For some time now French critics have been talking about a "crisis" in their literature. "Crisis" is a violent word, and there has possibly been some overdramatization in its use; but there can be no doubt about the seriousness of the situation that has evoked this word: French literature suggests a countryside overrun by generations of industrious cultivators until the point of diminishing returns seems reached, where the soil continues to yield crops only after exacting very much more drastic methods of cultivation and ever more painful labor. By the turn of the century, some traditional genres already appeared exhausted, and recently French critics have been declaring that the language itself demands new means of expression.

The background of Qu'est-ce que la littérature?, then, is this continuing crisis in French literature, one which is still apparent on the contemporary literary scene. For in retrospect it seems clear that Sartre is not, nor is likely to become, a great writer: clever, enormously, furiously energetic, he does not possess the authentic gifts of a really first-rate creative talent. But in the present case this may be no disadvantage—a greater writer, for whom literature itself might never become a question, might be less sensitive to the historic forces that now push the literary man into such an odd and difficult place in the world. And what we can always count on in Sartre is the prodigious intelligence with which he plunges into any problem. In the grand tradition, he divides the problem of literature into three questions: Qu'est-ce qu'écrire? Pourquoi écrire? Pour qui écriton? These questions themselves breathe the air of crisis, for they are not the kind of questions that enter the writer's head during his periods of fertility and overflow; they become urgent and sometimes paralyzing only when he has descended into the pits of silence, anguish, artistic nihilism; when he exists on the margins of literature where language itself seems to become impossible, a position described almost twenty years later in Les Mots.

Coming out of this double crisis in the French situation, Sartre does not present us with any radically new theory of literature: most of his views had their antecedents in the Marxist theorizing of the 'thirties, although he gives them a new philosophical color. The revolutionary import of Sartre's message lies in his complete acceptance of the conditions under which, it appears, the writer may soon have to work, even though to accept these conditions may imply a radical break with the whole tradition of literature in France.

He attempts to give an historical answer to the three questions that divide his book by reviewing the conditions of author, public, and society during the major periods of French literature. The influence of Marxism obviously forms judgments of taste at certain points. Thus he undervalues the literature of the seventeenth century because it was aristocratic, actually preferring the comedies of Beaumarchais, for example, which belong to the more democratic eighteenth century, to those of Molière, and going so far as to describe Molière's Le Misanthrope as a comedy dealing only with the trivial subjects of manners. The trouble is not that Sartre lacks taste—the entire work is evidence of his passionate addiction to literature—but that the brilliance of his insights on the past is often spoiled by extreme and doctrinaire judgments.

This lack of critical balance has its most serious consequences when Sartre is dealing with the "bourgeois" literature of the nineteenth century. Here his judgments are obviously colored by his passionate hatred of the bourgeois class itself, and therefore, though he makes some telling points against bourgeois literature, they are usually directed at its weakest side and hardly do justice to its main bulk of significant work. The error is the familiar one of seeking to convert political and social sympathies too directly into literary judgment, so that he still sees political and cultural realities under drastic Marxist simplifications.

The facts, however, are always more complex. Flaubert, for example, has always been a target for Sartre…. Sartre attempts to justify his severity by citing long passages from Flaubert, particularly his letters and early works, that express an aristocratic hatred of the mob. This is all very well; but the accusation is rendered meaningless when we recall that Flaubert, despite his correspondence, has produced in the few pages of Un Coeur simple a more profound and sympathetic picture of the poor than in all the thousand pages of Sartre's trilogy Les Chemins de la liberté…. Both Flaubert and Sartre could be described as execrating the bourgeois. In the former this became a revolt, an obsession with la bétise, and in the latter, an obsession with le salaud. Even the personal lives of these men, with their brilliant intellects, their voluntary isolation in order to write more effectively, even the presence of an ageing mother and une amie, all suggest the close physical and metaphysical rapport which exists between them. That Flaubert should therefore be so consistently misinterpreted by Sartre, at least thus far, suggests interesting and complex conclusions.

There are, to be sure, reasons for the Sartrian approach. His interest in literary criticism, admittedly, is indirect: His concern is chiefly to understand the condition of the writer, the particular way in which he remains dependent on, but manages to be free from, his day and place, his public and his language. To communicate effectively with his reader a writer must, in Sartre's view, be representative yet original, influenced by his situation yet able to assert his own self much more than most of us are ever in a position to do. Viewed in such a way, the situation of the writer is a privileged instance of the human condition, and the study of it necessarily occupies a considerable place in a philosophy which is above all concerned with the problem of freedom. At the same time, the practice of criticism, in this special sense, enables Sartre to express his ideas with a bold provocativeness which lies happily midway in style between his forbiddingly abstract rhetoric and the controversialist's violent irony…. [In] Qu'est-ce que la littérature? one simple point made was that all literature of the past is dead and should be left where it belongs—in those cemeteries we call libraries! It is precisely the fact that Sartrian criticism examines literature not on a strictly literary basis but from a philosophical point of view that makes reading this criticism such an interesting but, on occasion, a frustrating experience. (pp. 39-42)

Sartre started out with an overriding interest in phenomenology as a philosophy of what Husserl called the Lebenswelt (le monde vécu), which was to overcome the dichotomy between idealism and materialism as much as that between philosophy and experience. He developed a rigorous analysis of the structures of consciousness while feeling compelled at the same time to elucidate certain experiences in his own mind and to communicate them in creative literature. A close examination of his literary criticism shows it to be a mediation between his phenomenology and the "monde vécu" of the author under review. Sartre's contribution consists precisely in locating the author's way of apprehending "le monde vécu," his metaphysics.

But the point is that these differences scarcely justify the fusillades littéraires in which Sartre indulges himself…. [Balzac] embarrasses Sartre; he does not know where or how to place him. As a bourgeois? But he goes far beyond the limits of the bourgeoisie. As a revolutionary? But he has reactionary opinions. Better, therefore, not to treat him at all. Balzac is not mentioned. And better omit Stendhal also, to be more prudent. Taine is dismissed as a cheap pedant! It is the peremptory quality of these statements which makes them so galling. (p. 43)

All this brings us now to the core of Sartre's message, which is his now well-known concept of littérature engagée. His doctrine is an insistence upon the reintegration of literature into life, against the idea of the priesthood of letters that germinated during the whole of the nineteenth century to come to full and final bloom in the symbolists…. [Looking] back on more than half a century of writers who will eventually give their names to the twentieth century, we seem to see them in retrospect as belonging almost to a vanished culture, so different were the conditions of their existence from those of the period into which we have now entered. If they inherited the nineteenth century view of the writer as a separate and anointed being, a kind of priest, they were able to hold on to this role only with the tensions of an irony that provided it with a new human content. Proust, Joyce, Mann, and the others, all exist in the full plenitude of a tradition of which they sought to lose no part, so that their work in its richness already carries the seeds of disorder and dissolution. Probably a moment like this in literary history could not be prolonged any further. Sartre's work is perhaps the first conscious announcement that the conditions of literature must return to a lower and less ambitious level; but even if the program did not become conscious, the attitude has already begun to prevail. We are now able to understand our surprise at the evolution of Sartre's career. The discrepancy between the very abstract and involved philosophy of the Critique de la raison dialectique and the rudimentary and plodding fiction is no longer a puzzle. It was something of a shock, after the intellectual sophistication and complexity of L'Etre et le néant to descend upon the three volumes of Sartre's trilogy Les Chemins de la liberté, not because his creative gifts were lacking but because he was willing to aim so low in the novel. But all this now appears to have been intentional: The committed writer disdains the creation of masterpieces, and even the very concept of the masterpiece, with whatever silence, exile, or cunning it may exact, no longer seems to have any connection with that act of writing that aims essentially at making an impact, just as one might strike a blow or fire a pistol.

Sartre is therefore entirely consistent with himself when he proposes that the writer neglect none of the mass media available, such as television, radio, and cinema. He notes with satisfaction that the modern writer is able to reach a much vaster audience than his predecessor of the nineteenth century…. It is true that Sartre is aware of the other side of the coin—that when Gide, for example, becomes known through the cinema to thousands who have not read him, the writer also becomes inseparable from the face of Michèle Morgan, or Marcello Mastroianni in the case of Camus' L'Etranger—but he fails to consider what will happen if this process continues unchecked. The cultural process in modern 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, as Marshall McLuhan has suggested. 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 complications and subtleties, and indeed the very limitations of personality that have in the past defined his most authentic themes. (pp. 44-5)

Sartre's criticism is undoubtedly characteristic of that of many creative writers—it tells us much less about the work criticized than it does about the critic. As such, his criticism is stimulating and provocative, as is much of his production. But we genuinely hope that future critics will endeavor to judge literature on its own merits, and not by standards imposed from foreign disciplines. (p. 45)