Volume 9 of Minumsa's World Literature series is not a novel but a work of criticism: Jean-Paul Sartre's What Is Literature? It is remembered as the book of “committed literature,” yet in its first chapter Sartre says he will not ask commitment of poetry, painting or music. Why would the man who called for commitment leave poetry out first? After this guide you will be able to explain the answer with a single distinction from Chapter 1, and follow how the four chapters widen from that distinction to the reader, the history of the reading public and the present of 1947.
What kind of book this is
The original title is Qu'est-ce que la littérature? It appeared in parts from 1947 in Les Temps modernes, the journal Sartre had founded in 1945, and was collected in 1948 in Situations II, a volume of essays published by Gallimard. The Minumsa edition came out in August 1998, runs to 456 pages and was translated by Jung Myung-hwan. The publisher describes it as a complete translation that includes Part 4, “The Writer's Situation in 1947,” which most earlier Korean editions left out, with some 500 notes. The contents are four chapters: “What Is Writing?”, “Why Write?”, “For Whom Does One Write?” and “The Writer's Situation in 1947.”
Sartre was born in Paris in 1905. He studied philosophy at the École normale supérieure, served in the Second World War, was taken prisoner and was released in 1941. A novelist and philosopher, author of Nausea (1938) and Being and Nothingness (1943), he argued after the war, with Les Temps modernes as his base, for the social responsibility of the writer. He declined the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964 and died in 1980. Because the book is still in copyright, this guide describes its content in its own words and quotes only one sentence, translated directly from the French.
READING NOTES
The four chapters of What Is Literature?
What, why, for whom, and where we stand now
Chapter 1 · What is writing?
- Prose is set apart from poetry, painting and music.
- The prose writer uses words as signs to disclose the world.
Chapter 2 · Why write?
- A work exists only while it is being read.
- Writing is an appeal to the reader's freedom.
Chapter 3 · For whom does one write?
- It separates the real public from the potential one.
- Writers and their readers from the Middle Ages to the 19th century.
Chapter 4 · The writer's situation in 1947
- Three generations of writers; a critique of surrealism.
- From contemplation (exis) to action (praxis).
Serialized in Les Temps modernes in 1947; collected in Situations II in 1948. Korean chapter titles follow the Minumsa contents.
The distinction in Chapter 1: using words or handling them
Chapter 1 begins by separating prose from the other arts. For a painter, a colour is not a sign pointing at something else. Sartre says Tintoretto did not choose the yellow rent in the sky above Golgotha to signify anguish or to provoke it. That yellow is not a sign of anguish but anguish that has become a thing. The same goes for a note in music. Under these conditions, he asks, who would require the painter or the musician to commit himself?
The poet stands on the same side. For the poet a word is not a clear pane of glass onto the world but a thing with sound, shape and weight, which he handles and tests as if turning it inside out. The prose writer, by contrast, uses words as signs and tools. He is a speaker: he designates, demonstrates, orders, refuses. Sartre sums up the difference in one sentence: “Prose uses words; poetry serves them.”
Here is the answer to our question. Commitment can be asked only of someone who uses words as signs to point at something in the world, because to speak is to act, and whatever has been named is no longer quite the same. Sartre calls the prose writer someone who has chosen action by disclosure, and writes that the writer's task is to make sure that nobody can be ignorant of the world and nobody can say he has nothing to do with it. Poetry is left out not because it matters less, but because it does a different job with words.
READING NOTES
Words as signs, or words as things?
Why Sartre asks commitment of prose alone
The prose writer · uses words
- Words are signs and tools that point at the world.
- He designates, demonstrates, orders, refuses.
- What has been named has already begun to change.
The poet · the painter · the musician
- The poet treats words as things, not signs.
- Tintoretto's yellow sky is not a sign of anguish.
- It is anguish turned into a thing, a yellow rent in the sky.
"Prose uses words; poetry serves them." The author's translation from the French.
Chapter 2: a work exists only while it is read
Chapter 2 asks why one writes. Sartre's starting point is simple. A shoemaker can put on the shoes he has just made, but a writer cannot read what he has written, because he already knows the next sentence. A literary work is therefore like a spinning top: it exists only while it moves, and when the act of reading stops, only black marks on paper remain.
Reading is thus a “directed creation.” The reader follows the marks the author has left, but builds the work by constantly filling in what is not written. The author cannot force this on the reader; he can only ask. So writing is an appeal to the reader's freedom, and reading becomes a “pact of generosity” in which author and reader trust each other and demand of each other. If Chapter 1 defined prose as action, Chapter 2 says that this action is never complete without the reader's freedom. Writing by a free person for free people, the chapter concludes, can in the end have only one subject: freedom.
Chapters 3 and 4: who has read writers, and who reads them now
Chapter 3 applies the same idea to history. A writer has a real public, the people who actually read him, and a potential public, those who could. Twelfth-century clerics wrote only for other clerics, so there was no gap between the two and no reason to unsettle the ideas of their age. The seventeenth-century writer's readers were “society”: the court, the clergy, magistrates and the wealthy bourgeois. The eighteenth century, when writers addressed both a declining aristocracy and a rising bourgeoisie at once, Sartre calls the unique golden age of French writers. By the late nineteenth century literature, in the name of destruction, has cut its ties with society, and in the end no longer even has a public.
READING NOTES
Whom have writers written for?
The history of French writers and readers in Chapter 3
12th century · clerics for clerics
- Clerics write only for other clerics.
- There is no gap between the real and the potential public.
17th century · 'society'
- The court, the clergy, magistrates, the wealthy bourgeois.
- The readers are also cultivated critics.
18th century · the writers' golden age
- Between a declining aristocracy and a rising bourgeoisie.
- Two publics whose demands are in tension from the start.
Late 19th century · a literature of destruction
- Literature cuts every tie with society.
- And then it no longer even has a public.
Sartre's history covers French literature only.
Chapter 4 brings the story to 1947. Sartre divides the writers then at work into three generations, looks at each in turn, and criticizes surrealism for a destruction that stayed only in the mind. He then calls for a move from a literature of contemplation (exis) to one of action (praxis). The diagnosis that radio and cinema have made writers better known than read is also in this chapter. Because it is a report tied to a date and a place, France in 1947, it is full of names from the time, and this is where the Minumsa edition's notes are most useful.
What to mark as you read
First, each time the word “freedom” appears, note whose freedom it is. The author's freedom, the reader's freedom and the freedom of the characters come under the same word, and the argument of Chapter 2 is that each needs the others.
Second, keep description and demand apart. The history in Chapter 3 is written like a statement of fact, but in Chapter 4 it turns into what the writer ought to do. Mark where “this is how it was” becomes “this is how it must be,” and you will see what Sartre's claims rest on.
Third, do not leave the passages on poetry behind in Chapter 1. Sartre excused the poet from the demand for commitment, but he grants the prose writer no such excuse. His view that style, however fine, must never come before what is said runs all through the chapter.
If you do just one thing
Take one paragraph from an article or a novel you read today and write down what it names, and what, once it has been named, you as a reader can no longer say you did not know. If you can answer, the paragraph is prose in Sartre's sense; if no answer comes and only the sound and shape of the sentences remain, it stands on the side of poetry. Hold Chapter 1's distinction in your hand this way before moving on to Chapter 2, and the remaining three chapters read as that distinction widening to the reader and to history.
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