FOR WHOM DOES ONE WRITE?
eventful life, with its sunlit crests and its dizzying steeps, was that of
an adventurer. The other evening I was reading the dedication of
Blaise Cendrars'
Rum:
"To the young people of today who are tired
of literature, to prove to them that a novel can also be an act," and
I thought that we are quite unfortunate and quite guilty, since we
have to prove what in the eighteenth century was self-evident. A
work of the mind was then doubly an act since it produced ideas
which were to be at the origin of social upheavals and since it ex–
posed its author to danger. And this act, whatever the book we
may be considering, can always be defined in the same way; it is a
liberator.
And, doubtless, in the seventeenth century too, literature
had a liberating function, though one which remained veiled and
implicit. In the time of the Encyclopedists, it was no longer a ques–
tion of freeing the gentleman from his passions by reflecting them
back to him without complaisance, but of helping with the pen to
bring about the political freedom simply of man. The appeal which
the writer addressed to his bourgeois public was, whether he meant
it or not, an incitement to revolt; the one which he directed to the
ruling class was an invitation to lucidity, to critical self-examination,
to the giving up of its privileges....
And as the writer thought that he had broken the bonds which
united
him
to his original class, as he spoke to
his
readers from above
about universal human nature,
it
seemed to him that the appeal he
made to them and the part he took in their misfortunes were dictated
by pure generosity. To write is to give. In
this
way he accepted
and excused what was unacceptable in his situation as a parasite in
an industrious society; this was also how he became conscious of that
absolute freedom, that gratuity, which characterize literary creation.
But though he constantly had in view universal man and the abstract
rights of human nature, there is no reason to believe that he was an
incarnation of the clerk as Benda has described him. Since
his
posi–
tion was, in essence,
critical,
he certainly had to have
something
to criticize; and the objects which first presented themselves to criti–
cism were the institutions, superstitions, traditions, and acts of a
traditional government.
In other words, as the walls of Eternity and the Past which had
supported the ideological structure of the seventeenth century cracked
and gave way, the writer perceived a new dimension of temporality
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