Here is the passage that causes me some questions that I hope this newsgroup will help me out with.
======================================================================== ============= [taken from Jean-Paul Sartre's introduction to the _Journeaux Intimes_ of Baudelaire]
In the XVIII Century the existence of an aristocracy by birth simplified everything [for a writer]: The professional writer, whatever his origins, be it bastard, son of a knife maker or court magistrate, had direct relations with the aristocracy, bypassing the bourgeoisie. Given a pension by the nobility, or flogged on its orders, he was under its immediate dependence and drew from the nobility his earnings as well as his social dignity. He was aristocratized, so to speak. The nobility communicated a little of its _mana_; the writer participated in its leisure, and the glory that he aimed at attaining was a reflection of the immorality [_sic_] that the title confers by heredity to a royal family.
When the nobility collapsed, the writer was dumbfounded by the fall of his protectors. He had to seek new justifications. The business he undertook with
the holy caste of priests and nobles had declassed him. That is, he was torn from the bourgeois class from which he emanated, cleaned of his origins, and nourished by the aristocracy without however being able to enter its bosom. Depending for his work and his material life on a superior and inaccessible society, leisured and parasitic itself, which rewarded his labors with capricious gifts of no relation that could be grasped with the work itself; meanwhile plunged by his family and daily life into the bosom of a bourgeoisie that had lost the power to justify him, he had become aware of being apart, rootless in the air, a Ganymede carried off by the talons of an eagle. He perpetually felt superior to his milieu.
But after the Revolution the bourgeois class itself took power. Logically, it was the bourgeoisie that should confer a new dignity on the writer. Only, this operation is not possible unless the writer accepts entering the bosom of the bourgeoisie. That was out of the question. First two hundred years of royal favor had taught him to scorn the bourgeoisie, but above all, a parasite of a parasitic class, he had become used to considering himself like a clerk, cultivating pure thought, and art for art's sake. If he returned to his class, his function becomes radically modified. Indeed, the bourgeoisie, even if it is an oppressive class, is not parasitic. It despoils the worker, but works with him. The creation of a work of art within a bourgeois society becomes the provision of a service. The poet must offer his talent to his class, like an engineer or a lawyer. He must help his class take conscience of itself and contribute to the development of the myths that permit the oppression of the proletariat. In exchange, bourgeois society will consecrate him. But he loses in this change; he abdicates his independence and renounces his superiority. He is part of an elite, to be sure, but there is an elite of doctors, an elite of accountants. The hierarchy is constituted within the bosom of the class according to its social efficacy, and the body of artists takes a secondary place, a little above the university.
That is what most writers could not accept. For an Emile Augier who correctly fulfilled his contract, how many others, on the contrary, were malcontents and in revolt? What to do? Nobody, we well understand, had the idea of asking the proletariat for his justification - which would have performed a declassing just as real but in a reverse sense. . The majority of writers tried to work out a symbolic declassing. .. ======================================================================== ====
First, it never occurred to me that the aristocracy was "parasitic". I thought that at least in its origins it was a warrior class, which I assumed could not be parasitic. So, is a warrior class parasitic? If not, did the aristocracy degenerate to parasitism?
Second, what is parasitism? Note that clerks and priests in Sartre's passage are lumped with parasites. But since clerks and priests do necessary work (at least, necessary to somebody) in what sense are they parasites?
I rather agree that the writer, at least the poet, has lost a meaningful function in bourgeois society. Poetry may be interesting, but it just isn't needed. Sartre says that there is nevertheless a bourgeois blessed use for writers (and poets). What would that be today? Journalist, like Safire or Molly Ivins, perhaps? Copywriter for an ad agency? Ghost writing like Buchanan? Technical writing for IBM?
And finally, what could a proletariat writer be? Lyric writer for pop songs? Probably not because pop songs do nothing to let the proles obtain awareness of themselves as a class. Pop is more distraction than anything else. Movie script writer? Same objection, movies are distracting amusements for the worker. There are outstanding movies, to be sure, but if they are class based, it seems to me the class is bourgeois. I have difficulty imagining what a proletarian writer would write. Does anybody have any ideas?
Thanks in advance. If not suitable for this list, I hope somebody will let me know.
-- John K. Taber