The Rhetoric of Imagination in Sartre's Philosophy and Prose
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Language and Engagement: The Rhetoric of Imagination in Sartre’s Philosophy and Prose Merel Aalders (11753560) Master Thesis UvA Philosophy First Reader: dr. A. van Rooden Second reader: dr. E.C Brouwer September 2018 1 Table of Contents Abstract ................................................................................................................................. 3 Introduction .......................................................................................................................... 4 1. Early Engagement: A Literature of Praxis ........................................................................ 8 I Being and Nothingness: Consciousness and Freedom .................................................... 8 II What is Literature?: Consciousness, Freedom and Creative Imagination ................. 10 III The Relationship between Reader and Writer ........................................................... 14 IV The Situation of the Writer .......................................................................................... 15 V Between Language and World ...................................................................................... 19 2. Late Engagement: Materiality, Alienation and Ambiguity ............................................ 25 VI Engagement Evolves ..................................................................................................... 25 VII Disinformation and the Inexpressible ........................................................................ 28 VIII Materiality, Ambiguity and Alienation of Language .............................................. 30 IX Early and Late Engagement: Consciousness, Freedom and Language ................... 34 X Language: From Body to Vécu ...................................................................................... 39 3. Rhetoric in Sartre’s Prose: Theme and Metaphor as Forms of Enquiry...................... 45 XI The Métaphysique of the Writer: Narrative and Thematic Structures .................... 45 XII Roads to Freedom: Conversion and the Inexpressible .............................................. 48 XIII Roads to Freedom: The Category Mistake of Metaphor......................................... 53 XIV Rhetoric and Sartre’s Phenomenology of Language............................................... 57 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................... 61 Bibliography ........................................................................................................................ 64 2 Abstract In What is Literature?, Sartre articulates his conception of literary engagement (commitment) as an appeal from writer to reader, in which freedom is imagined to be the highest ethical end. The appeal functions through the instrumentality of language of literary prose; poetry is excluded. In the course of his work, however, Sartre develops a different stance towards poetry, engagement and the role of the writer. Goldthorpe treats Sartre’s philosophy as one that rejects conclusiveness and therefore considers his theory to be most sufficiently analysed by means of an intertextual approach that includes his literary fiction. Sartre’s biography on Mallarmé is key in this approach: in it, he describes Mallarmé’s poetry as as committed as possible. Through his analysis of Mallarmé’s life as a project of commitment to the failure of poetry, Sartre reinstates the value of ambiguity. This concerns both language itself, and consciousness, as he now envisions it to be contributing to the transcendence of the subject’s alienation from themselves, the Other, the world and language. The developments in Sartre’s thought raise the fundamental question: Language or Man? According to Goldthorpe, this question and its subsequent concerns can be analysed in terms of Sartre’s rhetoric of imagination: the persuasive linguistic figures Sartre uses to appeal to the imagination of the reader in order to contest the traditional limits of logic. Goldthorpe’s account of the development of Sartrean commitment complicates this interpretation: the rhetorical, functional style of Sartre’s work reveals the early presence of questions that would be articulated and deepened out further in his later work. Roads to Freedom is overlaid with such rhetorical structures, and they already illuminate the self- questioning nature of what is often taken to be the philosophy Sartre attempted to exemplify by means of his fiction. Goldthorpe’s account of Sartrean engagement functions as the basis for my analysis of the rhetoric of imagination in Roads to Freedom. In fundamental relation to the developments regarding Sartre’s engagement, I consider the key elements in his relative stance towards the aspects of inexpressibility, ambiguity, alienation, the sens/signification-distinction, the subject/object-dichotomy, le vécu and (de)totalization. According to these considerations, Sartre’s phenomenology of language can be (at least partly) uncovered, revealing the complexity of the language/man question that never stops busying philosophers. 3 Introduction The question whether a writer is supposed to involve themselves politically in the society that delivers them – take a stance; choose sides – or whether they are allowed to retract into an ivory tower of artistic immunity, has been a pressing one for some time now. Engagement is never off the table: now and then it seems that only literature which involves a political component is considered worthy of praise; at other times, this tendency within the literary climate is fiercely contested, because whoever decided art could not just be art for art’s sake anymore? If there is any philosopher that can always be counted on to make matters more complicated, it is of course the one for whom existence precedes essence, hell is other people, and, most importantly, words are loaded pistols. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) can be considered a pioneer of the advocacy of literary engagement. Although never having been able to make a lifelong commitment to any considerable political organization himself, Sartre wrote about the interplay between literature and politics as littérature engagé extensively. However, his conception of literary engagement has been in no way unwavering: it altered in some significant respects along the way. Sartre’s philosophical considerations seem to have visited nearly both ends of the spectrum that covers the extent to which a writer can or should be engaged, but he never surrendered to the idea that art could just exist for art’s sake. Eventually, literature will serve a purpose. How it does, exactly, is a question that takes us deep into the heart of Sartre’s existential phenomenology. The complexity of this question might give us an indication of why it is still pressing, and mostly unresolved. In What is Literature? (1947), Sartre describes literature as a commitment to freedom. It is an appeal from writer to reader, in which freedom is imagined to be the highest ethical end. The appeal functions through the instrumentality of language of literary prose. Language is at our disposal, it can be turned into action; Sartre even goes as far as to say that “we are within language as within our body.”1 Words, for Sartre, are loaded pistols: to write is to speak, to speak is to act, and to act is to shoot.2 This does not go for all linguistic expression: poetry, for instance, is left out of this equation. Whereas literary language needs a referent in reality, poetic language embodies the l’art pour l’art Sartre initially contests: it refers only to itself, whereas change needs to happen in the real world. Seventeen years later, however, the perspective seems to have shifted completely. In his autobiography Words (1964), Sartre considers his previous attitude towards language illusory. He writes: “Since I had discovered the world through 1 Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature? (New York, Routledge Classics, 2001): 12. 2 Geoffrey Baker, “Pressing Engagement: Sartre’s Littérature, De Beauvoir’s Literature and the Lingering Uncertainty of Literary Activism,” (Dalhousie French Studies 63 2003): 73. 4 language, for a long time I mistook language for the world. To exist was to have a registered trade-name somewhere in the Table of the Word; writing meant engraving new beings on them or – this was my most persistent illusion – catching living things in the trap of phrases.”3 But before arriving at these conclusions, Sartre’s phenomenology of language undergoes some significant changes. Sartre admitted “that he had never formulated an explicit philosophy of language but insisted that one could be reconstructed from elements employed throughout his work.” 4 Rhiannon Goldthorpe’s treatment of the development of Sartre’s concept of engagement (or commitment) in Sartre: Literature and Theory can be considered in line with such a project of reconstruction. In Sartre’s work, the question of language is intricately tied up with the question of literary engagement: if we can disclose the nature of language, we can determine its possibility to affect the world and create freedom. Goldthorpe treats Sartre’s philosophy as one that rejects conclusiveness and thus considers it appropriate that her analysis of the relationship between Sartre’s theory and literature formulates only open-ended questions. She urges all readers of Sartre to do the same: to continually reframe their enquiries in terms of the open- ended philosophy he is considered to