It is tempered by a clear sense of lived
experience
which the writer alone communicates to his or her readers.
Sartre-Jean-Paul-What-is-literature¿-Introducing-Les-Temps-modernes-The-nationalization-of-literature-Black-orpheus
rature engage?
e as a program grounded in a fully articulated philosophy of history.
Only later does he accept this polyvalence as a condition rather than a conse- quence of his notion of commitment.
TAfs literary program extends to all writings irrespective of genre. Yet Sartre confers a privileged status on the journalistic essay as the form of writing best suited to disclose the experience of freedom: "It strikes us, in fact, that journalism is one of the literary genres and that it can become one of the most important of them. The ability to grasp meanings instantly and intuitively, and a talent for regrouping them in order to offer the reader immediately comprehensible synthetic wholes, are the qualities most crucial to a reporter; they are the ones we ask of all our collaborators" ("Introducing Les Temps modernes," p. 266). The importance of reportage in TM's program responds to the conditions of ceremony dominating French literature between the wars. "The Nationalization of Literature" describes how texts become pretexts for judgment. From the side of ceremony, each new book provides the opportunity to reassert its contribution to the interests of the Republic. The result is an empty literature of "national treasures. "
"The Nationalization of Literature" also contains Sartre's views on literary terror, defined by Jean Paulhan in The Flowers of Tarbes (1941) as a fear of the potential of all language to betray the purity of thought prior to expression. * Paulhan ultimately assimilates the terrorist
* Paulhan's inclusion on TM's editorial board reinforces Sartre's ties with Editions Gallimard. As director of the NRF between 1925 and 1940, Paulhan mediates between the founding group led by Gide and younger
? Introduction \ 11
attitude into a rhetoric of communication. For Sartre, however, terror turns literature into an alibi when it projects the meaning of a text into the future, thereby accommo- dating those who prefer to remain at a safe distance from the conflicts of the historical present. Sounding like a Jacques Derrida twenty years before the fact, Sartre concludes that we cannot be simultaneously inside and outside history. Concerning history, we are always (toujours de? ja`! ? ) insidel
"What Is Literature? " begins with a two-part definition of writing that opposes an instrumental prose to a poetic attitude more focused on the materiality of language. For the prose writer who makes use of words, language is a particular moment of action in the real world and almost an extension of the body ("a sixth finger, a third leg, in short, a pure function"). The prose writer is always looking toward the world beyond words while the poet considers them primarily as objects: "For the former, they are useful conventions, tools which gradually wear out and which one throws away when they are no longer serviceable; for the latter, they are natural things which sprout upon the earth like grass and trees" ("What Is Literature? " p. 29). For Sartre, prose and poetry are relations to language growing out of distinct attitudes and decisions. Both disclose the world, but in different ways: "For the word, which tears the writer of prose away from himself and throws him into the world, sends back to the poet his own image, like a mirror" ("What Is Literature? " p. 31). Of the two, only prose discloses the world with the intention of changing it. Only prose uses language to confer meaning on objects in the real world, thereby demonstrating that to speak is indeed to act.
Critics mistake the prose/poetry distinction as absolute when it clearly falls within a practice of writing relative to circumstance. The poetry rejected in "What Is Literature? "
contributors such as Malraux, Leiris, Sartre, and Raymond Queneau. After France falls to the Germans in June 1940, Paulhan refuses to direct the monthly under censorship. Over the next four years, he becomes a double agent who publically advocates literary publishing under the Vichy regime while he supports the underground Editions de Minuit and cofounds Les Lettres franc? aises.
? 12 I Introduction
is embodied by the Surrealists and by a pretension to political revolution that Sartre sees as overblown and dangerous: "They were the proclaimers of catastrophe in the time of the fat cows; in the time of the lean cows they have nothing more to say" ("What Is Literature? " p. 164). As with Flaubert and Proust, history refutes the Surrealists. In 1947, Sartre does not forget the lessons of the Occupation. If, as he argues, Surrealism is entering a period of with- drawal, it is one he is ready to advance . . . with a vengeance! Sartre's hostility is aimed at the Surrealists and at a relation to language he deems incompatible with TM's ambitions. Thus Sartre displaces--rather than rejects-- poetry because it does not transmit the clear and unambig- uous meaning he requires for TM's 1947 program. The poet's involvement with the materiality of language neglects the reader and the world. As a result, poetry does not attain the disclosure and praxis Sartre wants to promote.
"Black Orpheus," written as the preface to an anthology of works by African and West Indian poets, revises the program of litte? rature engage? e in two significant ways. First, it allows for poetry to be reconsidered in the context of colonialism, thereby transposing its marginal status in "What Is Literature? " into a meaningful function tied to social change: "For once at least, the most authentic revolutionary plan and the purest poetry come from the same source" ("Black Orpheus," p. 330). Second, it allows Sartre to mediate on behalf of Senghor and the poets in or- der to address the white European readers for whom the anthology is intended. The conflict between colonial and native cultures converges on a practice of poetry resistant to the conventional usage imposed on the Africans by the French. The black African and Caribbean poets who appropriate the French langauge "received" under colonial rule deny the instrumentality of a dominant culture much as the Surrealists sought to deny conventions of repre- sentation and expression: "When the Negro declares in French that he rejects French culture, he accepts with one hand what he rejects with the other; he sets up the
? Introduction \ 13
enemy's thinking-apparatus in himself, like a crusher" (p. 301).
The refusal of prose imposes a revised function for poetry as a means of generating self-awareness and liberation within an alienating culture. Ne? gritude poetry does not simply export the Surrealists' spirit of revolt. Whereas Breton and his followers want poetry to help liberate the unconscious in order to overcome alienation, the poetry in the Senghor anthology grows out of an oppression whose social and economic reality is lived on a daily basis. This context inverts the relationship between prose and poetry in "What Is Literature? " In "Black Orpheus," prose is denied and poetry asserted: "Strange and decisive turn: race is transmuted into historicity9 (p. 324). When Saint-Genet appears in 1952, Sartre's rehabilitation of poetry is com- plete.
I I recall, in fact, that in litte? rature engage? e, engagement must in no way lead to a forgetting of litte? rature, and that our concern must be to serve literature by infusing it with new blood, even as we serve the collectivity by attempting to give it the literature
it deserves.
Sartre, "Introducing Les Temps modernes" (1945)
Sartre's advocacy of journalism extends his postwar vision of the individual as both subject and agent of history. In this context, TAf's early program also supports the hybrid of academic disciplines known in France as the human sciences: "We would like our journal to contribute in a modest way to the elaboration of a synthetic anthropology. But it is not, we repeat, simply a question of effecting an advance in the domain of pure knowledge: the more distant goal we are aiming at is a liberation" ("Introducing Les Temps modernes, p. 261). The apparent eclipse of literature and philosophy by politics points to Sartre's growing involvement with prac- tical knowledge over other ("purer") forms after World War
? 14 I Introduction
II. What, then, is the synthetic anthropology announced in "Introducing TM" and how does it relate to the liberatory impulse behind litte? rature engage? e?
For the Sartre of 1945, the study of man can be nothing other than prospective and open-ended. The project of a synthetic anthropology extends the claim in Being and Nothingness that existence precedes essence. In keeping with Sartre's progression toward liberation through praxis, it inscribes consideration of a human condition within a lived present that is markedly historical: "Praxis, then, becomes the key concept for Sartre, the linchpin in his philosophy of history and the mechanism of mediation between knowledge and being" (Michael Sprinker, Imaginary Relations: Aesthetics and Ideology in the Theory ofHistorical Materialism {New York: Verso, 1987], pp. 186-187). The priority of action over knowledge is not a simple reversal, not a rejection of the latter in favor of the former. The synthetic anthropology announced in TM's first issue is Sartre's attempt to connect the ontology of Being and Nothingness to the philosophy of history he sets forth in his i 9 6 0 Critique of Dialectical
Reason. * As a critical project, Sartre's synthetic anthropol- ogy supplements the pure--that is, abstract and speculative--knowledge of philosophy with the lived his- torical dimension of the postwar present it is 77W's mission to disclose. In so doing, it responds to Marx's imperative-- in Theses on Feuerbach--to transform the world that philos- ophers have only tried to interpret.
The centrality of praxis to Sartre's postwar position on writing represents a swing to practical politics which, in turn, entails its own problematic on the relation between thought and action. In light of Sartre's intellectual evolu- tion, the growing importance he confers on praxis points to Martin Heidegger's inquiry into the end of philosophy.
* In Sartre and "Les Temps modernes" (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), Howard Davies analyzes TM's attitudes toward the social sciences, anthropology in particular. His discussion of the roles of Michel
Leiris and Claude Le? vi-Strauss is informed and incisive. See also Terry Nichols Clark, Prophets and Patrons: The French University and the Emergence of the Social Sciences (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1973).
? Introduction \ 15
Much rests on how the term 'end" is understood. Some forty years after the fact, it remains unclear whether Sartre sees his move toward politics as a logical consequence ("end" as culmination) of philosophy or whether the breakdown ("end" as demise) of philosophy is a prerequisite to action. While the former sense holds true for Sartre in the immediate postwar period, a longer duration suggests in retrospect that his progression forecast a move from theory to political action more common in France some twenty years later (Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, trans. L. Scott-Fox and J. M. Harding [New York: Cam- bridge University Press, 1980}, p. 136). Like others of his generation, Sartre first understands history through philos- ophy until he realizes that philosophy itself derives from history in the form of politics.
"What Is Literature? " addresses the question of audience--"For whom does one write? "--as a practical concern for how to incorporate potential readers into TATs empirical public. To this end, Sartre sees that litte? rature engage? e must adapt to the media and technology of mass communication: "The book is the noblest, the most ancient of forms; to be sure, we will always have to return to it. But there is a literary art of radio, film, editorial, and report- ing . . . We must learn to speak in images, to transpose the ideas of our books into these new languages ("What Is Literature? " pp. 216-217). Sartre supports this imperative on a personal level with lectures, interviews and radio broadcasts as well as plays {The Dirty Hands), screenplays {The Chips Are Down), novels {Iron in the Soul), and essays {Saint Genet), all undertaken on the premise that the committed writer must contend with as many technologies and media as possible. If not, he or she can expect to be read only by the bourgeoisie. This is the barrier Sartre hopes to break when he writes "Black Orpheus" for Senghor and edits a book in support of Henri Martin, the French sailor court-martialed in 1950 for protesting the French presence in Indochina. It is this expanded sense of commitment as praxis that he embodies over the following two decades as an
? 16 I Introduction
intellectual who takes a public stand on behalf of others who are less able to plead their own cause.
Immediate and ongoing responses to "What Is Litera- ture? " focus on the wider sense of committed writing and the ambitions Sartre holds for it. As early as 1947, Roland Barthes answers Sartre with what later becomes the opening section of Writing Degree Zero. In place of the prose/poetry distinction, Barthes posits a plurality of writings removed from a unified notion of literature. A decade later, his Mythologies combines a Sartrean impulse to disclose the present with a systematic model of ideology in everyday life. In both cases, representation in literature and popular culture is associated with identity at the level of individual and institution. Barthes's impulse to disclose is markedly Sartrean, even if his methodology is not. Furthermore, both texts by Barthes distinguish between commitment at the level of language as opposed to commitment at the level of content. Finally, Barthes's notions of writing and scriptor suggest a problematic of the writing subject that Sartre
addresses over the next three decades in his studies on Mallarme? , Genet, and Flaubert. *
If we are to render unto Sartre his due, we must contend with the fact that the questions raised by his writings outlive the answers they provide. In this sense, Theodor Adorno's critique of litte? rature engage? e raises a number of substantive issues. Adorno begins by noting the confusion caused by opposing a committed art to an autonomous-- and presumably uncommitted--art. He goes on to question the importance Sartre places on free choice: "The work of art becomes an appeal to subjects, because it is itself nothing other than a declaration by a subject of his own choice or failure to choose" ("Commitment," p. 78). For Adorno, Sartre's emphasis on the work of art as an appeal to freedom
* In 1965 lectures published in 1972 as "A Plea for Intellectuals," Sartre responds directly to Barthes when he notes that style is "the expression of our invisible conditioning by the world behind us. " Between Existentialism and Marxism, trans. John Mathews (New York: Pantheon, 1974), p. 282.
? Introduction \ IJ
is subverted by historical reality which predetermines the range of possible choices.
Unlike Sartre, Adorno is less concerned with generating specific disclosure or implementing change than with dis- rupting fundamental attitudes. His own aesthetic theory sees the representation ('gesture toward reality") achieved by the work of art as more meaningful than the authorial intention or motivation behind it. Setting the negative example of Brecht's theater alongside that of Sartre, Adorno rejects a committed art that ends up being neither aesthet- ically nor politically effective. He concludes in support of an ostensibly autonomous art--Kafka and Beckett are his examples--capable of expressing what is barred to politics: "Kafka's prose and Beckett's plays, or the truly monstrous novel The Unnameable, have an effect by comparison with which officially committed works look like pantomime. Kafka and Beckett arouse the fear which existentialism merely talks about" (Adorno, p. 86).
To his credit, Adorno notes that Sartre reacts against a tradition of art for art's sake in France which has no equivalent impact in postwar Germany. But what he rejects in Sartre (as in Brecht) is the pretense of a committed art's carrying a moral or political message in a culture which inevitably degrades that message into an ineffectual com- modity. Such degradation is less an inherent quality of art or the artist than a condition of postwar modernity: "This is not a time for political art, but politics has migrated into autonomous art, and nowhere more so than where it seems to be politically dead" (Adorno, p. 89). In sum, the differences between Adorno and Sartre engage practice-- specifically, Sartre's theater and fiction--rather than theory. Because Adorno believes that art is invariably politicized, his emphasis on the autonomous works of Kafka and Beckett is intended as sociopolitical. The Sartrean program of litte? rature engage? e sets literature against politics so as to assert its inherent political value: "Proclaiming that literature is
already intrinsically political is the best way of freeing it from the narrow sense of the political to which others would
? 18 I Introduction
like to bind it" (Boschetti, p. no). As for the pretense of a committed art, The Words and Sartre's i 9 6 0 essay on Merleau-Ponty acknowledge the failings of litte? rature engage? e. Indeed, Adorno notes that Sartre's intellectual honesty does him credit.
I The intellectual, the product of a class-divided society, . . . is thus a product of history. In this sense, no society can complain of its intellectuals without accusing itself, for it has the intellectuals it makes.
Sartre, "A Plea for Intellectuals" (1972)
Sartre's trajectory traverses all three of Debray's intellec- tual cycles, from university to publishing and media. In 1945, he starts TM as a former academic ready to extend the cultures of literature and philosophy to a wider public. After the Liberation, he remains attentive to what Adorno refers
to disparagingly as the culture industry. But unlike Adorno, Sartre engages the emerging media cycle on its own terms
by maintaining a high level of public visibility. By the mid-1960s, cold war politics put him at odds with both supporters and friends. During a 1966 visit to Japan, he delivers three lectures at Tokyo and Kyoto in which he reformulates committed writing on the basis of a revised notion of the intellectual as "someone who meddles in what is not his business' ("Plea," p. 230).
Throughout the lectures, Sartre emphasizes the particu- larity of historical events. On the subject of fighting against racism, for example, he refers not only to its frequency as idea or image in books, plays, and films, but also to its lived historical form in trials (the Dreyfus Affair), newspaper editorials, and political speeches: "In short, the intellectual must work to at the level of events to produce other concrete events that will combat pogroms or racist verdicts in the courts" (ibid. , p. 251). For the Sartre of 1966, the intellectual's activist role extends the call to action expressed
? Introduction \ 19
by the concept of praxis twenty years earlier. This activist dimension accounts for litte? rature engage? es persistent appeal among the young and the oppressed, for whom the imper- ative to act in and on history--whether imposed or chosen-- is experienced as the mixture of ideas and values Sartre calls the singular universal.
"A Plea for Intellectuals" also addresses issues of language and communication taken up in "What Is Literature? " but with a clear sense of the contradictions internalized by the intellectuals who, as technicians of specialized knowledge, find themselves "the instruments of ends which remain foreign to them and which they are forbidden to question" ("Plea," p. 240). Emphasis on historical particularity does not prevent Sartre from reiterating the value of the literary work as the objective model of the singular universal: "A book is necessarily a part of the world, through which the totality of the world is made manifest, although without ever being fully disclosed" (ibid. , p. 275). In such terms, Sartre's evolution toward practical politics following "What Is Literature? " does not entail rejection of the literary work's singular capacity to disclose being-in-the-world.
The Heideggerian ring of this capacity to disclose should not be misconstrued as vaguely poetic or metaphysical.
It is tempered by a clear sense of lived experience which the writer alone communicates to his or her readers. Despite the cultural privilege and isolation of Western writers--himself included--from true revolutionary activity, Sartre asserts the essential (rather than accidental) capacity of all writers to fulfill the intellectual function of disclosing the lived present. This assertion echoes the call to action in and on history set forth in TM's early program. It suggests that despite its own historical particularity, the concept of committed writing is far from exhausted by its archival status as a postwar phenomenon.
Re? gis Debray notes in passing that all intellectual universes have their own coordinates of time and space. What might Sartre's coordinates be? For better or worse, popular memory retains the image of Henri Cartier-
? 20 I Introduction
Bresson's photo of a fortyish Sartre with horn-rimmed eyeglasses, philosopher's scarf, and obligatory pipe. There is, of course, more than the image. More than three decades after the Liberation, the questions Sartre raises and the ambitions he holds continue to set the agenda for literary and intellectual debate in France. Whether one sides with him or against him, the issues he addresses are the major issues of his (modern) times. As Etienne Barilier--for one-- puts it in Les Petits Camarades (Paris: Julliard, 1987), he would rather be wrong with Sartre than right with Aron.
The four texts in the present volume point repeatedly to the interplay of thought, action, and circumstance. They evoke an age marked by war in which the consequences of writing and reading lead to issues unresolved some forty to fifty years after the fact. (It is not surprising that Claude Lanzmann, producer of the Holocaust film Shoahy has served on TATs editorial board for over thirty years. ) The Sartrean program of committed writing inscribes questions of the theory and practice of literature within a problematic of choice and accountability for which solutions are neither simple nor definitive. That remains--despite the vagaries of Sartre's career and the ambivalence of sympathizers and detractors alike--a lesson for the present which has lost little of its urgency.
Steven Ungar
? What Is Literature?
? <<TTF you want to commit yourself/ writes a young im- I becile, 'what are you waiting for? Join the Communist JL Party/ A great writer who committed himself often and then cried off still more often, but who has forgotten, said to me, 'The worst artists are the most committed. Look at the Soviet painters/ An old critic gently complained, "You want to murder literature. Contempt for belles-lettres is spread out insolently all through your review/ A petty mind calls me pigheaded, which for him is evidently the highest insult. An author who barely crawled from one war to the other and whose name sometimes awakens languishing memories in old men accuses me of not being concerned with immortality; he knows, thank God, any number of people whose chief hope it is. In the eyes of an American hack-journalist the trouble with me is that I have not read Bergson or Freud; as for Flaubert, who did not commit himself, it seems that he haunts me like remorse. Smart-alecks wink at me, 'And poetry? And painting? And music? You want to commit them, too? ' And some martial spirits demand, 'What's it all about? Commitment in liter- ature? Well, it's the old socialist realism, unless it's a revival
of populism, only more aggressive/
What nonsense. They read quickly, badly, and pass judge-
ment before they have understood. So let's begin all over again. This doesn't amuse anyone, neither you nor me. But we have to hit the nail on the head. And since critics con- demn me in the name of literature without ever saying what they mean by that, the best answer to give them is to examine the art of writing without prejudice. What is writing? Why does one write? For whom? The fact is, it seems that nobody has ever asked himself these questions.
? What Is Writing?
No, we do not want to 'commit' painting, sculpture, and music 'too', or at least not in the same way. And why would we want to? When a writer of past cen- turies expressed an opinion about his craft, was he immedi- ately asked to apply it to the other arts? But today it's the thing to 'talk painting' in the jargon of the musician or the literary man and to "talk literature' in the jargon of the painter, as if at bottom there were only one art which ex- pressed itself indifferently in one or the other of these languages, like the Spinozistic substance which is adequately reflected by each of its attributes.
Doubtless, one could find at the origin of every artistic calling a certain undifferentiated choice which circum- stances, education, and contact with the world particu- larized only later. Besides, there is no doubt that the arts of a period mutually influence each other and are conditioned by the same social factors. But those who want to expose the absurdity of a literary theory by showing that it is inap- plicable to music must first prove that the arts are parallel.
Now, there is no such parallelism. Here, as everywhere,
it is not only the form which differentiates, but the matter
as well. And it is one thing to work with colour and sound,
and another to express oneself by means of words. Notes, colours, and forms are not signs. They refer to nothing exterior to themselves. To be sure, it is quite impossible to reduce them strictly to themselves, and the idea of a pure sound, for example, is an abstraction. As Merleau-Ponty
has pointed out in The Phenomenology of Perception, there is no quality of sensation so bare that it is not penetrated with significance. But the dim little meaning which dwells within
it, a light joy, atimidsadness, remains immanent or trembles about it like a heat mist; it is colour or sound. Who can
? 26 I What Is Literature?
distinguish the green apple from its tart gaiety? And aren't we already saying too much in naming 'the tart gaiety of the green apple? There is green, there is red, and that is all. They are things, they exist by themselves.
It is true that one might, by convention, confer the value of signs upon them. Thus, we talk of the language of flowers. But if, after the agreement, white roses signify 'fidelity' to me, the fact is that I have stopped seeing them as roses. My attention cuts through them to aim beyond them at this abstract virtue. I forget them. I no longer pay attention to their mossy abundance, to their sweet stagnant odour. I have not even perceived them. That means that I have not behaved like an artist. For the artist, the colour, the bouquet, the tinkling of the spoon on the saucer, are things, in the highest degree. He stops at the quality of the sound or the form. He returns to it constantly and is en- chanted with it. It is this colour-object that he is going to transfer to his canvas, and the only modification he will make it undergo is that he will transform it into an imaginary object. He is therefore as far as he can be from considering colours and signs as a language. 1
What is valid for the elements of artistic creation is also valid for their combinations. The painter does not want to draw signs on his canvas, he wants to create a thing. 2 And if he puts together red, yellow, and green, there is no reason why this collection of colours should have a definable significance, that is, should refer particularly to another object. Doubdess the composition is also inhabited by a soul, and since there must have been motives, even hidden ones, for the painter to have chosen yellow rather than violet, it may be asserted that the objects thus created reflect his deepest tendencies. However, they never express his anger, his anguish, or his joy as do words or the expression of the face; they are impregnated with these emotions; and in order for them to have crept into these colours, which by themselves already had something like a meaning, his emotions get mixed up and grow obscure. Nobody can quite recognize them there.
? What Is Writing? | 27
Tintoretto did not choose that yellow rift in the sky above Golgotha to signify anguish or to provoke it. It is anguish and yellow sky at the same time. Not sky of anguish or anguished sky; it is an anguish become thing, an anguish which has turned into yellow rift of sky, and which thereby is submerged and impasted by the qualities peculiar to things, by their impermeability, their extension, their blind permanence, their externality, and that infinity of relations which they maintain with other things. That is, it is no longer readable. It is like an immense and vain effort, for- ever arrested half-way between sky and earth, to express what their nature keeps them from expressing.
Similarly, the significance of a melody--if one can still speak of significance--is nothing outside the melody itself, unlike ideas, which can be adequately rendered in several ways. Call it joyous or sad. It will always be over and above anything you can say about it. Not because its passions, which are perhaps at the origin of the invented theme, have, by being incorporated into notes, undergone a transubstantiation and a transmutation. A cry of grief is a sign of the grief which provokes it, but a song of grief is both grief itself and something other than grief Or, if one wishes to adopt the existentialist vocabulary, it is a grief which does not exist any more, which is. But, you will say, suppose the painter portrays houses? That's just it. He makes them, that is, he creates an imaginary house on the canvas and not a sign of a house. And the house which thus appears preserves all the ambiguity of real houses.
The writer can guide you and, if he describes a hovel, make it seem the symbol of social injustice and provoke your indignation. The painter is mute. He presents you with a hovel, that's all. You are free to see in it what you like. That attic window will never be the symbol of misery; for that, it would have to be a sign, whereas it is a thing. The bad painter looks for the type. He paints the Arab, the Child, the Woman; the good one knows that neither the Arab nor the proletarian exists either in reality or on his canvas. He offers a workman, a certain workman. And
? 28 I What Is Literature?
what are we to think about a workman? An infinity of con- tradictory things. All thoughts and all feelings are there, adhering to the canvas in a state of profound undifferentia- tion. It is up to you to choose. Sometimes, high-minded artists try to move us. They paint long lines of workmen waiting in the snow to be hired, the emaciated faces of the unemployed, batdefields. They affect us no more than does Greuze with his 'Prodigal Son\ And that masterpiece, 'The Massacre of Guernica', does anyone think that it won over a single heart to the Spanish cause? And yet something is said that can never quite be heard and that would take an infinity of words to express. And Picasso's long harlequins, ambiguous and eternal, haunted with inexplicable meaning, inseparable from their stooping leanness and their pale diamond-shaped tights, are emotion become flesh, emotion which the flesh has absorbed as the blotter absorbs ink, and emotion which is unrecognizable, lost, strange to itself, scattered to the four corners of space and yet present to itself.
I have no doubt that charity or anger can produce other objects, but they will likewise be swallowed up; they will lose their name; there will remain only things haunted by a mysterious soul. One does not paint meanings; one does not put them to music. Under these conditions, who would dare require that the painter or musician commit himself?
On the other hand, the writer deals with meanings. Still,
a distinction must be made. The empire of signs is prose; poetry is on the side of painting, sculpture, and music. I am accused of detesting it; the proof, so they say, is that Les Temps Modernes* publishes very few poems. On the contrary, this is proof that we like it. To be convinced, all one need do is take a look at contemporary production. 'At least/ critics say triumphandy, 'you can't even dream of committing it. ' Indeed. But why should I want to? Because
it uses words as does prose? But it does not use them in the same way, and it does not even use them at all. I should
*A periodical edited by M. Sartre. --Translator.
? What Is Writing? \ 29
rather say that it serves them. Poets are men who refuse to utilise language. Now, since the quest for truth takes place in and by language conceived as a certain kind of instru- ment, it is unnecessary to imagine that they aim to discern or expound the true. Nor do they dream of naming the world, and, this being the case, they name nothing at all, for naming implies a perpetual sacrifice of the name to the object named, or, as Hegel would say, the name is revealed as the inessen- tial in the face of the thing which is essential. They do not speak, neither do they keep silent; it is something different. It has been said that they wanted to destroy the 'word* by monstrous couplings, but this is false. For then they would have to be thrown into the midst of utilitarian language and would have had to try to retrieve words from it in odd litde groups, as for example 'horse' and "butter* by writing "horses of butter'. 8
Besides the fact that such an enterprise would require infinite time, it is not conceivable that one can keep oneself on the plane of the utilitarian project, consider words as instruments, and at the same time contemplate taking their instrumentality away from them. In fact, the poet has with- drawn from language-instrument in a single movement. Once and for all he has chosen the poetic attitude which considers words as things and not as signs. For the am- biguity of the sign implies that one can penetrate it at will like a pane of glass and pursue the thing signified, or turn one's gaze towards its reality and consider it as an object. The man who talks is beyond words and near the object, whereas the poet is on this side of them. For the former, they are domesticated; for the latter they are in the wild state. For the former, they are usefid conventions, tools which gradually wear out and which one throws away when they are no longer serviceable; for the latter, they are natural things which sprout naturally upon the earth like grass and trees.
But if the poet dwells upon words, as does the painter with colours and the musician with sounds, that does not mean that they have lost all meaning in his eyes. Indeed, it
? 30 I What Is Literature?
is meaning alone which can give words their verbal unity. Without it they are frittered away into sounds and strokes of the pen. Only, it too becomes natural. It is no longer the goal which is always out of reach and which human transcendence is always aiming at, but a property of each term, analogous to the expression of a face, to the little sad or gay meaning of sounds and colours. Having flowed into the word, having been absorbed by its sonority or visual aspect, having been thickened and defaced, it too is a thing, uncreated and eternal.
For the poet, language is a structure of the external world. The speaker is in a situation in langauge; he is invested by words. They are prolongations of his senses, his pincers, his antennae, his spectacles. He manoeuvres them from within; he feels them as if they were his body; he is surrounded by a verbal body which he is hardly conscious of and which extends his action upon the world. The poet is outside language. He sees the reverse side of words, as if he did not share the human condition and as if he werefirstmeeting the word as a barrier as he comes towards men. Instead offirstknowing things by their name, it seems that first he has a silent contact with them, since, turning towards that other species of thing which for him is the word, touching words, testing them, fingering them, he discovers in them a slight luminosity of their own and particular affinities with the earth, the sky, the water, and all created things.
Not knowing how to use them as a sign of an aspect of the world, he sees in the word the image of one of these aspects. And the verbal image he chooses for its resemblance to the willow tree or the ash tree is not necessarily the word which we use to designate these objects. As he is already on the outside, he considers words as a trap to catch a fleeing reality rather than as indicators which throw him out of himself into the midst of things. In short, all language is for him the mirror of the world. As a result, important changes take place in the internal economy of the word. Its sonority, its length, its masculine or feminine endings, its visual aspect, compose for him a face of flesh which
? What Is Writing? \ 31
represents rather than expresses meaning. Inversely, as the meaning is realised, the physical aspect of the word is reflected within it, and it, in its turn, functions as an image of the verbal body. Like its sign, too, for it has lost its pre- eminence; since words, like things, are given, the poet does not decide whether the former exist for the latter or vice versa.
Thus, between the word and the thing signified, there is established a double reciprocal relation of magical resem- blance and meaning. And the poet does not utilise the word, he does not choose between different senses given to it; each of them, instead of appearing to him as an autonomous function, is given to him as a material quality which merges before his eyes with the other accepted meanings.
Thus, in each word he realizes, solely by the effect of the poetic attitude, the metaphors which Picasso dreamed of when he wanted to do a matchbox which was completely a bat without ceasing to be a matchbox. Florence is city, flower, and woman. It is city-flower, city-woman, and girl- flower all at the same time. And the strange object which thus appears has the liquidity of the rivery the soft, tawny ardency oigold, andfinallygives itself up with propriety and, by the continuous diminution of the silent e, prolongs indefinitely its modest blossoming. * To that is added the insidious effect of biography. For me, Florence is also a certain woman, an American actress who played in the silent films of my childhood, and about whom I have forgotten everything except that she was as long as a long evening glove and always a bit weary and always chaste and always married and misunderstood and whom I loved and whose
name was Florence.
For the word, which tears the writer of prose away from
? This sentence is not fully intelligible in translation as the author is here associating the component sounds of the word Florence with the meaning of the French words they evoke. Thus: FL-OR-ENCE,
fleuve,ory andde? cence. Thelatterpartofthesentencereferstothepractice in French poetry of giving, in certain circumstances, a syllabic value to the otherwise silent terminal e. --Translator.
? $2 I What Is Literature?
himself and throws him out into the world, sends back to the poet his own image, like a mirror. This is what justifies the double undertaking of Leiris who, on the one hand, in his Glossary, tries to give certain words a poetic definition, that is, one which is by itself a synthesis of recipro- cal implications between the sonorous body and the verbal soul, and, on the other hand, in a still unpublished work, goes in quest of remembrance of things past, taking as guides a few words which for him are particularly charged with feeling. Thus, the poetic word is a microcosm.
The crisis of language which broke out at the beginning of this century is a poetic crisis. Whatever the social and historical factors, it showed itself in an attack of deperson- alization when the writer was confronted by words. He no longer knew how to use them, and, in Bergson's famous formula, he only half recognized them. He approached them with a completely fruitful feeling of strangeness.
TAfs literary program extends to all writings irrespective of genre. Yet Sartre confers a privileged status on the journalistic essay as the form of writing best suited to disclose the experience of freedom: "It strikes us, in fact, that journalism is one of the literary genres and that it can become one of the most important of them. The ability to grasp meanings instantly and intuitively, and a talent for regrouping them in order to offer the reader immediately comprehensible synthetic wholes, are the qualities most crucial to a reporter; they are the ones we ask of all our collaborators" ("Introducing Les Temps modernes," p. 266). The importance of reportage in TM's program responds to the conditions of ceremony dominating French literature between the wars. "The Nationalization of Literature" describes how texts become pretexts for judgment. From the side of ceremony, each new book provides the opportunity to reassert its contribution to the interests of the Republic. The result is an empty literature of "national treasures. "
"The Nationalization of Literature" also contains Sartre's views on literary terror, defined by Jean Paulhan in The Flowers of Tarbes (1941) as a fear of the potential of all language to betray the purity of thought prior to expression. * Paulhan ultimately assimilates the terrorist
* Paulhan's inclusion on TM's editorial board reinforces Sartre's ties with Editions Gallimard. As director of the NRF between 1925 and 1940, Paulhan mediates between the founding group led by Gide and younger
? Introduction \ 11
attitude into a rhetoric of communication. For Sartre, however, terror turns literature into an alibi when it projects the meaning of a text into the future, thereby accommo- dating those who prefer to remain at a safe distance from the conflicts of the historical present. Sounding like a Jacques Derrida twenty years before the fact, Sartre concludes that we cannot be simultaneously inside and outside history. Concerning history, we are always (toujours de? ja`! ? ) insidel
"What Is Literature? " begins with a two-part definition of writing that opposes an instrumental prose to a poetic attitude more focused on the materiality of language. For the prose writer who makes use of words, language is a particular moment of action in the real world and almost an extension of the body ("a sixth finger, a third leg, in short, a pure function"). The prose writer is always looking toward the world beyond words while the poet considers them primarily as objects: "For the former, they are useful conventions, tools which gradually wear out and which one throws away when they are no longer serviceable; for the latter, they are natural things which sprout upon the earth like grass and trees" ("What Is Literature? " p. 29). For Sartre, prose and poetry are relations to language growing out of distinct attitudes and decisions. Both disclose the world, but in different ways: "For the word, which tears the writer of prose away from himself and throws him into the world, sends back to the poet his own image, like a mirror" ("What Is Literature? " p. 31). Of the two, only prose discloses the world with the intention of changing it. Only prose uses language to confer meaning on objects in the real world, thereby demonstrating that to speak is indeed to act.
Critics mistake the prose/poetry distinction as absolute when it clearly falls within a practice of writing relative to circumstance. The poetry rejected in "What Is Literature? "
contributors such as Malraux, Leiris, Sartre, and Raymond Queneau. After France falls to the Germans in June 1940, Paulhan refuses to direct the monthly under censorship. Over the next four years, he becomes a double agent who publically advocates literary publishing under the Vichy regime while he supports the underground Editions de Minuit and cofounds Les Lettres franc? aises.
? 12 I Introduction
is embodied by the Surrealists and by a pretension to political revolution that Sartre sees as overblown and dangerous: "They were the proclaimers of catastrophe in the time of the fat cows; in the time of the lean cows they have nothing more to say" ("What Is Literature? " p. 164). As with Flaubert and Proust, history refutes the Surrealists. In 1947, Sartre does not forget the lessons of the Occupation. If, as he argues, Surrealism is entering a period of with- drawal, it is one he is ready to advance . . . with a vengeance! Sartre's hostility is aimed at the Surrealists and at a relation to language he deems incompatible with TM's ambitions. Thus Sartre displaces--rather than rejects-- poetry because it does not transmit the clear and unambig- uous meaning he requires for TM's 1947 program. The poet's involvement with the materiality of language neglects the reader and the world. As a result, poetry does not attain the disclosure and praxis Sartre wants to promote.
"Black Orpheus," written as the preface to an anthology of works by African and West Indian poets, revises the program of litte? rature engage? e in two significant ways. First, it allows for poetry to be reconsidered in the context of colonialism, thereby transposing its marginal status in "What Is Literature? " into a meaningful function tied to social change: "For once at least, the most authentic revolutionary plan and the purest poetry come from the same source" ("Black Orpheus," p. 330). Second, it allows Sartre to mediate on behalf of Senghor and the poets in or- der to address the white European readers for whom the anthology is intended. The conflict between colonial and native cultures converges on a practice of poetry resistant to the conventional usage imposed on the Africans by the French. The black African and Caribbean poets who appropriate the French langauge "received" under colonial rule deny the instrumentality of a dominant culture much as the Surrealists sought to deny conventions of repre- sentation and expression: "When the Negro declares in French that he rejects French culture, he accepts with one hand what he rejects with the other; he sets up the
? Introduction \ 13
enemy's thinking-apparatus in himself, like a crusher" (p. 301).
The refusal of prose imposes a revised function for poetry as a means of generating self-awareness and liberation within an alienating culture. Ne? gritude poetry does not simply export the Surrealists' spirit of revolt. Whereas Breton and his followers want poetry to help liberate the unconscious in order to overcome alienation, the poetry in the Senghor anthology grows out of an oppression whose social and economic reality is lived on a daily basis. This context inverts the relationship between prose and poetry in "What Is Literature? " In "Black Orpheus," prose is denied and poetry asserted: "Strange and decisive turn: race is transmuted into historicity9 (p. 324). When Saint-Genet appears in 1952, Sartre's rehabilitation of poetry is com- plete.
I I recall, in fact, that in litte? rature engage? e, engagement must in no way lead to a forgetting of litte? rature, and that our concern must be to serve literature by infusing it with new blood, even as we serve the collectivity by attempting to give it the literature
it deserves.
Sartre, "Introducing Les Temps modernes" (1945)
Sartre's advocacy of journalism extends his postwar vision of the individual as both subject and agent of history. In this context, TAf's early program also supports the hybrid of academic disciplines known in France as the human sciences: "We would like our journal to contribute in a modest way to the elaboration of a synthetic anthropology. But it is not, we repeat, simply a question of effecting an advance in the domain of pure knowledge: the more distant goal we are aiming at is a liberation" ("Introducing Les Temps modernes, p. 261). The apparent eclipse of literature and philosophy by politics points to Sartre's growing involvement with prac- tical knowledge over other ("purer") forms after World War
? 14 I Introduction
II. What, then, is the synthetic anthropology announced in "Introducing TM" and how does it relate to the liberatory impulse behind litte? rature engage? e?
For the Sartre of 1945, the study of man can be nothing other than prospective and open-ended. The project of a synthetic anthropology extends the claim in Being and Nothingness that existence precedes essence. In keeping with Sartre's progression toward liberation through praxis, it inscribes consideration of a human condition within a lived present that is markedly historical: "Praxis, then, becomes the key concept for Sartre, the linchpin in his philosophy of history and the mechanism of mediation between knowledge and being" (Michael Sprinker, Imaginary Relations: Aesthetics and Ideology in the Theory ofHistorical Materialism {New York: Verso, 1987], pp. 186-187). The priority of action over knowledge is not a simple reversal, not a rejection of the latter in favor of the former. The synthetic anthropology announced in TM's first issue is Sartre's attempt to connect the ontology of Being and Nothingness to the philosophy of history he sets forth in his i 9 6 0 Critique of Dialectical
Reason. * As a critical project, Sartre's synthetic anthropol- ogy supplements the pure--that is, abstract and speculative--knowledge of philosophy with the lived his- torical dimension of the postwar present it is 77W's mission to disclose. In so doing, it responds to Marx's imperative-- in Theses on Feuerbach--to transform the world that philos- ophers have only tried to interpret.
The centrality of praxis to Sartre's postwar position on writing represents a swing to practical politics which, in turn, entails its own problematic on the relation between thought and action. In light of Sartre's intellectual evolu- tion, the growing importance he confers on praxis points to Martin Heidegger's inquiry into the end of philosophy.
* In Sartre and "Les Temps modernes" (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), Howard Davies analyzes TM's attitudes toward the social sciences, anthropology in particular. His discussion of the roles of Michel
Leiris and Claude Le? vi-Strauss is informed and incisive. See also Terry Nichols Clark, Prophets and Patrons: The French University and the Emergence of the Social Sciences (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1973).
? Introduction \ 15
Much rests on how the term 'end" is understood. Some forty years after the fact, it remains unclear whether Sartre sees his move toward politics as a logical consequence ("end" as culmination) of philosophy or whether the breakdown ("end" as demise) of philosophy is a prerequisite to action. While the former sense holds true for Sartre in the immediate postwar period, a longer duration suggests in retrospect that his progression forecast a move from theory to political action more common in France some twenty years later (Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, trans. L. Scott-Fox and J. M. Harding [New York: Cam- bridge University Press, 1980}, p. 136). Like others of his generation, Sartre first understands history through philos- ophy until he realizes that philosophy itself derives from history in the form of politics.
"What Is Literature? " addresses the question of audience--"For whom does one write? "--as a practical concern for how to incorporate potential readers into TATs empirical public. To this end, Sartre sees that litte? rature engage? e must adapt to the media and technology of mass communication: "The book is the noblest, the most ancient of forms; to be sure, we will always have to return to it. But there is a literary art of radio, film, editorial, and report- ing . . . We must learn to speak in images, to transpose the ideas of our books into these new languages ("What Is Literature? " pp. 216-217). Sartre supports this imperative on a personal level with lectures, interviews and radio broadcasts as well as plays {The Dirty Hands), screenplays {The Chips Are Down), novels {Iron in the Soul), and essays {Saint Genet), all undertaken on the premise that the committed writer must contend with as many technologies and media as possible. If not, he or she can expect to be read only by the bourgeoisie. This is the barrier Sartre hopes to break when he writes "Black Orpheus" for Senghor and edits a book in support of Henri Martin, the French sailor court-martialed in 1950 for protesting the French presence in Indochina. It is this expanded sense of commitment as praxis that he embodies over the following two decades as an
? 16 I Introduction
intellectual who takes a public stand on behalf of others who are less able to plead their own cause.
Immediate and ongoing responses to "What Is Litera- ture? " focus on the wider sense of committed writing and the ambitions Sartre holds for it. As early as 1947, Roland Barthes answers Sartre with what later becomes the opening section of Writing Degree Zero. In place of the prose/poetry distinction, Barthes posits a plurality of writings removed from a unified notion of literature. A decade later, his Mythologies combines a Sartrean impulse to disclose the present with a systematic model of ideology in everyday life. In both cases, representation in literature and popular culture is associated with identity at the level of individual and institution. Barthes's impulse to disclose is markedly Sartrean, even if his methodology is not. Furthermore, both texts by Barthes distinguish between commitment at the level of language as opposed to commitment at the level of content. Finally, Barthes's notions of writing and scriptor suggest a problematic of the writing subject that Sartre
addresses over the next three decades in his studies on Mallarme? , Genet, and Flaubert. *
If we are to render unto Sartre his due, we must contend with the fact that the questions raised by his writings outlive the answers they provide. In this sense, Theodor Adorno's critique of litte? rature engage? e raises a number of substantive issues. Adorno begins by noting the confusion caused by opposing a committed art to an autonomous-- and presumably uncommitted--art. He goes on to question the importance Sartre places on free choice: "The work of art becomes an appeal to subjects, because it is itself nothing other than a declaration by a subject of his own choice or failure to choose" ("Commitment," p. 78). For Adorno, Sartre's emphasis on the work of art as an appeal to freedom
* In 1965 lectures published in 1972 as "A Plea for Intellectuals," Sartre responds directly to Barthes when he notes that style is "the expression of our invisible conditioning by the world behind us. " Between Existentialism and Marxism, trans. John Mathews (New York: Pantheon, 1974), p. 282.
? Introduction \ IJ
is subverted by historical reality which predetermines the range of possible choices.
Unlike Sartre, Adorno is less concerned with generating specific disclosure or implementing change than with dis- rupting fundamental attitudes. His own aesthetic theory sees the representation ('gesture toward reality") achieved by the work of art as more meaningful than the authorial intention or motivation behind it. Setting the negative example of Brecht's theater alongside that of Sartre, Adorno rejects a committed art that ends up being neither aesthet- ically nor politically effective. He concludes in support of an ostensibly autonomous art--Kafka and Beckett are his examples--capable of expressing what is barred to politics: "Kafka's prose and Beckett's plays, or the truly monstrous novel The Unnameable, have an effect by comparison with which officially committed works look like pantomime. Kafka and Beckett arouse the fear which existentialism merely talks about" (Adorno, p. 86).
To his credit, Adorno notes that Sartre reacts against a tradition of art for art's sake in France which has no equivalent impact in postwar Germany. But what he rejects in Sartre (as in Brecht) is the pretense of a committed art's carrying a moral or political message in a culture which inevitably degrades that message into an ineffectual com- modity. Such degradation is less an inherent quality of art or the artist than a condition of postwar modernity: "This is not a time for political art, but politics has migrated into autonomous art, and nowhere more so than where it seems to be politically dead" (Adorno, p. 89). In sum, the differences between Adorno and Sartre engage practice-- specifically, Sartre's theater and fiction--rather than theory. Because Adorno believes that art is invariably politicized, his emphasis on the autonomous works of Kafka and Beckett is intended as sociopolitical. The Sartrean program of litte? rature engage? e sets literature against politics so as to assert its inherent political value: "Proclaiming that literature is
already intrinsically political is the best way of freeing it from the narrow sense of the political to which others would
? 18 I Introduction
like to bind it" (Boschetti, p. no). As for the pretense of a committed art, The Words and Sartre's i 9 6 0 essay on Merleau-Ponty acknowledge the failings of litte? rature engage? e. Indeed, Adorno notes that Sartre's intellectual honesty does him credit.
I The intellectual, the product of a class-divided society, . . . is thus a product of history. In this sense, no society can complain of its intellectuals without accusing itself, for it has the intellectuals it makes.
Sartre, "A Plea for Intellectuals" (1972)
Sartre's trajectory traverses all three of Debray's intellec- tual cycles, from university to publishing and media. In 1945, he starts TM as a former academic ready to extend the cultures of literature and philosophy to a wider public. After the Liberation, he remains attentive to what Adorno refers
to disparagingly as the culture industry. But unlike Adorno, Sartre engages the emerging media cycle on its own terms
by maintaining a high level of public visibility. By the mid-1960s, cold war politics put him at odds with both supporters and friends. During a 1966 visit to Japan, he delivers three lectures at Tokyo and Kyoto in which he reformulates committed writing on the basis of a revised notion of the intellectual as "someone who meddles in what is not his business' ("Plea," p. 230).
Throughout the lectures, Sartre emphasizes the particu- larity of historical events. On the subject of fighting against racism, for example, he refers not only to its frequency as idea or image in books, plays, and films, but also to its lived historical form in trials (the Dreyfus Affair), newspaper editorials, and political speeches: "In short, the intellectual must work to at the level of events to produce other concrete events that will combat pogroms or racist verdicts in the courts" (ibid. , p. 251). For the Sartre of 1966, the intellectual's activist role extends the call to action expressed
? Introduction \ 19
by the concept of praxis twenty years earlier. This activist dimension accounts for litte? rature engage? es persistent appeal among the young and the oppressed, for whom the imper- ative to act in and on history--whether imposed or chosen-- is experienced as the mixture of ideas and values Sartre calls the singular universal.
"A Plea for Intellectuals" also addresses issues of language and communication taken up in "What Is Literature? " but with a clear sense of the contradictions internalized by the intellectuals who, as technicians of specialized knowledge, find themselves "the instruments of ends which remain foreign to them and which they are forbidden to question" ("Plea," p. 240). Emphasis on historical particularity does not prevent Sartre from reiterating the value of the literary work as the objective model of the singular universal: "A book is necessarily a part of the world, through which the totality of the world is made manifest, although without ever being fully disclosed" (ibid. , p. 275). In such terms, Sartre's evolution toward practical politics following "What Is Literature? " does not entail rejection of the literary work's singular capacity to disclose being-in-the-world.
The Heideggerian ring of this capacity to disclose should not be misconstrued as vaguely poetic or metaphysical.
It is tempered by a clear sense of lived experience which the writer alone communicates to his or her readers. Despite the cultural privilege and isolation of Western writers--himself included--from true revolutionary activity, Sartre asserts the essential (rather than accidental) capacity of all writers to fulfill the intellectual function of disclosing the lived present. This assertion echoes the call to action in and on history set forth in TM's early program. It suggests that despite its own historical particularity, the concept of committed writing is far from exhausted by its archival status as a postwar phenomenon.
Re? gis Debray notes in passing that all intellectual universes have their own coordinates of time and space. What might Sartre's coordinates be? For better or worse, popular memory retains the image of Henri Cartier-
? 20 I Introduction
Bresson's photo of a fortyish Sartre with horn-rimmed eyeglasses, philosopher's scarf, and obligatory pipe. There is, of course, more than the image. More than three decades after the Liberation, the questions Sartre raises and the ambitions he holds continue to set the agenda for literary and intellectual debate in France. Whether one sides with him or against him, the issues he addresses are the major issues of his (modern) times. As Etienne Barilier--for one-- puts it in Les Petits Camarades (Paris: Julliard, 1987), he would rather be wrong with Sartre than right with Aron.
The four texts in the present volume point repeatedly to the interplay of thought, action, and circumstance. They evoke an age marked by war in which the consequences of writing and reading lead to issues unresolved some forty to fifty years after the fact. (It is not surprising that Claude Lanzmann, producer of the Holocaust film Shoahy has served on TATs editorial board for over thirty years. ) The Sartrean program of committed writing inscribes questions of the theory and practice of literature within a problematic of choice and accountability for which solutions are neither simple nor definitive. That remains--despite the vagaries of Sartre's career and the ambivalence of sympathizers and detractors alike--a lesson for the present which has lost little of its urgency.
Steven Ungar
? What Is Literature?
? <<TTF you want to commit yourself/ writes a young im- I becile, 'what are you waiting for? Join the Communist JL Party/ A great writer who committed himself often and then cried off still more often, but who has forgotten, said to me, 'The worst artists are the most committed. Look at the Soviet painters/ An old critic gently complained, "You want to murder literature. Contempt for belles-lettres is spread out insolently all through your review/ A petty mind calls me pigheaded, which for him is evidently the highest insult. An author who barely crawled from one war to the other and whose name sometimes awakens languishing memories in old men accuses me of not being concerned with immortality; he knows, thank God, any number of people whose chief hope it is. In the eyes of an American hack-journalist the trouble with me is that I have not read Bergson or Freud; as for Flaubert, who did not commit himself, it seems that he haunts me like remorse. Smart-alecks wink at me, 'And poetry? And painting? And music? You want to commit them, too? ' And some martial spirits demand, 'What's it all about? Commitment in liter- ature? Well, it's the old socialist realism, unless it's a revival
of populism, only more aggressive/
What nonsense. They read quickly, badly, and pass judge-
ment before they have understood. So let's begin all over again. This doesn't amuse anyone, neither you nor me. But we have to hit the nail on the head. And since critics con- demn me in the name of literature without ever saying what they mean by that, the best answer to give them is to examine the art of writing without prejudice. What is writing? Why does one write? For whom? The fact is, it seems that nobody has ever asked himself these questions.
? What Is Writing?
No, we do not want to 'commit' painting, sculpture, and music 'too', or at least not in the same way. And why would we want to? When a writer of past cen- turies expressed an opinion about his craft, was he immedi- ately asked to apply it to the other arts? But today it's the thing to 'talk painting' in the jargon of the musician or the literary man and to "talk literature' in the jargon of the painter, as if at bottom there were only one art which ex- pressed itself indifferently in one or the other of these languages, like the Spinozistic substance which is adequately reflected by each of its attributes.
Doubtless, one could find at the origin of every artistic calling a certain undifferentiated choice which circum- stances, education, and contact with the world particu- larized only later. Besides, there is no doubt that the arts of a period mutually influence each other and are conditioned by the same social factors. But those who want to expose the absurdity of a literary theory by showing that it is inap- plicable to music must first prove that the arts are parallel.
Now, there is no such parallelism. Here, as everywhere,
it is not only the form which differentiates, but the matter
as well. And it is one thing to work with colour and sound,
and another to express oneself by means of words. Notes, colours, and forms are not signs. They refer to nothing exterior to themselves. To be sure, it is quite impossible to reduce them strictly to themselves, and the idea of a pure sound, for example, is an abstraction. As Merleau-Ponty
has pointed out in The Phenomenology of Perception, there is no quality of sensation so bare that it is not penetrated with significance. But the dim little meaning which dwells within
it, a light joy, atimidsadness, remains immanent or trembles about it like a heat mist; it is colour or sound. Who can
? 26 I What Is Literature?
distinguish the green apple from its tart gaiety? And aren't we already saying too much in naming 'the tart gaiety of the green apple? There is green, there is red, and that is all. They are things, they exist by themselves.
It is true that one might, by convention, confer the value of signs upon them. Thus, we talk of the language of flowers. But if, after the agreement, white roses signify 'fidelity' to me, the fact is that I have stopped seeing them as roses. My attention cuts through them to aim beyond them at this abstract virtue. I forget them. I no longer pay attention to their mossy abundance, to their sweet stagnant odour. I have not even perceived them. That means that I have not behaved like an artist. For the artist, the colour, the bouquet, the tinkling of the spoon on the saucer, are things, in the highest degree. He stops at the quality of the sound or the form. He returns to it constantly and is en- chanted with it. It is this colour-object that he is going to transfer to his canvas, and the only modification he will make it undergo is that he will transform it into an imaginary object. He is therefore as far as he can be from considering colours and signs as a language. 1
What is valid for the elements of artistic creation is also valid for their combinations. The painter does not want to draw signs on his canvas, he wants to create a thing. 2 And if he puts together red, yellow, and green, there is no reason why this collection of colours should have a definable significance, that is, should refer particularly to another object. Doubdess the composition is also inhabited by a soul, and since there must have been motives, even hidden ones, for the painter to have chosen yellow rather than violet, it may be asserted that the objects thus created reflect his deepest tendencies. However, they never express his anger, his anguish, or his joy as do words or the expression of the face; they are impregnated with these emotions; and in order for them to have crept into these colours, which by themselves already had something like a meaning, his emotions get mixed up and grow obscure. Nobody can quite recognize them there.
? What Is Writing? | 27
Tintoretto did not choose that yellow rift in the sky above Golgotha to signify anguish or to provoke it. It is anguish and yellow sky at the same time. Not sky of anguish or anguished sky; it is an anguish become thing, an anguish which has turned into yellow rift of sky, and which thereby is submerged and impasted by the qualities peculiar to things, by their impermeability, their extension, their blind permanence, their externality, and that infinity of relations which they maintain with other things. That is, it is no longer readable. It is like an immense and vain effort, for- ever arrested half-way between sky and earth, to express what their nature keeps them from expressing.
Similarly, the significance of a melody--if one can still speak of significance--is nothing outside the melody itself, unlike ideas, which can be adequately rendered in several ways. Call it joyous or sad. It will always be over and above anything you can say about it. Not because its passions, which are perhaps at the origin of the invented theme, have, by being incorporated into notes, undergone a transubstantiation and a transmutation. A cry of grief is a sign of the grief which provokes it, but a song of grief is both grief itself and something other than grief Or, if one wishes to adopt the existentialist vocabulary, it is a grief which does not exist any more, which is. But, you will say, suppose the painter portrays houses? That's just it. He makes them, that is, he creates an imaginary house on the canvas and not a sign of a house. And the house which thus appears preserves all the ambiguity of real houses.
The writer can guide you and, if he describes a hovel, make it seem the symbol of social injustice and provoke your indignation. The painter is mute. He presents you with a hovel, that's all. You are free to see in it what you like. That attic window will never be the symbol of misery; for that, it would have to be a sign, whereas it is a thing. The bad painter looks for the type. He paints the Arab, the Child, the Woman; the good one knows that neither the Arab nor the proletarian exists either in reality or on his canvas. He offers a workman, a certain workman. And
? 28 I What Is Literature?
what are we to think about a workman? An infinity of con- tradictory things. All thoughts and all feelings are there, adhering to the canvas in a state of profound undifferentia- tion. It is up to you to choose. Sometimes, high-minded artists try to move us. They paint long lines of workmen waiting in the snow to be hired, the emaciated faces of the unemployed, batdefields. They affect us no more than does Greuze with his 'Prodigal Son\ And that masterpiece, 'The Massacre of Guernica', does anyone think that it won over a single heart to the Spanish cause? And yet something is said that can never quite be heard and that would take an infinity of words to express. And Picasso's long harlequins, ambiguous and eternal, haunted with inexplicable meaning, inseparable from their stooping leanness and their pale diamond-shaped tights, are emotion become flesh, emotion which the flesh has absorbed as the blotter absorbs ink, and emotion which is unrecognizable, lost, strange to itself, scattered to the four corners of space and yet present to itself.
I have no doubt that charity or anger can produce other objects, but they will likewise be swallowed up; they will lose their name; there will remain only things haunted by a mysterious soul. One does not paint meanings; one does not put them to music. Under these conditions, who would dare require that the painter or musician commit himself?
On the other hand, the writer deals with meanings. Still,
a distinction must be made. The empire of signs is prose; poetry is on the side of painting, sculpture, and music. I am accused of detesting it; the proof, so they say, is that Les Temps Modernes* publishes very few poems. On the contrary, this is proof that we like it. To be convinced, all one need do is take a look at contemporary production. 'At least/ critics say triumphandy, 'you can't even dream of committing it. ' Indeed. But why should I want to? Because
it uses words as does prose? But it does not use them in the same way, and it does not even use them at all. I should
*A periodical edited by M. Sartre. --Translator.
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rather say that it serves them. Poets are men who refuse to utilise language. Now, since the quest for truth takes place in and by language conceived as a certain kind of instru- ment, it is unnecessary to imagine that they aim to discern or expound the true. Nor do they dream of naming the world, and, this being the case, they name nothing at all, for naming implies a perpetual sacrifice of the name to the object named, or, as Hegel would say, the name is revealed as the inessen- tial in the face of the thing which is essential. They do not speak, neither do they keep silent; it is something different. It has been said that they wanted to destroy the 'word* by monstrous couplings, but this is false. For then they would have to be thrown into the midst of utilitarian language and would have had to try to retrieve words from it in odd litde groups, as for example 'horse' and "butter* by writing "horses of butter'. 8
Besides the fact that such an enterprise would require infinite time, it is not conceivable that one can keep oneself on the plane of the utilitarian project, consider words as instruments, and at the same time contemplate taking their instrumentality away from them. In fact, the poet has with- drawn from language-instrument in a single movement. Once and for all he has chosen the poetic attitude which considers words as things and not as signs. For the am- biguity of the sign implies that one can penetrate it at will like a pane of glass and pursue the thing signified, or turn one's gaze towards its reality and consider it as an object. The man who talks is beyond words and near the object, whereas the poet is on this side of them. For the former, they are domesticated; for the latter they are in the wild state. For the former, they are usefid conventions, tools which gradually wear out and which one throws away when they are no longer serviceable; for the latter, they are natural things which sprout naturally upon the earth like grass and trees.
But if the poet dwells upon words, as does the painter with colours and the musician with sounds, that does not mean that they have lost all meaning in his eyes. Indeed, it
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is meaning alone which can give words their verbal unity. Without it they are frittered away into sounds and strokes of the pen. Only, it too becomes natural. It is no longer the goal which is always out of reach and which human transcendence is always aiming at, but a property of each term, analogous to the expression of a face, to the little sad or gay meaning of sounds and colours. Having flowed into the word, having been absorbed by its sonority or visual aspect, having been thickened and defaced, it too is a thing, uncreated and eternal.
For the poet, language is a structure of the external world. The speaker is in a situation in langauge; he is invested by words. They are prolongations of his senses, his pincers, his antennae, his spectacles. He manoeuvres them from within; he feels them as if they were his body; he is surrounded by a verbal body which he is hardly conscious of and which extends his action upon the world. The poet is outside language. He sees the reverse side of words, as if he did not share the human condition and as if he werefirstmeeting the word as a barrier as he comes towards men. Instead offirstknowing things by their name, it seems that first he has a silent contact with them, since, turning towards that other species of thing which for him is the word, touching words, testing them, fingering them, he discovers in them a slight luminosity of their own and particular affinities with the earth, the sky, the water, and all created things.
Not knowing how to use them as a sign of an aspect of the world, he sees in the word the image of one of these aspects. And the verbal image he chooses for its resemblance to the willow tree or the ash tree is not necessarily the word which we use to designate these objects. As he is already on the outside, he considers words as a trap to catch a fleeing reality rather than as indicators which throw him out of himself into the midst of things. In short, all language is for him the mirror of the world. As a result, important changes take place in the internal economy of the word. Its sonority, its length, its masculine or feminine endings, its visual aspect, compose for him a face of flesh which
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represents rather than expresses meaning. Inversely, as the meaning is realised, the physical aspect of the word is reflected within it, and it, in its turn, functions as an image of the verbal body. Like its sign, too, for it has lost its pre- eminence; since words, like things, are given, the poet does not decide whether the former exist for the latter or vice versa.
Thus, between the word and the thing signified, there is established a double reciprocal relation of magical resem- blance and meaning. And the poet does not utilise the word, he does not choose between different senses given to it; each of them, instead of appearing to him as an autonomous function, is given to him as a material quality which merges before his eyes with the other accepted meanings.
Thus, in each word he realizes, solely by the effect of the poetic attitude, the metaphors which Picasso dreamed of when he wanted to do a matchbox which was completely a bat without ceasing to be a matchbox. Florence is city, flower, and woman. It is city-flower, city-woman, and girl- flower all at the same time. And the strange object which thus appears has the liquidity of the rivery the soft, tawny ardency oigold, andfinallygives itself up with propriety and, by the continuous diminution of the silent e, prolongs indefinitely its modest blossoming. * To that is added the insidious effect of biography. For me, Florence is also a certain woman, an American actress who played in the silent films of my childhood, and about whom I have forgotten everything except that she was as long as a long evening glove and always a bit weary and always chaste and always married and misunderstood and whom I loved and whose
name was Florence.
For the word, which tears the writer of prose away from
? This sentence is not fully intelligible in translation as the author is here associating the component sounds of the word Florence with the meaning of the French words they evoke. Thus: FL-OR-ENCE,
fleuve,ory andde? cence. Thelatterpartofthesentencereferstothepractice in French poetry of giving, in certain circumstances, a syllabic value to the otherwise silent terminal e. --Translator.
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himself and throws him out into the world, sends back to the poet his own image, like a mirror. This is what justifies the double undertaking of Leiris who, on the one hand, in his Glossary, tries to give certain words a poetic definition, that is, one which is by itself a synthesis of recipro- cal implications between the sonorous body and the verbal soul, and, on the other hand, in a still unpublished work, goes in quest of remembrance of things past, taking as guides a few words which for him are particularly charged with feeling. Thus, the poetic word is a microcosm.
The crisis of language which broke out at the beginning of this century is a poetic crisis. Whatever the social and historical factors, it showed itself in an attack of deperson- alization when the writer was confronted by words. He no longer knew how to use them, and, in Bergson's famous formula, he only half recognized them. He approached them with a completely fruitful feeling of strangeness.
