Would he choose the masses against the Hits, and would he attempt to re-create for his own profit the duality of
publics?
Sartre-Jean-Paul-What-is-literature¿-Introducing-Les-Temps-modernes-The-nationalization-of-literature-Black-orpheus
The recompense given to him and the dignities conferred from above did not yet have the official impersonality of the prizes and decorations awarded by our republics.
They retained the quasi-feudal character of man to man relations.
And since he was, above all, an eternal consumer in a society of producers, a parasite of a parasitic
? For Whom Does One Write? \ 97
class, he treated money like a parasite. He did not earn it since there was no common measure between his work and his remuneration; he only spent it. Therefore, even if he was poor, he lived in luxury. Everything was a luxury to him, including, and in fact particularly so, his writing. Yet, even in the king's chamber he retained a rough force, a potent vulgarity; Diderot, in the heat of a philosophical conver- sation, pinched the thigh of the Empress of Russia until the blood flowed. And then, if he went too far, he could always be made to feel that he was only a scribbler. The life of Voltaire, from his beating, his imprisonment, and his flight to London, to the insolence of the King of Prussia was a succession of triumphs and humiliations. At times the writer enjoyed the passing favours of a marquise, but he married his maid or a bricklayer's daughter. Hence, his mind, as well as his public, was torn apart. But this did not cause him to suffer; on the contrary, this original contradiction was the source of his pride. He thought that he had no obligations to anyone, that he could choose his friends and opponents, and that it was enough for him to take his pen in hand to free himself from the conditioning of milieu, nation, or class. He flew, he soared, he was pure thought, pure observation. He chose to write to vindicate his unclassing which he assumed and transformed into solitude. From the outside, he con- templated the great with the eyes of the bourgeois and the bourgeois with the eyes of the nobility, and he retained enough complicity with both to understand them equally from within. Hence, literature, which up to then had been only a conservative and purifying function of an integrated society, became conscious in him and by him of its auton- omy. Placed by an extreme chance between confused aspir- ations and an ideology in ruins--like the writer between the bourgeoisie, the Court, and the Church--literature suddenly asserted its independence. It was no longer to reflect the commonplaces of the collectivity; it identified itself with Mind, that is, with the permanent power of forming and criticizing ideas.
Of course, this taking over of literature by itself was
? 98 I What Is Literature?
abstract and almost purely formal, since the literary works were not the concrete expression of any class; and as the writers began by rejecting any deep solidarity with the milieu from which they came as well as the one which adopted them, literature became confused with Negativity, that is, with doubt, refusal, criticism, and opposition. But as a result of this very fact, it led to the setting up, against the ossified spirituality of the Church, of the rights of a new spirituality, one in movement, which was no longer identi- fied with any ideology and which manifested itself as the power of continually surpassing the given, whatever it might be. When, in the shelter of the structure of the very Christian monarchy, it was imitating wonderful models, it hardly fussed about truth because truth was only a very crude and very concrete quality of the ideology which had been nourishing it; according to the dogmas of the Church, to be true or, quite simply, to be, was all one, and truth could not be conceived apart from the system. But now that spirituality had become this abstract movement which cut through all ideologies and then left them along the wayside like empty shells, truth, in its turn, was disentangled from all concrete and particular philosophy; it was revealed in its abstract independence; it became the regulating idea of literature and the distant limit of the critical movement.
Spirituality, literature, and truth: these notions were bound up in that abstract and negative moment of becoming conscious of the world. Their instrument was analysis, a negative and critical method which perpetually dissolves concrete data into abstract elements and the products of history into combinations of universal concepts. An adoles- cent chooses to write in order to escape an oppression from which he suffers and a solidarity he is ashamed of; as soon as he has written a few words, he thinks he has escaped from his milieu and class and from all milieus and all classes and that he has broken through his historical situation by the mere fact that he has attained reflective and critical knowl- edge. Above the confusion of those bourgeois and nobles, locked up in their particular age by their prejudices, he has,
? For Whom Does One Write? \ 99
on taking up his pen, discovered himself as a timeless and unlocalized consciousness, in short, as universal man. And literature, which has delivered him, is an abstract function and an a priori power of human nature; it is the movement whereby at every moment man frees himself from history; in short, it is the exercise of freedom.
In the seventeenth century a man, by choosing to write, embraced a definite profession, with the tricks of the trade, its rules and customs, its rank in the hierarchy of the pro- fessions. In the eighteenth century, the moulds were broken; everything remained to be done; works of the mind, instead of being put together according to established patterns and more or less by luck, were each a particular invention and were a kind of decision of the author regarding the nature, value, and scope of belles-lettres; each one brought its own rules and the principles by which it was to be judged; each one aspired to engage the whole of literature and to blaze new paths. It is not by chance that the worst works of the period are also those which claimed to be the most traditional; tragedy and epic were the exquisite fruits of an integrated society; in a collectivity which was torn apart, they could subsist only in the form of survivals and pastiches.
What the eighteenth-century writer tirelessly demanded in all his works was the right to practise an anti-historical reason against history, and in this sense all he did was to reveal the essential requirements of abstract literature. He was not concerned with giving his readers a clearer class consciousness. Quite the contrary, the urgent appeal which he addressed to his bourgeois public was an invitation to forget humiliations, prejudices, and fears; the one he directed to his noble public was a solicitation to strip itself of its pride of caste and its privileges. As he had made himself universal, he could have only universal readers, and what he required of the freedom of his contemporaries was that they cut their historical ties in order to join him in universality.
What is the origin of this miracle by which, at the very moment he was setting up abstract freedom against concrete oppression and Reason against History, he was going along
? ioo I What Is Literature?
in the very direction of historical development? First, the bourgeoisie, by a tactic which was characteristic of it and which it was to repeat in 1830 and 1848, joined forces, on the eve of taking power, with those oppressed classes which were not in a condition to push their demands. And since the bonds which united social groups so different from one another could only be very general and very abstract, it aimed not so much to acquire a clear consciousness of itself, which would have opposed it to the workingmen and peasants, as to have its right to lead the opposition recog- nized on the grounds that it was in a better position to let the established powers know the demands of universal human nature. On the other hand, the revolution being prepared was a political one; there was no revolutionary ideology and no organized party. The bourgeoisie wanted to be enlightened; it wanted the ideology which for centuries had mystified and alienated man to be liquidated. There would be time later on to replace it. For the time being, it aimed at freedom of opinion as a step towards political power. Hence, by demandingfor himselj"and as a writer free- dom of thinking and of expressing his thought, the author necessarily served the interests of the bourgeois class. No more was asked of him and there was nothing more he could do. In later periods, as we shall see, the writer could demand his freedom to write with a bad conscience; he might be aware that the oppressed classes wanted something other than that freedom. Freedom of thinking could then appear as a privilege; in the eyes of some it could pass for a means of oppression, and the position of the writer risked becoming untenable. But on the eve of the Revolution he enjoyed an extraordinary opportunity, that is, it was enough for him to defend his profession in order to serve as a guide
to the aspirations of the rising class.
He knew it. He considered himself a guide and a spiritual
chief. He took chances. As the ruling e? lite, which grew in- creasingly nervous, lavished its graces upon him one day only to have him locked up the next, he had none of that tranquillity, that proud mediocrity, which his predecessors
? For Whom Does One Write? \ 101
had enjoyed. His glorious and eventful life, with its sunlit crests and its dizzying steeps, was that of an adventurer. The other evening I was reading the dedication of Blaise Cendrars' Rhum: 'To the young people of today who are tired of literature, to prove to them that a novel can also be an act', and I thought that we are quite unfortunate and quite guilty, since we have to prove what in the eighteenth cen- tury was self-evident. A work of the mind was then doubly an act since it produced ideas which were to lead to social upheavals and since it exposed its author to danger. And this act, whatever the book we may be considering, was always defined in the same way; it was a liberator. And, doubtless, in the seventeenth century too, literature had a liberating function, though one which remained veiled and implicit. In the time of the Encyclopaedists, it was no longer
a question of freeing the gentleman from his passions by reflecting them back to him without complaisance, but of helping with the pen to bring about the political freedom simply of man. The appeal which the writer addressed to his bourgeois public was, whether he meant it or not, an incite- ment to revolt; the one which he directed to the ruling class was an invitation to lucidity, to critical self-examination, to the giving up of its privileges. The condition of Rousseau was much like that of Richard Wright when he writes for both enlightened negroes and whites. Before the nobility he bore witness and at the same time was inviting his fellow commoners to become conscious of themselves. It was not only the taking of the Bastille which his writings and those
of Diderot and Condorcet were preparing at long range; it was also the night of August the fourth.
And as the writer thought that he had broken the bonds which united him to his class of origin, as he spoke to his readers from above about universal human nature, it seemed to him that the appeal he made to them and the part he took in their misfortunes were dictated by pure generosity. To write is to give. In this way he accepted and excused what was unacceptable in his situation as a parasite in an indus- trious society; this was also how he became conscious of
? 102 I What Is Literature?
that absolute freedom, that gratuity, which characterize literary creation. But though he constantly had in view universal man and the abstract rights of human nature, there is no reason to believe that he was an incarnation of the 'clerk' as Benda has described him. Since his position was, in essence, critical, he certainly had to have something to criti- cize; and the objects which first presented themselves to criticism were the institutions, superstitions, traditions, and acts of a traditional government.
In other words, as the walls of Eternity and the Past which had supported the ideological structure of the seven- teenth century cracked and gave way, the writer perceived a new dimension of temporality in its purity: the Present. The Present, which preceding centuries had sometimes con- ceived as a perceptible figuration of Eternity and sometimes as a degraded emanation of Antiquity. He had only a con- fused notion of the future, but he knew that the fleeting hour which he was living was unique and that it was his, that it was in no way inferior to the most magnificent hours of Antiquity, since they too had begun by being the present. He knew that it was his chance and that he must not waste it. That was why he considered the fight he had to wage not so much as a preparation for the society of the future but rather as a short-term enterprise, one of immediate efficacy. It was this institution that had to be denounced and at once, that superstition that had to be destroyed immediately, that particular injustice that had to be rectified. This impassioned sense of the present saved him from idealism; he did not confine himself to contemplating the eternal ideas of Free- dom or Equality. For the first time since the Reformation, writers intervened in public life, protested against an unjust decree, asked for the review of a trial, and, in short, decided that the spiritual was in the street, at the fair, in the market place, at the tribunal, and that it was by no means a matter of turning away from the temporal, but, on the contrary, that one had to come back to it incessantly and go on beyond it in each particular circumstance.
Thus, the overthrow of his public and the crisis of the European consciousness had invested the writer with a new
? For Whom Does One Write? \ 103
function. He conceived literature to be the permanent practice of magnanimity. He still submitted to the strict and severe control of his peers, but below him he caught a glimpse of an unformed and passionate waiting, a more feminine, more undifferentiated kind of desire which freed him from their censorship. He had disembodied the spir- itual and had separated his cause from that of a dying ideology; his books were free appeals to the freedom of his readers.
The political triumph of the bourgeoisie which writers had so eagerly desired convulsed their condition from top to bottom and put the very essence of literature into question. It might be said that the result of all their efforts was merely a preparation for their certain ruin. There is no doubt that by identifying the cause of belles-lettres with that of political democracy they helped the bourgeoisie to come to power, but by the same token they ran the risk of seeing the dis- appearance of the object of their demands, that is, the con- stant and almost the only subject of their writing. In short, the miraculous harmony which united the essential demands
of literature with that of the oppressed bourgeoisie was broken as soon as both were realized. So long as millions of men were burning to be able to express their feelings it was fine to demand the right to write freely and to examine everything, but once freedom of thought and confession and equality of political rights were gained, the defence of liter- ature became a purely formal game which no longer amused anyone; something else had to be found.
Now, at the same time writers had lost their privileged position whose origin had been the split which had torn apart their public and which had allowed them to have a foot in both camps. These two halves had knitted together; the bourgeoisie had absorbed the nobility or very nearly. Authors had to meet the demands of a unified public. There was no hope of getting away from their class of origin. Born of bourgeois parents, read and paid by bourgeois, they had to remain bourgeois; the bourgeoisie had closed round them like a prison. It was to take them a century to get over
? io4 I What Is Literature?
their keen regret for the flighty and parasitic class which had indulged them out of caprice and whom they had remorse- lessly undermined in their ro^le of double agent. It seemed to them that they had killed the goose which laid the golden eggs. The bourgeoisie introduced new forms of oppression; however, it was not parasitic. Doubtless, it had taken over the means of work, but it was highly diligent in regulating the production and distribution of its products. It did not conceive literary work as a gratuitous and disinterested creation but as a paid service.
The justifying myth of this industrious and unproductive class was utilitarianism; in one way or another the function of the bourgeois was that of intermediary between producer and consumer; it was the middleman raised to omnipotence. Thus, in the indissoluble yoke of means and end, he had chosen to give primary importance to the means. The end was implied; one never looked it in the face but passed over it in silence. The goal and dignity of a human life was to spend itself in the ordering of means. It was not serious to occupy oneself without intermediary in producing an abso- lute end. It wras as if one aspired to see God face to face without the help of the Church. The only enterprises to be credited were those whose end was the perpetually with- drawing horizon of an infinite series of means. If the work of art entered the utilitarian round, if it hoped to be taken seriously, it had to descend from the heaven of uncon- ditioned ends and resign itself to becoming useful in its turn, that is, to presenting itself as a means of ordering means. In particular, as the bourgeois was not quite sure of
himself, because his power was not based on a decree of Providence, literature had to help it feel bourgeois by divine right. Thus, after having been the bad conscience of the privileged in the eighteenth century it ran the risk in the nineteenth century of becoming the good conscience of an oppressing class.
Well and good, if the writer could have kept that spirit of free criticism which in the preceding century had been his fortune and his pride. But his public was opposed to that.
? For Whom Does One Write? \ 105
So long as the bourgeoisie had been struggling against the privileges of the nobility it had given assent to destructive negativity. But now that it had power, it passed on to con- struction and asked to be helped in constructing. Oppo- sition had remained possible within the religious ideology because the believer referred his obligations and the articles of faith back to the will of God. He thereby established a concrete and feudal person-to-person bond with the Almighty. This recourse to the divine free will introduced, although God was perfect and chained to His perfection,
an element of gratuity into Christian ethics and consequently a bit of freedom into literature. The Christian hero was always Jacob wrestling with the angel; the saint contested the divine will even if he did so in order to submit to it even more narrowly. But bourgeois ethics did not derive from Providence; its universal and abstract procedures were inscribed in things. They were not the effect of a sovereign and quite amiable but personal will; rather, they resembled the uncreated laws of physics. At least, so one supposed, for it was not prudent to look at them too closely. The serious man kept from examining them precisely because their origin was obscure. Bourgeois art either would be a means or would not be; it would forbid itself to lay hands on principles, for fear they might collapse,11 and to probe the human heart too deeply for fear of finding disorder in it. Its public feared nothing so much as talent, that gay and menacing madness which uncovers the disturbing roots of things by unforeseeable words and which, by repeated appeals to freedom, stirs the still more disturbing roots of men. Facility sold better; it was talent in leash, turned against itself, the art of reassuring readers by harmonious and expected discourse, in a tone of good fellowship, that man and the world were quite ordinary, transparent, without surprises, without threats, and without interest.
There was more: as the only relationship which the bourgeois had with natural forces was through inter- mediaries, as material reality appeared to him in the form of
? io6 I What Is Literature?
manufactured products, as he was surrounded as far as the eye could see by an already humanized world which re- flected back to him his own image, as he limited himself to gleaning on the surface of things the meaning that other men had put forward, as his job was essentially that of handling abstract symbols, words, figures, plans, and dia- grams for determining methods whereby his employees would share in consumer's goods, as his culture, quite as much as his trade, inclined him to consider ideas, he was convinced that the universe was reducible to a system of ideas; he dissolved effort, difficulty, needs, oppression, and wars into ideas; there was no evil, only pluralism; certain ideas lived in a free state; they had to be integrated into the system. Thus, he conceived human progress as a vast move- ment of assimilation; ideas assimilated each other and so did minds. At the end of this immense digestive process, thought would find its unification and society its total integration.
Such optimism was at the opposite extreme of the writer's conception of his art: the artist needs an unassimilable matter because beauty is not resolved into ideas. Even if he is a prose-writer and assembles signs, his style will have neither grace nor force if it is not sensitive to the material character of the word and its irrational resistances. And if he wishes to build the universe in his work and to support it by an inexhaustible freedom, the reason is that he radically distinguishes things from thought. His freedom and the thing are homogeneous only in that both are unfathomable, and if he wishes to readapt the desert or the virgin forest to the Mind, he does so not by transforming them into ideas of desert and forest, but by having Being sparkle as Being, with its opacity and its coefficient of adversity, by the in- definite spontaneity of Existence. That is why the work of art is reducible to an idea: first, because it is a production or a reproduction of a being, that is, of something which never quite allows itself to be thought; then, because this being is totally penetrated by an existence, that is, by a freedom which decides on the very fate and value of thought. That is also
? For Whom Does One Write? \ IOJ
why the artist has always had a special understanding of Evil, which is not the temporary and remediable isolation of an idea, but the irreducibility of man and the world of Thought.
The bourgeois could be recognized by the fact that he denied the existence of social classes and particularly of the bourgeoisie. The gentleman wished to command because he belonged to a caste. The bourgeois based his power and his right to govern on the exquisite ripening which comes from the secular possession of the goods of this world. More- over, he admitted only synthetic relationships between the owner and the thing possessed; for the rest, he demonstrated by analysis that all men are alike because they are unvarying elements of social combinations and because each one of them, whatever his rank, completely possesses human nature. Hence, inequalities appeared as fortuitous and passing acci- dents which could not alter the permanent characteristics of the social atom. There was no proletariat, that is, no syn- thetic class of which each worker was a passing mode; there were only proletarians, each isolated in his human nature, who were not united by internal solidarity but only by external bonds of resemblance.
The bourgeois saw only psychological relations among the individuals whom his analytical propaganda circumvented and separated. That is understandable: as he had no direct hold on things, as his work was concerned essentially with men, it was purely a matter, for him, of pleasing and intim- idating. Ceremony, discipline, and courtesy ruled his be- haviour; he regarded his fellow-men as marionettes, and if he wished to acquire some knowledge of their emotions and character, it was because it seemed to him that each passion was a wire that could be pulled. The breviary of the am- bitious bourgeois was 'The Art of Making Good'; the breviary of the rich was 'The Art of Commanding'. Thus, the bourgeoisie considered the writer as an expert. If he started reflecting on the social order, he annoyed and fright- ened it. All it asked of him was to share his practical experi- ence of the human heart. So, as in the seventeenth century,
? io8 I What Is Literature?
literature was reduced to psychology. All the same, the psychology of Corneille, Pascal and Vauvenargues was a cathartic appeal to freedom. But the merchant distrusted the freedom of the people he dealt with and the prefect that of the sub-prefect. All they wanted was to be provided with infallible recipes for winning over and dominating. Man had to be governable as a matter of course and by modest means. In short, the laws of the heart had to be rigorous and with- out exceptions. The bourgeois bigwig no more believed in human freedom than the scientist believes in a miracle. And as his ethics were utilitarian, the chief motive of his psycho- logy was self-interest. For the writer it was no longer a matter of addressing his work as an appeal to absolute free- doms, but of exhibiting the psychological laws which
determined him to readers who were likewise determined.
Idealism, psychologism, determinism, utilitarianism, the spirit of seriousness--this was what the bourgeois writer had to reflect to his public first of all. He was no longer asked to restore the strangeness and opacity of the world, but to dissolve it into elementary subjective impressions which made it easier to digest; nor was he asked to discover the most intimate movements of his heart at the very depths of his freedom, but to bring his 'experience' face to face with that of his readers. All his works were at once inventories of bourgeois appurtenances, psychological reports of an expert which invariably tended to ground the rights of the e? lite and to show the wisdom of institutions, and handbooks of civility. The conclusions were decided in advance; the degree of depth permitted to the investigation was also established in advance; the psychological motives were selected; the very style was regulated. The public feared no surprise. It could buy with its eyes closed. But literature had been assassinated. From Emile Augier to Marcel Pre? vost and Edmond Jaloux, including Dumas fils, Pailleron, Ohnet, Bourget, and Bordeaux, authors were found to do the job and, if I may say so, to honour their signature to the very end. It is not by chance that they wrote bad books; if they had talent, they were forced to hide it.
? For Whom Does One Write? \ 109
The best refused. This refusal saved literature but fixed its traits for fifty years. Indeed, from 1848 on, and until the war of 1914, the radical unification of his public led the author to write on principle against all his readers. However, he sold his productions, but he despised those who bought them and forced himself to disappoint their wishes. It was taken for granted that it was better to be unknown than famous, that success--if the writer ever got it in his lifetime--was to be explained by a misunderstanding. And if, by chance, the book one published did not offend sufficiently, one added an insulting preface. This fundamental conflict between the writer and his public was an unprecedented phenomenon in literary history. In the seventeenth century the harmony between the man of letters and his readers was perfect; in the eighteenth century the author had two equally real publics at his disposal and could rely upon one or the other as he pleased. In its early stages, romanticism had been a vain attempt to avoid open conflict by restoring this duality and by depending upon the aristocracy against the liberal bour- geoisie. But after 1850 there was no longer any means of covering up the profound contradiction which opposed bourgeois ideology to the requirements of literature. About the same time a virtual public was beginning to take form in the deeper layers of society; it was already waiting to be revealed to itself because the cause of free and compulsory education had made some progress. The Third Republic was soon to sanction the right of all men to read and write. What was the writer going to do?
Would he choose the masses against the Hits, and would he attempt to re-create for his own profit the duality of publics?
At first sight, it seemed so. By means of the great move- ment of ideas which from 1830 to 1848 were brewing in the marginal zones of the bourgeoisie, certain writers had the revelation of their virtual public. They adorned this public, under the name of 'The People', with mystic graces. It would be the instrument of salvation. But, as much as they loved it, they hardly knew it and above all they did not come from it. Sand was Baronne Dudevant; Hugo, the son
? no I What Is Literature?
of a general of the Empire; even Michelet, the son of a printer, was still far removed from the silk-weavers of Lyons or the textile-weavers of Lille. Their socialism--when they were socialists--was a by-product of bourgeois idealism. And then the people were much more the subject of certain of their works than their chosen public. Hugo, to be sure, had the rare fortune of penetrating everywhere. He was one of the few--perhaps the only one--of our writers who was really popular. But the others had incurred the hostility of the bourgeoisie without creating a working-class public in compensation. To convince oneself of this fact all one need do is compare the importance which the bourgeois Univer- sity accorded to Michelet, an authentic genius and a first-rate prose-writer, and to Taine, who was only a cheap pedant, or to Renan, whose 'fine style' offers all the examples one could want of meanness and ugliness. This purgatory in which the bourgeois class let Michelet vegetate was without compensation; the people' that he loved read him for a while, and then the success of Marxism pushed him into oblivion. In short, most of these authors were the losers in a revolution that didn't come off. They attached their name and their destiny to it. None of them, except Hugo, really left their mark on literature.
The others, all the others, backed away from the per- spective of an unclassing from below which would have made them sink straight down as if a stone had been tied round their necks. They had no lack of excuses: the time wasn't ripe, there was no real bond which attached them to the proletariat, that oppressed class couldn't absorb their work, it didn't know how much it needed them; their decision to defend it had remained abstract; whatever their sincerity might have been, they had 'brooded' over miseries which they had understood with their heads without feeling them in their hearts. Fallen from their class of origin, haunted by the memory of an affluence which they should have refused to accept, they ran the risk of forming "a white-collar proletariat' on the margin of the real proletariat, suspect to the workers and spurned by the bourgeois, whose
? For Whom Does One Write? \ in
demands had been dictated by bitterness and resentment rather than large-mindedness and who had ended by turning against both groups.
Besides, in the eighteenth century, the necessary liberties required by literature were not distinguished from the political liberties which the citizen wanted to win; all that was necessary for the writer to become a revolutionary was to explore the arbitrary essence of his art and to make him- self the interpreter of its formal demands; when the revo- lution which was in the making was bourgeois, literature was naturally revolutionary because the first discovery which it made of itself revealed to it its connections with political democracy. But the formal liberties which the essayist, the novelist, and the poet were to defend had nothing in com- mon with the deeper needs of the proletariat. The latter was not dreaming of demanding political freedom, which, after all, it did enjoy, and which was only a mystification. 13 As for freedom of thought, for the time being the proletariat was not concerned with it. What it asked for was quite different from these abstract liberties. It wanted material improve- ment of its lot, and more deeply, and more obscurely too, the end of man's exploitation by man. We shall see later that these demands were of the same kind made by the art of writing conceived as a concrete and historical phenomenon; that is, as the particular and timely appeal which, by agree- ing to historicize himself, a man launches in regard to all mankind to the men of his time.
But in the nineteenth century literature had just dis- engaged itself from religious ideology and refused to serve bourgeois ideology. Thus, it set itself up as being, in prin- ciple, independent of any sort of ideology. As a result, it retained its abstract aspect of pure negativity. It had not yet understood that it was itself ideology; it wore itself out asserting its autonomy, which no one contested. This amounted to saying that it claimed it had no privileged sub- ject and could treat any matter whatever. There was no doubt about the fact that one might write felicitously about the condition of the working class; but the choice of this
? ii2 I What Is Literature?
subject depended upon circumstances, upon a free decision of the artist. One day one might talk about a provincial bourgeoise, another day, about Carthaginian mercenaries. From time to time, a Flaubert would affirm the identity of form and content, but he drew no practical conclusion from it. Like all his contemporaries, he drew his definition of beauty from what the Winckelmanns and Lessings had said almost a hundred years earlier and which in one way or other boiled down to presenting it as multiplicity in unity. It was a matter of capturing the iridescence of the various and imposing a strict unity upon it by means of style. The 'artistic style' of the Goncourts had no other meaning. It was a formal method of unifying and embellishing any materials, even the most beautiful. How could anyone have then conceived that there might be an internal relationship between the demands of the lower classes and the principles of the art of writing? Proudhon seems to have been the only one to have surmised it. And of course Marx. But they were not men of letters. Literature, still completely absorbed by the discovery of its autonomy, was to itself its own subject. It had passed to the reflective period; it tried out its methods, broke its former moulds, and tried to determine experiment- ally its own laws and to forge new techniques. It advanced step by step towards the current forms of the drama and the novel, free verse, and the criticism of language. Had it dis- covered a specific content, it would have had to tear itself away from its meditation on itself and derive its aesthetic rules from the nature of this content.
At the same time, by choosing to write for a virtual public, authors would have had to adapt their art to the capacities of the readers, which would have amounted to determining it according to external demands and not according to its own essence. It would have had to give up some of the exquisite forms of narrative, poetry, and even reasoning, for the sole reason that they would be inaccessible to readers without culture. It seemed, therefore, that liter- ature would be running the risk of relapsing into alienation. Hence, the writer, in all honesty, refused to enslave literature
? For Whom Does One Write? \ 113
to a public and a determined subject. But he did not perceive the divorce which was taking place between the concrete revolution trying to be born and the abstract games he was indulging in. This time it was the masses who wanted power, and as the masses had no culture or leisure, any would-be literary revolution, by refining its technique, put the works it inspired out of their range and served the interests of social conservatism.
Thus, he had to revert to the bourgeois public. The writer tried hard to break all relations with it, but by re- fusing to be unclassed from below, his break was con- demned to remain symbolic; he played at it tirelessly; he showed it by his clothes, his food, the way he furnished his home, and the manners he adopted, but he did not do it. It was the bourgeoisie which read him. It was the bourgeoisie alone which maintained him and decided his fame. In vain did he pretend that he was getting perspective in order to consider it as a whole. Had he wanted to judge it, he would first have had to leave it, and there was no other way to leave it than by trying out the interests and way of life of another class. Since he did not bring himself to do this, he lived in a state of contradiction and dishonesty since he both knew and did not want to know for whom he was writing, He was fond of speaking of his solitude, and rather than assume responsibility for the public which he had slyly chosen, he concocted the notion that one writes for oneself alone or for God. He made of writing a metaphysical occu- pation, a prayer, an examination of conscience, everything but a communication. He frequently likened himself to one possessed, because, if he spewed up words under the sway of an inner necessity, at least he was not giving them. But that did not keep him from carefully polishing his writings. And moreover, he was so far from wishing harm to the bourgeoisie that he did not even dispute its right to govern.
Quite the contrary. Flaubert recognized its right and mentioned it by name, and his correspondence after the Commune, which frightened him so, abounds in disgrace- ful abuse of the workers. 14 And, as the artist, submerged in
? ii4 I What Is Literature?
his milieu, was unable to judge it from without, as his rejections were ineffectual states of mind, he did not even notice that the bourgeoisie was an oppressing class; in fact, he did not at all consider it as a class, but rather as a natural species, and if he ventured to describe it, he did so in strictly psychological terms.
Thus the bourgeois writer and the 'damned* {maudit) writer moved on the same level; their only difference was that the first practised white psychology and the second, black psychology. For example, when Flaubert declared that he called 'anyone who thought basely bourgeois', he was defining the bourgeois in psychological and idealistic terms, that is, in the perspective of the ideology which he pretended to reject. As a result, he rendered a signal service to the bourgeoisie. He led back to the fold the rebellious and the maladjusted, who might have gone over to the proletariat, by convincing them that one could cast off the bourgeois in oneself by a simple inner discipline. All they had to do was to practise high thinking in private and they could continue to enjoy their goods and prerogatives with a peaceful conscience. They could still live in bourgeois fashion, and enjoy their incomes in bourgeois fashion, and frequent bourgeois drawing-rooms, but that would all be nothing but appearance. They had raised themselves above their kind by the nobility of their feelings. By the same token he taught his confre`res the trick which could allow them, at any rate, to maintain a good conscience; for magnanimity finds its most fitting practice in the practice of the arts.
The solitude of the artist was doubly a fake: it covered up not only a real relationship with the great public but also the restoration of an audience of specialists. Since the government of men and goods was abandoned to the bourgeoisie, the spiritual was once again separated from the temporal. A sort of priesthood once again sprang up. StendhaPs public was Balzac, Baudelaire's was Barbey d'Aurevilly; and Baudelaire, in turn, made himself the public of Poe. These literary salons took on a vague collegiate atmosphere; one 'talked literature' in a hushed voice, with
? For Whom Does One Write? \ 115
an infinite respect; one debated whether the musician derived more aesthetic joy from his music than the writer from his books. Art again became sacred to the extent that it turned aside from life. It even set up for itself a sort of communion of saints; one joined hands across the centuries with Cervantes, Rabelais, and Dante. One identified oneself with this monastic society. The priesthood, instead of being a concrete and, so to speak, geographical organism, became a hereditary institution, a club, all of whose members were dead except one, the last in point of time, who represented the others upon earth and who epitomized the whole college.
These new believers, who had their saints in the past, also had their future life. The divorce of the temporal and spiritual led to a deep modification of the idea of glory. From the time of Racine on, it had been not so much the revenge of the misunderstood writer as the natural pro- longation of success in an immutable society. In the nine- teenth century it functioned as a mechanism of over- compensation. *I shall be understood in 1880', 'I shall win my trial on appeal'; these famous words prove that the writer had not lost the desire to practise a direct and uni- versal action within the framework of an integrated col- lectivity. But as this action was not possible in the present, one projected into an indefinite future the compensatory myth of a reconciliation between the writer and his public. Moreover, all this remained quite vague; none of these lovers of glory asked himself in what sort of society he would be able to find his recompense. They merely took pleasure in dreaming that their grandnephews would profit from an internal betterment for having come at a later time
into an older world. That was the way Baudelaire, who didn't worry about contradictions, often dressed his wounded pride, by considering his posthumous renown, although he held that society had entered a period of deca- dence which would end only with the disappearance of the human race.
Thus, for the present, the writer relied on an audience of
? u6 I What Is Literature?
specialists; as for the past, he concluded a mystic pact with the great dead; as to the future, he made use of the myth of glory. He neglected nothing in wrenching himself free from his class. He was up in the air, a stranger to his century, out of his element, damned. All this play-acting had but one goal: to integrate the writer into a symbolic society which would be like an image of the aristocracy of the old re? gime. Psycho-analysis is familiar with these processes of identifi- cation of which artistic thinking offers numerous examples: the sick person who needs the key of the asylum in order to escape and finally comes to believe that he himself is the key. Thus, the writer, who needed the favour of the great to unclass himself, ended by taking himself for the incarnation of the whole nobility, and as the latter was characterized by its parasitism it was the ostentation of parasitism which he chose for his style of living. He made himself the martyr of pure consumption. As we have pointed out, he saw no objection to using the goods of the bourgeoisie, but on condition that he was to spend them, that is, transform them into unproductive and useless objects. He burned them, so to speak, because fire purifies everything. More- over, as he was not always rich, and as he had to live well, he composed a strange life for himself, both extravagant and needy, in which a calculated improvidence symbolized the mad liberality which was denied him. Outside of art, he found nobility in only three kinds of occupation. First, in love, because it is a useless passion and because women, as Nietzsche said, are the most dangerous game. Also in travel, because the traveller is a perpetual witness who
passes from one society to another without ever remaining in any and because, as a foreign consumer in an industrious collectivity, he is the very image of parasitism. Sometimes, in war too, because it is an immense consumption of men and goods.
The contempt with which trade was regarded in aris- tocratic and warlike societies was again met with in the writer. He was not satisfied with being useless, like the courtiers of the Old Re? gime; he wanted to be able to trample
? For Whom Does One Write? \ ny
on utilitarian work, to smash it, burn it, damage it; he wanted to imitate the unconstraint of the lords whose hunting parties rode across the ripe wheat. He cultivated in himself those destructive impulses of which Baudelaire has spoken in The Glass-maker. A little later he was to have a particular liking for instruments which were defective, worthless or no longer in use, half retrieved by nature, and which were like caricatures of instruments. It was not a rare thing for him to consider his own life as a tool to be destroyed. In any event, he risked it and played to lose: alcohol, drugs, everything served his purpose. The height of uselessness, of course, was beauty. From 'art for art's sake' to symbolism, including realism and the Parnassians, all schools agreed that art was the highest form of pure con- sumption. It taught nothing, it reflected no ideology, and above all, it refrained from morali2ing. Long before Gide wrote it, Flaubert, Gautier, the Goncourts, Renard, and Maupassant had in their own way said that 'it is with good sentiments that one produces bad literature*.
For some, literature was subjectivity carried to the abso- lute, a bonfire in which the black vines of their sufferings and vices writhed and twisted. Lying at the bottom of a world as in a dungeon, they passed beyond it and dispelled
it by their dissatisfaction, which revealed other worlds to them. It seemed to them that their heart was different enough so that the picture of it which they drew might be resolutely barren. Others set themselves up as the impartial witnesses of their age, but nobody noticed that they were testifying. They raised testimony and witness to the absolute; they offered to the empty sky the tableau of the society about them. Circumvented, transposed, unified, and caught in the trap of an artistic style, the events of the universe were neutralked and, so to speak, put in parentheses; realism was an epoche^. Here impossible truth joined hands with inhu- man Beauty 'beautiful as a marble dream'. Neither the author, in so far as he wrote, nor the reader, in so far as he read, belonged to this world any longer: they were trans- formed into pure beholding; they considered man from
? n8 I What Is Literature?
without; they strove to see him from the point of view of God, or, if you like, of the absolute void. But after all, I can still recognize myself in the purest lyricist's description of his particularities. And if the experimental novel imitated science, was it not utilizable as science was? Could it not likewise have its social applications?
The extremists wished, for fear of being serviceable, that their works should not even enlighten the reader about his own heart; they refused to transmit their experience. In the last analysis the work would be entirely gratuitous only if it were entirely inhuman. The logical conclusion of all this was the hope of an absolute creation, a quintessence of luxury and prodigality, not utilizable in this world because
it was not of the world and because it recalled nothing in it. Imagination was conceived as an unconditioned faculty of denying the real and the objet d9art was set up on the collaps- ing of the universe. There was the heightened artificiality of Des Esseintes, the systematic deranging of all the senses, and finally the concerted destruction of language. There was also silence: that icy silence, the work of Mallarme? --or the silence of M. Teste for whom all communication was impure.
The extreme point of this brilliant and mortal literature was nothingness. Its extreme point and its deeper essence. There was nothing positive in the new spirituality. It was a pure and simple negation of the temporal. In the Middle Ages it was the temporal which was the Inessential in relation to spirituality; in the nineteenth century the opposite occurred: the Temporal was primary and the spiritual was the inessential parasite which gnawed away at it and tried to destroy it. It was a question of denying the world or con- suming it. Of denying it by consuming it. Flaubert wrote to disentangle himself from men and things. His sentence surrounds the object, seizes it, immobilizes it and breaks its back, changes into stone and petrifies the object as well. It is blind and deaf, without arteries; not a breath of life. A deep silence separates it from the sentence which follows; it falls into the void, eternally, and drags its prey along in
? For Whom Does One Write? \ 119
this infinite fall. Once described, any reality is stricken from the inventory; one moves on to the next. Realism was nothing else but this great gloomy chase. It was a matter of setting one's mind at rest before anything else. Wherever one went, the grass stopped growing. The determinism of the naturalistic novel crushed out life and replaced human actions by one-way mechanisms. It had virtually but one subject: the slow disintegration of a man, an enterprise, a family, or a society. It was necessary to return to zero. One took nature in a state of productive disequilibrium and one wiped out this disequilibrium; one returned to an equilibrium of death by annulling the forces with which one was confronted. When, by chance, he shows us the success of an ambitious man, it is only in appearance; Bel Ami does not take the strongholds of the bourgeoisie by assault; he is a gauge whose rise merely testifies to the collapse of a society. And when symbolism discovered the close relation- ship between beauty and death, it was merely making explicit the theme of the whole literature of a half century. The beauty of the past, because it is gone; the beauty of
young people dying and of flowers which fade; the beauty of all erosions and all ruins; the supreme dignity of con- sumption, of the disease which consumes, of the love which devours, of the art which kills; death is everywhere, before us, behind us, even in the sun and the perfumes of the earth. The art of Barre? s is a meditation on death: a thing is beautiful only when it is 'consumable', that is, it dies when one has enjoyed it.
The temporal structure which was particularly appro- priate for those princely games was the moment. Because it passes and because in itself it is the image of eternity, it is the negation of human time, that three-dimensional time of work and history. A great deal of time is needed to build; a moment is enough to hurl everything to the ground. When one considers the work of Gide in this perspective, one cannot help seeing in it an ethic strictly reserved for the writer-consumer. What is his gratuitous act if not the culmination of a century of bourgeois comedy and the
? i20 I What Is Literature?
imperative of the author-gentleman: Philocte`te gives away his bow, the millionaire squanders his banknotes, Bernard steals, Lafcadio kills and Me? nalque sells his belongings.
This destructive movement was to go to its logical con- sequence: 'The simplest surrealist act', Breton was to write twenty years later, 'consists of going down into the street, revolver in hand, and firing into the crowd at random as long as you can/ It was the last stage of a long dialectical process. In the eighteenth century literature had been a negativity; in the reign of the bourgeoisie it passed on to a state of absolute and hypostasized Negation. It became a multicoloured and glittering process of annihilation. 'Sur- realism is not interested in paying much attention . . . to anything whose end is not the annihilation of being and its transformation into an internal and blind brilliance which is no more the soul of ice than it is of fire/ writes Breton once again. In the end there is nothing left for literature to do but to challenge itself. That is what it did in the name of surrealism. For seventy years writers had been working to consume the world; after 1918 one wrote in order to consume literature: one squandered literary traditions, hashed together words, threw them against each other to
make them shatter. Literature as Negation became Anti- literature; never had it been more literary: the circle was completed.
? For Whom Does One Write? \ 97
class, he treated money like a parasite. He did not earn it since there was no common measure between his work and his remuneration; he only spent it. Therefore, even if he was poor, he lived in luxury. Everything was a luxury to him, including, and in fact particularly so, his writing. Yet, even in the king's chamber he retained a rough force, a potent vulgarity; Diderot, in the heat of a philosophical conver- sation, pinched the thigh of the Empress of Russia until the blood flowed. And then, if he went too far, he could always be made to feel that he was only a scribbler. The life of Voltaire, from his beating, his imprisonment, and his flight to London, to the insolence of the King of Prussia was a succession of triumphs and humiliations. At times the writer enjoyed the passing favours of a marquise, but he married his maid or a bricklayer's daughter. Hence, his mind, as well as his public, was torn apart. But this did not cause him to suffer; on the contrary, this original contradiction was the source of his pride. He thought that he had no obligations to anyone, that he could choose his friends and opponents, and that it was enough for him to take his pen in hand to free himself from the conditioning of milieu, nation, or class. He flew, he soared, he was pure thought, pure observation. He chose to write to vindicate his unclassing which he assumed and transformed into solitude. From the outside, he con- templated the great with the eyes of the bourgeois and the bourgeois with the eyes of the nobility, and he retained enough complicity with both to understand them equally from within. Hence, literature, which up to then had been only a conservative and purifying function of an integrated society, became conscious in him and by him of its auton- omy. Placed by an extreme chance between confused aspir- ations and an ideology in ruins--like the writer between the bourgeoisie, the Court, and the Church--literature suddenly asserted its independence. It was no longer to reflect the commonplaces of the collectivity; it identified itself with Mind, that is, with the permanent power of forming and criticizing ideas.
Of course, this taking over of literature by itself was
? 98 I What Is Literature?
abstract and almost purely formal, since the literary works were not the concrete expression of any class; and as the writers began by rejecting any deep solidarity with the milieu from which they came as well as the one which adopted them, literature became confused with Negativity, that is, with doubt, refusal, criticism, and opposition. But as a result of this very fact, it led to the setting up, against the ossified spirituality of the Church, of the rights of a new spirituality, one in movement, which was no longer identi- fied with any ideology and which manifested itself as the power of continually surpassing the given, whatever it might be. When, in the shelter of the structure of the very Christian monarchy, it was imitating wonderful models, it hardly fussed about truth because truth was only a very crude and very concrete quality of the ideology which had been nourishing it; according to the dogmas of the Church, to be true or, quite simply, to be, was all one, and truth could not be conceived apart from the system. But now that spirituality had become this abstract movement which cut through all ideologies and then left them along the wayside like empty shells, truth, in its turn, was disentangled from all concrete and particular philosophy; it was revealed in its abstract independence; it became the regulating idea of literature and the distant limit of the critical movement.
Spirituality, literature, and truth: these notions were bound up in that abstract and negative moment of becoming conscious of the world. Their instrument was analysis, a negative and critical method which perpetually dissolves concrete data into abstract elements and the products of history into combinations of universal concepts. An adoles- cent chooses to write in order to escape an oppression from which he suffers and a solidarity he is ashamed of; as soon as he has written a few words, he thinks he has escaped from his milieu and class and from all milieus and all classes and that he has broken through his historical situation by the mere fact that he has attained reflective and critical knowl- edge. Above the confusion of those bourgeois and nobles, locked up in their particular age by their prejudices, he has,
? For Whom Does One Write? \ 99
on taking up his pen, discovered himself as a timeless and unlocalized consciousness, in short, as universal man. And literature, which has delivered him, is an abstract function and an a priori power of human nature; it is the movement whereby at every moment man frees himself from history; in short, it is the exercise of freedom.
In the seventeenth century a man, by choosing to write, embraced a definite profession, with the tricks of the trade, its rules and customs, its rank in the hierarchy of the pro- fessions. In the eighteenth century, the moulds were broken; everything remained to be done; works of the mind, instead of being put together according to established patterns and more or less by luck, were each a particular invention and were a kind of decision of the author regarding the nature, value, and scope of belles-lettres; each one brought its own rules and the principles by which it was to be judged; each one aspired to engage the whole of literature and to blaze new paths. It is not by chance that the worst works of the period are also those which claimed to be the most traditional; tragedy and epic were the exquisite fruits of an integrated society; in a collectivity which was torn apart, they could subsist only in the form of survivals and pastiches.
What the eighteenth-century writer tirelessly demanded in all his works was the right to practise an anti-historical reason against history, and in this sense all he did was to reveal the essential requirements of abstract literature. He was not concerned with giving his readers a clearer class consciousness. Quite the contrary, the urgent appeal which he addressed to his bourgeois public was an invitation to forget humiliations, prejudices, and fears; the one he directed to his noble public was a solicitation to strip itself of its pride of caste and its privileges. As he had made himself universal, he could have only universal readers, and what he required of the freedom of his contemporaries was that they cut their historical ties in order to join him in universality.
What is the origin of this miracle by which, at the very moment he was setting up abstract freedom against concrete oppression and Reason against History, he was going along
? ioo I What Is Literature?
in the very direction of historical development? First, the bourgeoisie, by a tactic which was characteristic of it and which it was to repeat in 1830 and 1848, joined forces, on the eve of taking power, with those oppressed classes which were not in a condition to push their demands. And since the bonds which united social groups so different from one another could only be very general and very abstract, it aimed not so much to acquire a clear consciousness of itself, which would have opposed it to the workingmen and peasants, as to have its right to lead the opposition recog- nized on the grounds that it was in a better position to let the established powers know the demands of universal human nature. On the other hand, the revolution being prepared was a political one; there was no revolutionary ideology and no organized party. The bourgeoisie wanted to be enlightened; it wanted the ideology which for centuries had mystified and alienated man to be liquidated. There would be time later on to replace it. For the time being, it aimed at freedom of opinion as a step towards political power. Hence, by demandingfor himselj"and as a writer free- dom of thinking and of expressing his thought, the author necessarily served the interests of the bourgeois class. No more was asked of him and there was nothing more he could do. In later periods, as we shall see, the writer could demand his freedom to write with a bad conscience; he might be aware that the oppressed classes wanted something other than that freedom. Freedom of thinking could then appear as a privilege; in the eyes of some it could pass for a means of oppression, and the position of the writer risked becoming untenable. But on the eve of the Revolution he enjoyed an extraordinary opportunity, that is, it was enough for him to defend his profession in order to serve as a guide
to the aspirations of the rising class.
He knew it. He considered himself a guide and a spiritual
chief. He took chances. As the ruling e? lite, which grew in- creasingly nervous, lavished its graces upon him one day only to have him locked up the next, he had none of that tranquillity, that proud mediocrity, which his predecessors
? For Whom Does One Write? \ 101
had enjoyed. His glorious and eventful life, with its sunlit crests and its dizzying steeps, was that of an adventurer. The other evening I was reading the dedication of Blaise Cendrars' Rhum: 'To the young people of today who are tired of literature, to prove to them that a novel can also be an act', and I thought that we are quite unfortunate and quite guilty, since we have to prove what in the eighteenth cen- tury was self-evident. A work of the mind was then doubly an act since it produced ideas which were to lead to social upheavals and since it exposed its author to danger. And this act, whatever the book we may be considering, was always defined in the same way; it was a liberator. And, doubtless, in the seventeenth century too, literature had a liberating function, though one which remained veiled and implicit. In the time of the Encyclopaedists, it was no longer
a question of freeing the gentleman from his passions by reflecting them back to him without complaisance, but of helping with the pen to bring about the political freedom simply of man. The appeal which the writer addressed to his bourgeois public was, whether he meant it or not, an incite- ment to revolt; the one which he directed to the ruling class was an invitation to lucidity, to critical self-examination, to the giving up of its privileges. The condition of Rousseau was much like that of Richard Wright when he writes for both enlightened negroes and whites. Before the nobility he bore witness and at the same time was inviting his fellow commoners to become conscious of themselves. It was not only the taking of the Bastille which his writings and those
of Diderot and Condorcet were preparing at long range; it was also the night of August the fourth.
And as the writer thought that he had broken the bonds which united him to his class of origin, as he spoke to his readers from above about universal human nature, it seemed to him that the appeal he made to them and the part he took in their misfortunes were dictated by pure generosity. To write is to give. In this way he accepted and excused what was unacceptable in his situation as a parasite in an indus- trious society; this was also how he became conscious of
? 102 I What Is Literature?
that absolute freedom, that gratuity, which characterize literary creation. But though he constantly had in view universal man and the abstract rights of human nature, there is no reason to believe that he was an incarnation of the 'clerk' as Benda has described him. Since his position was, in essence, critical, he certainly had to have something to criti- cize; and the objects which first presented themselves to criticism were the institutions, superstitions, traditions, and acts of a traditional government.
In other words, as the walls of Eternity and the Past which had supported the ideological structure of the seven- teenth century cracked and gave way, the writer perceived a new dimension of temporality in its purity: the Present. The Present, which preceding centuries had sometimes con- ceived as a perceptible figuration of Eternity and sometimes as a degraded emanation of Antiquity. He had only a con- fused notion of the future, but he knew that the fleeting hour which he was living was unique and that it was his, that it was in no way inferior to the most magnificent hours of Antiquity, since they too had begun by being the present. He knew that it was his chance and that he must not waste it. That was why he considered the fight he had to wage not so much as a preparation for the society of the future but rather as a short-term enterprise, one of immediate efficacy. It was this institution that had to be denounced and at once, that superstition that had to be destroyed immediately, that particular injustice that had to be rectified. This impassioned sense of the present saved him from idealism; he did not confine himself to contemplating the eternal ideas of Free- dom or Equality. For the first time since the Reformation, writers intervened in public life, protested against an unjust decree, asked for the review of a trial, and, in short, decided that the spiritual was in the street, at the fair, in the market place, at the tribunal, and that it was by no means a matter of turning away from the temporal, but, on the contrary, that one had to come back to it incessantly and go on beyond it in each particular circumstance.
Thus, the overthrow of his public and the crisis of the European consciousness had invested the writer with a new
? For Whom Does One Write? \ 103
function. He conceived literature to be the permanent practice of magnanimity. He still submitted to the strict and severe control of his peers, but below him he caught a glimpse of an unformed and passionate waiting, a more feminine, more undifferentiated kind of desire which freed him from their censorship. He had disembodied the spir- itual and had separated his cause from that of a dying ideology; his books were free appeals to the freedom of his readers.
The political triumph of the bourgeoisie which writers had so eagerly desired convulsed their condition from top to bottom and put the very essence of literature into question. It might be said that the result of all their efforts was merely a preparation for their certain ruin. There is no doubt that by identifying the cause of belles-lettres with that of political democracy they helped the bourgeoisie to come to power, but by the same token they ran the risk of seeing the dis- appearance of the object of their demands, that is, the con- stant and almost the only subject of their writing. In short, the miraculous harmony which united the essential demands
of literature with that of the oppressed bourgeoisie was broken as soon as both were realized. So long as millions of men were burning to be able to express their feelings it was fine to demand the right to write freely and to examine everything, but once freedom of thought and confession and equality of political rights were gained, the defence of liter- ature became a purely formal game which no longer amused anyone; something else had to be found.
Now, at the same time writers had lost their privileged position whose origin had been the split which had torn apart their public and which had allowed them to have a foot in both camps. These two halves had knitted together; the bourgeoisie had absorbed the nobility or very nearly. Authors had to meet the demands of a unified public. There was no hope of getting away from their class of origin. Born of bourgeois parents, read and paid by bourgeois, they had to remain bourgeois; the bourgeoisie had closed round them like a prison. It was to take them a century to get over
? io4 I What Is Literature?
their keen regret for the flighty and parasitic class which had indulged them out of caprice and whom they had remorse- lessly undermined in their ro^le of double agent. It seemed to them that they had killed the goose which laid the golden eggs. The bourgeoisie introduced new forms of oppression; however, it was not parasitic. Doubtless, it had taken over the means of work, but it was highly diligent in regulating the production and distribution of its products. It did not conceive literary work as a gratuitous and disinterested creation but as a paid service.
The justifying myth of this industrious and unproductive class was utilitarianism; in one way or another the function of the bourgeois was that of intermediary between producer and consumer; it was the middleman raised to omnipotence. Thus, in the indissoluble yoke of means and end, he had chosen to give primary importance to the means. The end was implied; one never looked it in the face but passed over it in silence. The goal and dignity of a human life was to spend itself in the ordering of means. It was not serious to occupy oneself without intermediary in producing an abso- lute end. It wras as if one aspired to see God face to face without the help of the Church. The only enterprises to be credited were those whose end was the perpetually with- drawing horizon of an infinite series of means. If the work of art entered the utilitarian round, if it hoped to be taken seriously, it had to descend from the heaven of uncon- ditioned ends and resign itself to becoming useful in its turn, that is, to presenting itself as a means of ordering means. In particular, as the bourgeois was not quite sure of
himself, because his power was not based on a decree of Providence, literature had to help it feel bourgeois by divine right. Thus, after having been the bad conscience of the privileged in the eighteenth century it ran the risk in the nineteenth century of becoming the good conscience of an oppressing class.
Well and good, if the writer could have kept that spirit of free criticism which in the preceding century had been his fortune and his pride. But his public was opposed to that.
? For Whom Does One Write? \ 105
So long as the bourgeoisie had been struggling against the privileges of the nobility it had given assent to destructive negativity. But now that it had power, it passed on to con- struction and asked to be helped in constructing. Oppo- sition had remained possible within the religious ideology because the believer referred his obligations and the articles of faith back to the will of God. He thereby established a concrete and feudal person-to-person bond with the Almighty. This recourse to the divine free will introduced, although God was perfect and chained to His perfection,
an element of gratuity into Christian ethics and consequently a bit of freedom into literature. The Christian hero was always Jacob wrestling with the angel; the saint contested the divine will even if he did so in order to submit to it even more narrowly. But bourgeois ethics did not derive from Providence; its universal and abstract procedures were inscribed in things. They were not the effect of a sovereign and quite amiable but personal will; rather, they resembled the uncreated laws of physics. At least, so one supposed, for it was not prudent to look at them too closely. The serious man kept from examining them precisely because their origin was obscure. Bourgeois art either would be a means or would not be; it would forbid itself to lay hands on principles, for fear they might collapse,11 and to probe the human heart too deeply for fear of finding disorder in it. Its public feared nothing so much as talent, that gay and menacing madness which uncovers the disturbing roots of things by unforeseeable words and which, by repeated appeals to freedom, stirs the still more disturbing roots of men. Facility sold better; it was talent in leash, turned against itself, the art of reassuring readers by harmonious and expected discourse, in a tone of good fellowship, that man and the world were quite ordinary, transparent, without surprises, without threats, and without interest.
There was more: as the only relationship which the bourgeois had with natural forces was through inter- mediaries, as material reality appeared to him in the form of
? io6 I What Is Literature?
manufactured products, as he was surrounded as far as the eye could see by an already humanized world which re- flected back to him his own image, as he limited himself to gleaning on the surface of things the meaning that other men had put forward, as his job was essentially that of handling abstract symbols, words, figures, plans, and dia- grams for determining methods whereby his employees would share in consumer's goods, as his culture, quite as much as his trade, inclined him to consider ideas, he was convinced that the universe was reducible to a system of ideas; he dissolved effort, difficulty, needs, oppression, and wars into ideas; there was no evil, only pluralism; certain ideas lived in a free state; they had to be integrated into the system. Thus, he conceived human progress as a vast move- ment of assimilation; ideas assimilated each other and so did minds. At the end of this immense digestive process, thought would find its unification and society its total integration.
Such optimism was at the opposite extreme of the writer's conception of his art: the artist needs an unassimilable matter because beauty is not resolved into ideas. Even if he is a prose-writer and assembles signs, his style will have neither grace nor force if it is not sensitive to the material character of the word and its irrational resistances. And if he wishes to build the universe in his work and to support it by an inexhaustible freedom, the reason is that he radically distinguishes things from thought. His freedom and the thing are homogeneous only in that both are unfathomable, and if he wishes to readapt the desert or the virgin forest to the Mind, he does so not by transforming them into ideas of desert and forest, but by having Being sparkle as Being, with its opacity and its coefficient of adversity, by the in- definite spontaneity of Existence. That is why the work of art is reducible to an idea: first, because it is a production or a reproduction of a being, that is, of something which never quite allows itself to be thought; then, because this being is totally penetrated by an existence, that is, by a freedom which decides on the very fate and value of thought. That is also
? For Whom Does One Write? \ IOJ
why the artist has always had a special understanding of Evil, which is not the temporary and remediable isolation of an idea, but the irreducibility of man and the world of Thought.
The bourgeois could be recognized by the fact that he denied the existence of social classes and particularly of the bourgeoisie. The gentleman wished to command because he belonged to a caste. The bourgeois based his power and his right to govern on the exquisite ripening which comes from the secular possession of the goods of this world. More- over, he admitted only synthetic relationships between the owner and the thing possessed; for the rest, he demonstrated by analysis that all men are alike because they are unvarying elements of social combinations and because each one of them, whatever his rank, completely possesses human nature. Hence, inequalities appeared as fortuitous and passing acci- dents which could not alter the permanent characteristics of the social atom. There was no proletariat, that is, no syn- thetic class of which each worker was a passing mode; there were only proletarians, each isolated in his human nature, who were not united by internal solidarity but only by external bonds of resemblance.
The bourgeois saw only psychological relations among the individuals whom his analytical propaganda circumvented and separated. That is understandable: as he had no direct hold on things, as his work was concerned essentially with men, it was purely a matter, for him, of pleasing and intim- idating. Ceremony, discipline, and courtesy ruled his be- haviour; he regarded his fellow-men as marionettes, and if he wished to acquire some knowledge of their emotions and character, it was because it seemed to him that each passion was a wire that could be pulled. The breviary of the am- bitious bourgeois was 'The Art of Making Good'; the breviary of the rich was 'The Art of Commanding'. Thus, the bourgeoisie considered the writer as an expert. If he started reflecting on the social order, he annoyed and fright- ened it. All it asked of him was to share his practical experi- ence of the human heart. So, as in the seventeenth century,
? io8 I What Is Literature?
literature was reduced to psychology. All the same, the psychology of Corneille, Pascal and Vauvenargues was a cathartic appeal to freedom. But the merchant distrusted the freedom of the people he dealt with and the prefect that of the sub-prefect. All they wanted was to be provided with infallible recipes for winning over and dominating. Man had to be governable as a matter of course and by modest means. In short, the laws of the heart had to be rigorous and with- out exceptions. The bourgeois bigwig no more believed in human freedom than the scientist believes in a miracle. And as his ethics were utilitarian, the chief motive of his psycho- logy was self-interest. For the writer it was no longer a matter of addressing his work as an appeal to absolute free- doms, but of exhibiting the psychological laws which
determined him to readers who were likewise determined.
Idealism, psychologism, determinism, utilitarianism, the spirit of seriousness--this was what the bourgeois writer had to reflect to his public first of all. He was no longer asked to restore the strangeness and opacity of the world, but to dissolve it into elementary subjective impressions which made it easier to digest; nor was he asked to discover the most intimate movements of his heart at the very depths of his freedom, but to bring his 'experience' face to face with that of his readers. All his works were at once inventories of bourgeois appurtenances, psychological reports of an expert which invariably tended to ground the rights of the e? lite and to show the wisdom of institutions, and handbooks of civility. The conclusions were decided in advance; the degree of depth permitted to the investigation was also established in advance; the psychological motives were selected; the very style was regulated. The public feared no surprise. It could buy with its eyes closed. But literature had been assassinated. From Emile Augier to Marcel Pre? vost and Edmond Jaloux, including Dumas fils, Pailleron, Ohnet, Bourget, and Bordeaux, authors were found to do the job and, if I may say so, to honour their signature to the very end. It is not by chance that they wrote bad books; if they had talent, they were forced to hide it.
? For Whom Does One Write? \ 109
The best refused. This refusal saved literature but fixed its traits for fifty years. Indeed, from 1848 on, and until the war of 1914, the radical unification of his public led the author to write on principle against all his readers. However, he sold his productions, but he despised those who bought them and forced himself to disappoint their wishes. It was taken for granted that it was better to be unknown than famous, that success--if the writer ever got it in his lifetime--was to be explained by a misunderstanding. And if, by chance, the book one published did not offend sufficiently, one added an insulting preface. This fundamental conflict between the writer and his public was an unprecedented phenomenon in literary history. In the seventeenth century the harmony between the man of letters and his readers was perfect; in the eighteenth century the author had two equally real publics at his disposal and could rely upon one or the other as he pleased. In its early stages, romanticism had been a vain attempt to avoid open conflict by restoring this duality and by depending upon the aristocracy against the liberal bour- geoisie. But after 1850 there was no longer any means of covering up the profound contradiction which opposed bourgeois ideology to the requirements of literature. About the same time a virtual public was beginning to take form in the deeper layers of society; it was already waiting to be revealed to itself because the cause of free and compulsory education had made some progress. The Third Republic was soon to sanction the right of all men to read and write. What was the writer going to do?
Would he choose the masses against the Hits, and would he attempt to re-create for his own profit the duality of publics?
At first sight, it seemed so. By means of the great move- ment of ideas which from 1830 to 1848 were brewing in the marginal zones of the bourgeoisie, certain writers had the revelation of their virtual public. They adorned this public, under the name of 'The People', with mystic graces. It would be the instrument of salvation. But, as much as they loved it, they hardly knew it and above all they did not come from it. Sand was Baronne Dudevant; Hugo, the son
? no I What Is Literature?
of a general of the Empire; even Michelet, the son of a printer, was still far removed from the silk-weavers of Lyons or the textile-weavers of Lille. Their socialism--when they were socialists--was a by-product of bourgeois idealism. And then the people were much more the subject of certain of their works than their chosen public. Hugo, to be sure, had the rare fortune of penetrating everywhere. He was one of the few--perhaps the only one--of our writers who was really popular. But the others had incurred the hostility of the bourgeoisie without creating a working-class public in compensation. To convince oneself of this fact all one need do is compare the importance which the bourgeois Univer- sity accorded to Michelet, an authentic genius and a first-rate prose-writer, and to Taine, who was only a cheap pedant, or to Renan, whose 'fine style' offers all the examples one could want of meanness and ugliness. This purgatory in which the bourgeois class let Michelet vegetate was without compensation; the people' that he loved read him for a while, and then the success of Marxism pushed him into oblivion. In short, most of these authors were the losers in a revolution that didn't come off. They attached their name and their destiny to it. None of them, except Hugo, really left their mark on literature.
The others, all the others, backed away from the per- spective of an unclassing from below which would have made them sink straight down as if a stone had been tied round their necks. They had no lack of excuses: the time wasn't ripe, there was no real bond which attached them to the proletariat, that oppressed class couldn't absorb their work, it didn't know how much it needed them; their decision to defend it had remained abstract; whatever their sincerity might have been, they had 'brooded' over miseries which they had understood with their heads without feeling them in their hearts. Fallen from their class of origin, haunted by the memory of an affluence which they should have refused to accept, they ran the risk of forming "a white-collar proletariat' on the margin of the real proletariat, suspect to the workers and spurned by the bourgeois, whose
? For Whom Does One Write? \ in
demands had been dictated by bitterness and resentment rather than large-mindedness and who had ended by turning against both groups.
Besides, in the eighteenth century, the necessary liberties required by literature were not distinguished from the political liberties which the citizen wanted to win; all that was necessary for the writer to become a revolutionary was to explore the arbitrary essence of his art and to make him- self the interpreter of its formal demands; when the revo- lution which was in the making was bourgeois, literature was naturally revolutionary because the first discovery which it made of itself revealed to it its connections with political democracy. But the formal liberties which the essayist, the novelist, and the poet were to defend had nothing in com- mon with the deeper needs of the proletariat. The latter was not dreaming of demanding political freedom, which, after all, it did enjoy, and which was only a mystification. 13 As for freedom of thought, for the time being the proletariat was not concerned with it. What it asked for was quite different from these abstract liberties. It wanted material improve- ment of its lot, and more deeply, and more obscurely too, the end of man's exploitation by man. We shall see later that these demands were of the same kind made by the art of writing conceived as a concrete and historical phenomenon; that is, as the particular and timely appeal which, by agree- ing to historicize himself, a man launches in regard to all mankind to the men of his time.
But in the nineteenth century literature had just dis- engaged itself from religious ideology and refused to serve bourgeois ideology. Thus, it set itself up as being, in prin- ciple, independent of any sort of ideology. As a result, it retained its abstract aspect of pure negativity. It had not yet understood that it was itself ideology; it wore itself out asserting its autonomy, which no one contested. This amounted to saying that it claimed it had no privileged sub- ject and could treat any matter whatever. There was no doubt about the fact that one might write felicitously about the condition of the working class; but the choice of this
? ii2 I What Is Literature?
subject depended upon circumstances, upon a free decision of the artist. One day one might talk about a provincial bourgeoise, another day, about Carthaginian mercenaries. From time to time, a Flaubert would affirm the identity of form and content, but he drew no practical conclusion from it. Like all his contemporaries, he drew his definition of beauty from what the Winckelmanns and Lessings had said almost a hundred years earlier and which in one way or other boiled down to presenting it as multiplicity in unity. It was a matter of capturing the iridescence of the various and imposing a strict unity upon it by means of style. The 'artistic style' of the Goncourts had no other meaning. It was a formal method of unifying and embellishing any materials, even the most beautiful. How could anyone have then conceived that there might be an internal relationship between the demands of the lower classes and the principles of the art of writing? Proudhon seems to have been the only one to have surmised it. And of course Marx. But they were not men of letters. Literature, still completely absorbed by the discovery of its autonomy, was to itself its own subject. It had passed to the reflective period; it tried out its methods, broke its former moulds, and tried to determine experiment- ally its own laws and to forge new techniques. It advanced step by step towards the current forms of the drama and the novel, free verse, and the criticism of language. Had it dis- covered a specific content, it would have had to tear itself away from its meditation on itself and derive its aesthetic rules from the nature of this content.
At the same time, by choosing to write for a virtual public, authors would have had to adapt their art to the capacities of the readers, which would have amounted to determining it according to external demands and not according to its own essence. It would have had to give up some of the exquisite forms of narrative, poetry, and even reasoning, for the sole reason that they would be inaccessible to readers without culture. It seemed, therefore, that liter- ature would be running the risk of relapsing into alienation. Hence, the writer, in all honesty, refused to enslave literature
? For Whom Does One Write? \ 113
to a public and a determined subject. But he did not perceive the divorce which was taking place between the concrete revolution trying to be born and the abstract games he was indulging in. This time it was the masses who wanted power, and as the masses had no culture or leisure, any would-be literary revolution, by refining its technique, put the works it inspired out of their range and served the interests of social conservatism.
Thus, he had to revert to the bourgeois public. The writer tried hard to break all relations with it, but by re- fusing to be unclassed from below, his break was con- demned to remain symbolic; he played at it tirelessly; he showed it by his clothes, his food, the way he furnished his home, and the manners he adopted, but he did not do it. It was the bourgeoisie which read him. It was the bourgeoisie alone which maintained him and decided his fame. In vain did he pretend that he was getting perspective in order to consider it as a whole. Had he wanted to judge it, he would first have had to leave it, and there was no other way to leave it than by trying out the interests and way of life of another class. Since he did not bring himself to do this, he lived in a state of contradiction and dishonesty since he both knew and did not want to know for whom he was writing, He was fond of speaking of his solitude, and rather than assume responsibility for the public which he had slyly chosen, he concocted the notion that one writes for oneself alone or for God. He made of writing a metaphysical occu- pation, a prayer, an examination of conscience, everything but a communication. He frequently likened himself to one possessed, because, if he spewed up words under the sway of an inner necessity, at least he was not giving them. But that did not keep him from carefully polishing his writings. And moreover, he was so far from wishing harm to the bourgeoisie that he did not even dispute its right to govern.
Quite the contrary. Flaubert recognized its right and mentioned it by name, and his correspondence after the Commune, which frightened him so, abounds in disgrace- ful abuse of the workers. 14 And, as the artist, submerged in
? ii4 I What Is Literature?
his milieu, was unable to judge it from without, as his rejections were ineffectual states of mind, he did not even notice that the bourgeoisie was an oppressing class; in fact, he did not at all consider it as a class, but rather as a natural species, and if he ventured to describe it, he did so in strictly psychological terms.
Thus the bourgeois writer and the 'damned* {maudit) writer moved on the same level; their only difference was that the first practised white psychology and the second, black psychology. For example, when Flaubert declared that he called 'anyone who thought basely bourgeois', he was defining the bourgeois in psychological and idealistic terms, that is, in the perspective of the ideology which he pretended to reject. As a result, he rendered a signal service to the bourgeoisie. He led back to the fold the rebellious and the maladjusted, who might have gone over to the proletariat, by convincing them that one could cast off the bourgeois in oneself by a simple inner discipline. All they had to do was to practise high thinking in private and they could continue to enjoy their goods and prerogatives with a peaceful conscience. They could still live in bourgeois fashion, and enjoy their incomes in bourgeois fashion, and frequent bourgeois drawing-rooms, but that would all be nothing but appearance. They had raised themselves above their kind by the nobility of their feelings. By the same token he taught his confre`res the trick which could allow them, at any rate, to maintain a good conscience; for magnanimity finds its most fitting practice in the practice of the arts.
The solitude of the artist was doubly a fake: it covered up not only a real relationship with the great public but also the restoration of an audience of specialists. Since the government of men and goods was abandoned to the bourgeoisie, the spiritual was once again separated from the temporal. A sort of priesthood once again sprang up. StendhaPs public was Balzac, Baudelaire's was Barbey d'Aurevilly; and Baudelaire, in turn, made himself the public of Poe. These literary salons took on a vague collegiate atmosphere; one 'talked literature' in a hushed voice, with
? For Whom Does One Write? \ 115
an infinite respect; one debated whether the musician derived more aesthetic joy from his music than the writer from his books. Art again became sacred to the extent that it turned aside from life. It even set up for itself a sort of communion of saints; one joined hands across the centuries with Cervantes, Rabelais, and Dante. One identified oneself with this monastic society. The priesthood, instead of being a concrete and, so to speak, geographical organism, became a hereditary institution, a club, all of whose members were dead except one, the last in point of time, who represented the others upon earth and who epitomized the whole college.
These new believers, who had their saints in the past, also had their future life. The divorce of the temporal and spiritual led to a deep modification of the idea of glory. From the time of Racine on, it had been not so much the revenge of the misunderstood writer as the natural pro- longation of success in an immutable society. In the nine- teenth century it functioned as a mechanism of over- compensation. *I shall be understood in 1880', 'I shall win my trial on appeal'; these famous words prove that the writer had not lost the desire to practise a direct and uni- versal action within the framework of an integrated col- lectivity. But as this action was not possible in the present, one projected into an indefinite future the compensatory myth of a reconciliation between the writer and his public. Moreover, all this remained quite vague; none of these lovers of glory asked himself in what sort of society he would be able to find his recompense. They merely took pleasure in dreaming that their grandnephews would profit from an internal betterment for having come at a later time
into an older world. That was the way Baudelaire, who didn't worry about contradictions, often dressed his wounded pride, by considering his posthumous renown, although he held that society had entered a period of deca- dence which would end only with the disappearance of the human race.
Thus, for the present, the writer relied on an audience of
? u6 I What Is Literature?
specialists; as for the past, he concluded a mystic pact with the great dead; as to the future, he made use of the myth of glory. He neglected nothing in wrenching himself free from his class. He was up in the air, a stranger to his century, out of his element, damned. All this play-acting had but one goal: to integrate the writer into a symbolic society which would be like an image of the aristocracy of the old re? gime. Psycho-analysis is familiar with these processes of identifi- cation of which artistic thinking offers numerous examples: the sick person who needs the key of the asylum in order to escape and finally comes to believe that he himself is the key. Thus, the writer, who needed the favour of the great to unclass himself, ended by taking himself for the incarnation of the whole nobility, and as the latter was characterized by its parasitism it was the ostentation of parasitism which he chose for his style of living. He made himself the martyr of pure consumption. As we have pointed out, he saw no objection to using the goods of the bourgeoisie, but on condition that he was to spend them, that is, transform them into unproductive and useless objects. He burned them, so to speak, because fire purifies everything. More- over, as he was not always rich, and as he had to live well, he composed a strange life for himself, both extravagant and needy, in which a calculated improvidence symbolized the mad liberality which was denied him. Outside of art, he found nobility in only three kinds of occupation. First, in love, because it is a useless passion and because women, as Nietzsche said, are the most dangerous game. Also in travel, because the traveller is a perpetual witness who
passes from one society to another without ever remaining in any and because, as a foreign consumer in an industrious collectivity, he is the very image of parasitism. Sometimes, in war too, because it is an immense consumption of men and goods.
The contempt with which trade was regarded in aris- tocratic and warlike societies was again met with in the writer. He was not satisfied with being useless, like the courtiers of the Old Re? gime; he wanted to be able to trample
? For Whom Does One Write? \ ny
on utilitarian work, to smash it, burn it, damage it; he wanted to imitate the unconstraint of the lords whose hunting parties rode across the ripe wheat. He cultivated in himself those destructive impulses of which Baudelaire has spoken in The Glass-maker. A little later he was to have a particular liking for instruments which were defective, worthless or no longer in use, half retrieved by nature, and which were like caricatures of instruments. It was not a rare thing for him to consider his own life as a tool to be destroyed. In any event, he risked it and played to lose: alcohol, drugs, everything served his purpose. The height of uselessness, of course, was beauty. From 'art for art's sake' to symbolism, including realism and the Parnassians, all schools agreed that art was the highest form of pure con- sumption. It taught nothing, it reflected no ideology, and above all, it refrained from morali2ing. Long before Gide wrote it, Flaubert, Gautier, the Goncourts, Renard, and Maupassant had in their own way said that 'it is with good sentiments that one produces bad literature*.
For some, literature was subjectivity carried to the abso- lute, a bonfire in which the black vines of their sufferings and vices writhed and twisted. Lying at the bottom of a world as in a dungeon, they passed beyond it and dispelled
it by their dissatisfaction, which revealed other worlds to them. It seemed to them that their heart was different enough so that the picture of it which they drew might be resolutely barren. Others set themselves up as the impartial witnesses of their age, but nobody noticed that they were testifying. They raised testimony and witness to the absolute; they offered to the empty sky the tableau of the society about them. Circumvented, transposed, unified, and caught in the trap of an artistic style, the events of the universe were neutralked and, so to speak, put in parentheses; realism was an epoche^. Here impossible truth joined hands with inhu- man Beauty 'beautiful as a marble dream'. Neither the author, in so far as he wrote, nor the reader, in so far as he read, belonged to this world any longer: they were trans- formed into pure beholding; they considered man from
? n8 I What Is Literature?
without; they strove to see him from the point of view of God, or, if you like, of the absolute void. But after all, I can still recognize myself in the purest lyricist's description of his particularities. And if the experimental novel imitated science, was it not utilizable as science was? Could it not likewise have its social applications?
The extremists wished, for fear of being serviceable, that their works should not even enlighten the reader about his own heart; they refused to transmit their experience. In the last analysis the work would be entirely gratuitous only if it were entirely inhuman. The logical conclusion of all this was the hope of an absolute creation, a quintessence of luxury and prodigality, not utilizable in this world because
it was not of the world and because it recalled nothing in it. Imagination was conceived as an unconditioned faculty of denying the real and the objet d9art was set up on the collaps- ing of the universe. There was the heightened artificiality of Des Esseintes, the systematic deranging of all the senses, and finally the concerted destruction of language. There was also silence: that icy silence, the work of Mallarme? --or the silence of M. Teste for whom all communication was impure.
The extreme point of this brilliant and mortal literature was nothingness. Its extreme point and its deeper essence. There was nothing positive in the new spirituality. It was a pure and simple negation of the temporal. In the Middle Ages it was the temporal which was the Inessential in relation to spirituality; in the nineteenth century the opposite occurred: the Temporal was primary and the spiritual was the inessential parasite which gnawed away at it and tried to destroy it. It was a question of denying the world or con- suming it. Of denying it by consuming it. Flaubert wrote to disentangle himself from men and things. His sentence surrounds the object, seizes it, immobilizes it and breaks its back, changes into stone and petrifies the object as well. It is blind and deaf, without arteries; not a breath of life. A deep silence separates it from the sentence which follows; it falls into the void, eternally, and drags its prey along in
? For Whom Does One Write? \ 119
this infinite fall. Once described, any reality is stricken from the inventory; one moves on to the next. Realism was nothing else but this great gloomy chase. It was a matter of setting one's mind at rest before anything else. Wherever one went, the grass stopped growing. The determinism of the naturalistic novel crushed out life and replaced human actions by one-way mechanisms. It had virtually but one subject: the slow disintegration of a man, an enterprise, a family, or a society. It was necessary to return to zero. One took nature in a state of productive disequilibrium and one wiped out this disequilibrium; one returned to an equilibrium of death by annulling the forces with which one was confronted. When, by chance, he shows us the success of an ambitious man, it is only in appearance; Bel Ami does not take the strongholds of the bourgeoisie by assault; he is a gauge whose rise merely testifies to the collapse of a society. And when symbolism discovered the close relation- ship between beauty and death, it was merely making explicit the theme of the whole literature of a half century. The beauty of the past, because it is gone; the beauty of
young people dying and of flowers which fade; the beauty of all erosions and all ruins; the supreme dignity of con- sumption, of the disease which consumes, of the love which devours, of the art which kills; death is everywhere, before us, behind us, even in the sun and the perfumes of the earth. The art of Barre? s is a meditation on death: a thing is beautiful only when it is 'consumable', that is, it dies when one has enjoyed it.
The temporal structure which was particularly appro- priate for those princely games was the moment. Because it passes and because in itself it is the image of eternity, it is the negation of human time, that three-dimensional time of work and history. A great deal of time is needed to build; a moment is enough to hurl everything to the ground. When one considers the work of Gide in this perspective, one cannot help seeing in it an ethic strictly reserved for the writer-consumer. What is his gratuitous act if not the culmination of a century of bourgeois comedy and the
? i20 I What Is Literature?
imperative of the author-gentleman: Philocte`te gives away his bow, the millionaire squanders his banknotes, Bernard steals, Lafcadio kills and Me? nalque sells his belongings.
This destructive movement was to go to its logical con- sequence: 'The simplest surrealist act', Breton was to write twenty years later, 'consists of going down into the street, revolver in hand, and firing into the crowd at random as long as you can/ It was the last stage of a long dialectical process. In the eighteenth century literature had been a negativity; in the reign of the bourgeoisie it passed on to a state of absolute and hypostasized Negation. It became a multicoloured and glittering process of annihilation. 'Sur- realism is not interested in paying much attention . . . to anything whose end is not the annihilation of being and its transformation into an internal and blind brilliance which is no more the soul of ice than it is of fire/ writes Breton once again. In the end there is nothing left for literature to do but to challenge itself. That is what it did in the name of surrealism. For seventy years writers had been working to consume the world; after 1918 one wrote in order to consume literature: one squandered literary traditions, hashed together words, threw them against each other to
make them shatter. Literature as Negation became Anti- literature; never had it been more literary: the circle was completed.
