No More Learning

At any rate, the natural relations are inverted; that tree in the foreground of the Ce? zanne painting appears initially as the product of a causal chain. But the causality is an illusion; it will doubtless remain as a proposition as long as we look at the painting, but it will be supported by a deep finality; if the tree is placed in such a way it is because the rest of the painting requires that this form and those colours be placed in the foreground. Thus, through the phenomenal causality, our gaze attains finality as the deep structure of the object, and, beyond finality, it attains human freedom as its source and original basis. Vermeer's realism is carried so far that at first it might be thought to be photographic. But if one considers the splendour of his texture, the pink and velvety glory of his little brick walls, the blue thickness of a branch of woodbine, the glazed darkness of his vestibules, the orange-coloured flesh of his faces, which are as polished as the stone of holy-water basins, one suddenly feels, in the pleasure that he experiences, that the finality is not so much in the forms or colours as in his material imagination. It is the very substance and temper of the things which here give the forms their reason for being. With this realist we are perhaps closest to absolute creation, since it is in the very passiveness of the matter that we meet the unfathomable freedom of man.
The work is never limited to the painted, sculpted, or narrated object. Just as one perceives things only against the background of the world, so the objects represented by art appear against the background of the universe. In the
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background of Fabrice's adventures are the Italy of 1820, Austria, France, the sky and stars which the Abbe? Blanis consults, and finally the whole earth. If the painter presents us with a field or a vase of flowers, his paintings are windows that open onto the whole world. We follow the red path which is buried among the wheat much farther than Van Gogh has painted it, among other wheat fields, under other clouds, to the river which empties into the sea, and we extend to infinity, to the other end of the world, the deep finality which supports the existence of the field and the earth. So that, through the various objects which it produces or reproduces, the creative act aims at a total renewal of the world. Each painting, each book, is a recovery of the totality of being. Each of them presents this totality to the freedom of the spectator. For this is quite the final goal of art: to recover this world by giving it to be seen as it is, but as if it had its source in human freedom. But, since what the author creates takes on objective reality only in the eyes of the spectator, this recovery is consecrated by the ceremony of the spectacle--and particularly of reading. We are already in a better position to answer the question we raised a while ago: the writer chooses to appeal to the freedom of other men so that, by the reciprocal implications of their demands, they may re-adapt the totality of being to man and may again enclose the universe within man.
If we wish to go still further, we must bear in mind that the writer, like all other artists, aims at giving his reader a certain feeling that is customarily called aesthetic pleasure, and which I would very much rather call aesthetic joy, and that this feeling, when it appears, is a sign that the work is achieved. It is therefore fitting to examine it in the light of the preceding considerations. In effect, this joy, which is denied to the creator, in so far as he creates, becomes one with the aesthetic consciousness of the spectator, that is, in the case under consideration, of the reader. It is a com- plex feeling but one whose structures and condition are inseparable from one another. It is identical, at first, with the recognition of a transcendent and absolute end which,
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for a moment, suspends the utilitarian round of ends-means and means-ends,7 that is, of an appeal or, what amounts to the same thing, of a value. And the positional conscious- ness which I take of this value is necessarily accompanied by the non-positional consciousness of my freedom, since my freedom is manifested to itself by a transcendent ex- igency. The recognition of freedom by itself is joy, but this structure of non-thetical consciousness implies another: since, in effect, reading is creation, my freedom does not only appear to itself as pure autonomy but as creative activity, that is, it is not limited to giving itself its own law but perceives itself as being constitutive of the object. It is on this level that the phenomenon specifically is manifested, that is, a creation wherein the created object is given as
object to its creator. It is the sole case in which the creator gets any enjoyment out of the object he creates. And the word enjoyment which is applied to the positional con- sciousness of the work read indicates sufficiently that we are in the presence of an essential structure of aesthetic joy. This positional enjoyment is accompanied by the non- positional consciousness of being essential in relation to an object perceived as essential. I shall call this aspect of aesthetic consciousness the feeling of security; it is this which stamps the strongest aesthetic emotions with a sover- eign calm. It has its origin in the authentication of a strict harmony between subjectivity and objectivity. As, on the other hand, the aesthetic object is properly the world in so far as it is aimed at through the imaginary, aesthetic joy accompanies the positional consciousness that the world is a value, that is, a task proposed to human freedom. I shall call this the aesthetic modification of the human project, for, as usual, the world appears as the horizon of our situa- tion, as the infinite distance which separates us from our- selves, as the synthetic totality of the given, as the un- differentiated whole of obstacles and implements--but never as a demand addressed to our freedom. Thus, aesthetic joy proceeds to this level of the consciousness which I take of recovering and internalizing that which is non-ego par
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excellence, since I transform the given into an imperative and the fact into a value. The world is my task, that is, the essential and freely accepted function of my freedom is to make that unique and absolute object which is the universe come into being in an unconditioned movement. And, thirdly, the preceding structures imply a pact between human freedoms, for, on the one hand, reading is a con- fident and exacting recognition of the freedom of the writer, and, on the other hand, aesthetic pleasure, as it is itself experienced in the form of a value, involves an absolute exigence in regard to others; every man, in so far as he is a freedom, feels the same pleasure in reading the same work. Thus, all mankind is present in its highest free- dom; it sustains the being of a world which is both its world and the 'external* world. In aesthetic joy the posi- tional consciousness is an image-making consciousness of
the world in its totality both as being and having to be, both as totally ours and totally foreign, and the more ours as it is the more foreign. The non-positional consciousness really envelops the harmonious totality of human freedoms in so far as it makes the object of a universal confidence and exigency.
To write is thus both to disclose the world and to offer it as a task to the generosity of the reader. It is to have recourse to the consciousness of others in order to make one's self be recognized as essential to the totality of being; it is to wish to live this essentiality by means of interposed persons; but, on the other hand, as the real world isLJEr vealed only by action, as one can feel oneself in it only by exceeding it in order to change it, the novelist's universe would lack depth if it were not discovered in a movement to transcend it. It has often been observed that an object in a story does not derive its density of existence from the number and length of the descriptions devoted to it, but from the complexity of its connections with the different characters. The more often the characters handle it, take it up, and put it down, in short, go beyond it towards their own ends, the more real will it appear. Thus, of the world
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of the novel, that is, the totality of men and things, we may say that in order for it to offer its maximum density the disclosure-creation by which the reader discovers it must also be an imaginary participation in the action; in other words, the more disposed one is to change it, the more alive it will be. The error of realism has been to believe that the real reveals itself to contemplation, and that conse- quently one could draw an impartial picture of it. How could that be possible, since the very perception is partial, since by itself the naming is already a modification of the object? And how could the writer, who wants himself to
be essential to this universe, want to be essential to the injustice which this universe comprehends? Yet, he must be; but if he accepts being the creator of injustices, it is in
a movement which goes beyond them towards their abolition. As for me who read, if I create and keep alive an unjust world, I cannot help making myself responsible for
it. And the author's whole art is bent on obliging me to create what he discloses* therefore to compromise myself. So both of us bear the responsibility for the universe. And precisely because this universe is supported by the joint effort of our two freedoms, and because the author, with me
as medium, has attempted to integrate it into the human, it must appear truly in itself\ in its very marrow, as being shot through and through with a freedom which has taken human freedom as its end, and if it is not really the city of ends that it ought to be, it must at least be a stage along the way; in a word, it must be a becoming and it must always be considered and presented not as a crushing mass which weighs us down, but from the point of view of its going beyond towards that city of ends. However bad and hope- less the humanity which it paints may be, the work must have an air of generosity. Not, of course, that this generosity is to be expressed by means of edifying discourses and virtuous characters; it must not even be premeditated, and it is quite true that fine sentiments do not make fine books. But it must be the very warp and woof of the book, the stuff out of which the people and things are cut; whatever the
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subject, a sort of essential lightness must appear everywhere and remind us that the work is never a natural datum, but an exigence and a gift. And if I am given this world with its injustices, it is not so that I may contemplate them coldly, but that I may animate them with my indignation, that I may disclose them and create them with their nature as injustices, that is, as abuses to be suppressed. Thus, the writer's universe will only reveal itself in all its depth to the examination, the admiration, and the indignation of the reader; and the generous love is a promise to maintain, and the generous indignation is a promise to change, and the admiration a promise to imitate; although literature is one thing and morality a quite different one, at the heart of the aesthetic imperative we discern the moral imperative. For, since the one who writes recognizes, by the very fact that he takes the trouble to write, the freedom of his readers, and since the one who reads, by the mere fact of his opening the book, recognizes the freedom of the writer, the work
of art, from whichever side you approach it, is an act of confidence in the freedom of men. And since readers, like the author, recognize this freedom only to demand that it manifest itself, the work can be defined as an imaginary presentation of the world in so far as it demandshuman freedom. The result of which is that there is no 'gloomy literature', since, however dark may be the colours in which one paints the world, one paints it only so that free men may feel their freedom as they face it. Thus, there are only good and bad novels. The bad novel aims to please by flattering, whereas the good one is an exigence and an act of faith. But above all, the unique point of view from which the author can present the world to those freedoms whose concurrence he wishes to bring about is that of a world to be impregnated always with more freedom. It would be inconceivable that this unleashing of generosity provoked by the writer could be used to authorize an injustice, and that the reader could enjoy his freedom while reading a work
which approves or accepts or simply abstains from con- demning the subjection of man by man. One can imagine
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a good novel being written by an American negro even if hatred of the whites were spread all over it, because it is the freedom of his race that he demands through this hatred. And, as he invites me to assume the attitude of generosity, the moment I feel myself a pure freedom I can- not bear to identify myself with a race of oppressors. Thus, I require of all freedoms that they demand the liberation of coloured people against the white race and against myself
in so far as I am a part of it, but nobody can suppose for a moment that it is possible to write a good novel in praise of anti-Semitism. 8 For, the moment I feel that my freedom is indissolubly linked with that of all other men, it cannot be demanded of me that I use it to approve the enslavement of a part of these men. Thus, whether he is an essayist, a pamphleteer, a satirist, or a novelist, whether he speaks. jonly of individual passions or whether he attacks the social order,
the writer, a free man addressing free men, has only_one subject--freedom.
Hence, any attempt to enslave his readers threatens him in his very art. A blacksmith can be affected by fascism in his life as a man, but not necessarily in his craft; a writer will be affected in both, and even more in his craft than in his life. I have seen writers, who before the war called for fascism with all their hearts, smitten with sterility at the very moment when the Nazis were loading them with honours. I am thinking of Drieu la Rochelle in particular; he was mistaken, but he was sincere. He proved it. He had agreed to direct a Nazi-inspired review. The first few months he reprimanded, rebuked, and lectured his country- men. No one answered him because no one was free to do
so. He became irritated; he no longer felt his readers. He became more insistent, but no sign appeared to prove that he had been understood. No sign of hatred, nor of anger either; nothing. He seemed to have lost his bearings, the victim of a growing distress. He complained bitterly to the Germans. His articles had been superb; they became shrill. The moment arrived when he struck his breast; no echo, except among the bought journalists whom he despised. He
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handed in his resignation, withdrew it, again spoke, still in the desert. Finally, he said nothing, gagged by the silence of others. He had demanded the enslavement of others, but in his crazy mind he must have imagined that it was volun- tary, that it was still free. It came; the man in him con- gratulated himself mightily, but the writer could not bear it. While this was going on, others, who, happily, were in the majority, understood that the freedom of writing implies the freedom of the citizen. One does not write for slaves. The art of prose is bound up with the only re? gime in which prose has meaning, democracy. When one is threatened, the other is too. And it is not enough to defend them with the pen. A day comes when the pen is forced to stop, and the writer must then take up arms. Thus, however you might have come to it, whatever the opinions you might have professed, literature throws you into batde. Writing
is a certain way of wanting freedom; once you have begun, you are committed, willy-nilly.
Committed to what? Defending freedom? That's easy to say. Is it a matter of acting as a guardian of ideal values like Benda's 'clerk' before the betrayal,* or is it concrete every- day freedom which must be protected by our taking sides in political and social struggles? The question is tied up with another one, one very simple in appearance but which nobody ever asks himself: 'For whom does one write? '
* The reference here is to Benda's La Trahison des clercs, translated into English as The Great Betrayal. --Translator.
? For Whom
Does One Write?
AT first sight, there doesn't seem to be any doubt: one writes for the universal reader, and we have seen, in effect, that the exigency of the writer is, as a rule, addressed to all men. But the preceding descriptions are ideal. As a matter of fact the writer knows that he speaks for freedoms which are swallowed up, masked, and unavail- able; and his own freedom is not so pure; he has to clean it. It is dangerously easy to speak too readily about eternal values; eternal values are very, very fleshless. Even freedom, if one considers it sub specie aeternitatisy seems to be a withered branch; for, like the sea, there is no end to it. It is nothing else but the movement by which one perpetually uproots and liberates oneself. There is no given freedom. One must win an inner victory over one's passions, one's race, one's class, and one's nation and must conquer other men along with oneself. But what counts in this case is the particular form of the obstacle to be surmounted, of the resistance to be overcome. That is what gives form to freedom in each circumstance. If the writer has chosen, as Benda has it, to talk drivel, he can speak in fine, rolling periods of that eternal freedom which National Socialism, Stalinist commu- nism, and the capitalist democracies all lay claim to. He won't disturb anybody; he won't address anybody. Every- thing he asks for is granted him in advance. But it is an abstract dream. Whether he wants to or not, and even if he has his eyes on eternal laurels, the writer is speaking to his contemporaries and brothers of his class and race.
As a matter of fact, it has not been sufficiendy observed that a work of the mind is by nature allusive. Even if the author's aim is to give the fullest possible representation of his object, there is never any question as to whether he is telling everything. He knows far more than he tells. This is
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so because language is elliptical. If I want to let my neigh- bour know that a wasp has got in by the window, there is no need for a long speech. 'Look out! ' or 'Hey! '--a word is enough, a gesture--as soon as he sees the wasp, everything is clear. Imagine a gramophone record reproducing for us, without comment, the everyday conversations of a house- hold in Provins or Angoule^me--we wouldn't understand a thing; the context would be lacking, that is, memories and perceptions in common, the situation and the enterprises of the couple; in short, the world such as each of the speakers knows it to appear to the other.
The same with reading: people of the same period and community, who have lived through the same events, who have raised or avoided the same questions, have the same taste in their mouth; they have the same complicity, and there are the same corpses among them. That is why it is not necessary to write so much; there are key-words. If I were to tell an audience of Americans about the German occupation, there would have to be a great deal of analysis and precaution. I would waste twenty pages in dispelling preconceptions, prejudices, and legends. Afterwards, I would have to be sure of my position at every step; I would have to look for images and symbols in American history which would enable them to understand ours; I would always have to keep in mind the difference between our old man's pessimism and their childlike optimism. If I were to write about the same subject for Frenchmen, we
would be entre nous. For example, it would be enough to say: 'A concert of German military music in the band-stand of a public garden/ Everything is there: a raw spring day, a park in the provinces, men with shaven skulls blowing away at their brasses, blind and deaf passers-by who quicken their steps, two or three sullen-looking listeners under the trees, this useless serenade to France which drifts off into the sky, our shame and our anguish, our anger, and our pride too. Thus, the reader I am addressing is neither Microme? gas nor L'Inge? nu; nor is he God the Father either. He has not the ignorance of the noble savage to whom everything has to be
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explained on the basis of principles; he is not a spirit or a tabula rasa. Neither has he the omniscience of an angel or of the Eternal Father. I reveal certain aspects of the universe to him; I take advantage of what he knows to attempt to teach him what he does not know. Suspended between total ignorance and omniscience, he has a definite stock of knowledge which varies from moment to moment and which is enough to reveal his historical character. In actual fact, he is not an instantaneous consciousness, a pure timeless affirmation of freedom, nor does he soar above history; he is involved in it.
Authors too are historical. And that is precisely the reason why some of them want to escape from history by a leap into eternity. The book, serving as a go-between, establishes an historical contact among the men who are steeped in the same history and who likewise contribute to its making. Writing and reading are two facets of the same historical fact, and the freedom to which the writer invites us is not a pure abstract consciousness of being free. Strictly speaking, it is not\ it wins itself in an historical situa- tion; each book proposes a concrete liberation on the basis
of a particular alienation. Hence, in each one there is an implicit recourse to institutions, customs, certain forms of oppression and conflict, to the wisdom and the folly of the day, to lasting passions and passing stubbornness, to super- stitions and recent victories of common sense, to evidence and ignorance, to particular modes of reasoning which the sciences have made fashionable and which are applied in all domains, to hopes, to fears, to habits of sensibility, imagina- tion, and even perception, and finally, to customs and values which have been handed down, to a whole world which the author and the reader have in common. It is this familiar world which the writer animates and penetrates with his
freedom. It is on the basis of this world that the reader must bring about his concrete liberation; it is alienation, situation, and history. It is this world which I must change or preserve for myself and others. For if the immediate aspect of freedom is negativity, we know that it is not a matter of
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the abstract power of saying no, but of a concrete negativity which retains within itself (and is completely coloured by) what it denies. And since the freedoms of the author and reader seek and affect each other through a world, it can just as well be said that the author's choice of a certain aspect of the world determines the reader and, vice versa, that it is by choosing his reader that the author decides upon his subject.
Thus, all works of the mind contain within themselves the image of the reader for whom they are intended. I could draw the portrait of Gide's Nathanae? l on the basis of Fruits of the Earth: I can see that the alienation from which he is urged to free himself is the family, the property he owns or will own by inheritance, the utilitarian project, a con- ventional morality, a narrow theism; I also see that he is cultured and has leisure, since it would be absurd to offer Me? nalque as an example to an unskilled labourer, a man out of work, or an American negro; I know that he is not threatened by any external danger--by hunger, war, or class or racial oppression; the only danger is that of being the victim of his own milieu. Therefore, he is a rich white Aryan, the heir of a great bourgeois family that lives in a period which is still relatively stable and easy, in which the ideology of the possessing class is barely beginning to decline: the image of that Daniel de Fontanin whom Roger Martin du Gard later presented to us as an enthusiastic admirer of Andre? Gide.
To take a still more recent example, it is striking that The Silence of the Sea, a work written by a man who was a member of the resistance from the very beginning and whose aim is perfectly evident, was received with hostility in the e? migre? circles of New York, London, and sometimes even Algiers, and they even went so far as to tax its author
with collaboration. The reason is that Vercors did not aim at that public. In the occupied zone, on the other hand, no- body doubted the author's intentions or the efficacy of his writing; he was writing for us. As a matter of fact, I do not think that one can defend Vercors by saying that his German
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is real or that his old Frenchman and French girl are real. Koesder has written some very fine pages about this question; the silence of the two French characters has no psychological verisimilitude; it even has a slight taste of anachronism; it recalls the stubborn muteness of Maupas- sant's patriotic peasants during another occupation, an other occupation with other hopes, other anguish, and other customs. As to the German officer, his portrait does not lack life, but, as is self-evident, Vercors, who at the time refused to have any contact with the occupying army, did it *without a model', by combining the probable elements of his character. Thus, it is not in the name of truth that these images should be preferred to those which Anglo-Saxon propaganda was shaping each day. But for a Frenchman of continental France, Vercors' story, in 1941, was effective. When the enemy is separated from you by a barrier of fire, you have to judge him as a whole, as the incarnation of evil; all war is a form of Manichaeism. It is therefore understandable that the English newspapers did not waste their time distinguishing the wheat from the chaff in the German army.
But, conversely, the conquered and occupied populations, who mingled with their conquer- ors, re-learned by familiarization and the effects of clever propaganda to consider them as men. Good men and bad men; good and bad at the same time. A work which in '41 would have presented the German soldiers to them as ogres would have made them laugh and would have failed in its purpose.
As early as the end of '42 The Silence of the Sea had lost its effectiveness; the reason is that the war was starting again on our soil. On one side, underground propaganda, sabo- tage, derailment of trains, and acts of violence; and on the other, curfew, deportations, imprisonment, torture, and execution of hostages. An invisible barrier of fire once again separated Germans and Frenchmen. We no longer wished to know whether the Germans who plucked out the eyes and ripped off the nails of our friends were accomplices or victims of Nazism; it was no longer enough to maintain a
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lofty silence before them; besides, they would not have tolerated it. At this point in the war it was necessary to be either for them or against them. In the midst of bombard- ments and massacres, of burned villages and deportations, Vercors' story seemed like an idyll; it had lost its public. Its public was the man of '41 humiliated by defeat but astonished at the studied courtesy of the occupiers, desiring peace, terrified by the spectre of Bolshevism and misled by the speeches of Pe? tain. It would have been fruitless to present the Germans to this man as bloodthirsty brutes. On the contrary, you had to admit to him that they might be polite and even likeable, and since he had discovered with surprise that most of them were 'men like us/ he had to be re-shown that even if such were the case, fraternizing was impossible, that the more likeable they seemed, the more unhappy and impotent they were, and that it was necessary to fight against a re? gime and an ideology even if the men who brought it to us did not seem bad. And, in short, as one was addressing a passive crowd, as there were still rather few important organizations, and as these showed themselves to be highly cautious in their recruiting, the only form of opposition that could be required of the population was silence, scorn, and an obedience which was forced and which showed it.
Thus, Vercors' story defined its public; by defining it, it defined itself. It wanted to combat within the mind of the French bourgeoisie of 1941 the effects of Pe? tain's interview with Hitler at Montoire. A year and a half after the defeat it was alive, virulent, and effective. In a half-century it will no longer excite anyone. An ill-informed public will still read it as an agreeable and somewhat languid tale about the war of 1939. It seems that bananas have a better taste when they have just been picked. Works of the mind should like- wise be eaten on the spot.
One might be tempted to accuse any attempt to explain a work of the mind by the public to which it is addressed for its vain subtlety and its indirect character. Is it not more simple, direct, and rigorous to take the condition of the author himself as the determining factor? Shouldn't one be
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satisfied with Taine's notion of the 'milieu? I answer that the explanation by the milieu is, in effect, determinative: the milieu produces the writer; that is why I do not believe in it. On the contrary, the public calls to him, that is, it puts questions to his freedom. The milieu is a vis a tergo; the public, on the contrary, is a waiting, an emptiness to be filled in,anaspiration,figurativelyandliterally. Inaword,itis the other. And I am so far from rejecting the explanation of the work by the situation of the man that I have always con- sidered the project of writing as the free exceeding of a certain human and total situation. In which, moreover, it is not different from other undertakings. Etiemble in a witty but superficial article writes,9 'I was going to revise my little dictionary when chance put three lines of Jean-Paul Sartre right under my nose: "In effect, for us the writer is neither a Vestal nor an Ariel. Do what he may, he's in the thick of it, marked and compromised down to his deepest refuge. " To be in the thick of it, up to the ears. I recognized,
in a way, the words of Blaise Pascal: "We are embarked. " But at once I saw commitment lose all its value, reduced sud- denly to the most ordinary of facts, the fact of the prince and the slave, to the human condition/
That's what I said all right. But E? tiemble is being silly. If every man is embarked, that does not at all mean that he is fully conscious of it. Most men pass their time in hiding their commitment from themselves. That does not neces- sarily mean that they attempt evasions by lying, by artificial paradises, or by a life of make-believe. It is enough for them to dim their lanterns, to see the foreground without the background and, vice versa, to see the ends while passing over the means in silence, to refuse solidarity with their kind, to take refuge in the spirit of pompousness, to remove all value from life by considering it from the point of view of someone who is dead, and at the same time, all horror from death byfleeingfrom it in the commonplaceness of everyday existence, to persuade themselves, if they belong to an oppressing class, that they are escaping their class by the loftiness of their feelings, and, if they belong to the
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oppressed, to conceal from themselves their complicity with oppression by asserting that one can remain free while in chains if one has a taste for the inner life. Writers can have recourse to all this just like anyone else. There are some, and they are the majority, who furnish a whole
arsenal of tricks to the reader who wants to go on sleeping quietly.
I shall say that a writer is committed when he tries to achieve the most lucid and the most complete conscious- ness of being embarked, that is, when he causes the com- mitment of immediate spontaneity to advance, for himself and others, to the reflective. The writer is, par excellence, a mediator and his commitment is to mediation. But, if it is true that we must account for his work on the basis of his condition, it must also be borne in mind that his condition
is not only that of a man in general but precisely that of a writer as well. Perhaps he is a Jew, and a Czech, and of peasant family, but he is a Jewish writer, a Czech writer and of rural stock. When, in another article, I tried to define the situation of the Jew, the best I could do was this: 'The Jew is a man whom other men consider as a Jew and who is obliged to choose himself on the basis of the situation which is made for him/ For there are qualities which come to us solely by means of the judgement of others. In the case of the writer, the case is more complex, for no one is obliged to choose himself as a writer. Hence, freedom is at the origin. I am an author, first of all, by my free intention to write. But at once it follows that I become a man whom other men consider as a writer, that is, who has to respond to a certain demand and who has been invested, whether he likes it or not, with a certain social function. Whatever game he may want to play, he must play it on the basis of the representation which others have of him. He may want to modify the character that one attributes to the man of letters in a given society; but in order to change it, he must first slip into it. Hence, the public intervenes, with its customs, its vision of the world, and its conception of society and of literature within that society. It surrounds the
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writer, it hems him in, and its imperious or sly demands, its refusals and its flights, are the given facts on whose basis a work can be constructed.
Let us take the case of the great negro writer, Richard Wright. If we consider only his condition as a many that is, as a Southern 'nigger' transported to the North, we shall
at once imagine that he can only write about Negroes or Whites seen through the eyes of Negroes. Can one imagine for a moment that he would agree to pass his life in the contem- plation of the eternal True, Good, and Beautiful when ninety per cent, of the negroes in the South are practically deprived
of the right to vote? And if anyone speaks here about the treason of the clerks, I answer that there are no clerks among the oppressed. Clerks are necessarily the parasites of op- pressing classes or races. Thus, if an American negro finds that he has a vocation as a writer, he discovers his subject at the same time. He is the man who sees the whites from the outside, who assimilates the white culture from the outside, and each of whose books will show the alienation of the black race within American society. Not objectively, like the realists, but passionately, and in a way that will com- promise his reader. But this examination leaves the nature
of his work undetermined; he might be a pamphleteer, a blues-writer, or the Jeremiah of the Southern negroes.
If we want to go further, we must consider his public. To whom does Richard Wright address himself? Certainly not to the universal man. The essential characteristic of the notion of the universal man is that he is not involved in any particular age, and that he is no more and no less moved by the lot of the negroes of Louisiana than by that of the Roman slaves in the time of Spartacus. The universal man can think of nothing but universal values. He is a pure and abstract affirmation of the inalienable right of man. But neither can Wright think of intending his books for the white racialists of Virginia or South Carolina whose minds are made up in advance and who will not open them. Nor to the black peasants of the bayous who cannot read. And if he seems to be happy about the reception his books have
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had in Europe, still it is obvious that at the beginning he had not the slightest idea of writing for the European public. Europe is far away. Its indignation is ineffectual and hypo- critical. Not much is to be expected from the nations which have enslaved the Indies, Indo-China, and negro Africa. These considerations are enough to define his readers. He is addressing himself to the cultivated negroes of the North and the white Americans of goodwill (intellectuals, demo- crats of the left, radicals, CI. O. workers).
It is not that he is not aiming through them at all men but it is through them that he is thus aiming. Just as one can catch a glimpse of eternal freedom at the horizon of the historical and concrete freedom which it pursues, so the human race is at the horizon of the concrete and historical group of its readers. The illiterate negro peasants and the Southern planters represent a margin of abstract possi- bilities around its real public. After all, an illiterate may learn to read. Black Boy may fall into the hands of the most stubborn of negrophobes and may open his eyes. This merely means that every human project exceeds its actual limits and extends itself step by step to the infinite.
Now, it is to be noted that there is a fracture at the very heart of this actualpublic. For Wright, the negro readers represent the subjective. The same childhood, the same difficulties, the same complexes: a mere hint is enough for them; they understand with their hearts. In trying to become clear about his own personal situation, he clarifies theirs for them. He mediates, names, and shows them the life they lead from day to day in its immediacy, the life they suffer without finding words to formulate their sufferings. He is their conscience, and the movement by which he raises him- self from the immediate to the reflective recapturing of his condition is that of his whole race. But whatever the good- will of the white readers may be, for a negro author they represent the Other. They have not lived through what he has lived through. They can understand the negro's condi- tion only by an extreme stretch of the imagination and by relying upon analogies which at any moment may deceive
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them. On the other hand, Wright does not completely know them. It is only from without that he conceives their proud security and that tranquil certainty, common to all white Aryans, that the world is white and that they own it. The words he puts down on paper have not the same context for whites as for negroes. They must be chosen by guess- work, since he does not know what resonances they will set up in those strange minds. And when he speaks to them, their very aim is changed. It is a matter of implicating them and making them take stock of their responsibilities. He must make them indignant and ashamed.
Thus, each of Wright's works contains what Baudelaire would have called 'a double simultaneous postulation"; each word refers to two contexts; two forces are applied simul- taneously to each phrase and determine the incomparable tension of his tale. Had he spoken to the whites alone, he might have turned out to be more prolix, more didactic, and more abusive; to the negroes alone, still more elliptical, more of a confederate, and more elegiac. In the first case, his work might have come close to satire; in the second, to prophetic lamentations. Jeremiah spoke only to the Jews. But Wright, a writer for a split public, has been able both to maintain and go beyond this split. He has made it the pretext for a work of art.
The writer consumes and does not produce, even if he
has decided to serve the community's interests with his pen.
His works remain gratuitous; thus no price can be set on their value. Their market value is fixed arbitrarily. In some periods he is pensioned and in others he gets a percentage
of the sales of the book. But there is no more common measure between the work of the mind and percentage remuneration in modern society than there was between the poem and the royal pension under the old re? gime. Actually,
the writer is not paid; he is fed, well or badly, according to
the period. The system cannot work any differendy, for his activity is useless. It is not at all useful; it is sometimes harmful for society to become self-conscious. For the fact is that the useful is defined within the framework of an established
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society and in relationship to institutions, values, and ends which are already fixed. If society sees itself and, in particu- lar, sees itself as seen, there is, by virtue of this very fact, a contesting of the established values of the re? gime. The writer presents it with its image; he calls upon it to assume it or to change itself. At any rate, it changes; it loses the equilibrium which its ignorance had given it; it wavers
between shame and cynicism; it practises dishonesty; thus, the writer gives society a guilty conscience; he is thereby in a state of perpetual antagonism towards the conservative forces which are maintaining the balance he tends to upset. For the transition to the mediate which can be brought about only by a negation of the immediate is a perpetual revolution.
Only the governing classes can allow themselves the luxury of remunerating so unproductive and dangerous an activity, and if they do so, it is a matter both of tactics and of misapprehension. Misapprehension for the most part: free from material cares, the members of the governing e? lite are sufficiently detached to want to have a reflective know- ledge of themselves. They want to retrieve themselves, and they charge the artist with presenting them with their image without realizing that he will then make them assume it. A tactic on the part of some who, having recognized the danger, pension the artist in order to control his destructive power. Thus, the writer is a parasite of the governing e? lite. But, functionally, he moves in opposition to the interests of those who keep him alive. 10 Such is the original conflict which defines his condition.
Sometimes the conflict is obvious. Wc? still talk about the courtiers who made the success of the Marriage of Figaro though it sounded the death-knell of the re? gime. Other times, it is masked, because to name is to show, and to show is to change. And as this challenging activity, which is harmful to the established interests, ventures, in its very modest way, to concur in a change of re? gime, as, on the other hand, the oppressed classes have neither the leisure nor the taste for reading, the objective aspect of the conflict may express itself as an antagonism between the conserva-
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tive forces, or the real public of the writer, and the pro- gressive forces, or the virtual public.
In a classless society, one whose internal structure would be permanent revolution, the writer might be a mediator/^ ally and his challenge on principle might precede or accom- pany the changes in fact. In my opinion this is the deeper meaning we should give to the notion of self-criticism. The expanding of the real public up to the limits of his virtual public would bring about within his mind a reconciliation of hostile tendencies. Literature, entirely liberated, would represent negativity in so far as it is a necessary moment in reconstruction. But to my knowledge this type of society does not for the moment exist, and it may be doubted whether it is possible. Thus, the conflict remains. It is at the origin of what I would call the writer's ups and downs and his bad conscience.
It is reduced to its simplest expression when the virtual public is practically nil and when the writer, instead of re- maining on the margin of the privileged class, is absorbed by it. In that case literature identifies itself with the ideology of the directing class; reflection takes place within the class; the challenge deals with details and is carried on in the name of uncontested principles. For example, that is what happened in Europe in about the twelfth century; the clerk wrote exclusively for clerks. But he could keep a good conscience because there was a divorce between the spiritual and the temporal. The Christian Revolution brought in the spiritual, that is, the spirit itself, as a negation, a challenge, and a transcendence, a perpetual construction, beyond the realm of Nature, of the anti-natural city of freedoms. But it was necessary that this universal power of surpassing the object be first encountered as an object, that this perpetual negation of Nature appear, in the first place, as nature, that this faculty of perpetually creating ideologies and of leaving them behind along the way be embodied, to begin with, in
a particular ideology. In the first centuries of our era the spiritual was a captive of Christianity, or, if you prefer, Christianity was the spiritual itself but alienated. It was the
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spirit made object. Hence, it is evident that instead of appear- ing as the common and forever renewed experience of all men, it manifested itself at first as the specialty of a few. Medieval society had spiritual needs, and, to serve them, it set up a body of specialists who were recruited by co-option. Today we consider reading and writing as human rights and, at the same time, as means for communicating with others which are almost as natural and spontaneous as oral language. That is why the most uncultured peasant is a potential reader. In the time of the clerks, they were tech- niques which were reserved strictly for professionals. They were not practised for their own sake, like spiritual exercises. Their aim was not to obtain access to that large and vague
humanism which was later to be called 'the humanities'. They were means solely of preserving and transmitting Christian ideology. To be able to read was to have the necessary tool for acquiring knowledge of the sacred texts and their innumerable commentaries; to be able to write was to be able to comment. Other men no more aspired to possess these professional techniques than we aspire today to acquire that of the cabinet-maker or the palaeographer if we practise other professions. The barons counted on the clerks to produce and watch over spirituality. By themselves they were incapable of exercising control over writers as the public does today, and they were unable to distinguish heresy from orthodox beliefs if they were left without help. They got excited only when the pope had recourse to the secular arm. Then they pillaged and burned everything, but only because they had confidence in the pope, and they never turned up their noses at a chance to pillage. It is true that the ideology was ultimately intended for them, for them and the people, but it was communicated to them orally by preaching, and the church very early made use of a simpler language than writing: the image. The sculpture of the cloisters and the cathedrals, the stained glass windows, the paintings, and the mosaics speak of God and the Holy Story. The clerk wrote his chronicles, his philosophical works, his commentaries, and his poems on the margin of
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this vast illustrating enterprise of faith. He intended them for his peers; they were controlled by his superiors. He did not have to be concerned with the effects which his works would produce upon the masses, since he was assured in advance that they would have no knowledge of them. Nor did he want to introduce remorse into the conscience of a feudal plunderer or caitiff; violence was unlettered. Thus, for him it was neither a question of reflecting its own image back to the temporal, nor of taking sides, nor of disengag- ing the spiritual from historical experience by a continuous effort. Quite the contrary, as the writer was of the Church, as the Church was an immense spiritual college which proved its dignity by its resistance to change, as history and the temporal were one and spirituality was radically distinct from the temporal, as the aim of his clerkship was to main- tain this distinction, that is, to maintain itself as a specialized body in the face of the century, as, in addition, the economy was so divided up and as means of communication were so few and slow that events which occurred in one province had no effect upon the neighbouring province and as a monastery could enjoy its individual peace, like the hero of the AcharnianSy while its country was at war, the writer's mission was to prove his autonomy by delivering himself to the exclusive contemplation of the Eternal. He incessandy affirmed the Eternal's existence and demonstrated it pre- cisely by the fact that his only concern was to regard it. In this sense, he realized, in effect, the ideal of Benda, but one can see under what conditions: spirituality and literature had to be alienated, a particular ideology had to triumph, a feudal pluralism had to make the isolation of the clerks possible, virtually the whole population had to be illiterate, and the only public of the writer could be the college of other writers.