Talk:Paul Nizan

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Paul Nizan's Aden Arabie is one of the finest pieces of writing in French literature. It is a literary Baedeker, arguing, in communist tone, that "Homo Economicus" is ubiquitous and that, no matter where one travels, one should gaze the cynical gaze at modern man.

Nizan wrote the piece when he was twenty, when idealism and reality clash dialectically, and when serious adolescents begin to interrogate, as an auto-de fe, the adult world into which they are being forcibly launched.

Nizan travels to Arabie, expecting the Rouseeauian "noble savagery" of exotica, but receiving, instead, cupidity, petty mindedness, and outright fraud. Capitalism and French colonialism have done their work, spreading their cancer all about the globe.

The intensity of the writing is due to the force with which Nizan's original idealism smashed against the anvil of hard reality: Had Nizan lived longer, or had he written Aden, Arabie in his later years, his compromised integrity may have diminished the energy of his Achilles-like anger, fortunately for the literary world and unlike so many men, he died before his idealism.

In Antoine- Bloye, Nizan examines bourgeois life from the perspective of his own failed father. Men work, and in working they slowly but ineluctably compromise their integrity and their dreams. Bloye is an inspector for railroads, but his goal is to succeed; to move up the ladder of civil service one slow rung at a time. His marriage, like most, is a sham full of pretenses and civility sans honesty. He has a mistress, for his hypocritical life must be paid for in money. Love, like every other human emotion, must be commodified and bought. Bloye lives the tethered life, and it is a life measured out at his birth and circumscribed by the narrow world of the bourgeoisie. He dies within the narrow orbit of his frustrated, uneventful, and sham existence. Flaubert was no better writer.

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