Throughout the twentieth century, very many books and films have looked to Existentialism for inspiration and for a guiding philosophy. From Camus to the Coen brothers, story-tellers have exploited such Existentialist ideas as the freedom of the individual in an Godless, amoral universe, and the essential meaninglessness of the world. Existentialism lends itself very well to gangster films and crime novels, to satires and black comedies. The irony is that, while Existentialism proclaims itself a metaphysical theory, it exists more in fiction than in real life. Existentialism only applies to fictional people, not to real ones. This is what makes it so interesting.
It would be easy to create a theory of Existentialist literature; it has already been done. Existentialist literature has its dogma, which is well understood. What is more complicated is to create an Existentialist theory of literature.
To see if this is possible, I have been reading Satre’s “What Is Literature?”. Jean-Paul Sartre was, more than anyone else, the inventor of Existentialism and so can be considered a good guide in this area. Let me say straight off, that I read this book so that you don’t have to. Its last chapter, in particular, maunders terribly. Moreover, the book commits the cardinal sin of confusing the descriptive with the normative – that is, it confuses the question “What Is Literature?” with the question “What Should Literature Be?” This is hardly surprising: Satre was a Marxist who believed that writers should be politically engaged, committed to the cause of attacking oppression and furthering human freedom. For Satre, to write is to act and the aim of this act is to change the world.
(In fact, a confusion between the descriptive and the normative can be found in much literary theory, and the reason for this is deeper than first appears. Literature produces aesthetic pleasure. Therefore, shouldn’t the best literature be the sort that produces the most pleasure? And if we enjoy literature more if it presents a political viewpoint with which we agree, shouldn’t the politics of a work be one of its aesthetic qualities? These questions must be answered in the affirmative. But we need to ensure that the literary theory we create on these grounds is not simply an iteration of the author’s own particular prejudices. The way to resolve this dilemma is to consider not only what the author enjoys but what other readers enjoy,)
The part of “What is Literature?” that is most relevant to this blog is the second chapter, “Why Write?” I shall try to summarise the argument.
The author of a literary work encounters, in his own work, only his own subjectivity- that is, he finds only what he has himself put in there. This means, oddly enough, that he cannot take aesthetic pleasure in it. The work exists as an object only for the reader, and only when it is read:
“Reading seems, in fact, to be the synthesis of perception and creation….In short reading is directed creation.”
Because the work is created by the reader in the process of reading, the writer must make “an appeal” to the reader. He must implicity ask of the reader to “lead into objective existence the revelation which I have undertaken by means of language”. The reader cannot be forced; he must be free, free to make “a perpetually renewed choice to believe”. Reading “is a free dream.”
The freedom of the reader to ‘reveal’ the literary work differs from his freedom to observe and thus ‘reveal’ the objective, natural world. The world throws things together randomly; the author does not. When reading, “a gentle force accompanies us and supports us from the first page to the last… Thus, reading is a pact of generosity between author and reader”. This leads to the heart of Satre’s literary theory: aesthetic delight. Aesthetic delight has its origin in the reader’s recognition of his own freedom, “not as pure autonomy but as creative activity… a creation wherein the created object is given as object to its creator”. This recognition is accompanied by the knowledge that he is essential to the object, in that he has created it. The world is given to the reader as a “task” to accomplish, in a contract between two freedoms.
So far, I like Sartre’s analysis. It is the last part of Satre’s argument with which I disagree. In this final step, Satre associates the freedom of reader and writer with responsibility:
“As for me who read, if I create and keep alive an unjust world, I cannot help making myself responsible for it.”
Sartre argues that a literary work “can be defined as an imaginary presentation of the world insofar as it demands human freedom”. These quotes show that, in the final analysis, literature concerns itself with the world. Readers of my previous instalment will be aware that I have an issue with the term ‘world’ as used in this way: alert readers will also have spotted that Satre himself is ambiguous. How can a literary presentation be at once of the (social, political) world and also be “imaginary”?
What I would like to do now is to creatively misread Satre. For Satre, freedom entails responsibility: we are free to act however we can but must then bear responsibility for our actions. In opposition to this, I would argue that reading is precisely a freedom FROM responsibility. To read is to vicariously effect actions that we would not and, in fact, could not carry out in reality. Reading is a form of make-believe. In this perspective, the freedom of the reader is most fully realized when reading fantastical fiction, such as science fiction and comic books, even though these works have only a tenuous connection with the reader’s material situation. By ‘creating’ Worlds that are quite distinct from the reader’s real World, the reader is able to exercise total freedom.
I shall discuss make-believe more fully later in the next instalment.