PARTISAN REVIEW
What undertaking are you engaged in, and why does it require you
to have recourse to writing?" In any case this undertaking cannot
have pure contemplation as an end. For, intuition is silence, and the
end of language is to communicate. One can doubtless
pin down
the
results of intuition, but in this case a few words hastily scrawled on
the paper will suffice; it will always be enough for the author to
recognize what he had in mind.
If
the words are assembled into sen–
tences, with a concern for clarity, a decision foreign to the intuition,
to the language itself, must intervene, the decision of confiding to
others the results obtained. In each case one must ask the reason for
this decision. And the common sense which our pedants too readily
forget never stops repeating it. Are we not in the habit of putting
this basic question to young people who are thinking of writing: "Do
you have anything to say?" Which means: something which is worth
the trouble of being communicated. But what do we mean by some–
thing which is "worth the trouble," if it is not by recourse to a system
of transcendent values?
Moreover, to consider only this secondary structure of the
undertaking, which is what the
verbal moment
is, the serious error
of the pure stylists is to think that the word is a gentle breeze which
plays lightly over the surface of things, which grazes them without
altering them, and that the speaker is a pure
witness
who sums up
with a word his harmless contemplation. To speak is to act; anything
which one names is already no longer quite the same; it has lost its
innocence.
If
you name the behavior of an individual, you reveal it to him;
he sees himself. And since you are at the same time naming it to
all
others, he knows that he is
seen
at the moment he
sees
himself. His
furtive gesture which he forgot while he was making it, begins to exist
beyond
all
measure, to exist for everybody; it is integrated into the
objective mind; it takes on new dimensions; it is retrieved. After
that, how can you expect him to act in the same way? Either he
will persist in his behavior out of obstinacy and with full knowledge
of what he is doing, or he will give it up. Thus, by speaking, I reveal
the situation by my very intention of changing it; I reveal it to
myself and to others
in order
to change it. I strike at its very heart,
I transpierce it, and I display it in full view; at present I dispose of
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