Literature According to Sartre

By Mariano Pacheco

(Translated by Tamina Pitrelli)

 

¿How could we not make an echo of phrases like “our intention is to contribute to the production of certain changes in the society that surrounds us” or “we place ourselves next to those who want to change both the social condition of man and the conception man has of himself”? Both quotes belong to his classic post-war book, What is literature? Situation II, published for the first time in 1948 Paris by the emblematic publishing house Gallimard, and in Buenos Aires in 1950 by Editorial Losada.

This is the book in which that other cannonic phrase is thrown: “How —they say— is it that that writing thing compromises?”. The writer’s compromise; behold the beginning of a misunderstanding. Because beyond his personal position during the sixties and seventies (his visit to revolutionary Cuba, next to Simone de Beauvoir; his foreword to The Condemned of the Earth by Frantz Fanon; his role during May 68 in Paris; his speeches to labourers at the doorsteps of the Peugeot factory —standing on a barrel— as a workers union conflict unfolds, only to point out his most known, most outstanding breakthroughs), his theory of compromise has little to nothing to do with what is usually “divulged” under the compromised intellectual label.

Firstly, because compromise is an existential position, that exceeds political option (read: he who says to have leftist ideas is compromised). One can be compromised with the Right, or, more so —Sartre tells us— the abstention from a position is also a decision. As it can be read in the quoted extracts, Sartre speaks of “contributing” and placing oneself “next to”. Which has nothing to do with that “ivory-towerist” figure of the compromised intellectual as he who places himself above the process of the real movement. Or at least, that, is how I like to read, in a gesture for recovering this old partisan who both academic trends and rigorous criticism tossed from critical thinking sent to the museum, as an old piece —in best case scenario—  when they didn’t simply send him to the old-age pensioners’ line.

Sartre hasn’t only been criticized for that figure of compromise being stained by an avant-garde intellectualism, but rather that it was sustained on the principle of an unconditional, eternal freedom. Nevertheless, when he refers to this issue his conclusions are blunt (unlike what he’s criticized for), in sustaining, for example, matters as the ones that follow:

“Totally conditioned by his class, his salary, the nature of his labour, conditioned even in his feelings, even in his thoughts, it is his turn to decide the sense of his condition and that of his comrades and it is him who, freely, gives the proletariat its prospects of humiliation without a truce or of conquest and victory, depending on whether he chooses himself resigned or revolutionary; and it is for this decision that he is responsible.”

In regards to writing —as he did as well in his autobiography The Words—, Sartre never ceases to claim that it is a job. “Writing —he tells us in the text that I’m recovering— is acting.” And because word is action, it can contribute to producing certain changes in society. Written and spoken word, then, can be a weapon in the combat for emancipation. Of course, it can be objected: While some act by biting the bullet others do it from their desks! But in this, as well, Sartre is clear, and doesn’t hesitate to affirm: “There comes a day in which the pen sees itself forced to stop and it is then necessary for the writer to take up arms… Writing throws the writer into battle.”

Writing throws the writer into battle, among other issues, because literature (in its broad sense), is like a calling. One writes for others to read. Therefore, because one doesn’t write for slaves, it is that writing is, also, a certain way of wanting freedom, and fighting for it. It’s not that one must choose between one aim or the other. Aims are invented —Sartre insists—. “Man must invent every day.” To write for a public that has the freedom to change it all.