world, this secret, this metaphysics as conventions and forms,which they complacently presented, and which constituted both thevisible framework and the basis of their works. As Jean Paulhan remarksdecisively on this point: 'Castles that come tumbling down,l lights in thenight, ghosts and dreams (for example) are . . . pure conventions, likerhyme and the three unities, but they are convenrions that we happily takefor dreams and castles, whereas no one has ever thought they have seenthe three unities.' In other words, for these kinds of writers, metaphysics,

5fl l_loru is Ltlcrttture possiblc?

religion and feelings take rhe place of rechnique and language. They areenre, rn a wordr literature.live an answer to the question: how isirtue of a double illusion _ the illusionagatnst sions and lan_

:ans whiand the illusion and common-

s or, as rhey say, ,t",JT"":Jr:ifphysics, religion, etc. - which is not its own. Now it isth ro u gh

" .. uo t., ti #qj!,:[: :T.ě ;JJll *:'i?: iT: J:":.:;tt* j

proposes to estabrish a more precise and more rigorous rergn ror rit-erarure' Let us nore ar the outset how bord ttir r.,oo'i,riio., i.] sinc. wrratit invorves is putting an end to the esseutial i'usion which makes lit_

: cleareitherirectlyrdentto commonplaces he will be able tornot fight against lirerarure, that heonvenrions by accepting their con_:l arrificial track indicating the pathut as the means of his discovery andrrity, where there are neither paths

one more step, without thinking of goingirably demonstrated that a writei, concen_thought he wants to express or commun_hostile

condemned to silence or only ehe .invites him to give, in hisemlnence to the system of verb

How is Literature Possible? 59

:r [brm. One might say that his Copernican revolution consists in noIonger making language iust turn around thought, but in imaginingrrnorher, very subtle and very complex mechanism by which thought, inorder to rediscover its authenticity, turns around language. Let us stopwith this remark and see if we can express it another way. Throughoutthe various sections of his study, Paulhan accepted - with an obedientsubmission to common sense which visibly hides a trap - the traditionaldistinction between signs and things, words and ideas. In actual factl'aulhan, knowing full well how arbitrary the opposition between contentand form is and that, in Paul Valéry's words, what we call content is onlyan impure form, factors this equivocation into his calculations and doesnot attempt to dispel it. If he were to dispel it, we would see clearly thatwhat he means by thought is not pure thought (all perceived thought isfrom the outset a language), but a confusion of isolated words, fragmentsof sentences, a first fortuitous expression - and by language, a regulatedexpression, the organized system of conventions and commonplace ex-pressions. This observation allows us to say, therefore, that according toPaulhan - at least in the secret book that we assume he has written -thought, in order to return to its source, that is, in order to throw offtheloose outer form it is clothed in and which is a travesty of thought, has toyield to clichés, conventions and the rules of language.

In an essay which he has not included in his book, but which is a

continuation of its project, La Demoiselle aux miroirs [The Young Lady ofthe Mirrorsl,2 Paulhan notes that a proper study of the strictest and mostfaithful kind of translation would provide a method for gaining access toauthentic thought. For such a translation would show what transforma-tion, proper to language, expression brings to bear on thought; all onewould have to do would be to work out what kind of change the trans-lator necessarily imposes on the text he is translating, and then toimagine within the original text analagous changes in order to work back,ideally, to a thought deprived of language and saved from reflection.Now, as is often pointed out, it seems that the almost inevitable effect onany translation is to make the translated text appear richer in its imageryand more concrete than the language into which it is'translated. Thetranslator dissociates the text's stereotypes, interprets them as expressivemetaphors and, so as not to replace them with simple, abstract words(which would be a further deformation), he translates them as concrete,picturesque images. This is also how all reflection becomes a travesty ofineffable original thought. Immediate thought, the kind perceived for usby consciousness with a look that decomposed it, is deprived of what wemight call its stereotypes, its commonplaces, its abstract rhythm. It isfalse and arbitrary, impure and conventional. All we recognize in it is ourown look. But if, on the other hand, we submit it to the rules of rhetoric,

ll

Ó() llozu is Litcrature l\tssible?

if our attention is surprised by rh5ment, we can hope to see the mir:commonplaces, reunited with theThought will become pure, it will

Notes

I The originadescribe rod lly' 'shaky castles') is a cliche used to

2 Mesures, 15 ranslator's note].

Editions du iliTf: in Oeutlres complétes, PaÍis,

Translated by Michael Syrotinski

8

The Novel is a Work of Bad Faith(1947)*

'l'he views on the novel provided by Jean Pouillon's bookr manage tolvoid the vagueness one associates with literary appreciation. They areconscious of their own principles. That is their great merit. rJ7hen onebegins to think about works of literature, it is surprising to realize howlong it is possible for such thinking to go on using the most imprecise ofnotions' unaware of what justifies it and of what it ímplies. Indeed, suchignorance would seem to be something that is required not only byliterature, but also by reflections on literature. To surround works ofliterature with too many problems, seeking to bring out the sense of thoseproblems, seems to be something the critic has no right to do, as ifcriticism is possible only if it respects a fundamental ignorance, anignorange pecqliar to art' more precisely if it $aitš

(ttrat ignorance by

appěáring to dispel it with a display of remarks that explain nothing, butprovide an aljbi,for problems which thus remain beyond inquiry, main-tained at a iauti. us remove. In this sense, criticism can be compared totheology. But theology is admirably elaborate and exact, even if itsexactness sometimes serves to defend it against questions which it doesnot consider legitimate. Criticism does not seem even to have a right toprecision and rigour; on the contrary, it must make what it talks aboutcomprehensible by introducing into the theoretical domain to which afterall it belongs, and into the effort of elucidation it seeks to accomplish,that movement of ignorance, those blind groping steps whose pleasingeffects are manifest in literature. It reproduces this ignorance, but mustneither study it nor recognize it, Iet alone turn it into a problem forcriticism. It thus raises vagueness to the level of perfection and soinevitably nullifies itself. But such nullity cloes not disappoint it, since itthereby renders an ultimate homage to its object, which then appears inits true light: as. an ob ject capable of rendering contradictory or meaning- ,,less any attempt to study it theoretically. ;

* Originally published as 'Le Roman, oeuvre de mauvaise foi', Les Temps Modenes, 19 (April 1947), pp.1104-17.