JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

Writing263It is we who have invented the laws by which we judge it. It is our history, our love,our gaiety that we recognize in it. Even if we should look at it without touching it anyfurther, we never receive from it that gaiety or love. We put them into it. The resultswhich we have obtained on canvas or paper never seem to us objective. We are toofamiliar with the processes of which they are the effects. These processes remain asubjective discovery; they are ourselves, our inspiration, our trick, and when we seekto perceive our work, we create it again, we repeat mentally the operations whichproduced it; each of its aspects appears as a result. Thus, in the perception, the objectis given as the essential thing and the subject as the inessential. The latter seeksessentiality in the creation and obtains it, but then it is the object which becomes theinessential.This dialectic is nowhere more apparent than in the art of writing, for the literaryobject is a peculiar top which exists only in movement. To make it come into view aconcrete act called reading is necessary, and it lasts only as long as this act can last.Beyond that, there are only black marks on paper. Now, the writer cannot read whathe writes, whereas the shoemaker can put on the shoes he has just made if they are hissize, and the architect can live in the house he has built. In reading, one foresees; onewaits. One foresees the end of the sentence, the following sentence, the next page. Onewaits for them to confirm or disappoint one’s foresights. The reading is composed ofa host of hypotheses, of dreams followed by awakenings, of hopes and deceptions.Readers are always ahead of the sentence they are reading in a merely probable futurewhich partly collapses and partly comes together in proportion as they progress,which withdraws from one page to the next and forms the moving horizon of theliterary object. Without waiting, without a future, without ignorance, there is noobjectivity.Now the operation of writing involves an implicit quasi-reading which makes realreading impossible. When the words form under his pen, the author doubtless seesthem, but he does not see them as the reader does, since he knows them before writingthem down. The function of his gaze is not to reveal, by brushing against them, thesleeping words which are waiting to be read, but to control the sketching of the signs.In short, it is a purely regulating mission, and the view before him reveals nothingexcept for slight slips of the pen. The writer neither foresees nor conjectures; heprojects. It often happens that he awaits, as they say, the inspiration. But one doesnot wait for oneself the way one waits for others. If he hesitates, he knows that thefuture is not made, that he himself is going to make it, and if he still does not knowwhat is going to happen to his hero, that simply means that he has not thought about