Jean-Paul Sartre's interest in literary criticism is indirect: his concern is chiefly to understand the condition of the writer, the particular way in which he remains dependent on, but manages to be free from his day and place, his public and his language. To communicate effectively with his reader a writer must, in Sartre's view, be representative yet original, influenced by his situation yet able to assert his own self much more than most of us are ever in a position to do. Viewed in this way, the condition of the writer is a privileged instance of the human condition, and the study of it necessarily occupies a considerable place in a philosophy which is above all concerned with the problem of freedom. At the same time, the practice of literary criticism, in this special sense, enables Sartre to express his ideas with a bold provocativeness which lies happily midway in style between his forbiddingly abstract philosophic rhetoric and the controversialist's violent irony. (p. 427)
Although Sartre has written about poets, including Baudelaire, Ponge and French-speaking Negro poets, he has paid little attention to style or language. Indeed, because of his sweeping condemnation of the surrealists (a condemnation he has nevertheless qualified several times), some critics have denied that he knows what poetry is. It is true that half-way through his 200-page Baudelaire he admits having shed no light upon 'the secret charm which makes his poems inimitable', and then forges ahead without further reference to this intrinsic quality. But there is evidence for the other view. When he is analysing the essential task confronting Negro poets in present or former French colonies—the vindication of their coloured self, the affirmation of their blackness—Sartre effectively exposes the white values hidden in the French language which the Negro poet must transform if he is to express himself…. (pp. 427-28)
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