by Susan Sontag
As I have said, the only work of Sartre’s comparable to Saint Genet is the dazzling essay on Baudelaire. Baudelaire is analyzed as a man in revolt whose life is continually lived in bad faith. His freedom is not creative, rebellious though it may have been, because it never finds its own set of values. Throughout his life the profligate Baudelaire needed bourgeois morality to condemn him. Genet is a true revolutionist. In Genet, freedom is won for freedom’s sake. Genet’s triumph, his “sanctity,” is that he broke through the social framework against unbelievable odds to found his own morality. Sartre shows us Genet making a lucid, coherent system out of le mal. Unlike Baudelaire, Genet is free of self-deception.
Saint Genet is a book about the dialectic of freedom, and is, formally at least, set in the Hegelian mold. What Sartre wants to show is how Genet, by means of action and reflection, has spent his whole life attaining the lucid free act. Cast from his birth in the role of the Other, the outcast, Genet chose himself. This original choice is asserted through three different metamorphoses—the criminal, the aesthete, the writer. Each one is necessary to fulfill freedom’s demand for a push beyond the self. Each new level of freedom carries with it a new knowledge of the self. Thus the whole discussion of Genet may be read as a dark travesty on Hegel’s analysis of the relations between self and other. Sartre speaks of the works of Genet as being, each one of them, small editions of The Phenomenology of Mind. Absurd as it sounds, Sartre is correct. But it is also true that all of Sartre’s writings as well are versions, editions, commentaries, satires on Hegel’s great book. This is the bizarre point of connection between Sartre and Genet; two more different human beings it would be hard to imagine.
In Genet, Sartre has found his ideal subject. To be sure, he has drowned in him. Nevertheless, Saint Genet is a marvellous book, full of truths about moral language and moral choice. (Take, as only one instance, the insight that “evil is the systematic substitution of the abstract for the concrete.”) And the analyses of Genet’s narratives and plays are consistently perceptive. On Genet’s most daring book, Funeral Rites, Sartre is particularly striking. And he is certainly capable of appraisal, as well as explication, as in the entirely just comment that “The style of Our Lady of the Flowers, which is a dream poem, a poem of futility, is very slightly marred by a kind of onanistic complacency. It does not have the spirited tone of the works that follow.” Sartre does say many foolish, superfluous things in Saint Genet. But everything true and interesting that can be said about Genet is in this book as well.
It is also a crucial book for the understanding of Sartre at his best. After Being and Nothingness, Sartre stood at the crossroads. He could move from philosophy and psychology to an ethics. Or he could move from philosophy and psychology to a politics, a theory of group action and history. As everyone knows, and many deplore, Sartre chose the second path; and the result is the Critique of Dialectical Reason, published in 1960. Saint Genet is his complex gesture in the direction he did not go.
Of all the philosophers in the Hegelian tradition (and I include Heidegger), Sartre is the man who has understood the dialectic between self and other in Hegel’s Phenomenology in the most interesting and usable fashion. But Sartre is not simply Hegel with knowledge of the flesh, any more than he deserves to be written off as a French disciple of Heidegger. Sartre’s great book, Being and Nothingness, is heavily indebted to the language and problems of Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger, to be sure. But it has a fundamentally different intention from theirs. Sartre’s work is not contemplative, but is moved by a great psychological urgency. His pre-war novel, Nausea, really supplies the key to all his work. Here is stated the fundamental problem of the assimilability of the world in its repulsive, slimy, vacuous, or obtrusively substantial thereness—the problem which moves all of Sartre’s writings. Being and Nothingness is an attempt to develop a language to cope with, to record the gestures of, a consciousness tormented by disgust. This disgust, this experience of the superfluity of things and of moral values, is simultaneously a psychological crisis and a metaphysical problem.
Sartre’s solution is nothing if not impertinent. Corresponding to the primitive rite of anthropophagy, the eating of human beings, is the philosophical rite of cosmophagy, the eating of the world. The hallmark of the philosophical tradition to which Sartre is heir starts with consciousness as the sole given. Sartre’s solution to the anguish of consciousness confronted by the brute reality of things is cosmophagy, the devouring of the world by consciousness. More exactly, consciousness is understood as both world-constituting and world-devouring. All relations—especially, in the most brilliant passages in Being and Nothingness, the erotic—are analyzed as gestures of consciousness, appropriations of the other in the interminable self-definition of the self.
In Being and Nothingness, Sartre reveals himself as a psychologist of the first rank—worthy to rank with Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Freud. And the focus of the Baudelaire essay is the analysis of Baudelaire’s work and biography, treated as texts equivalent from a symptomatic point of view, disclosing fundamental psychological gestures. What makes Saint Genet even more interesting than the Baudelaire essay (though, at the same time, more unmanageable as well) is that, through thinking about Genet, Sartre has gone beyond the notion of action as a mode of psychological self-conservation. Through Genet, Sartre has glimpsed something of the autonomy of the aesthetic. More exactly, he has redemonstrated the connection between the aesthetic dimension and freedom, rather differently argued by Kant. The artist who is the subject of Saint Genet is not psychologized away. Genet’s works are interpreted in terms of a saving ritual, a ceremony of consciousness. That this ceremony is essentially onanistic, is curiously apt. According to European philosophy since Descartes, world-creating has been the principal activity of consciousness. Now, a disciple of Descartes has interpreted world-creating as a form of world-procreating, as masturbation.
Sartre correctly describes Genet’s spiritually most ambitious book, Funeral Rites, as “a tremendous effort of transubstantiation.” Genet relates how he transformed the whole world into the corpse of his dead lover, Jean Decarnin, and this young corpse into his own penis. “The Marquis de Sade dreamt of extinguishing the fires of Etna with his sperm,” Sartre observes. “Genet’s arrogant madness goes further: he jerks off the Universe.” Jerking off the universe is perhaps what all philosophy, all abstract thought is about: an intense, and not very sociable pleasure, which has to be repeated again and again. It is a rather good description, anyway, of Sartre’s own phenomenology of consciousness. And, certainly, it is a perfectly fair description of what Genet is about.
[1963]
Nathalie Sarraute and the novel
A NEW mode of didacticism has conquered the arts, is indeed the “modern” element in art. Its central dogma is the idea that art must evolve. Its result is the work whose main intention is to advance the history of the genre, to break ground in matters of technique. The paramilitary imagery of avant-garde and arrière-garde perfectly expresses the new didacticism. Art is the army by which human sensibility advances implacably into the future, with the aid of ever newer and more formidable techniques. This mainly negative relation of individual talent to tradition, which gives rise to the rapid and built-in obsolescence of each new item of technique, and each new use of materials, has vanquished the conception of art as giving familiar pleasure, and produced a body of work which is principally didactic and admonitory. As everyone knows by now, the point of Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase” is not so much to represent anything, much less a nude, descending a staircase, as to teach a lesson on how natural forms may be broken into a series of kinetic planes. The point of the prose works of Stein and Beckett is to show how diction, punctuation, syntax, and narrative order can be recast to express continuous impersonal states of consciousness. The point of the music of Webern and Boulez is to show how, for example, the rhythmical function of silence and the structural role of tone colors can be developed.
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nbsp; The victory of the modern didacticism has been most complete in music and painting, where the most respected works are those which give little pleasure on first hearing and seeing (except to a small and highly trained audience) but make important advances in the technical revolutions which have taken place in these arts. Compared with music and painting, the novel, like the cinema, lags well to the rear of the battlefield. A body of “difficult” novels comparable to Abstract Expressionist painting and musique concrète has not overrun the territory of critically respectable fiction. On the contrary, most of the novel’s few brave ventures to the front line of modernism get marooned there. After a few years they seem merely idiosyncratic, for no troops follow the brave CO and back him up. Novels which, in the order of difficulty and of merit, are comparable to the music of Gian-Carlo Menotti and the painting of Bernard Buffet, are garnished with the highest critical acclaim. The ease of access and lack of rigor that causes embarrassment in music and painting are no embarrassment in the novel, which remains intransigently arrière-garde.
Yet, middle-class art form or no, there is no genre in greater need of sustained reexamination and renovation. The novel is (along with opera) the archetypal art form of the 19th century, perfectly expressing that period’s wholly mundane conception of reality, its lack of really ambitious spirituality, its discovery of the “interesting” (that is, of the commonplace, the inessential, the accidental, the minute, the transient), its affirmation of what E. M. Cioran calls “destiny in lower case.” The novel, as all the critics who praise it never tire of reminding us and upbraiding contemporary writers who deviate, is about man-in-society; it brings alive a chunk of the world and sets its “characters” within that world. Of course, one can treat the novel as the successor to the epic and the picaresque tale. But everyone knows that this inheritance is superficial. What animates the novel is something wholly missing from these older narrative forms: the discovery of psychology, the transposition of motives into “experiences.” This passion for the documentation of “experience,” for facts, made the novel the most open of all art forms. Every art form works with some implicit standard of what is elevated and what is vulgar—except the novel. It could accommodate any level of language, any plot, any ideas, any information. And this, of course, was its eventual undoing as a serious art form. Sooner or later discriminating readers could no longer be expected to become interested in one more leisurely “story,” in half a dozen more private lives laid open for their inspection. (They found the movies doing this, with more freedom and with more vigor.) While music and the plastic arts and poetry painfully dug themselves out of the inadequate dogmas of 19th century “realism,” by a passionate commitment to the idea of progress in art and a hectic quest for new idioms and new materials, the novel has proved unable to assimilate whatever of genuine quality and spiritual ambition has been performed in its name in the 20th century. It has sunk to the level of an art form deeply, if not irrevocably, compromised by philistinism.
When one thinks of giants like Proust, Joyce, the Gide of Lafcadio, Kafka, the Hesse of Steppenwolf, Genet, or lesser but nonetheless masterly writers such as Machado de Assis, Svevo Woolf, Stein, the early Nathanael West, Céline, Nabokov, the early Pasternak, the Djuna Barnes of Nightwood, Beckett (to mention only some), one thinks of writers who close off rather than inaugurate, who cannot be learned from, so much as imitated, and whom one imitates at the peril of merely repeating what they have done. One hesitates to blame or praise critics for anything that happens in an art form, whether for good or bad. Yet it is hard not to conclude that what the novel has lacked, and what it must have if it is to continue as a generally (as opposed to sporadically) serious art form, is any sustained distance from its 19th century premises. (The great flowering of literary criticism in England and America in the last thirty years, which began with the criticism of poetry and then passed on to the novel, precisely does not contain such a reevaluation. It is a philosophically naïve criticism, unquestioning and uncritical of the prestige of “realism.”)
This coming-of-age of the novel will entail a commitment to all sorts of questionable notions, like the idea of “progress” in the arts and the defiantly aggressive ideology expressed in the metaphor of the avant-garde. It will restrict the novel’s audience because it will demand accepting new pleasures—such as the pleasure of solving a problem—to be gotten from prose fiction and learning how to get them. (It may mean, for example, that we shall have to read aloud as well as with the eye, and it will certainly mean that we must expect to read a novel a number of times to understand it fully or to feel ourselves competent to judge it. We have already accepted this idea of repeated looking or hearing or reading with serious contemporary poetry, painting, sculpture, and music.) And it will make self-conscious aestheticians, didactic explorers, of all who wish seriously to practice the form. (All “modern” artists are aestheticians.) This surrender of the novel’s commitment to facileness, to easy availability and the perpetuation of an outmoded aesthetic, will undoubtedly give rise to a great many boring and pretentious books; and one may well come to wish the old unselfconsciousness back again. But the price must be paid. Readers must be made to see, by a new generation of critics who may well have to force this ungainly period of the novel down their throats by all sorts of seductive and partly fraudulent rhetoric, the necessity of this move. And the sooner the better.
For until we have a continuous serious “modern” tradition of the novel, venturesome novelists will work in a vacuum. (Whether critics will decide not to call these prose fictions novels any more doesn’t matter. Nomenclature has not proved an obstacle in painting or music or poetry, although it has in sculpture, so that we now tend to drop that word in favor of words like “construction” and “assemblage.”) We shall continue to have monstrous hulks, like abandoned tanks, lying about the landscape. An example, perhaps the greatest example, is Finnegans Wake—still largely unread and unreadable, left to the care of academic exegetes who may decipher the book for us, but cannot tell us why it should be read or what we can learn from it. That Joyce expected his readers to devote their whole lives to his book may seem an outrageous demand; but it is a logical one, considering the singularity of his work. And the fate of Joyce’s last book presages the obtuse reception of a number of its less mammoth but equally plotless successors in English—the books of Stein, Beckett, and Burroughs come to mind. No wonder these stand out, as stark isolated forays, on an eerily pacified battleground.
Lately, however, the situation appears to be changing. A whole school—should I say a battalion?—of important and challenging novels is being produced in France. There are actually two waves here. The earlier was led by Maurice Blanchot, Georges Bataille, and Pierre Klossowski; most of these books were written in the 1940s and are as yet untranslated into English. Better known, and mostly translated, are a “second wave” of books written in the 1950s, by (among others) Michel Butor, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, and Nathalie Sarraute. All these writers—and they differ greatly from each other, in intention and achievement—have this in common: they reject the idea of the “novel” whose task is to tell a story and delineate characters according to the conventions of 19th century realism, and all they abjure is summed up in the notion of “psychology.” Whether they try to transcend psychology by Heidegger’s phenomenology (a powerful influence) or undercut it by behavioristic, external description, the results are at least negatively similar, and constitute the first body of work on the form of the novel which gives promise of telling us something useful about the new forms which fiction may take.
But perhaps the more valuable achievement to come out of France for the novel has been a whole body of criticism inspired by the new novelists (and, in some cases, written by them) which amounts to a most impressive attempt to think systematically about the genre. This criticism—I am thinking of essays by Maurice Blanchot, Roland Barthes, E. M. Cioran, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor, Michel Foucault, an
d others—is, by far, the most interesting literary criticism today. And nothing prevents novelists in the English-speaking world from drawing sustenance from the brilliant reexamination of the premises of the novel expounded by these critics, but doing work in the novel very different from that of the French novelists. The reason these essays may prove more valuable than the novels is that they propose standards that are ampler and more ambitious than anything yet achieved by any writer. (Robbe-Grillet, for example, admits that his novels are inadequate illustrations of the diagnoses and recommendations put forth in his essays.)
This is, to me, the importance of the appearance in English of The Age of Suspicion, a collection of Nathalie Sarraute’s essays in which, ostensibly, the theory behind her novels is fully set forth.11 Whether or not one enjoys or admires Sarraute’s novels (I really like only Portrait of a Man Unknown and The Planetarium), whether or not she really practices what she preaches (in a crucial respect, I think she does not), the essays broach a number of criticisms of the traditional novel which seem to me a good beginning for the theoretical reconsideration long overdue on this side of the Atlantic.