JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

Writing285the real. And yet they remained what they were: young bourgeois of the middle class,supported by their family or practicing a “liberal” profession. So they had to choose:either nothing had been produced—because nothing could be produced—except indreams; and so literature, insofar as it demanded these ruptures, had become impossible.Or the choice of the imaginary, insofar as it represented the common signification ofthat behavior, was an effective and revolutionary step. The Postromantics chose theimaginary so as to be able to write.But the necessity of this choice represents in itself an element of objective neurosis.Let us examine what it means. In the first place, rupture with the real—which isequivalent to condemning it—cannot be lived except as a permanent refusal to adapt;the artist must deny the aims of the race and society in himself and others as much aspossible. And as he does not always manage to do so, the refusal must be imaginary.Similarly, he is required to lose the ordinary comprehension of objects, acts, andwords to the same extent that absolute negation compels him no longer to sharecommon aims. But this incomprehension does not come—as with the philosophers ofthe Platonic cave—from a superior knowledge that would in itself degrade the superficialactivities of men in the name of their underlying essence and the essential goals ofhumanity, or even from a demand for deeper knowledge of them. Outside thisincomprehension there is nothing: it confines itself to manifesting things in a state ofestrangement precisely because of the refusal to integrate them into a real system. Thepoint, in short, is to live in a permanent state of slight depersonalization, sometimessincerely felt, sometimes maintained in the form of a role. In this state, if it can besustained by external assistance, the writer must put himself and the world betweenparentheses; he does not intervene, he abstains. Consequently, things lose their weightof reality and sensation loses its “seriousness”; this is a subtle way of “realizing”absolute negation by reducing the universe to a series of apparitions untested bypraxis and which—by their nothingness of being, the total absence of any coefficientof instrumentality or adversity—are finally equal to appearances. Since art must bethe supreme negation, the content of the work will be that desubstantialized, invisibleuniverse of the imaginary. And in order to obtain the suppression of being in theinterest of the pure, unreal apparition, the artist will have to receive his impressions asif he were imagining them. This is called the aesthetic attitude, the rigorous requirementof a literature that claims its full autonomy just when the bourgeoisie wants a classliterature. With this attitude the artist unrealizes himself and at the same time derealizesthe world. And as art is posited for its own sake through him, these strategies must inthemselves imply a reversal of the usual set of values, making appearances worth