No More Learning

Twenty thousand readers--a minor pre-war success. These worldwide reputations are far less well established than the national reputations of our elders. I know, paper is coming back. But at the same moment, European publishing is entering a crisis; the volume of sales remains constant.
Even though we might have a certain amount of celebrity outside France, there would be no reason for rejoicing; it would be an ineffectual glory. Nations today are separated by differences of economic and military potential more surely than by seas or mountains. An idea can descend from a country with a high potential towards a country with a low potential--for example, from America to France--it cannot rise. To be sure, there are so many newspapers, so many international contacts, that Americans finally get to hear about the literary or social theories that are circulating in
Europe, but these doctrines are exhausted in their ascent; virulent in a country with a weak potential, they are in a languid state when they reach the summit. We know that intellectuals in the United States gather European ideas into a bouquet, inhale them for a moment, and then toss them away because the bouquets wither more quickly there than in other climates. As for Russia, she gleans and takes what
? 198 I What Is Literature?
she can easily convert into her own substance. Europe is conquered and ruined; she is no longer master of her destiny; and that is the reason why her ideas can no longer make their way. The only concrete circuit for the exchange of ideas passes through England, France, the Northern countries, and Italy.
It is true that our reputations are far more widespread than our books. We make contact with people, without even wanting to do so, by new means, with new angles of incidence. Of course, the book is still the heavy infantry which clears and occupies the terrain. But literature has its aeroplanes, its W s and VYs which go a great distance, upsetting and harassing, without bringing about the actual decision. First, the newspaper. An author used to write for ten thousand readers. He is given the critic's column in a weekly and he has three hundred thousand even if his articles are worthless. Then the radio. In Camera^ one of my plays, banned in England by the theatre censors, was broadcast four times by the B. B. C. On a London stage it would not have found, even making the improbable assumption that it would be a success, more than twenty to thirty thousand spectators. The drama broadcast of the B. B. C. automatically provided me with a half-million. Finally, the cinema. Four million people frequent the French cinemas. If we recall that at the beginning of the century Paul Souday reproached Gide for publishing his works in limited editions, the success of ThePastoralSymphony will enable us to measure the distance that we have covered.
However, of the columnist's three hundred thousand readers, he'll be lucky if a few thousand have the curiosity to buy his works, into which he has put the best of his talent. The? others will learn his name from having read it a hundred times on the second page of the magazine, like that of the physic which they've seen a hundred times on the twelfth. The Englishmen who would have gone to see In Camera in the theatre would have done so with a knowledge of why they were going, on the basis of the reviews and mouth to mouth criticism, and with the intention of judging the
? Situation of the Writer in 194J \ 199
work. When my B. B. C. listeners were turning on their radios they were unaware of the existence of the play or of me. They wanted to hear, as usual, the Thursday drama broadcast. As soon as it was over, they forgot it, as they did the preceding ones.
In the cinemas, the public is attracted by the names of the stars, then by the name of the director, and last of all by that of the writer. The name of Gide recendy entered certain heads by invasion, but I am sure that it is curiously married there with the beautiful face of Miche`le Morgan. It is true that the film has caused a few thousand copies of the work to be sold, but in the eyes of its new readers the latter appears as a more or less faithful commentary on the former. The wider the public that the author reaches, the less deeply does he affect it, the less he recognizes himself in the influence he has; his thoughts escape him; they become distorted and vulgarized. They are received with more indifference and scepticism by bored and weary souls who, because the author cannot speak to them in their 'native language', still consider literature as a diversion. What remains is formulas attached to names. And since our reputations extend much farther than our books, that is, than our merits, whether great or small, we need not see in these passing favours which are granted us the sign of a first awakening of the concrete universal but quite simply that of a literary inflation.
That would be nothing; it would be enough, in short, to be on guard; after all, it depends on us for literature not to be industrialized. But there is worse; we have readers but no public. 3 In 1780 the oppressing class alone had an ideology and political organizations. The bourgeoisie had neither party nor political self-consciousness. The writer worked for it directly by criticizing the old myths of monarchy and religion, and by giving it a few elementary notions whose content was chiefly negative, such as those of liberty, political equality, and habeas corpus. In 1850 the proletariat, in the presence of a conscious bourgeoisie which was provided with a systematic ideology, remained formless and
? 200 I What Is Literature?
obscure to itself, pervaded by vain and hopeless anger. The First International had only scratched its surface. Everything remained to be done. The writer could have addressed the workers direcdy. We have seen that he missed his chance. But at least he served the interests of the oppressed class unintentionally and even unknowingly by practicing his negativity on bourgeois values. Thus, in either case, circum- stances permitted him to testify for the oppressed before the oppressor and to help the oppressed become conscious of themselves. The essence of literature found itself in accord with the exigencies of the historical situation. But today everything is reversed. The oppressing class has lost its
ideology; its self-consciousness vacillates; its limits are no longer clearly definable; it opens up and it calls the writer to the rescue. The oppressed class, cramped in a party and tied down by a rigorous ideology, becomes a closed society. One can no longer communicate with it without an inter- mediary. The fate of the bourgeoisie was tied up with European supremacy and colonialism. It is losing its colonies at a time when Europe is ceasing to govern its destiny. It is no longer a matter of litde kings carrying on wars for Rumanian oil or the Bagdad railroad; the next conflict will necessitate an industrial equipment that the entire Old World is incapable of furnishing. Two world powers, neither of which is bourgeois and neither of which is European, are disputing the possession of the universe. The triumph of one means the advent of state control and international bureaucracy; of the other, the coming of abstract capitalism. Everybody a civil servant? Everybody an employee? The bourgeoisie will be lucky if it can keep the illusion of the sauce with which it will be eaten. It knows today that it represented a moment in the history of Europe, a stage in the development of techniques and tools and that it has never been the measuring rod of the world. Besides, the feeling it had of its essence and its mission has been dimmed. It has been shaken, undermined, and eroded by economic crises with consequent internalfissures,displace- ments, and landslides. In certain countries it stands like the
? Situation of the Writer in 1947 | 201
fac? ade of a building which has been gutted; in others, great sections of it have collapsed into the proletariat. It can no longer be defined by the possession of goods, of which it has less and less each day, nor by political power, which it shares almost everywhere with new men who have sprung directly from the proletariat. At present it is the bourgeoisie which has taken on the amorphous and gelatinous aspect which characterizes oppressed classes before they have be- come conscious of their state. In France we discover that it is fifty years behind in equipment and in the organization of heavy industry. Whence, the crisis in our birth-rate, an undeniable sign of regression. Besides, the black market and the occupation have caused forty per cent, of its wealth to pass into the hands of a new bourgeoisie which has neither the morals, the principles, nor the goals of the old one. Ruined, but still oppressive, the European bourgeoisie barely manages to keep governing, and with modest means. In Italy, it keeps the workers in check because it is sup- ported by the coalition of the Church and misery. Elsewhere, it makes itself indispensable because it supplies the technical staffs and administrative personnel. Elsewhere again, it rules by dividing. And then, above all, the era of national revolu- tions is closed. The revolutionary parties do not want to overturn this worm-eaten carcase. They even do what they can to prevent its collapsing. At the first sound of cracking there would be foreign intervention and perhaps the world- wide conflict for which Russia is not yet ready. An object of everybody's solicitude, doped by the U. S. A. , by the Church, and even by the U. S. S. R. , at the mercy of the changing fortunes of the diplomatic game, the bourgeoisie can neither preserve nor lose its power without the concurrence of foreign powers. It is the "sick man* of contemporary Europe. Its agony may last a long time.
As a result, its ideology is collapsing. It justified property by work and also by that slow osmosis which diffuses into the soul of the possessors the virtues of the things possessed. The possession of property was, in its eyes, a merit and the finest self-culture. But, property is becoming symbolic and
? 202 I What Is Literature?
collective. One no longer possesses things but their signs or the signs of their signs. The arguments of 'work-merit' and 'enjoyment-culture* have turned flat. Out of hatred of the trusts and the bad conscience which abstract property induces, many turned towards fascism. Summoned by their wishes, it came, replaced the trusts by a system of directorship, then disappeared, and the system remained. The bourgeois gained nothing. If they still possess, they do so harshly and joylessly. They considered wealth as an
unjustifiable state of fact; they have lost faith. Neither do they retain much confidence in that democratic re? gime which was their pride and which collapsed at thefirstpush. But as national socialism in turn collapsed just when they were about to rally to it, they no longer believe either in Republic or Dictatorship. Nor in Progress; it was fine when their class was on the way up; now that it is declining, they are no longer concerned with the notion; it would be heart- breaking for them to think that other men and other classes will ensure it. Their work brings them into no more direct contact with actual matter than before, but two wars have made them discover fatigue, blood and tears, violence, and evil. The bombs have not only destroyed their factories but have caused fissures to appear in their idealism as well. Utilitarianism was the philosophy of saving; it loses all meaning when the savings are compromised by inflation and threats of bankruptcy. To quote Heidegger roughly, 'The world is revealed at the horizon of instruments which are out of order/ When you use a tool, you do so to produce a certain modification which is itself the means of bringing about another, and so on. Thus, you are engaged in a chain of means and ends whose scope escapes you, and you are too absorbed in the details of your action to question its final ends. But if the tool should break, the action is sus- pended and you see the whole chain. So with the bourgeois; his instruments are out of order; he sees the chain and knows the gratuitousness of his ends. As long as he believed in them without seeing them, and as long as he was working over the nearest links with his head down, they justified
? Situation of the Writer in 1947 \ 203
him; now that they hit him right between the eyes, he discovers that he is unjustifiable. The whole world is dis- closed and likewise his forlornness in the world. Anguish is born. 37 And shame too. Even for those who judge it in the name of its own principles, it is manifest that the bourgeoisie has been guilty of three betrayals: at Munich, in May '40, and under the Vichy government. Of course, it corrected itself; many Vichyites of thefirsthour were in the resistance in '42. They realised that they had to fight against the occupier in the name of bourgeois nationalism. And it is true that the Communist Party hesitated more than a year; it is true that the Church hesitated until the Liberation. But both of them have enough strength, unity, and discipline to demand of their initiates that they forget their past faults, The bourgeoisie has forgotten nothing. It still carries about
the wounds inflicted upon it by one of its sons, the one it was most proud of. By condemning Pe? tain to life imprison- ment, it feels that it has put itself behind bars. It might apply to itself the words of Paul Chack, an officer, a Catholic, and a bourgeois, who, because he blindly followed the orders of a Catholic and bourgeois marshal of France, was accused before a bourgeois tribunal under the government of a Catholic and bourgeois general, and who, stupefied by this sleight-of-hand, kept mumbling throughout the trial, 'I don't understand/ Harassed, without a future, without guarantees, without justification, the bourgeoisie, which objectively had become the sick man, has subjectively entered the phase of the guilty conscience. Many of its members are bewildered; they shuttle between anger and fear, which are two kinds of flight. The best of them still try to defend, if
not their goods, which in a good many cases have gone up in smoke, at least the real bourgeois conquests: the universality of laws, freedom of expression, habeas corpus. It is they who form our public. Our onlypublic. They understood, in reading the old books, that literature, by its nature, is ranged on the side of democratic freedom. They turn to it; they beg it to give them reasons for living and hoping, a new ideology. Perhaps never since
? 204 I What Is Literature?
the eighteenth century has so much been expected of the writer.
We have nothing to tell them. In spite of themselves, they belong to an oppressing class. Victims, doubtless, and innocent, but, still tyrants and guilty. All we can do is reflect their unhappy conscience in our mirrors, that is, advance a bit further the decomposition of their principles. We have the thankless job of reproaching them for their faults when they have become a curse. Ourselves bourgeois, we have known bourgeois anguish. We have had that harassed soul. But since the characteristic of an unhappy conscience is to want to tear itself away from the state of unhappiness, we cannot remain tranquilly in the bosom of our class, and since it is no longer possible for us to leave it with aflapof our wings by giving ourselves the appearance of a parasitic aristocracy, we must be its gravediggers, even if we run the risk of burying ourselves along with it.
We turn towards the working class which today, like the bourgeoisie in 1780, might constitute for the writer a revolu- tionary public. It is still a virtual public, but it is singularly present. The worker of 1947 has a social and professional culture. He reads technical, union, and political journals. He has become conscious of himself and his position in the world and he has much to teach us. He has lived all the adventures of our time, in Moscow in 1917, in Budapest, in Munich, in Madrid, in Stalingrad, and in the Maquis. At the time that we are discovering in the art of writing freedom in its two aspects of negation and the creative transcendence of negation, he is trying to free himself and, by the same token, to free all men from oppression for ever. As a member of the oppressed, he may see the object of his anger reflected by literature in its aspect of negation; as a producer and revolutionary, he is, par excellence, the subject of a literature ofpraxis. We share with him the duty of contesting and destroying; he demands the right to make history at the
moment when we are discovering that we are part of history. We are not yet familiar with his language; neither is he with ours; but we already know the means of reaching
? Situation of the Writer in 1947 \ 205
him. We also know that in Russia he engages in discussion with the writer himself and that a new relationship between the public and the writer has appeared there which is neither a passive and female waiting nor the specialized criticism of the intellectual. I do not believe in the 'Mission* of the proletariat, nor that it is endowed with a state of grace; it is made up of men, just and unjust, who can make mistakes and who are often mystified. But it must be said without hesitation that the fate of literature is bound up with that of the working class.
Unhappily, these men, to whom we must speak, are separated from us by an iron curtain in our own country; they will not hear a word that we shall say to them. The majority of the proletariat, strait-jacketed by a single party, encircled by a propaganda which isolates it, forms a closed society without doors or windows. There is only one way of access, a very narrow one, the Communist Party. Is it desirable for the writer to engage himself in it? If he does it out of conviction as a citizen and out of disgust with literature, very well, he has chosen. But can he become a communist and remain a writer?
The C. P. aligns its politics with that of Soviet Russia because this is the only country in which onefindsthe rough draught of a socialist organization. But if it is true that Russia began the social revolution, it is also true that she has not ended it. The retardation of her industry, her shortage of supervisory personnel, and the masses' lack of culture have prevented her from realizing socialism by herself and even from imposing it upon other countries by the con- tagion of her example. If the revolutionary movement which started from Moscow could have spread to other nations, it would have continued to evolve in Russia itself in propor- tion to the ground it gained outside. Contained within the Soviet frontiers, it congealed into a defensive and conserva- tive nationalism because it had to save, at any cost, the results it had achieved. At the very moment when it was becoming the Mecca of the working classes, Russia saw that it was impossible, on one hand, for her to assume her
? 2o6 I What Is Literature?
historical mission and, on the other, to deny it. She was forced to withdraw into herself, to apply herself to creating supervisors, to catch up on her equipment, and to perpetuate herself by an authoritarian re? gime in the form of a revolu- tion at a standstill. As the European parties which derived from her, and which were preparing for the coming of the proletariat, were nowhere strong enough to take the offen- sive, she had to use them as the advance bastions of her defence. But as they could serve her, in regard to the masses, only by fostering revolutionary politics, and as she has never lost hope of becoming the leader of the European proletariat if circumstances should some day show them- selves more favourable, she has left them their red flag and their faith. Thus the forces of the World Revolution have been diverted to the maintenance of a revolution in a state of hibernation. Still, it must be acknowledged that, in so far as it has honestly believed in the possibility, even though remote, of seizing power by insurrection, and in so far as it has made it its business to weaken the bourgeoisie and to bore from within the Socialist Party, the C. P. has practised a negative criticism of capitalistic institutions and re?
gimes which has maintained the outer appearances of freedom. Before 1939 it made use of everything: pamphlets, satires, bitter novels, Surrealistic violence, overwhelming evidence regarding our colonial methods. Since 1944 things have become aggravated; a collapsing Europe has simplified the situation. Two powers remain standing, the U. S. S. R. and the U. S. A. ; each one frightens the other. From fear, as we know, comes anger, and from anger, blows.
Now, the U. S. S. R. is the less strong. Hardly out of a war which she had feared for twenty years, she still has to temporize, to catch up in the armament race, to retighten the dictatorship internally, and, externally, to assure herself of allies, vassals, and positions.
The revolutionary tactic is changed into diplomacy. It must have Europe on its side. Thus, it must appease the bourgeoisie, lull it to sleep with fables, and at any cost keep it from throwing itself into the Anglo-Saxon camp out of
? Situation of the Writer in 1947 | 207
fright. The time has quite passed when UHumaniti could write: 'Every bourgeois who meets a workman ought to be scared/ Never have the Communists been so powerful in Europe, and yet never have the chances of a revolution been slighter. If the Party should somewhere consider the possibility of seizing power, this attempt would be nipped in the bud. The Anglo-Saxons have at their disposal a hundred ways of annihilating it, even without having re- course to arms, and for that matter the Soviets would not look upon it very favourably. If, by chance, the insurrection succeeded, it would simply vegetate without spreading. If by some miracle it finally became contagious, it would risk being the occasion of a third world war. Thus, it is no longer for the coming of the proletariat that the Communists are preparing in their respective nations, but for war, plain and simple war. If victorious, the U. S. S. R. will spread its re? gime to Europe; the nations will fall like ripe fruit; if beaten, it's all up with her and the Communist parties. To reassure the bourgeoisie without losing the confidence of the masses, to permit it to govern while appearing to keep up the offensive, and to occupy positions of command without letting itself be compromised--that's the politics of the C. P. Between 1939 and 1940 we were the witnesses and victims of the decay of a war; today we are present at the decaying of a revolutionary situation.
If it should be asked whether the writer, in order to reach the masses, should offer his services to the Communist Party, I answer no. The politics of Stalinist Communism is incompatible in France with the honest practice of the literary craft. A party which is planning revolution should have nothing to lose. For the C. P. there is something to lose and something to handle circumspectly. As its immediate goal can no longer be the establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat by force, but rather that of safeguarding a Russia which is in danger, it now presents an ambiguous appearance. Progressive and revolutionary in its doctrine and in its avowed ends, it has become conservative in its means. Even before it has seized power, it has adopted the
? 2o8 I What Is Literature?
turn of mind, the reasoning, and the artifices of those who have long since attained it, those who feel that it is escaping them and who want to maintain themselves. There is some- thing in common, and it is not talent, between Joseph de Maistre and M. Garaudy. And generally it is enough to skim through a piece of Communist writing to pick out at random a hundred conservative practices: persuasion by repetition, by intimidation, by veiled threats, by forceful and scornful assertion, by cryptic allusions to demonstrations that are not forthcoming, by exhibiting so complete and superb a con- viction that, from the very start, it places itself above all debate, casts its spell, and ends by becoming contagious; the opponent is never answered; he is discredited; he belongs to the police, to the Intelligence Service; he's a fascist. As for proofs, they are never given, because they are terrible and
implicate too many people. If you insist upon knowing them, you are told to stop where you are and to take someone's word for the accusation. 'Don't force us to bring them out; you'll be sorry if you do. ' In short, the Com- munist intellectual adopts the attitude of the staff which condemned Dreyfus on secret evidence. He also reverts, to be sure, to the Manichaeism of the reactionaries, though he divides the world according to other principles. For the Stalinist a Trotskyist is an incarnation of evil, like the Jew for Maurras. Everything that comes from him is necessarily bad. On the other hand, the possession of certain tides serves as a seal of approval. Compare this sentence of Joseph de Maistre, 'The married woman is necessarily chaste,' with this one of a correspondent of Action, 'The communist is
the permanent hero of our time. ' That there are heroes in the Communist Party--let me be the first to admit it. So what? Has no married woman ever been weak? No, since she is married before God. And is it enough to enter the Party to become a hero? Yes, since the C. P. is the party of heroes. But what if someone cited the name of a Communist who sometimes was not all he should be? It's because he wasn't a real Communist.
In the nineteenth century one had to give all sorts of
? Situation of the Writer in 1947 | 209
guarantees and lead an exemplary life in order to cleanse oneself in the eyes of the bourgeois of the sin of writing, for literature is, in essence, heresy. The situation has not changed except that it is now the Communists, that is, the qualified representatives of the proletariat, who as a matter of principle regard the writer as suspect. Even though he may be irreproachable in his morals, a Communist intel- lectual bears within him this original defect: that he entered the party freefy; he was led to this decision by a thoughtful reading of Capital, a critical examination of the historical situation, an acute sense of justice and generosity, and a taste for solidarity; all this is proof of an independence which doesn't smell so very good. He entered the party by free choice; therefore, he can leave it. 38 He entered because he had criticized the politics of his class of origin; therefore, he will be able to criticize that of the representa- tives of his class of adoption. But in the very action by which he inaugurates a new life, there is a curse which will weigh upon him all through this life. From the moment of ordination there begins for him a long trial, similar to the one Kafka has described for us, in which the judges are unknown and the dossiers secret, where the only final sen- tences are condemnations. It is not up to his invisible accusers to give proof of his crime, as is customary in justice; it is for him to prove his innocence. As everything he writes can be held against him and as he knows it, each of his works presents the ambiguous character of being both a public appeal in the name of the C. P. and a secret plea for his own cause. Everything that, from the outside, for the readers, seems a chain of peremptory assertions, appears within the Party, in the eyes of the judges, as a humble and clumsy attempt at self-justification. When to us he appears most brilliant and most effective, he is perhaps then most guilty. Sometimes it seems to us--and perhaps he too believes it--that he has been raised into the hier- archy of the Party and that he has become its spokesman, but he is being tested or tricked; the rungs of the ladder are faked; when he thinks he's high up, he's far down. You
? 2io I What Is Literature?
can read his writings a hundred times but you'll never be able to decide their real importance. When Nisan, who was in charge of foreign politics for Ce soir, was in all honesty trying his utmost to prove that our only chance for salvation lay in a Franco-Russian pact, his secret judges, who let him talk on, already knew about Ribbentrop's con- versations with Molotov. If he thinks that he can get out of it by a corpselike obedience, he is mistaken. He is ex-
pected to have wit, pungency, lucidity, and inventiveness. But at the same time that they are required of him, he is penalized for these virtues, for they are, in themselves, tendencies towards crime. How is he to practise the critical spirit? The flaw is in him like the worm in a piece of fruit. He can please neither his readers, his judges, nor himself.
In the eyes of everyone and even of himself he is only a guilty subjectivity which deforms Knowledge by reflecting
it in his troubled waters. This deformation can be useful;
as his readers make no distinction between what comes from the author and what from the 'historical process', it is always possible to disclaim him. It is taken for granted that he dirties his hands in his job, and as his mission is to express C. P. politics from day to day, his articles still remain when the line has long since changed, and these are what the opponents of Stalinism refer to when they want
to show its contradictions or versatility. Thus, the writer
is not only presumed guilty in advance; he is charged with all past faults, since his name remains attached to the errors of the Party, and he is the scapegoat of all the political purges.
Nevertheless, it is not impossible that he may hold out for a long time if he learns to keep his qualities in leash when they run the risk of pulling him too far. Yet he must not use cynicism. Cynicism is as serious a vice as good will. Let him know how to keep his eyes shut; let him see what need not be seen, and let him forget sufficiently what he has seen in order never to write about it, yet let him remem- ber it sufficiently so that in the future he may avoid looking at it; let him carry his criticism far enough to determine the point where it should be brought to a halt, that is, let him
? Situation of the Writer in 1947 \ 211
go beyond this point In order to be able in the future to avoid the temptation of going beyond it, but let him know how to detach himself from this prospective criticism, to put it in parentheses, and to regard it as null and void; in short, let him at all times be aware that the mind is finite, bounded everywhere by magic frontiers, by mists, like the primitives who can count up to twenty and are mysteriously denied the power of going any further. This artificial fog which he must be always ready to spread between himself and risky evidence, we shall call, very simply, dishonesty. But we're notfinishedyet: let him avoid speaking too often about dogmas; it's not good to show them in broad day- light; the works of Marx, like the Bible of the Catholics, are dangerous to anyone who approaches them without a director of conscience; there is one in each cell; if doubts or scruples arise it is to him that one must go and talk. Nor should you put too many Communists in your novels or on the stage; if they have faults, they run the risk of displeas- ing; if they are too perfect, they bore. Stalinist politics has no desire to find its image in literature because it knows that
a portrait is already a challenge. One can get out of it by painting the 'permanent hero* en profil perdu--by making him appear at the end of the story to draw conclusions, or by everywhere suggesting his presence but without showing it, as Daudet with the Arle? sienne. As far as possible, avoid bringing up the revolution; that's rather dated. The Euro- pean proletariat no more governs its destiny than does the bourgeoisie; history is written elsewhere. It must be slowly weaned of its old dreams, and the perspective of insurrec- tion must be gently replaced by that of war. If the writer conforms to all these prescriptions, he will not be in greater favour on that account. He's a useless mouth; he doesn't work with his hands. He knows it; he suffers from an in- feriority complex; he is almost ashamed of his craft and puts as much zeal into bowing before the workers as Jules Lamai^tre put into bowing before the generals round about
1900.
During this period, the Marxist doctrine--which is quite
? 212 I What Is Literature?
intact--has been withering away; for want of internal con- troversy, it has been degraded to a stupid determinism. Marx, Lenin, and Engels said any number of times that explanation by causes had to yield to the dialectical process. But the dialectic does not admit of being put into the formulas of a catechism. An elementary scientism is being spread. History is accounted for by juxtapositions of causal and linear series. Shortly before the war, Politzer, the last of the great minds of French Communism, was forced to teach that 'the brain secretes thought' as an endocrine gland secretes hormones; when the Communist intellectual today wants to interpret history or human behaviour, he borrows from bourgeois ideology a deterministic psychology based on mechanism and the law of interest.
But there is worse. The conservation of the C. P. is today accompanied by an opportunism which contradicts it. It is not only a matter of safeguarding the U. S. S. R. , but it is also necessary to deal tactfully with the bourgeoisie. Thus, they talk its language: family, country, religion, morality. And as they have not thereby given up the idea of weaken- ing it, they try to fight it on its own ground by improving upon its principles. The result of this tactic is to superim- pose two contradictory conservatisms, materialist scholas- ticism and Christian moralism. The truth is that once you abandon all logic, it is not so difficult to pass from one to the other because both suppose the same sentimental attitude; it is a matter of holding fast to positions which are threatened, of refusing to discuss, and of masking fear behind anger. But the point is that the intellectual, by definition, must also use logic. Therefore, he is asked to cover up the contradictions by sleight-of-hand. He must do his best to reconcile the irreconcilable, to unite by force ideas which repel each other, and to cover up the soldering by glittering layers of fine style--to say nothing of the task which has fallen to him only recently, that is, to steal the history of France from the bourgeoisie, to annex the great Ferre? , little Bara, Saint Vincent de Paul, and Descartes. Poor Communist intellectuals. They have fled the ideology
? Situation of the Writer in 1947 \ 213
of their class of origin only to find it again in the class they have chosen. This time, there is no more laughing; work, family, country--these are the words they must sing. I imagine that they must often rather want to let loose, but they are chained. They are allowed to roar at phantoms or against some writers who have remained free and who represent nothing.
They'll start naming illustrious writers. To be sure, I recognize the fact that they had talent. Is it an accident if they no longer have any? I have shown above that the work of art, which is an absolute end, is opposed in essence to bourgeois utilitarianism. Do they think that it can accom- modate itself to Communist utilitarianism? In a genuinely revolutionary party it would find the propitious climate for its blossoming because the freedom of man and the coming of the classless society are likewise absolute goals, uncon- ditioned exigencies which literature can reflect in its own exigency. But the C. P. today has entered the infernal circle of means. It must take and keep key positions, that is, means of acquiring means. When ends withdraw, when means are swarming like gnats as far as the eye can see, the work of art in turn becomes a means. It enters the chain. Its ends and its principles become external to it. It is governed from the outside. It takes man by the belly or the short hairs. The writer maintains the appearance of talent, that is, the art of finding words which gleam, but some- thing is dead within. Literature has changed into propa- ganda. 39 Yet it is someone like M. Garaudy, a Communist and a propagandist, who accuses me of being a grave- digger. I could return the insult, but I prefer to plead guilty; if I could do so, I would bury literature with my own hands rather than make it serve ends which utilize it. But why the excitement? Grave-diggers are honest people, certainly unionized, perhaps Communists. Fd rather be a grave-digger than a lackey.
Since we are still free, we won't join the C. P. watch- dogs. The fact that we have talent does not depend upon us, but as we have chosen the profession of writing, each of
? 214 I What Is Literature?
us is responsible for literature, and whether or not it be- comes alienated does depend upon us. It is sometimes claimed that our books reflect the hesitations of the petty bourgeoisie which decides for neither the proletariat nor for capitalism. That's false; we've made up our minds. We are then told that our choice is ineffectual and abstract, that it is an intellectual game if it is not accompanied by our adhesion to a revolutionary party. It is true that today in France one can hardly reach the working classes if not through the Party. But only loose thinking can identify their cause with the C. P. 's. Even if, as citizens, we can in strictly specific circumstances support its politics with our votes, that does not mean that we should serve it with our pens. If the two alternatives are really the bourgeoisie and the C. P. , then the choice is impossible. For we do not have
the right to write for the oppressing class alone, nor to join forces with a party which asks us to work dishonestly and with a bad conscience. In so far as the Communist Party canalizes, almost in spite of itself, the aspirations of an entire oppressed class which irresistibly leads it to demand, for fear of being 'outflanked on the left', such measures as peace with the Viet Nam or the increase of salaries--which its whole political line is inclined to avoid--we are with this party against the bourgeoisie; in so far as certain well- intentioned bourgeois circles recognize that spirituality must be simultaneously a free negativity and a free con- struction, we are with these bourgeois against the C. P. In so far as a scurvy, opportunistic, conservative, and deter- ministic ideology is in contradiction with the very essence of literature we are against both the C. P. and the bour- geoisie. That means clearly that we are writing against everybody, that we have readers but no public. Bourgeois who have broken with our class but who have remained bourgeois in our morals, separated from the proletariat by the Communist screen, we remain up in the air; our good will serves no one, not even us; we are in the age of the un- discoverable public. Worse still, we are writing against the
current,
? Situation of the Writer in 194 7 | 215
The authors of the eighteenth century helped to make his- tory because the historical perspective of the moment was revolution and because a writer can and ought to align him- self on the side of revolution if it is proved that there is no other means of bringing an end to oppression. But the writer today can in no case approve of a war, because the social structure of war is dictatorship, because its results are always a matter of chance, and because, whatever happens, its costs are infinitely greater than the gains, and finally because war alienates literature by making it serve the propagandist hullabaloo.
Since our historical perspective is war, since we are asked to choose between the Anglo-Saxon and the Soviet blocs, and since we refuse to prepare for war with either one or the other, we have fallen outside history and are speaking in the desert.