FOR WHOM DOES ONE WRITE?
them were added the "watchdogs" of the temporal: historians, court
poets, jurists, and philosophers who were concerned with establishing
and maintaining the ideology of absolute monarchy. But we see
appearing at their side a third category of writers, strictly secular,
who, for the most part,
accepted
the religious and political ideology
of the age without thinking that they were bound to prove it or
preserve it. They did not write about it; they accepted it implicitly.
For them, it was what we called a short time ago the context or
ensemble of the presuppositions common to readers and author,
which are necessary to render the writings of the latter intelligible to
the former. In general, they belonged to the bourgeoisie; they were
pensioned by the nobility.
As
they consumed without producing, and
as the nobility did not produce either but lived off the work of others,
they were the parasites of a parasitic class. They no longer lived in
a college but formed an implicit corporation in that highly inte–
grated society; and to remind them constantly of their collegiate
origin and former clerkship the royal power chose a certain number
of them and grouped them in a sort of symbolic college, the French
Academy. Fed by the King and read by an elite, they were con–
cerned solely with responding to the demands of this limited public.
They had as good or almost as good a conscience as the twelfth–
century clerks. It is impossible to speak of a potential public as
distinguished from a real public in that age. La Bruyere happened
to speak
about
peasants, but he did not speak
to
them, and
if
he took
note of their misery, it was not for the sake of drawing an argument
against the ideology which he accepted, but in the name of that
ideology; it was a disgrace for enlightened monarchs and good Chris–
tians. Thus, one spoke about the masses above their heads and even
without any conception of helping them to become self-conscious.
And the homogeneity of the public banished all contradiction from
•
the authors' souls. They were not pulled between real but detestable
readers and potential readers who were desirable but out of reach;
they did not ask themselves questions about their role in the world,
for the writer questions himself about his mission only in ages when
it is not clearly defined and when he must invent or re-invent it,
that is, when he notices, beyond the elite who read
him,
an
amorphous
mass of possible readers whom he may or may not choose to win,
and when he must himself decide, in the event that he actually has the
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