Sartre's Silence: Limits of Recognition in Why Write?

Abstract

On 1 November 1946, Jean-Paul Sartre participated in a conference celebrating the inaugural session of the UNESCO. An important argument in his presentation 'La responsabilite de l'ecrivain' was that an author writes in order to achieve recognition. As Sartre puts it: 'The writer is a man who uses language, putting words together in a way he hopes will be beautiful. Why does he do it? I think the writer speaks in order to be recognised by the others in the sense in which Hegel talks about the mutual recognition of one consciousness by another.'.1 This question 'Why does he do it?', Why Write? was also taken up in the second essay of What is Literature? In this longer and more complex text, Sartre not only reiterates his position from La responsabilite de l'ecrivain, he adds that the reader, too, comes to the literary work with the hope of satisfying his desire for recognition. The present article will examine this conjunction of writing and Hegelian recognition as it appears in Why Write? What happens when literature and recognition are brought together? Or perhaps, what does literature do to the dialectics of recognition? As this last question indicates, I believe it is significant that Sartre establishes his theory of recognition on the basis of the aesthetic experience; consequently I cannot agree with T Storm Heter's contention that 'Sartre might have just as easily used the model of conversation to describe mutual recognition'.2 Indeed, I will argue that in Why Write? Sartre's theory of literature is precisely not only a theory of literature as conversation and communication, but also a theory about the relation to a certain silence, and since literature and recognition go together in Sartre's text, the presence of silence has consequences for his theory of recognition. However, before addressing these relations, I would like briefly to recollect the argument in Why Write?3