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Language and Engagement: The Rhetoric of Imagination in Sartre’s
Philosophy and Prose
Merel Aalders (11753560) Master Thesis UvA Philosophy First Reader: dr. A. van Rooden Second reader: dr. E.C Brouwer
2 Table of Contents
Abstract ... 3
Introduction ... 4
1. Early Engagement: A Literature of Praxis ... 8
I Being and Nothingness: Consciousness and Freedom ... 8
II What is Literature?: Consciousness, Freedom and Creative Imagination ... 10
III The Relationship between Reader and Writer ... 14
IV The Situation of the Writer ... 15
V Between Language and World ... 19
2. Late Engagement: Materiality, Alienation and Ambiguity ... 25
VI Engagement Evolves ... 25
VII Disinformation and the Inexpressible ... 28
VIII Materiality, Ambiguity and Alienation of Language ... 30
IX Early and Late Engagement: Consciousness, Freedom and Language ... 34
X Language: From Body to Vécu ... 39
3. Rhetoric in Sartre’s Prose: Theme and Metaphor as Forms of Enquiry... 45
XI The Métaphysique of the Writer: Narrative and Thematic Structures ... 45
XII Roads to Freedom: Conversion and the Inexpressible ... 48
XIII Roads to Freedom: The Category Mistake of Metaphor... 53
XIV Rhetoric and Sartre’s Phenomenology of Language... 57
Conclusion ... 61
3 Abstract
In What is Literature?, Sartre articulates his conception of literary engagement (commitment) as an appeal from writer to reader, in which freedom is imagined to be the highest ethical end. The appeal functions through the instrumentality of language of literary prose; poetry is excluded. In the course of his work, however, Sartre develops a different stance towards poetry, engagement and the role of the writer. Goldthorpe treats Sartre’s philosophy as one that rejects conclusiveness and therefore considers his theory to be most sufficiently analysed by means of an intertextual approach that includes his literary fiction. Sartre’s biography on Mallarmé is key in this approach: in it, he describes Mallarmé’s poetry as as committed as possible. Through his analysis of Mallarmé’s life as a project of commitment to the failure of poetry, Sartre reinstates the value of ambiguity. This concerns both language itself, and consciousness, as he now envisions it to be contributing to the transcendence of the subject’s alienation from themselves, the Other, the world and language. The developments in Sartre’s thought raise the fundamental question: Language or Man? According to Goldthorpe, this question and its subsequent concerns can be analysed in terms of Sartre’s rhetoric of imagination: the persuasive linguistic figures Sartre uses to appeal to the imagination of the reader in order to contest the traditional limits of logic. Goldthorpe’s account of the development of Sartrean commitment complicates this interpretation: the rhetorical, functional style of Sartre’s work reveals the early presence of questions that would be articulated and deepened out further in his later work. Roads to Freedom is overlaid with such rhetorical structures, and they already illuminate the self-questioning nature of what is often taken to be the philosophy Sartre attempted to exemplify by means of his fiction. Goldthorpe’s account of Sartrean engagement functions as the basis for my analysis of the rhetoric of imagination in Roads to Freedom. In fundamental relation to the developments regarding Sartre’s engagement, I consider the key elements in his relative stance towards the aspects of inexpressibility, ambiguity, alienation, the sens/signification-distinction, the subject/object-dichotomy, le vécu and (de)totalization. According to these considerations, Sartre’s phenomenology of language can be (at least partly) uncovered, revealing the complexity of the language/man question that never stops busying philosophers.
4 Introduction
The question whether a writer is supposed to involve themselves politically in the society that delivers them – take a stance; choose sides – or whether they are allowed to retract into an ivory tower of artistic immunity, has been a pressing one for some time now. Engagement is never off the table: now and then it seems that only literature which involves a political component is considered worthy of praise; at other times, this tendency within the literary climate is fiercely contested, because whoever decided art could not just be art for art’s sake anymore? If there is any philosopher that can always be counted on to make matters more complicated, it is of course the one for whom existence precedes essence, hell is other people, and, most importantly, words are loaded pistols. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) can be considered a pioneer of the advocacy of literary engagement. Although never having been able to make a lifelong commitment to any considerable political organization himself, Sartre wrote about the interplay between literature and politics as littérature engagé extensively. However, his conception of literary engagement has been in no way unwavering: it altered in some significant respects along the way. Sartre’s philosophical considerations seem to have visited nearly both ends of the spectrum that covers the extent to which a writer can or should be engaged, but he never surrendered to the idea that art could just exist for art’s sake. Eventually, literature will serve a purpose. How it does, exactly, is a question that takes us deep into the heart of Sartre’s existential phenomenology. The complexity of this question might give us an indication of why it is still pressing, and mostly unresolved.
In What is Literature? (1947), Sartre describes literature as a commitment to freedom. It is an appeal from writer to reader, in which freedom is imagined to be the highest ethical end. The appeal functions through the instrumentality of language of literary prose. Language is at our disposal, it can be turned into action; Sartre even goes as far as to say that “we are within language as within our body.”1 Words, for Sartre, are loaded pistols: to write is to speak, to
speak is to act, and to act is to shoot.2 This does not go for all linguistic expression: poetry, for instance, is left out of this equation. Whereas literary language needs a referent in reality, poetic language embodies the l’art pour l’art Sartre initially contests: it refers only to itself, whereas change needs to happen in the real world. Seventeen years later, however, the perspective seems to have shifted completely. In his autobiography Words (1964), Sartre considers his previous attitude towards language illusory. He writes: “Since I had discovered the world through
1 Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature? (New York, Routledge Classics, 2001): 12.
2 Geoffrey Baker, “Pressing Engagement: Sartre’s Littérature, De Beauvoir’s Literature and the Lingering
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language, for a long time I mistook language for the world. To exist was to have a registered trade-name somewhere in the Table of the Word; writing meant engraving new beings on them or – this was my most persistent illusion – catching living things in the trap of phrases.”3 But before arriving at these conclusions, Sartre’s phenomenology of language undergoes some significant changes.
Sartre admitted “that he had never formulated an explicit philosophy of language but insisted that one could be reconstructed from elements employed throughout his work.”4 Rhiannon Goldthorpe’s treatment of the development of Sartre’s concept of engagement (or commitment) in Sartre: Literature and Theory can be considered in line with such a project of reconstruction. In Sartre’s work, the question of language is intricately tied up with the question of literary engagement: if we can disclose the nature of language, we can determine its possibility to affect the world and create freedom. Goldthorpe treats Sartre’s philosophy as one that rejects conclusiveness and thus considers it appropriate that her analysis of the relationship between Sartre’s theory and literature formulates only open-ended questions. She urges all readers of Sartre to do the same: to continually reframe their enquiries in terms of the open-ended philosophy he is considered to comply with himself.5 She suggests that style is functional in his works, which provides a common ground for both his philosophical and literary writing.6
On the basis of his analysis of Stephane Mallarmé’s poetry as as committed as possible, Sartre reinstates the value of ambiguity, which relates to both consciousness and language as the ability to transcend alienation. According to Goldthorpe this means that the highest stakes are risked: “la Parole ou l’Homme.”7 Is language ours, or are we in it? According to Goldthorpe, the reconstruction of Sartre’s phenomenology of language can be analysed further on the basis of a structural rhetoric of imagination: the persuasive and linguistic figures he uses to appeal to the imagination of the reader to contest the traditional limits of logic. It is this function of imagination of language, its very structure and semantics, that Goldthorpe wants to see explored further when reading Sartre. According to her, reading Sartre is a project that is never quite finished: the open-endedness and the interrelatedness of his earlier and later work, and of his philosophy and his fiction, should always encourage us to dig deeper.
Between 1945 and 1949, Sartre published the first three volumes of Roads to Freedom, the fourth of which was published in Les Temps Modernes in 1981 (posthumously). His
3 Jean-Paul Sartre, Words, trans. Irene Clephane (London: Penguin, 2000): 115. 4 Thomas Flynn, “Jean-Paul Sartre,” (The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2013).
5 Rhiannon Goldthorpe, Sartre: Literature and Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984): 3. 6 Goldthorpe, Sartre: Literature and Theory, 2.
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conception of committed literature was supposedly still very action-centred, since What is Literature? was published somewhere in the middle of the publication of the three volumes of Roads to Freedom. However, Goldthorpe’s account of the development of Sartrean commitment complicates this interpretation: the rhetorical, functional style of Sartre’s work reveals the early presence of questions that would be articulated and deepened out further in his later work. It becomes clear that the difference between Sartre’s earlier and later conception of commitment is not so radical after all, rather, it bears witness of a deepening of questions that are, in earlier texts, already present in rhetorical form. Consequently, Roads to Freedom inhabits this rhetoric. Goldthorpe lists a number of stylistic devices it appears in: “apparent tautologies, the negation of a term by itself, the identity of contradictory propositions, oxymoron, the ‘category mistakes’ of metaphor.”8 Indeed, Roads to Freedom is constructed out
of such stylistic devices, and they already illuminate the self-questioning nature of what is often taken to be the philosophy Sartre attempted to exemplify by means of his fiction. Goldthorpe’s account of Sartrean commitment, then, will function as the base for my analysis of the seductive rhetoric Roads to Freedom is overlaid with.
In the first part of my thesis, I will discuss Sartre’s earlier conception of engagement. I will outline the concepts of freedom and consciousness as they are described in Being and Nothingness (1943) because they form the basis for Sartre’s conception of engagement as disclosed in What is Literature?. I will discuss this further in relation to the concept of creative imagination, the relationship between writer and reader, and the situation of the writer. I will then focus on the relationship between language and the world, because I believe this is the locus for the most fundamental change in Sartre’s thought on literary engagement.
In the second part, I will discuss Sartre’s later conception of engagement in relation to some concepts that have become increasingly emphasized throughout his writing: first disinformation and the inexpressible, and then materiality, ambiguity and alienation. To briefly summarize the most essential changes up until this point, I will relate this late conception of engagement to the earlier one by analysing the changes in Sartre’s thought on consciousness and freedom. They lead me to an analysis of the evolution of his thought on language: whereas in Sartre’s earlier thought, language is considered instrumental and transparent, it is now considered part of the lived experience (vécu), which constitutes a fundamentally different conception of the relationship between language and the world.
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In the third part of my thesis, I will illustrate how metaphorical language has a rhetorical function in Sartre’s earlier fictional work, which exemplifies the changes in his thought on consciousness, freedom and language. The focus on these rhetorical structures allows the reader of Sartre to rethink the interrelatedness of his philosophy and literary fiction, and consider this philosophy an open-ended one with an emphasis on the aspect of enquiry through imagination. In relation to Sartre’s Roads to Freedom, I consider narrative and thematic structures, conversion and the inexpressible, metaphor as a category mistake and, finally, the implications for the development of Sartre’s thought on engagement this entails.
8 1. Early Engagement: A Literature of Praxis
I Being and Nothingness: Consciousness and Freedom
Sartre’s conception of freedom in What is Literature? is based on three modes of consciousness: Being-in-Itself, Being-for-Itself and Being-for-Others (en-soi, pour-soi and pour-autrui). Sartre first describes these modes of consciousness in his essay on phenomenological ontology Being and Nothingness. Being-in-Itself indicates a mode of consciousness in which one considers oneself to be whole, complete and unable to be affected by the presence of other consciousnesses. It is an inauthentic mode of being, one lives in Bad Faith: attached to a belief or set of beliefs that generates self-deception.9 In the case of Being-for-Itself, consciousnesses
do recognize each other. This is a more fluid and dynamic mode of being. Being-in-Itself can be seen as nonconscious (Sartre rejects the terminology of the unconscious); Being-for-Itself as conscious.10 Being-for-Itself should be seen as the internal negation of the Being-in-Itself, and
this duality constitutes our situation: “Viewed more concretely, this duality is cast as ‘facticity’ and ‘transcendence.’ The ‘givens’ of our situation such as our language, our environment, our previous choices and our very selves in their function as in-Itself constitute our facticity. As conscious individuals, we transcend this facticity in what constitutes our ‘situation.’”11 We are
always in situation. At the same time we experience the need to give our being meaning, which Sartre indicates with the term obligation, even though it is neither a physical, nor a rational force. We cannot detach ourselves from this necessity, and it constitutes us at the most fundamental level. Thus, we are more than our situation, Sartre thinks: we are free, and we are condemned to be so.12
Sartre does not discuss the concept of freedom along the lines of the philosophical tradition that precedes him: he notably sidesteps terms such as will and liberty, and evades notions of freedom as a property to be ascribed to human beings. Freedom, according to Sartre, is freedom of consciousness. It is inseparable from the being of human reality: “We can be free in relation to the things of the world, only if our self-relation contains freedom.”13 Consciousness, as we have seen, is the “imaginative transcendence of the given situation.” 14
But consciousness is also intentional: it always relates to something it negates. The distance
9 Thomas Flynn, Jean-Paul Sartre (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) 10 Flynn, “Jean-Paul Sartre,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2013). 11 Idem.
12 Sebastian Gardner, Sartre’s ‘Being and Nothingness’: A Reader's Guide (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2009): 154. 13 Gardner, Sartre’s ‘Being and Nothingness,’ 149.
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between subject and object is called negation or nothingness. Next to that, consciousness is
temporal: “it constantly surpasses itself in anticipation of the future.”15 This means that
consciousness is not subject to matter, since it is constant negation of it, and always future-oriented instead of determined by a past, which makes it radically contingent. The aspects of intentionality and temporality constitute the ontological structure of the necessary, universal human features of consciousness, and make it free.16
The third mode of consciousness, Being-for-Others, is a mode in which we adopt the form in which others perceive us: “The category or ontological principle of the for-others comes into play as soon as the other subject or Other appears on the scene. The Other cannot be deduced from the two previous principles [Being-in-Itself and Being-for-itself] but must be encountered.”17 Sartre describes the shame that occurs when consciousnesses encounter each
other through the look or gaze, by the analogy of looking through a keyhole and spying on others, when suddenly being caught in the act. But when subjects encounter each other, there is more to it than just shame. In “Sartre & the Other: Conflict, Conversion, Language and the We,” Gavin Rae argues that the concept of conversion has often been overlooked when analysing Sartre’s phenomenological ontology. Conversion is a specific process of communication, that consists of two important aspects: “1) consciousness alters its pre-reflective fundamental project so that it values freedom as the highest ethical and; and 2) consciousness alters its reflective self-understanding so that it recognizes that it is a subjective freedom that lives an objective body in an objective situation.”18 These two aspects of the
relations between consciousnesses imply that their nature is not merely conflictual. It is not the case that they are fundamentally unable to identify with each other’s subjective freedom: they are at least able to comprehend it.19 Consciousnesses relate to each other through the look, which refers to a recognition of the Other as a general presence (not just ocular). The meaning attributed to the Other’s look depends on the subject’s pre-reflective fundamental project: “the freely chosen general project that shapes its reflective self-understanding and its everyday values, norms, meanings, and choices.”20
Our natural inclination would be to choose a project that is in Bad Faith. A consciousness that is in Bad Faith fails to understand that it is a free subjectivity living in an
15 Storm Heter, Sartre’s Ethics of Engagement, 8. 16 Idem., 18.
17 Flynn, “Jean-Paul Sartre,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2013).
18 Gavin Rae, “Sartre & the Other: Conflict, Conversion, Language and the We,” (Sartre Studies International
15.2, 2009): 55.
19 Rae, “Sartre & the Other,” 68. 20 Idem., 54.
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objective situation, and so its project would consist of trying to fill the nothingness between itself and the world. It is not content with being nothing, so it attempts to become something, create itself – essentially, it wants to be God.21 It would not recognize the Other’s freedom as such and so consciousnesses would be primordially conflictual. But we can surpass this conflict by the formation of we-relations. It is essential for the recognition of the Other and the Other’s freedom to create these we-relations. They are made possible by conversion, in which consciousnesses alter their pre-reflective project to value freedom as the highest ethical end, and alter their pre-reflective self-understanding to recognize “a subjective freedom that lives an objective body in an objective situation.”22 This conception of consciousnesses’ relational
aspect is fundamental to that of the writer/reader. Language, as the essential vehicle for carrying out the project of conversion, supports the relation of the mutual recognition of each other’s freedom, instead of negating the Other’s subjectivity.23
When we-relations are formed, consciousness “reflectively recognizes, respects, and affirms the Other’s practical freedom, which is based on their ontological freedom.”24 Practical
or empirical freedom is the freedom we can speak of on a daily basis, the popular conception of it that entails a freedom of action. Ontological freedom, on the other hand, indicates the philosophical, technical conception of it.25 It is a characteristic of consciousness. Practical freedom is based on ontological freedom when consciousness’ activity is not being restrained by external forces, and that it is able to “freely and creatively express itself in the real world.”26
After Being and Nothingness, Sartre loses the distinction between practical and ontological freedom and ascribes a priority to how “our social and historical being involves a union of freedom with necessity.”27 When analysing What is Literature?, however, it is still important
to understand this difference. For Sartre, ontological freedom is the basic ground on which literary engagement can exist, whereas practical freedom is what the writer hopes to establish through an appeal to the reader’s creative imagination.
II What is Literature?: Consciousness, Freedom and Creative Imagination
At the basis of Sartre’s What is Literature? lies a belief in literature as a commitment to freedom, and an appeal to the writer to carry responsibility for it. Literature, having delivered
21 Rae, “Sartre & the Other,” 64-65. 22 Idem., 55.
23 Idem., 62. 24 Idem., 55.
25 Gardner, Sartre’s ‘Being and Nothingness,’ 160. 26 Rae, “Sartre & the Other,” 75.
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the writer, is “an abstract function and an a priori power of human nature; it is the movement whereby at every moment man frees himself from history; in short, it is the exercise of freedom.”28 This conception of freedom has the characteristics of a totalizing, action-centred
theory. It focusses on the writer as a product of their contemporary socio-political environment. We are ontologically free, according to Sartre, but this does not mean that our choices are limitless. We do have to realize that we can freely choose the position we take in relation to the facticity of our situation, since “it is not a matter of choosing one’s age but of choosing oneself within it.”29
A writer is an inevitable product of their own time, but through the dialectical and reciprocal process of writing, they should appeal to a universal public. Writing is dialectical in the sense that it seeks to bring about a higher consciousness among two opposing ones (reader and writer) as they are confronted with each other. Moreover, it is reciprocal in the sense that the interaction between writer and reader, as mutual contributors to the same project, constructs its existence. These aspects of literature make it an appeal instead of a finished product. The writer appeals to the context-specific aspects of an envisioned reader that possess the quality of unveiling universal, human truths. In this way, they contest the reader’s alienation and dogmatism: literature functions as a catalyst for change. After all, “it is the writer’s mission to dispel inertia, ignorance, prejudice and false emotion.”30 For Sartre, appealing to these
situational effects (ignorance, prejudice and the like) in order to express universal, human truths, can only happen through the signification of prosaic language, which finds its resonance in the world.
In What is Literature? Sartre distinguishes verbal arts from fine arts, and prose from poetry. This is because poetry, according to Sartre, exists as an end for itself, and is therefore incapable of committing itself to freedom. Within prosaic expression, “each sentence contains language in its entirety and refers back to the whole universe.”31 Consequently, literary prose
is to be judged by measure of the extent to which it relates to the world, instead of the aesthetic criteria reserved for poetry. Sartre’s prose/poetry distinction can be considered in light of language’s necessity to engage with the world: “Prose works through the signification of words, poetry through the sens.”32 The words of literary prose are descriptive and significative, they
28 Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature? (New York, Routledge Classics, 2001): 80. 29 Sartre, What is Literature?, 184.
30 Idem., X. 31 Idem., 15.
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signify worldly aspects, whereas poetic language, employing the sens, refers predominantly to itself.
Signification and sens can be distinguished from each other by the way they relate to the concept of meaning. Signification can be regarded as a direct imposition of words upon things as referents.33 It is “effected by signs, that is to say, bearers of meaning which direct our attention beyond themselves to whatever they signify.”34 Sens, on the other hand, appeals to the
infinite and universal meaning of inexpressible things through an aspect of the given object. Our attention and understanding are directed towards the quality of the object that involves “the incarnation of a reality which goes beyond it but which cannot be grasped apart from it and whose infinity does not allow expression in any system of signs.”35 Prose, with its significative
language, escapes the self-reflexive and thereby self-destructive tendency of the language of the sens. It is to be judged on the basis of a method Sartre calls action by disclosure. He writes: “I reveal the situation by my very intention of changing it; […] with every word I utter, I involve myself a little more in the world, and by the same token I emerge from it a little more, since I go beyond it towards the future.”36 By disclosing the world he seeks to change, the writer moves
towards action.
“There is no given freedom,” Sartre writes in For Whom Does One Write?, the third chapter of What is Literature?.37 “It is nothing else but the movement by which one perpetually uproots and liberates oneself.”38 Freedom, however ontological, is not a given fact: it is to be
achieved constantly as individual victories over the self, the other, and the situation. At the same time, “like the sea, there is no end to it.”39 According to Howells, as she writes in Sartre: The
Necessity of Freedom, Sartre is always concerned with freedom in relation to its opposite, non-freedom: alienation or aspects of human finitude, like the limits of language. Howells writes: “The early Sartre […] is concerned primarily with the individual, his situation and his facticity; the later Sartre with society, ‘pre-destination’ and the ‘practico-inert.’”40 What is Literature?
emerges from these earlier thoughts on freedom, relating to the individual, the situation and facticity. Here, freedom is freedom of consciousness: the movement that characterizes freedom starts with a consciousness that realizes itself to be a free subject in an objective situation.
33 Suzanne Guerlac, “Sartre and the Powers of Literature,” (Modern language Notes 108.5, 1993): 810. 34 Paul Crittenden, “The Singular Universal in Jean-Paul Sartre,” (Literature and Aesthetics 8, 2011): 33. 35 Crittenden, “The Singular Universal in Jean-Paul Sartre,” 33.
36 Sartre, What is Literature?, 14 37 Idem., 50.
38 Idem., 50. 39 Idem., 50.
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According to Howells, Sartre’s works on aesthetics and literary criticism deal with notions of freedom of consciousness in terms of the creative imagination.41 Considering freedom of consciousness synonymous with the imagination allows Sartre to “relate his literary productions and aesthetic theories to his philosophical and political radicalism.”42 Imagining is a type of consciousness, and an image is relational: it is a consciousness of something. At the same time, it proposes a nothingness (néant), since, when we imagine an object, we know that it is not before us, precisely because we imagine it.43 Howells writes: “Imagination is not simply the formation of images, not just a matter of daydreaming. It also allows us to envisage the possible, the unreal, that which is not; in positing the unreal it simultaneously negates the real, and it is this power to negate which is the key to the freedom of consciousness. It is imagination which permits us to stand back and totalize the world as world.”44 The negating function of
consciousness is synonymous with the imagination’s function to go beyond the real, to replace any notion of pre-destination with contingency, and thus to constitute freedom.
Taking a step back, proposing the nothingness of the unreal is the same act as placing the world as a synthetic totality. Without the power to imagine we would get stuck in the world, according to Sartre, and merely exist without being able to seize something else than existence. Imagination is consciousness in its entirety, as it realizes its own freedom.45 Howells writes: “I perceive the world as I do because I can at any moment stand back from it; in so far as I apprehend the world as a meaningful totality, I go beyond the immediate ‘given,’ and this potential dépassement is always implicit in my awareness of my situation.”46 The creative imagination, then, is a type of consciousness that fully realizes its freedom, and perceives the world as a meaningful totality. The (potential) dépassement, in this context, refers to the surpassing of the facticity of the Being-in-Itself (the ‘givens’ of our situation such as language) by the negation of it by the Being-for-Itself. It constitutes the situation we are in, and in which we feel the obligation to give our being meaning.
Meaning is not contained in language, for art is not an end in itself, but is rather realized through it as a dialectical process. Words are a kind of secondary action, as Sartre calls it, since they depend on a reflective consciousness. Since art is, according to Sartre, a recovery of the totality of being, “the creative act aims at a total renewal of the world.”47 The writer needs to
41 Howells, Sartre: The Necessity of Freedom, 1. 42 Idem., 10.
43 Idem., 11. 44 Idem., 13. 45 Idem., 3. 46 Idem., 13-14.
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want (practical, not merely ontological) freedom as their highest ethical end. They address their contemporaries while at the same time manifesting themselves as essential to the universality of being, in order to realize change. Sartre writes: “This is quite the final goal of art: to recover this world by giving it to be seen as it is, but as if it had its source in human freedom.”48 Literary
prose is able to exist as such a relational process through which freedom can be realized. It always relates to something: to the world; to others. Sartre writes: “There is no art except for and by others.”49 In What is Literature?, then, there is no writer without a reader.
III The Relationship between Reader and Writer
Consciousnesses do not interact through language first, but through the look. The look is primordially a social relation. At first it is alienating to realize oneself to be an object through the look of the Other, but through conversion consciousnesses are opened up to the possibility of transcending their alienating and conflictual tendencies. By re-evaluating and abandoning their inauthentic pre-reflective fundamental project to become God, consciousnesses can adopt a project that considers freedom to be the highest end. The subject then understands that it needs the Other as a condition for experience. The pre-reflective fundamental projects are expressed and brought into practice by communication’s conversion. Language, then, functions as a pathway towards the recognition of the Other’s freedom.50 This constitution of the we-relation is “the highest form of social relation because it allows each consciousness to exist freely and, by working with others in a way that affirms each other’s freedom, achieve ends they would not otherwise be able to achieve.”51 The structure of the we-relation constitutes authentic being:
being in full realization of the respective freedom of self and Other. In What is Literature?, Sartre regards the writer/reader relation to be one of those we-relations that is naturally formed. Through language, the writer appeals to the freedom of the reader, and through this appeal the literary object is constituted. Freedom, then, is experienced through a creative act, and the work of art exists by means of this act.52
In the act of reading, the potential engagement of the work of art is realized. In order to co-create this committed literary object, the reader has to adopt a certain willingness to keep alive the imagination that allows the writer to construct a certain worldview. Howells puts it as follows:
48 Sartre, What is Literature?, 42-43. 49 Idem., 31.
50 Rae, “Sartre & The Other: Conflict, Conversion, Language and the We,” 66. 51 Idem., 71.
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“The work is described as a call from writer to reader to participate in the paradox of what Sartre calls ‘un rêve libre,’ which appears to be his version of the ‘willing suspension of disbelief.’ […] In so far as works of art necessarily convey a certain world-view, the reader is drawn into a participation in the creation, not merely the observation, of that world as she reads.”53
The writer depends on the reader’s willingness to imagine with them – without it, the possibility of commitment would be lacking, and the literary object would not be constituted.
Sartre calls the process of reading a dialectical paradox. The writer acknowledges and appeals to the freedom of the reader, but the reader has to recognize the creative freedom of the writer as well, requesting it as a “symmetrical and inverse appeal.”54 Sartre writes: “The more
we experience our freedom, the more we recognize that of the other; the more he demands of us, the more we demand of him.”55 The work of art, then, exists through the perpetual
continuation of the reciprocal, paradoxical dialectics between writer and reader. The literary object is not given in language, but realized through it.56 Its meaning is not contained within the words, but is entirely dependent on the subject. On the other hand, Sartre thinks, words are like traps “to arouse our feelings and to reflect them towards us.”57 The role of language is paradoxical as well: words are already given to the reader, and directed towards having a certain effect, but on the other hand, everything still needs to be done. Sartre writes: “Each word is a path of transcendence; it shapes our feelings, names them, and attributes them to an imaginary personage who take it upon himself to live them for us and who has no other substance than these borrowed passions; he confers objects, perspectives, and a horizon upon them.”58 The
literary artwork depends on the reader’s subjectivity to constitute it as meaningful; to finish it, even though, since this process has no end in sight, the work of art is never really finished.
IV The Situation of the Writer
The writer/reader-relationship, then, consists of a situated writer on the one hand, and the public he addresses on the other. This relationship has, according to Sartre, taken on different forms
53 Howells, Sartre: The Necessity of Freedom, 51. 54 Sartre, What is Literature?, 38.
55 Idem., 38. 56 Idem., 32. 57 Idem., 33. 58 Idem., 33.
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throughout different periods of time. In most of the seventeenth century, the writer embraced the specific profession of writing and its idiosyncratic attributes. Literature had a quietly moralizing function: it urged man to transcend from the psychological way they understood the world into the moral. It was not concerned with any specific oppressed class, but did not contribute to oppression either: “The writer, though completely assimilated by the oppressing class, is by no means its accomplice; his work is unquestionably a liberator since its effect, within this class, is to free man from himself.”59 The writer saw themselves as a liberator of
man in general.
In the eighteenth century, the specific moulds in which a writer could work were broken up: they started to reject the ideology of the ruling class.60 Their situation was characterized by
tension, since they had to satisfy two opposing interests: that of the governing class, and that of the (in Marxist terms) rising class: the bourgeoisie. The élite wanted writers to propagate the religious and political beliefs they had lost faith in (which made the validity of these principles all the more questionable); the bourgeois, having just become conscious of itself, needed to be guided into any enlightening direction. Sartre writes: “The essential characteristic of the eighteenth-century writer was precisely an objective and subjective unclassing. Though he still remembered his bourgeois attachments, yet the favour of the great drew him away from his milieu.”61 Soaring up out of his class, the writer became “pure thought, pure observation.”62
Literature’s identification with the Mind, “the permanent power of forming and criticizing ideas,” gave it its sudden independence.63 Whereas in the seventeenth century, the liberating
function of literature had been implicit and veiled, eighteenth-century literature was always immediately an act of liberation. However, since literature, by serving the interests of different groups, had become a mere formality, its very essence had become an object of scrutiny. It lost its privileged position.
Nineteenth-century literature wanted to free itself of any ideology, and did so by appealing to a virtual public instead of any actual public. Therefore, it remained abstract and negating, as it failed to recognize itself as ideological.64 In the nineteenth century, the masses wanted power, but they had no culture or leisure on which to base a literary revolution. The writer, then, reverted back to the bourgeois public again. “Thus, the writer, who needed the
59 Sartre, What is Literature?, 74. 60 Idem., 80.
61 Idem., 77. 62 Idem., 78. 63 Idem., 79. 64 Idem., 93.
17
favour of the great to unclass himself, ended by taking himself for the incarnation of the whole nobility, and as the latter was characterized by its parasitism it was the ostentation of parasitism which he chose for his style of living. He made himself the martyr of pure consumption.”65 In
the end, Sartre thinks, there is nothing left to do for literature except challenge itself.
Literature thus characterizes itself as a long, dialectical process which came to an end, according to Sartre, with surrealism.66 This is characterized as “the literature of adolescence, of that age when the young man, useless and without responsibility, still supported and fed by his parents, wastes his family’s money, passes judgement on his father, and takes part in the demolition of the serious universe which protected his childhood.”67Instead, the writer should have tried to find an actual public in the oppressed classes, to start a declassing from below and incentivize what Sartre calls a “movement of ideas, that is, an open, contradictory, and dialectical ideology.”68 But surrealism marked, according to Sartre, literature’s fall. What is
now left to do for literature, then, is to make use of these experiences, as it “comes to raise the question of its essential content.”69
The writer thus begins the day after their death, and their job is now to address a concrete universality. This concrete universality should be understood as “the sum total of men living in a given society.”70 The writer immediately realizes that they only write for a select group of
readers, and so their appeal is, like the surrealists, to a virtual public. However, Sartre writes: “If the public were identified with the concrete universal, the writer would really have to write about the human totality. Not about the abstract man of all the ages and for a timeless reader, but about the whole man of his age and for his contemporaries.”71 For Sartre, the writer “must write for a public which has the freedom of changing everything; which means, besides suppression of classes, abolition of all dictatorship, constant renewal of frameworks, and the continuous overthrowing of order once it tends to congeal. In short, literature is, in essence, the subjectivity of a society in permanent revolution.”72 The writer should be concerned with
freedom as an end, strive for progress and base themselves on ethical principles, appealing to a public that finishes their thought. Literature is a moment of reflective consciousness, it is to be thrown into the world and propose renewal as its job, it is a constant incentive for action. This
65 Sartre, What is Literature?, 98. 66 Idem., 102. 67 Idem., 112-113. 68 Idem., 114. 69 Idem., 118. 70 Idem., 119. 71 Idem., 120. 72 Idem., 122.
18 total literature can actually only exist in a society that is classless. It would be complete and in full realization of its essence in a socialist collectivity.73 However, paradoxically, literature would end in a classless society by becoming conscious of itself. Therefore the classless society should be understood as utopian: the practical tools to realize it are lacking. Literature is the essential condition for action striving towards but never realizing classlessness.
In the fourth and last chapter of What is Literature?, “Situation of the Writer in 1947,” in which Sartre specifically appeals to the French intellectual writer, he envisions a literature of praxis, “that is, as a synthesis of historical relativity and moral and metaphysical absolute.”74
He urges the writer to take a position and pursue socialist principles, but at the same time reject doctrines that consider socialism as an absolute end.75 A literature of praxis is both negative
and constructive: it is negative in the sense that it seeks to clean its instrument, that is, to rid language of its thick and turbid excrescences and make it pure again (to call a spade a spade), and it is constructivist in the sense that it is supposed to engage politically.76 Sartre rejects the
(poetic) writer who speaks in order to say nothing.77 Literature has to examine, represent and criticize its political situation, engage and invent the whole of man, even if only for its own survival, since, according to Sartre, a free circulation of ideas and the possibility for literature to find a public and an object can only be possible in a socialist Europe.78
The situation of the writer in 1947, then, depends on the writer’s mission to find a public and an object, so that they can determine how to represent their situation and subjectivity from throughout, address a human totality and affect change. Sartre considers teachers, intellectuals, the (new) bourgeoisie, peasants and the working class, although these last two categories supposedly hardly read. But, Sartre thinks, the public needs to be told what it needs, and more specifically: that it needs to read. Sartre concludes What is Literature? by stating that socialism, democracy and peace are literature’s last and only chance. He cannot guarantee that literature is immortal. Then again, “the world can do very well without literature. But it can do without man still better.”79
Sartre’s appeal to literature to examine, represent and criticize its political situation, and to engage man as universal man, can be viewed in light of his theory of the universal singular (or singular universal). Throughout his work, Sartre sought to provide “a comprehensive
73 Sartre, What is Literature?, 120-121. 74 Idem., 184.
75 Idem., 214-215. 76 Idem., 215.
77 Opelz, “Between Writing and World,” 335. 78 Sartre, What is Literature?, 227-228. 79 Idem., 229.
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method by which one might hope to understand individual persons or particular events, on the one hand, and the whole of history on the other.”80 In What is Literature?, this method is not
yet fully articulated. Sartre’s views are outlined only very generally. Paul Crittenden writes:
“Each person is shaped by, and is an expression, of universal history and their epoch; at the same time, each person contributes to the history of which they are part. From the early 1960’s, Sartre came to express this idea in the phrase ‘singular universal’ and the reverse formulation ‘universal singular.’ The idea, in summary, is that individuals reflect the universal features of their time and, conversely, that the individuals of an age are realised concretely and singularly by individuals.”81
It is clear that in What is Literature?, Sartre is already appealing to a dialectical relationship between a singular, situated writer, and a concrete public as universal man. In the biographies Sartre wrote in later years on Baudelaire, Genet and, most importantly, Mallarmé, this appeal will be particularized, which will steer his conceptions of language and literary engagement towards that of critical consciousness. First, however, I will consider Sartre’s early engagement in relation to his thought on language and the world as it forms an underlying structural base.
V Between Language and World
I will briefly summarize Sartre’s engagement as I have outlined it so far. Early engagement can be characterized as follows: it is based on ontological freedom and strives for practical freedom, it is an appeal from writer to reader based on the creative imagination, and it is an attempt to unite the individual subject as they are delivered from their specific socio-historical context with man as a concrete universality. These ideas stem from Sartre’s phenomenological analyses of consciousness and freedom. Consciousness is relational and intentional, according to the earlier Sartre, and it is able to surpass conflictual relations by conversion through language. Achieving it through art requires literary language, which refers to the world by signification. However, a work of art escapes its author: it is never finished, but instead exists as a reciprocal, dialectical paradox. The extent to which language has the possibility to liberate us, then, depends on what can be said to be totalizing tendencies in Sartre’s work: his interest in an
80 Crittenden, “The Singular Universal in Jean-Paul Sartre,” 31. 81 Idem., 31.
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appeal to man as totality, or concrete universality. But the role of language in Sartre’s earlier conception of engagement is a topic of discussion.
It has often been argued that Sartre never provided an actual answer to the question of what an engaged writer is supposed to write about. Suzanne Guerlac, however, argues that a question like that does not do justice to a sufficient interpretation of Sartre’s thought. First of all, Guerlac analyses that Sartre’s conception of engagement has often been considered to be of a mythical nature. Since it is directed at an impossible totalization, the outset of it has the character of myth, a new myth that is to be created after the end of history. It is characterized by the desire to describe an origin on which to base its goal, and an eventual return to this origin as though its essence is situated within a cyclical temporality.
Secondly Guerlac argues that if we want to do justice to the mythical status of Sartre’s conception of engaged literature, the rhetoric of transparency and of instrumentality have to be considered more profoundly. Transparency is associated with a contemplative model of consciousness; it assumes an analogy between consciousness of something and the signification of words, as if there were an ideal representation of them. The theme of instrumentality, on the other hand, is associated with an action model of communication.82 Reading What is Literature? with a focus on these two themes reveals, according to Guerlac, that social relations are foundational to the concept of engagement. She argues that the literary prose work should not be seen as a transparent instrument through which the writer appeals to the reader to deliver meaning. Rather, we should look at the rhetoric of Sartre’s philosophy that suggests we consider the crisis of language, and its possibility to unveil.
According to Sartre, the word passes through the look, Guerlac argues, which means that any conception of transparency of words should not be modelled after a contemplative consciousness, but after the look itself, which constitutes intersubjective reciprocity instead of
undisturbed signification.83 Next to that, the notion of instrumentality becomes invalidated in
the course of What is Literature? itself. In the first chapters of What is Literature?, language still seems to be presented as a tool, ready to hand. However, in the course of the work it becomes clear that this is not the case: language is in crisis since “the link between speech and action said to epitomize the prose of literary engagement […] has been broken by the war.”84
Language cannot be seen as instrumental anymore. Instead, it should be regarded as consisting of a specific socio-political reality in the first place. Because its goal is freedom, it will direct
82 Guerlac, “Sartre and the Powers of Literature,” 813. 83 Idem., 814.
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itself towards the social relations it seeks to change: “The alliance between literature and politics derives, for Sartre, from the very essence of literature. The literary absolute – the recognition of freedom by itself – provides the model for, as well as the means to, social relations at the end of history.”85
Following from this interpretation of Sartre’s conception of engagement as outlined in What is Literature?, Guerlac appeals to the (Marxist) motive of revolution as well:
“It is not the case, then, that literary engagement enjoins the author to write in a transparent prose in order to express social or political ideas, valid and legitimate in themselves, and to encourage the responsible social or political action that would be dictated by those values. Rather, the ontology of the literary event itself, as founding moment of value (the absolute value of freedom as condition of possibility for the invention of any value, ‘la reconnaissance de la liberté par elle-même’), provides the model for the utopian goal in social relations. As such it calls for its own concrete realization through revolution.”86
An engaged writer has to consider the socio-political context as a framework from which to start to fight for freedom. This notion of revolution, according to Guerlac, stems from Sartre’s conception of unveiling (dévoilement) as disclosed in the third chapter of What is Literature?: “For Whom Does One Write?.” The first chapter considers unveiling to be the aspect of language that turns it into action; the second considers it to be the mechanism that answers to the inherent need of a text to be brought into objective being.87 Guerlac writes: “In the third section […] the figure of dévoilement is displaced to the process of historical becoming. It is a figure associated with freedom within historical embeddedness or situation, that is, with revolution.”88 This conception of revolution requires the invention of new solutions. Inventing
something means, after all, that something hidden is brought into appearance. “Freedom within history or situation is thus identified with the literary or creative process itself – invention.”89 Because literary language engenders the subjectivity of a society in revolution, because it
85 Guarlac, “Sartre and the Powers of Literature,” 823. 86 Idem., 819.
87 Idem., 819. 88 Idem., 819. 89 Idem., 819.
22 unveils or invents such a subjectivity, it has the possibility to resolve “antinomies of class contradiction.”90
According to Guerlac, however, freedom remains a paradigm for social or political ends in What is Literature?: “Literature is revolutionary in its essence, ontologically. But, as Sartre depicts in his sketch of concrete relations between writer and public, the historical process itself unfolds in terms of the binary structure of self and other.”91 The relationship between writer
and reader is precarious, according to Guerlac, and so in light of the historical process itself, alienated recognition (of interacting consciousnesses) is exhausted. Sartre’s depiction of the writer and their public in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth century does not feature any moments of overcoming the alienation of self and Other through language. It is only in the twentieth century that this possibility announces itself, when literature has to critically re-evaluate its own essence. But only the result of the remaining binary structures of self and Other (the way reader, writer and text relate to each other as Others) play a role in Sartre’s idea of (utopian) totalization.92 It is only in Sartre’s later work, starting with his Critique of Dialectical
Reason (1960), that history becomes part of literature’s totalizing project as well.93
For Guerlac, engagement in What is Literature? can be considered in light of literature’s revolutionary essence, its capability to unveil, and its effect on social relations. Literary language consists of a specific socio-political context in the first place; it is not a transparent instrument, since language “has fallen into history along with the writer.”94 Sartre’s conception
of engagement is for a significant part intertwined with the question how language operates. Hannes Opelz argues that the question of what literary engagement is (or should be) is intricately linked with the question of language, because it touches upon the relationship between language and the world.95 For him, however, transparency does fulfil an important role in language’s possibility to make literature engaged. He writes: “Sartre, of course, was hardly the first modern writer to establish a link between literature and commitment. […] The difference with Sartre is that he ‘inscribes engagement at the heart of the work.’ At the heart of the work, there is, of course, the question of language.”96 Sartre envisions a direct link between literature and the political, and thereby between language and the world, or writing and being. According to Opelz, Sartre saw it as his task as a writer to make Being-in-Language the
90 Guerlac, “Sartre and the Powers of Literature,” 820. 91 Idem., 820.
92 Idem., 820. 93 Idem., 820. 94 Idem., 807.
95 Opelz, “Between Writing and World,” 330. 96 Idem., 331.
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expression of Being-in-the-World, since the principal movement of language is its inherent transparency: the word is constantly negated to produce the thing; it is a living, moving thing that reaches out to the world to disclose it and produce meaning in the world.97 In short: language negates itself in order to generate action in the name of freedom.98 This is of course true for how, at least according to Howells, the creative imagination works for Sartre. But transparency, as will turn out, is not language’s only or most important characteristic.
For Opelz, to commit is to recognize the freedom of the self as a writer, the freedom of the reader and the freedom of all mankind, and to acknowledge the possibilities of literary language. Sartrean commitment, he argues, is “literature watching over its own conditions of possibility.”99 This means that engaged literature makes its own existence possible. Opelz
considers Sartre’s conception of language and literary activity to be that of a totalizing, unifying process, which supposes an unproblematic relation between language and the world. From this point of view, Sartre’s philosophy is considered essentially logocentric: it proposes language as the transparent medium by means of which an external reality or ideality can be signified.100
Opelz’s argument that the transparency of language is essential to Sartre’s conception of engagement complies with the proclamation that we are within language as within our bodies. On the other hand, it ignores the development Sartre’s thought undergoes in What is Literature? already: the increasing emphasis on language as subject to objective structures, that will eventually urge him to reinstate the value of its materiality. However, Opelz does recognize detotalizing aspects within Sartre’s conception of the totalizing character of literature, meaning there are already some aspects in it present that prevent it from being able to appeal to the totality or concrete universality of man. The engaged literature, in which the (not yet fully articulated) singular and universal should aim at reconciliation, is utopian from the start.101 As we shall see, the detotalizing aspects of Sartre’s unifying discourse are especially important to Goldthorpe (among others) for reading What is Literature? as a prelude to later developments in Sartre’s thought.
Guerlac and Opelz have slightly different conceptions of what literary engagement is according to the earlier Sartre, and what the role of the transparency of language is in relation to it. Either language is transparent and instrumental – a tool by means of which to express its referents in the world – or it is problematized from the start. Although inclined to support the
97 Opelz, “Between Writing and World,” 332. 98 Idem., 332-333.
99 Idem., 333. 100 Idem., 334. 101 Idem., 334.
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first conception, Opelz does direct our attention towards the essentially detotalizing aspects of literature’s totalizing project. He emphasizes that the goal of literature is utopian: it is always implied that complete totalization is impossible, since the imagination it presupposes is always also a negation of reality.
Guerlac argues that language is in crisis at the moment of Sartre’s formulation of engagement in What is Literature?. For her, what is most important to consider is language’s power to unveil the subjectivity of literature’s revolutionary character. Opelz, on the other hand, argues that in the same way that the imagination negates reality, language negates itself because of its inherent transparency, thereby creating the necessary freedom-centred action for engagement. Even though these views seem to conflict, both Guerlac’s nuance of the notions of transparency and instrumentality in What is Literature? and the emphasis literature’s negative character that Opelz points out, are significant for the consideration of Sartre’s later conception of engagement as a deepening of his earlier one. In the second part of my thesis, I will introduce Sartre’s late conception of engagement, and suggest which cogs in the machine of his thought are to be examined to determine its general motion.
25 2. Late Engagement: Materiality, Alienation and Ambiguity
VI Engagement Evolves
The evolution of Sartre’s conception of engagement can be exemplified most evidently by his Mallarmé, or the Poet of Nothingness (1953). In this study on Mallarmé, Sartre notoriously declares poetry to be possibly committed as well. In fact, Sartre proclaims that the engagement of this poet seems to him as total as possible.102 The relevant question, then, is how Sartre arrived at this supposedly unexpected conclusion. According to Ernest Sturm, as he writes in the introduction to the publication of Mallarmé from 2004, “what especially intrigued Sartre was the way Mallarmé’s unsettling negativity undermined the very substance of poetry: nature, society, the person of the poet himself. He once called Mallarmé ‘our greatest poet’ – a greatness enhanced by what Sartre perceived, paradoxically, as deficiencies redeemed by the poet’s life ‘project.’”103 By outlining Mallarmé’s (rather tragic) life project as a commitment to
poetry, Sartre attempts to lay bare the cultural patterns of the socio-political context that Mallarmé and contemporaries dealt with, and their effect on Western consciousness.104
Poets in Mallarmé’s day were predominantly unbelievers, but did display a certain nostalgia towards the faith that was lost. This rendered them unable to identify with their own class, whose values they despised, the result of which was that their grievances were projected onto the metaphysical realm. Unable to affect or be affected by their history or social status, these poets fled into the metaphysical.105 Sturm writes: “Since history seemed to have exhausted its teleological potential, their revolt becomes cosmic instead of social, symbolic and imaginary instead of real.”106 Sartre considers Mallarmé to be exemplary of the struggles of his time. Next
to that, the physical and psychological issues he suffered from personally, contribute, according to Sartre, to the universal collection of human errors such as apathy, narcissism and the tendency to flee into transitory passions. In their multiplicity, human errors such as Mallarmé’s testify to “the asphyxiation of French thought in the nineteenth century or to the human condition itself.”107 Stacking up all these human errors, according to Sartre, leads to the toppling
of them, and to the revelation of the human condition. In doing so, Mallarmé rises above the cultural restrains of his contemporary context.108 Mallarmé had to “live out the Paradox in all
102 Sartre, Mallarmé, or the Poet of Nothingness, trans. Ernest Sturm (Penn State Press, 2004): 16. 103 Sartre, Mallarmé, 1. 104 Idem., 3. 105 Idem., 3. 106 Idem., 3. 107 Idem., 64. 108 Idem., 4.
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its contradictions to the point of dying for it.”109 Thereby, he would testify of his situation and
that of the human condition itself, and then transcend it. According to Sturm, “Sartre insists that Mallarmé’s singular poesis grew out of a series of conscious choices exercised on the basis of prior conditions.”110 Mallarmé’s engagement, then, rests on the transcendence of the conditions
that are prior to his conscious choice.
In order to describe this process, Sartre appeals to Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis, but goes beyond these theories (especially psychoanalysis) to the extent that they cannot explain consciousness phenomenologically. From a phenomenological point of view, “an individual who enters a group realizes that its former ‘totalization’ has marked the limits for his own conduct. Within this context, he carries on his own totalization. His ‘truth’ is anchored both within him and outside him, for he is at once a reflexive consciousness and a social product.”111 This emphasis on the individual, reflexive, and therefore critical consciousness that is able to achieve its own totalization, marks a definite difference with the earlier conception of engagement, in which literature’s totalization is rooted in the dialectical relationship between the singular writer and the concrete, universal reader. The universal-singular is now constituted within the individual.
According to Sartre’s earlier conception of engagement, the individual writer or reader is shaped by their social, historical and political context as well, but with Mallarmé, surpassing them in order to achieve totalization now plays a vital part. Moreover, in Sartre’s earlier conception of engagement, language functions as a pathway towards the mutual recognition of freedom. However, “with Mallarmé, language is relentlessly pursued by its own negation.”112
Sartre has already proclaimed that poetic language always only refers back to itself, but now it becomes clear that Mallarmé’s surrender to its power to negate reality is precisely what constitutes his engagement: it elucidates the essence of poetry itself. According to Sturm, what united Sartre with Mallarmé was that they both shared the conviction that Being bursts from Nothingness (hence: the poet of Nothingness). By analysing the relationship between the individual’s socio-historical context and the human condition in its totality in greater depth, Sartre discovers the fundamental, ontological roles of self-reflexivity and transcendence on the basis of the self-negating essence of Mallarmé’s poetic language.
109 Sartre, Mallarmé, 64. 110 Idem., 9.
111 Idem., 10. 112 Idem., 13.
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Goldthorpe discusses L’idiot de la Famille (1971-1972), Mallarmé and a number of unfinished manuscripts of which the chronology is unclear, in order to reconstruct the development in Sartre’s thought on engagement. According to Goldthorpe, Sartre applies the progressive-regressive method to Mallarmé: a method that is concerned with the empathic understanding of the dialectical relationship between social conditioning, which involves psycho-analytical notions, and individual projects such as writing. This method proposes an emphasis on interdependent forces: “An inevitable involvement in society (even if the reaction to that involvement takes the form of a superficial detachment), and a more positive commitment to literature (which might indeed result from such a detachment).”113
In L’Engagement de Mallarmé, Sartre places the experience of the writer in an elaborate socio-historical context. Next to that, the poetic act itself is to be seen as constructively critical. Sartre increasingly emphasizes the reconciliation of the universal and the singular within the writer themselves, and according to Goldthorpe, this is the new prerequisite for commitment.114
In an (according to Goldthorpe superficially Marxist) account of the superstructure that surrounded Mallarmé and contemporaries, Sartre sketches a situation in which institutional changes, ideologies, culture and class attitudes are all interrelated. He refers in particular to the fall of the monarchy, the ‘death’ of God, a cultural situation in which the artist, such as the poet, is marginalized and the false consciousness of both the bourgeoisie and the petite-bourgeoisie.115 The economic base he describes consists of the interaction of competition and the free market with a social atomism “which cultivates the solitary and the incommunicable.”116 Together, these factors constitute Mallarmé’s socio-historical context.
Sartre rejects the Marxist idea of a causal and determining relationship between superstructure and economic base. He does, however, consider the outlines of the superstructure do contribute to a number of interrelating poetic attitudes such as sterility, loss of religious and social vocation, misanthropy, elitism and negativism.117 Instead of causal relations, Sartre envisions the necessity for an active attitude of reciprocity between social conditions and the individual – the universal and the singular. The relationship between social conditions and the individual is already emphasized in What is Literature?, but is now becoming specific, and its reciprocal function is prioritized. The result of this is a conscious dépassement of the aforementioned poetic attitudes. This is what Sturm points out as well: Mallarmé’s commitment
113 Goldthorpe, Sartre: Literature and Theory, 159. 114 Idem., 185.
115 Idem., 185. 116 Idem., 185. 117 Idem., 185.
