FOR WHOM DOES ONE WRITE?
products of history into combinations of universal concepts. An
adolescent chooses to write in order to escape an oppression from
which he suffers and a solidarity he is ashamed of; as soon as he has
written a few words, he thinks that he has escaped from his milieu
and class and from all milieus and all classes and that he has broken
through his historical situation by the mere fact that he has attained
reflective and critical knowledge. Above the confusion of those bour–
geois and nobles, locked up in their particular age by their preju–
dices he has, on taking up his pen, discovered himself as a timeless
and unlocalized mind, in short, as
universal man.
And literature,
which has delivered him, is an abstract function and an a priori power
of human nature; it is the movement whereby at every moment
man frees himself from history; it is the exercise of freedom.
In the seventeenth century by choosing to write a man em–
braced a definite profession, with the tricks of the trade, its rules
and customs, its rank in the hierarchy of the professions. In the
eighteenth century, the molds were broken; everything was to be
done; works of the mind, instead of being put together according
to established norms and more or less by luck, were each a particular
invention and were a kind of decision of the author regarding the
nature, value, and scope of belles-lettres; each one brought its own
rules and the principles by which it was to be judged; each one
aspired to engage the whole of literature and to cut out new paths.
It is not by chance that the worst works of the period are also those
which claimed to be the most traditional; tragedy and epic were the
exquisite fruits of an integrated society; in a collectivity which was
torn apart, they could subsist only in the form of survivals and
pastiches.
What the eighteenth-century writer tirelessly demanded in all
his works was the right to practice an antihistorical reason against
history, and in this sense all he did was to reveal the essential require–
ments of abstract literature. He was not concerned with giving his
readers a clearer class consciousness. On the contrary, the urgent
appeal which he addressed to his bourgeois public was an invitation
to forget humiliations, prejudices, and fears; the one he directed
to his noble public was a solicitation to strip itself of its pride of
caste and its privileges.
As
he had made himself universal, he could
have only universal readers, and what he required of the freedom
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