No More Learning

Whether one sides with him or against him, the issues he addresses are the major issues of his (modern) times. As Etienne Barilier--for one-- puts it in Les Petits Camarades (Paris: Julliard, 1987), he would rather be wrong with Sartre than right with Aron.
The four texts in the present volume point repeatedly to the interplay of thought, action, and circumstance. They evoke an age marked by war in which the consequences of writing and reading lead to issues unresolved some forty to fifty years after the fact. (It is not surprising that Claude Lanzmann, producer of the Holocaust film Shoahy has served on TATs editorial board for over thirty years. ) The Sartrean program of committed writing inscribes questions of the theory and practice of literature within a problematic of choice and accountability for which solutions are neither simple nor definitive. That remains--despite the vagaries of Sartre's career and the ambivalence of sympathizers and detractors alike--a lesson for the present which has lost little of its urgency.
Steven Ungar
? What Is Literature?
? <<TTF you want to commit yourself/ writes a young im- I becile, 'what are you waiting for? Join the Communist JL Party/ A great writer who committed himself often and then cried off still more often, but who has forgotten, said to me, 'The worst artists are the most committed. Look at the Soviet painters/ An old critic gently complained, "You want to murder literature. Contempt for belles-lettres is spread out insolently all through your review/ A petty mind calls me pigheaded, which for him is evidently the highest insult. An author who barely crawled from one war to the other and whose name sometimes awakens languishing memories in old men accuses me of not being concerned with immortality; he knows, thank God, any number of people whose chief hope it is. In the eyes of an American hack-journalist the trouble with me is that I have not read Bergson or Freud; as for Flaubert, who did not commit himself, it seems that he haunts me like remorse. Smart-alecks wink at me, 'And poetry? And painting? And music? You want to commit them, too? ' And some martial spirits demand, 'What's it all about? Commitment in liter- ature? Well, it's the old socialist realism, unless it's a revival
of populism, only more aggressive/
What nonsense. They read quickly, badly, and pass judge-
ment before they have understood. So let's begin all over again. This doesn't amuse anyone, neither you nor me. But we have to hit the nail on the head. And since critics con- demn me in the name of literature without ever saying what they mean by that, the best answer to give them is to examine the art of writing without prejudice. What is writing? Why does one write? For whom? The fact is, it seems that nobody has ever asked himself these questions.
? What Is Writing?
No, we do not want to 'commit' painting, sculpture, and music 'too', or at least not in the same way. And why would we want to? When a writer of past cen- turies expressed an opinion about his craft, was he immedi- ately asked to apply it to the other arts? But today it's the thing to 'talk painting' in the jargon of the musician or the literary man and to "talk literature' in the jargon of the painter, as if at bottom there were only one art which ex- pressed itself indifferently in one or the other of these languages, like the Spinozistic substance which is adequately reflected by each of its attributes.
Doubtless, one could find at the origin of every artistic calling a certain undifferentiated choice which circum- stances, education, and contact with the world particu- larized only later. Besides, there is no doubt that the arts of a period mutually influence each other and are conditioned by the same social factors. But those who want to expose the absurdity of a literary theory by showing that it is inap- plicable to music must first prove that the arts are parallel.
Now, there is no such parallelism. Here, as everywhere,
it is not only the form which differentiates, but the matter
as well. And it is one thing to work with colour and sound,
and another to express oneself by means of words. Notes, colours, and forms are not signs. They refer to nothing exterior to themselves. To be sure, it is quite impossible to reduce them strictly to themselves, and the idea of a pure sound, for example, is an abstraction. As Merleau-Ponty
has pointed out in The Phenomenology of Perception, there is no quality of sensation so bare that it is not penetrated with significance. But the dim little meaning which dwells within
it, a light joy, atimidsadness, remains immanent or trembles about it like a heat mist; it is colour or sound. Who can
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distinguish the green apple from its tart gaiety? And aren't we already saying too much in naming 'the tart gaiety of the green apple? There is green, there is red, and that is all. They are things, they exist by themselves.
It is true that one might, by convention, confer the value of signs upon them. Thus, we talk of the language of flowers. But if, after the agreement, white roses signify 'fidelity' to me, the fact is that I have stopped seeing them as roses. My attention cuts through them to aim beyond them at this abstract virtue. I forget them. I no longer pay attention to their mossy abundance, to their sweet stagnant odour. I have not even perceived them. That means that I have not behaved like an artist. For the artist, the colour, the bouquet, the tinkling of the spoon on the saucer, are things, in the highest degree. He stops at the quality of the sound or the form. He returns to it constantly and is en- chanted with it. It is this colour-object that he is going to transfer to his canvas, and the only modification he will make it undergo is that he will transform it into an imaginary object. He is therefore as far as he can be from considering colours and signs as a language. 1
What is valid for the elements of artistic creation is also valid for their combinations. The painter does not want to draw signs on his canvas, he wants to create a thing. 2 And if he puts together red, yellow, and green, there is no reason why this collection of colours should have a definable significance, that is, should refer particularly to another object. Doubdess the composition is also inhabited by a soul, and since there must have been motives, even hidden ones, for the painter to have chosen yellow rather than violet, it may be asserted that the objects thus created reflect his deepest tendencies. However, they never express his anger, his anguish, or his joy as do words or the expression of the face; they are impregnated with these emotions; and in order for them to have crept into these colours, which by themselves already had something like a meaning, his emotions get mixed up and grow obscure. Nobody can quite recognize them there.
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Tintoretto did not choose that yellow rift in the sky above Golgotha to signify anguish or to provoke it. It is anguish and yellow sky at the same time. Not sky of anguish or anguished sky; it is an anguish become thing, an anguish which has turned into yellow rift of sky, and which thereby is submerged and impasted by the qualities peculiar to things, by their impermeability, their extension, their blind permanence, their externality, and that infinity of relations which they maintain with other things. That is, it is no longer readable. It is like an immense and vain effort, for- ever arrested half-way between sky and earth, to express what their nature keeps them from expressing.
Similarly, the significance of a melody--if one can still speak of significance--is nothing outside the melody itself, unlike ideas, which can be adequately rendered in several ways. Call it joyous or sad. It will always be over and above anything you can say about it. Not because its passions, which are perhaps at the origin of the invented theme, have, by being incorporated into notes, undergone a transubstantiation and a transmutation. A cry of grief is a sign of the grief which provokes it, but a song of grief is both grief itself and something other than grief Or, if one wishes to adopt the existentialist vocabulary, it is a grief which does not exist any more, which is. But, you will say, suppose the painter portrays houses? That's just it. He makes them, that is, he creates an imaginary house on the canvas and not a sign of a house. And the house which thus appears preserves all the ambiguity of real houses.
The writer can guide you and, if he describes a hovel, make it seem the symbol of social injustice and provoke your indignation. The painter is mute. He presents you with a hovel, that's all. You are free to see in it what you like. That attic window will never be the symbol of misery; for that, it would have to be a sign, whereas it is a thing. The bad painter looks for the type. He paints the Arab, the Child, the Woman; the good one knows that neither the Arab nor the proletarian exists either in reality or on his canvas. He offers a workman, a certain workman. And
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what are we to think about a workman? An infinity of con- tradictory things. All thoughts and all feelings are there, adhering to the canvas in a state of profound undifferentia- tion. It is up to you to choose. Sometimes, high-minded artists try to move us. They paint long lines of workmen waiting in the snow to be hired, the emaciated faces of the unemployed, batdefields. They affect us no more than does Greuze with his 'Prodigal Son\ And that masterpiece, 'The Massacre of Guernica', does anyone think that it won over a single heart to the Spanish cause? And yet something is said that can never quite be heard and that would take an infinity of words to express. And Picasso's long harlequins, ambiguous and eternal, haunted with inexplicable meaning, inseparable from their stooping leanness and their pale diamond-shaped tights, are emotion become flesh, emotion which the flesh has absorbed as the blotter absorbs ink, and emotion which is unrecognizable, lost, strange to itself, scattered to the four corners of space and yet present to itself.
I have no doubt that charity or anger can produce other objects, but they will likewise be swallowed up; they will lose their name; there will remain only things haunted by a mysterious soul. One does not paint meanings; one does not put them to music. Under these conditions, who would dare require that the painter or musician commit himself?
On the other hand, the writer deals with meanings. Still,
a distinction must be made. The empire of signs is prose; poetry is on the side of painting, sculpture, and music. I am accused of detesting it; the proof, so they say, is that Les Temps Modernes* publishes very few poems. On the contrary, this is proof that we like it. To be convinced, all one need do is take a look at contemporary production. 'At least/ critics say triumphandy, 'you can't even dream of committing it. ' Indeed. But why should I want to? Because
it uses words as does prose? But it does not use them in the same way, and it does not even use them at all. I should
*A periodical edited by M. Sartre. --Translator.
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rather say that it serves them. Poets are men who refuse to utilise language. Now, since the quest for truth takes place in and by language conceived as a certain kind of instru- ment, it is unnecessary to imagine that they aim to discern or expound the true. Nor do they dream of naming the world, and, this being the case, they name nothing at all, for naming implies a perpetual sacrifice of the name to the object named, or, as Hegel would say, the name is revealed as the inessen- tial in the face of the thing which is essential. They do not speak, neither do they keep silent; it is something different. It has been said that they wanted to destroy the 'word* by monstrous couplings, but this is false. For then they would have to be thrown into the midst of utilitarian language and would have had to try to retrieve words from it in odd litde groups, as for example 'horse' and "butter* by writing "horses of butter'. 8
Besides the fact that such an enterprise would require infinite time, it is not conceivable that one can keep oneself on the plane of the utilitarian project, consider words as instruments, and at the same time contemplate taking their instrumentality away from them. In fact, the poet has with- drawn from language-instrument in a single movement. Once and for all he has chosen the poetic attitude which considers words as things and not as signs. For the am- biguity of the sign implies that one can penetrate it at will like a pane of glass and pursue the thing signified, or turn one's gaze towards its reality and consider it as an object. The man who talks is beyond words and near the object, whereas the poet is on this side of them. For the former, they are domesticated; for the latter they are in the wild state. For the former, they are usefid conventions, tools which gradually wear out and which one throws away when they are no longer serviceable; for the latter, they are natural things which sprout naturally upon the earth like grass and trees.
But if the poet dwells upon words, as does the painter with colours and the musician with sounds, that does not mean that they have lost all meaning in his eyes. Indeed, it
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is meaning alone which can give words their verbal unity. Without it they are frittered away into sounds and strokes of the pen. Only, it too becomes natural. It is no longer the goal which is always out of reach and which human transcendence is always aiming at, but a property of each term, analogous to the expression of a face, to the little sad or gay meaning of sounds and colours. Having flowed into the word, having been absorbed by its sonority or visual aspect, having been thickened and defaced, it too is a thing, uncreated and eternal.
For the poet, language is a structure of the external world. The speaker is in a situation in langauge; he is invested by words. They are prolongations of his senses, his pincers, his antennae, his spectacles. He manoeuvres them from within; he feels them as if they were his body; he is surrounded by a verbal body which he is hardly conscious of and which extends his action upon the world. The poet is outside language. He sees the reverse side of words, as if he did not share the human condition and as if he werefirstmeeting the word as a barrier as he comes towards men. Instead offirstknowing things by their name, it seems that first he has a silent contact with them, since, turning towards that other species of thing which for him is the word, touching words, testing them, fingering them, he discovers in them a slight luminosity of their own and particular affinities with the earth, the sky, the water, and all created things.
Not knowing how to use them as a sign of an aspect of the world, he sees in the word the image of one of these aspects. And the verbal image he chooses for its resemblance to the willow tree or the ash tree is not necessarily the word which we use to designate these objects. As he is already on the outside, he considers words as a trap to catch a fleeing reality rather than as indicators which throw him out of himself into the midst of things. In short, all language is for him the mirror of the world. As a result, important changes take place in the internal economy of the word. Its sonority, its length, its masculine or feminine endings, its visual aspect, compose for him a face of flesh which
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represents rather than expresses meaning. Inversely, as the meaning is realised, the physical aspect of the word is reflected within it, and it, in its turn, functions as an image of the verbal body. Like its sign, too, for it has lost its pre- eminence; since words, like things, are given, the poet does not decide whether the former exist for the latter or vice versa.
Thus, between the word and the thing signified, there is established a double reciprocal relation of magical resem- blance and meaning. And the poet does not utilise the word, he does not choose between different senses given to it; each of them, instead of appearing to him as an autonomous function, is given to him as a material quality which merges before his eyes with the other accepted meanings.
Thus, in each word he realizes, solely by the effect of the poetic attitude, the metaphors which Picasso dreamed of when he wanted to do a matchbox which was completely a bat without ceasing to be a matchbox. Florence is city, flower, and woman. It is city-flower, city-woman, and girl- flower all at the same time. And the strange object which thus appears has the liquidity of the rivery the soft, tawny ardency oigold, andfinallygives itself up with propriety and, by the continuous diminution of the silent e, prolongs indefinitely its modest blossoming. * To that is added the insidious effect of biography. For me, Florence is also a certain woman, an American actress who played in the silent films of my childhood, and about whom I have forgotten everything except that she was as long as a long evening glove and always a bit weary and always chaste and always married and misunderstood and whom I loved and whose
name was Florence.
For the word, which tears the writer of prose away from
? This sentence is not fully intelligible in translation as the author is here associating the component sounds of the word Florence with the meaning of the French words they evoke. Thus: FL-OR-ENCE,
fleuve,ory andde? cence. Thelatterpartofthesentencereferstothepractice in French poetry of giving, in certain circumstances, a syllabic value to the otherwise silent terminal e. --Translator.
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himself and throws him out into the world, sends back to the poet his own image, like a mirror. This is what justifies the double undertaking of Leiris who, on the one hand, in his Glossary, tries to give certain words a poetic definition, that is, one which is by itself a synthesis of recipro- cal implications between the sonorous body and the verbal soul, and, on the other hand, in a still unpublished work, goes in quest of remembrance of things past, taking as guides a few words which for him are particularly charged with feeling. Thus, the poetic word is a microcosm.
The crisis of language which broke out at the beginning of this century is a poetic crisis. Whatever the social and historical factors, it showed itself in an attack of deperson- alization when the writer was confronted by words. He no longer knew how to use them, and, in Bergson's famous formula, he only half recognized them. He approached them with a completely fruitful feeling of strangeness. They were no longer his; they were no longer he; but in those strange mirrors, the sky, the earth, and his own life were reflected. And, finally, they became things themselves, or rather the black heart of things. And when the poet joins several of these microcosms together the case is like that of painters when they assemble their colours on the canvas. One might think that he is composing a sentence, but this is only what
it appears to be. He is creating an object. The words-things are grouped by magical associations of fitness and incon- gruity, like colours and sounds. They attract, repel, and 'burn9 one another, and their association composes the veritable poetic unity which is the phrase-object.
More often the poet first has the scheme of the sentence in his mind, and the words follow. But this scheme has nothing in common with what one ordinarily calls a verbal scheme. It does not govern the construction of a meaning.
Rather, it is comparable to the creative project by which Picasso, even before touching his brush, prefigures in space
the thing which will become a buffoon or a harlequin.
Fuir, la`-bas fuir, je sens que des oiseaux sont ivres Mais o^ mon coeur entends le chant des matelots.
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This 'but' which rises like a monolith at the threshold of the sentence does not tie the second line to the preceding one. It colours it with a certain reserved nuance, with 'private associations' which penetrate it completely. In the same way, certain poems begin with 'and\ This conjunc- tion no longer indicates to the mind an operation which is to be carried out; it extends throughout the paragraph to give it the absolute quality of a sequel. For the poet, the sentence has a tonality, a taste; by means of it he tastes for their own sake the irritatingflavoursof objection, of reserve, of disjunction. He carries them to the absolute. He makes them real properties of the sentence, which becomes an utter objection without being an objection to anything pre- cise. He finds here those relations of reciprocal implication which we pointed out a short time ago between the poetic word and its meaning; the unit made up of the words chosen functions as an image of the interrogative or restric- tive nuance, and vice versa, the interrogation is an image of the verbal unit which it delimits.
As in the following admirable lines:
O saisons! O cha^teaux! Quelle a^me est sans de? faut?
Nobody is questioned; nobody is questioning; the poet is absent. And the question involves no answer, or rather it is its own answer. Is it therefore a false question? But it would be absurd to believe that Rimbaud 'meant* that everybody has his faults. As Breton said of Saint-Pol Roux, 'If he had meant it, he would have said it* Nor did he mean to say something else. He asked an absolute question. He conferred upon the beautiful word 'a^me* an interrogative existence. The interrogation has become a thing as the anguish of Tintoretto became a yellow sky. It is no longer a meaning, but a substance. It is seen from the outside, and Rimbaud invites us to see it from the outside with him. Its strangeness arises from the fact that, in order to consider it, we place ourselves on the other side of the human con- dition, on the side of God.
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If this is the case, one easily understands how foolish it would be to require a poetic commitment. Doubtless, emotion, even passion--and why not anger, social indigna- tion, and political hatred? --are at the origin of the poem. But they are not expressed there, as in a pamphlet or in a confession. In so far as the writer of prose exhibits feelings, he illustrates them; whereas, if the poet injects his feelings into his poem, he ceases to recognize them; the words take hold of them, penetrate them, and metamorphose them; they do not signify them, even in his eyes. Emotion has become thing; it now has the opacity of things; it is com- pounded by the ambiguous properties of the words in which it has been enclosed. And above all, there is always much more in each phrase, in each verse, as there is more than simple anguish in the yellow sky over Golgotha. The word, the phrase-thing, inexhaustible as things, everywhere overflow the feeling which has produced them. How can one hope to provoke the indignation or the political en- thusiasm of the reader when the very thing one does is to withdraw him from the human condition and invite him to consider with the eyes of God a language that has been turned inside out? Someone may say, 'You're forgetting the poets of the Resistance. You're forgetting Pierre Emman- uel. ' Not a bit! They're the very ones I was going to give as examples. 4
But even if the poet is forbidden to commit himself, is that a reason for exempting the writer of prose? What do they have in common? It is true that the prose-writer and the poet both write. But there is nothing in common be- tween these two acts of writing except the movement of the hand which traces the letters. Otherwise, their universes are incommunicable, and what is good for one is not good for the other. Prose is, in essence, utilitarian. I would readily define the prose-writer as a man who makes use of words. M. Jourdan made prose so that he could ask for his slippers, and Hitler, so that he could declare war on Poland. The writer is a speaker-, he designates, demonstrates, orders, refuses, interpolates, begs, insults, persuades, insinuates. If
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he does so without any effect, he does not therefore become a poet; he is a writer who is talking and saying nothing. We have seen enough of language's reverse; it is now time to look at its right side. 5
The art of prose is employed in discourse; its substance is by nature significative--that is, the words are first of all not objects but designations for objects. It is not first of all a matter of knowing whether they please or displease in themselves; it is a matter of knowing whether they correctly indicate a certain thing or a certain notion. Thus, it often happens that we find ourselves possessing a certain idea that someone has taught us by means of words without being able to recall a single one of the words which have transmitted it to us.
Prose is first of all an attitude of mind. As Vale? ry would say, there is prose when the word passes across our gaze as the glass across the sun. When one is in danger or in difficulty one grabs any instrument. When the danger is past, one does not even remember whether it was a hammer or a stick; moreover, one never knew; all one needed was a prolongation of one's body, a means of extending one's hand to the highest branch, It was a sixth finger, a third leg, in short, a pure function which one assimilated. Thus, re- garding language, it is our shell and our antennae; it pro- tects us against others and informs us about them; it is a prolongation of our senses, a third eye which is going to look into our neighbour's heart. We are within language as within our body. We feel it spontaneously while going beyond it towards other ends, as we feel our hands and our feet; we perceive it when it is someone else who is using it, as we perceive the limbs of others. There is the word which is lived and the word which is met. But in both cases it is in the course of an undertaking, either of me acting upon others, or the others upon me. The word is a certain par- ticular moment of action and has no meaning outside it. In certain cases of aphasia the possibilities of acting, of understanding situations, and of having normal relations with the other sex, are lost.
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At the heart of this apraxia the destruction of language appears only as the collapse of one of the structures, the finest and the most apparent. And if prose is never any- thing but the privileged instrument of a certain undertaking, if it is only the poet's business to contemplate words in a dis- interested fashion, then one has the right to ask the prose- writer from the very start, 'What is your aim in writing? What undertaking are you engaged in, and why does it require you to have recourse to writing? ' In any case this undertaking cannot have pure contemplation as an end. For, intuition is silence, and the end of language is to com- municate. One can doubdess pin down the results of intui- tion, but in this case a few words hastily scrawled on paper
will suffice; it will always be enough for the author to recognize what he had in mind. If the words are assembled into sentences, with a concern for clarity, a decision foreign to the intuition, to the language itself, must intervene, the decision of confiding to others the results obtained. In each case one must ask how this decision can be justified. And the good sense which our pedants too readily forget never stops repeating it. Are we not in the habit of putting this basic question to young people who are thinking of writing: 'Do you have anything to say? ' Which means: something which is worth the trouble of being commun- icated. But what do we mean by something which is 'worth the trouble* if it is not by recourse to a system of transcendent values?
Moreover, to consider only this secondary structure of the undertaking, which is what the verbal moment is, the serious error of pure stylists is to think that the word is a gentle breeze which plays lightly over the surface of things, grazing them without altering them, and that the speaker is a pure witness who sums up with a word his harmless contemplation. To speak is to act; anything which one names is already no longer quite the same; it has lost its innocence.
If you name the behaviour of an individual, you reveal it to him; he sees himself. And since you are at the same time
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naming it to all others, he knows that he is seenat the moment he sees himself. The furtive gesture, which he forgot while making it, begins to exist enormously, to exist for everybody; it is integrated into the objective mind; it takes on new dimensions; it is retrieved. After that, how can you expect him to act in the same way? Either he will persist in his behaviour out of obstinacy and with full knowledge of what he is doing, or he will give it up. Thus, by speaking, I reveal the situation by my very intention of changing it; I reveal it to myself and to others in order to change it. I strike at its very heart, I transfix it, and I display it in full view; at present I dispose of it; with every word I utter, I involve myself a little more in the world, and by the same token I emerge from it a little more, since I go beyond it towards the future.
Thus, the prose-writer is a man who has chosen a certain method of secondary action which we may call action by disclosure. It is therefore permissible to ask him this second question: "What aspect of the world do you want to dis- close? What change do you want to bring into the world by this disclosure? ' The 'committed' writer knows that words are action. He knows that to reveal is to change and that one can reveal only by planning to change. He has given up the impossible dream of giving an impartial picture of Society and the human condition. Man is the being towards whom no being can be impartial, not even God. For God, if He existed, would be, as certain mystics have seen Him, in a situation in relationship to man. And He is also the being Who cannot even see a situation without changing it, for His gaze congeals, destroys, or sculpts, or, as does eternity, changes the object in itself. It is in love, in hate, in anger, in fear, in joy, in indignation, in admiration, in hope, in despair, that man and the world reveal them- selves in their truth. Doubtless, the committed writer can be mediocre; he can even be conscious of being so; but as one cannot write without the intention of succeeding perfectly, the modesty with which he envisages his work should not divert him from constructing it as if it were to have the
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greatest celebrity. He should never say to himself, 'Bah! Fll be lucky if I have three thousand readers/ but rather, 'What would happen if everybody read what I wrote? ' He remembers what Mosca said beside the coach which carried Fabrice and Sanseverina away: 'If the word Love comes up between them, I'm lost/ He knows that he is the man who names what has not yet been named or what dares not tell its name. He knows that he makes the word 'love* and the word 'hate' surge up and with them love and hate between men who had not yet decided upon their feelings. He knows that words, as Brice Parain says, are loaded pistols'. If he speaks, he fires. He may be silent, but since he has chosen to fire, he must do it like a man, by aiming at targets, and not like a child, at random, by shutting his eyes and firing merely for the pleasure of hearing the shot go off.
Later on we shall try to determine what the goal of litera- ture may be. But from this point on we may conclude that the writer has chosen to reveal the world and particularly to reveal man to other men so that the latter may assume full responsibility before the object which has been thus laid bare. It is assumed that no one is ignorant of the law because there is a code and because the law is written down; thereafter, you are free to violate it, but you know the risks you run. Similarly, the function of the writer is to act in such a way that nobody can be ignorant of the world and that nobody may say that he is innocent of what it's all about. And since he has once committed himself in the universe of language, he can never again pretend that he cannot speak. Once you enter the universe of meanings, there is nothing you can do to get out of it. Let words organize themselves freely and they will make sentences, and each sentence contains language in its entirety and refers back to the whole universe. Silence itself is defined in relationship to words, as the pause in music receives its
meaning from the group of notes round it. This silence is a moment of language; being silent is not being dumb; it is to refuse to speak, and therefore to keep on speaking. Thus,
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if a writer has chosen to remain silent on any aspect what- ever of the world, or, according to an expression which says just what it means, to pass over it in silence, one has the right to ask him a third question: 'Why have you spoken of this rather than that, and--since you speak in order to bring about change--why do you want to change this rather than that? '
All this does not prevent there being a manner of writing. One is not a writer for having chosen to say certain things, but for having chosen to say them in a certain way. And, to be sure, the style makes the value of the prose. But it should pass unnoticed. Since words are transparent and since the gaze looks through them, it would be absurd to slip in among them some panes of rough glass. Beauty is in this case only a gentle and imperceptible force. In a painting it shines forth at the very first sight; in a book it hides itself; it acts by persuasion like the charm of a voice or a face. It does not coerce; it inclines a person without his suspecting it, and he thinks that he is yielding to arguments when he is really being solicited by a charm that he does not see. The ceremonial of the Mass is not faith; it disposes. The harmony of words, their beauty, the balance of the phras- es, dispose the passions of the reader without his being aware and order them like the Mass, like music, like the dance. If he happens to consider them by themselves, he loses the meaning; there remains only a boring seesaw of phrases.
In prose the aesthetic pleasure is pure only if it is thrown in into the bargain. I blush at recalling such simple ideas, but it seems that today they have been forgotten. If that were not the case, would we be told that we are planning the murder of literature, or, more simply, that commitment is harmful to the art of writing? If the contamination of a certain kind of prose by poetry had not confused the ideas of our critics, would they dream of attacking us on the matter of form, when we have never spoken of anything but the content? There is nothing to be said about form in advance, and we have said nothing. Everyone invents his
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own, and one judges it afterwards. It is true that the sub- jects suggest the style, but they do not order it. There are no styles ranged a priori outside the literary art. What is more 'committed', what is more boring, than the idea of attacking the Jesuits? Yet, out of this Pascal made his Provincial Letters. In short, it is a matter of knowing what one wants to write about, whether butterflies or the con- dition of the Jews. And when one knows, then it remains to decide how one will write about it.
Often the two choices are only one, but among good writers the second choice never precedes the first. I know that Giraudoux has said that 'the only concern is finding one's style; the idea comes afterwards'; but he was wrong. The idea did not come. On the contrary, if one considers subjects as problems which are always open, as solicitations, as expectations, it will be easily understood that art loses
nothing by being committed. On the contrary, just as physics submits to mathematicians new problems which require them to produce a new symbolism, in like manner the always new requirements of the social and the meta- physical involve the artist in finding a new language and new techniques. If we no longer write as they did in the eighteenth century, it is because the language of Racine and Saint-Evremond does not lend itself to talking about loco- motives or the proletariat. After that, the purists will per- haps forbid us to write about locomotives. But art has never been on the side of the purists.
If that is the principle of commitment, what objection
can one have to it? And above all what objection has been made to it? It has seemed to me that my opponents have not had their hearts in their work very much and that their articles contain nothing more than a long scandalized sigh which drags on over two or three columns. I should have liked
to know in the name of n>haty with what conception of liter- ature, they condemned commitment. But they have not said; they themselves have not known. The most reasonable thing would have been to support their condemnation on
the old theory of art for art's sake. But none of them can
? What Is Writing? \ 41
accept it. That is also disturbing. We know very well that pure art and empty art are the same thing and that aesthetic purism was a brilliant manoeuvre of the bourgeois of the last century who preferred to see themselves denounced as philistines rather than as exploiters. Therefore, they them- selves admitted that the writer had to speak about some- thing. But about what? I believe that their embarrassment would have been extreme if Fernandez had not found for them, after the other war, the notion of the message. The writer of today, they say, should in no case occupy himself with temporal affairs. Neither should he set up lines with- out meaning, or seek only beauty of phrase and of imagery. His function is to deliver messages to his readers. Well, what is a message?
It must be borne in mind that most critics are men who have not had much luck and who, just about the time they were growing desperate, found quiet little jobs as cemetery watchmen. God knows whether cemeteries are peaceful; none of them are more cheerful than a library. The dead are there; the only thing they have done is write. They have long since been washed clean of the sin of living, and besides, their lives are known only through other books which other dead men have written about them. Rimbaud is dead. So are Paterne Berrichon and Isabelle Rimbaud. The trouble makers have disappeared; all that remains are the little coffins that are stacked on shelves along the walls like urns in a columbarium. The critic lives badly; his wife does not appreciate him as she ought to; his children are ungrateful; the first of the month is hard on him. But it is always possible for him to enter his library, take down a book from the shelf, and open it. It gives off a slight odour of the cellar, and a strange operation begins which he has decided to call reading. From one point of view it is a possession; he lends his body to the dead in order that they may come back to life. And from another point of view it is a contact with the beyond. Indeed, the book is by no means an object; neither is it an act, or even a thought. Written by a dead man about dead things, it no longer has any place
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on this earth; it speaks of nothing which interests us directly. Left to itself, it falls back and collapses; there remain only ink spots on musty paper. And when the critic reanimates these spots, when he makes letters and words of them, they speak to him of passions which he does not feel, of bursts of anger without objects, of dead fears and hopes. It is a whole disembodied world which surrounds him, where human feelings, because they are no longer affecting, have passed on to the status of exemplary feelings and, in short, of values. So he persuades himself that he has entered into relations with an intelligible world which is like the truth of his daily sufferings. And their reason for being. He thinks that nature imitates art, as for Plato the world of the senses imitates that of the archetypes. And during the time he is reading, his everyday life becomes an appearance.