The Age of Suspicion (4 page)

approval is a trap 'to lead the innocent into temptation'; 'everything is falsely interpreted,' even to your own questions, you no longer understand your own conduct, 'you do not know whether you resisted or yielded; like a man who has no mirror, you do not know what your own face is like, you are, as it were, to one side, at a distance from yourself, indifferent and somewhat hostile, an icy void, without light or shade. All the tiny tentacles that constantly stretch out towards the nearby partner, that cling to him, become detached, right themselves, slacken, collide, then come together again, here, like organs that are no longer used, become atrophied and disappear; the subtle, precise movements, the skilful attractions and feigned withdrawals are now reduced to so many blind, disordered jerks, the monotonous starts of a trapped animal; this malleability, or this suggestibility, which had been a furtive, avid caress, has become docility of inert things, desperate passivity in the face of 'an unavoidable fate'; death itself, to which people submit without resisting, because already, for a long time, they have been nothing but 'dead matter,' has lost its nature of unique tragedy; assassination is no longer the ultimate embrace, nor even the ultimate break, it is only part of a customary and minutely ordered ritual, at once slightly sickening and a bit ludicrous, performed by stilted, clean-shaven 'gentlemen,' in frock-coats and top-hats, filled with delicate, icy courtesy, who indulge in a lengthy exchange of 'polite phrases to settle questions of precedence,' a ritual in which the victim does his best to participate, until finally, under the gaze of 'gentlemen bending close to his face, observing him, cheek to cheek,' he dies, slaughtered: 'like a dog'!

With the divinatory powers peculiar to certain geniuses, the same that made Dostoievski foresee the fraternal impulse of the Russian people and their unusual destiny, Kafka, who was Jewish, and lived in the shadow of the German nation, foretold the fate that awaited his people, and understood certain fundamental traits of the German character that were to lead the Germans to conceive and carry out a unique experiment: this consisted of yellow satinette stars distributed upon receipt of two coupons cut from the textile ration-card; of crematoria on which hung large posters giving the name and address of the sanitary firm that had built the model; and of gas chambers in which two thousand naked bodies (as in The
Trial,
their clothes had previously been carefully folded and put aside) writhed under the gaze of well- girthed, booted and decorated gentlemen, sent on a mission of inspection, who watched them through a glass-covered orifice to which they approached, each in turn, respecting precedence and exchanging polite phrases.

Beyond these furthermost limits, to which Kafka did not follow them, but to where he had the superhuman courage to precede them, all feeling disappears, even contempt and hatred; there remain only vast, empty stupefaction, definitive, total don't understand.

To remain at the point where he left off, or to attempt to go on from there, are equally impossible. Those who live in a world of human beings can only retrace their steps.

Temps
Modernes
October 1947.

THE AGE OF SUSPICION

A
LTHOUGH
critics may prefer, like good pedagogues, to appear not to notice anything and, on the other hand, seize every opportunity to proclaim, as though announcing a fundamental truth, that the novel, unless they are very much mistaken, is and always
will
be, first and foremost, 'a story in which characters move and have their being,' that no novelist is worthy of the name unless he is able to 'believe in' his characters, which is what makes it possible for him to 'infuse life' into them and give them 'fictional relief; although they may continue to lavish praise on novelists who, like Balzac or Flaubert, succeed in making their heroes 'stand out,' thus adding one more 'unforgettable' figure to the unforgettable figures with which so many famous novelists have already peopled our world; although they may dangle before young writers the mirage of exquisite rewards that are supposed to await those whose faith is greatest: that moment, familiar to a few 'real novelists,' when the character, by virtue of the intensity of the author's belief and interest in him, actuated by some mysterious fluid, as in table-rapping, suddenly starts to move of his own momentum, and takes in tow the delighted creator who has only to let himself be guided, in his turn, by his creature; finally, however sternly critics may add threat to promise, warning novelists that if they are not vigilant, their best-armed rival, the cinema, will one day wrest the sceptre from their unworthy hands —it is of no avail. Neither reproaches nor encouragements are able to revive a faith that is waning.

And, according to all appearances, not only has the novelist

practically ceased to believe in his characters, but the reader, too, is unable to believe in them; with the result that the characters, having lost the two-fold support that the novelist's and the reader's faith afforded them, and which permitted them to stand upright with the burden of the entire story resting on their broad shoulders, may now be seen to vacillate and fall apart.

Since the happy days of Eugénie Grandet when, at the height of his power, the character occupied the place of honour between reader and novelist, the object of their common devotion, like the Saints between the donors in primitive paintings, he has continued to lose, one after the other, his attributes and prerogatives.

At that time he was richly endowed with every asset, the recipient of every attention; he lacked for nothing, from the silver buckles on his breeches to the veined wart on the end of his nose. Since then he has lost everything: his ancestors, his carefully built house, filled from cellar to garret with a variety of objects, down to the tiniest gew gaw; his sources of income and his estates; his clothes, his body, his face. Particularly, however, has he lost that most precious of all possessions, his personality—which belonged to him alone—and frequently, even his name.

Today, a constantly rising tide has been flooding us with literary works that still claim to be novels and in which a being devoid of outline, indefinable, intangible and invisible, an anonymous 'I', who is at once all and nothing, and who as often as not is but the reflection of the author himself, has usurped the role of the hero, occupying the place of honour. The other characters, being deprived of their own existence, are reduced to the status of visions, dreams, nightmares, illusions, reflections, quiddities or dependents of this all-powerful 'I'.

Our minds might be set at rest, if we could impute this method of procedure to an egocentricity peculiar to adolescence, to the timidity or inexperience of the beginner. As it happens, however, this youthful malady has attacked some of the most important works of our time (from
Remembrance of Things
Past and
Marshlands,
to the
Mirale
de
la rose,
not to mention the
Notebook of
Malte
Laurids Brigge, Journey
to
the End of the
Night, and the
Diary of
Antoine
Roquentin (Nausea);
in other words, works in which the authors have given immediate proof of very evident mastery and rare forcefulness.

What is revealed, in fact, by the present evolution of the character in fiction is just the opposite of regression to an infantile state.

It shows, on the part of both author and reader, an unusually sophisticated state of mind. For not only are they both wary of the character, but through him, they are wary of each other. He had been their meeting ground, the solid base from which they could take off in a common effort towards new experiments and new discoveries. He has now become the converging point of their mutual distrust, the devasted ground on which they confront each other. And if we examine his present situation, we are tempted to conclude that it furnishes a perfect illustration of Stendhal's statement that 'the genius of suspicion has appeared on the scene.' We have now entered upon an age of suspicion.

To begin with, today's reader is suspicious of what the author's imagination has to offer him. 'There is nobody left,' M. Jacques Tournier complains, 'who is willing to admit that he invents. The only thing that matters is the document, which must be precise, dated, proven, authentic. Works of the imagination are banned, because they are invented ... (The public), in order to believe what it is told, must be convinced that it is not being "taken in." All that counts now is the "true
fact
..."
{6}

But M. Tournier should not be so bitter. This predilection for 'true facts' which, at heart, we all share, does not indicate a timorous, sedate mind, forever ready to crush under the weight of 'sound reality' all daring experiment, all impulse towards evasion. On the contrary, we must do the reader the justice to admit that he needs little coaxing to follow the writer along new paths. He has never really balked before the perspective of effort, and when he agreed to examine with minute attention each detail of Père Grandet's dress and each object in his house, to evaluate his poplar trees and vineyards and supervise his stock-market transactions, it was not because of a liking for sound reality, nor from a need to cuddle down snugly in the nest of a familiar world, whose contours inspired confidence. He knew well where he was being taken. Also, that it would not be plain sailing.

Something unwonted, violent, lay beneath these everyday appearances. Every gesture of the character was a reminder of some aspect of this fact, the most insignificant bauble reflected some facet of it. It was this that had to be brought out, explored to the very limit, investigated in its most secret recesses. Here was a compact, absolutely fresh subject-matter that required effort and fanned the passion for experimental research. Consciousness of this effort and of the validity of this research justified the cocksureness with which the author, indifferent as to whether or not he was trying the reader's patience, forced him to participate in prying housewifely inspections, to make computations that would do honour to a bank-clerk or appraisals worthy of an auctioneer. It also justified the reader's tractability. They both realised that here was to be found what, at the time, was their chief concern. Here and nowhere else: as inseparable from the object as the colour yellow from the lemon in a Chardin canvas—or in a Veronese, the colour blue from the sky. Just as the colour yellow was the lemon and the colour blue was the sky, so that they were inconceivable one without the other, avarice was Père Grandet; it was his entire substance, it filled him to the very brim and, at the same time, owed its own form and vigour to him.

The stronger the framework, the better constructed and more richly ornamented the object, the richer and more delicately shaded was the subject-matter.

Is it any fault of the reader if, since then, this same subject- matter has taken on the mushy consistency and general insipidness of over-chewed food, and the object containing it the flat appearance of painted scenery?

The sense of life to which, in the long run, all art harks back (the 'intensity of life' that undoubtedly, as Gide says, 'is what gives things their value'), has deserted these erstwhile promising forms and betaken itself elsewhere. By virtue of the ceaseless movement which tends to bring it ever nearer to the mobile point where, at a given moment, experiment and the peak of effort meet, it has broken through the earlier novel form and forsaken, one by one, all the old, useless accessories. Today, warts and waistcoats, characters and plots, may offer the most infinite variety without revealing anything other than a reality, the slightest particle of which we are familiar with already, from having been over and over it, in every direction. Instead of inciting the reader, as in Balzac's time, to attain to a truth whose conquest denotes hard-won struggle, all these accessories now appear to him to constitute but a dangerous concession to his inclination towards laziness—as well as to that of the author—or to his fear of change. The swiftest glance about him, the most fleeting contact, tells him more than all these external appearances, the sole aim of which is to give a semblance of likelihood to the characters. He has only to dip into the huge stock, which as a result of his own experience is constantly increasing, to compensate for what is lacking in these tiresome descriptions.

As regards the character, he realises that it is nothing other than a crude label which he himself makes use of, without real conviction and by way of convenience, for the purpose of orienting, very approximately, his own behaviour. So he is wary of the abrupt, spectacular types of action that model the character with a few resounding whacks; he is also wary of plot, which winds itself around the character like wrappings, giving it, along with an appearance of cohesiveness and life, mummy-like stiffness.

In fact, M. Tournier is right; the reader has grown wary of practically everything. The reason being that, for some time now, he has been learning about too many things, and he is unable to forget entirely all he has learned.

What he has learned is a matter of such common knowledge that there is no need to go into it here. He has made the acquaintance of Joyce, Proust and Freud; the trickle, imperceptible from without, of the interior monologue; the infinitely profuse growth of the psychological world and the vast, as yet almost unexplored regions of the unconscious. He has watched the watertight partitions that used to separate the characters from one another, give way, and the hero become an arbitrary limitation, a conventional figure cut from the common woof that each of us contains in its entirety, and which captures and holds within its meshes, the entire universe. Like the surgeon who eyes the exact spot on which his greatest effort is to be concentrated, isolating it from the rest of the sleeping body, he has been led to centre all his attention and curiosity on some new psychological state, forgetting meanwhile the motionless character, who serves as its chance prop. He has seen time cease to be the swift stream that carried the plot forward, and become a stagnant pool at the bottom of which a slow, subtle decomposition is in progress; he has seen our actions lose their usual motives and accepted meanings, he has witnessed the appearance of hitherto unknown sentiments and seen those that were most familiar change both in aspect and name.