Against Interpretation (14 page)

Given all these ulterior intellectual motives, it is surprising how well Sartre’s enterprise serves Genet. This is because Genet himself, in his writings, is notably and explicitly involved in the enterprise of self-transfiguration. Crime, sexual and social degradation, above all murder, are understood by Genet as occasions for glory. It did not require much ingenuity on Sartre’s part to propose that Genet’s writings are an extended treatise on abjection—conceived as a spiritual method. The “sanctity” of Genet, created by an onanistic meditation upon his own degradation and the imaginative annihilation of the world, is the explicit subject of his prose works. What remained for Sartre was to draw out the implications of what is explicit in Genet. Genet may never have read Descartes, Hegel, or Husserl. But Sartre is right, entirely right, in finding a relation in Genet to the ideas of Descartes, Hegel, and Husserl. As Sartre brilliantly observes: “Abjection is a methodical conversion, like Cartesian doubt and Husserlian
epoché:
it establishes the world as a closed system which consciousness regards from without, in the manner of the divine understanding. The superiority of this method to the other two lies in its being lived in pain and pride. It therefore does not lead to the transcendental and universal consciousness of Husserl, the formal and abstract thinking of the Stoics, or the substantial
cogito
of Descartes, but to an individual existence at its highest degree of tension and lucidity.”

As I have said, the only work of Sartre’s comparable to
Saint Genet
is the dazzling essay on Baudelaire. Baudelaire is analyzed as a man in revolt whose life is continually lived in bad faith. His freedom is not creative, rebellious though it may have been, because it never finds its own set of values. Throughout his life the profligate Baudelaire needed bourgeois morality to condemn him. Genet is a true revolutionist. In Genet, freedom is won for freedom’s sake. Genet’s triumph, his “sanctity,” is that he broke through the social framework against unbelievable odds to found his own morality. Sartre shows us Genet making a lucid, coherent system out of
le mal.
Unlike Baudelaire, Genet is free of self-deception.

Saint Genet
is a book about the dialectic of freedom, and is, formally at least, set in the Hegelian mold. What Sartre wants to show is how Genet, by means of action and reflection, has spent his whole life attaining the lucid free act. Cast from his birth in the role of the Other, the outcast, Genet chose himself. This original choice is asserted through three different metamorphoses—the criminal, the aesthete, the writer. Each one is necessary to fulfill freedom’s demand for a push beyond the self. Each new level of freedom carries with it a new knowledge of the self. Thus the whole discussion of Genet may be read as a dark travesty on Hegel’s analysis of the relations between self and other. Sartre speaks of the works of Genet as being, each one of them, small editions of
The Phenomenology of Mind.
Absurd as it sounds, Sartre is correct. But it is also true that all of Sartre’s writings as well are versions, editions, commentaries, satires on Hegel’s great book. This is the bizarre point of connection between Sartre and Genet; two more different human beings it would be hard to imagine.

In Genet, Sartre has found his ideal subject. To be sure, he has drowned in him. Nevertheless,
Saint Genet
is a marvellous book, full of truths about moral language and moral choice. (Take, as only one instance, the insight that “evil is the systematic substitution of the abstract for the concrete.”) And the analyses of Genet’s narratives and plays are consistently perceptive. On Genet’s most daring book,
Funeral Rites,
Sartre is particularly striking. And he is certainly capable of appraisal, as well as explication, as in the entirely just comment that “The style of
Our Lady of the Flowers,
which is a dream poem, a poem of futility, is very slightly marred by a kind of onanistic complacency. It does not have the spirited tone of the works that follow.” Sartre does say many foolish, superfluous things in
Saint Genet.
But everything true and interesting that can be said about Genet is in this book as well.

It is also a crucial book for the understanding of Sartre at his best. After
Being and Nothingness,
Sartre stood at the crossroads. He could move from philosophy and psychology to an ethics. Or he could move from philosophy and psychology to a politics, a theory of group action and history. As everyone knows, and many deplore, Sartre chose the second path; and the result is the
Critique of Dialectical Reason,
published in 1960.
Saint Genet
is his complex gesture in the direction he did not go.

Of all the philosophers in the Hegelian tradition (and I include Heidegger), Sartre is the man who has understood the dialectic between self and other in Hegel’s
Phenomenology
in the most interesting and usable fashion. But Sartre is not simply Hegel with knowledge of the flesh, any more than he deserves to be written off as a French disciple of Heidegger. Sartre’s great book,
Being and Nothingness,
is heavily indebted to the language and problems of Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger, to be sure. But it has a fundamentally different intention from theirs. Sartre’s work is not contemplative, but is moved by a great psychological urgency. His pre-war novel,
Nausea,
really supplies the key to all his work. Here is stated the fundamental problem of the assimilability of the world in its repulsive, slimy, vacuous, or obtrusively substantial thereness—the problem which moves all of Sartre’s writings.
Being and Nothingness
is an attempt to develop a language to cope with, to record the gestures of, a consciousness tormented by disgust. This disgust, this experience of the superfluity of things and of moral values, is simultaneously a psychological crisis and a metaphysical problem.

Sartre’s solution is nothing if not impertinent. Corresponding to the primitive rite of anthropophagy, the eating of human beings, is the philosophical rite of cosmophagy, the eating of the world. The hallmark of the philosophical tradition to which Sartre is heir starts with consciousness as the sole given. Sartre’s solution to the anguish of consciousness confronted by the brute reality of things is cosmophagy, the devouring of the world by consciousness. More exactly, consciousness is understood as both world-constituting and world-devouring. All relations—especially, in the most brilliant passages in
Being and Nothingness,
the erotic—are analyzed as gestures of consciousness, appropriations of the other in the interminable self-definition of the self.

In
Being and Nothingness,
Sartre reveals himself as a psychologist of the first rank—worthy to rank with Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Freud. And the focus of the Baudelaire essay is the analysis of Baudelaire’s work and biography, treated as texts equivalent from a symptomatic point of view, disclosing fundamental psychological gestures. What makes
Saint Genet
even more interesting than the Baudelaire essay (though, at the same time, more unmanageable as well) is that, through thinking about Genet, Sartre has gone beyond the notion of action as a mode of psychological self-conservation. Through Genet, Sartre has glimpsed something of the autonomy of the aesthetic. More exactly, he has redemonstrated the connection between the aesthetic dimension and freedom, rather differently argued by Kant. The artist who is the subject of
Saint Genet
is not psychologized away. Genet’s works are interpreted in terms of a saving ritual, a ceremony of consciousness. That this ceremony is essentially onanistic, is curiously apt. According to European philosophy since Descartes, world-creating has been the principal activity of consciousness. Now, a disciple of Descartes has interpreted world-creating as a form of world-procreating, as masturbation.

Sartre correctly describes Genet’s spiritually most ambitious book,
Funeral Rites,
as “a tremendous effort of transubstantiation.” Genet relates how he transformed the whole world into the corpse of his dead lover, Jean Decarnin, and this young corpse into his own penis. “The Marquis de Sade dreamt of extinguishing the fires of Etna with his sperm,” Sartre observes. “Genet’s arrogant madness goes further: he jerks off the Universe.” Jerking off the universe is perhaps what all philosophy, all abstract thought is about: an intense, and not very sociable pleasure, which has to be repeated again and again. It is a rather good description, anyway, of Sartre’s own phenomenology of consciousness. And, certainly, it is a perfectly fair description of what Genet is about.

[
1963
]

Nathalie Sarraute and the novel

A
NEW
mode of didacticism has conquered the arts, is indeed the “modern” element in art. Its central dogma is the idea that art must evolve. Its result is the work whose main intention is to advance the history of the genre, to break ground in matters of technique. The paramilitary imagery of
avant-garde
and
arrière-garde
perfectly expresses the new didacticism. Art is the army by which human sensibility advances implacably into the future, with the aid of ever newer and more formidable techniques. This mainly negative relation of individual talent to tradition, which gives rise to the rapid and built-in obsolescence of each new item of technique, and each new use of materials, has vanquished the conception of art as giving familiar pleasure, and produced a body of work which is principally didactic and admonitory. As everyone knows by now, the point of Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase” is not so much to represent anything, much less a nude, descending a staircase, as to teach a lesson on how natural forms may be broken into a series of kinetic planes. The point of the prose works of Stein and Beckett is to show how diction, punctuation, syntax, and narrative order can be recast to express continuous impersonal states of consciousness. The point of the music of Webern and Boulez is to show how, for example, the rhythmical function of silence and the structural role of tone colors can be developed.

The victory of the modern didacticism has been most complete in music and painting, where the most respected works are those which give little pleasure on first hearing and seeing (except to a small and highly trained audience) but make important advances in the technical revolutions which have taken place in these arts. Compared with music and painting, the novel, like the cinema, lags well to the rear of the battlefield. A body of “difficult” novels comparable to Abstract Expressionist painting and
musique concrète
has not overrun the territory of critically respectable fiction. On the contrary, most of the novel’s few brave ventures to the front line of modernism get marooned there. After a few years they seem merely idiosyncratic, for no troops follow the brave CO and back him up. Novels which, in the order of difficulty and of merit, are comparable to the music of Gian-Carlo Menotti and the painting of Bernard Buffet, are garnished with the highest critical acclaim. The ease of access and lack of rigor that causes embarrassment in music and painting are no embarrassment in the novel, which remains intransigently
arrière-garde.

Yet, middle-class art form or no, there is no genre in greater need of sustained reexamination and renovation. The novel is (along with opera) the archetypal art form of the 19th century, perfectly expressing that period’s wholly mundane conception of reality, its lack of really ambitious spirituality, its discovery of the “interesting” (that is, of the commonplace, the inessential, the accidental, the minute, the transient), its affirmation of what E. M. Cioran calls “destiny in lower case.” The novel, as all the critics who praise it never tire of reminding us and upbraiding contemporary writers who deviate, is about man-in-society; it brings alive a chunk of the world and sets its “characters” within that world. Of course, one can treat the novel as the successor to the epic and the picaresque tale. But everyone knows that this inheritance is superficial. What animates the novel is something wholly missing from these older narrative forms: the discovery of psychology, the transposition of motives into “experiences.” This passion for the documentation of “experience,” for facts, made the novel the most open of all art forms. Every art form works with some implicit standard of what is elevated and what is vulgar—except the novel. It could accommodate any level of language, any plot, any ideas, any information. And this, of course, was its eventual undoing as a serious art form. Sooner or later discriminating readers could no longer be expected to become interested in one more leisurely “story,” in half a dozen more private lives laid open for their inspection. (They found the movies doing this, with more freedom and with more vigor.) While music and the plastic arts and poetry painfully dug themselves out of the inadequate dogmas of 19th century “realism,” by a passionate commitment to the idea of progress in art and a hectic quest for new idioms and new materials, the novel has proved unable to assimilate whatever of genuine quality and spiritual ambition has been performed in its name in the 20th century. It has sunk to the level of an art form deeply, if not irrevocably, compromised by philistinism.

When one thinks of giants like Proust, Joyce, the Gide of
Lafcadio,
Kafka, the Hesse of
Steppenwolf,
Genet, or lesser but nonetheless masterly writers such as Machado de Assis, Svevo Woolf, Stein, the early Nathanael West, Céline, Nabokov, the early Pasternak, the Djuna Barnes of
Nightwood,
Beckett (to mention only some), one thinks of writers who close off rather than inaugurate, who cannot be learned from, so much as imitated, and whom one imitates at the peril of merely repeating what they have done. One hesitates to blame or praise critics for anything that happens in an art form, whether for good or bad. Yet it is hard not to conclude that what the novel has lacked, and what it must have if it is to continue as a generally (as opposed to sporadically) serious art form, is any sustained distance from its 19th century premises. (The great flowering of literary criticism in England and America in the last thirty years, which began with the criticism of poetry and then passed on to the novel, precisely does
not
contain such a reevaluation. It is a philosophically naïve criticism, unquestioning and uncritical of the prestige of “realism.”)