In reality, the human act,
governed
by needs and urged on by the
useful, is, in a sense, a means.
useful, is, in a sense, a means.
Sartre-Jean-Paul-What-is-literature¿-Introducing-Les-Temps-modernes-The-nationalization-of-literature-Black-orpheus
There is only one proud upheaval which can be equally well described as a desire plunging its roots into suffering or as suffering fixed like a sword across a vast cosmic desire.
This "righteous patience" that Ce?
saire evokes is both vegetal growth and patience against suffering; it resides in the very muscles of the Negro; it sustains the black porter going a thousand miles up the Niger under a blinding sun with a fifty-pound load balanced on his head.
But if in a certain sense, one can compare the fecundity of Nature to a proliferation of suffering, in another sense--and this one is also Dionysian--this fecundity, by its exuberance, goes beyond suffering, drowns it in its creative abundance which is poetry, love, and dance.
Perhaps, in order to understand this indissoluble unity of suffering, eros, and joy, one must
? Black Orpheus \ 321
have seen the black men of Harlem dance frenetically to the rhythm of "blues," which are the saddest sounds in the world. In effect, rhythm cements the multiple aspects of the black soul, communicates its Nietzschean lightness with heavy Dionysian intuitions. Rhythm--tam-tam, jazz, the "bounding" of these poems--represents the temporality of Negro existence. And when a black poet prophesies to his brothers a better future, he portrays their deliverance to them in the form of rhythm:
What?
rhythm
sound wave in the night across the forests, nothing
--or a new soul timbre
intonation
vigor
dilation
vibration which flows out by degrees into the marrow re? vulses* in its progression an old sleeping body, takes it by the waist
and spins it
and turns
and once more vibrates in its hands, in its loins, its sexual member, its thighs, its vagina . . .
But one must go still further: this basic experience of suffering is ambiguous; through it, black conscience is going to become historical. In effect, whatever may be the intolerable iniquity of his present condition, it is not to that condition that the black man first refers when he proclaims that he has touched the heart of human suffering. He has the horrible benefit of having known bondage. For these poets, most of whom were born between 1900 and 1918, slavery-- abolished half a century earlier--lingers on as a very real memory:
Each of my todays looks on my yesterday with large eyes rolling with rancor with
* Re? vulses: referring to the medical term revulsion, a counterirritant. -- Translator.
? $22 I Black Orpheus
shame
Still real is my stunned condition of the past
of
blows from knotted cords of bodies calcinated
from toe to calcinated back
of deadfleshof red ironfirebrandsof arms
broken under the whip which is breaking loose . . .
writes Damas, poet from Guiana. And the Haitian, Brierre:
. . . Often like me you feel stiffnesses Awaken after murderous centuries
And old wounds bleed in your flesh . . .
During the centuries of slavery, the black man drank the cup of bitterness to the last drop; and slavery is a past fact which neither our authors nor their fathers have actually experienced. But it is also a hideous nightmare from which even the youngest of them are not yet sure of having awakened. From one end of the earth to the other, black men--separated by languages, politics, and the history of their colonizers--have a collective memory in common. This will not be surprising if one only recalls the French peasants who, in 1789, were still aware of the panicky terrors that went back to the Hundred Years' War. Thus, when the black man goes back to his principal experience, it is suddenly revealed to him in two dimensions: it is both the intuitive seizure of the human condition and the still-fresh memory of a historical past. Here, I am thinking of Pascal, who relentlessly repeated that man was an irrational com- posite of metaphysics and history, his greatness unexplain- able if he comes from the alluvium, his misery unexplainable if he is still as God made him; that in order to understand man, one had to go back to the simple basic fact of man's downfall. It is in this sense that Ce? saire calls his race "the fallen race. " And in a certain sense I can see the rapprochement that can be made between black conscience and Christian
conscience: the brazen law of slavery evokes that law of the Old Testament, which states the consequences of the Fault. The abolition of slavery recalls this other historical fact:
? Black Orpheus \ 323
Redemption. The white man's insipid paternalism after 1848 resembles that of the white God after the Passion. The difference being, however, that the expiable fault that the black man discovers in the back of his memory is not his own; it belongs to the white man. The first fact of Negro history is certainly a kind of original sin; but the black man is the innocent victim of it. This is why his concept of suffering is radically opposed to white "dolorism. " If these poems are for the most part so violently anti-Christian, it is because the white man's religion is more clearly a hoax in the eyes of the Negro than in the eyes of the European proletariat: this religion wants to make him share the responsibility for a crime of which he is the victim; it wants to persuade him to see the kidnappings, the massacres, the rapes, and the tortures which have covered Africa with blood as a legitimate punishment, deserved tests. Will you say that it also proclaims equality for all men before God? Before God, yes. Only yesterday I was reading in Esprit these
lines from a correspondent in Madagascar:
I am as certain as you that the soul of a Malagasy is worth the soul of a white man . . . Just as, before God, the soul of a child is worth the soul of his father. However, if you have an automobile, you don't let your children drive it,
One can hardly reconcile Christianity and colonialism more elegantly. In opposition to these sophisms, the black man--by a simple investigation of his memory as a former slave--affirms that suffering is man's lot and that it is no less deserved for all that. He rejects with horror Christian stagnation, melancholy sensual pleasure, masochistic humil- ity, and all the tendentious inducements to his submission; he lives the absurdity of suffering in its pure form, in its injustice and in its gratuitousness; and he discovers thereby this truth which is misunderstood or masked by Christian- ity: suffering carries within itself its own refusal; it is by nature a refusal to suffer, it is the dark side of negativity, it opens onto revolt and liberty. The black man promptly
? 324 I Black Orpheus
transforms himself into history inasmuch as the intuition of suffering confers on him a collective past and assigns to him a goal in the future. Only a short while ago, he was a sheer
present surging of timeless instincts, a simple manifestation of universal and eternal fecundity. Now he calls to his colored brothers in quite another language:
Negro peddler of revolt
you have known the paths of the world ever since you were sold in Guine? e . . .
And:
Five centuries have seen you with weapons in your hands and you have taught the exploiting races
passion for liberty.
There is already a black epic:* first the golden age of Africa, then the era of dispersion and captivity, then the awakening of conscience, the heroic and somber times of great revolts, of Toussaint L'Ouverture and black heroes, then the fact of the abolition of slavery--"unforgettable metamorphosis/' says Ce? saire--then the struggle for defin- itive liberation:
You are waiting for the next call
the inevitable mobilization
for that war which is yours has known only truces
for there is no land where your blood has not flowed no language in which your color has not been insulted You smile, Black Boy,
you sing
you dance
you cradle generations
which go out at all hours to the
fronts of work and pain
which tomorrow will assault bastilles
* The French here reads geste, as in chanson de geste. Sartre is comparing the Negro epic with the themes of medieval French epic poetry. -- Translator.
? Black Orpheus \ 325
onward toward the bastions of the future in order to write in all languages
on the clear pages of all skies
the declaration of your rights unrecognized for more than five centuries . . .
Strange and decisive turn: race is transmuted into historicityy the black Present explodes and is temporalized, ne? gritude--with its Past and its Future--is inserted into Universal History, it is no longer a state, nor even an existential attitude, it is a "Becoming. " The black contri- bution to the evolution of Humanity is no longer savor, taste, rhythm, authenticity, a bouquet of primitive in- stincts: it is a dated enterprise, a long-suffering construction and also a future. Previously, the black man claimed his place in the sun in the name of ethnicqualities; now, he establishes his right to life on his mission; and this mission, like the proletariat's, comes to him from his historical position: because he has suffered from capitalistic exploita- tion more than all the others, he has acquired a sense of revolt and a love of liberty more than all the others. And because he is the most oppressed, he necessarily pursues the liberation of all, when he works for his own deliverance:
Black messenger of hope
you know all the hymns of the world
even those of the timeless building-works of the Nile.
But, after that, can we still believe in the interior homogeneousness of ne? gritude? And how can one say that it exists? Sometimes it is lost innocence which had its existence in some faraway past, and sometimes hope which can be realized only within the walls of the future City. Sometimes it contracts with Nature in a moment of pantheistic fusion and sometimes it spreads itself out to coincide with the whole history of Humanity; sometimes it is an existential attitude and sometimes the objective ensemble of Negro-African traditions. Is it being discov- ered? Is it being created? After all, there are black men who
? 326 I Black Orpheus
"collaborate"; after all, in the prefaces he writes for the works of each poet, Senghor seems to distinguish between degrees of ne? gritude. Does the poet who would be the Prophet for his colored brothers invite them to become more Negro, or does he disclose to them what they are, by a sort of poetic psychoanalysis? Is ne? gritude necessity or liberty? For the authentic Negro, is it a matter of conduct deriving from essences, as consequences derive from a principle, or is one a Negro in the way that the religious faithful are believers, that is to say, in fear and trembling, in anguish, in perpetual remorse for never sufficiently being what one would like to be? Is it a given fact or a value? The object of empirical intuition or of a moral concept? Is it a conquest of meditation? Or does meditation poison it? Is it never authentic except when unmeditated and in the immediate? Is it a systematic explanation of the black soul, or a Platonic Archetype which one can approach indefinitely without ever attaining? Is it, for black men, like our engineer's common sense, the most widely shared thing in the world? Or do some have it, like grace; and if so, does it have its chosen ones? One will undoubtedly answer this question by saying that it is all of these at once, and still other things. And I agree: like all anthropological notions, ne? gritude is a shimmer of being and of needing-to-be; it makes you and
you make it: both oath and passion. But there is something even more important in it: the Negro himself, we have said, creates a kind of antiracist racism. He wishes in no way to dominate the world: he desires the abolition of all kinds of ethnic privileges; he asserts his solidarity with the oppressed of every color. After that, the subjective, existential, ethnic notion of ne? gritude "passes," as Hegel says, into that which one has of the proletariat: objective, positive, and precise. Senghor says: "For Ce? saire, 'White' symbolizes capital, just as Negro symbolizes work. . . . When writing about the black men of his race, he is writing about the worldwide proletarian struggle. " It is easy to say, not so easy to think. And it is certainly not just by accident that the most ardent cantors of ne? gritude are also militant Marxists. Neverthe-
? Black Orpheus | 327
less, the notion of race does not mix with the notion of class: the former is concrete and particular; the latter, universal and abstract. One belongs to what Jaspers calls comprehen- sion, and the other to intellection; the first is the product of a psychobiological syncretism, and the other is a methodical construction starting with experience. In fact, ne? gritude appears like the upbeat {unaccented beat] of a dialectical progression: the theoretical and practical affirmation of white supremacy is the thesis; the position of ne? gritude as an antithetical value is the moment of negativity. But this negative moment is not sufficient in itself, and these black men who use it know this perfectly well; they know that it aims at preparing the synthesis or realization of the human being in a raceless society. Thus, ne? gritude is for destroying itself; it is a "crossing to" and not an "arrival at," a means and not an end. A poem by Jacques Roumain, a black communist, furnishes the most moving evidence of this new
ambiguity:
Africa I have held on to your memory Africa
you are in me
Like a thorn in a wound
like a guardian mascot in the center of the village make of me the stone of your sling
of my mouth the lips of your wound
of my knees the broken columns of your humbling however
I want to be only of your race
peasant workers of all countries.
With what sadness he still retains for the moment what he has decided to abandon. With what pride as a man he will strip his pride as a Negro for other men! He who says both that Africa is in him like "a thorn in a wound," and that he wants to be only of the universal race of the oppressed, has not left the empire of afflicted consciousness. One more step and ne? gritude will disappear completely: the Negro himself makes of what was the mysterious bubbling of black blood a geographic accident, the inconsistent product of universal determinism:
? 328 I Black Orpheus
Is it all that climate extended space which creates clan tribe nation
skin race gods
our inexorable dissimilarity. *
But the poet does not completely have the courage to accept the responsibility for this rationalization of the racial concept; one sees that he limits himself to questioning; a bitter regret is visible beneath his will to unite. Strange road: humiliated and offended, black men search deep within themselves to find their most secret pride; and when they have found it at last, it challenges its own right to exist. Through supreme generosity they abandon it, just as Philoctetes abandoned his bow and arrows at Neoptolemus. Thus, the rebel Ce? saire finds the secret of his revolts in the bottom of his heart: he is of royal blood:
it is true that there is in you something which has
never been able to yield, an anger, a desire, a sadness, an impatience, in short a scorn, a violence . . . and now your veins carry gold, not mud; pride, not servitude. King you have been King in the past.
But he immediately thrusts aside this temptation:
There is a law that I cover up with a chain unbroken
as far as the confluence of fire which violates me
which purifies me and burns me with my prism of amal- gamated gold . . . I shall perish. But one. Whole.
It is perhaps this ultimate nudity of man that has snatched from him the white rags that were concealing his black armor, and that now destroys and rejects that very armor; it is perhaps this colorless nudity that best symbolizes ne? gritude: for ne? gritude is not a state, it is a simple going-beyond-itself, it is love. It is when ne? gritude re- nounces itself that it finds itself; it is when it accepts losing
* Although the poem itself and Sartre's interpretation of it suggest that there should be a question mark here, there is none in the text from which this was translated. --Translator.
? Black Orpheus \ 329
that it has won: the colored man--and he alone--can be asked to renounce the pride of his color. He is the one who is walking on this ridge between past particularism--which he has just climbed--and future universalism, which will be the twilight of his ne? gritude; he is the one who looks to the end of particularism in order to find the dawn of the universal. Undoubtedly, the white worker also becomes conscious of his class in order to deny it, since he wants the advent of a classless society: but once again, the definition of class is objective; it sums up only the condition of the white worker's alienation; whereas it is in the bottom of his heart that the Negro finds race, and he must tear out his heart. Thus, ne? gritude is dialectical; it is not only nor above all the blossoming of atavistic instincts; it represents "going beyond" a situation defined by free consciences. Ne? gritude is a sad myth full of hope, born of Evil and pregnant with future Good, living like a woman who is born to die and who feels her own death even in the richest moments of her life; it is an unstable rest, an explosive fixity, a pride which renounces itself, an absolute that knows it is transitory: for whereas it is the Announcer of its birth and of its death agony, it also remains the existential attitude chosen by free men and lived absolutely, to the fullest. Because it is tension between a nostalgic Past into which the black man can no longer enter completely and a future in which it will be replaced by new values, ne? gritude adorns itself with a tragic beauty that finds expression only in poetry. Because it is the living and dialectical unity of so many opposites, because it is a Complex defying analysis, ne? gritude is only the multiple unity of a hymn that can reveal both it and the flashing beauty of the Poem which Breton calls "explosante-fixe" Because any attempt to conceptualize its
various aspects would necessarily end up showing its relativity--even though it is lived in the absolute through royal consciences--and because the poem is an absolute, it is poetry alone that will allow the unconditional aspect of this attitude to be fixed. Because it is subjectivity written in the objective, ne? gritude must take form in a poem, that is
? 330 I Black Orpheus
to say, in a subjectivity-object; because it is an Archetype and a Value, it will find its most transparent symbol in aesthetic values; because it is a call and a gift, it will make itself heard and offer itself only by means of a work of art which is both a call to the spectator's liberty and absolute generosity. Ne? gritude is the content of the poem, it is the poem like a thing of the world, mysterious and open, obscure and suggestive; it is the poet himself. One must go still further; triumph of Narcissism and Narcissus* suicide, tension of the soul beyond culture, beyond words and beyond all psychic facts, luminous night of unknowing, deliberate choice of the impossible and of what Bataille calls "torture*' [supplice], intuitive acceptance of the world and refusal of the world in the name of "the law of the heart," double contradictory postulation, demanding retraction, expansion of generosity--ne? gritude is, in essence, Poetry. For once at least, the most authentic revolutionary plan and the purest poetry come from the same source.
And if the sacrifice is achieved one day, what will happen then? What will happen if, casting off his ne? gritude for the sake of the Revolution, the black man no longer wishes to consider himself only a part of the proletariat? What will happen if he then allows himself to be defined only by his objective condition? If, in order to struggle against white capitalism, he undertakes to assimilate white technics? Will the source of poetry run dry? Or in spite of everything, will the great black river color the sea into which it flows? That does not matter: each era has its poetry; in each era, circumstances of history elect a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch, by creating situations that can be expressed or that can go beyond themselves only through Poetry. Some- times the poetic e? lan coincides with the revolutionary e? lan, and sometimes they diverge. Let us greet today the historic chance that will permit black men to
shout out the great Negro cry so hard that the world's foundations will be shaken. 3
Translated byJohn MacCombie
? Notes
A Note on the Texts
Index
? Notes
What Is Literature?
i. At least in general. The greatness and error of Klee lie in his attempt to make a painting both sign and object.
2. I say 'create', not 'imitate', which is enough to squelch the bombast of M. Charles Estienne, who has obviously not understood a word of my argument and who is dead set on tilting at shadows.
3. This is the example cited by Bataille in Expe? rience inte? rieure.
4. If you wish to know the origin of this attitude towards language, the following are a few brief indications.
Originally, poetry creates the myth, while the prose-writer draws its portrait.
In reality, the human act, governed by needs and urged on by the
useful, is, in a sense, a means. It passes unnoticed, and it is the result which counts. When I extend my hand in order to take up my pen, I have only a fleeting and obscure consciousness of my gesture; it is the pen which I see. Thus, man is alienated by his ends. Poetry reverses the relationship: the world and things become inessential, become a pretext for the act which becomes its own end. The vase is there so that the girl may perform the graceful act of filling it; the Trojan War, so that Hector and Achilles may engage in that heroic combat. The action, detached from its goals, which become blurred, becomes an act of prowess or a dance. Nevertheless, however indifferent he might have been to the success of the enterprise, the poet, before the nineteenth century, remained in harmony with society as a whole. He did not use language for the end which prose seeks, but he had the same confidence in it as the prose-writer.
With the coming of bourgeois society, the poet puts up a common front with the prose-writer to declare it unliveable. His job is always to create the myth of man, but he passes from white magic to black magic. Man is always presented as the absolute end, but by the success of his enterprise he is s_cked into a utilitarian collectivity. The thing that is in the background of his act and that will allow transition to the myth is thus no longer success, but defeat. By stopping the infinite series of his projects like a screen, defeat alone returns him to himself in his purity. The world remains the inessential, but it is now there as a pretext for defeat. The finality of the thing is to send man back to himself by blocking the route. Moreover, it is not a matter of arbitrarily introducing defeat and ruin into the course of the world, but rather of having no eyes for anything but that. Human enterprise has two aspects: it is both success and failure. The dialectical scheme is inadequate for reflecting upon it. We must make our vocabulary and the frames of our reason more supple. Some day I am going to try to
? 334 I Notes to Page 34
describe that strange reality, History, which is neither objective, nor ever quite subjective, in which the dialectic is contested, penetrated, and corroded by a kind of antidialectic, but which is still a dialectic. But that is the philosopher's affair. One does not ordinarily consider the two faces of Janus; the man of action sees one and the poet sees the other. When the instruments are broken and unusable, when plans are blasted and effort is useless, the world appears with a childlike and terrible freshness, without supports, without paths. It has the maximum reality because it is crushing for man, and as action, in any case, generalizes, defeat restores to things their individual reality. But, by an expected reversal, the defeat, considered as a final end, is both a contesting and an appropriation of this universe. A contesting, because man is worth more than that which crushes; he no longer contests things in their 'little bit of reality', like the engineer or the captain, but, on the contrary, in their 'too full of reality', by his very existence as a vanquished person; he is the remorse of the world. An appropriation, because the world, by ceasing to be the tool of success, becomes the instrument of failure. So there it is, traversed by an obscure finality; it is its coefficient of adversity which serves, the more human in so far as it is more hostile to man. The defeat itself turns into salvation. Not that it makes us yield to some 'beyond', but by itself it shifts and is metamorphosed. For example, poetic language rises out of the ruins of prose. If it is true that the word is a betrayal and that communication is impossible, then each word by itself recovers its individuality and becomes an instrument of our defeat and a receiver of the incommunicable, It is not that there is another thing to communicate; but the communication of prose having miscarried, it is the very meaning of the word which becomes the pure incommunicable. Thus, the failure of communication becomes a suggestion of the incommunicable, and the thwarted project of utilizing words is succeeded by the pure disinterested intuition of the word. Thus, we again meet with the description which we attempted earlier in this study, but in the more general perspective of the absolute valorization of the defeat, which seems to me the original attitude of contemporary poetry. Note also that this choice confers upon the poet a very precise function in the collectivity: in a highly integrated or religious society, the defeat is masked by the State or redeemed by Religion; in a less integrated and secular society, such as our democracies, it is up to poetry to redeem them.
Poetry is a case of the loser winning. And the genuine poet chooses to lose, even if he has to go so far as to die, in order to win. I repeat that I am talking of contemporary poetry. History presents other forms of poetry. It is not my concern to show their connection with ours. Thus, if one absolutely wishes to speak of the commitment of the poet, let us say that he is the man who commits himself to lose. This is the deeper meaning of that tough-luck, of that curse with which he always claims kinship and which he always attributes to an intervention from without; whereas it is his deepest choice, the source and not the consequence of his poetry. He is certain of the total defeat of the human enterprise and arranges to fail in his own life in order to bear witness, by his individual defeat, to human defeat in general. Thus, he challenges, as we shall see, which is what the prose-writer does too. But the challenge of prose is carried on in the name
? Notes to Pages 34--113 \ 335
of a greater success; and that of poetry, in the name of the hidden defeat which every victory conceals.
5. It goes without saying that in all poetry a certain form of prose, that is, of success, is present; and, vice versa, the driest prose always contains a bit of poetry, that is, a certain form of defeat; no prose-writer is quite capable of expressing what he wants to say; he says too much or not enough; each phrase is a wager, a risk assumed; the more cautious one is, the more attention the word attracts; as Vale? ry has shown, no one can understand a word to its very bottom. Thus, each word is used simultaneously for its clear and social meaning and for certain obscure resonances--let me say, almost for its physiognomy. The reader, too, is sensitive to this. At once we are no longer on the level of concerted communication, but on that of grace and chance; the silences of prose are poetic because they mark its limits, and it is for the purpose of greater clarity that I have been considering the extreme cases of pure prose and pure poetry. However, it need not be concluded that we can pass from poetry to prose by a continuous series of intermediate forms. If the prose-writer is too eager to fondle his words, the eidos of'prose' is shattered and we fall into highfalutin nonsense. If the poet relates, explains, or teaches, the poetry complex becomes prosaic; he has lost the game. It is a matter of structures--impure, but well-defined.
6. The same is true in different degrees regarding the spectator's attitude before other works of art (paintings, symphonies, statues, etc. ). 7. In practical life a means may be taken for an end as soon as one searches for it, and each end is revealed as a means of attaining another end. 8. This last remark may arouse some readers. If so, I'd like to know a single good novel whose express purpose was to serve oppression, a single good novel which has been written against Jews, negroes, workers, or colonial people. 'But if there isn't any, that's no reason why someone may not write one some day. ' But you then admit that you are an abstract theoretician. You, not I. For it is in the name of your abstract conception of art that you assert the possibility of a fact which has never come into being, whereas I limit myself to proposing an explanation for a recognized
fact.
9. Etiemble: 'Happy the writers who die for something. ' Combat,
January 24, 1947.
10. Today his public is spread out. He sometimes runs into a hundred
thousand copies. A hundred thousand copies sold means four hundred thousand readers. Thus, for France, one out of a hundred in the population. 11. Dostoyevsky's famous 'If God does not exist, all is permissible' is the terrible revelation which the bourgeoisie has forced itself to conceal
during the one hundred and fifty years of its reign.
12. This was somewhat the case of Jules Valle`s, though a natural
magnanimity constantly struggled within him against bitterness.
13. I am not unaware that workers defended political democracy against Louis Napoleon Bonaparte much more than did the bourgeois, but that was because they thought that by means of it they would be able to bring about
structural reforms.
14. I have so often been accused of being unfair to Flaubert that I cannot
? 336 I Notes to Pages 113-12-/
resist the pleasure of quoting the following texts, which anyone can verify in the correspondence:
'Neo-Catholicism on one hand and socialism on the other have stultified France. Everything moves between the Immaculate Conception and the workers' lunch-boxes' (1868).
'The first remedy would be to put an end to universal suffrage, the shame of the human mind' (September 1871).
'I'm worth twenty Croisset voters' (1871).
'I have no hatred for the communards for the reason that I don't hate mad dogs' (Croisset, Thursday, 1871).
'I believe that the crowd, the herd, will always be hateful. The only ones important are a small group of spirits, always the same, who pass the torch from hand to hand' (Croisset, September 8, 1871).
'As to the Commune, which is on its last legs, it's the last manifestation of the Middle Ages. '
'I hate democracy (at least what it is taken to mean in France)--that is, the exaltation of grace to the detriment of justice, the negation of law: in short, anti-sociability. '
'The Commune re-instates murderers. '
'The populace is an eternal minor, and it will always be at the bottom of the scale since it is number, mass, the unbounded. '
'It's not important for a lot of peasants to know how to read and no longer listen to their priest, but it's infinitely important that a lot of men like Renan or Littre? live and be listened to. Our salvation is now in a legitimate aristocracy. I mean by that a majority which will be composed of something other than mere figures' (1871).
'Do you believe that if France, instead of being governed, in short, by the mob, were in the power of the mandarins, we would be in this mess? If, instead of having wanted to enlighten the lower classes, we had been concerned with educating the upper ones? ' (Croisset, Wednesday, August 3, 1870).
15. In The Devil on Two Sticks, for example, Le Sage novelizesthe characters of La Bruye`re and the maxims of La Rochefoucauld; that is, he binds them together by the slender thread of a plot.
16. The procedure of writing the novel in the form of letters is only a variation of what I have just indicated. The letter is the subjective recital of an event; it refers back to the one who wrote it and who becomes both actor and witnessing subjectivity. As to the event itself, although it is recent, it is already re-thought and explained: the letter always supposes a lag between the fact (which belongs to a recent past) and its recital, which is given subsequently and in a moment of leisure.
17. This is the reverse of the vicious circle of the surrealists, who try to destroy painting by painting. In this case one wants to have literature's letters of credit given by literature.
18. When Maupassant writes Le Horla, that is, when he speaks of the madness which threatens him, the tone changes. It is because at last something--something horrible--is going to happen. The man is overwhelmed, crushed; he no longer understands; he wants to drag the reader along with him into his terror. But the twig is bent; lacking a
? Notes to Pages 127-129 | 337
technique adapted to madness, death, and history, he fails to move the reader.
19. Among these procedures I shall first cite the curious recourse to the style of the theatre that one finds at the end of the last century and the beginning of this one in Gyp, Lavedan, Abel Hermant, etc. The novel was written in dialogue form. The gestures of the characters and their actions were indicated in italics and parenthetically. It was evidently a matter of making the reader contemporaneous with the action as the spectator is during the performance. This procedure certainly manifests the predomi- nance of dramatic art in polite society around 1900. In its way it also sought to escape the myth of primary subjectivity. But the fact that it was abandoned shows sufficiently that it did not solve the problem. First, it is a sign of weakness to ask for help from a neighbouring art, a proof that one lacks resources in the very domain of the art one practises. Then, the author did not thereby prevent himself from entering into the consciousness of his characters and having the reader enter with him. He simply divulged the intimate contents of the consciousness in parentheses and italics, with the style and typographical methods that are generally used for stage directions. In effect, it was an attempt without a future. The authors who used it had a vague feeling that new life could be put into the novel by writing it in the present. But they had not yet understood that it was not possible if one did not first give up the explanatory attitude.
More serious was the attempt to introduce the interior monologue of Schnitzler. (I am not speaking here of that of Joyce, which has quite different metaphysical principles. Larbaud, who, I know, harks back to
Joyce, seems to me much rather to draw his inspiration from Les Lauriers sont couple? s and from Mademoiselle Else. ) In short, it was a matter of pushing the hypothesis of a primary subjectivity to the limit and of passing on to realism by leading idealism up to the absolute.
The reality which one shows to the reader without intermediary is no longer the thing itself--the tree, the ashtray--but the consciousness which sees the thing; the 'real' is no longer only a representation, but rather the representation becomes an absolute reality since it is given to us as an immediate datum. The inconvenient aspect of this procedure is that it encloses us in an individual subjectivity and that it thereby lacks the intermonadic universe; besides, it dilutes the event and the action in the perception of one and then the other. Now, the common characteristic of the fact and the action is that they escape subjective representation, which grasps their results but not their living movement. In short, it is only with a certain amount of faking that one reduces the stream of consciousness to a succession of words, even deformed ones. If the word is given as an intermediary signifying a reality which in essence transcends language, nothing could be better; it withdraws itself, is forgotten, and discharges consciousness upon the object.
But if it presents itself as the psychic reality, if the author, by writing, claims to give us an ambiguous reality which is a sign, objective in essence--that is, in so far as it relates to something outside itself--and a thing, formal in essence--that is, as an immediate psychic datum--then he can be accused of not having participated and of disregarding the
? 338 I Notes to Pages 129--164
rhetorical law which might be formulated as follows: in literature, where one uses signs, it is not necessary to use only signs; and if the reality which one wants to signify is one word, it must be given to the reader by other words. He can be charged, besides, with having forgotten that the greatest riches of the psychic life are silent. We know what has happened to the internal monologue: having become rhetoric, that is, a poetic transposition of the inner life--silent as well as verbal--it has today become one method among others of the novelist. Too idealistic to be true, too realistic to be complete, it is the crown of the subjectivist technique. It is within and by means of this technique that the literature of today has become conscious of itself; that is, the literature of today is a double surpassing, towards the objective and towards the rhetorical, of the technique of the internal monologue. But for that it is necessary that the historical circumstance change.
It is evident that the writer continues today to write in the past tense. It is not by changing the tense of the verb but by revolutionizing the techniques of the story that he will succeed in making the reader contemporary with the story.
20. American literature is still in the stage of regionalism.
21. When I was passing through New York in 1945, I asked a literary agent to get the translation rights of Miss Lonelyhearts, a work by Nathanael West. He did not know the book and came to a gentleman's agreement with the author of a certain Lonlyheart, an old maiden lady who was very surprised that someone was thinking of translating her book into French. He learned of his mistake and, continuing his search, finally found West's publisher, who admitted that he did not know what had become of the author. I urged them to investigate and finally they learned that West had died several years earlier in an automobile accident. It seems that he still had a bank account in New York and the publisher was still sending him cheques from time to time.
22. In Jouhandeau the bourgeois souls have the same quality of the marvellous; but often this marvellous changes sign; it becomes negative and satanic. As you might well imagine, the Black Masses of the bourgeoisie are still more fascinating than its permissible displays.
23. To make oneself the clerk of violence implies that one deliberately adopts violence as a method of thought, that is, one has common recourse to intimidation, to the principle of authority; one haughtily refuses to demonstrate and discuss. This is what gives the dogmatic texts of the surrealists a purely formal but disturbing resemblance to the political writings of Charles Maurras.
24. A resemblance to L'Action Franc? aise, of which Maurras was able to say that it was not a party but a conspiracy. And don't the punitive expeditions of the surrealists resemble the pranks of the young royalist henchmen?
25. These passionless remarks have stirred up impassioned whirlwinds. However, far from convincing me, the defences and the attacks have made me more convinced than ever that surrealism has lost--perhaps temporarily--its timeliness. As a matter of fact, I find that most of its defenders are eclectics. It is made out to be a cultural phenomenon 'of high
? Notes to Page 164 \ 339
importance', an exemplary' attitude, and an attempt is being made to integrate it, on the quiet, into bourgeois humanism. If it still had any life in it, would it be willing to spice the slightly stale rationalism of M. Alquie? with the Freudian pepper? In the last analysis, it is a victim of the idealism which it has so fought against; the Gazette des lettres, Fontaine, and Carrefour are stomachs which just can't wait to digest it.
If a Desnos could have read in 1930 the following lines of M. Claude Mauriac, a young sparkplug of the Fourth Republic: 'Man fights against man without realizing that the joint effort of all minds should first be brought to bear against a certain skimpy and false conception of man. But surrealism has known this and has been crying it aloud for twenty years. As an enterprise of knowledge, it proclaims that everything about the traditional modes of thinking and feeling has to be re-invented,' he would certainly have protested; surrealism was not an 'enterprise oi^ knowledge'; he specifically quoted Marx's famous phrase: 'We do not want to understand the world; we want to change it'; he never wanted this 'joint effort of minds' which pleasantly recalls the Rally of the French People [General de Gaulle's Rassemblement Populaire Franc? ais--Translator]. Against this rather silly optimism he always affirmed the strict connection between inner censorship and oppression; if there had to be a joint effort of all minds (that expression minds, in the plural, is hardly surrealistic! ) it would come after the Revolution. In his heyday he would not have tolerated anyone's brooding over him that way in order to understand him. He considered-- like the Communist Party in this respect--that everything that was not totally and exclusively for him was against him. Is he aware today of the way he is being manoeuvred? In order to enlighten him, I shall therefore reveal to him that M. Bataille, before publicly informing Merleau-Ponty that he was withdrawing his article from us, had notified him of his intentions in a private conversation. [M. Merleau-Ponty is a member of the editorial board of Les Temps Modernes of which M. Sartre is editor-in-chief and in which the present work was originally serialized--Translator. ] This champion of surrealism had then declared, 'I have serious charges to make against Breton, but we must unite against communism. ' That should be sufficient! I think that I show more esteem for surrealism by harking back to the time of its ardent life and by discussing its aim than by slyly trying to assimilate it. It is true that it is not going to thank me for it, for, like all totalitarian parties, it affirms the continuity of its views in order to mask their perpetual change and therefore does not at all like anyone to hark back to its previous declarations. Many of the texts I meet with today in the catalogue of the surrealist exhibition (Surrealism in 1947) and which are approved by the chiefs of the movement are closer to the gentle eclecticism
of M. Claude Mauriac than to the bitter revolt of the first surrealism.
? Black Orpheus \ 321
have seen the black men of Harlem dance frenetically to the rhythm of "blues," which are the saddest sounds in the world. In effect, rhythm cements the multiple aspects of the black soul, communicates its Nietzschean lightness with heavy Dionysian intuitions. Rhythm--tam-tam, jazz, the "bounding" of these poems--represents the temporality of Negro existence. And when a black poet prophesies to his brothers a better future, he portrays their deliverance to them in the form of rhythm:
What?
rhythm
sound wave in the night across the forests, nothing
--or a new soul timbre
intonation
vigor
dilation
vibration which flows out by degrees into the marrow re? vulses* in its progression an old sleeping body, takes it by the waist
and spins it
and turns
and once more vibrates in its hands, in its loins, its sexual member, its thighs, its vagina . . .
But one must go still further: this basic experience of suffering is ambiguous; through it, black conscience is going to become historical. In effect, whatever may be the intolerable iniquity of his present condition, it is not to that condition that the black man first refers when he proclaims that he has touched the heart of human suffering. He has the horrible benefit of having known bondage. For these poets, most of whom were born between 1900 and 1918, slavery-- abolished half a century earlier--lingers on as a very real memory:
Each of my todays looks on my yesterday with large eyes rolling with rancor with
* Re? vulses: referring to the medical term revulsion, a counterirritant. -- Translator.
? $22 I Black Orpheus
shame
Still real is my stunned condition of the past
of
blows from knotted cords of bodies calcinated
from toe to calcinated back
of deadfleshof red ironfirebrandsof arms
broken under the whip which is breaking loose . . .
writes Damas, poet from Guiana. And the Haitian, Brierre:
. . . Often like me you feel stiffnesses Awaken after murderous centuries
And old wounds bleed in your flesh . . .
During the centuries of slavery, the black man drank the cup of bitterness to the last drop; and slavery is a past fact which neither our authors nor their fathers have actually experienced. But it is also a hideous nightmare from which even the youngest of them are not yet sure of having awakened. From one end of the earth to the other, black men--separated by languages, politics, and the history of their colonizers--have a collective memory in common. This will not be surprising if one only recalls the French peasants who, in 1789, were still aware of the panicky terrors that went back to the Hundred Years' War. Thus, when the black man goes back to his principal experience, it is suddenly revealed to him in two dimensions: it is both the intuitive seizure of the human condition and the still-fresh memory of a historical past. Here, I am thinking of Pascal, who relentlessly repeated that man was an irrational com- posite of metaphysics and history, his greatness unexplain- able if he comes from the alluvium, his misery unexplainable if he is still as God made him; that in order to understand man, one had to go back to the simple basic fact of man's downfall. It is in this sense that Ce? saire calls his race "the fallen race. " And in a certain sense I can see the rapprochement that can be made between black conscience and Christian
conscience: the brazen law of slavery evokes that law of the Old Testament, which states the consequences of the Fault. The abolition of slavery recalls this other historical fact:
? Black Orpheus \ 323
Redemption. The white man's insipid paternalism after 1848 resembles that of the white God after the Passion. The difference being, however, that the expiable fault that the black man discovers in the back of his memory is not his own; it belongs to the white man. The first fact of Negro history is certainly a kind of original sin; but the black man is the innocent victim of it. This is why his concept of suffering is radically opposed to white "dolorism. " If these poems are for the most part so violently anti-Christian, it is because the white man's religion is more clearly a hoax in the eyes of the Negro than in the eyes of the European proletariat: this religion wants to make him share the responsibility for a crime of which he is the victim; it wants to persuade him to see the kidnappings, the massacres, the rapes, and the tortures which have covered Africa with blood as a legitimate punishment, deserved tests. Will you say that it also proclaims equality for all men before God? Before God, yes. Only yesterday I was reading in Esprit these
lines from a correspondent in Madagascar:
I am as certain as you that the soul of a Malagasy is worth the soul of a white man . . . Just as, before God, the soul of a child is worth the soul of his father. However, if you have an automobile, you don't let your children drive it,
One can hardly reconcile Christianity and colonialism more elegantly. In opposition to these sophisms, the black man--by a simple investigation of his memory as a former slave--affirms that suffering is man's lot and that it is no less deserved for all that. He rejects with horror Christian stagnation, melancholy sensual pleasure, masochistic humil- ity, and all the tendentious inducements to his submission; he lives the absurdity of suffering in its pure form, in its injustice and in its gratuitousness; and he discovers thereby this truth which is misunderstood or masked by Christian- ity: suffering carries within itself its own refusal; it is by nature a refusal to suffer, it is the dark side of negativity, it opens onto revolt and liberty. The black man promptly
? 324 I Black Orpheus
transforms himself into history inasmuch as the intuition of suffering confers on him a collective past and assigns to him a goal in the future. Only a short while ago, he was a sheer
present surging of timeless instincts, a simple manifestation of universal and eternal fecundity. Now he calls to his colored brothers in quite another language:
Negro peddler of revolt
you have known the paths of the world ever since you were sold in Guine? e . . .
And:
Five centuries have seen you with weapons in your hands and you have taught the exploiting races
passion for liberty.
There is already a black epic:* first the golden age of Africa, then the era of dispersion and captivity, then the awakening of conscience, the heroic and somber times of great revolts, of Toussaint L'Ouverture and black heroes, then the fact of the abolition of slavery--"unforgettable metamorphosis/' says Ce? saire--then the struggle for defin- itive liberation:
You are waiting for the next call
the inevitable mobilization
for that war which is yours has known only truces
for there is no land where your blood has not flowed no language in which your color has not been insulted You smile, Black Boy,
you sing
you dance
you cradle generations
which go out at all hours to the
fronts of work and pain
which tomorrow will assault bastilles
* The French here reads geste, as in chanson de geste. Sartre is comparing the Negro epic with the themes of medieval French epic poetry. -- Translator.
? Black Orpheus \ 325
onward toward the bastions of the future in order to write in all languages
on the clear pages of all skies
the declaration of your rights unrecognized for more than five centuries . . .
Strange and decisive turn: race is transmuted into historicityy the black Present explodes and is temporalized, ne? gritude--with its Past and its Future--is inserted into Universal History, it is no longer a state, nor even an existential attitude, it is a "Becoming. " The black contri- bution to the evolution of Humanity is no longer savor, taste, rhythm, authenticity, a bouquet of primitive in- stincts: it is a dated enterprise, a long-suffering construction and also a future. Previously, the black man claimed his place in the sun in the name of ethnicqualities; now, he establishes his right to life on his mission; and this mission, like the proletariat's, comes to him from his historical position: because he has suffered from capitalistic exploita- tion more than all the others, he has acquired a sense of revolt and a love of liberty more than all the others. And because he is the most oppressed, he necessarily pursues the liberation of all, when he works for his own deliverance:
Black messenger of hope
you know all the hymns of the world
even those of the timeless building-works of the Nile.
But, after that, can we still believe in the interior homogeneousness of ne? gritude? And how can one say that it exists? Sometimes it is lost innocence which had its existence in some faraway past, and sometimes hope which can be realized only within the walls of the future City. Sometimes it contracts with Nature in a moment of pantheistic fusion and sometimes it spreads itself out to coincide with the whole history of Humanity; sometimes it is an existential attitude and sometimes the objective ensemble of Negro-African traditions. Is it being discov- ered? Is it being created? After all, there are black men who
? 326 I Black Orpheus
"collaborate"; after all, in the prefaces he writes for the works of each poet, Senghor seems to distinguish between degrees of ne? gritude. Does the poet who would be the Prophet for his colored brothers invite them to become more Negro, or does he disclose to them what they are, by a sort of poetic psychoanalysis? Is ne? gritude necessity or liberty? For the authentic Negro, is it a matter of conduct deriving from essences, as consequences derive from a principle, or is one a Negro in the way that the religious faithful are believers, that is to say, in fear and trembling, in anguish, in perpetual remorse for never sufficiently being what one would like to be? Is it a given fact or a value? The object of empirical intuition or of a moral concept? Is it a conquest of meditation? Or does meditation poison it? Is it never authentic except when unmeditated and in the immediate? Is it a systematic explanation of the black soul, or a Platonic Archetype which one can approach indefinitely without ever attaining? Is it, for black men, like our engineer's common sense, the most widely shared thing in the world? Or do some have it, like grace; and if so, does it have its chosen ones? One will undoubtedly answer this question by saying that it is all of these at once, and still other things. And I agree: like all anthropological notions, ne? gritude is a shimmer of being and of needing-to-be; it makes you and
you make it: both oath and passion. But there is something even more important in it: the Negro himself, we have said, creates a kind of antiracist racism. He wishes in no way to dominate the world: he desires the abolition of all kinds of ethnic privileges; he asserts his solidarity with the oppressed of every color. After that, the subjective, existential, ethnic notion of ne? gritude "passes," as Hegel says, into that which one has of the proletariat: objective, positive, and precise. Senghor says: "For Ce? saire, 'White' symbolizes capital, just as Negro symbolizes work. . . . When writing about the black men of his race, he is writing about the worldwide proletarian struggle. " It is easy to say, not so easy to think. And it is certainly not just by accident that the most ardent cantors of ne? gritude are also militant Marxists. Neverthe-
? Black Orpheus | 327
less, the notion of race does not mix with the notion of class: the former is concrete and particular; the latter, universal and abstract. One belongs to what Jaspers calls comprehen- sion, and the other to intellection; the first is the product of a psychobiological syncretism, and the other is a methodical construction starting with experience. In fact, ne? gritude appears like the upbeat {unaccented beat] of a dialectical progression: the theoretical and practical affirmation of white supremacy is the thesis; the position of ne? gritude as an antithetical value is the moment of negativity. But this negative moment is not sufficient in itself, and these black men who use it know this perfectly well; they know that it aims at preparing the synthesis or realization of the human being in a raceless society. Thus, ne? gritude is for destroying itself; it is a "crossing to" and not an "arrival at," a means and not an end. A poem by Jacques Roumain, a black communist, furnishes the most moving evidence of this new
ambiguity:
Africa I have held on to your memory Africa
you are in me
Like a thorn in a wound
like a guardian mascot in the center of the village make of me the stone of your sling
of my mouth the lips of your wound
of my knees the broken columns of your humbling however
I want to be only of your race
peasant workers of all countries.
With what sadness he still retains for the moment what he has decided to abandon. With what pride as a man he will strip his pride as a Negro for other men! He who says both that Africa is in him like "a thorn in a wound," and that he wants to be only of the universal race of the oppressed, has not left the empire of afflicted consciousness. One more step and ne? gritude will disappear completely: the Negro himself makes of what was the mysterious bubbling of black blood a geographic accident, the inconsistent product of universal determinism:
? 328 I Black Orpheus
Is it all that climate extended space which creates clan tribe nation
skin race gods
our inexorable dissimilarity. *
But the poet does not completely have the courage to accept the responsibility for this rationalization of the racial concept; one sees that he limits himself to questioning; a bitter regret is visible beneath his will to unite. Strange road: humiliated and offended, black men search deep within themselves to find their most secret pride; and when they have found it at last, it challenges its own right to exist. Through supreme generosity they abandon it, just as Philoctetes abandoned his bow and arrows at Neoptolemus. Thus, the rebel Ce? saire finds the secret of his revolts in the bottom of his heart: he is of royal blood:
it is true that there is in you something which has
never been able to yield, an anger, a desire, a sadness, an impatience, in short a scorn, a violence . . . and now your veins carry gold, not mud; pride, not servitude. King you have been King in the past.
But he immediately thrusts aside this temptation:
There is a law that I cover up with a chain unbroken
as far as the confluence of fire which violates me
which purifies me and burns me with my prism of amal- gamated gold . . . I shall perish. But one. Whole.
It is perhaps this ultimate nudity of man that has snatched from him the white rags that were concealing his black armor, and that now destroys and rejects that very armor; it is perhaps this colorless nudity that best symbolizes ne? gritude: for ne? gritude is not a state, it is a simple going-beyond-itself, it is love. It is when ne? gritude re- nounces itself that it finds itself; it is when it accepts losing
* Although the poem itself and Sartre's interpretation of it suggest that there should be a question mark here, there is none in the text from which this was translated. --Translator.
? Black Orpheus \ 329
that it has won: the colored man--and he alone--can be asked to renounce the pride of his color. He is the one who is walking on this ridge between past particularism--which he has just climbed--and future universalism, which will be the twilight of his ne? gritude; he is the one who looks to the end of particularism in order to find the dawn of the universal. Undoubtedly, the white worker also becomes conscious of his class in order to deny it, since he wants the advent of a classless society: but once again, the definition of class is objective; it sums up only the condition of the white worker's alienation; whereas it is in the bottom of his heart that the Negro finds race, and he must tear out his heart. Thus, ne? gritude is dialectical; it is not only nor above all the blossoming of atavistic instincts; it represents "going beyond" a situation defined by free consciences. Ne? gritude is a sad myth full of hope, born of Evil and pregnant with future Good, living like a woman who is born to die and who feels her own death even in the richest moments of her life; it is an unstable rest, an explosive fixity, a pride which renounces itself, an absolute that knows it is transitory: for whereas it is the Announcer of its birth and of its death agony, it also remains the existential attitude chosen by free men and lived absolutely, to the fullest. Because it is tension between a nostalgic Past into which the black man can no longer enter completely and a future in which it will be replaced by new values, ne? gritude adorns itself with a tragic beauty that finds expression only in poetry. Because it is the living and dialectical unity of so many opposites, because it is a Complex defying analysis, ne? gritude is only the multiple unity of a hymn that can reveal both it and the flashing beauty of the Poem which Breton calls "explosante-fixe" Because any attempt to conceptualize its
various aspects would necessarily end up showing its relativity--even though it is lived in the absolute through royal consciences--and because the poem is an absolute, it is poetry alone that will allow the unconditional aspect of this attitude to be fixed. Because it is subjectivity written in the objective, ne? gritude must take form in a poem, that is
? 330 I Black Orpheus
to say, in a subjectivity-object; because it is an Archetype and a Value, it will find its most transparent symbol in aesthetic values; because it is a call and a gift, it will make itself heard and offer itself only by means of a work of art which is both a call to the spectator's liberty and absolute generosity. Ne? gritude is the content of the poem, it is the poem like a thing of the world, mysterious and open, obscure and suggestive; it is the poet himself. One must go still further; triumph of Narcissism and Narcissus* suicide, tension of the soul beyond culture, beyond words and beyond all psychic facts, luminous night of unknowing, deliberate choice of the impossible and of what Bataille calls "torture*' [supplice], intuitive acceptance of the world and refusal of the world in the name of "the law of the heart," double contradictory postulation, demanding retraction, expansion of generosity--ne? gritude is, in essence, Poetry. For once at least, the most authentic revolutionary plan and the purest poetry come from the same source.
And if the sacrifice is achieved one day, what will happen then? What will happen if, casting off his ne? gritude for the sake of the Revolution, the black man no longer wishes to consider himself only a part of the proletariat? What will happen if he then allows himself to be defined only by his objective condition? If, in order to struggle against white capitalism, he undertakes to assimilate white technics? Will the source of poetry run dry? Or in spite of everything, will the great black river color the sea into which it flows? That does not matter: each era has its poetry; in each era, circumstances of history elect a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch, by creating situations that can be expressed or that can go beyond themselves only through Poetry. Some- times the poetic e? lan coincides with the revolutionary e? lan, and sometimes they diverge. Let us greet today the historic chance that will permit black men to
shout out the great Negro cry so hard that the world's foundations will be shaken. 3
Translated byJohn MacCombie
? Notes
A Note on the Texts
Index
? Notes
What Is Literature?
i. At least in general. The greatness and error of Klee lie in his attempt to make a painting both sign and object.
2. I say 'create', not 'imitate', which is enough to squelch the bombast of M. Charles Estienne, who has obviously not understood a word of my argument and who is dead set on tilting at shadows.
3. This is the example cited by Bataille in Expe? rience inte? rieure.
4. If you wish to know the origin of this attitude towards language, the following are a few brief indications.
Originally, poetry creates the myth, while the prose-writer draws its portrait.
In reality, the human act, governed by needs and urged on by the
useful, is, in a sense, a means. It passes unnoticed, and it is the result which counts. When I extend my hand in order to take up my pen, I have only a fleeting and obscure consciousness of my gesture; it is the pen which I see. Thus, man is alienated by his ends. Poetry reverses the relationship: the world and things become inessential, become a pretext for the act which becomes its own end. The vase is there so that the girl may perform the graceful act of filling it; the Trojan War, so that Hector and Achilles may engage in that heroic combat. The action, detached from its goals, which become blurred, becomes an act of prowess or a dance. Nevertheless, however indifferent he might have been to the success of the enterprise, the poet, before the nineteenth century, remained in harmony with society as a whole. He did not use language for the end which prose seeks, but he had the same confidence in it as the prose-writer.
With the coming of bourgeois society, the poet puts up a common front with the prose-writer to declare it unliveable. His job is always to create the myth of man, but he passes from white magic to black magic. Man is always presented as the absolute end, but by the success of his enterprise he is s_cked into a utilitarian collectivity. The thing that is in the background of his act and that will allow transition to the myth is thus no longer success, but defeat. By stopping the infinite series of his projects like a screen, defeat alone returns him to himself in his purity. The world remains the inessential, but it is now there as a pretext for defeat. The finality of the thing is to send man back to himself by blocking the route. Moreover, it is not a matter of arbitrarily introducing defeat and ruin into the course of the world, but rather of having no eyes for anything but that. Human enterprise has two aspects: it is both success and failure. The dialectical scheme is inadequate for reflecting upon it. We must make our vocabulary and the frames of our reason more supple. Some day I am going to try to
? 334 I Notes to Page 34
describe that strange reality, History, which is neither objective, nor ever quite subjective, in which the dialectic is contested, penetrated, and corroded by a kind of antidialectic, but which is still a dialectic. But that is the philosopher's affair. One does not ordinarily consider the two faces of Janus; the man of action sees one and the poet sees the other. When the instruments are broken and unusable, when plans are blasted and effort is useless, the world appears with a childlike and terrible freshness, without supports, without paths. It has the maximum reality because it is crushing for man, and as action, in any case, generalizes, defeat restores to things their individual reality. But, by an expected reversal, the defeat, considered as a final end, is both a contesting and an appropriation of this universe. A contesting, because man is worth more than that which crushes; he no longer contests things in their 'little bit of reality', like the engineer or the captain, but, on the contrary, in their 'too full of reality', by his very existence as a vanquished person; he is the remorse of the world. An appropriation, because the world, by ceasing to be the tool of success, becomes the instrument of failure. So there it is, traversed by an obscure finality; it is its coefficient of adversity which serves, the more human in so far as it is more hostile to man. The defeat itself turns into salvation. Not that it makes us yield to some 'beyond', but by itself it shifts and is metamorphosed. For example, poetic language rises out of the ruins of prose. If it is true that the word is a betrayal and that communication is impossible, then each word by itself recovers its individuality and becomes an instrument of our defeat and a receiver of the incommunicable, It is not that there is another thing to communicate; but the communication of prose having miscarried, it is the very meaning of the word which becomes the pure incommunicable. Thus, the failure of communication becomes a suggestion of the incommunicable, and the thwarted project of utilizing words is succeeded by the pure disinterested intuition of the word. Thus, we again meet with the description which we attempted earlier in this study, but in the more general perspective of the absolute valorization of the defeat, which seems to me the original attitude of contemporary poetry. Note also that this choice confers upon the poet a very precise function in the collectivity: in a highly integrated or religious society, the defeat is masked by the State or redeemed by Religion; in a less integrated and secular society, such as our democracies, it is up to poetry to redeem them.
Poetry is a case of the loser winning. And the genuine poet chooses to lose, even if he has to go so far as to die, in order to win. I repeat that I am talking of contemporary poetry. History presents other forms of poetry. It is not my concern to show their connection with ours. Thus, if one absolutely wishes to speak of the commitment of the poet, let us say that he is the man who commits himself to lose. This is the deeper meaning of that tough-luck, of that curse with which he always claims kinship and which he always attributes to an intervention from without; whereas it is his deepest choice, the source and not the consequence of his poetry. He is certain of the total defeat of the human enterprise and arranges to fail in his own life in order to bear witness, by his individual defeat, to human defeat in general. Thus, he challenges, as we shall see, which is what the prose-writer does too. But the challenge of prose is carried on in the name
? Notes to Pages 34--113 \ 335
of a greater success; and that of poetry, in the name of the hidden defeat which every victory conceals.
5. It goes without saying that in all poetry a certain form of prose, that is, of success, is present; and, vice versa, the driest prose always contains a bit of poetry, that is, a certain form of defeat; no prose-writer is quite capable of expressing what he wants to say; he says too much or not enough; each phrase is a wager, a risk assumed; the more cautious one is, the more attention the word attracts; as Vale? ry has shown, no one can understand a word to its very bottom. Thus, each word is used simultaneously for its clear and social meaning and for certain obscure resonances--let me say, almost for its physiognomy. The reader, too, is sensitive to this. At once we are no longer on the level of concerted communication, but on that of grace and chance; the silences of prose are poetic because they mark its limits, and it is for the purpose of greater clarity that I have been considering the extreme cases of pure prose and pure poetry. However, it need not be concluded that we can pass from poetry to prose by a continuous series of intermediate forms. If the prose-writer is too eager to fondle his words, the eidos of'prose' is shattered and we fall into highfalutin nonsense. If the poet relates, explains, or teaches, the poetry complex becomes prosaic; he has lost the game. It is a matter of structures--impure, but well-defined.
6. The same is true in different degrees regarding the spectator's attitude before other works of art (paintings, symphonies, statues, etc. ). 7. In practical life a means may be taken for an end as soon as one searches for it, and each end is revealed as a means of attaining another end. 8. This last remark may arouse some readers. If so, I'd like to know a single good novel whose express purpose was to serve oppression, a single good novel which has been written against Jews, negroes, workers, or colonial people. 'But if there isn't any, that's no reason why someone may not write one some day. ' But you then admit that you are an abstract theoretician. You, not I. For it is in the name of your abstract conception of art that you assert the possibility of a fact which has never come into being, whereas I limit myself to proposing an explanation for a recognized
fact.
9. Etiemble: 'Happy the writers who die for something. ' Combat,
January 24, 1947.
10. Today his public is spread out. He sometimes runs into a hundred
thousand copies. A hundred thousand copies sold means four hundred thousand readers. Thus, for France, one out of a hundred in the population. 11. Dostoyevsky's famous 'If God does not exist, all is permissible' is the terrible revelation which the bourgeoisie has forced itself to conceal
during the one hundred and fifty years of its reign.
12. This was somewhat the case of Jules Valle`s, though a natural
magnanimity constantly struggled within him against bitterness.
13. I am not unaware that workers defended political democracy against Louis Napoleon Bonaparte much more than did the bourgeois, but that was because they thought that by means of it they would be able to bring about
structural reforms.
14. I have so often been accused of being unfair to Flaubert that I cannot
? 336 I Notes to Pages 113-12-/
resist the pleasure of quoting the following texts, which anyone can verify in the correspondence:
'Neo-Catholicism on one hand and socialism on the other have stultified France. Everything moves between the Immaculate Conception and the workers' lunch-boxes' (1868).
'The first remedy would be to put an end to universal suffrage, the shame of the human mind' (September 1871).
'I'm worth twenty Croisset voters' (1871).
'I have no hatred for the communards for the reason that I don't hate mad dogs' (Croisset, Thursday, 1871).
'I believe that the crowd, the herd, will always be hateful. The only ones important are a small group of spirits, always the same, who pass the torch from hand to hand' (Croisset, September 8, 1871).
'As to the Commune, which is on its last legs, it's the last manifestation of the Middle Ages. '
'I hate democracy (at least what it is taken to mean in France)--that is, the exaltation of grace to the detriment of justice, the negation of law: in short, anti-sociability. '
'The Commune re-instates murderers. '
'The populace is an eternal minor, and it will always be at the bottom of the scale since it is number, mass, the unbounded. '
'It's not important for a lot of peasants to know how to read and no longer listen to their priest, but it's infinitely important that a lot of men like Renan or Littre? live and be listened to. Our salvation is now in a legitimate aristocracy. I mean by that a majority which will be composed of something other than mere figures' (1871).
'Do you believe that if France, instead of being governed, in short, by the mob, were in the power of the mandarins, we would be in this mess? If, instead of having wanted to enlighten the lower classes, we had been concerned with educating the upper ones? ' (Croisset, Wednesday, August 3, 1870).
15. In The Devil on Two Sticks, for example, Le Sage novelizesthe characters of La Bruye`re and the maxims of La Rochefoucauld; that is, he binds them together by the slender thread of a plot.
16. The procedure of writing the novel in the form of letters is only a variation of what I have just indicated. The letter is the subjective recital of an event; it refers back to the one who wrote it and who becomes both actor and witnessing subjectivity. As to the event itself, although it is recent, it is already re-thought and explained: the letter always supposes a lag between the fact (which belongs to a recent past) and its recital, which is given subsequently and in a moment of leisure.
17. This is the reverse of the vicious circle of the surrealists, who try to destroy painting by painting. In this case one wants to have literature's letters of credit given by literature.
18. When Maupassant writes Le Horla, that is, when he speaks of the madness which threatens him, the tone changes. It is because at last something--something horrible--is going to happen. The man is overwhelmed, crushed; he no longer understands; he wants to drag the reader along with him into his terror. But the twig is bent; lacking a
? Notes to Pages 127-129 | 337
technique adapted to madness, death, and history, he fails to move the reader.
19. Among these procedures I shall first cite the curious recourse to the style of the theatre that one finds at the end of the last century and the beginning of this one in Gyp, Lavedan, Abel Hermant, etc. The novel was written in dialogue form. The gestures of the characters and their actions were indicated in italics and parenthetically. It was evidently a matter of making the reader contemporaneous with the action as the spectator is during the performance. This procedure certainly manifests the predomi- nance of dramatic art in polite society around 1900. In its way it also sought to escape the myth of primary subjectivity. But the fact that it was abandoned shows sufficiently that it did not solve the problem. First, it is a sign of weakness to ask for help from a neighbouring art, a proof that one lacks resources in the very domain of the art one practises. Then, the author did not thereby prevent himself from entering into the consciousness of his characters and having the reader enter with him. He simply divulged the intimate contents of the consciousness in parentheses and italics, with the style and typographical methods that are generally used for stage directions. In effect, it was an attempt without a future. The authors who used it had a vague feeling that new life could be put into the novel by writing it in the present. But they had not yet understood that it was not possible if one did not first give up the explanatory attitude.
More serious was the attempt to introduce the interior monologue of Schnitzler. (I am not speaking here of that of Joyce, which has quite different metaphysical principles. Larbaud, who, I know, harks back to
Joyce, seems to me much rather to draw his inspiration from Les Lauriers sont couple? s and from Mademoiselle Else. ) In short, it was a matter of pushing the hypothesis of a primary subjectivity to the limit and of passing on to realism by leading idealism up to the absolute.
The reality which one shows to the reader without intermediary is no longer the thing itself--the tree, the ashtray--but the consciousness which sees the thing; the 'real' is no longer only a representation, but rather the representation becomes an absolute reality since it is given to us as an immediate datum. The inconvenient aspect of this procedure is that it encloses us in an individual subjectivity and that it thereby lacks the intermonadic universe; besides, it dilutes the event and the action in the perception of one and then the other. Now, the common characteristic of the fact and the action is that they escape subjective representation, which grasps their results but not their living movement. In short, it is only with a certain amount of faking that one reduces the stream of consciousness to a succession of words, even deformed ones. If the word is given as an intermediary signifying a reality which in essence transcends language, nothing could be better; it withdraws itself, is forgotten, and discharges consciousness upon the object.
But if it presents itself as the psychic reality, if the author, by writing, claims to give us an ambiguous reality which is a sign, objective in essence--that is, in so far as it relates to something outside itself--and a thing, formal in essence--that is, as an immediate psychic datum--then he can be accused of not having participated and of disregarding the
? 338 I Notes to Pages 129--164
rhetorical law which might be formulated as follows: in literature, where one uses signs, it is not necessary to use only signs; and if the reality which one wants to signify is one word, it must be given to the reader by other words. He can be charged, besides, with having forgotten that the greatest riches of the psychic life are silent. We know what has happened to the internal monologue: having become rhetoric, that is, a poetic transposition of the inner life--silent as well as verbal--it has today become one method among others of the novelist. Too idealistic to be true, too realistic to be complete, it is the crown of the subjectivist technique. It is within and by means of this technique that the literature of today has become conscious of itself; that is, the literature of today is a double surpassing, towards the objective and towards the rhetorical, of the technique of the internal monologue. But for that it is necessary that the historical circumstance change.
It is evident that the writer continues today to write in the past tense. It is not by changing the tense of the verb but by revolutionizing the techniques of the story that he will succeed in making the reader contemporary with the story.
20. American literature is still in the stage of regionalism.
21. When I was passing through New York in 1945, I asked a literary agent to get the translation rights of Miss Lonelyhearts, a work by Nathanael West. He did not know the book and came to a gentleman's agreement with the author of a certain Lonlyheart, an old maiden lady who was very surprised that someone was thinking of translating her book into French. He learned of his mistake and, continuing his search, finally found West's publisher, who admitted that he did not know what had become of the author. I urged them to investigate and finally they learned that West had died several years earlier in an automobile accident. It seems that he still had a bank account in New York and the publisher was still sending him cheques from time to time.
22. In Jouhandeau the bourgeois souls have the same quality of the marvellous; but often this marvellous changes sign; it becomes negative and satanic. As you might well imagine, the Black Masses of the bourgeoisie are still more fascinating than its permissible displays.
23. To make oneself the clerk of violence implies that one deliberately adopts violence as a method of thought, that is, one has common recourse to intimidation, to the principle of authority; one haughtily refuses to demonstrate and discuss. This is what gives the dogmatic texts of the surrealists a purely formal but disturbing resemblance to the political writings of Charles Maurras.
24. A resemblance to L'Action Franc? aise, of which Maurras was able to say that it was not a party but a conspiracy. And don't the punitive expeditions of the surrealists resemble the pranks of the young royalist henchmen?
25. These passionless remarks have stirred up impassioned whirlwinds. However, far from convincing me, the defences and the attacks have made me more convinced than ever that surrealism has lost--perhaps temporarily--its timeliness. As a matter of fact, I find that most of its defenders are eclectics. It is made out to be a cultural phenomenon 'of high
? Notes to Page 164 \ 339
importance', an exemplary' attitude, and an attempt is being made to integrate it, on the quiet, into bourgeois humanism. If it still had any life in it, would it be willing to spice the slightly stale rationalism of M. Alquie? with the Freudian pepper? In the last analysis, it is a victim of the idealism which it has so fought against; the Gazette des lettres, Fontaine, and Carrefour are stomachs which just can't wait to digest it.
If a Desnos could have read in 1930 the following lines of M. Claude Mauriac, a young sparkplug of the Fourth Republic: 'Man fights against man without realizing that the joint effort of all minds should first be brought to bear against a certain skimpy and false conception of man. But surrealism has known this and has been crying it aloud for twenty years. As an enterprise of knowledge, it proclaims that everything about the traditional modes of thinking and feeling has to be re-invented,' he would certainly have protested; surrealism was not an 'enterprise oi^ knowledge'; he specifically quoted Marx's famous phrase: 'We do not want to understand the world; we want to change it'; he never wanted this 'joint effort of minds' which pleasantly recalls the Rally of the French People [General de Gaulle's Rassemblement Populaire Franc? ais--Translator]. Against this rather silly optimism he always affirmed the strict connection between inner censorship and oppression; if there had to be a joint effort of all minds (that expression minds, in the plural, is hardly surrealistic! ) it would come after the Revolution. In his heyday he would not have tolerated anyone's brooding over him that way in order to understand him. He considered-- like the Communist Party in this respect--that everything that was not totally and exclusively for him was against him. Is he aware today of the way he is being manoeuvred? In order to enlighten him, I shall therefore reveal to him that M. Bataille, before publicly informing Merleau-Ponty that he was withdrawing his article from us, had notified him of his intentions in a private conversation. [M. Merleau-Ponty is a member of the editorial board of Les Temps Modernes of which M. Sartre is editor-in-chief and in which the present work was originally serialized--Translator. ] This champion of surrealism had then declared, 'I have serious charges to make against Breton, but we must unite against communism. ' That should be sufficient! I think that I show more esteem for surrealism by harking back to the time of its ardent life and by discussing its aim than by slyly trying to assimilate it. It is true that it is not going to thank me for it, for, like all totalitarian parties, it affirms the continuity of its views in order to mask their perpetual change and therefore does not at all like anyone to hark back to its previous declarations. Many of the texts I meet with today in the catalogue of the surrealist exhibition (Surrealism in 1947) and which are approved by the chiefs of the movement are closer to the gentle eclecticism
of M. Claude Mauriac than to the bitter revolt of the first surrealism.
