The Engaged and the Enraged
Bondy, François
THE DISTINCTION between the commitment of the engaged writer and the outcry of the enraged writer is not merely verbal. Engaged literature—the term is reminiscent of numerous, now dated...
...Today, they are no longer young, and not all of them remain angry...
...He became a pioneer of the new French prose...
...Julien Gracq believes that he tends to negate things generally and that this tendency will ultimately lead to the negation of his own work and reputation...
...We (and here by "we" I mean the thirties' writers) not only look back on them with reverence, but we also revered them at the time...
...Celine in his contorted, fantastic autobiographical novels wrote with a violent, obscene obsessiveness about his disgust with the world...
...The difference between the perse THE ENGAGED AND THE ENRAGED cutor and the persecuted often was a matter of accident and could not be explained by facile concepts of guilt and innocence...
...he sought a cure...
...The goal was not to change conditions THE ENGAGED AND THE ENRAGED but to wipe out the guilty, in Celine's case "the Jews," whose massacre he called for without really believing in the fulfillment of the wish...
...Celine's, however, was a concrete rage that looked for targets and if need be created its own...
...Engaged—Brecht...
...Sinyaysky, who has since been sentenced to hard labor, published an article in which he took issue with Yevtushenko...
...The engaged writer: the term poses some problems, for engaged also means hired, and fails to make clear the difference between the writer who follows his conscience and the one who has tendered it to a party or government he believes to be the personification of justice and progress...
...In retrospect Spender believes that the writers of his generation and his beliefs betrayed literature more profoundly than Pound, Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, or Yeats, that is, than the tradition-bound, at times reactionary writers...
...If they have anything to say at all, they reflect the position of their profession rather than true understanding...
...Once that happens, he ceases to think of himself as the voice of the silent, and it is the problems of engagement that may well come to form the main part of his engaged writings...
...Bertolt Brecht in his conversations with Walter Benjamin raised the issue of a resurgence of a medieval monarchy within socialism, thereby carefully touching upon the entire problem of engagement, which in Stalin's empire was apt to lead to an alliance with a strange and mysterious power...
...Categorizations, including these two, are for temporary use, an attempt to define relations, and no more...
...There, writers have worked to create a legal base for individual freedom, above all their own freedom of expression...
...The enraged are by definition lonely, even if superficially social...
...The "testament," the "personal document" which, almost without literary transposition, reproduced the author's more or less profound reflections as he read his daily newspaper, the diary published day by day, and journalism tout court became the dominant forms of this literature of men who were so busy keeping up appearances FRANgOIS BONDY that they barely had time to formulate their thoughts, far less to organize them...
...And Sartre himself has said that to his dying day he will continue to hate the bourgeoisie of which he is a product...
...I The "enraged" writer: he suffers from the evils of the world and is indignant over them...
...Sartre has some of the traits of the enraged...
...As the history of Ezra Pound shows, the results of this could be tragic...
...They don't study these questions for themselves...
...enraged—Genet...
...Their nostalgia misled them into sympathizing with whatever jackbooted corporal or demagogue set himself up in defense of order...
...N AMERICAN BLACK LITERATURE the road leads from the Marxist-revolutionary ideas of Richard Wright to the prophetic sermonizing of James Baldwin, and to Leroi Jones, the Black Power playwright whose works celebrate a kind of revenge on the whites...
...The theme of the engaged and the enraged writers relates to the realm of the purely literary and the nonliterary...
...But the reactionariness of the "reactionaries" is the weakness, not the strength, of their work...
...However, this is a generalization which must be re-examined...
...His anger and ideas are scattered through his writings...
...In his effort to support the Social Democratic party, Grass stressed all those factors which in his eyes set the SPD apart from any other German party —while at the same time the party was trying to persuade the voters that it was a party just like any other, and everyone except the THE ENGAGED AND THE ENRAGED "writers' group" worked toward coalition with the Christian Democrats...
...That we did so made us reflect that we were a generation less single-minded in our art, but which had perhaps found a new subject—the social situation...
...Those who succeed in incorporating this irony into their works come closest to becoming the present-day Enlighteners...
...That disparate pair of the thirties, Celine and Malraux, fit this categorization very well...
...Moreover, there is an internal connection between impotence and rage on the one hand and engagement and hope for change on the other...
...His criticism would seem to make clear the difference between considered engagement and emotional reactions...
...At most, a television appearance, a few demonstrations...
...The writer is thrown back to the problematical and tense relationship between truth and power, and ultimately to the question of the distance he must keep in order to comprehend and describe society...
...It may be useful in some contexts to distinguish between the committed and the angry...
...Their engagement concerns their interests as writers but it also goes beyond that...
...True, socialism is more than merely a prescription for the cure of economic ills...
...Is this startling thesis acceptable...
...This would indicate that the engaged writer cannot serve without laying down moral conditions, if not for himself then by postulating such general values as "decency," conditions which, however, go beyond what the power they wish to serve is willing to grant...
...In the end, everything that happened in some part of the world came to be viewed in terms of an Incarnate Reason busy with the supreme problem of its own consistency...
...whereas a Jew will receive information...
...He and Frantz Fanon thought to have found them among the colonialized, the underdeveloped peoples, and on them Sartre pinned his hopes for the destruction of the European bourgeoisie...
...This is an arguable point, but there can be no doubt that Genet is possessed by rage, that he identifies with power and with the "ceremonial of power," and that this identification might well manife^ t itself in the worship of the most arbitrary and sadistic forces...
...Could it be that the ambivalence between these two reactions—between the consciously thought out and the emotionally conditioned—is connected with the fact that in the past ten years the class struggles more and more have tended to turn into race struggles and that the automatic, unproblematical equation of skin color and unfulfilled demands has changed the style of activist literature...
...Are their protests manifestations of an all-encompassing internationalism or of doubts about the chance for radical politics in their own coun tries...
...They accepted French credits and expelled French agitators...
...Solitude thereby turns into an advantage...
...Engaged — Malraux...
...The comparison between the treatment of students and young workers in West Germany today and the fate of the Jews under Hitler seems to me—and probably not only to me—an unfortunate one...
...The transfer of social differences to the international scene —as a conflict between developed and underdeveloped nations or between the white race and others—represents an attempt on the part of nations to find their identity in difference, or in the right to be different...
...one calls a friend on quick impulse—the line is busy...
...it offers an exalted vision of the future...
...I prefer arguments to credos...
...In his writings this near-rage, a hatred against something within himself he cannot overcome, seems larger than his love of the oppressed...
...Grass has worked for reform within the framework of a moderate workers' party...
...and the goyim are undoubtedly in great numbers cattle...
...One tends to think of the enraged as fascists, as writers in whom emotion and instinct dominate, and of the engaged as Marxistoriented, analytical, and systematic...
...The liberals, the progressives, the antiFascists could not invest their future with a vision of the values of present civilization as great as the reactionaries' vision of past values...
...Mailer is not reacting to an evil but to a desolate world whose major sin is boredom and indifference, that "mood of the time" which forms the essence of both of Moravia's best works and Sartre's Nausea...
...I shall use the term "engaged" only in the sense of a free commitment not subject to authority from above...
...And then there are the very different French Negro writings, ranging from novels of social criticism to the exaltation of negritude by Leopold Senghor, the President of Senegal, and Aime Cesaire, the Martinique deputy...
...N SARTRE THE AMBIVALENCE between re bellious hatred and revolutionary ideas, between expression and responsibility, is tangible...
...He loudly proclaims his suffering and his anger, and he hates the existing order or disorder more than he loves its victims...
...he identifies with this victory...
...That regime did not last...
...Frantz Fanon asks the Africans to refrain from imitating the West (for what would be the point of ousting the colonizers under whom material conditions might be better...
...We others, on the other hand, sit in our comfortable apartments...
...The enraged begins with himself...
...enraged — Celine...
...and "engagement" ended in solipsism...
...The Algerians, who did not feel obligated to become the executioners of Sartre's sentence over the bourgeoisie, soon had a better rapport with French officials than with the French intellectuals who had run grave risks for their cause...
...In his more rational writings Mailer examines the steady onslaught on the nervous system made by life in the big cities, and he seeks to cushion the shock by aggressive countermeasures...
...Engagement and critical detachment are not irreconcilable opposites, just as political freedom can exist in the face of political authority...
...Writers become an agency of authority, a power against and among other powers, and like other powers they have definite ideas of what makes for justice and injustice...
...Andre Breton and the Surrealists dreamed of uniting the two, simultaneously to change life and the world...
...But does any writer completely fit into one or the other category...
...Neither is satisfied with simply writing, neither is satisfied with the mere existence of his work...
...In his search for a conception about the evils of capitalism, he came across the Canadian social-credit movement which, though not explicitly fascist, resembled early National Socialism...
...When the Russian tanks entered Prague, they took positions in front of the Writers Union and the Acad emy of Science, places which, in the eyes of the invaders, had a high priority...
...But that would be false...
...We did not think this could lead to better work than theirs, but on the other hand we saw that young poets could not go on writing esoteric poetry about the end of civilization...
...and to find dignity in their own mode of life...
...You think what is happening here and what's happening there is "basically the same thing...
...The examples of Celine and Pound (oddly enough, Germany has not produced any major anti-Semitic literature, only an influential subliterature) might give rise to the impression that anti-Semitism, the imagined slaughter of the "evil ones," was the hallmark of contemporary enragement...
...It thereby became identified with noble causes—in the case of Zola the fight for justice for Dreyfus, and in the case of Romain Rolland the battle against blind national hatreds—instead of with a wealth of petty annoyances...
...He sees the extremism of an enraged art and literature as the last defense against infamous conditions of life...
...The intellectuals are able to become the spokesmen of the silent and powerless classes, but they cannot remain its leaders once these groups win complete or even partial power...
...Negritude, and not the demands for equality, now hold the stage...
...This is an orgiastic literature completely unlike the engaged literature we have come to know, yet nonetheless it seeks to be politically effective...
...If we assume Marxism to be an intellec tual commitment and fascism an emotional response, we will note that governments have arisen in the so-called developing na tions which present a cross between the two...
...yet since he continues to be "engaged," he attempts to combine detachment and involvement...
...All that is nothing but theory, nothing but words...
...This contention has been argued most recently by Stephen Spender in an essay entitled "Writers and Politics," in the Summer 1967 Partisan Review...
...For him man, in Malraux's words, begins with his fellow man...
...Since Peter Weiss and others have asked me to own up to my convictions, I wish to tell them that the diverse souls in their and my breasts are of no interest politically...
...From the standpoint of "pure literature," both the engaged and enraged tend to dissipate their energies, and many a literary historian has expressed the wish for greater restraint on their part...
...This tradition is a proud one, dating back to Voltaire, who until his dying breath spoke out for victims of intolerance, to Zola and Heinrich Mann...
...Enragemeat— this mood found its most harmless expression ten years later among the "angry young men," as for example the playwright John Osborne...
...We begin to discover similarities between the intellectual who attacks mass so ciety from the vantage point of the far Left and the intellectual in league with the aris tocrat who fights the new mass society from the Right because he fears the decline of tra ditional values...
...They have heeded the exhortation of Rimbaud, the youthful genius of "rage," to change life, and Marx's exhortation to change the world...
...A people deadened by interruption go mad...
...instead, he begins to hate the spirit of the bourgeoisie in the masses and goes in search of new, still unspoiled "wretched of the earth...
...The French intellectual tradition of involvement in public life dates back to the Enlightenment, to such polar opposites as Voltaire and Rousseau, to the famous "manifesto of the intellectuals" in the Dreyfus Affair, and to the declarations against the Algerian War...
...start to contemplate—the refrigerator will begin to speak...
...Once the silent to whom the litterateurs have given voice come to power, they look for defenders of their interests, not for ideologues...
...Today the politically engaged writers are never free of a certain degree of irony turned against themselves...
...They hoped to achieve these twin goals by appealing to what is visionary, spontaneous, and untrammeled in man, as well as through criticism of social conditions and active support of such political upheavals as the Russian Revolution...
...He states: In a period when poets seemed imprisoned in their private worlds, their occasional acts of surrender to the excitement of a public world of action in the service of what they could pretend to themselves was a civilizing cause is understandable...
...The enraged is better able to give free rein to his 1 Herbert Luthy, "The French Intellectuals," in George B. de Huszar (ed...
...He had counted on this revolutionary force in the Algerian War, and when the end of this war brought independence to Algeria but failed to bring revolution to France, he decried the outcome...
...In Cannibals and Christians, Mailer says that sex and drugs play an ever greater role in his books and that these take on an intoxicating quality...
...Trotsky's critical writings fill two big volumes...
...we are talking of modern man's ability to swallow nausea...
...When the war ended and details about the massacre of the Jews became known, it was not quite so easy to judge Pound solely on aesthetic grounds as a major poet...
...246 ff...
...The cry of anguish of a Norman Mailer, who believes exhibitionism to be a new variant of autobiography, the protest of the ego against the materialism and categories of a functionalized world, is answered by Saul Bellow, who combines engagement with critical detachment and a more subtle awareness of the limits of literature: "I think that the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers had atrue understanding of social problems," Bellow states, "but that in the twentieth century the writers have left this to the specialists...
...Although he has succeeded in making the separation between novelist and politically engaged citizen which Orwell recommended, his example at the same time shows the limits of the "engaged" posture of the writer...
...The intellectual permeation of literature by a definite, extraliterary purpose can make much greater inroads than anger and prejudice, which are not necessarily as all-encompassing...
...One is reminded of Flaubert's constant rage against the stolid bourgeoisie of his time...
...The gulf between the private obsessions of Celine, a doctor of the poor who never harmed nor denounced nor persecuted anyone, and the public obsessions of Hitler is the gulf between literature and reality...
...In 1966, Enzensberger, in a reply to Peter Weiss, was highly critical of a pseudoactivist identification with revolutions in faroff places: Our self-appointed models demonstrate their solidarity with the underdog...
...He prefers the magic of exorcism to sober reason...
...Both realms are peopled by writers who refuse to remain in an ivory tower—a symbol whose progress from the Psalms to the residence of the "nonengaged" poet I wish I understood...
...Even within a Communist regime differences are to be noted...
...We need them...
...A peculiar inversion has taken place: Western writers criticize the working class because it is satisfied with paltry gains and has lost sight of the great "solution" to all social problems...
...They don't do their homework...
...In the literature of Black Power, the dividing line between engagement and enragement has been eradicated...
...Germany, he said, had had a regime which sought to exterminate the Jews and the unfit...
...In the Soviet Union, on the other hand, the engaged writers are accused of seeing only puny individual fates and losing sight of the great line...
...To Sartre it seemed that the great hopes of the radical revolution were sold out for paltry immediate gains...
...Sartre's longest work is a study of Jean Genet...
...I am no idealist...
...They believe in a connection between intellectual and social rationality, they are the spokesmen of those who want to expand the realm of reason and understanding...
...But this wish is based on a notion that the writer is a writer before he is a man and that he is or should be capable of dismissing everything that distracts him from his work, or interferes too greatly with his creative efforts or aims too directly at extraliterary effects...
...The engaged writers thus made an even greater sacrifice than they thought, namely FRANgOIS BONDY that of literary integrity...
...There sprang up in [Sartre's] wake a whole literature, written by intellectuals about intellectuals...
...If in bourgeois France the lot of the prole -tariat improves, if workers who become the beneficiaries of a welfare state turn their backs on the class struggle, if they become petty-bourgeois, Sartre is not happy with this step forward...
...Hans Magnus Enzensberger, writing in the Times Literary Supplement (London), called the "engagement" of the German writers' Group 47 a complete failure for it had become obvious, he said, that a nonrevolutionary road to progress no longer existed...
...The engaged writer attempts to persuade by reason...
...Engaged literature embodies the conviction that all men are brothers and that this constitutes a claim to equality...
...But they did not put literature before politics...
...The intellectual who becomes engaged without taking into account the pos sible response of ,those whose spokesman he THE ENGAGED AND THE ENRAGED believed himself to be is likely to be pushed into an isolation in which engagement easily turns into "rage...
...The works of Norman Mailer, the Jew ish novelist and pamphleteer, increasingly combine radical social criticism of urban America with a cry of rage...
...The engaged literary critic is often a forerunner of a direct political engagement, as for example Georg Lukacs, Kurt Eisner, and Gustav Landauer in Germany...
...Yet admittedly the gulf between Celine and Hitler was smaller than, for instance, that between Brecht and Stalin, because lack of detachment makes for similarities, whereas the literature of detachment preserves differences, even though some statements seem occasionally to abolish it...
...And once they have gained power, the writer no longer sees in them the personification of suffering humanity...
...In England the reform movement of the Labor party was closely linked to the Fabians, to writers like Wells and Shaw...
...Dionys Mascolo, a leading exponent of Sartreism in the fifties, complained in Le Nouvel Observateur of November 1, 1967, that the OAS [the reactionary pro-Algerian forces] had given up too soon...
...The time has come once more to discard categories...
...Literary criticism constitutes a major portion of the writings of the Socialist Leon Blum and the Communist Gramsci...
...The engaged is possessed of a sense of responsibility...
...Since literature in a rationalized society also can serve as a symbol of chaos, as a reversion to the magical powers of the word in contrast to language as a sane, purposeful, orderly system, the "enraged" poet is in league with eerie yet nonetheless real forces, with the rebellion against a practical, material world...
...We live, remember, in a time which interrupts the mood of everything alive...
...The conflict between the private and public man, between individual and citizen, which both Rousseau and Marx sought to eliminate, arises once more and forms the basis of the social consciousness of the writer...
...Simone de Beauvoir tells us that Sartre loathes society but does not loathe loathing it...
...It assumes that annoyance, not love or passion or dedication or climax or interest or mood or mind or even matter, but annoyance, is the foundation of modern existence, and the progressively most common condition for everyone alive is interruption and annoyance...
...Every writer worthy of the name is a unique being...
...Sinyaysky maintained—and his own fate was to endow his reply with painful significance— that such differentiations were meaningless...
...Numerous counterexamples come to mind: Orwell, Camus, Silone, and in a way Brecht...
...In a poll conducted by the Spiegel, many writers, including those of the Left, replied to Enzensberger as he had himself answered Peter Weiss...
...Pravda said that the miserable conditions described by Vitali Siomin, the author of Seven in the House, might well be true, but that they were not a proper theme for a writer, because while searching for the small truths he tends to lose sight of the "big truths"—i.e., the progress of socialism...
...His work will always be more autobiographical than that of the engaged who, although rebelling against external authority, follows an inner discipline and whose writings are part of an ordered world—the world of tomorrow which he pits against that of today...
...And let us not forget that in this instance the one who differentiated was one who was persecuted...
...The gap between engagement and expert knowledge may not be a valid criterion in the approach to moral issues, but things have changed...
...Through all the events of the post-war era, the aim was to preserve one's good conscience and intellectual balance by carefully measured protests against tyranny in Spain and tyranny in Czechoslovakia, race discrimination in America and forced labor in Russia, executions in Persia and executions in Budapest...
...look to pour a friend a drink—the telephone will ring...
...And who would not favor rebellion against total objectification...
...Thus Hitler's politically obsessive world in which "alien races" are candidates for enslavement or extermination becomes the precursor of a world in which these emotionally primitive contrasts play an increasingly decisive role...
...446-47...
...At most, we pay our own air fare on our inspection tours of socialism...
...The label "activist literature" can be attached to both engaged and enraged...
...2 Norman Mailer, Cannibals and Christians (NewYork: The Dial Press, 1966), pp...
...W W HAT ABOUT EZRA POUND, celebrated as a pioneer of modem poetry, who spent years in a mental institution as an alternative to imprisonment as a traitor...
...In Russian, the two kinds of truths even have different names: istina, the small truth, and pravda, the big truth...
...To put it crudely: rage--extreme Right...
...Perhaps we go to Cuba or the Soviet Union, but only as visitors...
...This debate, reminiscent of Hannah Arendt's concept of the banality of evil, offers a classic demonstration of the necessity to differentiate between rational engagement and pure anger...
...Genet's theater offers the opportunity to point out an extraliterary perspective...
...Yevtushenko differentiated between those in the Stalin era who were in camps and those who sent them there as if they were two completely different sets of human beings, the one innocent, the other guilty...
...But no writer from Dante to Hochhuth can be stopped from wishing to consign to hell the popes he dislikes...
...engagement—Left...
...The spread of engaged literature to colonial, semicolonial, or excolonial peoples is another matter, and its spread to the Communistruled countries of the East yet another, one so vast and complex that we can do no more than hint at it...
...They did not, as the antiFascist writers did, abandon or postpone their literary tasks...
...The "engaged" writer Elio Vitto rini, in his Conversazione in Sicilia (1939), calls rabbia astratta—abstract rage against the world—the basic mood of a generation...
...Genet has been called a Nazi writer because of his sensual identification with sadistic SS characters...
...Did the vastly greater number of writers who opted for socialism possess greater understanding and deeper insight into the problems of the economy than Pound...
...Genet celebrates the victory of oppressed Negroes and Algerian fellahim over their white oppressors...
...I prefer doubts to sentiment...
...That four of these six writers are French is no accident...
...A NUMBER of contemporary German writers, particularly Gunter Grass, are attempting an engagement without rage...
...He may FRAN9OIS BONDY have been ill-informed and may have oversimplified— nobody has been so harsh in condemning his past mistakes as Pound himself— but still he tried to arrive at an understanding of the society and economy...
...The reactionaries cared passionately for past values...
...A later statement by Enzensberger would indicate that he has lost the sense of proportion that marked his past writings...
...Others, like Julien Benda, see it as the "treason of the clerics," a renunciation of intellectual integrity in favor of political activity and a role in everyday affairs, neither of which could serve the essential function of philosophy or literature...
...emotions...
...Thus a literature of "engagement," as for example Peter Weiss's Lusitanische Popanz, may still be possible for the remnants of the colonial empire, but it is no longer possible in decolonized countries calling themselves revolutionary...
...They are the heirs of the Enlightenment and the Encyclopedists...
...But in the case of writers who were close to fascism—Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, Yeats—we find more than rage, more than merely revolt and outcry...
...on interruption—so the arts of the midcentury are the arts of the absurd and deal with categories and hierarchies of discontinuity and the style of their breaks...
...He tells how it is and how the American dream has turned into a nightmare...
...For years Sartre has been working on a book about Flaubert, the bourgeois who hated the bourgeoisie yet was part of it, and there are striking similarities between Flaubert's and Sartre's impotent rage...
...In these countries, there is a popular response in which—particularly in Czechoslovakia—writers have been the traditional spokesmen for the masses and for progress, and they are attempting to set themselves up against the representatives of state power and dogmatism...
...Pound supported this movement with a dogged determination...
...T T HE DIVIDING LINE between engagement and enragement has never been quite clear, not even with the Surrealists...
...Perhaps the distinction can be made clear by naming names...
...Engaged—Sartre...
...Unlike Celine, Pound was not simply obsessed...
...After all, we only write...
...Neither should a government that beats up its students and young workers be allowed to survive...
...Spender belongs to the generation of engaged British writers who went to Spain during the Civil War...
...From the perspective of history it might be said that as far back as the Enlightenment engaged literature presupposed a bourgeois world in which established moral authorities, particularly the Church, are vanishing, while writers as well as other intellectuals emerge as a moral force toward which the bourgeoisie and later the other classes can turn...
...I can do without the moral rearmament of the Left...
...Enzensberger's open letter published by the New York Review of Books announcing his intention to leave the United States and his decision to spend some time in Cuba is more in keeping with the political style of the Peter Weiss he attacked in 1966...
...I don't think dying in a mine in Angola is basically the same thing as reading statistics about Angolan mineworkers...
...They are prisoners of their anger,their fears, their visions of catastrophe...
...The enraged find release in the act of writ ing, just as a fit of temper helps to still an ger...
...The absurd is an art which is built not only on interruptions but annoyance...
...his consciousness is formed on collisions and interruptions...
...He does not permit any detachment, any awareness of his personal problems, any irony, to stand between himself and his writings...
...Be cause their hatred of the bourgeoisie no long er finds an echo among the "disinherited," indignant masses, it turns into hatred of the Americanized mass civilization of stupefac tion, of false contentment, and myopic mod eration...
...So am I. Not everyone has the gift of scattering declarations of belief around...
...His and Celine's rage so closely paralleled actual events that their works were credited with an effectiveness that they surely did not possess—least of all the difficult poetry of Ezra Pound...
...To picture the United States, at a time when it has become the arena of major political differences, as a monolith shrouded in pseudoliberalism is, if I may say so, rather Teutonic and romantic, the typical reaction of a nonpolitical person...
...They proclaim their beliefs...
...This closeness can be an incomparable poetic force but also an intellectual and literary failing...
...the enraged writer appeals—and frequently successfully— to the immediate sympathy which his outcry evokes and with which others can identify...
...The early stages of the socialist revolution brought forth a remarkable num ber of literary critics, from Lafargue and Franz Mehring to Plekhanov and (in Rumania) Dobrogeanu Gherea...
...Thus even today engagement has totally different points of departure, according to the social framework...
...T HAS BEEN SAID that dedication to a great cause and a great idea is not as harmful to a writer as becoming the victim of primi tive prejudice or resentment...
...he does not identify with any specific political tendency but preserves distance...
...The new power conflicts leave little room for the ardor of engagement...
...Perhaps they are only a handful, yet they are the ones who recognize and fight against the threat of a war that will claim the lives of countless victims...
...Petain defended Verdun, while Blum was defending a bidet," he said in his Pisan Cantos, and also: "The yidd is a stimulant, and the goyim are cattle/ in gt/ proportion and go to saleable slaughter/ with the maximum of docility...
...German students hate the Shah, French students the rulers of Bolivia...
...The desire of these countries to be different rules out an emotional identification among leftists in the West...
...However, in Les Paravents, it is a victory of death rather than a triumph of revolution...
...Yet Genet's Les Negres and Les Paravents were nonetheless accepted as "engaged theater," and found enthusiastic response among the Left...
...This obliteration of differences has presented the intellectuals in Europe and America with a new problem...
...Engaged literature—the term is reminiscent of numerous, now dated discussions among French intellectuals in the early postwar years, particularly of Jean-Paul Sartre's essay What Is Literature?, in which he asked writers to become engaged, without calling for any specific political affiliation...
...At least, let the question be asked...
...And intelligence holds within itself the possibility of detachment, self-irony, nonadherence to systems...
...Art is here on earth to uplift us, to encourage the religious and the nonreligious to feel a heavenly glow—so declared the caretakers of art for two thousand years...
...What helped to make the "engaged" position effective was not its involvement in day-to-day politics but a certain reserve and detachment...
...Yet their endgames were our beginnings...
...yet the difference is anything but clear-cut...
...I am of a different opinion...
...The children who came after the Second World War grew up...
...One plans to eat—one has to wait for the food to unfreeze...
...The outcry of the poet was judged as though it were a deed...
...But now art is a FRANgOIS BONDY heart pill—nitroglycerine—it binds shattered nerves together by shattering them all over again with style, with wit, each explosion a guide to building a new nervous system...
...But what do we find when we look at Sartre and his circle...
...The Intellectuals: A Controversial Portrait (Chicago: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1960), pp...
...It is important to understand that we thought of them as a greater generation of more devoted artists...
...Yet there is something to be said for Spender's almost masochistic criticism of his generation...
...The one theme of "litterature engagee" finally became—itself...
...I hate revolutionary prattle...
...People who sent others to camps frequently themselves ended up in camps...
...And even though the workers may no longer know where their true interests lie, the writer can still consider himself the representative of these interests...
...The engaged writers of the Left take over entire intellectual systems, and the systems color their work much more strongly than anger colors the work of the enraged...
...However, the possibility of acquiring an exact understanding of society—a possibility that was still open to the Encyclopedists and on which they based their recommendations for change—is becoming foreclosed to the nonspecialist...
...Since then, engagement has lost some of its naivete...
...He does not lead any specific battle, he does not point the way, or rather, he does not know the way...
...He did not simply voice indignation over the evils of capitalism...
...enraged — Mailer...
...Writers like Sartre who have nothing in common with him have acknowledged their debt to him...
...Generally speaking, the works of the engaged writers show greater intelligence than the works of the enraged...
...Go to Vietnam or Peru or spend twenty years carrying on revolutionary warfare...
...begin to watch a show— a commercial comes in...
...For ten years French intellectuals discussed the great question of the age before a mirror, so to speak, and what they were looking for was not objective knowledge but the striking of a proper attitude—the right traditional posture...
...But Celine's fury with the world could not be stilled and his obsession had activist elements...
...The works of major "engaged writers" such as Orwell and Camus deal with the ambiguous position of the writer taking a stand on contemporary problems and hence are self-critical...
...perhaps we hold public readings in Leipzig, but then we again take the interzone train [to West Germany...
...Yesterday's Sukarno and Nkrumah, today's FRANC^OIS BONDY Nasser—where is the dividing line between an emotionally conditioned leadership cult, an identification with a living savior, and social revolutionary goals...
...Having arrived at the limits of our differentiation, or perhaps our game, I believe that both categories—engage and enrage—are meaningful, first in the typology of the writer, then in the different historical situations and societies...
...In the eyes of some, this dedication to the pursuit of truth—as exemplified by Romain Rolland's self-imposed exile in World War I—constitutes the glory of the intellectuals...
...Translated by JEAN STEINBERG...
...Where the attempt at identity is nevertheless made, it is an escape from one's own society rather than the common pursuit of a defined goal...
...After all, the American intellectuals and universities stood in the forefront of the fight against the Vietnam War...
...The engaged writer aware of the complexities of modern life tends to be an individualist...
...You, gentlemen, are readers of statistics...
Vol. 16 • January 1969 • No. 1
