PIOVENE:1 Sartre and Luporini found themselves in agreement on a point that is, certainly, general in character, but which is nonetheless a substantial one. Namely, they agree in affirming that even though it is not easy to find Marxism’s sense of subjectivity, this is nonetheless something that remains at the very centre of Marxist thought. It is no appendage to it. If I am citing him correctly, Luporini said that ‘the objective pole is not Marxism’s only concern’. Sartre’s discourse has been very productive for me, both in terms of the points of view that he proposed and the stimulating character of his intervention.
I would now like to lay emphasis on the problem of art – a question that I think is part of the problem of subjectivity. I will say it frankly: it seems to me that this problem has been neglected and very little examined in recent Marxist studies. There is no satisfactory doctrine or in-depth theory of art elaborated on the basis of Marxist precepts. This is, certainly, a lacuna, since such a theory is essential.
The fact of having a satisfactory doctrine of this kind – or not having one – is a criterion for art itself, because for a system to be able to explain and understand art is a proof of its validity and completeness. If the system is not up to the task of providing one, then that reveals a lacuna, which then affects all other sectors, speaking to a true lack of in-depth analysis, and in particular with regard to the problem that we are discussing at the moment – the problem of subjectivity. To go back to what Sartre has said, I would like to start precisely with an objection, which at bottom is not truly an objection – or, if we have to say that this is an objection, then it has but one goal, which is to provoke a response on his part, or, at least, to initiate a certain order of discourse.
During his presentation, I was struck by the fact that he presented us with the example of the communist worker who feels a very strong antipathy when he is faced with a Jewish comrade. At a given moment, the worker comes to be conscious of the fact that he is anti-Semitic. This consciousness, Sartre tells us, is in itself something useful, because it helps him to transcend the contradiction that persisted within him, thus setting off a conflict between his being-communist and his being unconsciously anti-Semitic. Evidently, in order for him to be consistent, he has to eliminate the anti-Semitism that he has thus recognised.
However, then I got the feeling that Sartre does not always consider coming-to-consciousness of one’s subjectivity to be a positive thing. I asked him about this in the course of a private discussion we had, and he confirmed this feeling. He told me, for example, that for certain works of art, and even for works of art in general, for the artist to be absolutely conscious of his own subjectivity can be useful, and yet this does not mean that he cannot also benefit from a certain degree of unconsciousness of his own subjectivity. And I have to say, frankly, this leaves me rather doubtful.
Indeed, he confirmed this argument yesterday in passing, when he was talking about Madame Bovary, and maintained that this novel simultaneously expressed both a representation of provincial France in a particular era, and Flaubert’s own unconscious – in large part unconscious – projection onto Madame Bovary and that whole environment. He seemed to want to give this unconsciousness a positive value, which raised my doubts.
I would instead ask whether art has not always been a becoming-conscious of one’s own subjectivity, but a becoming-conscious that reconstructs its history, the manner by which we arrive at objectivity. At a certain moment, subjectivity projects itself into objectivity, all the while maintaining a preponderant role that the artist must watch, study and constantly take consciousness of.
Let us consider the example of this now-famous unconsciously anti-Semitic worker. Suppose that this worker wrote a book, that he suddenly became an artist, and that this book was anti-Semitic in character. Would the fact that this book was unconsciously but effectively anti-Semitic diminish its value as a work of art, or not? I think that it certainly would. If that were not the case, then we would have to admit that the negativity of this book is external to art, that is, that this book could be artistically marvellous at the same time as being hateful for other reasons, from a moral point of view, in the measure that its judgements would surely earn our disapproval.
I, for my part, believe that the weakness of this book would also be an artistic one, and that this unconsciousness would also translate into artistic weakness. We cannot reply by saying that in the past there were a lot of works of art in which unconsciousness played a remarkable role, and that this unconsciousness was, in a certain sense, beneficial. But I don’t know; and I’d like to leave this debate open, since by no means is this the question that we’re posed.
Indeed, I think that art is today undergoing developments that are bringing it towards an ever greater degree of consciousness, to the point that the artist is ever less able to free himself of this. In this sense, I very much appreciated what Sartre told us when he said that subjectivity is increasingly absorbed by objectivity, without this however eliminating it. The development of art and of subjectivity tends towards an ever-more pronounced absorption by objectivity, whereby subjectivity changes in nature, in state, without at all being diminished or destroyed.
It seems to me that, so far as the artist is concerned, this marks an ever more clearly asserted demand for truth and an ever more pronounced refusal of any form of unconsciousness. For me, objectivation – what we call objectivation in art – preserves and even validates subjectivity: objectivity is truly something that provides foundations for subjectivity and which, therefore, validates it, in providing it with new value. For me, art is a subjectivity that knows itself and constantly inserts itself into objectivity.
Sartre addressed other points, too. He told us that subjectivity can be transcended by the response that we give to a determinate situation, and I think that this is also correct. Subjectivity is, indeed, transcended in the response that we give to a determinate situation; but in the case of a work of art, art is not only the response that we give, but also the history of our response, and, consequently, subjectivity plays a preponderant role therein. In a certain sense, I would say that the plant is pulled up together with all its roots.
I found the concept of totalisation very interesting, and in particular that of continuous retotalisation, which is a very fertile concept, because totalisation, retotalisation, is the artist’s continuous movement. In art, we feel that expression must be total and that all that exists in reality must be expressed: all that exists in reality must not be denied, but, on the contrary, be expressed. Then, he very clearly brought to light the continuous movement between subjectivity and objectivity, this movement that I think every artist must know. The prolonged debate – particularly in the field of journalism – with regard to the distinction between inner man and social man is a theme that we have to move away from: subjectivity projects itself into social man and sociality is interiorised within subjectivity, in a continuous movement. I would go so far as to say that a pure and abstract subjectivity does not exist, and could not exist. I would like to hear about the experiences of each and every artist: I have one here in front of me,2 and I hope we will hear from him after me.
I ask myself if, for example, our Gattuso has ever in his life painted a picture for the sake of the picture itself: no one has ever painted a picture for the sake of the picture itself, and no one has ever written a line for the sake of the line itself.
We all sense that in the practice of a work of art, at the most subjective moment of the work of art, this subjectivity is already dialogic. We work to realise a determinate society. All our work – even the most intimate – which we call ‘subjective’, is social, in a certain sense. It is always a matter of the interio-risation of sociality, or indeed the socialisation of interiority. So that was what I wanted to say – those were the points that I wanted briefly to bring to light. And I would like to add a couple of words on what Luporini said yesterday. He spoke to me in private of his desire to go deeper into what he was saying to us, particularly in the sense of a theory of art. The elaboration of such a theory would be of very great importance, for the reasons that I have presented. I strongly hope that he goes ahead with this.
SARTRE: I am rather embarrassed to respond. I share your opinion, on the points that you have presented here. I would simply like to take this as a pretext to go back and delve deeper into the idea of subjectivity. You said that sociality deeply penetrates subjectivity and that an abstract subjectivity would be meaningless; that it could not exist. I am wholly of the same opinion as you. In the sense that, for me, subjectivity is interio-risation and retotalisation, that is to say, fundamentally (and here I’ll again use rather vaguer and, at the same time, more familiar terms): you live; subjectivity is to live your own being, and to live what you are in a society – because we know no other state of man, he is precisely a social being, a social being who, at the same time, lives the whole of society from his own point of view. I think that any individual, or any group, or any ensemble, is an incarnation of the total society, since they have to live what they are. Moreover, it is only because we can conceive the dialectical play of an enveloping totalisation – that is, a condensing totalisation, which I call incarnation – that each individual is, in a certain manner, the total representation of her epoch; it is only for this reason that we can conceive a true social dialectic. In these conditions, then, I think that this social subjectivity is the very definition of subjectivity. Subjectivity at the social level is a social subjectivity.
What does this mean? It means that everything that makes an individual, all her projections, her acts, and also everything to which she is subject, only reflects – but not in a certain Marxist tradition’s scholastic sense of the word ‘reflect’ – only incarnates, if you prefer, the society itself. That is how Flaubert wrote Madame Bovary! What did he do? On the one hand, he wanted to give an objective description of a certain environment, the world of the French countryside around 1850, with its transformations, the appearance of the doctor replacing the health officer, the rise of a nonbeliever petty bourgeoisie, etc. He wanted to describe all these things, of which he was fully conscious. But at the same time, what was the man who wrote that, himself ? Nothing other than the incarnation of all these things. In reality, he was himself the son of a doctor, the son of a doctor who had come from the countryside; he himself lived in the countryside, in Croissé, which is far outside Rouen; he had links to landed interests; he did not concern himself with investing in industry as did many people at the time … he was exactly what he was describing. He even went further, because to the extent that he was a rentier, a victim of his family, remaining in his family, dominated first by his father and then by his mother in a situation very much resembling that of the women of the time, he projected his own being onto his book’s heroine. To put it another way, this book has two structures, ultimately referring back to one same one, since you can only totalise the social being that you are, and, at the same time, you describe the society that you see. The particularly interesting thing in Flaubert’s case is not some extraordinary or uncommon sensibility of his – transformed by his vices or by a particularly sinister childhood – but a real life of the epoch, which projects itself, in a subjective form, into a book that claims to describe the epoch objectively. And it is precisely this contradiction and, at the same time, this overdetermination, that constitutes the beauty of his work, because instead of only dealing with people outside of him, there is a whole interiorisation of Flaubert himself, which we can feel from the outset and which we then go on to discover. The story of Madame Bovary is a curious one, and that is why I take it into consideration, in the sense that in 1850 this was considered the book – the ‘Cromwell’, if you will – of realism. Flaubert was the realist. Well, we know that, in reality, he was not a realist. He chose this subject in order to bring out aspects of himself that he had been unable to give account of in The Temptation of Saint Anthony, and so he wanted to situate this story in a real world, but with a whole crowd of things that were part of him. His readers little by little came to learn that this supposedly realist book in fact had two dimensions. So the first was a true, real description of a small provincial town in France, and the second was the description of a man, a more or less conscious description, projected into this first description. We learned that bit by bit – we knew it – and that is why I am going to return for a little to the question of knowing and not-knowing. We learned that Flaubert was perfectly conscious of this, saying ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi’; so he knew very well what he was doing.
The only thing is – and this is not to disagree with you; but I do want to complete my thinking with regard to what you said – Flaubert knew what he was doing, but he did not know it at the moment when he was writing. He knew it when he reflected on what he was doing, but he had never thought ‘I am going to depict myself in Madame Bovary’. If he had said that, then he would have given a bad depiction of himself. I think that this was, rather, a subsequent reflection – whether he did it during his work writing the book, but at moments when he was reflecting on his work, or else afterward, since the comment comes after the book. But, in any case, it is very clear that he never had the deliberate intention of depicting himself in Madame Bovary. What he wanted to do was simply to depict a certain number of ideas that he had, which had not been synthe-sised properly in The Temptation of Saint Anthony, and which he took up in another form. So here we have three things – and it’s this, I think, that makes for a true novel: an objective depiction; the same objectivity, no longer as depiction but relived in a subjectivity that projects itself, thus constituting this work as well as an identity of subjective and objective, in the sense that both relate to the same thing: the development of France in a certain era. An epoch captured simultaneously in the eyes of the now-departing health officer Charles Bovary, or those of Monsieur Homais, and also by way of Flaubert himself, feeling conflicts within himself that he projects onto it. Take the example of his hatred for Homais – which is hatred for his own father, whom he loved too much and who pushed him away; a hatred for science that is also a love for science; a very complicated mix that is Flaubert. So he presents Homais, Bovary, the priest, the Abbé Bournisien, etc. in an outwardly objective form, but in reality it is very impassioned. He reproaches the cleric Bournisien for not having provided him the keys to having faith – though he did want to believe – and at the same time reproaches the surgeon Homais, a degraded image of his own father, for having only poor scientific knowledge that risks inhibiting mystical ecstasy but without providing any solution to it. All of this was Flaubert himself, and at the same time, it was the real situation, since this was the epoch in which there was a great swell of de-Christianisation in France, which, starting from the Jacobins, spread across the petty bourgeoisie. But this also relates back to Flaubert, producing two forms – and it is necessary that both exist. There needs to be a kind of dense obscurity [épaisseur obscure], which is the manner by which you understand yourself. The book has to relate back to both these things.
If I went to Patagonia on an assignment, and then I wrote a novel on the mores of the Patagonians, I would produce a relatively objective book full of information gathered during my journey. However, it would be a very bad book, unless I produced a sort of poem putting myself in the Patagonians’ place. But in that case the Patagonians would disappear, and there is not in truth enough relation between the Patagonians and me such that I could project myself. If, conversely, I wrote a novel on everything around me, the novel would be myself, as a projection, and, at the same time, everything around me; besides, I am myself everything that is around me. Indeed, here we again arrive at a practical retotalisation, the same as that which we find everywhere. That is why the strictly objective novel is, in my view, a thing of no value. There has to be this kind of condensation, the author’s obscurity to himself, which can go back from there to his situation, as a totalisation. Without the author’s obscurity to himself, we would get a book like they often had in the socialist countries at a certain moment: a writer sets himself up in a factory for a few weeks, comes back and then recounts what happened in the factory. He does not put himself into it or project himself onto it, because he knows that he is not truly a worker – he is a socialist writer, but not a worker – and nor is he putting other people into it, since he does not know them well enough; so what we get is a bad book.
I just wanted to point to what Gide called ‘the Devil’s part’3 in the book: there can be no good book without subjectivity. Evidently there needs to be a depiction of society, in the measure that man is in it – but what really expresses the situation is the fact that he is and that he is within it. In reality, this is what we all are: people who know in the same measure as we project ourselves. There is no difference between the attitude of the poet – or rather, of the novelist – and the ordinary attitude in our lives. In practice, we capture the social by projecting ourselves onto it, but, moreover, by projecting this social itself onto it, such as we retotalise it. There is this kind of permanent envelopment and incarnation, which we need to take into consideration. So, can we really govern our subjectivity? I understand that you want subjectivity to appear more and more clearly, precisely in the name of truth, as it is certain that truth is one of the elements of art. I say ‘one of the elements’ because this only a matter of the truth internal to aesthetic schemas, aesthetic values, and not of pure truth. Moreover, when it comes to truth, a set of statistical data and dialectical reflections on a given social environment will always contain more objective truth than does a novel on these people. And if a novel is truer, it is truer precisely to the degree that it adds subjectivity, the subjectivity of whoever is depicting this social environment, and who in depicting it puts himself into it. But if it is true that we can better know our subjectivity, that does not mean that we could define the portion of ourselves that we put into the book; rather, it means that we are ever more reflective in relation to the immediate subjectivity that we are.
As I was telling you yesterday, the worker who says, ‘It’s true that I am anti-Semitic’ could, in his reflection, very well become complicit in this bourgeois ideology that has been inculcated into him, and it may well be that rather than saying ‘this is not compatible with my activity as a militant, and so I will get rid of this anti-Semitism’, he will maintain, ‘I am anti-Semitic, and that’s fine. It’s the communists who are wrong; Jews are indeed this and that’. And, without doubt, at the moment that we produce some work, at a certain level we can increasingly see ourselves as the object of subjectivity; and if this subjectivity is necessary to the work, we find it within reflection itself. So we can clarify that much, but then this subjectivity resumes on other terrains; even if we know it as an object, we find it again in an unknown, unseen form, because it is in the very principle of acting [agissante] subjectivity that it is unknown and unseen; and in the measure that the artist is projecting, he does not know himself, even if otherwise he does know himself very well. When Flaubert was writing his book, he was thinking about Madame Bovary, and when he ascribed her a certain number of reactions, he thought that these were the reactions that this woman would have; and then afterwards, reflecting on what he had written, it occurred to him that he would have had the same reactions – that he had ascribed his own reactions to her. So here, we again find the interplay that we mentioned earlier, and I think that it is impossible to conceive of art if not as the point where the subjective and the objective meet. That is more or less what I wanted to say in response, but I don’t think that we are very much in disagreement on that point.
A VOICE: It is not out of some prior volition; it is a consciousness that we grasp during the work itself.
SARTRE: Yes, during the work, all of a sudden, that’s it.
A VOICE: If you’ll allow me, there is perhaps another thing to look into here: the life of the provincial town, of Flaubert, his father, his brother, the college, the doctor, etc. We might say that this is within Flaubert, as something that he preserves within himself, in its obscurity and in the denseness of its obscurity. So we have the proof that the thing that we call the unconscious is the exterior that is to be found within myself. Do you agree?
SARTRE: Exactly. That is what I wanted to say. It is the exterior: it is society itself. I think the society by recognising it outside of me, and I project myself, that is, I project it onto itself. At bottom, if you will, here are two different levels that are bound up with one another, two socialities; and it is the same sociality, it is the same conditioning.
A VOICE: The important thing is that we can work on that basis, analysing the word ‘unconscious’ in a different form.
SARTRE: I said not-knowing, in general, of reality.
A VOICE: Yes, yes, rightly so, but it’s the reality of the objectivity that I preserve within me, it’s not something intelligible: that is the point. Don’t you agree?
SARTRE: I entirely agree.
ALICATA:4 I agree on the fact that art does not exist without this subjectivity-objectivity relation. I believe that this is nothing foreign to Marxism. But I would like to make a small objection, in order to advance the discussion a little: does this relation also apply to poetic discourse? And how does it apply to historical discourse? I think that yesterday we even went so far as to say that this subjectivity-objectivity relation also applies, to a certain extent, to scientific discourse. That said, we have not yet defined what poetic discourse is – when, in a determinate subjectivity-objectivity relation, we can say: here, we have a poetic discourse. In sum, I think that we have made only the first step. But in what manner is this problem realised? Is this subjectivity-objectivity relation characteristic of art?
BANDINELLI: Do you have something to say?
SARTRE: No, but I think that does have to be the object of the question.
A VOICE (PACI?): Allow me to speak from my point of view. I understand what you [addressing himself to an interlocutor elsewhere in the room] mean. If this schema, or this praxis of interiorisation and exteriorisation applies to no matter what field, that is because at a certain moment it applies either as an aesthetic, or pictorial, or musical expression, which, from this point of view, gives it its specificity. But this is a discourse that neither you nor I would grasp in the same way as a Crocean, for example, who would attribute art a determinate form of space. That is not to say that Croce5 is not important, but a solution thus conceived is too easy.
To arrive at a more profound answer, we have to pose the problem of my incarnation, of the image, of meaning and of matter – isn’t that the case? I can interiorise a social world that is also a historical world; the past, my history and the history of the world where I live. But in the externalisation, when I express it in not doing all the other things that are not art, I am doing a very specific work: one that first and foremost concerns language, already-constituted language – or the already-constituted language of the arts – as well as my contact with the material. So if we are talking about a painter, then this comes from his feeling for his material, and also of his degradation into material, since he himself becomes colour. In his example, Sartre spoke of Flaubert, but he pointed out that Flaubert’s style also flows from that. You did not say that, but that’s how it is.
There is also a reason why Flaubert was a writer and not a politician: he could express himself, externalise himself, only as a writer. At a certain moment, he said: ‘I have plenty of things to do other than loving myself more than my father and my brother’. His father was a doctor, his brother the ideal son who studied at the same college as his father had. So at a certain moment came Flaubert’s rebellion against his family, which was also his rebellion against this petty bourgeoisie that had made him and which he preserved within himself. From a genetic point of view, we see that in him, this rebellion expressed itself in literature, and not by other means. So this rebellion had to converge with the language of the era, the writing style of the era, and also Flaubert’s own singular manner of writing.
SARTRE: It is like someone who rebels against activity. Not all artists are the same, fortunately, but that was true in his case …
A VOICE: Absolutely.
SARTRE: … and he claimed that by writing he was producing science. He said ‘I have a surgeon’s view’; but in reality what we have in Flaubert is literature against science. There is no doubt – it’s against a certain method of science, his father’s.
A VOICE: That is related to his epoch and his society.
SARTRE: He chose that it should be like that. To repeat, that is not always the case, but that is what he did.
A VOICE: I’ll conclude. Alicata, in an analysis of this kind the problem that you pose does exist, but I think that it is extremely difficult. Rather than pick out the subjectivity-objectivity relation in art, in science, in morality, etc., as you said, what we need to do is take the road that explains the universality of the singular incarnation, through a regressive method.
SARTRE: There are some ordinary books that portray this fiction, and socialist books of a particular aesthetic value; in Poland, for example, books were written to describe the whole 1945–52 period after the fact, but, at the same time, they were also justifications of the authors themselves. I am particularly thinking of La Défense de Grenade [1956] by [Kazimierz] Brandys [1916–2000]. He is an extremely curious figure, because in a certain sense he was fully attached to the regime, such as it was at the time, and his novels were narrowly realist, socialist books in which he did not portray himself. He then started to follow another tendency: he passed judgement on himself. But at the same time as he passed judgement on himself, he did not want to disavow himself entirely. He wanted to show the errors and the failures, and simultaneously to maintain a sort of link, a continuity in conflict with change, saying, ‘Ah, well, yes, there were errors, it wasn’t possible to do any differently’. And he recounted this objectively. Again, take The Mother of Kings [1957], a novel in which he objectively recounted this period. But at the same time as he recounted it objectively, it is also clear that he himself is the hero; and that’s the same thing, isn’t it? At the level of a single writer, we see a development and an attempt at justification, self-critique and justification, but without his character ever appearing; and, at the same time, we see a set of characters who are captured objectively, and in whom we see this ensemble of errors, necessity and good will; derailed good will. Which means that here we are dealing with what I would call a socialist post-realist type of novel, in the sense that there is a lot more in it than the simple description of a society. It is not like when Balzac talked about the French Revolution, which was not his own work and which he only knew by way of the documents. [Brandys] is a man who truly did this, and recounts what people did. Yes, he is still recounting it with the objective methods of the socialist-realist novel, but at the same time he depicts himself within it. Which means that there is a subtlety to his analyses – and that relates to him wanting to show that he was wrong in being right; he wants to produce an auto-critique, but nonetheless this auto-critique does not ‘liquidate’ him as a character. Taking that as its basis, this is a remarkable novel; the author penetrates all the more deeply into the consciousness of his characters because he is himself one of them – isn’t that the case? Anyway, this is something very important; it is a fact that none of us, for example, could write a true story of the life of a Pole or a Russian between 1945 and 1952. They had an extraordinary experience, this construction of socialism with all its deviations, its errors, the whole ensemble of things that went on there, and those of us who saw it only from the outside – even if we belonged to Left groups that were linked to this experience – could not describe it. It’s up to them to produce today’s novel. And why is it up to them? Because they were the ones who experienced it. So you see that here we find subjectivity again, in full. We can dream of sending a writer into a factory, of having him stay there for two years. But none of us would dare to write a novel on the period from 1945 to 1952 in Poland, Hungary, Russia – no one, isn’t that right? – because it would have to be done by the people who experienced that. So, then, the simple fact that we recognise this proves the importance of subjectivity as retotalisation.
A VOICE: Piovene said the same thing yesterday evening …
PIOVENE: What I meant is that, for me, subjectivity has a preponderant role in the work of art. When you were speaking, it occurred to me that what you called obscurity-to-the-self is declining in art today, despite everything.
SARTRE: Yes.
PIOVENE: That is the point that I wanted to emphasise. This obscurity is in decline, despite everything. I believe that the artist always has more than one vision, in capturing the reasons for this vision. However, I don’t think that you can be obscure to yourself at will, and I think that this element of obscurity, of productive obscurity – let’s say – plays an ever smaller part.
SARTRE: The novel is invention.
A VOICE: That’s it. I think that if Flaubert were writing today, he would manage to depict himself by more direct means; he would choose less long a road. I am not saying that Madame Bovary is not a masterpiece – clearly it is. And I’m also thinking of something else that’s very important, namely that today, even in art, it is important to arrive at a correct conclusion.
SARTRE: I’m perfectly in agreement with you.
A VOICE: You can’t feel that you’re a liar. Probably for an artist in the past that was less important.
SARTRE: Then, too, it was very important. Flaubert’s book is very true, it arrives at accurate conclusions. Thibaudet6 has shown that Flaubert foresaw the development of the petty bourgeoisie in France, its importance to political life under the Third Republic. All that is already there in what he wrote under the Empire. But I agree with you, with the caveat that I think that in any case the subjective retotalisation does take place – at another level, but it exists even so.
A VOICE: In fact, if it did not exist, we would have no identity.
SARTRE: Or there would be a copy of yourself, an object that you would project, and that would be a bad thing.
BANDINELLI:7 Excuse me, I do not know if it’s your [Della Volpe’s] turn to speak or Luporini’s.
LUPORINI: I would rather speak first, for the following reason: Della Volpe has an aesthetic. I don’t. It’s better that whoever doesn’t have one speaks first, as then we will end up with more complete answers.
BANDINELLI: Perfect reasoning!
LUPORINI: I asked to speak because I think that I will more be following the line of observation that Alicata indicated more than did those who’ve gone before me. I think that his position poses Sartre’s with the greatest difficulties. I say ‘difficulties’ precisely because I have no aesthetic; I have problems, I have questions, perhaps because Marxism has not provided itself an orthodox aesthetic. It could be that it depends on this lack of aesthetic. In any case, I have only questions. So first I would like to pose a general problem, which concerns what I call – in translation – the ‘subject forgetting itself’ [il dimenticarsi del soggetto]. This is a fact that we always find in subjects’ ‘operations’. And Sartre was fully in agreement, I think, when he spoke about the man going down the stairs … In any operation, the subject does not think about the operation that he is accomplishing, but clearly he is thinking about the goal that he is aiming at. So the problem is to capture the subject within a determinate field: in the first place, I would say, in the field of knowledge in general. By that I mean historical knowledge, scientific knowledge and art. I believe that this element of ‘dense obscurity’ – this backdrop that the subject stands out from – is present in all these fields: it is present in the artist, in the scholar …
A VOICE: Sartre didn’t say otherwise …
LUPORINI: … allow me to retrace the path that led me to these difficulties. I’m a bit of a pedant, so I have to follow a certain order. So this ‘dense obscurity’ is always present in operation, in the operation that is knowledge, be it scientific or historiographical. It is an artistic backdrop, which is still present in subjectivity.
For the present moment, I just want to invoke a certain experience, which isn’t my own, but my wife’s. I have followed it with a certain interest for a number of years. I would have preferred her to speak about it herself, but she did not want to. She worked on editing the oeuvre that you were all talking about yesterday evening. And editing Tolstoy’s oeuvre means studying the process by which his novels take form, and Tolstoy’s narrative form, by way of both their different variants and all that he said across the years of his work. Now, we can see that here there is a continual reflection on the self; it does not come afterward, but in the work process itself. So Tolstoy was perfectly conscious of two things: he was conscious that he was describing an objective world, and, at the same time, that he was continually describing himself. That is, he saw himself in each of his characters, not only the male ones but also in Natasha8 etc. Which we could also prove philologically. So we could say that Tolstoy is more modern than Flaubert – and he may well also be [more modern] by the standard of a certain measure of values. But there is no doubt, thanks to philology and studies of the texts, that this consciousness is permanently present in Tolstoy – a consciousness that is simultaneously an objectivation of the two moments. I think that this objectivation helped Tolstoy: it was characteristic of him as an author and constituted the greatness of his art.
Now I get to the objection that Alicata raised: the question of art is posed starting from this point of arrival. If we agree that art is knowledge, the major problem then is to determine to what genre of knowledge art belongs. For example, if we again look to Tolstoy and this experience that I found so captivating as I followed it, then we can see that in his particular case, all of Tolstoy’s characters emerged from real prototypes, from characters whom he had really met or, let’s say, elements of characters that he freely mixed together. But it’s not only that – that would be too elementary. Tolstoy began writing, describing and giving form to the things that interested him, by way of a style that we could characterise as naturalist, with an absolute wealth of details and supplementary aspects. The process of constituting the character consists of taking away all these minute details and creating what we could call an ‘idealisation’. This is where the aesthete’s discourse begins. Tolstoy was conscious of that. It was as if he were saying, ‘Note: when I am writing a historical novel my goal is different to a historian’s, because when I produce a description the historical character is not the same one that the historian is interested in. The historian captures the character in his historical significance, whereas I capture him in all the interlacing of real life, like other men.’ So when it comes to this process of ‘denaturalising’ the realist prototype, could we not pose the question to which I’ll return – which I’ll conclude by posing, and which I do not feel up to the task of answering. For it seems to me that this is the fundamental question: to what genre of knowledge does art belong, and in what sense is it different from other genres of knowledge?
SARTRE: I will respond afterwards.
DELLA VOLPE:9 I think the debate has arrived at a really interesting, almost dramatic point here. After Sartre’s phenomenological description, defended by our friend Enzo Paci, we have arrived at a true question mark. True, we can grant Sartre that his phenomenological description – and I’ll emphasise the word ‘description’ – is a very interesting one. But then we bump into the following problem: what is distinctive about the relation between subjectivity and objectivity such as it appears in a novel? What distinguishes a novel from a historical narrative?
Let’s use this category of subjectivity, for a moment, and consider Mommsen’s History of Rome.10 This work is famous for this aspect in particular, namely the powerful character of Mommsen’s subjectivity, of his political ideas. The history of Rome is analysed by way of Mommsen’s own subjectivity and political perspective – the perspective outlined by his political ideas – which, we all know, led him to emphasise the figure of Caesar, etc.
So what is the difference, on this point, between Mommsen’s subjectivity and Flaubert’s, between the subjectivity realised in Madame Bovary and the one reflected in A History of Rome? None. What has Sartre done, in truth? Let’s follow his method: with great finesse he presented us a description of the contents of Madame Bovary. He conveyed them to us as should be done today, namely by taking account of society, the social base. But Thibaudet had already done that. In any case, in Sartre this is much more marked. We can also do this for Sentimental Education [1869] and Flaubert’s other masterpieces. But it still remains to be explained why this is a novel and not a historical narrative. It seems to me, therefore, that phenomenological description is a path that leads us to an impasse. But I will say that Sartre’s analyses, which we get a sample of in Critique of Dialectical Reason, are very interesting – a far-reaching, brilliant effort, often even a work of genius.
A VOICE:11 I’ll specify: it is regressive and progressive, not phenomenological.
DELLA VOLPE: Certainly, it is regressive and progressive; but it is the description itself that we could term ‘phenomenological’. It remains descriptive in character, and doesn’t get to the fundamentals: it does not tell us what the principles of art are, and, above all, what really matters – after all, we could get by just fine without all the rest – namely what the criterion for literary criticism is, the criterion for criticism in the plastic arts and criticism in general. It’s not apparent what criterion it can offer us for evaluating literary works. I repeat: the very fine analysis in Sartre’s regressive and progressive description of Madame Bovary does not explain why these are poetic characters and not historical ones.
In my view, we have to abandon this path. Certainly, it is very interesting to note that the crisis of culture today is a very serious one. We can deduce as much from the fact that many Marxists – or many people who proclaim themselves Marxists – are interested by this form of describing art, which, truth be told, is useless because it does not show us how the historical content becomes poetry, as it does in Mayakovsky but not in other artists in Soviet Russia. That is what should interest Marxists. But Marxists have gone so far in identifying with what Plekhanov called ‘the signified’ – sociological values – and their attitude is so heavily determined by these abstract values, that they open their arms even to Sartre.
Indeed, Sartre has already evolved a lot. What we have been presented with here is a very interesting, very instructive phenomenon. But it seems to me that – to go back to the example that I just gave – we should not follow this path, which is not worth borrowing. For a Marxist, it is a point of honour to be able to explain to a bourgeois, to a man with bourgeois tastes, why Mayakovsky is a poet, a great poet, why Brecht is a poet much greater than all those whom the bourgeois present to us as so many dramatic poets, including Pirandello. Why is Mayakovsky a poet, just like Brecht is?
The path to follow, then – and this is just my personal opinion (I am well aware that almost no one here agrees with me, but I am not too worried by that) – is a different one, which consists of seeing what the elements are that constitute the structure of the work of art. We need that in order to go beyond a vague discourse and get to the concrete: we need to start from language, and, starting from language, show how common, vernacular language acquires a power in a work of art, thus becoming poetry.
Let’s take an example, which I think is a very banal, simple one, but which tells us a lot. Let’s take a line from Browning, which reads ‘so wore night’.12 What tools would we need to convince ourselves, and prove to others, that not only do we feel moved by his words, but that this is poetry? In my opinion we have no other means of doing so than by starting from the text and the elements that compose it. We have to start from questions of language, and note, for example, that we cannot grasp the poetic nature of ‘so wore night’ unless we start out from banal, common language. If we were using that language, we would express the same thing by saying ‘the night passed’. To grasp ‘so wore night’ we have to transcend ‘the night passed’, which is a trivial, vulgar, unpoetic expression, but one that cannot be totally eliminated, since ‘so wore night’ is a metaphor. And we cannot grasp the metaphor if we don’t keep in mind what is literally being signified. We find this latter in vernacular language, and not in poetry, as Croce said, following Humboldt.13 It is a phrase in the metaphorical sense, a phrase that is a phenomenon of language and in language, in this linguistic system that has norms different from those of other linguistic systems and languages.
So how can we explain ‘so wore night’? It seems to me that this is already a way of entering into Browning’s verse. If I had to explain it, I would say the following: it is a metaphor, and everyone understands it as one. But the possibility of appreciating this metaphor’s force of expression presupposes what is literally signified: in this case, the verb ‘passes’. And even having said that much, we are only halfway. We still need to convince ourselves that there is a relation between these two elements, which could only be called dialectical.
Why is this so? Because the one cannot exist without the other: it is and it is not. We understand that ‘so wore night’ is poetry because it is not ‘the night passed’. But conversely, we cannot explain ‘so wore night’ without keeping in mind the fact that these words entail ‘the night passed’. ‘So wore night’ dialectically contains ‘the night passed’. ‘So wore night’ shelters the literally signified, which has been overruled but is still conserved within it. I think that it is impossible to deny that. And this is just a basic example, the most elementary one we could take.
We cannot grasp ‘so wore night’ without ‘the night passed’. But it is just as true that ‘so wore night’ says something rather different from ‘the night passed’; and yet even so, we cannot do without ‘the night passed’ if we are properly to grasp ‘so wore night’. We cannot arrive at ‘so wore night’ or explain this line all by itself, with its famous synthetic immediacy, etc. It cannot be done: these are stories, myths. We cannot arrive at ‘so wore night’ except by starting from ‘the night passed’ and keeping in mind the continual, dialectical relation between the two. We are no longer dealing with Hegel’s dialectic here, since the distinctions between ‘passed’ and ‘so wore’ are entirely respected. Yet at the same time the one does not exist without the other. We can only grasp that this is a metaphor by starting from a literal signified, which it deforms and confers an extension upon. The metaphor is the relation between the literal signified and the content of the metaphor. So we can demonstrate that the metaphor ‘so wore night’ is realised as a metaphor, and can be appreciated as a metaphor, only with reference to ‘the night passed’.
The path to follow is that of analysing technique in art and in the work of art. We have to start from questions of language. I understand the comrades who are scandalised to see these questions of linguistics being posed (and that’s before we even get to stylistic matters, the critique of taste); after all, these questions do not belong to our Marxist tradition. [But] we always evoke Gramsci, and, rightly or wrongly, we can also refer to him in this case. Gramsci ridiculed the famous Bertoni14 precisely on account of his idealist linguistics; he wanted to unbind language15 in order to reduce the linguistic phenomenon to the word – the famous complete, subjective, ‘creative’ word – when it is in fact always a phenomenon within a linguistic system.
I don’t think that we can settle for what Sartre says, even if there is a great truth in his argument. It does not allow us to access the problematic specific to art, because the old categories no longer serve us here. In the example that I presented, the example of Mommsen, one of the greatest historians, we can recognise his powerful subjectivity, which indeed we find in his History of Rome. So the criterion of subjectivity – the traditional one as well as your own – becomes useless, because subjectivity is present in the novel as well as in the work of history.
So we have to follow another path, the path of structural analysis of the work of art. In order to do so, we have to start out from singular, concrete, technical questions, which are not in themselves poetic. Our sensibility is not used to such questions, which force us to mount an analytical effort in order to be able, perhaps, to draw out a synthesis. Of course, all that involves us being able to identify what poetry is. Starting from the example that I have given, we have to recognise what I call the ‘multi-sense’ [polisenso]: the poetic signified cannot be confused with the univocal signified of the historical narrative. The ‘multi-sense’ poetic signified is not the univocal signified pertaining to science, history, philosophy, etc.
I’ll conclude. And I’ll pose you this question: is the example that I presented – which concerned the distinction between ‘the night passed’ and ‘so wore night’, as well as the indestructible, truly dialectical relation between these two elements – only a matter of subtleties and sophisms, or is there some fundamental truth here? Does this relation between poetic and literal expression convince you? And the critic himself, when he is writing his critique – what does he have to do? Croce said that we have to start from the literal signified in order to grasp the metaphorical signified. Ultimately, that could even seem rather banal.
BANDINELLI: I’ll kindly ask all those who want to intervene to pose short questions, for the moment. If necessary they can speak again. So, Gattuso, let’s have your question … if you only put it to Della Volpe, we won’t be able to hear you …
GATTUSO:16 It relates to the example ‘the night passed’. Indeed, the literal signified of the line saying ‘so wore night’ is still present in the poetic phrase; but we could equally say ‘the night was destroyed’ or ‘the night dissolved’, or something else of your choosing. The problem is the choice, all the more so since we are translating this verse from English. I would like to know why the poet made this choice, and how the critic can know that this choice was the right one?
DELLA VOLPE: The question is meaningless. The critic knows this by way of comparison. This is a continual dialectical process: by comparing what is literally given – what I call the ‘literal material’, in this example, ‘the night passed’ – with ‘so wore night’, we measure the gap between the expressive value of each of the two. At the same time, we cannot grasp the second without going through the first. The first is always within the second; it is a dialectical relation. We don’t have one without the other; they are not each other, but we do not have the one without the other. That’s the gap.
A VOICE: Excuse me – I don’t know if [Della Volpe] has finished, but Sartre wants to say something right away.
SARTRE: Yes, because I am very troubled by what Della Volpe is saying, since that would make poetry the metaphorical poetry that Delille17 was doing in the eighteenth century: the work of a poet who is renowned in France but who has a bad reputation. He could indeed coin expressions like ‘the heroes who put out the fire’ to say ‘firemen’ or ‘the riders pulling a chariot’ simply to say people in a cart. In truth, I think that the metaphorical relation such as you portray it, taken by itself, is wholly unable to distinguish a bad comparison – perhaps denoting firemen with ‘these valiant mortals who put out the fire’ – from a good one. In one case, we have a metaphor, that is to say, a process that results in another manner of speaking. That is what we also do, in certain tongues, when we want a novel to talk about sexual themes. We take other words and make comparisons because there is a prohibition, because there is a moral barrier, but these other words are much poorer ones. So it seems to me that the true criterion for knowing whether a set of words works aesthetically is its relation to the totality of the projected object. Personally, I addressed the aesthetic problem only because Piovene and I were talking about subjectivity in art, but by that I did not mean to suggest that subjectivity defines the structure of art. But if we get to the true problem, then you cannot make an artistic critique independently of the totality, and you cannot consider the slightest phrase or formula apart from as a differentiation within this totality itself; which, moreover, is a totality linked to this other totality, language.
We must start out from totality – that is, the projected totality – and not only from this totality, but from the totality of a language [langue]. ‘La notte si consumò’ [that is, Della Volpe’s translation of ‘So wore night’] is a phrase that works in Italian. We cannot say ‘La nuit se consume’ in French. The poet who said ‘La nuit se consume’ would not be a poet: his choice of words would be no good. Simply because there is a difference between these languages. And here I want to get to this point: this verse is by Browning, and though you can put it like this in English and translate it like that in Italian, we would certainly not translate Browning’s poem into French by saying ‘La nuit se consume’. Simply because – and this is my point – languages [langues] implicate subjectivity. That is what we began to understand, ever since Saussure. What do we understand by subjectivity, in relation to languages? We understand this: that every fact, every fact of exteriority is interiorised in a total system and takes on an internal meaning, that is, one relating the whole to the part, whereas outside of this it was something else. And language [langage] in the form of languages [langues] is this: it is an ensemble structured by itself, with the phonological element, the lexical element, the semantic element, each of which conditions each other, and always synthetically and dialectically; and everything that happens in a language happens to it linguistically. That is, a language reflects all social facts, but it reflects them in its own manner as a language, and there will be new linguistic differentiations internal to the totality. Let’s take the example of two invasions. When the Romans invaded and occupied Gaul it was the Latin language that prevailed. When the Normans invaded England, it was the English language that prevailed, with a few exceptions. In each of the two cases, the invasions were reflected in the language, not through ready-made facts but through new syntheses, new dialectical forms that introduced themselves, a new relation among words; but these were very particular relations that made this language into something without equivalents – and that makes it difficult to translate poems. So when you talk about a poet, you are entirely correct: it is a man who expresses the incommunicable by way of a subjective whole, the language [langue] – because he apprehends it, because the language is also an objectivating fact. For example, we cannot translate the difference between ‘mutton’ and ‘sheep’ into French [both are mouton]; and similarly we would cause you a lot of trouble with our word bois, which simultaneously means wood for the fire, a forest, etc. [it has no Italian equivalent].
So we have the poet who uses these elements, but these elements are not uniquely objective structures – they are simultaneously both objective and subjective, and subjective in an intersubjective sense. So in the artistic fact we have the structured totality that the poet wants to create by way of another structured intersubjective totality, namely the language [langue]. We can never translate Mayakovsky: there are some translations by Elsa Triolet, which can get as close as you like, but you don’t feel the …
A VOICE: The impossibility of translating – well, there’s a romantic argument!
SARTRE: No, it is a provisional thesis; but it is a fact that at the current moment we don’t translate poems, the great poets; we don’t translate them. We translate certain parts where there is a kind of approximation, but other parts we don’t: and some of them are truly, totally, untranslatable. I’ll give you one example, and it’s a very curious one, because he’s a great poet. Now, if you take his words the one after the other, if you take what he says, it’s truly lamentable: I’m talking about Lamartine. In truth Lamartine is not very interesting to read, but it is poetry. It’s a certain type of poetry of his era.
A VOICE: Rather a mediocre poet!
SARTRE: No, a good poet, but one who said mediocre things. That happens to a lot of poets. And you cannot translate Lamartine into another language.
A VOICE: The same goes for Pushkin.
SARTRE: That’s another poet who it’s impossible to translate. And Mayakovsky, too, it’s impossible to translate him into French. And your poets? Petrarch, impossible, it would be senseless. And Shakespeare? In truth, I agree with you that all this is temporary, since it represents a moment: history is not universal, it begins to be universal, it is not completely universal. But this is not a romantic myth, it is a reality, and a reality that I have constantly come up against. I simply wanted to suggest to you that if we want to talk about works of art, then we first have to speak of the idea of totality and the idea of projection towards a totality by way of totalitarian fields, one of which – and on that you’re entirely right – is language [le langage]. But properly taking into account the fact that the choice of words comes from the totality, and it is then subject to this other totality that is language. In particular, the surrealists in France often made for very good poets, very great poets, but they were also poets without metaphor. In their case, you can’t take recourse to the ‘the night passes’ behind ‘so wore night’. That’s not what they wanted. They wanted something quite diferent. The surrealists wanted to set some words directly next to others that had no logical connection to them, in order to get hold of something that is, or in any case should give you, an objective reality that is simultaneously rationally comprehensible. Isn’t that right? Take the example, if you will, of the ‘butter horse’. They wrote of a ‘butter horse’: a horse, then, that would melt in the sun, a horse that could be eaten. Their goal was clearly a sort of self-destruction of language [langage] by itself, allowing us to look for what’s behind it: I am not telling you that they were right or wrong. Poetically, this example is not well-chosen; but they often were right, poetically. Fine, but where does this butter horse take us? Only to horses and to butter: that is, not to expressions, but to the signifying differentiations in language.
A VOICE: Let’s take Pushkin, where he says ‘Unscathed by northern gales blooms the Russian rose’.18 Here there is no metaphor, but the same thing is at work here, the dialectical relation between …
SARTRE: Ah, yes, here there is no metaphor, there is a real. It’s just that at this moment it is the whole that counts, totality; the totality decides whether you use a metaphorical ensemble …
A VOICE: But won’t I find that the same is true for a passage of Mommsen’s?
SARTRE: Yes! But the difference between Mommsen and the poet is that there is an objective ensemble that allows other historians to come along and pull apart Mommsen’s evaluation of certain points. So then Mommsen will be reduced to [renvoyé à] his subjectivity, like – as I was telling you yesterday – our friend who suggested Le Grabuge [as a journal title], and who was reduced to his subjectivity because this proposal was not accepted. Whereas no one would ever think of reproaching Pushkin for having been a poet, saying that he had been transcended, or reproaching Flaubert for having written Madame Bovary. There is a difference, in the sense that the work of art is an absolute: if it is a good one, it remains so; it cannot be transcended, it would be meaningless to say that. Mommsen’s work can be transcended because it is on the level of rigorously objective truth, whereas the work of art is an absolute, precisely because you will never transcend the incarnation of a singular individual. Flaubert was not a very pleasant figure, not someone who you wish you’d been; he died almost a hundred years ago, etc., in a period that was less advanced than our own in all sorts of ways. That said, Madame Bovary remains something that is entirely impossible to transcend, because Flaubert is in it. Whereas, if he had described the society without putting himself into it, it would be a description that we could pick up retrospectively and develop further, as Luporini said; and clearly it would then have a wholly different meaning, however valuable it was as an ensemble. I am simply warning you against separating out the structures of subjectivity too much: all this makes up a whole.
I would add that it’s not accurate to say that I am mounting a phenomenological description. That’s not the task that I have set myself. Rather, what is at issue is to find – by way of a regressive dialectic – the fields of internal meanings that allow us to understand the work of art projectively. When, for example, Flaubert started to consider himself a woman, we have to know how come, when he was almost fifty-five years old and a doctor said to him, ‘You are a hysterical old woman’, rather than getting angry, he was delighted, and how come in all his letters he wrote ‘you’ll never guess what they told me – they tell me that I am a hysterical old woman’. We have to understand this; and it’s not that he was a homosexual.
So here is a certain kind of guy who we can’t understand by description, but by …
A VOICE: … psychoanalysis.
SARTRE: Ah, of course, psychoanalysis. Indeed I don’t see why it should be rejected, as long as it doesn’t have a metaphysical basis, as long as it doesn’t say (as it sometimes does) that it can explain capitalism in terms of some complex, for example. But if we take psychoanalysis simply as a method for objectivating subjectivity, then I don’t at all see why it should be rejected. And what does psychoanalysis teach us, when we take it dialectically? It teaches us about the personal adventure of an individual within a family, through his first years. But what does this adventure represent? It singularly represents the society of a given era. For example, the Oedipus complex – that is, the child’s relation with his mother and antagonistic relation with his father – has no sense for the eighteenth century.
For example, if you read Rétif de la Bretonne’s Mémoires, then you will see that he was fixated – as a psychoanalyst would say – on his father, whereas his mother was not of great importance. And take Flaubert: for him it was his father who counted, because again his was a family of this same era. Conversely, Baudelaire, who was born in a richer, more cultured and more bourgeois family, was fixated on his mother, because already there was this shift in the family … And what does that mean? It means that the domestic family, broken by the rise of capitalism, was transforming into the normal bourgeois family, the conjugal family. That’s something very important, and so your psychoanalysis of a singular life is only reflecting a situation that is objective and social.
A VOICE: We still haven’t got to the work of art …
SARTRE: But this is very important, because it’s starting from here that you get to a singular work of art.
LUPORINI: I just wanted to observe that I have read Della Volpe’s books. His position and Sartre’s are not really so far apart – within limits, of course. Della Volpe defines the work of art as a closed discourse, and scientific discourse as an open discourse. I think that if we had started the discussion from this point – that is, on the plane of totality, of the interpretation of totality – that would have been more productive. I wanted to ask for Sartre’s response to a question that concerns the great problem of the permanence of art’s value. That is the question Marx posed. I do not accept the answer that Marx gave, but I do agree that it’s the right question. I think that to define the work of art as an absolute, in the sense that Sartre has just suggested, does not suffice to answer this problem. The work of art can be an absolute, but this is an absolute that does not interest us, an absolute that concerns the subject that created it. But what is at issue is the permanence of the value of a work of art, the thing that makes the poems of the Iliad and the Odyssey maintain all their value even for us – we have to constantly reconquer it, for sure, but it is always there. I think that this problem is linked to the difference in the form, the difference in type, between artistic knowledge and scientific knowledge, etc.
SARTRE: Well, I would say that it’s precisely because art is a closed discourse, in the sense that you have projected from the singularised society onto a totality, which is the description of this same society. We never demand, so to speak, that a work of art give us objective information on a period. Rather, we ask that it give us a more complex type of information: again, not objective information, but its duplication of a period seeing itself, with all its possible blindnesses, all its prejudices – yet, at the same time, experiencing itself, no? What it represents is a totalisation of the period in the form of the individual or group of individuals who made it. Take for example Don Quixote: what is it that makes Don Quixote an enduring work? There is a historical aspect that may interest only historians: the liquidation of a certain feudal society. In an era when absolute monarchies were establishing themselves – and, as such, at the same time as the Renaissance – here we also have the liquidation of a feudal ideology in favour of another ideology, within a man who lived this contradiction. The liquidation of this feudalism – in the form of tales of chivalry, regarding a man who would now simply be a soldier for the king and no longer a wandering knight – is interesting from a strictly historical point of view, if that’s how we take it. But if we read this in a book into which a man has projected these contradictions, then we have to deal with a character like Don Quixote – who is almost constantly ridiculous and sometimes tragic – isn’t that right? With this kind of strange contradiction that is Cervantes’s own. There we have something that interests us, because it presents us with this whole society as a society that is as lively in its contradictions as the one that we live in.
Do you see what I am getting at? Don Quixote would not be able to connect to us if it were not for Cervantes’s subjectivity, and precisely in the way that Cervantes was very ill at ease in himself, because he was witnessing this separation between two worlds. So, for my part – and I would like to say this, too – I don’t think that a historical character is a historical type. I don’t think that the true goal of a novel – or, at least, of a typical character in a novel – is ‘typologising’. Rather, I think that its goal is the singularisation of the universal. But singularisation of the universal does not mean typical. It means presenting us a character who in himself – like Don Quixote, for example – is in no sense typical. But in reality, I think it is necessary to represent characters who have a certain degree of obscurity at the outset, which is their individuality, their personality, and whose universality the reader gradually succeeds in discovering concretely, though without ever arriving at the universal in itself. If you see what I mean by that.
Moreover, it is necessary that the character – like Don Quixote, for example – be plagued by manias, a sort of imbecility that strikes right from the outset: that he behave unusually, like a one-in-a-thousand case. And then, without him ceasing to be unusual, we should be able to feel all the contradictions of his era within him. So you have this constant fact, the real and individual fact of the life of each person, namely, that we are incarnations; that is to say, that we are the singularisation of the whole universal of systems within which we live. We are that – each of us is – and that is what our novels show. If we are presented as living in full awareness of what the contradictions are, that does not ring true. However, if we are presented as beings who do not recognise these contradictions, which are half-hidden – we can grasp them in part, but in part we can’t – then we are on the terrain of the work of art. Whatever the degree of abstraction or schematisation, here we find the character that each of us is, for ourselves and for others.
A VOICE [LUPORINI?]: Excuse me, Sartre, but I don’t think that suffices to answer the question of the permanence of the value of a work of art, which is linked to the work’s existence, its presence. For example, in an archaeological dig I found a fragment of a work of art from a civilisation that I don’t know anything about – but that, to my eyes, is a work of art, and so the fragment immediately took on an artistic value. All that poses problems of interpretation. It is the immediate incarnation of a value and the permanence of a value, which is something completely different from historical values, etc. And that’s the problem that Marx posed, and I still haven’t found any answer to it, either in you or in Della Volpe or in Lukács, or in general.
SARTRE: Yes, but then I’d say this. On the one hand, you can’t provide an answer to that without an analysis and a study of the work itself. It is impossible to say, in principle, why one work endures and another does not. That’s a problem that concerns the work itself. On the other hand, what is missing, in my view …
A VOICE: That is a general problem …
SARTRE: Yes, that is a general problem, but it’s one that can only be resolved by particular studies. You cannot decide a priori. And second, both you and we are still lacking a theory of values. Marxism does not have a theory of values. You are missing any such theory. So to you Marxists I say that there is no established Marxist axiological system; indeed, there is no such system – we cannot claim to have found one, either. To be clear, that is still not a given. It’s not true, it is still not a given. Evidently a Marxist axiology does need to be created: it is one of the essential questions. There are elements of it, but it is not a given. So you pose a problem that I think is almost premature, because you want to found this permanence on values, but we have to find these values, establish what they are.
A VOICE: Even Marx …
SARTRE: But he didn’t have the values for a response; we still need to know how in a Marxist system – like that which we discussed today and yesterday, or how thousands of others have defined it before us – how, in this system, the passage to value, in short, to a norm, can exist. That isn’t already given. And also there is almost always a contradiction – a well-founded contradiction, but still a constant one – between a Marxist’s judgement on an individual and his activity, for example, and the dialectical understanding of this individual as the actual representative of a fraction, of a class, acting as he must act on this basis. There is a problem, here, and this problem has never been dealt with. Yes, from 1945 to 1952 there were abusive versions of value judgements, but there wasn’t the foundation for value judgements. And then there is the reaction – precisely because we made too many unfounded value judgements in this period – that consists of creating a Marxism without values, in which people are what they are, produced by economic and historical processes. That doesn’t work either, and it suffocates any possibility of judging either action or the work of art.
So I believe that this is one of the problems we have; indeed, it is linked to subjectivity, but not …
A VOICE: In my philosophical training, I started out with the masterpiece. So I am going to explain my thinking to see if I am truly in agreement. The task is to explicate a Marxist axiological theory …
SARTRE: Exactly.
A VOICE: … in which the subject, the question of art must have its place …
SARTRE: And also a moral …
A VOICE: Of course.
SARTRE: But this is an extremely difficult problem, since we could also say that the moral is not possible in the current state of things, that is, with men whose relations are reified, with fetishes, with a struggle that is in itself a violent struggle. We could say that today the moral is impossible, and at the same time that it has to be, if we want to give account of all aspects of humanity.
In my view the two problems are analogous. For example, if I told you that it is clear that in certain circumstances no moral attitude can be taken. Let’s imagine a young man who has become a colonial administrator because he just drifted into this position, or because his family forced him to, and here he is in the colonies. He cannot apply any kind of moral attitude, among the colonised who he is administering. Even if he was as liberal as liberal could be, this would be a liberal neocolonialism. He couldn’t do anything. Similarly, in the relation between a married couple, if one of the two is totally alienated then the other can’t do anything. I have even seen cases where the wife was alienated and the husband wanted her to work, and this – quite proper – attitude in fact led the wife to become even more alienated, because she was working out of obedience to her husband. So either all problems are totally turned inside-out by the current situation, by the current separation, by the current world, or else there is no real possibility of moral action or of axiology. And nonetheless it is impossible to speak for anyone for fifteen minutes without letting out thirty-odd axiological judgements. So we have to take account of that. And there has never been any serious prospect of a rigorous Marxist work on that.
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1Guido Piovene (1907–1974), writer and journalist at Corriere della Sera and La Stampa. His major works include Lettere di una novizia (1941) and Viaggio in Italia (1956).
2Piovene is here addressing Renato Gattuso, who speaks next.
3See George Strauss, La Part du diable dans l’oeuvre d’André Gide, Paris: Lettres Modernes, 1985 (Archives des Lettres Modernes, vol. 219, Archives André Gide no. 5).
4Mario Alicata (1918–66) was an important leader of the PCI, having joined the clandestine Communist Party in 1940, the same year that he defended his thesis Vincenzo Gravina e l’estetica del primo Settecento. He participated in the anti-fascist resistance in Rome and worked as a literary critic and journalist; as a Party leader he was very attentive to cultural questions. A complete bibliography of his writings from 1937 to 1966 appears in R. Martinelli and R. Maini, eds, Intellettuali e azione politica, Roma: Riuniti, 1976, pp. 463–503.
5Benedetto Croce (1866–1952), Italian critic, philosopher and historian, and a fundamental reference point for twentieth-century Italian intellectuals. We can hardly present his thought in a footnote, but we shall highlight the fact that he professed an intransigent historicism from an idealist viewpoint. His numerous works include Aesthetic (1902), Logic as the Science of the Pure Concept (1908) and History as the Story of Liberty (1938).
6Albert Thibaudet (1874–1936), Gustave Flaubert, 1922, revised and corrected edition 1935, now available in Gallimard’s Tel collection.
7Bianchi Bandinelli (1900–1975), archaeologist and art historian, specialist in classical art; a Siena aristocrat and antifascist who became a Communist after the war. His works include Quelques jours avec Hitler et Mussolini, Paris: Carnets-Nord, 2011, an account of Hitler’s 1938 visit to Mussolini’s Italy in 1938 excerpted from his Dal diario di un borghese, published in 1948. Bandinelli had been seconded to serve as a guide to Hitler and Mussolini during their visits to the monuments and museums of Rome and Florence.
8Natasha Rostova, a character in War and Peace.
9Galvano Della Volpe (1895–1968), Marxist philosopher, who had a particular interest in developing a rigorously materialist aesthetic theory. He emphasised the social production process of works of art in the formation of aesthetic judgement and emphasised the rational value of artistic creations. His works include Critica del gusto (1960).
10Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903), A History of Rome, Glencoe: Free Press, 1957 [1854–56].
11This could well be Sartre’s voice; in any case, it is the voice of a convinced Sartrean.
12Robert Browning (1812–1889). The line reads: ‘So wore night; the East was grey’; it is the first line of the fifth stanza of his poem ‘A Serenade at the Villa’ published in his 1846 collection Men and Women. Della Volpe inaccurately renders this phrase as ‘wore the night’, which he translates into Italian as la notte si consumò – literally, ‘the night consumed itself’.
13The linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835).
14Giulio Bertoni (1878–1942), a linguist who identified with Crocean idealism and who published Brevario di neolinguistica in 1925 together with Matteo Giulio Bartoli (1873–1946). Bartoli had been Gramsci’s professor, and his former student reproached him for this work.
15Délier la langue: literally it means ‘loosen the tongue’.
16Renato Gattuso (1911–87) a painter, he joined the clandestine Communist Party in 1940 and participated in the antifascist Resistance. His Crocifissione (1940–41) is considered one of the most significant paintings of the Novecento.
17Jacques Delille (1738–1813), translator of Virgil’s Georgics. His most famous poem is Les jardins, ou, L’art d’embellir les paysages (1782), a poem in four ‘songs’. He was as rapidly forgotten as he was famous in his own lifetime.
18The speaker says ‘comme s’ouvre legère la rose russe dans le tourbillon de la neige’, a reference that the French editors ascribe to Pushkin’s Winter Morning. However, it seems more likely that this in fact is a rendering of line 45 from his Winter: What Are We to Do in the Country? (Зима. Что делать нам в деревне?), which reads ‘Но бури севера не вредны русской розе’ – DB.