"The Nationalization of Literature" describes how texts become
pretexts
for judgment.
Sartre-Jean-Paul-What-is-literature¿-Introducing-Les-Temps-modernes-The-nationalization-of-literature-Black-orpheus
"What Is Literature?
"
and Other Essays JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts
? Copyright (C) 1988 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America 1098765432 1
"What Is Literature? " copyright (C) 1949 by The Philosophical Library, Inc. Originally published as "Qu'est-ce que la litte? rature? " in Situations II, copy- right (C) 1948 by Editions Gallimard; "The National- ization of Literature" and "Introducing Les Temps modernes" also originally appeared in French in Situations II. "Black Orpheus" is reprinted from The Massachusetts Review, copyright (C) 1965, The Massa- chusetts Review, Inc. Originally published as
"Orphe? e Noir" in Situations III, copyright (C) 1949 by Editions Gallimard.
This book is printed on acid-free paper, and its binding materials have been chosen for strength and durability.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sartre, Jean Paul, 1 9 0 5 -
[Essays. English. Selections]
"What is literature? " and other essays / Jean-Paul
Sartre.
p. cm.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
ISBN 0-674-95083-6 (alk. paper). ISBN 0-674-95084-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Literature--Philosophy. 2. Authorship. I. Title.
PN45. S245 1988
809--dci9 87-37931
CIP
? Contents
Introduction by Steven Ungar i
What Is Literature? 21
What Is Writing? 25
Why Write? 48
For Whom Does One Write? Situation of the Writer in 1947 Writing for One's Age 239
70 141
Introducing Les Temps modernes 247 The Nationalization of Literature 269 Black Orpheus 289
Notes 333
A Note on the Texts 349 Index 351
? Introduction
? Introduction
Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.
Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)
AWRITER as widely read as Sartre invariably suffers from a contempt bred by familiarity. Long after his death in April 1980, the reactions elicited by men- tion of his name range from adulation to dismissal, with many of the latter in the vein of what Sartre once described as the superiority of live dogs to dead lions. For a man who wanted above all to write for his time, dismissal is the harshest of condemnations: "It seems to be generally accepted that the Sartrean problematic has by now been essentially relegated to the past. Smiles are quick to surface whenever anyone is still interested in Sartre or still writes about him, as though the person were all but suspect of still being with' Sartre, of having stuck with him" (Denis Hollier, The Politics of Prose: Essay on Sartre, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986], p. 92). The quick smiles are a professional hazard, a result of the notoriety Sartre maintained by choice. His detractors--many of them the "live dogs" noted above-- would do well to note Sartre's awareness of this notoriety and the strategic uses to which he puts it.
Instead of asking ironically whether the Sartrean prob- lematic is passe? or whether Sartre has faded as a key figure of postwar modernity, I want to cast my comments around the question of what it might mean to read Sartre today. In so doing, I want to echo the heightened sense of history and circumstance Sartre confers on the acts of writing and reading throughout the four texts in the present volume, versions of which appeared in early issues of LesTemps
? 4 I Introduction
modernes, the monthly Sartre started in 1945. The following pages are intended to trace the evolving concept of litte? rature engage? e in the aftermath of World War IL* Chronology provides a context and a first order of specificity. Whenever possible, it serves to ground the issues of theory that Sartre's postwar writings on writing engage directly or by implica- tion. The secondary literature on Sartre is overwhelming and I make no claims to do more than address selected issues.
I We would be hunters of meaning, we would speak the truth about the world and about our own lives.
Sartre, "Merleau-Ponty" (i960)
March 1941: Jean-Paul Sartre returns to civilian life in Paris after eight months of captivity by the Germans. Almost immediately, he recruits students at the Lyce? e Pasteur and the Ecole Normale Supe? rieure for Socialisme et Liberte? (Socialism and Freedom), a small cell of intellec- tual re? sistants including Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques-Laurent Bost, and Jean Pouillon. The group holds grand visions. If--as Simone de Beauvoir puts it in The Prime of Life--the democracies win the war, the French left will need a new program. But if, on the other hand, the Axis nations defeat the Allies, it will be necessary to see that Germany loses the peace. Party politics intervene when the Communists, fearful of a potential rival in Sartre, spread rumors that he is a German agent. After a
* I have retained the original French in place of the expression "engaged literature" used by Bernard Frechtman. My alternative translation is "committed writing. " This for two reasons: First, the transitive usage of the verb "commit" denotes the conscious assertion of value that the concept
is intended to convey. Second, "writing" rather than "literature" because the program set forth in "What Is Literature? " involves practices and media--journalism, radio, film--beyond traditional conceptions. On the notion of commitment and/or engagement, see David L. Schalk, The Spectrum ofPolitical Engagement: Mounter, Benda, Nizan, Brasillach, Sartre (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979) and my discussion below of Theodor Adorno, "Commitment," New Left Review 87-88 (1974).
? Introduction \ 5
number of friends and contacts are arrested, Sartre feels personally responsible and disbands the group in October
1941.
Socialisme et Liberte? allows Sartre to draft a constitution
of some 120 articles mixing economics with a Utopian vision freely adapted from the writings of Marx and Proudhon. Although none of the ten reputed copies of the constitution survives the war, accounts by group members suggest that it addresses concerns ranging from parliamentary represen- tation to military service and the division between judicial and executive branches of government. The lost constitu- tion provides evidence that Sartre's vision of a non- authoritarian socialism precedes the postwar period. It supports Fredric Jameson's view that Marxism coexists with Sartre's existentialsm; it is not something he comes to afterward {Marxism and Form [Princeton: Princeton Univer- sity Press, 1971], p. 207). Three years after Nausea, Sartre's early attempts to lay bare the structures of conscious- ness articulate with issues of collective action and social change.
In the wake of Socialisme et Liberte? , Sartre's wartime activities are increasingly devoted to writing. When Being and Nothingness appears in 1943, he is writing for the theater and working with the Comite? National des Ecrivains (National Committee of Writers), an underground group founded with the help of Communists who have either forgotten or repressed their accusations of two years earlier. By September 1944, a n editorial committee of Raymond Aron, Michel Leiris, Albert Ollivier, and Jean Paulhan is created around the nucleus of Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Merleau-Ponty. Albert Camus and Andre? Malraux--major figures of the Resistance underground--are invited to join, but turn down the invitation. *
* The 1987 Klaus Barbie trial is a reminder that full disclosure of the Occupation has yet to occur. Survivors of the period remain the objects of allegation and rumor. For a sense of the issues involved in such disclosure,
see Pierre Assouline's L'Epuration des intellectuels (Brussels: Complexe, 1985) and Herbert Lottman's The Purge: The Purification ofFrench Collaborators after
? 6 I Introduction
Temps modernes marks a changing of the literary guard even before its first issue appears. With the Nouvelle Revuefranc? aise discredited because of Pierre Drieu La Rochelle's collabora- tion, Sartre and TM are prime candidates to assume the preeminence enjoyed by Gide and the NRF between the wars. By 1944, all indications are that at the age of seventy-five Gide is to be cast in a postwar role of gray eminence. The problem is that the role is not one of his personal choosing. Following the Liberation, ongoing and new rivalries place Sartre and TM in conflict with an older literary generation. The conflict goes beyond individual personalities to a change in the economy of the cultural review allying functions of production, distribution, and legitimation that usually com- pete with one another (Re? gis Debray, Teachers, Writers, Ce- lebrities: The Intellectuals of Modern France, trans. David Macey [London: Verso, 1981}, p. 67). Embodied respectively by writer, publisher, and critic, these functions converge in a successful marketing strategy when the NRF features works-in-progress it later reviews as books published by Gallimard. When the books compete for literary prizes funded by publishers, the result is a literary and economic hegemony Sartre emulates in TM's program.
Initial reactions to TM are mixed. In Esprit (December 1945), Emmanuel Mounier calls it a "review-event" and notes the convergence of its vision with his own Personalism
of the interwar period. Gide mixes caution with praise. Writing on TM in his short-lived weekly, Terre des hommes, he evokes the specter of Soviet art in the service of the Party.
World War 11 (New York: Morrow, 1986). The question of Sartre's wartime activities resurfaces in June 1985 when the Parisian daily Libe? ration prints a statement by the late Vladimir Janke? le? vitch to the effect that Sartre's political activities after the war are an unhealthy compensation, "a remorse, a quest for the danger he did not want to run during the war" (quoted in Ronald Hayman, Sartre: A Biography [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987}, p. 189). My account of Sartre's wartime activities is based on Michel Conta^t and Michel Rybalka, The Writings ofJean-Paul Sartre, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974). The recent biographies by Hayman and by Annie Cohen-Solal (Sartre: A Life, trans. Anna Cancogni [New York: Pantheon, 1987]) do little to substantiate
Janke? le? vitch's purported claim.
? Introduction | 7
A later issue of the weekly notes with deference that "al- though Sartre speaks of committing himself to our times, it
is our times which are committed through him" (Anna Boschetti, The Intellectual Enterprise: Sartre and "Les Temps Modernes" trans. Richard C. McCleary [Evanston, 111. : Northwestern University Press, 1988], p. 9). Predictably, the Communists see the new monthly as a symptom of bourgeois decadence. Jean Kanapa, an acquaintance from the Socialisme et Liberte? days who joins the Communists, ranks the existentialists among the Party's major foes, alongside proponents of Surrealism ("the Trotskyism of literary cafe? s"). When Gabriel Marcel describes him as an existentialist, Sartre replies that his philosophy is a philosophy of existence and that he doesn't even know what Existentialism is!
October--November 1945: Just over a year after the Liberation, Sartre launches TM with "Introducing Les Temps modernes" and "The Nationalization of Literature," two statements of purpose that outline an agenda based on the program of litte? rature engage? e later developed in "What Is Literature? " and "Black Orpheus. " Taken as a set or unit with this common focus, all four texts extend questions of definition--what literature is--toward inquiry into what it should and could be. In each instance, urgency is a result of the historical immediacy from which the activity of writing derives. This sense of writing for one's time expresses what Edward Said describes as Sartre's missionary aim of uphold- ing literature's singular capacity to disclose and reveal the present: "Literature was about the world, readers were in the world; the question was not whether to be but how to be, and this was best answered by carefully analyzing language's symbolic enactments of the various existential possibilities available to human beings" ("Opponents, Audiences, Con- stituencies and Community," in Hal Foster, e? d. , The
Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture [Post Townsend, Wash. : Bay Press, 1983], p. 139). The point here is that the disclosure promoted by writing and reading is intended as praxis: the action in and on history that Sartre is to expand into his theory of revolution.
? 8 I Introduction
Sartre draws immediate attention to the social function of writing when--in the first sentence of "Introducing Les Tempsmodernes"--he refers to the temptation of irrespon- sibility known by all writers of middle-class origin. In a capitalist society dominated by material value, Sartre openly addresses the issue of where the money to finance writing comes from. This might be nothing more than a jab at the low esteem in which writers--and critics, in particular--are held, were it not for the fact that TM's first issue marks Sartre's decision to abandon his teaching career in order to live from his writing. No longer a civil servant in the French educational system, Sartre is in a singular position. As a
graduate of the Ecole Normale Supe? rieure, his ties with an intellectual elite are not fully broken by his resignation. Likewise, his role in the Comite? National des Ecrivains puts him on working terms with the Communists. Finally, his ability to combine the prestige of literature and philosophy holds the promise of recognition by academics and specialists as well as by the general public. In 1945, Sartre embodies the writer-intellectual as an independent agent whose removal from state institutions and political parties allows him to function as critic or mediator as circumstance dictates. *
On a sour note, Sartre's references to Flaubert and Proust are strident and abusive, as though he feels compelled to make negative examples of writers who represent views he may once have held but now condemns. When, in "Intro-
* While Sartre remains on the Gallimard payroll as author, reader, and special editor, TM's ties with the publisher are broken after a run-in with Malraux results in eviction from the rue Se? bastien-Bottin. Soon, the editorial board relocates at Editions Julliard, on the nearby rue de l'Universite? (Claude Francis and Fernande Gontier, Simone deBeauvoir, trans. Linda Nesselson [New York: St. Martin's, 1987], p. 212). Gallimard's offer to help finance TM is motivated in part by a desire to placate suspicions about his wartime activities. Unlike his rival publishers Bernard Grasset and Robert Denoe? l, Gallimard is never openly accused of collaboration despite the fact that he resumes control of his publishing interests in October 1940 and that the NRF under Drieu La Rochelle is a showcase of "new" Franco-German solidarity. After the war, the NRF does not reappear until 1954 when, with his monthly renamed theNouvelle Nouvelle Revuefranc? aise, Gallimard's desire to break with the past is evident.
? Introduction | 9
ducing Les Temps modernes," he writes that Flaubert and the Goncourts are to be held responsible for their silence following the 1871 Paris Commune, his virulence recalls the ongoing purge of Nazi collaborators: "The writer is situated in his time; every word he utters has reverbations. As does his silence/' This misplaced use of situation is inexcusable and embarrassing. Concering Proust, in partic- ular, Sartre overlooks some of the very problems of subjec- tivity he soon explores in Saint Genet. In this instance, he inadvertently practices the very terrorist attitude he rejects in "The Nationalization of Literature/'
"Introducing Les Temps modernes" also extends debate over the role of the writer as social critic in the wake of The Treason of the Intellectuals, Julien Benda's 1927 tract against the modern commitment to political passions. The resem- blances between Benda and Sartre are striking. Both cast the writer in the role of social conscience, assert the primacy of moral concerns, and employ a rhetoric of accusation. Benda wants the writer-intellectual {clerc) to intervene in temporal affairs in the name of mankind: "An intellectual seems to me to betray his function by descending into the public arena only if he does so . . . to secure the triumph of a realist passion of class, race, or nation" (Benda, La Trahison des clercs [Paris: Grasset, 1975], p. 136). The decision to write is irreducibly historical; it constitutes an instance of a universal condition that the individual experiences in spe- cific circumstances: "By taking part in the singularity of our era, we ultimately make contact with the eternal, and it is
our task as writers to allow the eternal values implicit in such social or political debates to be perceived . . . We proclaim that man is an absolute. But he is such in his time, in his surroundings, on his parcel of earth. What is absolute, what a thousand years of history cannot destroy is that irreplaceable, incomparable decision which he makes at this moment concerning these circumstances ("Introducing Les Temps modernes/' p. 254).
For Sartre, a clear sense of history is of strategic impor- tance if he is to make commitment viable to the concerns of
? io I Introduction
traditional philosophers. His use of the terms "eternal" and "absolute" in the preceding passage is unusual and concil- iatory; it suggests that the differences between Benda and Sartre are differences of emphasis rather than substance. At the same time, Sartre's position clearly echoes that taken by Marx in the passage from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte quoted at the start of this essay. The polyvalent affinities with Benda and Marx point to Sartre's problems in establishing litte? rature engage? e as a program grounded in a fully articulated philosophy of history. Only later does he accept this polyvalence as a condition rather than a conse- quence of his notion of commitment.
TAfs literary program extends to all writings irrespective of genre. Yet Sartre confers a privileged status on the journalistic essay as the form of writing best suited to disclose the experience of freedom: "It strikes us, in fact, that journalism is one of the literary genres and that it can become one of the most important of them. The ability to grasp meanings instantly and intuitively, and a talent for regrouping them in order to offer the reader immediately comprehensible synthetic wholes, are the qualities most crucial to a reporter; they are the ones we ask of all our collaborators" ("Introducing Les Temps modernes," p. 266). The importance of reportage in TM's program responds to the conditions of ceremony dominating French literature between the wars.
"The Nationalization of Literature" describes how texts become pretexts for judgment. From the side of ceremony, each new book provides the opportunity to reassert its contribution to the interests of the Republic. The result is an empty literature of "national treasures. "
"The Nationalization of Literature" also contains Sartre's views on literary terror, defined by Jean Paulhan in The Flowers of Tarbes (1941) as a fear of the potential of all language to betray the purity of thought prior to expression. * Paulhan ultimately assimilates the terrorist
* Paulhan's inclusion on TM's editorial board reinforces Sartre's ties with Editions Gallimard. As director of the NRF between 1925 and 1940, Paulhan mediates between the founding group led by Gide and younger
? Introduction \ 11
attitude into a rhetoric of communication. For Sartre, however, terror turns literature into an alibi when it projects the meaning of a text into the future, thereby accommo- dating those who prefer to remain at a safe distance from the conflicts of the historical present. Sounding like a Jacques Derrida twenty years before the fact, Sartre concludes that we cannot be simultaneously inside and outside history. Concerning history, we are always (toujours de? ja`! ? ) insidel
"What Is Literature? " begins with a two-part definition of writing that opposes an instrumental prose to a poetic attitude more focused on the materiality of language. For the prose writer who makes use of words, language is a particular moment of action in the real world and almost an extension of the body ("a sixth finger, a third leg, in short, a pure function"). The prose writer is always looking toward the world beyond words while the poet considers them primarily as objects: "For the former, they are useful conventions, tools which gradually wear out and which one throws away when they are no longer serviceable; for the latter, they are natural things which sprout upon the earth like grass and trees" ("What Is Literature? " p. 29). For Sartre, prose and poetry are relations to language growing out of distinct attitudes and decisions. Both disclose the world, but in different ways: "For the word, which tears the writer of prose away from himself and throws him into the world, sends back to the poet his own image, like a mirror" ("What Is Literature? " p. 31). Of the two, only prose discloses the world with the intention of changing it. Only prose uses language to confer meaning on objects in the real world, thereby demonstrating that to speak is indeed to act.
Critics mistake the prose/poetry distinction as absolute when it clearly falls within a practice of writing relative to circumstance. The poetry rejected in "What Is Literature? "
contributors such as Malraux, Leiris, Sartre, and Raymond Queneau. After France falls to the Germans in June 1940, Paulhan refuses to direct the monthly under censorship. Over the next four years, he becomes a double agent who publically advocates literary publishing under the Vichy regime while he supports the underground Editions de Minuit and cofounds Les Lettres franc? aises.
? 12 I Introduction
is embodied by the Surrealists and by a pretension to political revolution that Sartre sees as overblown and dangerous: "They were the proclaimers of catastrophe in the time of the fat cows; in the time of the lean cows they have nothing more to say" ("What Is Literature? " p. 164). As with Flaubert and Proust, history refutes the Surrealists. In 1947, Sartre does not forget the lessons of the Occupation. If, as he argues, Surrealism is entering a period of with- drawal, it is one he is ready to advance . . . with a vengeance! Sartre's hostility is aimed at the Surrealists and at a relation to language he deems incompatible with TM's ambitions. Thus Sartre displaces--rather than rejects-- poetry because it does not transmit the clear and unambig- uous meaning he requires for TM's 1947 program. The poet's involvement with the materiality of language neglects the reader and the world. As a result, poetry does not attain the disclosure and praxis Sartre wants to promote.
"Black Orpheus," written as the preface to an anthology of works by African and West Indian poets, revises the program of litte? rature engage? e in two significant ways. First, it allows for poetry to be reconsidered in the context of colonialism, thereby transposing its marginal status in "What Is Literature? " into a meaningful function tied to social change: "For once at least, the most authentic revolutionary plan and the purest poetry come from the same source" ("Black Orpheus," p. 330). Second, it allows Sartre to mediate on behalf of Senghor and the poets in or- der to address the white European readers for whom the anthology is intended. The conflict between colonial and native cultures converges on a practice of poetry resistant to the conventional usage imposed on the Africans by the French. The black African and Caribbean poets who appropriate the French langauge "received" under colonial rule deny the instrumentality of a dominant culture much as the Surrealists sought to deny conventions of repre- sentation and expression: "When the Negro declares in French that he rejects French culture, he accepts with one hand what he rejects with the other; he sets up the
? Introduction \ 13
enemy's thinking-apparatus in himself, like a crusher" (p. 301).
The refusal of prose imposes a revised function for poetry as a means of generating self-awareness and liberation within an alienating culture. Ne? gritude poetry does not simply export the Surrealists' spirit of revolt. Whereas Breton and his followers want poetry to help liberate the unconscious in order to overcome alienation, the poetry in the Senghor anthology grows out of an oppression whose social and economic reality is lived on a daily basis. This context inverts the relationship between prose and poetry in "What Is Literature? " In "Black Orpheus," prose is denied and poetry asserted: "Strange and decisive turn: race is transmuted into historicity9 (p. 324). When Saint-Genet appears in 1952, Sartre's rehabilitation of poetry is com- plete.
I I recall, in fact, that in litte? rature engage? e, engagement must in no way lead to a forgetting of litte? rature, and that our concern must be to serve literature by infusing it with new blood, even as we serve the collectivity by attempting to give it the literature
it deserves.
Sartre, "Introducing Les Temps modernes" (1945)
Sartre's advocacy of journalism extends his postwar vision of the individual as both subject and agent of history. In this context, TAf's early program also supports the hybrid of academic disciplines known in France as the human sciences: "We would like our journal to contribute in a modest way to the elaboration of a synthetic anthropology. But it is not, we repeat, simply a question of effecting an advance in the domain of pure knowledge: the more distant goal we are aiming at is a liberation" ("Introducing Les Temps modernes, p. 261). The apparent eclipse of literature and philosophy by politics points to Sartre's growing involvement with prac- tical knowledge over other ("purer") forms after World War
? 14 I Introduction
II. What, then, is the synthetic anthropology announced in "Introducing TM" and how does it relate to the liberatory impulse behind litte? rature engage? e?
For the Sartre of 1945, the study of man can be nothing other than prospective and open-ended. The project of a synthetic anthropology extends the claim in Being and Nothingness that existence precedes essence. In keeping with Sartre's progression toward liberation through praxis, it inscribes consideration of a human condition within a lived present that is markedly historical: "Praxis, then, becomes the key concept for Sartre, the linchpin in his philosophy of history and the mechanism of mediation between knowledge and being" (Michael Sprinker, Imaginary Relations: Aesthetics and Ideology in the Theory ofHistorical Materialism {New York: Verso, 1987], pp. 186-187). The priority of action over knowledge is not a simple reversal, not a rejection of the latter in favor of the former. The synthetic anthropology announced in TM's first issue is Sartre's attempt to connect the ontology of Being and Nothingness to the philosophy of history he sets forth in his i 9 6 0 Critique of Dialectical
Reason. * As a critical project, Sartre's synthetic anthropol- ogy supplements the pure--that is, abstract and speculative--knowledge of philosophy with the lived his- torical dimension of the postwar present it is 77W's mission to disclose. In so doing, it responds to Marx's imperative-- in Theses on Feuerbach--to transform the world that philos- ophers have only tried to interpret.
The centrality of praxis to Sartre's postwar position on writing represents a swing to practical politics which, in turn, entails its own problematic on the relation between thought and action. In light of Sartre's intellectual evolu- tion, the growing importance he confers on praxis points to Martin Heidegger's inquiry into the end of philosophy.
* In Sartre and "Les Temps modernes" (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), Howard Davies analyzes TM's attitudes toward the social sciences, anthropology in particular. His discussion of the roles of Michel
Leiris and Claude Le? vi-Strauss is informed and incisive. See also Terry Nichols Clark, Prophets and Patrons: The French University and the Emergence of the Social Sciences (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1973).
? Introduction \ 15
Much rests on how the term 'end" is understood. Some forty years after the fact, it remains unclear whether Sartre sees his move toward politics as a logical consequence ("end" as culmination) of philosophy or whether the breakdown ("end" as demise) of philosophy is a prerequisite to action. While the former sense holds true for Sartre in the immediate postwar period, a longer duration suggests in retrospect that his progression forecast a move from theory to political action more common in France some twenty years later (Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, trans. L. Scott-Fox and J. M. Harding [New York: Cam- bridge University Press, 1980}, p. 136). Like others of his generation, Sartre first understands history through philos- ophy until he realizes that philosophy itself derives from history in the form of politics.
"What Is Literature? " addresses the question of audience--"For whom does one write? "--as a practical concern for how to incorporate potential readers into TATs empirical public. To this end, Sartre sees that litte? rature engage? e must adapt to the media and technology of mass communication: "The book is the noblest, the most ancient of forms; to be sure, we will always have to return to it. But there is a literary art of radio, film, editorial, and report- ing . . . We must learn to speak in images, to transpose the ideas of our books into these new languages ("What Is Literature? " pp. 216-217). Sartre supports this imperative on a personal level with lectures, interviews and radio broadcasts as well as plays {The Dirty Hands), screenplays {The Chips Are Down), novels {Iron in the Soul), and essays {Saint Genet), all undertaken on the premise that the committed writer must contend with as many technologies and media as possible. If not, he or she can expect to be read only by the bourgeoisie. This is the barrier Sartre hopes to break when he writes "Black Orpheus" for Senghor and edits a book in support of Henri Martin, the French sailor court-martialed in 1950 for protesting the French presence in Indochina. It is this expanded sense of commitment as praxis that he embodies over the following two decades as an
? 16 I Introduction
intellectual who takes a public stand on behalf of others who are less able to plead their own cause.
Immediate and ongoing responses to "What Is Litera- ture? " focus on the wider sense of committed writing and the ambitions Sartre holds for it. As early as 1947, Roland Barthes answers Sartre with what later becomes the opening section of Writing Degree Zero. In place of the prose/poetry distinction, Barthes posits a plurality of writings removed from a unified notion of literature. A decade later, his Mythologies combines a Sartrean impulse to disclose the present with a systematic model of ideology in everyday life. In both cases, representation in literature and popular culture is associated with identity at the level of individual and institution. Barthes's impulse to disclose is markedly Sartrean, even if his methodology is not. Furthermore, both texts by Barthes distinguish between commitment at the level of language as opposed to commitment at the level of content. Finally, Barthes's notions of writing and scriptor suggest a problematic of the writing subject that Sartre
addresses over the next three decades in his studies on Mallarme? , Genet, and Flaubert. *
If we are to render unto Sartre his due, we must contend with the fact that the questions raised by his writings outlive the answers they provide. In this sense, Theodor Adorno's critique of litte? rature engage? e raises a number of substantive issues. Adorno begins by noting the confusion caused by opposing a committed art to an autonomous-- and presumably uncommitted--art. He goes on to question the importance Sartre places on free choice: "The work of art becomes an appeal to subjects, because it is itself nothing other than a declaration by a subject of his own choice or failure to choose" ("Commitment," p. 78). For Adorno, Sartre's emphasis on the work of art as an appeal to freedom
* In 1965 lectures published in 1972 as "A Plea for Intellectuals," Sartre responds directly to Barthes when he notes that style is "the expression of our invisible conditioning by the world behind us. " Between Existentialism and Marxism, trans. John Mathews (New York: Pantheon, 1974), p. 282.
? Introduction \ IJ
is subverted by historical reality which predetermines the range of possible choices.
Unlike Sartre, Adorno is less concerned with generating specific disclosure or implementing change than with dis- rupting fundamental attitudes. His own aesthetic theory sees the representation ('gesture toward reality") achieved by the work of art as more meaningful than the authorial intention or motivation behind it. Setting the negative example of Brecht's theater alongside that of Sartre, Adorno rejects a committed art that ends up being neither aesthet- ically nor politically effective. He concludes in support of an ostensibly autonomous art--Kafka and Beckett are his examples--capable of expressing what is barred to politics: "Kafka's prose and Beckett's plays, or the truly monstrous novel The Unnameable, have an effect by comparison with which officially committed works look like pantomime. Kafka and Beckett arouse the fear which existentialism merely talks about" (Adorno, p. 86).
To his credit, Adorno notes that Sartre reacts against a tradition of art for art's sake in France which has no equivalent impact in postwar Germany. But what he rejects in Sartre (as in Brecht) is the pretense of a committed art's carrying a moral or political message in a culture which inevitably degrades that message into an ineffectual com- modity. Such degradation is less an inherent quality of art or the artist than a condition of postwar modernity: "This is not a time for political art, but politics has migrated into autonomous art, and nowhere more so than where it seems to be politically dead" (Adorno, p. 89). In sum, the differences between Adorno and Sartre engage practice-- specifically, Sartre's theater and fiction--rather than theory. Because Adorno believes that art is invariably politicized, his emphasis on the autonomous works of Kafka and Beckett is intended as sociopolitical. The Sartrean program of litte? rature engage? e sets literature against politics so as to assert its inherent political value: "Proclaiming that literature is
already intrinsically political is the best way of freeing it from the narrow sense of the political to which others would
? 18 I Introduction
like to bind it" (Boschetti, p. no). As for the pretense of a committed art, The Words and Sartre's i 9 6 0 essay on Merleau-Ponty acknowledge the failings of litte? rature engage? e. Indeed, Adorno notes that Sartre's intellectual honesty does him credit.
I The intellectual, the product of a class-divided society, . . . is thus a product of history. In this sense, no society can complain of its intellectuals without accusing itself, for it has the intellectuals it makes.
Sartre, "A Plea for Intellectuals" (1972)
Sartre's trajectory traverses all three of Debray's intellec- tual cycles, from university to publishing and media. In 1945, he starts TM as a former academic ready to extend the cultures of literature and philosophy to a wider public. After the Liberation, he remains attentive to what Adorno refers
to disparagingly as the culture industry. But unlike Adorno, Sartre engages the emerging media cycle on its own terms
by maintaining a high level of public visibility. By the mid-1960s, cold war politics put him at odds with both supporters and friends. During a 1966 visit to Japan, he delivers three lectures at Tokyo and Kyoto in which he reformulates committed writing on the basis of a revised notion of the intellectual as "someone who meddles in what is not his business' ("Plea," p. 230).
Throughout the lectures, Sartre emphasizes the particu- larity of historical events. On the subject of fighting against racism, for example, he refers not only to its frequency as idea or image in books, plays, and films, but also to its lived historical form in trials (the Dreyfus Affair), newspaper editorials, and political speeches: "In short, the intellectual must work to at the level of events to produce other concrete events that will combat pogroms or racist verdicts in the courts" (ibid. , p. 251). For the Sartre of 1966, the intellectual's activist role extends the call to action expressed
? Introduction \ 19
by the concept of praxis twenty years earlier. This activist dimension accounts for litte? rature engage? es persistent appeal among the young and the oppressed, for whom the imper- ative to act in and on history--whether imposed or chosen-- is experienced as the mixture of ideas and values Sartre calls the singular universal.
"A Plea for Intellectuals" also addresses issues of language and communication taken up in "What Is Literature? " but with a clear sense of the contradictions internalized by the intellectuals who, as technicians of specialized knowledge, find themselves "the instruments of ends which remain foreign to them and which they are forbidden to question" ("Plea," p. 240). Emphasis on historical particularity does not prevent Sartre from reiterating the value of the literary work as the objective model of the singular universal: "A book is necessarily a part of the world, through which the totality of the world is made manifest, although without ever being fully disclosed" (ibid. , p. 275). In such terms, Sartre's evolution toward practical politics following "What Is Literature? " does not entail rejection of the literary work's singular capacity to disclose being-in-the-world.
The Heideggerian ring of this capacity to disclose should not be misconstrued as vaguely poetic or metaphysical. It is tempered by a clear sense of lived experience which the writer alone communicates to his or her readers. Despite the cultural privilege and isolation of Western writers--himself included--from true revolutionary activity, Sartre asserts the essential (rather than accidental) capacity of all writers to fulfill the intellectual function of disclosing the lived present. This assertion echoes the call to action in and on history set forth in TM's early program. It suggests that despite its own historical particularity, the concept of committed writing is far from exhausted by its archival status as a postwar phenomenon.
Re? gis Debray notes in passing that all intellectual universes have their own coordinates of time and space. What might Sartre's coordinates be? For better or worse, popular memory retains the image of Henri Cartier-
? 20 I Introduction
Bresson's photo of a fortyish Sartre with horn-rimmed eyeglasses, philosopher's scarf, and obligatory pipe.
and Other Essays JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts
? Copyright (C) 1988 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America 1098765432 1
"What Is Literature? " copyright (C) 1949 by The Philosophical Library, Inc. Originally published as "Qu'est-ce que la litte? rature? " in Situations II, copy- right (C) 1948 by Editions Gallimard; "The National- ization of Literature" and "Introducing Les Temps modernes" also originally appeared in French in Situations II. "Black Orpheus" is reprinted from The Massachusetts Review, copyright (C) 1965, The Massa- chusetts Review, Inc. Originally published as
"Orphe? e Noir" in Situations III, copyright (C) 1949 by Editions Gallimard.
This book is printed on acid-free paper, and its binding materials have been chosen for strength and durability.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sartre, Jean Paul, 1 9 0 5 -
[Essays. English. Selections]
"What is literature? " and other essays / Jean-Paul
Sartre.
p. cm.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
ISBN 0-674-95083-6 (alk. paper). ISBN 0-674-95084-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Literature--Philosophy. 2. Authorship. I. Title.
PN45. S245 1988
809--dci9 87-37931
CIP
? Contents
Introduction by Steven Ungar i
What Is Literature? 21
What Is Writing? 25
Why Write? 48
For Whom Does One Write? Situation of the Writer in 1947 Writing for One's Age 239
70 141
Introducing Les Temps modernes 247 The Nationalization of Literature 269 Black Orpheus 289
Notes 333
A Note on the Texts 349 Index 351
? Introduction
? Introduction
Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.
Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)
AWRITER as widely read as Sartre invariably suffers from a contempt bred by familiarity. Long after his death in April 1980, the reactions elicited by men- tion of his name range from adulation to dismissal, with many of the latter in the vein of what Sartre once described as the superiority of live dogs to dead lions. For a man who wanted above all to write for his time, dismissal is the harshest of condemnations: "It seems to be generally accepted that the Sartrean problematic has by now been essentially relegated to the past. Smiles are quick to surface whenever anyone is still interested in Sartre or still writes about him, as though the person were all but suspect of still being with' Sartre, of having stuck with him" (Denis Hollier, The Politics of Prose: Essay on Sartre, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986], p. 92). The quick smiles are a professional hazard, a result of the notoriety Sartre maintained by choice. His detractors--many of them the "live dogs" noted above-- would do well to note Sartre's awareness of this notoriety and the strategic uses to which he puts it.
Instead of asking ironically whether the Sartrean prob- lematic is passe? or whether Sartre has faded as a key figure of postwar modernity, I want to cast my comments around the question of what it might mean to read Sartre today. In so doing, I want to echo the heightened sense of history and circumstance Sartre confers on the acts of writing and reading throughout the four texts in the present volume, versions of which appeared in early issues of LesTemps
? 4 I Introduction
modernes, the monthly Sartre started in 1945. The following pages are intended to trace the evolving concept of litte? rature engage? e in the aftermath of World War IL* Chronology provides a context and a first order of specificity. Whenever possible, it serves to ground the issues of theory that Sartre's postwar writings on writing engage directly or by implica- tion. The secondary literature on Sartre is overwhelming and I make no claims to do more than address selected issues.
I We would be hunters of meaning, we would speak the truth about the world and about our own lives.
Sartre, "Merleau-Ponty" (i960)
March 1941: Jean-Paul Sartre returns to civilian life in Paris after eight months of captivity by the Germans. Almost immediately, he recruits students at the Lyce? e Pasteur and the Ecole Normale Supe? rieure for Socialisme et Liberte? (Socialism and Freedom), a small cell of intellec- tual re? sistants including Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques-Laurent Bost, and Jean Pouillon. The group holds grand visions. If--as Simone de Beauvoir puts it in The Prime of Life--the democracies win the war, the French left will need a new program. But if, on the other hand, the Axis nations defeat the Allies, it will be necessary to see that Germany loses the peace. Party politics intervene when the Communists, fearful of a potential rival in Sartre, spread rumors that he is a German agent. After a
* I have retained the original French in place of the expression "engaged literature" used by Bernard Frechtman. My alternative translation is "committed writing. " This for two reasons: First, the transitive usage of the verb "commit" denotes the conscious assertion of value that the concept
is intended to convey. Second, "writing" rather than "literature" because the program set forth in "What Is Literature? " involves practices and media--journalism, radio, film--beyond traditional conceptions. On the notion of commitment and/or engagement, see David L. Schalk, The Spectrum ofPolitical Engagement: Mounter, Benda, Nizan, Brasillach, Sartre (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979) and my discussion below of Theodor Adorno, "Commitment," New Left Review 87-88 (1974).
? Introduction \ 5
number of friends and contacts are arrested, Sartre feels personally responsible and disbands the group in October
1941.
Socialisme et Liberte? allows Sartre to draft a constitution
of some 120 articles mixing economics with a Utopian vision freely adapted from the writings of Marx and Proudhon. Although none of the ten reputed copies of the constitution survives the war, accounts by group members suggest that it addresses concerns ranging from parliamentary represen- tation to military service and the division between judicial and executive branches of government. The lost constitu- tion provides evidence that Sartre's vision of a non- authoritarian socialism precedes the postwar period. It supports Fredric Jameson's view that Marxism coexists with Sartre's existentialsm; it is not something he comes to afterward {Marxism and Form [Princeton: Princeton Univer- sity Press, 1971], p. 207). Three years after Nausea, Sartre's early attempts to lay bare the structures of conscious- ness articulate with issues of collective action and social change.
In the wake of Socialisme et Liberte? , Sartre's wartime activities are increasingly devoted to writing. When Being and Nothingness appears in 1943, he is writing for the theater and working with the Comite? National des Ecrivains (National Committee of Writers), an underground group founded with the help of Communists who have either forgotten or repressed their accusations of two years earlier. By September 1944, a n editorial committee of Raymond Aron, Michel Leiris, Albert Ollivier, and Jean Paulhan is created around the nucleus of Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Merleau-Ponty. Albert Camus and Andre? Malraux--major figures of the Resistance underground--are invited to join, but turn down the invitation. *
* The 1987 Klaus Barbie trial is a reminder that full disclosure of the Occupation has yet to occur. Survivors of the period remain the objects of allegation and rumor. For a sense of the issues involved in such disclosure,
see Pierre Assouline's L'Epuration des intellectuels (Brussels: Complexe, 1985) and Herbert Lottman's The Purge: The Purification ofFrench Collaborators after
? 6 I Introduction
Temps modernes marks a changing of the literary guard even before its first issue appears. With the Nouvelle Revuefranc? aise discredited because of Pierre Drieu La Rochelle's collabora- tion, Sartre and TM are prime candidates to assume the preeminence enjoyed by Gide and the NRF between the wars. By 1944, all indications are that at the age of seventy-five Gide is to be cast in a postwar role of gray eminence. The problem is that the role is not one of his personal choosing. Following the Liberation, ongoing and new rivalries place Sartre and TM in conflict with an older literary generation. The conflict goes beyond individual personalities to a change in the economy of the cultural review allying functions of production, distribution, and legitimation that usually com- pete with one another (Re? gis Debray, Teachers, Writers, Ce- lebrities: The Intellectuals of Modern France, trans. David Macey [London: Verso, 1981}, p. 67). Embodied respectively by writer, publisher, and critic, these functions converge in a successful marketing strategy when the NRF features works-in-progress it later reviews as books published by Gallimard. When the books compete for literary prizes funded by publishers, the result is a literary and economic hegemony Sartre emulates in TM's program.
Initial reactions to TM are mixed. In Esprit (December 1945), Emmanuel Mounier calls it a "review-event" and notes the convergence of its vision with his own Personalism
of the interwar period. Gide mixes caution with praise. Writing on TM in his short-lived weekly, Terre des hommes, he evokes the specter of Soviet art in the service of the Party.
World War 11 (New York: Morrow, 1986). The question of Sartre's wartime activities resurfaces in June 1985 when the Parisian daily Libe? ration prints a statement by the late Vladimir Janke? le? vitch to the effect that Sartre's political activities after the war are an unhealthy compensation, "a remorse, a quest for the danger he did not want to run during the war" (quoted in Ronald Hayman, Sartre: A Biography [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987}, p. 189). My account of Sartre's wartime activities is based on Michel Conta^t and Michel Rybalka, The Writings ofJean-Paul Sartre, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974). The recent biographies by Hayman and by Annie Cohen-Solal (Sartre: A Life, trans. Anna Cancogni [New York: Pantheon, 1987]) do little to substantiate
Janke? le? vitch's purported claim.
? Introduction | 7
A later issue of the weekly notes with deference that "al- though Sartre speaks of committing himself to our times, it
is our times which are committed through him" (Anna Boschetti, The Intellectual Enterprise: Sartre and "Les Temps Modernes" trans. Richard C. McCleary [Evanston, 111. : Northwestern University Press, 1988], p. 9). Predictably, the Communists see the new monthly as a symptom of bourgeois decadence. Jean Kanapa, an acquaintance from the Socialisme et Liberte? days who joins the Communists, ranks the existentialists among the Party's major foes, alongside proponents of Surrealism ("the Trotskyism of literary cafe? s"). When Gabriel Marcel describes him as an existentialist, Sartre replies that his philosophy is a philosophy of existence and that he doesn't even know what Existentialism is!
October--November 1945: Just over a year after the Liberation, Sartre launches TM with "Introducing Les Temps modernes" and "The Nationalization of Literature," two statements of purpose that outline an agenda based on the program of litte? rature engage? e later developed in "What Is Literature? " and "Black Orpheus. " Taken as a set or unit with this common focus, all four texts extend questions of definition--what literature is--toward inquiry into what it should and could be. In each instance, urgency is a result of the historical immediacy from which the activity of writing derives. This sense of writing for one's time expresses what Edward Said describes as Sartre's missionary aim of uphold- ing literature's singular capacity to disclose and reveal the present: "Literature was about the world, readers were in the world; the question was not whether to be but how to be, and this was best answered by carefully analyzing language's symbolic enactments of the various existential possibilities available to human beings" ("Opponents, Audiences, Con- stituencies and Community," in Hal Foster, e? d. , The
Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture [Post Townsend, Wash. : Bay Press, 1983], p. 139). The point here is that the disclosure promoted by writing and reading is intended as praxis: the action in and on history that Sartre is to expand into his theory of revolution.
? 8 I Introduction
Sartre draws immediate attention to the social function of writing when--in the first sentence of "Introducing Les Tempsmodernes"--he refers to the temptation of irrespon- sibility known by all writers of middle-class origin. In a capitalist society dominated by material value, Sartre openly addresses the issue of where the money to finance writing comes from. This might be nothing more than a jab at the low esteem in which writers--and critics, in particular--are held, were it not for the fact that TM's first issue marks Sartre's decision to abandon his teaching career in order to live from his writing. No longer a civil servant in the French educational system, Sartre is in a singular position. As a
graduate of the Ecole Normale Supe? rieure, his ties with an intellectual elite are not fully broken by his resignation. Likewise, his role in the Comite? National des Ecrivains puts him on working terms with the Communists. Finally, his ability to combine the prestige of literature and philosophy holds the promise of recognition by academics and specialists as well as by the general public. In 1945, Sartre embodies the writer-intellectual as an independent agent whose removal from state institutions and political parties allows him to function as critic or mediator as circumstance dictates. *
On a sour note, Sartre's references to Flaubert and Proust are strident and abusive, as though he feels compelled to make negative examples of writers who represent views he may once have held but now condemns. When, in "Intro-
* While Sartre remains on the Gallimard payroll as author, reader, and special editor, TM's ties with the publisher are broken after a run-in with Malraux results in eviction from the rue Se? bastien-Bottin. Soon, the editorial board relocates at Editions Julliard, on the nearby rue de l'Universite? (Claude Francis and Fernande Gontier, Simone deBeauvoir, trans. Linda Nesselson [New York: St. Martin's, 1987], p. 212). Gallimard's offer to help finance TM is motivated in part by a desire to placate suspicions about his wartime activities. Unlike his rival publishers Bernard Grasset and Robert Denoe? l, Gallimard is never openly accused of collaboration despite the fact that he resumes control of his publishing interests in October 1940 and that the NRF under Drieu La Rochelle is a showcase of "new" Franco-German solidarity. After the war, the NRF does not reappear until 1954 when, with his monthly renamed theNouvelle Nouvelle Revuefranc? aise, Gallimard's desire to break with the past is evident.
? Introduction | 9
ducing Les Temps modernes," he writes that Flaubert and the Goncourts are to be held responsible for their silence following the 1871 Paris Commune, his virulence recalls the ongoing purge of Nazi collaborators: "The writer is situated in his time; every word he utters has reverbations. As does his silence/' This misplaced use of situation is inexcusable and embarrassing. Concering Proust, in partic- ular, Sartre overlooks some of the very problems of subjec- tivity he soon explores in Saint Genet. In this instance, he inadvertently practices the very terrorist attitude he rejects in "The Nationalization of Literature/'
"Introducing Les Temps modernes" also extends debate over the role of the writer as social critic in the wake of The Treason of the Intellectuals, Julien Benda's 1927 tract against the modern commitment to political passions. The resem- blances between Benda and Sartre are striking. Both cast the writer in the role of social conscience, assert the primacy of moral concerns, and employ a rhetoric of accusation. Benda wants the writer-intellectual {clerc) to intervene in temporal affairs in the name of mankind: "An intellectual seems to me to betray his function by descending into the public arena only if he does so . . . to secure the triumph of a realist passion of class, race, or nation" (Benda, La Trahison des clercs [Paris: Grasset, 1975], p. 136). The decision to write is irreducibly historical; it constitutes an instance of a universal condition that the individual experiences in spe- cific circumstances: "By taking part in the singularity of our era, we ultimately make contact with the eternal, and it is
our task as writers to allow the eternal values implicit in such social or political debates to be perceived . . . We proclaim that man is an absolute. But he is such in his time, in his surroundings, on his parcel of earth. What is absolute, what a thousand years of history cannot destroy is that irreplaceable, incomparable decision which he makes at this moment concerning these circumstances ("Introducing Les Temps modernes/' p. 254).
For Sartre, a clear sense of history is of strategic impor- tance if he is to make commitment viable to the concerns of
? io I Introduction
traditional philosophers. His use of the terms "eternal" and "absolute" in the preceding passage is unusual and concil- iatory; it suggests that the differences between Benda and Sartre are differences of emphasis rather than substance. At the same time, Sartre's position clearly echoes that taken by Marx in the passage from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte quoted at the start of this essay. The polyvalent affinities with Benda and Marx point to Sartre's problems in establishing litte? rature engage? e as a program grounded in a fully articulated philosophy of history. Only later does he accept this polyvalence as a condition rather than a conse- quence of his notion of commitment.
TAfs literary program extends to all writings irrespective of genre. Yet Sartre confers a privileged status on the journalistic essay as the form of writing best suited to disclose the experience of freedom: "It strikes us, in fact, that journalism is one of the literary genres and that it can become one of the most important of them. The ability to grasp meanings instantly and intuitively, and a talent for regrouping them in order to offer the reader immediately comprehensible synthetic wholes, are the qualities most crucial to a reporter; they are the ones we ask of all our collaborators" ("Introducing Les Temps modernes," p. 266). The importance of reportage in TM's program responds to the conditions of ceremony dominating French literature between the wars.
"The Nationalization of Literature" describes how texts become pretexts for judgment. From the side of ceremony, each new book provides the opportunity to reassert its contribution to the interests of the Republic. The result is an empty literature of "national treasures. "
"The Nationalization of Literature" also contains Sartre's views on literary terror, defined by Jean Paulhan in The Flowers of Tarbes (1941) as a fear of the potential of all language to betray the purity of thought prior to expression. * Paulhan ultimately assimilates the terrorist
* Paulhan's inclusion on TM's editorial board reinforces Sartre's ties with Editions Gallimard. As director of the NRF between 1925 and 1940, Paulhan mediates between the founding group led by Gide and younger
? Introduction \ 11
attitude into a rhetoric of communication. For Sartre, however, terror turns literature into an alibi when it projects the meaning of a text into the future, thereby accommo- dating those who prefer to remain at a safe distance from the conflicts of the historical present. Sounding like a Jacques Derrida twenty years before the fact, Sartre concludes that we cannot be simultaneously inside and outside history. Concerning history, we are always (toujours de? ja`! ? ) insidel
"What Is Literature? " begins with a two-part definition of writing that opposes an instrumental prose to a poetic attitude more focused on the materiality of language. For the prose writer who makes use of words, language is a particular moment of action in the real world and almost an extension of the body ("a sixth finger, a third leg, in short, a pure function"). The prose writer is always looking toward the world beyond words while the poet considers them primarily as objects: "For the former, they are useful conventions, tools which gradually wear out and which one throws away when they are no longer serviceable; for the latter, they are natural things which sprout upon the earth like grass and trees" ("What Is Literature? " p. 29). For Sartre, prose and poetry are relations to language growing out of distinct attitudes and decisions. Both disclose the world, but in different ways: "For the word, which tears the writer of prose away from himself and throws him into the world, sends back to the poet his own image, like a mirror" ("What Is Literature? " p. 31). Of the two, only prose discloses the world with the intention of changing it. Only prose uses language to confer meaning on objects in the real world, thereby demonstrating that to speak is indeed to act.
Critics mistake the prose/poetry distinction as absolute when it clearly falls within a practice of writing relative to circumstance. The poetry rejected in "What Is Literature? "
contributors such as Malraux, Leiris, Sartre, and Raymond Queneau. After France falls to the Germans in June 1940, Paulhan refuses to direct the monthly under censorship. Over the next four years, he becomes a double agent who publically advocates literary publishing under the Vichy regime while he supports the underground Editions de Minuit and cofounds Les Lettres franc? aises.
? 12 I Introduction
is embodied by the Surrealists and by a pretension to political revolution that Sartre sees as overblown and dangerous: "They were the proclaimers of catastrophe in the time of the fat cows; in the time of the lean cows they have nothing more to say" ("What Is Literature? " p. 164). As with Flaubert and Proust, history refutes the Surrealists. In 1947, Sartre does not forget the lessons of the Occupation. If, as he argues, Surrealism is entering a period of with- drawal, it is one he is ready to advance . . . with a vengeance! Sartre's hostility is aimed at the Surrealists and at a relation to language he deems incompatible with TM's ambitions. Thus Sartre displaces--rather than rejects-- poetry because it does not transmit the clear and unambig- uous meaning he requires for TM's 1947 program. The poet's involvement with the materiality of language neglects the reader and the world. As a result, poetry does not attain the disclosure and praxis Sartre wants to promote.
"Black Orpheus," written as the preface to an anthology of works by African and West Indian poets, revises the program of litte? rature engage? e in two significant ways. First, it allows for poetry to be reconsidered in the context of colonialism, thereby transposing its marginal status in "What Is Literature? " into a meaningful function tied to social change: "For once at least, the most authentic revolutionary plan and the purest poetry come from the same source" ("Black Orpheus," p. 330). Second, it allows Sartre to mediate on behalf of Senghor and the poets in or- der to address the white European readers for whom the anthology is intended. The conflict between colonial and native cultures converges on a practice of poetry resistant to the conventional usage imposed on the Africans by the French. The black African and Caribbean poets who appropriate the French langauge "received" under colonial rule deny the instrumentality of a dominant culture much as the Surrealists sought to deny conventions of repre- sentation and expression: "When the Negro declares in French that he rejects French culture, he accepts with one hand what he rejects with the other; he sets up the
? Introduction \ 13
enemy's thinking-apparatus in himself, like a crusher" (p. 301).
The refusal of prose imposes a revised function for poetry as a means of generating self-awareness and liberation within an alienating culture. Ne? gritude poetry does not simply export the Surrealists' spirit of revolt. Whereas Breton and his followers want poetry to help liberate the unconscious in order to overcome alienation, the poetry in the Senghor anthology grows out of an oppression whose social and economic reality is lived on a daily basis. This context inverts the relationship between prose and poetry in "What Is Literature? " In "Black Orpheus," prose is denied and poetry asserted: "Strange and decisive turn: race is transmuted into historicity9 (p. 324). When Saint-Genet appears in 1952, Sartre's rehabilitation of poetry is com- plete.
I I recall, in fact, that in litte? rature engage? e, engagement must in no way lead to a forgetting of litte? rature, and that our concern must be to serve literature by infusing it with new blood, even as we serve the collectivity by attempting to give it the literature
it deserves.
Sartre, "Introducing Les Temps modernes" (1945)
Sartre's advocacy of journalism extends his postwar vision of the individual as both subject and agent of history. In this context, TAf's early program also supports the hybrid of academic disciplines known in France as the human sciences: "We would like our journal to contribute in a modest way to the elaboration of a synthetic anthropology. But it is not, we repeat, simply a question of effecting an advance in the domain of pure knowledge: the more distant goal we are aiming at is a liberation" ("Introducing Les Temps modernes, p. 261). The apparent eclipse of literature and philosophy by politics points to Sartre's growing involvement with prac- tical knowledge over other ("purer") forms after World War
? 14 I Introduction
II. What, then, is the synthetic anthropology announced in "Introducing TM" and how does it relate to the liberatory impulse behind litte? rature engage? e?
For the Sartre of 1945, the study of man can be nothing other than prospective and open-ended. The project of a synthetic anthropology extends the claim in Being and Nothingness that existence precedes essence. In keeping with Sartre's progression toward liberation through praxis, it inscribes consideration of a human condition within a lived present that is markedly historical: "Praxis, then, becomes the key concept for Sartre, the linchpin in his philosophy of history and the mechanism of mediation between knowledge and being" (Michael Sprinker, Imaginary Relations: Aesthetics and Ideology in the Theory ofHistorical Materialism {New York: Verso, 1987], pp. 186-187). The priority of action over knowledge is not a simple reversal, not a rejection of the latter in favor of the former. The synthetic anthropology announced in TM's first issue is Sartre's attempt to connect the ontology of Being and Nothingness to the philosophy of history he sets forth in his i 9 6 0 Critique of Dialectical
Reason. * As a critical project, Sartre's synthetic anthropol- ogy supplements the pure--that is, abstract and speculative--knowledge of philosophy with the lived his- torical dimension of the postwar present it is 77W's mission to disclose. In so doing, it responds to Marx's imperative-- in Theses on Feuerbach--to transform the world that philos- ophers have only tried to interpret.
The centrality of praxis to Sartre's postwar position on writing represents a swing to practical politics which, in turn, entails its own problematic on the relation between thought and action. In light of Sartre's intellectual evolu- tion, the growing importance he confers on praxis points to Martin Heidegger's inquiry into the end of philosophy.
* In Sartre and "Les Temps modernes" (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), Howard Davies analyzes TM's attitudes toward the social sciences, anthropology in particular. His discussion of the roles of Michel
Leiris and Claude Le? vi-Strauss is informed and incisive. See also Terry Nichols Clark, Prophets and Patrons: The French University and the Emergence of the Social Sciences (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1973).
? Introduction \ 15
Much rests on how the term 'end" is understood. Some forty years after the fact, it remains unclear whether Sartre sees his move toward politics as a logical consequence ("end" as culmination) of philosophy or whether the breakdown ("end" as demise) of philosophy is a prerequisite to action. While the former sense holds true for Sartre in the immediate postwar period, a longer duration suggests in retrospect that his progression forecast a move from theory to political action more common in France some twenty years later (Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, trans. L. Scott-Fox and J. M. Harding [New York: Cam- bridge University Press, 1980}, p. 136). Like others of his generation, Sartre first understands history through philos- ophy until he realizes that philosophy itself derives from history in the form of politics.
"What Is Literature? " addresses the question of audience--"For whom does one write? "--as a practical concern for how to incorporate potential readers into TATs empirical public. To this end, Sartre sees that litte? rature engage? e must adapt to the media and technology of mass communication: "The book is the noblest, the most ancient of forms; to be sure, we will always have to return to it. But there is a literary art of radio, film, editorial, and report- ing . . . We must learn to speak in images, to transpose the ideas of our books into these new languages ("What Is Literature? " pp. 216-217). Sartre supports this imperative on a personal level with lectures, interviews and radio broadcasts as well as plays {The Dirty Hands), screenplays {The Chips Are Down), novels {Iron in the Soul), and essays {Saint Genet), all undertaken on the premise that the committed writer must contend with as many technologies and media as possible. If not, he or she can expect to be read only by the bourgeoisie. This is the barrier Sartre hopes to break when he writes "Black Orpheus" for Senghor and edits a book in support of Henri Martin, the French sailor court-martialed in 1950 for protesting the French presence in Indochina. It is this expanded sense of commitment as praxis that he embodies over the following two decades as an
? 16 I Introduction
intellectual who takes a public stand on behalf of others who are less able to plead their own cause.
Immediate and ongoing responses to "What Is Litera- ture? " focus on the wider sense of committed writing and the ambitions Sartre holds for it. As early as 1947, Roland Barthes answers Sartre with what later becomes the opening section of Writing Degree Zero. In place of the prose/poetry distinction, Barthes posits a plurality of writings removed from a unified notion of literature. A decade later, his Mythologies combines a Sartrean impulse to disclose the present with a systematic model of ideology in everyday life. In both cases, representation in literature and popular culture is associated with identity at the level of individual and institution. Barthes's impulse to disclose is markedly Sartrean, even if his methodology is not. Furthermore, both texts by Barthes distinguish between commitment at the level of language as opposed to commitment at the level of content. Finally, Barthes's notions of writing and scriptor suggest a problematic of the writing subject that Sartre
addresses over the next three decades in his studies on Mallarme? , Genet, and Flaubert. *
If we are to render unto Sartre his due, we must contend with the fact that the questions raised by his writings outlive the answers they provide. In this sense, Theodor Adorno's critique of litte? rature engage? e raises a number of substantive issues. Adorno begins by noting the confusion caused by opposing a committed art to an autonomous-- and presumably uncommitted--art. He goes on to question the importance Sartre places on free choice: "The work of art becomes an appeal to subjects, because it is itself nothing other than a declaration by a subject of his own choice or failure to choose" ("Commitment," p. 78). For Adorno, Sartre's emphasis on the work of art as an appeal to freedom
* In 1965 lectures published in 1972 as "A Plea for Intellectuals," Sartre responds directly to Barthes when he notes that style is "the expression of our invisible conditioning by the world behind us. " Between Existentialism and Marxism, trans. John Mathews (New York: Pantheon, 1974), p. 282.
? Introduction \ IJ
is subverted by historical reality which predetermines the range of possible choices.
Unlike Sartre, Adorno is less concerned with generating specific disclosure or implementing change than with dis- rupting fundamental attitudes. His own aesthetic theory sees the representation ('gesture toward reality") achieved by the work of art as more meaningful than the authorial intention or motivation behind it. Setting the negative example of Brecht's theater alongside that of Sartre, Adorno rejects a committed art that ends up being neither aesthet- ically nor politically effective. He concludes in support of an ostensibly autonomous art--Kafka and Beckett are his examples--capable of expressing what is barred to politics: "Kafka's prose and Beckett's plays, or the truly monstrous novel The Unnameable, have an effect by comparison with which officially committed works look like pantomime. Kafka and Beckett arouse the fear which existentialism merely talks about" (Adorno, p. 86).
To his credit, Adorno notes that Sartre reacts against a tradition of art for art's sake in France which has no equivalent impact in postwar Germany. But what he rejects in Sartre (as in Brecht) is the pretense of a committed art's carrying a moral or political message in a culture which inevitably degrades that message into an ineffectual com- modity. Such degradation is less an inherent quality of art or the artist than a condition of postwar modernity: "This is not a time for political art, but politics has migrated into autonomous art, and nowhere more so than where it seems to be politically dead" (Adorno, p. 89). In sum, the differences between Adorno and Sartre engage practice-- specifically, Sartre's theater and fiction--rather than theory. Because Adorno believes that art is invariably politicized, his emphasis on the autonomous works of Kafka and Beckett is intended as sociopolitical. The Sartrean program of litte? rature engage? e sets literature against politics so as to assert its inherent political value: "Proclaiming that literature is
already intrinsically political is the best way of freeing it from the narrow sense of the political to which others would
? 18 I Introduction
like to bind it" (Boschetti, p. no). As for the pretense of a committed art, The Words and Sartre's i 9 6 0 essay on Merleau-Ponty acknowledge the failings of litte? rature engage? e. Indeed, Adorno notes that Sartre's intellectual honesty does him credit.
I The intellectual, the product of a class-divided society, . . . is thus a product of history. In this sense, no society can complain of its intellectuals without accusing itself, for it has the intellectuals it makes.
Sartre, "A Plea for Intellectuals" (1972)
Sartre's trajectory traverses all three of Debray's intellec- tual cycles, from university to publishing and media. In 1945, he starts TM as a former academic ready to extend the cultures of literature and philosophy to a wider public. After the Liberation, he remains attentive to what Adorno refers
to disparagingly as the culture industry. But unlike Adorno, Sartre engages the emerging media cycle on its own terms
by maintaining a high level of public visibility. By the mid-1960s, cold war politics put him at odds with both supporters and friends. During a 1966 visit to Japan, he delivers three lectures at Tokyo and Kyoto in which he reformulates committed writing on the basis of a revised notion of the intellectual as "someone who meddles in what is not his business' ("Plea," p. 230).
Throughout the lectures, Sartre emphasizes the particu- larity of historical events. On the subject of fighting against racism, for example, he refers not only to its frequency as idea or image in books, plays, and films, but also to its lived historical form in trials (the Dreyfus Affair), newspaper editorials, and political speeches: "In short, the intellectual must work to at the level of events to produce other concrete events that will combat pogroms or racist verdicts in the courts" (ibid. , p. 251). For the Sartre of 1966, the intellectual's activist role extends the call to action expressed
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by the concept of praxis twenty years earlier. This activist dimension accounts for litte? rature engage? es persistent appeal among the young and the oppressed, for whom the imper- ative to act in and on history--whether imposed or chosen-- is experienced as the mixture of ideas and values Sartre calls the singular universal.
"A Plea for Intellectuals" also addresses issues of language and communication taken up in "What Is Literature? " but with a clear sense of the contradictions internalized by the intellectuals who, as technicians of specialized knowledge, find themselves "the instruments of ends which remain foreign to them and which they are forbidden to question" ("Plea," p. 240). Emphasis on historical particularity does not prevent Sartre from reiterating the value of the literary work as the objective model of the singular universal: "A book is necessarily a part of the world, through which the totality of the world is made manifest, although without ever being fully disclosed" (ibid. , p. 275). In such terms, Sartre's evolution toward practical politics following "What Is Literature? " does not entail rejection of the literary work's singular capacity to disclose being-in-the-world.
The Heideggerian ring of this capacity to disclose should not be misconstrued as vaguely poetic or metaphysical. It is tempered by a clear sense of lived experience which the writer alone communicates to his or her readers. Despite the cultural privilege and isolation of Western writers--himself included--from true revolutionary activity, Sartre asserts the essential (rather than accidental) capacity of all writers to fulfill the intellectual function of disclosing the lived present. This assertion echoes the call to action in and on history set forth in TM's early program. It suggests that despite its own historical particularity, the concept of committed writing is far from exhausted by its archival status as a postwar phenomenon.
Re? gis Debray notes in passing that all intellectual universes have their own coordinates of time and space. What might Sartre's coordinates be? For better or worse, popular memory retains the image of Henri Cartier-
? 20 I Introduction
Bresson's photo of a fortyish Sartre with horn-rimmed eyeglasses, philosopher's scarf, and obligatory pipe.
