For Sartre, committed writing aims at changing the world by disclosing it and by asking and investigating the question of meaning; the meaning of human existence in the world, and the meaning of life.
Writers, Sartre says, must be politically and socially committed; their commitment is their writing through which the world is disclosed and then changed and improved. Writing is committed to the extent that it endeavors to reveal and change the world and to the extent that it asks the question of the meaning of existence.
This is why Sartre insists that writers must be politically and socially engaged; writers must endeavor to change the social and political situation of the Other, of the reader. In What Is Literature?, Sartre investigates and sets forth the role of the writer and argues for his view that writing must be committed.
The Writer as Situated Freedom
For Sartre, the writer is a free being; the writer is freedom itself, but this freedom is first announced and fully experienced through commitment. The writer is free and situated; the writer is situated freedom, according to Sartre. But what does the situatedness of the writer mean? And why is this situatedness freedom?
Writers are situated in the sense that what they write is written from out of their factical, historical, social, cultural, and political situation in the world. Writers write from out of their situation, toward and into their situation so that revealing, changing, and improving the world, their world, could become genuine possibilities.
But to be situated in a certain historical, factical, social, and political world does not mean that writers or their writing should be unfree. Writers write from out of their own situation in the world so that the situation itself could be challenged, questioned, re-thought, problematized, and destabilized, so that the world itself could be changed and rendered different.
Committed writing acknowledges and embraces the situation by revealing and challenging it. For Sartre, committed writing is authentic to the extent that it writes about the world, to the extent that it reveals the world. Committed writing is authentic writing because it neither withdraws from the world nor denies the world’s problems.
Authentic writing thinks and responds to the question of meaning, writes about and discloses the world as it is, embraces and challenges the situation, and aims at changing and improving the world.
Committed Writing and the Relation Between the Writer and the Reader
In What Is Literature?, Sartre discusses and thinks the relation linking together the writer and the reader. Both the writer and the reader are situated and free; both are situated freedoms, according to Sartre.
For Sartre, between the situated and free writer and the situated and free reader, a dialogue is constantly underway, a dialogue that is itself free, situated, factical, and historical.
In order for a genuine dialogue between the writer and the reader to take place, both should be committed. And in order for both to be committed, they must acknowledge their freedom, they must embrace their own factical situation in the world; they must challenge their situation, history, and destiny.
The writer and the reader are situated freedoms connected to each other through words. According to Sartre, the writer converses with the reader through words. The writer uses the words in such a way that transforms the reader by revealing the world, that is, by allowing the world to show itself as it is to the reader.
According to Sartre, “the engaged” writer knows that words are actions; that is, words render actions possible by calling upon the reader to act and to decide. The writer knows that revealing the world leads to its transformation. The writer transforms the world only by revealing it. The world of the reader undergoes a transformation once it is revealed by the writing of the writer. The writing of the writer is transformative, according to Sartre.
In a word, writing reveals the world and renders possible its transformation. But what is the aim of this revealing, according to Sartre? For Sartre, the main aim of the writing of the writer is to allow the reader to take full responsibility before the world, the world that has been disclosed through the words of the writer.
This is why the role of the writer in the world, for Sartre, is crucial and important, since writing is that through which the world is revealed in such a way that allows the reader to feel responsible for the world and its destiny.
According to Sartre, the role of the writer is “to act in such a way that nobody can be ignorant of the world and that nobody may say that he is innocent of what it’s all about”.
Sartre’s argument for committed writing is that because writing reveals the problems of the world and renders them fully available and completely present to the reader, the reader will eventually begin to assume full responsibility for the world by endeavoring to change it.
The writer renders the reader aware of the world, its injustices, and its problems. This rendering aware occurs by revealing the world, by disclosing the world as it is. This rendering aware calls upon the reader to challenge and change the world.
In the existential thinking-philosophizing of Sartre, this attempt at rendering aware so that acting and deciding could be motivated is closely linked together with Sartre’s argument that one is not free if the Other is still not free, which was first expressed in Existentialism Is a Humanism.
For instance, because the words of the writer disclose the world as it is, the reader will eventually realize that the world is full of oppressed and still unfree individuals. This realization will motivate the reader to fight for the freedom of the Other, since without the Other’s freedom, the reader cannot be free.
The freedom of the Other completes the reader’s freedom and lets it become radical and absolute. One is not free unless everyone else is free, according to Sartre. This is why, for Sartre, the aim of writing is to disclose the world as it is and to render the reader aware so that changing the world becomes a genuine and real possibility.
The world, just disclosed through the words of the writer, calls upon the free reader to change it, for instance, by freeing the Other. Changing the world thus depends upon revealing the world, which occurs through committed writing.
According to Sartre, the mere act of disclosing the world as it is renders change possible. Hence, the writer, Sartre says, is ethically required to be committed freedom and to struggle for the freedom of the Other.
Writing, Justifying Existence, and Feeling Essential
The writer does not write only to reveal and change the world, but also to experience a sense of essentiality in the world. According to Sartre, “one of the chief motives of artistic creation is certainly the need of feeling that we are essential in relationship to the world”.
This is why Roquentin in Nausea decides to write a novel, since this decision arises from Roquentin’s feelings of contingency and inessentiality. Roquentin writes because he feels the need to create something that could justify his own existence in the world.
For Sartre, the writer and the reader are not separated from each other; they are not distanced from each other; there is no apartness divorcing the writer from the reader.
All writing is directed toward a reader; all reading is a response to a written word; all reading confirms writing and the role of the writer. Again, this is Roquentin’s discovery, which is that the writer becomes justified and essential only through the reading of the reader.
The writer renders the world apparent and the reader aware. The writer thus needs the reader to welcome this revealing and this knowledge. Only the reading of the reader could justify the writing of the writer; only the reader could justify the writer; only the reading of the reader could confirm the world that the writer unveils and brings into view so that it could be challenged, re-thought, or re-shaped.
According to Sartre, “all literary work is an appeal. To write is to make an appeal to the reader…The writer appeals to the reader’s freedom to collaborate in the production of his work.”
In the existentialism of Sartre, one’s freedom depends on, passes through, and needs the freedom of the Other so that it could be confirmed, radicalized, and rendered absolute. The same way of linking one’s freedom together with the Other’s freedom is also found in the relation between the reader and the writer.
For Sartre, to write is to make an appeal to the freedom of the reader. This means that the writer must acknowledge the freedom of the reader; the writer must trust the reader; the writer must write from out of and toward the freedom of the reader.
Sartre says that between the writer and the reader, there must be a “pact of generosity”, which means that there is a party that discloses and renders aware and another party that justifies all disclosing and confirms every rendering aware.
By disclosing the world, the writer calls upon the reader not only to change the disclosed world, but also to disclose it further, to render it more apparent. This means that both the writer and the reader are responsible for the work whose only aim is to reveal the world and to render possible its transformation. Sartre says that both the writer and the reader should “bear the responsibility for the universe”.
Freedom is what links the reader and the writer together, according to Sartre. Committed writing is grounded in freedom; it involves and links together the freedom of the writer and the freedom of the reader, the freedom of oneself and the freedom of the Other.
For Sartre, writing is itself an indication that freedom is that for which searching is already underway, since to write is to decide to reveal the world as it is, and since to read is to attempt to change the revealed world.
This is why, for Sartre, both the writer and the reader are historically situated individuals; both are historically situated freedoms, revealing the world as it is now and here and endeavoring to change what has been revealed here and now.
Social, cultural, and political changes are thus possible through committed writing, through the words of the committed writer. Writing must be committed, the writer must be committed, and also the reader must be committed, according to Sartre.
This means that to committed writing belong searching for freedom, grounding responsibility, revealing and changing the world, asking the question of the meaning of existence, and embracing the historical and factical situation of individuals as objectives, as necessary objectives.