No More Learning

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
? For Whom Does One Write? \ 129
in that she . . /, 'Mercier had the nasty habit, common among civil-service clerks . . . ' And as these laws cannot be deduced a priori nor grasped by intuition nor founded on experiments which are scientific and capable of being universally reproduced, they refer the reader back to a subjectivity which has produced these recipes from the circumstances of an active life. In this sense it can be said that most of the French novels of the Third Republic aspired, whatever the age of their real author and much more so if the author was very young, to the honour of having been written by quinquagenarians.
During this whole period, which extends over several generations, the plot is related from the point of view of the absolute, that is, of order.
It is a local change in a system at rest; neither the author nor the reader runs any risk; there is no surprise to be feared; the event is a thing of the past; it has been catalogued and understood. In a stable society which is not yet conscious of the dangers which threaten it, which has a morality at its disposal, a scale of values, and a system of explanations to integrate its local changes, which is convinced that it is beyond history and that nothing important will ever happen any more, in a bourgeois France tilled to the last acre, laid out like a chessboard by its secular walls, congealed in its industrial methods, and resting on the glory of its Revolution, no other fictional technique could be possible. New methods that some writers attempted to introduce were successful only as curiosities or were not followed up. Neither writers, readers, the structure of the collectivity, nor its myths had any need of them. 19
Thus, whereas literature ordinarily represents an integrat- ing and militant function in society, bourgeois society at the end of the nineteenth century offers the unprecedented spectacle of an industrious society, grouped round the banner of production, from which there issues a literature which, far from reflecting it, never speaks to it about what interests it, runs counter to its ideology, identifies the beautiful with the unproductive, refuses to allow itself to be integrated, and does not even wish to be read.
? 130 I What Is Literature?
The authors are not to be blamed; they did what they could; among them are some of our greatest and purest writers. And besides, as every kind of human behaviour discloses to us an aspect of the universe, their attitude has enriched us despite themselves by revealing gratuitousness as one of the infinite dimensions of the world and as a possible goal of human activity. And as they were artists, their work covered up a desperate appeal to the freedom of the reader they pretended to despise. It pushed challenge to the limit, even to the point of challenging itself; it gives us a glimpse of a black silence beyond the massacre of words, and, beyond the spirit of seriousness, the bare and empty sky of equivalences; it invites us to emerge into nothingness by destruction of all myths and all scales of value; it discloses to us in man a close and secret relationship with the nothing, instead of the intimate relationship with the divine tran- scendence. It is the literature of adolescence, of that age when the young man, useless and without responsibility, still supported and fed by his parents, wastes his family's money, passes judgement on his father, and takes part in the demolition of the serious universe which protected his childhood. If one bears in mind that the festival, as Caillois has well shown, is one of those negative moments when the collectivity consumes the goods it has accumulated, violates the laws of its moral code, spends for the pleasure of spend- ing, and destroys for the pleasure of destroying, it will be seen that literature in the nineteenth century was, on the margin of the industrious society which had the mystique of saving, a great sumptuous and funereal festival, an invitation to burn in a splendid immorality, in the fire of the passions, even unto death. When I come to say later on that it found its belated fulfilment and its end in Trotskyizing surrealism, one will better understand the function it assumes in a too closed society: it was a safety valve. After all, it's not so far from the perpetual holiday to the permanent revolution.
However, the nineteenth century was the time of the writer's transgression and fall. Had he accepted declassing from below and had he given his art a content, he would
? For Whom Does One Write? \ 131
have carried on with other means and on another plane the undertaking of his predecessors. He might have helped literature pass from negativity and abstraction to concrete construction; without losing the autonomy which the eighteenth century had won for it and which there was no longer any question of taking away from it, it might have again integrated itself into society; by clarifying and sup- porting the claims of the proletariat, he would have attained the essence of the art of writing and would have understood that there is a coincidence not only between formal freedom of thought and political democracy, but also between the material obligation of choosing man as a perpetual subject of meditation and social democracy. His style would have regained an inner tension because he would have been addressing a split public. By trying to awaken the conscious- ness of the working class while giving evidence to the bourgeois of their own iniquity, his works would have reflected the entire world. He would have learned to dis- tinguish generosity, the original source of the work of art, the unconditioned appeal to the reader, from prodigality,
its caricature; he would have abandoned the analytical and psychological interpretation of 'human nature* for the synthetic appreciation of conditions. Doubdess it was difficult, perhaps impossible; but he went about it the wrong way. It was not necessary for him to get on his high horse in a vain effort to escape all class determination, nor to 'brood over* the proletariat, but on the contrary to think of himself as a bourgeois who had broken loose from his class and who was united with the oppressed masses by a solidarity of interest.
The sumptuousness of the means of expression which he discovered should not make us forget that he betrayed literature. But his responsibility goes even further; if the authors had found an audience in the oppressed classes, per- haps the divergence of their points of view and the diversity of their writings would have helped to produce in the masses what someone has very happily called a movement of ideas, that is, an open, contradictory, and dialectical ideology.
? 132 I What Is Literature?
Without doubt, Marxism would have triumphed, but it would have been coloured with a thousand nuances; it would have had to absorb rival doctrines, digest them, and remain open. We know what happened; two revolu- tionary ideologies instead of a hundred: before 1870, the Prudhonians in the majority in the International, then crushed by the defeat of the Commune; Marxism triumphing over its adversary not by the power of the Hegelian negation which preserves while it surpasses, but because external forces pure and simple suppressed one of the forms of the antinomy. It would take a long time to tell all that this triumph without glory has cost Marxism; for want of con-
tradiction, it has lost life. Had it been the better, constantly combated, transforming itself in order to win, stealing its enemies' arms, it might have been identified with mind; alone, it became the Church, while the gentlemen-writers, a thousand miles away, made themselves guardians of an abstract spirituality.
Will anyone doubt that I am aware how incomplete and debatable these analyses are? Exceptions abound, and I know them, but it would take a big book to go into them. I have touched only the high spots. But above all, one should understand the spirit in which I have undertaken this work. If one were to see in it an attempt, even superficial, at sociological explanation, it would lose all significance. Just as for Spinoza, the idea of a line segment rotating about one of its extremities remains abstract and false if one considers it outside the synthetic, concrete, and bounded idea of circumference which contains, completes, and justifies it,
likewise here, the considerations remain arbitrary if they are not replaced in the perspective of a work of art, that is, of a free and unconditioned appeal to a freedom. One cannot write without a public and without a myth--without a certain public which historical circumstances have made, without a certain myth of literature which depends to a very great extent upon the demand of this public. In a word, the author is in a situation, like all other men. But his writings, like every human project, simultaneously enclose, specify,
? For Whom Does One Write? \ 133
and surpass this situation, even explain it and set it up, just as the idea of a circle explains and sets up that of the rotation of a segment.
Being situated is an essential and necessary characteristic of freedom. To describe the situation is not to cast aspersions on freedom. The Jansenist ideology, the law of the three unities, and the rules of French prosody are not art; in regard to art they are even pure nothingness, since they can by no means produce, by a simple combination, a good tragedy, a good scene, or even a good line. But the art of Racine had to be invented on the basis of these; not by conforming to them, as has been rather foolishly said, and by deriving exquisite difficulties and necessary constraints from them, but rather by re-inventing them, by conferring
a new and peculiarly Racinian function upon the division into acts, the caesura, rhyme, and the ethics of Port Royale, so that it is impossible to decide whether he poured his subject into a mould which his age imposed upon him or whether he really elected this technique because his subject required it. To understand what Phe`dre could not be, it is necessary to appeal to all anthropology. To understand what it is, it is necessary only to read or listen, that is, to make oneself a pure freedom and to give one's confidence generously to a generosity. The examples we have chosen have served only to situate the freedom of the writer in different ages, to illuminate by the limits of the demands made upon him the limits of his appeal, to show by the idea of his ro^le which the public fashions for itself the necessary boundaries of the idea which he invents of literature. And
if it is true that the essence of the literary work is freedom totally disclosing and willing itself as an appeal to the freedom of other men, it is also true that the different forms of oppression, by hiding from men the fact that they were free, have screened all or part of this essence from authors. Thus, the opinions which they have formed about their profession are necessarily truncated. There is always some truth tucked away in them, but this partial and isolated truth becomes an error if one stops there, and the social movement
? 134 I What Is Literature?
permits us to conceive thefluctuationsof the literary idea, although each particular work surpasses, in a certain way, all conceptions which one can have of art, because it is always, in a certain sense, unconditioned, because it comes out of nothingness and holds the world in suspense in nothingness. In addition, as our descriptions have permitted us to catch a glimpse of a sort of dialectic of the idea of literature, we can, without in the least pretending to give a history of belles-lettres, restore the movement of this dialectic in the last few centuries in order to discover at the end, be it as an ideal, the pure essence of the literary work and, conjoindy, the type of public--that is, of society--
which it requires.
I say that the literature of a given age is alienated when it
has not arrived at the explicit consciousness of its autonomy and when it submits to temporal powers or to an ideology, in short, when it considers itself as a means and not as an unconditioned end. There is no doubt that literary works, in their particularity, surpass this servitude and that each one contains an unconditioned exigence, but only by implication. I say that a literature is abstract when it has not yet acquired the full view of its essence, when it has merely set up the principle of its formal autonomy and when it considers the subject of the work as indifferent. From this point of view the twelfth century offers us the image of a concrete and alienated literature. Concrete, because content and form are blended; one learns to write only to write about God; the book is the mirror of the world in so far as the world is His work; it is an inessential creation on the margin of a major Creation; it is praise, psalm, offering, a pure reflection. By the same token literature falls into alienation; that is, since it is, in any case, the reflectiveness of the social body, since it remains in the state of non- reflective reflectiveness, it mediates the Catholic universe; but, for the clerk, it remains the immediate; it retrieves the world, but by losing itself. But as the reflective idea must necessarily reflect itselfon pain of annihilating itself with the whole reflected universe, the three examples which we have
? For Whom Does One Write? \ 135
studied showed a movement of the retrieving of literature by itself, that is, its transition from the state of unreflective and immediate reflection to that of reflective mediation. At first concrete and alienated, it liberates itself by negativity and passes to abstraction; more exacdy, it passes in the eighteenth century to abstract negativity before becoming in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century absolute negation. At the end of this evolution it has cut all its bonds with society; it no longer even has a public. 'Every one knows', writes Paulhan, 'that there are two literatures in our time, the bad, which is really unreadable (it is widely read) and the good, which is not read. '
But even that is an advance; at the end of this lofty isolation, at the end of this scornful rejection of all efficacity there is the destruction of literature by itself; at first, the terrible 'it's only literature'; then, that literary phenomenon which the same Paulhan calls terrorism, which is born at about the same time as the idea of parasitic gratuitousness, and as its antithesis, and which runs all through the nine- teenth century, contracting as it goes a thousand irrational marriages, and finally bursts forth shortly before the First World War. Terrorism, or rather the terrorist complex, for it is a tangle of vipers. One might distinguish, first, so deep a disgust with the sign as such that it leads in all cases to preferring the thing signified to the word, the act to the statement, the word conceived as object to the word- meaning, that is, in the last analysis, poetry to prose, spon- taneous disorder to composition; second, an effort to make literature one expression among others of life, instead of sacrificing life to literature; and third, a crisis of the writer's moral conscience, that is, the sad collapse of parasitism.
Thus, without for a moment conceiving the idea of los- ing its formal autonomy, literature makes itself a nega- tion of formalism and comes to raise the question of its es- sential content. Today we are beyond terrorism and we can make use of its experience and the preceding analyses to set down the essential traits of a concrete and liberated literature.
? 136 I What Is Literature?
We have said that, as a rule, the writer addressed all men. But immediately afterwards we noted that he was read only by a few. As a result of the divergence between the real public and the ideal public, there arose the idea of abstract universality. That is, the author postulates the constant repetition in an indefinite future of the handful of readers which he has at present. Literary glory peculiarly resembles Nietzsche's eternal recurrence; it is a struggle against history; here, as there, recourse to the infinity of time seeks to compensate for the failure in space (for the author of the seventeenth century, a recurrence ad infinitum of the gentle- man; for the one of the nineteenth century, an extension ad infinitum of the club of writers and the public of specialists). But as it is self-evident that the effect of the projection into the future of the real and present public is to perpetuate, at least in the representation of the writer, the exclusion of the majority of men, as, in addition, this imagining of an infinity of unborn readers is tantamount to extending the
actual public by a public made up of merely possible men, the universality which glory aims at is partial and abstract. And as the choice of the public conditions, to a certain extent, the choice of subject, the literature which has set up glory as its goal and its governing idea must also remain abstract.
The term 'concrete universality' must be understood, on the contrary, as the sum total of men living in a given society. If the writer's public could ever be extended to the point of embracing this total, the result would not be that he would necessarily have to limit the reverberations of his work to the present time, but rather he would oppose to the abstract eternity of glory, which is an impossible and hollow dream of the absolute, a concrete and finite duration which he would determine by the very choice of his subjects, and which, far from uprooting him from history, would define his situation in social time. As a matter of fact, every human project outlines a certain future by its very motto: if I'm going to sow, Fm putting a whole year of waiting before me; if I get married, my venture suddenly causes my whole
? For Whom Does One Write? \ 137
life to rise up before me; if I launch out into politics, I'm mortgaging a future which will extend beyond my death. The same with writing. Already, under the pretence of belaurelled immortality, one discerns more modest and more concrete pretensions. The aim of The Silence of the Sea was to lead the French to reject the enemy's efforts to get them to collaborate. Its effectiveness and consequently its actual public could not extend beyond the time of the occupation. The books of Richard Wright will remain alive as long as the negro question is raised in the United States. Thus, there
is no question as to the writer's renouncing the idea of survival; quite the contrary, he is the one who decides it; he will survive so long as he acts. Afterwards, it's honorary membership, retirement. Today, for having wanted to escape from history, he begins his honorary membership the day after his death, sometimes even while he is alive.
Thus, the concrete public would be a tremendous feminine questioning, the waiting of a whole society which the writer would have to seduce and satisfy. But for that the public would have to be free to ask and the writer to answer. That means that in no case must the questions of one group or class cover up those of other milieus; otherwise, we would relapse into the abstract. In short, actual literature can only realize its full essence in a classless society. Only in this society could the writer be aware that there is no difference of any kind between his subject and his public. For the subject of literature has always been man in the world. However, as long as the virtual public remained like a dark sea round the sunny litde beach of the real public, the writer risked confusing the interests and cares of man with those of a small and favoured group. But, if the public were identified with the concrete universal, the writer would really have to write about the human totality. Not about the abstract man of all the ages and for a timeless reader, but about the whole man of his age and for his contemporaries. As a result, the literary antinomy of lyrical subjectivity and objective testi- mony would be left behind. Involved in the same adventure as his readers and situated like them in a society without
? 138 I What Is Literature?
cleavages, the writer, in speaking about them, would be speaking about himself, and in speaking about himself would be speaking about them. As no aristocratic pride would any longer force him to deny that he is in a situation, he would no longer seek to soar above his times and bear witness to it before eternity, but, as his situation would be universal, he would express the hopes and anger of all men, and would thereby express himself completely, that is, not as a metaphysical creature like the medieval clerk, nor as a psychological animal like our classical writers, nor even as a social entity, but as a totality emerging into the world from the void and containing within it all those structures in the indissoluble unity of the human condition; literature would really be anthropological, in the full sense of the term.
It is quite evident that in such a society there would be nothing which would even remotely recall the separation of the temporal and the spiritual. Indeed, we have seen that this division necessarily corresponds to an alienation of man and, therefore, of literature; our analyses have shown us that it always tends to oppose a public of professionals or, at least, of enlightened amateurs, to the undifferentiated masses. Whether he identifies himself with the Good and with divine Perfection, with the Beautiful or the True, a clerk is always on the side of the oppressors. A watchdog or a jester: it is up to him to choose. M. Benda has chosen the cap and bells and M. Marcel the kennel; they have the right to do so, but if literature is one day to be able to enjoy its essence, the writer, without class, without colleges, without salons, without excess of honours, and without indignity, will be thrown into the world, among men, and the very notion of clerkship will appear inconceivable. The spiritual, moreover, always rests upon an ideology, and ideologies are freedom when they make themselves and oppression when they are made. The writer who has attained full self- consciousness will therefore not make himself the guardian of any spiritual hero; he will no longer know the centrifugal movement whereby certain of his predecessors turned their eyes away from the world to contemplate the heaven of
? For Whom Does One Write? \ 139
established values; he will know that his job is not adoration of the spiritual, but rather spiritualization.
Spiritualization, that is, renewal. And there is nothing else to spiritualize, nothing else to renew but this multicoloured and concrete world with its weight, its opaqueness, its zones of generalization, and its swarm of anecdotes, and that invincible Evil which gnaws at it without ever being able to destroy it. The writer will renew it as it is, the raw, sweaty, smelly, everyday world, in order to submit it to freedoms on die foundation of a freedom. Literature in this classless society would thus be the world aware of itself, suspended in a free act, and offering itself to the free judge- ment of all men, the reflective self-awareness of a classless society. It is by means of the book that the members of this society would be able to get their bearings, to see themselves and see their situation. But as the portrait compromises the model, as the simple presentation is already the beginning of change, as the work of art, taken as the sum of its exigencies, is not a simple description of the present but a judgement of this present in the name of a future,finally,as every book contains an appeal, this awareness of self is a surpassing of self. The universe is not challenged in the name of simple consumption, but in the name of the hopes and sufferings of those who inhabit it. Thus, concrete literature will be a synthesis of Negativity, as a power of uprooting from the given, and a Project, as an outline of a future order; it will be the Festival, the flaming mirror which burns everything reflected in it, and generosity, that is, a free invention, a gift. But if it is to be able to ally these two complementary aspects of freedom, it is not enough to accord the writer freedom to say everything; he must write for a public which has the freedom of changing everything; which means, besides suppression of classes, abolition of all dictatorship, constant renewal of frameworks, and the continuous overthrowing of order once it tends to congeal. In short, literature is, in essence, the subjectivity of a society in permanent revolu- tion. In such a society it would go beyond the antinomy of word and action. Certainly in no case would it be regarded
? 140 I What Is Literature?
as an act; it is false to say that the author acts upon his readers; he merely makes an appeal to their freedom, and in order for his works to have any effect, it is necessary for the public to adopt them on their own account by an unconditioned decision. But in a collectivity which con- stantly corrects, judges, and metamorphoses itself, the written work can be an essential condition of action, that is, the moment of reflective consciousness.
Thus, in a society without classes, without dictatorship, and without stability, literature would end by becoming conscious of itself; it would understand that form and content, public and subject, are identical, that the formal freedom of saying and the material freedom of doing com- plete each other, and that one should be used to demand the other, that it best manifests the subjectivity of the person when it translates most deeply collective needs and, reciprocally, that its function is to express the concrete universal to the concrete universal and that its end is to appeal to the freedom of men so that they may realize and maintain the reign of human freedom. To be sure, this is Utopian. It is possible to conceive this society, but we have no practical means at our disposal of realizing it. It has allowed us to perceive the conditions under which literature might manifest itself in its fullness and purity. Doubdess, these conditions are not fulfilled today; and it is today that we must write. But if the dialectic of literature has been
pushed to the point where we have been able to perceive the essence of prose and of writing, perhaps we may at this time attempt to answer the only question which is urgent for us: what is the situation of the writer in 1947; what is his public; what are his myths; what does he want to write about; what can he and what ought he write about?
? Situation of the Writer in 1947
IAM speaking about the French writer, the only one who has remained a bourgeois, the only one who has to adjust himself to a language which a hundred and fifty years of bourgeois domination have broken, vulgarized, slackened, and stuffed with 'bourgeoisisms', each of which seems a little sigh of ease and abandon. The American writer has often practised manual occupations before writing his books; he goes back to them. Between two novels, his voca- tion seems to be on the ranch, in the shop, in the city streets; he does not see in literature a means of proclaiming his solitude, but an opportunity of escaping it. He writes blindly, out of an absurd need to rid himself of his fears and anger, somewhat as the Mid-West farmer writes to the New York radio commentators to pour out his heart to them. He muses less about glory than he dreams of fraternity. He does not invent his manner against tradition, but for want of one, and in certain ways his most extreme audacities are
nai? vete? s. The world is new in his eyes, everything is yet to be said, no one before him has spoken of the skies or the crops. He rarely appears in New York, and if he goes there, it is only on the way through, or, like Steinbeck, he locks himself up for three months to write and he's quits for the year, a year which he will pass on the highways, in the work-yards, or in the bars. It is true that he belongs to 'guilds' and Associations, but that is purely to defend his material interests. He has no solidarity with other writers; he is often separated from them by the length or breadth of the continent;20 nothing is more remote from him than the idea of college or clerkship; for a while he is feted and then is lost and forgotten; he reappears with a new book to take a new plunge. 21
Thus, at the mercy of twenty ephemeral glories and
? 142 I What Is Literature?
twenty disappearances, he drifts continually between the working-class world, where he goes to seek adventures, and his middle-class readers (I don't dare call them bourgeois; I very much doubt whether there is a bourgeoisie in the United States), hard, brutal, young, and lost, who tomorrow will take the same plunge as he.
In England, the intellectuals are less integrated into the collectivity than we; they form an eccentric and slighdy cantankerous caste which does not have much contact with the rest of the population. The reason is, first of all, that they have not had our luck; because remote predecessors whom we hardly deserve prepared the Revolution, the class in power, after a century and a half, still does us the honour of fearing us a little (very little); it treats us tactfully. Our confre`res in London, who do not have these glorious memories, do not frighten anyone; they are considered quite harmless; and then, club life is less suitable for spreading their influence than salon life has been in spreading ours.
Among themselves, the men speak about business, politics, women, or horses, never about literature, whereas our matrons, who practised literature as an accomplishment, helped, by their receptions, to bring together politicians, financiers, generals, and men of letters. The English writers make a virtue of necessity and by aggrandizing the oddness of their ways attempt to claim as a free choice the isolation which has been imposed upon them by the structure of their society. Even in Italy, where the bourgeoisie, without ever having counted for much, has been ruined by fascism and defeat, the condition of the writer, needy, badly paid, lodged in dilapidated palaces too vast and grandiose to be heated or even furnished, at grips with a princely lan- guage too pompous to be supple, is far removed from
ours.
Thus, we are the most bourgeois writers in the world.
Well housed, decently dressed, not so well fed, perhaps; but even that is significant: the bourgeois spends lesson his food, proportionally, than the workman; much more for his clothes and lodging. All of us, moreover, are steeped
? Situation of the Writer in 1947 | 143
in bourgeois culture; in France, where the school leaving- certificate is a hallmark of the bourgeoisie, it is not per- missible to plan to write without it. In other countries, the possessed, with dreamy eyes, twist and squirm under the sway of an idea which has seized them from behind and which they never manage to look in the face. After having tried everything, they end by trying to pour their obsession on paper and to let it dry there with the ink. But as for us, we were used to literature long before beginning our first novel. To us it seemed natural for books to grow in a Civilized society, like trees in a garden. It is because we loved Racine and Verlaine too much that when we were
fourteen years old, we discovered, during the evening study period or in the great court of the lyce? e> our vocation as a writer. Even before having found ourselves at grips with
a work of our own--that monster, so drab, so smeared with our own sticky juices, such a gamble--we had been brought up on literature already made, and we naively thought that our future writings would issue from our mind in the fin- ished state in which we found those of others, with the seal of collective recognition and the pomp which comes from secular consecration, in short, like national resources. For
us, the ultimate transformation of a poem, its last toilette for eternity, was, after having appeared in magnificent illustrated editions, that it should end by appearing in small type in a hard-covered book bound in green canvas, whose clean smell of ink and pulp seemed to us the very perfume of the Muses, and that it should move the dreamy, inky- fingered sons of the future bourgeoisie. Breton himself, who wanted to set fire to culture, got his first literary shock in class one day when his teacher was reading Mallarme? to him. In short, for a long time we thought that the final des- tination of our work was to furnish literary texts for the French explication classes of 1980. Later on, five years would be just about long enough after our first book for us to be shaking hands with ail our confre`res. Centralization has grouped us all in Paris. With a bit of luck, a busy American might meet us all in twenty-four hours, to know, in twenty-
? 144 I What Is Literature?
four hours, our opinions about U. N. R. R. A. , the U. N. , U. N. E. S. C. O. , the Henry Miller affair, and the atomic bomb; in twenty-four hours, a trained cyclist might circulate --from Aragon to Mauriac, from Vercors to Cocteau, stop- ping off to see Breton in Montmartre, Queneau in Neuilly, and Billy at Fontainebleau--a report of the scruples and moral crises which are part of our professional obligations, one of those manifestoes, one of those petitions or protests to Tito for or against the return of Trieste, the annexation of the Saar, or the use of Vys in future warfare, by which we like to show that we belong to our century; in twenty-four hours, without a cyclist, a piece of gossip goes all about our college and returns, embroidered, to the one who launched it. We all--or almost all--can be seen together in certain cafe? s, at the Ple? iade concerts, and, in certain strictly literary circumstances, at the British Embassy. From time to time, one of us who has been overworking has it announced that he's leaving for the country; we all go to see him; we advise him that it's all for the best, that one can't write in Paris, and we see him off with our envy and our best wishes; as for us, an aged mother, a young mistress, or an urgent job keeps us in town.