Throughout the essays of Situations 1 one finds a recurrent preoccupation with the problems of language and silence, with the artist's perception of the insufficiencies of language, the perception that language disintegrates the wholeness of the artist's silent intuition. It is precisely those writers who vainly attempt to use language to express silence and a world that precedes words who fascinate Sartre—Parain, Bataille, Blanchot, Camus, Ponge, Faulkner. (p. 19)

Sartre's preoccupation in these early essays appears in an understanding of the novel as a form of action and not as language, and in an antipathy for wordiness (shades of Carlyle!); in other essays, it centers on attempts, particularly by the surrealists, to destroy language and on the twentieth-century "obsession with silence" and the "crisis of language" following World War I. The problem of language and action weaves gradually into the paradoxes of language and silence.

"Aller et retour" concerns itself with the writings of Brice Parain…. Sartre approaches Parain's writing in terms of biography; presenting Parain as a peasant come to the city: "Behind his moral philosophy, his critique of language, one spots the pick and the spade."… Parain also represents what Sartre calls peasant "muteness." "The peasant works alone, among natural forces that don't need to be named in order to act. He keeps still."… Sartre has now created a new element in his mythology: the silent peasant, man alone heroically facing nature, the man of action walking his mother earth, his awaiting, feminine land. Parain, the peasant, is a man of action …, springing forth from "enormous earthy silences," and a man alone. Action, silence, solitude—a pattern begins to take shape. Parain, silent peasant, leaves his land, and is faced, at the Ecole Normale, with the glib, easy talkers of the city, with Sartre himself. He comes to the city, meets the talkers, and learns "intellectual gymnastics," the weightless brilliance of polemics, the games of intellection, rhetoric, and language. To join society he must make this language his; like Jean Cayrol's peasant Gaspard in Les Corps Etrangers, he must use the language of others, wear the language of the bourgeoisie like a foreign body. To join society he must cease to act and begin to talk; he must sacrifice authentic nature to theatrics. To the peasant, separated from his land, no longer alone, language is from the first a betrayal.

Parain sees this betrayal as a betrayal of intuition…. According to Sartre, Parain is haunted by the idea of intuitive, immediate knowledge, which was also the impulse behind surrealism. He remains always in search of silence, or really of what Sartre refers to as "infrasilence," that silence prior to language which one might postulate as coincident with some state of nature. He reaches for a lost paradise of man's unity with nature, where the word did not interpose itself between intuition and the object, between man and his desire, between man and his need. (pp. 20-2)

It would be a sad mistake to equate Sartre's complex musings about the nature of the universe with Parain's up-dated romanticism (as Sartre depicts it), or to attribute Parain's interests directly to Sartre. In fact, elsewhere in his writings Sartre destroys at length both the myth of primitive man alone with nature and the "myth" of the metaphysical problem of language; in "Aller et retour" he finds Parain in Parain's writings, and not Sartre. Simone de Beauvoir quotes a letter from Sartre, who says that while Parain is an intelligent man, he spends his time on problems that do not have any real interest, among them language and the inexhaustible depth of words. She also tells us that Sartre's interest is not in language, but in "communication." At the end of the essay on Parain, Sartre outlines a critique of Parain's ideas, to the effect that the metaphysical problem of language does not exist. "Language is nothing other than existence in the presence of the other … it is that mute and desperate dialogue. Language is being-for-others … if it is true that to speak means to act under the gaze of the other, the celebrated problems of language run the grave risk of being nothing but a regional specification of the great problem of the existence of the other."… The problem is the relationship between men, and language becomes problematic only as a mode of that relationship.

Furthermore, Sartre will come to believe that man is never alone and has never been alone. (pp. 22-3)

We must recognize, then, that our tentative construct of Sartre's imagination will often be contradicted by developments in Sartre's discursive thought. What we are aiming at here are hypothesized, unexamined, and autonomous reservoirs of imagination that might precede prosaic, logical delineation but that are nonetheless present in the text. Parain's mythic vision of the peasant matches a cluster of corresponding images in Sartre's imagination at a time when Sartre had apparently not yet discovered the fallacies of social atomism; despite his nascent reservations he can still say that he generally accepts most of Parain's analyses. He contests only the conclusions to which they lead. (p. 24)

The discontinuous perceptions we see at the back of Sartre's mind in these early writings develop into a first form of cohesion in the essay of Jules Renard…. In "L'homme ligoté," which directly evolves from the preoccupations of the essays on Parain and Ponge, certain strands of Sartre's approach to literature come together for the first time, and Sartre's intuitions translate themselves into literary theory. Sartre seems almost to have chosen Renard to bring together the ends of the question: first because, according to Sartre, Renard "created the literature of silence" …; secondly, because, in contrast to his fascination with Parain and Ponge, Sartre dislikes Renard.

Creator of the "literature of silence," Renard is precisely the man who has betrayed his peasant heritage. He has left behind him generations of muteness, the "virile" silence of short peasant sentences bred deeply into him by the forces of nature, to come to the salons of the city to talk and to write…. Renard has left behind him silence, solitude, action, and manliness; and like Parain, like Genet, like Jean-Paul in Les Mots, he does it to be liked, to seduce, to have friends, and to join society—to communicate, superficially, though not to "commune." (pp. 25-6)

What Sartre sees in Renard is both a recognition and a rejection of self: the self-rejection and self-accusation of being a bavard de salon, a glib normalien as seen by the peasant Parain, and a traitor. He sees himself as having betrayed the paternal heritage of silence, tricked by a false Moses who replaced the true father, "child of silence." (pp. 26-7)

Sartre as phenomenologist, as novelist, as essayist, is he who describes, who writes, who talks, who seduces. The need for self-justification and the justification itself are immediate; one has only to understand that language as a tool must approach action, that talking must never be useless, and that "intellectual gymnastics" can never be only a game, but must aim instead at being an act. Seduction must change from an end in itself to a means to justified ends. The writer must recover his betrayed masculinity by changing mincing bavardage into heroism, futile words into acts, language into action, language into silence, and social atomism into unity. Renard "spent his childhood in the midst of peasants, who, each in his own way, proclaimed the uselessness of speech" …, and Sartre has got their message. He must find a way to use words. A first definition of the problematic nature of literature, a style, and an eventual yet remarkably clear link to Marxism are born here. "The quest for truth," Sartre will say in Qu'est-ce que la littérature?, "takes place in and by language conceived as a certain kind of instrument."

What must be shown is the centrality of this choice in Sartre's criticism and the directions he moves in from this basis. He makes the first connecting steps in "L'homme ligoté." In the considerations of the opposition of peasant silence and Parisian bavardage there first emerges what must be considered an essential Sartrian literary principle and criterion of judgment: "On peut bavarder en cinq mots comme en cinq lignes. Il suffit de préférer la phrase aux idées" (One can chatter in five words as well as in five lines. All that is needed is to prefer the expression to the ideas)…. (pp. 28-9)

In his early criticism Sartre very definitely contrasts thought and language. Somehow, thought appears to be more meaty and substantial than its ordinary expression, and, as a consequence, the proper use of language is to aim at a philosophical precision and density, an effectiveness and directness, that embody the weightiness of its message. Renard's mistake is to confuse the gravid silence of comprehension and thought with briefness in speech. (p. 29)

At this stage in Sartre's thought, for a brief moment, the true prose artist appears to be an icy yet impassioned (hence, non-mechanistic) analyst, whose tools are precision, humor (used as a weapon), and a "scientist's eye," and in whose writing exist elements of sudden violence, of brusque and dry hardness. His function is to cut critically into the world of men—not to observe it passively as a "realist" would, but to slice it to pieces and to lay it out uncovered.

Contained within the comparison of romantic-verbal and classical-practical styles there lies an unresolved argument about artistic abandon and artistic distance, about the artist as a trickster-manipulator and as participant, as témoin ("witness") and as complice ("accomplice"). Central to this discussion is, of course, the famous essay "M. François Mauriac et la liberté." Sartre denounces in it the "treachery" inherent in Mauriac's novels and the treachery Mauriac demands of the reader by writing of his characters at once from an interior viewpoint, as their complice, and from an external, distant, omnisciently Godlike viewpoint, as their judge, their témoin. "The novelist may be [the characters'] witness or their accomplice, but never both at once. In or out."… [Mauriac] has defined the limits of Sartre's admiration for classicism in the novel. In playing God-as-critical-artist, Mauriac is led to emblematic scene staging, to a theatrical form of concision that is only dramatic eloquence and illusory ceremony. He has gone beyond the bounds of Sartre's taste, beyond what Sartre will allow the novelist at this point…. Mauriac has perverted the practical ideal of classicism and destroyed the novel, which Sartre understands as majestic breadth and density, movement and action.

Mauriac is guilty in Sartre's eyes of the grossest and most evident artifice. What might weaken Sartre's attack on Mauriac is that in Sartre's eyes all art is artifice: it cheats, it "lives by appearances." The act of writing itself puts the artist in a false position. Whether analytic or poetic, judging or sympathetic, concise or bombastic in style, the artist's work is imbued a priori with illusionism; it begins as betrayal. All the same, this argument in no way helps Mauriac, for even in this framework there do exist for Sartre preferred choices that can be made within certain limits. He distinguishes here, for example—and he will develop and to some extent negate this idea in Qu'estce que la littérature?—between tricking the reader by a technique in which intention and process are clear (as in Dos Passos, where artificial techniques appear semilegitimate to Sartre because they are reversible and are evident to the reader who can judge them in their artificiality and beauty) and tricking the reader by the continuous, insidious onslaught of style…. Style as the essence of conventional literary procedure Sartre understands as indirect, hidden, and manipulatory, to a degree that robs the reader of his freedom and his creativity. Style, properly understood, should only be a technique subservient to a message, and separable from that message; after all, Sartre would claim, it is not an act, but only a geste ("gesture," "posture").

Within the ordinary limits of literary artifice the most concise expression is the best. The wrapping on the package should be kept to a minimum. But Renard goes beyond the point to which Sartre is willing to apply this idea. While the economy of Ponge's style pleases Sartre and makes his poems seem like "bevelled constructions, with each facet a paragraph" …, in which each sentence has density, definition, internal cohesion, and constitutes in itself a "minutely articulated world, in which the place of each word has been calculated" …, the excessive economy of Renard's sentences causes them to resemble those "solid, rudimentary animals, for whom a single hole serves as mouth and meatus."… Still, in reference to Proust and Descartes, Sartre stipulates that the length of a sentence is only consequent to the weightiness of the thought. Certain writers are to be permitted lengthy expression and extraordinary complexity of development. How are we to know them?

Renard's main default is that he is guilty of bavardage, of literary chatter (Heidegger's "Gerede," which Sartre translates as "parlerie"). In Situations 1, Nabokov sins in the same way: he is too literary, he has read too much; like his heroes, he is too self-aware, too critical; he is a bavard, masochistic and gratuitous. In other words, he is a stylist, he prefers words to thoughts. To transcend this ordinary condition of the writer, it is only necessary to reverse the terms of the equation, to prefer the thought to the expression, the matter to the form. (pp. 30-4)

In contrast to Renard, the true Sartrian artist has something to say, he has a new way of seeing, and his only struggle is to put that silent intuition into words. He must express his understanding of the human condition in a way that will create a bond of communion with other men; he must change the world. "In effect, it is a matter of penetrating the real."… Unlike Renard, he cannot be passive, he cannot timidly observe and contemplate, he cannot docilely accept the given, but he must contest it, he must act, and his thought must become action, directed toward a specific goal through language. His writing must act in a real fashion upon reality, within a specific situation—he must refuse a dissatisfaction with everything because that accomplishes nothing concrete. He must, like Dos Passos, create a desire for revolution in his readers; he must make the reader ashamed and guilty and change his world.

Renard is not capable of this action and has nothing to say because, Sartre implies, he is a coward, or, to be more exact, an effeminate coward and a formalist. He escapes out of reality into a verbal world of cocasserie ("drollery") and gentillesse ("gracefulness") …, into an elitist, autistic, comfortable, protected world of positivism and art. At one moment he has sensed an intuitive world of silence and action, but backed timorously away from it…. Afraid of solitude, Renard hides in the crowds of literary Paris, in the ranks of the realists; afraid of true communion in society, he is only his own complice. Afraid of silence, he is a bavard; afraid of language as a total human enterprise, he mutilates language and says nothing. Afraid of action, he takes flight from reality into onanistic dreams and into a formal conception of beauty as decoration and voluptuousness. (pp. 34-5)

Sartre's Renard, girdled, "ligoté" in his style, traitor, bavard de salon, is an emblem of bad and inauthentic writing. What he should be, and is not, is "prophète," "maudit," or "combattant." He should commit himself to presenting a total picture of mankind that would change and deepen the human condition. In Situations 1, there seem to be two such writers, beyond Husserl, Dos Passos, and Camus. The first is Francis Ponge, contemporary poet and author of Le Parti pris des choses. Of all the essays of Situations 1, it is the essay on Ponge, "L'homme et les choses," along with the article on Husserl, that bear the greatest interest for contemporary theoreticians. (p. 36)

What Sartre discerns in Ponge's use of language is the creation of an independent, self-sufficient, and self-referential system of signifiers that do not docilely transpose the phenomena to which they ostensibly refer into linguistic experience but instead become self-revealing objects in themselves. According to Sartre, Ponge, having assimilated a world of objects, discovers that world living an autonomous life within him as language, and nature outside him begins to exist as petrified language. At first, like Parain, like the surrealists, he attempts to negate those worlds, to destroy words with other words, only to find himself still speaking a human language. What he then discovers are the turgid lumps and swellings of words, their secret, personal, adventitious and useless meanings, born of their history and the clumsiness of their users…. The discovery leads him to try to strip words of their socialized significations, to seize them at the moment they are about to become independent objects. For Roquentin [in Nausea] in the tramway or before the chestnut tree in the public garden, things lose their labels and human names. So does Ponge separate the signifying object from its a priori anthropocentric context. Through doubt, Husserlian naiveté, and love, he takes on the role of the phenomenological hero in search of things themselves. He seeks to purify words, to go beyond the negative surrealist moment to a constructive "revolution of language."… (p. 37)

Ponge never quite becomes the Sartrian hero he might have been. Unlike Genet, he never goes far enough, because he does not doubt everything. He never gets around to a methodical doubting of science, and his vision, which might have been pure, falls back at important instances on his scientific knowledge and on an underlying mechanistic preconception of the universe. He cheats, in other words; he does not keep faith. In this light, Sartre sees Ponge's revolutionary enterprise as an example of bad faith…. Ponge's attempt to change the world reveals itself to Sartre as ultimately petulant, like that of Flaubert in some ways, and as futile, merely personal and self-inflating, contemptuous of man. It does not have to be taken seriously because in the end Sartre can reduce it to metaphor.

But where Ponge fails as a model for the writer, Paul Nizan does not. Nizan was a Marxist novelist who had been Sartre's schoolboy friend, and Sartre offers Nizan to us, not just as a model of literary intention and procedure, but also as a model of style. (pp. 37-8)

Nizan wrote prose that Sartre describes as youthful and tough. His violence is particularly telling because it is in itself a denunciation of the complacent bourgeois and of Sartre himself, and because it is a political violence. The relation between Sartre's political views and his literary judgments has always been clear—in his attacks on bourgeois society and on Baudelaire and Flaubert as bourgeois, in his embrace of the revolutionary artist—but nowhere is the coincident element of guilt and self-judgment more explicit. (p. 39)

In the end, however, Nizan comes back to the same problem that Sartre has always faced: words. Although Sartre claims that Nizan was the better writer, that words came to him more easily, and were therefore less important to him, he was nonetheless primarily a writer, and limited by that condition. His response to the problem of writing, as Sartre explains it, is not hard to understand; as a Communist, he saw that language belonged to the bourgeois masters and had to be taken aggressively from them: "A book can be an act if the revolutionary writer sets about deconditioning language." For Sartre, then, Nizan's writing was aimed at the proper ideal for literature and centered on the proper problem: literature must be an act; literature is language.

All literature, Sartre says at the end in Qu'est-ce que la littérature?…, consists essentially in taking a position. Literature is a choice of perspective, a prise de position toward the world and toward the self, which is expressed and discovered through words. In the face of the impossibility of the human condition, it is a way out (issue) of the "mousetrap" of situation; it is an invention of the self, through the full, free usage of all the creative faculties.

In the search for truth, the writer's only tools are words. If, as Sartre's contemporaries claim, language suffers from a cancerous disease, then for him the writer's task is to cure it…. Echoing elements of the essay on Ponge, Sartre asks of the writer that he reestablish language in its purest dignity; specifically, he must open the doors to new ideas through the control of new words and he must analytically cleanse words of their adventitious, merely formal and material senses and resonances to restore their clear and useful meanings. That is, he must strip the poetic element away from prose…. The issue that the writer invents is total; it includes, in addition to his subjects, his style and his technique. He cannot, therefore, permit himself a childlike enjoyment of language for its own sake, because that would transform literature into a form of mystification or illusionism. Literature must be demystified, and the writer must strive to communicate clearly, without pretending to hint at the incommunicable. (pp. 40-2)

According to Sartre, the task of literature and of criticism in the twentieth century has also become total; it demands an entire commitment. Literature must become an act, and the literature of the future will be a literature of praxis. The questions that man poses for himself are moral ones. Literature must be an aggressive answering of those questions, an ethical choosing that is both difficult and disquieting. Therefore, writing can no longer be description or explication or narration, because "description … is pure contemplative enjoyment; explanation is acceptance, it excuses everything. Both of them assume that the die is cast."… Literature is dying; it no longer has anything to do in contemporary society. The traditional uses of prose are no longer possible because they are forms of passivity; a new literature is to be invented in which perception itself will be a form of action, a revealing (dévoilement) of the world in the perspective of possible change.

Qu'est-ce que la littérature? itself. Sartre's best known programmatic critical text, is obviously enough a prise de position within a traditional framework: to save literature, Sartre states, it is necessary to take a position within literature…. [The major arguments of Qu'est-ce que la littérature?] concern themselves, for the most part, with the principles of "committed" literature and the social responsibility of the writer; they lead to the conclusions above and to an almost journalistic conception of literature as ideologically concerned with present-day problems, as a dialectical exercise in creative "generosity" on the part of both reader and writer, as negativity and construction, as an appeal for practical change and freedom, as a revelation of injustices, and finally as representing an integrating and militant function within society. This essay, with the other articles assembled in Situations 2 ("Présentation des Temps modernes" and "La Nationalisation de la littérature"), establishes for Sartre a rounded critical position, setting for the next twenty-five years the major lines of his views of the relations of literature to language, society, and the individual. (pp. 42-3)

First, there is in Qu'est-ce que la littérature? an attack on "pure" literature, an indictment of the "grave error of pure stylists" …, based on the investigations in Situations 1 into language. The error of the stylists (which Sartre speaks of elsewhere as the incredible stupidity of "des forts en thème"), the mistake of those who prefer expression to thought, is to believe that words are winds blowing over the surface of things, touching them without changing them. Sartre proclaims, with many of his contemporaries, that to speak is to act, and that to name something is to change it. Words, speech, are "a certain particular moment of action" that has no meaning except as a prolongation of the senses and physical action. To write is to speak; the writer, by which Sartre really means prosateur, "is a speaker; he designates, demonstrates, orders, refuses, challenges, begs, insults, persuades, insinuates."… That is to say, the writer is a certain kind of man of action, and writing is an act, an uncertain, solitary enterprise that involves risk and danger and demands courage.

At question here, of course, is Sartre's notoriously arbitrary distinction between the poet and the writer, between the poetic attitude and the attitude of the prose writer. Sartre's poet is a man who refuses to use words, who takes them as objects rather than signs. So, he is not a "speaker," he does not name and change the world…. Poetry assumes man's defeat; it is a commitment to failure, based particularly on a vision of the inadequacies of language to express everything, which makes of failure a final value, a contestation and appropriation of the universe. It is the mythic humanism of "loser wins," which ignores the practical uses of things, and so, unlike prose, it does not have to be an act. The essence of prose, on the other hand, the impulse behind communication, Sartre sees as the aspiration to success…. (pp. 43-4)

Implicit here, too, are problems arising from the notion of style. The stylists' error is based on the idea of a "value" carried in each text, separable from its content, and to be found intuitively in the involuntary resonances of beauty and style. For Sartre, at this point, a text is not to be handled only intuitively, since "intuition is silence, and the end of language is to communicate."… A written work is based on the decision to communicate to others certain ideas, results obtained of intuition, perhaps, and that decision is not part of a sensual intuition nor of language. Sartre demands from the writer that he have something to say, which can only be measured in terms of a system of transcendent values. The writer, he says, must write as a man, responsible for what he writes and aiming at certain targets, not as a child, firing his weapon "at random, by shutting his eyes, and merely for the pleasure of hearing the shot go off."… Writing is an appeal to the liberty of another and cannot attempt to overwhelm the reader or to arouse in him fear, desire, or any state of passion. Literature cannot proceed by constraint or fascination, and consequently the only ultimately admissible style and technique in prose is directness. Writing must be divided into form and matter; for "good authors" form never precedes.

There remains unresolved in this discussion the question of a literary value of a text, which Sartre has not rejected. In the "Présentation des Temps modernes,"… he proposes to publish texts on a basis that still considers their literary value, and that value is something extrinsic to their social intention. An "engaged" writer can yet be a mediocre one, he admits in Qu'est-ce que la littérature? "One is not a writer for having chosen to say certain things, but for having chosen to say them in a certain way. And, to be sure, the style makes the value of the prose. But it should pass unnoticed…. Beauty is in this case only a gentle and imperceptible force … in a book it hides itself, it acts by persuasion like the charm of a voice or a face…. In prose the aesthetic pleasure is pure only if it is thrown into the bargain."… To us, these ambiguous considerations are very little satisfactory. Making style subsidiary to content hardly demystifies literature, since it remains a form of illusion and persuasion. "In committed literature, commitment should at no time make us forget literature."… This is Sartre's answer: the real value of a book lies in its total impact, not just in its political meaning. But still, what is the exact role of style within that impact? How can unnoticed style and beauty be allowed to persuade when literature must eschew fascination?

Sartre reproaches "pure" literature with its overemphasis on style, its predilection for words instead of thoughts, and its insistence on the merely personal. At base, he considers it a perversion of literature. "This is 'true,' 'pure' literature, a subjectivity which yields itself under the aspect of the objective, a discourse so curiously contrived that it is equivalent to silence, a thought which debates with itself, a reason which is only the mask of madness."… "Pure" literature expresses the cult of subjectivity; it transforms literature into a marketplace for "little straying souls" and the literary art into "the ensemble of treatments which render them inoffensive."… Tanned, refined, chemically treated, the souls of authors are made into objects that are to be contemplated from a respectful distance and whose use is guaranteed without risk.

This terrorist, antirhetorical attack on "pure" literature takes its place in Qu'est-ce que la littérature? within a more general attack on the tradition of French literature and on the bourgeois writer. Although the writer in France has been a perpetual antagonist of conservative forces, he has nonetheless, according to Sartre, always been a "parasite" of the ruling elite in society. He is an unproductive and dangerous luxury that the ruling classes have permitted themselves. As such, his work has been totally useless; he consumes and does not produce. Although the position of the writer is essentially a critical one, historically he has allowed his destructive power to be controlled by the elite, and he has written only for an elite public. Since the rise of bourgeois power, the writer—too "timid" to oppose his financial masters, who had closed around him like a prison—has allowed himself to be put into a position of particular inauthenticity…. Once prophet, pariah, maudit, the writer now grotesquely ranks among the specialists, with the stamp collectors and the weight lifters.

Sartre equates the parasitism of the bourgeois writer with cowardice and passivity. The subjectivism of contemporary literature means for Sartre a fear of the real world outside the writer and a passive turning in to the self. For the most, it reflects only self-pity and an insistence on the writer's vices, weaknesses, and unhappiness. There have been those, Sartre admits, who have refused this role and this conception of literature and who have courageously insisted on literature as negation. They have created the best in modern literature, but they, too, have slipped into error; in the end, the literature of destruction seems to Sartre a literature of adolescence. (pp. 44-8)

But there have been great writers. For Sartre they are the ones who wanted to destroy and to demonstrate, to contest and to construct, all at once. Sartre leaves aside the question of literary value to judge works great in terms of their efficacy and their ability to create change within their own societies; he measures the force of a writer by the direct action of his work on the public. Does a novel produce outrage, enthusiasm, or meditation in its readers? These are for Sartre the criteria of judgment. The correct function of the writer is not to let himself flow onto the page in "abject passivity," but to attack the world around him, to seize upon writing as an act. In an ideal classless society, the "concrete public would be an immense feminine questioning, the waiting of a whole society which the writer would have to seduce and satisfy."#x2026; In this active, masculine stance, writing becomes an act of sexual generosity, and the writer redeems himself by giving of himself.

For Sartre, the force of a work of art is measured first of all in terms of its social impact, the degree to which it creates a collective bad conscience; and it should not, therefore, be judged outside its concrete situation. No work of art can be reduced to bare ideas, since each creation is "totally penetrated by an existence," that is to say, characterized by freedom. The artist works on an unassimilable and irreducible material—language—that he can never completely ingest or integrate into a system, to create a work that reproduces both being and existence.

Style, then, becomes sensitivity to the material aspects of language, directed with the intention of forcefully, gracefully, and efficiently producing a certain social result. Language is allusion and ellipsis within a given framework, and its use as style only has meaning within that framework. The work of art, which lifts society out of the "bog" of the immediate, reflects the material aspect of its medium; it includes elements of hardness, resistance, and moral austerity…. Literature should be more than seduction; it should go beyond any appeal to the emotions (since the emotions are "degraded" forms of consciousness for Sartre) to argue and demonstrate, as an objective appeal to the "free" generosity of the reader. (pp. 48-9)

Sartre completes his attack on "pure" literature and the bourgeois writer with an attack on the cowardice of the contemporary critic. Critics, he says, were once people who liked to read; in the twentieth century, they have become merely the professional "chroniqueurs" of literature. In 1947, they have no humanistic interest in following the general line of an author's evolution; instead, they cut the work off from the author and busy themselves with classifications, labels, and predictions in their haste to make each author a recognized national resource. "Through fear and a taste for social consecration, critics read today the way one re-reads."…

Sartre's point is that, as writing is an uncertain enterprise, so reading, for an author's contemporary, should share the risks of that enterprise; it should require the minimal naiveté that allows the reader to react honestly and immediately, to risk making his own evaluation of a book. But contemporary critics, he feels, are unsettled by new thoughts and new forms of expression, and they hasten to neutralize their effect on a passive public. With ill-concealed impatience they await the writer's death…. (p. 50)

From Situations 1 to Situations 2, through the creation of Les Temps modernes, the urge towards schematic formulation and decree grows much stronger in Sartre. In the articles on Parain and Renard he seemed to be testing and clarifying his intuitions and preoccupations; by Qu'est-ce que la littérature? he has integrated them into a fully developed approach. Along the way, he does much violence to detail: from his arbitrary distinction between poetry and prose and his circular argument that there is no good anti-Semitic novel (based on his definition of "good" as an appeal to freedom), to his roughshod trampling of a thousand years of French literature (from the medieval clerks to his eighteenth-century heroes to 1947), Sartre keeps his train of thought fluid by repeated, obsessive jumps in the argument. The key to the development of Qu'est-ce que la littérature? is a series of unproven assumptions…. Here the sensitivity to sexual dichotomies is expressed through the dialectics of form and matter, life and death, the active and the passive. (p. 51)

Joseph Halpern, in his Critical Fictions: The Literary Criticism of Jean-Paul Sartre (copyright © 1976 by Yale University), Yale University Press, 1976, 176 p.