Will What is Literature? find a permanent place in literary studies of the future? It will, for at heart it is didactic and prescriptive: it informs the contemporary writer what he ought to write and what ideals he ought to adopt. Put another way, Sartre asks three questions that really matter: What reasons have we to live? What and to what end do we live? Is it worthwhile living as we live? Life is what literature is all about.***************************************
by Ravi Vyas
(March 15, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) A writer who takes political, social or literary positions must act only with the means that are his. These means are the writer’s words.
-Jean Paul Sartre: On refusing the Nobel Prize for Literature, 1964
In his time, Sartre went into the ring with nearly every literary form: novels, plays, stories, philosophy and aesthetics, politics and criticism. Whatever his form of expression, Sartre’s works as a philosopher, novelist, playwright, literary critic and journalist are inseparable from his philosophical and political writings, which is, to express and develop a total view of the world.
If poetry is conspicuously absent in the totality of his oeuvre, it is because, as he says in What is Literature?, prose is capable of a purposeful reflection of the world, whereas poetry is an end in itself. In prose, words are "significative", they describe men and objects. In poetry, words are ends in themselves. While Sartre’s radical distinction is untenable - there are many kinds of poetry from the communicative and discursive to the most "poetic" and symbolist - it is really masking a value-judgement that reveals his personal preference for a language that is descriptive and unembellished, tailored to express "with urgency" the most immediate issues of the times.
"The function of a writer is to call a spade a spade. If words are sick, it is up to us to cure them. If one starts deploring the inadequacy of language to reality...one makes oneself an accomplice to the enemy, that is, of propaganda. I distrust the incommunicable; it is the source of all violence... "
Sartre, it must be remembered, approaches literature rather like a physician approaches a patient, in a cold Cartesian manner. Literature in his view is sick because of a separation of the writer from life (literature takes a lot of living with and living by), which has shown itself in either a hatred of language or an absorption in language for its own sake. If the writer has been forced back to a living contact with the world it is because he has found himself being placed in extreme situations that compelled him to go "within". Having done so, it is up to him to effect a cure of the language by reaffirming its central role in communication and which is what Sartre tries to put across in What is Literature?
It is impossible to sketch the possible lines of What is Literature? in this brief space but at its heart is a commitment to freedom. "Freedom" to Sartre is a philosophical state that means something very different from the workaday definition we might have as the liberty to do, and say, for instance, what we want to within certain restraints.
It begins with asking three basic questions on the theory and technique of writing: What is Writing? Why Write? For whom does one Write? Which can be expressed by Sartre as Being-in-Itself, Being-for-Itself and Being-for-Others. If the novel or play is all about people’s treatment of each other, and so about human values, Being-in-Itself implies the process of placing oneself at a distance from the person or object you perceive and so acknowledges its "otherness". This gap is freedom: it allows the possibility of free choice and conscious action. But the gap also entails an emptiness and a sense of anguish. According to Sartre, we can react to this anguish either honestly by acting on the basis of our freedom or in bad faith by escape or evasion. We can pretend that we are Being-in-Itself, that we are self-sufficient with no need for others. But this will involve "inertia, withdrawal, passivity or acceptance". We can assume the identity of Being-for-Others by adopting the form in which others see and label us.
For Sartre, human freedom is a mode of life and a consciousness that has to be kept alive all the time and not to be avoided. "It is a potential, a process of becoming." Sartre laid emphasis on the becoming, on the active side of freedom. Literature, properly employed, can be a powerful means of liberating the reader from the kinds of alienation which often develop in particular situations. By this process the writer frees himself and overcomes his own alienation. Sartre argued that literature is alienated when it is divorced from life or ignores its autonomy and succumbs to temporal power, dogma and mystification. It is the writer’s task to dispel inertia, ignorance, prejudice and false emotion.
The Sartreian concept of freedom logically demanded that the writer be "committed" and accept a literature of engagement. This did not mean that prose literature become a purely utilitarian practice to be judged by the value of the actions it inspires. If that was so then advertisements, religious propaganda or sentimental fantasies could compete on equal terms with plays and novels.
But "commitment" did mean at least one thing: That literature should not be a sedative, a feel-good pill or a sub-division of the entertainment industry. It should be an irritant that would provoke men to change the world in which they lived and in so doing change themselves. By adopting this role the writer would ensure that the content of his work would avoid sterile dogmatism; it would be addressed to the potentially free reader and by doing so, the writer would also be freeing himself. The process is dialectical and reciprocal. Also, it meant that there would be no room for ambiguity, for what could be called the "music of chance".
Even in his lifetime, What is Literature? raised a number of questions. The greater Sartre’s emphasis on insisting that literature be an indispensable agent of liberation the more it became clear that man’s freedom was not so much inherent as conditioned by material circumstances, by his environment. Sartre recognised in subsequent years the limitations imposed on freedom by necessity, by the social and economic forces which limited freedom in specific situations.
In What is Literature? dense pages abound, always a little overdone, powerful verbal waves seething with ideas, sarcasm, things that just occurred to him. But the best of Sartre’s writing was the most personal, the least "committed" which were closer to confession than to speculation, like so many passages from his childhood memoirs, Words: the words, embody, play, and return to their childhood. Sartre excelled in two opposing modes: analysis and invective. He was an excellent critic and a fiery polemicist. But the polemicist damaged the critic in What is Literature? by his insistence on a committed literature or literature engagee.
Sartre also did not question, like his other great contemporaries did, whether the conscious mind was not the great inhibitor, the great censor. Social mores, education, environment, family pressures, and conventions created the conscious mind. For creativity it was necessary to work with the unconscious which accumulated pure experience, reactions, impressions, intuitions, images, memories - an unconscious freed from societal evaluations. The conscious mind could take over later as critic, selector, discarder but it had to give space to the unconscious to play its role.
Will What is Literature? find a permanent place in literary studies of the future? It will, for at heart it is didactic and prescriptive: it informs the contemporary writer what he ought to write and what ideals he ought to adopt. Put another way, Sartre asks three questions that really matter: What reasons have we to live? What and to what end do we live? Is it worthwhile living as we live? Life is what literature is all about.
What is Literature? Jean-Paul Sartre, first published in English translation, 1950, Methuen paperback, 1967 edition, `A38.99.
- Sri Lanka Guardian
by Ravi Vyas
(March 15, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) A writer who takes political, social or literary positions must act only with the means that are his. These means are the writer’s words.
-Jean Paul Sartre: On refusing the Nobel Prize for Literature, 1964
In his time, Sartre went into the ring with nearly every literary form: novels, plays, stories, philosophy and aesthetics, politics and criticism. Whatever his form of expression, Sartre’s works as a philosopher, novelist, playwright, literary critic and journalist are inseparable from his philosophical and political writings, which is, to express and develop a total view of the world.
If poetry is conspicuously absent in the totality of his oeuvre, it is because, as he says in What is Literature?, prose is capable of a purposeful reflection of the world, whereas poetry is an end in itself. In prose, words are "significative", they describe men and objects. In poetry, words are ends in themselves. While Sartre’s radical distinction is untenable - there are many kinds of poetry from the communicative and discursive to the most "poetic" and symbolist - it is really masking a value-judgement that reveals his personal preference for a language that is descriptive and unembellished, tailored to express "with urgency" the most immediate issues of the times.
"The function of a writer is to call a spade a spade. If words are sick, it is up to us to cure them. If one starts deploring the inadequacy of language to reality...one makes oneself an accomplice to the enemy, that is, of propaganda. I distrust the incommunicable; it is the source of all violence... "
Sartre, it must be remembered, approaches literature rather like a physician approaches a patient, in a cold Cartesian manner. Literature in his view is sick because of a separation of the writer from life (literature takes a lot of living with and living by), which has shown itself in either a hatred of language or an absorption in language for its own sake. If the writer has been forced back to a living contact with the world it is because he has found himself being placed in extreme situations that compelled him to go "within". Having done so, it is up to him to effect a cure of the language by reaffirming its central role in communication and which is what Sartre tries to put across in What is Literature?
It is impossible to sketch the possible lines of What is Literature? in this brief space but at its heart is a commitment to freedom. "Freedom" to Sartre is a philosophical state that means something very different from the workaday definition we might have as the liberty to do, and say, for instance, what we want to within certain restraints.
It begins with asking three basic questions on the theory and technique of writing: What is Writing? Why Write? For whom does one Write? Which can be expressed by Sartre as Being-in-Itself, Being-for-Itself and Being-for-Others. If the novel or play is all about people’s treatment of each other, and so about human values, Being-in-Itself implies the process of placing oneself at a distance from the person or object you perceive and so acknowledges its "otherness". This gap is freedom: it allows the possibility of free choice and conscious action. But the gap also entails an emptiness and a sense of anguish. According to Sartre, we can react to this anguish either honestly by acting on the basis of our freedom or in bad faith by escape or evasion. We can pretend that we are Being-in-Itself, that we are self-sufficient with no need for others. But this will involve "inertia, withdrawal, passivity or acceptance". We can assume the identity of Being-for-Others by adopting the form in which others see and label us.
For Sartre, human freedom is a mode of life and a consciousness that has to be kept alive all the time and not to be avoided. "It is a potential, a process of becoming." Sartre laid emphasis on the becoming, on the active side of freedom. Literature, properly employed, can be a powerful means of liberating the reader from the kinds of alienation which often develop in particular situations. By this process the writer frees himself and overcomes his own alienation. Sartre argued that literature is alienated when it is divorced from life or ignores its autonomy and succumbs to temporal power, dogma and mystification. It is the writer’s task to dispel inertia, ignorance, prejudice and false emotion.
The Sartreian concept of freedom logically demanded that the writer be "committed" and accept a literature of engagement. This did not mean that prose literature become a purely utilitarian practice to be judged by the value of the actions it inspires. If that was so then advertisements, religious propaganda or sentimental fantasies could compete on equal terms with plays and novels.
But "commitment" did mean at least one thing: That literature should not be a sedative, a feel-good pill or a sub-division of the entertainment industry. It should be an irritant that would provoke men to change the world in which they lived and in so doing change themselves. By adopting this role the writer would ensure that the content of his work would avoid sterile dogmatism; it would be addressed to the potentially free reader and by doing so, the writer would also be freeing himself. The process is dialectical and reciprocal. Also, it meant that there would be no room for ambiguity, for what could be called the "music of chance".
Even in his lifetime, What is Literature? raised a number of questions. The greater Sartre’s emphasis on insisting that literature be an indispensable agent of liberation the more it became clear that man’s freedom was not so much inherent as conditioned by material circumstances, by his environment. Sartre recognised in subsequent years the limitations imposed on freedom by necessity, by the social and economic forces which limited freedom in specific situations.
In What is Literature? dense pages abound, always a little overdone, powerful verbal waves seething with ideas, sarcasm, things that just occurred to him. But the best of Sartre’s writing was the most personal, the least "committed" which were closer to confession than to speculation, like so many passages from his childhood memoirs, Words: the words, embody, play, and return to their childhood. Sartre excelled in two opposing modes: analysis and invective. He was an excellent critic and a fiery polemicist. But the polemicist damaged the critic in What is Literature? by his insistence on a committed literature or literature engagee.
Sartre also did not question, like his other great contemporaries did, whether the conscious mind was not the great inhibitor, the great censor. Social mores, education, environment, family pressures, and conventions created the conscious mind. For creativity it was necessary to work with the unconscious which accumulated pure experience, reactions, impressions, intuitions, images, memories - an unconscious freed from societal evaluations. The conscious mind could take over later as critic, selector, discarder but it had to give space to the unconscious to play its role.
Will What is Literature? find a permanent place in literary studies of the future? It will, for at heart it is didactic and prescriptive: it informs the contemporary writer what he ought to write and what ideals he ought to adopt. Put another way, Sartre asks three questions that really matter: What reasons have we to live? What and to what end do we live? Is it worthwhile living as we live? Life is what literature is all about.
What is Literature? Jean-Paul Sartre, first published in English translation, 1950, Methuen paperback, 1967 edition, `A38.99.
- Sri Lanka Guardian
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