Yielding Words & Bodies

Ccertainly, a writer is not a bird. The notion that a writer spews patterns of words as naturally and compulsively as a bird emits its song is romantic, and Jean Paul Sartre finds it an annoying and common idea. It is a myth that writers tolerate out of vanity or humility. The vain ones like being thought of as vaguely magical. The humble ones avoid talking about themselves--their goals and their techniques--and this reticence leaves their occupation swathed in mystery. Sartre has patiently tried to explain the process of writing; he disects literature continuously and intently in the essays, lectures and interviews of Between Existentialism and Marxism.

The writer spews words because he has something to say. In this respect he is no different from anyone else. You can talk about laws, social structure, mores, psychology or history without turning to a writer for help, and since these subjects don't have to be expressed by a writer, Sartre concludes that they are not what a writer has to say. When you write about these subjects, you depend on certain technical words whose meaning within the frameword of history, let's say, has been agreed on. A special language has been devised to fit these disciplines.

But how would you tell the story of your life? Perhaps you suspect it would make an intriguing novel, but there isn't a ready-made set of words to match its pits and camber--you have to grapple with ordinary, imprecise language. This is material for a writer, who will imbue it with form. The mystery that the writer possesses is the mystery of narrative technique and, as Sartre points out, people believe an author can take the content of his take from anywhere. This opinion leads to a disconcerting contradiction in the prevailing conception of a writer. He is thought of as a person with something to say, and at the same time as someone with nothing to say--as a man with a form that is seeking a content. You forget that one form holds some things neatly and bars others.

It is hard to express yourself in ordinary language because it contains a maximum of misinformation--ambiguity, plurality of meaning, and so on. For Sartre, literary style is very important--he delights in three or four meanings lurking in a single string of words. The French language lends itself to a strange kind of deformation. With some words it is possible to apply a feminine gender to men and a masculine gender to women; in this way the man is feminized and the woman's femininity is undermined at the moment the two individuals are named. Sartre calls this "positive misinformation." Similarly, words can go to the extreme of "non-knowledge" instead of meaning-as-knowledge. This kind of distortion is possible in any language simply because the printed or spoken word is a physical reality. The words "frog" and "ox," for example, possess a sound and image totally unrelated to the animals they conjure up. Sartre contends that a phrase like "The frog that wants to become as big as an ox" contains, in an inextricable blend between materiality and meaning, much more corporeal density than the expression x:y.

Writing with these verbal properties in mind involves a form of communication that goes beyond language. Words can reveal knowledge of bury it inside their physical structure. They can "talk" to you or dangle silently but visibly on the page. Often someone will discuss a text by saying "this is just literature" when their implication is "you speak to say nothing."

The writer coagulates his vision of the world and his place in it by his experiments with words. Sartre sees him "as an adventurer, turning back on his language, and assuming its follies and ambiguities in order to give witness to his practical singularity." The writer infuses a text with himself by presenting it in a unique style. Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man intones:

Being invisible and without substance, a disembodied voice, as it were, what else could I do? What else but try to tell you what was really happening when your eyes were looking through? And it is this which frightens me:

Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you? Any author could be speaking--what's more, this writer is deliberately shirking a human, corporeal identity--but the reader absorbs the warning through its zig-zagged rhythm, by its attachment to a style. And he will only remember the idea through Ellison thinking it.

Sartre feels that a literary work is not worth-while unless it expresses a whole era. This is possible if the author inserts his reactions to the social world into the text, since he is being buffeted by the social order as much as any other man (supposedly he is suffering from "alienation, reification, frustration, want, solitude, against a suspected background of possible plenitude"--but that's another story). Even the Invisible Man, who lives in a hole in a basement lit by exactly 1369 light bulbs, cannot be allowed--as a valid literary invention and especially as a black man--to shirk the contradictions of the whole planet: let's say, the contradiction between the atomic war and the people's war. This demand isn't as finicky as it sounds. The precise form of his awareness isn't too important: "A vague anguish drifting from page to page is enough to demonstrate the existence of the bomb." The writer's totalization belongs to the domain of non-knowledge. But without it, he would be reckoning up an abstract world, not a living world, and that is the shallow goal of an entertainer or a fraud.

Literature aims for engagement, commitment. And "the commitment of the writer is to communicate the incommunicable (being-in-the-world as lived experience) by exploiting the misinformation contained in ordinary language and maintaining the tension between the whole and the part."

At the age of 70, Sartre has left off writing because he is nearly blind. It was a job, what he had called "The task of wresting [his] life from the various forms of night," which he considers finished now--even destroyed. During an interview given in 1959, he felt that "What is primary is what I haven't yet written--what I intend to write (not tomorrow, but the day after tomorrow) and what perhaps I will never write..." Maybe this early premonition that something would always remain to be written explains his serenity in a recent conversation with Michel Contat. Although he has lost the basic impetus to his life, Sartre relates: "for some unknown reason I feel quite good: I am never sad, nor do I have any moments of melancholy in thinking of what I have lost."

He refuses to dictate his thoughts out loud, since this precludes the transformation of language through style. He notes unhappily that many young people these days scorn style. For him the act of writing and the elements of style remain inseparable.

Words as the material structure of language are no longer entirely accessible to Sartre but, interestingly enough, he seems to have prised another kind of physicality out of language--the expressiveness of hands and faces. It may prove to be a revealing type of language for a man who has something to say if, as he suggests, "it is impossible to accept the fact that we would yield our bodies as we do and keep our thoughts hidden."

Sartre still claims to be an anarchist--that is, he holds individualist activity above any other. Anarchy jibes with his definition of the limit of freedom: "the small movement which makes of a totally conditioned social being someone who does not render back completely what his conditioning has given him. Which makes Genet a poet when he had been rigorously conditioned to be a thief." The Invisible Man affirms his freedom when he says

...a decision has been made. I'm shaking off the old skin and I'll leave it here in the hole...Perhaps that's my greatest social crime, I've overstayed my hibernation...

Perhaps Sartre realizes that he cannot overstay his occupation as a writer and when he insists that "I have decided--I say it loud and clear: I have decided--that I have said everything I had to say," it is no less than an affirmation of his freedom.