No More Learning

? For Whom
Does One Write?
AT first sight, there doesn't seem to be any doubt: one writes for the universal reader, and we have seen, in effect, that the exigency of the writer is, as a rule, addressed to all men. But the preceding descriptions are ideal. As a matter of fact the writer knows that he speaks for freedoms which are swallowed up, masked, and unavail- able; and his own freedom is not so pure; he has to clean it. It is dangerously easy to speak too readily about eternal values; eternal values are very, very fleshless. Even freedom, if one considers it sub specie aeternitatisy seems to be a withered branch; for, like the sea, there is no end to it. It is nothing else but the movement by which one perpetually uproots and liberates oneself. There is no given freedom. One must win an inner victory over one's passions, one's race, one's class, and one's nation and must conquer other men along with oneself. But what counts in this case is the particular form of the obstacle to be surmounted, of the resistance to be overcome. That is what gives form to freedom in each circumstance. If the writer has chosen, as Benda has it, to talk drivel, he can speak in fine, rolling periods of that eternal freedom which National Socialism, Stalinist commu- nism, and the capitalist democracies all lay claim to. He won't disturb anybody; he won't address anybody. Every- thing he asks for is granted him in advance. But it is an abstract dream. Whether he wants to or not, and even if he has his eyes on eternal laurels, the writer is speaking to his contemporaries and brothers of his class and race.
As a matter of fact, it has not been sufficiendy observed that a work of the mind is by nature allusive. Even if the author's aim is to give the fullest possible representation of his object, there is never any question as to whether he is telling everything. He knows far more than he tells. This is
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so because language is elliptical. If I want to let my neigh- bour know that a wasp has got in by the window, there is no need for a long speech. 'Look out! ' or 'Hey! '--a word is enough, a gesture--as soon as he sees the wasp, everything is clear. Imagine a gramophone record reproducing for us, without comment, the everyday conversations of a house- hold in Provins or Angoule^me--we wouldn't understand a thing; the context would be lacking, that is, memories and perceptions in common, the situation and the enterprises of the couple; in short, the world such as each of the speakers knows it to appear to the other.
The same with reading: people of the same period and community, who have lived through the same events, who have raised or avoided the same questions, have the same taste in their mouth; they have the same complicity, and there are the same corpses among them. That is why it is not necessary to write so much; there are key-words. If I were to tell an audience of Americans about the German occupation, there would have to be a great deal of analysis and precaution. I would waste twenty pages in dispelling preconceptions, prejudices, and legends. Afterwards, I would have to be sure of my position at every step; I would have to look for images and symbols in American history which would enable them to understand ours; I would always have to keep in mind the difference between our old man's pessimism and their childlike optimism. If I were to write about the same subject for Frenchmen, we
would be entre nous. For example, it would be enough to say: 'A concert of German military music in the band-stand of a public garden/ Everything is there: a raw spring day, a park in the provinces, men with shaven skulls blowing away at their brasses, blind and deaf passers-by who quicken their steps, two or three sullen-looking listeners under the trees, this useless serenade to France which drifts off into the sky, our shame and our anguish, our anger, and our pride too. Thus, the reader I am addressing is neither Microme? gas nor L'Inge? nu; nor is he God the Father either. He has not the ignorance of the noble savage to whom everything has to be
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explained on the basis of principles; he is not a spirit or a tabula rasa. Neither has he the omniscience of an angel or of the Eternal Father. I reveal certain aspects of the universe to him; I take advantage of what he knows to attempt to teach him what he does not know. Suspended between total ignorance and omniscience, he has a definite stock of knowledge which varies from moment to moment and which is enough to reveal his historical character. In actual fact, he is not an instantaneous consciousness, a pure timeless affirmation of freedom, nor does he soar above history; he is involved in it.
Authors too are historical. And that is precisely the reason why some of them want to escape from history by a leap into eternity. The book, serving as a go-between, establishes an historical contact among the men who are steeped in the same history and who likewise contribute to its making. Writing and reading are two facets of the same historical fact, and the freedom to which the writer invites us is not a pure abstract consciousness of being free. Strictly speaking, it is not\ it wins itself in an historical situa- tion; each book proposes a concrete liberation on the basis
of a particular alienation. Hence, in each one there is an implicit recourse to institutions, customs, certain forms of oppression and conflict, to the wisdom and the folly of the day, to lasting passions and passing stubbornness, to super- stitions and recent victories of common sense, to evidence and ignorance, to particular modes of reasoning which the sciences have made fashionable and which are applied in all domains, to hopes, to fears, to habits of sensibility, imagina- tion, and even perception, and finally, to customs and values which have been handed down, to a whole world which the author and the reader have in common. It is this familiar world which the writer animates and penetrates with his
freedom. It is on the basis of this world that the reader must bring about his concrete liberation; it is alienation, situation, and history. It is this world which I must change or preserve for myself and others. For if the immediate aspect of freedom is negativity, we know that it is not a matter of
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the abstract power of saying no, but of a concrete negativity which retains within itself (and is completely coloured by) what it denies. And since the freedoms of the author and reader seek and affect each other through a world, it can just as well be said that the author's choice of a certain aspect of the world determines the reader and, vice versa, that it is by choosing his reader that the author decides upon his subject.
Thus, all works of the mind contain within themselves the image of the reader for whom they are intended. I could draw the portrait of Gide's Nathanae? l on the basis of Fruits of the Earth: I can see that the alienation from which he is urged to free himself is the family, the property he owns or will own by inheritance, the utilitarian project, a con- ventional morality, a narrow theism; I also see that he is cultured and has leisure, since it would be absurd to offer Me? nalque as an example to an unskilled labourer, a man out of work, or an American negro; I know that he is not threatened by any external danger--by hunger, war, or class or racial oppression; the only danger is that of being the victim of his own milieu. Therefore, he is a rich white Aryan, the heir of a great bourgeois family that lives in a period which is still relatively stable and easy, in which the ideology of the possessing class is barely beginning to decline: the image of that Daniel de Fontanin whom Roger Martin du Gard later presented to us as an enthusiastic admirer of Andre? Gide.
To take a still more recent example, it is striking that The Silence of the Sea, a work written by a man who was a member of the resistance from the very beginning and whose aim is perfectly evident, was received with hostility in the e? migre? circles of New York, London, and sometimes even Algiers, and they even went so far as to tax its author
with collaboration. The reason is that Vercors did not aim at that public. In the occupied zone, on the other hand, no- body doubted the author's intentions or the efficacy of his writing; he was writing for us. As a matter of fact, I do not think that one can defend Vercors by saying that his German
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is real or that his old Frenchman and French girl are real. Koesder has written some very fine pages about this question; the silence of the two French characters has no psychological verisimilitude; it even has a slight taste of anachronism; it recalls the stubborn muteness of Maupas- sant's patriotic peasants during another occupation, an other occupation with other hopes, other anguish, and other customs. As to the German officer, his portrait does not lack life, but, as is self-evident, Vercors, who at the time refused to have any contact with the occupying army, did it *without a model', by combining the probable elements of his character. Thus, it is not in the name of truth that these images should be preferred to those which Anglo-Saxon propaganda was shaping each day. But for a Frenchman of continental France, Vercors' story, in 1941, was effective. When the enemy is separated from you by a barrier of fire, you have to judge him as a whole, as the incarnation of evil; all war is a form of Manichaeism. It is therefore understandable that the English newspapers did not waste their time distinguishing the wheat from the chaff in the German army. But, conversely, the conquered and occupied populations, who mingled with their conquer- ors, re-learned by familiarization and the effects of clever propaganda to consider them as men. Good men and bad men; good and bad at the same time. A work which in '41 would have presented the German soldiers to them as ogres would have made them laugh and would have failed in its purpose.
As early as the end of '42 The Silence of the Sea had lost its effectiveness; the reason is that the war was starting again on our soil. On one side, underground propaganda, sabo- tage, derailment of trains, and acts of violence; and on the other, curfew, deportations, imprisonment, torture, and execution of hostages. An invisible barrier of fire once again separated Germans and Frenchmen. We no longer wished to know whether the Germans who plucked out the eyes and ripped off the nails of our friends were accomplices or victims of Nazism; it was no longer enough to maintain a
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lofty silence before them; besides, they would not have tolerated it. At this point in the war it was necessary to be either for them or against them. In the midst of bombard- ments and massacres, of burned villages and deportations, Vercors' story seemed like an idyll; it had lost its public. Its public was the man of '41 humiliated by defeat but astonished at the studied courtesy of the occupiers, desiring peace, terrified by the spectre of Bolshevism and misled by the speeches of Pe? tain. It would have been fruitless to present the Germans to this man as bloodthirsty brutes. On the contrary, you had to admit to him that they might be polite and even likeable, and since he had discovered with surprise that most of them were 'men like us/ he had to be re-shown that even if such were the case, fraternizing was impossible, that the more likeable they seemed, the more unhappy and impotent they were, and that it was necessary to fight against a re? gime and an ideology even if the men who brought it to us did not seem bad. And, in short, as one was addressing a passive crowd, as there were still rather few important organizations, and as these showed themselves to be highly cautious in their recruiting, the only form of opposition that could be required of the population was silence, scorn, and an obedience which was forced and which showed it.
Thus, Vercors' story defined its public; by defining it, it defined itself. It wanted to combat within the mind of the French bourgeoisie of 1941 the effects of Pe? tain's interview with Hitler at Montoire. A year and a half after the defeat it was alive, virulent, and effective. In a half-century it will no longer excite anyone. An ill-informed public will still read it as an agreeable and somewhat languid tale about the war of 1939. It seems that bananas have a better taste when they have just been picked. Works of the mind should like- wise be eaten on the spot.
One might be tempted to accuse any attempt to explain a work of the mind by the public to which it is addressed for its vain subtlety and its indirect character. Is it not more simple, direct, and rigorous to take the condition of the author himself as the determining factor? Shouldn't one be
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satisfied with Taine's notion of the 'milieu? I answer that the explanation by the milieu is, in effect, determinative: the milieu produces the writer; that is why I do not believe in it. On the contrary, the public calls to him, that is, it puts questions to his freedom. The milieu is a vis a tergo; the public, on the contrary, is a waiting, an emptiness to be filled in,anaspiration,figurativelyandliterally. Inaword,itis the other. And I am so far from rejecting the explanation of the work by the situation of the man that I have always con- sidered the project of writing as the free exceeding of a certain human and total situation. In which, moreover, it is not different from other undertakings. Etiemble in a witty but superficial article writes,9 'I was going to revise my little dictionary when chance put three lines of Jean-Paul Sartre right under my nose: "In effect, for us the writer is neither a Vestal nor an Ariel. Do what he may, he's in the thick of it, marked and compromised down to his deepest refuge. " To be in the thick of it, up to the ears. I recognized,
in a way, the words of Blaise Pascal: "We are embarked. " But at once I saw commitment lose all its value, reduced sud- denly to the most ordinary of facts, the fact of the prince and the slave, to the human condition/
That's what I said all right. But E? tiemble is being silly. If every man is embarked, that does not at all mean that he is fully conscious of it. Most men pass their time in hiding their commitment from themselves. That does not neces- sarily mean that they attempt evasions by lying, by artificial paradises, or by a life of make-believe. It is enough for them to dim their lanterns, to see the foreground without the background and, vice versa, to see the ends while passing over the means in silence, to refuse solidarity with their kind, to take refuge in the spirit of pompousness, to remove all value from life by considering it from the point of view of someone who is dead, and at the same time, all horror from death byfleeingfrom it in the commonplaceness of everyday existence, to persuade themselves, if they belong to an oppressing class, that they are escaping their class by the loftiness of their feelings, and, if they belong to the
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oppressed, to conceal from themselves their complicity with oppression by asserting that one can remain free while in chains if one has a taste for the inner life. Writers can have recourse to all this just like anyone else. There are some, and they are the majority, who furnish a whole
arsenal of tricks to the reader who wants to go on sleeping quietly.
I shall say that a writer is committed when he tries to achieve the most lucid and the most complete conscious- ness of being embarked, that is, when he causes the com- mitment of immediate spontaneity to advance, for himself and others, to the reflective. The writer is, par excellence, a mediator and his commitment is to mediation. But, if it is true that we must account for his work on the basis of his condition, it must also be borne in mind that his condition
is not only that of a man in general but precisely that of a writer as well. Perhaps he is a Jew, and a Czech, and of peasant family, but he is a Jewish writer, a Czech writer and of rural stock. When, in another article, I tried to define the situation of the Jew, the best I could do was this: 'The Jew is a man whom other men consider as a Jew and who is obliged to choose himself on the basis of the situation which is made for him/ For there are qualities which come to us solely by means of the judgement of others. In the case of the writer, the case is more complex, for no one is obliged to choose himself as a writer. Hence, freedom is at the origin. I am an author, first of all, by my free intention to write. But at once it follows that I become a man whom other men consider as a writer, that is, who has to respond to a certain demand and who has been invested, whether he likes it or not, with a certain social function. Whatever game he may want to play, he must play it on the basis of the representation which others have of him. He may want to modify the character that one attributes to the man of letters in a given society; but in order to change it, he must first slip into it. Hence, the public intervenes, with its customs, its vision of the world, and its conception of society and of literature within that society. It surrounds the
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writer, it hems him in, and its imperious or sly demands, its refusals and its flights, are the given facts on whose basis a work can be constructed.
Let us take the case of the great negro writer, Richard Wright. If we consider only his condition as a many that is, as a Southern 'nigger' transported to the North, we shall
at once imagine that he can only write about Negroes or Whites seen through the eyes of Negroes. Can one imagine for a moment that he would agree to pass his life in the contem- plation of the eternal True, Good, and Beautiful when ninety per cent, of the negroes in the South are practically deprived
of the right to vote? And if anyone speaks here about the treason of the clerks, I answer that there are no clerks among the oppressed. Clerks are necessarily the parasites of op- pressing classes or races. Thus, if an American negro finds that he has a vocation as a writer, he discovers his subject at the same time. He is the man who sees the whites from the outside, who assimilates the white culture from the outside, and each of whose books will show the alienation of the black race within American society. Not objectively, like the realists, but passionately, and in a way that will com- promise his reader. But this examination leaves the nature
of his work undetermined; he might be a pamphleteer, a blues-writer, or the Jeremiah of the Southern negroes.
If we want to go further, we must consider his public. To whom does Richard Wright address himself? Certainly not to the universal man. The essential characteristic of the notion of the universal man is that he is not involved in any particular age, and that he is no more and no less moved by the lot of the negroes of Louisiana than by that of the Roman slaves in the time of Spartacus. The universal man can think of nothing but universal values. He is a pure and abstract affirmation of the inalienable right of man. But neither can Wright think of intending his books for the white racialists of Virginia or South Carolina whose minds are made up in advance and who will not open them. Nor to the black peasants of the bayous who cannot read. And if he seems to be happy about the reception his books have
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had in Europe, still it is obvious that at the beginning he had not the slightest idea of writing for the European public. Europe is far away. Its indignation is ineffectual and hypo- critical. Not much is to be expected from the nations which have enslaved the Indies, Indo-China, and negro Africa. These considerations are enough to define his readers. He is addressing himself to the cultivated negroes of the North and the white Americans of goodwill (intellectuals, demo- crats of the left, radicals, CI. O. workers).
It is not that he is not aiming through them at all men but it is through them that he is thus aiming. Just as one can catch a glimpse of eternal freedom at the horizon of the historical and concrete freedom which it pursues, so the human race is at the horizon of the concrete and historical group of its readers. The illiterate negro peasants and the Southern planters represent a margin of abstract possi- bilities around its real public. After all, an illiterate may learn to read. Black Boy may fall into the hands of the most stubborn of negrophobes and may open his eyes. This merely means that every human project exceeds its actual limits and extends itself step by step to the infinite.
Now, it is to be noted that there is a fracture at the very heart of this actualpublic. For Wright, the negro readers represent the subjective. The same childhood, the same difficulties, the same complexes: a mere hint is enough for them; they understand with their hearts. In trying to become clear about his own personal situation, he clarifies theirs for them. He mediates, names, and shows them the life they lead from day to day in its immediacy, the life they suffer without finding words to formulate their sufferings. He is their conscience, and the movement by which he raises him- self from the immediate to the reflective recapturing of his condition is that of his whole race. But whatever the good- will of the white readers may be, for a negro author they represent the Other. They have not lived through what he has lived through. They can understand the negro's condi- tion only by an extreme stretch of the imagination and by relying upon analogies which at any moment may deceive
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them. On the other hand, Wright does not completely know them. It is only from without that he conceives their proud security and that tranquil certainty, common to all white Aryans, that the world is white and that they own it. The words he puts down on paper have not the same context for whites as for negroes. They must be chosen by guess- work, since he does not know what resonances they will set up in those strange minds. And when he speaks to them, their very aim is changed. It is a matter of implicating them and making them take stock of their responsibilities. He must make them indignant and ashamed.
Thus, each of Wright's works contains what Baudelaire would have called 'a double simultaneous postulation"; each word refers to two contexts; two forces are applied simul- taneously to each phrase and determine the incomparable tension of his tale. Had he spoken to the whites alone, he might have turned out to be more prolix, more didactic, and more abusive; to the negroes alone, still more elliptical, more of a confederate, and more elegiac. In the first case, his work might have come close to satire; in the second, to prophetic lamentations. Jeremiah spoke only to the Jews.
But Wright, a writer for a split public, has been able both to maintain and go beyond this split. He has made it the pretext for a work of art.
The writer consumes and does not produce, even if he
has decided to serve the community's interests with his pen.
His works remain gratuitous; thus no price can be set on their value. Their market value is fixed arbitrarily. In some periods he is pensioned and in others he gets a percentage
of the sales of the book. But there is no more common measure between the work of the mind and percentage remuneration in modern society than there was between the poem and the royal pension under the old re? gime. Actually,
the writer is not paid; he is fed, well or badly, according to
the period. The system cannot work any differendy, for his activity is useless. It is not at all useful; it is sometimes harmful for society to become self-conscious. For the fact is that the useful is defined within the framework of an established
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society and in relationship to institutions, values, and ends which are already fixed. If society sees itself and, in particu- lar, sees itself as seen, there is, by virtue of this very fact, a contesting of the established values of the re? gime. The writer presents it with its image; he calls upon it to assume it or to change itself. At any rate, it changes; it loses the equilibrium which its ignorance had given it; it wavers
between shame and cynicism; it practises dishonesty; thus, the writer gives society a guilty conscience; he is thereby in a state of perpetual antagonism towards the conservative forces which are maintaining the balance he tends to upset. For the transition to the mediate which can be brought about only by a negation of the immediate is a perpetual revolution.
Only the governing classes can allow themselves the luxury of remunerating so unproductive and dangerous an activity, and if they do so, it is a matter both of tactics and of misapprehension. Misapprehension for the most part: free from material cares, the members of the governing e? lite are sufficiently detached to want to have a reflective know- ledge of themselves. They want to retrieve themselves, and they charge the artist with presenting them with their image without realizing that he will then make them assume it. A tactic on the part of some who, having recognized the danger, pension the artist in order to control his destructive power. Thus, the writer is a parasite of the governing e? lite. But, functionally, he moves in opposition to the interests of those who keep him alive. 10 Such is the original conflict which defines his condition.
Sometimes the conflict is obvious. Wc? still talk about the courtiers who made the success of the Marriage of Figaro though it sounded the death-knell of the re? gime. Other times, it is masked, because to name is to show, and to show is to change. And as this challenging activity, which is harmful to the established interests, ventures, in its very modest way, to concur in a change of re? gime, as, on the other hand, the oppressed classes have neither the leisure nor the taste for reading, the objective aspect of the conflict may express itself as an antagonism between the conserva-
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tive forces, or the real public of the writer, and the pro- gressive forces, or the virtual public.
In a classless society, one whose internal structure would be permanent revolution, the writer might be a mediator/^ ally and his challenge on principle might precede or accom- pany the changes in fact. In my opinion this is the deeper meaning we should give to the notion of self-criticism. The expanding of the real public up to the limits of his virtual public would bring about within his mind a reconciliation of hostile tendencies. Literature, entirely liberated, would represent negativity in so far as it is a necessary moment in reconstruction. But to my knowledge this type of society does not for the moment exist, and it may be doubted whether it is possible. Thus, the conflict remains. It is at the origin of what I would call the writer's ups and downs and his bad conscience.
It is reduced to its simplest expression when the virtual public is practically nil and when the writer, instead of re- maining on the margin of the privileged class, is absorbed by it. In that case literature identifies itself with the ideology of the directing class; reflection takes place within the class; the challenge deals with details and is carried on in the name of uncontested principles. For example, that is what happened in Europe in about the twelfth century; the clerk wrote exclusively for clerks. But he could keep a good conscience because there was a divorce between the spiritual and the temporal. The Christian Revolution brought in the spiritual, that is, the spirit itself, as a negation, a challenge, and a transcendence, a perpetual construction, beyond the realm of Nature, of the anti-natural city of freedoms. But it was necessary that this universal power of surpassing the object be first encountered as an object, that this perpetual negation of Nature appear, in the first place, as nature, that this faculty of perpetually creating ideologies and of leaving them behind along the way be embodied, to begin with, in
a particular ideology. In the first centuries of our era the spiritual was a captive of Christianity, or, if you prefer, Christianity was the spiritual itself but alienated. It was the
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spirit made object. Hence, it is evident that instead of appear- ing as the common and forever renewed experience of all men, it manifested itself at first as the specialty of a few. Medieval society had spiritual needs, and, to serve them, it set up a body of specialists who were recruited by co-option. Today we consider reading and writing as human rights and, at the same time, as means for communicating with others which are almost as natural and spontaneous as oral language. That is why the most uncultured peasant is a potential reader. In the time of the clerks, they were tech- niques which were reserved strictly for professionals. They were not practised for their own sake, like spiritual exercises. Their aim was not to obtain access to that large and vague
humanism which was later to be called 'the humanities'. They were means solely of preserving and transmitting Christian ideology. To be able to read was to have the necessary tool for acquiring knowledge of the sacred texts and their innumerable commentaries; to be able to write was to be able to comment. Other men no more aspired to possess these professional techniques than we aspire today to acquire that of the cabinet-maker or the palaeographer if we practise other professions. The barons counted on the clerks to produce and watch over spirituality. By themselves they were incapable of exercising control over writers as the public does today, and they were unable to distinguish heresy from orthodox beliefs if they were left without help. They got excited only when the pope had recourse to the secular arm. Then they pillaged and burned everything, but only because they had confidence in the pope, and they never turned up their noses at a chance to pillage. It is true that the ideology was ultimately intended for them, for them and the people, but it was communicated to them orally by preaching, and the church very early made use of a simpler language than writing: the image. The sculpture of the cloisters and the cathedrals, the stained glass windows, the paintings, and the mosaics speak of God and the Holy Story. The clerk wrote his chronicles, his philosophical works, his commentaries, and his poems on the margin of
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this vast illustrating enterprise of faith. He intended them for his peers; they were controlled by his superiors. He did not have to be concerned with the effects which his works would produce upon the masses, since he was assured in advance that they would have no knowledge of them. Nor did he want to introduce remorse into the conscience of a feudal plunderer or caitiff; violence was unlettered. Thus, for him it was neither a question of reflecting its own image back to the temporal, nor of taking sides, nor of disengag- ing the spiritual from historical experience by a continuous effort. Quite the contrary, as the writer was of the Church, as the Church was an immense spiritual college which proved its dignity by its resistance to change, as history and the temporal were one and spirituality was radically distinct from the temporal, as the aim of his clerkship was to main- tain this distinction, that is, to maintain itself as a specialized body in the face of the century, as, in addition, the economy was so divided up and as means of communication were so few and slow that events which occurred in one province had no effect upon the neighbouring province and as a monastery could enjoy its individual peace, like the hero of the AcharnianSy while its country was at war, the writer's mission was to prove his autonomy by delivering himself to the exclusive contemplation of the Eternal. He incessandy affirmed the Eternal's existence and demonstrated it pre- cisely by the fact that his only concern was to regard it. In this sense, he realized, in effect, the ideal of Benda, but one can see under what conditions: spirituality and literature had to be alienated, a particular ideology had to triumph, a feudal pluralism had to make the isolation of the clerks possible, virtually the whole population had to be illiterate, and the only public of the writer could be the college of other writers. It is inconceivable that one can practise free- dom of thought, write for a public which coincides with the restricted collectivity of specialists, and restrict oneself to describing the content of eternal values and a priori ideas. The good conscience of the medieval clerk flowered on the death of literature,
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However, in order for writers to preserve this happy con- science it is not quite necessary that their public be reduced to an established body of professionals. It is enough for them to be steeped in the ideology of the privileged classes, to be completely permeated by it, and to be unable even to conceive any others. But in this case their function is modified; they are no longer asked to be the guardians of dogma but merely not to make themselves its detractors. As a second example of the adherence of writers to estab- lished ideology, one might, I believe, choose the French seventeenth century.
The secularization of the writer and his public was in process of being completed in that age. It certainly had its origin in the expansive force of the written thing, its monu- mental character, and the appeal to freedom which is hidden away in any work of the mind. But external circumstances contributed, such as the development of education, the weakening of the spiritual power, and the appearance of new ideologies which were expressly intended for the temporal. However, secularization does not mean universalization. The writer's public still remained strictly limited. Taken as
a whole, it was called society, and this name designated a fraction of the court, the clergy, the magistracy, and the rich bourgeoisie. Considered individually, the reader was called a 'gentleman* {honne^te homme) and he exercised a certain function of censorship which was called taste. In short, he was both a member of the upper classes and a specialist. If he criticized the writer, it was because he him- self could write. The public of Corneille, Pascal, and Des- cartes was Mme de Se? vigne? , the Chevalier de Me? re? , Mme
de Grignan, Mme de Rambouillet, and Saint-E? vremonde. Today the public, in relation to the writer, is in a state of passiveness: it waits for ideas or a new art form to be im- posed upon it. It is the inert mass wherein the idea will assume flesh. Its means of control is indirect and negative; one cannot say that it gives its opinion; it simply buys or does not buy the book; the relationship between author and reader is analogous to that of male and female: reading has
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become a simple means of information and writing a very general means of communication. In the seventeenth cen- tury being able to write already meant really being able to write well. Not that Providence divided the gift of style equally among all men, but because the reader, if not strictly identical with the writer, was a potential writer. He belonged to a parasitical e? lite for whom the art of writing was, if not a profession, at least the mark of its superiority. He read because he could write; with a little luck he might have been able to write what he read. The public was active; pro- ductions of the mind were really submitted to it. It judged them by a scale of values which it helped to maintain. A revolution analogous to romanticism is not conceivable in this period because there would have to have been the con- currence of an indecisive mass, which one surprises, over- whelms, and suddenly animates by revealing to it ideas or feelings of which it was ignorant, and which, lacking firm convictions, constandy requires being ravished and fecun- dated. In the seventeenth century convictions were un- shakeable; the religious ideology went hand in hand with a political ideology which the temporal itself secreted; no one publicly questioned the existence of God or the divine right of kings. 'Society' had its language, its graces, and its ceremonies which it expected to find in the books it read. Its conception of time, too. As the two historical facts which it constantly pondered--original sin and redemption-- belonged to a remote past, as it was also from this past that the great governing families drew their pride and the justifi- cation of their privileges, as the future could bring nothing new, since God was too perfect to change, and since the two great earthly powers, the Church and the Monarchy, aspired only to immutability, the active element of tempor- ality was the past, which is itself a phenomenal degradation of the Eternal; the present is a perpetual sin which can find an excuse for itself only if it reflects, with the least possible unfaithfulness, the image of a completed era. For an idea to be received, it must prove its antiquity; for a work of art to please, it must have been inspired by an ancient model.
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Again we find writers expressly making themselves the guardians oFtfris ideology. There were still great clerks who belonged to the Church and who had no other concern than to defend dogma. To them were added the 'watchdogs' of the temporal, historians, court poets, jurists, and philoso- phers who were concerned with establishing and maintain- ing the ideology of the absolute monarchy. But we see appearing at their side a third category of writers, stricdy secular, who, for the most part, accepted the religious and political ideology of the age without thinking that they were bound to prove it or preserve it. They did not write about it, they accepted it implicitly. For them, it was what we called a short time ago the context or the whole body of the presuppositions common to readers and author which are necessary to make the writings of the latter intelligible to the former. In general, they belonged to the bourgeoisie; they were pensioned by the nobility. As they consumed without producing, and as the nobility did not produce either but lived off the work of others, they were the para- sites of a parasitic class. They no longer lived in a college but formed an implicit corporation in that highly integrated society, and to remind them constandy of their collegiate origin and their former clerkship the royal power chose some of them and grouped them in a sort of symbolic college, the French Academy. Fed by the king and read by an e? lite, they were concerned solely with responding to the demands of this limited public. They had as good or almost as good a conscience as the twelfth-century clerks. It is impossible to speak of a virtual public as distinguished from a real public in this age. La Bruye`re happened to speak about peasants, but he did not speak to them, and if he took note of their misery, it was not for the sake of drawing an argu- ment against the ideology he accepted, but in the name of that ideology: it was a disgrace for enlightened monarchs and good Christians. Thus, one spoke about the masses above their heads and without even conceiving the notion
that one might help them become self-conscious. And the homogeneity of the public banished all contradiction from
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the authors' souls. They were not pulled between real but detestable readers and readers who were virtual and desir- able but out of reach; they did not ask themselves questions about their ro^le in the world, for the writer questions him- self about his mission only in ages when it is not clearly defined and when he must invent or re-invent it, that is, when he notices, beyond the e? lite who read him, an amor- phous mass of possible readers whom he may or may not choose to win, and when he must himself decide, in the event that he has the opportunity to reach them, what his relations with them are to be. The authors of the seventeenth century had a definite function because they addressed an enlightened, strictly limited, and active public which exer- cised permanent control over them. Unknown by the people, their job was to reflect back its own image to the e? lite which supported them. But there are many ways of reflecting an image: certain portraits are by themselves challenges because they have been made from without and without passion by a painter who refuses any complicity with his model. However, for a writer merely to conceive the idea of drawing a portrait-challenge of his real reader, he must have become conscious of a contradiction between himself and his public, that is, he must come to his readers from without and must consider them with astonishment, or he must feel the astonished regard of unfamiliar minds (ethnic minorities, oppressed classes, etc. ) weighing upon the little society which he forms with them. But in the seventeenth century, since the virtual public did not exist, since the artist accepted without criticism the ideology of the elite, he made himself an accomplice of his public. No unfamiliar stare came to trouble him in his games. Neither the prose writer nor even the poet was accursed. They did not have to decide with each work what the meaning and value of literature were, since its meaning and value were fixed by tradition. Well integrated in a hier- archical society, they knew neither the pride nor the anguish of being 'different'; in short, they were classical. There is classicism when a society has taken on a relatively stable
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form and when it has been permeated with the myth of its perpetuity, that is, when it confounds the present with the eternal and historicity with traditionalism, when the hier- archy of classes is such that the virtual public never exceeds the real public and when each reader is for the writer a qualified critic and a censor, when the power of the religious and political ideology is so strong and the prohibitions so rigorous that in no case is there any question of discovering new countries of the mind, but only of putting into shape the commonplaces adopted by the e? litey in such a way that reading--which, as we have seen, is the concrete relation between the writer and his public--is a ceremony of recogni- tion analogous to the bow of salutation, that is, the cere- monious affirmation that author and reader are of the same world and have the same opinions about everything. Thus, each production of the mind is at the same time an act of courtesy, and style is the supreme courtesy of the author towards his reader, and the reader, for his part, never tires
of finding the same thoughts in the most diverse of books because these thoughts are his own and he does not ask to acquire others but only to be offered with magnificence those which he already has. Hence, it is in a spirit of com- plicity that the author presents and the reader accepts a portrait which is necessarily abstract; addressing a parasitical class, he cannot show man at work or, in general, the rela- tions between man and external nature. As, on the other hand, there are bodies of specialists who, under the control of the Church and the Monarchy, are concerned with main- taining the spiritual and secular ideology, the writer does not even suspect the importance of economic, religious, metaphysical, and political factors in the constitution of the person; and as the society in which he lives confounds the present with the eternal he cannot even imagine the slightest change in what he calls human nature. He conceives history as a series of accidents which affect the eternal man on the surface without deeply modifying him, and if he had to assign a meaning to historical duration he would see in it both an eternal repetition, so that previous events can and
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ought to provide lessons for his contemporaries, and a pro- cess of slight degeneration, since the fundamental events of history are long since passed and since, perfection in letters having been attained in Antiquity, his ancient models seem beyond rivalry. And in all this he is once again fully in har- mony with his public, which considers work as a curse, which does notfeel its situation in history and in the world for the simple reason that it is privileged and because its only con- cern is faith, respect for the Monarch, passion, war, death, and courtesy. In short, the image of classical man is purely psychological because the classical public is conscious only of his psychology. Furthermore, it must be understood that this psychology is itself traditionalist, it is not concerned with discovering new and profound truths about the human heart or with setting up hypotheses. It is in unstable societies when the public exists on several social levels, that the writer, torn and dissatisfied, invents explanations for his anguish. The psychology of the seventeenth century is purely descriptive. It is not based so much upon the author's personal experience as it is the aesthetic expression of what the e? lite thinks about itself. La Rochefoucauld borrows the form and the content of his maxims from the diversions of the salons. The casuistry of the Jesuits, the etiquette of the Pre? cieuses, the portrait game, the ethics of Nicole, and the religious conception of the passions are at the origin of a hundred other works. The comedies draw their inspiration from ancient psychology and the plain common sense of the upper bourgeoisie. Society is thoroughly delighted at seeing itself mirrored in them because it recognizes the notions it has about itself; it does not ask to be shown what it is, but it asks rather for a reflection of what it thinks it is. To be sure, some satires are permitted, but it is the e? lite which, through pamphlets and comedies, carries on, in the name of its morality, the cleansings and the purges necessary
for its health. The ridiculous marquis, the litigants, or the Pre? cieuses are never made fun of from a point of view external to the governing class; it is always a matter of eccen- trics who are inassimilable in a civilized society and who
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live on the margin of the collective life. The Misanthrope is twitted because he lacks courtesy, Cathos and Madelon, because they have too much. Philaminte goes counter to the accepted ideas about women; the bourgeois gentleman is odious to the rich bourgeois who have a lofty modesty and who know the greatness and the humbleness of their con- dition, and, at the same time, to the gentlemen because he wants to push his way into the nobility. This internal and, so to speak, physiological satire has no connection with the great satire of Beaumarchais, P. L. Courier, J. Valle`s, and Ce? line; it is less courageous and much more severe because it exhibits the repressive action which the collectivity practises upon the weak, the sick, and the maladjusted. It is the pitiless laughter of a gang of street-urchins at the
awkwardness of their scapegoat.
Bourgeois in origin and outlook, more like Oronte and Chrysale in his home life than like his brilliant and restless confre`res of 1780 or 1830, yet accepted in the Society of the Great and pensioned by them, slightly unclassed from above, yet convinced that talent is no substitute for birth, docile to the reprimands of the clergy, respectful of the royal power, happy to occupy a modest place in the immense structure of which the Church and the Monarchy are the pillars, some- what above the merchants and the scholars, below the nobles and the clergy, the writer practises his profession with a good conscience, convinced that he has come too late, that everything has been said, and that the only proper thing to do is to re-say it agreeably. He conceives the glory which awaits him as a feeble reflection of hereditary titles and if he expects it to be eternal it is because he does not even suspect that the society of his readers may be over- thrown by social changes. Thus, the permanence of the royal family seems to him a guarantee of that of his renown.
Yet, almost in spite of himself, the mirror which he modestly offers to his readers is magical: it enthrals and compromises. Even though everything has been done to offer them only a flattering and complaisant image, more subjective than objective and more internal than external,
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this image remains none the less a work of art, that is, it has its basis in the freedom of the author and is an appeal to the freedom of the reader. Since it is beautiful, it is made of glass; aesthetic distance puts it out of reach. Impossible to be delighted with it, to find any comfortable warmth in it, any discrete indulgence. Even though it is made up of the commonplaces of the age and that smug complacency which unite contemporaries like an umbilical cord, it is supported by a freedom and thereby another kind of objectivity. It is itselfy to be sure, that the e? litefindsin the mirror, but itself as it would see itself if it went to the very extremes of severity.