THE END OF MODERN lITERA1URE
but then we are suddenly reminded of the human complications of
literary composition when we recall that Flaubert, despite his correspon–
dence, has produced in the few pages of
Un Coeur Simple
a more pro–
found and sympathetic picture of the poor than in all the thousand
pages of Sartre's recent trilogy. And
if
we are going to insist at all on
the social role of literature, we may as well remember that it was the
bourgeois epoch which first produced the conception of a literature em–
bracing the whole of society in a single understanding vision.
All this brings us now to the core of Sartre's message, which is of
course his now well-known concept of
litterature
eng~gee,
where we will
also be dealing with some of the hazy notions left in the American
mind by the "social-consciousness" of the 'thirties. ("Engaged litera–
ture," by the way, is a piece of linguistic nonsense that the translator
might have spared us; if some of the literal force of the French is to be
kept, he might have rendered it as "enlisted literature," which is the
connotation to French ears; but, all told, "engagement" is probably
best done into English as
commitment. )
Sartre complains that he has
been misunderstood, but despite all his efforts in this book his idea of
commitment still remains somewhat unclear. He has still not dealt
adequately with the kinds and degrees of commitment, nor with the
question of the necessary
artistic
detachment that must accompany the
writer's
human
commitments.
It
is easy to be sympathetic to the causes
that prompt Sartre's doctrine. The most eloquent pages in this book are
those on the French experience under the German occupation, which
make it quite clear that after such experiences the writer could no
longer immure himself in an aestheticism. for which neither concentra–
tion camps, executioners, nor victims would exist. We can very well ac–
cept the decisive force of such experiences for the young men of Sartre's
generation. But then, can this experience be generalized for the writer
everywhere and allowed to circumscribe his material, methods, and at–
titudes?
The point is, again, that the writer's involvement
is
a more compli–
cated matter than Sartre allows. Commitment may work on various levels
and in various degrees: the detached writer sometimes turns out to
be
the most committed at a deeper level, and the most blatantly committed
writer to have only a transitory connection with the deeper issues of
history, society, and literary tradition. Proust complains in one of
his
letters of the criticism (made after the first volumes of his novel had
already appeared and been acclaimed) that his was the work of a snob,
showing no recognition of social (by which was meant socialist) ideas.
The criticism was in fact just, in the sense that the socialist ideology
