Ep. 212: Sartre on Literature (Part Two)

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0:48 Mark: Hey, you're listening to Partially Examined Life Episode 212Part 2 on Sartre's what Is Literature? We've been discussing what is writing the first essay in that and have just gotten through the poetry part, so we need to move to his discussion of what prose is. Contrast to that, 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.

1:18 Wes: And the answer is it can't help but be political because it's prose. All prose is political.

Yeah.

1:26 Mark: So just following up where we stop 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, interpellates, 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 early here. Style does matter with prose.

2:18 Wes: Well, he says, you know, style makes the value of prose, but it should pass to unnoticed because words need to essentially remain transparent. And you want beauty, but it has to be gentle is the word that he used. 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.

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. And so poetic prose would not be gently aesthetic, but it would be, in fact, using that aesthetic to appeal without persuading.

Yeah. He says if you get too poetic with prose, it just becomes highfalutin nonsense.

3:29 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.

3:51 Wes: Yeah, it's rhetoric. We know how Plato feels about rhetoric. Yeah.

3:54 Mark: Rhetoric is not poetry, but it has some of the same objectionable qualities according 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.

4:23 Wes: It's a tough one. Yeah. I mean, the Lucretius case is actually quite tough. I mean, there's beautiful language and metaphor, but.

4:31 Mark: 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.

4:38 Wes: Yeah.

4:39 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.

4:57 Wes: Make poetry great again, you got to go back.

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.

Yeah, super poetic.

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

Lots of metaphor. Yep.

Yeah, well.

5:24 Mark: And certainly Sartre knew about Shakespeare or any of the ancient Greek popular 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.

5:50 Wes: Euripides.

5:51 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 of, well then porn is probably lacking in ideas for the most part.

6:56 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'm 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, 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.

7:55 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. But to engage in 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?

8:52 Wes: Is this why he hates Proust?

8:54 Mark: Does he? It does seem like he might, yeah.

8:57 Wes: And it seems like he would, in that vein. He would hate any, like, 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.

9:12 Mark: Highfalutin nonsense. Oh, yeah.

9:14 Wes: It's not trying to communicate anything, but sort of.

9:17 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 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.

9:42 Wes: Yeah. So there's some great stuff here about poetry. And the poet's business is to contemplate words in a disinterested fashion. But for prose, you can have pure contemplation as an end for intuition, to silence. And the end of language is to communicate.

9:58 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 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.

11:21 Wes: We got to move to the second

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

11:27 Mark: Sure.

11:28 Wes: Where he's talking about critics. And then he says, it must be borne in mind that most critics are men who have not had much luck and who, just about the time they were growing desperate, found quiet little jobs as cemetery watchmen.

He'll later say they live poor lives.

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, which he has decided to call reading.

That's awesome.

12:08 Mark: So that's very much relevant to the positive account of reading that he's going to give in the second essay.

12:13 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, 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.

13:56 Mark: So he'd not be a David Sedaris fan.

13:59 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 this, 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.

14:36 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.

14:59 Wes: Right.

15:00 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.

15:53 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.

16:08 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 lettre, 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.

17:22 Wes: So let's move on to essay two. Why write?

17:26 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.

17:47 Wes: So then he'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.

18:57 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?

20:33 Wes: So he says literature is special. So he had started out in the beginning on 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 whose experience 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.

He calls reading the dialectical correlative of writing.

22:08 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.

22:47 Wes: So I think we should basically move to the point where he's going to talk about the writer and the reader as the. Their conjoint effort brings about this imaginary

object and what the consequence of that is. Right.

23:01 Mark: Yep.

23:01 Wes: Go ahead.

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.

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.

23:27 Mark: There is no art except for or by others. It is fundamentally communicative.

23:32 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. If 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.

24:36 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 going to get that. You're not going to understand it in the same way the good writer is going to, even if it's a character, 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.

25:52 Wes: 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.

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.

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.

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 involve 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.

Yep.

28:34 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.

30:00 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.

31:03 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.

31:28 Wes: Right.

They become responsible through that knowledge.

31:31 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.

31:54 Wes: 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.

32:38 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.

34:25 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

34:37 Mark: because of the writer's genius, but because anything, once it's put out in the world is a transcendent, inexhaustible thing.

34:43 Wes: Well, right, because the author went through the act of creation and that's not a knowledge that the reader can ever have.

I try 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.

35:04 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.

35:30 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.

37:04 Mark: Yep, that's what gives them their freedom. They're not being roofied by the work.

37:09 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.

37:29 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. But by just showing the suffering 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 anti Semitism is fundamentally bad faith. That hatred is fundamentally bad faith.

38:34 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.

38:56 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.

39:46 Wes: But in that way 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?

40:09 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

40:23 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 going to feel exactly the way you just told me to feel.

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.

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.

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.

42:06 Mark: Right. 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. Has to be rested on that.

42:48 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.

43:25 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. And. And the writer in turn is giving the reader credit to be able to, you know, rise to the heights that he's gonna 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.

44:03 Wes: 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.

44:42 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, right. What's different about prose is it's so

45:13 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?

45:21 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, and it's 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 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.

47:20 Wes: 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.

48:40 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, but 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.

50:04 Wes: 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.

50:29 Mark: What if they are earnest though, and they're just wrong?

50:32 Wes: Well, that's a different thing. Right.

50:34 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.

51:02 Wes: Give up your gayness.

51:04 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.

51:44 Wes: You're right, Mark. Both happen. Right. There's the dishonest case and there's the earnest case. Yep.

51:51 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.

52:06 Wes: 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. I mean, that.

52:22 Mark: 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?

53:14 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 values 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.

54:40 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 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 creators 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, I really. That's a good thing. So come back for that. Hope you enjoyed this. Go on Facebook, go on our blog partialexaminedlife.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 et cetera.

57:36 Wes: No, not more Sartre.

57:38 Mark: Not soon. Today's closing song is Things I Shouldn't Have Told You. 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.

57:52 Wes: Good night.

Good night.

Pleasure.

58:02 Mark: It's 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 ahead the dead are alive? Sometimes more than the living? Things I shouldn't have told you? Well, the worst thing is that you don't even know my secrets you made up my mind. Questions stay in one place in the oil fields there's no calls for long? 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? Sa.