For some time now French critics have been talking about a "crisis" in their literature. "Crisis" is a violent word, and there has possibly been some overdramatization in its use; but there can be no doubt about the seriousness of the situation that has evoked this word: French literature suggests a countryside overrun by generations of industrious cultivators until the point of diminishing returns seems reached, where the soil continues to yield crops only after exacting very much more drastic methods of cultivation and ever more painful labor. By the turn of the century, some traditional genres already appeared exhausted, and recently French critics have been declaring that the language itself demands new means of expression.
The background of Qu'est-ce que la littérature?, then, is this continuing crisis in French literature, one which is still apparent on the contemporary literary scene. For in retrospect it seems clear that Sartre is not, nor is likely to become, a great writer: clever, enormously, furiously energetic, he does not possess the authentic gifts of a really first-rate creative talent. But in the present case this may be no disadvantage—a greater writer, for whom literature itself might never become a question, might be less sensitive to the historic forces that now push the literary man into such an odd and difficult place in the world. And what we can always count on in Sartre is the prodigious intelligence with which he plunges into any problem. In the grand tradition, he divides the problem of literature into three questions: Qu'est-ce qu'écrire? Pourquoi écrire? Pour qui écriton? These questions themselves breathe the air of crisis, for they are not the kind of questions that enter the writer's head during his periods of fertility and overflow; they become urgent and sometimes paralyzing only when he has descended into the pits of silence, anguish, artistic nihilism; when he exists on the margins of literature where language itself seems to become impossible, a position described almost twenty years later in Les Mots.
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