In short, the domination of leftism in postwar Uterature isnbroken, although the agony and the burial took an inordinatelynlong time. The media are still ruled by the Marxist epigones,nthe recycled liberal-democrats, the conformist little bureaucratsnready to cash in on any regime’s handouts. With an admirablynexecuted about-face, they now turn not to Moscownbut to Washington, from where invitations and checks are expected.nFrom Kremlin to White House, Gorbachev-style. Butntalent can only be found on the right. I speak here of literature,nnot of essays, pamphlets, scholarship, historiography, sociopoliticalnanalysis—fields today, at long last, unclassifiablenas to ideological commitment. From war’s end to the mid-n70’s—the date of Solzhenitsyn’s still well-remembered Parisiannvisit and television debate—the period was leftistA)ourgeois,nUtopian, and unoriginal.’ Since then, France has witnessed anreactionary renaissance, and books hidden under the veil ofnhypocrisy have found the channels of public acclaim. Ideologynslowly yielded to life—at whose description Celine,nAnouilh, Rebatet, and Ayme were masters. Modernity camenfinally to mean not communist Aragon’s and feminist Beauvoir’snmind-killing volumes, or the nouveau roman, empty ofncharacters and peopled by geometrical descriptions, or ideologicalnelucubrations, but immersion in life and, above all, inna style, a language. The message was clear to those able tonread: the way of writing, of approaching things, must conveynthe way of living. The latter was no longer to be confined tonalcoves, protest marches, and the signing of pro-Mao manifestos.n”Reaction” became an act of living. As Bernanos oncenwrote: “Of course I am a reactionary! Only a corpse does notnreact—but then it is covered with worms!”nThe word “reactionary,” less familiar to the reader, at leastnin its literary use, than “modern,” should acquire meaningnwhen put in the context of time. The great schools of romanticism,nrealism, and naturalism raised the novel to itsnhighest achievement, but in the last half-century the genre hasndeclined and has been in search of a philosophical base innwhich it could make sense once again, in which the term storyncan be appreciated. But we have been living in an overlynanalytical age, with dozens of theories and labyrinthine detours—Freudian,nsemiotic, structuralist, deconstructionist—n18/CHRONICLESnHis ‘Life’nby Richard Moorenall flying around us like airplanes out of control. As in modernistnexhibits of art, we no longer know “what is what”; titles,ncontents, and shapes offer no clues; words abolish each other.nLet us call it an absence of meaning, perhaps a deliberatenone. It is, at any rate, a cult of the subjective, an exclusivistncerebration, a series of game theories. The “reactionary” actnin literature (and art) is then the restoration of meaning, hencenof objects, images, people, and of their relationships, passions,nfears, and hopes. Reactionary literature is not today not somethingnsimplistic, rudimentary, fearful of verbal risks; it is a turnnto the “story” of the literary text, the rooting of characters innthe world common to the reader and writer. “Reactionary” literaturenwas the novels of Thackeray and Balzac, Flamsun andnTolstoy and Chekhov, the plays of Ibsen and Shaw, althoughnthey did not bear this label, since there was no vast, victorious,nand dominant counter-novel, counter-drama. And it is untruenthat their public was as puzzled by their novelties as today’snpublic is: it merely had to adjust, as publics before them, tona new style, plot, and characters. There was no need for professorsnof semantics to explain what it was all about, whilentheir academic rivals prepared a counter-explanation that wasnjust as farfetched.nWhy were Flaubert and Dostoyevsky reactionaries? Becausenthey worked with the assumption that literary creationnis not a mere system of signs, that people understand othernpeople, and that the modern reader knows what Homer ornSophocles were also writing about: human beings. Solzhenitsyn,ntoo, is a reactionary: sabotaging the ukase to write aboutnidealized tractor drivers, he fashioned flcsh-and-blood IvannDenisovitches. What would we readers gain by knowing (gratuitouslynguessing) Ivan’s dreams, Oliver Twist’s castrationncomplex, Aliosha’s sublimated envy of Ivan or vice versa?nModern reaction in literature is thus the talent and thencourage to write again on the human level, a return fromnpiled-up theories and layers of the sub-, un-, and proto-eonscious.nOnly the mediocre writer allows language and grammarnto dictate his text. The reactionary novelist is aware thatnafter a never-ending apprenticeship he is master of the word,nthat he and his characters forever mingle in inspiration.nnQuip upon quipnin “smarty ass” one-upmanshipnuntil our clownnexperienced death’s clever put-down.nnn