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

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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

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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.

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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 comply with himself.5 She suggests that style is functional in his works, which provides a common ground for both his philosophical and literary writing.6 On the basis of his analysis of Stephane Mallarmé’s poetry as as committed as possible, Sartre reinstates the value of ambiguity, which relates to both consciousness and language as the ability to transcend alienation. According to Goldthorpe this means that the highest stakes are risked: “la Parole ou l’Homme.” 7 Is language ours, or are we in it? According to Goldthorpe, the reconstruction of Sartre’s phenomenology of language can be analysed further on the basis of a structural rhetoric of imagination: the persuasive and linguistic figures he uses to appeal to the imagination of the reader to contest the traditional limits of logic. It is this function of imagination of language, its very structure and semantics, that Goldthorpe wants to see explored further when reading Sartre. According to her, reading Sartre is a project that is never quite finished: the open-endedness and the interrelatedness of his earlier and later work, and of his philosophy and his fiction, should always encourage us to dig deeper. Between 1945 and 1949, Sartre published the first three volumes of Roads to Freedom, the fourth of which was published in Les Temps Modernes in 1981 (posthumously). His

3 Jean-Paul Sartre, Words, trans. Irene Clephane (London: Penguin, 2000): 115. 4 Thomas Flynn, “Jean-Paul Sartre,” (The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2013). 5 Rhiannon Goldthorpe, Sartre: Literature and Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984): 3. 6 Goldthorpe, Sartre: Literature and Theory, 2. 7 Idem., 198. 5

conception of committed literature was supposedly still very action-centred, since What is Literature? was published somewhere in the middle of the publication of the three volumes of Roads to Freedom. However, 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. It becomes clear that the difference between Sartre’s earlier and later conception of commitment is not so radical after all, rather, it bears witness of a deepening of questions that are, in earlier texts, already present in rhetorical form. Consequently, Roads to Freedom inhabits this rhetoric. Goldthorpe lists a number of stylistic devices it appears in: “apparent tautologies, the negation of a term by itself, the identity of contradictory propositions, oxymoron, the ‘category mistakes’ of metaphor.”8 Indeed, Roads to Freedom is constructed out of such stylistic devices, 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 commitment, then, will function as the base for my analysis of the seductive rhetoric Roads to Freedom is overlaid with. In the first part of my thesis, I will discuss Sartre’s earlier conception of engagement. I will outline the concepts of freedom and consciousness as they are described in Being and Nothingness (1943) because they form the basis for Sartre’s conception of engagement as disclosed in What is Literature?. I will discuss this further in relation to the concept of creative imagination, the relationship between writer and reader, and the situation of the writer. I will then focus on the relationship between language and the world, because I believe this is the locus for the most fundamental change in Sartre’s thought on literary engagement. In the second part, I will discuss Sartre’s later conception of engagement in relation to some concepts that have become increasingly emphasized throughout his writing: first disinformation and the inexpressible, and then materiality, ambiguity and alienation. To briefly summarize the most essential changes up until this point, I will relate this late conception of engagement to the earlier one by analysing the changes in Sartre’s thought on consciousness and freedom. They lead me to an analysis of the evolution of his thought on language: whereas in Sartre’s earlier thought, language is considered instrumental and transparent, it is now considered part of the lived experience (vécu), which constitutes a fundamentally different conception of the relationship between language and the world.

8 Goldthorpe, Sartre: Literature and Theory, 201-202. 6

In the third part of my thesis, I will illustrate how metaphorical language has a rhetorical function in Sartre’s earlier fictional work, which exemplifies the changes in his thought on consciousness, freedom and language. The focus on these rhetorical structures allows the reader of Sartre to rethink the interrelatedness of his philosophy and literary fiction, and consider this philosophy an open-ended one with an emphasis on the aspect of enquiry through imagination. In relation to Sartre’s Roads to Freedom, I consider narrative and thematic structures, conversion and the inexpressible, metaphor as a category mistake and, finally, the implications for the development of Sartre’s thought on engagement this entails.

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1. Early Engagement: A Literature of Praxis

I Being and Nothingness: Consciousness and Freedom Sartre’s conception of freedom in What is Literature? is based on three modes of consciousness: Being-in-Itself, Being-for-Itself and Being-for-Others (en-soi, pour-soi and pour-autrui). Sartre first describes these modes of consciousness in his essay on phenomenological ontology Being and Nothingness. Being-in-Itself indicates a mode of consciousness in which one considers oneself to be whole, complete and unable to be affected by the presence of other consciousnesses. It is an inauthentic mode of being, one lives in Bad Faith: attached to a belief or set of beliefs that generates self-deception.9 In the case of Being-for-Itself, consciousnesses do recognize each other. This is a more fluid and dynamic mode of being. Being-in-Itself can be seen as nonconscious (Sartre rejects the terminology of the unconscious); Being-for-Itself as conscious.10 Being-for-Itself should be seen as the internal negation of the Being-in-Itself, and this duality constitutes our situation: “Viewed more concretely, this duality is cast as ‘facticity’ and ‘transcendence.’ The ‘givens’ of our situation such as our language, our environment, our previous choices and our very selves in their function as in-Itself constitute our facticity. As conscious individuals, we transcend this facticity in what constitutes our ‘situation.’”11 We are always in situation. At the same time we experience the need to give our being meaning, which Sartre indicates with the term obligation, even though it is neither a physical, nor a rational force. We cannot detach ourselves from this necessity, and it constitutes us at the most fundamental level. Thus, we are more than our situation, Sartre thinks: we are free, and we are condemned to be so.12 Sartre does not discuss the concept of freedom along the lines of the philosophical tradition that precedes him: he notably sidesteps terms such as will and liberty, and evades notions of freedom as a property to be ascribed to human beings. Freedom, according to Sartre, is freedom of consciousness. It is inseparable from the being of human reality: “We can be free in relation to the things of the world, only if our self-relation contains freedom.” 13 Consciousness, as we have seen, is the “imaginative transcendence of the given situation.” 14 But consciousness is also intentional: it always relates to something it negates. The distance

9 Thomas Flynn, Jean-Paul Sartre (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) 10 Flynn, “Jean-Paul Sartre,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2013). 11 Idem. 12 Sebastian Gardner, Sartre’s ‘Being and Nothingness’: A Reader's Guide (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2009): 154. 13 Gardner, Sartre’s ‘Being and Nothingness,’ 149. 14 T. Storm Heter, Sartre’s Ethics of Engagement (London: Continuum, 2009): 18. 8

between subject and object is called negation or nothingness. Next to that, consciousness is temporal: “it constantly surpasses itself in anticipation of the future.” 15 This means that consciousness is not subject to matter, since it is constant negation of it, and always future- oriented instead of determined by a past, which makes it radically contingent. The aspects of intentionality and temporality constitute the ontological structure of the necessary, universal human features of consciousness, and make it free.16 The third mode of consciousness, Being-for-Others, is a mode in which we adopt the form in which others perceive us: “The category or ontological principle of the for-others comes into play as soon as the other subject or Other appears on the scene. The Other cannot be deduced from the two previous principles [Being-in-Itself and Being-for-itself] but must be encountered.”17 Sartre describes the shame that occurs when consciousnesses encounter each other through the look or gaze, by the analogy of looking through a keyhole and spying on others, when suddenly being caught in the act. But when subjects encounter each other, there is more to it than just shame. In “Sartre & the Other: Conflict, Conversion, Language and the We,” Gavin Rae argues that the concept of conversion has often been overlooked when analysing Sartre’s phenomenological ontology. Conversion is a specific process of communication, that consists of two important aspects: “1) consciousness alters its pre- reflective fundamental project so that it values freedom as the highest ethical and; and 2) consciousness alters its reflective self-understanding so that it recognizes that it is a subjective freedom that lives an objective body in an objective situation.”18 These two aspects of the relations between consciousnesses imply that their nature is not merely conflictual. It is not the case that they are fundamentally unable to identify with each other’s subjective freedom: they are at least able to comprehend it.19 Consciousnesses relate to each other through the look, which refers to a recognition of the Other as a general presence (not just ocular). The meaning attributed to the Other’s look depends on the subject’s pre-reflective fundamental project: “the freely chosen general project that shapes its reflective self-understanding and its everyday values, norms, meanings, and choices.”20 Our natural inclination would be to choose a project that is in Bad Faith. A consciousness that is in Bad Faith fails to understand that it is a free subjectivity living in an

15 Storm Heter, Sartre’s Ethics of Engagement, 8. 16 Idem., 18. 17 Flynn, “Jean-Paul Sartre,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2013). 18 Gavin Rae, “Sartre & the Other: Conflict, Conversion, Language and the We,” (Sartre Studies International 15.2, 2009): 55. 19 Rae, “Sartre & the Other,” 68. 20 Idem., 54. 9

objective situation, and so its project would consist of trying to fill the nothingness between itself and the world. It is not content with being nothing, so it attempts to become something, create itself – essentially, it wants to be God.21 It would not recognize the Other’s freedom as such and so consciousnesses would be primordially conflictual. But we can surpass this conflict by the formation of we-relations. It is essential for the recognition of the Other and the Other’s freedom to create these we-relations. They are made possible by conversion, in which consciousnesses alter their pre-reflective project to value freedom as the highest ethical end, and alter their pre-reflective self-understanding to recognize “a subjective freedom that lives an objective body in an objective situation.” 22 This conception of consciousnesses’ relational aspect is fundamental to that of the writer/reader. Language, as the essential vehicle for carrying out the project of conversion, supports the relation of the mutual recognition of each other’s freedom, instead of negating the Other’s subjectivity.23 When we-relations are formed, consciousness “reflectively recognizes, respects, and affirms the Other’s practical freedom, which is based on their ontological freedom.”24 Practical or empirical freedom is the freedom we can speak of on a daily basis, the popular conception of it that entails a freedom of action. Ontological freedom, on the other hand, indicates the philosophical, technical conception of it.25 It is a characteristic of consciousness. Practical freedom is based on ontological freedom when consciousness’ activity is not being restrained by external forces, and that it is able to “freely and creatively express itself in the real world.”26 After Being and Nothingness, Sartre loses the distinction between practical and ontological freedom and ascribes a priority to how “our social and historical being involves a union of freedom with necessity.”27 When analysing What is Literature?, however, it is still important to understand this difference. For Sartre, ontological freedom is the basic ground on which literary engagement can exist, whereas practical freedom is what the writer hopes to establish through an appeal to the reader’s creative imagination.

II What is Literature?: Consciousness, Freedom and Creative Imagination At the basis of Sartre’s What is Literature? lies a belief in literature as a commitment to freedom, and an appeal to the writer to carry responsibility for it. Literature, having delivered

21 Rae, “Sartre & the Other,” 64-65. 22 Idem., 55. 23 Idem., 62. 24 Idem., 55. 25 Gardner, Sartre’s ‘Being and Nothingness,’ 160. 26 Rae, “Sartre & the Other,” 75. 27 Gardner, Sartre’s ‘Being and Nothingness,’ 161. 10

the writer, is “an abstract function and an a priori power of human nature; it is the movement whereby at every moment man frees himself from history; in short, it is the exercise of freedom.”28 This conception of freedom has the characteristics of a totalizing, action-centred theory. It focusses on the writer as a product of their contemporary socio-political environment. We are ontologically free, according to Sartre, but this does not mean that our choices are limitless. We do have to realize that we can freely choose the position we take in relation to the facticity of our situation, since “it is not a matter of choosing one’s age but of choosing oneself within it.”29 A writer is an inevitable product of their own time, but through the dialectical and reciprocal process of writing, they should appeal to a universal public. Writing is dialectical in the sense that it seeks to bring about a higher consciousness among two opposing ones (reader and writer) as they are confronted with each other. Moreover, it is reciprocal in the sense that the interaction between writer and reader, as mutual contributors to the same project, constructs its existence. These aspects of literature make it an appeal instead of a finished product. The writer appeals to the context-specific aspects of an envisioned reader that possess the quality of unveiling universal, human truths. In this way, they contest the reader’s alienation and dogmatism: literature functions as a catalyst for change. After all, “it is the writer’s mission to dispel inertia, ignorance, prejudice and false emotion.” 30 For Sartre, appealing to these situational effects (ignorance, prejudice and the like) in order to express universal, human truths, can only happen through the signification of prosaic language, which finds its resonance in the world. In What is Literature? Sartre distinguishes verbal arts from fine arts, and prose from poetry. This is because poetry, according to Sartre, exists as an end for itself, and is therefore incapable of committing itself to freedom. Within prosaic expression, “each sentence contains language in its entirety and refers back to the whole universe.”31 Consequently, literary prose is to be judged by measure of the extent to which it relates to the world, instead of the aesthetic criteria reserved for poetry. Sartre’s prose/poetry distinction can be considered in light of language’s necessity to engage with the world: “Prose works through the signification of words, poetry through the sens.”32 The words of literary prose are descriptive and significative, they

28 Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature? (New York, Routledge Classics, 2001): 80. 29 Sartre, What is Literature?, 184. 30 Idem., X. 31 Idem., 15. 32 Christina Howells, “Sartre and the Language of Literature,” (The Modern Language Review 74.3, 1979): 572. 11

signify worldly aspects, whereas poetic language, employing the sens, refers predominantly to itself. Signification and sens can be distinguished from each other by the way they relate to the concept of meaning. Signification can be regarded as a direct imposition of words upon things as referents.33 It is “effected by signs, that is to say, bearers of meaning which direct our attention beyond themselves to whatever they signify.”34 Sens, on the other hand, appeals to the infinite and universal meaning of inexpressible things through an aspect of the given object. Our attention and understanding are directed towards the quality of the object that involves “the incarnation of a reality which goes beyond it but which cannot be grasped apart from it and whose infinity does not allow expression in any system of signs.”35 Prose, with its significative language, escapes the self-reflexive and thereby self-destructive tendency of the language of the sens. It is to be judged on the basis of a method Sartre calls action by disclosure. He writes: “I reveal the situation by my very intention of changing it; […] with every word I utter, I involve myself a little more in the world, and by the same token I emerge from it a little more, since I go beyond it towards the future.”36 By disclosing the world he seeks to change, the writer moves towards action. “There is no given freedom,” Sartre writes in For Whom Does One Write?, the third chapter of What is Literature?.37 “It is nothing else but the movement by which one perpetually uproots and liberates oneself.”38 Freedom, however ontological, is not a given fact: it is to be achieved constantly as individual victories over the self, the other, and the situation. At the same time, “like the sea, there is no end to it.”39 According to Howells, as she writes in Sartre: The Necessity of Freedom, Sartre is always concerned with freedom in relation to its opposite, non- freedom: alienation or aspects of human finitude, like the limits of language. Howells writes: “The early Sartre […] is concerned primarily with the individual, his situation and his facticity; the later Sartre with society, ‘pre-destination’ and the ‘practico-inert.’”40 What is Literature? emerges from these earlier thoughts on freedom, relating to the individual, the situation and facticity. Here, freedom is freedom of consciousness: the movement that characterizes freedom starts with a consciousness that realizes itself to be a free subject in an objective situation.

33 Suzanne Guerlac, “Sartre and the Powers of Literature,” (Modern language Notes 108.5, 1993): 810. 34 Paul Crittenden, “The Singular Universal in Jean-Paul Sartre,” (Literature and Aesthetics 8, 2011): 33. 35 Crittenden, “The Singular Universal in Jean-Paul Sartre,” 33. 36 Sartre, What is Literature?, 14 37 Idem., 50. 38 Idem., 50. 39 Idem., 50. 40 Howells, Sartre: The Necessity of Freedom, 1. 12

According to Howells, Sartre’s works on aesthetics and literary criticism deal with notions of freedom of consciousness in terms of the creative imagination. 41 Considering freedom of consciousness synonymous with the imagination allows Sartre to “relate his literary productions and aesthetic theories to his philosophical and political radicalism.”42 Imagining is a type of consciousness, and an image is relational: it is a consciousness of something. At the same time, it proposes a nothingness (néant), since, when we imagine an object, we know that it is not before us, precisely because we imagine it.43 Howells writes: “Imagination is not simply the formation of images, not just a matter of daydreaming. It also allows us to envisage the possible, the unreal, that which is not; in positing the unreal it simultaneously negates the real, and it is this power to negate which is the key to the freedom of consciousness. It is imagination which permits us to stand back and totalize the world as world.”44 The negating function of consciousness is synonymous with the imagination’s function to go beyond the real, to replace any notion of pre-destination with contingency, and thus to constitute freedom. Taking a step back, proposing the nothingness of the unreal is the same act as placing the world as a synthetic totality. Without the power to imagine we would get stuck in the world, according to Sartre, and merely exist without being able to seize something else than existence. Imagination is consciousness in its entirety, as it realizes its own freedom.45 Howells writes: “I perceive the world as I do because I can at any moment stand back from it; in so far as I apprehend the world as a meaningful totality, I go beyond the immediate ‘given,’ and this potential dépassement is always implicit in my awareness of my situation.”46 The creative imagination, then, is a type of consciousness that fully realizes its freedom, and perceives the world as a meaningful totality. The (potential) dépassement, in this context, refers to the surpassing of the facticity of the Being-in-Itself (the ‘givens’ of our situation such as language) by the negation of it by the Being-for-Itself. It constitutes the situation we are in, and in which we feel the obligation to give our being meaning. Meaning is not contained in language, for art is not an end in itself, but is rather realized through it as a dialectical process. Words are a kind of secondary action, as Sartre calls it, since they depend on a reflective consciousness. Since art is, according to Sartre, a recovery of the totality of being, “the creative act aims at a total renewal of the world.”47 The writer needs to

41 Howells, Sartre: The Necessity of Freedom, 1. 42 Idem., 10. 43 Idem., 11. 44 Idem., 13. 45 Idem., 3. 46 Idem., 13-14. 47 Sartre, What is Literature?, 42 13

want (practical, not merely ontological) freedom as their highest ethical end. They address their contemporaries while at the same time manifesting themselves as essential to the universality of being, in order to realize change. Sartre writes: “This is quite the final goal of art: to recover this world by giving it to be seen as it is, but as if it had its source in human freedom.”48 Literary prose is able to exist as such a relational process through which freedom can be realized. It always relates to something: to the world; to others. Sartre writes: “There is no art except for and by others.”49 In What is Literature?, then, there is no writer without a reader.

III The Relationship between Reader and Writer Consciousnesses do not interact through language first, but through the look. The look is primordially a social relation. At first it is alienating to realize oneself to be an object through the look of the Other, but through conversion consciousnesses are opened up to the possibility of transcending their alienating and conflictual tendencies. By re-evaluating and abandoning their inauthentic pre-reflective fundamental project to become God, consciousnesses can adopt a project that considers freedom to be the highest end. The subject then understands that it needs the Other as a condition for experience. The pre-reflective fundamental projects are expressed and brought into practice by communication’s conversion. Language, then, functions as a pathway towards the recognition of the Other’s freedom.50 This constitution of the we-relation is “the highest form of social relation because it allows each consciousness to exist freely and, by working with others in a way that affirms each other’s freedom, achieve ends they would not otherwise be able to achieve.”51 The structure of the we-relation constitutes authentic being: being in full realization of the respective freedom of self and Other. In What is Literature?, Sartre regards the writer/reader relation to be one of those we-relations that is naturally formed. Through language, the writer appeals to the freedom of the reader, and through this appeal the literary object is constituted. Freedom, then, is experienced through a creative act, and the work of art exists by means of this act.52 In the act of reading, the potential engagement of the work of art is realized. In order to co-create this committed literary object, the reader has to adopt a certain willingness to keep alive the imagination that allows the writer to construct a certain worldview. Howells puts it as follows:

48 Sartre, What is Literature?, 42-43. 49 Idem., 31. 50 Rae, “Sartre & The Other: Conflict, Conversion, Language and the We,” 66. 51 Idem., 71. 52 Sartre, What is Literature?, 38 14

“The work is described as a call from writer to reader to participate in the paradox of what Sartre calls ‘un rêve libre,’ which appears to be his version of the ‘willing suspension of disbelief.’ […] In so far as works of art necessarily convey a certain world-view, the reader is drawn into a participation in the creation, not merely the observation, of that world as she reads.”53

The writer depends on the reader’s willingness to imagine with them – without it, the possibility of commitment would be lacking, and the literary object would not be constituted. Sartre calls the process of reading a dialectical paradox. The writer acknowledges and appeals to the freedom of the reader, but the reader has to recognize the creative freedom of the writer as well, requesting it as a “symmetrical and inverse appeal.”54 Sartre writes: “The more we experience our freedom, the more we recognize that of the other; the more he demands of us, the more we demand of him.” 55 The work of art, then, exists through the perpetual continuation of the reciprocal, paradoxical dialectics between writer and reader. The literary object is not given in language, but realized through it.56 Its meaning is not contained within the words, but is entirely dependent on the subject. On the other hand, Sartre thinks, words are like traps “to arouse our feelings and to reflect them towards us.”57 The role of language is paradoxical as well: words are already given to the reader, and directed towards having a certain effect, but on the other hand, everything still needs to be done. Sartre writes: “Each word is a path of transcendence; it shapes our feelings, names them, and attributes them to an imaginary personage who take it upon himself to live them for us and who has no other substance than these borrowed passions; he confers objects, perspectives, and a horizon upon them.”58 The literary artwork depends on the reader’s subjectivity to constitute it as meaningful; to finish it, even though, since this process has no end in sight, the work of art is never really finished.

IV The Situation of the Writer The writer/reader-relationship, then, consists of a situated writer on the one hand, and the public he addresses on the other. This relationship has, according to Sartre, taken on different forms

53 Howells, Sartre: The Necessity of Freedom, 51. 54 Sartre, What is Literature?, 38. 55 Idem., 38. 56 Idem., 32. 57 Idem., 33. 58 Idem., 33. 15

throughout different periods of time. In most of the seventeenth century, the writer embraced the specific profession of writing and its idiosyncratic attributes. Literature had a quietly moralizing function: it urged man to transcend from the psychological way they understood the world into the moral. It was not concerned with any specific oppressed class, but did not contribute to oppression either: “The writer, though completely assimilated by the oppressing class, is by no means its accomplice; his work is unquestionably a liberator since its effect, within this class, is to free man from himself.”59 The writer saw themselves as a liberator of man in general. In the eighteenth century, the specific moulds in which a writer could work were broken up: they started to reject the ideology of the ruling class.60 Their situation was characterized by tension, since they had to satisfy two opposing interests: that of the governing class, and that of the (in Marxist terms) rising class: the bourgeoisie. The élite wanted writers to propagate the religious and political beliefs they had lost faith in (which made the validity of these principles all the more questionable); the bourgeois, having just become conscious of itself, needed to be guided into any enlightening direction. Sartre writes: “The essential characteristic of the eighteenth-century writer was precisely an objective and subjective unclassing. Though he still remembered his bourgeois attachments, yet the favour of the great drew him away from his milieu.”61 Soaring up out of his class, the writer became “pure thought, pure observation.”62 Literature’s identification with the Mind, “the permanent power of forming and criticizing ideas,” gave it its sudden independence. 63 Whereas in the seventeenth century, the liberating function of literature had been implicit and veiled, eighteenth-century literature was always immediately an act of liberation. However, since literature, by serving the interests of different groups, had become a mere formality, its very essence had become an object of scrutiny. It lost its privileged position. Nineteenth-century literature wanted to free itself of any ideology, and did so by appealing to a virtual public instead of any actual public. Therefore, it remained abstract and negating, as it failed to recognize itself as ideological.64 In the nineteenth century, the masses wanted power, but they had no culture or leisure on which to base a literary revolution. The writer, then, reverted back to the bourgeois public again. “Thus, the writer, who needed the

59 Sartre, What is Literature?, 74. 60 Idem., 80. 61 Idem., 77. 62 Idem., 78. 63 Idem., 79. 64 Idem., 93. 16

favour of the great to unclass himself, ended by taking himself for the incarnation of the whole nobility, and as the latter was characterized by its parasitism it was the ostentation of parasitism which he chose for his style of living. He made himself the martyr of pure consumption.”65 In the end, Sartre thinks, there is nothing left to do for literature except challenge itself. Literature thus characterizes itself as a long, dialectical process which came to an end, according to Sartre, with surrealism.66 This is characterized as “the literature of adolescence, of that age when the young man, useless and without responsibility, still supported and fed by his parents, wastes his family’s money, passes judgement on his father, and takes part in the demolition of the serious universe which protected his childhood.”67 Instead, the writer should have tried to find an actual public in the oppressed classes, to start a declassing from below and incentivize what Sartre calls a “movement of ideas, that is, an open, contradictory, and dialectical ideology.”68 But surrealism marked, according to Sartre, literature’s fall. What is now left to do for literature, then, is to make use of these experiences, as it “comes to raise the question of its essential content.”69 The writer thus begins the day after their death, and their job is now to address a concrete universality. This concrete universality should be understood as “the sum total of men living in a given society.”70 The writer immediately realizes that they only write for a select group of readers, and so their appeal is, like the surrealists, to a virtual public. However, Sartre writes: “If the public were identified with the concrete universal, the writer would really have to write about the human totality. Not about the abstract man of all the ages and for a timeless reader, but about the whole man of his age and for his contemporaries.”71 For Sartre, the writer “must write for a public which has the freedom of changing everything; which means, besides suppression of classes, abolition of all dictatorship, constant renewal of frameworks, and the continuous overthrowing of order once it tends to congeal. In short, literature is, in essence, the subjectivity of a society in permanent revolution.” 72 The writer should be concerned with freedom as an end, strive for progress and base themselves on ethical principles, appealing to a public that finishes their thought. Literature is a moment of reflective consciousness, it is to be thrown into the world and propose renewal as its job, it is a constant incentive for action. This

65 Sartre, What is Literature?, 98. 66 Idem., 102. 67 Idem., 112-113. 68 Idem., 114. 69 Idem., 118. 70 Idem., 119. 71 Idem., 120. 72 Idem., 122. 17

total literature can actually only exist in a society that is classless. It would be complete and in full realization of its essence in a socialist collectivity. 73 However, paradoxically, literature would end in a classless society by becoming conscious of itself. Therefore the classless society should be understood as utopian: the practical tools to realize it are lacking. Literature is the essential condition for action striving towards but never realizing classlessness. In the fourth and last chapter of What is Literature?, “Situation of the Writer in 1947,” in which Sartre specifically appeals to the French intellectual writer, he envisions a literature of praxis, “that is, as a synthesis of historical relativity and moral and metaphysical absolute.”74 He urges the writer to take a position and pursue socialist principles, but at the same time reject doctrines that consider socialism as an absolute end.75 A literature of praxis is both negative and constructive: it is negative in the sense that it seeks to clean its instrument, that is, to rid language of its thick and turbid excrescences and make it pure again (to call a spade a spade), and it is constructivist in the sense that it is supposed to engage politically.76 Sartre rejects the (poetic) writer who speaks in order to say nothing.77 Literature has to examine, represent and criticize its political situation, engage and invent the whole of man, even if only for its own survival, since, according to Sartre, a free circulation of ideas and the possibility for literature to find a public and an object can only be possible in a socialist Europe.78 The situation of the writer in 1947, then, depends on the writer’s mission to find a public and an object, so that they can determine how to represent their situation and subjectivity from throughout, address a human totality and affect change. Sartre considers teachers, intellectuals, the (new) bourgeoisie, peasants and the working class, although these last two categories supposedly hardly read. But, Sartre thinks, the public needs to be told what it needs, and more specifically: that it needs to read. Sartre concludes What is Literature? by stating that socialism, democracy and peace are literature’s last and only chance. He cannot guarantee that literature is immortal. Then again, “the world can do very well without literature. But it can do without man still better.”79 Sartre’s appeal to literature to examine, represent and criticize its political situation, and to engage man as universal man, can be viewed in light of his theory of the universal singular (or singular universal). Throughout his work, Sartre sought to provide “a comprehensive

73 Sartre, What is Literature?, 120-121. 74 Idem., 184. 75 Idem., 214-215. 76 Idem., 215. 77 Opelz, “Between Writing and World,” 335. 78 Sartre, What is Literature?, 227-228. 79 Idem., 229. 18

method by which one might hope to understand individual persons or particular events, on the one hand, and the whole of history on the other.”80 In What is Literature?, this method is not yet fully articulated. Sartre’s views are outlined only very generally. Paul Crittenden writes:

“Each person is shaped by, and is an expression, of universal history and their epoch; at the same time, each person contributes to the history of which they are part. From the early 1960’s, Sartre came to express this idea in the phrase ‘singular universal’ and the reverse formulation ‘universal singular.’ The idea, in summary, is that individuals reflect the universal features of their time and, conversely, that the individuals of an age are realised concretely and singularly by individuals.”81

It is clear that in What is Literature?, Sartre is already appealing to a dialectical relationship between a singular, situated writer, and a concrete public as universal man. In the biographies Sartre wrote in later years on Baudelaire, Genet and, most importantly, Mallarmé, this appeal will be particularized, which will steer his conceptions of language and literary engagement towards that of critical consciousness. First, however, I will consider Sartre’s early engagement in relation to his thought on language and the world as it forms an underlying structural base.

V Between Language and World I will briefly summarize Sartre’s engagement as I have outlined it so far. Early engagement can be characterized as follows: it is based on ontological freedom and strives for practical freedom, it is an appeal from writer to reader based on the creative imagination, and it is an attempt to unite the individual subject as they are delivered from their specific socio-historical context with man as a concrete universality. These ideas stem from Sartre’s phenomenological analyses of consciousness and freedom. Consciousness is relational and intentional, according to the earlier Sartre, and it is able to surpass conflictual relations by conversion through language. Achieving it through art requires literary language, which refers to the world by signification. However, a work of art escapes its author: it is never finished, but instead exists as a reciprocal, dialectical paradox. The extent to which language has the possibility to liberate us, then, depends on what can be said to be totalizing tendencies in Sartre’s work: his interest in an

80 Crittenden, “The Singular Universal in Jean-Paul Sartre,” 31. 81 Idem., 31. 19

appeal to man as totality, or concrete universality. But the role of language in Sartre’s earlier conception of engagement is a topic of discussion. It has often been argued that Sartre never provided an actual answer to the question of what an engaged writer is supposed to write about. Suzanne Guerlac, however, argues that a question like that does not do justice to a sufficient interpretation of Sartre’s thought. First of all, Guerlac analyses that Sartre’s conception of engagement has often been considered to be of a mythical nature. Since it is directed at an impossible totalization, the outset of it has the character of myth, a new myth that is to be created after the end of history. It is characterized by the desire to describe an origin on which to base its goal, and an eventual return to this origin as though its essence is situated within a cyclical temporality. Secondly Guerlac argues that if we want to do justice to the mythical status of Sartre’s conception of engaged literature, the rhetoric of transparency and of instrumentality have to be considered more profoundly. Transparency is associated with a contemplative model of consciousness; it assumes an analogy between consciousness of something and the signification of words, as if there were an ideal representation of them. The theme of instrumentality, on the other hand, is associated with an action model of communication. 82 Reading What is Literature? with a focus on these two themes reveals, according to Guerlac, that social relations are foundational to the concept of engagement. She argues that the literary prose work should not be seen as a transparent instrument through which the writer appeals to the reader to deliver meaning. Rather, we should look at the rhetoric of Sartre’s philosophy that suggests we consider the crisis of language, and its possibility to unveil. According to Sartre, the word passes through the look, Guerlac argues, which means that any conception of transparency of words should not be modelled after a contemplative consciousness, but after the look itself, which constitutes intersubjective reciprocity instead of undisturbed signification.83 Next to that, the notion of instrumentality becomes invalidated in the course of What is Literature? itself. In the first chapters of What is Literature?, language still seems to be presented as a tool, ready to hand. However, in the course of the work it becomes clear that this is not the case: language is in crisis since “the link between speech and action said to epitomize the prose of literary engagement […] has been broken by the war.”84 Language cannot be seen as instrumental anymore. Instead, it should be regarded as consisting of a specific socio-political reality in the first place. Because its goal is freedom, it will direct

82 Guerlac, “Sartre and the Powers of Literature,” 813. 83 Idem., 814. 84 Idem., 807. 20

itself towards the social relations it seeks to change: “The alliance between literature and politics derives, for Sartre, from the very essence of literature. The literary absolute – the recognition of freedom by itself – provides the model for, as well as the means to, social relations at the end of history.”85 Following from this interpretation of Sartre’s conception of engagement as outlined in What is Literature?, Guerlac appeals to the (Marxist) motive of revolution as well:

“It is not the case, then, that literary engagement enjoins the author to write in a transparent prose in order to express social or political ideas, valid and legitimate in themselves, and to encourage the responsible social or political action that would be dictated by those values. Rather, the ontology of the literary event itself, as founding moment of value (the absolute value of freedom as condition of possibility for the invention of any value, ‘la reconnaissance de la liberté par elle-même’), provides the model for the utopian goal in social relations. As such it calls for its own concrete realization through revolution.”86

An engaged writer has to consider the socio-political context as a framework from which to start to fight for freedom. This notion of revolution, according to Guerlac, stems from Sartre’s conception of unveiling (dévoilement) as disclosed in the third chapter of What is Literature?: “For Whom Does One Write?.” The first chapter considers unveiling to be the aspect of language that turns it into action; the second considers it to be the mechanism that answers to the inherent need of a text to be brought into objective being.87 Guerlac writes: “In the third section […] the figure of dévoilement is displaced to the process of historical becoming. It is a figure associated with freedom within historical embeddedness or situation, that is, with revolution.”88 This conception of revolution requires the invention of new solutions. Inventing something means, after all, that something hidden is brought into appearance. “Freedom within history or situation is thus identified with the literary or creative process itself – invention.”89 Because literary language engenders the subjectivity of a society in revolution, because it

85 Guarlac, “Sartre and the Powers of Literature,” 823. 86 Idem., 819. 87 Idem., 819. 88 Idem., 819. 89 Idem., 819. 21

unveils or invents such a subjectivity, it has the possibility to resolve “antinomies of class contradiction.”90 According to Guerlac, however, freedom remains a paradigm for social or political ends in What is Literature?: “Literature is revolutionary in its essence, ontologically. But, as Sartre depicts in his sketch of concrete relations between writer and public, the historical process itself unfolds in terms of the binary structure of self and other.”91 The relationship between writer and reader is precarious, according to Guerlac, and so in light of the historical process itself, alienated recognition (of interacting consciousnesses) is exhausted. Sartre’s depiction of the writer and their public in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth century does not feature any moments of overcoming the alienation of self and Other through language. It is only in the twentieth century that this possibility announces itself, when literature has to critically re- evaluate its own essence. But only the result of the remaining binary structures of self and Other (the way reader, writer and text relate to each other as Others) play a role in Sartre’s idea of (utopian) totalization.92 It is only in Sartre’s later work, starting with his Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), that history becomes part of literature’s totalizing project as well.93 For Guerlac, engagement in What is Literature? can be considered in light of literature’s revolutionary essence, its capability to unveil, and its effect on social relations. Literary language consists of a specific socio-political context in the first place; it is not a transparent instrument, since language “has fallen into history along with the writer.”94 Sartre’s conception of engagement is for a significant part intertwined with the question how language operates. Hannes Opelz argues that the question of what literary engagement is (or should be) is intricately linked with the question of language, because it touches upon the relationship between language and the world.95 For him, however, transparency does fulfil an important role in language’s possibility to make literature engaged. He writes: “Sartre, of course, was hardly the first modern writer to establish a link between literature and commitment. […] The difference with Sartre is that he ‘inscribes engagement at the heart of the work.’ At the heart of the work, there is, of course, the question of language.”96 Sartre envisions a direct link between literature and the political, and thereby between language and the world, or writing and being. According to Opelz, Sartre saw it as his task as a writer to make Being-in-Language the

90 Guerlac, “Sartre and the Powers of Literature,” 820. 91 Idem., 820. 92 Idem., 820. 93 Idem., 820. 94 Idem., 807. 95 Opelz, “Between Writing and World,” 330. 96 Idem., 331. 22

expression of Being-in-the-World, since the principal movement of language is its inherent transparency: the word is constantly negated to produce the thing; it is a living, moving thing that reaches out to the world to disclose it and produce meaning in the world.97 In short: language negates itself in order to generate action in the name of freedom.98 This is of course true for how, at least according to Howells, the creative imagination works for Sartre. But transparency, as will turn out, is not language’s only or most important characteristic. For Opelz, to commit is to recognize the freedom of the self as a writer, the freedom of the reader and the freedom of all mankind, and to acknowledge the possibilities of literary language. Sartrean commitment, he argues, is “literature watching over its own conditions of possibility.” 99 This means that engaged literature makes its own existence possible. Opelz considers Sartre’s conception of language and literary activity to be that of a totalizing, unifying process, which supposes an unproblematic relation between language and the world. From this point of view, Sartre’s philosophy is considered essentially logocentric: it proposes language as the transparent medium by means of which an external reality or ideality can be signified.100 Opelz’s argument that the transparency of language is essential to Sartre’s conception of engagement complies with the proclamation that we are within language as within our bodies. On the other hand, it ignores the development Sartre’s thought undergoes in What is Literature? already: the increasing emphasis on language as subject to objective structures, that will eventually urge him to reinstate the value of its materiality. However, Opelz does recognize detotalizing aspects within Sartre’s conception of the totalizing character of literature, meaning there are already some aspects in it present that prevent it from being able to appeal to the totality or concrete universality of man. The engaged literature, in which the (not yet fully articulated) singular and universal should aim at reconciliation, is utopian from the start.101 As we shall see, the detotalizing aspects of Sartre’s unifying discourse are especially important to Goldthorpe (among others) for reading What is Literature? as a prelude to later developments in Sartre’s thought. Guerlac and Opelz have slightly different conceptions of what literary engagement is according to the earlier Sartre, and what the role of the transparency of language is in relation to it. Either language is transparent and instrumental – a tool by means of which to express its referents in the world – or it is problematized from the start. Although inclined to support the

97 Opelz, “Between Writing and World,” 332. 98 Idem., 332-333. 99 Idem., 333. 100 Idem., 334. 101 Idem., 334. 23

first conception, Opelz does direct our attention towards the essentially detotalizing aspects of literature’s totalizing project. He emphasizes that the goal of literature is utopian: it is always implied that complete totalization is impossible, since the imagination it presupposes is always also a negation of reality. Guerlac argues that language is in crisis at the moment of Sartre’s formulation of engagement in What is Literature?. For her, what is most important to consider is language’s power to unveil the subjectivity of literature’s revolutionary character. Opelz, on the other hand, argues that in the same way that the imagination negates reality, language negates itself because of its inherent transparency, thereby creating the necessary freedom-centred action for engagement. Even though these views seem to conflict, both Guerlac’s nuance of the notions of transparency and instrumentality in What is Literature? and the emphasis literature’s negative character that Opelz points out, are significant for the consideration of Sartre’s later conception of engagement as a deepening of his earlier one. In the second part of my thesis, I will introduce Sartre’s late conception of engagement, and suggest which cogs in the machine of his thought are to be examined to determine its general motion.

24

2. Late Engagement: Materiality, Alienation and Ambiguity

VI Engagement Evolves The evolution of Sartre’s conception of engagement can be exemplified most evidently by his Mallarmé, or the Poet of Nothingness (1953). In this study on Mallarmé, Sartre notoriously declares poetry to be possibly committed as well. In fact, Sartre proclaims that the engagement of this poet seems to him as total as possible.102 The relevant question, then, is how Sartre arrived at this supposedly unexpected conclusion. According to Ernest Sturm, as he writes in the introduction to the publication of Mallarmé from 2004, “what especially intrigued Sartre was the way Mallarmé’s unsettling negativity undermined the very substance of poetry: nature, society, the person of the poet himself. He once called Mallarmé ‘our greatest poet’ – a greatness enhanced by what Sartre perceived, paradoxically, as deficiencies redeemed by the poet’s life ‘project.’”103 By outlining Mallarmé’s (rather tragic) life project as a commitment to poetry, Sartre attempts to lay bare the cultural patterns of the socio-political context that Mallarmé and contemporaries dealt with, and their effect on Western consciousness.104 Poets in Mallarmé’s day were predominantly unbelievers, but did display a certain nostalgia towards the faith that was lost. This rendered them unable to identify with their own class, whose values they despised, the result of which was that their grievances were projected onto the metaphysical realm. Unable to affect or be affected by their history or social status, these poets fled into the metaphysical.105 Sturm writes: “Since history seemed to have exhausted its teleological potential, their revolt becomes cosmic instead of social, symbolic and imaginary instead of real.”106 Sartre considers Mallarmé to be exemplary of the struggles of his time. Next to that, the physical and psychological issues he suffered from personally, contribute, according to Sartre, to the universal collection of human errors such as apathy, narcissism and the tendency to flee into transitory passions. In their multiplicity, human errors such as Mallarmé’s testify to “the asphyxiation of French thought in the nineteenth century or to the human condition itself.”107 Stacking up all these human errors, according to Sartre, leads to the toppling of them, and to the revelation of the human condition. In doing so, Mallarmé rises above the cultural restrains of his contemporary context.108 Mallarmé had to “live out the Paradox in all

102 Sartre, Mallarmé, or the Poet of Nothingness, trans. Ernest Sturm (Penn State Press, 2004): 16. 103 Sartre, Mallarmé, 1. 104 Idem., 3. 105 Idem., 3. 106 Idem., 3. 107 Idem., 64. 108 Idem., 4. 25

its contradictions to the point of dying for it.”109 Thereby, he would testify of his situation and that of the human condition itself, and then transcend it. According to Sturm, “Sartre insists that Mallarmé’s singular poesis grew out of a series of conscious choices exercised on the basis of prior conditions.”110 Mallarmé’s engagement, then, rests on the transcendence of the conditions that are prior to his conscious choice. In order to describe this process, Sartre appeals to Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis, but goes beyond these theories (especially psychoanalysis) to the extent that they cannot explain consciousness phenomenologically. From a phenomenological point of view, “an individual who enters a group realizes that its former ‘totalization’ has marked the limits for his own conduct. Within this context, he carries on his own totalization. His ‘truth’ is anchored both within him and outside him, for he is at once a reflexive consciousness and a social product.” 111 This emphasis on the individual, reflexive, and therefore critical consciousness that is able to achieve its own totalization, marks a definite difference with the earlier conception of engagement, in which literature’s totalization is rooted in the dialectical relationship between the singular writer and the concrete, universal reader. The universal- singular is now constituted within the individual. According to Sartre’s earlier conception of engagement, the individual writer or reader is shaped by their social, historical and political context as well, but with Mallarmé, surpassing them in order to achieve totalization now plays a vital part. Moreover, in Sartre’s earlier conception of engagement, language functions as a pathway towards the mutual recognition of freedom. However, “with Mallarmé, language is relentlessly pursued by its own negation.”112 Sartre has already proclaimed that poetic language always only refers back to itself, but now it becomes clear that Mallarmé’s surrender to its power to negate reality is precisely what constitutes his engagement: it elucidates the essence of poetry itself. According to Sturm, what united Sartre with Mallarmé was that they both shared the conviction that Being bursts from Nothingness (hence: the poet of Nothingness). By analysing the relationship between the individual’s socio-historical context and the human condition in its totality in greater depth, Sartre discovers the fundamental, ontological roles of self-reflexivity and transcendence on the basis of the self-negating essence of Mallarmé’s poetic language.

109 Sartre, Mallarmé, 64. 110 Idem., 9. 111 Idem., 10. 112 Idem., 13. 26

Goldthorpe discusses L’idiot de la Famille (1971-1972), Mallarmé and a number of unfinished manuscripts of which the chronology is unclear, in order to reconstruct the development in Sartre’s thought on engagement. According to Goldthorpe, Sartre applies the progressive-regressive method to Mallarmé: a method that is concerned with the empathic understanding of the dialectical relationship between social conditioning, which involves psycho-analytical notions, and individual projects such as writing. This method proposes an emphasis on interdependent forces: “An inevitable involvement in society (even if the reaction to that involvement takes the form of a superficial detachment), and a more positive commitment to literature (which might indeed result from such a detachment).”113 In L’Engagement de Mallarmé, Sartre places the experience of the writer in an elaborate socio-historical context. Next to that, the poetic act itself is to be seen as constructively critical. Sartre increasingly emphasizes the reconciliation of the universal and the singular within the writer themselves, and according to Goldthorpe, this is the new prerequisite for commitment.114 In an (according to Goldthorpe superficially Marxist) account of the superstructure that surrounded Mallarmé and contemporaries, Sartre sketches a situation in which institutional changes, ideologies, culture and class attitudes are all interrelated. He refers in particular to the fall of the monarchy, the ‘death’ of God, a cultural situation in which the artist, such as the poet, is marginalized and the false consciousness of both the bourgeoisie and the petite- bourgeoisie.115 The economic base he describes consists of the interaction of competition and the free market with a social atomism “which cultivates the solitary and the incommunicable.”116 Together, these factors constitute Mallarmé’s socio-historical context. Sartre rejects the Marxist idea of a causal and determining relationship between superstructure and economic base. He does, however, consider the outlines of the superstructure do contribute to a number of interrelating poetic attitudes such as sterility, loss of religious and social vocation, misanthropy, elitism and negativism.117 Instead of causal relations, Sartre envisions the necessity for an active attitude of reciprocity between social conditions and the individual – the universal and the singular. The relationship between social conditions and the individual is already emphasized in What is Literature?, but is now becoming specific, and its reciprocal function is prioritized. The result of this is a conscious dépassement of the aforementioned poetic attitudes. This is what Sturm points out as well: Mallarmé’s commitment

113 Goldthorpe, Sartre: Literature and Theory, 159. 114 Idem., 185. 115 Idem., 185. 116 Idem., 185. 117 Idem., 185. 27

rests on socio-political contextual factors and the moments of conscious decision that surpass them. Therefore, as Goldthorpe argues, Sartre needs “to find a transition in Mallarmé from narcissism to self-transcending concern with cosmic and metaphysical drama.”118 This is where Sartre’s conception of consciousness can be considered fundamentally altered: “Given that Sartre now recognizes […] the opacity of childhood, his earlier uncompromising rejection of the unconscious […] becomes increasingly problematic, if not self-contradictory. […] The modes of reflection and activity available to consciousness have radically changed.”119 It is not that Sartre suddenly acknowledges the concept of the unconscious, rather, he adopts an attitude towards le vécu (the lived experience, opposed to le connu, the known) that allows a reinterpretation of the workings of consciousness, and consequently of commitment. According to Goldthorpe, the deepening of Sartre’s phenomenological account of consciousness can be related to the transition in his thought on engagement. She does not appeal to the three modes of consciousness as defined in Being and Nothingness (Being-in-Itself, Being-for-Itself and Being-for-Others) but summarizes consciousness in Sartre’s earlier thought as follows: it is free but situated, negating, responsible for conferring meaning upon the world, and an impersonal ground of being. It changes the world by naming it, and therefore the writer is granted a privileged status as translator of metaphysical freedom into personal and political freedom, and, of course, poetry denies this instrumentality.120 The problem with this quite incomplete definition, Goldthorpe argues, is that it often presupposes the freedom it seeks to promote (ontological and practical freedom are insufficiently distinguishable).121 In his later conception of commitment, then, Sartre seems to overcome this contradiction: consciousness is not necessarily ontologically free, rather, it is primordially shaped by experience. Language, then, is to be considered on the basis of these new conceptions of consciousness and freedom as well. I will first discuss the reinstated importance of its notion of inexpressibility.

VII Disinformation and the Inexpressible In Words, language is no longer the body we are in, the living, moving thing – it is now part of the practico-inert. This is similar to the mode of consciousness of Being-in-Itself. It is the field of unmoving, practical unities (neither man, nor anything else); the objectivity that surrounds and conditions the subject; the opposite to human activity as praxis.122 Howells considers the

118 Goldthorpe, Sartre: Literature and Theory, 189. 119 Idem., 189. 120 Idem., 165. 121 Idem., 166. 122 Jean-Paul Sartre Critique of Dialectical Reason, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith (Verso, 2004): 324. 28

emphasis in Sartre’s thought to definitely have shifted with the publication of Critique of Dialectical Reason. Here, Sartre contemplates the structure and semantics of language as a source of alienation for the speaker, instead of for the individual listener. Consciousnesses’ social relations, such as the conflictual confrontations or their mutual recognition, are no longer prior to language.123 Howells writes:

“Sartre has not rejected his earlier assertion of the interdependence of thought and language, but he now maintains that we are fundamentally incapable of thinking certain thoughts, which we might, in a sense, be groping towards, because language, as it is given to us, cannot provide adequate expression for them. Our thought is not distorted après coup, by its verbal expression, it is vitiated from the outset by the limitations of the language in which it is attempting to realize itself.”124

Howells regards Orphée Noir (1948) and Saint Genet (1952) as early explorations of the inability of language to express what Sartre would later call le vécu. In these works, Sartre becomes increasingly concerned with the way the writer is able to overcome language’s alienation by accepting their failure to express the inexpressible. This interest is at the basis of the transformation of his conception of literary communication.125 Based on a series of lectures and interviews that complement his Critique of Dialectical Reason, Howells sees Sartre’s conception of the distortion of communication as twofold: language is both too poor and too rich; too conceptual and inflexible to adequately express the real, but at the same time overlaid with interfering secondary connotations.126 We are reminded of the writer in need of cleaning their instrument, as Sartre describes in What is Literature?, but now the layer of secondary connotations is seen as substantially conflictual with the writer/speaker’s intention. Whereas in What is Literature?, the writer is able to disclose the world through the use of language and thereby affect this world, it is now fundamentally incapable of disclosing anything. Language, therefore, becomes significantly disinforming. Howells writes: “But it is precisely language as désinformation, or in more general terms the practico-inert of language, which the writer can turn to his own ends.”127 The writer should

123 Howells, “Sartre and the Language of Literature,” 572. 124 Idem., 572. 125 Idem., 573. 126 Idem., 573. 127 Idem., 574. 29

embrace language’s failure to express. It is now their job to try to communicate the incommunicable, and express the ambiguity of their own situation through the ambiguity of language, rather than signify the world as if language were the instrument at their disposal. This means that Sartre becomes increasingly interested in the functionality of style, and that the concepts of materiality, ambiguity and alienation demand a closer look.

VIII Materiality, Ambiguity and Alienation of Language In Sartre: Literature and Theory, Goldthorpe suggests that signs of Sartre’s later views on commitment are to be found in much earlier texts than generally considered. Orphée Noir, for instance, was published only one year after What is Literature?, but already shows signs of the possibility of committed poetry: “a project which, far from assuming the transparency of language, experiences, exploits and transcends its alienating power.”128 Goldthorpe argues that the transformation of the definition of literary prose in Sartre’s work finds its origin in the reconciliation of transparency and materiality. Transparency is often viewed as essential for Sartre’s earlier conception of commitment (although there exists some disagreement on this). In his later conception of commitment, it becomes clear that transparency is reserved for purely technical language, whereas within prose, the materiality of the word is reinstated. Literary language is now considered material: it consists of objective structures which it imposes upon itself, and which can always be affirmed at the expense of signification.129 Poetic language has always consisted of these characteristics, being opaque and dense, but already in What is Literature?, Goldthorpe argues, Sartre undermines this distinction by suggesting that the literary object is never in language, but rather in silence.130 Goldthorpe’s view is underscored by Christiana Howells’, who writes that Sartre “has, since 1947, become increasingly aware of the fact of alienation as it affects self-expression. […] By 1960 […] the emphasis has shifted; Sartre is concerned to show how language too is part of the practico-inert whereby man’s free activity, his praxis, becomes rigid and objectified, part of the external situation of both himself and other men. He no longer envisages the individual listener as the chief source of the alienation of the speaker; the very structures and semantics of language are now held responsible.”131 Howells focusses on the change of the nature of linguistic communication in Sartre’s theory, which enables him to make writers such

128 Goldthorpe, Sartre: Literature and Theory, 164-165. 129 Idem., 162. 130 Idem., 183. 131 Howells, “Sartre and the Language of Literature,” 572. 30

as Flaubert and Mallarmé committed: “… Sartre has come to see the imagination of language as the essential medium of inter-subjective communication.”132 It is important to note that Sartre’s conception of alienation changes significantly: whereas, in his earlier thought, alienation was a term mostly reserved for the confrontation of consciousnesses through the look, it now relates predominantly to the subject’s historical, social and political situation, the self, and, according to Howells, the very structure of language. The reconciliation of transparency and materiality, Goldthorpe argues, “creates an ambiguity which is now seen to be characteristic of all literary expression.”133 The ambiguity of language is essential, for it expresses the ambiguity of the situation of the writer. Moreover, it “pre-eminently exemplifies the tension between transcendence and alienation implicit in all human experience.”134 The instatement of the value of ambiguity unites the language of prose with poetic language, and, according to Goldthorpe, together they hold in tension both the unity and contradiction of the singular and the universal: “The literary work, then, makes manifest the ‘universel singulier’: a synthesis of the subjective and the objective, the individual and the socio-historical – a totalising synthesis which constitutes the engagement of the writer, represents his creative freedom and sustains his communication with the reader.” 135 The writer’s appeal to his public is based on the communication of a tension existing within the human situation, between alienation and transcendence. The ambiguity of language appears to lend itself for such a communication, transforming its initially significative role. For Howells, the change in Sartre’s thought starts with a different conception of the writer, and therefore of the language through which the writer communicates. Whereas the earlier Sartre envisions the writer as directly involved with a specific socio-political context (even if somewhat undefined), a modification of his views on the interaction between language and thought later leads him to see the writer as obliged to communicate more indirectly and allusively. According to Howells, Sartre acquired “certain linguistic and aesthetic insights” and developed an “increasing awareness of the ‘function’ of style” that lead him to nuance his previously envisioned prose/poetry distinction, and refine his articulation of the interdependence between signification and sens.136 Howells writes:

132 Howells, “Sartre and the Language of Literature,” 579. 133 Goldthorpe, Sartre: Literature and Theory, 162. 134 Idem., 162. 135 Idem., 162. 136 Howells, “Sartre and the Language of Literature,” 574. 31

“Sartre has come to see the literary writer as someone who uses the signification of words as a means to the evocation of their sens. In a real sense, then, signification is still primary, but even the prose artist is aiming to communicate something else. […] The writer creates through style an universel singulier which expresses the individual’s being-in-the-world, the subjective and objective dimensions of the real.”137

The later Sartre, then, starts to recognize the function of style, as the individual’s Being-in-the- World can be expressed through the ambiguity of language. Le vécu is an important aspect of the development of Sartre’s theory. It contains notions similar to the unconscious, but Sartre rejects this psychoanalytical term since it does not do justice to the ontological phenomenology of the relationship between individual and world. In Mallarmé, Sartre articulates the lived experience as follows: “We do not think Human Reality, we live it: for it is pure paradox, a conflict incapable of synthesis. Man is that being prodded at the point of a sword to ascend to God’s throne without ever reaching it.”138 The lived experience is the experience the subject does not know directly. Moreover, it is based on our paradoxical and problematic fundamental project to create ourselves. Sartre, in his later thought on the language of committed art, considers this vécu to be able to find adequate expression through the sens of language: the writer is now trying to communicate something more than what language is able to signify. The writer does not write about something; they just write, and that is all.139 The self-referentiality of language, then, becomes less of a problem for Sartre. This means that poetry, which works through the sens, can be granted a higher status. It can now be seen to represent a moment of reflection in the eternal process of internalization and externalization of what we live, but do not know we live. Poetry unveils (dévoilement) the unknown, and in this sense, it fulfils an ethical function complementary to prose. With its power to unveil, poetry can function as a catalyst to change our fundamental relations to the world and ourselves. Therefore, it is engaged. According to Howells, the sens is identifiable with the imaginary function of words. The development of Sartre’s thought circles around the materiality of language, Howells argues: through materiality, language can communicate le vécu. This is because the materiality of language refers to the creative imagination: our ability to imagine a material configuration

137 Howells, “Sartre and the Language of Literature,” 574-575. 138 Sartre, Mallarmé, 123. 139 Howells, “Sartre and the Language of Literature,” 575. 32

graphique of the world. The imagination is a negation of reality, but it also constitutes a reality: words become material things by their power to connotate forms of exteriority, of reality. This ability lets the sens communicate the lived experience, despite its conflict with signification (the two necessarily negate each other). 140 Howells’ analysis of the reinstatement of the materiality of language is similar to Goldthorpe’s remarks on the unification of materiality and transparency. Language’s power to refer to itself is no longer considered problematic, but rather seen as a necessary complement to its ability to find resonance in reality. Both Goldthorpe and Howells recognize the growing importance of the ambiguity of language in Sartre’s work: the ability to refer to both the world and itself, even though sens and signification supposedly negate each other. Without ambiguity, Howells points out, the object does not come to inhabit the word – it needs the sens as much as the signification.141 Because the materiality of language refers to our ability to imagine, the committed writer or poet has to make the reader adopt such an attitude of imagination. The poet needs to encourage the creation of personal references through association and connotation of words in order to constitute a sort of semi-communication. The writer, on the other hand, needs to control such connotations and be cautious of language becoming too dominant over the real. According to Howells, these prescriptions exemplify the fact that Sartre incorporated the Romantic value of belief in the imagination into his own rational humanism. This is most notable in L’Idiot de la Famille, in which Sartre arrives at a conception of Madame Bovary (1857) as unveiling rather than realistic. Howells writes: “Sartre has come to see the imagination of language as the essential medium of linguistic communication.”142 His work on Mallarmé consists of a similar structure. In both works, Sartre deepens his conception of consciousness, but enlarges the framework from which to consider language as integral to committed art as well. Like Howells, Goldthorpe recognizes that Sartre is already thinking in terms of le vécu, which is comprehensible for the subject, but not to their explicit knowledge: it is opaque and does not let itself be denoted.143 Rather, Sartre thinks, the highest form of understanding the lived experience can engender one’s own language. This language is, however, always inadequate, and has the metaphorical structure of a dream. 144 Goldthorpe writes: “Consciousness, then, is no longer a flicker of negation, nor being a sickening superfluity. The terms of Sartrean dualism, we discover, are not after all ontological but rather genetic

140 Howells, “Sartre and the Language of Literature,” 576-577. 141 Idem., 574. 142 Idem., 579. 143 Goldthorpe, Sartre: Literature and Theory, 190. 144 Idem., 190. 33

categories.”145 Childhood experiences such as the death of a parent, which is the case for Mallarmé (and his mother), decide whether one departs from a happy or unhappy consciousness, which determines one’s existential relation to the world. In Mallarmé’s case, the intensity resulting from a need to recapture the perpetual evanescence of his mother rarely finds expression. “But that intensity, whether latent, oblique or icy, is the precondition for a fragile salvation and an unforeseen commitment.” 146 The commitment, then, occurs when Mallarmé moves from negativity to a critical consciousness: “Through Mallarmé’s negation of the pure negativity generated in him by his family, he becomes the critical consciousness which transforms art and history.”147 The subject, such as Mallarmé, and their consciousness, now are the site in which the universal and the singular attempt to be reconciled through creation. Goldthorpe writes: “But the process of reconciliation can never be complete, for the ‘universal singular’ must live in and through the paradox of language, which man creates, but which he experiences as a mode of alienation. It is through Mallarmé’s struggle to free language from its contingencies that Sartre learns to recognise its resistance as an element of the ‘practico-inerte.’”148 Mallarmé fails to negate what is between himself and the world, to bridge that gap through language, but by destroying the absence he experiences with an intensity constituted of childhood experience, he is able to transform art itself. His failure becomes an unforeseen strength: the prerequisite of engagement. “Man is a Drama,” Sartre writes, “a Drama lived out by Mallarmé.”149

IX Early and Late Engagement: Consciousness, Freedom and Language In this chapter, I will summarize the most essential changes in Sartre’s thought up until this point, and relate his late conception of engagement to the earlier one in relation to the concepts of consciousness and freedom. In Sartre: The Necessity of Freedom, Howells states: “The early Sartre […] is concerned primarily with the individual, his situation and his facticity; the later Sartre with society, ‘pre-destination’ and the ‘practico-inert.’”150 For Sartre’s conception of engagement this means a number of things. First, he increasingly focusses on different notions of consciousness: instead of making the distinction between Being-in-Itself, Being-for-Itself and Being-for-Others, he focusses on specific individuals and the way in which their childhood

145 Goldthorpe, Sartre: Literature and Theory, 191-192. 146 Idem., 193. 147 Idem., 195. 148 Idem., 196. 149 Sartre, Mallarmé, 123. 150 Howells, Sartre: The Necessity of Freedom, 1. 34

experiences have shaped them. This shift in focus produces another one. The notion of freedom that Sartre is first concerned with in What is Literature? is ontological as well as practical; a base for the production of art as well as its highest ethical ideal. In Mallarmé and other works that exemplify his later thought, Sartre is increasingly influenced by Marx and (less explicitly) Freud, which enables him to refine the concept of freedom as the transcendence of one’s genetic category. The evolution of his phenomenology of language and engagement, then, is largely based on these refinements concerning consciousness and freedom. When Sartre writes about consciousness in What is Literature?, he appeals to the imaginative transcendence of the individual situation. The facticity of our situation consists of what is already present. Language is an example of this, but also concrete contextual facticity. We are always in situation, but are also more than that, since we always feel the need to create meaning: we are condemned to freedom. In Sartre’s work on Mallarmé, the extent to which the individual is shaped by his environment, and the way in which his situation is constituted, is considered in greater detail. The focus moves towards the transcendence of the situation within the individual, critical, reflexive consciousness itself. Consciousness, Sartre now stresses, is shaped by childhood experiences to the extent that its actions are determined by it. Sartre does not refute his earlier ideas on the individual, the situation and facticity. Rather, he specifies them by disclosing the situation of an actual individual (such as Mallarmé, but also Flaubert an Genet) in order to arrive at a more impersonal notion of totalization. According to Howells, the earlier and the later Sartre often do not seem to coincide, but do not contradict each other explicitly either: his life’s work often allows paradoxes to exist within it. As Sartre comes to realize the importance of childhood experience, the focus is shifted to its future-oriented nature: it constitutes a pre-destination that would not have seemed possible in light of his earlier convictions about the radical contingency of existence. Another such paradox is the reinstatement of the importance of the practico-inert (such as language) which opposes itself to the praxis that was given priority in his earlier work. This field of objective, practical unities that surrounds and conditions us, the opposite to human activity, is now taken to be a more decisive factor in the way consciousness relates to and affects the world. Whereas in Being and Nothingness, consciousness is not subject to matter, Sartre now considers everything to be matter. In Mallarmé, he writes: “Thought is merely a dream of thought; whenever it tries to become concrete, it turns out to be merely matter, a scattering of words. In short, only Matter exists.”151 This prioritization of matter, then, undermines the intentionality of consciousness.

151 Sartre, Mallarmé, 124. 35

The transition of the emphasis of consciousness’ intentionality, which makes it free, to its temporality, motivates the development of Sartre’s thought on freedom as well. Freedom, in What is Literature?, is the movement through which one continually uproots oneself. It is the highest goal, yet there is no end to it, it is freedom of consciousness, and it is situated in opposition to alienation. According to Howells, Sartre’s conception of freedom changes notably when he becomes increasingly political from throughout a Marxist framework. In What is Literature?, Marxism is already present in Sartre’s analyses of the situation of the writer and its subsequent discussions of ideology, class struggle and revolution. In 1945, two years before the publication of What is Literature?, Sartre states that he agrees with Marx “on the basic idea that man makes history from within his situation.”152 With Mallarmé, however, the notions of singular and universal are refined, and the way in which man makes history from within his situation can now be illustrated in depth. These developments concerning consciousness and freedom are, of course, interrelated with Sartre’s phenomenology of language. Whereas in What is Literature? language is action, in Mallarmé it becomes clear that “freedom and action […] are in some deep sense irreconcilable, and the ontological gap between the two is only widened by the alienating force of […] the ‘practico-inert.’”153 Language, as part of the practico-inert, only alienates the subject instead of liberating it. Howells argues that communication is key to the development of Sartre’s thoughts on literature. Sartre’s view on communication has broadened in direct relation to the deepening of his views on the alienation of language. This is visible in his works on Flaubert and Genet as well, in which individuals are insufficiently integrated in society by their families, and have thereby become alienated from language. The same pattern is to be found in Mallarmé, and in Sartre’s own autobiography Words. For Mallarmé, it was the death of his mother and the incapability of his father and other family-members to let the young Mallarmé fully process his grief; for Sartre himself, the constant eulogizing of his young self by his family rendered him feeling like a fraud – pretending to be doing what he was actually incapable of: representing anything real with words. The alienation of language and our failure to communicate, then, parallel a failure to act. But this alienation is also the source of possible transcendence. Freedom and action are irreconcilable, Cary Wolfe argues, because all action is ontological failure insofar as it attempts to be self-originating: we want to, but cannot, be God. If the individual accepts, or rather lives his failure, however, by way of a being-towards-failure,

152 Jean-Paul Sartre, The Last Chance, trans. Craig Vasey (Continuum, 2009): 20. 153 Cary Wolfe, “Rethinking Commitment: Ontology, Genre, and Sartre’s Mallarmé,” Diacritics 21.4 (1991): 72. 36

they can surpass their situation. Wolfe argues: “What Sartre is saying with all but words is that poetic engagement can be figured in one of two ways: either, in What is Literature?, as a commitment to the failure of the project of communication as such or as a reflection of the ontological failure Sartre was struggling with from Being and Nothingness on.”154 According to him, the biography of Mallarmé represents the development Sartre undergoes, from a concern with the struggle of ontological failure to that of the failure of communication. It becomes Mallarmé’s individual project to commit himself to the impossibility of poetry, and its incapability to communicate.155 In Mallarmé, Sartre writes: “Mallarmé, an impotent poet who gives voice to his impotence, converts his personal failure into the Impossibility of Poetry; and then, in yet another reversal, he will transform the Failure of Poetry into a Poetry of Failure.” 156 Failure is ontological, here, since man is essentially Failure itself:

“Within matter – that shapeless infinity – there seems to be some deep-seated need to turn back on itself in order to know itself. To shed light on its obscure infinity, matter seems to produce those shreds of fire, those tatters of thought, called man. But infinite dispersion takes hold of the Idea and scatters it. […] Man is failure, ‘a stunted wolf in a pack of wolves.’ His greatness consists in living out his flawed nature until it finally explodes.”157

Through his poetry, Mallarmé embodies the failure of man itself, since his poetic language expresses a universal absence that, just as poetic language returns to the world, removes the whole world from language.158 Expressing it thus, Mallarmé destroys a universal absence. In Mallarmé, the development of Sartre’s thought on poetry is twofold, Wolfe argues. First of all, it is historical in the sense that the impasse of poetry is explained on the basis of the present ideological structures in society. Secondly, Sartre develops a “crucial category of the imaginary.” 159 Sartre’s later conception of the imagination differs fundamentally from his earlier one in that it now attempts to unite literature’s praxis with poetry’s apraxia (its inability to act). Poetry, according to Wolfe, “liberates neither desire nor the human totality, but pure

154 Wolfe, “Rethinking Commitment,” 73. 155 Idem., 73. 156 Sartre, Mallarmé, 129. 157 Idem., 136. 158 Idem., 140. 159 Wolfe, “Rethinking Commitment,” 74. 37

imagination.”160 For the later Sartre, poetry liberates the creative imagination, and the poet’s ability to express their failure can now be considered a fundamental addition to literary engagement. We have seen that in What is Literature?, poetry is distinguished from prose, since it has no referent in reality and is therefore unable to be engaged. In Mallarmé, on the other hand, poetic language is, in its ambiguity, analogous to the position of the writer, and is engaged precisely in the sense that it is able to communicate the inexpressible. For Wolfe, this is because the imaginary is now not to be analysed as an aesthetic category, but as ideology. It is the “derealization of the object-world,” and “the judgment of history itself.”161 The environment that the poet rejects, is negated by the language he uses. Wolfe writes: “If poetry is, as Sartre argues, ‘pure negation,’ Mallarmé’s genius is to transform, first, his own ontological failure into the failure of poetry, and then to transform the latter into the Poetry of Failure. Mallarmé pushes the ‘universal negation’ of poetry to critical consciousness and thereby enacts, through the impossibility of poetry, ‘the impossibility of man.’”162 The failure of language that poetry embodies, then, is synonymous with that of man and his wish to create himself. Language cannot sufficiently express everything we mean, we cannot make it our own, just as we cannot make ourselves. Through its own metaphorical, dreamlike style, however, its ambiguity can express that of the subject’s situation. For this, we have seen, a renewed emphasis on the fact that language is itself material is necessary. It enables us to imagine a reality, but is still concerned with finding resonance in the objective reality the subject inhabits. The ideological imaginary of poetic language judges its history and negates its environment.163 Mallarmé’s poetry has as its theme its own impossibility, and thereby expresses the impossibility of being man. His commitment is “to create in full knowledge of creation’s futility.”164 As opposed to Howells, Wolfe sees Sartre’s earlier conception of engagement as more political than the later one. Sartre’s later conception of engagement, according to Wolfe, “refers to consciousness engaged from the outset with what it is not (facticity, the world of things, the situation, and so on).”165 This is what puts the emphasis on its dialectical character. Through Mallarmé, the earlier and the later conceptions of engagement are reconciled, Wolfe argues, on the basis of the concept of creation. The failure of our desire to create our own

160 Wolfe, “Rethinking Commitment,” 75. 161 Idem., 76. 162 Idem., 78. 163 Idem., 78. 164 Idem., 82. 165 Idem., 84. 38

ontology shows that our creation can be for ourselves, but never for others. This is where both conceptions start from, although they arrive at different conclusions. The first conception is concerned with the creation of freedom as a perpetual movement, the second is concerned with language as resistant towards the individual’s freedom. According to Wolfe, Sartre fully signifies the difference between the two conceptions in Mallarmé, and it is in these terms that “the Sartrean project of the forties and fifties, must now be read.”166

X Language: From Body to Vécu In What is Literature?, Sartre’s conception of the nature of language can be considered most basically defined by the claim: “We are within language as within our body.”167 Sartre writes: “It is our shell and our antennae; it protects us against others and informs us about them; it is a prolongation of our senses, a third eye which is going to look into our neighbour’s heart.”168 Language is an intuition, a sixth sense. Its end is to communicate: to speak is to act and prose is, before all else, an attitude of mind.169 With the creation of Words, however, Sartre considers himself cured from this neurosis to be in language. The position of the author is no longer considered a commitment to freedom, he is no longer a hero. Sartre writes: “Men needed me: to do what? […] I asked: ‘What’s it really all about?’ and, at once, I thought all was lost. It was about nothing. Not everyone who wants can be a hero.”170 It is not up to the writer to liberate the reader of their dogmatism, Sartre now realizes. Language is no pathway to freedom, no essential instrument. All one does when one writes is create himself, for himself. The motive behind these proclamations might seem ironic or rhetorical even, “a form of litotes designed to inspire greater confidence in the authority of writer and text,” as Goldthorpe remarks.171 Maybe. At least we know now that the development of Sartre’s phenomenology of language cannot be separated from his abandonment of his conception of the engaged writer as a hero of action. Geoffrey Baker argues that the great divorces that Sartre proposes in relation to his earlier conception of engagement – between fine arts and verbal arts, and between poetry and prose – “are firmly grounded in his own perception of language.”172 As opposed to poetry, prose language is a sign system which has no end to it: art is the end to which it submits itself. But the concept of engagement problematizes this distinction already in What is Literature?, Baker

166 Wolfe, “Rethinking Commitment,” 85. 167 Sartre, What is Literature?, 12. 168 Idem., 12. 169 Idem., 12-13. 170 Sartre, Words, 110. 171 Goldthorpe, Sartre: Literature and Theory, 201. 172 Baker, “Pressing Engagement,” 73 39

argues, because it elevates the use of words to the status of engagement itself, which suggests “an untenable union between signifier and thing-signified.”173 It is untenable, Baker argues, because to name a thing cannot change the thing. Baker writes: “To suppose that one can change a thing by changing its signifier is to suppose a necessary and concrete relation between words and their referents, and […] such relations are always only contingent.”174 Moreover, engaged literary language is supposed to unveil, but Baker thinks that this notion of unproblematic dévoilement does not do justice to the subjectivity of both writer and reader. Lastly, in What is Literature?, Sartre envisions a literature of praxis, but sometimes envisions the writer as an independent force behind the text, and at other times envisions them as inhabiting a much more prominent textual position (that is: having chosen a stance within the existing literature). All the aforementioned incongruences contribute to the idea that Sartre’s conception of engagement was never closed-off in the first place. The problems arising from Sartre’s earlier conception of engagement indicate its unfinished character, but they are useful in determining its course towards the later conception of engagement. According to Baker, the problems Sartre’s engagement is facing in What is Literature? point out a visible trend that extends itself to his later work. This trend revolves around the praxis Sartre appeals to: he wants to reconcile the constructive character of a political or ideological discourse with the negative character of literature (it negates the content it addresses through imagination). But the praxis of the reader/writer-relationship Sartre proposes in What is Literature? has the work of art fulfil a ventilating function: when reading a book or watching a play, one is not actually engaging in revolutionary practices, but is rather diverted from it.175 According to Baker, this fundamental problem of the praxis of literary language eventually leads Sartre to revise the great poetry/prose-distinction. Sartre’s proclamation that we are within language as within our body, then, has been problematic from the start: when its implications are considered in depth, the developments of his thought concerning language and engagement can be foreseen. In light of this, Guerlac’s rejection of a reading of Sartre’s earlier engagement as pertaining to a transparent, instrumental conception of language bears witness of an approach similar to Baker’s, and his argument that the literature of praxis as disclosed in What is Literature? should not be considered a fixed, finished theory of engagement that opposes Sartre’s later thought. Along the same lines, Goldthorpe considers Sartre’s work to be read with an appeal to the mobile relationships within

173 Baker, “Pressing Engagement,” 73. 174 Idem., 73. 175 Idem., 76. 40

his own texts, and between his and other’s. A we have seen, her focus rests primarily on the unification of transparency and materiality, and she considers these factors to be present in Sartre’s earlier work as well, or at least in the questions it raises but leaves unanswered. Sartre’s unification of transparency and materiality creates an ambiguity that allows language to express the situation of the writer more accurately than before. Goldthorpe especially considers some unfinished drafts on La Grande Morale to be of crucial importance in defining the role of Sartre’s work on Mallarmé in the development of his later conception of engagement. In it, Sartre reflects on a Hegelian theory of action and the concordant notions of reflection. According to Goldthorpe, Sartre pays attention to the representation of history as itself a historical factor, and to theory, or reflection, as itself a possible factor of historical change. But, however influenced by it, Sartre rejects the totalising nature of Hegelian dialectics, and instead settles for “a plurality of unstable meanings and for a series of provisional totalisations – of ‘totalités’ which are constantly ‘détotalisées.’”176 On the outset, this proposes a problematic subject/object dichotomy: not only is history subject to human subjectivity, human subjectivity is also an object that cannot be known, since any representation of it interferes with it.177 La Grande Morale confronts this problem, but its solution lies in works such as Mallarmé, that propose a substantial relation between compréhension and le vécu. Compréhension, in this sense, refers to understanding as Verstehen (as opposed to Erklären): “to understand social and psychological phenomena in terms of distinctively human intentions and meanings apprehended either through empathy and intuition or by rational reconstruction.”178 Erklären, on the other hand, would refer to explanation on the basis of mechanistic or biological models. In this respect, one could refer to theories such as psycho- analysis and Marxism, and indeed, although they contribute to both Sartre’s early and late, they are not considered sufficiently explanatory enough for the phenomenological approach he seeks.179 The locus for Sartre’s compréhension, then, is le vécu, which transcends the initial passivity of Sartre’s notions of contestation into “a dynamic, progressive ‘totalising’ of objective structures.”180 Compréhension contests the social alienation of the subject by means of a critical reflection. Goldthorpe writes: “Finally, if Sartrean commitment must overcome both ontological and socio-political alienation, poetry, if it is to be committed, must both make

176 Goldthorpe, Sartre, Literature and Theory, 174. 177 Idem., 174-175. 178 Idem., 88. 179 Idem., 88. 180 Idem., 176. 41

manifest and heal the rift between man and world.” 181 Poetry is now granted some real responsibility. Goldthorpe’s focus on consciousness and understanding in What is Literature? and other works views Sartre’s development of a phenomenology of language in light of a further exploration of what was initially left open to interpretation. The totalising project of engaged literature as an appeal to the concrete universal, for instance, had always been considered to be utopian. La Grande Morale, Mallarmé and other works suggest that this utopianism consists of the detotalizing nature of subjective expression, as it exists in a fundamentally paradoxical relationship with objectivity.182 Moreover, like Guerlac, Goldthorpe questions the reading of Sartre as initially disclosing language as a transparent medium. She writes: “Sartre’s elusive subject cannot be said to be the central source of meaning, nor can language be said to be the transparent medium of that meaning.”183According to her, “such a view can be derived only from the first short section of Qu’est-ce que la Littérature?. Elsewhere, both in his direct discussions of language and in the metalinguistic significance of his own writing, that view is radically questioned.” 184 The subject escapes objectification, and can therefore not be the central source of meaning. Nor can it be appealed to concretely through language. Goldthorpe envisions a unification between the transparency and materiality of language. The prose sign becomes material, consisting of objective structures, a status that was earlier reserved for poetic language. Language in whatever form, then, is ambiguous: instead of being either signifying, or working through the sens, it includes in its expression both characteristics at the same time. Through this ambiguity, it expresses the situation of the writer, the universal man and art itself, and is thereby able to transcend the alienation of the social situation. The exact workings of this mechanism are exemplified by Mallarmé’s movement from alienated product of his time, to the poet of nothingness. Approaches such as that of Guerlac, Baker and Goldthorpe offer an insight into Sartre’s work that respects his wish to be read in his own time. They consider his contemporary writing to be part of the dialogue that characterizes the wide-ranging scope of his work and that of significant others, without restraining it by the chronology according to which a certain terminology is introduced or refined. For Goldthorpe, this even includes the metalinguistic significance of his own writing: the rhetorical figures Sartre uses can be included in the

181 Goldthorpe, Sartre: Literature and Theory, 177. 182 Idem., 174. 183 Idem., 200. 184 Idem., 200. 42

phenomenological theorization of language that is supposed to be retrieved from his body of work. In the postscript to Sartre: Literature and Theory, Goldthorpe once more emphasizes the injustice done to the complexity and originality of Sartre’s thought when considering him a logocentric thinker – one that favours one of the poles of the oppositions he proposes – since the subject he departs from is “a paradoxical construct created by consciousness in an attempt to escape from its own temporal dispersal and from its pre-personal insubstantiality.”185 The subject tries to transcend the facticity of their situation, as well as the pre-determined genetic category they inhabit. Both of these considerations are merely deepened out at different instances in Sartre’s work – the complexity of the way they relate to each other should not simply be discarded as contradiction. In all of Sartre’s work, consciousness is unstable, it slips away from itself, and in his later thought it becomes clear that historical knowledge and social action are based on an equally unstable status of the subject. Goldthorpe writes: “In other areas too it is clear that his dichotomies may be provisional and labile ones, and that he is intent upon exploring their margins: for instance, the permeable borderlines between imagination and intellection, or between desire, knowledge and creativity.”186 The dichotomies Sartre is concerned with are not only posed directly or hinted at to intend their exploration, but are present in a rhetorical structure that is to be found in his whole body of work. Goldthorpe suggests that this should encourage us, when reading Sartre, to further explore the horizons of “cognition and imagination, of complicity and resistance, of ideology and knowledge, of representation and meaning.”187 Especially representation and meaning, then, are significant for considering the rhetorical and stylistic devices of Sartre’s own, supposedly engaged, literary prose. For Goldthorpe, “the process of reflecting upon our readings of Sartre can never be complete.”188 Precisely because in Words, Sartre finally distances himself from his perspective on the writer as a hero and writing as a form of salvation, the pervasiveness of his rhetoric is revealed and, according to Goldthorpe, an emphasis on this pervasive rhetoric should be extended to his literary prose, for it would confirm “the interdependence of literary and philosophical writing.”189 This interdependence is already a visible trend within continental philosophy, and Sartre’s work can only be exemplary of it.190 Goldthorpe concludes:

185 Goldthorpe, Sartre: Literature and Theory, 199. 186 Idem., 200. 187 Idem., 202. 188 Idem., 202. 189 Idem., 201. 190 Howells, Sartre: The Necessity of Freedom, 46. 43

“For the overriding aim of all philosophical writing is to convince, and, short of couching its arguments in formally symbolic language, it will share the methods of persuasion also fundamental to literary writing. But in Sartre, rhetorical figures are not merely forms of persuasion or assertion; they are, additionally, forms of enquiry. Apparent tautologies, the negation of a term by itself, the identity of contradictory propositions, oxymoron, the ‘category mistakes’ of metaphor – these and other figures contest, in his theoretical work, the traditional limits of logic. Further, his literary works do not so much incorporate as constitute extended figures in which these limits are both lived and transgressed in imagination.”191

Focussing on the rhetoric of imagination that engenders the phenomenological enquiry Sartre conducts in both his earlier and later works elucidates it as an open-ended philosophy. After all, “Sartre’s philosophy rejects stability and closure.”192 His philosophy proposes knowledge as dialectical, as a process, which means that “we are not the recipients of a mastered body of knowledge.”193 Moreover, it is intertwined with his literary writing, which I will explore in the next part of my thesis.

191 Goldthorpe, Sartre, Literature and Theory, 201-202. 192 Idem., 3. 193 Idem., 202. 44

3. Rhetoric in Sartre’s Prose: Theme and Metaphor as Forms of Enquiry

XI The Métaphysique of the Writer: Narrative and Thematic Structures Howells argues that recent continental thinking has started to contest the distinction between philosophy and literature, and that Sartre’s work can be considered to be in agreement with this trend: “Sartre would not go so far as those who wish to break down the philosophy/literature distinction entirely, though his work can […] be seen as a progressively more concerted attempt to undermine such binary oppositions.”194 In relation to Sartre’s phenomenological account, the contestation of the philosophy/literature opposition is functional. Existentialism and phenomenology are situated and concrete philosophies, Howells writes, so illustration and example are just as useful in investigating them as exposition and analysis: “Conversely, in Sartre’s view, novels are necessarily expressive of the novelist’s world view or philosophy: ‘une technique romanesque renvoie toujours a la métaphysique du romancier.’ And by metaphysics Sartre does not of course mean an obscure byzantine abstraction, but rather an exploration of man’s situation in the world.” 195 A novelistic technique always reflects the métaphysique of the novelist. In fact, Sartre argues, all writers are metaphysical writers, since metaphysics is the living attempt to embrace human totality from within.196 According to Howells, this dialectical conception of reality, which Sartre would later designate with the term universal singular or its opposite, singular universal, is relevant for his literary production in three ways: “In the first place, man himself is an universel singulier so that any man is literally, not merely metaphorically, representative of all men; secondly, in so far as he is a totality, each element of a man’s behaviour or lifestyle is revealing of him as a whole. […] And thirdly, the work of art itself is similarly synecdochic.”197 The elements of man’s behaviour or lifestyle that seem most insignificant or ordinary are precisely the ones that reveal him as a totality: the parts represent the whole, and the whole represents the parts. For the structure of literary expression, this means that literature is now endowed with a philosophical responsibility: it is only through the fragmentary and the individual that the whole, or the universal, can be expressed.198

194 Howells, Sartre: The Necessity of Freedom, 46. 195 Idem., 46. 196 Idem., 46. 197 Idem., 47. 198 Idem., 47. 45

Fiction is thus a form of the universal singular.199 According to Howells, this means that art should give expression to the world in all its flux and contingency. The event always resists thought and language, since it is essentially inapprehensible to us: every moment is always already gone. General headings are forged on the event only after it happens. As I pointed out earlier, Goldthorpe indicates this struggle between subjectivity and objectivity within history with Sartre’s need to reject a totalizing conception of history and handle a plurality of detotalizing meanings. In La Grande Morale and in Mallarmé, Goldthorpe then argues, this problem is confronted and tackled by the introduction of the substantial relation between le vécu and comprehension that poetry can provide. 200 According to Howells, in literature, the subject/object-dichotomy is represented by the struggle between plot (the chronology of the events) and story (the structure by means of which the events are represented); between acting and telling.201 This struggle is precisely the one Rocquetin faces in Nausea (1938), and the one that Mathieu in Roads to Freedom attempts to overcome from the beginning. The fictional work comes into being from the reader’s point of view. Even though the plot has already been constructed by the writer beforehand, the story ought to suggest that everything is open-ended, fluctuating and contingent. According to Howells, Sartre achieves this by constantly disappointing the reader’s sense of adventure: the idea that the plot will unravel in a way more or less anticipated, and that events transpire in necessary relation to each other. 202 The reader constantly expects something to happen, when in fact nothing does. Howells refers for instance to the opening scene of The Age of Reason (1945) in which Mathieu encounters a drunkard who asks him for money. Mathieu gives the man five francs, and is given a stamp from Madrid in return. The encounter is of no direct consequence for the plot and appears meaningless: it is open-ended – but these apparent trivialities convey a deeper significance. According to Howells, “the drunkard is significant in reminding Mathieu of his lack of commitment in the Spanish Civil War and of the fact he is getting older.”203 In this way, universal experience is signified through what appears to be mundane and insignificant in the first place. Howells argues that the open-endedness of Sartre’s fiction is constituted in the experience of the reader, since “it is […] in the act of reading that the potential commitment of

199 Howells, Sartre: The Necessity of Freedom, 47-48. 200 Goldthorpe, Sartre, Literature and Theory, 174. 201 Howells, Sartre: The Necessity of Freedom, 48. 202 Idem., 50. 203 Idem., 50. 46

the novel is realized.”204 The functions of causality and finality are inverted for the reader. Howells explains:

“The reader interprets Daniel’s refusal to lend Mathieu money as a gratuitous whim, or as evidence of callousness; for the writer, Daniel’s refusal is necessary if Mathieu’s quest is not to come to a premature conclusion. Yet the reader trusts implicitly that Daniel’s decision is part of some overall authorial design: part of her aesthetic pleasure lies in the tension between the illusion of arbitrariness and the hidden knowledge of purpose, or what Sartre calls the ‘sentiment de sécurité.’”205

This sentiment of security, which gives the reader the impression that there is a hidden purpose behind the structure of the story, constitutes the work of art. According to Howells, it gives us an idea of the métaphysique of the writer Sartre envisions. In order to focus on the specifics by means of which the writer wishes to communicate this métaphysique she considers “the interplay of liberty and situation, and the interaction between freedom, facticity and alienation.”206 The characters in Sartre’s fiction are always situated, restricted by their own facticity and their alienation from other people. The interplay between these factors and freedom (that is, the freedom we can imagine for these characters) establishes what Sartre calls des libertés prises au piège: trapped freedoms.207 Howells argues that “the dialectic of freedom and facticity is fundamentally incompatible with the métaphysique implied by the use of an omniscient narrator whose privileged perspective would be at odds both with our experience of the world and other people, and also with the spontaneity and unpredictability of man as Sartre sees him.”208 This means that Sartre’s fiction will be told from the first person, “a paradoxical mode in which even the most assured and self-confidently ‘objective’ descriptions and judgements are radically vitiated by their necessarily ‘subjective’ horizon,” or throughout a succession of different perspectives that has the structure of a third person narrative, but the viewpoint of an individual subject.209 In The Age of Reason, the individual perspective makes place for another in about every other

204 Howells, Sartre: The Necessity of Freedom, 51. 205 Idem., 51. 206 Idem., 52. 207 Idem., 54. 208 Idem., 56. 209 Idem., 56. 47

scene; The Reprieve (1945) shifts the perspective every sentence but sticks to the viewpoint of one of the main characters. According to Howells, the perspective that the reader adopts towards the fictional world he engages with, is just as fragmented and subjective as the characters’ perspectives.210 Moreover, “the reader shares the characters’ vision of the world.”211 By that Howells means their relative focus, bewilderment or naïveté, and their sense of time. In the next chapter, I will discuss the thematic structures of conversion and the inexpressible, on the basis of which Sartre’s métaphysique is expressed throughout Roads to Freedom, contesting the purely contextual interpretation of this work with an intertextual one.

XII Roads to Freedom: Conversion and the Inexpressible When reading Roads to Freedom in relation to its political context, it can easily be said to parallel the conception of engagement as political praxis that Sartre develops in What is Literature?. Roads to Freedom has the form of a string of period pieces or historical testaments that can be related to its contemporary political context more or less directly.212 Its increasingly intensifying interest in the Spanish Civil War can be read in direct relation to a growing enthusiasm about concrete political involvement on Sartre’s side. For Goldthorpe, Howells and Baker, however, Sartre’s earlier work can and should be considered precisely in light of the later developments already anticipated in his earlier thought, which concerns the writer as the one to transcend failure by means of expressing the failure of humankind. For Goldthorpe and Howells, this also means seriously considering the interplay between his philosophical and literary work. My own analysis of Roads to Freedom will be in line with such a project. In Sartre and Fiction, however, Gary Cox analyses Roads to Freedom on the basis of the contextual approach. According to him, The Age of Reason is especially exemplary of the political focus Sartre maintains in his earlier conception of engagement: “The novel grew alongside Being and Nothingness for several years and echoes many of its central themes, particularly the themes of freedom, responsibility and being-for-others.”213 Within a social realm of apathy and indifference to largescale political developments, the character of Mathieu undergoes a journey that leads him from the personal towards a situation of radical freedom. Roads to Freedom contains autobiographical aspects in the sense that Matthieu is largely based on Sartre’s own person, and can therefore be said to align with the development of Sartre’s

210 Howells, Sartre: The Necessity of Freedom, 57-58. 211 Idem., 60. 212 Idem., 81. 213 Gary Cox, Sartre and Fiction (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2009): 99. 48

politically committed stance: “Politics remains peripheral even by the close of The Age of Reason, but importantly by the close Mathieu has dispensed with the personal. […] Although he does not yet know it, he is ready for the approaching war, for total commitment.” 214 According to Cox, the whole series can be read as a political journey, especially in The Reprieve, in which defeat is an important theme. It contains a series of events that lead Matthieu to adopt an attitude of self-discipline and authenticity, even if it means his (supposed) death. However, reading Roads to Freedom is not necessarily confined to the analysis of the theme of a political journey: the themes of conversion and the inexpressible, for instance, reveal aspects of Sartre’s thought that already go beyond such a reading. Roads to Freedom tells the story of Mathieu and his acquaintances as they live their individual lives in 1938, while at the same time the Spanish Civil War is unfolding. The first volume, The Age of Reason, covers roughly forty-eight hours and deals with philosophy professor Mathieu as he wanders around Paris, trying to figure out a way to raise money for the abortion his girlfriend Marcelle is planning on having. In these forty-eight hours, Mathieu visits his brother, sits in cafés conversing with his friends (one of whom supposedly dies, but later appears to be alive after all), kisses one of his students (the gloomy, self-destructive Ivich) as he takes her to see a Gaugain-exhibit, and eventually decides to choose freedom, leave Marcelle, burn all his bridges and go to Spain to fight. Marcelle is left in the hands of Daniel, who decides to marry her and raise her baby with her, even though he is not attracted to women. Mathieu figures he has reached the age of reason, the age at which you cannot flee into the safety of making inauthentic choices anymore, and engaging politically seems to be the only sensible thing to do. However, as Sartre explains in an interview in 1945: “Mathieu is the freedom of indifference, freedom in the abstract, freedom for nothing. Mathieu is not free, he is nothing, because he’s always on the outside.”215 Mathieu’s journey towards freedom, then, already has the characteristics of failure. In the second volume, The Reprieve, we lose Mathieu a little bit at first. His presence is still felt, but a vast number of new characters is introduced. All of them are represented by the expression of the inconclusive things they think, say and do. Their consciousnesses overlap each other as though sewn together into a rather incoherent patchwork of experiences. The plot takes place within the timespan of about a week. The characters are situated in Paris, at the border of Czechoslovakia or in other European places, suffer from a heatwave and await the outcome of the Munich agreement, as if they were one general consciousness. A year and nine

214 Cox, Sartre and Fiction, 100. 215 Sartre, The Last Chance, 18. 49

months later, the third volume of Roads to Freedom, Iron in the Soul (1949), takes off. France has fallen and the group of soldiers that are now followed closely are both heroic and tragic. Especially Mathieu, as a scene in which the world comes crashing down on him is the last we see of him. The remaining fragments of Roads to Freedom are published as a fourth volume, The Last Chance. They mostly feature conversations between the friends Mathieu and Brunet, as they have become prisoners of war. Howells argues that in Sartre’s fictional work, the reader experiences the same haunting silence that the characters face: in Roads to Freedom, Mathieu and the others are constantly haunted by the things they cannot sufficiently express. Howells writes: “There seems to be a tension in the Sartre of the 1940s between an awareness of the inadequacy of language and a determination that language can suffice for all purposes. […] It is certain that his characters feel strongly the struggle with language and the frequent failure of expression.” 216 Of all the characters, Ivich is by far the one who most notably recognizes this inexpressibility. She has a clear sense of what words are meant for and what not, and often falls silent, contemplating, concerned with matters that are apparently unfit for language:

“‘What are you thinking about, Ivich?’ he [Mathieu] asked. She sat for a moment with her mouth open, disconcerted, then she resumed her meditative air and her face again became impenetrable. […] ‘What are you thinking about?’ he repeated. ‘I…’ Ivich shook herself. ‘You’re always asking me that. Nothing definite. Things that can’t be expressed. There are no words for them.’”217

Ivich’s unwillingness to express herself through language embodies the inadequacy of the medium itself, and thereby the struggle between freedom (to speak, to act, to shoot) and its opposing facticity and alienation. Howells writes: “Language is evidently a major factor in the dialectic of freedom and non-freedom explored by the novels. Language socializes, humanizes and orders; when it breaks down, the consequence is chaos.”218 The sporadically aphasic Ivich definitely embodies this tension between freedom and non-freedom. For Mathieu she is ever so enigmatic, for she does not conform to anyone, and does not belong to anyone. At the same time, however, she

216 Howells, Sartre: The Necessity of Freedom, 63. 217 Jean-Paul Sartre, The Age of Reason, trans. Eric Sutton (Penguin, 2016): 73. 218 Howells, Sartre: The Necessity of Freedom, 64. 50

barely holds it together in anticipation of the notice that she failed her final exams, enveloping herself with the limitedness of her situation and leaving everything to chance. The other characters experience the haunting silence and the non-freedom it comprises in various degrees as well. In The Age of Reason, Mathieu constantly finds his words to be of no affect, reality resists the predictions and promises he expresses; Marcelle is unable to voice what she really wants and therefore does not make authentic choices; Daniel gets trapped inside feverish internal monologues. Silence represents the character’s fundamental alienation from themselves, each other, and the world. According to Howells, however, it is through conversion that the alienation the characters experience reveals itself as well: “Yet it is precisely the social aspect of language which constitutes a major aspect of its power to alienate: […] we are spoken by language as much as we speak it, and the novels are particularly sensitive to the anonymity of much discourse.” 219 In Roads to Freedom, it often becomes painfully clear that the characters’ consciousnesses conflict when they communicate. Their conversations appear to be predominantly performative, whereas their own thoughts, surrounding the conversations, conflict with the things they say or what they think the other is saying. They cannot really connect through language and recognize each other’s freedom. Some characters are more aware of this impossibility than others, which contributes to their sense of alienation all the more. The conversations between Boris and Lola, a couple with a significant age-difference between them, often exemplify the way in which language, instead of contributing to the forming of we-relations, complicates the alienation of human relationships even further:

“‘You’re a strange boy,’ said Lola. Boris blinked and assumed a pleading air. He didn’t like people talking about him: it was always so complicated, and he became bewildered. Lola looked as if she was angry, but it was simply because she loved him passionately and tormented herself about him. There were moments when it was more than she could bear, she would lose her temper for no reason, and glare at Boris, not knowing how to take him, and her hands began to quiver. All this used to surprise Boris, but he was quite accustomed to it by this time. Lola laid her hand on Boris’s head: ‘I wonder what’s inside it,’ she said. ‘I feel quite frightened sometimes.’”220

219 Howells, Sartre: The Necessity of Freedom, 65. 220 Sartre, The Age of Reason, 27. 51

Scenes like these illustrate more than just consciousnesses’ conflictual relations: by their inability to converse, consciousnesses alienate themselves even more from each other. Sartre also often lets one consciousness be superseded by the next through the use of an impersonal perspective, sometimes even expressing (apparent) contradictions within one such perspective. In The Reprieve, consciousnesses succeed each other fairly rapidly and are often alternated by a general perspective that seems to belong to no consciousness in particular, or perhaps precisely to both:

“He [Milan] put down the chair, and gazed at the walls in bewilderment. It was no longer the room he knew. They had disembowelled it: a red mist blurred his eyes: he thrust his hands into his pockets, and said to himself: ‘I’m not alone. I’m not alone.’ Daniel thought: ‘I am alone.’ Alone with his bloodstained dreams in a peace that reached beyond his vision. […] The future lay there, poised upon that countryside: Daniel was within it, like a worm in an apple. One sole future. The future of all men: they have fashioned it with their own hands, very slowly, as the years rolled on, and they have not left me the smallest place in it, nor the meanest chance. Tears of rage welled into Milan’s eyes, and Daniel turned towards Marcelle: my wife, my future, the only one remaining to me, since the world has decided for peace.”221

The reader’s experience switches from Milan to Daniel and back, sometimes without knowing which thread to follow. Moreover, Sartre places the contradictory phrases I’m not alone and I am alone in direct relation to each other. All this contributes to the idea that language is both personal and impersonal, both specific and overlaid with conflictual meanings: the anonymity of discourse indicates how we are spoken by language just as much as we speak it. Howells argues: “In so far as it universalizes the individual and makes the subjective objective, language is bound to betray at the same time as it communicates.”222 The inexpressible is constantly present as language’s failed attempts to unite the universal whole of human experience with the singular, fragmentarily composed, individual subject. So far, Sartre’s earlier suggestion that language is like a body (external, instrumental) and the pragmatic implications it entails are already contested and questioned within the theme

221 Jean-Paul Sartre, The Reprieve, trans. Eric Sutton (London: Penguin, 2001): 43. 222 Howells, Sartre: The Necessity of Freedom, 67. 52

of conversion. Howells argues that the presence of these thematic mechanisms in Sartre’s work exemplify the fact that his fictional works are not simply representations of his philosophical thought. They are constructed much more complexly, and thereby reveal the ambivalences in his earlier thought on consciousness, freedom and language. Howells writes: “In the case of language in particular, both La Nausée and Les Chemins de la Liberté express an awareness of alienation in tension with Sartre’s instinctive faith in the human potential to communicate, and which the philosophy tackles head on only at a later stage.”223 Roads to Freedom is situated in a strict historical context, but it already provokes the enquiry concerning imagination and determination that would later adopt the progressive-regressive form of biography in Sartre’s work.224 In order to fully apprehend the complexity of social situations, Sartre moves on to an analysis consisting of some more in-depth psychoanalytic and Marxist components, but the grounds on which this analysis would take place are already explored in earlier (fictional) works. These grounds are, finally, explored by a rhetoric of imagination, as Goldthorpe suggests, including metaphorical language and its connotation of category mistake.

XIII Roads to Freedom: The Category Mistake of Metaphor According to Goldthorpe, Sartre’s rhetorical language constitutes figures in which the traditional limits of logic “are both lived and transgressed in imagination.”225 And, even more importantly, they “expose the rhetorical seductiveness of their own procedures.”226 The rhetoric of Sartre’s literary and philosophical language draws attention to its own seductiveness: by revealing itself to be of structural significance, the workings of its own mechanism come to lay bare. Therefore, the forms of persuasion that rhetoric is usually reserved for, are for Sartre forms of enquiry as well. They invite us to into further investigation: “exploring the moving horizons of the rational and the irrational, of the active and the passive, of cognition and imagination, of complicity and resistance, of ideology and knowledge, of representation and meaning.”227 Language is paradoxical. We are within it as we are within our bodies, Sartre states in What is Literature?. However, this statement should be read in relation to the oppositional suggestion that language is also always shortcoming. Goldthorpe writes: “The ‘universal singular’ must live in and through the paradox of language, which man creates, but which he

223 Howells: Sartre: The Necessity of Freedom, 67. 224 Idem., 68. 225 Goldthorpe, Sartre: Literature and Theory, 201. 226 Idem., 201. 227 Idem., 201-202. 53

experiences as a mode of alienation.” 228 In Roads to Freedom, the struggle between the experience of alienation and the constitution of a universal singular is already present in thematic structures, such as the treatment of conversion, but according to Goldthorpe, the rhetorical stylistic devices of Sartre’s fictional work should be considered as well. One of those stylistic devices is the metaphor, which consists of a category mistake: it frames an aspect belonging to one category within another. This creates a sense of confusion concerning both concepts and their respective categories, and suggests that what is true is actually the opposite of what is presented on the surface. In Roads to Freedom, for instance, language is often described metaphorically as something relating to the human body: the categories of linguistic entities and bodily aspects are inverted. At the same time, however, our attention is directed towards the sense of confusion this metaphorical language provokes, which contributes to our understanding that it is actually not that evident that language has the characteristics of a body. As Goldthorpe remarks: Sartre’s rhetorical language draws attention to its own persuasiveness and seductiveness. Thus, the notions of externalization and instrumentality are put to the test already, precisely because they are presented through the use of this rhetorical device: the reader is invited to question whether language is actually similar to our limbs or the tools we use. In The Age of Reason, the question of language is posed rather straightforwardly at the beginning of the work. Mathieu and Marcelle discuss Ivich, and despite the fact that Marcelle does not display any signs of jealousy at all, Mathieu tries not to sound too fond of Ivich in front of her:

“His tone, which suggested a sort of protective detachment, was surely intended to mislead. Everything that could be expressed in words, he said. ‘But what are words?’ He paused, then hung his head despondently.”229

Mathieu expresses exactly everything he is able to put in words, but there still remains a large part of inexpressibility. Throughout the work, stylistic devices are used to continue this rhetorical questioning. As far as the category mistake of the metaphor goes, language is portrayed as being, as part of

228 Goldthorpe, Sartre: Literature and Theory, 196. 229 Sartre, The Age of Reason, 7. 54

the body, and as the body as a whole. First, Mathieu envisions himself as a bet of which the words change in accordance with his age:

“He had said to himself: ‘I shall achieve my salvation!’ Ten times, a hundred times, he had made that same bet. The words changed as his age increased, to suit his intellectual attitudes, but it was one and the same bet; and Mathieu was not, in his own eyes, a tall, rather ungainly fellow who taught philosophy in a public school, nor the brother of Jacques Delarue, the lawyer, nor Marcelle’s lover, nor Daniel’s and Brunet’s friend: he was just that bet personified.”230

The bet Mathieu makes with himself is a performative use of language, it becomes reality by the proclamation of it, but it is the person of Mathieu as well. The words uttered are inseparable from himself. Moreover, conversational pieces are often represented as whole bodies, sitting between the actual bodies that are talking. When Boris and Ivich are both bothered by Mathieu’s reaction to the news that Lola has died but refuse to discuss it any further, for instance, Mathieu’s body remains metaphorically in between them: “Boris felt very solitary. He would have liked to get near to Ivich, but Mathieu was still between them.”231 At another instance, Mathieu and Marcelle discuss Daniel, although rather allusively, not saying what they really think, because their relative perspectives on Daniel and his business are wholly different: “They were silent: Daniel was there, he was sitting between them.”232 The matters the characters want to talk about, but do not, are represented as actual bodies. Lastly, words are represented as parts of the body, such as hands. In Iron in the Soul, for instance, Daniel, bored with his relationship with Marcelle to whom he is not attracted, spots a boy by whose beauty he is profoundly moved (much like Gustav von Aschenbach’s fascination with Tadzio in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice):

“Daniel would have been no more deeply moved if the evening breeze had spoken his name in human accents, if the clouds had written its syllables on the mauve heavens, so manifest was it that this youth had been placed there for him,

230 Sartre, The Age of Reason, 61. 231 Idem., 282. 232 Idem., 361. 55

that the long, broad hands, blossoming from silken sleeves, were the words of his secret language.”233

The hands of a boy are words of a secret language, and Daniel’s fascination with the boy is itself analogous to what he would have felt if the skies and the wind had started speaking or writing. At another instance, Mathieu is described to have “clinched his words with a movement of the hand.”234 Here, they are described as tools, ready at hand. Words are also endowed with other material characteristics. They get stuck in throats (which is what Marcelle often experiences), have a certain taste (sugary, for instance, or the taste of catastrophe), they can be empty, tiresome, violent or snapped into the air by a “varnished mauve-tinted mouth, like a crimson insect intent upon devouring that ashen visage.”235 They can be scattered, tumble over each other or come lolloping out of someone’s mouth. At a certain point, the singing voice of the character of Ménard is even compared to vermin, which is no bodily metaphor for language, but certainly shakes up the categories of human expression:

“He seemed to have no control over his voice. It was like some huge parasite feeding upon him, sucking up his blood and gilts and transforming them into song. He sat there, an inert figure with dangling arms, watching with horrified amazement the vermin that was issuing from his mouth.”236

All this imagery concerning language, words and voices indicate that Sartre’s enquiry, the developments of which would become so important for the evolution of his concept of engagement, started with the imagination of the reader of a work of fiction. The rhetoric of metaphor draws attention to its own allure: words and voices as limbs or other organic aspects moving in accordance with, towards, and away from bodies become objects of scrutiny precisely because of their excessive exploration. Our ability to imagine language as such contests the supposed logical inclination of considering it a representative tool. The importance of its ambiguity in relation to expression, which Sartre would become increasingly concerned with, is posed here as a question without a definite answer to it yet.

233 Jean-Paul Sartre, Iron in the Soul, trans. Gerard Hopkins (London: Penguin, 2002): 134-135. 234 Sartre, Iron in the Soul, 175. 235 Sartre, The Age of Reason, 15. 236 Sartre, Iron in the Soul, 122. 56

XIV Rhetoric and Sartre’s Phenomenology of Language Like the question what words are, the question of freedom is also posed quite literally, this time at the end of The Age of Reason:

“‘Is that what freedom is?’ he [Mathieu] thought. ‘He [Daniel] has acted; and now he can’t go back: it must seem strange to him to feel behind him an unknown act which he has already almost ceased to understand and which will tum his life upside down. All I do, I do for nothing. It might be said that I am robbed of the consequences of my acts; everything happens as though I could always play my strokes again. I don’t know what I would give to do something irrevocable.’”237

Even though Mathieu sometimes forms quite articulate definitions of consciousness and freedom in Roads to Freedom, they do change throughout the work, and even though consciousness and freedom are illustrated by the actions of Mathieu and his acquaintances (like the soldiers’ decision to go and fight in the war), the way these actions are to be judged remains open for interpretation. Sartre’s exploration of these themes remains in the spirit of an open enquiry. He questions us, we question him; the more he demands of us, the more we demand of him. Sartre’s earlier conception of engagement is concerned with the creation of freedom, whereas the second is concerned with language as resisting the individual’s freedom. It is clear that a significant part of the characters of Roads to Freedom is concerned with the creation of freedom (at least most of the men are), but language’s resistance of it is already present within the rhetorical structure of the work. One of the rhetorical devices that, according to Goldthorpe, feature in Sartre’s philosophical as well as his fictional work, is that of “the identity of contradictory propositions.”238 When oppositional propositions are formulated in relation to each other, their identity becomes an object of enquiry. In one of the scenes of Iron in the Soul, the group of soldiers feels let down by the officers, and frankly by the rest of the country: like no one is bothered with them and their service is useless. They all feel this, but are unable to express the feeling with words, until finally someone does:

“A buzz of talk drowned him. […] Tongues were loosened: talk had become a necessity. No one likes us, no one: the civilians blame us for not defending them,

237 Sartre, The Age of Reason, 391. 238 Goldthorpe, Sartre: Literature and Theory, 201. 57

our wives have got no pride in us, our officers have left us in the lurch, the villagers hate us, the Jerries are advancing through the darkness. What was in their minds had got to find words. We are the scapegoats, we are the conquered, the cowards, the vermin, the offscourings of the earth: we have lost the war: we are ugly and we are guilty, and no one, no one in the whole world, likes us. Mathieu dared not find expression for all this, but Latex, behind him, spoke it calmly and unemotionally: ‘We’re pariahs.’ There was a sputter of voices. Everywhere the word was repeated, harshly, pitilessly: ‘Pariahs!’ Silence fell. Mathieu looked at Longin, for no particular reason, but simply because he was his nearest neighbour. Charlot and Latex exchanged glances. All present stared at one another: all present seemed to be waiting, as though something still remained to be said. Then, suddenly, Latex smiled at Mathieu, and Mathieu returned his smile. Charlot smiled. Latex smiled. On every face the moon brought pallid flowers to birth.”239

Talk has become a necessity, but it turns out that to say nothing is eventually what is best: the soldiers merely smile at each other, and thereby reach an understanding. The proposition that talk is a necessity and its counterproposition that the inexpressible can, in fact, be left unsaid, become the locus of a deeper underlying question: is language the tool through which to achieve a mutual recognition of freedom, or is the alienation it entails precisely the vantage point from which to start to consider its power? Roads to Freedom is full of nuances like these. As we have seen, its narrative- and thematic structures already circle around the theme of conversion as the creation of freedom, as well as language’s alienation due to consciousness’ confrontation with inexpressibility. Next to that, metaphorical language and the use of rhetorical stylistic devices such as oxymoron (in the case of Mathieu’s contemplation of his original future, for instance, or in the recurring phrase condemned to be free) are used to defy logical limits and appeal to further exploration. Rhetorical language functions as a device to raise such questions in Sartre’s earlier (literary) work; questions that are articulated, refined and deepened in his later work. The transition from his earlier to his later thought can be traced back to the considerations Sartre articulates in his work on Mallarmé, the poet who makes him realize that “the critical self-destruction of Poetry”

239 Sartre, Iron in the Soul, 111-112. 58

can be considered a whole commitment.240 For language, this means a renewed appreciation of the sens and a reinstatement of the materiality of the word, so that it can be united with its significative transparency and thus create an ambiguity similar to the writer’s own. By living out the paradox of language, as Mallarmé did, one can create, and by creating, create oneself.241 Engagement, in its mature appearance, is based on this realization. In What is Literature?, it seems Sartre urges the writer to have a message, even if he is not yet sure what that message is supposed to be. However, he does consider language itself to be the essential instrument through the use of which we can pick up on the perpetual movement of self-liberation that freedom, as it is both conditional and infinite, entails. By the time of Mallarmé’s publication, however, Sartre has discovered that the message of the writer is essentially conveyed within the structure of language itself, only as possibility. Guerlac writes: “As we have seen, writing is not value because of the value of its message; it is value in its very structure, or essence, to the extent that value here means freedom, the necessary condition for the invention of value through action.”242 Freedom is the essential value, and other values can become reality through the realization of it. Through what Guerlac calls the esthetic modification of experience (like the use of metaphor), the creative project of inventing value becomes reality: “It is the esthetic modification of experience that gives the world to us as a project. The dialectic of reading, then, – the very mode of being of the literary event – is not only an origin, or ground, of esthetic value. It is a condition of possibility of value in general in the sense that, grounding value in freedom, it establishes the basis for commitment and responsibility of any kind.” 243 The structure of Mallarmé’s poetic language, which, according to Sartre, travels via itself to the whole universe and back again and wins because of its losing posture, incentivizes him to admit that the ambiguous, the alienating and the inexpressible are essential qualities of the language he initially considers to be engaged only through signification. But the semantic structures of his own fictional writing already anticipate this move he is about to make. In this last scene of Iron in the Soul, the notion of apraxia, which Sartre involves in his re-evaluation of poetic language and voices so wretchedly in Words, is already deeply felt. The structure of Sartre’s literary language once more reveals to us his interest in the juxtaposition of antithetical entities, such as life and death, movement and inertia, loneliness and collectivity.

240 Sartre, Mallarmé, 145. 241 Idem., 145. 242 Guerlac, “Sartre and the Powers of Literature,” 817. 243 Idem., 817. 59

Sartre’s literary métaphysique (the exploration of his situation in the world) is revealed to us by the style and structure through which these themes are considered. The soldiers, both dead and alive, are transported in the back of a train. The point of view is from Brunet:

“Brunet was alone, rigid and uncomfortable. The place was hot as an oven. He stood there on one foot: the other was jammed in a confusion of legs and boots. He made no attempt to free himself. He was obsessed by the need to feel that everything about him was provisional, that he was passing through something, that his thoughts were passing through his head, that the train was passing through France. Ideas leapt from his brain, vague, indistinct and fell on the railway track behind, even before he had had time to identify them. He was moving farther and farther and farther away. Only when life was moving at this speed it was endurable. Complete immobility. Speed slid by and dropped at his feet. He knew that the train was moving, grinding, bumping, shuddering its way onward, but he was no longer conscious of movement. He was in a great dust- bin. Somebody was kicking about inside it. Behind him, on the embankment, lay a body, limp and boneless. Brunet knew that they were moving farther from it with each passing minute. He longed to feel the reality of their movement, but could not. Complete stagnation reigned. Above the dead body, above the inert freight-van, the darkness wheeled. It alone was living. Tomorrow’s dawn would cover all of them with the same dew. Dead flesh and rusted steel would run with the same sweat. Tomorrow the black birds would come.”

This passage does not contain any indication of man being capable of anything. There is definitely no positive political message involved. Brunet needs everything to be provisional, he needs to feel that he is passing through his situation – there is no commitment, there is only loss. But that is precisely the point of freedom, as Sartre describes in Mallarmé and implies at the end of Words: the individual surrenders, accepts and engulfs his loss, and then, precisely by this being-towards-failure, surpasses his situation.244 The grounds on which to create value are thus established. In other words: the loser wins.

244 Sartre, Mallarmé, 129. 60

Conclusion One of the realizations that shapes the course in which Sartre’s thought develops significantly, is the one that art can never really be created for others. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre already considers the mode of consciousness described as Being-for-Others to be fundamentally inauthentic, but when he starts to consider engaged literary language to be essentially expressive of the writer’s being, as it is situated ambiguously (shaped by childhood experiences that determine its happiness; a product of a historical background it seeks to transcend), the concrete universal public he envisioned in What is Literature? is also to be revised. The utopian notion of totalization Sartre handles in What is Literature? is infused with notions of detotalization, since the making of a subject into an object is problematic from a historical point of view: the historical object is always already viewed subjectively. Sartre overcomes this struggle by reinstating the importance of the working of the sens in relation to its opposite, signification, and thereby elevates the status of the poetry he previously considered to be unworthy of the allotment of engagement. This means that language can now refer to itself, at the same time that it tries to find resonance in the world. The reinstatement of the sens, however, makes it difficult to envision a concrete public on which to base the writer/reader-relationship as defined in What is Literature?. Now, the writer has to win through the acknowledgement, indulgence and transcendence of their failure to communicate. This emphasis on the failure to communicate, then, indicates an important transition within Sartre’s phenomenology of language. The great language-question, la Parole ou l’Homme?, can be inquired by retracing the steps Sartre makes within the whole body of his philosophical and literary work concerning conversion, instrumentality, transparency, materiality, alienation and ambiguity. In doing so, it eventually becomes clear that, for Sartre, the writer is far from able to achieve any sort of salvation. At the end of Words, Sartre renounces his belief in the power of (literary) language to affect the world:

“For a long time, I took my pen for a sword; I now know we’re powerless. No matter. I write and will keep writing books; they’re needed; all the same, they do serve some purpose. Culture doesn’t save anything or anyone, it doesn’t justify. But it’s a product of man: he projects himself into it, he recognizes himself in it; that critical mirror alone offers him his image.”245

245 Sartre, Words, 254-255. 61

Literature does serve some purpose, but this purpose is significantly distinguishable from the one Sartre advocated in What is Literature?. Literature is now able to provide critical self- reflection, but any specific emphasis on the praxis articulated in Sartre’s earlier conception of engagement is left behind. The writer is no hero, he does not save anyone except for himself:

“My sole concern has been to save myself – nothing in my hands, nothing up my sleeve – by work and faith. As a result, my pure choice did not raise me above anyone. Without equipment, without tools, I set all of me to work in order to save all of me. If I relegate impossible Salvation to the proproom, what remains? A whole man, composed of all men and as good as all of them and no better than any.”246

The impossible Salvation (or: utopian totalization) that appears so essential in What is Literature? has fled from Sartre’s thought. The anticipation of the concerns Sartre voices here in the closing chapter of Words, then, is already present in his fictional work of the forties and fifties. These fictional works were published around the same time that What is Literature? was written and published, and so it would be comprehensible to analyse them according to the notion of literary praxis Sartre discloses in his early conception of engagement. However, such an interpretation would not do justice to the originality and inventiveness of this philosopher and literary writer: it would be ignorant, at best, to consider Sartre’s own literary fiction deprived of the linguistic structures his philosophy of literature is concerned with. Sartre’s rhetorical creativity reveals itself through the use of metaphorical language and other functional stylistic devices, and draws attention to its own mechanism to anticipate the enquiry his philosophy carries out more profoundly at a later stage. Analysing Sartre with this emphasis on the open-endedness of his philosophy means, at least according to Goldthorpe, that the highest stakes are raised: language or man? As is to be expected, Sartre does not provide us with a definite answer to that question. We are left to contemplate to what extent language is ours to appropriate, and if and how its quality to estrange us from the world and ourselves will necessarily always keep it one step ahead of us. It can at least be said that our relationship with language is paradoxical by nature. In the name of

246 Sartre, Words, 255. 62

paradox, then, literature has the quality of enriching this relationship with the possibility of understanding it as well as complicating it even further. According to Sartre, Mallarmé was the first to ask whether anything like literature existed at all. Whether or not it does: once one starts to write, there is no turning back. Sartre writes: “From the moment he decided to write so as to plunge the Word into an adventure from which there was no turning back, there has been no writer, however modest, who has not put the Word itself into question.”247 Moreover, he then proclaims: “The Word or Man: it is all one and the same.”248 Language imitates us in both our artificial and natural essences, Mallarmé states, and in our exercises of will as well as in our blindness.249 Sartre agrees. It is only from the moment we become one with language that the question of its existence presents itself to us. The nature of its existence is not a question that can be separated from the question of our own existence, then: we revolve around this phenomenon that just as well encircles us, as if caught up in an inexhaustible dance with our reflection. The question of language and the question of literary engagement do not demand an answer as though they could simply be judged from the outside. The answer is simply to write.

247 Sartre, Mallarmé, 129. 248 Idem., 129. 249 Idem., 129. 63

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