"Thus the prose-writer is a man who has chosen a certain method of secondary action which we may call action by disclosure...The 'committed' writer knows that words are action. He knows that to reveal is to change and that one can reveal only by planning to change." P37
"The writer has chosen to reveal the world and particularly to reveal man to other men so that the latter may assume full responsibility before the object which has been thus laid bare." P38
"It must be borne in mind that most critics are men who have not had much luck and who, just about the time they were growing desperate, found quiet little jobs as cemetery watchmen. God knows whether cemeteries are peaceful; none of them are more cheerful than a library. The dead are there; the only thing they have done is write. They have long since been washed clean of the sin of living, and besides, their lives are known only through other books which other dead men have written about them... The trouble makers have disappeared; all that remains are the little coffins that are stacked on shelves along the walls like urns in a columbarium... Indeed, the book is by no means an object; neither is it an act, or even a thought. Written by a dead man about dead things, it no longer has any place on this earth; it speaks of nothing which interests us directly." P41
[about the critics] "They get excited only about classified matters, closed quarrels, stories whose ends are known. They never bet on uncertain issues, and since history has decided for them , since the objects which terrified or angered the authors they read have disappeared, since bloody disputes seem futile at the distance of two centuries, they can be charmed with balanced periods, and everything happens for them as if all literature were only a vast tautology and as if every new prose-writer had invented a new way of speaking only for the purpose of saying nothing.... Our great writers wanted to destroy, to edify, to demonstrate. But we no longer retain the proofs which they mean to prove. the abuses which they denounced are no longer those of our time.
We are still moved by the passion of these impassioned geometries when the geometry no longer convinces us. Or rather by the representation of the passion. In the course of centuries the ideas have turned flat, but they remain the little personal objectives of a man who was once flesh and bone; behind the reason of reasons of the heart, the virtues, the vices, and that great pain that men have in living. " P43
"So let them [contemporary writers] reason, assert, deny, refute, and prove; but the cause they are defending must be only the apparent aim of their discourse; the deeper goal is to yield themselves without seeming to do so." P45
"A bare tear is not lovely. It offends. A good argument also offends, as Stendhal well observed. But an argument that masks a tear - that's what we're after. The argument remove the obscenity from the tears; the tears remove the aggressiveness from the argument. We shall be neither too deeply touched not at all convinced, and we shall be able to yield ourselves safely to that moderate pleasure which, as everyone knows, we derive from the contemplation of works of art. Thus, this is 'true', 'pure' literature, a subjective thing which reveals itself under the aspect of the objective, a discourse so curiously contrived that it is equivalent to silence, a thought which debates with itself, a reason which is only the mask of madness, an Eternal which lets it be understood that it is only a moment of History, a historical moment which, by the hidden side which it reveals, suddenly send back a perpetual lesson to the eternal man, but which is produced against the express wishes of those who do the teaching." P45
"When all is said and done, the message is a soul which is made object. A soul, and what is to be done with a soul? One contemplates it at a respectful distance. It is not customary to show one's soul in society without a powerful motive. But, with certain reservation, convention permits some individual to put theirs into commerce, and all adults may procure it for themselves. For many people today, works of the mind are thus little wandering souls which one acquires at a modest price." P45-46
"One of the chief motives of artistic creation is certainly the need of feeling that we are essential in relationship to the world. If I fix on canvas or in writing a certain aspect of the fields or the sea or a look on someone's face which I have disclosed, I am conscious of having produced them by condensing relationships, by introducing order where there was none, by imposing the unity of the mind on the diversity of things." P48
"This dialectic is nowhere more apparent than in the art of writing, for the literary object is a peculiar top which exists only in movement. To make it come into view a concrete act called reading is necessary, and it lasts only as long as this act can last. Beyond that, there are only black marks on paper. Now, the writer cannot read what he writes, whereas the shoemaker can put on the shoes he has just made if they are his size, and the architect can live in the house he has built. In reading, one foresees; one waits. One foresees the end of the sentences, the following sentence, the next page. One waits for them to confirm or disappoint one's foresights. The reading is composed of a host of hypotheses, of dreams followed by awakenings, of hopes and deceptions. Readers are always ahead of the sentence they are reading in a merely probable future which partly collapses and partly comes together in proportion as they progress, which withdraws from one page to the next and forms the moving horizon of the literary object. Without waiting, without a future, without ignorance, there is no objectivity.
Now the operation of writing involves an implicit quasi-reading which makes real reading impossible. When the words form under his pen, the author doubtless sees them, but he does not see them as the reader does, since he knows them before writing them down. The function of his gaze is not to reveal, by brushing against them, the sleeping words which are waiting to be read, but to control the sketching of the signs...The writer neither foresees nor conjectures; he projects. It often happens that he awaits, as they say, the inspiration. But one does not wait for oneself the way one waits for others. If he hesitates, he knows that the future is not made, that he himself is going to make it, and if he still does not know what is going to happen to his hero, that simply means that he has not thought about it, that he has not decided upon anything. The future is then a blank page, whereas the future of the reader is two hundred pages filled with words which separate him from the end. Thus, the writer meets everywhere only his knowledge, his will, his plans, in short, himself. He touches only his own subjectivity; the object he creates is out of reach; he does not create it for himself. If he re-reads himself, it is already too late. The sentence will never quite be a thing in his eyes. He goes to the very limits of the subjective but without crossing it. He appreciates the effect of a touch, of an epigram, of a well-placed adjective, but it is the effect they will have on others. " P50-51
"Thus, it is not true that one writes for oneself. That would be the worst blow. In projecting one's emotions on paper, one barely manages to give them a languid extension. The creative act is only an incomplete and abstract moment in the production of a work. If the author existed alone he would be able to write as much as he liked; the work as object would never see the light of day and he would either have to put down his pen or despair. But the operation of writing implies that the reading as its dialectical correlative and these two connected acts necessitate two distinct agents. It is the joint effort of author and reader which brings upon the scene that corrected and imaginary object which is the work of the mind. There is no art except for and by others." P51
"Thus from the very beginning, the meaning is no longer contained in the words, since it is he, on the contrary, who allows the significance of each of them to be understood; and the literary object, though realized through language, is never given in language. On the contrary, it is by nature a silence and an opponent of
the word. In addition, the hundred thousand words aligned in a book can be read
one by one so that the meaning of the work does not emerge. Nothing is accomplished if the reader does not put himself from the very beginning and almost without a guide at the height of this silence; if in short, he does not invent
it and does not then place there, and hold on to, the words and sentences which he awakens" P52
"To say that they [the silences] are unexpressed is hardly the word; for they are precisely the inexpressible. And that is why one does not come upon them at any definite moment in the reading; they are everywhere and nowhere. The quality of the marvellous in Le Grand Meaulnes, the grandioseness of Armance, the degree of realism and truth of Kafka's mythology, these are never given. The reader must invent them all in a continual exceeding of the written thing. To be sure, the author guides him, but all he does is guide him. The landmarks he sets up are separated by the void. The reader must unite them; he must go beyond them. In short, reading is directed creation.
On the one hand, the literary object has no other substance than the reader's subjectivity; Raskolnikov's waiting is my waiting which I lend him. Without this impatience of the reader he would remain only a collection of signs. His hatred of the police magistrate who questions him is my hatred which has been solicited and wheeled out of me by signs, and the police magistrate himself would not exist without the hatred I have for him via Raskolnikov. That is what animates him, it is his very flesh.
But on the other hand, the words are there like traps to arouse our feelings and to reflect them towards us." P53
"Art here is a ceremony of the gift, and the gift alone brings about the metamorphosis. It is something like the transmission of titles and powers in the matriarchate, where the mother does not possess the names but is the indispensable intermediary between uncle and nephew. Since I have captured this illusion on flight, since I lay it fort them, they can consider it with confidence. It has become intentional. As for me, I remain, to be sure, at the border of the subjective and the objective without ever being able to contemplate the objective arrangement which I transmit.
The reader, on the contrary, progresses in security. However far he may go, the author has gone further. Whatever connections he may establish among the different parts of the book-among chapters or the words-he has a guarantee, namely, that they have been expressly willed." P60
"To write is thus both do disclose the world and to offer it as a task to the generosity of the reader. It is to have recourse to the consciousness of others in order to make one's self be recognized as essential to the totality of being; it is to wish to live this essentiality by means of interposed persons." P65
"And if I am given this world with its injustices, it is not so that I may contemplate them coldly, but that I may animate them with my indignation, that I may disclose them and create them with their nature as injustices, that is, as abuses to be suppressed. Thus, the writer's universe will only reveal itself in all its depth to the examination, the admiration, and the indignation of the reader; and the generous love is a promise to maintain, and generous indignation is a promise to change, and the admiration a promise to imitate; although literature is one thing and morality a quite different one, at the heart of the aesthetic imperative we discern the moral imperative. For, since the one who writes recognizes, by the very fact that he takes the trouble to write recognizes, by the very fact that he takes the trouble to write, the freedom of his readers, and since the one who reads, by the mere fact of his opening the book, recognizes the freedom of the writer, the work of art, from whichever side you approach it, is an act of confidence in the freedom of men. And since readers, like the author, recognize this freedom only to demand that it manifest itself, the work can be defined as an imaginary presentation of the world in so far as it demands human freedom. The result of which is that there is no 'gloomy literature', since, however dark may be the colours in which one paints the world, one paints it only so that free men may feel their freedom as they face it. Thus, there are only good and bad novels. The bad novel aims to please by flattering, whereas the good one is an exigence and an act of faith.But above all, the unique point of view from which the author can present the world to those freedoms whose concurrence he wishes to bring about is that of a world to be impregnated always with more freedom. It would be inconceivable that this unleashing of generosity provoked by the writer could be used to authorize an injustice, and that the reader could enjoy his freedom while reading a work which approves or accepts or simply abstains from condemning the subjection of man by man."P67
"At this point in the war it was necessary to be either for them or against them. In the midst of bombardments and massacres, of burned villages and deportations, Vercors' story seemed like an idyll; it had lost its public. It's public was the man f 1941 humiliated vy defeat but astonished at the sudied courtesy of the occupiers, desiring peace, terrified by the spectre of Bolshevism and misled by the speeches of Petain. It would have been fruitless to present the Germans to this man a bloodthirsty brutes. On the contrary, you had to admit to him that they might be polite and even likeable, and since he had discovered with surprise that most of them were 'men like us,' he had to be re-shown that even if such were the case, that the more likeable they seemed, the more unhappy and impotent they were, and that it was necessary to fight against a regime and an ideology even if the men who brought it to us did not seem bad. And, in short, as one was addressing a passive crowd, as there were still rather few important organizations, and as these showed themselves to be highly cautious in their recruiting, the only form of opposition that could be required of the population was silence, scorn, and an obedience which was forced and which showed it". P75
"It seems that bananas have a better taste when they have just been picked. Works of the mind should likewise be eaten on the spot" P75
"Most men pass their time in hiding from themselves. That does not necessary mean that they attempt evasions by lying, by artificial paradises, or by a life of make-believe. It is enough for them to dim their lanterns, to see the foreground without the background and, vice versa, to see the ends while passing over the means in silence, to refuse solidarity with their kind, to take refuge in the spirit of pompousness, to remove all value from life by considering it from the point of view of someone who is dead, and at the same time, all horror from death by fleeing from it in the commonplaceness of everyday existence, to persuade themselves, if they belong to an oppressing class, that they are escaping their class by the loftiness of their feelings, and, if they belong to the oppressed, to conceal from themselves their complicity with oppression by asserting that one can remain free while in chains if one has a taste for the inner life." P76
"Now, it is to be noted that there is a fracture at the very heart of this
actual public. For Wright, the negro readers represent the subjective. The same childhood, the same difficulties, the same complexes: a more hint is enough for them; they understood with their hearts. In trying to become clear about his own personal situation, he clarifies theirs for them. He mediates, names, and shows them. He mediates, names, and shows them the life they lead from day to day in its immediacy, the life they suffer without finding words to formulate their sufferings. He is their conscience, and the movement by which he raises himself from the immediate to the reflective recapturing of his condition is that of his whole race. But whatever the goodwill for the white readers may be, for a negro author they represent the
Other. They have not lived through what he has lived through. They can understand the negro's condition only by an extreme stretch of the imagination and by relying upon analogies which at any moment may deceive them." P79
"The writer consumes and does not produce, even if he has decided to serve the community's interests with his pen. His works remain gratuitous; thus no price can be set on their value. Their market value is fixed arbitrarily. In some periods he is pensioned and in other he gets a percentage of the sales of the book. But there is no more common measure between the work of the mind and percentage remuneration in modern society than there was between the poem and royal pension under the old regime. Actually, the writer is not paid; he is fed, well or badly, according to the period. The system cannot work any differently, for his activity is useless. It is not at all useful; it is sometimes harmful for society to become self-conscious. For the fact is that the useful is defined within the framework of an established society and in relationship to institutions, values, and ends which are already fixed." P80
"If society sees itself, and in particular, sees itself as seen, there is, by virtue of this very fact, a contesting of the established values of the regime. The writer presents it with its image; he calls upon it to assume it or to change itself. At any rate, it changes; it loses the equilibrium which its ignorance had given it; it wavers between shame and cynicism; it practices dishonesty; thus, the writer gives society a guilty conscience, he is thereby in a state of perpetual antagonism towards the conservative forces which are maintaining the balance he tends to upset. For the transition to the mediate which can be brought about only by a negation of the immediate is a perpetual revolution." P81
"Only the governing classes can allow themselves the luxury of remunerating so unproductive and dangerous an activity, and if they do so, it is a matter both of tactics and misapprehension [not sure if this is valid by today's standards unless there is a definition of "the governing classes" M.Z]. Misapprehension for the most part: free from material cares, the members of the governing elite are sufficiently detached to want to have a reflective knowledge of themselves. They want to retrieve themselves, and they charge the artist with presenting them with their image without realizing that he will then make them assume it. A tactic on the part of some who, having recognized the danger, pension the artist in order to control his destructive power. Thus, the writer is a parasite of the governing elite. But, functionally, he moves in opposition to the interests of those who keep him alive. Such is the original conflict which defines his condition...the oppressed classes have neither the leisure nor the taste for reading, the objective aspect of the conflict may express itself as an antagonism between the conservative forces, or the real public of the writer, and the progressive forces, or the virtual public" P81
"In a classless society, one whose internal structure would be permanent revolution, the writer might be a mediator for all, and his challenge on principle might be precede or accompany the changes in fact. In my opinion this is the deeper meaning we should give to the notion of self-criticism. The expanding of the real public up to the limits of his virtual public would bring about within his mind a reconciliation of hostile tendencies. Literature, entirely liberated, would represent negativity in so far as it is a necessary moment in reconstruction. But to my knowledge this type of society does not for the moment exist, and it may be doubted whether it is possible. Thus, the conflict remains. It is at the origin of what I would call the writer's ups and downs and his bad conscience.
It is reduced to its simplest expression when the virtual public is practically nil and when the writer, instead of remaining on the margin of the privileged class, is absorbed by it. In that case literature identifies itself with the ideology of the directing class; reflection takes place within the class; the challenge deals with details and is carried on in the name of uncontested principles. " P82
"It is inconceivable that one can practise freedom of thought, write for a public which coincides with the restricted collectivity of specialists, and restrict oneself to describing the content of eternal values and a priori ideas. The good conscience of the medieval clerk flowered on the death of literature." P84
"They [writers of the 12th century] were not pulled between real but detestable readers and readers who were virtual and desirable but out of reach; they did not ask themselves questions about their role in the world, for the writer questions himself about his mission only in ages when it is not clearly defined and when he must invent or re-invent it, that is, when he notices, beyond the elite who read him, an amorphous mass of possible readers whom he may or may not choose to win, and when he must himself decide, in the event that he has the opportunity to each them, what his relationship with them are to be." P88
"The authors of the seventeenth century had a definite function because they addressed an enlightened, strictly limited, and active public which exercised a permanent control over them." P88
"Unknown by the people, their [17th century authors] job was to reflect back its own image to the elite which supported them. But there are many ways of reflecting an image: certain portraits are by themselves challenges because they have been made from without and without passion by a painter who refuses any complicity with his model. However, for a writer merely to conceive the idea of drawing a portrait-challenge of his real reader, he must have become a conscious of a contradiction between himself and hos public, that is, he must come to his readers from without and must consider them with astonishment, or he must feel the astonished regard of unfamiliar minds (ethnic minorities, oppressed classes, etc.) weighing upon the little society which he forms with them". P88
"But in the seventeenth century, since the virtual public did not exist, since the artist accepted without criticism the ideology of the elite, he made himself an accomplice of his public. No unfamiliar stare came to trouble him in his games. Neither the prose writer nor even the poet was accursed. They did not have to decide with each work what the meaning and value of literature were, since its meaning and value were fixed by tradition. Well integrated in a hierarchial society, they knew neither the pride not the anguish of being different; in short, they were classical." P88
"There is classicism when a society has taken on relatively stable form and when it has been permeated with the myth of its perpetuity, that is, when it confounds the present with the eternal and historicity with traditionalism, when the hierarchy of classes is such that the virtual public never exceeds the real public and when each reader is for the writer a qualified critic and a censor, when the power of the religious and political ideology is so strong and the prohibitions so rigorous that in no case is there any question of discovering new countries of the mind, but only of putting into shape the commonplaces adopted by the elite, in such a way that reading - which, as we have seen, is the concrete relations between the writer and his public - is a ceremony of recognition analogous to the bow of salutation, that is, the ceremonious affirmation that the author and the reader are of the same world and have the same opinions about everything. Thus, each production of the mind is at the same time an act of courtesy, and style is the supreme courtesy of the author towards his reader, and the reader, for his part, never tires of finding the same thoughts in the most diverse of books because these thoughts are his own and he does not ask to acquire others but only to be offered with magnificence those which he already has. Hence, it is in a spirit of complicity that the author presents and the reader accepts a portrait which is necessarily abstract; addressing a parasitical class, he cannot show man at work or, in general, the relations between man and external nature. As, on the other hand, there are bodies of specialists who, under the control of the Church and the Monarchy, are concerned with maintaining the spiritual and secular ideology, the writer does not even suspect the importance of economic, religious, metaphysical, and political factors in the constitution of the person; and as the society in which he lives confounds the present with the eternal he cannot even imagine the slightest change in what he calls human nature. He conceives history as a series of accidents which affect the eternal man on the surface without deeply modifying him, and if he had to assign a meaning to historical duration he would see in it both an eternal repetition, so that previous events can and ought to provide lessons for his contemporaries, and a process of slight degeneration, since the fundamental events of history are long since passed and since, perfection in letters having been attained in Antiquity, his ancient models seem beyond rivalry" P89-90
"... the art of reflective presentation which characterizes the art of the 17th century is a strictly internal process; however, it pushes to the limits each one's efforts to see into himself clearly; it is a perpetual cognito. To be sure, it does not call idleness, oppression, or parasitism into question, because these aspects of the governing class are revealed only to observers who place themselves outside it; hence, the image which is reflected back to it is strictly psychological." P92
"But to paint passion is already to go beyond it, already to shed it. It is not a matter of chance that, about the same time, philosophers were suggesting the idea of curing one's self of it by knowledge. And as the reflective practice of freedom when confronted by the passions is usually adorned with the name of morals, it must be recognized that the art of the 17th century is eminently a moralizing art. Not that its avowed aim is to teach virtue, nor that it is poisoned by the good intentions which produce bad literature, but by the mere fact that it quietly offers the reader his own image, it makes it unbearable to him. Moralizing: this is both a definition and a limit. It is not moralizing only; if it proposes to man that he transcend the psychological towards the moral, it is because it regards religious, metaphysical, political, and social problems as solved; but its action is none the less 'orthodox'. As it confounds universal man with the particular men who are in power, it does not dedicate itself to the liberation of any concrete category of the oppressed; however, 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" P92-93
"Up to this point [the 17th century] we have been considering the case in which the writer's potential public was nil, or just about, and in which his real public was not torn by any conflict. We have seen that he could then accept the current ideology with a good conscience and that he launched his appeals to freedom within the ideology itself. If the potential public suddenly appears, or if the real public is broken up into hostile factions, everything changes. We must now consider what happens to literature when the writer is led to reject the ideology of the ruling classes" P:93
"The 18th century was the palmy time, unique in history, and the soon-to-be-lost paradise, of French writers. Their social condition had not changed. Bourgeois in origin, with very few exceptions, they were unclassed by the favours of the great. The circle of their real readers had grown perceptibly larger because the bourgeoisie had begun to read, but they were still unknown to the 'lower' classes, and if the writers spoke of them more often than did La Bruyere and Fenelon, they never addressed them, even in spirit. However, a profound upheaval had broken their public in two; they had to satisfy contradictory demands. Their situation was characterized from the beginning by tension. This tension was manifested in a very particular way. The governing class had in fact lost confidence in its ideology. It had put itself into a position of defence; it tried, to a certain extent, to retard the diffusion of new ideas, but it could not keep from being penetrated by these ideas. It understood that its religious and political principles were the best instruments for establishing power, but the fact is that as it saw them only as instruments, it ceased to believe in them completely. Pragmatic truth had replaced revealed truth. If censorship and prohibitions were more visible, they covered up a secret weakness and a cynicism of despair. There were no more clerks; church literature was empty apologetics, a fist holding on to dogmas which were breaking loose; it was turning against freedom; it addressed itself to respect, fear, and self-interest, and by ceasing to be a free appeal to free men, it was ceasing to be literature. This distraught elite turned to the genuine writer and asked him to do the impossible, not to spare his severity, if he was bent on it, but to breathe at least a bit of freedom into a wilting ideology, to address himself to his reader's reason and to persuade them to adopt dogmas which, with time, had to become irrational. In short to turn, propagandist without ceasing to be a writer. " P:93-94
"It has not been sufficiently pointed out that a class can acquire class consciousness only if it sees itself from within and without at the same time; in other words, if it profits by external competition; that is where the intellectuals, the perpetually unclassed, come into the picture." P96
"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 milieul he no longer felt any concrete solidarity with his cousin the lawyer or his brother the village cure because he had privileges which they had not. It was from the court and nobility that he borrowed his manners and the very graces of his style. Glory, his dearest hope and his consecration, had become for him a slippery and ambiguous notion; a fresh idea of glory was rising up in which a writer was truly rewarded if an obscure doctor in Bruges or a briefless lawyer in Rheims devoured his books almost in secret.
But the diffuse recognition of this public which he hardly knew only half touched him. He had received from his elders a traditional conception of fame. According to this conception, it was the monarch who consecrated his genius. The visible sign of his success was for Catherine or Frederick to invite him to their table. The recompense given to him and the dignities conferred from above did not yet have the official impersonality of the prizes and decorations awarded by our republics. They retained the quasi-feudal character of man to man relations. And since he was, above all, an eternal consumer in a society of producers, a parasite of a parasitic class, he treated money like a parasite. He did not earn it since there was no common measure between his work and his remuneration; he only spent it. Therefore, even if he was poor, he lived in luxury. Everything was luxury to him, including, and in fact particularly so, his writing... At times, the writer enjoyed the passing favours of a marquise, but he married his maid or a bricklayer's daughter. Hence, his mind, as well as his public, was torn apart. But this did not cause him to suffer; on the contrary, this original contradiction was the source of his pride. He thought that he had no obligations to anyone, that he could choose hi friends and opponents, and that it was enough for him to take his pen in hand to free himself from the conditioning of milieu, nation, or class... From the outside, he contemplated the great with the eyes of the bourgeois and the bourgeois with the eyes of the nobility, and he retained enough complicity with both to understand them equally from within. Hence, literature, which up to then had been only a conservation and purifying function of an integrated society, became conscious in him and by him of its autonomy. Placed by an extreme chance between confused aspirations and an ideology in ruins - like the writer between the bourgeoise, the Court, and the Church - literature suddenly asserted its independence. It was no longer to reflect the commonplaces of the collectivity; it identified itself with Mind, that is, with the permanent power of forming and criticizing ideas." P96-97
"In the 17th century a man, by choosing to write, embraced a definite profession, with the tricks of the trade, its rules and customs, its rank in the hierarchy of the professions. In the 18th century, the moulds were broken; everything remained to be done; works of the mind, instead of being put together according to established patterns and more or less by luck, were each particular invention and were a kind of decision of the author regarding the nature, value, and scope of belles-lettres; each one brought its own rules and the principles by which it was to be judged; each one aspired to engage the whole of literature and to blaze new paths. It is not by chance that the worst works of the period are also those which claimed to be the most traditional; tragedy and epic were the exquisite fruits of an integrated society; in a collectivity which was torn apart, they could subsist only in the form of survivals and pastiches.
What the 18th century writer tirelessly demanded in all his works was the right to practise an anti-historical reason against history, and in this sense all he did was to reveal the essential requirements of abstract literature. He was not concerned with giving his readers a clearer class consciousness. Quite the contrary, the urgent appeal which he addressed to his bourgeois public was an invitation to forget humiliations, prejudices, and fears; the one he directed to his noble public was a solicitation to strip itself of its pride of caste and privileges. As he had made himself universal, he could have only universal readers, and what he required of the freedom of his contemporaries was that they cut their historical ties in order to join him in universality." P99
"The bourgeoisie wanted to be enlightened; it wanted the ideology which for centuries had mystified and alienated man to be liquidated. There would be time later on to replace it. For the time being, it aimed at freedom of opinion as a step towards political power. Hence, by demanding for himself and as a writer freedom of thinking and of expressing hit thought, the author necessarily served the interests of the bourgeois class. No more was asked of him and there was nothing more he could do. In later periods, as we shall see, the writer could demand his freedom to write with a bad conscience; he might be aware that the oppressed classes wanted something other than that freedom. Freedom of thinking could then appear as a privilege; in the eyes of some it could pass for a means of oppression, and the position of the writer risked becoming untenable. But on the eve of the Revolution he enjoyed an extraordinary opportunity, that is, it was enough for him to defend his profession in order to serve as a guide to the aspirations of the rising class.
He knew it. He considered himself a guide and a spiritual chief. He took chances. As the ruling elite, which grew increasingly nervous, lavished its graces upon him one day only to have him locked up the next, he had none of that tranquillity, that proud mediocrity, which his predecessors had enjoyed. His glorious and eventful life, with its sunlit crests and its dizzying steeps, was that of an adventurer." P:100-101.
"And as the writer thought that he had broken the bongs which united him to his class of origin, as he spoke to his readers from above about universal human nature, it seemed to him that the appeal he made to them and the part he took in their misfortunes were dictated by pure generosity. To write is to give. In this way he accepted and excused what was unacceptable in his situation as a parasite in an industrious society; this was how he became conscious of that absolute freedom, that gratuity, which characterize literary creation." P:101-102
"In other words, as the walls of Eternity and the Past which had supported the ideological structure of the 17th century cracked and gave way, the writer perceived a new dimension of temporality in its purity: the Present. The Present, which preceding centuries had sometimes conceived as a perceptible figuration of Eternity and sometimes as a degraded emanation of Antiquity. He has only a confused notion of the future, but he knew that the fleeting hour which he was living was unique and that it was his, that it was in no way inferior to the most magnificent hours of Antiquity, since they too had begun by being the present. He knew that it was his chance and that he must not waste it. That was why he considered the flight he had to wage not so much as a preparation for the society of the future but rather as short-term enterprise, one of immediate efficacy." P:102
"This impassioned sense of the present saved him from idealism; he did not confine himself to contemplating the eternal ideas of Freedom or Equality. For the first time since of the Reformation, writers intervened in public life, protested against an unjust decree, asked for the review of a trial, and, in short, decided that the spiritual was in the street, at the fair, in the market place, at the tribunal, and that it was by no means a matter of turning away from the temporal, but, on the contrary, that one had to come back to it incessantly and go on beyond it in each particular circumstances." P102
"The political triumph of the bourgeoisie which writers had so eagerly desired convulsed their condition from tom to bottom and put they very essence of literature into question. It might be said that the result of all their efforts was merely a preparation for their certain ruin. There is no doubt that by identifying the cause of belles-lettres with that of political democracy they helped the bourgeoisie to come to power, but the same token they ran the risk of seeing the disappearance of the object of their demands, that is, the constant and almost the only subject of their writing. In short, the miraculous harmony which united the essential demands of literature with that of the oppressed bourgeoisie was broken as soon as both were realized. So long as millions of men were burning to be able to express their feelings it was fine to demand the right to write freely and to examine everything, but once freedom of thought and confession and equality of political rights were gained, the defence of literature became purely formal game which no longer amused anyone; something else had to be found." P:103
"Now, at the same time writers had lost their privileged position whose origin had been the split which had torn apart their public and which had allowed them to have a foot in both camps. These two halves had knitted together; the bourgeoisie had absorbed the nobility or very nearly. Authors had to meet the demands of a unified public. There was no hope of getting away from their class of origin. Born of bourgeois parents, read and paid by bourgeois, they had to remain bourgeois; the bourgeoisie had closed round them like a prison. It was to take them a century to get over their keen regret for the flighty and parasitic class which had indulged them out of caprice and whom they had remorselessly undermined in their role of double agent... The bourgeoisie introduced new forms of oppression; however, it was not parasitic. Doubtless, it had taken over the means of work, but it was highly diligent in regulating the production and distribution of its products. It did not conceive literary work as a gratuitous and disinterested creation but as a paid service. " P:103-104
"The justifying myth of this industrious and unproductive class was utilitarianism; in one way or another the function of the bourgeois was that of intermediary between producer and consumer; it was the middleman raised to omnipotence...In particular, as the bourgeois was not quite sure of himself, because his power was not based on a decree of Providence, literature had to help it feel bourgeois by divine right. Thus, after having been the bad conscience of the privileged in the 18th century it ran the risk in the 19th century of becoming the good conscience of an oppressing class." P:104
"The serious man kept from examining them [the bourgeoisie ethics] precisely because their origin was obscure. Bourgeois art either would be a means or would not be; it would forbid itself to lay hands on principles, for fear they might collapse, and to probe the human heart too deeply for fear of finding disorder in it. Its public feared nothing so much as talent, that gay and menacing madness which uncovers the disturbing roots of things by unforeseeable words and which, by repeating appeals to freedom, stirs the still more disturbing roots of men. Facility sold better; it was talent in leash, turned against itself, the art of reassuring readers by harmonious and expected discourse, in a tone of good fellowship, that man and the world were quite ordinary, transparent, without surprises, without threats, and without interest." P:105
"The bourgeois saw only psychological relations among the individuals whom his analytical propaganda circumvented and separated. That is understandable: as he had no direct hold on things, as his work was concerned essentially with men, it was purely a matter, for him, of pleasing and intimidating. Ceremony, discipline, and courtesy ruled his behaviour; he regarded his fellow-men as marionettes, and if he wished to acquire some knowledge of their emotions and character, it was because it seemed to him that each passion was a wire that could be pulled. The breviary of the ambitious bourgeois was "The Art of Making Good"; the breviary of the rich was "The Art of Commanding". Thus, the bourgeoisie considered the writer as an expert. If he started reflecting on the social order, he annoyed and frightened it. All is asked of him was to share his practical experience of the human heart." P:107
"But the merchant distrusted the freedom of the people he dealt with and the prefect that of the sub-prefect. All they wanted was to be provided with infallible recipes for winning over and dominating. Man had to be governable as a matter of course and by modest means. In short, the laws of the heart had to be rigorous and without exceptions. The bourgeois bigwig no more believed in human freedom than the scientist believes in a miracle. And as his ethics were utilitarian, the chief motive of his psychology was self-interest. For the writer it was no longer a matter of addressing his work as an appeal to absolute freedoms, but of exhibiting the psychological laws which determine him to readers who were likewise determined....[The bourgeois writer] was no longer asked to restore the strangeness and opacity of the world, but to dissolve it into elementary subjective impressions which made it easier to digest; nor was he asked to discover the most intimate movements of his heart at the very depths of his freedom, but to bring his 'experience' face to face with that of his readers....The conclusions were decided in advance; the degree of depth permitted to the investigation was also established in advance; the psychological motives were selected; the very style was regulated. The public feared no surprise. It could buy with its eyes closed. But literature had been assassinated. From Emile Augier to Marcel Prevost and Edmond Jaloux, including Dumas fils, Pailliron, Ohnet, Bourget, and Bordeaux, authors were found to do the job and, if I may say so, to honour their signature to the every end. It is not by chance that they wrote bad books; if they had talent, they were forced to hide it" P:108
"Thus the bourgeois writer and the 'damned' (maudit) writer moved on the same level; their only difference was that the first practised white psychology and the second, black psychology. For example, when Flaubert declared that he called 'anyone who thought basely bourgeois', he was defining the bourgeois in psychological and idealistic terms, that is, in the perspective of the ideology which he pretended to reject. As a result, he rendered a signal service to the bourgeoisie. He led back to the fold the rebellious and the maladjusted, who might have gone over to the proletariat, by convincing them that one could cast off the bourgeois in oneself by a simple inner discipline. All they had to do was to practise high thinking in private and they could continue to enjoy their goods and prerogatives with a peaceful conscience. They could still live in bourgeois fashion, and enjoy their incomes in bourgeois fashion, and frequent bourgeois drawing rooms, but that would all be nothing but appearance. They had raised themselves above their kind by the nobility of their feelings. By the same token he taught his confreres the trick which could allow them, at any rate, to maintain a good conscience; for magnanimity finds its most fitting practice in the practice of the arts.
The solitude of the artist was doubly a fake: it covered up not only a real relationship with the great public but also the restoration of an audience of specialists. Since the government of men and goods was abandoned to the bourgeoisie, the spiritual was once again separated from the temporal. " P:114
"He [the writer] neglected nothing in wrenching himself free from his class. He was up in the air, a stranger to his century, out of his element, damned. All this play-acting had but one goal: to integrate the writer into a symbolic society which would be like an image of the aristocracy of the old regime. Psycho-analysis is familiar with these processes of identification of which artistic thinking offers numerous examples: the sick person who needs the key of the asylum in order to escape and finally comes to believe that he himself is the key. Thus, the writer, who needed the 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..Moreover, as he was not always rich, and as he had to live well, he composed a strange life for himself, both extravagant and needy, in which a calculated improvidence symbolized the mad liberality which was denied him. Outside of art, he found nobility in only three kinds of occupation. First, in love, because it is as useless passion and because women, as Nietzsche said, are the most dangerous game. Also in travel, because the traveller is a perpetual witness who passes from one society to another without every remaining in any and because, as a foreign consumer in an industrious collectivity, he is the very image of parasitism. Sometimes, in war too, because it is an immense consumption of men and goods." P:116
"It was not a rare thing for him [the writer] to consider his own life as a tool to be destroyed. In any event, he risked it and played to lose: alcohol, drugs, everything served his purpose. The height of uselessness, of course, was beauty. From 'art of art's sake' to symbolism, including realism and the Parnassians, all schools agreed that art was the highest form of pure consumption. It taught nothing, it reflected no ideology, and above all, it refrained from moralizing. Long before Gide wrote it, Flaubert, Gautier, the Goncourts, Renard, and Maupassant had in their own way said that 'it is with good sentiments that one produces bad literature". P:117
"The extreme point of this brilliant and mortal literature was nothingness. Its extreme point and its deeper essence. There was nothing positive in the new spirituality. It was a pure and simple negation of the temporal. In the Middle Ages it was the temporal which was the Inessential in relation to spirituality; in the 19th century the opposite occurred: The Temporal was primary and the spiritual was the inessential parasite which gnawed away at it and tried to destroy it. It was a question of denying the world or consuming it. Of denying it. Flaubert wrote to disentangle himself from men and things. His sentence surrounds the object, seizes it, immobilizes it and breaks it back, changes into stone and petrifies the object as well. It is blind and deaf, without arteries; not a breath of life. A deep silence separates it from the sentence which follows; it falls into the void, eternally; and drags its prey along in this infinite fall." P:118
"Once described, any reality is stricken from the inventory; one moves on to the next. Realism was nothing else but this great gloomy chase. It was a matter of setting one's mind at rest before anything else. Wherever one went, the grass stopped growing. Where one went, the grass stopped growing. The determinism of the naturalistic novel crushed out life and replaced human actions by one-way mechanisms. It had virtually but one subject: the slow disintegration of a man, an enterprise, a family, or a society. It was necessary to return to zero. One took nature in a state of productive disequilibrium and one wiped out this disequilibrium; one returned to an equilibrium of death by annulling the forces with which one was confronted. When by chance, he shows us the success of an ambitious man, it is only in appearance; Bel Ami does not take the strongholds of the bourgeoisie by assault; he is a gauge whose rise merely testifies tot he collapse of a society. And when symbolism discovered the close relationship between beauty and death, it was merely making explicit the theme of the whole literature of a half century. The beauty of the past, because it is gone; the beauty of young people dying and of flowers which fade; the beauty of all erosions and all ruins; the supreme dignity of consumption, of the disease which consumes, of the love which devours, of the art which kills; death is everywhere, before us, behind us, even in the sun and the perfumes of the earth. The art of Barres is a meditation on death: a thing is beautiful only when it is 'consumable', that is, it dies when one has enjoyed it." P:119
"In the 18th century literature had been a negativity in the reign of the bourgeoisie it passed on to a state of absolute and hypostasized Negation. It became a multicoloured and glittering process of annihilation. 'Surrealism is not interested in paying much attention ... to anything whose end is not the annihilation of being and its transformation into an internal and blind brilliance which is no more the soul of ice than it is of fire', writes Breton once again. In the end there is nothing left for literature to do but to challenge itself. That is what it did in the name of surrealism. For seventy years writers had been working to consume the world; after 1918 one wrote in order to consumer literature: one squandered literary traditions, hashed together word, threw them against each other to make them shatter. Literature as Negation became Anti-literature; never had it been more literary: the circles was completed.
During the same time, the writer, in order to imitate the lighthearted squandering of an aristocracy birth, had no greater concern than that of establishing his irresponsibility. He began by setting up the rights of genius which replaced the divine right of the authoritarian monarchy. Since Beauty was luxury carried to the extreme, since it was a pyre with cold flames which lit up and consumed everything, since it was fed by all forms of deterioration and destruction, in particular suffering and death, the artist, who was its priest, had the right to demand in its name and to provoke, if need be, the unhappiest of those close to him." P:120
"As for him, he had been burning for a long time; he was in ashes; other victims were needed to feed the flames. Women in articular: they would make him suffer and he would pay them back with interest. He wanted to be able to bring bad luck to everyone around him. And if there were no means of setting off catastrophes, he would accept offerings. Admirers, male and female, were there so that the might set fire to their hearts or spend their money without gratitude or remorse... Whom he would be responsible for? And in the name of what? If his work aimed at constructing, he could be asked to give an account. But sense it declared itself to be pure destruction, it escaped judgement." P:121
"But the motives are evident: a parasitic aristocracy of pure consumption, whose function was to keep burning the goods of an industrious and productive society, could not come under the jurisdiction of the collectivity he was destroying. And as this systematic destruction never went any further than scandal, this amounted in the last analysis to saying that the primary duty of the writer was to provoke scandal and that his inalienable right was to escape its consequences." P:121 (I would compare this to actors and celebrities.)
"Besides, the bourgeoisie knew very well that the writer secretly took its part: he needed it for his aesthetic of opposition and resentment; it provided him with this goods he consumed; he wanted to preserve the social order so that he could feel that as a stranger there he was a permanent fixture. In short, he was a rebel, not a revolutionary." P:122
"The reason was that even though the writer might have put all his efforts into concealing his readers from himself, he could never completely escape their insidious influence. A shame-faced bourgeoisie, writing for bourgeois without admitting it to himself, he was able to launch the maddest ideas; the ideas were often only bubbles which popped up on the surface of his mind. But his technique betrayed him because he did not watch over it with the same zeal. It expressed a deeper and truer choice, an obscure metaphysic, a genuine relationship with contemporary society. Whatever the cynicism and the bitterness of the chosen subject, 19th century narrative technique offered the French public a reassuring image of the bourgeoisie. Our authors, to be sure, inherited it, but they were responsible for having perfected it." P:123
"...he [the writer of the middle ages] was the man who knew the most charming stories and who, instead of telling them orally, set them down in writing. He invented little; he gave them style; he was the historian of the imaginary. When he himself started contriving the fiction which he published, he found himself. He discovered simultaneously his almost guilty solitude and unjustifiable gratuitousness, the subjectivity of literary creation. In order to mask them from the eyes of others and from his own as well, in order to establish his right to tell these stories, he wanted to give his inventions the appearance of truth." P:123
"Thereupon, the narrator is introduced. He is a maiddle-aged man who has 'seen much, read much, and retained much', a professional man of experience, a doctor, a military man, an artist, or a Don Juan. He has reached the time of life when, according to a respectful and comfortable myth, man is freed from the passions and considers with an indulgent clear sightedness those he has experienced. His heart is calm, like the night. He tells his story with detachment. If it has caused him suffering, he has made honey from his suffering. He looks back upon it and considers it as it really was, that is, sub specie aeternitatis. There was difficult to be sure, but his difficulty ended long ago; the actors are dead or married or confronted. Thus, the adventure was a brief which is over with. It is told from the viewpoint of experience and wisdom; it is listened to from the viewpoint of order. Order triumphs; order is everywhere; it contemplates an old disorder as if the still waters of a summer day have preserved the memory of the ripples which have run through it. Moreover, had there even been this disturbance? The evocation of an abrupt change would frighten this bourgeois society... and they warn us, from the moment they start talking, that their tale has a moral. Besides, the story is explanatory; it aims at producing a psychological law on the basis of this example." P:126
"If we have spoken at some length about Maupassant's narrative procedure it is because it constituted the basic technique for all the French novelists of his own generation, of the succeeding one and of al the generations since. The internal narrator is always present. He may reduce himself to an abstraction; often he is not even explicitly designated; but, at any rate, it is through his subjectivity that we perceive the event. When he does not appear at all, it is not that he has been suppressed like a useless device; it is that he has become the alter ego of the author. The latter, with his blank sheet of paper if front of him, sees his imagination transmuted into experiences. He no longer writes in his own name but at the dictation of a mature and sober man who has witnessed the circumstances which are being related." P:127
"Even realistic writers who wished to be the objective historians of their time preserved the abstract scheme of the method that is, in all their novels there is a common milieu, a common plot, which is not the individual and historical subjectivity of the novelist but the ideal and universal one of the man of experience. First of all, the tale is laid in the past: the ceremonial past, in order to put some distance between the events and the audience; the subjective past, equivalent to the memory of the story-teller; the social past, since the plot does not belong to that history without conclusion which is in the making but to history already made." P:129
"And as they were artists, their work covered up a desperate appeal to the freedom of the reader they pretend to despise. It pushed challenge to the limit, even to the point of challenging itself; it gives us a glimpse of a black silence beyond the massacre of words, and, beyond the spirit of seriousness, the bare and empty sky of equivalences; it invites us to emerge into nothingness by destruction of all myths and all scales of value; it discloses to us in man a close and secret relationship with the nothing, instead of the intimate relationship with the divine transcendence. It is 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. If one bears in mind that the festival ... is one of those negative moments when the collectivity consumes the goods it has accumulated, violates the laws of its moral code, spends for the pleasure of spending, and destroys for the pleasure of destroying, it will be seen that literature in the 19th century was, on the margin of the industrious society which had the mystique of saving, a great sumptuous and funereal festival, an invitation to burn in a splendid immorality, in the fire of the passions, even unto death. when I come to say later on that it found its bleated fulfilment and its end on Trotskyizing surrealism, one will better understand the function it assumes in a too closed society: it was a safety valve. After all, it's not so far from the perpetual holiday to the permanent revolution." P:130
"One cannot write without a public and without a myth - without a certain public which historical circumstances have made, without a certain myth of literature which depends to a very great extent upon the demand of this public. In a word, the author is in a situation, like all other men. But his writings, like every human project, simultaneously enclose, specify, and surpass this situation, even explian it and set it up, just as the idea of a circle explains and sets up that of a rotation of a segment." P:132
"I sat that literature of a given age is alienated when it has not arrived at the explicit consciousness of its autonomy and when it submits to temporal powers or to an ideology, in short, when it considers itself as a means and not as an unconditioned end. There is no doubt that literary works, in their particularity, surpass this servitude and that each one contains an unconditioned exigence, but only by implication." P:134
"[literature] At first concrete and alienated, it liberates itself by negativity and passes to abstraction; more exactly, it passes in the 18th century to abstract negativity before becoming in the late 19th and early 20th century absolute negation. At the end of this evolution it has cut all its bonds with society; it no longer even has a public. 'Every one knows,' writes Pauhlan, 'that there are two literatures in our time, the bad, which is really unreadable (it is widely read) and the good, which is not read.' P:135
"The same with writing. Already, under the pretence of belaurelled immorality, one discerns more modest and more concrete pretensions. The aim of The Silence of the Sea was to lead the French to reject the enemy's efforts to get them to collaborate. Its effectiveness and consequently its actual public could not extend beyond the time of the occupation. The books of Richard Wright will remain alive as long as the negro question is raised in the United States. Thus, there is no question as to the writer's renouncing the idea of survival; quite the contrary, he is the one who decides it; he will survive so long as he acts. Afterwards, it's honorary membership, retirement. Today, for having wanted to escape from history, he begins his honorary membership the day after his death, sometimes even while he is alive." P:137
"In short, actual literature can only realize its full essence in a classless society. Only in this society could the writer be aware that there is no difference of any kind between his subject and his public." P:137
"Thus, in a society without classes, without dictatorship, and without stability, literature would end by becoming conscious of itself; it would understand that form and content, public and subject, are identical, that the formal freedom of saying and the material freedom of doing complete each other, that is best manifests the subjectivity of the person when it translates most deeply collective needs and, reciprocally, that its function is to express the concrete universal to the concrete universal and that its end is to appeal to the freedom of men so that they may realize and maintain the reign of human freedom." P:140
"The American writer has often practised manual occupations before writing his books; he goes back to them. Between two novels, his vocation seems to be on the ranch, in the shop, in the city streets; he does not see in literature means of proclaiming his solitude, but an opportunity of escaping it." P:141
"he [the American writer] drifts continually between the working-class world, where he goes to seek adventures, and his middle-class readers (I don't dare call them bourgeois; I very much doubt whether there is a bourgeoisie in the United States), hard, brutal, and lost, who tomorrow will take the same plunge as he.
In England, the intellectuals are less integrated into the collectivity than we; they form an eccentric and slightly cantankerous cast which does not have much contact with the rest of the population. The reason is, first of all, that they have not had our luck; because remote predecessors whom we hardly deserve prepared the Revolution, the class in power, after a century and a half, still does us the honour of fearing us a little (very little); it treats us tactfully. Our confrères in London, who do not have the glorious memories, do not frighten anyone; they are considered quite harmless; and then, club life is less suitable for spreading their influence than salon life has been in spreading ours." P:142
"Romain Rolland had proved at the beginning of the century in Jean Christophe that one can achieve a rather good likenss by combining the features of a few famous musicians. But one can devise other schemes; it's not bad to start one's life like Rambaud, to begin a Goethean return to order in one's thirties, to throw oneslef at fifty, like Zola, into a public debate. After that, you can chose the death of Nerval, Byron, or Shelly." P:145
"It should first be noted that they drew the greater part of their resources from something quite other than their writings. Gide and Mauriac have property...others came to literature from the liberal professions: Duhamel was a doctor...The reason was that, except for successful tripe, one could not support oneself by literature in the period when they began writing. Like politics under the Third republic, it could only be a 'marginal' occupation, even if it ended by becoming the principal concern of the one who practised it. Thus, literary personnel were drawn by and large from the same milieu as political personnel. As a result, the writer could no longer consider himself as a pure consumer; he directed the production or supervised the distribution of goods or he was a civil-servant; he had duties toward the State; in short, a whole part of him was integrated into the bourgeoisie; his behaviour, his professional relationships, his obligations, and his concerns were bourgeois; he bought, sold, ordered, and obeyed; he entered the charmed circle of courtesy and ceremony." P:146
"About 1900 the machine was reversed in France: it was understood that one would find the seal of God in the human heart, provided one sounded it deeply enough. Estaunie speaks about secret lives. The postal-clerk, the blacksmith, the engineer, the departmental treasurer, all have their nocturnal and solitary fetes. Consuming passions and wild conflagrations dwell deeply within them. In the wake if this author, and a hundred others, we were to learn to recognize in stamp and coin collecting all the nostalgia for the beyond, all the Baudelairean dissatisfaction. For I ask you, why would one spend one's time and money acquiring medallions, were it not that one was past caring for the friendship of men and the love of women and power? And what is more gratuitous than a stamp collection? Not everybody can be a Leonardo or a Michelangelo, but those useless stamps pasted on the pink pages of an album are a touching homage to all the nine muse; it is the very essence of destructive consumption." P:148
"Be that a it may, that is how the writers I am talking about established their reputation. They addressed a new generation and explained to it that there was a strict equivalence between production and consumption and between construction and destruction; they demonstrated that order was a perpetual festival and disorder the most boring monotony." P:149
"..by the destruction of painting by painting and of literature by literature, surrealism pursues this curious enterprise of realizing nothingness by too much fullness of being. It is always by creating, that is, by adding paintings to already existing paintings and books to already published books, that it destroys...Nothingness glitters on its surface, a Nothingness which is only the endless fluttering of contradictions...Confusion and not synthesis, for synthesis would appear as an articulated existence, dominating and governing its internal contradictions." P:154
"And just as surrealism has radicalized the negation of the useful in order to transform it into a rejection of the project and the conscious life, it radicalizes the old literary claim of gratuitousness in order to make of it a rejection of action by destroying its categories." P:157
"Yet surrealism declares itself revolutionary and offers its hand to the Communist Party. It is the first time since the Restoration that a literary school explicitly claims kinship with an organized revolutionary movement. The reasons are clear: these writers, who are also young people, want, above all, to destroy their family, their uncle the general, their cousin the cure`..."P:157
"The deep source of the misunderstanding lies in the fact that the surrealist is very little concerned with the Revolution, as pure violence, the absolute end, whereas the end that communism proposes to itself is the taking of power, and by means of that end it justifies the blood it will shed. And then the bond between surrealism and the proletariat is indirect and abstract. The strength of a writer lies in his direct action upon the public, in the anger, the enthusiasm, and the reflections which he stirs up by his writings. Diderot, Rousseau, and Voltaire were in constant contact with the bourgeoisie because it read them. But the surrealists have no readers in the proletariat; there is just a bare chance of their communicating with the party from the outside, or rather with its intellectuals. Their public is elsewhere, among the cultivated bourgeoisie; the C.P knows this and uses them simply to stir up trouble in ruling-class circles. Thus, their revolutionary doctrines remain purely theoretical (since they change nothing by their attitude), do not help them gain a single reader, and find no echo among the workers; they remain the parasites of the class they insult; their revolt remains on the margin of the revolution." P:159
"In the end nothing else is left but the world, similar and monotonous everywhere" (On the way capitalist mechanism and rationalism sees the world, However)... there is something beyond, which, though chained and conquered, is yet virulent and bewitching" P:162
"It was Cartesian in that is distrusted improvements which were too abrupt and in that, contrary to the romantics who have always hoped that happiness would burst upon them like a catastrophe, it dreamed rather of mastering itself than of changing the course of the world. This class, which has been happily baptized 'average', teaches its sons that there is no need for too much and that the best is the enemy of the good. It is well disposed towards the demands of the working-class provided that these remain on the strictly professional level. It has no history and no historical sense, since, unlike the upper bourgeoisie, it has neither a past nor traditions, nor, unlike the working class, does it have immense hope for the future. As it does not believe in God, but needs very strict imperatives to give meaning to the privations which it endures, one of its intellectual concerns has been to establish a lay morality." P:167
"They founded their humanism upon profession, friendship, social solidarity, and sport. Thus, the petty bourgeoisie which already had its political party, Radical Socialism, its mutual aid society, the League for Human Rights, its secret society, Freemasonary, and its daily paper, L'OEuvre, had writers, and even a literary weekly, which was called symbolically, Marianne." P:167
"The pressure of history suddenly revealed to us the interdependence of nations. An incident in Shanghai was a snip of the scissors in our destiny, but at the same time it replaced us, in spite of ourselves, in the national collectivity. We very soon had to realize that the travelling of our elders, their sumptuous voyages abroad, and the whole ceremonial of travel on the grand scale, was an illusion. Everywhere they went they carried France with them. They travelled because France had won the war and the exchange was favourable. They followed the franc. Like the franc, they had more access to Seville and Palermo than to Zurich and Amsterdam.
As for us, when we were old enough to make our world tour, autarchy had killed off the novels about the grand tour, and then, we no longer had the heart to travel. With a perverse taste for standardizing the world, they amused themselves with finding the imprint of capitalism everywhere. We would have found, without any difficulty, a much more obvious uniformity." P:176
"But what makes our position original, I believe, is that the war and the occupation, by turning us into a world in a state of fusion, perforce made us rediscover the absolute at the heart of relativity itself. For our predecessors the rule of the game was to save everybody, because suffering is atoned for, because nobody is bad voluntarily, because man's heart is unfathomable, because divine grace is shared equally. That meant that literature - apart from the Surrealist extreme left which simply spread mischief - tended to establish a sort of moral relativism. Christians no longer believe in hell. Sin was the place devoid of God; carnal love was love of God gone astray." P:177
"The Marxist at least recognized the reality of oppression and capitalist imperialism, of the class struggle and misery. But the effect of dialectical materialism, as I have shown elsewhere, is to make Good and Evil vanish conjointly. There remains only the historical process, and then Stalinist communism does not attribute so much importance to the individual that his sufferings and even his death cannot be redeemed if they help to hasten the day when power is seized." P:178
"We have been taught to take it seriously. It is neither our fault nor our merit if we lived in a time when torture was a daily fact. Chateaubriand, Oradour, the Rue des Saussaies, Tulle, Dachau, and Auschwitz have all demonstrated to us the Evil is not an appearance, that knowing its cause does not dispel it, that it is not opposed to Good as a confused idea is to a clear one, that it is not the effects of passions which might be cured, of a fear which might be overcome, of a passing aberration which might be excused, of an ignorance which might be enlightened, that it can in no way be diverted, brought back, reduced, and incorporated into idealistic humanism, like that shade of which Leibnitz has written that it is necessary for the glare of daylight." P:178
"Satan, Maritain once said, is pure. Pure, that is, without mixture and without remission. we have learned to know this horrible, this irreducible purity. It blazes forth in the close and almost sexual relation between the executioner and his victim. For torture is first of all a matter of debasement. Whatever the sufferings which have been endured, it is the victim who decides, as a last resort, what the moment is when they are unbearable and when he must talk. The supreme irony of torture is that the sufferer, if he breaks down and talks, applies his will as a man to denying that he is a man, makes himself the accomplice of his executioners and, by his own movement, throws himself into abjection. The executioner is aware of this; he watches for this weakness, not only because he will obtain the information he desires, but because it will prove to him once again the he is right in using torture and that man is an animal who must be lead with a whip. Thus, he attempts to destroy the humanity in his fellow-creature. Also, as a consequence, in himself; he knows that the groaning, sweating, filthy creature who begs for mercy and abandons himself in a swooning consent with the moanings of an amorous woman, and who yields everything and is even carried away that he improves upon his betrayals because the consciousness that he has done evil is like a stone round his neck dragging him still further down, exists also in his own image and that he - the executioner - is bearing down upon himself as much as upon his victim. If he wishes, on his own account, to excape this total degradation, he has no other recourse than to affirm his blind faith in an iron order which like a corset confines our repulsive weaknesses - in short, to commit man's destiny to the hands of inhuman powers." P:179
"A moment comes when torturer and tortured are in accord, the former because he has, in a single victim, symbolically gratified his hatred of all mankind, the latter because he can bear his failing only by pushing it to the limit, and because the only way he can endure his self-hatred is by hating all other men along with himself. Later, perhaps, the executioner will be hanged. Perhaps the victim, if he recovered, will be redeemed. But what will blot out this Mass in which two freedoms have communed in the destruction of the human? We knew that, to a certain context, it was being celebrated everywhere in Paris while we were eating, sleeping, and making love." P:179
"Five years [WWII]. We lived entranced and as we did not take our profession of writer lightly, this state of trance is still reflected in our writings. We have undertaken to create a literature of extreme situations. I am not at all claiming that in this we are superior to our elders. Quite the contrary. Bloch-Michael, who has earned the right to talk, has said that fewer virtues are needed in great circumstances than in small. It is not for me to decide whether he is right or whether it is better to be Jansenist than a Jesuit. I rather think that there must be something of everything and that the same man cannot be one and the other at the same time." P:182
"But since we were in it, how could we see it as a whole? Since we were situated, the only novels we could dream of were novels of situation, without internal narrators or all-knowing witnesses. In short, if we wished to give an account of our age, we had to make the technique of the novel shift from Newtonian mechanics to generalized relativity; we had to people our books with minds that were half lucid and half overcast, some of which we might consider with more sympathy than others, but none of which would have a privileged point of view either upon the event of upon itself. We had to present creatures whose reality would be the tangled and contradictory tissue of each one's evaluations of all the other characters - himself included - and evaluation by all the other himself, and who could never decide from within whether the changes of their destinies came from their own efforts, from their own faults, or from the course of the universe.
Finally, we had to leave doubts, expectations, and the unachieved throughout our works, leaving it up to the reader to conjecture for himself by giving him the feeling, without giving him or letting him guess our feeling, that his view of the plot and the characters was merely one among many others." P:184
"... the irreversibility of our age belonged only to us" P:185
"But if it occurred to us to meditate on our future writings, we were convinced that no art could really be ours if it did not restore to the event its brutal freshness, its ambiguity, its unforeseeability, if it did not restore to time its actual course, to the world its rich and threatening opacity, and to man his long patience. We did not want to delight our public with its superiority to a dead world - we wanted to take it by the throat." P:185
"The work of art, an outcome of similar pleasures, itself pretends to be enjoyment or promise of enjoyment. So the circle is completed. We, on the contrary, have been led by circumstances to bring to light the relationship between being and doing in the perspective of our historical situation. Is one what one does? What one makes of oneself? In present day society, where work is alienated? What should one do, what end should one choose today? And how is it to be done, by what means? What are the relationships between ends and means in a society based on violence?
The works deriving from such preoccupations cannot aim first to please. They irritate and disturb. They offer themselves as tasks to be discharged. " P:192
"From this point of view, the situation of the writer has never been so paradoxical. Is seems to be made up of the most contradictory characteristics. On the credit side, brilliant appearances, vast possibilities; on the whole, an enviable way of life. On the debit side, only this: that literature is dying. Not that talent or good will is lacking, but it has no longer anything to do in contemporary society. At the very moment that we are discovering the important of parxis, at the moment that we are beginning to have some notion of what a total literature might be, our public collapses and disappears. We no longer know - literally - for whom to write." P:196
"If it should be asked whether the writer, in order to reach the masses, should offer his services to the Communist Party, I answer no. The politics of Stalinist Communism is incompatible in France with the honest practice of the literary craft. A party which is planning a revolution should have nothing to lose. For the C.P. there is something to lose and something to handle circumspectly. As its immediate goal can no longer be the establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat by force, but rather that of safeguarding a Russia which is in danger, it now presents an ambiguous appearance. Progressive and revolutionary in its doctrine and in its avowed ends, it has become conservative in its meant." P:207
"In so far as a scurvy, opportunistic, conservative, and deterministic ideology is in contradiction with the very essence of literature we are against both the C.P. and the bourgeoisie. That means clearly that we are writing against everybody, that we have readers but no public. Bourgeois who have broken with our class but who have remained bourgeois in our morals, separated from the proletariat by the Communist screen, we remain up in the air; our good will serves no one, not even us; we are in the age of the undiscovered public. Worse still, we are writing against the current". P:214
"But the writer today can in no case approve of a war, because the social structure of war is dictatorship, because its results are always a matter of chance, and because, whatever happens, its costs are infinitely greater than the gains, and finally because war alienates literature by making it serve the propagandist hullabaloo." P:215
"but this is exactly the point that we have to fight about. It is improper for us to stoop in order to please; on the contrary, our job is to reveal to the public its own needs and, little by little, to form it so that I needs to read. We must appear to be giving in and yet must make ourselves indispensable and consolidate our positions, if possible, by facile successes; then, we must take advantage of the disorder in the governmental services and the incompetence of certain producers to turn these arms against them." P:217
"Such is the present paradox of ethics; if I am absorbed in treating a few chosen persons as absolute ends, for example, my wife, my son, my friends, the needy person I happen to come across, if I am bent upon fulfilling all my duties towards them, I shall spend my life doing so; I shall be led to pass over in silence the injustices of the age, the class struggle, colonialism, Anti-Semitism, etc., and finall, to take advantage of oppression in order to be good. Moreover, the former will be found in person-to-person relationships and, more subtly, in my very intentions. The good that I try to do will be vitiated at the roots. It will be turned into radical evil. But, vice versa, if I throw myself into the revolutionary enterprise I risk having no more leisure for personal relations - worse still, of being led by the logic of the action into treating most men, and even my friends, as means. But if we start with the moral exigence which the aesthetic feeling envelops without meaning to do so, we are starting on the right foot. We must historicize the reader's goodwill, that is, by the formal agency of our work, we must, if possible, provoke his intention of treating men, in every case, as an absolute end and, by the subject of our writing, direct his intention upon his neighbours, that is, upon the oppressed of the world. But we shall have accomplished nothing if, in addition, we do not show him - and in the very wrap and weft of the work - that it is quite impossible to treat concrete men as ends in contemporary society." P:221-222
"The function of a writer is to call a spade a spade. If words are sick, it is up to us to cure them. Instead of that, many writers live off this sickness. In many cases modern literature is a cancer of words. It is perfectly all right to write 'horse of butter' but in a sense it amounts to doing the same thing as those who speak of a fascist United States or a Stalinist national socialism. There is nothing more deplorable than the literary practice which, I believe, is called poetic prose and which consists of using words for the obscure harmonics which resound about them and which are made up of vague meanings which are in contradiction of the clear meaning" P:228
"Our first dusty as a writer is this to re-establish language in its dignity. After all, we think with words. We would have to be quite vain to believe that we are concealing ineffable beauties which the word is unworthy of expressing. And then, I distrust the incommunicable; it is the source of all violence. When it seems impossible to get others to share the certainties which we enjoy, the only thing left is to fight, to burn, or to hang. No. We are no better than our life, and it is by our life that we must be judged; our thought is no better than our language, and it ought to be judged by the way it uses it. If we want to restore their virtue to words, we must carry on a double operation; on the one hand, an analytical cleaning which rids them off their adventitious meanings, and, on the other hand, a synthetic enlargement which adapts them to the historical situation." P:229
"And if we are told that we are acting as if we were quite important and that it is quite childish of us to hope that we can change the course of the world, we shall reply that we have no illusion about it, but that nevertheless it is fitting that certain things be said, even though it be only to save face in the eyes of our children; and besides, we do not have the crazy ambition of influencing the state Department, but rather the slightly less crazy one of acting upon the opinion of our fellow citizens." P:230
"But after the victory of the United States, when the C.P. would be annihilated and the working class discouraged, disoriented, and - if I may risk a neologism - atomized, when capitalism would be more pitiless since it would be master of the world, can anyone believe that a revolutionary movement which would start from zero would have much chance? But aren't there unknown factors to be reckoned with? That's just it! I reckon with what I know. But who is forcing us to choose? Does one really make history by choosing between given wholes simply because they are given, and by siding with the stronger? In that case in 1940 all Frenchmen should have sided with Germany as the collaborators proposed.
Now, it is obvious that, on the contrary, historical action can never be reduced to a choice between ray data, but that it has always been characterized by the invention of new solutions on the basis of definite situation." P:236
"As for socialist Europe, there's no 'choosing' it since it doesn't exist. It is to be made. Not by starting with the England of Mr. Churchill, nor even with that of Mr. Bevin, but by starting on the continent, by the union of all countries which have the same problems. It will be said that it is too late, but what does anyone know about it? Has anyone even tried?" P:236
"There is no guarantee that literature is immortal. Its chance today, its only chance, is the chance of Europe, of socialism, of democracy, and of peace. We must play it. If we writers lose it, too bad for us. But also, too bad for society. As I have shown, the collectivity passes to reflection and mediation by means of literature, it acquires an unhappy conscience, a lopsided image of itself which it constantly tries to modify and improve. But, after all, the art of writing is not protected by immutable decrees of Providence; it is what men make it; they choose it in choosing themselves. It it were to turn into pure propaganda or pure entertainment, society would wallow in the immediate, that is, in the life without memory of hymenoptera and gastropods. Of course, all of this is not very important. The world can very well do without literature. But it can do without man still better." P:238
"But it is with words and not with his troubles that the writer makes his books. If he wants to keep his wife from being disagreeable, it is a mistake to write about her; he would do better to beat her. One no more puts one's misfortunes into a book than one puts a model on the canvas; one is inspired by them, and they remain what they are. One gets perhaps a passing relief in placing oneself above them in order to describe them, but once the book is finished, there they are again. Insincerity begins when the artist wants to ascribe a meaning to his misfortunes, a kind of immanent finality, and when he persuades himself that they are there in order for him to speak about them. When he justifies his own sufferings by this ruse, he invites laughter; but he is contemptible if he seeks to justify those of others. The most beautiful book in the world will not save a child from pain; one does not redeem evil, one fights it; the most beautiful book in the world redeems itself; it also redeems the artist. But not the man. Any more than the man redeems the artist. We want the man and the artist to work their salvation together, we want the work to be at the same time an act; we want it to be explicitly conceived as a weapon in the struggle that men wage against evil.
The other error is just as grave. There is such a hunger for the absolute in every heart that eternity, which is a non-temporal absolute, is frequently confused with immortality, which is only a perpetual reprieve and a long succession of vicissitudes. I understand this desire for the absolute; I desire it too. But what need is there to go looking for it so far off: there it is, about us, under our feet, in each of our gestures. We produce the absolute as M. Jourdain produced prose. You light your pipe and that's an absolute; you detest oysters and that's an absolute; you join the Communist Party and that's an absolute. Whether the world is mind or matter, whether God exists or whether He does not exist, whether the judgement of the centuries to come is favourable to you or hostile, nothing will ever prevent your having passionately loved that painting, that cause, that woman, nor that love's having been lived from day to day; lived, willed, undertaken; nor your being completely committed to it. Our grandfathers were right in saying, as they drank their glass of wine, 'Another one that the Prussians won't get'. Neither the Prussians nor anyone else. They can kill you, they can deprive you of wine to the end of your days, but no God, no man, can take away that final trickling of Bordeaux along your tongue." P:240-241
"But the human condition requires us to choose in ignorance; it is ignorance which makes morality possible. If we knew all the factors which condition a phenomena, if we gambled on a sure thing, the risk would disappear; and with the risk, the courage and the fear, the waiting, the final joy and the effort; we would be listless gods, but certainly not men. The bitter Babylonian disputes about omens, the bloody and passionate heresies of the Albigenses, of the Anabaptists, now seem to us mistakes. At the time, man committed himself to them completely, and, in manifesting them at the peril of his life, he brought truth into being through them, for truth never yields itself directly, it merely appears through errors. In the dispute over Universals, over the Immaculate Conception of Transubstantation, it was the fate of human Reason that was at stake. And the fate of Reason was at stake. And the fate of Reason was again at stake when American teachers who taught the theory of evolution were brought to trial in certain states. It is at stake in every age, totally so, in regard to doctrines which the following age will reject as false. Evolution may some day appear to be the biggest folly of our century; in testifying for it against the clerics, the American teachers lived the truth, they lived is passionately and absolutely, at personal risk. Tomorrow they will be wrong, today they are absolutely right; the age is always wrong when it is dead, always right when it is alive. Condemn it later on, if you like; but first it had it's passionate way of loving itself and lacerating itself, against which future judgements are of no avail. It had its taste which it tasted alone and which is as incomparable, as irremediable, as the taste of wine in our mouths." P:242
"A book has its absolute truth within the age. It is lived like an outbreak, like a famine. With much less intensity, to be sure, and by fewer people, but in the same way. It is an emanation of intersubjective, a living bond of rage, hatred or love among those who produce it and those who receive it. If it succeeds in commanding attention, thousands of people reject it and deny it: as everybody knows, to read a book is to re-write it. At the time it is at first a panic or an evasion or a courageous assertion; at the time it is a good or bad action. Later on, when the age is done with, it will enter into the relative, it will become a message. But the judgements of posterity will not invalidate those that were passed on it in its lifetime. I have often been told about dates and bananas: 'You don't know anything about them. In order to know what they are, you have to eat them on the spot, when they've just been picked.' And I have always considered bananas as dead fruit whose real, live taste escapes me. Books that are handed down from age to age are dead fruit. They had, in another time, another taste, tart and tangy." P:242-243
"It is not by running after immortality that we will make ourselves eternal; we will become absolute not because we have allowed our writings to reflect a few emaciated principles (which are sufficiently empty and null to make the transition from one century to the next), but because we will have fought passionately within our own era, because we will have loved it passionately and accepted that we would perish entirely along with it.
In summary, our intention is to help effect certain changes in the Society that surrounds us. By which we do not mean changes within people's souls....we align ourselves on the side of those who want to change simultaneously the social condition of man and the concept he has of himself.". P:255
"First of all, we do not accept a priori the idea that romantic love is a constitutive affect of the human mind. It may well be the case, as Denis de Rougemont has suggested, that is originated historically as a correlate of Christian ideology. More generally, we are of the opinion that a feeling always expresses a specific way of life and a specific conception of the world that are shared by an entire class or an entire era, and that its evolution is not the effect of some unspecified internal mechanism but of those historical and social factors." P:259
"Third, we refuse to believe that the love felt by a homosexual offers the same characteristics as that felt by a heterosexual. The secretive and forbidden character of the former, its Black Mass side, the existence of a homosexual freemasonry, and that damnation toward which the homosexual is aware of dragging his partner all elements that seem to us to exercise an influence on the feeling in its entirety and even in the every details of its evolution. We maintain that the various sentiments of an individual are not juxtaposed, but that there is a synthetic unity of one's affective and that every individual moves within an affective world specifically of his own." P:259-260
"We should imbue ourselves, on the contrary, with this austere truth: from whatever heights we pretend to judge ourselves, a future historian will judge us from an even greater height; the mountain on which we believe we have built our eagle's nest will be but a molehill for him. The verdict we have delivered concerning our era will figure as only part of the evidence in our case. In vain would we attempt to be our own historians: the historian himself is a historical creature. We are obliged to be satisfied with forging our history blindly, one day at a time, choosing from all the options the one which seems best to us at present." P:278
"...Formerly , a new writer felt superfluous on earth: he was not awaited. The public never awaits anything. Or rather, yes, it awaits the next book by the novelist it already knows, whose style and way of viewing things it has assimilated. But between the problems of any particular era and the random or traditional solutions they are given, for better or worse, a certain balance is invariably reached, and any newcomer arrives on the scene as an intruder. No one was waiting for Freud; the psychology of Ribot and Wundt sufficed as best it could to explain everything one or two little rebellious points, which people hoped would soon be absorbed into the reigning order. No one was awaiting for Einstein; it was thought that Michelson-Morley experiment could be interpreted without abandoning Newton's physics... Today ideas or styles are not awaited any more than previously, but one waits for men. One goes to search out the author at home; he is solicited. With his first book, people say to themselves, "Well, now! This could be our man." With his second, they're sure of it. With his third, he is already reigning: he presides over committees, writes for political newspapers, is already thought of as a candidate for the Chamber or the Academy. What is essential is that he be consecrated as quickly as possible. We already have a habit of publishing a writer's posthumous works during his lifetime; before long we may be casting his statue before he is dead. This is, in the strict sense of term, literary inflation. In periods of calm, there is a normal and constant gap between fiduciary circulation and the gold which covers it, between and author's reputation and the works he has produced. When the gab grows, there is inflation. It is though France had a desperate need for great men." P:280-281
"....Quite the contrary: when, during the Occupation, the public, disconcerted by the disloyalty of several great writers, turned toward men who were younger and more sure, gave them its trust, and in the process, in order to counterbalance the weight of the traitors, conferred on the newcomers a glory they did not yet deserve on the basis of their works, they were, in the surge of feeling, a moving greatness and energy. I know some who have been elevated - not morally, as might be expected, but literally, by their silence. That is proper; the duty of the man of letters is not only to write but also to know how to keep silent when he should. But now, that the war is over, it's dangerous to fish for great men on the basis of the same principles." P:282
"A great man is always awaited, because it is flattering for a nation to have produced him. But a great thought is never awaited, because it offends. Let him then accept industry's motto: create needs in order to satisfy them. Let him create the need for justice, freedom, and solidarity, and strain to satisfy these needs with his subsequent works." P:287
"As everyone knows, every poetic experience has its origin in this feeling of frustration that one has when confronted with a language that is supposed to be means of direct communication." P:302
"For the white man, to possess is to transform. To be sure, the white worker uses instruments which he does no possess. But at least his techniques are his own: if it is true that the personnel responsible for the major inventions of European industry comes mainly from the middle classes, at least the trades of carpenter, cabinetmaker, potter, seem to the white workers to be a true heritage, despite the fact that the orientation of great capitalist production tends to remove their "joy of work" from them. But it is not enough to say that the black worker uses instruments which are lent to him: techniques are also lent to him." P:314-315
"Perhaps, in order to understand this indissoluble unity of suffering, eros, and joy, one must have seen the black men of Harlem dance frenetically to the rhythm of "blues", which are the saddest sounds in the world. In effect, rhythm cements the multiple aspects of the black soul, communicates its Nietzschean lightness with heavy Dionysian institutions." P:320-321
"One can hardly reconcile Christianity and colonialism more elegantly. In opposition to these sophism, the black man - by a simple investigation of his memory as a former slave - affirms that suffering is man's lot and that it is no less deserved for all that. He rejects with horror Christian stagnation, melancholy sensual pleasure, masochistic humility, and all the tendentious inducements to his submission; he lives the absurdity of suffering in its pure form, in its injustice and in its gratuitousness; and discovers thereby this truth which is misunderstood or masked by Christianity: suffering carries within itself its own refusal; it is by nature a refusal to suffer, it is the dark side of negativity, it open onto revolt and liberty." P:323
"..each era has it's poetry; in each era, circumstances of history elect a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch, by creating situations that can be expressed or that can go beyond themselves only though poetry. Sometimes the poetic elan [strong eagerness] coincides with the revolutionary elan, and sometimes they diverge." P:330
