IE THéÂTRE DE JEAN GENET, qui ne comprend que cinq pièces,1 frappe d'emblée parson caractère agonistique. Alors que les dramaturges contemporains les plus illustres, Ionesco, Arrabal et surtout Beckett nous présentent des personnages égarés ou hagards, incapables de lutter contre un destin dont ils ne conçoivent clairement que l'absurdité, Genet semble savoir où il va. Animés d'une cruauté lucide et efficace, ses personnages ont entrepris d'un cœur allègre la démolition de leur société, de notre société, au nom de l'idée de Révolution. Nous entendrons ce dernier mot au sens qu'on lui accorde généralement dans le vocabulaire politique, en l'opposant au simple coup d‘état, dépourvu de tout idéalisme et qui ne vise au pouvoir que pour satisfaire une cynique volonté de puissance. L'activité révolutionnaire, elle, cherche à opérer un changement de gouvernement afin de favoriser l‘épanouissement des citoyens dans une liberté plus grande. Obéissant au mouvement dialectique qui va de l'analyse de la Babylone à détruire aux exigences de la cité nouvelle à édifier, nous commencerons par la critique de cette société sclérosée, que Genet affirme être la nôtre et qui ne tient plus debout que par habitude, grâce aux lois de la pesanteur et de l'inertie sociologiques. Contre elle se tendront toutes les forces des principaux personnages et, par derrière eux, de Genet. Telle qu'elle est décrite dans Le Balcon et dans Les Nègres, la société à renverser nous apparaît d'abord sous des espèces féodales. En effet l'autorité s'y incarne en ce que Genet appelle “les Trois Figures fondamentales.” Il désigne par là l'Evêque. le Juge et le Général du Balcon. On les reconnaîtra à leur stature surhumaine, à leurs épaules artificiellement élargies et à l'espèce de cothurne qu'ils doivent chausser:

Contrary to widely accepted arguments, Whitman's poems did not resolve the unconscious conflicts from which they sprang; nor did they indicate the resolution of philosophical questions or psychological conflicts. Neither should they be judged according to their success or failure in such analogical pursuits. Instead they must be judged according to the honesty and courage with which Whitman confronted the chaos within himself and according to the amount and quality of poetic order with which he was able to express the chaos within. If seen in a psychoanalytic context, Whitman's mystical or transcendental moments—moments of apparent attunement with the universe—are wishful assertions, comparable to psychological catharsis—“catharsis” being an experience which gives the illusion that conflicts are resolved when in fact they are not. There is bibliographical and biographical evidence in support of these arguments, but the strongest evidence comes from the literary analysis of such exemplary poems as “Clef Poem,” “As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life,” “There Was a Child Went Forth,” and “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.”

The sources of the Bible's influence on Baudelaire, which is greater than previous research would indicate, are his education at home and school, the example of other French poets, and some preoccupation with the Bible in his criticism of art and literature. The influence manifests itself in allusions to the Bible's characters, often involving use of its imagery, and many other echoes of its diction, including some Hebraisms. Of single books of Scripture, Job, the Song of Songs, and the Apocalypse exerted the strongest influence: Job affected not only the diction but also the structure and train of thought of “Benediction”; many love poems of Les Fleurs du mal are indebted to the Song of Songs for their stark sensuality and bizarre similes; the Apocalypse helped to shape the visions of “Une Gravure fantastique” and “Rêve parisien.” Also, the poet blunted the anti-Biblical edge of the chapter “Révolte” in Les Fleurs du mal by a genuine Biblical tone and diction. Yet, although Baudelaire is much plagued by a sense of sin and evil, the effect of the Bible on his poetry remains generally external, limited to the use of image, symbol, and event or character.

In attempting to make sense of the vacillating, inconsistent, and often bizarre behavior of the underground man, critics have employed two distinct modes of analysis, thematic and psychological. The psychological approach seems more appropriate; the novel is essentially a portrait of a character. As yet, however, critics have not approached the work with a psychological theory that is congruent with it and adequate to its complexities. The underground man's character structure, attitudes, and behavior can be understood in terms of Karen Horney's analysis of neurotic processes. In Horneyan terms, the underground man is a detached person whose aggressive and compliant trends are very close to awareness and rather evenly balanced. He experiences severe and almost continuous conflict between all three of his trends and is caught in a devastating crossfire of contradictory “shoulds.” He compensates for his feeling of worthlessness by self-glorification and then hates himself even more because he cannot live up to his idealized image. The novel's philosophic passages are an integral part of Dostoevsky's portrait of his character. The underground man's worship of freedom, will, caprice, and individuality, and his phobic reaction to anything suggesting coercion, conformity to law, or ordinariness are all aspects of his detached solution.

In his Trilogy of Desire, Theodore Dreiser presented a virtual biography of the model (Charles T. Yerkes, Jr.) for his central character (Frank A. Cowperwood). Dreiser's connection with Yerkes dated from the 1880's in Chicago, continued through the 1890's when both men moved to New York, and extended past 1905, when Yerkes died, and 1910, when The Financier was begun. Yerkes, a man of many facets, was selected by Dreiser as model for the generic millionaire principally because the dissolution of his estate after 1905 demonstrated Dreiser's theory of the natural “Equation Inevitable” in action. The events portrayed in The Financier, The Titan, and The Stoic followed verbatim the events of Yerkes' life as established in Dreiser's working notes and verified by newspapers, periodicals, and books of the era. In this central fictional figure also is found a clear, though submerged, portrait of Dreiser's own hopes and desires.

THIS STUDY is to show an interrelationship between Thomas Mann's fiction and certain attitudes he displayed during the course of his life. The word “orientation” is useful because it denotes a practice everybody uses every day. It is similar to the process that shapes a number of words in such a way that they comprise artistic sense in a literary work of art, which we will call “poem.”

The construction of Degrés is based on a series of texts taken from Western literature and ranging from Homer to Keats. These are grouped in different ways around a brief sequence of events, and it is the responsibility of each reader to elaborate on the scanty story by using the information offered by these texts, to the extent of his knowledge, awareness, and willingness to participate in the creation of the novel. An analysis of the texts extracts the information each contains, then correlates relevant fact and possible interpretation in order to show clearly the two major themes of the novel: the relationship of Vernier to his nephew Eller, and the vast possibilities open to man in the world; and the three styles of presentation: as a structure, a personal experience, and a retrospective fact. Butor teaches his readers to understand his work by attempting to break down mental barriers between different fields of experience and force people to draw on the full range of their knowledge at all times.

Stevens' literary correspondence discloses some of the factors that determine the character of his later poetry. These formative elements are his changing concept of the ideal nature of poetry, his habits of work, his tendency to think inductively. Before 1930 Stevens was an advocate of the doctrine of “pure poetry,” but later became interested in the function of thought in poetry. Answering the questions of his critics, he pondered the significance of images and figures in his poems. His discussion of some of these figures shows an inherent tendency to expand them into universale. The pressure of business limited the amount of time Stevens felt he could devote to a poem. He did not build his poems from verbal elements or textual modification. He created from a preliminary meditation and depended for wording on his genius for improvisation. The meditations out of which his poems emerged could be more or less philosophical, or as slight as the evocation of a sense of place. Whatever thought prompted a poem Stevens wished that poem to be a complete idiomatic expression of it.

BULGAKOV'S NOVEL The Master andMargarita is a confusing combination of different elements: satire, fantasy, serious philosophical and religious questioning.1 The variety of critical commentaries has already shown the impossibility of reducing it to one single interpretation. The action can be stated briefly. Satan, alias Woland, arrives in Moscow with two demonic henchmen, a thug Azazello and a tomcat Behemoth; plus an “interpreter,” Koroviev. Among bureaucrats, petty crooks, and those simply concerned with personal gain they cause havoc.2 But they give aid and protection to a persecuted writer in an asylum, the Master, and to his love, Margarita, after she has agreed to act as hostess for Satan's Ball. A hack poet, Ivan Homeless, is brought to a deeper understanding of life and becomes a “disciple” of the Master. Central to the book is the Master's novel about Pontius Pilate, the chapters of which form part of Bulgakov's text and conclude simultaneously with the story about the Master in an epilogue. A strong connection with the Faust tradition is evident.

ON ITS LITERARY LEVEL Leone Ebreo's Dialoghi d'amore (Rome, 1535) is presented as a long courtship between an ardent lover, Filone, and his reluctant mistress, Sofia. At one point the clever lady summarizes their respective attitudes by the casual observation that, while she is more interested in the theory of love, Filone is more bent on the practice thereof.1 This wry comment is a capsule of the entire work, for it explains not only the constant narrative shift between amorous language and philosophical approfondissement, but also the basic paradox that pervades the entire Dialoghi, that of theoria versus action, which appears as the tension between Filone's amorous involvement and Sofia's aloofness but especially as the opposition between the via contemplativa and the via activa!1 In this paper we shall suggest that Leone Ebreo's work may be defined as a dialogue between two philosophies of life or “kinds of people,” the contemplative man and the active man, and that these two human types are represented by the two interlocutors, Filone and Sofia. This view will require revision of the usual critical approaches to the Dialoghi. For one thing, if we take Leone's title seriously and consider the work as a true dialogue, as a confrontation of two substantially divergent points of view, then it is difficult to describe it as essentially a monologue in which only one of the characters—Filone—expresses the author's ideas. Moreover, in addition to the purely philosophical argument, we shall have to pay close attention both to the psychological nature of the characters and to the precise levels of their allegorization. In short, we shall no longer be able to neglect the work's literary nature.3 vient thin