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WHAT IS LITERATURE?

JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

Translated from the French

BERNARD FRECHTMAN

PHILOSOPHICAL LIBRARY

NEW YORK

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword

I What is Writing? 7

II Why Write? 38

III For Whom Does One Write? 67

IV Situation of the Writer in 1947 161

Index 299

FOREWORD

"If you want to engage yourself," writes a young im-

becile, "what are you waiting for? Join the Communist

Party." A great writer who engaged himself often and disengaged himself still more often, but who has forgotten, said to me, "The worst artists are the most engaged. Look at the Soviet painters" An old critic gently complained, "You want to murder literature. Contempt for belles-let- tres 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 engage himself, it seems that he haunts me like remorse. Smart-alecks wink at me, "And poetry? And painting? And music? You want to engage them, too?" And some martial spirits demand, "What's it all about? Engaged literature? 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

judgment before they have understood. So let's begin all over. This doesn't amuse anyone, neither you nor me. But

we have to hit the nail on the head. And since critics condemn me in the name of literature without ever say- ing 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 "engage" painting, sculpture, and music "too/

or at least not in the same way. And why would we want to? When a writer of past centuries ex- pressed an opinion about his craft, was he immediately asked to apply it to the other arts? But today it's the thing to do to "talk painting

55 in the argot of the musician or

the literary man and to "talk literature 55

in the argot of the painter, as if at bottom there were only one art which

expressed itself indifferently in one or the other of these

languages, like the Spinozistic substance which is ade-

quately 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 con- ditioned by the same social factors. But those who want to expose the absurdity of a literary theory by showing that it is inapplicable 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

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

as well. And it is one thing to work with color and sound, and another to express oneself by means of words. Notes, colors, 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 Per-

ception, there is no quality of sensation so bare that it is not penetrated with signification. But the dim little mean-

ing which dwells within it, a light joy, a timid sadness, remains immanent or trembles about it like a heat mist; it is color or sound. Who can 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 55

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 odor. I have not even perceived them. That means that I have not behaved like an artist. For the artist, the color, 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 enchanted with it. It is this color-object that he is going to transfer to his canvas, and the only modification he will make it undergo is that he will

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transform it into an imaginary object. He is therefore as far as he can be from considering colors 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 create a thing.

2 And if he puts together red, yel- low, and green, there is no reason for the ensemble to have a definable signification, that is, to refer particularly to another object. Doubtless this ensemble is also inhab-

ited 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 colors, which by themselves already had something like a meaning, his emotions get mixed up and grow obscure. Nobody can quite recognize them there.

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 proper qualities of things, by their impermeability, their exten-

sion, 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, forever arrested half-way between sky

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and earth, to express what their nature keeps them

from expressing. Similarly, the signification of a melody if one can

still speak of signification is nothing outside of the mel-

ody itself, unlike ideas, which can be adequately rendered

in several ways. Call it joyous or somber. It will always be over and above anything you can say about it. Not be-

cause 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 does 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, thatV 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 what are we to think about a workman? An infinity of contradictory things. All thoughts and all

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feelings are there, adhering to the canvas in a state of

profound undifferentiation. 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, battle-

fields. They affect us no more than does Greuze with his "Prodigal Son.

53 And that masterpiece, "The Massa- cre of Guernica,

55 does any one 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 harle-

quins, 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 signifi- cations; one does not put them to music. Under these conditions, who would dare require that the painter or musician engage himself?

On the other hand, the writer deals with significations. 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 con-

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vinced, all one need do is take a look at contemporary

production. "At least/ 5

critics say triumphantly, "you can't even dream of engaging 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 rather say that it serves them. Poets are men who refuse to utilize language. Now, since the quest for truth takes place in and by language con- ceived as a certain kind of instrument, 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 still; it is something dif- ferent. 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 little groups, as for example "horse" and "butter" by writing "horses of butter."

Besides the fact that such an enterprise would require infinite time, it is not conceivable that one can keep one- self on the plane of the utilitarian project, consider words as instruments, and at the same contemplate taking their

instrumentality away from them. In fact, the poet has withdrawn from language-instrument in a single move- ment. Once and for all he has chosen the poetic attitude which considers words as things and not as signs. For the

ambiguity of the sign implies that one can penetrate it at

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will like a pane of glass and pursue the thing signified, or

turn his gaze toward its reality and consider it as an ob-

ject. 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 useful conven-

tions, 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 he dwells upon words, as does the painter with

colors and the musician with sounds, that does not mean that they have lost all signification in his eyes. Indeed, it

is signification 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 colors. Having flowed into the word, having been absorbed by its sonority or visual aspect, having been thickened and defaced, it too is a thing, increate and eternal.

For the poet, language is a structure of the external world. The speaker is in a situation in language; he is in- vested with words. They are prolongations of his mean-

ings, his pincers, his antennae, his eyeglasses. He maneuv- ers them from within; he feels them as if they were his body; he is surrounded by a verbal body which he is

hardly aware of and which extends his action upon the world. The poet is outside of language. He sees words

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

inside out as if he did not share the human condition, and as if he were first meeting the word as a barrier as he comes toward men. Instead of first knowing things

by their name, it seems that first he has a silent contact with them, since, turning toward that other species of

thing which for him is the word, touching them, testing them, palping them, he discovers in them a slight lumi-

nosity 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 neces-

sarily 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 represents rather than expresses signification. Inversely, as the signification is realized, 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 increate, 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 re- semblance and signification. And the poet does not utilize

WHAT IS WRITING?

the word, he does not choose between diverse accepta- tions; each of them, instead of appearing to him as an autonomous function, is given to him as a material qual- ity which merges before his eyes with the other accep- tation.

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 com-

pletely 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 river> the soft, tawny ardency of gold> and finally aban- dons itself with propriety and, by the continuous diminu- tion of the silent

, prolongs indefinitely its modest blos-

soming.* To that is added the insidious effect of biog- raphy. 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 himself and throws him into the midst of the world, sends back to the poet his own image, like a mirror.

; . i nil

"This sentence is not fully intelligible in translation as the author is here associating the component sounds of the word Florence with the signification of the French words they evoke. Thus: FL-OR-ENCE, fleuve (river), or (gold), and dfaence (propriety). The latter part of the sentence refers to the practice in French poetry of giving, in certain circumstances, a syllabic value to the otherwise silent terminal e. Translator's note.

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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 reciprocal 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 affectivity. Thus, the poetic word is a microcosm. The crisis of language which broke out at the begin-

ning of this century is a poetic crisis. Whatever the so- cial and historical factors, it manifested itself by attacks of depersonalization of the writer in the face of 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 be- came things themselves, or rather the black heart of things. And when the poet joins several of these micro- cosms together the case is like that of painters when they assemble their colors on the canvas. One might think that he is composing a sentence, but this is only what it ap- pears to be. He is creating an object. The words-things are grouped by magical associations of fitness and in-

congruity, like colors and sounds. They attract, repel, and "burn" 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 sen-

tence in his mind, and the words follow. But this scheme

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has nothing in common with what one ordinarily calls a verbal scheme. It does not govern the construction

of a signification. 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.

To flee, to flee there, I feel that birds are drunk But, oh, my heart, hear the song of the sailors. (Fuir, la-bas fuir, je sens que des oiseaux sont ivres

Mais o mon coeur entends le chant des matelots.}

This "but" which rises like a monolith at the thresh-

old of the sentence does not tie the second verse to the pre-

ceding one. It colors it with a certain reserved nuance, with "private associations

55 which penetrate it completely. In the same way, certain poems begin with "and.

55 This

conjunction 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 irritating flavors of

objection, of reserve, of disjunction. He carries them to the absolute. He makes them real properties of the sen- tence, which becomes an utter objection without being an objection to anything precise. He finds here those relations of reciprocal implication which we pointed out a short time ago between the poetic word and its mean-

ing; the ensemble of the words chosen functions as an

image of the interrogative or restrictive nuance, and vice-

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versa, the interrogation is an image of the verbal en-

semble which it delimits.

As in the following admirable verses:

Oh seasons! Oh castles! What soul is faultless? (O saisons! O chateaux! Quelle dme est sans defaut?)

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. 55 Nor

did he mean to say something else. He asked an absolute question. He conferred upon the beautiful word "soul" an interrogative existence. The interrogation has become a

thing as the anguish of Tintoretto became a yellow sky. It is no longer a signification, 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 condition, on the side of God.

If this is the case, one easily understands how foolish it would be to require a poetic engagement. Doubtless, emotion, even passion and why not anger, social in- dignation, and political hatred? are at the origin of the

poem. But they are not expressed there, as in a pamphlet or in a confession. Insofar as the writer of prose exhibits

feelings, he illustrates them; whereas, if the poet injects

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his feelings into his poem, he ceases to recognize them; the words take hold of them, penetrate them, and meta-

morphose them; they do not signify them, even in his

eyes. Emotion has become thing; it now has the opacity of things; it is compounded by the ambiguous properties of the vocables 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, inexhaust- ible as things, everywhere overflows the feeling which has produced them. How can one hope to provoke the indignation or the political enthusiasm of the reader when the very thing one does is to withdraw him from the hu- man condition and invite him to consider with the eyes of God a language that has been turned inside out? Some- one may say, "You're forgetting the poets of the Re- sistance. You're forgetting Pierre Emmanuel.

55 Not a bit!

They're the very ones I was going to give as examples. 4

But even if the poet is forbidden to engage himself, is that a reason for exempting the writer of prose? What do they have in common? It is true that the prosewriter and the poet both write. But there is nothing in com- mon between these two acts of writing except the movement of the hand which traces the letters. Other- wise, 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 to ask for his slippers, and Hitler to declare war on Po- land. The writer is a speaker; he designates, demonstrates, orders, refuses, interpolates, begs, insults, persuades, in-

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

sinuates. If 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 in- side out; it is now time to look at it right side out.

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 dis-

please in themselves, but whether they correctly indicate a certain thing or a certain notion. Thus, it often happens that we find ourselves possessing a certain idea that some- one 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 Valery 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 he grabs any instrument. When the dan- ger is past, he does not even remember whether it was a hammer or a stick; moreover, he never knew; all he needed was a prolongation of his body, a means of ex-

tending his hand to the highest branch. It was a sixth

finger, a third leg, ia short, a pure function which he assimilated. Thus, regarding language, it is our shell and our antennae; it protects 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 neighbor's heart. We are within language as within our body. We feel it spon- taneously while going beyond it toward other ends, as we feel our hands and our feet; we perceive it when it is the other who is using it, as we perceive the limbs of

WHAT IS WRITING?

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 other upon me. The word is a certain particular moment of action and has no meaning outside of it. In certain cases of aphasia the possibilities of acting, of understanding

situations, and of having normal relations with the other

sex, are lost.

At the heart of this apraxia the destruction of lan-

guage appears only as the collapse of one of the structures, the finest and the most apparent. And if prose is never anything but the privileged instrument of a certain un-

dertaking, if it is only the poet's business to contemplate words in a disinterested fashion, then one has the right to ask the prose-writer from the very start, "What is your aim in writing? What undertakings are you engaged in, and why does it require you to have recourse to writing?

In any case this undertaking cannot have pure contem-

plation as an end. For, intuition is silence, and the end of

language is to communicate. One can doubtless pin down the results of intuition, 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 the reason for this decision. And the com- mon 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 writ-

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ing: "Do you have anything to say?" Which means:

something which is worth the trouble of being com- municated. 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, which grazes 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 behavior of an individual, you reveal it to him; he sees himself. And since you are at the same time naming it to all others, he knows that he is seen at the moment he sees himself. The furtive gesture which he forgot while making it, begins to exist beyond all

measure, 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 behavior out of obstin-

acy 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 transpierce 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

WHAT IS WRITING?

I emerge from it a little more, since I go beyond it to-

ward the future.

Thus, the prose-writer is a man who has chosen a cer- tain 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 disclose? What change do you want to bring into the world by this disclosure?" The "engaged

55 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 toward 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 can not 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 themselves in their truth. Doubtless, the engaged writer can be mediocre; he can

even be conscious of being so; but as one can not 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 greatest celebrity. He should never say to himself "Bah! I'll be lucky if I have three thousand readers,

33 but rather,

"What would happen if everybody read what I wrote? 55

He remembers what Mosca said beside the coach which carried Fabrizio and Sanseverina away, "If the word Love

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

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 "love53 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-Parrain says, are "loaded pistols.

55 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 lit- erature may be. But from this point on we may conclude that the writer has chosen to reveal the world and particu- larly 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 in- nocent of what it5s all .about. And since he has once en- gaged himself in the universe of language, he can never

again pretend that he can not speak. Once you enter the universe of significations, 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 lan- guage 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

WHAT IS WRITING?

notes around 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, if a writer has

chosen to remain silent on any aspect whatever 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 writ-

ing. 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 ab- surd 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 phrases, dispose the passions of the reader without his being aware and orders 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

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

thrown 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

engagement is harmful to the art of writing? If the con-

tamination 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 own, and one judges it

afterward. It is true that the subjects suggest the style,

but they do not order it. There are no styles ranged a priori outside of the literary art. What is more en-

gaged, what is more boring than the idea of attacking the

Jesuits? Yet, out of this Pascal made his Provincial Let- ters. In short, it is a matter of knowing what one wants to write about, whether butterflies or the condition of

the Jews. And when one knows, then it remains to de- cide 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 the style; the idea comes afterwards;

55 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 under- stood that art loses nothing in engagement. On the con- trary, just as physics submits to mathematicians new problems which require them to produce a new sym- bolism, in like manner the always new requirements of

WHAT IS WRITING?

the social and the metaphysical engage the artist in find-

ing 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 locomotives or the proletariat. After that, the purists will perhaps forbid us to write

about locomotives. But art has never been on the side of the purists.

If that is the principle of engagement, 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 col- umns. I should have liked to know in the name of what, with what conception of literature, they condemned en-

gagement. 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 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 maneuver of the bourgeois of the last cen-

tury who preferred to see themselves denounced as phil- istines 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 embarrass- ment 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

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

set up lines without signification nor seek solely beauty of phrase and of imagery. His function is to deliver mes-

sages 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 a quiet little

job as cemetery watchmen. God knows whether ceme- teries 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 odor 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, nor even a thought. Written by a dead man about dead things, it no longer has any place 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

WHAT IS WRITING?

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 a word, 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 ap- pearance. His nagging wife3 his hunchbacked son, they too are appearances. And he will put up with them be- cause Xenophon has drawn the portrait of Xantippe and

Shakespeare that of Richard the Third.

It is a holiday for him when contemporary authors do him the favor of dying. Their books, too raw, too living, too urgent, pass on to the other shore; they become less and less affecting and more and more beautiful. After a short stay in Purgatory they go on to people the intel-

ligible heaven with new values. Bergotte, Swann, Sieg- fried and Bella, and Monsieur Teste are recent acquisi- tions. He is waiting for Nathanael and Menalque. As for the writers who persist in living, he asks them only not to move about too much, and to make an effort to resemble from now on the dead men they will be. Valery, who for twenty-five years had been publishing posthumous books, managed the matter very nicely. That is why, like some

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

highly exceptional saints, he was canonized during his

lifetime. But Malraux is scandalous. Our critics are Catharians. They don't want to have

anything to do with the real world except eat and drink in it, and since it is absolutely necessary to have relations with our fellow-creatures, they have chosen to have them with the defunct. They get excited only about classified

matters, closed quarrels, stories whose ends are known.

They never bet on uncertain issues, and since history has decided for them, since the objects which terrified or

angered the authors they read have disappeared, since

bloody disputes seem futile at a distance of two centuries, they can be charmed with balanced periods, and every- thing happens for them as if all literature were only a vast tautology and as if every new prose-writer had in- vented a new way of speaking only for the purpose of saying nothing. To speak of archetypes and "human nature" is that

speaking in order to say nothing? All the conceptions of our critics oscillate from one idea to the other. And, of

course, both of them are false. Our great writers wanted to destroy, to edify, to demonstrate. But we no longer retain the proofs which they have advanced because we have no concern with what they mean to prove. The abuses which they denounced are no longer those of our time. There are others which rouse us which they did not suspect. History has given the lie to some of their predictions, and those which have been fulfilled became true so long ago that we have forgotten that they were at first flashes of their genius. Some of their thoughts are utterly dead, and there are others which the whole hu-

WHAT IS WRITING?

man race has taken up to its advantage and which we now regard as commonplace. It follows that the best arguments of these writers have lost their effectiveness. We admire only their order and rigor. Their most com- pact composition is in our eyes only an ornament, an

elegant architecture of exposition, with no more practical application than such architectures as the fugues of

Bach and the arabesques of the Alhambra. We are still moved by the passion of these impassioned

geometries when the geometry no longer convinces us. Or rather by the representation of the passion. In the course of centuries the ideas have turned flat, but they remain the little personal objectives of a man who was once flesh and bone; behind the reasons of reason, which

languish, we perceive the reasons of the heart, the virtues, the vices, and that great pain that men have in living. Sade does his best to win us over, but we hardly find him scandalous. He is no longer anything but a soul eaten by a beautiful disease, a pearl-oyster. The Letter on the Theater no longer keeps anyone from going to the theater, but we find it piquant that Rousseau detested the art of the drama. If we are a bit versed in psychoanalysis, our pleasure is perfect. We shall explain the Social Contract by the Oedipus complex and The Spirit of the Laws by the inferiority complex. That is, we shall fully enjoy the well-known superiority of live dogs to dead lions.

Thus, when a book presents befuddled thoughts which appear to be reasons only to melt under scrutiny and to be reduced to heart beats, when the teaching that one can draw from it is radically different from what its author intended, the book is called a message. Rousseau,

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

the father of the French Revolution, and Gobineau, the father of racism, both sent us messages. And the critic considers them with equal sympathy. If they were alive, he would have to choose between the two, to love one and hate the other. But what brings them together, above all, is that they are both profoundly and deliciously wrong, and in the same way: they are dead.

Thus, contemporary writers should be advised to de- liver messages, that is, voluntarily to limit their writing to the involuntary expression of their souls. I say in-

voluntary because the dead, from Montaigne to Rim-

baud, have painted themselves completely, but without

having meant to it is something they have simply thrown into the bargain. The surplus which they have

given us unintentionally should be the primary and

professed goal of living writers. They are not to be forced to give us confessions without any dressing, nor are they to abandon themselves to the too-naked lyricism of the romantics. But since we find pleasure in foiling the ruses of Chateaubriand or Rousseau, in surprising them in the secret places of their being at the moment they are playing at being the public man, in distinguishing the

private motives from their most universal assertions, we shall ask newcomers to procure us this pleasure deliber-

ately. So let them reason, assert, deny, refute, and prove; but the cause they are defending must be only the ap- parent aim of their discourse; the deeper goal is to yield themselves without seeming to do so. They must first disarm themselves of their arguments as time has done for those of the classic writers; they must bring them to bear upon subjects which interest no one or on truths

WHAT IS WRITING?

so general that readers are convinced in advance. As for their ideas, they must give them an air of profundity, but with an effect of emptiness, and they must shape them in such a way that they are obviously explained by an unhappy childhood, a class hatred, or an incestuous love. Let them not presume to think in earnest; thought conceals the man, and it is the man alone who interests us. A bare tear is not lovely. It offends. A good argu- ment also offends, as Stendhal well observed. But an

argument that masks a tear that's what we're after. The argument removes the obscenity from the tears; the tears, by revealing their origin in the passions, remove the aggressiveness from the argument. We shall be neither too deeply touched nor at all convinced, and we shall be able to yield ourselves in security to that moderate

pleasure which, as everyone knows, we derive from the contemplation of works of art. Thus, this is "true,

"pure 55

literature, a subjectivity which yields itself under the

aspect of the objective, a discourse so curiously contrived

that it is equivalent to silence, a thought which debates with itself, a reason which is only the mask of madness, an Eternal which lets it be understood that it is only a moment of History, a historical moment which, by the hidden side which it reveals, suddenly sends back a per- petual lesson to the eternal man, but which is produced against the express wishes of those who do the teaching. When all is said and done, the message is a soul which

is made object. A soul, and what is to be done with a soul? One contemplates it at a respectful distance. It is not customary to show one

s soul in society without an

imperious motive. But, with certain reserves, convention

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

permits some individuate to put theirs into commerce, and all adults may procure it for themselves. For many people today, works of the mind are thus little straying souls which one acquires at a modest price; there is good old Montaigne's, dear La Fontaine's, and that of Jean- Jacques and of Jean-Paul and of delicious Gerard. What is called literary art is the ensemble of the treatments

which make them inoffensive. Tanned, refined, chem-

ically treated, they provide their acquirers with the op-

portunity of devoting some moments of a life completely turned outward to the cultivation of subjectivity. Custom

guarantees it to be without risk. Montaigne's skepticism? Who can take it seriously since the author of the Essays got frightened when the plague ravaged Bordeaux? Or Rousseau's humamtarianism, since "Jean-Jacques" put his children into an orphanage? And the strange revela- tions of Sylvie, since Gerard de Nerval was mad? At the

very most, the professional critic will set up infernal di-

alogues between them and will inform us that French

thought is a perpetual colloquy between Pascal and

Montaigne. In so doing he has no intention of making Pascal and Montaigne more alive, but of making Mal- raux and Gide more dead. Finally, when the internal contradictions of tEe life and the work have made both of them useless, when the message, in its imponderable depth, has taught us these capital truths, "that man is neither good nor bad," "that there is a great deal of suf-

fering in human life," "that genius is only great patience," this melancholy cuisine will have achieved its purpose, and the reader, as he lays down the book, will be able to

cry out with a tranquil soul, "All this is only literature."

WHAT IS WRITING?

But since, for us, writing is an enterprise; since writers

are alive before being dead; since we think that we must try to be as right as we can in our books; and since, even if the centuries show us to be in the wrong, this is no reason to show in advance that we are wrong; since we think that the writer should engage himself com-

pletely in his works, and not as an abject passivity by put- ting forward his vices, his misfortunes, and his weak-

nesses, but as a resolute will and as a choice, as this total

enterprise of living that each one of us is, it is then proper that we take up this problem at its beginning and that we, in our turn, ask ourselves: "Why does one write?"

NOTES 1. At least in general. The greatness and error of Klee lie in his attempt to

make a painting both sign and object. 2. I say "create," not "imitate," which is enough to squelch the bombast

of M. Charles Estienne who has obviously not understood a word of my argu- ment and who is dead set on tilting at shadows.

3. This is the example cited by Bataille in Inner Experience. 4. If one wishes to know the origin of this attitude toward language, the

following are a few brief indications.

Originally, poetry creates the myth, while the prose-writer draws its portrait. In reality, the human act, governed by needs and urged on by the useful is, in a sense, a means. It passes unnoticed, and it is the result which counts. When I extend my hand in order to take up my pen, I have only a fleeting and ob- scure consciousness of my gesture; it is the pen which I see. Thus, man is alienated by his ends. Poetry reverses the relationship: the world and things become inessential, become a pretext for the act which becomes its own end. The vase is there so that the girl may perform the graceful act of filling it; the Trojan War, so that Hector and Achilles may engage in that heroic com- bat. The action, detached from its goals, which become blurred, becomes an act of prowess or a dance. Nevertheless, however indifferent he might have been to the success of the enterprise, the poet, before the nineteenth century, re-

mained in harmony with society as a whole. He did not use language for the end which prose seeks, but he had the same confidence in it as the prose-writer. With the coming of bourgeois society, the poet puts up a common front

with the prose-writer to declare it unlivable. His job is always to create the

myth of man, but he passes from white magic to black magic. Man is always

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

presented as the absolute end, but by the success of his enterprise he is

sucked into a utilitarian collectivity. The thing that is in the background of his act and that will allow transition to the myth is thus no longer success, but defeat. By stopping the infinite series of his projects like a screen, defeat alone returns him to himself in his purity. The world remains the inessential, but it is now there as a pretext for defeat. The finality of the thing is to send man back to himself by blocking the route. Moreover, it is not a matter of arbi-

trarily introducing defeat and ruin into the course of the world, but rather of having no eyes for anything but that. Human enterprise has two aspects: it is both success and failure. The dialectical scheme is inadequate for reflecting upon it. We must make our vocabulary and the frames of our reason more supple. Some day I am going to try to describe that strange reality, History, which is neither objective, nor ever quite subjective, in which the dialectic is

contested, penetrated, and corroded by a kind of antidialectic, but which is still a dialectic. But that is the philosopher's affair. One does not ordinarily consider the two faces of Janus; the man of action sees one and the poet sees the other. When the instruments are broken and unusable, when plans are blasted and effort is useless, the world appears with a childlike and terrible

freshness, without supports, without paths. It has the maximum reality be- cause it is crushing for man, and as action, in any case, generalizes, defeat restores to things their individual reality. But, by an expected reversal, the

defeat, considered as a final end, is both a contesting and an appropriation of this universe. A contesting, because man 5 worth more than that which crushes; he no longer contests things in their "little bit of reality," like the

engineer or the captain, but, on the contrary, in their "too full of reality," by his very existence as a vanquished person; he is the remorse of the world. An appropriation, because the world, by ceasing to be the tool of success, be- comes the instrument of failure. So there it is, traversed by an obscure final-

ity; it is its coefficient of adversity which serves, the more human insofar as it is more hostile to man. The defeat itself turns into salvation. Not that it makes us yield to some "beyond," but by itself it shifts and is metamorphosed. For example, poetic language rises out of the ruins of prose. If it is true that the word is a betrayal and that communication is impossible, then each word by itself recovers its individuality and becomes an instrument of our defeat and a receiver of the incommunicable. It is not that there is another thing to com-

municate; but the communication of prose having miscarried, it is the very meaning of the word which becomes the pure incommunicable. Thus, the failure of communication becomes a suggestion of the incommunicable, and the thwarted project of utilizing words is succeeded by the pure disinterested in- tuition of the word. Thus, we again meet with the description which we at- tempted earlier in this study, but in the more general perspective of the ab- solute valorization of the defeat, which seems to me the original attitude of contemporary poetry. Note also that this choice confers upon the poet a very precise function in the collectivity: in a highly integrated or religious society, the defeat is masked by the State or redeemed by Religion; in a less inte- grated and secular society, such as our democracies, it is up to poetry to re- deem them.

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

Poetry is a case of the loser winning. And the genuine poet chooses to lose, even if he has to go so far as to die, in order to win. I repeat that I am talking of contemporary poetry. History presents other forms of poetry. It is not my concern to show their connection with ours. Thus, if one absolutely wishes to

speak of the engagement of the poet, let us say that he is the man who en- gapes himself to lose. This is the deeper meaning of that tough-luck, of that malediction with which he always claims kinship and which he always at- tributes to an intervention from without; whereas it is his deepest choice, the source, and not the consequence of his poetry. He is certain of the total de- feat of the human enterprise and arranges to fail in his own life in order to bear witness, by his individual defeat, to human defeat in general. Thus, he contests, as we shall see, which is what the prose-writer does too. But the contesting of prose is carried on in the name of a greater success; and that of poetry, in the name of the hidden defeat which every victory conceals.

5. It goes without saying that in all poetry a certain form of prose, that is, of success, is present; and, vice-versa, the driest prose always contains a bit

of poetry, that is, a certain form of defeat; no prose-writer is quite capable of expressing what he wants to say; he says too much or not enough; each phrase is a wager, a risk assumed; the more cautious one is, the more atten- tion the word attracts; as Valery has shown, no one can understand a word to its very bottom. Thus, each word is used simultaneously for its clear and social

meaning and for certain obscure resonances let me say, almost for its physiognomy. The reader, too, is sensitive to this. At once we are no longer on the level of concerted communication, but on that of grace and chance; the silences of prose are poetic because they mark its limits, and it is for the purpose of greater clarity that I have been considering the extreme cases of

pure prose and pure poetry. However, it need not be concluded that we can pass from poetry to prose by a continuous series of intermediate forms. If the

prose-writer is too eager to fondle his words, the eidos of "prose" is shattered

and we fall into highfalutin nonsense. If the poet relates, explains, or teaches, the poetry becomes prosaic; he has lost the game. It is a matter of complex structures, impure, but well-defined.

WHY WRITE?

Each one has his reasons: for one, art is a flight; for

another, a means of conquering. But one can flee into a

hermitage, into madness, into death. One can conquer by arms. Why does it have to be writing, why does one have to manage his escapes and conquests by writing? Because, behind the various aims of authors, there is a deeper and more immediate choice which is common to all of us. We shall try to elucidate this choice, and we shall see whether it is not in the name of this very choice of writ-

ing that the engagement of writers must be required. Each of our perceptions is accompanied by the con-

sciousness that human reality is a "revealer," that is, it is through human reality that "there is" being, or, to put it differently, that man is the means by which things are manifested. It is our presence in the world which multi-

plies relations. It is we who set up a relationship between this tree and that bit of sky. Thanks to us, that star which has been dead for millennia, that quarter moon, and that dark river are disclosed in the unity of a landscape. It is

the speed of our auto and our airplane which organizes the great masses of the earth. With each of our acts, the

WHY WRITE?

world reveals to us a new face. But, if we know that we are directors of being, we also know that we are not its producers. If we turn away from this landscape, it will sink back into its dark permanence. At least, it will sink back; there is no one mad enough to think that it is going to be annihilated. It is we who shall be annihilated, and the earth will remain in its lethargy until another con- sciousness comes along to awaken it. Thus, to our inner

certainty of being "revealers" is added that of being ines- sential in relation to the thing revealed.

One of the chief motives of artistic creation is certainly the need of feeling that we are essential in relationship to the world. If I fix on canvas or in writing a certain

aspect of the fields or the sea or a look on someone's face which I have disclosed, I am conscious of having pro- duced them by condensing relationships, by introduc- ing order where there was none, by imposing the unity of mind on the diversity of things. That is, I feel myself essential in relation to my creation. But this time it is the created object which escapes me; I can not reveal and produce at the same time. The creation becomes in- essential in relation to the creative activity. First of all, even if it appears to others as definitive, the created ob-

ject always seems to us in a state of suspension; we can always change this line, that shade, that word. Thus, it never forces itself. A novice painter asked his teacher, "When should I consider my painting finished?" And the teacher answered, "When you can look at it in amazement and say to yourself Tm the one who did that?" Which amounts to saying "never." For it is virtually

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

:onsidering one's work with someone else's eyes and re-

pealing what one has created. But it is self-evident that

we are proportionally less conscious of the thing pro- duced and more conscious of our productive activity. When it is a matter of pottery or carpentry, we work

according to traditional norms, with tools whose usage s codified; it is Heidegger's famous "they

55 who are

working with our hands. In this case, the result can seem

:o us sufficiently strange to preserve its objectivity in our

>yes. But if we ourselves produce the rules of production, he measures, the criteria, and if our creative drive comes rbm the very depths of our heart, then we never find

mything but ourselves in our work. It is we who have nvented the laws by which we judge it. It is our history, >ur love, our gaiety that we recognize in it. Even if we hould regard it without touching it any further, we never -eceive from it that gaiety or love. We put them into it. The results which we have obtained on canvas or paper lever seem to us objective. We are too familiar with the >rocesses of which they are the effects. These processes emain a subjective discovery; they are ourselves, our

nspiration, our ruse, and when we seek to perceive our vork, we create it again, we repeat mentally the opera- ions which produced it; each of its aspects appears as a esult. Thus, in the perception, the object is given as the essential thing and the subject as the inessential. The atter seeks essentiality in the creation and obtains it, >ut then it is the object which becomes the inessential. This dialectic is nowhere more apparent than in the

irt of writing, for the literary object is a peculiar top vhich exists only in movement. To make it come into

WHY WRITE?

view a concrete act called reading is necessary, and it lasts only as long as this act can last. Beyond that, there are only black marks on paper. Now, the writer can not read what he writes, whereas the shoemaker can put on the shoes he has just made if they are his size, and the architect can live in the house he has built. In reading, one foresees; one waits. He foresees the end of the sen- tence, the following sentence, the next page. He waits for them to confirm or disappoint his foresights. The reading is composed of a host of hypotheses, of dreams followed by awakenings, of hopes and deceptions. Readers are always ahead of the sentence they are reading in a merely proba- ble future which partly collapses and partly comes to-

gether in proportion as they progress, which withdraws from one page to the next and forms the moving horizon of the literary object. Without waiting, without a future, without ignorance, there is no objectivity. Now the operation of writing involves an implicit

quasi-reading which makes real reading impossible. When the words form under his pen, the author doubt- less sees them, but he does not see them as the reader does, since he knows them before writing them down. The function of his gaze is not to reveal, by stroking them, the sleeping words which are waiting to be read, but to control the sketching of the signs. In short, it is a purely regulating mission, and the view before him reveals noth- ing except for slight slips of the pen. The writer neither foresees nor conjectures; he projects. It often hap- pens that he awaits, as they say, the inspiration. But one does not wait for himself the way he waits for others. If he hesitates, he knows that the future is not

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

made, that he himself is going to make it, and if he still does not know what is going to happen to his hero, that

simply means that he has not thought about it, that he has not decided upon anything. The future is then a blank

page, whereas the future of the reader is two hundred

pages filled with words which separate him from the end.

Thus, the writer meets everywhere only his knowledge, his will, his plans, in short, himself. He touches only his own subjectivity; the object he creates is out of reach; he does not create it for himself. If he rereads himself, it

is already too late. The sentence will never quite be a

thing in his eyes. He goes to the very limits of the sub- jective but without crossing it. He appreciates the effect of a touch, of an epigram, of a well-placed adjective, but it is the effect they will have on others. He can judge it, not feel it. Proust never discovered the homosexuality of Charlus, since he had decided upon it even before

starting on his book. And if a day comes when the book takes on for its author a semblance of objectivity, it is that years have passed, that he has forgotten it, that its

spirit is quite foreign to him, and doubtless he is no longer capable of writing it. This was the case with Rousseau when he reread the Social Contract at the end of his life.

Thus, it is not true that one writes for himself. That would be the worst blow. In projecting his emotions on

paper, one barely manages to give them a languishing extension. The creative act is only an incomplete and abstract moment in the production of a work. If the author existed alone he would be able to write as much as he liked; the work as object would never see the light of day and he would either have to put down his pen or

WHY WRITE?

despair. But the operation of writing implies that of

reading as its dialectical correlative and these two con- nected acts necessitate two distinct agents. It is the con-

joint effort of author and reader which brings upon the scene that concrete and imaginary object which is the work of the mind. There is no art except for and by others.

Reading seems, in fact, to be the synthesis of percep- tion and creation.1 It supposes the essentiality of both the subject and the object. The object is essential because it is strictly transcendent, because it imposes its own structures, and because one must wait for it and observe

it; but the subject is also essential because it is required not only to disclose the object (that is, to make there be an object) but also so that this object might be (that is, to produce it). In a word, the reader is conscious of dis-

closing in creating, of creating by disclosing. In reality, it is not necessary to believe that reading is a mechanical

operation and that signs make an impression upon him as light does on a photographic plate. If he is inattentive, tired, stupid, or thoughtless, most of the relations will es-

cape him. He will never manage to "catch on 55

to the

object (in the sense in which we see that fire "catches" or "doesn't catch"). He will draw some phrases out of the shadow, but they will seem to appear as random strokes. If he is at his best, he will project beyond the words a synthetic form, each phrase of which will be no more than a partial function: the "theme,

55 the "subject,

or the "meaning. 55

Thus, from the very beginning, the

1. The same is true in different degrees regarding the spectator's attitude before other works of art (paintings, symphonies, statues, etc.)

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

meaning is no longer contained in the words, since it is

he, on the contrary, who allows the signification of each of them to be understood; and the literary object, though realized through language, is never given in language. On the contrary, it is by nature a silence and an op- ponent of the word. In addition, the hundred thousand

words aligned in a book can be read one by one so that

the meaning of the work does not emerge. Nothing is ac-

complished if the reader does not put himself from the

very beginning and almost without a guide at the height of this silence; if, in short, he does not invent it and does not then place there, and hold on to, the words and sentences which he awakens. And if I am told that it would be more fitting to call this operation a re-invention or a discovery, I shall answer that, first, such a re-inven-

tion would be as new and as original an act as the first invention. And, especially, when an object has never existed before, there can be no question of re-inventing it or discovering it. For if the silence about which I am speaking is really the goal at which the author is aiming, he has, at least, never been familiar with it; his silence is subjective and anterior to language. It is the absence of words, the undifferentiated and lived silence of inspira- tion, which the word will then particularize, whereas the silence produced by the reader is an object. And at the very interior of this object there are more silences which the author does not tell. It is a question of silences which are so particular that they could not retain any meaning outside of the object which the reading causes to appear. However, it is these which give it its density and its particular face.

WHY WRITE?

To say that they are unexpressed is hardly the word; for they are precisely the inexpressible. And that is why one does not come upon them at any definite moment in the reading; they are everywhere and nowhere. The

quality of the marvelous in The Wanderer (Le Grand

Meaulnes], the grandiosity of Armance, the degree of realism and truth of Kafka's mythology, these are never

given. The reader must invent them all in a continual

exceeding of the written thing. To be sure, the author guides him, but all he does is guide him. The landmarks he sets up are separated by the void. The reader must unite them; he must go beyond them. In short, reading is directed creation.

On the one hand, the literary object has no other substance than the reader's subjectivity; Raskolnikov's

waiting is my waiting which I lend him. Without this impatience of the reader he would remain only a collec- tion of signs. His hatred of the police magistrate who questions him is my hatred which has been solicited and wheedled out of me by signs, and the police magistrate himself would not exist without the hatred I have for him via Raskolnikov. That is what animates him, it is his very flesh.

But on the other hand, the words are there like traps to arouse our feelings and to reflect them toward us. Each word is a path of transcendence; it shapes our feelings, names them, and attributes them to an imagi- nary personage who takes it upon himself to live them for us and who has no other substance than these borrowed passions; he confers objects, perspectives, and a horizon

upon them.

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

Thus, for the reader, all is to do and all is already

done; the work exists only at the exact level of his capac- ities; while he reads and creates, he knows that he can

always go further in his reading, can always create more

profoundly, and thus the work seems to him as inexhaust- ible and opaque as things. We would readily reconcile that "rational intuition" which Kant reserved to divine Reason with this absolute production of qualities, which, to the extent that they emanate from our subjectivity,

congeal before our eyes into impermeable objectivities. Since the creation can find its fulfillment only in read-

ing, since the artist must entrust to another the job of

carrying out what he has begun, since it is only through the consciousness of the reader that he can regard him-

self as essential to his work, all literary work is an appeal. To write is to make an appeal to the reader that he lead into objective existence the revelation which I have undertaken by means of language. And if it should be asked to what the writer is appealing, the answer is

simple. As the sufficient reason for the appearance of the aesthetic object is never found either in the book (where we find merely solicitations to produce the object) or in the author's mind, .and as his subjectivity, which he cannot get away from, cannot give a reason for the act of leading into objectivity, the appearance of the work of art is a new event which cannot be explained by an- terior data. And since this directed creation is an absolute beginning, it is therefore brought about by the freedom of the reader, and by what is purest in that freedom. Thus, the writer appeals to the reader's freedom to collaborate in the production of his work.

WHY WRITE?

It will doubtless be said that all tools address them-

selves to our freedom since they are the instruments of

a possible action, and that the work of art is not unique in that. And it is true that the tool is the congealed out- line of an operation. But it remains on the level of the

hypothetical imperative. I may use a hammer to nail up a case or to hit my neighbor over the head. Insofar as I consider it in itself, it is not an appeal to my freedom; it does not put me face to face with it; rather, it aims at using it by substituting a set succession of traditional

procedures for the free invention of means. The book does not serve my freedom; it requires it. Indeed, one cannot address himself to freedom as such by means of

constraint, fascination, or entreaties. There is only one

way of attaining it; first, by recognizing it, then, having confidence in it, and finally, requiring of it an act, an act in its own name, that is, in the name of the confidence that one brings to it.

Thus, the book is not, like the tool, a means for any end whatever; the end to which it offers itself is the

reader's freedom. And the Kantian expression "finality without end

53 seems to me quite inappropriate for desig-

nating the work of art. In fact, it implies that the aes- thetic object presents only the appearance of a finality and is limited to soliciting the free and ordered play of the

imagination. It forgets that the imagination of the spec- tator has not only a regulating function, but a constitutive

one. It does not play; it is called upon to recompose the beautiful object beyond the traces left by the artist. The

imagination can not revel in itself any more than can the

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

other functions of the mind; it is always on the outside,

always engaged in an enterprise. There would be finality without end if some object offered such a set ordering that it would lead us to suppose that it has one even

though we can not ascribe one to it. By defining the beau- tiful in this way one can and this is Kant's aim liken the beauty of art to natural beauty, since a flower,

for example, presents so much symmetry, such harmonious colors, and such regular curves, that one is immediately

tempted to seek a finalist explanation for all these prop- erties and to see them as just so many means at the dis-

posal of an unknown end. But that is exactly the error. The beauty of nature is in no way comparable to that of art. The work of art does not have an end; there we

agree with Kant. But the reason is that it is an end. The Kantian formula does not account for the appeal which

resounds at the basis of each painting, each statue, each

book. Kant believes that the work of art first exists as fact and that it is then seen. Whereas, it exists only if one looks at it and if it is first pure appeal, pure exigence to exist. It is not an instrument whose existence is manifest and whose end is undetermined. It presents itself as a task to be discharged;* from the very beginning it places itself on the level of the categorical imperative. You are perfectly free to leave that book on the table. But if you open it, you assume responsibility for it. For freedom is not experienced by its enjoying its free subjective func-

tioning, but in a creative act required by an imperative. This absolute end, this imperative which is transcendent

yet acquiesced in, which freedom itself adopts as its own,

WHY WRITE?

is what we call a value. The work of art is a value be- cause it is an appeal.

If I appeal to my readers so that we may carry the enterprise which I have begun to a successful conclusion, it is self-evident that I consider him as a pure freedom, as an unconditioned activity; thus, in no case can I ad-

dress myself to his passivity, that is, try to affect him, to

communicate to him, from the very first, emotions of

fear, desire, or anger. There are, doubtless, authors who concern themselves solely with arousing these emotions

because they are foreseeable, manageable, and because

they have at their disposal sure-fire means for provoking them. But it is also true that they are reproached for this

kind of thing, as Euripides has been since antiquity be-

cause he had children appear on the stage. Freedom is alienated in the state of passion; it is abruptly engaged in partial enterprises; it loses sight of its task which is to

produce an absolute end. And the book is no longer any- ihing but a means for feeding hate or desire. The writer should not seek to overwhelm; otherwise he is in contra- diction with himself; if he wishes to make demands he must propose only the task to be fulfilled. Hence, the char- acter of pure presentation which appears essential to the work of art. The reader must be able to make a certain aesthetic withdrawal. This is what Gautier foolishly con- fused with

u art for art's sake" and the Parnassians with

the imperturbability of the artist. It is simply a matter of precaution, and Genet more justly calls it the author's

politeness toward the reader. But that does not mean that the writer makes an appeal to some sort of abstract and conceptual freedom. One certainly creates the aes-

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

thetic object with feelings; if it is touching, it appears

through our tears; if it is comic, it will be recognized

by laughter. However, these feelings are of a particular kind. They have their origin in freedom; they are loaned. The belief which I accord the tale is freely assented to. It is a Passion, in the Christian sense of the word, that

is, a freedom which resolutely puts itself into a state of

passivity to obtain a certain transcendent effect by this

sacrifice. The reader renders himself credulous; he de- scends into credulity which, though it ends by enclosing him like a dream, is at every moment conscious of being free. An effort is sometimes made to force the writer into this dilemma: "Either one believes in your story, and it is intolerable, or one does not believe in it, and it is ri- diculous.

55 But the argument is absurd because the

characteristic of aesthetic consciousness is to be a belief

by means of engagement, by oath, a belief sustained by fidelity to one's self and to the author, a perpetually renewed choice to believe. I can awaken at every mo-

ment, and I know it; but I do not want to; reading is a free dream. So that all feelings which are exacted on the basis of this imaginary belief are like particular modula- tions of my freedom. Far from absorbing or masking it, they are so many different ways it has chosen to reveal itself to itself. Raskolnikov, as I have said, would only be a shadow, without the mixture of repulsion and friend-

ship which I feel for him and which makes him live. But, by a reversal which is the characteristic of the im-

aginary object, it is not his behavior which excites my indignation or esteem, but my indignation and esteem which give consistency and objectivity to his behavior.

WHY WRITE?

Thus, the reader's feelings are never dominated by the

object, and as no external reality can condition them,

they have their permanent source in freedom; that is,

they are all generous for I call a feeling generous which has its origin and its end in freedom. Thus, reading is an

exercise in generosity, and what the writer requires of the reader is not the application of an abstract freedom but the gift of his whole person, with his passions, his

prepossessions, his sympathies, his sexual temperament, and his scale of values. Only this person will give himself

generously; freedom goes through and through him and comes to transform the darkest masses of his sensibility. And as activity has rendered itself passive in order for it better to create the object, vice-versa, passivity becomes an act; the man who is reading has raised himself to the highest degree. That is why we see people who are known for their toughness shed tears at the recital of imaginary misfortunes; for the moment they have become what they would have been if they had not spent their lives

hiding their freedom from themselves.

Thus, the author writes in order to address himself to

the freedom of readers, and he requires it in order to make his work exist. But he does not stop there; he also

requires that they return this confidence which he has

given them, that they recognize his creative freedom, and that they in turn solicit it by a symmetrical and inverse appeal. Here there appears the other dialectical

paradox of reading; the more we experience our freedom, the more we recognize that of the other; the more he demands of us, the more we demand of him. When I am enchanted with a landscape, I know very

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

well that it is not I who create it, but I also know that without me the relations which are established before my eyes among the trees, the foliage, the earth, and the grass would not exist at all. I know that I can give no rea- son for the appearance of finality which I discover in

the assortment of hues and in the harmony of the forms and movements created by the wind. Yet, it exists; there it is before my eyes, and I can make there be being only if being already is. But even if I believe in God, I can

not establish any passage, unless it be purely verbal, be-

tween the divine, universal solicitude and the particular spectacle which I am considering. To say that He made the landscape in order to charm me or that He made me the kind of person who is pleased by it is to take a ques- tion for an answer. Is the marriage of this blue and that

green deliberate? How can I know? The idea of a univer- sal providence is no guarantee of any particular intention, especially in the case under consideration, since the green of the grass is explained by biological laws, specific con-

stants, and geographical determinism, while the reason for the blue of the water is accounted for by the depth of the river, the nature of the soil and the swiftness of the current. The assorting of the shades, if it is willed, can only be something thrown into the bargain; it is the

meeting of two causal series, that is to say, at first sight, a fact of chance. At best, the finality remains problem- atic. All the relations we establish remain hypotheses; no end is proposed to us in the manner of an imperative, since none is expressly revealed as having been willed by a creator. Thus, our freedom is never called forth by natural beauty. Or rather, there is an appearance of

WHY WRITE?

order in the ensemble of the foliage, the forms, and the

movements, hence, the illusion of a calling forth which

seems to solicit this freedom and which disappears im-

mediately when one regards it. Hardly have we be-

gun to run our eyes over this arrangement, than the

call disappears; we remain alone, free to tie up one color with another or with a third, to set up a relation-

ship between the tree and the water or the tree and the

sky, or the tree, the water and the sky. My freedom be- comes caprice. To the extent that I establish new relation-

ships, I remove myself further from the illusory ob-

jectivity which solicits me. I muse about certain motifs which are vaguely outlined by the things; the natural

reality is no longer anything but a pretext for musing. Or, in that case, because I have deeply regretted that this

arrangement which was momentarily perceived was not offered to me by somebody and consequently is not real, the result is that I fix my dream, that I transpose it to canvas or in writing. Thus, I interpose myself between the finality without end which appears in the natural

spectacles and the gaze of other men. I transmit it to them. It becomes human by this transmission. Art here is a ceremony of the gift and the gift alone brings about the metamorphosis. It is something like the transmission

of titles and powers in the matriarchate where the mother does not possess the names, but is the indispensable inter-

mediary between uncle and nephew. Since I have cap- tured this illusion in flight, since I lay it out for other

men and have disengaged it and rethought it for them, they can consider it with confidence. It has become in- tentional. As for me, I remain, to be sure, at the border

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

of the subjective and the objective without ever being able to contemplate the objective ordonnance which I

transmit.

The reader, on the contrary, progresses in security. However far he may go, the author has gone farther. Whatever connections he may establish among the dif- ferent parts of the book among the chapters or the words he has a guarantee, namely, that they have been

expressly willed. As Descartes says, he can even pretend that there is a secret order among parts which seem to have no connection. The creator has preceded him along the way, and the most beautiful disorders are effects of

art, that is, again order. Reading is induction, interpola- tion, extrapolation, and the basis of these activities rests on the reader's will, as for a long time it was believed that that of scientific induction rested on the divine will. A gentle force accompanies us and supports us from the first

page to the last. That does not mean that we fathom the artist's intentions easily. They constitute, as we have said, the object of conjectures, and there is an experience of the

reader; but these conjuctures are supported by the great certainty we have that the beauties which appear in the book are never accidental. In nature, the tree and the

sky harmonize only by chance; if, on the contrary, in the

novel, the protagonists find themselves in a certain tower, in a certain prison, if they stroll in a certain garden, it is a matter both of the restitution of independent causal series (the character had a certain state of mind which was due to a succession of psychological and social events; on the other hand, he betook himself to a determined

place and the layout of the city required him to

WHY WRITE?

cross a certain park) and of the expression of a deeper finality, for the park came into existence only in order to harmonize with a certain state of mind, to express it

by means of things or to put it into relief by a vivid con-

trast, and the state of mind itself was conceived in con- nection with the landscape. Here it is causality which is

appearance and which might be called "causality with-

out cause," and it is the finality which is the profound

reality. But if I can thus in all confidence put the order

of ends under the order of causes, it is because by open-

ing the book I am asserting that the object has its source in human freedom.

If I were to suspect the artist of having written out of

passion and in passion, my confidence would immediately vanish, for it would serve no purpose to have supported the order of causes by the order of ends. The latter would be supported in its turn by a psychic causality and the work of art would end by re-entering the chain of deter- minism. Certainly I do not deny when I am reading that the author may be impassioned, nor even that he might have conceived the first plan of his work under the sway of passion. But his decision to write supposes that he with-

draws somewhat from his feelings, in short, that he has transformed his emotions into free emotions as I do mine while reading him; that is, that he is in an attitude of

generosity.

Thus, reading is a pact of generosity between author and reader. Each one trusts the other; each one counts on the other, demands of the other as much as he de- mands of himself. For this confidence is itself generosity. Nothing can force the author to believe that his reader

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

will use his freedom; nothing can force the reader to be-

lieve that the author has used his. Both of them make a free decision. There is then established a dialectical go-

ing-and-coming; when I read, I make demands; if my demands are met, what I am then reading provokes me to demand more of the author, which means to demand of the author that he demand more of me. And, vice-

versa, the author's demand is that I carry my demands to the highest pitch. Thus, my freedom, by revealing itself, reveals the freedom of the other.

It matters little whether the aesthetic object is the

product of "realistic" art (or supposedly such) or "for-

mal" art. At any rate, the natural relations are inverted; that tree on the first plane of the Cezanne painting first

appears as the product of a causal chain. But the causality is an illusion; it will doubtless remain as a proposition as

long as we look at the painting, but it will be supported by a deep finality; if the tree is placed in such a way, it

is because the rest of the painting requires that this form and those colors be placed on the first plane. Thus,

through the phenomenal causality, our gaze attains fi-

nality as the deep structure of the object, and, beyond

finality, it attains human freedom as its source and orig- inal basis. Verrneer's realism is carried so far that at

first it might be thought to be photographic. But if one considers the splendor of his texture, the pink and velvety glory of his little brick walls, the blue thickness of a

branch of woodbine, the glazed darkness of his vestibules, the orange-colored flesh of his faces which are as polished as the stone of holy-water basins, one suddenly feels, in

the pleasure that he experiences, that the finality is not

WHY WRITE?

so much in the forms or colors as in his material imagi- nation. It is the very substance and temper of the things which here give the forms their reason for being. With this realist we are perhaps closest to absolute creation, since it is in the very passivity of the matter that we meet the unfathomable freedom of man. The work is never limited to the painted, sculpted,

or narrated object. Just as one perceives things only against the background of the world, so the objects rep- resented by art appear against the background of the universe. On the background of the adventures of Fa- brice are the Italy of 1820, Austria, France, the sky and stars which the Abbe Blanis consults, and finally the whole earth. If the painter presents us with a field or a vase of flowers, his paintings are windows which are open on the whole world. We follow the red path which is buried among the wheat much farther than Van Gogh has painted it, among other wheat fields, under other clouds, to the river which empties into the sea, and we extend to infinity, to the other end of the world, the deep finality which supports the existence of the field and the earth. So that, through the various objects which it

produces or reproduces, the creative act aims at a total

renewal of the world. Each painting, each book, is a re-

covery of the totality of being. Each of them presents this totality to the freedom of the spectator. For this is

quite the final goal of art: to recover this world by giving it to be seen as it is, but as if it had its source in human freedom. But, since what the author creates takes on ob-

jective reality only in the eyes of the spectator, this re-

covery is consecrated by the ceremony of the spectacle

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

and particularly of reading. We are already in a better position to answer the question we raised a while ago: the writer chooses to appeal to the freedom of other men so that, by the reciprocal implications of their demands,

they may re-adapt the totality of being to man and may again enclose the universe within man.

If we wish to go still further, we must bear in mind that the writer, like all other artists, aims at giving his reader a certain feeling that is customarily called aesthetic

pleasure, and which I would very much rather call aes- thetic joy, and that this feeling, when it appears, is a sign that the work is achieved. It is therefore fitting to examine it in the light of the preceding considerations. In effect, this joy, which is denied to the creator, insofar as he creates, becomes one with the aesthetic conscious- ness of the spectator, that is, in the case under conside-

ration, of the reader. It is a complex feeling but one

whose structures and condition are inseparable from one another. It is identical, at first, with the recognition of

a transcendent and absolute end which, for a moment, suspends the utilitarian round of ends-means and means- ends

1 , that is, of an appeal or, what amounts to the

same thing, of a value. And the positional consciousness which I take of this value is necessarily accompanied by the non-positional consciousness of my freedom, since my freedom is manifested to itself by a transcendent ex- igency. The recognition of freedom by itself is joy, but this structure of non-thetical consciousness implies an-

other: since, in effect, reading is creation, my freedom

1. In practical life a means may be taken for an end as soon as one searches for it, and each end is revealed as a means of attaining another end.

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

does not only appear to itself as pure autonomy but as creative activity, that is, it is not limited to giving itself

its own law but perceives itself as being constitutive of the object. It is on this level that the phenomenon specifi- cally is manifested, that is, a creation wherein the

created object is given as object to its creator. It is the

sole case in which the creator gets any enjoyment out of the object he creates. And the word enjoyment which is applied to the positional consciousness of the work read indicates sufficiently that we are in the presence of an essential structure of aesthetic joy. This positional en-

joyment is accompanied by the non-positional conscious- ness of being essential in relation to an object perceived as essential. I shall call this aspect of aesthetic conscious-

ness the feeling of security; it is this which stamps the

strongest aesthetic emotions with a sovereign calm. It has its origin in the authentication of a strict harmony be- tween subjectivity and objectivity. As, on the other hand, the aesthetic object is properly the world insofar as it is aimed at through the imaginary, aesthetic joy accom-

panies the positional consciousness that the world is a

value, that is, a task proposed to human freedom. I shall call this the aesthetic modification of the human project, for, as usual, the world appears as the horizon of our

situation, as the infinite distance which separates us from ourselves, as the synthetic totality of the given, as the undifferentiated ensemble of obstacles and imple- ments but never as a demand addressed to our free- dom. Thus, aesthetic joy proceeds to this level of the consciousness which I take of recovering and internal-

izing that which is non-ego par excellence, since I trans-

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

form the given into an imperative and the fact into a va-

lue. The world is my task, that is, the essential and freely accepted function of my freedom is to make that unique and absolute object which is the universe come into being in an unconditioned movement. And, thirdly, the pre-

ceding structures imply a pact between human free- doms, for, on the one hand, reading is a confident and

exacting recognition of the freedom of the writer, and, on the other hand, aesthetic pleasure, as it is itself ex-

perienced in the form of a value, involves an absolute

exigence in regard to others; every man, insofar as he is a freedom, feels the same pleasure in reading the same work. Thus, all mankind is present in its highest freedom; it sustains the being of a world which is both its world and the "external" world. In aesthetic joy the positional consciousness is an image-making consciousness of the world in its totality both as being and having to be, both as totally ours and totally foreign, and the more ours as it is the more foreign. The non-positional consciousness

really envelops the harmonious totality of human free- doms insofar as it makes the object of a universal confi- dence and exigency. To write is thus both to disclose the world and to of-

fer it as a task to the generosity of the reader. It is to

have recourse to the consciousness of others in order to make one's self be recognized as essential to the totality of being; it is to wish to live this essentiality by means of interposed persons; but, on the other hand, as the real world is revealed only by action, as one can feel himself in it only by exceeding it in order to change it, the novel- ist's universe would lack thickness if it were not dis-

WHY WRITE?

covered in a movement to transcend it. It has often been observed that an object in a story does not derive its

density of existence from the number and length of the

descriptions devoted to it, but from the complexity of

its connections with the different characters. The more often the characters handle it, take it up, and put it

down, in short, go beyond it toward their own ends, the more real will it appear. Thus, of the world of the novel, that is, the totality of men and things, we may say that in order for it to offer its maximum density the disclosure- creation by which the reader discovers it must also be an imaginary engagement in the action; in other words, the more disposed one is to change it, the more alive it will be. The error of realism has been to believe that the real reveals itself to contemplation, and that consequently one could draw an impartial picture of it. How could that be possible, since the very perception is partial, since

by itself the naming is already a modification of the ob-

ject? And how could the writer, who wants himself to be essential to this universe, want to be essential to the

injustice which this universe comprehends? Yet, he must

be; but if he accepts being the creator of injustices, it

is in a movement which goes beyond them toward their abolition. As for me who read, if I create and keep alive an unjust world, I can not help making myself responsi- ble for it. And the author's whole art is bent on obliging me to create what he discloses, therefore to com- promise myself. So both of us bear the responsibility for the universe. And precisely because this universe is sup- ported by the joint effort of our two freedoms, and because the author, with me as medium, has attempted

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

to integrate it into the human, it must appear truly in

itself, in its very marrow, as being shot through and

through with a freedom which has taken human freedom as its end, and if it is not really the city of ends that it

ought to be, it must at least be a stage along the way; in a word, it must be a becoming and it must always be

considered and presented not as a crushing mass which

weighs us down, but from the point of view of its going beyond toward that city of ends. However bad and hope- less the humanity which it paints may be, the work must have an air of generosity. Not, of course, that this gen-

erosity is to be expressed by means of edifying discourses and virtuous characters; it must not even be premed- itated, and it is quite true that fine sentiments do not make fine books. But it must be the very warp and woof of the book, the stuff out of which the people and things are cut; whatever the subject, a sort of essential lightness must appear everywhere and remind us that the work is never a natural datum, but an exigence and a gift. And if I am given this world with its injustices, it is not so that I might contemplate them coldly, but that I might ani- mate them with my indignation, that I might disclose them and create them with their nature as injustices, that

is, as abuses to be suppressed. Thus, the writer's universe will only reveal itself in all its depth to the examination, the admiration, and the indignation of the reader; and the generous love is a promise to maintain, and the gen- erous indignation is a promise to change, and the admi- ration a promise to imitate; although literature is one

thing and morality a quite different one, at the heart of the aesthetic imperative we discern the moral imper-

WHY WRITE?

ative. For, since the one who writes recognizes, by the

very fact that he takes the trouble to write, the freedom

of his readers, and since the one who reads, by the mere fact of his opening the book, recognizes the freedom of

the writer, the work of art, from whichever side you ap- proach it, is an act of confidence in the freedom of men.

And since readers, like the author, recognize this free- dom only to demand that it manifest itself, the work can be defined as an imaginary presentation of the world insofar as it demands human freedom. The result of which is that there is no "gloomy literature", since, how- ever dark may be the colors in which one paints the world, he paints it only so that free men may feel their freedom as they face it. Thus, there are only good and bad novels. The bad novel aims to please by flattering, whereas the

good one is an exigence and an act of faith. But above

all, the unique point of view from which the author can

present the world to those freedoms whose concurrence he wishes to bring about is that of a world to be impreg- nated always with more freedom. It would be inconceiv- able that this unleashing of generosity provoked by the writer could be used to authorize an injustice, and that the reader could enjoy his freedom while reading a work which approves or accepts or simply abstains from con-

demning the subjection of man by man. One can imagine a good novel being written by an American Negro even if hatred of the whites were spread all over it, because it is the freedom of his race that he demands through this hatred. And, as he invites me to assume the attitude of generosity, the moment I feel myself a pure freedom I can not bear to identify myself with a race of op-

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

pressors. Thus, I require of all freedoms that they de-

mand the liberation of colored people against the white race and against myself insofar as I am a part of it, but nobody can suppose for a moment that it is possible to write a good novel in praise of anti-Semitism.

For, the

moment I feel that my freedom is indissolubly linked with that of all other men, it can not be demanded of me that I use it to approve the enslavement of a part of

these men. Thus, whether he is an essayist, a pamph- leteer, a satirist, or a novelist, whether he speaks only of

individual passions or whether he attacks the social order, the writer, a free man addressing free men, has only one subject freedom.

Hence, any attempt to enslave his readers threatens

him in his very art. A blacksmith can be affected by fascism in his life as a man, but not necessarily in his

craft; a writer will be affected in both, and even more in his craft than in his life. I have seen writers, who be- fore the war, called for fascism with all their hearts, smit-

ten with sterility at the very moment when the Nazis were loading them with honors. I am thinking of Drieu la Rochelle in particular; he was mistaken, but he was sincere. He proved it. He had agreed to direct a Nazi- inspired review. The* first few months he reprimanded, rebuked, and lectured his countrymen. No one answered

1. This last remark may arouse some readers. If so, I'd like to know a single good novel whose express purpose was to serve oppression, a single good novel which has been written against Jews, negroes, workers, or colonial people. "But if there isn't any, that's no reason why someone may not write one some day." But you then admit that you are an abstract theoretician. You, not I. For it is in the name of your abstract conception of art that you assert the possibility of a fact which has never come into being, whereas I limit myself to proposing an explanation for a recognized fact.

wm WRITE? him because no one was free to do so. He became irrita- ted; he no longer felt his readers. He became more in- sistent, but no sign appeared to prove that he had been understood. No sign of hatred, nor of anger either; noth- ing. He seemed disoriented, the victim of a growing dis- tress. He complained bitterly to the Germans. His articles had been superb: they became shrill. The moment arrived when he struck his breast; no echo, except among the

bought journalists whom he despised. He handed in his resignation, withdrew it, again spoke, still in the desert.

Finally, he kept still, gagged by the silence of others. He had demanded the enslavement of others, but in his crazy mind he must have imagined that it was voluntary, that it was still free. It came; the man in him congratulated himself mightily, but the writer could not bear it. While this was going on, others, who, happily, were in the

majority, understood that the freedom of writing implies the freedom of the citizen. One does not write for slaves. The art of prose is bound up with the only regime in which prose has meaning, democracy. When one is threatened, the other is too. And it is not enough to defend them with the pen. A day comes when the pen is forced to stop, and the writer must then take up arms. Thus, however you might have come to it, whatever the opin- ions you might have professed, literature throws you into battle. Writing is a certain way of wanting freedom; once you have begun, you are engaged, willy-nilly. Engaged in what? Defending freedom? That's easy

to say. Is it a matter of acting as guardian of ideal values

like Benda's clerk before the betrayal, 1 or is it concrete,

1. The reference here is to Benda's La Trahison d6s clercs, translated into English as The Treason of the Intellectuals. Translator's note.

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

everyday freedom which must be protected by our tak-

ing sides in political and social struggles? The question is tied up with another one, one very simple in appear- ance but which nobody ever asks himself: "For whom does one write?

Ill

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 unavailable; 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 aeternitatis, seems to be a withered branch; for, like the

sea, there is no end to it. It is nothing else but the move- ment by which one perpetually uproots and liberates himself. There is no given freedom. One must win an in- ner victory over his passions, his race, his class, and his nation and must conquer other men along with himself. But what counts in this case is the particular form of the obstacle to surmount, of the resistance to 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 free- dom which National Socialism, Stalinist communism,

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

and the capitalist democracies all lay claim to. He won't disturb anybody; he won't address anybody. Everything 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 sufficiently ob-

served that a work of the mind is by nature allusive. Even if the author's aim is to give the fullest possible repre- sentation of his object, there is never any question as

to whether he is telling everything. He knows far more than he tells. This is so because language is elliptical. If I

want to let my neighbor know that a wasp has gotten in by the window, there is no need for a long speech, "Watch out!'

or "Hey!" a word is enough, a gesture as soon as he sees it, everything is clear. Imagine a phonograph record reproducing for us, without comment, the every- day conversations of a household in Provins or An-

gouleme 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 a same period and

collectivity, 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 Ger- man occupation, there would have to be a great deal of