THE BEST THING ABOUT the recent meeting at the Mutualité* was the Young Communist student leaders wearing red arm bands or bits of red silk ribbon, like happy novices in some religious order at the annual Prize Day. Glowing with pleasure or pale with responsibility, these boy and girl schismatics nurtured in the Party and now feeling its disapproval (expressed parentally by withdrawal of financial support) showed extraordinary discipline, cheerfulness, and patience in handling the crowds, mostly their contemporaries, though there were elders of the movement present in the front “honorary” rows. Two giant Christmas trees on either side of the platform struck the festive, family note. The occasional boos and hisses directed at the speakers were in the festal spirit—a form of sardonic applause accorded the enemy for his courage or simply for his long-windedness. No speaker was prevented from continuing. I do not think a meeting of this kind would have been so orderly and good-natured in the United States, though it is impossible, really, to imagine a parallel there, since a meeting on the topic of “What Can Literature Do?” would not have been attended by four thousand young people, even if the fire laws would have allowed it in a hall the size of the Mutualité.
These Parisian students expected something from this panel. Not just words but a word—“Le Verbe!” an angry man shouted from the floor at the end of the meeting. “On n’a pas parlé de la chose principale.” The speakers whispered to each other in bafflement. What did he mean—the Word in the first chapter of Genesis or language, discourse? Whatever logos the audience hoped for, they did not get it, and least of all from Jean-Paul Sartre, whose words they had come to hang on. “Ce sont les écrivains réactionnaires de gauche,” a tall boy explained to his companion as they walked into a cafe after the meeting had ended, at one-thirty in the morning. For the students, the meeting was a sell, though it more than accomplished its purpose—to raise funds for Clarté.
The question posed was not faced with any candor except by two speakers: the novelist Jorge Semprun, a member of the Communist Party sympathetic to the students, and Jean Ricardou, a delegate, roughly speaking, from the party of the nouveau roman. Semprun said, in essence, that what literature can do is tell the truth; this is its political and social function. He cited Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. There could be no real de-Stalinization unless the truth were told and continued to be told about Soviet life by Soviet writers. He did not accept the excuse that Soviet writers in the Stalin period “did not know” what was going on in the concentration camps, any more than he accepted the excuse when it came from Germans who “had not known” about Auschwitz. This was a plain, blunt answer to the question and a bold one. To vow to tell the truth, whether pleasing to the authorities or to your readers, is genuine literary commitment. I myself do not know of any other kind. Moreover, it is not a twentieth-century discovery. It is at least as old as Socrates.
Ricardou’s handling of the question had something Socratic about it too, including a certain mischievousness, which he showed in sounding and tapping the ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre. Briefly, Ricardou’s answer was that what literature can do is to interrogate the world by submitting it to the test of language. Language, for the maker of fictions, is not a vehicle for conveying messages to the public; it secretes, if you will, a message or messages in its own structures. To weigh literature in the balance with hunger is the old Art-for-Art’s-sake formula turned inside out. That is, Des Esseintes might say “Art is more important than a child’s dying from hunger,” while Sartre says “A child’s dying from hunger is more important than art.” In either case, it is like saying: Commit yourself; choose between pears and yellow. Language cannot be opposed in a scale of values to man, since language is man. In a world without language, i.e., without literature, a child’s dying from hunger could have no meaning. This required courage to say, not only intellectual courage but moral courage, before the massed audience of the Mutualité.
The rest of the evening was a series of evasions, sometimes executed with a witty sleight of hand, sometimes concealed in platitudes, sometimes brazenly posturing. Yves Berger insisted that life was horrible and that literature could do nothing, nothing, but give the reader surcease in the form of a taste of death. This took not courage but foolhardiness; he was booed, and one had the impression that he wanted to be booed, planned to be booed, offered his martyred face and lachrymose voice to the audience in the personally selected character of the scapegoat. Jean-Pierre Faye had some witty remarks to make about a nouveau roman of the sixteenth century and the “roman” of Hegel, but he finished in semantic trifling. Simone de Beauvoir, sounding like a smiling, sharp school principal, read an existentialist lesson mixed with ordinary schoolteacher’s bromides. Literature communicates a “vision of life.” It is a remedy for solitude. It allows you to live in someone else’s world. In one sense, she said, all writing was committed, whether the writer intended it or not, but there was passive commitment and active commitment. The bad, passive kind was when the writer shut himself up in his ivory tower. She did not really say what the good kind was. The audience applauded fervently, possibly because it was hearing familiar words.
Sartre gave an exhibition of dialectics. He was in good form when dealing with the mortuary remarks of Yves Berger and with the labyrinthine “freedom” Michel Butor claims to offer his readers. As usual in his writings, he had a surprise opening or gambit. The others had talked about the writer; he, more democratic, would talk about the reader. For the advocates of “pure” literature, the reader was only a means, the work of art being an end in itself. For Sartre, he explained, the reader was an end, since the aim of literature was communication. Furthermore, the Sartrian reader is not just an end or target; he is the author’s better half, his collaborator. When the author pauses to seek the right word, he is putting himself in the position of the reader. Thus the reader is joint author, since the author is joint reader.
This, in my opinion, was clever demagogy, whose effect was to alert and flatter a mass of four thousand young readers who had not known, until then, that they too were creative. It is true that the author not only writes his work but reads it as he writes. However, the reader or listener in the author is not the same as the real reader—unfortunately. The reader in the author is the ideal reader, not the sum of future readers, many of whom will misunderstand the author’s words, just as in several instances that night the audience misunderstood the words of Ricardou. Perhaps literary greatness consists in the power to force the reader to hear the text as it sounded in the author’s ears, with all the inflections falling in the right place; this is evident in poetry where the play of rhythm and tonalities against meter makes it harder for the reader to read wrong. But this is the reverse of the reader’s “liberty” as described by Sartre the other night. In fact, the greater the author, the more the reader is held in thrall; he is dominated and subjugated by the author. Hence such expressions as “A powerful writer,” “I could not put it down,” “I was enthralled,” etc. More correctly, he is subjugated by the author’s fictions; I agree with Ricardou. Besides, the author, when he looks for the right word, is not, in my experience, looking for the right coin to put into the slot, which will then ring a bell at the reader’s end of the line; he is asking language to tell him what he intends to say. Even when he has found the word, he may not know; the word knows.
Even more disappointing was Sartre’s sudden drop into the commonplace when he settled down to deal with the question proposed for the debate. The French existentialist vocabulary (this was noticeable with Simone de Beauvoir too) fails at just the point where existentialism claims superiority over other philosophies: in making a junction with life. What can literature do? Sartre replied with a vague truism: it can “make sense of his life” for the reader. All right, but how? Sartre did not say, just as Simone de Beauvoir did not say what committed literature was and how you were supposed to recognize it or be helped by it. She recognized a new work, she said at one point, by a tone in its voice. But this is the case with all literature. How does “committed literature” differ from the other kind unless it is a brand name for some special product that Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were unwilling to identify? Why? This evasiveness was all the more peculiar in that she spoke with an air of nervous bravery and he with an air of dogmatic intransigence. As though they were facing lions. But they were the lions; the audience was roaring with them. At least at the beginning. When Sartre had finished, the clapping, for the first time, was feeble. Yet he could not have been hissed or booed, because he had not said anything to provoke a reaction.
Sartre in his role of shocker, of a “diabolical” intelligence, found himself in an uncomfortable situation. It was the others, the defenders of “pure” literature, who shocked, and sometimes amused the youth—particularly Ricardou, with his mop of dark curling hair, round, simple face, and strange dark glasses. One of the charms of youth is that it is attracted to a minority, and Sartre knows that. You cannot be a minority and in the majority simultaneously, and this is the current dilemma of Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir throning in France. Moreover, to bait the nouveau roman, which is mainly a youth fashion, is not as easy as baiting the “bourgeois” of the Nobel Prize Committee. It is like rending black openwork stockings or crushing a butterfly.
Yet to treat the nouveau roman and its newest adepts—the young team of Tel Quel—with any degree of indulgence was impossible for Sartre and his life-companion, since, to speak plainly, “committed literature” is Aesopian language for literature enlisted in the service of the class struggle, and however much Sartre has edged away from the official Party line, he cannot go over to “formalism,” the stock enemy still faithfully attacked at Communist-sponsored writers’ congresses, along with U.S. imperialism, Peking, and whoever else is seen as the current adversary. The nouveau roman is a formalist deviation and its attraction for the young makes it particularly dangerous. There was a time when Sartre was interested by what he called the anti-roman (Nathalie Sarraute); he seemed to welcome the destruction of that old bourgeois structure, the novel, but he is now alarmed by the breakage, which “goes too far,” imperiling other old structures. A declaration of the autonomy of language, like any declaration of independence from the masses, is seen by him as a counterrevolutionary act.
In fact the term “committed literature” is an antique, dating back to the post-war period and designating an alliance of certain writers with the then-Stalinist Party. It has no other meaning—as was demonstrated, if that was necessary, by the two speakers’ reluctance to define it—and for the radical young that meaning has been drained of significance by the desacralization of the Party, following the Twentieth Congress, Hungary, the Moscow-Peking split. In any case, outside the Soviet Union, where a state literature, “socialist realism,” had to meet rather strict norms of commitment to official policy, the slogan never had much connection with actual novels and poems. Unlike, say, surrealism, it did not denote a school or “way” of composition. A writer in the West was judged to be “engagé” by the number of manifestos and petitions he signed, the initiatives he took, the demonstrations he marched in. Those may be legitimate criteria to measure the activism of a citizen but they do not throw any light on what literature can do. Hence the shadow character of the debate at the Mutualité, where a practicing school of young writers with an overt body of aesthetic doctrine was opposed by elderly generalities of the kind usually found in the book pages of conservative magazines and newspapers. The students in schism with the Party had asked a serious question and got from those they had most counted on, Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, a very dusty answer. That was maybe what the young man meant when he interpreted the evening for his girl friend: “Those are the reactionary writers of the Left.”
March, 1965