Ep. 212: Sartre on Literature (Part One)

0:08 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 212 is what is literature? And we read the first two essays in the book by Jean-Paul Sartre, what is literature from 1948? For more information, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer enjoying the superiority of live dogs to dead lions in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:32 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:35 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey sitting with an attitude of generosity in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:40 Unknown speaker: Yay.

0:40 Mark: More Sartre?

0:41 Wes: Yeah, yeah.

0:43 Mark: Last time it was too fun. We had to do more of this. And I'm a little more at home in something that's just about literature and that's basically in the same space as, like Kant arguing about is art disinterested or not? Plus, Sartre is a great writer, of course.

0:57 Wes: Yeah, yeah.

0:58 Dylan: I've never read this much Sartre in my life.

1:00 Wes: I'd never actually heard of this book. Nor had I heard of Black Orpheus or Anti-Semite and Jew, though he is very prolific. Yeah.

1:07 Mark: It seems strange that people stop at his earlier stuff where I feel like the more that we read about his notions of interpretation and authenticity and things like that, the more that I actually like it, the more that it actually makes sense, the more that I can connect it to Nietzsche and other folks and it doesn't just sound painful.

1:25 Dylan: Well, he had this whole career just reading about his biography. After the war, he starts this journal and he self consciously lives the life of a public intellectual. This stuff is at the beginning of that, but that goes on for decades.

1:37 Mark: Right. Maybe he did become an enormous tool,

1:40 Dylan: but maybe he was an enormous tool the whole time. I don't know.

1:43 Mark: Not by this point.

1:45 Dylan: Prima facie. You just can't tell by what someone writes, what they're like. Actually, he could be a complete tool and be a great writer. That. That's been my experience on numerous occasions.

1:52 Mark: The personality of the writer as revealed by the writing.

1:56 Dylan: I think there is no possible reflection of the personality of the writer in their writing. That's not my experience.

2:02 Wes: Why don't I give the. I worked a long time on the first essay. I think it probably makes sense to do them one at a time. The book, what Is Literature? Right. It was published in 1948. It was originally a collection of essays that were published in separate journals. And he's responding to critics, people who said things like, you want to murder literature? The dispute is over. Whether literature can be political or, to use the word that's used in this translation, engaged. Sartre's critics claim that engagement basically ruins art. If you want to do politics, do politics, but otherwise stay away from it when you're trying to do art.

In the first essay, what is writing? He's basically going to both agree and disagree. He agrees with his critics when it comes to poetry, and he disagrees when it comes to prose. Poetry, it turns out, cannot be engaged, and prose must be engaged. Poetry cannot be engaged because instead of using words as signs and tools of communication the way you do in prose, poetry treats words as things. And this is something that will take a while to flesh out. But the upshot of that is poetry demands that we engage in a sort of aesthetic withdrawal that we've talked about with Kant.

And because of that, it can't be used to express the emotions of indignation and other things that we need to have in engaged political writing. It can represent them in a sense, it can symbolize them, but it can't express them. And that's what we need for engagement. Prose, on the other hand, must be engaged. It must be engaged because when we communicate with others, we are acting in the world. We are revealing things about the world or ourselves to others, and that inevitably changes things, inevitably changes other people. So we are, in a sense, political actors.

As soon as we begin to engage in prose communication and anything we do aesthetically is what he says, it's thrown into the bargain. In fact, if we get too aesthetic with our prose, we get distracted from its communicative function. So, and the last part of this, he just ends by critiquing his critics in ways that I think are sometimes hilarious. But he will say what they are actually looking for from literature is a message. Basically these timeless truths that can be abstracted from books to say something about their passive, unengaged, day to day suffering in the here and now.

And he's going to give us some detail about why that is. But that's the basic outline of the first essay, right?

4:31 Mark: He thinks that the folks that point to classic literature and say they were all about beauty and you should be all about beauty too, they're actually willfully misunderstanding what those past authors were doing. The past authors did actually have urgent concerns that they were trying to communicate, but because those concerns are not our concerns, we end up defanging them. We've done this plenty of times in the podcasts ourselves, where we say, when I think I introduced Sartre, maybe at the beginning of last Episode as what a great writer. You know, kind of a nutty guy.

And especially if you psychoanalyze which he really objects to the practice at the time of not taking the writer seriously and just saying, oh, you know, Rousseau only made those condemnations of the theater because he was such a grumpy guy. And so we can admire how Rousseau writes, but we don't actually take him seriously. He's not gonna convince us not to go to the theater. And he thinks that's just entirely typical of the way folks treat past art. The great books question of enjoyment of literature. We can talk about an interesting contrast between that and the way that we put that in our Allan Bloom and St.

John's episodes, where no actually classic literature is addressing live, perennial questions. Even though we're not concerned about the Peloponnesian War in particular or the particular things that were going on in Rousseau's time. There's something about the way they put it that's in fact advantageous about considering it that way, as opposed to just considering particulars of today's political movements. So one little disagreement I would have in his emphasis, he's talking about poetry, mostly to distinguish between poetry and prose. He is not a poet, obviously.

We know from Black Orpheus he was very enthusiastic about poetry. He published some poetry in his magazine there. He was very selective about, apparently. But I didn't see so strongly this idea that poetry can't be political. It seems to follow, maybe from what you said, Wesley, but he really is concerned to just distinguish the two, that poetry is concerned with the surfaces of things, with words themselves, with words as aesthetic objects, whereas prose is more like using language in the ordinary sense. You're actually trying to do something.

So the connections to performatives and J.L. Austin, that stuff was all coming to my mind. There's something very utilitarian about prose, even though obviously the style of prose does matter for it being good, persuasive prose.

6:53 Wes: But he says this actually directly on page 18. He says, One easily understands how foolish it would be to require a poetic engagement, doubtless emotion, even passion. And why not? Anger, social indignation and political hatred are at the origin of the poem, but they are not expressed there as in a pamphlet or confession. So insofar as the writer of prose exhibits feelings, he illustrates them, whereas if the poet injects his feelings into the poem, he ceases to recognize them and so on.

7:19 Dylan: So emotion has become thing.

7:22 Wes: Engaged writing requires us to express certain emotions like indignation. And poetry submerges those emotions into Symbols, basically imaginary objects. It could be like the yellow sky in such a way that they're not going to have that communicative force. We're not signifying indignation if we have a symbol of indignation in our poem or painting.

7:41 Dylan: No, I think that's right. On interpretation, there's an interesting discussion to have, which I expect that we will. What that difference is between a thing and the interpretation of a thing. Right. Sartre is making a really big distinction between an object and an object as a sign, an interpretation of an object. That's a live discussion about whether or not you engage with objects directly at all, or whether you're always engaging with signs. And at some level the interpretation of those objects, even if they're poetical objects or prose objects.

And so there's a way in which the distinction that he's talking about gets fuzzy at the edges. And also, if I think about a poem as presenting the sky like a painting does, so it requires interpretation versus some kind of prose that is describing or convincing you about an emotion or about the sky or any of those things. Walking through those two things and how they're different, they collapse a little bit. After a while, they get closer.

8:43 Wes: He starts out very early on with that point, Dylan, which one we're used to, right? Which is that sense data are themselves theory laden, or to use his phrase, penetrated with signification. But the problem is, this is why I use the word symbol. Because if I'm talking about anguish, there's the word anguish, and it signifies the thing I'm talking about. And it could be the anguish of Christ on the cross, for instance, an example that he's using. I'm hardly even conscious of the word itself, of its sound, of its form, to use his analogy, like a window.

And I just go straight out through the window to the thing that I'm talking about. But if I have painted something. So he refers to Tintoretto's painting of Christ on the Cross, where there's part of the sky has a yellow tint. And we could take that as symbolizing anguish. That symbol may point to anguish in some sense, but it also is what it is. So it's yellow sky. And the way Sartre talks about this is that the anguish is submerged into that imaginary object, the yellow sky. It becomes opaque like the object. Instead of that yellow sky being a window that we can use to talk about anguish, the thing that's doing the symbolizing is in the foreground.

And what's being symbolized is in the background. The Thing we're immediately paying attention to is that yellow sky. And we just get this anguish, what he calls anguish become thing.

10:09 Dylan: Part of that is that in it as a thing, it has a richness as a thing that goes beyond it being a sign for anguish. As he points out, it's also a yellow sky. Right.

10:22 Wes: The word anguish, it's not really part of the presentation. It's used as a tool, like he said. The yellow sky isn't just a tool. It is what it is. It's the object of aesthetic contemplation.

10:34 Dylan: It makes you think of words that in their sound or in their shape, evoke the thing that they're talking about. Right. So that they have that kind of embodiment. He doesn't talk about that.

10:45 Wes: That would be the purest. Yeah, yeah. I think he rightly starts by talking about the painting because it's much easier to see than when you start talking about poetry. But the poetry version of this is just using words metaphorically. It's just to be talking about a yellow sky in the poem and to be meaning something else. So maybe if we read page 17, just give a taste of how he's writing about that. Tintoretto did not choose that yellow rift in the sky above Golgotha to signify anguish or to provoke it. It is anguish and yellow sky at the same time.

Not sky of anguish or anguish sky. It is an anguish become thing, an anguish which has turned into yellow rift of sky and which thereby is submerged and impasted by the proper qualities of things, by their impermeability, their extension, their blind permanence, their externality, and that infinity of relations which they maintain with other things. That is, it is no longer readable.

11:43 Mark: Okay. As you said on page eight, notes, colors and forms are not signed. They refer to nothing exterior to themselves. There's no abstraction like pure sound. All perception is shot through with signification. But he says there is a dim meaning which dwells within a pure sound, a light joy, a timid sadness. It remains imminent or trembles about it like a heat mist. It is color or sound. He's trying to give a phenomenological account of what the connotation of a thing is, as opposed to. If you use a word to refer to something, use it in the normal sense.

You're not concerned with what word you use. In fact, you might forget later what words were used. You just remember the ideas that were conveyed. But if you're presenting words or other elements like that, there's a sense in which they have A meaning blue feels cool or something like that. But he just wants to say that that's a totally different way of having a meaning. It's a dim little meaning.

12:38 Dylan: Music is a nice analogy here, right. Is that the piece might have been intended to have a meaning in terms of the emotions that it's evoking or whatever. And same thing with a painting too. But the nice thing about music is that it's still a series of notes and a series of notes and spaces between the notes and strength of the tone of playing and all that. That makes it a piece that is, in my experience, completely separate or uninterpretable in terms of its meaning as a sign.

13:09 Wes: This heat mist part. Right. He's trying to give an example of a way in which there's no quality of sensation so bare that it is not penetrated with signification. So even before we start using paintings or poems to make these things symbols, we could say they have their own proto symbology. When I use symbol, I'm using that in contrast to signification. Right. When we signify, we use the word to talk about something out in the world. When we symbolize, we do this thing with metaphor and poetry. Or the yellow sky and the Tintoretto

13:41 Dylan: painting, in the way he's talking about it. When you say signify, that's the fundamental function of prose and symbolization is, for lack of a better term, a prose like function of poetry.

13:54 Wes: Well, I wouldn't call it prose like, because what I'm referring to is that

13:57 Dylan: is the objectness of it.

13:59 Wes: Yeah. If yellow sky symbolizes anguish, anguish is submerged in yellow sky.

14:04 Dylan: So he gives this example in that section right at the beginning, after the timid sadness and the heat mist. Who can distinguish the green apple from its tart gaiety? Aren't we already saying too much in naming the tart gaiety of the green apple? There is green, there is red, and that is all there are things. They exist by themselves.

14:24 Mark: It is true that one might, by convention, convert the value of signs upon them. But if we do that, then we're not paying attention to the thing anymore.

14:31 Dylan: Yeah. So if you start always saying green apple, when what you mean is tart gaiety, then you've submerged that into green apple. It's now a sign you're using prose now you're not speaking of an object anymore.

14:45 Wes: Yeah, that's a case. When you start making roses signify things, that's a case in which you do try to use them as signifiers so that you're not Even thinking about the roses and the attention cuts through. But the artist stops at form. The artist is enchanted by form. The form isn't a throwaway like a prose word is, as he says, if

15:02 Dylan: after the agreement, right. Roses signify fidelity to me. The fact is that I have stopped seeing them as roses. They have to stay roses. They do stay roses when they're functioning as symbols or in poetry. And you cross that line when they stop being those objects and as are signs.

15:22 Mark: The way you're talking about it seems confusing because is it that the roses have to stay roses or that the word rose has to stay? What are we talking about here? Are we talking about roses or are we talking about roses as used as an image in a story?

15:33 Wes: I think we can be talking about either thing in that case. But what he's going to move on to say is that the one transformation that the artist does make is that he might take a rose and turn that into an imaginary object if he does a painting of it. So whether we're thinking about the object or the imaginary object in the painting, we conventionally assign significances to them, but that's not what the artist is doing.

15:58 Mark: Yeah, let's see what we think of that on page 10. He's talking about a house. The writer can guide you, and if he describes a hobble, 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're free to see in it what you like. That attic window will never be the symbol of misery. For that, it would have to be a sign, whereas it is a thing.

16:20 Wes: So if you don't present a hovel, you're in the realm of presenting a stereotype. But as a painter, your hands are kind of tied. So even if you're trying to do that sort of thing, what's on the painting, right, is a particular.

16:33 Dylan: The painter does not want to draw signs on his canvas. He wants to create a thing. Putting aside abstract art for a minute, right? He's created the hovel. That's what Sartre is saying that he's trying to do. He says in the previous paragraph to what we just read about the hovel. He's talking about music. He says a cry of grief is a sign of the grief which provokes it. But a song of grief is both grief itself and something other than grief. It is the embodiment of it rather than the sign of it.

17:01 Mark: So I think that's a more difficult case, actually. Just this Thing about representational art, this is deeply counterintuitive. We think if somebody draws a picture of a house, it's supposed to depict and represent. He doesn't use the word depict anywhere. Clearly, it doesn't merely represent a house. What about this? If somebody does, like a stick figure drawing of a person or a similarly simple version of a house that seems like a symbol for house, we're not invited by the stick figure drawings to immerse ourselves in. In the house picture object as something deep and transcendent.

17:36 Dylan: I don't think it has to be representational in that sense, like a Dutch painting from the 1600s. I don't see why it couldn't be a stick figure and be a person.

17:44 Wes: It's still a picturing relation, right?

17:46 Dylan: Yeah.

17:47 Wes: So it's not completely arbitrary the way a word is. And it's also maintaining a picturing function in the sense that it doesn't disappear like the word and simply get you to the thing that's being referred to. If you do a stick figure of a person, yeah. You might be evoking a lot of things. You might be evoking a more fleshed out person. You might be evoking any number of associations. And this is why I think it's important to keep the Tintoretto example in mind. Because he's not saying that you can't use yellow sky to in some sense, evoke or.

I'm going to use the word symbolize again, symbolize anguish. Even if you can't signify anguish in the way prose writer does. It's just that you get that submersion of anguish. So whatever you're doing, even with the hovel, I mean, the hovel could also. In the same way the yellow sky is evocative of anguish, the hovel could be evocative of poverty and naturally might be evocative of the anguish of poverty or something like that. But the point is, it doesn't simply signify that like a word does. It's submerged in the particular thing that is the immediate object of our perception.

18:54 Dylan: To Mark's point, it does seem weird, because anytime you make a painting, you're not actually building the hovel, right. You are making some kind of gesture towards it. A painting of a hovel isn't a hovel. It's evoking in some way. In that way, it's hard to not see it as a sign that points to a hovel.

19:14 Mark: I guess the question is, does it merely connote a hovel or. It seems like his distinction is between either connotation or representation, and there's nothing in between. And maybe that makes sense because he's going to be talking about words the rest of the time. And so he's really only bringing in painting here as a point of comparison to establish a few basic points. He's not actually giving us a thorough description of painting. If he was going to do that, he sure as hell better have some way to talk about depiction in a way that is not merely. I look at that and it is an object in itself, and it is inky and it is yellow, and then it has certain connotations. It makes me think of hovels, of little rundown houses out in the world. It is not merely an arbitrary connotation.

20:02 Wes: No, it's not connotation. He's not denying representation. He uses that word various places. So the painting of a hovel represents a.

20:11 Dylan: A hovel.

20:12 Wes: He calls it an imaginary object. Well, there's lots of layers to this, right? The imaginary object makes us think of something in the head. But suppose someone is standing with the easel. There's the hovel out there in the real world, and they've just painted it. Whatever you want to say about the painting, the relation of one to the other is picturing. That's not the relation of a signifier to a signified. Signifier to a signified is not a picturing relation. The word hovel does not stand for hovel. By virtue of any similarity, by virtue of any structural isomorphisms and the mark itself to the outside world.

There are lots of things going on in the painting. The parallel lines of the two sides of the hovel in the painting are isomorphic with the parallel lines of the hovel. Things like that. The picturing relation is completely different. And as a picture, it demands our attention in the way that sign doesn't. I think that's really the main point. We can't use pictures like a language. Although now I'm thinking of Egyptian hieroglyphs. But anyway, I think some of the

21:13 Mark: problem that I'm having here is I'm trying to get to exactly how strange Sartre's phenomenology of things in the world is, right when he's describing this on the bottom of page eight. For the artist, the color, the bouquet, the tinkling of the spoon, the saucer are things in the highest degree. He stops at the quality of the sound or the form. He returns to it constantly and is enchanted by it. It is this color object that he's going to transfer to his canvas and the only modification he will make it undergo is that he will transform it into an imaginary object.

He is therefore as far as can be from considering colors and signs as a language. Now, if you read that as what you just described, he's looking at a hovel, and he's going to transfer it to his canvas. He's actually not trying to transfer the hovel to his canvas. He's trying to transfer a visible form. And I think that's because his ontology is very much wrapped up with interpretation. Right. It's not that we're just walking around in a world of physical objects, that the power of human freedom, the content of our perception, is very much that we're in this blooming, buzzing confusion, the swirl of colors and things and whatever.

And it's our freedom, granted, fixed in a lot of sedimented habits, whether it's society or things about the human condition that would give us those habits of picking out this or that as a physical object, of picking out the hovel as a physical object. You know, the whole point of a novel like Nausea is that you could just look at an ordinary thing and suddenly not see it as an ordinary thing anymore, see it as monstrous, see it as this pulsating, just, you know, the fact that any physical object is transcendent is impermeable, that there's something about the.

That that is freaky. So naturally, if he has this freaky ontology where we're in the blooming, buzzing confusion and we sort of make objects out of it, but we're always at any danger, you know, this is the anguish of our freedom, of reinterpreting things in a radically different way. So that suddenly, you know, we're in a land of pulsating, disgusting, David Cronenberg land, something like that, then he's not going to have a normal account of artistic depiction where, oh, yes, this picture of a house represents the physical house in the world.

Especially when we're focusing on forms as we do in art, that's not actually the way perception works. We don't merely perceive it as house. And then the artist is going to put the house ness on the canvas. Like, the whole point of the artist is he stops thinking about the utilitarian, the way you would think of a house as a tool, as a thing. You could go in as a thing, you know, and starts to just contemplate the form.

23:49 Wes: That's interesting. I still think, though, for our purposes at this point, when he says something like the color object is being transferred to the canvas, it's helpful to think of a distinction between a picturing relation and a signifying relation. So this transformation into the imaginary object, whatever we want to do with the epistemology and ontology of all that, ultimately.

24:11 Mark: So you're right there contrasting the picturing and the signifying. I thought it was the referring and the signifying. Oh, you're sorry. Signifying is referring.

24:20 Wes: So the signifying would be when I talk about the hovel in prose. The picturing would be when I draw it or paint it. That's what I'm talking about as picturing. But yeah.

24:31 Mark: And picturing is form of symbolizing.

24:33 Dylan: Well, it can have symbolizing, but it's not intrinsically symbolizing. It's doing another function when it's symbolizing.

24:39 Wes: Symbolizing I'm thinking of as yellow sky, meaning anguish.

24:42 Dylan: Yeah. But the primary thing there is in that picturing relation is that it's a thing rather than a sign of a thing. I think that's one of the reasons why he spends so much time with painting is because it's easier to see this relationship in painting where, as we've been talking about the hovel, you have a. Whatever that painting is, it's particularized in this hovel or this stick figure or this object. In his account, it's all about those objects and whatever ways in which it works as symbols. Those are effectively prose relations when they're acting as signs.

25:21 Wes: Yeah. So again, I kind of feel bad now that I've introduced the word symbol.

25:25 Dylan: He uses the word sign to refer to prose all the time. The empire of signs is prose.

25:31 Wes: Symbol is my word, and it's not. Sartre isn't using it. When he does use it consistently in the way that I would want him to. I introduced that for myself, to keep this straight. But when I think of signification, I simply think of what we've talked about with prose. And then with symbolization, I'm thinking very specifically of bear represents my father. Or yellow sky symbolizes anguish, where it's not signifying anguish, it's symbolizing anguish. And those two are radically different. And to symbolize anguish means to be the anguish submerged in yellow sky thing.

26:09 Mark: Well, let's look back then to this melody thing that Dylan quoted. So this is the above the hovel part on page 10 below the Tintoretto part. Right. The signification of a melody, if one can still speak of signification, is nothing outside the melody itself. Unlike ideas, which can be adequately rendered in several ways, Call it joyous or somber, it will always be over and above anything you can say about it not because its passions, which are perhaps at the origin of the invented theme, have, by being incorporated into notes, undergone a transubstantiation and transmutation.

A cry of grief is a sign of the grief which provokes it. But a song of grief is both grief itself and something other than grief. So that's weird, right? Saying that a song is grief as opposed to symbolizes grief, as opposed to connotes grief in the hearer, or something like that. This is, again, I think, reflective of his underlying, really strange ontology.

27:06 Wes: You might be right, but I just think, more commonsensically, what he's trying to get us to is the. Again, the sense in which, instead of having the song, like the word grief, signify, be a window to the thing that it's signifying. It's a completely different thing than the way we would experience the grief of the song of grief.

27:25 Mark: But the cry of grief, which is the example he gives, is different than both of those. He's saying that a cry of grief is a sign of the grief that provokes it, which clearly that's not a sign in the way that Apple stands for Apple. It is a sign in the sense of an indication, an indication of a cause. But he's trying to contrast that with a song, as you don't actually have to be sad to sing a sad song. I'm not totally sure here.

27:50 Dylan: There's another word that he uses that he wants to align with prose, besides signify, which is in the line with his prose, being committed or engaged, which is the word provoke. So in the Tintoretto section, he says that the yellow rift in the sky is not chosen to signify anguish or to provoke it. It is anguish and yellow sky at the same time. And then he used the same word, provoke, in this case with grief. A cry of grief is the sign of the grief which provokes it. So that provoking and that signifying are, to him aligned. Whereas in the case of the song, that is an instantiation. It's an is, it's a thing which, as opposed to a consequence, something that's provoked or signed.

28:35 Wes: Unfortunately, this example does complicate things, because smoke is a sign of fire, footprints are a sign that someone has been walking by. That's the sense in which he's using sign here. It's a natural relation. And then signification is this conventional relation. So they are two very different things, except for the fact that when we're interpreting things as natural signs, we're not paying attention to the smoke, you know, in that moment. So anyway, I think this unnecessarily complicates things.

29:03 Dylan: He wants to maintain that causal relation, though it's complex, makes it complicated. I agree. But I think to Mark's point about the ontology being a little bit weird, he seems to be keying on the causality relation between them.

29:17 Mark: Well, when he's talking about signifying. But if he says then the sky is anguish and it is yellow sky at the same time, that's kind of what we have to decode. Why do we want to say that's a poetical relation.

29:29 Dylan: Right.

29:30 Mark: That the thing in poetry.

29:31 Wes: So we're talking about in poetry would be metaphor. Right? It would be metaphor. So we would say, my love is like a rose. Well, let's stick to yellow sky, then. So just think about it in a poem. So yellow sky, the phrase in the poem could be a metaphor for anguish. So what do you call it? Symbolization or metaphor? Yeah. So his way of saying it is anguish. That's kind of the way we treat it when we talk about metaphor. Right. We pretend that the metaphorical thing is the other thing and talk about it as if there's this identity.

30:01 Dylan: And he links it, saying that yellow sky and anguish at the same time. So he's arguing that as yellow sky, it's not sitting there and then signifying anguish, it is instantiating it.

30:14 Wes: And it's also not making me. This is the really interesting thing. Right. It's not making me feel anguish in the same way. This gets to the whole aesthetic contemplation component where we, with Kant, we talked about the apple. The. Our aesthetic contemplation of the apples. Not through the window of appetite, my wanting to eat the apple. It's something else. It's something formal. So it's really hard to get at. But it's an experience of almost like anguish from the outside, or anguish formalized or something like that. But it's not like the feeling of anguish has been evoked in me or given to me. And it's not like I've been made to understand through it that someone else is anguished, as I might in a prose.

30:57 Mark: Ultimately, I don't think we're going to be able to treat this with any thoroughness until we read what he has to say about the emotions. Because we're just seeing examples of a pattern he's already laid out in past works where the phenomenology is such that you don't say, like we say now, that emotions are just in your head when you're doing phenomenology you're describing. And you realize, again, we're not just these emotional creatures walking around in a cold world. He's much more comfortable actually attributing the emotions to things out there.

So an analytic philosopher might say, oh, the picture of the yellow sky. There's a dispositional quality that it has to bring about feelings of a connotation, not to feel anguish. You don't necessarily feel anguish looking at it, but you recognize that people have the disposition to call it anguish or something like that. And I think Sartre is just trying to avoid. He might see that as a desperate attempt to retain our basically dualist ontology. Right. Emotions, mental things are in the head. Physical things are in the world. Because of the power of our freedom of interpreting our surroundings.

Why not just say that the anguish is in the world? Again, like nausea. You're not saying, I feel nauseating. You're saying you. You're looking at the things in the world and saying, that is right now, to me, seeming like a big nauseating mess. It's in that sense that the yellow sky is anguish. It's not merely an indicator. So let's move through it. One more thing on that page right after the thing about the song being grief, he says, or if one wishes to adopt the existentialist vocabulary, it is a grief which does not exist anymore, which is. So I think this is actually important, you know, for what we're going to talk about reading.

And the critiques, Wes, that you're referring to, of focusing on past literature, dead things is because a live communication from somebody is something that exists.

33:02 Wes: Yeah. The existence is the subject.

33:04 Mark: Existence is defined by freedom, is defined by subjectivity. Those are basically the same thing. And so if somebody screams, then you could say that person is existing as in anguish, I think. Whereas if it is a recording of a scream or a scream channeled into a song, again, I'm kind of thinking of Herder, you know, as the original kind of song is the kind that is a scream. But once you codify that, and then we can all do the scream together, or we can listen to the scream every year on our birthday or whatever, the thing is becomes a product. It merely is. It becomes an opaque object.

33:46 Wes: So it's like it's thingified at that point. To say it's gone from existence to Is mean. It's gone from the subjective sense of anguish. It's been thingified, as in the yellow sky is a thing. I think we got through all of that initial painting stuff, and then we've

34:01 Dylan: decimated the first three pages.

34:04 Wes: Yeah. You will get into poetry and say that whether the prose writer deals with significations, poetry is like painting, and it doesn't even use words in the same sense as prose. It serves them, it dwells upon them. Yeah. Poets do not try to discern or expound the true or name the world. Poets use words as things, not as signs. So we want to think about words in terms of the same way we thought about Yellow sky in the painting. It's words being used like paint, in a sense.

34:39 Dylan: He's got all kinds of great sentences to characterize this. He says, for the poet, language is a structure of the external world. The poet is outside language. He sees in the word the image of one of these aspects, not knowing how to use words as a sign of an aspect of the world. He sees in the word the image of one of these aspects. He considers words as a trap to catch a fleeing reality, rather than as indicators which throw him out of himself into the midst of things. In short, all language is for him the mirror of the world.

35:14 Mark: Just to flesh this out a little bit, I just want to give one of the examples from a little later, page 18, where he says he's giving this poem, O seasons, O castles, what soul is faultless? And you might say, what does the author mean by that? Well, sounds like, what soul is faultless? Is a rhetorical question. To say that nobody is faultless. But he's saying, actually, no, nobody is questioning. The poet is absent, and the question involves no answer. Or rather, it is its own answer. Is it therefore a false question? But it would be absurd to believe that Rimbaud meant that.

Everyone has his faults, as somebody else said, if he had meant it, he would have said it. Nor did he mean to say anything else. He asked an absolute question. He conferred upon the beautiful word soul an interrogative existence. So what do you think of that? That you actually can't say, what did the author mean by that? Like that lines of poetry are given as things in themselves. Not like a piece of prose where you say, oh, an author wrote this. An author is trying to communicate something. What is the author trying to communicate in this? The words are not meant to communicate in that way.

They're just meant to exist in themselves, and you gaze upon them as you would a statue.

36:29 Wes: We should say, though, that when we talk about words, we're not just talking about the marks on the page or the sounds of the words. So that complicates the issue significantly in the same way that when we're talking about Tintoretto's painting, we're not just talking about, hey, there's paint on the canvas. We're talking about sky. So it's still words insofar as they have meanings. So if we use the phrase yellow sky in a poem, it's not just the utterance, not just the sounds and the forms of the words. The meaning of yellow sky is significant for the purpose of the poem.

It's just that, again, in the same way, it's not doing the signifying. It's not signifying the painting. It's not signifying in the poem either, in that same way, which is another way of saying it's being used metaphorically. And when we use. When we engage in metaphor, that's what we're doing. We're treating these images, these meanings, as if they were things.

37:28 Mark: The problem is metaphor is still fundamentally referential. And that. I know you said before, like, look, when he says the yellow sky is anguish, what he really means is that the yellow sky is a metaphor for anguish. But I'm not sure that he can do that, because, again, we're just saying it's a different sort of referring relation.

37:46 Wes: Like, I don't see metaphor as a referring relation.

37:50 Mark: It points to something outside itself.

37:52 Dylan: Yeah, but I don't think he means it to be metaphor. At least, maybe that's what he should say. But in this, just like in the case with Tintoretto, where he's insisting that there's an existence here, he lines this up, this set of lines from Rimbaud.

38:07 Wes: Yeah. This example I don't think is metaphor, but I think this example is much more complicated. That's the problem.

38:12 Dylan: But he says that he asked an absolute question. He conferred upon the word âme an interrogative existence. The interrogation has become a thing. As the anguish of Tintoretto became a yellow sky, it is no longer a meaning, but a substance. So he means something pretty strong here. I mean, regardless of whether we. Whether we agree with him, he means this thingyness about what a painting is and also how a poem is functioning.

38:41 Mark: You're just the man who brings in the different translation every time. It's always instructive. I'm not objecting. You know, you just said it's no longer a meaning, but a substance. My version says it is no longer a signification, but a substance. So you can see why those might be used interchangeably. But given how much trouble we've had in nailing down signify versus symbolize versus depict and these other Words, most of which he doesn't use. It's some interesting extra wrinkles.

39:10 Wes: Yeah, it's a problem. I do think that we're ultimately, just for listener's sake, we're talking about figurative use of language versus literal use, ultimately. I think so his way of putting it. I think it's very good at getting at what we're doing when we use figurative language. This idea, you know, of calling it a substance, calling it a thing. And maybe there is something stronger than that there. Dylan.

39:33 Dylan: We're struggling to articulate it as an interpretation of poetry, which, on the one hand it is. But I think it's probably worth reminding ourselves that it's, I think, in the end, for the sake of understanding prose. And I think the point he wants to most make is that prose is about provoking and signifying and has a particular relationship to freedom and stuff like that. That this whole thing is an interpretation to distinguish poetry from prose. But his eye is on prose. It's not on poetry.

40:05 Mark: That is definitely a good point in terms of not being discouraged by this part of this. I still feel like he dwells on it enough and it's interesting enough that what we're doing here is not useless.

40:16 Dylan: No, I. I in no way think it's useless. In fact, I am happy to stay on it. I just. I guess one thing we keep saying, Wes has said it a few times, is that he brings up things that, on the one hand, seem clear, but then are immediately very complicated. And even his examples are very complicated, and his explanation ends up being complicated. So that makes it interesting and rich. But it also. It seems a very provocative way to talk about poetry, to really put it into that box of being about existence and about things. And picturing it seems to be not quite the whole story.

And one indicator of that is just the way in which words act as signs. Anyway, like what Wes was just saying. Well, you have to remember that it's not just like this ink on the page. The words aren't like paintings. It's not like a painting on the page. They actually. They can't be separated from their meaning, but it has to be their meaning in a particular way.

41:19 Wes: This is why the figurative idea helps. So the idea of figurativeness is where things, where words become paintings. So when we're using metaphors, we're using words as if they were paint.

41:30 Mark: Well, actually, when Wes mentioned that it's not actually marks on the page, I'm not sure if Sartre can say that. Like, he seems very bent on ee.

41:38 Dylan: Cummings would Disagree.

41:39 Wes: Right.

41:40 Mark: Yeah. Well, so he's very bent on distinguishing different things by the experience we have of them. So, for instance, you know, the way we use poetry, if you're reading poetry on a page or someone is saying those very same words out loud to

41:53 Wes: you, if they're marks on the page, they're not readable. If they're just marks on the page, first of all, they're no more readable than my window blinds are readable. So you can't read a poem that's just marks on the page.

42:04 Mark: I guess the question is, though, is the work of art necessarily. Does it include. If you're going to ontologize, if you're going to thingize and say, we're not seeing through the words, we're looking at the words themselves. You have to be looking at the words then, as signifiers, but you're also looking at the sonorous aspects of them. That for sure. I think he could also say, then why not consider the visual aspects of them? Right. So in other words, it really would be a different thing to hear a poem and to read the very same poem.

42:35 Dylan: Some poems, that makes a huge difference.

42:37 Wes: Yeah, I think the sound and, you know, if you're reading it on the page, the way the, you know, the visual representation of the poem. Yeah, of course, he would say all of those things are relevant, but they become entirely irrelevant if the words don't mean anything. If I'm just reading cuneiform, for instance. And so I know enough to know, right. It's a language, so I'm not under the illusion that it's just simply random marks or my window blinds. And suppose I could even sound it all out. It can't really function as poetry if that's all it is. Maybe it can function as music or proto music.

43:11 Mark: Right. You could just say, I love the sound of Spanish poetry. I don't know any Spanish, but I just get all these pull up on Spotify, on my Spanish poets playlist, and I just let them say their beautiful words into my ear all the time. But in that case, clearly, then it would even matter, like who's saying them, what is the sonorous quality of their voices, how are they saying them?

43:32 Wes: And that you could say all that stuff matters. The point is that I'm just saying that none of it matters unless the words also mean something.

43:40 Dylan: Yeah, but wouldn't also part of the point in that prose poetry distinction be that the fact that all of those things matter for poetry are yet other indications of poetry being on the side of words? As things.

43:55 Wes: Yeah. He uses this phrase of, you know, being able to get outside of language and look at it as if you were God.

44:02 Unknown speaker: Yep.

44:03 Dylan: The poet is creating an object.

44:05 Mark: Continue that story, page 14. Not knowing how to use them as a sign of an aspect of the world. He's pretending again that the poet doesn't know how to use words the way we normal people do. Instead of using as a sign of an aspect of the world, he sees in the word. The image of one of these aspects in the verbal image he chooses for its resemblance to the willow tree or the ash tree, is not necessarily the word which we use to designate those objects. As he's already on the outside, he considers words as a trap to catch a fleeting reality, rather than as indicators which throw him out of himself into the midst of things.

In short, all language for him is a mirror of the world. As a result, important changes take place in the internal economy of the word, its sonority, its length, its masculine or feminine endings, its visual aspect, composed for him a face of flesh which represents rather than expresses signification. So that's weird. You know, we're not even talking about signification versus representation. It's that signification itself can be just embodied. In other words, when the word apple refers to an apple, then the word apple is expressing signification.

It is a signifier. But when it merely represents signification, then you're saying, yeah, the word apple is the kind of word that is usually used to refer to those red things in the world. And we're playing on that to talk about representation itself.

45:25 Wes: Yeah, right.

45:26 Dylan: Everywhere. In my version, it says meaning instead of signification.

45:30 Mark: It represents rather than expresses meaning.

45:33 Dylan: It represents rather than expresses meaning. Yes, that's what it says.

45:37 Mark: I don't know if either of those is clear.

45:39 Wes: I mean, I think that's okay. If it weren't, if we were all using that translation, I don't think it'd be a problem. But let's just revisit the concluding part of the poetry, which is that it demands aesthetic withdrawal. The whole reason he's going through all of this is to say he accepts the idea that poetry can't be engaged as opposed to prose. So. And I read some of that before. So this is on page 18. If this is the case, one easily understands how foolish it would be to require a poetic engagement. Emotion can certainly be the origin of the poem, but they are not expressed there as in a pamphlet or in a confession.

Insofar as the writer of prose exhibits feelings, he illustrates them. Whereas if the Poet injects his feelings into the poem, he ceases to recognize them. That submergence we talked about. The words take hold of them, penetrate them and metamorphose them. They do not signify them. Even in his eyes, emotion has become a thing. It now has the opacity of things. So just in the same way that the anguish gets submerged in Yellow sky when it's symbolizing it. If I use a poem to signify political indignation, for instance, it undergoes that same submergence and the emotions are attenuated.

And that's why you can't use poetry for political engagement. Because you're always just getting second level aesthetic withdrawal, which is the way he'll describe that later on, right?

47:07 Mark: So right after that he says, how can one hope to provoke the indignation or the political enthusiasm of the reader when the very thing one does is to withdraw him from the human condition and invite him to consider, with the eyes of a God, a language that has been turned inside out? And he says, someone may say, you're forgetting these, not knowing the things he's referring to. Here I would just insert the things that he just talked about or is about to talk about in Black Orpheus. Those seem like political poems, but he's saying no. By uncovering the black soul, that could lead to the sort of solidarity that then gets you to political action. But it's not a manipulation that is intended to do that. It's hard to see what it is doing.

47:52 Dylan: It's displaying something right, as opposed to telling you what it means. And it's the power of the display play that might be convincing, is the power of the portrait. But the political act would be the act of the reading itself, not the poem.

48:09 Mark: I just don't see the difference between poetry and prose in this respect. That maybe one could say that, you know, the kind of thing that was being lobbed against him is, hey, Sartre, show, don't tell, right? If you want to have one of your plays lead people to think about injustice and to go to correct it, when what you need to do is exactly what one is doing in these poems that he's praising in Black Orpheus and to show suffering, and then you say, hey, there's suffering. It's being illustrated by the poem. It's not being referred to by the poem.

The poem is not exhorting me to go out and fix the suffering, but it's showing me the suffering like a song, that it has a scream in there and is inviting me vicariously to feel that. That totally sounds like an incitement to political action, just like the many political songs there are. Truth Is Marching On, We Will Overcome. But I guess that's not real poetry, according to how Sartre is considering it, because it's too literal. So we need to move to his discussion of what prose is. The second chapter is going to be why Write? So between talking about prose here and talking about prose there, we want to say why it's okay for his prose to be so political.

49:23 Dylan: The answer is it can't help but be political because it's prose. All prose is political.

49:29 Wes: Yeah.

49:30 Mark: So just following up on the bottom page. 19. Prose is, in essence, utilitarian. The prose writer is somebody who makes use of words. The writer is a speaker. He designates, he demonstrates, orders, refuses, interpolates, begs, insults, persuades, insinuates. If he does so without any effect, he does not therefore become a poet. He's a writer who's talking and saying nothing. So you might think that poetry is. I guess the people who are criticizing are trying to say, look, prose, as opposed to writing in a newspaper. Literary prose is supposed to be pretty words, and your words are too utilitarian to be pretty. It seems like he's not distinguishing in this part at all between prose and just, you know, writing a newspaper article. What is the difference? I think he's going to get it into style, pretty earlier. Style does matter with prose.

50:23 Wes: Well, he says, you know, style makes the value of prose, but it should pass to unnoticed because words need to essentially remain untransparent. And you want beauty, but it has to be gentle is the word that he use. So we're persuading, not coercing. We're charming people with the balance of phrases, and we dispose them in various ways, but without them being aware of that. That's why he will say, aesthetic pleasure must be, quote, unquote, thrown into the bargain. It cannot be the primary objective with prose, the primary objective is to communicate.

51:00 Dylan: This distinction reminded, made me think a lot of Plato's criticism of poetry, actually, for this reason. Right. I read into it that this is what would be wrong with poetry, right. Is that it is persuading without focusing on meaning. And so poetic prose would not be gently aesthetic, but it would be, in fact, using that aesthetic to appeal without persuading.

51:27 Wes: Yes. He says, if you get too poetic with prose, it just becomes highfalutin nonsense.

51:33 Mark: But it sounds like the subtle charms of prose. Beauty in a book has to be subtle. The reader is being solicited by charm. When he thinks he's yielding to arguments. So this is a description of prose and it does sound exactly what Plato objects to in poetry. Right. That you're using. Really your prose should be stylists. It should not have any. The quality of.

51:55 Wes: Yeah, it's rhetoric. We know how Plato feels about rhetoric. Yeah.

51:58 Mark: Rhetoric is not poetry, but it has some of the same objectional qualities according to. To Plato. Because it's not that it's not focusing on content, it's just focusing on the wrong content. And it is using style to think of Lucretius that I'm just going to tell you stuff that I could tell you in straight prose, but I'm using the poetry as honey. So is he not even doing poetry according to Sartre or. We're not allowed to ask any questions of whether something is poetry or not because we're done with that part of the discussion.

52:27 Wes: So. Tough one. Yeah. I mean the Lucretius case is actually quite tough. I mean there's beautiful language and metaphor,

52:34 Mark: but yeah, it seems like Sartre would approve of that. That, you know, just the fact that there's rhyming. I mean, it's some sort of unholy hybrid.

52:42 Wes: Yeah.

52:43 Mark: Which I don't think that Sartre. It sounds like he does not approve of. That he would like to keep. Yes, there needs to be good style to prose, but that's not the focus. Whereas with poetry the style is the whole point. So if you're really trying to describe in detail things about physics, you're not using poetry. Right.

53:01 Wes: Make poetry great again. You got to go back.

53:05 Dylan: Yeah, it just makes me think a lot of his own style. Especially when you like read the beginning of something like Black Orpheus where it's hard not to call his own language poetic.

53:17 Wes: Yeah, super poetic.

53:19 Dylan: I guess what I mean by that is it's sonorous and evocative and imagistic and very figurative.

53:25 Wes: Lots of metaphor. Yep.

53:27 Dylan: Yeah, well.

53:28 Mark: And certainly Sartre knew about Shakespeare or any of the ancient Greek plays that are given in poetic form. Those are chock full of content and ideas and are not just about the surfaces of words at all. Like you have to have a coherent plot, one would think. And in fact he uses as examples of prose that's been criticized, which playwright that had children on the stage.

53:54 Dylan: Euripides.

53:55 Mark: Euripides, right. So we saw Nietzsche, hated Euripides, that it's all very ham handed and manipulative. So that's Sartre's thing about style, is that in prose it's not supposed to be Manipulative. It is supposed to allow you to have a certain artistic distance. And this is why Kant had his wrong theory about beauty being disinterested pleasure and why people would talk about arts for art's sake, because you can't. Even though prose is supposed to be utilitarian, if it's grossly utilitarian, if it's manipulative, then it's bad prose, in other words, like a literary treatise and porn have to be different, according to Sartre, just as they were for Kant, that if the point of the prose is to titillate you, Kant's objection would be that that's not actually being artistic because you don't have the proper distance.

It seems, on Sartre's view, if the main point of prose is to convey an idea, well, then porn is probably lacking in ideas for the most part.

55:01 Wes: Yeah, I think this is a big question that we don't have time for, unfortunately, any more. Time for. He says something in a footnote about history presents other forms of poetry. You know, he says, I repeat that I am talking of contemporary poetry, but I don't know what that means, what it applies to. But yeah, I mean, these are all complications. And there is a place where he. I think at the very end of this essay, too, he says there is more or less poetic prose and prosaic poetry. And it's not to say that they're all on a spectrum, but, you know, they're still distinct things.

But for the purpose of this essay, he's focused on pure poetry and pure prose. He says in the footnote, I have been considering the extreme cases of pure prose and pure poetry. If the prose writer is too eager to fondle his words, the eidos of prose is shattered and we fall into highfalutin nonsense. If the poet relates, explains, or teaches, the poetry becomes prosaic.

55:59 Mark: So you might think that you could still have poetic prose. That is, the purpose of why I'm writing is to just express something. The Romantics might say, I'm just. I had some flash of intuition and I'm trying to express that, but Sartre is objecting to that on page 21 or so. No, once you start to, you know, if you're just trying to note down your intuition, you could probably just write a couple words on a post it. But as soon as you move to, like, actually communicating, you are performing a social act. Merely expressing yourself might not seem like a social act.

But as soon as you say, I'm going to actually write this out as prose, not as poetry, not just to channel my emotion into some words, but to engage a communicative act. Then the question for the second essay. Why write? Is very important. What is your aim in writing? What are you actually trying to say? Why is it worth anybody's time to read you?

56:56 Dylan: Is this why he hates Proust?

56:58 Mark: Does he? It does seem like he might, yeah.

57:01 Dylan: And it seems like he would, in that vein. He would hate any, like, a stream of consciousness writing, like James Joyce or Virginia Woolf or anything like that, because it would be. Exactly. What did you characterize it as? I'm just trying to express myself.

57:16 Mark: Highfalutin, non? Oh, yeah.

57:18 Dylan: It's not trying to communicate anything, but sort of.

57:21 Mark: But what did you make of that? On page 22, he says, we ask young writers, do you have anything to say which means something which is worth the trouble of being communicated? But what do we mean by something which is worth the trouble, if not by recourse to a system of transcendent values? So it sounds like he does want to say you have to have ideas first to write. But it sounds like a critique there, because as an existentialist, he should not believe in transcendent values.

57:47 Wes: Yeah. So there's some great stuff here about poetry. And, you know, the poet's business is to contemplate words in a disinterested fashion. But for prose, you can have pure contemplation as an end for intuitionist silence. And the end of language is to communicate.

58:02 Mark: So he does talk about values. Value more in a positive sense. In the second essay, where you end up creating, by a work of art, a piece of prose, you end up creating a value. I was very much thinking of Nietzsche there. So the question is, does the word transcendent here mean transcendent? Like any object is transcendent, it is opaque. It is not merely like the thing as he's going to describe in the second essay. When you create a piece of prose yourself, you don't see it as transcendent because you're like, I could always change something. You know, like when you're actually drafting it, it is not a fixed object.

It is a live thing. It is not frozen in time and transcendent. It is not a thing yet. So it seems like a system of transcendent values. It just means established in some way. I'm not sure if that's a derogatory way of talking about it. Certainly a system of transcendent values. You could say Christianity is a system of transcendent values. In other words, they've been Handed down, supposedly from God. They are apart from anybody's particular opinion about them. They're not in flux. But again, any object in the world. If I write a story and I give it to you, that story is itself a transcendent value.

As he's going to say, whether you inherit it or you create it, as long as you're not at that moment creating it, it still ends up being transcendent. So it seems like he just uses transcendence in a lot of ways.

59:25 Wes: We got to move to the second

59:26 Dylan: essay because he says such awesome things about critics. Are we going to at least read a couple of things that he says?

59:32 Mark: Sure.

59:32 Dylan: Where he's talking about critics. And then he says it must be borne in mind that most critics are mentioned who have not had much luck and who, just about the time they were growing desperate, found quiet little jobs as cemetery watchmen.

59:47 Wes: He'll later say they live poor lives.

59:50 Dylan: The critic lives badly. His wife does not appreciate him as she ought to. His children are ungrateful. The first of the month is hard on him. But it is always possible for him to enter his library, take down a book from the shelf and open it. It gives off a slight odor of the cellar and a strange operation begins and which he has decided to call reading.

1:00:10 Wes: That's awesome.

1:00:12 Mark: So that's very much relevant to the positive account of reading that he's going to give in the second essay.

1:00:17 Wes: Let me just say why he was talking about that stuff, because he wants to. There is a serious component to what he's doing there, which is that he's trying to say that the critics have essentially withdrawn from engagement with the world. So naturally they're against engagement in literature. And what they want is something else out of literature, which are these messages, these timeless truths that will say something about their shitty lives. You know, all men suffer or this or that. And the way they get those messages is to treat dead authors.

So they focus on dead authors whose particular concerns are no longer urgent for us. And so they can just basically not take their communications at face value. They can just reduce them to sort of evidence or reduce them to the author's autobiography or to his psychology or social conditions, the stuff that produced him and his prose. And in doing that, they erect this ideal for literature in which writers, even contemporary writers, aren't writing seriously in the sense they're not writing to advance a certain theses. Let's say this is their non engaged literary writing.

They have nothing to say, but they make their writing sort of a function of their Autobiography, their identity, everything is a sort of expression of them instead of being something that's thought out. So I thought that was a very important critique of that whole approach, this idea that to have non engaged prose literature is to have literature that's essentially unserious and simply functions for people who want to interpret things as in terms of social and autobiographical conditions and things like that.

1:02:01 Mark: So he'd not be a David Sedaris fan.

1:02:03 Wes: I'm not saying he objects to autobiography per se. It's like taking Shakespeare and focusing not on the play, but on the. All the social, you know, if we knew anything about Shakespeare's autobiography, but, you know, all the social stuff to a fault, focusing on the conditions, the social conditions that produce the play and reducing it to that. And if plays have something to say, simply ignoring that, ignoring that as just this parochial, the specific concerns as not our concerns, but then deriving these broader empty messages out of this focus on autobiographical and other conditions.

1:02:40 Mark: Well, so he's saying not only do the critics treat these ancient texts as the gold standard and they treat them in the way that you're describing, where they, you know, you can't. It's not just a matter of, oh, they're focusing too much on stuff external to the text. It's just that you actually can't take the political concerns of somebody from 200 years ago or a thousand years ago seriously.

1:03:03 Wes: Right.

1:03:04 Mark: But then he thinks the effect on current writers is because they take those ancient writers and the way they are taken, in other words, the way they're defanged, then they preemptively defang themselves. So that's what I was thinking. Like, David Sedaris is very amusing, but is he really trying to say something about something in a way that Sartre is? Even when Sartre is writing his own autobiography, it's very philosophical. He has a philosophical point. He's trying to say definite things about the way the world is. Whereas even a very talented somebody telling amusing stories about his childhood, the observational humor is not cutting enough.

I would think that Sartre would object to that. So you could make a case that Sedaris actually is cutting it off. I'm not going to do that here, but he seems like the kind of feel good, smart but feel good writer that's not trying to necessarily change the world.

1:03:57 Wes: Yeah, we get into the question of what literature is. You know, is he thinking of a certain genre in a way, the way we think of literary fiction as a genre, But I'm not sure how, what his requirements are For Funny Essays.

1:04:12 Mark: So he uses this firing a gun analogy. Page 24. Words are loaded pistols. If he speaks, he fires. He may be silent, but since he has chosen to fire, he must do it like a man, by aiming at targets and not like a child, at random. By shutting his eyes and firing merely for the pleasure of hearing the shot go off. He gives this modified categorical imperative. Think what would happen if everyone read what I wrote, right? You can't just treat yourself like I'm part of the entertainment complex, or I'm just, you know, writing for my own little bunch of fans.

Words are about doing things, and so take responsibility. Throw yourself entirely into your words. Make your words come out of your heart. Be very deliberate and exert your will. It sounded very Zarathustra ish in places here in terms of using words like a gun there. I think that sets up what prose is supposed to do on his account. And so the belles lettres, the merely pretty words, the merely pretty prose that we might admire for stylistic reasons might make us chuckle a bit, but is mostly style over substance. It seems like he's going to have no patience for.

And certainly he's not going to put up with being negatively compared to those people.

1:05:26 Wes: So let's move on to essay two. Why write?

1:05:30 Mark: So this is really interesting. Phenomenology. It's the phenomenology of writing. It's the phenomenology of reading. It gets at fundamental things about our relationship to words as beings in the world. Right? He says man is the means by which things are manifested. The human being is a revealer. It is our presence in the world which multiplies relations.

1:05:51 Wes: So then I'll go on to say that basically, while we are. He calls us the directors of being in this sense, but we are not its producers. Which is to say, the world doesn't cease to exist when we turn away. It sinks into dark permanence, is the way he puts it. But it's not annihilated. And the meaning of that is that we are inessential in relation to the thing revealed. We don't have to be there in order for it to continue to be, even though we are the revealer of its being. And so the point of writing, the point of artistic creation in general, is basically to undo that.

It's to give us this feeling that we are actually essential in relation to the world by virtue of the fact that we create it. So we impose our mind on this diversity of things and unify them. And as a unifier, I am As a someone who puts those things in order. I become essential to that particular creation. And to the world it represents. So it's the seeking of essentiality that we lack in our normal relationship with being.

1:07:01 Mark: And this is all art. This is not even just prose at this point. So he contrasts this to seeing nature versus seeing a work of art. That when we see a work of art, we assume the purposiveness of the Creator. That the Creator was being intentional. When we see nature, we actually don't do that, he says. But if we catch, by being a presence in the world that multiplies relations. So if I see the pretty tree, there's a pretty tree next to a pretty river. Now, the tree has its own biological causes. And the river has its own physical causes. There's no reason to think that aesthetic beauty of their combination was intended just for me.

But if I see that, and by my presence I have caused that relation to rise to the fore. So that there really is beauty in the world according to my phenomenology. I can then draw that. I can take that momentary impression of beauty, put it on a canvas. It seemed like there was the objective tree and the objective river. And I'm sort of the inessential things. The river and the tree are still going to be there. But the beauty is something that I added. Once I put that down as a work of art. That becomes a thing. Then, yeah, I'm using that to communicate.

I've taken my inessentiality and made myself essential to this newly created thing. Which is not just a representation of the beauty that was in nature. It is beauty itself. It is a new instantiation of beauty. So how do we then break that into prose specifically?

1:08:37 Wes: So he says literature is special. So he had started out in the beginning with art in general. Literature is special in the sense that reading is necessary to bring it into being. Right. The painter paints something, and there it is. There's the painting. For a writer, it's marks on the page. And we've had some discussion of this. And the marks on the page by themselves aren't the novel. It's not a novel except by virtue of being readable as such. And the reader has to bring it into being as such. By working their way through it. So one of the distinctions he wants to make is that the writer cannot actually read what he writes.

So there's this dependence on the reader. We can't read what we write because we know what's there. A reader is kind of foreseeing they're waiting they're hypothesizing about what's going to happen. They're always kind of ahead of the sentence that they're in. But as a writer, when we look at it, we're looking at it in terms of. We're kind of rehearsing what we put into it and finding ourselves into it. And anyone who's experienced, has experience as a writer knows this. Right. In a way, it's very difficult to simply write something and then read your own work in any sort of objective way, or in a way that you might try to figure out how others might experience it.

You could only have that experience years later, which I've also had, going back to something and just not remembering what I wrote and truly being a reader of that and being surprised, like having so little memory of it.

1:10:06 Dylan: He calls reading the dialectical correlative of writing.

1:10:12 Mark: So remember, when you're a writer. I mean, I actually don't agree with his account here, but I just want to make it clear, maybe get to the critique if we have time. But yeah, the work of art, to you as creator, is not even a thing, because you always are looking at it and you're thinking about, I could change this, I could change this. So it's always existent. It is always a live existence. It is a work in progress, even when it's done. Whereas he thinks that for the reader, as you said, it is an object, it is transcendent, and we engage it in this specific way of anticipation that you're just talking about that we can't do as writer.

1:10:51 Wes: So I think we should basically move to the point where he's going to talk about the writer and the reader as their conjoint effort brings about this imaginary object and what the consequence of that is.

1:11:04 Dylan: Right.

1:11:05 Wes: Yep. Go ahead.

1:11:06 Dylan: Well, he says that the creation, the writing, can find its fulfillment only in reading. And as a result, all literary work is an appeal. So maybe that's the end. Maybe we need to say something more before then. But that's.

1:11:21 Wes: I was on page 43. It is the conjoined effort of the author and the reader which bring upon the scene that concrete and imaginary object which is the work of the mind.

1:11:31 Mark: There is no art except for or by others. It is fundamentally communicative.

1:11:36 Wes: Yeah. And so he'll go into the ways in which reading is a directed creation. So the author is directing, but there's this substantial dependence on the reader. So, for instance, if a character, Raskolnikov, hates the police magistrate, his hatred of the police magistrate who questions him is my hatred, which has been solicited and wheedled out of me by signs. And the police magistrate would not exist without the hatred I have for him via Raskolnikov. That is what animates him. It is his very flesh. So these very interesting ways in which. It's not like the writer can just put hate exactly into the book.

Right. There's no way to just stick hate in there. He has to. All he has is his signs. It's almost like this dried stuff that has to be hydrated. Right. To give it life again. And that's what the reader has to do. Yeah. It depends on the reader bringing to bear their own hatred in order to experience the hatred of a character. It's that fraud.

1:12:40 Mark: I'm just trying to think about the difference between understanding that Raskolnikov hates and it actually being an effective literary device, that it seems like he might be equating those two. That if you were describing a character that has emotions that you don't, you as a reader don't, then you're not gonna get that. You're not gonna understand it. In the same way the good writer is going to. Even if it's a character, let's say that the character is autistic or just has some emotional components that most of his readers will not, but is going to have to write it in such a way that you can still relate to it, that you can still.

There might be slight different ways of thinking, different ways of articulating, but the raw emotions of fear and awkwardness or whatever is being depicted are still things that you as a human being can make sense of. So that the good writer is going to expose these things to illicit. Again, you might not feel the hatred, you might not feel the way the character does, but you're gonna draw on your own experiences to understand that that is what the character is doing.

1:13:56 Dylan: In fact, you're gonna commit an act of creation in doing so as the reader. So in the Raskolnikov, just after that section, he says, on the other hand, the words are there like traps to arouse our feelings and to reflect them towards us. Each word is a path of transcendence. It shapes our feelings, names them, and attributes them to an imaginary personage who takes it upon himself to live them for us and who has no other substance than these borrowed passions. He confers objects, perspectives and horizon upon them. And then, I guess I want to skip to the creation can find its fulfillment only in reading.

1:14:35 Wes: So the next stage in this argument is Even though the move we've made here as writers that why are we writing? We want to become essential to the work, we have to do that by appealing to the consciousness of the reader, which ultimately means we're the directors, but we rely on the freedom of the reader to instantiate. Yeah. And then he'll say, so the book is not a means to an end, but it's an end offered to the reader's freedom, which is a really interesting formulation.

1:15:08 Dylan: It's a directed creation that is an absolute beginning and is therefore brought about by the freedom of the reader and by what is purest in that freedom. Thus the writer appeals to the reader's freedom to collaborate in the production of his work.

1:15:23 Wes: And he's going to contrast this to what Kant called finality without end, where, if we remember, it's from so long ago, but our Critique of Judgment episode, where aesthetic and judgment ultimately involved Kant's free play of the imagination. And it's sort of the illusion of the aesthetic object being like a final end, having that sort of teleology, but really being about the sort of the imagination, not doing the typical work of the imagination. Right. Which is in Kant to sort of construct objects cognitively, but not doing that work. Not sort of just revving its engines independent of that work.

So Sartre's going to say, no, the object is actually an end. And what the imagination of the spectator is doing is both regulative and constitutive. It's not like your imagination isn't just there to play, it's free. Right. The reader. We're relying on the reader's freedom, but the reader is composing the object for us. The work of art isn't composed as a means to producing this free play of the imagination. It's not a means to that end. Yeah, it is the end. The work of art itself is the end.

1:16:37 Dylan: Yep.

1:16:38 Mark: So fundamentally the work of art is ethical. That just like a human being, for Kant, is an end in itself. It is basically an invitation to give respect and dignity. It is an obligation. It is an invitation you should, according to Kant, do so out of your own freedom. Because you are realizing self regulating, using the categorical imperative, you realize that this is something that you should do. It is not a merely pre existent transcendent of any human being law that you have to be nice to people and treat them with dignity. But that's the way it appears in our phenomenology, is that people appear as ends in themselves.

And I think Sartre agrees with that. Right. Even though he doesn't have this notion of the transcendental status of the categorical imperative. But still he's not going to deny that people walking around are invitations to ethical obligation. But he wants to add to that list. It's not just people that works of art to, or at least works of prose, which he thinks have a very specifically strong role for the reader to co create them. It's just like a walking. It's an open wound walking around, inviting you as a reader to. You don't have to pick up the book, but once you pick up the book, it's presenting a challenge to you.

1:18:04 Wes: Yes. He says it presents itself as a task to be discharged and the task is the co creative thing to actually take this potential art object and turn it into the work of art. And this is where he'll say this is a quotation. But for freedom is not experienced by its enjoying its free subjective functioning, referring to the imagination, but in a creative act required by an imperative. So yeah, Mark, this goes towards your comparison. The fact that people are ends in themselves demands that we give them rights and treat them ethically. There's some sort of ethical imperative going on with the text.

I'm not sure if it's that we're not required to read it. Obviously I don't know if we're required to be good readers. If we are, you have to finish it. There are lots of people, I think, who essentially treat texts unethically. They treat them as means to their own particular agendas. They can't read openly, they can't read freely, they can't open their mind to it. But I don't know if that's what he's getting at. Right.

1:19:07 Mark: Because the purpose of prose is to reveal. It's to reveal. I think he says truth, although obviously he could be writing fiction. But good fiction, even in a fictional character is going to reveal truth of something. And the point of it is to let your readers not have the excuse that they don't understand how the world works. You want to reveal to them this is kind of the ethical obligation.

1:19:32 Unknown speaker: Right.

1:19:33 Wes: They become responsible through that knowledge.

1:19:35 Mark: Yeah, exactly. So it comes down to freedom and responsibility that you're inviting the reader to freely invest himself in what you've written, to co create it with you. And the responsibility is then to have the revelation of what is being revealed by the text. Actually let that enter your mind and affect your behavior.

1:19:59 Dylan: That's why I like the word that he uses elsewhere, provoke alongside reveal. I agree that he uses words, especially in this essay. Reveal. Act of generosity. All of these ways of describing the writer as displaying for the reader so that you have that ethical relationship with the reader that you described, Mark, that the reader then, in their own act of freedom, receives it. But there's also this act of, I guess, provoking that is in some way the. To me, it's a more muscular understanding of what the writer is doing as acting on the reader. And I guess in this part of the essay he seems to be diminishing that.

1:20:43 Mark: I wanted to return to Wes's metaphor of hydrating because, yeah, that's what it looks like to me is that I have a bunch of marks on a page in order for you to see them as a coherent story. Like, even if you understood the language that it's being written. But if you read just one sentence and then you wait an hour and read the next sentence, like it's never going to come together as a text, no matter what, whether it's fiction or nonfiction. So it is your responsibility as reader to recompose this. And so I like the idea of hydrating as, yeah, you've got this image of Raskolnikov, but unless you yourself have experienced hate, then you can't even understand when Dostoevsky is describing Raskolnikov's hate.

But that makes it sound like there's only one way that you're not actually being a co creator. You're inflating. Right. IKEA has sent it home for you, sent the kit home and you're assembling it. And that's exactly not. He thinks that the reader is much more active than that. I think because everybody has different connotations, everybody has a different field of experience, so that the work of art that is creative is actually going to be unique. It's a guided creation, right. That, as you said, the author is given some guidelines, is giving some direction.

But it is ultimately the reader that is creating this thing. And it will only be as awesome as the reader's capabilities are. If the reader can't understand hate, can't understand a lot of the words that are being said, the resultant artistic creation that is now being absorbed by the reader is not going to be as full as it could be. And I think maybe you could make an argument that if you have a genius level reader, the thing that is created, in fact, could overswell what was ever intended by the writer.

1:22:30 Wes: Yeah, he says earlier on that the author will be always ahead of the reader in that sense. So it's inexhaustible no matter how good a Reader you are. The work is inexhaustible, but not because

1:22:41 Mark: of the writer's genius, but because anything, once it's put out in the world is a transcendent, inexhaustible thing.

1:22:48 Wes: Well, right, because the author went through the act of creation and that's not a knowledge that the reader can ever have.

1:22:55 Dylan: I'm trying not to be too cynical. Part of me just feels like, isn't that just a bunch of bullshit? I mean, just the idea that any work that a writer writes out there is inexhaustible, it's just not true.

1:23:08 Mark: Right, but that's true of any object in the world. That's like just the definition of Sartre's, what he means by something that is, it is impenetrable. It doesn't mean it. You could have endless cogitations on it that are useful, but there's always more aspects of it that you could turn over. Even the stick figure that you drew on your canvas as a thing in the world, it is impenetrable in a certain way. You can never fully understand it.

1:23:34 Wes: But Mark, I wanted to get back to your whole idea of whether this hydration thing, whether everyone does it the same. Because there's a related thing he kinds of brings up, which is the potential heavy handedness of the author. One of the things we associate with bad literature is just people trying to manipulate us or beat us over the head with something, or treat us. The way he puts it is it would address us as a passivity and try to make this very conscious attempt to try to affect us where in that sense it's no longer appealing to us. Because to appeal is to suppose that we are a pure freedom.

What the writer of literature should be doing for Sartre is making the work itself a value. Like in the same way I might have any other kind of value, it becomes something I value in the sense that it demands a certain kind of action from me, behavior, activity. But it's not simply going the other direction and affecting me. I shouldn't be overwhelmed by the writer, but rather the writer proposes a task. This is the way Sartre puts it. And then he connects that to aesthetic withdrawal. So this idea that we saw in Schopenhauer and Kant is still very alive here.

Because at the end of this, this is on page 49, the writer should not seek to overwhelm, otherwise he is in contradiction with himself. If he wishes to make demands, he must propose only the task to be fulfilled. Hence the character of the pure presentation which appears essential to the work of art. The reader must be able to make a certain aesthetic withdrawal.

1:25:08 Mark: Yep. That's what gives them their freedom. They're not being roofied by the work.

1:25:13 Wes: So it's not like someone has put an apple in front of me when I'm starving. And there you go, suddenly I'm eating the apple. Someone is putting an aesthetic object in front of me. And my relationship to it is not one of appetite. It's something that's actually free. It's a task. It's something I could do with it.

1:25:33 Mark: That's still going to be different. I mean, the way you describes it works equally well for Kant and for Sartre. But the ultimate point of this essay is, I'm Sartre. I want to write really political, morally charged prose. And so if I say, look, there's persecution everywhere, it's incumbent upon you to fix it. And I hammer you over the head with that by just showing the suffering. And at a certain point, that's going to be manipulative. But he wants to retain the ability to still, it just has to be your choice. It has to appear like a moral obligation.

He has a section in here like, can you have a good work that is anti Semitic? And he says, no, because that would invite you to be doing something, you know, I invite you to join me in this creation of hatred for Jews. And that is not something that you seemingly can do out of a free choice, as we know from our whole analysis of anti Semitism, that antisemitism is fundamentally bad faith, that hatred is fundamentally bad faith.

1:26:38 Wes: Well, freedom for Sartre, right, depends on the recognition of the freedom of others. And then, of course, the reader must be free for the author to. But anyway, yeah, so if you were in the mode of wanting to enslave and oppress others, to basically take away their freedom, you can't do that freely as a reader. You can't fulfill that task. It's a contradiction.

1:27:00 Mark: So that was supposed to illustrate the limits, even if your cause is righteous, that you could, while still making good art, try to manipulate people into having that view. I think he thinks that just like for Kant, you choose the moral thing when you are free. Sartre's not going to put it that way because he doesn't believe in a pre existent transcendental moral law, still, it kind of comes down as a practical matter to the same thing. That you are invited to freely choose the moral path, the moral sentiment and consequent action in response to the exhortatory piece of prose. It's not tricking you into you know, in the way that Palpatine tricked Anakin into joining the dark side, you know, it is soliciting, but in that way

1:27:51 Dylan: it's the right kind of writing. Right. Just like the conditions of a good ethical choice depend upon your freedom, there's lots of ways you can be coerced. And you can also successfully act ethically, even in the face of that coercion, if you work your way through it. Right. But the way to think about it is what would be the act you would do freely?

1:28:14 Mark: You be nice to your brother or I'm gonna kick your ass. That is an exhortation to ethical action through unethical means. Do not respect your freedom. If the work of art is doing the equivalent of that, well, it also

1:28:27 Wes: could just be manipulating you into having certain feelings, doing this heavy handed, this overwhelming thing that he rejects. Obviously the work of art is going to produce feelings in you, but he's going to say, this is on page 50. However, these feelings are of a particular kind. They have their origin and freedom. They are loaned. I've certainly experienced this, right? If I feel like I'm being manipulated, if I feel like, oh, this is just someone obviously trying to pull something out of me, it's almost disgusting, or it makes for a bad movie or a bad piece of literature. When the author's agenda is so obvious. When you've been deprived really of any autonomy in relation to it and you're just supposed to sit there and say, oh, okay, I'm gonna feel exactly the way you just told me to feel.

1:29:15 Dylan: It's so much worse than like overly earnest saccharine sentiment. There's that kind, which is just bad. But then there's the aspect where you're being corralled. You feel like someone's opened the door to the van and invited you inside with some candy.

1:29:33 Wes: Yeah. It's the sense in which you don't see all sides of the object. Right. To get back to some of the phenomenology, if you feel like you're being given a good representation of something and it's plausible, it has that plausibility that Aristotle talks about, it's believable in some sense, and then it produces the emotion, that's one thing. But if the author is hiding something from you and just giving you the candy in order to make sure you have the feeling, that's something else.

1:30:00 Dylan: It's interesting to put it that way. In some ways, the really good writing, you would have that feeling of plausibility, but you would be led down that path. Right, right.

1:30:11 Mark: You're being solicited. So again, looking back at that quote on page 24, he's being solicited by charm when he thinks he's yielding to arguments. So he's admitting that it's not. Plato's distinction between poetry and rhetoric are just using flowery language to fool you into believing something versus reasoned philosophical argumentation, like prose is a work of art. It is not reasoned philosophical argumentation solely. And in fact, you think you're yielding to arguments. You're actually being solicited by charm. But there just still has to be the difference between being solicited and being manipulated. It has to be rested on that.

1:30:52 Wes: Well, he compares this to a passion in the Christian sense, a freedom which resolutely puts itself into a state of passivity to obtain a certain transcendent effect. By this sacrifice, the reader renders himself credulous. He descends into credulity, which, though it ends by enclosing him like a dream, is at every moment conscious of being free. Then we'll call this a sacrifice of a sort. This seems related to the suspension of disbelief. And, yeah, we do make a certain kind of sacrifice as a reader to be affected, but the idea is that that is something we freely do.

1:31:30 Mark: The writer requires from the reader the gift of his whole person. Reading is an exercise in generosity. There's a reciprocal relationship between the reader and the writer where pretty much the reader has to assume that the writer has something to say and is going to kind of extend himself to listen to the writer.

1:31:47 Unknown speaker: And.

1:31:47 Mark: And the writer, in turn, is giving the reader credit to be able to, you know, rise to the heights that he's going to sketch out how difficult this might be to understand, how much expansion of himself he might have to do in order to identify with, you know, a crazy character like Raskolnikov.

1:32:07 Dylan: Do you think that Sartre is overly romanticizing this relationship between the reader and the writer? Or even winnowing down into a very narrow corner, good writing and good reading, and that there's just a large universe of bad reading and bad writing that doesn't manifest freedom in the way he's talking about it. You know, we talked about being manipulated before, but even just the relationship of the reader as spectator to things, the nature of all writing as a kind of propaganda. I don't know. I was thinking of someone like Debord or.

1:32:47 Mark: I don't know. There's so much I don't. I don't actually like about. First of all, he. When we started here, it Seemed like he was trying to distinguish prose from the other arts and saying that prose requires this cooperative thing. Whereas I think, Wes, you said, oh, you know, you get the painting, you're just out there. The painting is an object in the world, and you don't need the. But I feel like that any work of art needs work by the spectator in something comparable, maybe not the same. What's different about prose is it's so

1:33:17 Wes: long, but it's also, again, it's the difference between the signifying and the picturing relation. I mean, a picture is a thing, right?

1:33:26 Mark: But between a poem, for instance, and prose, you still need active engagement. In fact, more so. It's harder to read poetry, I find, because those many meanings, right? A prose writer, he says, when a word has multiple meanings, a prose writer is going to pick one of those. Like, this is what the word means in this context. And if, unless you get that it's that meaning, then you're not going to understand the sentence. Whereas a poetry writer is going to acknowledge the multiple meanings and let them all just exist there. They're all just properties of the word, you know, in its referring, but not actually using its normal symbolic function.

So you certainly need engagement in various ways. I certainly buy the idea that somebody who's not a good reader is not going to get as much out of Dostoevsky as somebody who is a good reader, someone who has limited vocabulary, limited emotional life, limited imagination. But I don't know that he's convinced me here of the. You know, I still do like Wes's. The reader can hydrate it more or less, but, like the most, if it becomes the juicy bunch of grapes that the writer intended, then that's kind of as big as you can get it. I don't know. I guess we're getting here into the debate that we had with Foucault and Barthes about the death of the author and the role of the.

The reader. Originally, when I was reading this, I was like, yeah, I really like what Sartre has contributed to this debate, that he really is cashing out exactly what the reader actually adds, as opposed to those shorter articles that just say, oh, it's all about the reader. It's all about the reader's interpretation and don't give us enough in those contexts for us to really make sense of it. And I felt on first reading that Sartre made much more sense of it here. But as we're considering it in more depth, I'm not sure. I actually think it's that much more Helpful.

Unless he walked us through a book and gave us some more examples.

1:35:24 Dylan: Yeah. When I got to the end of the essay, even with all the provocative and really interesting interpretations of what it means to be a reader and what it means to be a writer and their symbiotic relation, at the end he has this bit about the freedom of writing implies the freedom of the citizen and effectively the role of writing as being a public presentation of one's freedom. And then the act of reading it is a reflection of that and again, linking it to politics. And so this is the way in which all prose is political because of it being an act of freedom.

I had a hard time not just thinking that he, in the end, just was seeing the great power of writing as revealing in the world in the face of the experience of World War II. Right. That's not all there is to it. I mean, there's all this interesting interpretation of it, but that deep down writing can save the world because it is revealing and it reveals and communicates to readers and in fact promotes democracy. The art of prose is bound up with the only regime in which prose has meaning, democracy. And so prose and its existence in the world puts us on a one way train towards democracy.

1:36:44 Mark: So do you feel like this language of revealing overemphasizes the degree to which literary depictions are accurate that he seems to have? By saying that the human beings as interpreters are exposing relationships between things? That's a very generous way of saying that pretty much everything that you perceive is correct. Right. If I see the forest as terrifying, again, the terrifyingness is out there in the forest. That's an objective property that the forest has because it turns up in my phenomenology. And so even if you don't see it as terrifying, well, neither of us is actually wrong.

It's just. It's different aspects of the forest. It's really saying that things that seem like they just contradict end up being different aspects of the same thing. Good literature is supposed to just reveal a point of view, a situation. So again, like the poems he's talking about in Black Orpheus, pretend those are prose. Forget about the prose versus poetry problem. But those are exposing truth of the black soul. And so that promotes understanding, that heals the world. I seem to be open to the idea that, like, I feel like I've read literature where there's something ideological about the way that the thing is presented.

That is, you could say it's incomplete, but in, you know, it might give what I regard as a morally pernicious outcome.

1:38:08 Dylan: I think you're right that something about him is presuming a genuine earnestness on the part of the writer. But that's just not always true. And what you just described, Mark, is that there's plenty of writing out there that is self consciously not earnest. It's ideological. And we characterize other cases where they're trying to hide something from you and persuade you of something.

1:38:34 Mark: What if they are earnest though, and they're just wrong?

1:38:36 Dylan: Well, that's a different thing. Right.

1:38:38 Mark: So somebody writes a story. I'm kind of thinking about like the Left behind novels. Not that I've read those or something, but like, are probably just literarily terrible. But one could imagine somebody writing a very heartfelt book about, you know, young people discovering that they're gay, like in Rent or something, and then discovering like really how in the current world it just leads to misery and that the message that would come out of it from this author.

1:39:06 Dylan: Give up your gayness.

1:39:08 Mark: Yeah, Just push those feelings right down. You know, maybe this is the kind of thing Nietzsche even thought. People think maybe Nietzsche was gay and that. But his exhortations to chastity to overcome that, to be just disgusted by the whole. The kind of, you know, anti romance Lucretius stuff that we then see, you know, so it's very honest but ultimately mistaken. And, you know, it maybe reflects the situation of somebody that is living in a particular world and you can see why they might come to that point of view. But if the world were better, you know, so if you don't like that example, you know, come up with a. Yeah, Fanon writing. How about how interracial couples are so messed up? He was being honest about it.

1:39:48 Dylan: You're right, Mark. Both happen. Right. There's the dishonest case and there's the earnest case. Yep.

1:39:55 Mark: Yeah. So I. I think that maybe this notion of revealing it would just need further examination for me to completely get on board with it. I mean, I certainly like the idea that good literature is literature that exposes truth of whatever sort, even if it's fiction. I like that idea.

1:40:11 Dylan: Is it wrong to say that it's always the case that it's revealing? It's just a question of whether it's revealing something that's as full and complete and truthful as it ought to be to be an engagement to freedom fully. Right.

1:40:26 Mark: I mean, that, that is a great point in relation to what we were just talking about with Black Orpheus, that maybe the revealing seems to be negritude. Embrace the black soul. But Sartre is going to ultimately have this dialectical take on it that if you get that into it, if you define yourself essentially as black or essentially as Jewish or. Or essentially as somebody who should get over their homosexuality or something, whatever, the thing is that that's still going to be potentially there's room for further revelations that would undermine the action you would take in light of this revelation. It might be a mere dialectical step. I think that's how he probably has to get around it, you know, the Hegelian way. It's not false, it's just overcome later. Dialectically, two plus two equals five is a mere step. Wes, do you want to finish us off? Give us some closing thoughts?

1:41:18 Wes: He just had some interesting things to say towards the end. We had started out in our relation to the world being revealers, but us being inessential and the objects being essential. And then we reverse that as writers, where as creators we become essential and the object becomes inessential, the created object in the sense that it depends on us. And he ends with this idea of having a non positional consciousness of being essential in relation to an essential object, which he calls a feeling of security. This sort of strict harmony between subject and object in which facts and value seem to coincide.

The world itself becomes an imperative. It becomes my task insofar as I look at it aesthetically. And the other thing he says, so here's a quotation for this is quite the final goal of art, to recover this world by giving it to be seen as is, but as if it had its source in human freedom. So this whole idea of, I don't know, representation of the world as evocative of. As sort of the result of human freedom, as making demands on human freedom. I don't know what else to say about that, but this reading as a whole, I found it incredible. I wish I had much, much more time to think about all of this stuff.

But, yeah, really enjoyed it.

1:42:44 Mark: It seems like on that phenomenological picture that I described, where, you know, the forest is objectively terrifying, that the world is always making demands of you. You know, if you're saying that emotions are projectable onto objects, you know, the work of art might have a very special way of doing it because, you know, that it came from a human being. But yeah, it seems like we are constantly beset by the world being meaningful and evocative of action. So I'm not sure how to make art give that a special extra place. I also just fundamentally disagree with the idea that as a writer, you can't see what you create as an object because you always remember how you made it.

You, you know, you focus on the creative act and you as essential compared to the object, as merely contingent. Because I think once you externalize something, it's out there, even if you just wrote it, Even if you just sit down and you write a couplet right now, like you're not actually familiar enough with your own internal thinking, internal mechanism to say how you came up with that couplet. It's just something that's out there. So essential to the process of creation is generating a bunch of ideas through some weird unconscious process and then acting as the editor on those and shaping them and getting rid of some of them.

I just don't see that as fundamentally different than to write a song with another person, than to write a song by yourself. Like, they are certainly different in certain ways, but you're kind of making yourself double when you become the creator versus the editor as a unified act of creation. And I see that as very much like, you know, in the same way that we said, Hegel's notion of self consciousness has given us the idea that we don't have this special Cartesian access to ourselves, that actually we see ourselves kind of how other people and maybe even derivatively to how other people see us.

So in the same way, I don't think we have this magical connection with the things that we happen to have created. I think that that was what gave power in our reading about the death of the author and stuff like that to the idea that it's not the intention of the author. That is the thing that, you know, is determinant of what the text means. No, once it's out there, it is, as Sartre would say, a transcendent object that is above and beyond even the creator's intentions about it. Nonetheless, very, very thought provoking. If you didn't detect that I had Zarathustra on the brain, that is what we're reading next.

Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which is like rereading Lord of the Rings to me. I just.

1:45:20 Unknown speaker: I really.

1:45:21 Mark: That's a good thing. So come back for that. Hope you enjoyed this. Go on Facebook, go on our blog, partiallyexaminedlife.com, go on Twitter, email us directly. Peltiallyexaminedlife.com tell us what you thought of this. If you want to hear more Sartre, what were you especially confused about, what you were, etc.

1:45:40 Dylan: No, not more Sartre.

1:45:43 Mark: Not sued. Today's closing song is Things I shouldn't have told you'd it is by Sam Phillips, whom I interviewed for Nakedly Examined Music, episode 90. Check it out at nakedlyexaminedmusic.com all right. Good night, everybody.

1:45:57 Wes: Good night.

1:45:57 Dylan: Good night.

1:46:07 Unknown speaker: Done. With just a few words? You could convert this to cash? Your eyes could take anyone? Things I shouldn't have told you? Live your life so whenever you lose you're a? The dead are alive? Sometimes more than the living? Things I shouldn't have told you. Were the worst thing? Leave? You don't even know my secrets? You made up my mind? Asking secretive questions? Stay in one place in the oil fields? There's no cause for alarm? Don't ever change? Things I shouldn't have told you? Things I shouldn't have told you? Things I shouldn't have told you? Things I shouldn't have told you? It.