The interrogative dominates this book. Three of its chapters are titled
as questions: “What is Writing?,” “Why Write?,” and “For Whom Does
One Write?” Following his recent counsel that the writer’s responsibility
is not eternal but contemporary, the final chapter addresses “The Situ-
ation of the Writer in 1947 ” (seenote 36 ). Let us follow his response
to each question as we prepare to assess the situation of the writer at
that time.
“What is Writing?”In response to this question, Sartre introduces the distinction between
poetry and prose that will haunt him in subsequent essays because of his
contention that prose can be politically committed whereas what he calls
“poetry” (which includes painting, music and sculpture) cannot. Poetry,
in his view, is intransitive; it is for its own sake, whereas prose is
transitive – it carries us into the world. He makes an implicit exception
for “literary prose” as we shall see.
Besides this famous distinction between poetry and prose, Sartre
refers to a parallel and more basic one betweensenseandsignification.
Introduced earlier inThe Imaginary, it appears frequently in Sartre’s art
and literary criticism, his cultural history, his existential biographies
and even his theory of history, once he formulates one with the help
of historical materialism and existential psychoanalysis. Admittedly, this is
quite a harvest to be gathered from a pair of conceptual seeds, and it would
be reckless to ignore the numerous other factors that figure into the
development of Sartre’s thought in each domain. But the point is that
this distinction between sense (sens), which might now be translated as
“concrete” or “lived presence,” and conceptual meaning (signification)
along with the cognate expressions that gather around each lends a unity
and coherence to Sartre’s thought that survives the transformations and
displacements required for his evolution from existential phenomenologist
to “materialist” dialectician. We have been witnessing some of those
changes in the collection of essays gathered in this chapter of our study.
Sign is the vehicle of prose in the transitive respect just mentio-
ned whereas the image is a feature of “poetry” in that it transforms
(“derealizes”) its object into an image, which Sartre, forgetting the
lesson of hisThe Imaginary, sees as a kind of “thing.” Thus “a cry of
grief is a sign of the grief which provokes it, but a song of grief is both
What is Literature? 253