In Sartre’s notebooks
for the phony war, from 1940, you can see a decision being made: Sartre was
going to resist the world falling down around him by being intelligent. Since
he was very good at being intelligent, this seemed to him one way, the best way,
in which he could resist the war, the defeat and the occupation. It is
interesting to compare him here to Wittgenstein, who in this same period was more
interested in the way intelligence was way too weak a thing to support the
weight of the world.
One of the essays
Sartre published in 1944 was mined from his notebooks: The tied up man: some
notes on the Journal of Jules Renard. It is a ferocious critique, which puts
the question of intelligence front and center. Sartre represents himself as the
agent of what James Scott called, in Domination and the Arts of Resistance, the
Great Tradition. The Great Tradition emerges in the metropole, and is vehiculized
by the state, which sends out its functionaries, teachers, policy makers, and
renders the world of the Little Tradition, the rural world, the world of the
peasants, legible. In this struggle, the peasant is accorded the virtue of the
ruse – metis – while the functionary is accorded the virtue of intelligence, of
rationality.
James Scott’s book,
published in 1990, is startlingly pertinent to Sartre’s 1944 essay. Sartre’s
essay is rooted in Sartre’s perception that Renard’s world view, his search for
the most economic and laconic of styles, is rooted in his peasant origins – or at
least his origins as a bourgeois from the countryside, from Chitry-les-Mines, located
midway between Orleans and Dijon. In Sartre’s notes, and in the essay, he made
use of an anecdote that Renard wrote down about a peasant smallholder, Papa
Bulot. A servant came to Bulot’s house after his legs were paralyzed.
“The first day, she
asked: What can I make that you would like to eat?
-
A potato soup.
The next day she
asked, what do you want me to make?
-
A potato soup, I already said.
The third day she
asked and received the same answer. Then she understood. From that day on, she made potato soup and didn’t
ask about it. “
For Sartre, this dialogue
was as revelatory as, to take a text being written at the same time –
Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations - the orders shouted between builders at the
beginning of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. In a sense, I am not
bringing in Wittgenstein as an odd philosophical ricochet. Sartre begins his
essay on Renard with the sentence: “He created the literature of silence.” Which,
for those who’ve read Wittgenstein and remember his most famous maxim from the
Tractatus (“that of which one cannot speak,
one must thereof be silent”), has an echo beyond Sartre’s references to French
literature. Which makes it all the more interesting that, for Sartre, there is
a social background here. To quote Sartre’s notebook: The most sense possible
in words, the most sense possible in the phrase, in the articulation. The thing
produced here is a supersaturation of sense. Everything crystallizes. Each
phrase is a silence closed around itself and supersaturated. And the most
curious thing is that Renard, in furious pursuit of saying things with the
least words, has absolutely nothing to say.”
The last sentence sums
up his critique of Renard, who like Papa Bulot is a paralyzed prisoner in the
house of language, who says once and only one time that he wants potato soup,
and wants it forever. (Oddly, this brings to mind one of Bela Tarr’s movies,
The Horse of Turin, in which peasants eating of potatoes is pretty much the
only drama in the whole movie).
Well, I’ve gone on a
bit of a ricochet spree here, and I want to finish up with Cyril Connolly’s
comments on Hemingway in The Enemies of Promise -via Aldous Huxley’s criticism
of Hemingway and Hemingway’s reply to Huxley. But that is for another day.
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