Nizan, Paul (1905-40). From 1929 to 1939, Nizan worked hard as a Communist militant, journalist, and writer of fiction and polemical essays, to serve the joint but often warring causes of Communism and truthfulness. The son of a French railway engineer, he had performed brilliantly at the École Normale Supérieure, where he formed a close friendship with Sartre. He married in 1927, and in 1929 joined the Communist Party. Over the next 10 years, although entrusted with responsibilities in the cultural sphere (journalism, public lectures, a study-tour to the USSR, the organization of anti-fascist congresses), and although encouraged to stand in the 1932 elections, he suffered, like almost all intellectuals, from abiding mistrust by the Party hierarchy. Nevertheless, he silenced any doubts about his adherence until the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939, which he judged a betrayal of Communist efforts. He joined up, and was killed near Dunkirk in 1940.
His first published work, Aden Arabie (1931), is a caustic attack on imperialist capitalism, a violent, often pompous essay, in which he lacerates his own illusions as well as his enemies'. Les Chiens de garde (1932) are the intellectual cheer-leaders of the ruling establishment. This challenging essay asks the perennially awkward question: who does our thinking for us?
In Antoine Bloyé (1933) Nizan presents an upwardly mobile worker's fundamentally unlived life. Nizan's approach emphasizes personal responsibility as much as economic determinism. This novel's undeniable morbidity is rarely gratuitous, for it stems from an angry awareness of what people fail to do in order to counteract their imposed fates. The Marxist optic is a means of correcting lazy eyes.
In Le Cheval de Troie (1935) Nizan switches from the alienated individual to the militant group. He does not idealize them, for ideological dissension and private sexual woes complicate their solidarity. The time is that of the Popular Front, with violent confrontations between a broad Left and fascistic street-gangs. The battles fought remain dubious, and any advance is only provisional.
His best novel, La Conspiration (1938), features a student group, still partly in hock and thrall to their bourgeois families and seeking different ways of escape from their angst. Nizan both analyses sympathetically and mocks their largely verbal activism and their ignorance of the real world. This novel benefits from an intelligent disgust with misapplied intellect, combined with a penetrating consciousness of multiple, competing conspiracies. The least anti-heroic of the group, Laforgue, survives a near-fatal illness to begin living again on more demandingly concrete terms. Of the traitor within the group, Pluvinage, Nizan writes with such understanding that, when he left the Party in 1939, he was accused by its hacks of having proved his own treachery in his fictional foray. It took the energetic championing of Sartre (notably in his preface to the 1960 edition of Aden Arabie) to restore him to proper recognition.
Irony was not Nizan's only mode. He wrote many passages of elegant, acerbic wit, of psychological finesse, of lyrical nature-descriptions, and of an anti-cerebral defence of the body's rights. As Sartre remarked, this revolutionary was singularly lacking in blindness. So much so that he presciently scooped Sartre in the area of problematic committed literature, and in scenes where characters subject each other to judgement via an unrelenting gaze (cf. the Sartrian regard). Nizan was as obsessed with the death-defying as he was with death itself.
[Walter Redfern]
Bibliography
- W. D. Redfern, Paul Nizan (1972)
