•
Jean-Paul Sartre
WHAT IS WRITING?*
"If you want to engage yourself," writes a young imbecile,
"what are you waiting for? join the Communist Party." A great
writer wlw engaged himself often and disengaged himself still more
often, but who has forgotten, said to me, "The worst artists are the
most engaged. Look at the Soviet painters." An old critic gently com–
plained, "You want to murder literature. Contempt for belles-lettres is
spread out insolently all through your review." A petty mind calls me
pig-headed, which for him is evidently the highest insult. An author
who barely crawled from one war to the other and whose name some–
times awakens languishing memories in old men accuses me of not
being concerned with immortality; he knows, thank God, any number
of people. whose chief hope it is. In the eyes of an American hack–
journalist the trouble with me is that I have not read Bergson or
Freud; as for Flaubert, who did not engage himself, it seems that
he haunts me like remorse. Smart-alecks wink at me, "And poetry?
And painting? And music? You want to engage them, too?" And
some martial spirits demand, "What's it
all
about? Engaged literature?
Well, it's the old socialist realism, unless it's a revival of populism,
only more aggressive."
.What nonsense. They read quickly, badly, and pass judgment
before they have understood. So let's begin all over. This doesn't
amuse anyone, neither you nor me. But we have to hit ·the nail on
the head. And since critics condemn me in the name of literature
without ever saying what they mean by that, the best answer to give
*
This is an essay from
What Is Literature? (Qu'est-ce que la littlrature?),
a series of six consecutive pieces which appeared originally in the February
through July, 1947, numbers of
Les Temps Modernes,
the monthly review edited
by Sartre. The translation is by Bernard Frechtman.
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