JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

286Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writingsmore than realities and any apparition valued in proportion to its quantity of nonbeing.Thus the autonomy of art in 1850 can be obtained only through the nonreality of theartist and the content of the work, since these show us the nonreality of the world orthe subordination of being to appearance. This may mean that the techniques of art areused to destroy the real, to present it in the work as it appears to the aesthetic attitude.Or it may mean that the artist can turn his back on reality, a strategy particularlyfavored in the Symbolist period for the purpose of choosing the imaginary and evenattempting an oneiric literature. The chief thing, in one form or another, is the valorizationof nonbeing. Around this time, the reason for writing is to resurrect vanishedcivilizations, to contest quotidian banality by an exoticism often entirely fabricated inParis. Everything that is no longer there, that is not there, that is fixed in a permanentabsence, is good provided one has access to the resurrected object solely throughimagination. There is nothing accidental in the widespread vogue of Orientalism, thetranslation of sacred Indian songs, the recurrent presence of antique Greece—workson Greek history and art proliferate—but it is more dead and distant than ever. Writersthus hoped to escape their element and wanted that ancient, exotic culture to remainsavage and inaccessible, its unassimilable originality revealing itself in the very heart ofreading to be an image beyond all images, making palpable the nothingness at the veryheart of imagination as the limit imposed on it by absence and death.Absolute-art, an objective determination of literature-to-be-written, imposes therupture with being on its future ministers from the outset. They cannot write withouta metamorphosis which, unable to call itself by name without exposing its neuroticnature, announces itself objectively as an ordination. But the comparison is misleading:a religious order is an institution that sustains the vocation of the neophyte against theexterior and often against himself; in addition, for a believer, and above all in eras whenfaith is a positive bond between men, a young man leaving the world, in what isactually a negative moment, believes he is turning toward the full positivity of being.But when literature makes itself the absolute, that absolute can be only an absolute ofnegation. Thus the vows of the writer commit him only to himself and are posited bythemselves as always revocable. In other words, they will be irrevocable—which is anecessity—only if the artist is unable to revoke them. The fact is that his first negationor renunciation of the world is not supported by any community and, far from beinga source of integration, reveals exile and solitude as his imperative lot; on the otherhand, this negation is not transformed into negativity—or the patient and joyouswork of undermining—or into the gateway to positivity (the neophyte’s access to theprimary truths of the supernatural plenitude of real being). It must remain radical