No More Learning

(2) How shall we incorporate some of our potential readers into our actual public? Books are inert. They act upon those who open them, but they cannot open by themselves. There can be no question of popularizing; we would be literary morons, and in order to keep literature from falling into the pitfalls of propaganda we would be throwing it right in ourselves. So we must have recourse to new means. They already exist; the Americans have already adorned them with the name of "mass media'; these are the real resources at our disposal for conquering the virtual public--the newspaper, the radio, and the cinema. Naturally, we have to quieten our scruples. To be sure, 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 work, and reporting. There is no need to popularize. The film, by its very nature, speaks to crowds; it speaks to them about crowds and about their destiny.
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The radio surprises people at the table or in bed, at the moment when they are most defenceless, in the almost organic abandon of solitude. At the present time, it makes use of its opportunity in order to fool them, but it is also the moment when one might better appeal to their good faith; they have not yet put on or have laid aside the personality with which they face the world. We've got one foot inside the door. We must learn to speak in images, to transpose the ideas of our books into these new languages.
It is by no means a matter of letting our works be adapted for the screen or the broadcasts of the French Radio. We must write directly for the cinema and the wire- less. The difficulties which I have mentioned above arise from the fact that radio and cinema are machines. Since considerable capital is at stake, it is inevitable that they are today in the hands of the state or of conservative corpora- tions. They apply to the writer under a sort of misapprehen- sion; he believes that they are asking him for his work, which they are not concerned with, whereas all they want of him is his signature, which pays. And since in this respect he is so lacking in practical sense that, in general, they can't persuade him to sell one without the other, at least they try to get him to please and to assure the stockholders of their profits or to be persuasive and serve the politics of the state. In both cases, they demonstrate to him statistically that bad productions have more success than good ones, and when they explain to him about the bad taste of the public, he is requested to be so good as to submit to it. When the work is finished, in order to be sure that it's bad enough they hand it over to mediocrities who cut out what's beyond them.
But this is exacdy the point that we have to fight about. It is improper for us to stoop in order to please; on the contrary, our job is to reveal to the public its own needs and, litde by little, to form it so that it needs to read. We must appear to be giving in and yet must make ourselves indis- pensable and consolidate our positions, if possible, by facile successes; then, we must take advantage of the disorder in
? 2i8 I What Is Literature?
the governmental services and the incompetence of certain producers to turn these arms against them. Then the writer will launch out into the unknown; he will speak in the dark to people he does not know, to whom no one has ever spoken except to lie. He will lend his voice to their anger and their worries. Through him, men whom no mirror has ever reflected, who have learned to smile and weep like blind men, without seeing themselves, will suddenly find themselves before their image. Who could dare claim that literature will lose thereby? I think that on the contrary it will gain. All the numbers and fractions which formerly
were the whole of arithmetic, today represent only a small sector of the science of numbers. The same with literature: 'total literature', if ever it sees the day, will have its algebra, its irrational and imaginary numbers. Let it not be said that these industries have nothing to do with art. After all, printing is also an industry, and the authors of former times conquered it for us. I do not think that we shall ever have the foil use of the 'mass media', but it would be a fine thing to begin conquering it for our successors. In any case, what is certain is that if we do not make use of it, we must resign ourselves to be forever writing for nobody but the bourgeois.
(3) Bourgeois, intellectuals, teachers, non-communist workers; granted we touch all these disparate elements, how are we going to make a public out of them, that is, an organic unity of readers, listeners, and spectators?
Let us bear in mind that the man who reads strips himself in some way of his empirical personality and escapes from his resentments, his fears, and his lusts in order to put himself at the peak of his freedom. This freedom takes the literary work and, through it, mankind, for absolute ends. It sets itself up as an unconditioned exigence in relationship to itself, to the author, and to possible readers. It can therefore be identified with Kantian good will which, in every circumstance, treats man as an end and not as a means. Thus, by his very exigence, the reader attains that chorus of good wills which Kant has called the Qty of Ends, which
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thousands of readers all over the world who do not know each other are, at every moment, helping to maintain. But in order that this ideal chorus should become a concrete society, it must satisfy two conditions:first,that readers replace this theoretical acquaintance with each other, in so far as they are all particular examples of mankind, by an intuition or, at the very least, by a presentiment of their physical presence in the midst of this world; second, that, instead of remaining solitary and uttering appeals in the void, which, in regard to the human condition in general, affect no one, these abstract good wills establish real relations among themselves when actual events take place, or, in other words, that these non-
temporal good wills historicite? themselves while preserving their purity, and that they transform their exigences into material and timely demands. Lacking the wherewithal, the city of ends lasts for each of us only while we are reading; on passing from the imaginary life to real life we forget this abstract, implicit community which rests on nothing. Whence, there arise what I might call the two essential mystifications of reading.
When a young communist while reading Aure^lien, or a Christian student while reading The Hostage, have a moment of aesthetic joy, their feeling envelops a universal exigence; the city of ends surrounds them with its phantom walls. But during this time the works are supported by a concrete collectivity--in one case, the Communist Party, in the other, the community of the faithful--which sanctions them and which manifests its presence between the lines: the priest has spoken of it from the pulpit, UHumanite? has recommended it. The student never feels alone when he reads. The book dons a sacred character. It is an accessory of the cult. Reading becomes a rite, more precisely, a com- munion. On the other hand if a Nathanae? l should open Fruits of the Earth, as soon as he gets into the swing of the book he launches the same impotent appeal to the good- will of men. The city of ends, magically evoked, does not refuse to appear. Yet, his enthusiasm remains essentially solitary. The reading in this case is disjunctive; he is turned
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against his family, against the society about him; he is cut off from the past and the future to be reduced to his naked presence in the moment; he is taught to descend within himself in order to recognize and take stock of his most particular desires. Our Nathanae? l pays no heed to the possibility that somewhere else in the world, wherever it may be, there may be another Nathanae? l plunged in the same reading and the same raptures. The message is addressed only to him. When all has been said and done, he is invited to reject the book, to break the pact of mutual exigences which unite him to the author; he has found nothing but himself, himself as a separate entity. As Durkheim might have put it, the solidarity of ClaudePs readers is organic and that of Gide's mechanical.
In both cases, literature runs very serious risks. When the book is sacred, it does not draw its religious virtue from its intentions or its beauty, but rather receives it from without, like a seal, and as the essential moment of the reading in this case is the communion, that is, the symbolic integration into the community, the written work passes to the inessential^ it really becomes an accessory of the ceremony. The example of Nizan shows this rather clearly: as a communist, he was read with fervour by the communists; now that he is an apostate, and dead, it would not occur to any Stalinist to pick up his books again; to these biased eyes they now offer nothing but the image of treason. But as in 1939 the reader of The
Trojan Horse and The Conspiracy addressed an unconditioned universal appeal for the adherence of all free men, as, on the other hand, the sacred character of these works was, on the contrary, conditional and temporary and implied the possi- bility, in the event of the excommunication of their author, of rejecting them like sacrificial offerings that had been defiled, or simply of forgetting them if the C. P. changed its line, these two contradictory implications destroyed the very meaning of the reading. 42 There's nothing surprising in that, since we have seen the communist writer himself ruin the very meaning of writing; the circle is completed.
Must we therefore be satisfied with being read in secret,
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almost by stealth? Must the work of art mature like a fine, ripe vice in the depths of solitary souls? Here again I think that I discern a contradiction: we have discovered in the work of art the presence of all mankind; reading is a com- merce of the reader with the author and with other readers; how can it be, at the same time, an invitation to segregation?
We do not want our public, however numerous it may be, to be reduced to the juxtaposition of individual readers nor to have its unity conferred upon it by the transcendent action of a Party or a Church. Reading should not be mystical communion any more than it should be masturba- tion, but rather a companionship. On the other hand we recognize that the purely formal recourse to abstract good wills leaves each one in his original isolation. However, that is the point from which we must start; if one loses this conducting wire, one is suddenly lost in the wilds of propaganda or in the egotistical pleasures of a style which is a matter of 'purely personal taste*. It is therefore up to us to convert the city of ends into a concrete and open society-- and this by the very content of our works.
If the city of ends remains a feeble abstraction, it is because it is not realizable without an objective modification of the historical situation. Kant, I believe, saw this very well, but sometimes he counted on a purely subjective transform- ation of the moral subject and at other times he despaired of ever meeting a goodwill on this earth. In fact, the contemplation of beauty might well arouse in us the purely formal intention of treating men as ends, but this intention would reveal itself to be utterly futile in practice since the fundamental structures of our society are still oppressive.
Such is the present paradox of ethics; if I am absorbed in treating a few chosen persons as absolute ends, for example,
my wife, my son, my friends, the needy person I happen
to come across, if I am bent upon fulfilling all my duties towards them, I shall spend my life doing so; I shall be led
to pass over in silence the injustices of the age, the class struggle, colonialism, Anti-Semitism, etc. , and, finally, to
take advantage of oppression in order to do good. Moreover, th
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former will be found in person-to-person relationships and, more subtly, in my very intentions. The good that I try to do will be vitiated at the roots. It will be turned into radical evil. But, vice versa, if I throw myself into the revolutionary enterprise I risk having no more leisure for personal relations--worse still, of being led by the logic of the action into treating most men, and even my friends, as means. But if we start with the moral exigence which the aesthetic feeling envelops without meaning to do so, we are starting on the right foot. We must historicite? the reader's goodwill, that is, by the formal agency of our work, we must, if possible, provoke his intention of treating men, in every case, as an absolute end and, by the subject of our writing, direct his intention upon his neighbours, that is, upon the oppressed of the world. But we shall have accomplished nothing if, in addition, we do not show him--and in the very warp and weft of the work--that it is quite impossible to treat concrete men as ends in contemporary society. Thus, he will be led by the hand until he is made to see that, in effect, what he wants is to eliminate the exploitation of man by man and that the city of ends which, with one stroke, he has set up in the aesthetic intuition is an ideal which we shall approach only at the end of a long historical evolution. In other words, we must transform his formal goodwill into a concrete and material will to change this world by specific means in order to help the coming of the concrete society of ends. For goodwill is not possible in this age, or rather, it is and can be only the intention of making goodwill possible. Whence, a particular tension which must manifest itself in our works and which remotely recalls the one I mentioned in regard to Richard Wright. For a whole section of the public which we wish to win over still consumes its good- will in person-to-person relationships, and another whole section, because it belongs to the oppressed classes, has given itself the job of obtaining, by all possible means, the material improvement of its lot. Thus, we must at the same time teach one group that the reign of ends cannot be realized without revolution and the other group that re? volu-
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tion is conceivable only if it prepares the reign of ends. It is this perpetual tension--if we can keep it up--which will realize the unity of our public. In short, we must militate, in our writings, in favour of the freedom of the person and the socialist revolution. It has often been claimed that they are not reconcilable. It is our job to show tirelessly that they imply each other.
We were born into the bourgeoisie, and this class has taught us the value of its conquests: political freedom, habeas corpus, etc. We remain bourgeois by our culture, our way of life, and our present public. But at the same time the historical situation drives us to join the proletariat in order to construct a classless society. No doubt that for the time being the latter is not very much concerned with freedom of thought; they've got other fish to fry. The bourgeoisie, on the other hand, pretends not even to understand what the words 'material freedom* mean. Thus, each class can, at least in this regard, preserve a good conscience, since it is unaware of one of the terms of the antinomy.
But we others, though we have nothing to mediate at present, are none the less in the position of mediators. Pulled from both sides, we are condemned to suffer this double exigence as a Passion. It is our personal problem as well as the drama of our age. It will, of course, be said that this antinomy which tortures us is merely due to our still dragging round the remains of bourgeois ideology which we have not been able to shake off; on the other hand, it will be said that we suffer from revolutionary snobbery and that we want to make literature serve ends for which it is not designed. That would not be too bad, but these voices find responsive echoes in some of us who have unhappy con- sciences. Therefore, it would be well for us to impress this truth upon our minds: it is, perhaps, tempting to abandon formal liberties in order to deny more completely our bourgeois origins, but that would be enough to discredit fundamentally the project of writing. It might be more simple for us to disinterest ourselves in material demands in order to produce 'pure literature* with a serene conscience,
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but we would thereby be giving up the idea of choosing our readers outside the oppressing class. Thus, opposition must also be overcome for ourselves and within ourselves. Let us first persuade ourselves that it can be overcome: literature in itself proves this, since it is the work of a total freedom addressing plenary freedoms and thus in its own way manifests the totality of the human condition as a free product of a creative activity. And if, on the other hand, a full solution is beyond the powers of most of us, it is our duty to overcome the opposition in a thousand detailed syntheses. Every day we must take sides: in our life as a writer, in our articles, in our books. Let it always be by preserving as our guiding principle the rights of total free- dom as an effective synthesis of formal and material free- doms. Let this freedom manifest itself in our novels, our essays, and our plays. And if our characters do not yet enjoy it, if they live in our time, let us at least be able to show what it costs them not to have it. It is not enough to denounce abuses and injustices in a fine style, nor to make
a brilliant and negative psychological study of the bour- geoisie, nor even to let our pens serve social parties in order to save literature. We must take up a position in our literature, because literature is in essence a taking of position. We must, in all domains, both reject solutions which are not rigorously inspired by socialist principles and, at the same time, stand off from all doctrines and movements which consider socialism as the absolute end. In our eyes it should not represent thefinalend, but rather the end of the beginning, or, if one prefers, the last means before the end which is to put the human person in possession of his freedom. Thus, our works should be presented to the public in a double
aspect of negativity and construction.
First, negativity. We are familiar with the great tradition of critical literature which goes back to the end of the eighteenth century; it is concerned with separating by analysis that which specifically belongs to each notion from what tradition or the mystifications of the oppressor have added to it. Writers like Voltaire or the Encyclopedists
? Situation of the Writer in 1947 \ 225
considered the practice of this criticism as one of their essential tasks. Since the matter and the tool of the writer are language, it is normal for writers to think of cleaning their instrument. This negative function of literature was, to tell the truth, ignored in the following century, probably because the class in power made use of these concepts which had been established on their behalf by the great writers of the past, and because there was, at the beginning, a kind of equilibrium among its institutions, its aims, the kind of oppression it practised, and the meaning it gave to the words it used. For example, it is clear that in the nineteenth century the word 'freedom* never designated anything but political freedom and that the words 'disorder* or 'licence* were reserved for all other forms of freedom. Similarly, the word revolution necessarily referred to a great historical revolu- tion, the one of '89. And as the bourgeoisie, by a very general convention, neglected the economic aspect of this revolution, as, in its history, it barely mentioned the name of Gracchus Baboeuf and the views of Robespierre and Marat so that it might give its official respect to Desmoulins and the Girondists, the result was that any political insurrec- tion which succeeded could be designated a revolution, and that this denomination could be applied to the events of 1830 and 1848 which, at bottom, merely brought about a simple change of the directing personnel.
This narrowness of vocabulary caused the picture to lack certain aspects of the historical, psychological, and philosophical reality, but as these aspects were not manifest by themselves, as they corresponded to a dull malaise in the consciousness of the masses or the individual rather than to effective factors of social or personal life, one was struck by the dry property of the words and by the immutable clear- ness of their meanings rather than by their insufficiency. In the eighteenth century to write a Philosophical Dictionary was secretly to undermine the class in power. In the nine- teenth, Littre? and Larousse were positivist and conserva- tive bourgeois; their dictionaries aimed solely at verifying and settling matters. The crisis of language which marked
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the literature between the two wars was the result of the fact that after ripening silently, neglected aspects of the historical and psychological reality passed abrupdy to the first level. Yet, we have the same verbal apparatus at our disposal for naming them. Perhaps it may not be too serious because in most cases it is only a matter of deepening concepts and changing definitions. For example, when we have rejuvenated the meaning of the word 'Revolution* by pointing out that what should be designated by this word is a historical phenomenon involving the change of the re? gime of property, the change of political personnel, and the recourse to insurrection, we shall have proceeded, with- out great effort, to the rejuvenation of a sector of the French language, and the word, impregnated with a new life, will be off to a new start. It must be noted, however, that the fundamental job to be done on language is of a synthetic nature, whereas in Voltaire's century it was analytic; it is necessary to enlarge, to deepen, and to open the doors and to let the troop of new ideas enter while controlling them as they pass by. In other words, to be anti-academic.
Unfortunately, what complicates our job in the extreme is that we are living in a century of propaganda. In 1914 the two opposing camps were arguing only the question of God; it still wasn't too serious. Today, there are five or six enemy camps which want to wrest the key-notions from each other because these are what exert the most influence on the masses. It will be recalled how the Germans preserved the external aspect, the title, the arrangement of articles, and even the typographical character of the pre-war French newspapers and used them to diffuse ideas which were entirely opposed to those which we were accustomed to find in them. They thought that we would not notice the difference in the pills since the coating did not change. The same with words: each party shoves them forward like Trojan horses, and we let them enter because they make the nineteenth-century meaning of the words shine before us. Once they are in place, they open up, and strange, astound- ing meanings spread out within us like armies; the fortress
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is taken before we are on guard. Thereafter, neither con- versation nor argument is any longer possible. Brice Parain saw this quite clearly; to quote him roughly, 'If you use the word freedom in front of me, I start fuming, I approve, or I contradict, but I don't understand what you mean by it. So we're talking in the dark/ That's true, but it's a modern evil. In the nineteenth century Littre? 's dictionary might have brought us together; before this war we could have had recourse to the vocabulary of Lalande. Today, there is no longer an arbiter.
Nevertheless, we are all accomplices because these slippery notions serve our dishonesty. That's not all; linguists have often noted that in troubled periods words preserve the traces of the great human migrations. A barbaric army crosses Gaul, the soldiers amuse themselves with the native language, and so it stays twisted for a long time. Our own still bears the marks of the Nazi invasion. The word 'Jew' formerly designated a certain type of man; perhaps French anti-Semitism had given it a slight pejorative meaning, but it was easy to brush it off. Today one fears to use it; it sounds like a threat, an insult, or a provocation. The word 'Europe' formerly referred to the geographical, economic, and political unity of the Old Continent. Today, it preserves a musty smell of Germanism and servitude. Even the
innocent and abstract term 'collaboration' is in disrepute. On the other hand, as Soviet Russia is now at a standstill the words which the communists used before the war have also stopped short. They stop in the middle of their meaning, just as the Stalinist intellectuals do in the middle of their thought, or else they get off on side-paths. The transforma- tions of the word 'Revolution' are quite significant in this respect. In an earlier chapter I quoted the saying of a journalist who was a collaborator: 'Stand firm! That's the motto of the Nationalist Revolution. ' To which I now add this one, which comes from a communist intellectual: 'Produce! That's the real Revolution! ' Things have gone so far that recently in France one could have read on the election posters: 'To vote for the Communist Party is to
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vote for the defence of property/ 3 Vice versa, who is not a socialist today? I remember a writers' congress--all of them leftists--which refused to use the word socialism in a manifesto 'because it was too discredited\ And the linguistic reality is today so complicated that I still do not know whether these authors rejected the word for the reason they gave or because it was so down at the heel that it scared them. Moreover, we know that in the United States the term communist designates any American citizen who does not vote for the Republicans, and in Europe the wotd fascist means any European citizen who does not vote for the communists. To confuse things still more, we must add that French conservatives state that the Soviet re? gime--which, however, subscribes neither to a theory of race, nor a theory of anti-Semitism, nor a theory of war--is one of national socialism, whereas on the left it is said that the United States--which is a capitalist democracy with a loose dictator- ship of public opinion--borders on fascism.
The function of a writer is to call a spade a spade. If words are sick, it is up to us to cure them. Instead of that, many writers live off this sickness. In many cases modern literature is a cancer of words. It is perfectly all right to write 'horse of butter' but in a sense it amounts to doing the same thing as those who speak of a fascist United States or a Stalinist national socialism. There is nothing more deplorable than the literary practice which, I believe, is called poetic prose and which consists ofusing words for the obscure harmonics which resound about them and which are made up of vague meanings which are in contradiction with the clear meaning.
I know: the purpose of a number of writers was to destroy words as that of the surrealists was to destroy both the subject and the object; but it was the extreme point of the literature of consumption. But today, as I have shown, it is necessary to construct. If one starts deploring the inadequacy of language to reality, like Brice Parain, one makes oneself an accomplice of the enemy, that is, of propaganda. Our first duty as a writer is thus to re-establish language in its dignity. After all, we think with words. We would have to be quite
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vain to believe that we are concealing ineffable beauties which the word is unworthy of expressing. And then, I distrust the incommunicable; it is the source of all violence. When it seems impossible to get others to share the certain- ties which we enjoy, the only thing left is to fight, to burn, or to hang. No. We are no better than our life, and it is by our life that we must be judged; our thought is no better than our language, and it ought to be judged by the way it uses it. If we want to restore their virtue to words, we must carry on a double operation; on the one hand, an analytical cleaning which rids them of their adventitious meanings, and, on the other hand, a synthetic enlargement which adapts them to the historical situation. If an author wished to devote himself completely to this job, there would be more than enough for a whole lifetime. With all of us working on it together, we shall do a good job of it without
too much trouble.
That is not all: we are living in the age of mystifications.
Some are fundamental ones which are due to the structure of society; some are secondary. At any rate, the social order today rests upon the mystification of consciousness, as does disorder as well. Nazism was a mystification; Gaullism is another; Catholicism is a third. At the present there can be no doubt that French communism is a fourth. Obviously we could pay no attention to it and do our work honestly without aggressiveness. But as the writer addresses the freedom of his reader, and as each mystified consciousness, in so far as it is an accomplice of the mystification which enchains it, tends to persist in its state, we will be able to safeguard literature only if we undertake the job of de- mystifying our public. For the same reason the writer's duty
is to take sides against all injustices, wherever they may come from. And as our writings would have no meaning if we did not set up as our goal the eventual coming of freedom by means of socialism, it is important in each case to stress the fact that there have been violations of formal and personal liberties or material oppression or both. From this point of view we must denounce British politics in
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Palestine and American politics in Greece as well as the Soviet deportations. And if we are told that we are acting as if we were quite important and that it is quite childish of us to hope that we can change the course of the world, we shall reply that we have no illusions about it, but that nevertheless it is fitting that certain things be said, even though it be only to save face in the eyes of our children; and besides, we do not have the crazy ambition of influencing the State Department, but rather the slightly less crazy one of acting upon the opinion of our fellow citizens.
Yet, we must not let off great inkwell explosions care- lessly and without discernment. In each case we must consider the aim in view. Former communists would like to make us see Soviet Russia as enemy number one because she has corrupted the very idea of socialism and has transformed the dictatorship of the proletariat into the dictatorship of the bureaucracy. Consequently, they would like us to devote all our time to stigmatizing its extortion and its violence; at the same time they point out to us that capitalist injustices are highly obvious and are not likely to deceive anyone; thus, we would be wasting our time exposing them. I am afraid that I surmise only too well the interests which this advice serves. Whatever the putative violence may be, still, before passing judgement upon it, it is advisable to consider the situation of the country which commits it and the perspec- tives in which it has committed it. It wouldfirstbe necessary to prove, for example, that the present machinations of the Soviet government are not, in the last analysis, dictated by its desire to protect the revolution which has stalled and to 'hold on' until the moment when it will be possible to resume its march forward. Whereas American anti-Semitism and negrophobia, our own colonialism and the attitude of the powers in regard to Franco, often lead to injustices which are less spectacular but which aim none the less at perpetuating the present re? gime of the exploitation of man by man. It will be said that everybody knows this. That may be true, but if nobody says it, what good does it do us to know it? Our job as a writer is to represent the world and
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to bear witness to it. Besides, even if it were proven that the Soviet Union and the Communist Party are pursuing genuinely revolutionary ends, that would not c? xempt us from judging the means. If one regards freedom as the principle and the goal of all human activity, it is equally false that one must judge the means by the end and the end by the means. Rather, the end is the synthetic unity of the means employed. Thus, there are means which risk destroying the end which they intend to realize because by their mere presence they smash the synthetic unity which they wish to enter.
The attempt has been made to determine by quasi- mathematical formulas the conditions under which a means may be called legitimate; in these formulas are included the probability of the end, its proximity, and what its returns are in regard to the cost of aie means employed. One might think that we were back at Bentham and the arithmetic of pleasure. I am not saying that a formula of this kind might not be applied in certain cases, for example, in the hypothesis, itself quantitative, in which a certain number of lives must be sacrificed to save others. But in the majority of cases the problem is quite different; the means employed introduce a qualitative alteration into the end and con- sequently are not measurable. Let us imagine that a revolu- tionary party systematically lies to its militants in order to protect them against uncertainties, cries of conscience, and adverse propaganda. The end pursued is the abolition of a re? gime of oppression; but the lie is itself oppression. May one perpetuate oppression with the pretext of putting an end to it? Is it necessary to enslave man in order the better to free him? It will be said that the means are transitory. Not if it helps to create a lied-to and lying mankind; for then the men who take power are no longer those who deserve to get hold of it; and the reasons one had for abolishing oppression are undermined by the way one goes about abolishing it. Thus, the politics of the Communist Party, which consists of lying to its own troops, of calumniating, of hiding its defeats and its faults, compromises the goal which it pursues. On the
? 2$2 I What Is Literature?
other hand, it is easy to reply that in war--and every revolutionary party is at war--one cannot tell soldiers the whole truth. Thus, we have here a question of measure. No ready-made formula will excuse us from an examination in each particular case. It is~up to us to make this examination. Left to itself, politics always takes the path of least resistance, that is, it goes downhill. The masses, duped by propaganda, follow it. So who can represent to the government, the parties, and the citizens the means that are being employed, if not the writer? That does not mean that we must be systematically opposed to the use of violence. I recognize that violence, under whatever form it may show itself, is a setback. But it is an inevitable setback because we are in a universe of violence; and if it is true that recourse to violence against violence risks perpetuating it, it is also true that it is the only means of bringing an end to it. A certain newspaper in which someone wrote a rather brilliant article saying that it was necessary to refuse any complicity with violence wherever it came from had to announce the following day thefirstskirmishes of the Indo-Chinese war. I should like to ask the writer today how we can refuse to participate indirectly in all violence. If you say nothing, you are necessarily for the continuation of the war; one is always responsible for what one does not try to prevent. But if you got it to stop at once and at any price, you would be at the origin of a number of massacres and you would be doing violence to all Frenchmen who have interests over there. I am not, of course, speaking of compromises, since war is born of compromise. Violence for violence; one must make a choice, according to other principles. The politician will wonder whether the transport of troops is possible, whether by continuing the war he will alienate public opinion, what the international repercussions will be. It is incumbent upon the writer to judge the means not from the point of view of an abstract morality, but in the perspectives of a precise goal which is the realization of a socialist democracy. Thus, we must mediate upon the modern problem of ends and means not only in theory but in each concrete case.
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Evidently, there is a big job to be done. But even if we consume our life in criticism who can reproach us? The task of criticism has become total; it engages the whole man. In the eighteenth century the tool was forged; the simple utilization of analytical reason was enough to clean the concepts; today when it is necessary both to clean and to complete, to push to their conclusions notions which have become false because they have stopped along the way, criticism is also synthetic. It brings into action all our
faculties of invention; instead of limiting itself to making use of a reason already established by two centuries of mathematics, on the contrary, it is this criticism which will form modern reason so that, in the end, it has creative freedom as its foundation. Doubtless, it will not by itself bring about a positive solution. But what does today? I see all about us only absolute formulas, patchwork, dishonest compromises, outdated and hastily refurbished myths. Even if we did nothing but puncture all these inflated wind- bladders one by one, we would be well deserving of our readers.
However, at about 1750 criticism was a direct preparation for changing the re? gime since it contributed to the weaken- ing of the oppressing class by dismantling its ideology. The case today is not the same since the concepts to be criticized belong to all ideologies and all camps. Thus, it is no longer negativity alone which can serve history even if it finally does become a positivity. The individual writer may limit himself to his critical task, but our literature as a whole must be, above all, constructive. That does not mean that we must make it our business, individually or as a group, to find a new ideology. In every age, as I have pointed out, it is literature in its entirety which is the ideology because it constitutes the synthetic and often contradictory totality of everything which the age has been able to produce to enlighten itself, taking into account the historical situation and the talent. But since we have recognized that we have to produce a literature o? praxis, we ought to stick to our purpose to the very end. We no longer have time to describe
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or narrate; neither can we limit ourselves to explaining. Description, even though it be psychological, is pure con- templative enjoyment; explanation is acceptance, it excuses everything. Both of them assume that the die is cast. But if perception itself is action, if, for us, to show the world is to disclose it in the perspectives of a possible change, then, in this age of fatalism, we must reveal to the reader his power,
in each concrete case, of doing and undoing, in short, of acting. The present situation, revolutionary by virtue of the fact that it is unbearable, remains in a state of stagnation because men have dispossessed themselves of their own destiny; Europe is abdicating before the future conflict and seeks less to prevent it than to range itself in advance in the camp of the conquerors. Soviet Russia considers itself to be alone and cornered, like a wild boar surrounded by a fierce pack ready to tear it apart. The United States, which does not fear the other nations, is infatuated with its own weight; the richer it is, the heavier it is. Weighed down with fat and pride, it lets itself be rolled towards war with its eyes closed. As for us, we are writing for only a few men in our own country and a handful of others in Europe. But we must go and seek them where they are, lost in their age like needles in a haystack, and we must remind them of their power. Let us take them in their job, in their family, in their class, and in their country, and let us examine their servitude with them, but let it not be to push them deeper into it; let us show them that in the most mechanical gesture of the worker there is already the complete negation of oppression; let us never envisage their situation as factual data but as a problem; let us point out that it keeps its form and its boundaries of infinite possibilities, in a word, that it has no other shape than what they confer upon it by the way they have chosen to go beyond it; let us teach them both that they are victims and that they are responsible for everything, that they are at once the oppressed, the oppressors, and the
accomplices of their own oppressors and that one can never draw a line between what a man submits to, what he accepts, and what he wants; let us show that the world they live in
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is never defined except in reference to the future which they project before them, and since reading reveals their freedom to them, let us take advantage of it to remind them that this future in which they place themselves in order to judge the present is none other than that in which man rejoins himself andfinallyreaches himself as a totality by the coming of the City of Ends, for it is only the presentiment of Justice which permits us to be shocked by particular injustices, that is, to put it precisely, to regard them as injustices; finally, in inviting them to see things from the viewpoint of the City of Ends so they may understand their age, let us not allow them to remain in ignorance of the aspects of this age which
favour the realizing of their aim.
The theatre was formerly a theatre of 'characters'. More or less complex, but complete,figuresappeared on the stage, and the situation had no other function than to put these characters into conflict and to show how each of them was modified by the action of the others. I have elsewhere shown how important changes have taken place in this domain; many authors are returning to the theatre of situation. No more characters; the heroes are freedoms caught in a trap like all of us. What are the issues? Each character will be nothing but the choice of an issue and will equal no more than the chosen issue. It is to be hoped that all literature will become moral and problematic like this new theatre. Moral --not moralizing; let it show simply that man is also a value and that the questions he raises are always moral. Above all,
let it show the inventor in him. In a sense, each situation is a trap--there are walls everywhere. I've expressed myself poorly: there are no issues to choose. An issue is invented. And each one, by inventing his own issue, invents himself. Man must be invented each day.
The point is that all is lost if we want to choose between the powers which are preparing for war. To choose the U. S. S. R. is to give up civil liberties without even being able to hope to gain material freedom; the retardation of its industry prohibits it, in case of victory, from organizing Europe; hence, indefinite prolongation of dictatorship and misery.
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But after the victory of the United States, when the C. P. would be annihilated and the working class discouraged, disoriented, and--if I may risk a neologism--atomized, when capitalism would be more pitiless since it would be master of the world, can anyone believe that a revolutionary movement which would start from zero would have much chance? But aren't there unknown factors to be reckoned with? That's just it! I reckon with what I know. But who is forcing us to choose? Does one really make history by choosing between given wholes simply because they are given, and by siding with the stronger? In that case in 1940 all Frenchmen should have sided with Germany as the collaborators proposed.
Now, it is obvious that, on the contrary, historical action can never be reduced to a choice between raw data, but that it has always been characterized by the invention of new solutions on the basis of a definite situation. Respect for 'wholes' is pure and simple empiricism. Man has long since gone beyond empiricism in science, ethics, and in- dividual life; the fountain-makers of Florence "chose between wholes'; Torricelli invented the weight of air--I say that he invented it rather than discovered it because when an object is concealed from all eyes, one must invent it out of whole cloth in order to be able to discover it. When it is a question
of historical fact, why, out of what inferiority complex, do our realists deny this faculty of creation which they proclaim everywhere else? The historical agent is almost always the man who in the face of a dilemma suddenly causes a third term to appear, one which up to that time had been invisible. It is true that a choice must be made between the U. S. S. R. and the Anglo-Saxon bloc. As for socialist Europe, there's no 'choosing' it since it doesn't exist. It is to be made. Not by starting with the England of Mr. Churchill, nor even with that of Mr. Bevin, but by starting on the continent, by the union of all countries which have the same problems. It will be said that it is too late, but what does anyone know about it? Has anyone even tried? Our relations with our immediate neighbours always take place through Moscow, London, or
? Situation of the Writer in 194-/ \ 23 7
New York; doesn't anyone know that there are direct ways? Whatever the case may be and as long as circumstances do not change, the fortunes of literature are tied up with the coming of a socialist Europe, that is, of a group of states with a democratic and collectivist structure, each of which, while waiting for something better, would be deprived of part of its sovereignty for the sake of the whole. The hope of avoiding war dwells in this hypothesis only; in this hypothesis only will the circulation of ideas remain free and literature again find an object and a public.
Quite a number of jobs at the same time--and quite dissimilar. It's true. But Bergson has well shown that the eye--an extremely complicated organ if you regard it as a juxtaposition of functions--appears somewhat simple if it is replaced in the creative movement of evolution. The same with the writer; if you enumerate by analysis the themes which Kafka develops and the questions he raises in his books, and if you then go back to the beginning of his career and consider that for him these were themes to be treated and questions to be raised, you will be alarmed. But that's not the way he's to be taken. The work of Kafka is a free and unitary reaction to the Judaeo-Christian world of Central Europe. His novels are a synthetic act of going beyond his situation as a man, as a Jew, as a Czech, as a recalcitrant fiance? , as a tubercular, etc. , as were also his handshake, his smile, and that gaze which Max Brod so admired. Under the analysis of the critic they break down into problems; but the critic is wrong; they must be read in movement.
I have not wanted to hand out extra impositions to the writers of my generation. What right would I have to do so, and has anybody asked me to? Nor do I have any taste for the manifestoes of a school. I have merely tried to describe a situation with its perspectives, its threats, and its demands. A literature ofpraxis is coming into being in the age of the unfindable public. That's the situation. Let each one handle it in his own way. His own way, that is, his own style, his
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own technique, his own subjects. If the writer is imbued, as I am, with the urgency of these problems, one can be sure that he will offer solutions to them in the creative unity of bis worky that is, in the indistinctness of a movement of free creation. 45
There is no guarantee that literature is immortal. Its chance today, its only chance, is the chance of Europe, of socialism, of democracy, and of peace. We must play it. If we writers lose it, too bad for us. But also, too bad for society. As I have shown, the collectivity passes to reflection and mediation by means of literature; it acquires an unhappy conscience, a lopsided image of itself which it constantly tries to modify and improve. But, after all, the art of writing is not protected by immutable decrees of Providence; it is what men make it; they choose it in choosing themselves.
If it were to turn into pure propaganda or pure entertain- ment, society would wallow in the immediate, that is, in the life without memory of hymenoptera and gastropods. Of course, all of this is not very important. The world can very well do without literature. But it can do without man still better.