What Is Literature? And Other Essays Book

Yes impressive. I tend to struggle with Sartre ... even the name .. shouldn't it be spelt Satre? Anyway I digress. The book is about literature as the name suggests but its also about the culture of literature, about the power of literature, what writing is, why we should write, for who people write and the situation of the writer around 1947 which is the year that this book was written. I love books about books so a book about the study of literature and the power that it can have is right up my street. The book started talking a little about politics in places which I'm sorry to say that i find a little bit boring (communist vs. bourgeoisie writing etc) but apart from this is was a solid upper end of the 4 star spectrum. It's one of the easiest to read of Sartre's books but even then in places I had no clue what the dude was going on about in places. Anyway - here are my favourite bits blad:
• In prose words are significative; they describe men and objects. In poetry, words are ends in themselves.
• Literature should not be a sedative but an irritant, a catalyst provoking men to change the world in which they live and in so doing to change themselves.
• His historical perspective suggested that art for art's sake was a diversionary manoeuvre patronised by the bourgeoisie who preferred to hear themselves denounced as philistines rather than as exploiters.
• Here Sartre echoed Marx; the philosophers had only interpreted the world whereas the point was to change it.
• Culture saves nothing and nobody, nor does it justify. But it is a product of man. He projects himself through it and recognises himself in it; the critical mirror alone shows him his image.
• For the artist the colour, the bouquet, the tinkling of the spoon on a saucer are things in the highest degree.
• The speaker is in a situation in language. He is invested with words. They are prolongations of his meanings, his pincers, his antennae, his spectacles. He manoeuvres them from within, he feels them as though they were his body. He is surrounded by a verbal body which he is hardly aware of and which extends his action upon the world. The poet is outside language. He sees words inside out as if he does not share the human condition .. he discovers in words a slight luminosity of their own and particular affinities with the earth, the sky, the water and all things created.
• Genius is only great patience
• In reading one foresees, one waits, one foresees the end of the sentence, the following sentence, the next page. One waits for them to confirm or disappoint ones foresight. The reading is composed of a host of hypotheses.
• Reading is a free dream
• For this is quite the final goal of art; to recover this world by giving it to be seen as it is but as if it had its source in human freedom.
• It has often been observed that an object in a story does not derive its density of existence from the number and length of descriptions devoted to it, but form the complexity of its connections with the different characters. The more often the characters handle it, take it up, and put it down, in short go beyond it towards their own ends, the more real it will appear.
• To the young people of today who are tired of literature, to prove to them that a novel can also be an act.
• A work of art is never finished until it has become a collective representation and then it contains but virtue of all that generations of readers have put into it infinitely more than at the moment of conception.
• We hope that our books remain in the air all by themselves and that their words instead of pointing backwards towards the one who has designed them will be toboggans, forgotten, unnoticed, and solitary, which will hurl readers into the midst of a universe where there are no witnesses; in short that our books may exist in the manner of things, of plants, of events, and not at first like products of men. We should no longer I believe define beauty by the form or even the matter but by the density of being.
• Of course the book is still the heavy infantry which clears and occupies the terrain. But literature has its aeroplanes, its V1s, its V2s which go a great distance upsetting and harassing without bringing about the actual decision.