No More Learning

Such optimism was at the opposite extreme of the writer's conception of his art: the artist needs an unassimilable matter because beauty is not resolved into ideas. Even if he is a prose-writer and assembles signs, his style will have neither grace nor force if it is not sensitive to the material character of the word and its irrational resistances. And if he wishes to build the universe in his work and to support it by an inexhaustible freedom, the reason is that he radically distinguishes things from thought. His freedom and the thing are homogeneous only in that both are unfathomable, and if he wishes to readapt the desert or the virgin forest to the Mind, he does so not by transforming them into ideas of desert and forest, but by having Being sparkle as Being, with its opacity and its coefficient of adversity, by the in- definite spontaneity of Existence. That is why the work of art is reducible to an idea: first, because it is a production or a reproduction of a being, that is, of something which never quite allows itself to be thought; then, because this being is totally penetrated by an existence, that is, by a freedom which decides on the very fate and value of thought. That is also
? For Whom Does One Write? \ IOJ
why the artist has always had a special understanding of Evil, which is not the temporary and remediable isolation of an idea, but the irreducibility of man and the world of Thought.
The bourgeois could be recognized by the fact that he denied the existence of social classes and particularly of the bourgeoisie. The gentleman wished to command because he belonged to a caste. The bourgeois based his power and his right to govern on the exquisite ripening which comes from the secular possession of the goods of this world. More- over, he admitted only synthetic relationships between the owner and the thing possessed; for the rest, he demonstrated by analysis that all men are alike because they are unvarying elements of social combinations and because each one of them, whatever his rank, completely possesses human nature. Hence, inequalities appeared as fortuitous and passing acci- dents which could not alter the permanent characteristics of the social atom. There was no proletariat, that is, no syn- thetic class of which each worker was a passing mode; there were only proletarians, each isolated in his human nature, who were not united by internal solidarity but only by external bonds of resemblance.
The bourgeois saw only psychological relations among the individuals whom his analytical propaganda circumvented and separated. That is understandable: as he had no direct hold on things, as his work was concerned essentially with men, it was purely a matter, for him, of pleasing and intim- idating. Ceremony, discipline, and courtesy ruled his be- haviour; he regarded his fellow-men as marionettes, and if he wished to acquire some knowledge of their emotions and character, it was because it seemed to him that each passion was a wire that could be pulled. The breviary of the am- bitious bourgeois was 'The Art of Making Good'; the breviary of the rich was 'The Art of Commanding'. Thus, the bourgeoisie considered the writer as an expert. If he started reflecting on the social order, he annoyed and fright- ened it. All it asked of him was to share his practical experi- ence of the human heart. So, as in the seventeenth century,
? io8 I What Is Literature?
literature was reduced to psychology. All the same, the psychology of Corneille, Pascal and Vauvenargues was a cathartic appeal to freedom. But the merchant distrusted the freedom of the people he dealt with and the prefect that of the sub-prefect. All they wanted was to be provided with infallible recipes for winning over and dominating. Man had to be governable as a matter of course and by modest means. In short, the laws of the heart had to be rigorous and with- out exceptions. The bourgeois bigwig no more believed in human freedom than the scientist believes in a miracle. And as his ethics were utilitarian, the chief motive of his psycho- logy was self-interest. For the writer it was no longer a matter of addressing his work as an appeal to absolute free- doms, but of exhibiting the psychological laws which
determined him to readers who were likewise determined.
Idealism, psychologism, determinism, utilitarianism, the spirit of seriousness--this was what the bourgeois writer had to reflect to his public first of all. He was no longer asked to restore the strangeness and opacity of the world, but to dissolve it into elementary subjective impressions which made it easier to digest; nor was he asked to discover the most intimate movements of his heart at the very depths of his freedom, but to bring his 'experience' face to face with that of his readers. All his works were at once inventories of bourgeois appurtenances, psychological reports of an expert which invariably tended to ground the rights of the e? lite and to show the wisdom of institutions, and handbooks of civility. The conclusions were decided in advance; the degree of depth permitted to the investigation was also established in advance; the psychological motives were selected; the very style was regulated. The public feared no surprise. It could buy with its eyes closed. But literature had been assassinated. From Emile Augier to Marcel Pre? vost and Edmond Jaloux, including Dumas fils, Pailleron, Ohnet, Bourget, and Bordeaux, authors were found to do the job and, if I may say so, to honour their signature to the very end. It is not by chance that they wrote bad books; if they had talent, they were forced to hide it.
? For Whom Does One Write? \ 109
The best refused. This refusal saved literature but fixed its traits for fifty years. Indeed, from 1848 on, and until the war of 1914, the radical unification of his public led the author to write on principle against all his readers. However, he sold his productions, but he despised those who bought them and forced himself to disappoint their wishes. It was taken for granted that it was better to be unknown than famous, that success--if the writer ever got it in his lifetime--was to be explained by a misunderstanding. And if, by chance, the book one published did not offend sufficiently, one added an insulting preface. This fundamental conflict between the writer and his public was an unprecedented phenomenon in literary history. In the seventeenth century the harmony between the man of letters and his readers was perfect; in the eighteenth century the author had two equally real publics at his disposal and could rely upon one or the other as he pleased. In its early stages, romanticism had been a vain attempt to avoid open conflict by restoring this duality and by depending upon the aristocracy against the liberal bour- geoisie. But after 1850 there was no longer any means of covering up the profound contradiction which opposed bourgeois ideology to the requirements of literature. About the same time a virtual public was beginning to take form in the deeper layers of society; it was already waiting to be revealed to itself because the cause of free and compulsory education had made some progress. The Third Republic was soon to sanction the right of all men to read and write. What was the writer going to do? Would he choose the masses against the Hits, and would he attempt to re-create for his own profit the duality of publics?
At first sight, it seemed so. By means of the great move- ment of ideas which from 1830 to 1848 were brewing in the marginal zones of the bourgeoisie, certain writers had the revelation of their virtual public. They adorned this public, under the name of 'The People', with mystic graces. It would be the instrument of salvation. But, as much as they loved it, they hardly knew it and above all they did not come from it. Sand was Baronne Dudevant; Hugo, the son
? no I What Is Literature?
of a general of the Empire; even Michelet, the son of a printer, was still far removed from the silk-weavers of Lyons or the textile-weavers of Lille. Their socialism--when they were socialists--was a by-product of bourgeois idealism. And then the people were much more the subject of certain of their works than their chosen public. Hugo, to be sure, had the rare fortune of penetrating everywhere. He was one of the few--perhaps the only one--of our writers who was really popular. But the others had incurred the hostility of the bourgeoisie without creating a working-class public in compensation. To convince oneself of this fact all one need do is compare the importance which the bourgeois Univer- sity accorded to Michelet, an authentic genius and a first-rate prose-writer, and to Taine, who was only a cheap pedant, or to Renan, whose 'fine style' offers all the examples one could want of meanness and ugliness. This purgatory in which the bourgeois class let Michelet vegetate was without compensation; the people' that he loved read him for a while, and then the success of Marxism pushed him into oblivion. In short, most of these authors were the losers in a revolution that didn't come off. They attached their name and their destiny to it. None of them, except Hugo, really left their mark on literature.
The others, all the others, backed away from the per- spective of an unclassing from below which would have made them sink straight down as if a stone had been tied round their necks. They had no lack of excuses: the time wasn't ripe, there was no real bond which attached them to the proletariat, that oppressed class couldn't absorb their work, it didn't know how much it needed them; their decision to defend it had remained abstract; whatever their sincerity might have been, they had 'brooded' over miseries which they had understood with their heads without feeling them in their hearts. Fallen from their class of origin, haunted by the memory of an affluence which they should have refused to accept, they ran the risk of forming "a white-collar proletariat' on the margin of the real proletariat, suspect to the workers and spurned by the bourgeois, whose
? For Whom Does One Write? \ in
demands had been dictated by bitterness and resentment rather than large-mindedness and who had ended by turning against both groups.
Besides, in the eighteenth century, the necessary liberties required by literature were not distinguished from the political liberties which the citizen wanted to win; all that was necessary for the writer to become a revolutionary was to explore the arbitrary essence of his art and to make him- self the interpreter of its formal demands; when the revo- lution which was in the making was bourgeois, literature was naturally revolutionary because the first discovery which it made of itself revealed to it its connections with political democracy. But the formal liberties which the essayist, the novelist, and the poet were to defend had nothing in com- mon with the deeper needs of the proletariat. The latter was not dreaming of demanding political freedom, which, after all, it did enjoy, and which was only a mystification. 13 As for freedom of thought, for the time being the proletariat was not concerned with it. What it asked for was quite different from these abstract liberties. It wanted material improve- ment of its lot, and more deeply, and more obscurely too, the end of man's exploitation by man. We shall see later that these demands were of the same kind made by the art of writing conceived as a concrete and historical phenomenon; that is, as the particular and timely appeal which, by agree- ing to historicize himself, a man launches in regard to all mankind to the men of his time.
But in the nineteenth century literature had just dis- engaged itself from religious ideology and refused to serve bourgeois ideology. Thus, it set itself up as being, in prin- ciple, independent of any sort of ideology. As a result, it retained its abstract aspect of pure negativity. It had not yet understood that it was itself ideology; it wore itself out asserting its autonomy, which no one contested. This amounted to saying that it claimed it had no privileged sub- ject and could treat any matter whatever. There was no doubt about the fact that one might write felicitously about the condition of the working class; but the choice of this
? ii2 I What Is Literature?
subject depended upon circumstances, upon a free decision of the artist. One day one might talk about a provincial bourgeoise, another day, about Carthaginian mercenaries. From time to time, a Flaubert would affirm the identity of form and content, but he drew no practical conclusion from it. Like all his contemporaries, he drew his definition of beauty from what the Winckelmanns and Lessings had said almost a hundred years earlier and which in one way or other boiled down to presenting it as multiplicity in unity. It was a matter of capturing the iridescence of the various and imposing a strict unity upon it by means of style. The 'artistic style' of the Goncourts had no other meaning. It was a formal method of unifying and embellishing any materials, even the most beautiful. How could anyone have then conceived that there might be an internal relationship between the demands of the lower classes and the principles of the art of writing? Proudhon seems to have been the only one to have surmised it. And of course Marx. But they were not men of letters. Literature, still completely absorbed by the discovery of its autonomy, was to itself its own subject. It had passed to the reflective period; it tried out its methods, broke its former moulds, and tried to determine experiment- ally its own laws and to forge new techniques. It advanced step by step towards the current forms of the drama and the novel, free verse, and the criticism of language. Had it dis- covered a specific content, it would have had to tear itself away from its meditation on itself and derive its aesthetic rules from the nature of this content.
At the same time, by choosing to write for a virtual public, authors would have had to adapt their art to the capacities of the readers, which would have amounted to determining it according to external demands and not according to its own essence. It would have had to give up some of the exquisite forms of narrative, poetry, and even reasoning, for the sole reason that they would be inaccessible to readers without culture. It seemed, therefore, that liter- ature would be running the risk of relapsing into alienation. Hence, the writer, in all honesty, refused to enslave literature
? For Whom Does One Write? \ 113
to a public and a determined subject. But he did not perceive the divorce which was taking place between the concrete revolution trying to be born and the abstract games he was indulging in. This time it was the masses who wanted power, and as the masses had no culture or leisure, any would-be literary revolution, by refining its technique, put the works it inspired out of their range and served the interests of social conservatism.
Thus, he had to revert to the bourgeois public. The writer tried hard to break all relations with it, but by re- fusing to be unclassed from below, his break was con- demned to remain symbolic; he played at it tirelessly; he showed it by his clothes, his food, the way he furnished his home, and the manners he adopted, but he did not do it. It was the bourgeoisie which read him. It was the bourgeoisie alone which maintained him and decided his fame. In vain did he pretend that he was getting perspective in order to consider it as a whole. Had he wanted to judge it, he would first have had to leave it, and there was no other way to leave it than by trying out the interests and way of life of another class. Since he did not bring himself to do this, he lived in a state of contradiction and dishonesty since he both knew and did not want to know for whom he was writing, He was fond of speaking of his solitude, and rather than assume responsibility for the public which he had slyly chosen, he concocted the notion that one writes for oneself alone or for God. He made of writing a metaphysical occu- pation, a prayer, an examination of conscience, everything but a communication. He frequently likened himself to one possessed, because, if he spewed up words under the sway of an inner necessity, at least he was not giving them. But that did not keep him from carefully polishing his writings. And moreover, he was so far from wishing harm to the bourgeoisie that he did not even dispute its right to govern.
Quite the contrary. Flaubert recognized its right and mentioned it by name, and his correspondence after the Commune, which frightened him so, abounds in disgrace- ful abuse of the workers. 14 And, as the artist, submerged in
? ii4 I What Is Literature?
his milieu, was unable to judge it from without, as his rejections were ineffectual states of mind, he did not even notice that the bourgeoisie was an oppressing class; in fact, he did not at all consider it as a class, but rather as a natural species, and if he ventured to describe it, he did so in strictly psychological terms.
Thus the bourgeois writer and the 'damned* {maudit) writer moved on the same level; their only difference was that the first practised white psychology and the second, black psychology. For example, when Flaubert declared that he called 'anyone who thought basely bourgeois', he was defining the bourgeois in psychological and idealistic terms, that is, in the perspective of the ideology which he pretended to reject. As a result, he rendered a signal service to the bourgeoisie. He led back to the fold the rebellious and the maladjusted, who might have gone over to the proletariat, by convincing them that one could cast off the bourgeois in oneself by a simple inner discipline. All they had to do was to practise high thinking in private and they could continue to enjoy their goods and prerogatives with a peaceful conscience. They could still live in bourgeois fashion, and enjoy their incomes in bourgeois fashion, and frequent bourgeois drawing-rooms, but that would all be nothing but appearance. They had raised themselves above their kind by the nobility of their feelings. By the same token he taught his confre`res the trick which could allow them, at any rate, to maintain a good conscience; for magnanimity finds its most fitting practice in the practice of the arts.
The solitude of the artist was doubly a fake: it covered up not only a real relationship with the great public but also the restoration of an audience of specialists. Since the government of men and goods was abandoned to the bourgeoisie, the spiritual was once again separated from the temporal. A sort of priesthood once again sprang up. StendhaPs public was Balzac, Baudelaire's was Barbey d'Aurevilly; and Baudelaire, in turn, made himself the public of Poe. These literary salons took on a vague collegiate atmosphere; one 'talked literature' in a hushed voice, with
? For Whom Does One Write? \ 115
an infinite respect; one debated whether the musician derived more aesthetic joy from his music than the writer from his books. Art again became sacred to the extent that it turned aside from life. It even set up for itself a sort of communion of saints; one joined hands across the centuries with Cervantes, Rabelais, and Dante. One identified oneself with this monastic society. The priesthood, instead of being a concrete and, so to speak, geographical organism, became a hereditary institution, a club, all of whose members were dead except one, the last in point of time, who represented the others upon earth and who epitomized the whole college.
These new believers, who had their saints in the past, also had their future life. The divorce of the temporal and spiritual led to a deep modification of the idea of glory. From the time of Racine on, it had been not so much the revenge of the misunderstood writer as the natural pro- longation of success in an immutable society. In the nine- teenth century it functioned as a mechanism of over- compensation. *I shall be understood in 1880', 'I shall win my trial on appeal'; these famous words prove that the writer had not lost the desire to practise a direct and uni- versal action within the framework of an integrated col- lectivity. But as this action was not possible in the present, one projected into an indefinite future the compensatory myth of a reconciliation between the writer and his public. Moreover, all this remained quite vague; none of these lovers of glory asked himself in what sort of society he would be able to find his recompense. They merely took pleasure in dreaming that their grandnephews would profit from an internal betterment for having come at a later time
into an older world. That was the way Baudelaire, who didn't worry about contradictions, often dressed his wounded pride, by considering his posthumous renown, although he held that society had entered a period of deca- dence which would end only with the disappearance of the human race.
Thus, for the present, the writer relied on an audience of
? u6 I What Is Literature?
specialists; as for the past, he concluded a mystic pact with the great dead; as to the future, he made use of the myth of glory. He neglected nothing in wrenching himself free from his class. He was up in the air, a stranger to his century, out of his element, damned. All this play-acting had but one goal: to integrate the writer into a symbolic society which would be like an image of the aristocracy of the old re? gime. Psycho-analysis is familiar with these processes of identifi- cation of which artistic thinking offers numerous examples: the sick person who needs the key of the asylum in order to escape and finally comes to believe that he himself is the key. Thus, the writer, who needed the favour of the great to unclass himself, ended by taking himself for the incarnation of the whole nobility, and as the latter was characterized by its parasitism it was the ostentation of parasitism which he chose for his style of living. He made himself the martyr of pure consumption. As we have pointed out, he saw no objection to using the goods of the bourgeoisie, but on condition that he was to spend them, that is, transform them into unproductive and useless objects. He burned them, so to speak, because fire purifies everything. More- over, as he was not always rich, and as he had to live well, he composed a strange life for himself, both extravagant and needy, in which a calculated improvidence symbolized the mad liberality which was denied him. Outside of art, he found nobility in only three kinds of occupation. First, in love, because it is a useless passion and because women, as Nietzsche said, are the most dangerous game. Also in travel, because the traveller is a perpetual witness who
passes from one society to another without ever remaining in any and because, as a foreign consumer in an industrious collectivity, he is the very image of parasitism. Sometimes, in war too, because it is an immense consumption of men and goods.
The contempt with which trade was regarded in aris- tocratic and warlike societies was again met with in the writer. He was not satisfied with being useless, like the courtiers of the Old Re? gime; he wanted to be able to trample
? For Whom Does One Write? \ ny
on utilitarian work, to smash it, burn it, damage it; he wanted to imitate the unconstraint of the lords whose hunting parties rode across the ripe wheat. He cultivated in himself those destructive impulses of which Baudelaire has spoken in The Glass-maker. A little later he was to have a particular liking for instruments which were defective, worthless or no longer in use, half retrieved by nature, and which were like caricatures of instruments. It was not a rare thing for him to consider his own life as a tool to be destroyed. In any event, he risked it and played to lose: alcohol, drugs, everything served his purpose. The height of uselessness, of course, was beauty. From 'art for art's sake' to symbolism, including realism and the Parnassians, all schools agreed that art was the highest form of pure con- sumption. It taught nothing, it reflected no ideology, and above all, it refrained from morali2ing. Long before Gide wrote it, Flaubert, Gautier, the Goncourts, Renard, and Maupassant had in their own way said that 'it is with good sentiments that one produces bad literature*.
For some, literature was subjectivity carried to the abso- lute, a bonfire in which the black vines of their sufferings and vices writhed and twisted. Lying at the bottom of a world as in a dungeon, they passed beyond it and dispelled
it by their dissatisfaction, which revealed other worlds to them. It seemed to them that their heart was different enough so that the picture of it which they drew might be resolutely barren. Others set themselves up as the impartial witnesses of their age, but nobody noticed that they were testifying. They raised testimony and witness to the absolute; they offered to the empty sky the tableau of the society about them. Circumvented, transposed, unified, and caught in the trap of an artistic style, the events of the universe were neutralked and, so to speak, put in parentheses; realism was an epoche^. Here impossible truth joined hands with inhu- man Beauty 'beautiful as a marble dream'.
Neither the author, in so far as he wrote, nor the reader, in so far as he read, belonged to this world any longer: they were trans- formed into pure beholding; they considered man from
? n8 I What Is Literature?
without; they strove to see him from the point of view of God, or, if you like, of the absolute void. But after all, I can still recognize myself in the purest lyricist's description of his particularities. And if the experimental novel imitated science, was it not utilizable as science was? Could it not likewise have its social applications?
The extremists wished, for fear of being serviceable, that their works should not even enlighten the reader about his own heart; they refused to transmit their experience. In the last analysis the work would be entirely gratuitous only if it were entirely inhuman. The logical conclusion of all this was the hope of an absolute creation, a quintessence of luxury and prodigality, not utilizable in this world because
it was not of the world and because it recalled nothing in it. Imagination was conceived as an unconditioned faculty of denying the real and the objet d9art was set up on the collaps- ing of the universe. There was the heightened artificiality of Des Esseintes, the systematic deranging of all the senses, and finally the concerted destruction of language. There was also silence: that icy silence, the work of Mallarme? --or the silence of M. Teste for whom all communication was impure.
The extreme point of this brilliant and mortal literature was nothingness. Its extreme point and its deeper essence. There was nothing positive in the new spirituality. It was a pure and simple negation of the temporal. In the Middle Ages it was the temporal which was the Inessential in relation to spirituality; in the nineteenth century the opposite occurred: the Temporal was primary and the spiritual was the inessential parasite which gnawed away at it and tried to destroy it. It was a question of denying the world or con- suming it. Of denying it by consuming it. Flaubert wrote to disentangle himself from men and things. His sentence surrounds the object, seizes it, immobilizes it and breaks its back, changes into stone and petrifies the object as well. It is blind and deaf, without arteries; not a breath of life. A deep silence separates it from the sentence which follows; it falls into the void, eternally, and drags its prey along in
? For Whom Does One Write? \ 119
this infinite fall. Once described, any reality is stricken from the inventory; one moves on to the next. Realism was nothing else but this great gloomy chase. It was a matter of setting one's mind at rest before anything else. Wherever one went, the grass stopped growing. The determinism of the naturalistic novel crushed out life and replaced human actions by one-way mechanisms. It had virtually but one subject: the slow disintegration of a man, an enterprise, a family, or a society. It was necessary to return to zero. One took nature in a state of productive disequilibrium and one wiped out this disequilibrium; one returned to an equilibrium of death by annulling the forces with which one was confronted. When, by chance, he shows us the success of an ambitious man, it is only in appearance; Bel Ami does not take the strongholds of the bourgeoisie by assault; he is a gauge whose rise merely testifies to the collapse of a society. And when symbolism discovered the close relation- ship between beauty and death, it was merely making explicit the theme of the whole literature of a half century. The beauty of the past, because it is gone; the beauty of
young people dying and of flowers which fade; the beauty of all erosions and all ruins; the supreme dignity of con- sumption, of the disease which consumes, of the love which devours, of the art which kills; death is everywhere, before us, behind us, even in the sun and the perfumes of the earth. The art of Barre? s is a meditation on death: a thing is beautiful only when it is 'consumable', that is, it dies when one has enjoyed it.
The temporal structure which was particularly appro- priate for those princely games was the moment. Because it passes and because in itself it is the image of eternity, it is the negation of human time, that three-dimensional time of work and history. A great deal of time is needed to build; a moment is enough to hurl everything to the ground. When one considers the work of Gide in this perspective, one cannot help seeing in it an ethic strictly reserved for the writer-consumer. What is his gratuitous act if not the culmination of a century of bourgeois comedy and the
? i20 I What Is Literature?
imperative of the author-gentleman: Philocte`te gives away his bow, the millionaire squanders his banknotes, Bernard steals, Lafcadio kills and Me? nalque sells his belongings.
This destructive movement was to go to its logical con- sequence: 'The simplest surrealist act', Breton was to write twenty years later, 'consists of going down into the street, revolver in hand, and firing into the crowd at random as long as you can/ It was the last stage of a long dialectical process. In the eighteenth century literature had been a negativity; in the reign of the bourgeoisie it passed on to a state of absolute and hypostasized Negation. It became a multicoloured and glittering process of annihilation. 'Sur- realism is not interested in paying much attention . . . to anything whose end is not the annihilation of being and its transformation into an internal and blind brilliance which is no more the soul of ice than it is of fire/ writes Breton once again. In the end there is nothing left for literature to do but to challenge itself. That is what it did in the name of surrealism. For seventy years writers had been working to consume the world; after 1918 one wrote in order to consume literature: one squandered literary traditions, hashed together words, threw them against each other to
make them shatter. Literature as Negation became Anti- literature; never had it been more literary: the circle was completed.
During the same time, the writer, in order to imitate the lighthearted squandering of an aristocracy of birth, had no greater concern than that of establishing his irresponsibility. He began by setting up the rights of genius which replaced the divine right of the authoritarian monarchy. Since Beauty was luxury carried to the extreme, since it was a pyre with cold flames which lit up and consumed everything, since it was fed by all forms of deterioration and destruction, in particular suffering and death, the artist, who was its priest, had the right to demand in its name and to provoke, if need be, the unhappiness of those close to him. As for him, he had been burning for a long time; he was in ashes; other
victims were needed to feed theflames. Women in particular:
? For Whom Does One Write? \ 121
they would make him suffer and he would pay them back with interest. He wanted to be able to bring bad luck to everyone around him. And if there were no means of set- ting off catastrophes, he would accept offerings. Admirers, male and female, were there so that he might set fire to their hearts or spend their money without gratitude or remorse. Maurice Sachs reports that his maternal grandfather, who had a fanatical admiration for Anatole France, spent a fortune furnishing the Villa Said. When he died, Anatole France uttered this funeral eulogy: "Too bad! He was de? corative/ By taking money from the bourgeois, the writer was practising his priesthood, since he was diverting a part of their wealth in order to send it up in smoke. And by the same token he placed himself above all responsibilities: whom could he be responsible to? And in the name of what? If his work aimed at constructing, he could be asked to give an account. But since it declared itself to be pure destruction, it escaped judgement.
At the end of the century all this remained somewhat confused and contradictory. But when literature, with sur- realism, made itself a provocation to murder, one saw the writer, by a paradoxical but logical sequence, explicitly setting up the principle of his total irresponsibility. To tell the truth, he did not make his reasons clear; he took refuge in the bushes of automatic writing. But the motives are evident: a parasitic aristocracy of pure consumption, whose function was to keep burning the goods of an industrious and productive society, could not come under the jurisdic- tion of the collectivity he was destroying. And as this systematic destruction never went any further than scandal, this amounted in the last analysis to saying that the primary duty of the writer was to provoke scandal and that his inalienable right was to escape its consequences.
The bourgeoisie let him carry on; it smiled at these pranks. What did it matter if the writer scorned it? This scorn wouldn't lead to anything since the bourgeoisie was his only public. It was the only one to whom he spoke about it; it was a secret between them; in a way, it was the bond which
? 122 I What Is Literature?
united them. And even if he won the popular audience, what likelihood was there of stirring up the discontent of the masses by showing that bourgeois thinking was con- temptible? There was not the slightest chance that a doctrine of absolute consumption could fool the working classes. Besides, the bourgeoisie knew very well that the writer secretly took its part: he needed it for his aesthetic of opposition and resentment; it provided him with the goods he consumed; he wanted to preserve the social order so that he could feel that as a stranger there he was a permanent fixture. In short, he was a rebel, not a revolutionary.
As for rebels, they were right in the bourgeoisie's line. In a sense, the bourgeoisie even became their accomplice; it was better to keep the forces of negation within a vain aestheticism, a rebellion without effect; if they were free, they might have interested themselves on behalf of the oppressed classes. And then, bourgeois readers understood, in their way, what the writer called the gratuitousness of his work: for the latter, this was the very essence of spirituality and the heroic manifestation of his break with the temporal; for the former, a gratuitous work was fundamentally inof- fensive, an amusement. They doubtless preferred the liter- ature of Bordeaux and Bourget but they did not think it bad if there were useless books. Such books distracted the mind from serious preoccupations; they provided it with the recre- ation it needed for its general well-being. Thus, even while recognizing that the work of art could serve no purpose, the bourgeois public still found means of utilizing it.
The writer's success was built upon this misunderstand- ing; as he rejoiced in being misunderstood, it was normal for his readers to be mistaken. Since literature had become in his hands an abstract negation which fed on itself, he must have expected them to smile at his most cutting insults and say 'it's only literature'; and since it was a pure challenge to the spirit of seriousness, he must have been pleased that they refused on principle to take him seriously. Thus, they found themselves, even though it was with scandal and without quite realizing it, in the most 'nihilistic' works of the age.
? For Whom Does One Write? \ 123
The reason was that even though the writer might have put all his efforts into concealing his readers from himself, he could never completely escape their insidious influence. A shame-faced bourgeois, writing for bourgeois without admitting it to himself, he was able to launch the maddest ideas; the ideas were often only bubbles which popped up on the surface of his mind. But his technique betrayed him because he did not watch over it with the same zeal. It expressed a deeper and truer choice, an obscure metaphysic, a genuine relationship with contemporary society. Whatever the cynicism and the bitterness of the chosen subject, nineteenth-century narrative technique offered the French public a reassuring image of the bourgeoisie. Our authors, to be sure, inherited it, but they were responsible for having perfected it.
Its appearance, which dates from the end of the Middle Ages, coincided with the first reflective meditation by which the novelist became conscious of his art. At first he told his story without putting himself on the stage or meditating on his function because the subjects of his tales were almost always of folk or, at any rate, collective origin, and he limited himself to making use of them. The social character of the matter he worked with as well as the fact that it existed before he came to be concerned with it conferred upon him the ro^le of intermediary and was enough to justify him; he was the man who knew the most charming stories and who, instead of telling them orally, set them down in writing. He invented little; he gave them style; he was the historian of the imaginary. When he himself started contriv- ing the fiction which he published, he found himself. He discovered simultaneously his almost guilty solitude and unjustifiable gratuitousness, the subjectivity of literary crea- tion. In order to mask them from the eyes of others and from his own as well, in order to establish his right to tell these stories, he wanted to give his inventions the appearance of truth. Lacking the power to preserve the almost material opacity which characterized them when they emanated from the collective imagination, he pretended that
? 124 I What Is Literature?
at least they did not originate with him, and he managed to give them out as memories. To do that he had represented himself in his works by means of a narrator of oral tradition and at the same time he inserted into them a fictitious audience which represented his real public, such as the characters in the Decameron whom their temporary exile puts curiously in the position of learned people and who in turn take up the ro^le of narrator, audience, and critic. Thus, after the age of objective and metaphysical realism, when the words of the tale were taken for the very things which they named and when its substance was the universe, there came that of literary idealism in which the word has existence only in someone's mouth or on someone's pen and refers back in essence to a speaker to whose presence it bears witness, where the substance of the tales is the subjectivity which perceives and thinks the universe, and where the novelist,
instead of putting the reader directly into contact with the object, has become conscious of his ro^le of mediator and embodies the mediation in a fictitious recital.
Since that time the chief characteristic of the story which one gives to the public has been that of being already thought, that is, achieved, set in order, pruned, and clarified; or rather, of yielding itself only through the thoughts which one retrospectively forms about it. That is why the tense of the novel is almost always the past, whereas that of the epic, which is of collective origin, is frequently the present.
Passing from Boccaccio to Cervantes and then to the French novels of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the proceedings grow complicated and become episodic because the novel picks up along the way and incorporates the satire, the fable, and the character sketch. 15 The novelist appears in the first chapter; he announces, he questions his readers, admonishes them, and assures them of the truth of his story. I shall call this "primary subjectivity'. Then, secondary characters intervene along the way, characters whom the narrator has met and who interrupt the course of the plot to tell the story of their own misfortunes. These are the 'secondary subjectivities' supported and restored by the
? For Whom Does One Write? \ 125
primary subjectivity. Thus, certain stories are re-thought and intellectualized to the second degree. 16 The readers never experience the direct onrush of the event; if the narrator has been surprised by it at the moment of its occurrence, he does not communicate his surprise to them; he simply informs them of it. As to the novelist, since he is convinced that the only reality of the word lies in its being said, since he lives in a polite century in which there still exists an art of conversa- tion, he introduces conversationalists into his book in order
to justify the words which are read there; but since it is by words that he represents the characters whose function is to talk, he does not escape the vicious circle. 17
Of course, the authors of the nineteenth century brought their efforts to bear on the narration of the event. They tried
to restore part of its freshness and violence, but for the most part they again took up the idealistic technique and adapted
it to their needs. Authors as dissimilar as Barbey d'Aurevilly and Fromentin make use of it constandy. In Dominique, for example, one finds a primary subjectivity which manipulates the levels of a secondary subjectivity and it is the latter which makes the tale. The procedure is nowhere more manifest than in Maupassant. The structure of his short stories is almost invariable; we are first presented with the audience, a brilliant and wordly society which has assembled
in a drawing-room after dinner. It is night-time, which dispels fatigue and passion. The oppressed are asleep, as are the rebellious; the world is enshrouded; the story unfolds.
In a bubble of light surrounded by nothing there remains this elite which stays awake, completely occupied with its ceremonies. If there are intrigues or love or hate among its members, we are not told of them, and desire and anger are likewise stilled; these men and women are occupied in preserving their culture and manners and in recognising each other by the rites of politeness. They represent order in its most exquisite form; the calm of night, the silence of
the passions, everything concurs in symbolizing the stable bourgeoisie of the end of the century which thinks that nothing more will happen and which believes in the eternity
? I2O^ I What Is Literature?
of capitalist organization. Thereupon, the narrator is intro- duced. He is a middle-aged man who has 'seen much, read much, and retained much', a professional man of experience,
a doctor, a military man, an artist, or a Don Juan. He has reached the time of life when, according to a respectful and comfortable myth, man is freed from the passions and considers with an indulgent clear sightedness those he has experienced. His heart is calm, like the night. He tells his story with detachment. If it has caused him suffering, he has made honey from this suffering. He looks back upon it and considers it as it really was, that is, sub specie aeternitatis. There was difficulty to be sure, but this difficulty ended long ago; the actors are dead or married or comforted. Thus, the adventure was a brief disturbance which is over with. It is told from the viewpoint of experience and wisdom; it is listened to from the viewpoint of order. Order triumphs; order is everywhere; it contemplates an old disorder as if the still waters of a summer day have preserved the memory of the ripples which have run through it. Moreover, had there even been this disturbance? The evocation of an abrupt change would frighten this bourgeois society. Neither the general nor the doctor confides his recollections in the raw state; they are experiences from which they have extracted the quintessence, and they warn us, from the moment they start talking, that their tale has a moral. Besides, the story
is explanatory; it aims at producing a psychological law on the basis of this example. A law, or, as Hegel says, the calm image of change. And the change itself, that is, the individual aspect of the anecdote, is it not an appearance? To the extent that one explains it, one reduces the entire effect to the entire cause, the unforeseen to the expected and the new to the old. The narrator brings the same workmanship to bear upon the human event as, according to Myerson, the nineteenth-century scientist brought to bear upon the scientific fact. He reduces the diverse to the identical. And if, from time to time, he maliciously desires to maintain a slightly disquieting tone in his story, he dispenses the irreducibility of the change most carefully, as in those
? For Whom Does One Write? \ 127
fantastic tales in which, behind the inexplicable, the author allows us to suspect a whole causal order which will restore rationality in the universe. Thus, for the novelist who is a product of this stabilked society change is a non-being, as it is for Parmenides, as Evil is for Claudel. Moreover, even should it exist, it would never be anything else but an individual calamity in a maladjusted soul.
It is not a question of studying the relative movements of partial systems within a system in motion--society, the universe--but of considering from the viewpoint of absolute rest, the absolute movement of a relatively isolated partial system. That is, one sets up absolute landmarks in order to determine it, and consequently one knows it in its absolute truth. In an ordered society which meditates upon its eter- nity and celebrates it with rites, a man evokes the phantom of a past disorder, makes it glitter, embellishes it with old-
fashioned graces, and at the moment when he is about to cause uneasiness, dispels it with a wave of his magic wand and substitutes for it the eternal hierarchy of causes and laws. In this magician who frees himself from history and life by understanding them and who is raised above his audi- ence by his knowledge and experience we recognize the lofty aristocrat whom we spoke about earlier. 18
If we have spoken at some length about Maupassant's narrative procedure it is because it constituted the basic technique for all the French novelists of his own generation, of the succeeding one, and of all the generations since. The internal narrator is always present. He may reduce himself to an abstraction; often he is not even explicitly designated; but, at any rate, it is through his subjectivity that we perceive the event. When he does not appear at all, it is not that he has been suppressed like a useless device; it is that he has become the alter ego of the author. The latter, with his blank sheet of paper in front of him, sees his imagination trans- muted into experiences. He no longer writes in his own name but at the dictation of a mature and sober man who has witnessed the circumstances which are being related.
Daudet, for example, obviously had the mind of a
? 128 I What Is Literature?
drawing-room raconteur who infuses into his style the twists and friendly casualness of worldly conversation, who exclaims, grows ironical, questions, and challenges his audience: 'Ah! how disappointed Tartarin was! And do you know why? You won't guess in a million years! ' Even realistic writers who wished to be the objective historians of their time preserved the abstract scheme of the method; that is, in all their novels there is a common milieu, a common plot, which is not the individual and historical subjectivity of the novelist but the ideal and universal one of the man of experience. First of all, the tale is laid in the past: the ceremonial past, in order to put some distance between the events and the audience; the subjective past, equivalent to the memory of the story-teller; the social past, since the plot does not belong to that history without conclusion which is in the making but to history already made.
If it is true, as Janet claims, that memory is distinguished from the somnambulistic resurrection of the past in that the latter reproduces the event, whereas the former, indefinitely compressible, can be told in a phrase or a volume, according to need, it can well be said that novels of this kind, with their abrupt contractions of time followed by long expan- sions, are precisely memories. Sometimes the novelist lingers to describe a decisive moment; at other times he leaps across several years: 'Three years flowed by, three years of gloomy suffering . . . ' He permits himself to shed light on his characters' present by means of their future: 'They did not think at the time that this brief encounter was to have fatal consequences . . . ' And from his point of view he is not wrong, since this present and future are both past, since the time of memory has lost its irreversibility and one can cross it backwards and forwards.
Besides, the memories which he gives us, already worked upon, thought over, and appraised, offer us an immediately assimilable teaching; the feelings and actions are often presented to us as typical examples of the laws of the heart: 'Daniel, like all young people . . . ', 'Eve was quite feminine
?