THE END OF MODERN LITERATURE
947
period, he has political opinions like everybody else. But expecting the
writer to be a citizen, we should not also expect that the literary pro–
fession gives him any special privileges of trespass into politics. Politics
is usually considered fair game for everybody, and literary men have
sometimes been the worst offenders, confusing their vaguest feelings
with facts, their rhetoric with logic, and their will to belong with moral
heroism. Sartre's own forays into politics show a good deal of this
naivete and confusion. It is time we recognized that there is such a
thing as "literary" politics, to be taken no more seriously than "literary"
philosophizing, "literary" psychology, and the rest of these adulterated
products. During the 'thirties, of course, "literary" politics was the uni–
versal pastime; the mood of the period was some excuse, but that period
has now passed, and literary men and fellow-travelers ought to be told
that politics is a special discipline, with its own data and rules, concern–
ing which one ought occasionally to think before one talks.
But the real revolution that Sartre announces for literature is not a
matter chiefly of politics. He hardly states this revolution in so many
words; we glimpse it only if we measure his theory by his practice, tak–
ing the present book along with his novels and plays, which are, after
all, his deliberate attempts to realize his own projects for literature; and
only too if we read a little between the lines in the present work, observ–
ing the writers to whom he makes most frequent and essential reference.
Sartre once said that Dos Passos was the greatest modern novelist; in
the present work his admiration for American writers is more cautious
than in the past, but we notice repeated reference to Richard Wright as
a great writer. This is entirely natural, for Wright's books, dealing with
the Negro question in America, satisfy Sartre's demand that literature
be directed at changing the fundamental conditions of social existence.
The highbrow critic in America is likely to settle on altogether different
names in any fundamental literary discussion: Joyce or Eliot or Proust
are the names that remind us of the possible ambitions of literature.
Sartre, however, is interested in a very practical program for litera–
ture, and his point would seem to be effectively this: that in the crisis
of exhaustion, or threatened exhaustion, in which French literature
now seems to find itself, the way out may be just to propose the second–
rate as an ideal. Perhaps, being second-rate, it is something within
reach, and therefore a thoroughly practicable goal for literature. In the
sense that his book represents a deliberate abnegation from the great
ambitions of modern literature, Sartre is in effect announcing the end of
a whole literary period.
For
the fact is that the one thing that distinguishes modern litera-
