The Absurd Man
‘If Stavrogin believes, he does not think he believes.
If he does not believe, he does not think he does not believe.’
—THE POSSESSED
‘My field,’ said Goethe, ‘is time.’ That is indeed the absurd speech. What, in fact, is the absurd man? He who, without negating it, does nothing for the eternal. Not that nostalgia is foreign to him. But he prefers his courage and his reasoning. The first teaches him to live without appeal and to get along with what he has; the second informs him of his limits. Assured of his temporally limited freedom, of his revolt devoid of future and of his mortal consciousness, he lives out his adventure within the span of his lifetime. That is his field, that is his action, which he shields from any judgement but his own. A greater life cannot mean for him another life. That would be unfair. I am not even speaking here of that paltry eternity that is called posterity. Madame Roland relied on herself. That rashness was taught a lesson. Posterity is glad to quote her remark but forgets to judge it. Madame Roland is indifferent to posterity.
There can be no question of holding forth on ethics. I have seen people behave badly with great morality and I note every day that integrity has no need of rules. There is but one moral code that the absurd man can accept, the one that is not separated from God: the one that is dictated. But it so happens that he lives outside that God. As for the others (I mean also immoralism), the absurd man sees nothing in them but justifications and he has nothing to justify. I start out here from the principle of his innocence.
That innocence is to be feared. ‘Everything is permitted,’ exclaims Ivan Karamazov. That, too, smacks of the absurd. But on condition that it be not taken in the vulgar sense. I don’t know whether or not it has been sufficiently pointed out that it is not an outburst of relief or of joy but rather a bitter acknowledgement of a fact. The certainty of a God giving a meaning to life far surpasses in attractiveness the ability to behave badly with impunity. The choice would not be hard to make. But there is no choice and that is where the bitterness comes in. The absurd does not liberate; it binds. It does not authorize all actions. Everything is per mitted does not mean that nothing is forbidden. The absurd merely confers an equivalence on the consequences of those actions. It does not recommend crime, for this would be childish, but it restores to remorse its futility. Likewise, if all experiences are indifferent, that of duty is as legitimate as any other. One can be virtuous through a whim.
All systems of morality are based on the idea that an action has consequences that legitimize or cancel it. A mind imbued with the absurd merely judges that those consequences must be considered calmly. It is ready to pay up. In other words, there may be responsible persons but there are no guilty ones, in its opinion. At very most such a mind will consent to use past experience as a basis for its future actions. Time will prolong time and life will serve life. In this field that is both limited and bulging with possibilities, everything in himself, except his lucidity, seems unforesee able to him. What rule, then, could emanate from that un reasonable order? The only truth that might seem instructive to him is not formal: it comes to life and unfolds in men. The absurd mind cannot so much expect ethical rules at the end of its reasoning as rather, illustrations and the breath of human lives. The few following images are of this type. They prolong the absurd reasoning by giving it a specific attitude and their warmth.
Do I need to develop the idea that an example is not necessarily an example to be followed (even less so if possible in the absurd world)and that these illustrations are not, therefore, models? Besides the fact that a certain vocation is required for this, one becomes ridiculous, with all due allowance, when drawing from Rousseau the conclusion that one must walk on all fours and from Nietzsche that one must maltreat one’s mother. ‘It is essential to be absurd,’ writes a modern author, ‘it is not essential to be a dupe.’ The attitudes of which I shall treat can assume their whole meaning only through consideration of their contraries. A sub-clerk in the post-office is the equal of a conqueror if consciousness is common to them. All experiences are indifferent in this regard. There are some that do either a service or a disservice to man. They do him a service if he is conscious. Otherwise, that has no importance: a man’s failures imply judge-ment, not of circumstances, but of himself.
I am choosing solely men who aim only to expend themselves or whom I see to be expending themselves. That has no further implications. For the moment I want to speak only of a world in which thoughts like lives are devoid of future. Everything that makes man work and get excited utilizes hope. The sole thought that is not mendacious is therefore a sterile thought. In the absurd world the value of a notion or of a life is measured by its sterility.
Don Juanism
If it were sufficient to love, things would be too easy. The more one loves the stronger the absurd grows. It is not through lack of love that Don Juan goes from woman to woman. It is ridiculous to represent him as a mystic in quest of total love. But it is indeed because he loves them with the same passion and each time with his whole self that he must repeat his gift and his profound quest. Whence each woman hopes to give him what no one has ever given him. Each time they are utterly wrong and merely manage to make him feel the need of that repetition. ‘At last,’ ex claims one of them, ‘I have given you love.’ Can we be surprised that Don Juan laughs at this? ‘At last? No,’ he says, ‘but once more.’ Why should it be essential to love rarely in order to love much?
Is Don Juan melancholy? This is not likely. I shall barely have recourse to the legend. That laugh, the conquering in solence, that playfulness and love of the theatre are all clear and joyous. Every healthy creature tends to multiply himself. So it is with Don Juan. But furthermore melancholy people have two reasons for being so: they don’t know or they hope. Don Juan knows and does not hope. He reminds one of those artists who know their limits, never go beyond them, and in that precarious interval in which they take their spiritual stand enjoy all the wonderful ease of masters. And that is, indeed: genius: the intelligence that knows its frontiers. Up to the frontier of physical death Don Juan is ignorant of melancholy. The moment he knows, his laugh bursts forth and makes one forgive everything. He was melancholy at the time when he hoped. Today, on the mouth of that woman he recognizes the bitter and comforting taste of the only knowledge. Bitter ? Barely: that nece sary imperfection that makes happiness perceptible!
It is quite false to try to see in Don Juan a man brought up on Ecclesiastes. For nothing is vanity to him except the hope of another life. He proves this because he gambles that other life against heaven itself. Longing for desire killed by satisfaction, that commonplace of the impotent man, does not belong to him. That is all fight for Faust who b lieved in God enough to sell himself to the devil. For Don Juan the thing is simpler. Molina’s ‘Burlador’ ever replies to the threats of hell: ‘What a long respite you give me!’ What comes after death is futile and what a long succession of days for whoever knows how to be alive! Faust craved worldly goods; the poor man had only to stretch out his hand. It already-amounted to selling his soul when he was unable to gladden it. As for satiety, Don Juan insists upon it, on the contrary. If he leaves a woman it is not absolutely because he has ceased to desire her. A beautiful woman is always desirable. But he desires another, and no, this is not the same thing.
This life gratifies his every wish and nothing is worse than losing it. This madman is a great wise man. But men who live on hope do not thrive in this universe where kindness yields to generosity, affection to virile silence, and communion to solitary courage. And all hasten to say: ‘He was a weakling, an idealist or a saint.’ One has to disparage the greamess that insults.
People are sufficiently annoyed (or smile that smile of complicity that debases what it admires)by Don Juan’s speeches and by that same remark that he uses on all women. But to anyone who seeks quantity in his joys, the only thing that matters is efficacy. What is the use of complicating the passwords that have stood the test? No one, neither the woman nor the man, listens to them, but rather to the voice that pronounces them. They are the rule, the convention, and the courtesy. After they are spoken the most important still remains to be done. Don Juan is already getting ready for it. Why should he give himself a problem in morality? He is not like Milosz’s Manara who damns himself through a desire to be a saint. Hell for him is a thing to be provoked. He has but one reply to divine wrath and that is human honour: ‘I have honour,’ he says to the Commander, ‘and I am keeping my promise because I am a knight.’ But it would be just as great an error to make an immoralist of him. In this regard, he is ‘like everyone else’: he has the moral code of his likes and dislikes. Don Juan can be properly understood only by constant reference to what he commonly symbolizes: the ordinary seducer and the sexual athlete. He is an ordinary seducer. [1] Except for the difference that he is conscious, and that is why he is absurd. A seducer who has become lucid will not change for all that. Seducing is his condition in life. Only in novels does one change condition or become better. Yet it can be said that at the same time nothing is changed and everything is transformed. What Don Juan realizes in action is an ethic of quantity, whereas the saint on the contrary tends towards quality. Not to believe in the profound meaning of things belongs to the absurd man. As for those cordial or wonderstruck faces, he eyes them, stores them up, and does not pause over them. Time keeps up with them. The absurd man is he who is not apart from time. Don Juan does not think of ‘collecting’ women. He exhausts their number and with them his chances of life. ‘Collecting’ amounts to being capable of living off one’s past. But he rejects regret, that other form of hope. He is incapable of looking at portraits.
Is he selfish for all that? In his way probably. But here, too, it is essential to understand one another. There are those who are made for living and those who are made for loving. At least Don Juan would be inclined to say so. But he would do so in a very few words such as he is capable of choosing. For the love we are speaking of here is clothed in illusions of the eternal. As all the specialists in passion teach us, there is no eternal love but what is thwarted. There is scarcely any passion without struggle. Such a love culminates only in the ultimate contradiction of death. One must be Werther or nothing. Then, too, there are several ways of committing suicide, one of which is the total gift and forgetfulness of self. Don Juan, as well as anyone else, knows that this can be stirring. But he is one of the very few who know that this is not the important thing. He knows just as well that those who turn away from all personal life through a great love enrich themselves perhaps but certainly impoverish those their love has chosen. A mother or passionate wife necessarily has a closed heart, for it is turned away from the world. A single emotion, a single creature, a single face, but all is devoured. Quite a different love disturbs Don Juan, and this one is liberating. It brings with it all the faces in the world and its tremor comes from the fact that it knows itself to be mortal. Don Juan has chosen to be nothing.
For him it is a matter of seeing clearly. We call love what binds us to certain creatures only by reference to a collective way of seeing for which books and legends are responsible. But of love I know only that mixture of desire, affection and intelligence that binds me to this or that creature. That compound is not the same for another per son. I do not have the right to cover all these experiences with the same name. This exempts one from conducting them with the same gestures. The absurd man multiplies here again what he cannot unify. Thus he discovers a new way of being which liberates him at least as much as it liberates those who approach him. There is no noble love but that which recognizes itself to be both short-lived and exceptional. All those deaths and all those rebirths gathered together as in a sheaf, make up for Don Juan the flowering of his life. It is his way of giving and of vivifying. I let it be decided whether or not one can speak of selfishness.
I think at this point of all those who absolutely insist that Don Juan be punished. Not only in another life, but even in this one. I think of all those tales, legends, and laughs about the aged Don Juan. But Don Juan is already ready. To a conscious man old age and what it portends are not a surprise. Indeed, he is conscious only in so far as he does not conceal its horror from himself. There was in Athens a temple dedicated to old age. Children were taken there. As for Don Juan, the more people laugh at him the more his figure stands out. Thereby he rejects the one the romantics lent him. No one wants to laugh at that tormented, pitiful Don Juan. He is pitied; heaven itself will redeem him ? But that’s not it. In the universe of which Don Juan has a glimpse, ridicule too is included. He would consider it normal to be chastised. That is the rule of the game. And, indeed, it is typical of his nobility to have accepted all the rules of the game. Yet he knows he is right and that there can be no question of punishment. A fate is not a punishment.
That is his crime, and how easy it is to understand why the men of God call down punishment on his head. He achieves a knowledge without illusions which negates everything they profess. Loving and possessing, conquering and consuming — that is his way of knowing. (There is significance in that favourite Scriptural word that calls the carnal act ‘knowing’.)He is their worst enemy to the extent that he is ignorant of them. A chronicler relates that the true ‘Burlador’ died assassinated by Franciscans who wanted ‘to put an end to the excesses and blasphemies of Don Juan whose birth assured him impunity’. Then they proclaimed that heaven had struck him down. No one has proved that strange end. Nor has anyone proved the contrary. But without wondering if it is probable, I can say that it is logical. I want merely to single out at this point the word ‘birth’ and to play on words: it was the fact of living that assured his innocence. It was from death alone that he derived a guilt now become legendary.
What else does that stone Commander signify, that cold statue set in motion to punish the blood and courage that dared to think? All the powers of eternal Reason, of order, of universal morality, all the foreign grandeur of a God open to wrath are summed up in him. That gigantic and soulless stone merely symbolizes the forces that Don Juan negated forever. But the Commander’s mission stops there. The thunder and lightning can return to the imitation heaven whence they were called forth. The real tragedy takes place quite apart from them. No, it was not under a stone hand that Don Juan met his death. I am inclined to believe in the legendary bravado, in that mad laughter of the healthy man provoking a non-existent God. But, above all, I believe that on that evening when Don Juan was waiting at Anna’s the Commander didn’t come and that, after midnight, the blasphemer must have felt the dreadful bitterness of those who have been fight. I accept even more readily the account of his life that has him eventually burying himself in a monastery. Not that the edifying aspect of the story can be considered probable. What refuge can he go to ask of God ? But this symbolizes rather the logical outcome of a life completely imbued with the absurd, the grim ending of an existence turned towards short-lived joys. At this point sensual pleasure winds up in asceticism. It is essential to realize that they may be as it were the two aspects of the same destitution. What more ghastly image can be called up than that of a man betrayed by his body who, simply because he did not die in time, lives out the comedy while awaiting the end, face to face with that God he does not adore, serving him as he served life, kneeling before a void and arms outstretched towards a heaven without eloquence that he knows to be also without depth?
I see Don Juan in a cell of one of those Spanish monasteries lost on a hill-top. And if he contemplates anything at all, it is not the ghosts of past loves, but perhaps, through a narrow slit in the sun-baked wall, some silent Spanish plain, a noble soulless land in which he recognizes himself. Yes, it is on this melancholy and radiant image that the curtain must be rung down. The ultimate end, awaited but never desired, the ultimate end is negligible.
Drama
‘The play’s the thing,’ says Hamlet, ‘wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.’ Catch is indeed the word. For con science moves swiftly or withdraws within itself. It has to be caught on the wing, at that barely perceptible moment when it glances fleetingly at itself. The everyday man does not enjoy tarrying. Everything, on the contrary, hurries him onward. But at the same time nothing interests him more than himself, especially his potentialities. Whence his interest in the theatre, in the show, where so many fates are offered him, where he can accept the poetry without feeling the sorrow. There, at least, can be recognized the thought less man, and he continues to hasten towards some hope or other. The absurd man begins where that one leaves off, where, ceasing to admire the play, the mind wants to enter in. Entering into all these lives, experiencing them in their diversity, amounts to acting them out. I am not saying that actors in general obey that impulse, that they are absurd men, but that their fate is an absurd fate which might charm and attract a lucid heart. It is necessary to establish this in order to grasp without misunderstanding what will follow.
The actor’s realm is that of the fleeting. Of all kinds of fame, it is known, his is the most ephemeral. At least this is said in conversation. But all kinds of fame are ephemeral. From the point of view of Sirius, Goethe’s works in ten thou sand years will be dust and his name forgotten. Perhaps a handful of archaeologists will look for ‘evidence’ as to our era. That idea has always contained a lesson. Seriously meditated upon, it reduces our perturbations to the profound nobility that is found in indifference. Above all, it directs our concerns towards what is most certain, that is towards the immediate. Of all kinds of fame the least deceptive is the one that is lived.
Hence the actor has chosen multiple fame, the fame that is hallowed and tested. From the fact that everything is to die some day he draws the best conclusion. An actor succeeds or does not succeed. A writer has some hope even if he is not appreciated. He assumes that his works will bear wimess to what he was. At best the actor will leave us a photograph, and nothing of what he was himself, his gestures and his silences, his gasping or his panting with love, will come down to us. For him, not to be known is not to act, and not acting is dying a hundred times with all the creatures he would have brought to life or resuscitated.
Why should we be surprised to find a fleeting fame built upon the most ephemeral of creations? The actor has three hours to be Iago or Alceste, Phèdre or Gloucester. In that short space of time he makes them come to life and die on fifty square yards of boards. Never has the absurd been so well illustrated or at such length. What more revelatory epitome can be imagined than those marvellous lives, those exceptional and total destinies unfolding for a few hours within a stage set? Off the stage, Sigismundo ceases to count. Two hours later he is seen dining out. Then it is, perhaps, that life is a dream. But after Sigismundo comes another. The hero suffering from uncertainty takes the place of the man roaring for his revenge. By thus sweeping over centuries and minds, by miming man as he can be and as he is, the actor has much in common with that other absurd individual, the traveller. Like him, he drains something and is constantly on the move. He is a traveller in time and, for the best, the hunted traveller, pursued by souls. If ever the ethics of quantity could find sustenance, it is indeed on that strange stage. To what degree the actor benefits from the characters is hard to say. But that is not the important thing. It is merely a matter of knowing how far he identifies himself with those irreplaceable lives. It often happens that he carries them with him, that they somewhat overflow the time and place in which they were born. They accompany the actor, who cannot very readily separate himself from what he has been. Occasionally when reaching for his glass he resumes Hamlet’s gesture of raising his cup. No, the distance separating him from the creatures into whom he infuses life is not so great. He abundantly illustrates every month or every day that so suggestive truth that there is no frontier between what a man wants to be and what he is. Always concerned with better representing, he demonstrates to what a degree appearing creates being. For that is his art — to simulate absolutely, to project himself as deeply as possible into lives that are not his own. At the end of his effort his vocation becomes clear: to apply himself whole heartedly to being nothing or to being several. The narrower the limits allotted him for creating his character the more necessary his talent. He will die in three hours under the mask he has assumed today. Within three hours he must experience and express a whole exceptional life. That is called losing oneself to find oneself. In those three hours he travels the whole course of the dead-end path that the man in the audience takes a lifetime to cover.
A mime of the ephemeral, the actor trains and perfects himself only in appearances. The theatrical convention is that the heart expresses itself and communicates itself only through gestures and in the body — or through the voice which is as much of the soul as of the body. The rule of that art insists that everything be magnified and translated into flesh. If it were essential on the stage to love as people really love, to employ that irreplaceable voice of the heart, to look as people contemplate in life, our speech would be in code. But here silences must make themselves heard. Love speaks up louder and immobility itself becomes spectacular.
The body is king. Not everyone can be ‘theatrical’ and this unjustly maligned word covers a whole aesthetic and a whole ethic. Half a man’s life is spent in implying, in turning away, and in keeping silent. Here the actor is the in truder. He breaks the spell chaining that soul, and at last the passions can rush on to their stage. They speak in every gesture; they live only through shouts and cries. Thus the actor creates his characters for display. He outlines or sculptures them and slips into their imaginary form, transfusing his blood into their phantoms. I am, of course, speaking of great drama, the kind that gives the actor an opportunity to fulfil his wholly physical fate. Take Shakespeare, for instance. In that impulsive drama the physical passions lead the dance. They explain everything. Without them all would collapse. Never would King Lear keep the appointment set by madness without the brutal gesture that exiles Cordelia and condemns Edgar. It is just that the unfolding of that tragedy should thenceforth be dominated by madness. Souls are given over to the demons and their sarabande. No fewer than four madmen: one by trade, another by intention, and the last two through suffering — four disordered bodies, four unutterable aspects of a single condition.
The very scale of the human body is inadequate. The mask and the buskin, the make-up that reduces and accentuates the face in its essential elements, the costume that exaggerates and simplifies — that universe sacrifices everything to appearance and is made solely for the eye. Through an absurd miracle, it is the body that also brings knowledge. I should never really understand Iago unless I played his part. It is not enough to hear him, for I grasp him only at the moment when I see him. Of the absurd character the actor consequently has the monotony, that single, oppressive silhouette, simultaneously strange and familiar, that he carries about from hero to hero. There, too, the great dramatic work contributes to this unity of tone. [2] This is where the actor contradicts himself: the same and yet so various, so many souls summed up in a single body. Yet it is the absurd contradiction itself, that individual who wants to achieve everything and live everything, that useless attempt, that ineffectual persistence. What always contradicts itself nevertheless joins in him. He is at that point where body and mind converge, where the mind, fired of its defeats, turns towards its most faithful ally. ‘And blest are those,’ says Hamlet, ‘whose blood and judgement are so well commingled that they are not a pipe for fortune’s finger to sound what stop she please.’
How could the Church have failed to condemn such a practice on the part of the actor? She repudiated in that art the heretical multiplication of souls, the emotional debauch, the scandalous presumption of a mind that objects to living but one life and hurls itself into all forms of excess. She proscribed in them that preference for the present and that triumph of Proteus which are the negation of everything she teaches. Eternity is not a game. A mind foolish enough to prefer a comedy to eternity has lost its salvation. Between ‘everywhere’ and ‘forever’ there is no compromise. Whence that much maligned profession can give rise to a tremendous spiritual conflict. ‘What matters,’ said Nietzsche, ‘is not eternal life but eternal vivacity.’ All drama is, in fact, in this choice.
Adrienne Lecouvreur on her deathbed was willing to con fess and receive communion but refused to abjure her profession. She thereby lost the benefit of the confession. Did this not amount, in effect, to choosing her absorbing passion in preference to God? And that woman in the death-throes refusing in tears to repudiate what she called her art gave evidence of a greatness that she never achieved behind the footlights. This was her finest role and the hardest one to play. Choosing between heaven and a ridiculous fidelity, preferring oneself to eternity or losing oneself in God is the age-old tragedy in which each must play his part.
The actors of the era knew they were excommunicated. Entering the profession amounted to choosing Hell. And the Church discerned in them her worst enemies. A few men of letters protest: ‘What! Refuse the last rites to Molière!’ But that was just, and especially in one who died on stage and finished under the actor’s make-up a life entirely de voted to dispersion. In his case genius is invoked, which excuses everything. But genius excuses nothing, just because it refuses to do so.
The actor knew at that time what punishment was in store for him. But what significance could such vague threats have compared to the final punishment that life itself was reserving for him? This was the one that he felt in advance and accepted wholly. To the actor as to the absurd man a premature death is irreparable. Nothing can make up for the sum of faces and centuries he would otherwise have traversed. But in any case one has to die. For the actor is doubtless everywhere, but time sweeps him along too and makes its impression with him.
It requires but a little imagination to feel what an actor’s fate means. It is in time that he makes up and enumerates his characters. It is in time likewise that he learns to dominate them. The greater number of different lives he has lived the more aloof he can be from them. The time comes when he must die to the stage and for the world. What he has lived faces him. He sees clearly. He feels the harrowing and irreplaceable quality of that adventure. He knows and can now die. There are homes for aged actors.
Conquest
‘No,’ says the conqueror, ‘don’t assume that because I love action I have had to forget how to think. On the contrary, I can thoroughly define what I believe. For I believe it firmly and I see it surely and clearly. Beware of those who say: “I know this too well to be able to express it.” For if they cannot do so, this is because they don’t know it or because out of laziness they stopped at the outer crust.
‘I have not many opinions. At the end of a life man notices that he has spent years becoming sure of a single truth. But a single truth, if it is obvious, is enough to guide an existence. As for me, I decidedly have something to say about the individual. One must speak of him bluntly and, if need be, with the appropriate contempt.
‘A man is more a man through the things he keeps to himself than through those he says. There are many that I shall keep to myself. But I firmly believe that all those who have judged the individual have done so with much less experience than we on which to base their judgement. The intelligence, the stirring intelligence perhaps foresaw what it was essential to note. But the era, its ruins and its blood over whelm us with facts. It was possible for ancient nations, and even for more recent ones down to our machine-age, to weigh one against the other the virtues of society and of the individual, to try to find out which was to serve the other. To begin with, that was possible by virtue of that stubborn aberration in man’s heart according to which human beings were created to serve or be served. In the second place, it was possible because neither society nor the individual had yet revealed all their ability.
‘I have seen bright minds express astonishment at the masterpieces of Dutch painters born at the height of the bloody wars in Flanders, be mazed by the prayers of Silesian mystics brought up during the frightful Thirty Years’ War. Eternal values survive secular turmoils before their astonished eyes. But there has been progress since. The painters of today are deprived of such serenity. Even if they have basically the heart the creator needs, I mean the closed heart, it is of no use; for everyone, including the saint himself, is mobilized. This is perhaps what I have felt most deeply. At every form that miscarries in the trenches, at every outline, metaphor, or prayer crushed under steel, the eternal loses a round. Conscious that I cannot stand aloof from my time, I have decided to be an integral part of it. This is why I esteem the individual only because he strikes me as ridiculous and humiliated. Knowing that there are no victorious causes, I have a liking for lost causes: they require an uncontaminated soul, equal to its defeat as to its temporary victories. For anyone who feels bound up with this world’s fate, the clash of civilizations has something agonizing about it. I have made that anguish mine at the same time that I wanted to join in. Between history and the eternal I have chosen history because I like certainties. Of it at least I am certain, and how can I deny this force crushing me?
‘There always comes a time when one must choose between contemplation and action. This is called becoming a man. Such wrenches are dreadful. But for a proud heart there can be no compromise. There is God or time, that cross or this sword. This world has a higher meaning that transcends its worries or nothing is true but those worries. One must live with time and die with it or else elude it for a greater life. I know that one can compromise and live in the world while believing in the eternal. That is called accepting. But I loathe this term and want all or nothing. If I choose action, don’t think that contemplation is like an unknown country to me. But it cannot give me everything and, deprived of the eternal, I want to ally myself with time. I do not want to put down to my account either nostalgia or bitterness and I merely want to see clearly. I tell you, tomorrow you will be mobilized. For you and for me that is a liberation. The individual can do nothing and yet he can do everything. In that wonderful unattached state you understand why I exalt and crush him at one and the same time. It is the world that pulverizes him and I who liberate him. I provide him with all his rights.
‘Conquerors know that action is in itself useless. There is but one useful action, that of remaking man and the earth. I shall never remake men. But one must do “as if ”. For the path of struggle leads me to the flesh. Even humiliated, the flesh is my only certainty. I can live only on it. The creature is my native land. This is why I have chosen this absurd and ineffectual effort. This is why I am on the side of the struggle. The epoch lends itself to this, as I have said. Hitherto the greatness of a conqueror was geographical. It was measured by the extent of the conquered territories. There is a reason why the word has changed in meaning and has ceased to signify the victorious general. The greatness has changed camp. It lies in protest and the blind-alley sacrifice. There, too, it is not through a preference for defeat. Victory would be desirable. But there is but one victory and it is eternal. That is the one I shall never have. That is where I stumble and cling. A revolution is always accomplished against the gods, beginning with the revolution of Prometheus, the first of modem conquerors. It is man’s demands made against his fate; the demands of the poor are but a pretext. Yet I can seize that spirit only in its historical act and that is where I make contact with it. Don’t assume, however, that I take pleasure in it: opposite the essential contradiction, I maintain my human contradiction. I establish my lucidity in the midst of what negates it. I exalt man before what crushes him and my freedom, my revolt and my passion come together then in that tension, that lucidity and that vast repetition.
‘Yes, man is his own end. And he is his only end. If he aims to be something, it is in this life. Now I know it only too well. Conquerors sometimes talk of vanquishing and overcoming. But it is always “overcoming oneself ” that they mean. You are well aware of what that means. Every man has felt himself to be the equal of a god at certain moments. At least, this is the way it is expressed. But this comes from that fact that, in a flash, he felt the amazing grandeur of the human mind. The conquerors are merely those among men who are conscious enough of their strength to be sure of living constantly on those heights and fully aware of that grandeur. It is a question of arithmetic, of more or less. The conquerors are capable of the more. But they are capable of no more than man himself when he wants. This is why they never leave the human crucible, plunging into the seething soul of revolutions.
‘There they find the creature mutilated, but they also encounter there the only values they like and admire, man and his silence. This is both their destitution and their wealth. There is but one luxury for them — that of human relations. How can one fail to realize that in this vulnerable universe everything that is human and solely human assumes a more vivid meaning? Taut faces, threatened fraternity, such strong and chaste friendship among men — these are the true riches because they are transitory. In their midst the mind is most aware of its powers and limitations. That is to say, its efficacy. Some have spoken of genius. But genius is easy to say; I prefer the intelligence. It must be said that it can be magnificent then. It lights up this desert and dominates it. It knows its obligations and illustrates them. It will die at the same time as this body. But knowing this constitutes its freedom.
‘We are not ignorant of the fact that all churches are against us. A heart so keyed up eludes the eternal, and all churches, divine or political, lay claim to the eternal. Happiness and courage, retribution or justice are secondary ends for them. It is a doctrine they bring, and one must subscribe to it. But I have no concern with ideas or with the eternal. The truths that come within my scope can be touched with the hand. I cannot separate from them. This is why you cannot base anything on me: nothing of the conqueror lasts, not even his doctrines.
‘At the end of all that, despite everything, is death. We know also that it ends everything. This is why those cemeteries all over Europe, which obsess some among us, are hideous. People beautify only what they love and death repels us and tires our patience. It, too, is to be conquered. The last Carrara, a prisoner in Padua emptied by the plague and besieged by the Venetians, ran screaming through the halls of his deserted palace: he was calling on the devil and asking him for death. This was a way of overcoming it. And it is likewise a mark of courage characteristic of the Occident to have made so ugly the places where death thinks itself honoured. In the rebel’s universe, death exalts in justice. It is the supreme abuse.
‘Others, without compromising either, have chosen the eternal and denounced the illusion of this world. Their cemeteries smile amid numerous flowers and birds. That suits the conqueror and gives him a clear image of what he has rejected. He has chosen, on the contrary, the black iron fence or the potter’s field. The best among the men of God occasionally are seized with fright mingled with consideration and pity for minds that can livewith such an image of their death. Yet those minds derive their strength and justification from this. Our fate stands before us and we provoke him. Less out of pride than out of awareness of our ineffectual condition. We, too, sometimes feel pity for ourselves. It is the only compassion that seems acceptable to us: a feeling that perhaps you hardly understand and that seems to you scarcely virile. Yet the most daring among us are the ones who feel it. But we call the lucid ones virile and we do not want a strength that is apart from lucidity.’
Let me repeat that these images do not propose moral codes and involve no judgements: they are sket-ches. They merely represent a style of life. The lover, the actor, or the adventurer plays the absurd. But equally well, if he wishes, the chaste man, the civil servant, or the President of the Republic. It is enough to know and to mask nothing. In Italian museums are sometimes found little painted screens that the priest used to hold in front of the face of condemned men to hide the scaffold from them. The leap in all its forms, rushing into the divine or the eternal, surrendering to the illusions of the everyday or of the idea — all these screens hide the absurd. But there are civil servants without screens and they are the ones of whom I mean to speak.
I have chosen the most extreme ones. At this level the absurd gives them a royal power. It is true that those princes are without a kingdom. But they have this advantage over others: they know that all royalties are illusory. They know, that is their whole nobility, and it is useless to speak in relation to them of hidden misfortune or the ashes of disillusion. Being deprived of hope is not despairing. The flames of earth are surely worth celestial perfumes. Neither I nor anyone can judge them here. They are not striving to be better, they are attempting to be consistent. If the term ‘wise man’ can be applied to the man who lives on what he has without speculating on what he has not, then they are wise men. One of them, a conqueror but in the realm of mind, a Don Juan but of knowledge, an actor but of the intelligence, knows this better than anyone: ‘You nowise deserve a privilege on earth and in heaven for having brought to perfection your dear little meek sheep; you nonetheless continue to be at best a ridiculous dear little sheep with horns and nothing more — even supposing that you do not burst with vanity and do not cream a scandal by posing as a judge.’
In any case it was essential to restore to the absurd reasoning more cordial examples. The imagination can add many others, inseparable from time and exile, who likewise know how to live in harmony with a universe without future and without weakness. This absurd, godless world is then peopled with men who think clearly and who have ceased to hope. And I have not yet spoken of the most absurd character, who is the creator.
[1] In the fullest sense and with his faults. A healthy attitude also includes faults.
[2] At this point I am thinking of Molière’s Alceste. Everything is so simple, so obvious and so coarse. Alceste against Philinte, Célimene against Elianthe, the whole subject in the absurd consequence of a nature carded to its extreme, and the verse itself, the ‘bad verse’ , barely accented like the monotony of the character’s nature.
Absurd Creation
Philosophy and Fiction
All those lives maintained in the rarefied air of the absurd could not persevere without some profound and constant thought to infuse its strength into them. Right here, it can be only a strange feeling of fidelity. Conscious men have been seen to fulfil their task amidst the most stupid of wars without considering themselves in contradiction. This is because it was essential to elude nothing. There is thus a metaphysical honour in enduring the world’s absurdity. Conquest or play-acting, multiple loves, absurd revolt are tributes that man pays to his dignity in a campaign in which he is defeated in advance.
It is merely a matter of being faithful to the rule of the Battle. That thought may suffice to sustain a mind; it has supported and still supports whole dvilizations. War cannot be negated. One must live it or die of it. So it is with the absurd: it is a question of breathing with it, of recognizing its lessons and recovering their flesh. In this regard the absurd joy par excellence is creation. ‘Art and nothing but art,’ said Nietzsche; ‘we have art in order not to die of the truth.’
In the experience that I am attempting to describe and to stress on several modes, it is certain that a new torment arises wherever another dies. The childish chasing after forgetfulness, the appeal of satisfaction are now devoid of echo. But the constant tension that keeps man face to face with the world, the ordered delirium that urges him to be receptive to everything, leave him another fever. In this universe the work of art is then the sole chance of keeping his consciousness and of fixing its adventures. Creating is living doubly. The groping, anxious quest of a Proust, his meticulous collecting of flowers, of wallpapers, and of anxieties, signifies nothing else. At the same time, it has no more significance than the continual and imperceptible creation in which the actor, the conqueror, and all absurd men indulge every day of their lives. All try their hands at miming, at repeating, and at re-creating the reality that is theirs. We always end up by having the appearance of our truths. All existence for a man turned away from the eternal is but a vast mime under the mask of the absurd. Creation is the great mime.
Such men know to begin with, and then their whole effort is to examine, to enlarge, and to enrich the ephemeral island on which they have just landed. But first they must know. For the absurd discovery coincides with a pause in which future passions are prepared and justified. Even men without a gospel have their Mount of Olives. And one must not fall asleep on theirs either. For the absurd man it is not a matter of explaining and solving, but of experiencing and describing. Everything begins with lucid indifference.
Describing — that is the last ambition of an absurd thought. Science likewise, having reached the end of its paradoxes, ceases to propound and stops to contemplate and sketch the ever-virgin landscape of phenomena. The heart learns thus that the emotion delighting us when we see the world’s aspects comes to us not from its depth but from their diversity. Explanation is useless but the sensation remains and, with it, the constant attractions of a universe inexhaustible in quantity. The place of the work of art can be understood at this point.
It marks both the death of an experience and its multiplication. It is a sort of monotonous and passionate repetition of the themes already orchestrated by the world: the body, inexhaustible image on the pediment of temples, forms or colours, number or grief. It is, therefore, not in different, as a conclusion, to encounter once again the principal themes of this essay in the wonderful and childish world of the creator. It would be wrong to see a symbol in it and to think that the work of art can be considered at last as a refuge for the absurd. It is itself an absurd phenomenon and we are concerned merely with its description. It does not offer an escape for the intellectual ailment. Rather, it is one of the symptoms of that ailment which reflects it throughout a man’s whole thought. But for the first time it makes the mind get outside of itself and places it in opposition to others, not for it to get lost but to show it clearly the blind path that all have entered upon. In the time of the absurd reasoning, creation follows indifference and discovery. It marks the point from which absurd passions spring and where the reasoning stops. Its place in this essay is justified in this way.
It will suffice to bring to light a few themes common to the creator and the thinker in order to find in the work of art all the contradictions of thought involved in the absurd. Indeed, it is not so much identical conclusions that prove minds to be related as the contradictions that are common to them. So it is with thought and creation. I hardly need to say that the same anguish urges man to these two attitudes. This is where they coincide in the beginning. But among all the thoughts that start from the absurd, I have seen that very few remain within it. And through their deviations or infidelities I have best been able to measure what belonged to the absurd. Similarly, I must wonder: is an absurd work of art possible?
It would be impossible to insist too much on the arbitrary nature of the former opposition between art and philosophy. If you insist on taking it in too limited a sense, it is cer tainly false. If you mean merely that these two disciplines each have their peculiar climate, that is probably true but remains vague. The only acceptable argument lay in the contradiction brought up between the philosopher enclosed within his system and the artist placed before his work. But this was pertinent for a certain form of art and of philosophy which we consider secondary here. The idea of an art detached from its creator is not only outmoded; it is false. In opposition to the artist, it is pointed out that no philosopher ever created several systems. But that is true insofar, indeed, as no artist ever expressed more than one thing under different aspects. The instantaneous perfection of art, the necessity for its renewal — this is true only through a preconceived notion. For the work of art likewise is a construction and everyone knows how monotonous the great creators can be. For the same reason as the thinker, the artist commits himself and becomes himself in his work. That osmosis raises the most important of aesthetic problems. Moreover, to anyone who is convinced of the mind’s singleness of purpose, nothing is more futile than these distinctions based on methods and objects. There are no frontiers between the disciplines that man sets himself for understanding and loving. They interlock and the same anxiety merges them.
It is necessary to state this to begin with. For an absurd work of art to be possible, thought in its most lucid form must be involved in it. But at the same time thought must not be apparent except as the regulating intelligence. This paradox can be explained according to the absurd. The work of art is born of the intelligence’s refusal to reason the concrete. It marks the triumph of the carnal. It is lucid thought that provokes it but in that very act that thought repudiates itself. It will not yield to the temptation of adding to what is described a deeper meaning that it knows to be illegitimate. The work of art embodies a drama of the intelligence, but it proves this only indirectly. The absurd work requires an artist conscious of these limitations and an art in which the concrete signifies nothing more than itself. It cannot be the end, the meaning, and the consolation of a life. Creating or not creating changes nothing. The absurd creator does not prize his work. He could repudiate it. He does some times repudiate it. An Abyssinia suffices for this, as in the case of Rimbaud.
At the same time a rule of aesthetics can be seen in this. The true work of art is always on the human scale. It is essentially the one that says ‘less’. There is a certain relationship between the global experience of the artist and the work that reflects that experience, between Wilhelm Meister and Goethe’s maturity. That relationship is bad when the work aims to give the whole experience in the lace-paper of an, explanatory literature. That relationship is good when the work is but a piece cut out of experience, a facet of the diamond in which the inner lustre is epitomized without being limited. In the first case there is overloading and pretension to the eternal. In the second, a fecund work because of a whole implied experience, the wealth of which is suspected. The problem for the absurd artist is to acquire this savoir-vivre which transcends savoir-faire . And, in the end, the great artist under this climate is above all a great living being, it being understood that living in this case is just as much experiencing as reflecting. The work then embodies an intellectual drama. The absurd work illustrates thought’s renouncing of its prestige and its resignation to being no more than the intelligence that works up appearances and covers with images what has no reason. If the world were clear, art would not exist.
I am not speaking here of the arts of form or colour in which description alone prevails in its splendid modesty. [1] Expression begins where thought ends. Those adolescents with empty eye-sockets who people temples and museums — their philosophy has been expressed in gestures. For an absurd man it is more educative than all libraries. Under another aspect the same is true for music. If any art is devoid of lessons, it is certainly music. It is too closely related to mathematics not to have borrowed their gratuitousness. That game the mind plays with itself according to set and measured laws takes place in the sonorous compass that belongs to us and beyond which the vibrations nevertheless meet in an inhuman universe. There is no purer sensation. These examples are too easy. The absurd man recognizes as his own these harmonies and these forms.
But I should like to speak here of a work in which the temptation to explain remains greatest, in which illusion offers itself automatically, in which conclusion is almost inevitable. I mean fictional creation. I propose to inquire whether or not the absurd can hold its own there.
To think is first of all to create a world (or to limit one’s own world, which comes to the same thing). It is starting out from the basic agreement that separates man from his experience in order to find a common ground according to one’s nostalgia, a universe hedged with reasons or lighted up with analogies but which, in any case, gives an opportunity to rescind the unbearable divorce. The philosopher, even if he is Kant, is a creator. He has his characters, his symbols and his secret action. He has his plot-endings. On the contrary, the lead taken by the novel over poetry and the essay merely represents, despite appearances, a greater intellectualization of the art. Let there be no mistake about it; I am speaking of the greatest. The fecundity and the importance of a literary form are often measured by the trash it contains. The number of bad novels must not make us forget the value of the best. These, indeed, carry with them their universe. The novel has its logic, its reasonings, its intuition, and its postulates. It also has its requirements of clarity. [2]
The classical opposition of which I was speaking above is even less justified in this particular case. It held in the time when it was easy to separate philosophy from its authors. Today when thought has ceased to lay claim to the universal, when its best history would be that of its repentances, we know that the system, when it is worth while, cannot be separated from its author. The Ethics itself, in one of its aspects, is but a long and reasoned personal confession. Abstract thought at last returns to its prop of flesh. And likewise, the fictional activities of the body and of the passions are regulated a little more according to the requirements of a vision of the world. The writer has given up telling ‘stories’ and creates his universe. The great novelists are philosophical novelists, that is the contrary of thesis-writers. For instance, Balzac, Sade, Melville, Stendhal, Dostoievsky, Proust, Malraux, Kafka, to cite but a few.
But, in fact, the preference they have shown for writing in images rather than in reasoned arguments is revelatory of a certain thought that is common to them all, convinced of the uselessness of any principle of explanation and sure of the educative message of perceptible appearance. They consider the work of art both as an end and a beginning. It is the outcome of an often unexpressed philosophy, its illustration and its consummation. But it is complete only through the implications of that philosophy. It justifies at last that variant of an old theme that a little thought estranges from life whereas much thought reconciles to life. Incapable of refining the real, thought pauses to mimic it. The novel in question is the instrument of that simultaneously relative and inexhaustible knowledge, so like that of love. Of love, fictional creation has the initial wonder and the fecund rumination.
These at least are the charms I see in it at the outset. But I saw them likewise in those princes of humiliated thought whose suicides I was later able to witness. What interests me, indeed, is knowing and describing the force that leads them back towards the common path of illusion. The same method will consequently help me here. The fact of having already utilized it will allow me to shorten my argument and to sum it up without delay in a particular example. I want to know whether, accepting a life without appeal , one can also agree to work and create without appeal and what is the way leading to these liberties. I want to liberate my universe of its phantoms and to people it solely with flesh and blood truths whose presence I cannot deny. I can perform absurd work, choose the creative attitude rather than another. But an absurd attitude, if it is to remain so, must remain aware of its gratuitousness. So it is with the work of art. If the commandments of the absurd are not respected, if the work does not illustrate divorce and revolt, if it sacrifices to illusions and arouses hope, it ceases to be gratuitous. I can no longer detach myself from it. My life may find a meaning in it but that is trifling. It ceases to be that exercise in detachment and passion which crowns the splendour and futility of a man’s life.
In the creation in which the temptation to explain is the strongest, can one overcome that temptation? In the fictional world in which awareness of the real world is keenest, can I remain faithful to the absurd without sacrificing to the desire to judge? So many questions to be taken into consideration in a last effort. It must be already clear what they signify. They are the last scruples of an awareness that fears to forsake its initial and difficult lesson in favour of a final illusion. What holds for creation, looked upon as one of the possible attitudes for the man conscious of the absurd, holds for all the styles of life open to him. The conqueror or the actor, the creator or Don Juan may forget that their exercise in living could not do without awareness of its mad character. One becomes accustomed so quickly. A man wants to earn money in order to be happy and his whole effort and the best of a life are devoted to the earning of that money. Happiness is forgotten; the means are taken for the end. Likewise the whole effort of this conqueror will be diverted to ambition, which was but a way towards a greater life. Don Juan in turn will likewise yield to his fate, be satisfied with that existence whose nobility is of value only through revolt. For one it is awareness and for the other, revolt; in both cases the absurd has disappeared. There is so much stubborn hope in the human heart. The most destitute men often end up by accepting illusion. That approval prompted by the need for peace inwardly parallels the existential consent. There are thus gods of light and idols of mud. But it is essential to find the middle path leading to the faces of man.
So far, the failures of the absurd exigence have best informed us as to what it is. In the same way, if we are to be informed it will suffice to notice that fictional creation can present the same ambiguity as certain philosophies. Hence I can choose as illustration a work comprising everything that denotes awareness of the absurd, having a clear starting point and a lucid climate. Its consequences will enlighten us. If the absurd is not respected in it, we shall know by what expedient illusion enters in. A particular example, a theme, a creator’s fidelity will suffice them. This involves the same analysis that has already been made at greater length.
I shall examine a favourite theme of Dostoievsky. I might just as well have studied other works. [3] But in this work the problem is treated directly, in the sense of nobility and emotion, as for the existential philosophies already discussed. This parallelism serves my purpose.
Kirilov
All of Dostoievsky’s heroes question themselves as to the meaning of life. In this they are modern: they do not fear ridicule. What distinguishes modem sensibility from classical sensibility is that the latter thrives on moral problems and the former on metaphysical problems. In Dostoievsky’s novels the question is propounded with such intensity that it can only invite extreme solutions. Existence is illusory or it is eternal. If Dostoievsky were satisfied with this inquiry, he would be a philosopher. But he illustrates the conse- quences that such intellectual pastimes may have in a man’s life and in this regard he is an artist. Among those consequences, his attention is arrested particularly by the last one, which he himself calls logical suicide in his Diary of a Writer . In the instalments for December 1876, indeed, he imagines the reasoning of ‘logical suicide’. Convinced that human existence is an utter absurdity for anyone without faith in immortality, the desperate man comes to the following conclusions:
‘Since in reply to my questions about happiness, I am told, through the intermediary of my consciousness, that I cannot be happy except in harmony with the great all, which I cannot conceive and shall never be in a position to conceive, it is evident . . .’
‘Since, finally in this connection, I assume both the role of the plaintiff and that of the defendant, of the accused and of the judge, and since I consider this comedy perpetrated by nature altogether stupid, and since I even deem it humiliating for me to deign to play it . . .’
‘In my indisputable capacity of plaintiff and defendant, of judge and accused, I condemn that nature which, with such impudent nerve, brought me into being in order to suffer — I condemn it to be annihilated with me.’
There remains a little humour in that position. This suicide kills himself because, on the metaphysical plane, he is vexed. In a certain sense he is taking his revenge. This is his way of proving that he ‘will not be had’. It is known, however, that the same theme is: embodied, but with the most wonderful generality, in Kirilov of The Possessed , likewise an advocate of logical suicide. Kirilov the engineer declares somewhere that he wants to take his own life because it ‘is his idea’. Obviously the word must be taken in its proper sense. It is for an idea, a thought that he is getting ready for death. This is the superior suicide. Progressively, in a series of scenes in which Kirilov’s mind is gradually illuminated, the fatal thought driving him is revealed to us. The engineer, in fact, goes back to the arguments of the Diary . He feels that God is necessary and that he must exist. But he knows that he does not and cannot exist ‘Why do you not realize,’ he exclaims, ‘that this is sufficient reason for killing oneself?’ That attitude involves likewise for him some of the absurd consequences. Through indifference he accepts letting his suicide be used to the advantage of a cause he despises. ‘I decided last night that I didn’t care.’ And finally he prepares his deed with a mixed feeling of revolt and freedom. ‘I shall kill myself in order to assert my insubordination, my new and dreadful liberty.’ It is no longer a question of revenge, but of revolt. Kirilov is consequently an absurd character — yet with this essential reservation: he kills himself. But he himself explains this contradiction, and in such a way that at the same time he reveals the absurd secret in all its purity. In truth, he adds to his fatal logic an extraordinary ambition which gives the character its full perspective: he wants to kill himself to become god.
The reasoning is classic in its clarity. If God does not exist, Kirilov is god. If God does not exist, Kirilov must kill himself. Kirilov must therefore kill himself to become god. That logic is absurd, but it is what is needed. The interesting thing, however, is to give a meaning to that divinity brought to earth. That amounts to clarifying the premise: ‘If God does not exist, I am god,’ which still remains rather obscure. It is important to note at the outset that the man who flaunts that mad claim is indeed of this world. He performs his gymnastics every morning to preserve his health. He is stirred by the joy of Chatov recovering his wife. On a sheet of paper to be found after his death he wants to draw a face sticking out his tongue at ‘them’. He is childish and irascible, passionate, methodical, and sensitive. Of the superman he has nothing but the logic and the obsession, whereas of man he has the whole catalogue. Yet it is he who speaks calmly of his divinity. He is not mad or else Dostoievsky is. Consequently it is not a megalomaniac’s illusion that excites him. And taking the words in their specific sense would, in this instance, be ridiculous.
Kirilov himself helps us to understand. In reply to a question from Stavrogin, he makes it clear that he is not talking of a god-man. It might be thought that this springs from concern to distinguish himself from Christ. But in reality it is a matter of annexing Christ. Kirilov, in fact, fancies for a moment that Jesus at his death did not find himself in Paradise . He found out then that his torture had been useless. ‘The laws of nature,’ says the engineer, ‘made Christ live in the midst of falsehood and die for a false- hood.’ Solely in this sense Jesus indeed personifies the whole human drama. He is the complete man, being the one who realized the most absurd condition. He is not the Godman but the man-god. And, like him, each of us can be crucified and victimized — and is to a certain degree.
The divinity in question is therefore altogether terrestrial. ‘For three years,’ says Kirilov, ‘I sought the attribute of my divinity and I have found it. The attribute of my divinity is independence.’ Now can be seen the meaning of Kirilov’s premiss: ‘If God does not exist, I am god.’ To become god is merely to be free on this earth, not to serve an immortal being. Above all, of course, it is drawing all the inferences from that painful independence. If God exists all depends on him and we can do nothing against his will. If he does not exist, everything depends on us. For Kirilov, as for Nietzsche, to kill God is to become god oneself; it is to realize on this earth the eternal life of which the Gospel speaks. [4]
But if this metaphysical crime is enough for man’s fulfilment, why add suicide? Why kill oneself and leave this world after having won freedom? That is contradictory. Kifilov is well aware of this, for he adds: ‘If you feel that, you are a Czar and, far from killing yourself, you will live covered with glory.’ But men in general do not know. They do not feel ‘that’. As in the time of Prometheus, they enter tain blind hopes. [5] They need to be shown the way and cannot do without preaching. Consequently Kirilov must kill himself out of love for humanity. He must show his brothers a royal and difficult path on which he will be the first. It is a pedagogical suicide. Kirilov sacrifices himself then. But if he is crucified, he will not be victimized. He remains the man-god, convinced of a death without future, imbued with evangelical melancholy. ‘I,’ he says, ‘am unhappy because I am obliged to assert my freedom.’ But once he is dead and men are at last enlightened, this earth will be peopled with Czars and lighted up with human glory. Kirilov’s pistol-shot will be the signal for the last revolution. Thus it is not despair that urges him to death but love of his neighbour for his own sake. Before terminating in blood an in describable spiritual adventure, Kirilov makes a remark as old as human suffering: ‘All is well.’
This theme of suicide in Dostoievsky, then, is indeed an absurd theme. Let us merely note before going on that Kirilov reappears in other characters who themselves set in motion additional absurd themes. Stavrogin and Ivan Karamazov try out the absurd truths in practical life. They are the ones liberated by Kirilov’s death. They try their skill at being Czars. Stavrogin leads an ‘ironic’ life, and it is well known in what regard. He arouses hatred around him. And yet the key to the character is found in his farewell letter: ‘I have not been able to detest anything.’ He is a Czar in indifference. Ivan is likewise by refusing to surrender the royal powers of the mind. To those who, like his brother, prove by their lives that it is essential to humiliate oneself in order to believe, he might reply that the condition is shameful. His keyword is ‘Everything is permitted’ , with the appropriate shade of melancholy. Of course, like Nietzsche, the most famous of God’s assassins, he ends in madness. But this is a risk worth running and, faced with such tragic ends, the essential impulse of the absurd mind is to ask: ‘What does that prove?’
Thus the novels, like the Diary , propound the absurd question. They establish logic unto death, exaltation, ‘dreadful’ freedom, the glory of the Czars become human. All is well, everything is permitted and nothing is hateful — these are absurd judgements. But what an amazing creation in which those creatures of fire and ice seem so familiar to us. The passionate world of indifference that rumbles in their heart does not seem at all monstrous to us. We recognize in it our everyday anxieties. And probably no one so much as Dostoievsky has managed to give the absurd world such familiar and tormenting charms.
Yet what is his conclusion? Two quotations will show the complete metaphysical reversal that leads the writer to other revelations. The argument of the one who commits logical suicide having provoked protests from the critics, Dostoievsky in the following instalments of the Diary amplifies his position and concludes thus: ‘If faith in immortality is so necessary to the human being (that without it he comes to the point of killing himself)it must therefore be the nor mal state of humanity. Since this is the case, the immortality of the human soul exists without any doubt.’ Then again in the last pages of his last novel, at the conclusion of that gigantic combat with God, some children ask Aliocha: ‘Karamazov, is it true what religion says, that we shall rise from the dead, that we shall see one another again?’ And Aliocha answers: ‘Certainly, we shall see one another again, we shall joyfully tell one another everything that has happened.’
Thus Kirilov, Stavrogin, and Ivan are defeated. The Brothers Karamazov replies to The Possessed. And it is indeed a conclusion. Aliocha’s case is not ambiguous as is that of Prince Muichkin. III, the latter lives in a perpetual present, tinged with smiles and indifference, and that blissful state might be the eternal life of which the Prince speaks. On the contrary, Aliocha clearly says: ‘We shall meet again.’ There is no longer any question of suicide and of madness. What is the use, for anyone who is sure of immortality and of its joys? Man exchanges his divinity for happiness. ‘We shall joyfully tell one another everything that has happened.’ Thus again, Kirilov’s pistol rang out somewhere in Russia, but the world continued to cherish its blind hopes. Men did not understand ‘that’.
Consequently, it is not an absurd novelist addressing us but an existential novelist. Here, too, the leap is touching and gives its nobility to the art that inspires it. It is a stirring acquiescence, riddled with doubts, uncertain and ardent. Speaking of The Brothers Karamazov , Dostoievsky wrote: ‘The chief question that will be pursued throughout this book is the very one from which I have suffered consciously or unconsciously all life long: the existence of God.’ It is hard to believe that a novel sufficed to transform into joyful certainty the suffering of a lifetime. One commentator [6] correctly pointed out that Dostoievsky is on Ivan’s side and that the affirmative chapters took three months of efforts whereas what he called ‘the blasphemies’ were written in three weeks in a state of excitement. There is not one of his characters who does not have that thorn in the flesh, who does not aggravate it or seek a remedy for it in sensation or immorality. [7] In any case let us remain with this doubt Here is a work which, in a chiaroscuro more gripping than the light of day, permits us to seize man’s struggle against his hopes. Having reached the end, the creator makes his choice against his characters. That contradiction thus allows us to make a distinction. It is not an absurd work that is in volved here but a work that propounds the absurd problem.
Dostoievsky’s reply is humiliation, ‘shame’ according to Stavrogin. An absurd work on the contrary does not provide a reply; that is the whole difference. Let us note this carefully in conclusion: what contradicts the absurd in that work is not its Christian character but rather its announcing a future life. It is possible to be Christian and absurd. There are examples of Christians who do not believe in a future life. In regard to the work of ‘art, it should therefore be possible to define one of the directions of the absurd analysis that could have been anticipated in the preceding pages. It leads to propounding ‘the absurdity of the Gospel’. It throws light upon this idea, fertile in repercussions, that convictions do not prevent incredulity. On the contrary, it is easy to see that the author of The Possessed , familiar with these paths, in conclusion took a quite different way. The surprising reply of the creator to his characters, of Dostoievsky to Kirilov, can indeed be summed up thus: Existence is illusory and it is eternal.
Ephemeral Creation
At this point, I perceive therefore that hope cannot be eluded for ever and that it can beset even those who wanted to be free of it. This is the interest I find in the works discussed up to this point. I could, at least in the realm of creation, list some truly absurd works. [8] But everything must have a beginning. The object of this quest is a certain fidelity. The Church has been so harsh with heretics only because she deemed that there is no worse enemy than a child who has gone astray. But the record of Gnostic effronteries and the persistence of Manichean currents have contributed more to the construction of orthodox dogma than all the prayers. With due allowance, the same is true of the absurd. One recognizes one’s course by discovering the paths that stray from it. At the very conclusion of the absurd reasoning, in one of the attitudes dictated by its logic, it is not a matter of indifference to find hope coming back in under one of its most touching guises. That shows the difficulty of the absurd ascesis. Above all, it shows the necessity of unfailing alermess and thus confirms the general plan of this essay.
But if it is still too early to list absurd works, at least a conclusion can be reached as to the creative attitude, one of those which can complete absurd existence. Art can never be so well served as by a negative thought. Its dark and humiliated proceedings are as necessary to the understanding of a great work as black is to white. To work and create ‘for nothing’ , to sculpture in clay, to know that one’s creation has no future, to see one’s work destroyed in a day while being aware that, fundamentally, this has no more importance than building for centuries — this is the difficult wisdom that absurd thought sanctions. Performing these two tasks simultaneously, negating on the one hand and magnifying on the other, is the way open to the absurd creator. He must give the void its colours.
This leads to a special conception of the work of art. Too often the work of a creator is looked upon as a series of isolated testimonies. Thus artist and man of letters are con fused. A profound thought is in a constant state of becoming; it adopts the experience of a life and assumes its shape. Likewise, a man’s sole creation is strengthened in its successive and multiple aspects: his works. One after another, they complement one another, correct or overtake one another, contradict one another too. If something brings creation to an end, it is not the victorious and illusory cry of the blinded artist: ‘I have said everything’ , but the death of the creator which closes his experience and the book of his genius.
That effort, that superhuman consciousness are not necessarily apparent to the reader. There is no mystery in human creation. Will performs this miracle. But at least there is no true creation without a secret. To be sure, a succession of works can be but a series of approximations of the same thought. But it is possible to conceive of another type of creator proceeding by juxtaposition. Their works may seem to be devoid of inter-relations. To a certain degree, they are contradictory. But viewed all together, they resume their natural grouping. From death, for instance, they derive their definitive significance. They receive their most obvious light from the very life of their author. At the moment of death, the succession of his works is but a collection of failures. But if those failures all have the same resonance, the creator has managed to repeat the image of his own condition, to make the air echo with the sterile secret he possesses.
The effort to dominate is considerable here. But human intelligence is up to much more. It will merely indicate clearly the voluntary aspect of creation. Elsewhere I have brought out the fact that human will had no other purpose than to maintain awareness. But that could not do without discipline. Of all the schools of patience and lucidity, creation is the most effective. It is also the staggering evidence of man’s sole dignity: the dogged revolt against his condition, perseverance in an effort considered sterile. It calls for a daily effort, selfmastery, a precise estimate of the limits of truth, measure and strength. It constitutes an ascesis. All that ‘for nothing’ , in order to repeat and mark time. But perhaps the great work of art has less importance in itself than in the ordeal it demands of a man and the opportunity with which it provides him of overcoming his phantoms and approaching a little closer to his naked reality.
Let there be no mistake in aesthetics. It is not patient inquiry, the unceasing, sterile illustration of a thesis that I am calling for here. Quite the contrary, if I have made myself clearly understood. The thesis-novel, the work that proves, the most hateful of all, is: the one that most often is inspired by a smug thought. You demonstrate the truth you feel sure of possessing. But those are ideas one launches, and ideas are the contrary of thought. Those creators are philosophers, ashamed of themselves. Those I am speaking of or who I imagine are on the contrary lucid thinkers. At a certain point where thought turns back on itself, they raise up the images of their works like the obvious symbols of a limited, mortal, and rebellious thought.
They perhaps prove something. But those proofs are ones that the novelists provide for themselves rather than for the world in general. The essential is that the novelists should triumph in the concrete and that this constitutes their nobility. This wholly carnal triumph has been prepared for them by a thought in which abstract powers have been humiliated. When they are completely so, at the same time the flesh makes the creation shine forth in all its absurd lustre. After all, ironic philosophies produce passionate works.
Any thought that abandons unity glorifies diversity. And diversity is the home of art. The only thought to liberate the mind is that which leaves it alone, certain of its limits and of its impending end. No doctrine tempts it. It awaits the ripening of the work and of life. Detached from it, the work will once more give a barely muffled voice to a soul for ever freed from hope. Or it will give voice to nothing if the creator, tired of his activity, intends to turn away. That is equivalent.
Thus I ask of absurd creation what I required from thought — revolt, freedom, and diversity. Later on it will manifest its utter futility. In that daily effort in which intelligence and passion mingle and delight each other, the absurd man discovers a discipline that will make up the greatest of his strengths. The required diligence, the doggedness and lucidity thus resemble the conqueror’s attitude. To create is likewise to give a shape to one’s fate. For all these characters, their work defines them at least as much as it is defined by them. The actor taught us this: there is no frontier between being and appearing.
Let me repeat. None of all this has any real meaning. On the way to that liberty, there is still a progress to be made. The final effort for these related minds, creator or conqueror, is to manage to free themselves also from their undertakings: succeed in granting that the very work, whether it be conquest, love, or creation, may well not be; consummate thus the utter futility of any individual life. Indeed, that gives them more freedom in the realization of that work, just as becoming aware of the absurdity of life authorized them to plunge into it with every excess.
All that remains is a fate whose outcome alone is fatal. Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty. A world remains of which man is the sole master. What bound him was the illusion of another world. The outcome of his thought, ceasing to be renunciatory, flowers in images. It frolics — in myths to be sure — but myths with no other depth than that, of human suffering and, like it, inexhaustible. Not the divine fable that amuses and blinds, but the terrestrial face, gesture, and drama in which are summed up a difficult wisdom and an ephemeral passion.
[1] It is curious to note that the most intellectual kind of painting, the one that tries to reduce reality to its essential elements, is ultimately but a visual delight. All it has kept of the world is its colour. (This is apparent particularly in Léger.)
[2]
If you stop to think of it, this explains the worst novels. Almost everybody considers himself capable of thinking and, to a certain degree, whether right or wrong, really does think. Very few, on the contrary, can fancy themselves poets or artists in words. But from the moment when thought won over style, the mob invaded the novel.
That is not such a great peril as is said. The best are led to make greater demands upon themselves. As for those who succumb, they did not deserve to survive.
[3] Makaux’s work, for instance. But it would have been necessary to deal at the same time with the social question which, in fact, cannot be avoided by absurd thought (even though that thought may put forward several solutions, very different from one another). One must, however, limit oneself.
[4] ‘Stavrogin: “Do you believe in eternal life in the other world?” Kirilov: “No, but in eternal life in this world.”’
[5] ‘Man simply invented God in order not to kill himself. That is the summary of universal history down to this moment.’
[6] Boris de Schloezer.
[7] Gide’s curious and penetrating remark: almost all Dostoievsky’s heroes are polygamous.
[8] Melville’s Moby Dick , for instance.
The Myth Of Sisyphus
The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labour.
If one believes Homer, Sisyphus was the wisest and most prudent of mortals. According to another tradition, however, he was disposed to practise the profession of highwayman. I see no contradiction in this. Opinions differ as to the reasons why he became the futile labourer of the underworld. To begin with, he is accused of a certain levity in regard to the gods. He stole their secrets. Aegina, the daughter of Aesopus, was carried off by Jupiter. The father was shocked by that disappearance and complained to Sisyphus. He, who knew of the abduction, offered to tell about it on condition that Aesopus would give water to the citadel of Corinth. To the celestial thunderbolts he preferred the benediction of water. He was punished for this in the underworld. Homer tells us also that Sisyphus had put Death in chains. Pluto could not endure the sight of his deserted, silent empire. He dispatched the god of war who liberated Death from the hands of her conqueror.
It is said also that Sisyphus, being near to death, rashly wanted to test his wife’s love. He ordered her to cast his unburied body into the middle of the public square. Sisyphus woke up in the underworld. And there, annoyed by an obedience so contrary to human love, he obtained from Pluto permission to return to earth in order to chastise his wife. But when he had seen again the face of this world, enjoyed water and sun, warm stones and the sea, he no longer wanted to go back to the infernal darkness. Recalls, signs of anger, warnings were of no avail. Many years more, he lived facing the curve of the gulf, the sparkling sea, and the smiles of earth. A decree of the gods was necessary. Mercury came and seized the impudent man by the collar and, snatching him from his joys, led him forcibly back to the underworld where his rock was ready for him.
You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted towards accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth. Nothing is told us about Sisyphus in the underworld. Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them. As for this myth, one sees merely the whole effort of a body straining to raise the huge stone, to roll it and push it up a slope a hundred times over; one sees the face screwed up, the cheek tight against the stone, the shoulder bracing the clay-covered mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start with arms outstretched, the wholly human security of two earth-clotted hands. At the very end of his long effort measured by skyless space and time without depth, the purpose is achieved. Then Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments towards that lower world whence he will have to push it up again towards the summit. He goes back down to the plain.
It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step towards the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks towards the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.
If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks and this fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition; it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.
If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. The word is not too much. Again I fancy Sisyphus returning towards his rock, and the sorrow was in the beginning. When the images of earth cling too tightly to memory, when the call of happiness becomes too insistent, it happens that melancholy rises in man’s heart: this is the rock’s victory, this is the rock itself. The bound less grief is too heavy to bear. These are our nights of Gethsemane. But crushing truths perish from being acknowledged. Thus Oedipus at the outset obeys fate without knowing it. But from the moment he knows, his tragedy begins. Yet at the same moment, blind and desperate, he realizes that the only bond linking him to the world is the cool hand of a girl. Then a tremendous remark tings out: ‘Despite so many ordeals, my advanced age and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well.’ Sophocles’ Oedipus, like Dostoievsky’s Kirilov, thus gives the recipe for the absurd victory. Ancient wisdom confirms modem heroism.
One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness. ‘What! by such narrow ways . . . ?’ There is but one world, however. Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. It would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd discovery. It happens as well that the feeling of the absurd springs from happiness. ‘I conclude that all is well,’ says Oedipus, and that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile sufferings. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men.
All Sisyphus’ silent joy is contained therein. His fate be longs to him. His rock is his thing. Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory. There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. The absurd man says yes and his effort will henceforth be un ceasing. If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny or at least there is but one which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, he knows himself to be the master of his days. At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning towards his rock, in that slight pivoting, he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which becomes his fate, created by him, combined under his memory’s eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling.
I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He, too, concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
Appendix
Hope and The Absurd in the Work of Franz Kafka
The whole art of Kafka consists in forcing the reader to re-read. His endings, or his absence of endings, suggest explanations which, however, are not revealed in clear language but, before they seem justified, require that the story be reread from another point of view. Sometimes there is a double possibility of interpretation, whence appears the necessity for two readings. This is what the author wanted. But it would be wrong to try to interpret everything in Kafka in detail. A symbol is always in general and, however precise its translation, an artist can restore to it only its movement: there is no word for word rendering. Moreover, nothing is harder to understand than a symbolic work. A symbol always transcends the one who makes use of it and makes him say in reality more than he is aware of expressing. In this regard, the surest means of getting hold of it is not to provoke it, to begin the work without a preconceived attitude and not to look for its hidden currents. For Kafka in particular it is fair to agree to his rules, to approach the drama through its externals and the novel through its form.
At first glance and for a casual reader, they are disturbing adventures that carry off quaking and dogged characters into pursuit of problems they never formulate. In The Trial , Joseph K. is accused. But he doesn’t know of what. He is doubtless eager to defend himself, but he doesn’t know why. The lawyers find his case difficult. Meanwhile he does not neglect to love, to eat, or to read his paper. Then he is judged. But the courtroom is very dark. He doesn’t understand much. He merely assumes that he is condemned, but to what, he barely wonders. At times he suspects just the same and he continues living. Sometime later, two well- dressed and polite gentlemen come to get him and invite him to follow them. Most courteously they lead him into a wretched suburb, put his head on a stone and slit his throat. Before dying the condemned man says merely: ‘like a dog’.
You see that it is hard to speak of a symbol in a tale whose most obvious quality just happens to be naturalness. But naturalness is a hard category to understand. There are works in which the event seems: natural to the reader. But there are others (rarer, to be sure)in which the character considers natural what happens to him. By an odd but obvious paradox, the more extraordinary the character’s adventures are, the more noticeable will be the naturalness of the story: it is in proportion to the divergence we feel between the strangeness: of a man’s life and the simplicity with which that man accepts it. It seems that this naturalness is Kafka’s. And precisely, one is well aware what The Trial means. People have spoken of an image of the human condition. To be sure. Yet it is both simpler and more complex. I mean that the significance of the novel is more particular and more personal to Kafka. To a certain degree, he is the one who does the talking, even though it is us he confesses. He lives and he is condemned. He learns this on the first pages of the novel he is pursuing in this world, and if he tries; to cope with this, he nonetheless does so without surprise. He will never show sufficient astonishment at this lack of astonishment. It is by such contradictions that the first signs of the absurd work are recognized. The mind projects into the concrete its: spiritual tragedy. And it can do so solely by means of a perpetual paradox which confers on colours the power to express the void and on daily gestures the strength to translate eternal ambitions.
Likewise, The Castle is perhaps a theology in action, but it is first of all the individual adventure of a soul in quest of its grace, of a man who asks of this world’s objects their royal secret and of women the signs of the god that sleeps in them. Metamorphosis , in turn, certainly represents the horrible imagery of an ethic of lucidity. But it is also the product of that incalculable amazement man feels at being conscious of the beast he becomes effortlessly. In this funda mental ambiguity lies Kafka’s secret. These perpetual oscillations between the natural and the extraordinary, the individual and the universal, the tragic and the everyday, the absurd and the logical, are found throughout his work and give it both its resonance and its meaning. These are the paradoxes that must be enumerated, the contradictions that must be strengthened, in order to understand the absurd work.
A symbol, indeed, assumes two planes, two worlds of ideas and sensations, and a dictionary of correspondences between them. This lexicon is the hardest thing to draw up. But awaking to the two worlds brought face to face is tantamount to getting on the trail of their secret relationship. In Kafka these two worlds are that of everyday life on the one hand, and, on the other, that of supernatural anxiety. [1] It seems that we are witnessing here an interminable exploitation of Nietzsche’s remark: ‘Great problems are in the street.’
There is in the human condition (and this is a common place of all literatures)a basic absurdity as well as an implacable nobility. The two coincide, as is natural. Both of them are represented, let me repeat, in the ridiculous divorce separating our spiritual excesses and the ephemeral joys of the body. The absurd thing is that it should be the soul of this body which it transcends so inordinately. Whoever would like to represent this absurdity must give it life in a series of parallel contrasts. Thus it is that Kafka expresses tragedy by the everyday and the absurd by the logical.
An actor lends more force to a tragic character the more careful he is not to exaggerate it. If he is moderate, the horror he inspires will be immoderate. In this regard Greek tragedy is rich in lessons. In a tragic work fate always makes itself felt better in the guise of logic and naturalness. Oedipus’s fate is announced in advance. It is decided super naturally that he will commit the murder and the incest. The drama’s whole effort is to show the logical system which, from deduction to deduction, will crown the hero’s misfortune. Merely to announce to us that uncommon fate is scarcely horrible, because it is improbable. But if its necessity is demonstrated to us in the framework of everyday life, society, state, familiar emotion, then the horror is hallowed. In that revolt that shakes man and makes him say: ‘That is not possible,’ there is an element of desperate certainty that ‘that’ can be.
This is the whole secret of Greek tragedy or at least of one of its aspects. For there is another which, by a reverse method, would help us to understand Kafka better. The human heart has a tiresome tendency to label as fate only what crushes it. But happiness likewise, in its way, is without reason, since it is inevitable. Modem man, however, takes the credit for it himself, when he doesn’t fail to recognize it. Much could be said, on the contrary, about the privileged fates of Greek tragedy and those favoured in legend who, like Ulysses, in the midst of the worst adventures, are saved from themselves. It was not so easy to return to Ithaca.
What must be remembered in any case is that secret complicity that joins the logical and the everyday to the tragic. This is why Smsa, the hero of Metamorphosis , is a travelling salesman. This is why the only thing that disturbs him in the strange adventure that makes a vermin of him is that his boss will be angry at his absence. Legs and feelers grow out on him, his spine arches up, white spots appear on his belly and — I shall not say that this does not astonish him, for the effect would be spoiled — it causes him a ‘slight annoyance’. The whole art of Kafka is in that distinction. In his central work, The Castle , the details of everyday life stand out and yet in that strange novel in which nothing concludes and everything begins over again, it is the essential adventure of a soul in quest of its grace that is represented. That translation of the problem into action, that coincidence of the general and the particular are recognized likewise in the little artifices that belong to every great creator. In The Trial the hero might have been named Schmidt or Franz Kafka. But he is named Joseph K. He is not Kafka and yet he is Kafka. He is an average European. He is like everybody else. But he is also the entity K. who is the x of this flesh and blood equation.
Likewise if Kafka wants to express the absurd, he will make use of consistency. You know the stow of the crazy man who was fishing in a bathtub. A doctor with ideas as to psychiatric treatments asked him ‘if they were biting’ , to which he received the harsh reply: ‘Of course not, you fool, since this is a bathtub.’ That story belongs to the baroque type. But in it can be grasped quite clearly to what a degree the absurd effect is linked to an excess of logic. Kafka’s world is in truth an indescribable universe in which man allows himself the tormenting luxury of fishing in a bathtub, knowing that nothing will come of it.
Consequently I recognize here a work that is absurd in its principles. As for The Trial , for instance, I can indeed say that it is a complete success. Flesh wins out. Nothing is lacking, neither the unexpressed revolt (but it is what is writing), nor lucid and mute despair (but it is what is creating), nor that amazing freedom of manner which the characters of the novel exemplify until their ultimate death.
Yet this world is not so closed as it seems. Into this universe devoid of progress, Kafk a is going to introduce hope in a strange form. In this regard The Trial and The Castle do not follow the same direction. They complement each other. The barely perceptible progression from one to the other represents a tremendous conquest in the realm of evasion. The Trial propounds a problem which The Castle , to a certain degree, solves. The first describes according to a quasiscientific method, and without concluding. The second, to a certain degree, explains. The Trial diagnoses, and The Castle imagines a treatment. But the remedy proposed here does not cure. It merely brings the malady back into normal life. It helps to accept it. In a certain sense (let us think of Kierkegaard), it makes people cherish it. The Land Surveyor K. cannot imagine another anxiety than the one that is tormenting him. The very people around him become attached to that void and that nameless pain, as if suffering assumed in this case a privileged aspect. ‘How I need you,’ Frieda says to K. ‘How forsaken I feel, since knowing you, when you are not with me.’ This subtle remedy that makes us love what crushes us and makes hope spring up in a world without issue, this sudden ‘leap’ through which everything is changed, is the secret of the existential revolution and of The Castle itself.
Few works are more rigorous in their development than The Castle . K. is named Land Surveyor to the Castle and he arrives in the village. But from the village to the Castle it is impossible to communicate. For hundreds of pages K. persists in seeking his way, makes every advance, uses trickery and expedients, never gets angry, and with disconcerting good-will tries to assume the duties entrusted to him. Each chapter is a new frustration. And also a new beginning. It is not logic but consistent method. The scope of that insistence constitutes the work’s tragic quality. When K. telephones to the Castle, he hears confused, mingled voices, vague laughs, distant invitations. That is enough to feed his hope, like those few signs appearing in summer skies or those evening anticipations which make up our reason for living. Here is found the secret of the melancholy peculiar to Kafka. The same, in truth, that is found in Proust’s work or in the landscape of Plotinus: a nostalgia for a lost paradise. ‘I become very sad,’ says Olga, ‘when Barnabas tells me in the morning that he is going to the Castle: that probably futile trip, that wasted day, that probably empty hope.’ ‘Probably’ — on this implication Kafka gambles his entire work. But nothing avails; the quest of the eternal here is meticulous. And those inspired automata, Kafka’s characters, provide us with a precise image of what we should be if we were deprived of our distractions [2] and utterly consigned to the humiliations of the divine.
In The Castle that surrender to the everyday becomes an ethic. The great hope of K. is to get the Castle to adopt him. Unable to achieve this alone, his whole effort is to deserve this favour by becoming an inhabitant of the village, by losing the status of foreigner that everyone makes him feel. What he wants is an occupation, a home, the life of a healthy, normal man. He can’t stand his madness any longer. He wants to be reasonable. He wants to cast off the peculiar curse that makes him a stranger to the village. The episode of Frieda is significant in this regard. If he takes as his mistress this woman who has known one of the Castle’s officials, this is because of her past. He derives from her something that transcends him — while being aware of what makes her for ever unworthy of the Castle. This makes one think of Kierkegaard’s strange love for Regina Olsen. In certain men, the fire of eternity consuming them is great enough for them to bum in it the very heart of those closest to them. The fatal mistake that consists in giving to God what is not God’s is likewise the subject of this episode of The Castle . But for Kafka it seems that this is not a mistake. It is a doctrine and a ‘leap’. There is nothing that is not God’s.
Even more significant is the fact that the Land Surveyor breaks with Frieda in order to go towards the Barnabas sisters. For the Barnabas family is the only one in the village that is utterly forsaken by the Castle and by the village itself. Amalia, the elder sister, has rejected the shameful pro positions made her by one of the Castle’s officials. The immoral curse that followed has forever cast her out from the love of God. Being incapable of losing one’s honour for God amounts to making oneself unworthy of his grace. You recognize a theme familiar to existential philosophy: truth contrary to morality. At this point things are far-reaching. For the path pursued by Kafka’s hero from Frieda to the Barnabas sisters is the very one that leads from trusting love to the deification of the absurd. Here again Kafka’s thought runs parallel to Kierkegaard. It is not surprising that the ‘Barnabas story’ is placed at the end of the book. The Land Surveyor’s last attempt is to recapture God through what negates him, to recognize him, not according to our categories of goodness and beauty but behind the empty and hideous aspects of his indifference, of his injustice, and of his hatred. That stranger who asks the Castle to adopt him is at the end of his voyage a little more exiled because this time he is unfaithful to himself, forsaking morality, logic, and intellectual truths in order to try to enter, endowed solely with his mad hope, the desert of divine grace. [3]
The word ‘hope’ used here is not ridiculous. On the contrary, the more tragic the condition described by Kafka, the firmer and more aggressive that hope becomes. The more truly absurd The Trial is, the more moving and illegitimate the impassioned ‘leap’ of The Castle seems. But we find here again in a pure state the paradox of existential thought as it is expressed, for instance, by Kierkegaard: ‘Earthly hope must be killed; only then can one be saved by true hope’ [4] which can be translated: ‘One has to have written The Trial to undertake The Castle .’
Most of those who have spoken of Kafka have indeed de fined his work as a desperate cry with no recourse left to man. But this calls for review. There is hope and hope. To me the optimistic work of Henri Bordeaux seems peculiarly discouraging. This is because it has nothing for the discriminating. Malraux’s thought on the other hand is always bracing. But in these two cases neither the same hope nor the same despair is at issue. I see merely that the absurd work itself may lead to the infidelity I want to avoid. The work which was but an ineffectual repetition of a sterile condition, a lucid glorification of the ephemeral, becomes here a cradle of illusions. It explains, it gives a shape to hope. The creator can no longer divorce himself from it. It is not the tragic game it was to be. It gives a meaning to the author’s life.
It is strange in any case that works of related inspiration like those of Kafka, Kierkegaard or Chestov, those in short of existential novelists and philosophers completely oriented towards the absurd and its consequences, should in the long run lead to that tremendous cry of hope.
They embrace the God that consumes them. It is through humility that hope enters in. For the absurd of this existence assures them a little more of supernatural reality. If the course of this life leads to God, there is an outcome after all. And the perseverance, the insistence with which Kierkegaard, Chestov and Kafka’s heroes repeat their itineraries are a special warrant of the uplifting power of that cer tainty. [5]
Kafka refuses his god moral nobility, evidence, virtue, coherence, but only the better to fall into his arms. The absurd is recognized, accepted, and man is resigned to it, but from then on we know that it has ceased to be the absurd. Within the limits of the human condition, what greater hope than the hope that allows an escape from that con dition? As I see once more, existential thought in this regard (and contrary to current opinion)is steeped in a vast hope. The very hope which at the time of early Christianity and the spreading of the news inflamed the ancient world. But in that leap that characterizes all existential thought, in that insistence, in that surveying of a divinity devoid of surface, how can one fail to see the mark of a lucidity that repudiates itself? It is merely claimed that this is pride abdicating to save itself. Such a repudiation would be fecund. But this does not change that. The moral of lucidity cannot be diminished in my eyes by calling it sterile like all pride. For a truth also, by its very definition, is sterile. All facts are. In a world where everything is given and nothing is explained, the fecundity of a value or of a metaphysic is a notion devoid of meaning.
In any case, you see here in what tradition of thought Kafka’s work takes its place. It would indeed be intelligent to consider as inevitable the progression from The Trial to The Castle . Joseph K. and the Land Surveyor K. are merely two poles that attract Kafka. [6] I shall speak as he does and say that his work is probably not absurd. But that should not deter us from seeing its nobility and universality. They come from the fact that he managed to represent so fully the everyday passage from hope to grief and from desperate wisdom to intentional blindness. His work is universal (a really absurd work is not universal)to the extent to which it represents the emotionally moving face of man fleeing humanity, deriving from his contradictions reasons for believing, reasons for hoping from his fecund despairs, and calling life his terrifying apprenticeship in death. It is universal because its inspiration is religious. As in all religions, man is freed of the weight of his own life. But if I know that, if I can even admire it, I also know that I am not seeking what is universal but what is true. The two may well not coincide.
This particular view will be better understood if I say that truly hopeless thought just happens to be defined by the opposite criteria and that the tragic work might be the work that, after all future hope is exiled, describes the life of a happy man. The more exciting life is, the more absurd is the idea of losing it. This is perhaps the secret of that proud aridity felt in Nietzsche’s work. In this connection, Nietzsche appears to be the only artist to have derived the extreme consequences of an aesthetic of the absurd, in as much as his final message lies in a sterile and conquering lucidity and an obstinate negation of any supernatural consolation.
The preceding should nevertheless suffice to bring out the capital importance of Kafka in the framework of this essay. Here we are carried to the confines of human thought. In the fullest sense of the word, it can be said that everything in that work is essential. In any case it propounds the absurd problem altogether. If one wants to compare these conclusions with our initial remarks, the content with the form, the secret meaning of The Castle with the natural art in which it is moulded, K.’s passionate, proud quest with the everyday setting against which it takes place, then one will realize what may be its greamess. For if nostalgia is the mark of the human, perhaps no one has given such flesh and volume to these phantoms of regret. But at the same time will be sensed what exceptional nobility the absurd work calls for, which is perhaps not found here. If the nature of art is to bind the general to the particular, ephemeral eternity of a drop of water to the play of its lights, it is even truer to judge the greamess of the absurd writer by the distance he is able to introduce between these two worlds. His secret consists in being able to find the exact point where they meet in their greatest disproportion.
And to tell the truth, this geometrical locus of man and the inhuman is seen everywhere by the pure in heart. If Faust and Don Quixote are eminent creations of art, this is because of the immeasurable nobilities they point out to us with their earthly hands. Yet a moment always comes when the mind negates the truths that those hands can touch. A moment comes when the creation ceases to be taken tragically; it is merely taken seriously. Then man is concerned with hope. But that is not his business. His business is to turn away from subterfuge. Yet this is just what I find at the conclusion of the vehement proceedings Kafka institutes against the whole universe. His unbelievable verdict is this hideous and upsetting world in which the very moles dare to hope. [7]
[1] It is worth noting that the works of Kafka can quite as legitimately be interpreted in the sense of a social criticism (for instance in The Trial). It is probable, moreover, that there is no need to choose. Both interpretations are good. In absurd terms, as we have seen, revolt against men is also directed against God: great revolutions are always metaphysical.
[2] In The Castle it seems that ‘distractions’ in the Pascalian sense are represented by the assistants who ‘distract’ K. from his anxiety. If Frieda eventually becomes the mistress of one of the assistants, this is because she prefers the stage setting to truth, everyday life to shared anguish.
[3] This is obviously true only of the unfinished version of The Castle that Kafka left us. But it is doubtful that the writer would have destroyed in the last chapters his novel’s unity of tone.
[4] Purity of heart.
[5] The only character without hope in The Castle is Amalia . She is the one with whom the Land Surveyor is most violently contrasted.
[6] On the two aspects of Kafka’s thought, compare ‘In the Penal Colon’ published by the Cahiers du Sud (and in America by Partisan Review — translator’s note): ‘Guilt [“of man” is understood] is never doubtful’ and a fragment of The Castle (Momus’ report): ‘The guilt of the Land Surveyor K. is hard to establish.’
[7] What is offered above is obviously an interpretation of Kafka’s work. But it is only fair to add that nothing prevents its being considered, apart from any interpretation, from a purely aesthetic point of view. For instance, B. Groethuysen in his remarkable preface to The Trial limits himself, more wisely than we, to following merely the painful fancies of what he calls, most strikingly, a day dreamer. It is the fate and perhaps the greatness of that work that it offers everything and confirms nothing.
企鹅口袋书系列·伟大的思想
记忆之灯
(英汉双语)
[英]约翰·罗斯金 著
刘涵 译
中国出版传媒股份有限公司
中国对外翻译出版有限公司
图书在版编目(CIP)数据
记忆之灯:英汉对照/(英)罗斯金著;刘涵译.—北京:中国对外翻译出版有限公司,2012.9
(企鹅口袋书系列·伟大的思想)
ISBN 978-7-5001-3336-0
Ⅰ.①记… Ⅱ.①罗… ②刘… Ⅲ.①英语—汉语—对照读物 Ⅳ.①H319.4
中国版本图书馆CIP数据核字(2012)第109878号
www.penguin.com
'The Lamp of Memory' first published in The Seven Lamps of Architecture , 1849
'Cambridge School of Art: Inaugural Address' first published 1858
'Of Kings' Treasuries' first published in Sesame and Lilies: Two Lectures , 1865
'Traffic' first published in The Crown of Wild Olive: Four Lectures on Industry and War in 1866
This collection first published 2008
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观 念
——《伟大的思想》代序
梁文道
每隔一段时间,媒体就喜欢评选一次“影响世界的X个人”或者“改变历史的X项发明”。然而,在我看来,几乎所有人类史上最重大的变革,首先都是一种观念的变革。
我们今天之所以会关注气候的暖化与生物多样性的保存,是因为我们看待地球的方式变了,我们比以前更加意识到人在自然中的位置,也更加了解自然其实是一个动态的系统。放弃了人类可以主宰地球的世界观,这就意味着我们接受了一个观念的变化。同样地,我们不再相信男人一出生就该主宰女人,甚至也不再认为男女之别是不可动摇的本质区分;这也是观念的变化。如果说环保运动和女权运动有任何影响的话,那些影响一定就是从大脑开始的。也不要只看好事,20世纪最惨绝人寰的浩劫最初也只不过是一些小小的观念,危险的观念。比如说一位德国人,他相信人类的进化必以“次等种族”的灭绝为代价……
这套丛书不叫“伟大的巨著”,是因为它们体积都不大,而且还有不少是抽取自某些名著的章节。可它们却全是伟大的观念,例如达尔文论天择,潘恩论常识,它们共同构成了人类的观念地图。从头看它们一遍,就是检视文明所走过的道路,从深处理解我们今天变成这个样子的原因。
也许你会发现其中有些陌生的名字,或者看起来没有那么“伟大”的篇章(譬如普鲁斯特追忆他的阅读时光),但你千万不要小看它们。因为真正重要、真正能够产生启蒙效果的观念往往具有跨界移动的能力,它会跨越时空,离开它原属的领域,在另一个世界产生意外的效果。就像马可·波罗在监狱里述说的异国图景,当时有谁料得到那些荒诞的故事会诱发出哥伦布的旅程呢?我也无法猜测,这套小书的读者里头会不会有下一个哥伦布,他将带着令人惊奇的观念航向自己的大海。
《伟大的思想》中文版序
企鹅《伟大的思想》丛书2004年开始出版。在英国,已付印80种,尚有20种计划出版。美国出版的丛书规模略小,德国的同类丛书规模更小一些。丛书销量已远远超过200万册,在全球很多人中间,尤其是学生当中,普及了哲学和政治学。中文版《伟大的思想》丛书的推出,迈出了新的一步,令人欢欣鼓舞。
推出这套丛书的目的是让读者再次与一些伟大的非小说类经典著作面对面地交流。太长时间以来,确定版本依据这样一个假设——读者在教室里学习这些著作,因此需要导读、详尽的注释、参考书目等。此类版本无疑非常有用,但我想,如果能够重建托马斯·潘恩《常识》或约翰·罗斯金《艺术与人生》初版时的环境,重新营造更具亲和力的氛围,那也是一件有意思的事。当时,读者除了原作者及其自身的理性思考外没有其他参照。
这样做有一定的缺点:每个作者的话难免有难解或不可解之处,一些重要的背景知识会缺失。例如,读者对亨利·梭罗创作时的情况毫无头绪,也不了解该书的接受情况及影响。不过,这样做的优点也很明显。最突出的优点是,作者的初衷又一次变得重要起来——托马斯·潘恩的愤怒、查尔斯·达尔文的灵光、塞内加的隐逸。这些作家在那么多国家影响了那么多人的生活,其影响不可估量,有的长达几个世纪,读他们书的乐趣罕有匹敌。没有亚当·斯密或阿图尔·叔本华,难以想象我们今天的世界。这些小书的创作年代已很久远,但其中的话已彻底改变了我们的政治学、经济学、智力生活、社会规划和宗教信仰。
《伟大的思想》丛书一直求新求变。地区不同,收录的作家也不同。在中国或美国,一些作家更受欢迎。英国《伟大的思想》收录的一些作家在其他地方则默默无闻。称其为“伟大的思想”,我们亦慎之又慎。思想之伟大,在于其影响之深远,而不意味着这些思想是“好”的,实际上一些书可列入“坏”思想之列。丛书中很多作家受到同一丛书其他作家的很大影响,例如,马塞尔·普鲁斯特承认受约翰·罗斯金影响很大,米歇尔·德·蒙田也承认深受塞内加影响,但其他作家彼此憎恨,如果发现他们被收入同一丛书,一定会气愤难平。不过,读者可自行决定这些思想是否合理。我们衷心希望,您能在阅读这些杰作中得到乐趣。
《伟大的思想》出版者
西蒙·温德尔
Introduction to the Chinese
Editions of Great Ideas
Penguin's Great Ideas series began publication in 2004. In the UK we now have 80 copies in print with plans to publish a further 20. A somewhat smaller list is published in the USA and a related, even smaller series in Germany. The books have sold now well over two million copies and have popularized philosophy and politics for many people around the world — particularly students. The launch of a Chinese Great Ideas series is an extremely exciting new development.
The intention behind the series was to allow readers to be once more face to face with some of the great nonfiction classics. For too long the editions of these books were created on the assumption that you were studying them in the classroom and that the student needed an introduction, extensive notes, a bibliography and so on. While this sort of edition is of course extremely useful, I thought it would be interesting to recreate a more intimate feeling — to recreate the atmosphere in which, for example, Thomas Paine's Common Sense or John Ruskin's On Art and Life was first published — where the reader has no other guide than the original author and his or her own common sense.
This method has its severe disadvantages — there will inevitably be statements made by each author which are either hard or impossible to understand, some important context might be missing. For example the reader has no clue as to the conditions under which Henry Thoreau was writing his book and the reader cannot be aware of the book's reception or influence. The advantages however are very clear — most importantly the original intentions of the author become once more important. The sense of anger in Thomas Paine, of intellectual excitement in Charles Darwin, of resignation in Seneca — few things can be more thrilling than to read writers who have had such immeasurable influence on so many lives, sometimes for centuries, in many different countries. Our world would not make sense without Adam Smith or Arthur Schopenhauer — our politics, economics, intellectual lives, social planning, religious beliefs have all been fundamentally changed by the words in these little books, first written down long ago.
The Great Ideas series continues to change and evolve. In different parts of the world different writers would be included. In China or in the United States there are some writers who are liked much more than others. In the UK there are writers in the Great Ideas series who are ignored elsewhere. We have also been very careful to call the series Great Ideas — these ideas are great because they have been so enormously influential, but this does not mean that they are Good Ideas — indeed some of the books would probably qualify as Bad Ideas. Many of the writers in the series have been massively influenced by others in the series — for example Marcel Proust owned so much to John Ruskin, Michel de Montaigne to Seneca. But others hated each other and would be distressed to find themselves together in the same series! But readers can decide the validity of these ideas for themselves. We very much hope that you enjoy these remarkable books.
Simon Winder
Publisher
Great Ideas
目 录
Introduction to the Chinese Editions of Great Ideas
Cambridge School of Art: Inaugural Address (1858)
译者导读
约翰·罗斯金(John Ruskin, 1819—1900)是英国维多利亚时代最伟大的艺术及社会评论家。他在知识界的影响力从19世纪后半叶开始一直延续到今天,可谓影响深远,跨越时代。
罗斯金的一生著述甚丰,其作品涵盖了广阔的领域,体裁也多种多样。然而,罗斯金最具影响力的作品大多集中在艺术及社会评论方面。他最为重要的艺术评论大多出自《现代画家》(1843—1960)和《建筑七灯》(1849)两部著作。作为艺术评论家,他的作品改变了维多利亚时代人们对于艺术的认知,同时他还是“哥特复兴”(Gothic Revival)建筑运动以及“前拉斐尔派”(Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood)艺术运动的主要幕后推手。作为社会评论家,他支持改变穷人们的生活窘况,颂扬手工艺劳动的尊严、道德以及美学价值,反对工厂劳动的日益机械化,因为他认为这种劳动既枯燥乏味又毁灭灵魂。由此,罗斯金也成为了19世纪“艺术与工艺运动”(Arts & Crafts Movement)的精神领袖。
此书收录了罗斯金在不同时期的四篇重要作品。它们分别是《记忆之灯》、《剑桥艺术学校:开学致辞(1858)》、《国王的宝藏》,以及《交易》。
《记忆之灯》是出版于1849年的《建筑七灯》中的一篇。罗斯金在书名中以“灯”冠之是为了表明它们是自己所理解的、建筑的七条原则。《记忆之灯》探讨的主要议题是建筑在文化传承方面所应当扮演的角色。罗斯金认为好的建筑应当犹如一座历史的丰碑,向子孙后代永远地传递建造它的那个时代的文化信息。从19世纪60年代起,罗斯金开始大量出席各种讲座及演讲活动。本书所收录的后三篇文章就是他在这一时期的演讲词。在《剑桥艺术学校:开学致辞(1858)》中,罗斯金论述了艺术教育的原则。他认为在大众的、通用的艺术学校里面,学生首先要学会的是观察,是提高鉴赏力,是对艺术的热爱,而非从事艺术创作。《国王的宝藏》最早出现在1865年出版的《芝麻与百合》中,是其中的第一篇。这篇演讲连同第二篇《王后的花园》一起,阐明了男人和女人各自的天性以及所应承担的责任。罗斯金在《国王的宝藏》中重点探讨了建立并资助公共图书馆的意义所在,并且论述了为什么要阅读经典以及如何阅读经典等等重要的议题。《交易》是罗斯金在1864年于布拉福德市政厅所做的演讲。他在演说中集中讨论了品味和道德的关系。他认为品味不是道德的一部分或是道德的表征,而是道德的全部。罗斯金的作品犹如一座巨大的宝库,然而到底能从其中挖掘到什么,则在很大程度上取决于我们读者自身所具备的禀赋。
翻译是件无比艰辛而又孤独的工作,如同一个人在漆黑的夜里行走在漫长而崎岖的道路上。然而所幸的是,在这孤独的夜路之上有一位伟大的思想者与我相伴而行,他就是约翰·罗斯金。他手中擎着那永不熄灭的灯盏,用充满睿智的言语照亮了我前进的路程。就像罗斯金在这本书开始时所说的那样:“在我的一生中,有些时刻值得以特别感激的心情去回味。那时,喜悦异常的丰满,教诲也异常的清澈。”——翻译《记忆之灯》的过程就是这样的时刻。
记忆之灯
在我的一生中,有些时刻值得以特别感激的心情去回味。那时,喜悦异常的丰满,教诲也异常的清澈。那是几年前的一个傍晚,我漫步在流经法国东部汝拉省尚帕尼奥勒村的爱恩河河畔的松林中。这里充满了阿尔卑斯山的庄严,却丝毫没有它的荒凉;这里,大地蕴藏着的巨大能量似乎正要显现,绵延起伏的松岗透露出深沉而高贵的和谐;这里,群山奏出交响乐的第一个音符,不久便抬高了调门,如惊涛般拍散在了阿尔卑斯山的群峰之上。然而群山的力量是有节制的;绵延的、长满牧草的山脊层层叠加,像是来自大海的怒涛,涌过平静的水面,发出长长的叹息。在这广袤的单调中弥漫着深深的柔情。中部山脉的破坏力连同他严肃的表情都不见了。柔软的汝拉牧场没有古老冰川冰刨石塞的侵蚀印记;没有成堆的碎石瓦砾破坏汝拉森林的美丽容颜;也没有苍白的、肮脏的,或是暴怒的河流在她的岩石间粗鲁地撕扯、蜿蜒。清澈的、绿色的溪水在熟悉的河床中流淌,耐心地、一个一个地打着旋涡。在静谧的松树的遮盖下,一簇簇的花朵年复一年地冒出头儿,我不知道这世界上还有什么比它们更快乐。那时正值春天,花团锦簇,争相斗艳;尽管空间足够,它们还是把叶子挤压成了各种奇形的怪状,只为了紧紧地挨在一起。银莲花星星点点,三五成群,如天上的星云一般;酢浆草成群结队,如同五月节向童贞女马利亚致敬的游行队伍一样塞满了石灰岩上黑色的垂直裂缝,它们洁白如雪,边上盘绕着像葡萄树枝蔓一样轻快而可爱的常春藤;一眨眼的工夫,紫罗兰便会喷涌而出,而报春花也在有阳光的地方绽放开来;在较为开阔一点的地方,野豌豆、雏菊、瑞香、宝石蓝色的远志的花蕾以及野草莓的花儿都沉浸在浓重、温暖、琥珀色的地衣那金黄色的温柔乡里了。我走出松林,来到山涧边上:涧水的隆隆轰鸣声从脚下突然冒了上来,与松枝上画眉鸟的鸣唱混合在了一起;山涧的对面是灰色的石灰岩峭壁,一只猎鹰在峭壁的边缘缓缓滑翔,翅膀几乎碰到了岩壁,松树的影子倒映在它闪闪发光的羽毛上;而在它身下数百英尺的地方,绿色的河水正打着旋涡,泛着令人晕眩的点点金光欢快地流淌着,水中的浪花同天上的猎鹰一起飞翔。感受这种孤独和严肃的美丽是不能掺杂任何私心杂念的。我清楚地记得,当自己试图要更为确切地捕捉到这种令人难忘的美丽背后的根源时——比如暂时把它想象成新大陆原始森林的景象,便瞬间感到头脑空白,身体冰凉。花朵顷刻间失去了光彩,河水停止了歌唱,群山变得压抑而荒芜。幽暗森林中的枝干仿佛在沉痛地诉说,诉说它们先前的力量其实是他人的赐予,而不朽的光辉和持续的重生再造则是诞生于它们珍贵的记忆。那些不断开放的花朵和永不停息的河流被人类的忍耐、勇敢和美德的深色所浸染;在夜空的映衬下,黑色群山的峰顶更是受到了人们的膜拜,因为它们向东投下的长长阴影笼罩住了朱克斯的铁墙以及格朗松的四方要塞。
我们应当以最严肃的态度对待建筑,因为她是这种神圣影响的集中体现和守护者。没有了建筑我们可以生存,可以祈祷,却将失去记忆。与一个民族所记载的内容和不朽的大理石所承载的内涵相比,一切历史是多么的冰冷,一切意象又是多么的了无生气!——几块石头的堆砌就会省却我们长篇累牍的含混记述!雄心勃勃的巴别塔的建造者告诉我们,只有两件东西可以征服人类的健忘——诗歌和建筑。而后者在某种意义上包括了前者,而且事实上更为强大,因为它如实地记载了人们生活的全部——人们的所思所感,所创所造,所见所闻。荷马的时代为黑暗所包围,有关他的个性也是众说纷纭。然而伯里克利的时代则清晰得多:毋庸讳言,与古希腊甜美的歌手和士兵历史学家相比,我们从其破碎的雕塑中学到了更多的东西。如果了解历史确有裨益,青史留名又是乐事一件的话(因为这样可以为我们当前的努力注入力量,为现在的坚持提供耐心),那么对于一个民族的建筑来说,我们就肩负着两项责任,而其重要性怎么说也不为过:第一,使当代的建筑彪炳史册;第二,将过去时代的建筑作为最珍贵的遗产加以保护。
就第一项责任来说,记忆确实可以称得上是建筑的第六盏明灯,因为只有具有纪念意义或是不朽的价值,民用和家居建筑才会变得真正完美。之所以如此,是因为带着这样一种观念,建筑会建造得更为牢固;而且建筑装饰会由于其隐喻性和历史性的内涵而显得栩栩如生。
就家居建筑而言,这种观念一定存在着某种局限性,因为无论是人心还是人力都会有所不及。不过我还是认为,某个民族建造房屋仅供一代人居住的做法是罪恶的。在善良人居住的房屋中有一种圣洁,而这种圣洁不是在其废墟上新建住宅就可以获得重生。我认为善良的人们通常会感受到这一点。由于在这幢房子里度过了欢乐和有尊严的一生,他们会在生命即将结束的时候感到悲伤,认为这幢见证,或是参与了他们所有的荣誉、欢乐或是痛苦的房子,这个自己在人世间的居所,连同它所承载的所有有关自己的记录,所有他们曾经爱过、拥有过的物质财富,所有他们曾经留下过的印记,就要在自己葬身墓地之后被扫除干净;人们对它不怀敬意,没有感情,孩子们也认为它一无是处;尽管在教堂里竖立着自己的墓碑,家里却不再有自己温暖的栖身之所;他们所有曾经珍视的东西都被厌弃,曾经为他们提供保护和慰藉的房子被夷为平地。我认为一位善良的人会对此感到恐惧;更进一步来说,一位善良的儿子,一位高贵的子嗣,会因为如此地对待他父亲的房子而感到恐惧。我认为,如果人们真的像人一样地活着,那么他们的房子就会成为一座座庙宇——我们不敢对它们加以伤害,而居住其中会使我们变得神圣;如果每个人只是为了自己建造房屋,为了满足他自己的,那一点点的,改变生活的需求的话,那么他们的亲情必定会奇怪地瓦解,对家庭的赐予和父母的教诲则会莫名其妙地知恩不报,莫名地意识到自己背叛了父辈的荣誉,或者自己的生命不足以使这幢房子对于孩子们来说成为神圣之所。我看到可怜的石灰和黏土的凝固物正如霉菌一样从我们首都周边的,受尽蹂躏的原野上迅速生长;我看到用木板和假冒石材建成的,如甲壳一样的建筑物,它们形体单薄、摇摇欲坠、毫无根基;我看到一排排阴郁的、千篇一律的小房子,它们彼此雷同却又毫无关联,形单影只却又似曾相识。看着它们,我感觉到的不仅仅是憎恨一瞥后淡漠的厌恶,不仅仅是对被玷污了的景色的痛惜,而且还痛苦地预感到,当我们这个民族的伟大的根系松散地扎根在这片土壤的时候,它们一定已经深度地溃烂了;那些让人丧气,令人羞愧的房屋显示出巨大而且不断蔓延的,普遍的不满情绪。这些房子告诉我们,每个人的居住目标都定在了比他们当前更好的自然环境当中,每个人过去的生活都成为了嘲笑的对象;人们都希望建造新房离开旧居,希望忘却过往的岁月;人们不再能感觉到家庭所带来的舒适、和平以及信仰;挣扎的、不安的人们所居住的拥挤的房子与阿拉伯人或是吉卜赛人的帐篷的唯一区别就是,它们不够健康敞亮,不能随心所欲地搬来搬去;人们牺牲了自由却未能换来安宁,牺牲了稳定却未能换来变动所带来的奢华。
这一罪恶并非微不足道,并非影响有限;它是带来其他错误和厄运的不祥之兆、传染之源和孕育的温床。当人们不再爱家,不再尊敬这个栖身之所,就表明他们已经羞辱了它,并且从未承认过基督教信仰中真正的普世价值。事实上,真正超越异教徒偶像崇拜的正是这一价值,而并非一颗虔诚之心。我们的上帝不仅仅活在天堂,还活在家中;他在每个人的居所里都有一座圣坛;所以当我们轻慢地搬动圣坛,倒掉灰烬的时候,就要多加小心了。一个民族的家居建筑要如何建造,就其耐久性和完整性来说,与单纯的视觉愉悦,知性的骄傲或是文雅而挑剔的想象力毫不相干。它是一种道德责任,一旦缺失就要受到惩罚,因为如何对待建筑取决于微妙而平衡的责任心——一种仔细、耐心、喜爱和坚持到底的决心;一种希望建筑能够跨越一般的国家革命的时期或是整个的区域利益转换的时期的观念。这是最起码的;但是,如果可能的话,人们最好把建造房屋提升到终身事业的高度,这一高度是最初的条件而不是最终的成就;人们建造房屋要尽力而为,使它屹立不倒;要通过房子给子孙后代展示自己的过去以及生活的历练。这样的房子建好后,我们就拥有了真正的家居建筑,它是所有其他方面要求的基础。真正的家居建筑,无论大房子还是小房子,都会一视同仁、考虑周到;真正的家居建筑会赋予世俗环境下的狭小空间以尊严,而人们正是依赖这种尊严才能够安居乐业。
我注意到这种光荣、骄傲、平和的泰然自若,这种安居乐业的永恒智慧,很有可能就是所有时代中最伟大智慧的主要源泉之一,而且毫无疑问,它们是古代意大利和法国伟大建筑的最重要源头。时至今日,这两个国家中最美丽的城市所吸引人们的,不是其孤立存在的,富丽堂皇的宫殿,而是它们在辉煌时期遗留下的,珍贵而优雅的房屋装饰,即便这些房屋小之又小。威尼斯最为精美的建筑是位于其大运河起始地段的一幢小房子。这幢房子上下共三层,二层三扇窗户,三层两扇。许多最为精美的建筑都位于较为狭窄的运河两岸,面积并不比这座大。意大利北部最为有趣的十五世纪的建筑中有这样一幢小房子,它并不临街,位于维琴察市场的后面;它始建于1481年,外墙上镌刻着这样的铭文:Il. n'est. rose. sans. épine. ——它是无刺的玫瑰;这幢房屋同样上下三层,每层三扇窗户,窗户之间是华丽的花叶装饰;中间阳台的下面起支撑作用的是展开双翅的雄鹰的造型,两边的阳台下面则支撑的是站立在丰饶角上的,长翅膀的狮身鹫首兽。认为房子建得好则必须建得大完全是现代人的想法,这种观念与认为绘画中的人物必须比真实生活中的人物大才会让这幅画具有历史感一样,如出一辙。
我希望普通住宅建得坚固耐久,赏心悦目;里里外外都让人倍感愉悦;至于房屋之间的风格和样式要近似到何种程度,我会在其他标题下另行讨论;但是无论如何,房屋之间要存在差异,而这种差异要能适应并表现出每个人的性格和职业特点,以及他部分的个人历史。我认为,房屋的首建者拥有这项权利,并且应当受到后代的尊重;房屋建造中要预留一些未经雕琢的石材,以便日后在上面记录下房屋主人的生平和房屋的变迁,如此一来,这一居所便具有了纪念碑的性质,进而演化成为更加系统的说教。这一良好的风俗古已有之,而现如今仍有一些瑞士人和德国人保留了这一传统,作为对于上帝恩赐的答谢,因为正是上帝允许自己建造并拥有了这样一处安静的栖身之所。下面这些镌刻在一幢乡间别墅外墙上的甜美文字正可以作为本段的结束语。这幢别墅建成不久,位于格林德瓦村和下游的冰川之间,为绿色的牧场所环抱:——
"Mit herzlichem Vertrauen
怀着真诚的信仰
Hat Johannes Mooter und Maria Rubi
约翰内斯·莫特和玛利·露比
Dieses Haus bauen lassen.
建造了这栋房子。
Der liebe Gott woll uns bewahren
仁慈的上帝保佑我们
Vor allem Unglück und Gefahren,
免于不幸和危险,
Und es in Segen lassen stehn
并且祝福我们
Auf der Reise durch diese Jammerzeit
经过悲伤的旅途
Nach dem himmlischen Paradiese,
来到美好的天国,
Wo alle Fromrnen wohnen,
所有虔诚的信徒都齐聚于此,
Da wird Gott sie belohnen
因为上帝将会奖赏他们
Mit der Friedenskrone
和平的冠冕
Zu alle Ewigkeit.
直到永远。”
公共建筑传承历史的作用应当更为明确。哥特式建筑的优点之一就是,——我所谓的“哥特式”是与其古典含义相较而言最为广义的含义,——它记录的丰富性几乎无穷无尽。哥特式建筑细微和繁复的雕刻装饰为所有应当为人所知的民族情感或是成就提供了表达的方式,这种表达可能是象征性的,也可能是直白的。事实上,装饰本身并不足以表达如此崇高的特性;即便是最富思想性的历史时期的装饰也会给想象留下很大的,自由发挥的空间,否则就不得不在装饰中重复地使用代表民族风貌或象征的符号。然而,即使仅仅在表面的装饰物中放弃哥特式建筑精神所独具的多样性与力量也是不明智的;在其他重要的建筑构件方面更是如此——例如圆柱的柱头或凸饰,束带层,以及为大家所公认的浅浮雕等。最粗陋的,能够讲述一个故事或是记录下一个事实的作品也要胜过最富丽堂皇却言之无物的装饰。伟大的城市建筑上所有的装饰物都应当传达某种智慧的思考。对于历史的真实再现在现代社会遇到了困难,这种困难相当讨厌却挥之不去;这就是难以驾驭的服饰:然而,通过足够大胆和富于想象力的处理以及对于象征符号的坦率的使用,就可以克服所有这些困难;这恐怕不仅仅可以使得雕塑本身获得满意的效果,而且可以使得它在整个建筑作品的所有构成要件中成为伟大并且富于表现力的一分子。以威尼斯道奇宫的柱头装饰为例。按说历史应当交由宫廷画师去表现,然而道奇宫拱廊的每颗柱头却都被赋予了含义。紧挨大门的,作为整个宫殿基石的那根大柱头象征着“抽象的公正”;上面是一尊“所罗门的裁决”的雕塑,其服务于装饰性目的的处理方式令人赞叹。如果整个雕塑都是由这些人物组成,那么他们就会中断柱子的角线,削弱它的力量;于是在这些人物中间便升起一根粗大的,带有棱纹的树干(事实上它与这些人物毫不相干,位于刽子手和求情的母亲之间),起到支撑并延续角柱的作用,而上面的树叶则荫蔽并装点着整个雕塑。下端的柱头在其叶饰的包围中是一位端坐王位的正义的化身——罗马皇帝图拉真,他正在为一个寡妇讨回公道,此外还有亚里士多德,以及一两个其他的,因为破损而难以分辨的人物。旁边的另一些柱头按照顺序依次代表各种美德和恶行,象征了对于民族和平和强盛的保护或是破坏。其中最后一根柱头代表了信仰,上面镌刻着“Fides optima in Deo est”——真理与上帝同在。柱头的另一侧是一个人在膜拜太阳。之后的一两根柱头上面梦幻般地装饰了鸟儿的图样,接下来是一系列柱头,描绘了各色水果、民族服饰以及来自威尼斯治下的各国的动物。
现在先不谈更为重要的公共建筑,我们不妨想象一下以历史的和象征性的雕塑装饰自己在印度的房屋:首先房子要建得牢固;然后雕刻上反映我们在印度的战争的浮雕,再辅之以具有东方韵味的叶饰或是镶嵌上东方的宝石;接下来,在更为重要的装饰雕塑中展现印度的风土人情,并且强调地表现出印度教崇拜中的诸神灵对于十字架的臣服。这样一件作品难道不胜过一千本历史书吗?然而,如果我们不具备进行如此装饰所必需的创造力,或是我们不乐意像欧陆诸民族一样喜欢谈论自己,即便是以大理石代言的话(这可能是我们为自己不善此道所能找到的最为高尚的托辞),那么至少在建筑物的耐久性方面我们仍然责无旁贷。由于这一问题与对于各种装饰方式的选择密切相关,所以有必要进一步地探讨。
人类的善意和决心很少能够超越自己这一代人而恩泽后世。他们也许指望着后辈侧耳倾听,专心致志,也许为了博得他们的赞誉而操劳:他们可能盼望着后辈承认那些未被承认的美德,并且要求他们对于现行的错误还以公道。但是所有这一切纯属出于自私的目的,丝毫没有考虑或是照顾到后辈的利益——我们欣然煽动他们对我们阿谀奉承,并且高兴地利用他们的权威支持我们当下颇具争议的诉求。为了子孙后代牺牲自我,为了还未出生的债主厉行节约,为了后人乘凉而栽树,或是为了将来的人们能居住而兴建城市,我认为所有这些想法都从未真正地成为被人们所公认的,努力工作的动机。但是,这并不是说我们可以免除这些职责;除非我们人生在世的用处不仅仅惠及同伴还能泽被后世,否则我们的存在便难以为继。上帝已经赐予了我们生活的土地;这是一笔巨大的遗产。它不仅仅属于我们,而且属于我们的子孙后辈,以及名字已经出现在《创世记》当中的先人们;我们没有权利,无论是通过作为或是不作为,使他们蒙受不必要的惩罚,或是剥夺他们应当获得的,我们有权力传承下去的利益。上帝为人类劳动指定的条件之一就是,果实的丰满程度与播种和收获之间的时间成正比;因此通常来说,我们将目标锁定得越远就越不会盼望着亲眼目睹自己的劳动果实,而我们所获取的成功就越是广泛和丰富。人类并不能像使后辈受益那样,使同辈获得好处;在所有发出人类声音的布道坛中,坟墓的发声最有说服力。
考虑将来并不意味着给当前带来损失。相反,人类的一举一动都会因为未雨绸缪而变得更为可敬、优雅和壮丽。在所有的品质当中,远见,平静的和自信的耐心将人与人区分开来,使得某些人更亲近上帝;没有什么行为或艺术不能用这一方法来验证其高贵。因此,当我们建造房屋的时候,要抱着使其屹立万代的想法。不要让建筑仅仅满足于当下的欢愉和使用;要让它成为我们子孙后代藉以感谢我们的作品。当我们一层层地堆砌石头的时候,要想一想,正是因为我们的双手触摸过它们,所以总有一天这些石头会被奉为神明;总有一天,当人们看到这幢建筑,这一劳动的结晶时会说,“看,这就是我的祖上为我们修建的。”的确,一幢建筑最耀眼的光辉不是来自它的石头,也不是来自装饰它的黄金。它的光辉之处在于其年龄,在于其丰富而深刻的内涵,其严肃的外表,神秘的同情心,以及,我们在其墙垣上感到的,一直以来被涌动的人性浪潮所不断冲刷的赞许或是谴责。建筑见证了历史的变迁,静静地与其他稍纵即逝的事物形成了对照。通过季节交替、时代流转,王朝的衰落和肇始,变换的沧海和桑田,建筑凭借其优美的造像在一个跨越古今的时代里获得了力量,将被遗忘的和即将来临的世纪连接在一起,并且,正如它聚集了人们的共通情感一样,部分地形成了民族身份的认同。正是在那金色的时间斑点上,我们要寻找真正的光明,色彩以及建筑的可贵之处;只有当一幢建筑获得了这种特点,博得了如此声誉,因人们的功绩而变得神圣,其墙垣见证了痛苦,其立柱在死亡的幽灵中屹立,它的存在才会比周围自然界的物体更为长久,才会像语言和生命一样鲜活起来……
我们不再讨论修复的问题了。这种事从始至终就是一句谎言。正如你可以将尸体做成标本一样,你也可以将一幢建筑制成模型,就像标本里保留有骨架一样,你的模型里面也可能会有旧墙的外壳,但是这样做的优点我既看不到,也不关心:然而旧建筑却毁掉了,这样做比它坍塌成一堆瓦砾,或是化成一坨烂泥还要来得更为彻底和无情:与重建的米兰相比,荒凉的尼尼微能够给予我们的更多。但是,据说,有的时候确实有修复的必要!没错。请仔细审视一下这种必要,按照它自身的逻辑理解一下。其实这是一种摧毁的必要。你可以接受这种摧毁的必要,将整幢建筑推倒,把石头扔到被遗忘的角落里,如果你愿意的话,将它们敲成铺路的碎石,制成盖房的灰浆;但是要诚实地做这件事,不要在它们的旧址上重建一处谎言取而代之。如果在此种必要来临之前仔细研究一下,或许就可以规避。近代的原则(我相信这一原则,至少在法国,被泥瓦匠们系统地加以贯彻,例如当地的市政官员为了给流浪汉们提供工作便把圣旺教堂推倒重建)就是首先对这些建筑不闻不问,然后对其加以修复。保护好你们的纪念碑吧,那样就不需要对它们进行修复。请及时地在房顶上放几块铅板,及时地清理排水槽中的落叶和枝条,这样就会使得房顶和墙壁免于毁坏。请诚惶诚恐地照看一幢老建筑,尽可能地保护它,不惜一切代价地使它免于破损。要像清点皇冠上的珠宝一样清点老建筑的石头;像对待被围困的城市的城门一样,派人看守;在松动的地方用铁箍加以固定;在下垂的地方用木料加以支撑;不要管辅助措施是否好看:拄拐杖总比没有腿强;并且要小心翼翼地、虔诚地、持续地做这件事,那么数代人之后的人们就仍然可以在它的庇护下走完一生。建筑的末日终会来临;但是要让它来得光明正大,不要让令人汗颜的、假冒的赝品剥夺它履行葬礼的职责,从而唤醒人们的记忆。
对于更为荒唐和无知的破坏就是说了也白说;我的话不会传到那些人的耳朵里 [1] ,然而,不管他们听到与否,我都要说出真理,这就是,我们是否应当保护古旧建筑并不涉及自身利益或是情感因素。无论怎样我们都没有权利碰触它们。它们不属于我们。它们部分地属于其修建者,部分地属于我们的后代。故去的人仍然对它们拥有权利:他们为此而劳作,并且试图通过这些建筑永远地传达诸如对于功绩的表彰,宗教情感的传递,或是其他什么信息,这些我们都无权抹杀。我们自己修建的建筑可以自由地摧毁;但是对于其他人付出了力量、财富和生命才得以完成的建筑,其权利并不会因为他们的故去而丧失;对于他们留下的建筑的使用权并不仅仅属于我们。它属于他们所有的后代。我们为了当下的便利就将这样的建筑推倒,而此后可能引起千百万人的悲痛,给他们带来伤害。我们无权制造这样的悲伤和损失。阿夫朗什大教堂是属于我们这些悲伤的,在它的地基上徘徊的人,还是属于那些将它摧毁的暴民们呢?无论什么建筑都不属于那些对它们施暴的人。他们现在是暴民,而且一直是;无论他们是出于一时激愤,还是出于蓄意的破坏;无论他们是人数众多,还是身居要职;毫无缘由地毁坏东西的人就是暴民,而建筑总是被毫无缘由地毁坏。一幢漂亮的建筑一定无愧于它所占据的土地,并且一直如此,除非中部非洲和美洲拥挤得像英格兰的米德尔塞克斯郡那样:无论出于怎样的因由,这种毁坏都是站不住脚的。也有一种情况可视为正当,这就是当这个地方,无论过去还是将来——当然不是充满躁动和渴求的现在,都被过度地占用了。自然的静谧正逐渐地离我们远去;成千上万的人们的生活中充斥了无休无止的狂热。而曾几何时,与他们漫长的旅途相伴的是寂静的天空和沉睡的大地;这个国家的脉搏正在剧烈地跳动,沿着钢铁的血脉传遍它的机体,每时每刻都变得更为炙热,更为迅速。所有的活力都通过律动的血管集中到了中心城市;走过狭窄的桥梁,对如绿色海洋一般的乡村视而不见,我们被涌动的人潮推向了城市的大门。在城市中,唯一能够替代森林和原野的,就是来自古代建筑的影响力。不要为了整齐的广场,围了篱笆或是种了树的人行道,抑或是漂亮的街道和宽敞的码头,等等这些,而抛弃古代建筑,因为所有这些都不能给你的城市带来骄傲。把这些留给大众吧;但要记住在不安的墙垣的环绕中确实有一些人,他们会要求到其他的地方走一走;会要求一些不同的形式一饱眼福:就像但丁,他经常会坐在一个夕阳照得到的地方,欣赏佛罗伦萨大教堂的穹顶在深邃的天空中勾画出的轮廓线,再比如皇宫的主人们,他们每天会透过宫殿房间的窗子眺望自己先辈的安息之地——维罗纳昏暗街道的交会之处。
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[1] 肯定不会!——从来没有听说过有谁比我的废话还要多,有谁比我更乐意蹚浑水;我认为,结尾的这一段是第六章中最好的,也是整本书中最好的一段文字,但同时也是最徒劳无益的。
剑桥艺术学校:开学致辞(1858)
我想有兴趣为劳工建立一所艺术学校的人们大体上可以分为两类。第一类,是那些主要是想让劳工们变得更快乐、更聪明、状况更好的人们;第二类,是那些想让劳工们生产出更好、更具价值的产品的人们。当然,这两个目标可以并行不悖;不过,我们更关注的是达到这两个目标的动机是什么,因为我们完成目标所需要的精神实质有着很大的不同。我曾经说过,这一不同足可以将所有如此计划的推动者分成两类:一类人的中心目的为慈善,一类人的中心目的为商业;一类人希望劳工自发地获取更多的知识,另一类人则希望劳工能为我们生产出更具价值的商品,以便能与其他国家进行竞争。
这种动机的不同一定会导致工作方法的差别。慈善家们关注的不仅仅是工匠,而且是广义上的劳动者。通过给予劳动者新的娱乐方式和新的思想,慈善家们希望尽一切可能改善他们的习惯,增进整个劳动群体的幸福感:一所目标如此宽泛而且有些模糊的学校所采取的艺术教育原则,是,而且应当是,与那些仅在自己行业内对工匠进行特殊培养的学校所采取的原则大为不同。我认为这种差异并没有引起我们足够的注意,或是在办学计划当中予以考虑。我觉得,迄今为止,我们一直模糊地认为绘画艺术,从某种程度上说,可以以一种普遍的方式教给所有的人,并且使他们都受益;而且之后的每一班技工都可以将这种普遍的知识,根据要求应用于自己的行业。然而,情况并非如此。一位木雕师,根据自己的职业,与一位瓷器画师学习绘画的方式会有很大的不同,宝石匠与铁匠也同样有这样的差别。一定要引导他们在各自不同的作品当中,以自然的形式呈现出不同的特点。教一位铁匠观察桃子上的绒毛是没有用的,同样,教给一位木雕师如何制造朦胧的效果也是没用的。就他们各自的领域而言,这些东西只会白白地占据他们的大脑,而他们则不能集中力量,清楚明白地追求,在他们所能利用的材质上可以表现出来的艺术特质。
现在,我认为,要在单独的一所学校里面,传授给学生各个行业特定的艺术原则是根本不可能的。这种特定的艺术原则只有通过在某种特定的工作中的多年的工作经验才能够获得。每一种材料的力量,对它进行处理时的诸多困难等,与其说是教会的不如说是凭经验获得的;只有通过不断的接触和熔炉旁边持续的试验,金匠才会发现控制黄金的办法,玻璃工才会知道如何摆弄水晶;只有通过观察以及在本行业的师傅实际操作的时候打下手,学徒们才会学会高效操作的秘诀,或是认识到原有设计的真正局限之处。因此我认为,在类似这所刚刚建立的学校中,应当放弃所有针对特定行业的教学计划,因为要使这样的教学发挥效用,就必须具备相应的材料,便利设施,以及师傅的实践经验,而这些我们都不具备。所有特定的艺术教学一定要在为其行业专门建立的学校中实施:当我们的技工对这些事情更为明悉之后,正如我在有关艺术的政治经济学的讲座中所说过的一样,以一种积极的和务实的形式建立各个行业的同业公会就是完全必要的了。同业公会的目的是为了搞清楚适合他们自己行业的艺术原则,要针对各种材料和新发明的程序方法做试验,而且要教导它们行业内的学徒。另外还有很多其他的功能我不能在此一一论述。我们不能期望,我重复一遍,目前在这样一所学校里实现这一切:不放弃这样的期望,我们就不会得到满意的结果;而且我们要致力于教给技工们,不管他是干什么的——是农户的雇工或是厂商的工人,是机修工、发明家、店员、水手、或是农夫——尽我们的一切可能,教给他们唯一的,也是同样的东西:观察。这并非无足轻重,观察可能是所有要教给学生的最为重要的东西。教给你阅读——这有什么用,如果你不知道所读的是真还是假?教给你写或是说——说有什么用,如果你无话可说?教给你如何思考——不,会思考又有什么用,如果你没有什么好思考的?但是教给你去观察,就等于同时让你懂得了如何正确地使用语言和进行思考。在表达对于光明的渴望时,祈祷和赞美诗的常见套话堕落成了单调乏味的隐喻,模糊地扭曲成为其他替代的语言,——先是借助拉丁文解释;然后用英文阐明;接着又用拉丁文答疑解惑;再用英文加以澄清;再后来又借助光束、光线、太阳、恒星、灯盏等来表达,直到有时我们希望,至少从宗教的角度来看,根本就不存在光明或是黑暗这类词语。只有当此时人们才模糊地认识到观察的重要性。尽管如此,使得人们忍受这种无休止的纠缠的主要动因是真实存在的;不同的是人们最最需要的东西不是光明而是观察。如果你不知道如何使用光那么拥有光的多少就没有意义。它只会骚扰而不会帮助你的眼睛。另外,在这个世界上,我们经常想要在黑暗中看到东西——这是所有人的天赋权利;——无论是通过什么样的光我们都想看到事物本来的样子。我保证,如果我们可以得到一点点,哪怕只一点点就好,《天方夜谭》当中苦行僧人的油膏,用以展示给我们世界的真相而不是世上的财宝的话,不久我们就会改变这个世界。
然而,不管这些东西正确与否,毫无疑问,在这样一所学校里,我们的当务之急是培养学生学会观察而不是学会动手;尽量让学生清楚而真实地观察到自然的物体对于他们来说大有裨益。我们不应该过分追求学生再现这些物体的能力。这种能力,可以或多或少地通过练习获得,而这种练习对于观察的精确性而言毫无助益;而且反之亦然,观察的精确性也可以通过练习获得,而这种练习同样也无助于提高学生再现物体的能力。例如,花很长的时间练习点染单一的色调对于绘画能力很有帮助;然而这种手法的练习对于培养学生确定某个物体的真正色调却没有丝毫的帮助。仅仅用一个小时的时间,通过精心的指导和恰当的修改,学生就会更为透彻地了解色彩的运用,而且会获得对于在绘画中所描摹事物的更敏锐的感知。在练习中,他擦来抹去,使色彩变明再变暗,用笔刮擦然后涂抹,耐心地、努力地与色彩运用的要求保持一致,尽管这样做可能会毁掉整张画或是让它完全不像样。当然,对于老师和学生而言,有一点很有诱惑力,这就是要尽力获得看得到的结果——在实际绘画中表现出美丽的,可信的或是有卖点的东西:但是我见到过的学校越多就越是有理由质疑那些产生出太多浮华而完整的学生作品的学校。我们仔细检查一下就会发现,一件浮华的作品往往是遵照某种约定俗成的规则完成的,而学生对这些规则盲目地遵照执行却并不知其所以然;他的作品是对真相的再现,而绘画的作者并未亲身观察到这一真相;此类画作的创作手法单调乏味,死气沉沉;它们的明暗处理似是而非、中规中矩,却又漏洞百出。如果学生仅仅学会了各种绘画的技巧,那么他的画作中就一定充斥了谬误和各种问题。所以,建立一所真正大众的,或是通用的艺术学校是非常必要的。在这所学校里,老师们不会试图掩盖这种谬误或是容忍它发生,相反会让学生利用时间获取最为宝贵的理解和心灵的感悟,而不是手上的技巧。
各位请注意,除非你能全身心地投入其中,否则绘画或是制图过程本身就会变得毫无价值。一位爱好者或是工匠的绘画——只要他不是艺术家,就没有什么价值。这样一幅作品作为纪念品、礼物或是记录事实的手段可能是弥足珍贵的;然而作为艺术品,爱好者的画作通常毫无价值;而我们的重要目标之一就是要让学生们明白并且感受到这一点,进而防止他们试图将自己本来毫无价值的作品,通过某种肤浅的、虚伪的、抓人眼球的、骗人钱财的方式装扮得像一幅真正好的作品。
因此,对于那些来自上流社会的学生,我们的主要职责就是使得他们成为好的艺术品鉴人而非艺术家;因为即便是给我一个月,而非一个小时的时间,来给你们讲解我们国内上流社会和中产阶级对于艺术的高明的品鉴能力的缺乏状况的林林总总,也是不可能的。这不是说这种品鉴能力没有手上的训练就可以获得:没有哪个不会画画的人对绘画会有透彻的鉴赏力;而是仅仅应当把绘画作为一种能使得他专注于眼前的艺术品的微妙之处的方式,或是使得他能够记录下必要的自然真相并与之相较的方式。而且我认为对于呈现给他的艺术品要进行严格的筛选。研究一位大师直至理解他为止,要胜过对于一千个人表面上的熟悉:批评的力量并不在于你知道多少画家的名字或是创作方式,而在于你是否能够洞悉几位画家的卓越之处。
相反,如果我们的教学更为明显地倾向于操作,那么我们就没有必要费力地提升学生的鉴赏能力。在诸多现存的艺术形式当中,学生知道的越少越好。我们应当主要培养他们对于自然的敏感性;如果可能的话,甚至要通过某种程度上对于他们的鉴赏力不利的方式发展他们的想象力。我们宁可学生的作品粗浅清晰,也不要完美无瑕;宁可欢快愉悦,也不要谨小慎微。
顺着这一思路,我们开始讨论第二个问题,也就是有关商业的问题;就是说,在工匠们接受了训练之后,如何才能让他们创作出最好、最珍贵的作品,以使我们能与其他国家展开竞争,或是在我们自己国内开拓出新的商业领域。
可能我们很多人都认为,足够的学校教育就可以达到这一目的;足够多的讲座可以达到这一目的;到国外取经学习可以达到这一目的;或是耐心、时间、金钱以及美好的愿望可以达到这一目的。呜呼,不幸的是,上面这些中没有一项,或是所有这些方面都加起来,也不会达到这一目的。如果你需要真正好的作品,比如在全世界得到认可的作品,那么途径就只有一条,而且并非捷径。你可能会为达此目的设立悬赏——但是你会发现悬赏其实并不管用。你可能会派人学习相反的风格样式——但是你会发现风格样式并不是关键所在。你可能会在我们王国范围内的每所学校里宣讲艺术的原则——而你会发现依照这些原则也不能达此目的。你可能会耐心地等待时代的进步——而你会发现艺术其实并不会随时代而变迁。或是,你可能会不耐烦地利用当代的发明促其形成——而你会发现无论是螺丝钉还是明轮翼都不会将艺术的战车推向前进。没有什么方法可以获得好的艺术品,我重复一遍,只有一条——最简单同时也最困难——享受艺术。查看一下各个民族的历史,你就会发现这一伟大的事实清楚明白地写在上面——只有享受艺术的民族才能产生好的艺术品;他们对待艺术就像对待面包一样,以其充饥;就像对待阳光一样,沐浴其中;他们为之欢呼雀跃,为之手舞足蹈;他们为之争吵,为之战斗,为之忍饥挨饿;事实上,他们对待艺术的态度同我们完全相反——我们拿艺术卖钱,他们则葆有艺术的永恒价值。
对于我们这样一个商业民族来说这确实是一种严重的困难。我们从事这一行业的主要动机本身使得这一行业变得不可能。要使艺术品畅销的首要和绝对的条件是生产它而不是为了销售;相反,则是下定决心,一旦拥有就什么价格都不卖。要努力使得你们的艺术品广受欢迎而且物美价廉——对于国外的市场而言是一件漂亮的商品;这样你们就会得到更好的回报。但是请切记,制作艺术品时只要自己感到愉悦就好,甚至于要下定决心不去讨好其他任何人;接下来你立刻就会发现所有的人都喜欢它。请你注意,这样做存在一个难以逾越的困难:我们为愉悦自己而生产,然而自身却不懂得愉悦。举一个最简单的例子,我们都能理解的,在服装艺术方面。近来我们在丝绸服饰的样式方面大吵大闹,要与法国里昂竞争,要将伦敦打造成巴黎。没错,我们可以一直这样尝试:但只要我们并不是真的喜欢丝绸服饰的样式,就永远都不会有所斩获。而事实上我们确实不喜欢。当然,所有的女士都希望自己的裙子合身而且漂亮;但是我却没有发现有谁,纯粹是出于对于丝绸服饰本身的喜爱而欣赏其美丽;检测有无这种欣赏的方法就是要看,她们是否希望该服饰穿在别人身上也同样的合身、好看。穿着漂亮所带来的快乐,甚至于是看到其他人穿着漂亮而感到的快乐——我猜想在座的听众一定是如此的无私——无论这种快乐是大是小,与美丽所带来的愉悦,与丝绸的褶皱与颜色的华丽和优雅所带来的愉悦是大为不同的。我刚刚获得了一条确凿的证据,证明现代人的这种感觉有多么欠缺。为了研究保罗·委罗内塞的一幅作品,夏天的时候我在都灵住了一段时间。他的这幅画描绘了示巴女王会见所罗门王的故事。画中最显著的特点之一就是丝质服饰的富丽堂皇:特别是有一条白色的锦缎,上面织有金色的图案,而这正是我到都灵去主要要临摹的东西之一。你可能对此感到奇怪;但我要顺便说一句,像所有好的学生和好的画家一样,我也有欣赏服装式样的癖好。弗拉·安吉利科,佩鲁基诺,约翰·贝里尼,乔尔乔涅,提香,丁托列托,委罗内塞,达·芬奇等,无论他们属于哪个流派,也无论在其他方面有多么不同,他们都喜欢服装式样;而且,越是高贵的画家就越是在服装式样方面处理得当。
前面我说过,在都灵停留时我研究了这条白色锦缎。在公共画廊里经常有这样的情况,就是最好的画作却摆放在最不起眼的位置;然而,这幅委罗内塞的画不仅高高挂起,而且就挂在进出画廊必经的门的上方,所以参观者不可能轻易漏掉它,尽管他们可能欣赏不了。为了工作方便,我在门的旁边架起一座高台。由于这座高台有一定的高度并且位于角落,所以我能够观察到参观者们看到这幅画时的表情,而他们却看不到我。我觉得这幅画具备所有艺术品藉以吸引大众眼球的要素。它画幅很大;颜色艳丽,题材喜闻乐见。整幅画上大概有二十个人物,主要人物有真人大小:所罗门的形象,尽管是在阴影里,是到目前为止我所知道的,在所有意大利艺术品当中,最能完美地展现出这位聪明睿智、仪表堂堂的年轻国王的形象;示巴女王是委罗内塞描绘过的最可爱的女性形象之一;所有其他次要人物也都魅力不凡,充满想象;整幅画作如此完美,以至于有一天我在高台上花了两个小时也没能丝毫不差地描摹出两条锦缎褶皱的曲线。有很多来自英国的旅行者走过这间屋子;即便有时他们自己没有看到,也无一例外地被侍从带到了这幅画前。然而,对这幅我花了六个星期仅仅是研究了两个人物的画作,我发现,平均而言,每个英国旅行者大概花了半分钟或是45秒进行参观,当然他们对意大利没有偏见,至于该看什么都是发自内心;更有甚者,行动迅速的或是时髦的旅行者们,他们匆匆来此就是为了走马观花,所以仅仅是扫了一眼,就立刻转过头去观赏悬挂在右边的一幅糟糕的山水画,画中是一堵着力绘制的白墙以及一条绿色的、没有光泽的护城河。然而,给我印象最深的是,没有一位女士停下来观赏委罗内塞绘制的服装。毫无疑问这些服装要比大广场上商店里卖的服装漂亮得多,然而却没人注意它们。有的时候会有某位相貌出众,明眸善睐的女孩走进来,我通常会一直关注她,心想——“拜托,至少你得看一看示巴女王穿的是什么衣服。”但是没有——她会漫不经心地走过,微微抬一抬头,似乎在说,“这间屋子里没什么值得可看的——除了我自己,”然后就穿门而过,一走了之。
事实上,我们并不在乎绘画:确实不在乎。我们之所以参观皇家艺术学院的展览是为了获得谈资和消遣空闲的时间;出于各种原因,我们当中的富人们会买上一两幅画作,有时是为了装点走廊的角落,有时是为了烘托晚餐前客厅的谈话气氛,有时是因为某个画家很受追捧,间或是因为他穷困潦倒,还经常有这种情况,就是我们有意搜集各种类型的绘画,就像我们搜集矿石或蝴蝶的标本一样,当然,在最好,也是最少见的情形下,我们购买画作是出于对它们的喜爱;而这种喜爱也不过是与喜爱一把漂亮的扶手椅或是一只新做成的玻璃水瓶如出一辙。但是对于绘画真正的热爱,得到一幅作品时的喜悦之情,恐怕有此感觉的人只是凤毛麟角。
然而我们的冷漠并不容易消除;即便是冷漠应当消除,我们也应当恰如其分地欣赏绘画作品,而好的作品也确有所增加,因为如此一来一定会增加的——接下来则会出现另外一个问题。可能今晚在座的各位当中有人听说过我经常会自相矛盾——我倒是非常希望自己如此,因为我还从来没见过哪个需要解决的重要问题,不是像一个二次方程一样,需要至少一个肯定以及一个否定的答案。通常来讲,任何重要的事物都是三方面的,四方面的,或是多方面的;所以人们要坚持自己的观点就要严肃地沿着这个多边形巡查。拿我自己来说,至少要自我否定三次,我才会认为已经掌握了某个问题并且感到满意:所以今晚我还要自我否定一次。我刚刚说过,如果我们不能在艺术中感到快乐就不能得到好的艺术:接下来我要说,同样确信无疑的,如果我们不能在艺术中拒绝快乐的话,就不可能得到好的艺术。我们必须首先爱艺术,然后要对我们的爱加以节制。
这听起来奇怪;而我敢保证这是千真万确的。事实上,如果有什么事儿听起来不怪,通常它的真实性就值得怀疑;因为所有的真理都是奇妙的。举一个物理方面的例子,听起来一样自相矛盾。假定你在给一个小学生讲解天文学上的地球怎样在自己的轨道上保持平稳运行的道理;你会这样对他说——难道不是吗?——地球总是有被太阳吸引的趋势;同时它又总是存在飞离太阳的趋势。在小学生理解地球运动的方式之前,这两种明显矛盾的说法够他消化一段时间了。而与此类似,当我们将艺术置于其真正的和有用的轨道时,它就会一边在闪闪发光的愉悦的诱惑下行进,另一边则带着做点有益工作的,坚定的道德目的而前行。如果艺术家的工作没有乐趣,他就会消失在太空中,死于寒冷:如果他仅为乐趣而工作,就会因为拥抱太阳而化为灰烬。总之,后面这一条就是所谓宿命,我不是说这最可怕,而是说迄今为止艺术多受此折磨,世界上的伟大民族也多遭此磨难。
一方面你能清楚地看到,历史上只有在艺术中获得快乐的民族才能产生出艺术,同样你会毫无疑问地,甚至是更为清楚地看到,那些仅仅是为了获得快乐而追求艺术的民族,他们的力量和生命总是被艺术消耗殆尽。当你审视世界上伟大民族的丰功伟绩的时候,这一事实一定让你震撼。你一定会严肃地提出这样一个疑问,即便是在今天,我们应当在多大程度上追求那似乎只会腐蚀我们灵魂,麻木我们机体的快乐呢?我一直以来都在抱怨英国蔑视艺术;但是,如果更公平一点的话,我似乎应当抱怨的是她对于艺术的畏惧而非蔑视。因为,有史以来,什么是给各民族带来毁灭的根源呢?是瘟疫、饥荒、地震或是火山爆发吗?所有这些都不曾战胜过一个伟大的民族,使他的名字在地球上消失。然而,在每一次民族走向衰败的时间和地点,你都会看到其他的,发挥作用的原因,这就是奢华、娇弱、耽于享受、艺术精良以及花样翻新的行乐。那么,什么才是我们应该从古代历史当中汲取的,从古典著作中获得的,送给年青一代人的经验教训呢?这就是——朴素的生活、语言和举止可以给予一个民族以力量;奢华的生活,精妙的语言以及优雅的举止会削弱并且摧毁一个民族。当人们一无所有,寡欲少求的时候,就会勇敢而高尚:当他们嘲笑所有奢华的艺术,而在其他民族看来是野蛮人的时候,他们的刀剑就会所向披靡,统治就会无边无际:但是,当让他们对于高雅的品味变得敏感,对于快乐的追求变得迅捷之后,他们那曾经紧握铁棒的手指就会即刻松开金色的权杖。在这点上我没有丝毫的夸张;怎样地强调这一真理及其普适性都不为过。野蛮和朴素的民族从来都比擅长艺术的民族更具美德,更具优势。看一看波斯人是怎样推翻吕底亚人的;雅典人怎样推翻波斯人的;斯巴达人怎样推翻雅典人的;然后整个优雅的希腊是怎样被更为粗野的罗马人推翻的;罗马人又在变得优雅之后怎样被哥特人驯服的:在中世纪的转折点上,正是这一小撮山地牧羊人宣告了欧洲的解放,践行了基督教的美德,证明了它的教义,而他们没有艺术,没有文学,几乎没有语言,却能在条顿骑士团的围攻下屹立不倒,在罗马森严的等级中出淤泥而不染……