RESPONSIBLE LITERATURE
307
situated in his time: each word has its reverberations, each silence too.
I hold Flaubert and Concourt responsible for the repressions
which followed the Commune, because they wrote not a single line
to prevent them. It may be said that it was none of their business:
but was the case of Calas the business of Voltaire? the sentence on
Dreyfus the business of Zola? the admini5tration of the Congo the
business of Gide? Each one of these writers, in some particular cir–
cumstance of his life, weighed up
his
responsibility as a writer. The
occupation has taught us ours. Since by our existence we influence our
time, we must decide that
t~
influence shall be deliberate. Again
we must specify: it is not usual for a writer to concern himself, in
his own small way, with shaping the future. But that is a vague,
conceptual future, embracing the whole of humanity and on which
no definite light can be cast: will history come to an end? will the
sun be extinguished? what will be the condition of man under the
socialist regime of the year 3000? We leave these dreams to the anti–
cipatory novelists: it is the future of
our
epoch which should be the
object of our concern: a limited future, which can hardly be dis–
tinguished from the present-for an epoch, like a man, is primarily
a future. It is formed by its current toils, by its undertakings, by its
more or less long-term projects, by its rebellions, by its struggles, by its
hopes: when will the war end? how will the country be re-equipped?
how will international relations be planned? what will be the so–
cial reforms? will the forces of reaction triumph? will there be a
revolution·, and what form will it take? This is the future we choose
for ourselves, and we desire no other. Nevertheless, some writers have
less immediate aims and take a longer view.
As
they pass amongst us,
they seem to be far away. Where are they, then? With their great–
nephews, they turn to look at the vanished era which was ours and of
which they are the sole survivors. But they err in their calculations:
posthumous glory is always based on misunderstanding. What do they
know of those nephews who are to come and pick them out from
amongst us? Immortality is a dreadful alibi: it is not easy to live
with one foot beyond and one foot before the grave. How can cur–
rent affairs be disposed when viewed from such a distance? How can
one stir oneself to battle, how can one rejoice in victory? All values
are equalized. They gazed unseeingly at us: we are already dead in
their eyes; so they return to the novel which they are writing for men
whom they will never see. They have allowed their lives to be stolen
from them by immortality. We write for our contemporaries, we do
not wish to view our world with eyes of the future-for that would
be the surest method of destroying it-but with our fleshy eyes, with
