WHAT IS WRITING?
the very most, the professional cnt1c will set up infernal dialogues
between them and will inform us that French thought is a perpetual
colloquy between Pascal and Montaigne. In so doing he has no inten–
tion of making Pascal and Montaigne more alive, but of making
Malraux and Gide more dead. Finally, when the internal contradic–
tions of the life and the work have made both of them useless, when
the message, in its imponderable depth, has taught us these ·capital
truths, "that man is neither good nor bad," "that there is a great deal
of suffering in human life," "that genius is only great patience," this
melancholy cuisine will have achieved its purpose, and the reader,
as he lays down the book, will be able to cry out with a tranquil
"Soul, "All this is only literature."
But since, for us, writing is an enterprise; since writers are alive
before being dead; since we think that we must
try
to be as right as
we can in our books; and since, even if the centuries show us to be in
the wrong, this is no reason to show in advance that we are wrong;
since we think that the writer should engage himself ·completely in
his works, and not as an abject passivity by putting forward his vices,
his
misfortunes, and his weaknesses, but as a resolute will and as a
choice, as this total enterprise of living that each one of us is, it is
then proper that we take up this problem at its beginning and that
we, in our turn, ask ourselves:
((Why
does one write?"
1. At least in general. The greatness and error of Klee lie in his attempt ,
to make a painting both sign and object.
2. I say "create," not "imita.te," which is enough to annihilate the bombast
of M . Charles Estienne who has obviously not understood a word of my argument
and who is dead set on tilting a t shadows.
3. This is the example cited by Bataille in
Inn er Experience.
4.
If
one wishes ·to know the origin of this attitude toward language, the
following arc a few brief indications.
O riginally, poetry creates the
myth,
while the prose-writer draws its
portrait.
In reality, the human act, governed by needs and urged on by the useful is, in
a sense, a
means.
It passes unnoticed, and it is the result which counts. When I
extend my h and
in order to
take up my pen, I h ave only a fleeting and obscure
consciousness of my gesture; it is the pen which I see. Thus, man is alienated by
his ends. Poetry reverses the relationship: the world and things become inessential,
become a pretext for the act which becomes its own end. The vase is there so
that the girl may p erform the graceful act of filling it; the Trojan War, so that
H ector and Achilles may engage in that heroic combat. The action, detached
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