ABSTRACT
''Microbiology'' is of first importance in the laboratory, and Nathalie Sarraute has for decades now been doing ''micro-literature''. In a very Sarraute-like challenge, just that technique is rigorously questioned, and with it the whole system of vanities in the cultural world, the terrorism of fame and prestige, the empty-minded deference to a Master who is thought to represent intelligence at its brilliant best and thus by definition quite incapable of simply saying something stupid. Both Georg Lukacs, the minister of culture, and the president of the Club, the peasant writer Peter Veres, were full of new projects, all to be informed by a free and new post-Stalinist spirit. From Carlyle to Snow's furious critic, F. R. Leavis, there has been a century of anger against the possibilities of spiritual stagnation and even intellectual degradation in both art and philosophy as a result of such naive Scientific Religion.
