WHAT IS WRITING?
phrases,
dispose
the passions of the reader without his being aware
and orders them like the Mass, like music, like the dance.
If
he hap–
pens to consider them by themselves, he loses the meaning; there
remains only a boring seesaw of phrases.
In prose the aesthetic pleasure is pure only
if
it is thrown into
the bargain. I blush at recalling such simple ideas, but it seems that
today they have been forgotten.
If
that were not the case, would we
be told that we are planning the murder of literature, or, more sim–
ply, that engagement is harmful to the
art
of writing?
If
the con–
tamination of a certain kind of prose by poetry had not confused the
ideas of our critics, would they dream of attacking us on the matter
of form, when we have never spoken of anything but the content?
There is nothing to be said about form in advance, and we have said
nothing. Everyone invents his own, and one judges it afterwards.
It is true that the subjects suggest the style, but they do not order it.
There are no styles ranged a priori outside of the literary art. What
is more engaged, what is more boring than the idea of attacking the
Jesuits? Yet, out of this Pascal made his
Provincial Letters.
In short,
it is a matter of knowing what one wants to write about, whether
butterflies or the condition of the Jews. And when one knows, then
it remains to decide how one will write about it.
Often the two choices are only one, but among good writers
the second choice never precedes the first. I know that Giraudoux has
said that "the only concern is finding the style; the idea comes after–
wards"; but he was wrong. The idea did not come. On the contrary,
if one considers subjects as problems which are always open, as solici–
tations, as expectations, it will be easily understood that art loses
nothing in engagement. On the contrary, just as physics submits to
mathematicians new problems which require them to produce a new
symbolism, in like manner the always new requirements of the social
and the metaphysical engage the artist in finding a new language and
new techniques.
If
we no longer write as they did in the eighteenth
century, it is because the language of Racine and Saint-Evremond
does not lend itself to talking about locomotives or the proletariat.
Mter that, the purists will perhaps forbid us to write about loco–
motives. But art has never been on the side of the purists.
If
that is the principle of engagement, what objection can one
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