The Age of Suspicion (9 page)

Every now and then we see our most influential critics in the grip of a kind of dizziness, which is comprehensible, of course, in persons who are so busy reading. But then they suddenly begin to pronounce a masterpiece, and praise to the skies, a work that is devoid of all literary value, as will be proven, some time later, by the indifference, then the oblivion into which its weakness will inevitably let it slip.

In their wake, the public is carried off its feet by a veritable tidal-wave which raises it to the peak of admiration and enthusiasm.

Once all bans have been lifted, it is astonishing, to see with what avidity the most faithful and most enthusiastic lovers of literary masterpieces—those who, ordinarily, when faced with a new work, are so forbidding, so severe, so fastidious—devour these works as though they were the most succulent of foods. Even more succulent, they confess, (and why should they hide a taste that is shared by the most respected critics?) than those that are offered them by the great works of the past. Here no adaptation is necessary; we enter in with no effort and immediately everything goes quite smoothly; the characters are like us, or like people we know, or else as we imagine those of our contemporaries whom we should like to know. Their feelings, their ideas, their conflicts, the situations in which they find themselves, the problems they must solve, their hopes and their despairs are all ours: we feel quite in our element in their lives. In vain a few sophisticated spirits, a few maladjusted persons express certain reservations. It is the lack of art, they say, in a way that is as vague as it is pretentious, which disturbs them. Or perhaps the weakness of style. But they are immediately snubbed; they call down upon themselves general disapproval, they arouse people's distrust and hostility. They are taxed with favouring art for art's sake. Accused of 'formalism'. And in reality, they only get what they deserve. For who on earth would think of laying himself open to sarcasm so clumsily as this, of treating such serious questions with such blundering frivolity?

But let several months, more often, several years, go by, and we witness the following astonishing fact: not only new readers of these novels, but their greatest admirers themselves, if they have the misfortune to commit the imprudence of re-reading them, as soon as they pick up one of these books, have the same painful sensation that the birds who tried to pilfer Zeuxis's famous grapes must have had. What they see is nothing but an illusion of reality. A flat, inert copy. The characters are like wax dummies, fabricated according to the easiest, most conventional methods. Clearly, these books cannot even be used, as may certain novels of the past, as documents of their epoch, for it is hard to believe that these childish plots, these puppets that are the leading characters, and which imitate the grossest sort of semblance, could ever have had the feelings, faced the conflicts or been obliged to solve the problems that the living men of their time did.

What happened, then? And how may we explain such a metamorphosis?

It should first be observed that the authors of the works under discussion are not devoid of talent. They undoubtedly have what are usually referred to as the gifts that go to make a novelist. Not only do they know how to concoct a plot, develop action, create what is called 'atmosphere,' but moreover, and above all, they know how to seize and represent likeness. Every gesture their characters make, the way they smooth their hair, adjust the pleat in their trousers, light a cigarette or order a cup of coffee, as well as the things they say, the feelings they have, the ideas that cross their minds, constantly give the reader the stimulating and delightful impression of recognising what he may or could have observed himself. We might even say that the great good fortune of these novelists, the secret of their felicity and of that of their readers, resides in the fact that they set up their observation posts quite naturally at the exact spot on which the reader too is located. Neither on this side, where the authors and readers of cheap serials are to be found, nor on the far side, in that secret twilight zone, that confused seething, in which our actions and our words are forming. No, at the very place where we ourselves are accustomed to be, when we want to give a rather clear account, to ourselves or to others, of our feelings or our impressions. And indeed, if we are to judge by the conversations of persons having wide experience of psychological matters, as soon as these novelists begin to be confidential or catty, to describe themselves or their neighbours, they are more apt to be on the far side, only a little more in depth.

Thanks to this favourable position, they inspire confidence in their readers, who have the impression of being quite at home, among objects that are quite familiar. A feeling of friendliness, solidarity and also of gratitude unites them with this novelist who is so like them, who understands so well what they themselves feel, but who, at the same time, being a little more discerning than they are, more attentive, more experienced, shows them a little more about themselves and about others than they believe they know, and leads them, just excited enough by a very slight effort, but never tired or discouraged by too great an effort, never slowed down or impeded in their pace, towards what they hope to obtain when they start to read a novel: help in their loneliness, a description of their own situation, disclosures about the secret sides of other people's lives, advice filled with wisdom, correct solutions to the conflicts from which they are suffering, broadening of their experience, an impression of living other lives.

These needs seem so natural, and the contentment derived from satisfying them is so great, that we can understand the impatience provoked in these readers by the spoil-sports who, just when they are feeling most gratified, come and talk to them about 'art' or 'style'. What difference does it make to them if these works are not destined to last? And if, one day when, with the help of these books, their difficulties will have been overcome, their situations altered, their sentiments changed and their curiosity aroused by other ways of living, interest in these books should wane and the excitement they stirred up die down, there is nothing to be said against this, and to regret it would be a mistake. Why stock works with an eye to an unknown future, however imperishable they may appear to be, when what is most urgent is to give immediate, effective aid to the humanity of one's time. For a book to wear out when it has served its purpose, is only natural and sound. We throw it away and replace it by another.

And this opinion would be so obviously the part of wisdom that no one would dream of disputing it, if it were not for one very disquieting point, which is, the painful impression, as soon as the excitement these works have stirred up dies down, that what they described was not reality. Or rather, that it was only a surface reality, nothing but the flattest, most commonplace sort of semblance. More commonplace even, and more cursory, contrary to what it had seemed at first, than what we ourselves perceive, however rushed and absent-minded we may be.

Everyone knows to what extent, in our haste, we can be ignorant and credulous, obliged as we are to continually do what presses most, to be guided by the grossest of appearances. It suffices to recall what a revelation the interior monologue was for us; the wariness with which we regarded and at times still regard the efforts of Henry James or Proust to take apart the delicate wheel- works of our inner mechanisms; with what readiness we consent to believe that a certain cipher code—such as psychoanalysis— applied to the immense mobile mass we call our 'heart of hearts', in which almost anything may be found, can cover it entirely and give an account of all its movements; and with what satisfaction, what a feeling of deliverance, we let ourselves be convinced, and have most of us remained convinced, that this 'heart of hearts' which, quite recently, still offered such a fertile field for discovery, did not exist, was nothing: empty space, so much air.

But what makes us lose all sense of judgement, and vastly increases our credulity, is a certain need that impels us to look to novels for the above-mentioned satisfactions, which we shall have to qualify as extra-literary, since they can be furnished us quite as well by works that are devoid of literary value as by those that have attained to the peak of perfection.

Here our already great suggestibility and malleability become really astonishing: in our impatience to experience the pleasures that these books so generously offer us, we try to recognise ourselves in the crudest of images, we make ourselves as inconsistent as possible so as to flow easily into the already prepared moulds that are held out to us; in our own eyes, we become so bloodless and so empty that, however cramped these casts may be, it seems to us that they hold us entirely. Indeed, there is not so much as a fortune-teller's printed slip from which we do not derive an impression of miraculous self-recognition, the moment it raises in us a vague hope of finding consolation and foretelling the future.

Any novel, consequently, that succeeds in satisfying this dangerous passion, becomes for us, at little cost, the very image of life, a work of the most powerful realism, which we compare with the best of the classics, with the most highly accomplished writings.

Just here our worst suspicions are confirmed. For confusion such as this to be possible, these, then, must be the satisfactions that admirers of first class works demand of them, and we may legitimately believe, for instance, that most of Proust's readers liked him, and still like him, for reasons that have little to do with what constitutes his real worth, and which are not very different from those for which their parents or their grandparents liked Georges Ohnet.

It is even, we must now conclude, precisely that which has grown most outmoded in good books, which has been most imitated and is consequently most commonly accepted, taken for granted, that brings them closer in the eyes of their admirers to spurious good novels. Like the latter, they no longer present any obstacles, they require almost no more effort, and they permit the reader, comfortably settled in his own familiar world, to glide weakly along towards dangerous delights.

And yet good books are the salvation of the reader, in spite of himself. For they present a difference from the others that it would be a mistake to regard as negligible: they bear re-reading.

But it should not be thought that what separates the authors of these two kinds of works is above all a difference in talent. If we look closely, it is rather a radical difference of attitude towards the object upon which all their efforts must be concentrated and, consequently, a total difference of method. This is so true that we ought to put even contemporary writers in the same category with these earlier writers who are still read, if their attitude and working methods are the same, and whatever their talent—talent being about equally divided between the two categories—or however uncertain the future of their books.

If we had to designate all of these writers by one name, it would have to be that of 'realists', in opposition to the others to whom, however paradoxical and outrageous this may seem to them, the name 'formalists' is exactly applicable.

But, people will ask, what do you mean by a realistic writer? Well, quite simply—and it could not be otherwise—a writer who, above all, however great his desire to amuse his contemporaries, to reform them, to instruct them, or to fight for their emancipation, applies himself, while making an effort to cheat as little as possible, and to neither trim nor smooth anything for the purpose of overcoming contradictions and complexities, to seizing with all the sincerity of which he is capable, to scrutinising as far as his sharpness of vision will permit him to see, what appears to him to be reality.

To achieve this, he works unceasingly to rid what he sees of the matrix of preconceived ideas and ready-made images that encase it, as also of all the surface reality that everyone can easily see and which, for want of anything better, everyone uses; and occasionally he succeeds in attaining to something that is thus
far
unknown, which it seems to him he is the first to have seen. When he tries to bring to light this fragment of reality that is his own, he frequently notices that the methods of his predecessors, which were created by them for their own ends, can no longer serve his purpose. He therefore rejects them without hesitation and applies himself to finding new ones for his own usage. Little does he care if, at first, they disconcert or irritate his readers.

His passion for this reality is so great and so sincere that he shrinks from no sacrifice it may entail. Indeed, he accepts the greatest of all those that a writer may be led to make: loneliness and the moments of doubt and distress that this involves (and which have elicited from some of the greatest such statements as: 'People will understand me in 1880,'
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or, 'I'll win my suit in the Court of Appeals,'
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which it is unfair to interpret as vague childish dreams of posthumous conquest and glory, for they show these writers' need to keep up their courage, to maintain their confidence, to persuade themselves that what they were practically alone in seeing was true, and not a mirage or, as Cezanne came to believe, the result of defective vision).

Style (whose harmony and visible beauty are such a constant, dangerous temptation for writers), is for this writer merely an instrument, the only value of which is that of serving to extract and embrace as closely as possible the fragment of reality that he is trying to lay bare. All desire to write 'beautifully' for the pleasure of doing so, to give aesthetic enjoyment to himself or to his readers, is quite inconceivable for him; style, from his standpoint, being capable of beauty, only in the sense that an athlete's gesture is beautiful; the better it is adapted to its purpose, the greater the beauty. And this beauty, which is composed of vigour, precision, vivacity, suppleness, boldness and economy of means, is merely the expression of its effectiveness.

This reality, to which all of these writers held fast with such undivided, sincere passion, once certain among them had succeeded in seizing it, whether in its metaphysical, poetic, psychological or social aspects—at times it was their good fortune, or rather their compensation, to seize it in all these aspects at one time —nothing was ever able to destroy or even to debase it. Though the ideas are often out-of-date, the sentiments only too well-known or out-moded, the characters cruder than those we have since come to know; though there is nothing unpredictable in either the development or the outcome of the plot; beneath the heavy apparatus that these novelists were obliged to construct to capture this reality, and in which today it seems to us to be imprisoned, we sense it like a hard core that lends its cohesion and firmness to the entire novel, like a source of heat that radiates throughout its parts something that everyone recognises but that no one is able to designate otherwise than by such vague terms as 'truth' or 'life'. This is the reality to which we always return, in spite of our momentary betrayals and deviations, thus proving that, when all is said and done, we, too, prize it above all else.