Commitment or the Crisis of Language

Summary

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Perec talks about commitment or the crisis of language from an article devoted to the nineteen-fifty's that captured perfectly the succession of literary tendencies since Sartre and Camus and finally Butor and Robbe-Grillet. As to Sartrean perspective, commitment opposes itself to aestheticism unilaterally, just as non-commitment identifies itself with art for art's sake while the crisis of language suffices to prohibit certain words, certain conspicuous turns of phrase and dissolves the entire paragraph. Perec states that the crisis of language emerged as a reflection of the twentieth-century bourgeois writer's mystified attitude and all these postwar committed literature in France, remains impoverished and inadequate.

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Extract

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Commitment or the Crisis of Language

"Old mentors fade. The young Right rises and falls. Innovators rule."1 This headline from an article devoted to the 1950s captures perfectly the succession of literary tendencies since the Liberation that first privileged Sartre and Camus, then Nimier and Blondin, and finally Beckett, Butor and Robbe-Grillet, each in their turn. From Sartrean "commitment" to the "reaction" of the "Hussars," and then to the "experimentation" of the nouveau roman, all postwar literary production in France, at least in what we might call its "advanced wing" accords with the terms of this convenient outline. 2

But the outline itself remains inadequate. If it sums up in these broad strokes the chronology of literary events of the past fifteen years, it only suggests this evolution in an approximate manner, while allowing us to explain only in the most conventional way the interdependent relations that Sartre, the right, and the nouveau roman maintained, by ineffectually opposing political literature and artistic literature, commitment and non-commitment, usefulness and beauty. The opposition betw...

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