For they do not indulge in Byzantine speculations about grammatical motivation, but ask a number of basic questions that are a part of human suffering. It is in their inquiry that our sacrifices find a form.
Only one thing has changed since the surrealists. Instead of using the uncertainty of language and the world to justify every possible kind of liberty—calculated madness or automatic writing—men are striving for an inner discipline. The tendency is no longer to deny that language is reasonable or to give free rein to the disorders it contains.
The trend is to recognize that language has the limited powers to return, through miracles or through absurdity, to its tradition. In other words, and this intellectual move is of the highest importance for our time, we no longer use the falsehood and apparent meaninglessness of the world to justify instinctual behavior, but to defend a prejudice in favor of intelligence.
It is a question merely of a reasonable intelligence that has returned to concrete things and has a concern for honesty. It is a new classicism— and one that expresses the two values most frequently attacked today: I mean intelligence and France.
For many reasons, the book Parain promises us on the ontology of language takes on great importance. But in the meantime, over and above any differences of opinion, let us begin by recognizing how deeply he resembles us. A taste for the truth, a lesson in modesty following scrupulous analysis informed by the most extensive documentation, this is the education one receives from Parain’s books. We cannot turn our back on such works. We still have much to do, and we are still subjected to the most torturous questions.
But it is certain that, whether we turn toward miracles or toward absurdity, we shall do nothing without those virtues in which human honor lies—honesty and poverty. What we can learn from the experience Parain sets forth is to turn our back upon attitudes and oratory in order to bear scrupulously the weight of our own daily life. “Preserve man in his perseverance,” we read in Essai sur la misère humaine, “it is through this that he becomes immense, and gains the only immensity that he can transmit.” Yes, we must rediscover our banality. The question is merely to know whether we shall have both the genius and the simple heart that are needed.
Article published in Poésie 44, 1944
1 Brice Parain (born 1897) was an author whose political preoccupations coincided with those of Camus at a later stage in his career. Thus on p. 184 of Carnets II (Alfred A. Knopf edition, p. 144), in November 1946, Camus noted down Parain’s remark that “the essence of modern literature is recantation,” and later used it as one of the main themes of The Rebel. Parain had written, in an article published in Combat on November 11, 1946, and entitled Le caractère commun des productions actuelles, that modern literature was characterized not by despair but by “palinodes, in other words, a return to commonplaces.” “In the last fifty years,” he continued, “we have seen all kinds of such returns. Once again it was Rimbaud who showed the way. The others, naturally, have followed. We have had Claudel and devotion, Gide and duty, Aragon and his voice quivering from patriotic emotion, Jean Paulhan and rhetoric, surrealism which has returned from different kinds of magic to different kinds of rationalism, even to positivism, pacifism which has gone to war and even existentialists who have become professors of ethics.” Camus took over this idea himself and made it into one of the central themes of The Rebel, arguing in his chapter on the Pozt’s Rebellion that in Rimbaud, Lautréamont, and surrealism, “complete conformism follows merciless revolt.” —P.T.
2 Essai sur le logos platonicien (1941), Recherches sur la nature et les fonctions du langage (Gallimard, 1943).
3 Essai sur la misère humaine (1934), Retour à la France (Grasset, 1936).
4 Recherches, p. 141.
5 Hackforth’s translation.
6 Recherches, p. 56.
7 Similarly, if we conclude that we cannot name what does not exist, everything that has a name therefore exists, and there is not one of man’s dreams (Jesus or Pan) that does not possess reality. If, on the contrary, we conclude that we can name what does not exist, we are without any rule.
8 Essai sur le logos platonicien.
9 How words do have meaning! For us, Pascal is a great philosopher. But in Clermond-Ferrand, on the street where he was born, there exists a Pascal Bar.
1 Recherches, p. 149.
2 Recherches, p. 173.
3 “Not to lie means not only refusing to hide our acts or our intentions, but also saying them and meaning them truthfully. This is not easy, and not something painlessly achieved.”
Recherches, p. 183.
4 Recherches, p. 179. But from that point onward, the new problem that arises is how to reconcile the existence of falsehood with the existence of God. This, I assume, is the problem
Parain will tackle in his next hook.
The end
