THE END OF MODERN LITERATURE
949
everywhere becoming a mass society) is precisely this watering down of
content as the writer reaches larger masses of people, and usually not
through his own written word but through the mechanical image that
an advanced technology substitutes for the printed page. Sartre accepts
the process,
in
fact seeks to assist it; for in his view the writer should
aim essentially at addressing the concrete collectivity, which is the total
mass of mankind, and eventually this mass is a classless society. This
is as utopian as most of Sartre's politics; but programs-and a program
for literature is no exception-should deal with present possibilities,
and the contemporary writer who seeks to reach this mass audience will
inevitably find himself rejecting his own essential difficulties, his com–
plications and subtleties, and indeed the very limitations of personality
that have in the past defined his most authentic themes. Here again we
have nothing less than a proposal to put an end to modern literature.
For the qualities that define modern literature have been in great part
the result of a desperate effort to preserve itself by a deliberate escape
from a mass audience.
It would be a mistake, however, to discount too easily Sartre's at–
titudes toward literature as simply the result of his own unhappy will
to have a political vocation. We would be right in part, but we would
be wrong to forget the more significant question why the writer today
should be so furiously haunted by the need to search for such a vocation.
Sartre's position might be very different without the large and vocal
presence of the Communists upon the French scene: the writer of
La
NausCe,
in becoming the leader of a school, has had to sacrifice himself
to the public figure who is drawn into competition with the Communists
and has had consequently to offer a message emphasizing more and more
the "positive" and social role of literature. It is very significant, thus,
that the discussion of the present situation of the writer in 1947, with
which this book concludes, should be in large part an unequivocal attack
upon communism as a moral and intellectual phenomenon (a section
which, along with his destruction of the literary theories of surrealism,
represents Sartre at his polemic best); but it is even more significant
of the ambiguous situation of the French writer now that Sartre's anti–
communism on the political level has been so very much less equivocal.
Communism and communist ideology do not play the same role in Amer–
ica; but in this respect the French situation may not be so much dif–
ferent as simply in advance of our own, and what we must be prepared
for all over the world is a literature produced under the conditions
01
a mass society, whatever may
be
the political regime imposed upon this
mass base. The end of modern literature, however, does not mean the
