No More Learning

\ 131
have carried on with other means and on another plane the undertaking of his predecessors. He might have helped literature pass from negativity and abstraction to concrete construction; without losing the autonomy which the eighteenth century had won for it and which there was no longer any question of taking away from it, it might have again integrated itself into society; by clarifying and sup- porting the claims of the proletariat, he would have attained the essence of the art of writing and would have understood that there is a coincidence not only between formal freedom of thought and political democracy, but also between the material obligation of choosing man as a perpetual subject of meditation and social democracy. His style would have regained an inner tension because he would have been addressing a split public. By trying to awaken the conscious- ness of the working class while giving evidence to the bourgeois of their own iniquity, his works would have reflected the entire world. He would have learned to dis- tinguish generosity, the original source of the work of art, the unconditioned appeal to the reader, from prodigality,
its caricature; he would have abandoned the analytical and psychological interpretation of 'human nature* for the synthetic appreciation of conditions. Doubdess it was difficult, perhaps impossible; but he went about it the wrong way. It was not necessary for him to get on his high horse in a vain effort to escape all class determination, nor to 'brood over* the proletariat, but on the contrary to think of himself as a bourgeois who had broken loose from his class and who was united with the oppressed masses by a solidarity of interest.
The sumptuousness of the means of expression which he discovered should not make us forget that he betrayed literature. But his responsibility goes even further; if the authors had found an audience in the oppressed classes, per- haps the divergence of their points of view and the diversity of their writings would have helped to produce in the masses what someone has very happily called a movement of ideas, that is, an open, contradictory, and dialectical ideology.
? 132 I What Is Literature?
Without doubt, Marxism would have triumphed, but it would have been coloured with a thousand nuances; it would have had to absorb rival doctrines, digest them, and remain open. We know what happened; two revolu- tionary ideologies instead of a hundred: before 1870, the Prudhonians in the majority in the International, then crushed by the defeat of the Commune; Marxism triumphing over its adversary not by the power of the Hegelian negation which preserves while it surpasses, but because external forces pure and simple suppressed one of the forms of the antinomy. It would take a long time to tell all that this triumph without glory has cost Marxism; for want of con-
tradiction, it has lost life. Had it been the better, constantly combated, transforming itself in order to win, stealing its enemies' arms, it might have been identified with mind; alone, it became the Church, while the gentlemen-writers, a thousand miles away, made themselves guardians of an abstract spirituality.
Will anyone doubt that I am aware how incomplete and debatable these analyses are? Exceptions abound, and I know them, but it would take a big book to go into them. I have touched only the high spots. But above all, one should understand the spirit in which I have undertaken this work. If one were to see in it an attempt, even superficial, at sociological explanation, it would lose all significance. Just as for Spinoza, the idea of a line segment rotating about one of its extremities remains abstract and false if one considers it outside the synthetic, concrete, and bounded idea of circumference which contains, completes, and justifies it,
likewise here, the considerations remain arbitrary if they are not replaced in the perspective of a work of art, that is, of a free and unconditioned appeal to a freedom. One cannot write without a public and without a myth--without a certain public which historical circumstances have made, without a certain myth of literature which depends to a very great extent upon the demand of this public. In a word, the author is in a situation, like all other men. But his writings, like every human project, simultaneously enclose, specify,
? For Whom Does One Write? \ 133
and surpass this situation, even explain it and set it up, just as the idea of a circle explains and sets up that of the rotation of a segment.
Being situated is an essential and necessary characteristic of freedom. To describe the situation is not to cast aspersions on freedom. The Jansenist ideology, the law of the three unities, and the rules of French prosody are not art; in regard to art they are even pure nothingness, since they can by no means produce, by a simple combination, a good tragedy, a good scene, or even a good line. But the art of Racine had to be invented on the basis of these; not by conforming to them, as has been rather foolishly said, and by deriving exquisite difficulties and necessary constraints from them, but rather by re-inventing them, by conferring
a new and peculiarly Racinian function upon the division into acts, the caesura, rhyme, and the ethics of Port Royale, so that it is impossible to decide whether he poured his subject into a mould which his age imposed upon him or whether he really elected this technique because his subject required it. To understand what Phe`dre could not be, it is necessary to appeal to all anthropology. To understand what it is, it is necessary only to read or listen, that is, to make oneself a pure freedom and to give one's confidence generously to a generosity. The examples we have chosen have served only to situate the freedom of the writer in different ages, to illuminate by the limits of the demands made upon him the limits of his appeal, to show by the idea of his ro^le which the public fashions for itself the necessary boundaries of the idea which he invents of literature. And
if it is true that the essence of the literary work is freedom totally disclosing and willing itself as an appeal to the freedom of other men, it is also true that the different forms of oppression, by hiding from men the fact that they were free, have screened all or part of this essence from authors. Thus, the opinions which they have formed about their profession are necessarily truncated. There is always some truth tucked away in them, but this partial and isolated truth becomes an error if one stops there, and the social movement
? 134 I What Is Literature?
permits us to conceive thefluctuationsof the literary idea, although each particular work surpasses, in a certain way, all conceptions which one can have of art, because it is always, in a certain sense, unconditioned, because it comes out of nothingness and holds the world in suspense in nothingness. In addition, as our descriptions have permitted us to catch a glimpse of a sort of dialectic of the idea of literature, we can, without in the least pretending to give a history of belles-lettres, restore the movement of this dialectic in the last few centuries in order to discover at the end, be it as an ideal, the pure essence of the literary work and, conjoindy, the type of public--that is, of society--
which it requires.
I say that the literature of a given age is alienated when it
has not arrived at the explicit consciousness of its autonomy and when it submits to temporal powers or to an ideology, in short, when it considers itself as a means and not as an unconditioned end. There is no doubt that literary works, in their particularity, surpass this servitude and that each one contains an unconditioned exigence, but only by implication. I say that a literature is abstract when it has not yet acquired the full view of its essence, when it has merely set up the principle of its formal autonomy and when it considers the subject of the work as indifferent. From this point of view the twelfth century offers us the image of a concrete and alienated literature. Concrete, because content and form are blended; one learns to write only to write about God; the book is the mirror of the world in so far as the world is His work; it is an inessential creation on the margin of a major Creation; it is praise, psalm, offering, a pure reflection. By the same token literature falls into alienation; that is, since it is, in any case, the reflectiveness of the social body, since it remains in the state of non- reflective reflectiveness, it mediates the Catholic universe; but, for the clerk, it remains the immediate; it retrieves the world, but by losing itself. But as the reflective idea must necessarily reflect itselfon pain of annihilating itself with the whole reflected universe, the three examples which we have
? For Whom Does One Write? \ 135
studied showed a movement of the retrieving of literature by itself, that is, its transition from the state of unreflective and immediate reflection to that of reflective mediation. At first concrete and alienated, it liberates itself by negativity and passes to abstraction; more exacdy, it passes in the eighteenth century to abstract negativity before becoming in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century absolute negation. At the end of this evolution it has cut all its bonds with society; it no longer even has a public. 'Every one knows', writes Paulhan, 'that there are two literatures in our time, the bad, which is really unreadable (it is widely read) and the good, which is not read. '
But even that is an advance; at the end of this lofty isolation, at the end of this scornful rejection of all efficacity there is the destruction of literature by itself; at first, the terrible 'it's only literature'; then, that literary phenomenon which the same Paulhan calls terrorism, which is born at about the same time as the idea of parasitic gratuitousness, and as its antithesis, and which runs all through the nine- teenth century, contracting as it goes a thousand irrational marriages, and finally bursts forth shortly before the First World War. Terrorism, or rather the terrorist complex, for it is a tangle of vipers. One might distinguish, first, so deep a disgust with the sign as such that it leads in all cases to preferring the thing signified to the word, the act to the statement, the word conceived as object to the word- meaning, that is, in the last analysis, poetry to prose, spon- taneous disorder to composition; second, an effort to make literature one expression among others of life, instead of sacrificing life to literature; and third, a crisis of the writer's moral conscience, that is, the sad collapse of parasitism.
Thus, without for a moment conceiving the idea of los- ing its formal autonomy, literature makes itself a nega- tion of formalism and comes to raise the question of its es- sential content. Today we are beyond terrorism and we can make use of its experience and the preceding analyses to set down the essential traits of a concrete and liberated literature.
? 136 I What Is Literature?
We have said that, as a rule, the writer addressed all men. But immediately afterwards we noted that he was read only by a few. As a result of the divergence between the real public and the ideal public, there arose the idea of abstract universality. That is, the author postulates the constant repetition in an indefinite future of the handful of readers which he has at present. Literary glory peculiarly resembles Nietzsche's eternal recurrence; it is a struggle against history; here, as there, recourse to the infinity of time seeks to compensate for the failure in space (for the author of the seventeenth century, a recurrence ad infinitum of the gentle- man; for the one of the nineteenth century, an extension ad infinitum of the club of writers and the public of specialists). But as it is self-evident that the effect of the projection into the future of the real and present public is to perpetuate, at least in the representation of the writer, the exclusion of the majority of men, as, in addition, this imagining of an infinity of unborn readers is tantamount to extending the
actual public by a public made up of merely possible men, the universality which glory aims at is partial and abstract. And as the choice of the public conditions, to a certain extent, the choice of subject, the literature which has set up glory as its goal and its governing idea must also remain abstract.
The term 'concrete universality' must be understood, on the contrary, as the sum total of men living in a given society. If the writer's public could ever be extended to the point of embracing this total, the result would not be that he would necessarily have to limit the reverberations of his work to the present time, but rather he would oppose to the abstract eternity of glory, which is an impossible and hollow dream of the absolute, a concrete and finite duration which he would determine by the very choice of his subjects, and which, far from uprooting him from history, would define his situation in social time. As a matter of fact, every human project outlines a certain future by its very motto: if I'm going to sow, Fm putting a whole year of waiting before me; if I get married, my venture suddenly causes my whole
? For Whom Does One Write? \ 137
life to rise up before me; if I launch out into politics, I'm mortgaging a future which will extend beyond my death. The same with writing. Already, under the pretence of belaurelled immortality, one discerns more modest and more concrete pretensions. The aim of The Silence of the Sea was to lead the French to reject the enemy's efforts to get them to collaborate. Its effectiveness and consequently its actual public could not extend beyond the time of the occupation. The books of Richard Wright will remain alive as long as the negro question is raised in the United States. Thus, there
is no question as to the writer's renouncing the idea of survival; quite the contrary, he is the one who decides it; he will survive so long as he acts. Afterwards, it's honorary membership, retirement. Today, for having wanted to escape from history, he begins his honorary membership the day after his death, sometimes even while he is alive.
Thus, the concrete public would be a tremendous feminine questioning, the waiting of a whole society which the writer would have to seduce and satisfy. But for that the public would have to be free to ask and the writer to answer. That means that in no case must the questions of one group or class cover up those of other milieus; otherwise, we would relapse into the abstract. In short, actual literature can only realize its full essence in a classless society. Only in this society could the writer be aware that there is no difference of any kind between his subject and his public. For the subject of literature has always been man in the world. However, as long as the virtual public remained like a dark sea round the sunny litde beach of the real public, the writer risked confusing the interests and cares of man with those of a small and favoured group. But, if the public were identified with the concrete universal, the writer would really have to write about the human totality. Not about the abstract man of all the ages and for a timeless reader, but about the whole man of his age and for his contemporaries. As a result, the literary antinomy of lyrical subjectivity and objective testi- mony would be left behind. Involved in the same adventure as his readers and situated like them in a society without
? 138 I What Is Literature?
cleavages, the writer, in speaking about them, would be speaking about himself, and in speaking about himself would be speaking about them. As no aristocratic pride would any longer force him to deny that he is in a situation, he would no longer seek to soar above his times and bear witness to it before eternity, but, as his situation would be universal, he would express the hopes and anger of all men, and would thereby express himself completely, that is, not as a metaphysical creature like the medieval clerk, nor as a psychological animal like our classical writers, nor even as a social entity, but as a totality emerging into the world from the void and containing within it all those structures in the indissoluble unity of the human condition; literature would really be anthropological, in the full sense of the term.
It is quite evident that in such a society there would be nothing which would even remotely recall the separation of the temporal and the spiritual. Indeed, we have seen that this division necessarily corresponds to an alienation of man and, therefore, of literature; our analyses have shown us that it always tends to oppose a public of professionals or, at least, of enlightened amateurs, to the undifferentiated masses. Whether he identifies himself with the Good and with divine Perfection, with the Beautiful or the True, a clerk is always on the side of the oppressors. A watchdog or a jester: it is up to him to choose. M. Benda has chosen the cap and bells and M. Marcel the kennel; they have the right to do so, but if literature is one day to be able to enjoy its essence, the writer, without class, without colleges, without salons, without excess of honours, and without indignity, will be thrown into the world, among men, and the very notion of clerkship will appear inconceivable. The spiritual, moreover, always rests upon an ideology, and ideologies are freedom when they make themselves and oppression when they are made. The writer who has attained full self- consciousness will therefore not make himself the guardian of any spiritual hero; he will no longer know the centrifugal movement whereby certain of his predecessors turned their eyes away from the world to contemplate the heaven of
? For Whom Does One Write? \ 139
established values; he will know that his job is not adoration of the spiritual, but rather spiritualization.
Spiritualization, that is, renewal. And there is nothing else to spiritualize, nothing else to renew but this multicoloured and concrete world with its weight, its opaqueness, its zones of generalization, and its swarm of anecdotes, and that invincible Evil which gnaws at it without ever being able to destroy it. The writer will renew it as it is, the raw, sweaty, smelly, everyday world, in order to submit it to freedoms on die foundation of a freedom. Literature in this classless society would thus be the world aware of itself, suspended in a free act, and offering itself to the free judge- ment of all men, the reflective self-awareness of a classless society. It is by means of the book that the members of this society would be able to get their bearings, to see themselves and see their situation. But as the portrait compromises the model, as the simple presentation is already the beginning of change, as the work of art, taken as the sum of its exigencies, is not a simple description of the present but a judgement of this present in the name of a future,finally,as every book contains an appeal, this awareness of self is a surpassing of self. The universe is not challenged in the name of simple consumption, but in the name of the hopes and sufferings of those who inhabit it. Thus, concrete literature will be a synthesis of Negativity, as a power of uprooting from the given, and a Project, as an outline of a future order; it will be the Festival, the flaming mirror which burns everything reflected in it, and generosity, that is, a free invention, a gift. But if it is to be able to ally these two complementary aspects of freedom, it is not enough to accord the writer freedom to say everything; he must write for a public which has the freedom of changing everything; which means, besides suppression of classes, abolition of all dictatorship, constant renewal of frameworks, and the continuous overthrowing of order once it tends to congeal. In short, literature is, in essence, the subjectivity of a society in permanent revolu- tion. In such a society it would go beyond the antinomy of word and action. Certainly in no case would it be regarded
? 140 I What Is Literature?
as an act; it is false to say that the author acts upon his readers; he merely makes an appeal to their freedom, and in order for his works to have any effect, it is necessary for the public to adopt them on their own account by an unconditioned decision. But in a collectivity which con- stantly corrects, judges, and metamorphoses itself, the written work can be an essential condition of action, that is, the moment of reflective consciousness.
Thus, in a society without classes, without dictatorship, and without stability, literature would end by becoming conscious of itself; it would understand that form and content, public and subject, are identical, that the formal freedom of saying and the material freedom of doing com- plete each other, and that one should be used to demand the other, that it best manifests the subjectivity of the person when it translates most deeply collective needs and, reciprocally, that its function is to express the concrete universal to the concrete universal and that its end is to appeal to the freedom of men so that they may realize and maintain the reign of human freedom. To be sure, this is Utopian. It is possible to conceive this society, but we have no practical means at our disposal of realizing it. It has allowed us to perceive the conditions under which literature might manifest itself in its fullness and purity. Doubdess, these conditions are not fulfilled today; and it is today that we must write. But if the dialectic of literature has been
pushed to the point where we have been able to perceive the essence of prose and of writing, perhaps we may at this time attempt to answer the only question which is urgent for us: what is the situation of the writer in 1947; what is his public; what are his myths; what does he want to write about; what can he and what ought he write about?
? Situation of the Writer in 1947
IAM speaking about the French writer, the only one who has remained a bourgeois, the only one who has to adjust himself to a language which a hundred and fifty years of bourgeois domination have broken, vulgarized, slackened, and stuffed with 'bourgeoisisms', each of which seems a little sigh of ease and abandon. The American writer has often practised manual occupations before writing his books; he goes back to them. Between two novels, his voca- tion seems to be on the ranch, in the shop, in the city streets; he does not see in literature a means of proclaiming his solitude, but an opportunity of escaping it. He writes blindly, out of an absurd need to rid himself of his fears and anger, somewhat as the Mid-West farmer writes to the New York radio commentators to pour out his heart to them. He muses less about glory than he dreams of fraternity. He does not invent his manner against tradition, but for want of one, and in certain ways his most extreme audacities are
nai? vete? s. The world is new in his eyes, everything is yet to be said, no one before him has spoken of the skies or the crops. He rarely appears in New York, and if he goes there, it is only on the way through, or, like Steinbeck, he locks himself up for three months to write and he's quits for the year, a year which he will pass on the highways, in the work-yards, or in the bars. It is true that he belongs to 'guilds' and Associations, but that is purely to defend his material interests. He has no solidarity with other writers; he is often separated from them by the length or breadth of the continent;20 nothing is more remote from him than the idea of college or clerkship; for a while he is feted and then is lost and forgotten; he reappears with a new book to take a new plunge. 21
Thus, at the mercy of twenty ephemeral glories and
? 142 I What Is Literature?
twenty disappearances, he drifts continually between the working-class world, where he goes to seek adventures, and his middle-class readers (I don't dare call them bourgeois; I very much doubt whether there is a bourgeoisie in the United States), hard, brutal, young, and lost, who tomorrow will take the same plunge as he.
In England, the intellectuals are less integrated into the collectivity than we; they form an eccentric and slighdy cantankerous caste which does not have much contact with the rest of the population. The reason is, first of all, that they have not had our luck; because remote predecessors whom we hardly deserve prepared the Revolution, the class in power, after a century and a half, still does us the honour of fearing us a little (very little); it treats us tactfully. Our confre`res in London, who do not have these glorious memories, do not frighten anyone; they are considered quite harmless; and then, club life is less suitable for spreading their influence than salon life has been in spreading ours.
Among themselves, the men speak about business, politics, women, or horses, never about literature, whereas our matrons, who practised literature as an accomplishment, helped, by their receptions, to bring together politicians, financiers, generals, and men of letters. The English writers make a virtue of necessity and by aggrandizing the oddness of their ways attempt to claim as a free choice the isolation which has been imposed upon them by the structure of their society. Even in Italy, where the bourgeoisie, without ever having counted for much, has been ruined by fascism and defeat, the condition of the writer, needy, badly paid, lodged in dilapidated palaces too vast and grandiose to be heated or even furnished, at grips with a princely lan- guage too pompous to be supple, is far removed from
ours.
Thus, we are the most bourgeois writers in the world.
Well housed, decently dressed, not so well fed, perhaps; but even that is significant: the bourgeois spends lesson his food, proportionally, than the workman; much more for his clothes and lodging. All of us, moreover, are steeped
? Situation of the Writer in 1947 | 143
in bourgeois culture; in France, where the school leaving- certificate is a hallmark of the bourgeoisie, it is not per- missible to plan to write without it. In other countries, the possessed, with dreamy eyes, twist and squirm under the sway of an idea which has seized them from behind and which they never manage to look in the face. After having tried everything, they end by trying to pour their obsession on paper and to let it dry there with the ink. But as for us, we were used to literature long before beginning our first novel. To us it seemed natural for books to grow in a Civilized society, like trees in a garden. It is because we loved Racine and Verlaine too much that when we were
fourteen years old, we discovered, during the evening study period or in the great court of the lyce? e> our vocation as a writer. Even before having found ourselves at grips with
a work of our own--that monster, so drab, so smeared with our own sticky juices, such a gamble--we had been brought up on literature already made, and we naively thought that our future writings would issue from our mind in the fin- ished state in which we found those of others, with the seal of collective recognition and the pomp which comes from secular consecration, in short, like national resources. For
us, the ultimate transformation of a poem, its last toilette for eternity, was, after having appeared in magnificent illustrated editions, that it should end by appearing in small type in a hard-covered book bound in green canvas, whose clean smell of ink and pulp seemed to us the very perfume of the Muses, and that it should move the dreamy, inky- fingered sons of the future bourgeoisie. Breton himself, who wanted to set fire to culture, got his first literary shock in class one day when his teacher was reading Mallarme? to him. In short, for a long time we thought that the final des- tination of our work was to furnish literary texts for the French explication classes of 1980. Later on, five years would be just about long enough after our first book for us to be shaking hands with ail our confre`res. Centralization has grouped us all in Paris. With a bit of luck, a busy American might meet us all in twenty-four hours, to know, in twenty-
? 144 I What Is Literature?
four hours, our opinions about U. N. R. R. A. , the U. N. , U. N. E. S. C. O. , the Henry Miller affair, and the atomic bomb; in twenty-four hours, a trained cyclist might circulate --from Aragon to Mauriac, from Vercors to Cocteau, stop- ping off to see Breton in Montmartre, Queneau in Neuilly, and Billy at Fontainebleau--a report of the scruples and moral crises which are part of our professional obligations, one of those manifestoes, one of those petitions or protests to Tito for or against the return of Trieste, the annexation of the Saar, or the use of Vys in future warfare, by which we like to show that we belong to our century; in twenty-four hours, without a cyclist, a piece of gossip goes all about our college and returns, embroidered, to the one who launched it. We all--or almost all--can be seen together in certain cafe? s, at the Ple? iade concerts, and, in certain strictly literary circumstances, at the British Embassy. From time to time, one of us who has been overworking has it announced that he's leaving for the country; we all go to see him; we advise him that it's all for the best, that one can't write in Paris, and we see him off with our envy and our best wishes; as for us, an aged mother, a young mistress, or an urgent job keeps us in town. He leaves with the reporters of Samedi-Soir who are going along to photograph his retreat. He gets bored; he comes back. 'After all/ he says, 'there's only Paris. ' It is Paris to which writers from the provinces, if they are well-off, come to practise regionalism; it is Paris where the qualified representatives of North African literature have chosen to express their nostalgia for Algiers. Our path is cut out for us; for the haunted Chicago Irishman who sud- denly decides to write as a last recourse, the new life which he is tackling is a fearful thing with no point of comparison. It is a block of dark marble which will take him a long time to hew into shape; but we knew, from the time we were adolescent, the memorable and edifying features of great lives; even if our father did not disapprove of our vocation, we knew from the time we were fourteen, in the fourth grade of the lyce? e* how one replies to recalcitrant parents, how much time the author of genius has to remain un-
? Situation of the Writer in 1947 \ 145
known, at what age it is normal for glory to crown him, how many women he should have and how many unhappy loves, whether it is desirable that he mix in politics, and when; everything is written down in books; it is enough to bear it well in mind. Romain Rolland had proved at the beginning of the century in Jean Christophe that one can achieve a rather good likeness by combining the features of a few famous musicians. But one can devise other schemes; it's not bad to start one's life like Rimbaud, to begin a Goethean return to order in one's thirties, to throw oneself at fifty, like Zola, into a public debate. After that, you can choose the death of Nerval, Byron, or Shelley. Naturally, it will not be a matter of realizing each episode in all its violence, but rather of indicating it, as a serious tailor indicates the fashion without servility. I know several among us, and not the least, who have thus taken the pre- caution of giving their lives a turn and an allure both typical and exemplary, so that if their genius remains doubtful in their books, it might at least shine forth in their behaviour. Thanks to these models and recipes, from our childhood on the career of a writer seemed to us magnificent, though
without surprises; one is promoted partly by merit, partly by seniority. That's what we are. In other respects, saints, heroes, mystics, adventurers, angels, enchanters, execu- tioners, victims, as you like. But, first of all, bourgeois.
There's no shame in admitting it. And different from one another only in the way we each assume this common situation.
In fact, if one wanted to make a sketch of contemporary literature, it wouldn't be a bad idea to distinguish three generations. The first is that of the authors who began to produce before the war of 1914. By now they have finished their career, and their future books, even though they may be masterpieces, will hardly be able to add to their fame; but they are still alive, they think and judge, and their presence determines minor literary currents which must be taken into account. The main thing, it seems to me, is that in their persons and by their works, they opened the way
? 146 I What Is Literature?
to a reconciliation between literature and the bourgeois public. It should first be noted that they drew the greater part of their resources from something quite other than their writings. Gide and Mauriac have property, Proust had inde- pendent means, Maurois comes from a family of manu- facturers; others came to literature from the liberal pro-
fessions: Duhamel was a doctor, Romains, a teacher, Gaudel and Giraudoux were in the diplomatic service. The reason was that, except for successful tripe, one could not support oneself by literature in the period when they began writing. Like politics under the Third Republic, it could only be a 'marginal' occupation, even if it ended by becom- ing the principal concern of the one who practised it. Thus, literary personnel were drawn by and large from the same milieu as political personnel; Jaure`s and Pe? guy came from the same school; Blum and Proust wrote in the same reviews. Barre? s carried on his literary campaigns and his electoral campaigns on the same front. As a result, the writer could no longer consider himself as a pure con- sumer; he directed the production or supervised the distri- bution of goods or he was a civil-servant; he had duties towards the State; in short, a whole part of him was inte- grated into the bourgeoisie; his behaviour, his professional relationships, his obligations, and his concerns were bour-
geois; he bought, sold, ordered, and obeyed; he entered the charmed circle of courtesy and ceremony. Certain writers of this period have a well-founded reputation for greed which is belied by the appeals which they have launched in their writings. I don't know whether this reputation is justified. It proves, all the same, that they know the value of money; the divorce we pointed out between the author and his public is now in the author's very soul. Twenty years after symbolism he had not forgotten about the absolute gratuitousness of art, but at the same time he was involved in the utilitarian cycle of means-ends and ends- means. A producer and destroyer at the same time. Divided between the spirit of seriousness that he has to observe at Cuverville, Frontenac, Elbeuf, and, when he has to represent
? Situation of the Writer in 194 7 | 147
France, at the White House, and the holiday spirit of con- tentiousness that he finds as soon as he sits down before a blank sheet of paper; incapable of embracing bourgeois ideology without reserve as well as of condemning without recourse the class to which he belongs. What saves him in this embarrassment is that the bourgeoisie itself has changed; it is no longer that fierce rising class whose sole concern was thrift and the possession of goods. The sons and grandsons of successful peasants and shopkeepers are born into money; they have learned the art of spending. The utilitarian ideology, without at all disappearing, is rele- gated to the background. A hundred years of uninterrupted reign have created traditions; bourgeois childhoods in the great country house or in the cha^teau bought from a ruined noble have acquired a poetic depth; the 'men of property* have less recourse in their prosperity to the spirit of analysis; they, in turn, ask the spirit of synthesis to establish their right to govern; a synthetic--thus poetic--bond is estab- lished between the proprietor and the thing possessed.
Barre? s was thefirstto invent it; the bourgeois is one with his property. If he remains in his province and on his estate, something passes into him from the gentle foot-hills of his region, from the silvery trembling of the poplars, from the mysterious and slow fecundity of the soil, from the rapid and capricious changes of mood in the skies; in assimilating the world, he assimilates its depth; henceforth, his soul has substrata, mines, gold-lodes, veins, underground sheets of oil. Henceforth the rallie? * writer has his path cut out for him; to save himself he will save the bourgeoisie depthwise.
Of course, he will not serve utilitarian ideology. He will even be, if necessary, its severe critic, but he will disclose all the gratuity in the exquisite hothouse of the bourgeois soul, all the spirituality which he needs to practise his art with a good conscience. Instead of reserving this symbolic aristocracy, which he won in the nineteenth century, for
* Les rallie? s: 'Royalists and imperialists who have accepted the Republic. ' This term will appear hereafter in the text. --Translator.
? 148 I What Is Literature?
himself and his confre`res alone, he will extend it to the whole bourgeoisie. In about 1850 an American writer showed, in a novel, an old colonel sitting in a Mississippi steamboat; for a moment he was tempted to ponder the innermost recesses of the souls of the passengers about him. He soon dismissed this preoccupation, saying to himself, or approximately, 'It is not good for man to penetrate too far into himself/ That was the reaction of the first bourgeois generation.
About 1900 the machine was reversed in France: it was understood that one would find the seal of God in the human heart, provided one sounded it deeply enough. Estaunie? speaks about secret lives. The postal-clerk, the blacksmith, the engineer, the departmental treasurer, all have their nocturnal and solitary fe^tes. Consuming passions and wild conflagrations dwell deeply within them. In the wake of this author, and a hundred others, we were to learn to recognize in stamp and coin collecting all the nostalgia for the beyond, all the Baudelairean dissatisfaction. For I ask you, why would one spend one's time and money acquiring medallions, were it not that one was past caring
for the friendship of men and the love of women and power? And what is more gratuitous than a stamp collec- tion? Not everybody can be a Leonardo or a Michelangelo, but those useless stamps pasted on the pink pages of an album are a touching homage to all the nine muses; it is the very essence of destructive consumption.
Others saw in bourgeois love a desperate appeal mount- ing towards God. What is more disinterested, what is more poignant than an adultery? And that taste of ashes in one's mouth after coitus, is it not negativity itself and the con- tentiousness of all pleasures? Others went even further. They discovered a divine grain of madness not in the weaknesses of the bourgeoisie but in its very virtues. We were shown that the oppressed and hopeless life of the mother of a family was so absurd and so lofty in its obstinacy that all the extravagances of the surrealists appeared as common sense in comparison. A young author who underwent the influ- ence of these teachers without belonging to their generation
? Situation of the Writer in 1947 \ 149
and who has since changed his mind, if I may judge by his behaviour, once said to me, 'Is there any madder wager than conjugal fidelity? Isn't it braving the Devil and even God? Show me a madder and more magnificent blasphemy/ You can see the trick; it's a matter of beating the great destroyers on their own ground. You name Don Juan and I answer by Orgon; there's more generosity, more cynicism, and more despair in raising a family than in seducing a thousand and one women. You offer Rimbaud, I come back with Chrysale; there's more pride and Satanism in assuming that the chair that one sees is a chair than in practising the systematic deranging of the senses. And so that there will be no doubt about it, the chair which is given to our perception is only probable; to assert that it is a chair, one must take a leap to the infinite and suppose an infinity of concordant representations. Doubtless, the vow of conjugal love also involves a virgin future; the sophism begins when one presents these necessary and, so to speak, natural inductions that man makes against time and to insure his tranquillity as the most audacious defiances, the most desperate challenges.
Be that as it may, that is how the writers I am talking about established their reputation. They addressed a new generation and explained to it that there was a strict equiva- lence between production and consumption and between construction and destruction; they demonstrated that order was a perpetual festival and disorder the most boring monotony. They discovered the poetry of daily life, made virtue enticing, even disturbing, and painted the bourgeois epic in long novels full of mysterious and perturbing smiles. That was all their readers asked for; when one is honest out of self-interest, virtuous out of pusillanimity, and faithful out of habit, it is agreeable to hear it said that one sur- passes a professional seducer or a highwayman in boldness. In about 1924, I knew a young man of good family who was infatuated with literature, particularly contemporary authors. He fooled about when it was the thing to do, gorged himself on the poetry of the bars when it was a` la
? 150 I What Is Literature?
mode, flashily paraded a mistress, and then, when his father died, prudently took over the family factory and followed the straight and narrow. He has since married an heiress; he doesn't deceive her, or, if he does, it's only on the sly, when he takes a trip. In short, the most faithful of husbands. Just about the time he got married, he drew from his reading the formula that was to justify his life: 'One should do what everyone else does', he wrote to me one day, 'and be like no one else. ' You can guess that I regard that as the most abject garbage and the justification of all sorts of dis- honesty. But it sums up rather well, I think, the ethics which our authors sold their public. They justified themselves with it first of all: you've got to do what everyone else does, that is, sell Elbeuf cloth or Bordeaux wine according to the conventional rules, take a wife with a dowry, visit your parents regularly, and your in-laws and the friends of your in-laws: you've got to be like no one else, that is, save your soul and your family's by fine writings which are both destructive and respectful. I shall call all these works an alibi literature. They rapidly supplanted those of the hire- ling writers. Since before the First World War, the governing classes needed alibis more than incense. The marvellous of Fournier was an alibi; a whole line of bourgeois fairies sprang from him; in each case it was a matter of leading each reader approximately to that obscure spot of the most bourgeois soul where all dreams meet and melt in a desperate desire for the impossible, where all the events of the most human everyday existence are lived as symbols, where the real is devoured by the imaginary,
where the whole man is no longer anything but a divine absence. People are sometimes astonished that Arland was the author of both Terres Etrange`res and L'Ordre; but they shouldn't be. The so noble dissatisfaction of his first heroes has meaning only if one experiences it at the heart of a strict order; it is not at all a matter of revolting against marriage, the professions, and the social disciplines, but of delicately going beyond them by means of a nostalgia which nothing can satisfy because at bottom it is not a desire for anything.
? Situation of the Writer in 1947 \ 151
Thus, order is there only to be transcended, but it must be there. There you have it, justified and solidly re-established. It's certainly better to challenge it by a dreamy melancholy than to overthrow it by arms. I shall say as much about the restlessness of Gide, which later became confusion, and the sin of Mauriac, the place from which God is absent. It is always a matter of putting daily life in parentheses and living it scrupulously but without soiling one's hands; it is always a matter of proving that man is worth more than his life, that love is much more than love and the bourgeois much more than the bourgeois. In the greater writers there is, of course, something else. In Gide, in Claudel, in Proust, one finds the real experience of a man, and a thousand directions. But I have not wanted to draw a picture of a period but rather to show a climate and isolate a myth. 22
The second generation came of age after 1918. Of course, this is a very rough classification since we are in- cluding Cocteau, who started before the war, whereas Marcel Arland, whose first book, to my knowledge, does not antedate the armistice, has definite affinities with the writers whom we have just spoken about. The obvious absurdity of a war whose true causes it took us thirty years
to know leads back the spirit of Negativity. I am not going
to enlarge upon this period of 'decompression', as Thi- baudet has so well named it. It was allfireworks;now that
it has fallen, so much has been written about it that we seem
to know it thoroughly. All we need note is that its most magnificent rocket, surrealism, ties in with the destructive tradition of the writer-consumer. These turbulent young bourgeois wanted to ruin culture because they were culti- vated; their chief enemy was Heine's philistine, Monnier's Prudhomme, and Flaubert's bourgeois, in short, their papa. But the violence of the preceding years had brought them to radicalism. Whereas their predecessors had confined them- selves to combating the utilitarian ideology of the bour- geoisie by consumption^ they more deeply identified the quest of the useful with the human project, that is, with the con- scious and voluntary life. Consciousness is bourgeois, the
? i$2 I What Is Literature?
self is bourgeois. Negativity should devote itself, in the first place, to that nature which, as Pascal says, is only a first layer of custom. The first thing to be done is to eliminate the conventional distinctions between conscious and un- conscious life, between dream and waking. This means that subjectivity is dissolved. There is, in effect, the subjective when we recognize, the moment they appear, that our thoughts, our emotions, and our will come from us, and when we believe both that it is certain that they belong to us and only probable that the external world is guided by them.
The surrealist took a hearty dislike to that humble cer- tainty on which the stoic based his ethics. It displeased him both by the limits it assigns us and the responsibilities it places upon us. Any means were good for escaping con- sciousness of self and consequendy of one's situation in the world. He adopted psycho-analysis because it presented consciousness as being invaded by parasitical outgrowths whose origin is elsewhere; he rejected 'the bourgeois idea* of work because work implies conjectures, hypotheses, and projects, thus, a perpetual recourse to the subjective. Auto- matic writing was, above all, destruction of subjectivity. When we try our hand at it, rushes of blood spasmodically tear through us; we are ignorant of their origin; we do not know them before they have taken their place in the world of objects and we must then perceive them with foreign eyes. Thus, it was not a matter, as has too often been said, of substituting their unconscious subjectivity for con- sciousness, but rather of showing the subject as a flimsy illusion at the heart of an objective universe. But the surrealist's second step was to destroy objectivity in turn. It was a matter of exploding the world, and as dynamite was not enough, as, on the other hand, a real destruction of all that exists was impossible, because it would simply cause everything to pass from one real state to another real state, one had to do one's best rather to disintegrate particular objects, that is, to do away with the very structure of objectivity in these witness-objects. Evidently this operation cannot be tried out on things that really exist, which are
? Situation of the Writer in 1947 \ 133
already given with their inde? formable essence. Hence, one will produce imaginary objects, so constructed that their objectivity does away with itself. We are given a first draft of this procedure in the false pieces of sugar which Duchamp actually cut in marble and which suddenly revealed themselves as having an unexpected weight. The visitor who weighed them in his hand was supposed to feel, in a blazing and instantaneous illumination, the self-destruction of the objective essence of sugar. It was necessary to let him know the deception of all being, the malaise, the off-balance feeling we get, for example, from trick gadgets, when the spoon abruptly melts in the tea-cup, when the sugar (an inverse hoax to the one Duchamp constructed) rises to the surface and floats. It was hoped that by means of his intuition the whole world would be exposed as a radical contradiction. Surrealist painting and sculpture had no other aim than to multiply these local and imaginary explosions, which were like holes through which the entire universe would be drained out. The paranoiacally critical method of Dali was only a perfecting and complication of the procedure. It also professed to be an effort 'to contribute to the total discredit of the world of reality'. Literature also did its best to make language go through the same kind of thing and to destroy it by telescoping words. Thus, the sugar refers to the marble and the marble to the sugar; the limp watch challenges itself by its limpness; the objective destroys itself and suddenly refers to the subjective, since one disqualifies reality and is pleased to 'consider the very images of the external world as unstable and transitory' and to put them into the service of the reality of our mind'. But the subjective then breaks down in its turn and allows a mysterious objectivity to appear behind it.
All this without even starting a single real destruction. Quite the contrary; by means of the symbolic annulment of the self by sleep and automatic writing, by the symbolic annulment of objects by producing evanescent objectivities, by the symbolic annulment of language by producing
? i$4 I What Is Literature?
aberrant meanings, by the destruction of painting by painting and of literature by literature, surrealism pursues this curious enterprise of realising nothingness by too much fullness of being. It is always by creating, that is, by adding paintings to already existing paintings and books to already published books, that it destroys. Whence, the ambivalence of its works: each of them can pass for the barbaric and mag- nificent invention of a form, of an unknown being, of an extraordinary phrase, and, as such, can become a voluntary contribution to culture; and as each of them is a project for annihilating all the rest by annihilating itself along with it, Nothingness glitters on its surface, a Nothingness which is only the endless fluttering of contradictions. And the esprit which the surrealists wish to attain on the ruins of sub- jectivity, this esprit of which it is not possible to have an inkling otherwise than by the accumulation of self-destruc- tive objects, also sparkles andflickersin the reciprocal and congealed annihilation of things. It is neither Hegelian Negativity, nor hypostasized Negation, nor even Nothing- ness, though it bears a likeness to it; it would be more correct to call it the Impossible or, if you like, the imaginary point where dream and waking, the real and the fictitious, the objective and the subjective, merge. Confusion and not synthesis, for synthesis would appear as an articulated existence, dominating and governing its internal contra- dictions. But surrealism does not desire the appearance of this novelty which it would again have to contest. It wants to maintain itself in the enervating tension which is pro- duced by an unrealizable intuition. At least Rimbaud wanted to see a drawing-room in a lake; the surrealist wants to be perpetually on the point of seeing lake and drawing-room; if, by chance, he encounters them, he gets disgusted or he gets scared and gets into bed with the blinds drawn. He ends up by doing a lot of painting and writing but he never actually destroys anything. Moreover, Breton recognized this in 1925 when he wrote: 'The immediate reality of the surrealist revolution is not so much to change anything whatever in the physical and apparent order of things as to
? Situation of the Writer in 1947 \ 155
criticize a movement in the mind/ The destruction of the universe is the object of a subjective enterprise very like what has always been called philosophical conversion. This world, perpetually annihilated without one's touching a grain of wheat or sand or a feather of a bird, is quite simply
put in parentheses. It has not been sufficiently noted that the constructions, paintings and poem-objects of surrealism were the manual realization of the sterilities by which the sceptics of the third century B. C. justified their perpetual epoche? . After which, Carneades and Philo, sure of not compromising themselves by an imprudent adherence, lived like everybody else. In the same way, the surrealists, once the world is destroyed and miraculously preserved by its destruction, can shamelessly give full play to their immense
love of the world. This world, the world of every day, with
its trees and roofs, its women, its sea-shells, and its flowers, but haunted by the impossible and by nothingness, is what
is called the marvellous in surrealism. I cannot keep myself from thinking of that other parenthesis by which the rallie? writers of the preceding generation destroyed bourgeois
life and preserved it with all its nuances. Isn't the marvellous
in surrealism that of Le Grand Meau/nes, but radicalised? Certainly its passion is sincere, as are its hatred of and dis- gust with the bourgeois class. But the situation has not changed: one must save oneself without breaking anything --or by a symbolic breaking--wash oneself of the original contamination without giving up the advantages of one's position.
The root of the matter is that once again one has to find an eagle's nest. The surrealists, more ambitious than their fathers, count on the radical and metaphysical destruction which they are initiating to confer upon them a dignity a thousand times superior to that of the parasitic aristocracy. It is no longer a matter of escaping from the bourgeois class; one must leap out of the human condition. It is the family patrimony that these sons want to squander, it is the world. They have come back to parasitism as to a lesser evil, abandoning everything, studies and professions, by
? 156 I What Is Literature?
common consent; but they have never been satisfied with being parasites on the bourgeoisie; their ambition has been to be parasites on the human race. Metaphysical as it may be, it is clear that they have been unclassed from above and that their preoccupations have strictlyforbiddenthem from finding a public in the working class. Breton once wrote: 'Marx said, "Transform the world. " Rimbaud said, "Change life. " For us, these two orders are one and the same/ That would be enough to reveal the bourgeois in- tellectual. For it is a question of knowing which change precedes which. For the militant Marxist there is no doubt that social transformation alone can permit radical trans- formations of thought and feeling. If Breton thinks that he can pursue his inner experiences on the margin of revolu- tionary activity and parallel to it, he is condemned in advance, for that would amount to saying that a freedom of
spirit is conceivable in chains, at least for certain people, and, consequently, to making revolution less urgent. This is the very betrayal of which revolutionaries have always accused Epictetus and of which Politeer not long ago accused Bergson. And if it is maintained that Breton in- tended in this text to announce a progressive and interlinked metamorphosis of the social state and the intimate life, I answer by citing this other passage: 'Everything leads us to believe that there is a certain point in the mind from which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the communicable and the incommunicable, the high and the low, cease to be regarded as contradictory. . . . One would be wasting one's time looking for any other motive in surrealist activity than the hope of determining this point/ Is this not a proclamation of divorce from a working-class public more than from a bourgeois public? For the proletariat, engaged in struggle, must at every moment, in order to bring its undertaking to a successful conclusion, distinguish the past from the future, the real
from the imaginary, and life from death. It is not by accident that Breton has cited these contraries; they are all categories of action; revolutionary activity, more than any
? Situation of the Writer in 194 7 | 157
other, needs them. And just as surrealism has radicalized the negation of the useful in order to transform it into a rejection of the project and the conscious life, it radicalizes the old literary claim of gratuitousness in order to make of it a rejection of action by destroying its categories. There is a surrealist quietism. Quietism and permanent violence; two complementary aspects of the same position. As the surrealist has deprived himself of the means of planning an enterprise, his activity is reduced to impulsions in the immediate. We find here a heavier and duller version of Gide's moment. That's not surprising; there is quietism in all parasitism and the favourite tempo of consumption is the moment.
Yet, surrealism declares itself revolutionary and offers its hand to the Communist Party. It is the first time since the Restoration that a literary school explicitly claims kinship with an organized revolutionary movement. The reasons are clear: these writers, who are also young people, want, above all, to destroy their family, their uncle the general, their cousin the cure? , as Baudelaire in 1848 saw in the February revolution an opportunity to set fire to the house of General Aupick; if they were born poor, they have also certain complexes to liquidate, envy and fear; and then they are also rebelling against external constraints: the recendy ended war, with its censorship, military service, taxes, army-ridden legislature, and all the general eye-wash; they are all anti-clerical, neither more nor less than Combes and the pre-war radicals, and they are nobly disgusted with colonialism and the war in Morocco. This indignation and hatred can be expressed abstracdy by a conception of radical
Negation which, a fortiori, will bring about, without there being any need of making it the object of a particular act of will, the negation of the bourgeois class. And youth being the metaphysical *%zpar excellencey as Auguste Comte well noted, this metaphysical and abstract expression of their revolt is evidendy the one they are choosing by prefer- ence. However, it is also the one which leaves the world strictly intact. It is true that they also add a few sporadic acts
? i$8 I What Is Literature?