No More Learning

The C. P. aligns its politics with that of Soviet Russia because this is the only country in which onefindsthe rough draught of a socialist organization. But if it is true that Russia began the social revolution, it is also true that she has not ended it. The retardation of her industry, her shortage of supervisory personnel, and the masses' lack of culture have prevented her from realizing socialism by herself and even from imposing it upon other countries by the con- tagion of her example. If the revolutionary movement which started from Moscow could have spread to other nations, it would have continued to evolve in Russia itself in propor- tion to the ground it gained outside. Contained within the Soviet frontiers, it congealed into a defensive and conserva- tive nationalism because it had to save, at any cost, the results it had achieved. At the very moment when it was becoming the Mecca of the working classes, Russia saw that it was impossible, on one hand, for her to assume her
? 2o6 I What Is Literature?
historical mission and, on the other, to deny it. She was forced to withdraw into herself, to apply herself to creating supervisors, to catch up on her equipment, and to perpetuate herself by an authoritarian re? gime in the form of a revolu- tion at a standstill. As the European parties which derived from her, and which were preparing for the coming of the proletariat, were nowhere strong enough to take the offen- sive, she had to use them as the advance bastions of her defence. But as they could serve her, in regard to the masses, only by fostering revolutionary politics, and as she has never lost hope of becoming the leader of the European proletariat if circumstances should some day show them- selves more favourable, she has left them their red flag and their faith. Thus the forces of the World Revolution have been diverted to the maintenance of a revolution in a state of hibernation. Still, it must be acknowledged that, in so far as it has honestly believed in the possibility, even though remote, of seizing power by insurrection, and in so far as it has made it its business to weaken the bourgeoisie and to bore from within the Socialist Party, the C. P. has practised a negative criticism of capitalistic institutions and re? gimes which has maintained the outer appearances of freedom. Before 1939 it made use of everything: pamphlets, satires, bitter novels, Surrealistic violence, overwhelming evidence regarding our colonial methods. Since 1944 things have become aggravated; a collapsing Europe has simplified the situation. Two powers remain standing, the U. S. S. R. and the U. S. A. ; each one frightens the other. From fear, as we know, comes anger, and from anger, blows.
Now, the U. S. S. R. is the less strong. Hardly out of a war which she had feared for twenty years, she still has to temporize, to catch up in the armament race, to retighten the dictatorship internally, and, externally, to assure herself of allies, vassals, and positions.
The revolutionary tactic is changed into diplomacy. It must have Europe on its side. Thus, it must appease the bourgeoisie, lull it to sleep with fables, and at any cost keep it from throwing itself into the Anglo-Saxon camp out of
? Situation of the Writer in 1947 | 207
fright. The time has quite passed when UHumaniti could write: 'Every bourgeois who meets a workman ought to be scared/ Never have the Communists been so powerful in Europe, and yet never have the chances of a revolution been slighter. If the Party should somewhere consider the possibility of seizing power, this attempt would be nipped in the bud. The Anglo-Saxons have at their disposal a hundred ways of annihilating it, even without having re- course to arms, and for that matter the Soviets would not look upon it very favourably. If, by chance, the insurrection succeeded, it would simply vegetate without spreading. If by some miracle it finally became contagious, it would risk being the occasion of a third world war. Thus, it is no longer for the coming of the proletariat that the Communists are preparing in their respective nations, but for war, plain and simple war. If victorious, the U. S. S. R. will spread its re? gime to Europe; the nations will fall like ripe fruit; if beaten, it's all up with her and the Communist parties. To reassure the bourgeoisie without losing the confidence of the masses, to permit it to govern while appearing to keep up the offensive, and to occupy positions of command without letting itself be compromised--that's the politics of the C. P. Between 1939 and 1940 we were the witnesses and victims of the decay of a war; today we are present at the decaying of a revolutionary situation.
If it should be asked whether the writer, in order to reach the masses, should offer his services to the Communist Party, I answer no. The politics of Stalinist Communism is incompatible in France with the honest practice of the literary craft. A party which is planning revolution should have nothing to lose. For the C. P. there is something to lose and something to handle circumspectly. As its immediate goal can no longer be the establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat by force, but rather that of safeguarding a Russia which is in danger, it now presents an ambiguous appearance. Progressive and revolutionary in its doctrine and in its avowed ends, it has become conservative in its means. Even before it has seized power, it has adopted the
? 2o8 I What Is Literature?
turn of mind, the reasoning, and the artifices of those who have long since attained it, those who feel that it is escaping them and who want to maintain themselves. There is some- thing in common, and it is not talent, between Joseph de Maistre and M. Garaudy. And generally it is enough to skim through a piece of Communist writing to pick out at random a hundred conservative practices: persuasion by repetition, by intimidation, by veiled threats, by forceful and scornful assertion, by cryptic allusions to demonstrations that are not forthcoming, by exhibiting so complete and superb a con- viction that, from the very start, it places itself above all debate, casts its spell, and ends by becoming contagious; the opponent is never answered; he is discredited; he belongs to the police, to the Intelligence Service; he's a fascist. As for proofs, they are never given, because they are terrible and
implicate too many people. If you insist upon knowing them, you are told to stop where you are and to take someone's word for the accusation. 'Don't force us to bring them out; you'll be sorry if you do. ' In short, the Com- munist intellectual adopts the attitude of the staff which condemned Dreyfus on secret evidence. He also reverts, to be sure, to the Manichaeism of the reactionaries, though he divides the world according to other principles. For the Stalinist a Trotskyist is an incarnation of evil, like the Jew for Maurras. Everything that comes from him is necessarily bad. On the other hand, the possession of certain tides serves as a seal of approval. Compare this sentence of Joseph de Maistre, 'The married woman is necessarily chaste,' with this one of a correspondent of Action, 'The communist is
the permanent hero of our time. ' That there are heroes in the Communist Party--let me be the first to admit it. So what? Has no married woman ever been weak? No, since she is married before God. And is it enough to enter the Party to become a hero? Yes, since the C. P. is the party of heroes. But what if someone cited the name of a Communist who sometimes was not all he should be? It's because he wasn't a real Communist.
In the nineteenth century one had to give all sorts of
? Situation of the Writer in 1947 | 209
guarantees and lead an exemplary life in order to cleanse oneself in the eyes of the bourgeois of the sin of writing, for literature is, in essence, heresy. The situation has not changed except that it is now the Communists, that is, the qualified representatives of the proletariat, who as a matter of principle regard the writer as suspect. Even though he may be irreproachable in his morals, a Communist intel- lectual bears within him this original defect: that he entered the party freefy; he was led to this decision by a thoughtful reading of Capital, a critical examination of the historical situation, an acute sense of justice and generosity, and a taste for solidarity; all this is proof of an independence which doesn't smell so very good. He entered the party by free choice; therefore, he can leave it. 38 He entered because he had criticized the politics of his class of origin; therefore, he will be able to criticize that of the representa- tives of his class of adoption. But in the very action by which he inaugurates a new life, there is a curse which will weigh upon him all through this life. From the moment of ordination there begins for him a long trial, similar to the one Kafka has described for us, in which the judges are unknown and the dossiers secret, where the only final sen- tences are condemnations. It is not up to his invisible accusers to give proof of his crime, as is customary in justice; it is for him to prove his innocence. As everything he writes can be held against him and as he knows it, each of his works presents the ambiguous character of being both a public appeal in the name of the C. P. and a secret plea for his own cause. Everything that, from the outside, for the readers, seems a chain of peremptory assertions, appears within the Party, in the eyes of the judges, as a humble and clumsy attempt at self-justification. When to us he appears most brilliant and most effective, he is perhaps then most guilty. Sometimes it seems to us--and perhaps he too believes it--that he has been raised into the hier- archy of the Party and that he has become its spokesman, but he is being tested or tricked; the rungs of the ladder are faked; when he thinks he's high up, he's far down. You
? 2io I What Is Literature?
can read his writings a hundred times but you'll never be able to decide their real importance. When Nisan, who was in charge of foreign politics for Ce soir, was in all honesty trying his utmost to prove that our only chance for salvation lay in a Franco-Russian pact, his secret judges, who let him talk on, already knew about Ribbentrop's con- versations with Molotov. If he thinks that he can get out of it by a corpselike obedience, he is mistaken. He is ex-
pected to have wit, pungency, lucidity, and inventiveness. But at the same time that they are required of him, he is penalized for these virtues, for they are, in themselves, tendencies towards crime. How is he to practise the critical spirit? The flaw is in him like the worm in a piece of fruit. He can please neither his readers, his judges, nor himself.
In the eyes of everyone and even of himself he is only a guilty subjectivity which deforms Knowledge by reflecting
it in his troubled waters. This deformation can be useful;
as his readers make no distinction between what comes from the author and what from the 'historical process', it is always possible to disclaim him. It is taken for granted that he dirties his hands in his job, and as his mission is to express C. P. politics from day to day, his articles still remain when the line has long since changed, and these are what the opponents of Stalinism refer to when they want
to show its contradictions or versatility. Thus, the writer
is not only presumed guilty in advance; he is charged with all past faults, since his name remains attached to the errors of the Party, and he is the scapegoat of all the political purges.
Nevertheless, it is not impossible that he may hold out for a long time if he learns to keep his qualities in leash when they run the risk of pulling him too far. Yet he must not use cynicism. Cynicism is as serious a vice as good will. Let him know how to keep his eyes shut; let him see what need not be seen, and let him forget sufficiently what he has seen in order never to write about it, yet let him remem- ber it sufficiently so that in the future he may avoid looking at it; let him carry his criticism far enough to determine the point where it should be brought to a halt, that is, let him
? Situation of the Writer in 1947 \ 211
go beyond this point In order to be able in the future to avoid the temptation of going beyond it, but let him know how to detach himself from this prospective criticism, to put it in parentheses, and to regard it as null and void; in short, let him at all times be aware that the mind is finite, bounded everywhere by magic frontiers, by mists, like the primitives who can count up to twenty and are mysteriously denied the power of going any further. This artificial fog which he must be always ready to spread between himself and risky evidence, we shall call, very simply, dishonesty. But we're notfinishedyet: let him avoid speaking too often about dogmas; it's not good to show them in broad day- light; the works of Marx, like the Bible of the Catholics, are dangerous to anyone who approaches them without a director of conscience; there is one in each cell; if doubts or scruples arise it is to him that one must go and talk. Nor should you put too many Communists in your novels or on the stage; if they have faults, they run the risk of displeas- ing; if they are too perfect, they bore. Stalinist politics has no desire to find its image in literature because it knows that
a portrait is already a challenge. One can get out of it by painting the 'permanent hero* en profil perdu--by making him appear at the end of the story to draw conclusions, or by everywhere suggesting his presence but without showing it, as Daudet with the Arle? sienne. As far as possible, avoid bringing up the revolution; that's rather dated. The Euro- pean proletariat no more governs its destiny than does the bourgeoisie; history is written elsewhere. It must be slowly weaned of its old dreams, and the perspective of insurrec- tion must be gently replaced by that of war. If the writer conforms to all these prescriptions, he will not be in greater favour on that account. He's a useless mouth; he doesn't work with his hands. He knows it; he suffers from an in- feriority complex; he is almost ashamed of his craft and puts as much zeal into bowing before the workers as Jules Lamai^tre put into bowing before the generals round about
1900.
During this period, the Marxist doctrine--which is quite
? 212 I What Is Literature?
intact--has been withering away; for want of internal con- troversy, it has been degraded to a stupid determinism. Marx, Lenin, and Engels said any number of times that explanation by causes had to yield to the dialectical process. But the dialectic does not admit of being put into the formulas of a catechism. An elementary scientism is being spread. History is accounted for by juxtapositions of causal and linear series. Shortly before the war, Politzer, the last of the great minds of French Communism, was forced to teach that 'the brain secretes thought' as an endocrine gland secretes hormones; when the Communist intellectual today wants to interpret history or human behaviour, he borrows from bourgeois ideology a deterministic psychology based on mechanism and the law of interest.
But there is worse. The conservation of the C. P. is today accompanied by an opportunism which contradicts it. It is not only a matter of safeguarding the U. S. S. R. , but it is also necessary to deal tactfully with the bourgeoisie. Thus, they talk its language: family, country, religion, morality. And as they have not thereby given up the idea of weaken- ing it, they try to fight it on its own ground by improving upon its principles. The result of this tactic is to superim- pose two contradictory conservatisms, materialist scholas- ticism and Christian moralism. The truth is that once you abandon all logic, it is not so difficult to pass from one to the other because both suppose the same sentimental attitude; it is a matter of holding fast to positions which are threatened, of refusing to discuss, and of masking fear behind anger. But the point is that the intellectual, by definition, must also use logic. Therefore, he is asked to cover up the contradictions by sleight-of-hand. He must do his best to reconcile the irreconcilable, to unite by force ideas which repel each other, and to cover up the soldering by glittering layers of fine style--to say nothing of the task which has fallen to him only recently, that is, to steal the history of France from the bourgeoisie, to annex the great Ferre? , little Bara, Saint Vincent de Paul, and Descartes. Poor Communist intellectuals. They have fled the ideology
? Situation of the Writer in 1947 \ 213
of their class of origin only to find it again in the class they have chosen. This time, there is no more laughing; work, family, country--these are the words they must sing. I imagine that they must often rather want to let loose, but they are chained. They are allowed to roar at phantoms or against some writers who have remained free and who represent nothing.
They'll start naming illustrious writers. To be sure, I recognize the fact that they had talent. Is it an accident if they no longer have any? I have shown above that the work of art, which is an absolute end, is opposed in essence to bourgeois utilitarianism. Do they think that it can accom- modate itself to Communist utilitarianism? In a genuinely revolutionary party it would find the propitious climate for its blossoming because the freedom of man and the coming of the classless society are likewise absolute goals, uncon- ditioned exigencies which literature can reflect in its own exigency. But the C. P. today has entered the infernal circle of means. It must take and keep key positions, that is, means of acquiring means. When ends withdraw, when means are swarming like gnats as far as the eye can see, the work of art in turn becomes a means. It enters the chain. Its ends and its principles become external to it. It is governed from the outside. It takes man by the belly or the short hairs. The writer maintains the appearance of talent, that is, the art of finding words which gleam, but some- thing is dead within. Literature has changed into propa- ganda. 39 Yet it is someone like M. Garaudy, a Communist and a propagandist, who accuses me of being a grave- digger. I could return the insult, but I prefer to plead guilty; if I could do so, I would bury literature with my own hands rather than make it serve ends which utilize it. But why the excitement? Grave-diggers are honest people, certainly unionized, perhaps Communists. Fd rather be a grave-digger than a lackey.
Since we are still free, we won't join the C. P. watch- dogs. The fact that we have talent does not depend upon us, but as we have chosen the profession of writing, each of
? 214 I What Is Literature?
us is responsible for literature, and whether or not it be- comes alienated does depend upon us. It is sometimes claimed that our books reflect the hesitations of the petty bourgeoisie which decides for neither the proletariat nor for capitalism. That's false; we've made up our minds. We are then told that our choice is ineffectual and abstract, that it is an intellectual game if it is not accompanied by our adhesion to a revolutionary party. It is true that today in France one can hardly reach the working classes if not through the Party.
But only loose thinking can identify their cause with the C. P. 's. Even if, as citizens, we can in strictly specific circumstances support its politics with our votes, that does not mean that we should serve it with our pens. If the two alternatives are really the bourgeoisie and the C. P. , then the choice is impossible. For we do not have
the right to write for the oppressing class alone, nor to join forces with a party which asks us to work dishonestly and with a bad conscience. In so far as the Communist Party canalizes, almost in spite of itself, the aspirations of an entire oppressed class which irresistibly leads it to demand, for fear of being 'outflanked on the left', such measures as peace with the Viet Nam or the increase of salaries--which its whole political line is inclined to avoid--we are with this party against the bourgeoisie; in so far as certain well- intentioned bourgeois circles recognize that spirituality must be simultaneously a free negativity and a free con- struction, we are with these bourgeois against the C. P. In so far as a scurvy, opportunistic, conservative, and deter- ministic ideology is in contradiction with the very essence of literature we are against both the C. P. and the bour- geoisie. That means clearly that we are writing against everybody, that we have readers but no public. Bourgeois who have broken with our class but who have remained bourgeois in our morals, separated from the proletariat by the Communist screen, we remain up in the air; our good will serves no one, not even us; we are in the age of the un- discoverable public. Worse still, we are writing against the
current,
? Situation of the Writer in 194 7 | 215
The authors of the eighteenth century helped to make his- tory because the historical perspective of the moment was revolution and because a writer can and ought to align him- self on the side of revolution if it is proved that there is no other means of bringing an end to oppression. But the writer today can in no case approve of a war, because the social structure of war is dictatorship, because its results are always a matter of chance, and because, whatever happens, its costs are infinitely greater than the gains, and finally because war alienates literature by making it serve the propagandist hullabaloo.
Since our historical perspective is war, since we are asked to choose between the Anglo-Saxon and the Soviet blocs, and since we refuse to prepare for war with either one or the other, we have fallen outside history and are speaking in the desert. We are not even left with the illusion of winning our case by means of an appeal; there will be no appeal, and we know that the posthumous fate of our works will depend neither upon our talents nor our efforts, but upon the results of future conflicts. In the event of a Soviet victory, we will be passed over in silence until we die a second time; in the event of an American victory, the best of us will be put into the jars of literary history and won't be taken out again.
A clear-sighted view of the darkest possible situation is in itself already an optimistic act. It implies, in effect, that the situation can be thought about, that is, that we are not lost in a dark forest and that, on the contrary, we can break away from it, at least in spirit, that we can examine it and thus already go beyond it and take up our resolutions in the face of it, even if these resolutions are hopeless. Our engagement must begin the moment we are repulsed and ex- communicated by the Churches, when the art of writing, wedged in between different propagandas, seems to have lost its characteristic effectiveness. It is not a question of adding to the exigencies of literature, but simply of serving them all together, even without hope.
(1) First, let us list our virtual readers, that is, the social
? 2i6 I What Is Literature?
categories which do not read us, but which might. I do not think that we have made much headway among teachers, which is a pity. They have already served as intermediaries between literature and the masses. 40 By now, most of them have already chosen. They dispense the Christian or the Stalinist ideology to their pupils, according to the side they have taken. However, there are still some who are hesita- ting. These are the ones who must be reached. A great deal has been written about the petty bourgeoisie, distrustful and always mystified, so ready, in its bewilderment, to follow fascist agitators. I do not think that much has been written for it l except propaganda tracts. Y et it is accessible through certain of its elements. Finally, more remote, diffi- cult to distinguish, and still more difficult to touch are those popular factions which have not joined up with communism or which detach themselves from it and risk falling into resigned indifference or formless discontent. Outside that, nothing. The peasants hardly read--though slightly more than they did in 1914. The working class is locked up. Such are the data of the problem; they are not encouraging, but we must adapt ourselves to them.
(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.
? Situation of the Writer in 1947 \ 217
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
? Situation of the Writer in 194 7 | 219
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
? 220 I What Is Literature?
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,
? Situation of the Writer in 194 7 | 221
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
? 222 I What Is Literature?
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-
? Situation of the Writer in 1947 \ 223
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,
? 224 I What Is Literature?
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
? 226 I What Is Literature?
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.