Writing for One’s Age

“What is Literature?” And Other Essays remains the most significant critical landmark of French literature since World War II. Neither abstract nor abstruse, it is a brilliant, provocative performance by a writer more inspired than cautious.The book challenges anyone who writes as if literature could be extricated from history or society. But Jean-Paul Sartre does more than indict. He offers a definitive statement about the phenomenology of reading, and he goes on to provide a dashing example of how to write a history of literature that takes ideology and institutions into account. Here is a brief excerpt looking at writing for one’s age.

We assert against certain critics and against certain authors that salvation is achieved on this earth, that it is of the whole man and by the whole man and that art is a meditation on life and not on death. It is true that for history talent alone counts. But I haven’t entered into history and I don’t know how I shall enter it; perhaps alone, perhaps in an anonymous crowd, perhaps as one of those names they put into footnotes in literary handbooks. At any rate, I do not have to bother myself with the judgements that the future will bring to bear upon my work since there’s nothing I can do about them. Art cannot be reduced to a dialogue with the dead and with men not yet born; that would be both too difficult and too easy; and I see in this a last remnant of Christian belief in immortality: just as man’s stay here below is presented as a moment of trial between limbo and hell or paradise, in like manner, for a book there is a transitory period coinciding approximately with that of its efficacy; after which, disembodied and gratuitous as a soul, it enters eternity. But at least, among Christians, it is this stay upon earth that decides everything and the final beatitude is only a sanction. Whereas it is commonly believed that the course run by our books, when we no longer exist, refers back to our life to justify it. This is true from the viewpoint of the objective mind. In the objective mind one classifies according to talent. But our descendants’ view of us is not a privileged one, since others will come after them and will judge them in turn. It is obvious that we write out of a need for the absolute, and a work of the mind is indeed an absolute. But here one commits a double error. First of all, it is not true that a writer transmits his sufferings and his faults to the absolute when he writes about them; it is not true that he saves them. It is said that the unhappily married man who writes about marriage with talent has made a good book with his conjugal woes. That would be too easy: the bee makes honey with the flower because it operates on the vegetal substance of real trans­ formations; the sculptor makes a statue with marble. But it is with words and not with his troubles that the writer makes his books. If he wants to keep his wife from being disagreeable, it is a mistake to write about her; he would do better to beat her. One no more puts one’s misfortunes into a book than one puts a model on the canvas; one is inspired by them, and they remain what they are. One gets perhaps a passing relief in placing oneself above them in order to describe them, but once the book is finished, there they are again. Insincerity begins when the artist wants to ascribe a meaning to his misfortunes, a kind of immanent finality, and when he persuades himself that they are there in order for him to speak about them. When he justifies his own sufferings by this ruse, he invites laughter; but he is contemptible if he seeks to justify those of others. The most beautiful book in the world will not save a child from pain; one does not redeem evil, one fights it; the most beautiful book in the world redeems itself; it also redeems the artist. But not the man. Any more than the man redeems the artist. We want the man and the artist to work their salvation together, we want the work to be at the same time an act; we want it to be explicitly conceived as a weapon in the struggle that men wage against evil.

The other error is just as grave. There is such a hunger for the absolute in every heart that eternity, which is a non-temporal absolute, is frequently confused with immortality, which is only a perpetual reprieve and a long succession of vicissitudes. I under­ stand this desire for the absolute; I desire it too. But what need is there to go looking for it so far off: there it is, about us, under our feet, in each of our gestures. We produce the absolute as absolute; you detest oysters and that’s an absolute; you join the Communist Party and that’s an absolute. Whether the world is mind or matter, whether God exists or whether He does not exist, whether the judgement of the centuries to come is favour­ able to you or hostile, nothing will ever prevent your having passionately loved that painting, that cause, that woman, nor that love’s having been lived from day to day; lived, willed, under­ taken; nor your being completely committed to it. Our grand­ fathers were right in saying, as they drank their glass of wine, ‘Another one that the Prussians won’t get.’ Neither the Prussians nor anyone else. They can kill you, they can deprive you of wine to the end of your days, but no God, no man, can take away that final trickling of the Bordeaux along your tongue. No relativism. Nor the ‘eternal course of history’ either. Nor the dialectic of the sensible. Nor the dissociations of psycho-analysis. It is a pure event, and we too, in the uttermost depths of historical relativity and our own insignificance, we too are absolutes, inimitable and incomparable, and our choice of ourselves is an absolute. All those living and passionate choices that we are and that we are constantly making with or against others, all those common enterprises into which we throw ourselves, from birth to death, all those bonds of love or hatred which unite us to one another and which exist only in so far as we feel them, those immense combinations of movements which are added to or cancel out one another and which are all lived, that whole discordant and harmonious life, concur in producing a new absolute which I shall call the age. The age is the intersubjectivity, the living absolute, the dialectical underside of history It gives birth in pain to events that historians will label later on. It lives blindly, distractedly, and fearfully the enthusiasm and the meanings that they will disengage rationally. Within the age, every utterance, before being a historical byword or the recognized origin of a social process, is first an insult or an appeal or a confession; economic phenomena themselves, before being the theoretical causes of social upheavals, are suffered in humiliation or despair, ideas are tools or evasions, facts are born of the intersubjectivity and overwhelm it, like the emotions of an individual soul. History is made with dead ages, for each age, when it dies, enters into relativity; it falls into line with other dead centuries; a new light is shed upon it; it is challenged by new knowledge; its problems are resolved for it; it is demonstrated that its most ardent pursuits were doomed to failure, that the results of the great undertakings of which it was so proud were the reverse of what it anticipated; its limits are suddenly apparent, and its ignorance too. But that is because it is dead; the limits and the ignorance did not exist ‘at the time’; no deficiency was seen; or rather the age was a constant surpassing of its limits towards a future which was its future and which died with it; it was this boldness, this rashness, this ignorance of its ignorance; to live is to foresee at short range and to manage with the means at hand. Perhaps with a little more knowledge our fathers might have understood that a certain problem was insoluble, that a certain problem was badly stated.