PARTISAN REVIEW
and the rigorous ideology of the rising class. The bourgeoisie wanted
light; it felt vaguely that its thought was somehow alienated, and it
wanted to become conscious of itself. One could probably find some
traces of organization: materialist societies, groups of intellectuals,
freemasonry. But they were chiefly associations for inquiry which
were waiting for ideas rather than producing them. To be sure, a
form of popular and spontaneous writing was spreading, the secret
and anonymous tract. But this literature of amateurs did not com–
pete with the professional writer but rather goaded and solicited him
by informing him about the confused aspirations of the collectivity.
Thus, the bourgeoisie- as opposed to a public of half-specialists,
which with difficulty still held on to its position and which was always
recruited at the Court and from the upper circles of society--offered
the rough draft of a mass public. In regard to literature, it was in
a state of relative
passivity
since it had no experience in the
art
of
writing, no preconceived opinions about style and literary genres, and
was awaiting everything, form and content, from the genius of the
writer.
Solicited by both sides, the writer found himself between the
two hostile factions of his public as the arbiter of their conflict.
He was no longer a clerk; the ruling class was not the only one
supporting him. It is true that it was still pensioning him, but it was
the bourgeoisie which was buying his books. He was collecting at
both ends. His father had been a bourgeois and his son would be
one; one might thus be tempted to see in him a bourgeois more
gifted than others but similarly oppressed, a man who had attained
knowledge of
his
state under the pressure of historical circumstances,
in short, an inner mirror by means of which the whole bourgeoisie
became conscious of itself and its demands. But this would be a
superficial view. It has not been sufficiently pointed out that a class
can acquire class consciousness only if it sees itself from within and
without at the same time; in other words, if it profits by external
competition; that is where the intellectuals, the perpetually unclassed,
come into the picture.
The essential characteristic of the eighteenth-century writer was
precisely an objective and subjective unclassing. He still remembered
his bourgeois attachments, yet the favor of the great drew him away
from his milieu; he no longer felt any concrete solidarity with his
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