by Iris Murdoch
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1 ‘The very fact of expression is a theft of thought.’
2 Kierkegaard’s ‘Knight of Faith’ bears no visible marks of his nature. He ‘looks like a tax-collector’ (Fear and Trembling, p. 53).
3 ‘Existentialisme ou Marxisme?, p. 90.
4 And set forth much more extensively in the work of Simone de Beauvoir.
X
LINGUISTIC ACTS AND LINGUISTIC OBJECTS
I have tried to rest what I have to say about Sartre upon a consideration of his novels. Although Sartre is plainly more at home as a playwright than as a novelist, the novels provide more comprehensive material for a study of his thought; they reveal very clearly both the central structure of his philosophy (La Nausée) and the detail of his interest in the contemporary world (Les Chemins). I want now in conclusion to discuss Sartre’s theory of la littérature engagée, and to pass some judgment upon his performance as a novelist.
The novel, the novel proper that is, is about people’s treatment of each other, and so it is about human values. A modern critic such as F. R. Leavis concentrates his attention upon this aspect of the novel’s subject-matter; he demands that the novelist should be concerned with serious matters and that his total treatment of them should be ‘morally mature’. What constitutes ‘maturity’ is something of which we all have some notion and which could be demonstrated in detail in the case of any particular novel. These considerations will form a large part of our estimate of a novel as a work of literature. But it will clearly not be enough for us to know that the novelist has a mature and interesting viewpoint on human affairs and to know from reading his novel what the viewpoint is; our judgment of him as a novelist will also depend on how he incarnates his viewpoint in his literary medium, although to put it thus is misleading if it suggests that the particular viewpoint exists apart from its incarnation.
Sartre could certainly not be accused of a lack of seriousness or of moral maturity. But what about his manner, in the novels, of making his thought concrete? The modern work with which I am most tempted to compare Les Chemins de la Liberté is L. H. Myers’s trilogy, The Near and the Far. This impressive work discusses a large number of philosophical and religious problems through the medium of a group of characters who ‘represent’ particular ideologies. Yet because we feel that the characters move in order to support the ideas, and that the colour is applied to them in a decorative manner, we are left with the sense that these books are not exactly novels. A certain transmutation of the ideas presented has not taken place. We feel a similar uneasiness in reading Les Chemins.
Sartre, be it remembered, approaches literature somewhat in the mood of a physician coming to his patient. Literature, in his view, is sick because of a separation of the writer from life, which has shown itself in either a hatred of language, or an absorption in language for its own sake. The writer has now been forced back to a living contact with the world by being placed in ‘extreme situations’. It remains for him to effect the cure of the language by affirming its role as a medium of communication. When he discusses this idea in What is Literature? Sartre makes a distinction between prose and poetry: with prose we are inside language, with poetry we are outside language. Prose is an extension of our activities, prose words are transparent, prose is simply for communication. Here ‘we are within language as within our body’ (p.11). This is what he wants to tell the novelist. Whereas for the poet ‘language is a structure of the external world’ (p. 6). In reading poetry we run up against language in amazement. But prose is an instrument; and ‘in prose the aesthetic pleasure is pure only if it is thrown in into the bargain’ (p. 15). It is only prose literature, then, which Sartre wishes to see ‘committed’, and it is only for prose literature that he makes the connexion of ‘good writing’ with ideological commitment. It is the prose writer who ‘has only one subject—freedom’.
There seem to be two theses about the task of prose literature. One is that the language of prose is naturally and properly communicative (as contrasted with the language of poetry), and that the healthy prose writer will not sport with it in a ‘poetic’ manner, but will use it to make a communication. The other thesis is that since the creation and enjoyment of literature demand a disciplined purging of the mind on the part of the writer and a similar ‘free’ response from the reader, the literary man has a special interest in the ‘free’ society; he desires a certain harmony of wills between himself and his readers, and cannot but be concerned about the promotion and preservation of the possibility of a similar free response throughout society at large. The good writer is a natural progressive.
The distinction between prose and poetry seems at first sight an illuminating one. But what exactly does it mean? It seems true that when reading a poem we ‘stay at the words’; what the thing is is here. As Sartre says of a piece of Rimbaud which he quotes: ‘The interrogation has become a thing as the anguish of Tintoretto became a yellow sky. It is no longer a meaning but a substance’ (p. 9). The image which suggests itself is that of language as an opaque coagulated substance to be contemplated for itself alone, or else as a transparent glass through which one looks at the world or a tool with which one prods it. Yet in what exactly does the opaque nature of poetry consist? One might guess that the distinction was simply that between discursive and non-discursive, communicative and non-communicative uses of language. Yet this is not in itself a very clear distinction. In an obvious sense many kinds of poetry (e.g. English poetry of the eighteenth century) are communicative and discursive, and it would be a sophistry to distinguish the content communicated from the ‘poetic’ character of the writing. Much prose, on the other hand, has qualities of form and texture such that it impresses us as a linguistic structure met with from the outside. (Landor, de Quincey, Sir Thomas Browne.) If the distinction is between the rhetorical and densely imaged and the straight-forward, this would seem to cut through the middle of both prose and poetry. There is the transparency of simplicity which is not the same as the transparency of utility. Some poetry consists of opaque mountains of imagery; but at other times we slip, with an ease which is part of the beauty of the thing, straight into the poetic thought. The poetic language of Hopkins is opaque, that of Wordsworth is transparent.
The ‘thinginess’ of the poem, that which tempts one to call it a substance, rather than a meaning, does not seem to depend upon the obscurity or complexity of the language or upon whether an intellectual grasp of the ‘argument’ forms a part of the enjoying of it. Poetic language may be transparent and discursive, and prose, whether in literary or in everyday use, may be opaque and rhetorical. The tautness, the separateness, the substantial character of the poem cannot be accounted for by any short formula about approaching language from inside or outside. The ‘substantiality’ is a function of all the aesthetically relevant properties of the poem, and what these are (imagery, vocabulary, word-order, thought, movement, argument) will vary according to the type of poetry or the particular poem in question. What makes the poem separate is not just the mode of language-using of which it is an instance, but the quality and integrity of the poetic thought of which it is an incarnation. (A bad poem is imperfectly ‘substantial’.) But if it is this which gives us the sensation of seeing the thing from the outside, may we not say that certain kinds of prose works are similarly seen? The distinction would now seem to be, again, not that between prose and poetry, but between formless non-aesthetic uses of language and disciplined aesthetic uses.
The language which we are completely inside is not prose language in general, but certain regions of ordinary practical discourse only. Literary prose language may be transparent in that we brood over the meaning rather than over the sound and order of the words; but it is not language which we are using, and it is not like a tool or an extension of our bodies. It is language which is deliberately disposed so as to conjure up before us some steady and internally coherent thought or image. Ordinary discourse, on the other hand, may be thought of as trans
parent not only in the sense of not drawing attention to its particular wordy properties, but also in the sense of being useful. It very often does what shouts or gestures or pictures might equally well achieve, when what matters is the achievement. It directs attention to things in the world, it alters courses of action, it arouses feelings and conveys information.
Now Sartre is patently not suggesting that prose literature ought to regard itself as a purely utilitarian practice, to be judged by the value of the actions it inspires. If that were so propaganda sheets, advertisements, religious tracts, and sentimental fantasies could compete on even terms with the great plays and novels. He appeals in general terms to a view of language as tool-like and communicative, an activity among other human activities, to support his contention that prose literature is naturally and properly ‘committed’. Yet when he comes to state more precisely what commitment involves he moves on to a second and very different thesis, to the effect that the proper activity of the prose writer is to invite a free and selfless response from his reader and in the process to commend the cause of freedom for all mankind. To achieve this involves a careful, disciplined and reflective use of language which is like neither its everyday tool-like use, where it appears as one activity among others, nor its reflective use as a propaganda weapon. Sartre makes persuasive play with the contrast between the poetic linguistic thing and the prose linguistic act; but the distinction he then makes between the disciplined ‘liberating’ uses of prose and its other uses disqualifies him from using the force of the first distinction to support his argument.
If the writer ought to be ‘progressive’ because the work of art is a task set to freedom, then it is hard to see why any art should be excluded: the very ‘thinginess’ of the poem, which Sartre used earlier as an example of the detachment of this art from influence on human affairs, appears to be an example of the achievement of the purged and disciplined appeal which Sartre later takes to be the especial task of the novelist. What can certainly be said is that the novel in particular, since it is a prose work which takes society and human affairs as its theme, is especially suited to making communications and recommendations about social organisation; this is obvious but it is less than what Sartre is maintaining. If moreover it is the disciplined character of aesthetic utterance which inspires a respect for freedom, then not only does there seem no reason to regard the prose writer as more nearly concerned with this liberating activity, but there seems no reason to prefer one sort of artistic subject-matter to another. Here Sartre needs the further equation which connects the ‘purging of the emotions’ that is involved in good writing with a respect for human personality which must have progressive political implications.
It may be said that a continuous reflective affirmation is required from the spectator to maintain the structure and separateness of the work of art; it may be illuminating to compare this affirmation with moral evaluation or reiterated acts of faith in an ideological code. But to suggest that therefore there is a contradiction involved in lending one’s imagination (as author or spectator) to a work which approves of tyranny is to lean too heavily upon the word ‘freedom’. It is at such moments that we are most aware of Sartre’s hasty rationalism. No a priori argument can show that the discipline which produces great art is identical with the discipline of reciprocal human toleration, particularly in the very special sense which Sartre gives to the latter concept.
It might certainly be argued that the great novelist always has some kind of social seriousness. George Lukacs says that the writer is a natural progressive because he is sensitive to the situation of the most suffering class. But this seriousness and sensitiveness then have to be sought and defined in what the writer shows, perhaps malgré lui, and not in what he professes or sets out to teach.1 Sartre says that no good novel could be written in praise of anti-Semitism. How does he know? Again it might be argued that such a novel would be somehow self-refuting, that the moral maturity and earnest observation of men which are essential to the writing of a good novel would here be in contradiction with the doctrine professed. But this is something which would have to be demonstrated in the case of particular novels—in which context terms such as ‘moral maturity’ would also find their definition—and not something which can be given sense beforehand in terms of a general theory of human nature.
If we leave theory and look about us all that seems certain is that art may break any rule. That minor art defies Sartre’s canons is very clear. It is at least arguable (and if Sartre were right it would be patently false) that Henri de Montherlant, whose political views are reactionary and who despises women, is a better novelist than Sartre who has exemplary opinions on both topics. The discipline which makes de Montherlant a fine writer seems independent of the lamentably unpurged nature of his world outlook. It might however be said that it is the latter which prevents him from being a great writer. Where great art is concerned we are more tempted to insist that there must be a connexion between morality and achievement. Hate may take a small writer a long way, but charity must be the quality of a great one. Yet in Shakespeare or in Dostoievsky charity wears a strange and unique face. We are not classifying, but experiencing something new, if we give it that name. Sartre’s conception of what the disciplined vision will teach is too confined. He cannot demonstrate that good art will, of its own nature, lead to the treasuring of a particular kind of society. His theory of la littérature engagée remains a recommendation to writers concerning their craft, not a demonstration of its essential nature.
His theory gives us however a clue to his own particular virtues and limitations as a novelist. What Sartre requires from art is analysis, the setting of the world in order, the reduction to the intelligible, where the intelligible is something smooth and balanced. Il faut souffrir en mesure is what the little tune says to Roquentin; and what is en mesure is the firm purity which lies at the opposite pole from the chaos which Roquentin and Sartre both dread—and also from the darkness which some art invokes. But Sartre describes the artist’s ‘evil’ as the irreducibility of man and the world of thought. Sartre has an impatience, which is fatal to a novelist proper, with the stuff of human life. He has, on the one hand, a lively interest, often slightly morbid, in the details of contemporary living, and on the other a passionate desire to analyse, to build intellectually pleasing schemes and patterns. But the feature which might enable these two talents to fuse into the work of a great novelist is absent, namely an apprehension of the absurd irreducible uniqueness of people and of their relations with each other. Sartre seems blind to the function of prose, not as an activity or an analytic tool, but as creative of a complete and unclassifiable image. It is only Sartre’s practical interests that put him in need of speech; his ideal is not the actual silence of Rimbaud but the intellectual silence of Mallarmé.
Sartre praises, significantly, what he calls ‘the theatre of situation’. In this type of drama, he says, ‘each character will be nothing but the choice of an issue and will equal no more than the chosen issue. It is to be hoped that all literature will become moral and problematic like this new theatre’ (What is Literature? p. 217). But an interest in issues rather than people, though it may sometimes be appropriate for a dramatist, is not appropriate for a novelist. It is a mark of Sartre’s rationalism, his concern after all with essences rather than existences, that he wishes to model the novel upon the drama of situation. But though a rationalist may be a good dramatist (Bernard Shaw, whom Sartre resembles in many ways, was both) he is rarely a good novelist. Sartre is certainly a natural playwright (and an excellent one) rather than a novel writer. Many of his scenes (the close of L’Age de Raison for instance) could be staged with hardly an alteration; and the carefully constructed clash of towering viewpoints of which Les Chemins consists has the harsh emphatic force of drama, rather than the more blurred and detailed working of a novel.
This latter is properly an art of image rather than of analysis; and its revelation is, to borrow Gabriel Marc
el’s terminology, of a mystery rather than of a problem. But Sartre’s special talent is social diagnosis and psychoanalysis; he is at his most brilliant when he dissects some deformed life and lays it out for our inspection, as in L’Enfance d’un Chef, where he sketches the growth of a young fascist (in Le Mur). The novels are problematic and analytical; and their appeal does in part depend upon our being initially moved by the intellectual conflicts which they resume. All who felt the Spanish War as a personal wound, and all disappointed and vainly passionate lovers of Communism will hear these novels speak to them. But those who, without any pressing concern with these problems, seek their human shape and weight in Sartre’s array of people may be left with a sense of emptiness.
Kierkegaard quotes someone as dividing mankind into officers, serving maids and chimney-sweeps—and adds that such a classification ‘sets the imagination in motion’. This is the perennial justification of rationalism. Sartre’s great inexact equations, like those of his master Hegel, inspire us to reflect. His passion both to possess a big theoretical machine and to gear it on to the details of practical activity compares favourably with the indifference of those who are complacently content to let history get on without them. His inability to write a great novel is a tragic symptom of a situation which afflicts us all. We know that the real lesson to be taught is that the human person is precious and unique; but we seem unable to set it forth except in terms of ideology and abstraction.
