That translates into a number of conclusions, one of which is that,
as committed writers, we cannot ignore social injustice in our society
when we take up our pens. To do so, he will argue from now on, is to be a
party to that injustice itself. We shall encounter this argument for the
remainder of Sartre’s career. It combines his fundamentally moral out-
look with his growing sense of social responsibility. Another conclusion
he draws from the foregoing is that “The art of prose is bound up with
the only regime in which prose has meaning, democracy” (WL 69 ).
Of course, by now we know that this democracy is nurtured by a socialist
economic system, a point he will stress in the following section.
“For Whom does one Write?”After offering us a brief survey of the writer and his public in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Sartre notes such writers’ prefer-
ence for abstractions, their penchant for psychological accounts, and
their insensitivity to historical context (“historialization”). Turning to
his own critique, Sartre considers how the writer can address those
who are willing to hear the message of socioeconomic liberation. It won’t
be the liberal democrat criticized inAnti-Semite and Jew; that is, the
historical optimist of the Third Republic, who fails to take seriously the
warning of Dostoevsky that, if God does not exist, all is permissible, and
who reduces moral evil to a mere idea as did Sartre’s idealist professors
at the Sorbonne.^41
This is why the work of art is irreducible to an idea: first, because it is a production or
a reproduction ofbeing, that is, of something which never quite allows itself to be
thought; then, because this being is totally penetrated by an existence; that is, by a
freedom which decides on the very fate of thought. That is also why the artist always
had a special understanding of Evil, which is not the temporary and remediable
isolation of an idea, but the irreducibility of man and the world to Thought.^42
From 1848 to 1914 , Sartre summarizes, “The author had to write on
principleagainst all his readers”(WL 109 , emphasis his). But a virtual
public was forming thanks to authors like Proudhon and Marx, the
(^41) WL 335 ,n. 11 and above, section onAnti-Semite and Jew.
(^42) WL 106 – 107 ;Sitii: 159 , translation emended to replace “reducible” with “irreducible” ( 106 )
and “of Thought” with “to Thought” ( 107 ).
What is Literature? 257