WHAT IS WRITING?
it; with every word I utter, I involve myself a little more in the
world, and by the same token I emerge from it a little more, since
I go beyond it toward the future.
Thus, the prose-writer is a man who has chosen a certain method
of secondary action which we may call action by disclosure.
It
is there–
fore permissible to ask him this second question: "What aspect of
the world do you want to disclose? What change do you want to
bring into the world by this disclosure? The "engaged" writer knows
that words are action. He knows that to reveal is to change and that
one can reveal only by planning to change. He has given up the im–
possible dream of giving an impartial picture of society and the human
condition. Man is the being in the face of whom no being can be
impartial, not even God. For God, if he existed, would be, as certain
mystics have seen him, in a
situation
in relationship to man. And he
is also the being who cannot even see a situation without changing it,
for his gaze congeals, destroys, or sculpts, or, as does eternity, changes
the object in itself. It is in love, in hate, in anger, in fear, in joy, in
indignation, in admiration, in hope, in despair, that man and the world
reveal themselves
in their truth.
Doubtless, the engaged writer can be
mediocre; he can even be conscious of being so; but as one cannot
write without the intention of succeeding perfectly, the modesty with
which he envisages his work should not divert him from constructing
it
as
if
it were to have the greatest celebrity. He should never say to
himself, "Bah! I'll be lucky if I have three thousand readers," but
rather, "What would happen if everybody read what I wrote?" He
remembers what Mosca said, beside the coach which carried Fabrizio
and Sanseverina away,
"If
the word Love comes up between them,
I'm lost." He knows that he is the man who names what has not
yet been named or what does not dare tell its name. He knows that
he makes the word "love" and the word "hate" surge up and with
them love and hate between men who had not yet decided upon their
feelings. He knows that words, as Brice-Parrain says, are "loaded
pistols."
If
he speaks, he fires. He may be silent, but sirrce he has
chosen to fire, he must do it like a man, by aiming at targets, and
not like a child, at random, by shutting his eyes and firing merely
for the pleasure of hearing the shot go off.
Later on we shall try to determine what the goal of literature
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