No More Learning

They were means solely of preserving and transmitting Christian ideology. To be able to read was to have the necessary tool for acquiring knowledge of the sacred texts and their innumerable commentaries; to be able to write was to be able to comment. Other men no more aspired to possess these professional techniques than we aspire today to acquire that of the cabinet-maker or the palaeographer if we practise other professions. The barons counted on the clerks to produce and watch over spirituality. By themselves they were incapable of exercising control over writers as the public does today, and they were unable to distinguish heresy from orthodox beliefs if they were left without help. They got excited only when the pope had recourse to the secular arm. Then they pillaged and burned everything, but only because they had confidence in the pope, and they never turned up their noses at a chance to pillage. It is true that the ideology was ultimately intended for them, for them and the people, but it was communicated to them orally by preaching, and the church very early made use of a simpler language than writing: the image. The sculpture of the cloisters and the cathedrals, the stained glass windows, the paintings, and the mosaics speak of God and the Holy Story. The clerk wrote his chronicles, his philosophical works, his commentaries, and his poems on the margin of
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this vast illustrating enterprise of faith. He intended them for his peers; they were controlled by his superiors. He did not have to be concerned with the effects which his works would produce upon the masses, since he was assured in advance that they would have no knowledge of them. Nor did he want to introduce remorse into the conscience of a feudal plunderer or caitiff; violence was unlettered. Thus, for him it was neither a question of reflecting its own image back to the temporal, nor of taking sides, nor of disengag- ing the spiritual from historical experience by a continuous effort. Quite the contrary, as the writer was of the Church, as the Church was an immense spiritual college which proved its dignity by its resistance to change, as history and the temporal were one and spirituality was radically distinct from the temporal, as the aim of his clerkship was to main- tain this distinction, that is, to maintain itself as a specialized body in the face of the century, as, in addition, the economy was so divided up and as means of communication were so few and slow that events which occurred in one province had no effect upon the neighbouring province and as a monastery could enjoy its individual peace, like the hero of the AcharnianSy while its country was at war, the writer's mission was to prove his autonomy by delivering himself to the exclusive contemplation of the Eternal. He incessandy affirmed the Eternal's existence and demonstrated it pre- cisely by the fact that his only concern was to regard it. In this sense, he realized, in effect, the ideal of Benda, but one can see under what conditions: spirituality and literature had to be alienated, a particular ideology had to triumph, a feudal pluralism had to make the isolation of the clerks possible, virtually the whole population had to be illiterate, and the only public of the writer could be the college of other writers. It is inconceivable that one can practise free- dom of thought, write for a public which coincides with the restricted collectivity of specialists, and restrict oneself to describing the content of eternal values and a priori ideas. The good conscience of the medieval clerk flowered on the death of literature,
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However, in order for writers to preserve this happy con- science it is not quite necessary that their public be reduced to an established body of professionals. It is enough for them to be steeped in the ideology of the privileged classes, to be completely permeated by it, and to be unable even to conceive any others. But in this case their function is modified; they are no longer asked to be the guardians of dogma but merely not to make themselves its detractors. As a second example of the adherence of writers to estab- lished ideology, one might, I believe, choose the French seventeenth century.
The secularization of the writer and his public was in process of being completed in that age. It certainly had its origin in the expansive force of the written thing, its monu- mental character, and the appeal to freedom which is hidden away in any work of the mind. But external circumstances contributed, such as the development of education, the weakening of the spiritual power, and the appearance of new ideologies which were expressly intended for the temporal. However, secularization does not mean universalization. The writer's public still remained strictly limited. Taken as
a whole, it was called society, and this name designated a fraction of the court, the clergy, the magistracy, and the rich bourgeoisie. Considered individually, the reader was called a 'gentleman* {honne^te homme) and he exercised a certain function of censorship which was called taste. In short, he was both a member of the upper classes and a specialist. If he criticized the writer, it was because he him- self could write. The public of Corneille, Pascal, and Des- cartes was Mme de Se? vigne? , the Chevalier de Me? re? , Mme
de Grignan, Mme de Rambouillet, and Saint-E? vremonde. Today the public, in relation to the writer, is in a state of passiveness: it waits for ideas or a new art form to be im- posed upon it. It is the inert mass wherein the idea will assume flesh. Its means of control is indirect and negative; one cannot say that it gives its opinion; it simply buys or does not buy the book; the relationship between author and reader is analogous to that of male and female: reading has
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become a simple means of information and writing a very general means of communication. In the seventeenth cen- tury being able to write already meant really being able to write well. Not that Providence divided the gift of style equally among all men, but because the reader, if not strictly identical with the writer, was a potential writer. He belonged to a parasitical e? lite for whom the art of writing was, if not a profession, at least the mark of its superiority. He read because he could write; with a little luck he might have been able to write what he read. The public was active; pro- ductions of the mind were really submitted to it. It judged them by a scale of values which it helped to maintain. A revolution analogous to romanticism is not conceivable in this period because there would have to have been the con- currence of an indecisive mass, which one surprises, over- whelms, and suddenly animates by revealing to it ideas or feelings of which it was ignorant, and which, lacking firm convictions, constandy requires being ravished and fecun- dated. In the seventeenth century convictions were un- shakeable; the religious ideology went hand in hand with a political ideology which the temporal itself secreted; no one publicly questioned the existence of God or the divine right of kings. 'Society' had its language, its graces, and its ceremonies which it expected to find in the books it read. Its conception of time, too. As the two historical facts which it constantly pondered--original sin and redemption-- belonged to a remote past, as it was also from this past that the great governing families drew their pride and the justifi- cation of their privileges, as the future could bring nothing new, since God was too perfect to change, and since the two great earthly powers, the Church and the Monarchy, aspired only to immutability, the active element of tempor- ality was the past, which is itself a phenomenal degradation of the Eternal; the present is a perpetual sin which can find an excuse for itself only if it reflects, with the least possible unfaithfulness, the image of a completed era. For an idea to be received, it must prove its antiquity; for a work of art to please, it must have been inspired by an ancient model.
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Again we find writers expressly making themselves the guardians oFtfris ideology. There were still great clerks who belonged to the Church and who had no other concern than to defend dogma. To them were added the 'watchdogs' of the temporal, historians, court poets, jurists, and philoso- phers who were concerned with establishing and maintain- ing the ideology of the absolute monarchy. But we see appearing at their side a third category of writers, stricdy secular, who, for the most part, accepted the religious and political ideology of the age without thinking that they were bound to prove it or preserve it. They did not write about it, they accepted it implicitly. For them, it was what we called a short time ago the context or the whole body of the presuppositions common to readers and author which are necessary to make the writings of the latter intelligible to the former. In general, they belonged to the bourgeoisie; they were pensioned by the nobility. As they consumed without producing, and as the nobility did not produce either but lived off the work of others, they were the para- sites of a parasitic class. They no longer lived in a college but formed an implicit corporation in that highly integrated society, and to remind them constandy of their collegiate origin and their former clerkship the royal power chose some of them and grouped them in a sort of symbolic college, the French Academy. Fed by the king and read by an e? lite, they were concerned solely with responding to the demands of this limited public. They had as good or almost as good a conscience as the twelfth-century clerks. It is impossible to speak of a virtual public as distinguished from a real public in this age. La Bruye`re happened to speak about peasants, but he did not speak to them, and if he took note of their misery, it was not for the sake of drawing an argu- ment against the ideology he accepted, but in the name of that ideology: it was a disgrace for enlightened monarchs and good Christians. Thus, one spoke about the masses above their heads and without even conceiving the notion
that one might help them become self-conscious. And the homogeneity of the public banished all contradiction from
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the authors' souls. They were not pulled between real but detestable readers and readers who were virtual and desir- able but out of reach; they did not ask themselves questions about their ro^le in the world, for the writer questions him- self about his mission only in ages when it is not clearly defined and when he must invent or re-invent it, that is, when he notices, beyond the e? lite who read him, an amor- phous mass of possible readers whom he may or may not choose to win, and when he must himself decide, in the event that he has the opportunity to reach them, what his relations with them are to be. The authors of the seventeenth century had a definite function because they addressed an enlightened, strictly limited, and active public which exer- cised permanent control over them. Unknown by the people, their job was to reflect back its own image to the e? lite which supported them. But there are many ways of reflecting an image: certain portraits are by themselves challenges because they have been made from without and without passion by a painter who refuses any complicity with his model. However, for a writer merely to conceive the idea of drawing a portrait-challenge of his real reader, he must have become conscious of a contradiction between himself and his public, that is, he must come to his readers from without and must consider them with astonishment, or he must feel the astonished regard of unfamiliar minds (ethnic minorities, oppressed classes, etc. ) weighing upon the little society which he forms with them. But in the seventeenth century, since the virtual public did not exist, since the artist accepted without criticism the ideology of the elite, he made himself an accomplice of his public. No unfamiliar stare came to trouble him in his games. Neither the prose writer nor even the poet was accursed. They did not have to decide with each work what the meaning and value of literature were, since its meaning and value were fixed by tradition. Well integrated in a hier- archical society, they knew neither the pride nor the anguish of being 'different'; in short, they were classical. There is classicism when a society has taken on a relatively stable
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form and when it has been permeated with the myth of its perpetuity, that is, when it confounds the present with the eternal and historicity with traditionalism, when the hier- archy of classes is such that the virtual public never exceeds the real public and when each reader is for the writer a qualified critic and a censor, when the power of the religious and political ideology is so strong and the prohibitions so rigorous that in no case is there any question of discovering new countries of the mind, but only of putting into shape the commonplaces adopted by the e? litey in such a way that reading--which, as we have seen, is the concrete relation between the writer and his public--is a ceremony of recogni- tion analogous to the bow of salutation, that is, the cere- monious affirmation that author and reader are of the same world and have the same opinions about everything. Thus, each production of the mind is at the same time an act of courtesy, and style is the supreme courtesy of the author towards his reader, and the reader, for his part, never tires
of finding the same thoughts in the most diverse of books because these thoughts are his own and he does not ask to acquire others but only to be offered with magnificence those which he already has. Hence, it is in a spirit of com- plicity that the author presents and the reader accepts a portrait which is necessarily abstract; addressing a parasitical class, he cannot show man at work or, in general, the rela- tions between man and external nature. As, on the other hand, there are bodies of specialists who, under the control of the Church and the Monarchy, are concerned with main- taining the spiritual and secular ideology, the writer does not even suspect the importance of economic, religious, metaphysical, and political factors in the constitution of the person; and as the society in which he lives confounds the present with the eternal he cannot even imagine the slightest change in what he calls human nature. He conceives history as a series of accidents which affect the eternal man on the surface without deeply modifying him, and if he had to assign a meaning to historical duration he would see in it both an eternal repetition, so that previous events can and
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ought to provide lessons for his contemporaries, and a pro- cess of slight degeneration, since the fundamental events of history are long since passed and since, perfection in letters having been attained in Antiquity, his ancient models seem beyond rivalry. And in all this he is once again fully in har- mony with his public, which considers work as a curse, which does notfeel its situation in history and in the world for the simple reason that it is privileged and because its only con- cern is faith, respect for the Monarch, passion, war, death, and courtesy. In short, the image of classical man is purely psychological because the classical public is conscious only of his psychology. Furthermore, it must be understood that this psychology is itself traditionalist, it is not concerned with discovering new and profound truths about the human heart or with setting up hypotheses. It is in unstable societies when the public exists on several social levels, that the writer, torn and dissatisfied, invents explanations for his anguish. The psychology of the seventeenth century is purely descriptive. It is not based so much upon the author's personal experience as it is the aesthetic expression of what the e? lite thinks about itself. La Rochefoucauld borrows the form and the content of his maxims from the diversions of the salons. The casuistry of the Jesuits, the etiquette of the Pre? cieuses, the portrait game, the ethics of Nicole, and the religious conception of the passions are at the origin of a hundred other works. The comedies draw their inspiration from ancient psychology and the plain common sense of the upper bourgeoisie. Society is thoroughly delighted at seeing itself mirrored in them because it recognizes the notions it has about itself; it does not ask to be shown what it is, but it asks rather for a reflection of what it thinks it is. To be sure, some satires are permitted, but it is the e? lite which, through pamphlets and comedies, carries on, in the name of its morality, the cleansings and the purges necessary
for its health. The ridiculous marquis, the litigants, or the Pre? cieuses are never made fun of from a point of view external to the governing class; it is always a matter of eccen- trics who are inassimilable in a civilized society and who
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live on the margin of the collective life. The Misanthrope is twitted because he lacks courtesy, Cathos and Madelon, because they have too much. Philaminte goes counter to the accepted ideas about women; the bourgeois gentleman is odious to the rich bourgeois who have a lofty modesty and who know the greatness and the humbleness of their con- dition, and, at the same time, to the gentlemen because he wants to push his way into the nobility. This internal and, so to speak, physiological satire has no connection with the great satire of Beaumarchais, P. L. Courier, J. Valle`s, and Ce? line; it is less courageous and much more severe because it exhibits the repressive action which the collectivity practises upon the weak, the sick, and the maladjusted. It is the pitiless laughter of a gang of street-urchins at the
awkwardness of their scapegoat.
Bourgeois in origin and outlook, more like Oronte and Chrysale in his home life than like his brilliant and restless confre`res of 1780 or 1830, yet accepted in the Society of the Great and pensioned by them, slightly unclassed from above, yet convinced that talent is no substitute for birth, docile to the reprimands of the clergy, respectful of the royal power, happy to occupy a modest place in the immense structure of which the Church and the Monarchy are the pillars, some- what above the merchants and the scholars, below the nobles and the clergy, the writer practises his profession with a good conscience, convinced that he has come too late, that everything has been said, and that the only proper thing to do is to re-say it agreeably. He conceives the glory which awaits him as a feeble reflection of hereditary titles and if he expects it to be eternal it is because he does not even suspect that the society of his readers may be over- thrown by social changes. Thus, the permanence of the royal family seems to him a guarantee of that of his renown.
Yet, almost in spite of himself, the mirror which he modestly offers to his readers is magical: it enthrals and compromises. Even though everything has been done to offer them only a flattering and complaisant image, more subjective than objective and more internal than external,
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this image remains none the less a work of art, that is, it has its basis in the freedom of the author and is an appeal to the freedom of the reader. Since it is beautiful, it is made of glass; aesthetic distance puts it out of reach. Impossible to be delighted with it, to find any comfortable warmth in it, any discrete indulgence. Even though it is made up of the commonplaces of the age and that smug complacency which unite contemporaries like an umbilical cord, it is supported by a freedom and thereby another kind of objectivity. It is itselfy to be sure, that the e? litefindsin the mirror, but itself as it would see itself if it went to the very extremes of severity. It is not congealed into an object by the gaze of the Other, for neither the peasant nor the working-man has yet become the Other for it, and the art of reflective presentation which characterizes the art of the seventeenth century is a stricdy internal process; however, it pushes to the limits each one's efforts to see into himself clearly; it is a perpetual
cogito. To be sure, it does not call idleness, oppression, or parasitism into question, because these aspects of the gov- erning class are revealed only to observers who place them- selves outside it; hence, the image which is reflected back to it is stricdy psychological. But spontaneous behaviour, by passing to the reflective state, loses its innocence and the excuse of immediacy; it must be assumed or changed. It is, to be sure, a world of courtesy and ceremony which is offered to the reader, but he is already emerging from this world since he is invited to know it and to recognize him- self in it. In this sense, Racine was not wrong when he said in regard to Phe`dre that 'the passions are presented before your eyes only to show all the disorder of which they are the cause*. On condition that one does not take that to mean that his express purpose was to inspire a horror of love. But to paint passion is already to go beyond it, already to shed it. It is not a matter of chance that, about the same time, philosophers were suggesting the idea of curing one's self of it by knowledge. And as the reflective practice of freedom when confronted by the passions is usually adorned with the name of morals, it must be recognized that the art
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of the seventeenth century is eminently a moralizing art. Not that its avowed aim is to teach virtue, nor that it is poisoned by the good intentions which produce bad litera- ture, but by the mere fact that it quietly offers the reader his own image, it makes it unbearable for him. Moralizing: this is both a definition and a limit. It is not moralizing only; if it proposes to man that he transcend the psychological to- wards the moral, it is because it regards religious, meta- physical, political, and social problems as solved; but its action is none the less 'orthodox'. As it confounds universal man with the particular men who are in power, it does not dedicate itself to the liberation of any concrete category of the oppressed; however, the writer, though completely assimilated by the oppressing class, is by no means its accomplice; his work is unquestionably a liberator since its effect, within this class, is to free man from himself.
Up to this point we have been considering the case in which the writer's potential public was nil, or just about, and in which his real public was not torn by any conflict. We have seen that he could then accept the current ideology with a good conscience and that he launched his appeals to freedom within the ideology itself. If the potential public suddenly appears, or if the real public is broken up into hostile factions, everything changes. We must now consider what happens to literature when the writer is led to reject the ideology of the ruling classes.
The eighteenth century was the palmy time, unique in history, and the soon-to-be-lost paradise, of French writers. Their social condition had not changed. Bourgeois in origin, with very few exceptions, they were unclassed by the favours of the great. The circle of their real readers had grown perceptibly larger because the bourgeoisie had begun to read, but they were still unknown to the 'lower' classes, and if the writers spoke of them more often than did La Bruye`re and Fe? nelon, they never addressed them, even in spirit. However, a profound upheaval had broken their public in two; they had to satisfy contradictory demands.
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Their situation was characterized from the beginning by tension. This tension was manifested in a very particular way. The governing class had in fact lost confidence in its ideology. It had put itself into a position of defence; it tried, to a certain extent, to retard the diffusion of new ideas, but it could not keep from being penetrated by these ideas. It understood that its religious and political principles were the best instruments for establishing its power, but the fact is that as it saw them only as instruments, it ceased to believe in them completely. Pragmatic truth had replaced revealed truth. If censorship and prohibitions were more visible, they covered up a secret weakness and a cynicism of des- pair. There were no more clerks; church literature was empty apologetics, a fist holding on to dogmas which were breaking loose; it was turning against freedom; it addressed itself to respect, fear, and self-interest, and by ceasing to be a free appeal to free men, it was ceasing to be literature. This distraught e? lite turned to the genuine writer and asked him to do the impossible, not to spare his severity, if he was bent on it, but to breathe at least a bit of freedom into a wilting ideology, to address himself to his readers' reason and to persuade them to adopt dogmas which, with time, had be- come irrational. In short, to turn propagandist without ceasing to be a writer. But it was playing a losing game. Since its principles were no longer a matter of immediate and unformulated evidence and since it had to present them to the writer so that he might come to their defence, since there was no longer any question of saving them for their own sake but rather of maintaining order, it contested their validity by its very effort to re-establish them. The writer who consented to buttress this shaky ideology at least con- sented to do so, and this voluntary adherence to principles which, in the past, had governed minds without being noticed now freed him from them. He was already going beyond them. In spite of himself he was emerging into soli- tude and freedom. The bourgeoisie, on the other hand, which constituted what in Marxist terms is called the rising class, was trying at this same time to disengage itself from
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the ideology that was being imposed upon it and to con- struct one better suited to its own purpose.
Now, this Rising class', which was soon to claim the right to participate in affairs of State, was subject only to political oppression. Confronted with a ruined nobility, it was in the process of very calmly attaining economic
pre-eminence. It already had money, culture, and leisure. Thus, for the first time an oppressed class was presenting itself to the writer as a real public. But the conjunction was still more favourable; for this awakening class, which was reading and trying to think, had not yet produced an organized revolutionary party which would secrete its own
ideology as did the Church in the Middle Ages. The writer was not yet wedged, as we shall see that he was later to be, between the dying ideology of a declining class and the rigorous ideology of the rising class. The bourgeoisie wanted light; it felt vaguely that its thought was alienated, and it wanted to become conscious of itself. One could probably find some traces of organization: materialist societies, groups of intellectuals, freemasonry. But they were chiefly associations for inquiry which were waiting for ideas rather than produc- ing them. To be sure, a form of popular and spontaneous writing was spreading: the secret and anonymous tract. But this literature of amateurs did not compete with the profes- sional writer; rather, it goaded and solicited him by inform- ing him about the confused aspirations of the collectivity. Thus, the bourgeoisie--as opposed to a public of half- specialists, which with difficulty held on to its position and which was always recruited at Court and from the upper cir- cles of society--offered the rough draft of a mass public. In regard to literature, it was in a state of relative passivity since it had no experience in the art of writing, no preconceived opinion about style and literary genres, and was awaiting everything, form and content, from the genius of the writer.
Solicited by both sides, the writer found himself between the two hostile factions of his public as the arbiter of their conflict.
He was no longer a clerk; the ruling class was not the only one supporting him. It is true that it was still
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pensioning him, but it was the bourgeoisie which was buy- ing his books. He was collecting at both ends. His father had been a bourgeois and his son would be as well; one might thus be tempted to see in him a bourgeois more gifted than others but similarly oppressed, a man who had attained knowledge of his state under the pressure of historical circumstances, in short, an inner mirror by means of which the whole bourgeoisie became conscious of itself and its demands. But this would be a superficial view. It has not been sufficiently pointed out that a class can acquire class consciousness only if it sees itself from within and without at the same time; in other words, if it profits by external competition; that is where the intellectuals, the perpetually unclassed, come into the picture.
The essential characteristic of the eighteenth-century writer was precisely an objective and subjective unclassing. Though he still remembered his bourgeois attachments, yet the favour of the great drew him away from his milieu; he no longer felt any concrete solidarity with his cousin the lawyer or his brother the village cure? because he had privi- leges which they had not. It was from the court and nobility that he borrowed his manners and the very graces of his style. Glory, his dearest hope and his consecration, had be- come for him a slippery and ambiguous notion; a fresh idea of glory was rising up in which a writer was truly rewarded if an obscure doctor in Bruges or a briefless lawyer in Rheims devoured his books almost in secret.
But the diffuse recognition of this public which he hardly knew only half touched him. He had received from his elders a traditional conception of fame. According to this conception, it was the monarch who consecrated his genius. The visible sign of his success was for Catherine or Frederick to invite him to their table. The recompense given to him and the dignities conferred from above did not yet have the official impersonality of the prizes and decorations awarded by our republics. They retained the quasi-feudal character of man to man relations. And since he was, above all, an eternal consumer in a society of producers, a parasite of a parasitic
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class, he treated money like a parasite. He did not earn it since there was no common measure between his work and his remuneration; he only spent it. Therefore, even if he was poor, he lived in luxury. Everything was a luxury to him, including, and in fact particularly so, his writing. Yet, even in the king's chamber he retained a rough force, a potent vulgarity; Diderot, in the heat of a philosophical conver- sation, pinched the thigh of the Empress of Russia until the blood flowed. And then, if he went too far, he could always be made to feel that he was only a scribbler. The life of Voltaire, from his beating, his imprisonment, and his flight to London, to the insolence of the King of Prussia was a succession of triumphs and humiliations. At times the writer enjoyed the passing favours of a marquise, but he married his maid or a bricklayer's daughter. Hence, his mind, as well as his public, was torn apart. But this did not cause him to suffer; on the contrary, this original contradiction was the source of his pride. He thought that he had no obligations to anyone, that he could choose his friends and opponents, and that it was enough for him to take his pen in hand to free himself from the conditioning of milieu, nation, or class. He flew, he soared, he was pure thought, pure observation. He chose to write to vindicate his unclassing which he assumed and transformed into solitude. From the outside, he con- templated the great with the eyes of the bourgeois and the bourgeois with the eyes of the nobility, and he retained enough complicity with both to understand them equally from within. Hence, literature, which up to then had been only a conservative and purifying function of an integrated society, became conscious in him and by him of its auton- omy. Placed by an extreme chance between confused aspir- ations and an ideology in ruins--like the writer between the bourgeoisie, the Court, and the Church--literature suddenly asserted its independence. It was no longer to reflect the commonplaces of the collectivity; it identified itself with Mind, that is, with the permanent power of forming and criticizing ideas.
Of course, this taking over of literature by itself was
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abstract and almost purely formal, since the literary works were not the concrete expression of any class; and as the writers began by rejecting any deep solidarity with the milieu from which they came as well as the one which adopted them, literature became confused with Negativity, that is, with doubt, refusal, criticism, and opposition. But as a result of this very fact, it led to the setting up, against the ossified spirituality of the Church, of the rights of a new spirituality, one in movement, which was no longer identi- fied with any ideology and which manifested itself as the power of continually surpassing the given, whatever it might be. When, in the shelter of the structure of the very Christian monarchy, it was imitating wonderful models, it hardly fussed about truth because truth was only a very crude and very concrete quality of the ideology which had been nourishing it; according to the dogmas of the Church, to be true or, quite simply, to be, was all one, and truth could not be conceived apart from the system. But now that spirituality had become this abstract movement which cut through all ideologies and then left them along the wayside like empty shells, truth, in its turn, was disentangled from all concrete and particular philosophy; it was revealed in its abstract independence; it became the regulating idea of literature and the distant limit of the critical movement.
Spirituality, literature, and truth: these notions were bound up in that abstract and negative moment of becoming conscious of the world. Their instrument was analysis, a negative and critical method which perpetually dissolves concrete data into abstract elements and the products of history into combinations of universal concepts. An adoles- cent chooses to write in order to escape an oppression from which he suffers and a solidarity he is ashamed of; as soon as he has written a few words, he thinks he has escaped from his milieu and class and from all milieus and all classes and that he has broken through his historical situation by the mere fact that he has attained reflective and critical knowl- edge. Above the confusion of those bourgeois and nobles, locked up in their particular age by their prejudices, he has,
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on taking up his pen, discovered himself as a timeless and unlocalized consciousness, in short, as universal man. And literature, which has delivered him, is an abstract function and an a priori power of human nature; it is the movement whereby at every moment man frees himself from history; in short, it is the exercise of freedom.
In the seventeenth century a man, by choosing to write, embraced a definite profession, with the tricks of the trade, its rules and customs, its rank in the hierarchy of the pro- fessions. In the eighteenth century, the moulds were broken; everything remained to be done; works of the mind, instead of being put together according to established patterns and more or less by luck, were each a particular invention and were a kind of decision of the author regarding the nature, value, and scope of belles-lettres; each one brought its own rules and the principles by which it was to be judged; each one aspired to engage the whole of literature and to blaze new paths. It is not by chance that the worst works of the period are also those which claimed to be the most traditional; tragedy and epic were the exquisite fruits of an integrated society; in a collectivity which was torn apart, they could subsist only in the form of survivals and pastiches.
What the eighteenth-century writer tirelessly demanded in all his works was the right to practise an anti-historical reason against history, and in this sense all he did was to reveal the essential requirements of abstract literature. He was not concerned with giving his readers a clearer class consciousness. Quite the contrary, the urgent appeal which he addressed to his bourgeois public was an invitation to forget humiliations, prejudices, and fears; the one he directed to his noble public was a solicitation to strip itself of its pride of caste and its privileges. As he had made himself universal, he could have only universal readers, and what he required of the freedom of his contemporaries was that they cut their historical ties in order to join him in universality.
What is the origin of this miracle by which, at the very moment he was setting up abstract freedom against concrete oppression and Reason against History, he was going along
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in the very direction of historical development? First, the bourgeoisie, by a tactic which was characteristic of it and which it was to repeat in 1830 and 1848, joined forces, on the eve of taking power, with those oppressed classes which were not in a condition to push their demands. And since the bonds which united social groups so different from one another could only be very general and very abstract, it aimed not so much to acquire a clear consciousness of itself, which would have opposed it to the workingmen and peasants, as to have its right to lead the opposition recog- nized on the grounds that it was in a better position to let the established powers know the demands of universal human nature. On the other hand, the revolution being prepared was a political one; there was no revolutionary ideology and no organized party. The bourgeoisie wanted to be enlightened; it wanted the ideology which for centuries had mystified and alienated man to be liquidated. There would be time later on to replace it. For the time being, it aimed at freedom of opinion as a step towards political power. Hence, by demandingfor himselj"and as a writer free- dom of thinking and of expressing his thought, the author necessarily served the interests of the bourgeois class. No more was asked of him and there was nothing more he could do. In later periods, as we shall see, the writer could demand his freedom to write with a bad conscience; he might be aware that the oppressed classes wanted something other than that freedom. Freedom of thinking could then appear as a privilege; in the eyes of some it could pass for a means of oppression, and the position of the writer risked becoming untenable. But on the eve of the Revolution he enjoyed an extraordinary opportunity, that is, it was enough for him to defend his profession in order to serve as a guide
to the aspirations of the rising class.
He knew it. He considered himself a guide and a spiritual
chief. He took chances. As the ruling e? lite, which grew in- creasingly nervous, lavished its graces upon him one day only to have him locked up the next, he had none of that tranquillity, that proud mediocrity, which his predecessors
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had enjoyed. His glorious and eventful life, with its sunlit crests and its dizzying steeps, was that of an adventurer. The other evening I was reading the dedication of Blaise Cendrars' Rhum: 'To the young people of today who are tired of literature, to prove to them that a novel can also be an act', and I thought that we are quite unfortunate and quite guilty, since we have to prove what in the eighteenth cen- tury was self-evident. A work of the mind was then doubly an act since it produced ideas which were to lead to social upheavals and since it exposed its author to danger. And this act, whatever the book we may be considering, was always defined in the same way; it was a liberator. And, doubtless, in the seventeenth century too, literature had a liberating function, though one which remained veiled and implicit. In the time of the Encyclopaedists, it was no longer
a question of freeing the gentleman from his passions by reflecting them back to him without complaisance, but of helping with the pen to bring about the political freedom simply of man. The appeal which the writer addressed to his bourgeois public was, whether he meant it or not, an incite- ment to revolt; the one which he directed to the ruling class was an invitation to lucidity, to critical self-examination, to the giving up of its privileges. The condition of Rousseau was much like that of Richard Wright when he writes for both enlightened negroes and whites. Before the nobility he bore witness and at the same time was inviting his fellow commoners to become conscious of themselves. It was not only the taking of the Bastille which his writings and those
of Diderot and Condorcet were preparing at long range; it was also the night of August the fourth.
And as the writer thought that he had broken the bonds which united him to his class of origin, as he spoke to his readers from above about universal human nature, it seemed to him that the appeal he made to them and the part he took in their misfortunes were dictated by pure generosity. To write is to give. In this way he accepted and excused what was unacceptable in his situation as a parasite in an indus- trious society; this was also how he became conscious of
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that absolute freedom, that gratuity, which characterize literary creation. But though he constantly had in view universal man and the abstract rights of human nature, there is no reason to believe that he was an incarnation of the 'clerk' as Benda has described him. Since his position was, in essence, critical, he certainly had to have something to criti- cize; and the objects which first presented themselves to criticism were the institutions, superstitions, traditions, and acts of a traditional government.
In other words, as the walls of Eternity and the Past which had supported the ideological structure of the seven- teenth century cracked and gave way, the writer perceived a new dimension of temporality in its purity: the Present. The Present, which preceding centuries had sometimes con- ceived as a perceptible figuration of Eternity and sometimes as a degraded emanation of Antiquity. He had only a con- fused notion of the future, but he knew that the fleeting hour which he was living was unique and that it was his, that it was in no way inferior to the most magnificent hours of Antiquity, since they too had begun by being the present. He knew that it was his chance and that he must not waste it. That was why he considered the fight he had to wage not so much as a preparation for the society of the future but rather as a short-term enterprise, one of immediate efficacy. It was this institution that had to be denounced and at once, that superstition that had to be destroyed immediately, that particular injustice that had to be rectified. This impassioned sense of the present saved him from idealism; he did not confine himself to contemplating the eternal ideas of Free- dom or Equality. For the first time since the Reformation, writers intervened in public life, protested against an unjust decree, asked for the review of a trial, and, in short, decided that the spiritual was in the street, at the fair, in the market place, at the tribunal, and that it was by no means a matter of turning away from the temporal, but, on the contrary, that one had to come back to it incessantly and go on beyond it in each particular circumstance.
Thus, the overthrow of his public and the crisis of the European consciousness had invested the writer with a new
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function. He conceived literature to be the permanent practice of magnanimity. He still submitted to the strict and severe control of his peers, but below him he caught a glimpse of an unformed and passionate waiting, a more feminine, more undifferentiated kind of desire which freed him from their censorship. He had disembodied the spir- itual and had separated his cause from that of a dying ideology; his books were free appeals to the freedom of his readers.
The political triumph of the bourgeoisie which writers had so eagerly desired convulsed their condition from top to bottom and put the very essence of literature into question. It might be said that the result of all their efforts was merely a preparation for their certain ruin. There is no doubt that by identifying the cause of belles-lettres with that of political democracy they helped the bourgeoisie to come to power, but by the same token they ran the risk of seeing the dis- appearance of the object of their demands, that is, the con- stant and almost the only subject of their writing. In short, the miraculous harmony which united the essential demands
of literature with that of the oppressed bourgeoisie was broken as soon as both were realized. So long as millions of men were burning to be able to express their feelings it was fine to demand the right to write freely and to examine everything, but once freedom of thought and confession and equality of political rights were gained, the defence of liter- ature became a purely formal game which no longer amused anyone; something else had to be found.
Now, at the same time writers had lost their privileged position whose origin had been the split which had torn apart their public and which had allowed them to have a foot in both camps. These two halves had knitted together; the bourgeoisie had absorbed the nobility or very nearly. Authors had to meet the demands of a unified public. There was no hope of getting away from their class of origin. Born of bourgeois parents, read and paid by bourgeois, they had to remain bourgeois; the bourgeoisie had closed round them like a prison. It was to take them a century to get over
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their keen regret for the flighty and parasitic class which had indulged them out of caprice and whom they had remorse- lessly undermined in their ro^le of double agent. It seemed to them that they had killed the goose which laid the golden eggs. The bourgeoisie introduced new forms of oppression; however, it was not parasitic. Doubtless, it had taken over the means of work, but it was highly diligent in regulating the production and distribution of its products. It did not conceive literary work as a gratuitous and disinterested creation but as a paid service.
The justifying myth of this industrious and unproductive class was utilitarianism; in one way or another the function of the bourgeois was that of intermediary between producer and consumer; it was the middleman raised to omnipotence. Thus, in the indissoluble yoke of means and end, he had chosen to give primary importance to the means. The end was implied; one never looked it in the face but passed over it in silence. The goal and dignity of a human life was to spend itself in the ordering of means. It was not serious to occupy oneself without intermediary in producing an abso- lute end. It wras as if one aspired to see God face to face without the help of the Church. The only enterprises to be credited were those whose end was the perpetually with- drawing horizon of an infinite series of means. If the work of art entered the utilitarian round, if it hoped to be taken seriously, it had to descend from the heaven of uncon- ditioned ends and resign itself to becoming useful in its turn, that is, to presenting itself as a means of ordering means. In particular, as the bourgeois was not quite sure of
himself, because his power was not based on a decree of Providence, literature had to help it feel bourgeois by divine right. Thus, after having been the bad conscience of the privileged in the eighteenth century it ran the risk in the nineteenth century of becoming the good conscience of an oppressing class.
Well and good, if the writer could have kept that spirit of free criticism which in the preceding century had been his fortune and his pride. But his public was opposed to that.
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So long as the bourgeoisie had been struggling against the privileges of the nobility it had given assent to destructive negativity. But now that it had power, it passed on to con- struction and asked to be helped in constructing. Oppo- sition had remained possible within the religious ideology because the believer referred his obligations and the articles of faith back to the will of God. He thereby established a concrete and feudal person-to-person bond with the Almighty. This recourse to the divine free will introduced, although God was perfect and chained to His perfection,
an element of gratuity into Christian ethics and consequently a bit of freedom into literature. The Christian hero was always Jacob wrestling with the angel; the saint contested the divine will even if he did so in order to submit to it even more narrowly. But bourgeois ethics did not derive from Providence; its universal and abstract procedures were inscribed in things. They were not the effect of a sovereign and quite amiable but personal will; rather, they resembled the uncreated laws of physics. At least, so one supposed, for it was not prudent to look at them too closely. The serious man kept from examining them precisely because their origin was obscure. Bourgeois art either would be a means or would not be; it would forbid itself to lay hands on principles, for fear they might collapse,11 and to probe the human heart too deeply for fear of finding disorder in it. Its public feared nothing so much as talent, that gay and menacing madness which uncovers the disturbing roots of things by unforeseeable words and which, by repeated appeals to freedom, stirs the still more disturbing roots of men. Facility sold better; it was talent in leash, turned against itself, the art of reassuring readers by harmonious and expected discourse, in a tone of good fellowship, that man and the world were quite ordinary, transparent, without surprises, without threats, and without interest.
There was more: as the only relationship which the bourgeois had with natural forces was through inter- mediaries, as material reality appeared to him in the form of
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manufactured products, as he was surrounded as far as the eye could see by an already humanized world which re- flected back to him his own image, as he limited himself to gleaning on the surface of things the meaning that other men had put forward, as his job was essentially that of handling abstract symbols, words, figures, plans, and dia- grams for determining methods whereby his employees would share in consumer's goods, as his culture, quite as much as his trade, inclined him to consider ideas, he was convinced that the universe was reducible to a system of ideas; he dissolved effort, difficulty, needs, oppression, and wars into ideas; there was no evil, only pluralism; certain ideas lived in a free state; they had to be integrated into the system. Thus, he conceived human progress as a vast move- ment of assimilation; ideas assimilated each other and so did minds. At the end of this immense digestive process, thought would find its unification and society its total integration.
Such optimism was at the opposite extreme of the writer's conception of his art: the artist needs an unassimilable matter because beauty is not resolved into ideas. Even if he is a prose-writer and assembles signs, his style will have neither grace nor force if it is not sensitive to the material character of the word and its irrational resistances. And if he wishes to build the universe in his work and to support it by an inexhaustible freedom, the reason is that he radically distinguishes things from thought. His freedom and the thing are homogeneous only in that both are unfathomable, and if he wishes to readapt the desert or the virgin forest to the Mind, he does so not by transforming them into ideas of desert and forest, but by having Being sparkle as Being, with its opacity and its coefficient of adversity, by the in- definite spontaneity of Existence. That is why the work of art is reducible to an idea: first, because it is a production or a reproduction of a being, that is, of something which never quite allows itself to be thought; then, because this being is totally penetrated by an existence, that is, by a freedom which decides on the very fate and value of thought. That is also
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why the artist has always had a special understanding of Evil, which is not the temporary and remediable isolation of an idea, but the irreducibility of man and the world of Thought.
The bourgeois could be recognized by the fact that he denied the existence of social classes and particularly of the bourgeoisie. The gentleman wished to command because he belonged to a caste. The bourgeois based his power and his right to govern on the exquisite ripening which comes from the secular possession of the goods of this world. More- over, he admitted only synthetic relationships between the owner and the thing possessed; for the rest, he demonstrated by analysis that all men are alike because they are unvarying elements of social combinations and because each one of them, whatever his rank, completely possesses human nature. Hence, inequalities appeared as fortuitous and passing acci- dents which could not alter the permanent characteristics of the social atom. There was no proletariat, that is, no syn- thetic class of which each worker was a passing mode; there were only proletarians, each isolated in his human nature, who were not united by internal solidarity but only by external bonds of resemblance.
The bourgeois saw only psychological relations among the individuals whom his analytical propaganda circumvented and separated. That is understandable: as he had no direct hold on things, as his work was concerned essentially with men, it was purely a matter, for him, of pleasing and intim- idating. Ceremony, discipline, and courtesy ruled his be- haviour; he regarded his fellow-men as marionettes, and if he wished to acquire some knowledge of their emotions and character, it was because it seemed to him that each passion was a wire that could be pulled. The breviary of the am- bitious bourgeois was 'The Art of Making Good'; the breviary of the rich was 'The Art of Commanding'. Thus, the bourgeoisie considered the writer as an expert. If he started reflecting on the social order, he annoyed and fright- ened it. All it asked of him was to share his practical experi- ence of the human heart. So, as in the seventeenth century,
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literature was reduced to psychology. All the same, the psychology of Corneille, Pascal and Vauvenargues was a cathartic appeal to freedom. But the merchant distrusted the freedom of the people he dealt with and the prefect that of the sub-prefect. All they wanted was to be provided with infallible recipes for winning over and dominating. Man had to be governable as a matter of course and by modest means. In short, the laws of the heart had to be rigorous and with- out exceptions. The bourgeois bigwig no more believed in human freedom than the scientist believes in a miracle. And as his ethics were utilitarian, the chief motive of his psycho- logy was self-interest. For the writer it was no longer a matter of addressing his work as an appeal to absolute free- doms, but of exhibiting the psychological laws which
determined him to readers who were likewise determined.
Idealism, psychologism, determinism, utilitarianism, the spirit of seriousness--this was what the bourgeois writer had to reflect to his public first of all. He was no longer asked to restore the strangeness and opacity of the world, but to dissolve it into elementary subjective impressions which made it easier to digest; nor was he asked to discover the most intimate movements of his heart at the very depths of his freedom, but to bring his 'experience' face to face with that of his readers. All his works were at once inventories of bourgeois appurtenances, psychological reports of an expert which invariably tended to ground the rights of the e? lite and to show the wisdom of institutions, and handbooks of civility. The conclusions were decided in advance; the degree of depth permitted to the investigation was also established in advance; the psychological motives were selected; the very style was regulated. The public feared no surprise. It could buy with its eyes closed. But literature had been assassinated. From Emile Augier to Marcel Pre? vost and Edmond Jaloux, including Dumas fils, Pailleron, Ohnet, Bourget, and Bordeaux, authors were found to do the job and, if I may say so, to honour their signature to the very end.