grief itself and something other than grief...The empire of signs
is prose; poetry is on the side of painting, sculpture, and music”
(WL 27 – 28 ). He insists that “One does not paint significations; one does
not put them to music. Under these conditions,” he challenges, “who
would dare require that the painter or the musician commit himself ?”
(WL 28 ). Anticipating a likely counterexample, Sartre challenges: Did
Picasso’sThe Massacre at Guernicaever win a single heart to the Spanish
cause? He doubts it: prose is capable of being committed and should be;
poetry is for its own sake (and for the aesthetic joy it can occasion as a
secondary effect) and is incapable of political or moral commitment. Sartre
will soon regret this hobbling of poetry when he writes of the African
and West Indian poets of liberation in “Black Orpheus” ( 1948 ). They,
in fact, used the language of their colonizers to resist colonialism.^38
The “committed” writer knows that words are action and that the
secondary action effected by prose is “action by disclosure.” This raises
the question “What aspect of the world do you want to disclose? What
change do you want to bring into the world by this disclosure?” (WL 37 ).
At this initial stage it suffices to claim that “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 that has been
laid bare” (WL 38 ).^39 Subsequently, this will lead Sartre famously to
abandon imaginative literature almost entirely.
“Why Write?”Each of our perceptions is accompanied by the consciousness that
human reality is a revealer (de ́voilante); that is, it is through human
reality that ‘there is’ (il y a[Heidegger’ses gibt]) being, or, to put it
(^38) Originally the preface to an anthology of works by African and West Indian poets,Anthologie
de la nouvelle poe ́sie ne`gre et malgache de langue franc ̧ais, ed. Le ́opold Se ́dar-Sanghor (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1948 ), excerpts were published inLTMand the entire text
translated as “Black Orpheus” inWL 291 – 330. Citations to the text inWLare given as
39 Orpheus.
This notion of “laying bare” or “revealing” (de ́voilement) suggests a well-known Heidegger-
ian usage, namely, understanding “truth” – in Greek “ale ́theia” – as “uncoveredness,” that
Beauvoir adopts in herEthics of Ambiguitypublished the same year ( 1946 ). The parallels
between the essays presented in this chapter and Beauvoir’s ethical monograph are striking.
For additional uses of “unveiling” (de ́voilement) in Sartre’s existential biographies, see below,
Chapter 15.
254 Existentialism: the fruit of liberation