by Iris Murdoch
The Surrealists proclaimed themselves followers of Rimbaud, opponents of Mallarmé. They rejected the intellectual fight with language, the attempt to outwit it and withdraw it from life, or to batter the sense out of it; they were rather for the swooning surrender to words which would carry them to subterranean caverns of encrusted opulence. Rimbaud, moreover, was idolized for another reason; because he had passed through art into life, because in the end he had rejected speech, because he had lived his destiny intensely. That long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens which Rimbaud had said to be the poet’s task—a discipline which was to make of him le grand malade, le grand criminel, le grand maudit—et le supreme savant—was embraced by the Surrealists as a universal programme of action. This revolutionary activity could not, however, remain easily upon the plane of personal salvation. ‘the Surrealists soon found that they were fellow-travellers, and ready to assimilate the more romantic aspect of Marxism.3 The Moroccan war of 1925 even precipitated many of them into the Party.
The animating spirit of Surrealism, however, did not bend easily to Party discipline. Much as the Surrealists professed to despise literature, they still wished to regard it as a liberating force in its own right, and not as a tool of opportunist party tactics. Much as they hated bourgeois society, the revolution for which they yearned was a revolution of the spirit. The question could not long be delayed: is there such a thing as Surrealist literature? And though for a long time the official answer was negative, yet in fact Surrealist writers could not but become absorbed by the literary techniques which their head-on clash with language had suggested to them. The movement gradually disintegrated into two halves, one part moving on towards direct action by way of the Communist Party, the other part slipping back into literature. Language had won that particular battle; but it had been severely mauled in the process.
The impact of Surrealism upon the themes, technique, and language of the novel in France was immediate, and its effect lasting. Meanwhile, and independently, an impressionist technique had made its appearance in England. Confronted with the chaotic process of the modern world, incomprehensible and gathering speed, and if one can find no place in this process for oneself as actor, or for one’s language as instrument, one is after all at liberty to stand back and simply record the particulars as they swirl by, making out of them what wistful personal beauty one can. ‘Life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end’, wrote Virginia Woolf. ‘Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible?’ The flux whose grey undulations afflicted the hero of La Nausée with metaphysical torment is rose-coloured in Mrs. Woolf’s work, and her characters take to it as to a natural medium. The logical conclusion of this method is reached in the writings of James Joyce, where (Rimbaud’s form of the sickness) the referential nature of language almost gives way under the pressure of the flood of undiscriminated ‘reality’ demanding expression.
When they wearied of automatic writing the Surrealists went back, though with new skills, to firmer literary forms and steadier uses of language. Finnegans Wake reached the extremity alone. The novel moved into what has been called its post-impressionist phase.4 The impressionist painters tried to paint exactly what they saw, with very startling results. The post-impressionists, by dislocating the ‘appearances’ ever so slightly, and colouring them with some special mood of their own, produced something even stranger. (The Surrealists had already discovered how little contriving is required to make some everyday object look grotesque, to turn the photograph into a nightmare.) The novelist went beyond the impressionistic ‘realism’ of Mrs. Woolf towards a mood of intellectual play, manipulating ideas, spinning fantasies, and experimenting more light-heartedly with language. Cleverness, brilliance, were now the novelist’s attributes. The traditional form of the novel was left, on the whole, to writers of lesser talent, who purveyed, in answer to public demand, easy literature of a faintly ideological kind.
This is the situation of language and literature which Sartre is not alone in deploring. An English critic, D. S. Savage,5 sees it in terms of a moral failure and a crisis of value. ‘Art is speech, and speech is ultimately impossible where there is no absolute existential relation to truth.’ According to Savage, the novelists he studies deny this relation, in their various ways, and so move towards ‘the impossibility of speech’. Of Huxley’s early phase (the key to his later phase) Savage writes: ‘Unaware that meaning and purpose do not reside as objective facts in the world of things but are interior realities which wait for their realisation upon interior dynamic movement, oblivious to the truth that personality is not a substance with which we are endowed by nature, but an inward integration which may be achieved only by the decisive choice of oneself, he arbitrarily attributes his own purposelessness to the universe as a whole’ (p. 137). And in discussing Joyce: ‘Language is not isolate, is not magical. It is the vehicle of communication, and is related intrinsically to meaning, and through meaning to truth—which is a transcendent value. Language is healthy when it is related directly to meaning, and it can be so related only when the mind itself aspires vertically to truth as an absolute centre’ (p. 193).
That meaning and purpose do not reside as objective facts in the world of things was something of which, in fact, people were becoming obscurely conscious. (‘In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value.’ Wittgenstein: Tractatus 6.41.) There were a variety of reactions, however, to this breaking of the social and moral fabric. When purposes and values are knit comfortably into the great and small practical activities of life, thought and emotion move together. When this is no longer so, when action involves choosing between worlds, not moving in a world, loving and valuing, which were once the rhythm of our lives, become problems. Emotions which were the aura of what we treasured, when what we treasured was what we unreflectively did, now glow feverishly like distant feux follets, or have the imminent glare of a volcanic threat. The attempt to go on making a total sense of the social and political world, as well as acting in it, demanded a new conception of value which connected it with the character and affirmation of the agent.
Those who were deeply concerned with practice on the scale and in the kind which demanded such an interpretation, those thinkers who were committed in a political or religious sense, made the search for truth in action the reconciling and central feature of their philosophies. Such were thinkers of a Marxist or existentialist type. Those who were less concerned, for one reason or another, with ideological activity, with reflexion upon the choice between different worlds, were readier to accept the divided scene at its face value and to take a more dualistic view. Phenomena were divided into the real and the unreal; it was the task of thought to express or mirror the real, and in this passive mirroring or spontaneous expression truth consisted; not in the dynamic picking and choosing, discriminating and evaluating of practical life.
The linguistic philosophers (in their early phase) took as real the facts of science and everyday life; they regarded as unreal the world of art, politics and religion, emotion, fantasy and dream. Value, failing to be in the world, was a sort of exclamation. Truth was correspondence with fact, was the sensibly verifiable. Interpretation of human conduct was left to behaviouristic psychologists. This was followed by a more sophisticated and self-consciously anti-dualistic phase, wherein language came to be viewed, no longer as the mirror of the world, but as one human activity among others. Yet the dualism which this philosophy opposed was still a crude version of the mind-body dualism: the Cartesian dualism (thinking and extended substance) and not the Kantian dualism (empirical world and creative spirit). In spite of a more patient treatment of the logic of ethical statements the serious study of the latter dualism was left to the ‘committed’ philosophies of the continent
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The Surrealists went the other way; they took as real the passions and desires, the destructive rage of emotion that no longer lived with everyday values and purposes, the lurid figures of the unconscious. To the undiscriminated and unevaluated world of sense they preferred the equally undiscriminated and unevaluated world of dream. This was the ‘reality’ that concerned the writer, and not the ephemeral value of a ‘truth’ that was thought out in terms of historical action. The Surrealists were not really concerned with working out the details of a practical programme. They never came to terms with the world sufficiently to do so. Their revolution was the perpetual revolution of romanticism, the violent juxtaposition of the hated bourgeois ‘everyday life’ and the life of desire; a sounding clash rather than a serious struggle.
Characteristic of both the Surrealists and the linguistic philosophers was the readiness to resolve what seemed a harsh and hopeless dualism into a simple and static monism. This could be done by taking one aspect of life as its total and allowing the other aspects to appear simply as peripheral clouds. For both parties, then, mental activity lost its complexity and depth and appeared as a simple unitary operation: the everyday wielding of tool-like symbols, or the unreflective expression of the contents of the consciousness (it was not Professor Ayer but Tristan Tzara who first said: la pensée se fait dans la bouche), while the same rather despairing monistic attitude appears in literature as a readiness simply to record the flux of reality, or to become absorbed in sporting with language itself.
Sartre grew up under the shadow of Surrealism. It was probably in connexion with the Surrealist-Communist struggle that he first encountered the problem of the ‘liberating’ role of literature; can art liberate without being itself committed? Can it be committed without degenerating into propaganda? Sartre also inherits much of the spirit of Surrealism: he shares its ‘heroic’ and exhibitionist temper, its fanatic hatred of bourgeois society, its cherishing of that flame of intense experience which was to be not exactly hard and gem-like, but vigorous, lurid and sweeping. Sartre is infected too with a certain Trotskyist romanticism, the nostalgia for the perpetual revolution. Yet he wears all these with a difference. He is more of a rationalistic intellectual than a poet by nature, and his experience has sobered him politically. The rich over-abundance of reality, the phantasmagoria of ‘disordered’ sensation, seem to the author of La Nausée a horrifying rather than a releasing spectacle, a threat to the possibility of meaning and truth. The more surprising contents of the consciousness are to be interpreted as distorted versions of our deep intentions and not as independent symbols, and certainly not as strays from a subterranean region of supreme value and power. Sartre fears, not loves, this notion of a volcanic otherness within the personality.
On the other hand, he is able to see a certain negative value in the destructive power of Surrealism and the literature of the breakdown of sense. False certainties must be seen through before true ones can be framed; as moral literature destroys itself, metaphysical literature imposes itself. ‘Human life begins on the other side of despair.’ The crude dualistic scepticism of Principles of Literary Criticism and Language, Truth and Logic taught philosophers something essential, effected the break with the past; they were then able to move on from seeing language as mirror or exclamation to seeing it as an activity in the world among other activities in the world. But the scene of this activity is for the modern British empiricist an everyday one from which certain conflicts are excluded. The ‘world’ of The Concept of Mind is the world in which people play cricket, cook cakes, make simple decisions, remember their childhood and go to the circus, not the world in which they commit sins, fall in love, say prayers or join the Communist Party.
Sartre too wishes to conceive language neither as a vehicle for realistic reporting nor as an expression of the unsorted totality of the unconscious. Literature is not to be a reconciliation through appropriation, it is to be an activity going forward in a world where certain reconciliations are impossible and certain conflicts inevitable. The world in which Sartre sees language as active is the world of ideological battles, where morality is a function of self-conscious political and religious allegiances and not of a simple and unreflective social round. Sartre wants to put language to work in the context of the great questions of faith; here it is not to be either despised or idolised but used. Sartre’s observations are recommendations for the proper use of language rather than analyses of its actual use; and this differentiates him from the British linguistic philosophers. Yet he regards himself as nevertheless expressing an important truth about the human condition when he affirms that language is properly a medium of communication.
The hero of La Nausée saw language and the world as hopelessly divided from each other. ‘The word remains on my lips: it refuses to go and rest upon the thing.’ Language was an absurd structure of sounds and marks behind which lay an overflowing undiscriminated chaos: the word which pretended to classify the infinitely and unclassifiable existent, the political slogan or social label or moral tag which concealed the formless heaving mass of human consciousness and human history. Roquentin experiences in an intense and total form that vision of the world which makes men despair of language or else sport with it or even attempt to make it into a self-contained system and a stronghold against chaos. Roquentin himself inclines to a ‘literary’ solution of his dilemma. But what he is concerned to appropriate and stabilise by these means is simply the shape of his own life. Roquentin is not Sartre, or is perhaps an aspect of an immature Sartre. Roquentin’s political insight is of a destructive and negative kind. He is aware that words may conceal or justify violence and disorder; he seems unaware that despair of words or their too exclusive cultivation (‘pure literature’ as well as ‘the incommunicable’) may do so equally. Or rather it is that while he sees the absurdity of certain attempts to dominate chaos, he has no real faith in any salvation other than the tenuous personal one which he envisages at the close. What is treated in La Nausée as a metaphysical discovery is conceived by Sartre elsewhere as a malady with political causes and political remedies. The problem is to find a middle way (a third force) between the ossification of language and its descent into the senseless, between the bad faith of the salauds and spiritual chaos, between (to translate again) an acceptance of totalitarian standards (capitalist or communist) and political cynicism. Sartre, as we shall see, going beyond the situation of Roquentin and beyond his solution, wants to connect in a great equation literature, meaning, truth, and democracy.
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1 What is Literature? pp. 210–11. Quotations from What is Literature? are taken from Bernard Frechtman’s translation. All other translations quoted are my own.
2 I owe the neat model offered by this contrast to Miss Elizabeth Sewell’s book The Structure of Poetry. See too Jean Paulhan’s Les Fleurs de Tarbes, which also analyses two extreme tactics in the warfare with language.
3 ‘Transformer le rnonde’, a dit Marx, ‘changer la vie’, a dit Rimbaud, ces deux mots d’ordre pour nous n’en font qu’un—Breton.
4 I owe this extension of the comparison with painting to Professor Bullough. I am not sure if I am making exactly the same use of it.
5 The Withered Branch, a study of Hemingway, Forster, Woolf, Margiad Evans, Huxley and Joyce. See especially Savage’s remarks on Joyce’s ‘magical’ use of language.
IV
INTROSPECTION AND IMPERFECT SYMPATHY
Zola said that the novelist ‘must kill the hero’. He must do this because, according to Zola, his job is to show ‘the ordinary course of average lives’. Sartre too believes in killing ‘the hero’, in the sense of a magnified central figure who enjoys the author’s exclusive approval; but for different reasons, reasons connected not with the author’s subject-matter but with the author’s standpoint. He says: ‘No more characters; the heroes are freedoms caught in a trap like all of us.’ We can readily give a simple sense to this programme. Sartre is not going to portray for
us solid figures with vices and virtues painted upon them. He is going to show us people made transparent by an ambiguous radiance. To do this is not to show the world as futile or senseless, since a part of the picture is the urgent demand for sense. In other words, Sartre intends to exhibit his people as more or less reflective moral agents in a peculiarly distracted and uncertain context, and to concentrate upon the quality of their doubt or insincerity. What is the technique which is suited to such an intention?
Sartre says that the mode of self-awareness of the modern novelist is the internal monologue. This seems to be exact. The modern novelist is not usually telling us about events as if they were past and remembered; he is presenting them, through the consciousness of his people, as if they were happening now. The reader is poised, with the character presented, upon the brink of a future whose ‘openness’ the novelist is at pains to make him feel. This method has both its peculiar appropriateness to the present time (we are not now so anxious to regard minds as things which can be adequately described from outside, or from a distance), and also its peculiar difficulties. Sartre himself points out some of the difficulties when he says (L’Etre et le Néant, p. 416): ‘Character has no distinct existence except as an object of knowledge to other people. Consciousness does not know its own character—except in so far as it may consider itself reflectively from the point of view of another . . . This is why pure introspective description of oneself does not reveal a character: Proust’s hero “has” no character which can be grasped directly.’ This need not point to more than a technical problem for the novelist: the problem of how to work in a variety of outside views of each person, so that we may obtain an ‘objective’ picture.