“What
aspect of the world do you want to disclose? What change do you want to bring
into the world by this disclosure?.”
Jean-Paul Sartre, a French
existentialist philosopher, novelist and playwright, challenges us, the
writers, to formulate some questions: ‘What is writing?’ ‘Why write?’ ‘For whom
does one write?’ and ultimately ‘What is literature?’
“The
writer can guide you and, if he describes a hovel, make it seem the symbol of
social injustice and provoke your indignation. The painter is mute. He presents
you with a hovel, that’s all. You are free to see in it what you like.”
“One
might think that he [a poet] is composing a sentence, but this is only what it
appears to be. He is creating an object. The words-things are grouped by
magical associations of fitness and incongruity, like colors and sounds. They
attract, repel, and ‘burn’ one another, and their association composes the
veritable poetic unity which is the phrase-object.”
Even
if the poet is forbidden to engage himself, what do the writer of prose and the
poet have in common?
“It
is true that the prosewriter and the poet both write. But there’s nothing in
common between these two acts of writing except the movement of the hand which
traces the letters.”
“Prose
is, in essence, utilitarian. I would readily define the prose-writer as a man
who makes use of words. The writer is a speaker; he designates, demonstrates,
orders, refuses, interpolates, begs, insults, persuades, insinuates. If he does
so without any effect, he has not therefore become a poet; he is a writer who
is talking and saying nothing.”
“One
is not a writer for having chosen to say certain things, but for having chosen
to say them in a certain way.”
Why
write? Each writer has his own reasons.
“For
one, art is a flight; for another, a means of conquering. But one can flee into
a hermitage, into madness, into death. One can conquer by arms. Why does it
have to be writing, why does one have to manage his escapes and conquests by
writing?”
“One
of the chief motives of artistic creation is certainly the need of feeling that
we are essential in relationship to the world. If I fix on canvas or in writing
a certain aspect of the fields or the sea or a look on someone’s face which I
have disclosed, I am conscious of having produced them by condensing
relationships, by introducing order where there was none, by imposing the unity
of mind on the diversity of things. That is, I feel myself essential in relation to my creation.”
For
whom does one write? The ideal of writing for the universal reader.
“As
a matter of fact, the writer knows that he speaks for freedoms which are
swallowed up, masked, and unavailable; and his own freedom is not so pure; he
has to clean it. It is dangerously easy to speak too readily about eternal
values; eternal values are very, very fleshless.”
“I
shall say that a writer is engaged when he tries to achieve the most lucid and
the most complete consciousness of being embarked, that is, when he causes the
engagement of immediate spontaneity to advance, for himself and others, to the
reflective. The writer is, par excellence, a mediator and his engagement is
mediation.”
*****
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Deconstructing INFATUATION
by Merce Cardus
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a thought-provoking novel about infatuation.
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