No More Learning

Consequently, they would like us to devote all our time to stigmatizing its extortion and its violence; at the same time they point out to us that capitalist injustices are highly obvious and are not likely to deceive anyone; thus, we would be wasting our time exposing them. I am afraid that I surmise only too well the interests which this advice serves. Whatever the putative violence may be, still, before passing judgement upon it, it is advisable to consider the situation of the country which commits it and the perspec- tives in which it has committed it. It wouldfirstbe necessary to prove, for example, that the present machinations of the Soviet government are not, in the last analysis, dictated by its desire to protect the revolution which has stalled and to 'hold on' until the moment when it will be possible to resume its march forward. Whereas American anti-Semitism and negrophobia, our own colonialism and the attitude of the powers in regard to Franco, often lead to injustices which are less spectacular but which aim none the less at perpetuating the present re? gime of the exploitation of man by man. It will be said that everybody knows this. That may be true, but if nobody says it, what good does it do us to know it? Our job as a writer is to represent the world and
? Situation of the Writer in 1947 \ 231
to bear witness to it. Besides, even if it were proven that the Soviet Union and the Communist Party are pursuing genuinely revolutionary ends, that would not c? xempt us from judging the means. If one regards freedom as the principle and the goal of all human activity, it is equally false that one must judge the means by the end and the end by the means. Rather, the end is the synthetic unity of the means employed. Thus, there are means which risk destroying the end which they intend to realize because by their mere presence they smash the synthetic unity which they wish to enter.
The attempt has been made to determine by quasi- mathematical formulas the conditions under which a means may be called legitimate; in these formulas are included the probability of the end, its proximity, and what its returns are in regard to the cost of aie means employed. One might think that we were back at Bentham and the arithmetic of pleasure. I am not saying that a formula of this kind might not be applied in certain cases, for example, in the hypothesis, itself quantitative, in which a certain number of lives must be sacrificed to save others. But in the majority of cases the problem is quite different; the means employed introduce a qualitative alteration into the end and con- sequently are not measurable. Let us imagine that a revolu- tionary party systematically lies to its militants in order to protect them against uncertainties, cries of conscience, and adverse propaganda. The end pursued is the abolition of a re? gime of oppression; but the lie is itself oppression. May one perpetuate oppression with the pretext of putting an end to it? Is it necessary to enslave man in order the better to free him? It will be said that the means are transitory. Not if it helps to create a lied-to and lying mankind; for then the men who take power are no longer those who deserve to get hold of it; and the reasons one had for abolishing oppression are undermined by the way one goes about abolishing it. Thus, the politics of the Communist Party, which consists of lying to its own troops, of calumniating, of hiding its defeats and its faults, compromises the goal which it pursues. On the
? 2$2 I What Is Literature?
other hand, it is easy to reply that in war--and every revolutionary party is at war--one cannot tell soldiers the whole truth. Thus, we have here a question of measure. No ready-made formula will excuse us from an examination in each particular case. It is~up to us to make this examination. Left to itself, politics always takes the path of least resistance, that is, it goes downhill. The masses, duped by propaganda, follow it. So who can represent to the government, the parties, and the citizens the means that are being employed, if not the writer? That does not mean that we must be systematically opposed to the use of violence. I recognize that violence, under whatever form it may show itself, is a setback. But it is an inevitable setback because we are in a universe of violence; and if it is true that recourse to violence against violence risks perpetuating it, it is also true that it is the only means of bringing an end to it. A certain newspaper in which someone wrote a rather brilliant article saying that it was necessary to refuse any complicity with violence wherever it came from had to announce the following day thefirstskirmishes of the Indo-Chinese war. I should like to ask the writer today how we can refuse to participate indirectly in all violence. If you say nothing, you are necessarily for the continuation of the war; one is always responsible for what one does not try to prevent. But if you got it to stop at once and at any price, you would be at the origin of a number of massacres and you would be doing violence to all Frenchmen who have interests over there. I am not, of course, speaking of compromises, since war is born of compromise. Violence for violence; one must make a choice, according to other principles. The politician will wonder whether the transport of troops is possible, whether by continuing the war he will alienate public opinion, what the international repercussions will be. It is incumbent upon the writer to judge the means not from the point of view of an abstract morality, but in the perspectives of a precise goal which is the realization of a socialist democracy. Thus, we must mediate upon the modern problem of ends and means not only in theory but in each concrete case.
? Situation of the Writer in 1947 \ 233
Evidently, there is a big job to be done. But even if we consume our life in criticism who can reproach us? The task of criticism has become total; it engages the whole man. In the eighteenth century the tool was forged; the simple utilization of analytical reason was enough to clean the concepts; today when it is necessary both to clean and to complete, to push to their conclusions notions which have become false because they have stopped along the way, criticism is also synthetic. It brings into action all our
faculties of invention; instead of limiting itself to making use of a reason already established by two centuries of mathematics, on the contrary, it is this criticism which will form modern reason so that, in the end, it has creative freedom as its foundation. Doubtless, it will not by itself bring about a positive solution. But what does today? I see all about us only absolute formulas, patchwork, dishonest compromises, outdated and hastily refurbished myths. Even if we did nothing but puncture all these inflated wind- bladders one by one, we would be well deserving of our readers.
However, at about 1750 criticism was a direct preparation for changing the re? gime since it contributed to the weaken- ing of the oppressing class by dismantling its ideology. The case today is not the same since the concepts to be criticized belong to all ideologies and all camps. Thus, it is no longer negativity alone which can serve history even if it finally does become a positivity. The individual writer may limit himself to his critical task, but our literature as a whole must be, above all, constructive. That does not mean that we must make it our business, individually or as a group, to find a new ideology. In every age, as I have pointed out, it is literature in its entirety which is the ideology because it constitutes the synthetic and often contradictory totality of everything which the age has been able to produce to enlighten itself, taking into account the historical situation and the talent. But since we have recognized that we have to produce a literature o? praxis, we ought to stick to our purpose to the very end. We no longer have time to describe
? 234 I What Is Literature?
or narrate; neither can we limit ourselves to explaining. Description, even though it be psychological, is pure con- templative enjoyment; explanation is acceptance, it excuses everything. Both of them assume that the die is cast. But if perception itself is action, if, for us, to show the world is to disclose it in the perspectives of a possible change, then, in this age of fatalism, we must reveal to the reader his power,
in each concrete case, of doing and undoing, in short, of acting. The present situation, revolutionary by virtue of the fact that it is unbearable, remains in a state of stagnation because men have dispossessed themselves of their own destiny; Europe is abdicating before the future conflict and seeks less to prevent it than to range itself in advance in the camp of the conquerors. Soviet Russia considers itself to be alone and cornered, like a wild boar surrounded by a fierce pack ready to tear it apart. The United States, which does not fear the other nations, is infatuated with its own weight; the richer it is, the heavier it is. Weighed down with fat and pride, it lets itself be rolled towards war with its eyes closed. As for us, we are writing for only a few men in our own country and a handful of others in Europe. But we must go and seek them where they are, lost in their age like needles in a haystack, and we must remind them of their power. Let us take them in their job, in their family, in their class, and in their country, and let us examine their servitude with them, but let it not be to push them deeper into it; let us show them that in the most mechanical gesture of the worker there is already the complete negation of oppression; let us never envisage their situation as factual data but as a problem; let us point out that it keeps its form and its boundaries of infinite possibilities, in a word, that it has no other shape than what they confer upon it by the way they have chosen to go beyond it; let us teach them both that they are victims and that they are responsible for everything, that they are at once the oppressed, the oppressors, and the
accomplices of their own oppressors and that one can never draw a line between what a man submits to, what he accepts, and what he wants; let us show that the world they live in
? Situation of the Writer in 1947 \ 235
is never defined except in reference to the future which they project before them, and since reading reveals their freedom to them, let us take advantage of it to remind them that this future in which they place themselves in order to judge the present is none other than that in which man rejoins himself andfinallyreaches himself as a totality by the coming of the City of Ends, for it is only the presentiment of Justice which permits us to be shocked by particular injustices, that is, to put it precisely, to regard them as injustices; finally, in inviting them to see things from the viewpoint of the City of Ends so they may understand their age, let us not allow them to remain in ignorance of the aspects of this age which
favour the realizing of their aim.
The theatre was formerly a theatre of 'characters'. More or less complex, but complete,figuresappeared on the stage, and the situation had no other function than to put these characters into conflict and to show how each of them was modified by the action of the others. I have elsewhere shown how important changes have taken place in this domain; many authors are returning to the theatre of situation. No more characters; the heroes are freedoms caught in a trap like all of us. What are the issues? Each character will be nothing but the choice of an issue and will equal no more than the chosen issue. It is to be hoped that all literature will become moral and problematic like this new theatre. Moral --not moralizing; let it show simply that man is also a value and that the questions he raises are always moral. Above all,
let it show the inventor in him. In a sense, each situation is a trap--there are walls everywhere. I've expressed myself poorly: there are no issues to choose. An issue is invented. And each one, by inventing his own issue, invents himself. Man must be invented each day.
The point is that all is lost if we want to choose between the powers which are preparing for war. To choose the U. S. S. R. is to give up civil liberties without even being able to hope to gain material freedom; the retardation of its industry prohibits it, in case of victory, from organizing Europe; hence, indefinite prolongation of dictatorship and misery.
? 236 I What Is Literature?
But after the victory of the United States, when the C. P. would be annihilated and the working class discouraged, disoriented, and--if I may risk a neologism--atomized, when capitalism would be more pitiless since it would be master of the world, can anyone believe that a revolutionary movement which would start from zero would have much chance? But aren't there unknown factors to be reckoned with? That's just it! I reckon with what I know. But who is forcing us to choose? Does one really make history by choosing between given wholes simply because they are given, and by siding with the stronger? In that case in 1940 all Frenchmen should have sided with Germany as the collaborators proposed.
Now, it is obvious that, on the contrary, historical action can never be reduced to a choice between raw data, but that it has always been characterized by the invention of new solutions on the basis of a definite situation. Respect for 'wholes' is pure and simple empiricism. Man has long since gone beyond empiricism in science, ethics, and in- dividual life; the fountain-makers of Florence "chose between wholes'; Torricelli invented the weight of air--I say that he invented it rather than discovered it because when an object is concealed from all eyes, one must invent it out of whole cloth in order to be able to discover it. When it is a question
of historical fact, why, out of what inferiority complex, do our realists deny this faculty of creation which they proclaim everywhere else? The historical agent is almost always the man who in the face of a dilemma suddenly causes a third term to appear, one which up to that time had been invisible. It is true that a choice must be made between the U. S. S. R. and the Anglo-Saxon bloc. As for socialist Europe, there's no 'choosing' it since it doesn't exist. It is to be made. Not by starting with the England of Mr. Churchill, nor even with that of Mr. Bevin, but by starting on the continent, by the union of all countries which have the same problems. It will be said that it is too late, but what does anyone know about it? Has anyone even tried? Our relations with our immediate neighbours always take place through Moscow, London, or
? Situation of the Writer in 194-/ \ 23 7
New York; doesn't anyone know that there are direct ways? Whatever the case may be and as long as circumstances do not change, the fortunes of literature are tied up with the coming of a socialist Europe, that is, of a group of states with a democratic and collectivist structure, each of which, while waiting for something better, would be deprived of part of its sovereignty for the sake of the whole. The hope of avoiding war dwells in this hypothesis only; in this hypothesis only will the circulation of ideas remain free and literature again find an object and a public.
Quite a number of jobs at the same time--and quite dissimilar. It's true. But Bergson has well shown that the eye--an extremely complicated organ if you regard it as a juxtaposition of functions--appears somewhat simple if it is replaced in the creative movement of evolution. The same with the writer; if you enumerate by analysis the themes which Kafka develops and the questions he raises in his books, and if you then go back to the beginning of his career and consider that for him these were themes to be treated and questions to be raised, you will be alarmed. But that's not the way he's to be taken. The work of Kafka is a free and unitary reaction to the Judaeo-Christian world of Central Europe. His novels are a synthetic act of going beyond his situation as a man, as a Jew, as a Czech, as a recalcitrant fiance? , as a tubercular, etc. , as were also his handshake, his smile, and that gaze which Max Brod so admired. Under the analysis of the critic they break down into problems; but the critic is wrong; they must be read in movement.
I have not wanted to hand out extra impositions to the writers of my generation. What right would I have to do so, and has anybody asked me to? Nor do I have any taste for the manifestoes of a school. I have merely tried to describe a situation with its perspectives, its threats, and its demands. A literature ofpraxis is coming into being in the age of the unfindable public. That's the situation. Let each one handle it in his own way. His own way, that is, his own style, his
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own technique, his own subjects. If the writer is imbued, as I am, with the urgency of these problems, one can be sure that he will offer solutions to them in the creative unity of bis worky that is, in the indistinctness of a movement of free creation. 45
There is no guarantee that literature is immortal. Its chance today, its only chance, is the chance of Europe, of socialism, of democracy, and of peace. We must play it. If we writers lose it, too bad for us. But also, too bad for society. As I have shown, the collectivity passes to reflection and mediation by means of literature; it acquires an unhappy conscience, a lopsided image of itself which it constantly tries to modify and improve. But, after all, the art of writing is not protected by immutable decrees of Providence; it is what men make it; they choose it in choosing themselves.
If it were to turn into pure propaganda or pure entertain- ment, society would wallow in the immediate, that is, in the life without memory of hymenoptera and gastropods. Of course, all of this is not very important. The world can very well do without literature. But it can do without man still better.
? Writing for One's Age
WE assert against certain critics and against certain authors that salvation is achieved on this earth, that it is of the whole man and by the whole man and that art is a meditation on life and not on death. It is true that for history talent alone counts. But I haven't entered into history and I don't know how I shall enter it; perhaps alone, perhaps in an anonymous crowd, perhaps as one of those names they put into footnotes in literary handbooks. At any rate, I do not have to bother myself with the judgements that the future will bring to bear upon my work since there's nothing I can do about them. Art cannot be reduced to a dialogue with the dead and with men not yet born; that would be both too difficult and too easy; and I see in this a last remnant of Christian belief in immortality: just as man's stay here below is presented as a moment of trial between limbo and hell or paradise, in like manner, for a book there is a transitory period coinciding approximately with that of its efficacy; after which, disembodied and gratuitous as a soul, it enters eternity. But at least, among Christians, it is this stay upon earth that decides everything and the final beatitude is only a sanction. Whereas it is commonly believed that the course run by our books, when we no longer exist, refers back to our life to justify it. This is true from the viewpoint of the objective mind. In the objective mind one classifies according to talent. But our descendants' view of us is not a privileged one, since others will come after them and will judge them in turn. It is obvious that we write out of a need for the absolute, and a work of the mind is indeed an
absolute. But here one commits a double error. First of all, it is not true that a writer transmits his sufferings and his faults to the absolute when he writes about them; it is not true that he saves them. It is said that the unhappily married man who writes about marriage with talent has made a good book with his conjugal woes. That would be too easy: the bee makes honey with the
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flower because it operates on the vegetal substance of real trans- formations; the sculptor makes a statue with marble. But it is with words and not with his troubles that the writer makes his books. If he wants to keep his wife from being disagreeable, it is a mistake to write about her; he would do better to beat her. One no more puts one's misfortunes into a book than one puts a model on the canvas; one is inspired by them, and they remain what they are. One gets perhaps a passing relief in placing oneself above them in order to describe them, but once the book is finished, there they are again. Insincerity begins when the artist wants to ascribe a meaning to his misfortunes, a kind of immanent finality, and when he persuades himself that they are there in order for him to speak about them. When he justifies his own sufferings by this ruse, he invites laughter; but he is contemptible if he seeks to justify those of others. The most beautiftd book in the world will not save a child from pain; one does not redeem evil, one fights it; the most beautiftd book in the world redeems itself; it also redeems the artist. But not the man. Any more than the man redeems the artist. We want the man and the artist to work their salvation together, we want the work to be at the same time an act; we want it to be explicitly conceived as a weapon in the struggle that men wage against evil.
The other error is just as grave. There is such a hunger for the absolute in every heart that eternity, which is a non-temporal absolute, is frequently confused with immortality, which is only a perpetual reprieve and a long succession of vicissitudes. I under- stand this desire for the absolute; I desire it too. But what need is there to go looking for it so far off: there it is, about us, under our feet, in each of our gestures. We produce the absolute as M. Jourdain produced prose. You light your pipe and that's an absolute; you detest oysters and that's an absolute; you join the Communist Party and that's an absolute.
Whether the world is mind or matter, whether God exists or whether He does not exist, whether the judgement of the centuries to come is favour- able to you or hostile, nothing will ever prevent your having passionately loved that painting, that cause, that woman, nor that love's having been lived from day to day; lived, willed, under- taken; nor your being completely committed to it. Our grand- fathers were right in saying, as they drank their glass of wine, 'Another one that the Prussians won't get. ' Neither the Prussians nor anyone else. They can kill you, they can deprive you of wine
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to the end of your days, but no God, no man, can take away that final trickling of the Bordeaux along your tongue. No relativism. Nor the 'eternal course of history* either. Nor the dialectic of the sensible. Nor the dissociations of psycho-analysis. It is a pure event, and we too, in the uttermost depths of historical relativity and our own insignificance, we too are absolutes, inimitable and incomparable, and our choice of ourselves is an absolute. All those living and passionate choices that we are and that we are constantly making with or against others, all those common enterprises into which we throw ourselves, from birth to death, all those bonds of love or hatred which unite us to one another and which exist only in so far as we feel them, those immense combinations of movements which are added to or cancel out one another and which are all lived, that whole discordant and harmonious life, concur in producing a new absolute which I shall call the age. The age is the intersubjectivity, the living absolute, the dialectical underside of history. . . . It gives birth in pain to events that historians will label later on. It lives blindly, distractedly, and fearfully the enthusiasm and the meanings that they will disengage rationally. Within the age, every utterance, before being a historical byword or the recognized origin of a social process, is first an insult or an appeal or a confession; economic phenomena themselves, before being the theoretical causes of social upheavals, are suffered in humiliation or despair, ideas are tools or evasions, facts are born of the intersubjectivity and overwhelm it, like the emotions of an individual soul. History is made with dead ages, for each age, when it dies, enters into relativity; it falls into line with other dead centuries; a new light is shed upon it; it is challenged by new knowledge; its problems are resolved for it; it is demonstrated that its most ardent pursuits were doomed to failure, that the results of the great undertakings of which it was so proud were the reverse of what it anticipated; its limits are suddenly apparent, and its ignorance too. But that is because it is dead; the limits and the ignorance did not exist 'at thetime';no deficiency was seen; or rather the age was a constant
surpassing of its limits towards a future which was its future and which died with it; it was this boldness, this rashness, this ignorance of its ignorance; to live is to foresee at short range and to manage with the means at hand. Perhaps with a little more knowledge our fathers might have understood that a certain problem was insoluble, that a certain problem was badly stated.
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But the human condition requires us to choose in ignorance; it is ignorance which makes morality possible. If we knew all the factors which condition phenomena, if we gambled on a sure thing, the risk would disappear; and with the risk, the courage and the fear, the waiting, thefinaljoy and the effort; we would be listless gods, but certainly not men. The bitter Babylonian dis- putes about omens, the bloody and passionate heresies of the Albigenses, of the Anabaptists, now seem to us mistakes. At the time, man committed himself to them completely, and, in mani- festing them at the peril of his life, he brought truth into being through them, for truth never yields itself directly, it merely
appears through errors. In the dispute over Universals, over the Immaculate Conception or Transubstantiation, it was the fate of human Reason that was at stake. And the fate of Reason was again at stake when American teachers who taught the theory of evolu- tion were brought to trial in certain states. It is at stake in every age, totally so, in regard to doctrines which the following age will reject as false. Evolution may some day appear to be the biggest folly of our century; in testifying for it against the clerics, the American teachers lived the truth, they lived it passionately and absolutely, at personal risk. Tomorrow they will be wrong, today they are absolutely right; the age is always wrong when it is dead, always right when it is alive. Condemn it later on, if you like; but first it had its passionate way of loving itself and lacerating itself, against which future judgements are of no avail. It had its taste which it tasted alone and which is as incomparable, as irremedi- able, as the taste of wine in our mouths.
A book has its absolute truth within the age. It is lived like an outbreak, like a famine. With much less intensity, to be sure, and by fewer people, but in the same way. It is an emanation of inter- subjectivity, a living bond of rage, hatred or love among those who produce it and those who receive it. If it succeeds in com- manding attention, thousands of people reject it and deny it: as everybody knows, to read a book is to re-write it. At the time it is at first a panic or an evasion or a courageous assertion; at the time it is a good or bad action. Later on, when the age is done with, it will enter into the relative, it will become a message. But the judgements of posterity will not invalidate those that were passed on it in its lifetime. I have often been told about dates and bananas: 'You don't know anything about them. In order to know what they are, you have to eat them on the spot, when
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they've just been picked/ And I have always considered bananas as dead fruit whose real, live taste escapes me. Books that are handed down from age to age are dead fruit. They had, in another time, another taste, tart and tangy. Emile or The Persian Letters should have been read when they were freshly picked.
Thus, one must write for one's age, as the great writers have done. But that does not mean that one has to lock oneself up in it. To write for one's age is not to reflect it passively; it is to want to maintain it or change it, thus to go beyond it towards the future, and it is this effort to change it that places us most deeply within it, for it is never reducible to the dead ensemble of tools and customs; it is in movement; it is constantly surpassing itself; the concrete present and the living future of all the men who compose it coincide rigorously within it. If, among other features, Newtonian physics and the theory of the noble savage concur in sketching the physiognomy of the first half of the eighteenth century, it should be borne in mind that one was a sustained effort to snatch some shreds of truth from the mists, to approach, beyond the state of contemporary knowledge, an ideal science in which phenomena might be mathematically deduced from the principle of gravitation, and that the other implied an attempt to restore, beyond the vices of civilization, the state of nature. They both drew up a rough sketch of a future; and if it is true that this future never became a present, that we have given up the golden age and the idea of making science a rigorous chain of reasons, still the fact remains that these live and deep hopes sketched out
a future beyond everyday concerns and that, in order to interpret the meaning of the everyday, we must go back to it on the basis of that future. One cannot be a man or become a writer without tracing a horizon line beyond oneself, but the self-surpassing is in each case finite and particular. One does not surpass in general and for the proud and simple pleasure of surpassing; Baudelairean dissatisfaction represents only the abstract scheme of transcend- ence and, since it is dissatisfaction with everything, ends by being dissatisfaction with nothing. Real transcendence requires one to want to change certain specific aspects of the world, and the surpassing is coloured and particularized by the concrete situation
it aims to modify. A man puts himself entirely into his project for emancipating the negroes or restoring the Hebrew language to the Jews of Palestine; he puts himself into it entirely and thereby realizes the human condition in its universality; but it is always on
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the occasion of a particular and dated enterprise. And if I am told, as by M. Schlumberger, that one also goes beyond the age when one aims at immortality, I shall reply that this is a false surpassing: instead of trying to change an intolerable situation, one attempts to evade it and seeks refuge in a future which is utterly foreign to us, since it is not the future that we are making, but die concrete present of our grandchildren. We have no means of action upon this present; they will live it on their own account and as they like;
situated in their age, as we are in ours, if they make use of our writings, it will be for ends which are proper to them and which we had not foreseen, as one picks up stones along the way in order to throw them into the face of an aggressor. An attempt on our part to burden them with the responsibility of prolonging our existence would be vain; it is no duty or concern of theirs. And as we have no means of action over these strangers, it is as beggars that we shall present ourselves before them and that we shall beg them to lend us the appearance of life by using us however they like. If Christians, we shall accept humbly, provided they still speak of us, that they make use of us to testify that faith is inefficacious; if atheists, we shall be quite content if they are still concerned with our anguish and our faults, be it to prove that
man without God is miserable. Would you be satisfied, M. Schlumberger, if our grandsons, after the Revolution, saw in your writings the most obvious example of the conditioning of art by economic structures? And if you do not have this literary destiny, you will have another which will hardly be worth more. If you escape dialectical materialism, it will be perhaps to become the subject of psycho-analysis. At all events, our grandchildren will be orphans who have their own concerns; why should they concern themselves with us? Perhaps Ce? line will be the only one of all of us to remain; it is highly improbable, but theoretically possible that the twenty-first century may retain the name of Drieu and drop that of Malraux; at any rate, it will not take up our quarrels, it will not mention what we call today the treason of certain writers; or, if it mentions it, it will do so without anger or contempt. But what does that matter to us? What Malraux, what Drieu are for us, that's the absolute. There is an absolute of contempt for Drieu in certain hearts, there was an absolute of friendship for Malraux that a hundred posthumous judgements will be unable to blemish. There was a living Malraux, a weight of hot blood in the age's heart; there will be a dead Malraux, a prey
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to history. Why does anyone expect the living man to be con- cerned with fixing the features of the dead man he will be? To be sure, he lives beyond himself; his gaze and his concerns exceed his death in the flesh. What measures the presence and weight of a man is not the fifty or sixty years of his organic life, nor the borrowed life he will lead throughout the centuries in minds foreign to his; it is the choice he himself will have made of the temporal cause which goes beyond him. It was said that the courier of Marathon had died an hour before reaching Athens, He had died and was still running; he was running dead, an- nounced the Greek victory dead. This is afinemyth; it shows that the dead still act for a litde while as if they were living. For a litde while, a year, ten years, perhaps fifty years; at any rate, a finite period; and then they are buried a second time. This is the measure we propose to the writer: as long as his books arouse anger, discomfort, shame, hatred, love, even if he is no more than
a shade, he will live. Afterwards, the deluge. We stand for an ethics and art of the finite.
Translated by Bernard Frechtman
? Introducing
Les Temps modernes
? Introducing
Les Temps modernes
ALL WRITERS of middle-class origin have known the temptation of irresponsibility. For a century now, it has been a traditional part of the literary career. An author rarely establishes a link between his works and the income they bring. On the one hand, he writes, sings, or sighs; on the other, he is given money. The two facts have no apparent relation: the best he can do is tell himself that he's being paid in order to sigh. As a consequence, he is apt to regard himself more as a student enjoying a scholarship than as a worker receiving wages for his efforts. The theoreticians of Art for Art's Sake and of Realism have confirmed him in that opinion. Has it been noted that they share the same purpose and the same origin? According to the former, the author's principal concern is to produce works that serve no end; if they are quite gratuitous, thoroughly bereft of roots, they are not far from seeming beautiful to him. He thus situates himself at the margins of society; or rather, he consents to appear there only in his role as pure consumer: precisely as the scholarship holder. The Realist, for his part, is also a willing consumer. As for producing, that is a different matter: he has been told that science is not concerned with utility and he aspires to the sterile impartiality of the scholar. Have we not been told often enough that he "pores over" the social groups he is intent on describing? He pores over\ Where was he, in that case? In the air? The truth is that unsure of his social position, too fearful to stand up to the bourgeoisie from whom he draws his pay, and too lucid to accept it without reservations, he has chosen to pass judgment on his century
and has thereby convinced himself that he remains outside it, just as an experimenter remains outside the system of his experiment. Thus does the disinterestedness of pure science
? 2jo I Introducing Les Temps modernes
join with the gratuitousness of Art for Art's Sake. It is not by chance that Flaubert should be simultaneously a pure stylist, a purist in his love of forms, and the father of Naturalism; it is not by chance that the Goncourt brothers should flatter themselves for simultaneously knowing how to observe and having a highly aestheticized prose style.
That legacy of irresponsibility has troubled a number of minds. They suffer from a literary bad conscience and are no longer sure whether to write is admirable or grotesque. In former times, the poet took himself for a prophet, which was honorable. Subsequently, he became a pariah and an accused figure, which was still feasible. But today he has fallen to the rank of specialist, and it is not without a certain malaise that he lists his profession on hotel registers as "man of letters. " Man of letters: that association of words is in itself sufficient to disgust one with writing. One thinks of an Ariel, a vestal virgin, an enfant terrible, and also of a fanatic similar in type to a numismatist or body builder. The whole business is rather ridiculous. The man of letters writes while others fight. One day he's quite proud of it, he feels himself to be a cleric and guardian of ideal values; the following day he's ashamed of it, and finds that literature appears quite markedly to be a special form of affectation. In relation to the middle-class people who read him, he is
aware of his dignity; but confronted with workers, who don't, he suffers from an inferiority complex, as was seen in 1936 at the Maison de la Culture. It is certainly that
complex which is the source of what Paulhan calls terrorism; it is what led the Surrealists to despise literature, on which they lived. After the other war, it was the occasion of a particular mode of lyricism: the best and purest writers confessed publicly to what might humiliate them the most and expressed their satisfaction whenever they succeeded in eliciting the disapproval of the bourgeoisie: they had produced a text which, through its consequences, bore a slight resemblance to an act. Those isolated attempts could not prevent words from undergoing a devaluation that increased by the day. There was a crisis of rhetoric, then one
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of language. On the eve of this war, most practitioners of literature were resigned to being no more than nightingales. Finally came a few authors who pressed their disgust with writing to an extreme. Outdoing their elders they declared that publishing a book that was merely useless was not enough: they maintained that the secret aim of all literature was the destruction of language, and that it was sufficient, in order to attain this end, to speak so as not to say anything. Such voluble silence was quite in fashion for a while, and Hachette used to distribute capsules of silence, in the form of voluminous novels, to many a railroad station bookstore. Today things have gone sufficiently far that we have seen writers who once were blamed or punished for renting their pens to the Germans express a pained aston- ishment. "What do you mean? " they ask. "Does the stuff
someone writes actually commit him? "
We do not want to be ashamed of writing and we don't
feel like writing so as not to say anything. Moreover, even if we wanted to we would not be able to: no one can. Every text possesses a meaning, even if that meaning is far removed from the one the author dreamed of inserting into it. For us, an author is indeed neither a vestal virgin nor Ariel: he is "implicated," whatever he does--tainted, compromised, even in his most distant retreat. If, at certain periods, he uses his art to forge what Mallarme? called "bibelots d'inanite? sonore* (trinkets of sonorous inanity), this in itself is a sign--that there is a crisis of Letters and, no doubt, of Society, or even that the dominant classes have channeled him without his realizing it toward an activity that seems pure luxury, for fear that he might take off and swell the ranks of the revolutionaries. What is Flaubert-- who so raged against the bourgeoisie and believed he had withdrawn outside the social machine--for us if not a talented man living off his investments? And does not his meticulous art presuppose the comfort of Croisset, the solicitude of a mother or a niece, an orderly regimen, a
prosperous commercial endeavor, dividends received on schedule? Few years are needed for a book to become a social
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datum, to be questioned like an institution or recorded as a statistical reality; not much distance is needed for it to merge with the furnishings of an era, its habits, headgear, means of transport, and nourishment. A historian will say to us. "They ate this, read that, and dressed thus. " The first railroads, cholera, the revolt of the Lyons silkworkers, Balzac's novels, and the rise of industry all contribute equally to characterizing the July Monarchy. All this has been said and repeated since Hegel; what we want to do is draw the practical consequences. Since the writer has no way of escaping, we want him to embrace his era--tightly. It is his only chance; it was made for him and he was made for it. We regret Balzac's indifference toward the revolutionary days of '48; we regret Flaubert's panicky incomprehension when confronted with the Commune. We regret themfor. them: those events are something that they missed out on forever. We don't want to miss out on anything of our time. There may be better ones, but this one is ours: we have only this life to live, amid this war, and perhaps this revolution. Let it not be concluded from this that we are preaching a variety of populism: quite the contrary. Populism is an offspring of the very old, the sad scion of the last Realists; it is yet another attempt to remove one's stakes from the board. We are convinced, on the contrary, that one cannot remove one's stakes from the board. Even if we were as deaf and dumb as pebbles, our very passivity would be an action.
The abstention of whoever wanted to devote his life to writing novels about the Hittites would in itself constitute taking a position. The writer is situated in his time; every word he utters has reverberations. As does his silence. I hold Flaubert and the Goncourts responsible for the repression that followed the Commune because they didn't write a line to prevent it. Some will object that this wasn't their business. But was the Calas trial Voltaire's business? Was Dreyfus's sentence Zola's business? Was the administration of the Congo Gide's business? Each of those authors, at a particular time in his life, took stock of his responsibility as a writer. The Occupation taught us ours. Since we act upon
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our time by virtue of our very existence, we decide that our action will be voluntary. Even then, it must be specified: it is not uncommon for a writer to be concerned, in his modest way, with preparing the future. But there is a vague, conceptual future which concerns humanity in its entirety and on which we have no particular light to shed: Will history have an end? Will the sun be extinguished? What will be the condition of man in the socialist regime of the year 3,000? We leave such reveries to futurist novelists. It is the future of our time that must be the object of our concern: a limited future barely distinguishable from it-- for an era, like a man, is first of all a future. It is composed of its ongoing efforts, its enterprises, its more or less long-term projects, its revolts, its struggles, its hopes: When will the war end? How will the country be rebuilt? How will international relations be organized? What social reforms will take place? Will the forces of reaction triumph? Will there be a revolution, and if so what will it be? That future we make our own; we don't want any other. No doubt some authors have concerns which are less contem- porary, and visions which are less short-sighted. They move through our midst as though they were not there. Where indeed are they? With their grandnephews, they turn
around to judge that bygone age which was ours and whose sole survivors they are. But they have miscalculated: post- humous glory is always based on a misunderstanding. What do they know of those nephews who will come fish them out of our midst! Immortality is a terrible alibi: it is not easy to live with one foot in the grave and another beyond it. How might one expedite current business if one saw it from such a distance? How might one grow excited over a battle, or enjoy a victory? Everything is equivalent. They look at us without seeing us: in their eyes we are already dead, and they return to the novel they are writing for men they will never see. They have allowed their lives to be stolen from them by immortality. We write for our contemporaries; we want to behold our world not with future eyes--which would be the surest means of killing it--but with our eyes
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of flesh, our real, perishable eyes. We don't want to win our case on appeal, and we will have nothing to do with any posthumous rehabilitation. Right here in our own lifetime is when and where our cases will be won or lost.
We are not, however, thinking of instituting a literary relativism. We have little taste for the purely historical. Besides, does the purely historical exist anywhere but in the manuals of Monsieur Seignobos?