Guest Column
FARRELL, JAMES T.
GUEST COLUMN By James T. Farrell France's Intellectuals Prefer Theory to Fact Paris One of the vices of the present cold-war period is the excessive use of generalizations. This is especially...
...His argument was purely formalistic, resting on Marxist cliches and unsupported by any profound knowledge of the contemporary situation...
...What does Mauriac think...
...Every time we asked another question, in an effort to bring the conversation down to a more concrete basis, we were given more of the situation in general...
...Of course, this is not true at all, even though intellectuals seem to play a bigger role here than they do in the United States...
...In the course of the discussion, the question was raised as to what Sartre would think...
...A storm often blows up over a difference of opinion between two prominent writers...
...I fear that the French intellectual's tendency to assume the latter role is leading to increasing sterility...
...It is often abstract and sometimes operates within a Marxist frame of reference...
...I asked what difference it made...
...This is especially true of Marxist thinking...
...In response to questions which an American friend and I put to him, he started telling us about the situation in general...
...His most recent work is The Face of Time...
...A couple of years ago, in Les Temps Modernes, he asserted that the Communists really represented the working class...
...This was brought home to me very strikingly five years ago at a meeting here whose purpose was to form an international anti-Communist organization of intellectuals...
...Back home, however, if some of us tried to give public lectures to Walter Reuther on trade-union policy, we would be deservedly laughed at...
...The chairman answered me with a speech...
...Or Raymond Aron...
...I recall discussing French labor problems several years ago with a young journalist who supported Force Ouvriere, the anti-Communist labor federation...
...Moreover, I often have the impression that these literati talk to each other and to their respective coteries rather than to a broad public...
...The daily Paris press frequently publishes leading articles by outstanding writers, and the reader turns first to these...
...Finally, our questions overexcited our young friend and he blew up...
...This is especially true in France...
...My American friend threw up his hands...
...Theory and logic can easily degenerate into cliches or plunge on under their own momentum without achieving a clear focus on contemporary problems...
...A friend of mine active in the American trade-union movement tells a story which is relevant to my remarks...
...Some of these—Raymond Aron is an exception—are not really grounded in politics, and their political views are less impressive than their literary style and their reputations...
...Pounding the table, he said that he had visited America and found that in America the intellectuals were absolutely powerless...
...And in France, where Marxism was never solidly grounded as in Germany, Austria and Russia, Marxist thinking is particularly abstract and cliche-ridden...
...Jean-Paul Sartre is an excellent case in point...
...James T. Farrell is author of the now classic novel, Studs Lonigan, and of the Danny O'Neill series...
...An intellectual row in the newspapers between two prominent writers tends to generate much more heat than understanding...
...I often get the impression that opinion is found more interesting here than fact, and that French culture is addicted to abstractions...
...He could not understand the divisions among certain non-Communist trade-union leaders here, why they were strongly at odds with one another...
...Finally, he had a meeting in a cafe with some of these French trade-unionists, and one of them explained that it all began with differing interpretations of Lenin's theory of the state...
...Newspaper articles about political events tend to editorialize and are less objective than reports in the better American papers...
...Leaving aside the fact that Sartre is anti-American, his writing on public affairs is less than noteworthy...
...French intellectuals are fond of boasting that they occupy a more important position in their country than our intellectuals do in America...
...A French intellectual can deliver lectures with great clarity of expression, but there is often more cleverness than hard, clear thinking...
...In general, I would advise intellectuals to concentrate on quiet creativity and avoid setting themselves up as judges...
Vol. 37 • August 1954 • No. 34
