l aura B ieger Jean-Paul Sartre, Richard Wright, and the Relational Aesthetics of Literary Engagement Engaged Literature as Relational Art “Engaged literature” (littérature engagée in the original French) is a provocation by design� 1 Coined by Jean-Paul Sartre in the immediate post-War years, its job was to debunk the philosophy of l’art pour l’art, which was dominating the French literary scene, and confront writers with their responsibility to society: to engage readers with the social and political problems of the time� “From 1930 on,” Sartre writes about himself and a group of fellow writers (among them Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty), the world depression, the coming of Nazism, and the events in China opened our eyes� It seemed as if the ground were going to fall from under us, and suddenly, for us too, the great historical juggling began. The first years of the great world Peace suddenly had to be regarded as years between wars� Each sign of promise which we had greeted had to be seen as a threat� Each day we had lived revealed its true face; we had abandoned ourselves trustingly and it was leading us to a new war with secret rapidity, with a rigor hidden beneath its nonchalant airs� And our life as an individual which had seemed to depend on our efforts, our virtues, and our faults, on our good or bad luck, on the good or bad will of a very small number of people, seemed governed down to its minutest details by obscure and collective forces, and its most private circumstances seemed to reflect the state of the world as a whole� All at once we felt ourselves abruptly situated. The detachment which our predecessors were so fond of practicing had become impossible� There was a collective adventure taking form in the future and which would be our adventure� (175; his emphasis) From Black Lives Matter to Fridays For Future a strikingly similar sense of being situated, of historical urgency and personal accountability, is animating and re-politicizing our culture today, and literature is often part of the process� Occupy Wall Street participants read “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” #MeToo protesters dress up as characters from The Handmaid’s Tale, and public discourse on the systemic racism in post-Jim Crow America has led to the republication of works by James Baldwin and Richard Wright and to Ta-Nehisi Coates writing his first novel. So yes, the time might be right to return to Sartre simply because our time has a similar mood, is connected to his plea 1 This essay was written during my stay as a Feodor Lynen Fellow at Harvard University in the spring of 2019. Special thanks go to the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and to my hosts Werner Sollors and Glenda Capri� 170 l aura B ieger for engaged literature by an existentialist zeitgeist, which Sartre so forcefully expressed in his work. But perhaps it is also the right time to return to Sartre’s ideas because our present age—sociologically speaking, a “network society” with its technologically imposed state of connectivity and participation 2 —is better attuned than his own to appreciate the relation/ participation-oriented model of the aesthetic on which his concept of engaged literature thrives� This essay sets out to reconsider the use of engaged literature as a critical concept for literary studies today� First popularized in a series of essays in the progressive magazine Les Temps Modernes, launched by Sartre and his fellow activists with a nod to the Chaplin movie (and to what Sartre viewed as a progressive potential of modern mass media), then in the book-length manifesto What Is Literature? , the idea of a socially engaged literature has been discredited from its inception by a presumed lack of the latter’s artistic value� How can an art that is not primarily responsible for itself be anything but propaganda? What is lesser known, however, is that Sartre conceived engaged literature in distinctly, if not primarily, aesthetic terms—terms that are at odds with the object-oriented understanding of the aesthetic that, in uniting conservative New Critics with formalist modernists and Frankfurt School Marxists, had a lion’s share in erecting the rigid opposition between aesthetics and politics that has sidelined the aesthetic in American (literary) studies in tandem with politicizing the field, and that volumes like these seek to overcome� 3 From the point of view of an object-oriented aesthetics, engagement must be rejected at all cost as it threatens the very foundations of art: its autonomy� 4 From the view of Sartre’s aesthetics of engagement, however, the value of art resides in an interactive process, in which the literary work is co-created by the reader in the act of reading, existing only as long as it is being read, but potentially extendable through a media network that reaches beyond the printed book� In the following, I will reassess Sartre’s ideas about engaged literature through the lens of non-object-oriented aesthetics, especially Nicolas Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics� Introduced in the late 1990s by the French art critic, the concept has sparked much debate in the art world but has, to my knowledge, not been picked up by literary studies so far� 5 The reason for this might be that Bourriaud developed his theory first and foremost to make better sense of certain artworks of the 1990s, which were strikingly transient, situational, and participatory� 6 Beyond the immediate job to understand (and valorize) a particular form of contemporary art, however, Bourriaud’s theory 2 For two of the leading sociological studies on this phenomenon see Castells; Boltanski and Chiapello� 3 For a similar volume with an exclusive focus on literature see Weinstein and Looby. 4 This position is epitomized in Adorno’s rebuttal of Sartre’s idea of engaged literature in his essay “Commitment�” See also Jehle� 5 For critical responses to Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics see Bishop; Kester; Martin; Radical Culture Research Collective� 6 Bourriaud’s iconic example are the hybrid installation performances of Rirkrit Tiravanija, in which the artist cooks for the people attending the museum, gallery, collector’s house, or wherever the work is presented� Further artists regularly featured Sartre, Wright, and the Relational Aesthetics of Literary Engagement 171 charts an alternative understanding of the aesthetic, an aspiration that clearly speaks from his definitions. Relational aesthetics, for him, is a theory that consists “in judging artworks on the basis of the inter-human relations which they represent, produce or prompt” (112)� (The issue of judgment is crucial here; I will return to it at the end this essay�) In a similarly sweeping fashion, Bourriaud defines relational art as a “set of practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space” (113). And it is in this latter, aspirational sense that Bourriaud’s aesthetic theory is useful to revaluate Sartre’s plea for an engaged literature� What an aesthetics oriented toward rationality helps reconsider in particular is literature’s relation to the social world� And this relation has recently been subject to much scholarly interest� Drawing on concepts such as the “field” (Bourdieu) and the “actor-network” (Latour, Castells), scholars have explored how literature participates in theorizing the social (Alworth) and how it forges affective ties within the social world (Felski)� They have turned to the expansive field of world literature (Casanova), the emotional currencies of charisma and trust (Leypoldt) and the system of prizes and awards (English) to shed light on the production of literary value� They have approached modernist writers as celebrities and their celebrity status as generated by the field formation of modernist literature (Glass). They have examined the transformation of post-war American fiction under the auspices of the creative writing program, which for the first time interlinked literary production with institutions of higher learning (McGurl)� They have analyzed the role of writers, colonies and generating thematic as well as formal literary tendencies (Roberts)� They have traced the network of actors that has turned alternative publishing houses into significant players in today’s literary field (Hungerford). They have explored how literary authorship has been reconstructed through new possibilities of self-publishing and self-promotion (Levey, Vadde). They have begun to examine the impact of these and other, everyday aspects of life in a “network society” on literary content and form (Ngai, Hoberek, Rosen)� And while it is hardly surprising that concerns with the aesthetic play a minor role in the new wave of literary sociology that is reshaping the field (and the above list is far from complete), it would be interesting to see how Bourriaud’s thoughts on the artistic and aesthetic dimensions of relationality might enhance this prolific line of work. 7 For the present purpose of gaining a firmer grasp on the relational aesthetics of engaged literature, suffice it to say that literature’s relation to the social world is indeed the “master relation” in Sartre’s literary theory� And in his book (and his exhibitions; he is also a renowned curator and co-founder of the Palais Paris Tokyo) are Philippe Parreno, Vanessa Beecroft, Liam Gillick, Jorge Pardo, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres. 7 A rare exception is Ngai’s essay “Network Aesthetics.” However, Ngai describes aesthetic aspects of the network society as they become manifest in the sociological writing of Bruno Latour and the literary writing of Juliana Spahr rather than offering an aesthetics (that is, an aesthetic theory) of the network� 172 l aura B ieger in light of my aim to reconsider the critical value of Sartre’s ideas, it is worth adding that What Is Literature? does offer a full-blown literary theory, structured around the intersecting practices of writing, reading, and disseminating literature, and based on the assumption that all literature is engaged in the sense that writing means acting in the world (and passivity or political disengagedness are forms of action that support the status quo)� True to the Marxist and Existentialist premises of Sartre’s theory, understanding literature as a form of social action implies that it exists to the end of promoting freedom (which is why, for Sartre, real literature can only exist in a classless society)� 8 My aim here is neither to defend this view, nor to argue that all literature is engaged (even though I agree with Sartre that disengagedness is an affordance of privilege)� Rather, it is to show how Sartre’s ideas about engaged literature, when viewed through the lens of Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics, offer a fresh view on literature’s social function and use� And this takes me back to the question of literature’s relation to the social world that drives Sartre’s ideas: It comes best into view as an object of critical inquiry when approaching literature not in terms of independent artworks, but as a set of practices. Relations do not simply exist; they are forged and maintained through practices� Practices are forms of collective rather than individual action� A claim recently made about practices is that they are the very stuff out of which the social world is made—with literature being one of these practices� 9 So, who are the actors conjointly engaged in the practice of literature, and what brings them together? What structures their interactions, and how do these interactions intersect with other, non-literary practices? These kinds of questions form the critical horizon of this essay, and Bourriaud’s theory brings to them a welcome approach to conceptualizing the role of the aesthetic within a practice-oriented rather than an object-centered understanding of literature� Not unlike the art of the 1990s, which prompted Bourriaud’s intervention, then, the artistic, social, and critical value of engaged literature might escape us unless we approach it through the lens of its relationality� From this point of view—one that is more readily available in today’s “network society” than ever before—social engagement is not the antagonist but the baseline of artistic production. Riffing on Bourriaud, it is that which conditions the terms of representing, producing, and prompting the relations that determine the form of a literary work� 8 Sartre’s ideas about engaged literature are marked by a dual concern with individual freedom and social change, a tension that echoes Sartre’s life-long investment in both Existentialism and Marxism. Reconstructing even the basic tenets of Sartre’s philosophy lies beyond the scope of this essay� See McGuigan and, especially, Gyllenhammer for two essays, which admirably perform this task while also placing Sartre’s ideas about literature within the context of his philosophy. 9 For an introduction to what is often referred to as a “practice turn” in critical theory see Schatzki. For scholarship on the praxeological dimension of literature see the body of work produced by the Cluster of Excellence 2020 “Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective” at Freie Universität Berlin� Sartre, Wright, and the Relational Aesthetics of Literary Engagement 173 Of course, the relational art of engaged literature involves a very different set of practices than the relational art of Bourriaud’s visual artists of the 1990s� Which also means that my attempt to understand engaged literature as relational art offers an opportunity to extend and differentiate Bourriaud’s theory� Drawing on his point that visual art “tightens the space of relations” (15; his emphasis), we would say that literary art tightens some relations (for instance, those between an individual reader and a particular text) while expanding others (for instance, those between the individual reader and all the possible other readers of the text), with the effect of participating in a transformation of the social world that involved (among other things) the rise of the public sphere� 10 The vectors of this double movement of contraction and expansion and the spaces it creates depend on the medium that is employed to reach the audience� In the case of engaged literature, the relations, spaces— and, we may add, the temporalities—afforded by printed books differ significantly from the relations, spaces, and temporalities afforded by e-books, just as the relations, spaces, and temporalities afforded by serial publications are different from the relations, spaces and temporalities afforded by books� In the context of literary art, the “affordances” of relational form (in Caroline Levine’s sense of formal properties that are at once aesthetic and social) are determined, it seems to me, by an interplay of three factors: the literary text, the physical object through with the text becomes available to its readers, and the relations conjointly forged by both of these things with and within the social world (to fictional characters and settings, other books and other readers, authors, publishing houses, critics, bookstores, blog sites, libraries, reading chairs, writing desks)� Bourriaud insists that relational aesthetics is “not a theory of art […] but a theory of form” (19), further arguing that the contemporary art practices he observes demand that “we ought to talk of ‘formations’ rather than ‘forms’,” and, in turn, think of the artwork as “a linking element,” a “bonding agent” (21, 20; his emphasis)� 11 Which is just as true for the historically specific formations of actors and institutions that define the practice of engaged literature within the discursive space of the public sphere� In fact, making sense of the transient and participatory formations that turn engaged literature into a distinctly relational art means attending to a multitude of different actors (writers, readers, publishers, scholars, critics, books, blogs, tweets, genres, characters) and institutions (prizes, awards, libraries, festivals, book clubs, literature departments)� 12 And if viewing the 10 For Bourriaud, literature, like television, and unlike cinema and theatre, “refers each individual person to his or her space of private consumption” (16)� But while this is a valid point about literature’s default mode of reception, it fails to acknowledge the formative role assigned to literature in most theories of the public sphere� See, for instance, Habermas; Warner� 11 In praxeological terms, acting in formation is a prototypical form of collective action. See Barnes� 12 As this list indicates, my praxeological approach to engaged literature assumes that both human and non-human actors are involved in it� For the ensuing debate on who counts as an actor and how to conceive of collective action see Dreyfus; Knorr Cetina; Pickering; Rouse� 174 l aura B ieger complex and dynamic interactions between these actors and institutions through the lens of relational aesthetics means valorizing the literary works created through them “on the basis of the inter-human relations which they represent, produce or prompt” (Bourriaud 112), literary works cannot be stable objects� Rather (in Bourriaud’s evocative terminology), they are linking elements in a complex and dynamic formation. In catalyzing and orchestrating a set of interrelated practices (reading, writing, publishing, reviewing, citing, reciting, recommending, republishing), they are the bonding agents in the production of literary engagement� I will later turn to the African American writer and bestselling author Richard Wright to illustrate the implications of this practice-oriented understanding of literature for my understanding of Sartre’s relational aesthetics of engagement� Curiously enough, Sartre draws on Wright, too; in fact, he turns to Wright regularly throughout his book to make his case for a socially engaged literature� Yet whereas Sartre is interested in Wright as an exemplary writer, I am interested in him—and by extension, in the figure of the ‘committed writer’ that is the neuralgic point of Sartre’s theory—as an individual actor who is acting in concert with many other actors in a complex and dynamic formation that extends (not least aesthetically) across, space, time and media, from Sartre’s and Wright’s intersecting contemporaneity all the way to our own� In bringing together Sartre, Wright and Bourriaud, I hope to show how literary engagement emerges from a web of relations that is woven out of a historically specific and transhistorically operative sets of practices (some artistic, some not); and that, against common assumptions of engagement as being intrinsic to certain aesthetics or politics, it defines the practice of literature from within this web of relations� Ultimately, my aim is to show that engaged literature might best be viewed as a set of practices that is geared toward producing meaningful and responsible relations with and within the social world—a process that is not exclusively, but irreducibly aesthetic; and, as we shall see, immensely valuable as such� Sartre’s Relational Aesthetics of Literary Engagement Sartre’s relational aesthetics of engagement unfolds from the interactions between the writer, the reader, and (sticking with Bourriaud’s useful terms) the “linking element” or “bonding agent” (21, 20) of the literary work� I have already mentioned that Sartre conceives the latter in strikingly dynamic and transient terms. At one point, he describes it as an object “which exists only in movement� To make it come into view, a concrete act of reading is necessary, and it lasts only as long as this act can last� Beyond that, there are only black marks on paper” (50). The proximity to Constance School-style reception aesthetics is considerable, for instance to Wolfgang Iser’s The Act of Reading, from which we learn that “the study of a literary work should concern not only the actual text, but also, and in equal measure, the actions involved in responding to that text. The text itself simply offers ‘schematized aspects’ through Sartre, Wright, and the Relational Aesthetics of Literary Engagement 175 which the aesthetic object of the work can be produced” (107)� The literary work is viewed here as co-created by the reader, a conceptual kinship that goes back to the existential phenomenology of Husserl, to which both Sartre and the Constance School thinkers were exposed (the former directly and through his study of Heidegger, the latter through Ingarden and Gadamer)� But in insisting that the writer always and imperatively writes for a reader, Sartre amplifies the importance of the reader’s share in the making of literature� Her activity of imaginatively reconstructing (or performatively reenacting) a text is conceived as “a synthesis of perception and creating” (52), and, a bit later, as “directed creation” (53). This creative act gains further significance through Sartre’s claim that the writer cannot read her own work, for she cannot act as her own co-creator� The literary work thus becomes a truly interpersonal achievement� The bond between the writer and reader in which this achievement resides is based on a reciprocal relation, on collaboration� It rests in “a pact of generosity” (61), entered by each party in performing their respective practice (reading, writing), with either side depending on, counting on, and trusting the other. The pact brings to mind the social ritual of gift exchange. The reader’s gift lies in her effort to understand the text, but she can, of course, also withhold her generosity (for instance when a text is perceived as artistically uninteresting, propagandistic, etc�)� The gift of the writer, in turn, “is to both disclose the world and to offer it to the generosity of the reader” (43)� I will have a closer look at the issue of “disclosing the world” momentarily� For now, my focus is on the bond itself—which is clearly social, yes� But is it also aesthetic? Here, I want to follow Paul Gyllenhammer’s reading of Sartre, in which the pact between the writer and reader is the product of an “aesthetic imperative�” The aesthetic imperative refers to a reciprocal duty between the writer and reader� The imperative is recognized as an appeal or call� The author writes to be read; so the writer appeals to the generosity of the reader to put the required effort into understanding a text (Sartre 1988, 65). The reader, on the other hand, takes up the work as an appeal from the author to recognize something about the world� The matter put forth in the text is a demand placed on the reader to try and critically reflect about a given reality (ib. 64). The reader prepares herself for a possible “aesthetic modification” of her projective understanding of the current situation (ib� 64)� (140) 13 Which is to say that said pact is aesthetic in at least two closely related ways: (a) it is founded in an “aesthetic imperative,” which, (b) opens up a space of “aesthetic modification” if both parties act on behalf of its appeal. And this takes us back to the issue of “disclosing the world�” The act of reading can transform the reader to the degree that she gains insight into her own situation and critically reflects on either maintaining or changing it. The act of writing and the literary work in and through which it becomes available to the reader are essential in bringing about this modification (which, by virtue of the reader’s actions in the world, is also a modification of the world)—for writing reveals the world to the reader� The revelatory capacity of literature that drives this 13 Gyllenhammer is citing the same edition of What is Literature? that I am using this essay� 176 l aura B ieger transformative process is a staple of the phenomenological understanding of literature as an art of aesthetic reflection in which Sartre’s thinking is rooted. 14 And if revealing and disclosing resonate (uncomfortably to many ears) with such things as an indisputable truth, the truth conveyed by the literary work in this model is (at least) self-reflexive: what the act of reading reveals to the generous reader is her responsibility to the world� In Gyllenhammer’s words, she “is brought face to face with the reality that a particular world of significance exists only through human action. The world disclosed in the text is not a mere factual given: it is a value system supported by human beings” (140)—a social world produced by those inhabiting it by acting and interacting in ways that either maintain or change a given value system� The formulation “bringing the reader face to face” is telling in this context. It signals encounter and intersubjective encounter as such� For Bourriaud, in turn, encounter is the motor force of relational art, which he conceives as “an art where the substrate is formed by inter-subjectiviy, and which takes ‘being together’ as a central theme, the ‘encounter’ between beholder and picture, and the collective elaboration of meaning” (15). Quoting affirmatively Serge Daney’s claim that “all form is a face looking at us” (21; emphasis his), Bourriaud argues that in the case of relational art, where “form” gives way to “formation,” “inter-subjectivity does not only represent the social setting for the reception of art, which is its ‘environment’, its ‘field’ (Bourdieu), but also becomes the quintessence of artistic practice” (22)� In spite of the descriptive tone of this passage, “encounter” and “inter-subjectivity” have unmistakably normative implications here; in declaring them to be the apotheosis of art-making, relational art—as that art form which is fully defined by these aspects—is not one among others but an aspired ideal� We can see a similar logic at work in Sartre’s claim that, to fulfill her social responsibilities, the writer must write for her age, which “is the intersubjectivity, the living absolute, the dialectical underside of history” (241)� Only when consciously operating from within this matrix can the act of writing disclose the world for the reader� But whereas Bourriaud seems to take the inter-subjective dimension of the relational artworks of the 1990s at face value (as “social intersticies,” these works afford inter-personal bonds that remedy a lack of connections in the social world), for Sartre its value lies in affording a space of reflection that is the nucleus for social change (and I will come back to this issue at the end of this essay in conjunction with the question of aesthetic judgment)� One way of viewing the literary work within this formation, then, is as a transient, situational and interactive site of encounter� But the bonding agent changes its shape when Sartre considers its material and medial aspects� For instance, when he describes the book as “a go-between” which “establishes an historical contact among men who are steeped in the same history and 14 Again, this understanding can be traced back to Husserl, and it finds an especially powerful expression in Heidegger’s understanding of the artwork as opening up a space of reflection in which a truth is brought forth (even though, and curiously so, Heidegger’s philosophy of artistic revelation, i�e� “unconcealment,” is a rigid rejection of the aesthetic)� For a lucid discussion of this tradition and Sartre’s place in it see Vandevelde� Sartre, Wright, and the Relational Aesthetics of Literary Engagement 177 who likewise contribute to its making” (72)� The book establishes this link both as a physical object and as the carrier of a message� But the same bonding agent can also assert a “sacred character” and become a cult object in a ritual of communion (Sartre names the Communists and the Church in one breath to make this point); or it can operate as a disjunctive force, turning the reader “against [her] family, against the society about [her]”, separating her “from the past and the future” (219-20)� In both of these cases, the book performs actions which mystify the act of reading, with the effect of withholding its transformative potential from the social word� And these are not the only problems with the book as the primary bonding agent of engaged literature� Its linking activity has shortcomings in the most basic sense� In Sartre’s words: “Books are inert� They act upon those who open them, but they cannot open themselves” (216)� Moreover, Sartre is keenly aware that the book confines the range of engaged literature to its already established audience; which, of course, also means, to the bourgeoisie� Unfolding the transformative potential of engaged literature means activating its “virtual public” (216), which is why a substantial part of the long section on “The Situation of the Writer in 1947” is dedicated to exposing these limitations and proposing a series of concrete measures to overcome them� And while Sartre does not want to give up the book, “the noblest, and most ancient of forms,” he contends that “there is a literary art of radio, film, editorial work, and reporting” (216), thus invoking a potential armada of co-actors (the “aeroplanes,” “V1’s” and “V2’s” of literature [198]) that might conjointly broaden its reach� For Sartre, it is clear that embracing these actors means changing the practice of literature, both in terms of its language (“We must learn to speak in images, to transpose the idea of our books into these new languages�” [217]), and in terms of the forms of writing produced by it� Collaboration with commercial ‘mass media’ (a term that Sartre only dares to use in scare quotes) means writing new works for and transmitting existing works through these media� Among his examples are newspapers columns and film scripts, broadcasts of plays on the radio, and film adaptations. In turn, the new bonding agents would enhance the relational form of engaged literature with new modes and sites of reception� “Film, by its very nature, speaks to crowds; it speaks to them about crowds and about their destiny� The radio surprises people at the table or in bed, at the moment when they are most defenseless” (216-17)� Engaged literature should tap into the receptive modalities of commercial mass media and exploit their linking potential for the project of inducing social change, ideally with the side effect of transforming those media themselves in the process, just as “the authors of former times have conquered [the commercial mass medium of print]” (218)� So yes, Sartre’s relational aesthetics of engagement thrives on a bond between the writer and reader with historical ties to the book, yet it proliferates through an extensive media network. But while engaging new bonding agents is a necessity for realizing the transformative potential of engaged literature, it comes at the expense of weakening the bond between the reader and writer, which is clearly the privileged relation in Sartre’s model� “The 178 l aura B ieger wider the public that the author reaches, the less deeply does he affect it, the less he recognizes himself in the influence he has; his thoughts escape him; they become distorted and vulgarized” (199)� That Sartre frames these common fears about popular media diminishing the work of the writer in terms of influence is significant, for it sheds light on the special position assigned to the writer in his theory� It falls upon the writer to reveal the world because, for Sartre, only the practice of writing can accomplish this task (which also explains Sartre’s preference for the presumably transparent prose writing and his dismissal of poetry as a suitable form of engaged literature)� Besides Sartre’s misguided assumptions about language as a transparent medium of reflection which become tangible here (and which he partly revised in his later works), this claim rests on a problematic assumption, namely, to quote Gyllenhammer once more, that “the writer has a translucent understanding of the situation” (143)� 15 Rather than the presumed lack of artistic autonomy—which Sartre shifts from the literary object to the “pact of gratitude between the writer and reader” (61)—the figure of the clairvoyant writer is the greatest weakness of Sartre’s theory. Aware of this problem, Sartre turned to exploring the consciousness of the writer in some of his following works (and Gyllenhammer gives a lucid account of this development and its significance in Sartre’s universe of thought)� For the purpose of reconsidering the critical value of Sartre’s literary theory, I want to take a different route and rethink the figure of the committed writer from within the formation of engaged literature as relational art, thus opening Sartre’s theory up for future use� “The day Native Son appeared …”, or, the Making of a Committed Writer In 1963, as the Civil Rights Movement in the United States approaches its decisive years, Irving Howe writes about Richard Wright’s first novel Native Son: The day Native Son appeared, American culture was changed forever� No matter how much qualifying the book might later need, it made impossible a repetition of the old lies� In all its crudeness, melodrama, and claustrophobia of vision, Richard Wright’s novel brought out into the open, as no one ever had before, the hatred, fear, and violence that have crippled and may yet destroy our culture� (119; my emphasis) These lines are not only remarkable in capturing the impact of Wright’s novel, but also in ascribing agency to the book rather than its writer (and I am especially intrigued who is “no one” here—other novels, other writers, other ‘native sons’? )� Few works of engaged literature have reached a public on the scale of Wright’s first novel. When it was published on March 1, 1940, it sold 250,000 copies in just three weeks, became the first U.S. bestseller by a Black author, and was quickly translated into French, German, Italian, Dutch, and 15 For two representative and astute critiques of Sartre’s problematic and interrelated views on prose writing and language see Hung; Guerlac� Sartre, Wright, and the Relational Aesthetics of Literary Engagement 179 Czech, thus internationalizing Wright’s audience� And in doing all of the these things, Native Son was essential to the making of Richard Wright, i�e� the committed writer who makes a regular appearance in Sartre’s plea for an engaged literature� Sartre treats Wright as an exemplary individual, someone who, in claiming the profession of the writer and writing about his oppression in a deeply racist society, “discovers his subject” (78), and (contrary to post-Althusserian implications of the term) liberates himself� And in addressing himself to a reading public divided by racism and white supremacy, he is, in Sartre’s view, indeed a model writer, for he “has been able to both maintain and go beyond that split” (80), thus occupying a position “between the oppressed and the oppressor, […] between blacks and whites, read by the oppressed and the oppressor, furnishing the oppressor with his image […], being conscious with and for the oppressed of the oppression” (195-96)� Now, this is a perfect illustration of the clairvoyant writer, for whom “to conceive the idea of drawing a portrait-challenge of his real reader” means that “[she] must have become conscious of a contradiction between [herself] and [her] public, that is, [she] must come to [her] readers from without” (88; his emphasis)� In line with Sartre’s ideas, I want to consider the figure of the committed writer as an actor in both the literary and the public sphere, whose actions are defined by an aspiration to transform the public sphere as a first step to transforming the social world� Contrary to Sartre’s view, however, I want to consider Wright—and by extension, Sartre’s beloved figure of the committed writer—as both a product of and a prominent actor in the dynamic formation of engaged literature� 16 A crucial part of this exercise is to widen the scope beyond the individual artwork and consider how its making (its being written, published, reviewed, reissued) and its doing (its finding readers, spurring responses, generating prestige and publics) are conditioned by other actors� In line with the model of relational art discussed in the previous sections, this means foregrounding the dynamic relations in and through which a literary work gains its form, meaning, and value in thoroughly mediated relations of proximity or distance, opposition to, or alliance with other texts. (As we shall see, for Native Son, relations to the non-fictional works dovetailing its publication, especially to his bestselling autobiography Black Boy, were key players in making Richard Wright the exemplary writer as whom Sartre features him.) These relations are aesthetic to the minimal degree that they involve engaging with a work of art, and (drawing on Sartre’s notion of aesthetic modification) to the maximal degree of invoking change (of address, opinion, outlook, behavior) in the recipient (and thus in the social world)� Both outcomes hinge on the physical and imaginary bonds forged within the formation of engaged literature; their impact on the social world depends on the degree to 16 This section is part of a forthcoming monograph, tentatively entitled Richard Wright Native Son and the Power of Literature� 180 l aura B ieger which the literary and the public sphere are synchronized in the actions and interactions prompted by a literary work� In other words, they hinge on the aesthetic relationality of the work� From this point of view, Native Son may best be described as the headstone in establishing a position that transformed the U.S. literary field in ways which enabled its author to become (like Emile Zola, in France, speaking out against the Dreyfus Affair from his field position as a renowned writer) an eminent public figure (and as Sartre later makes clear in his “Plea for Intellectuals,” the committed writer is always a public figure). The novel, its author and its iconic protagonist, written responses and follow-up publications in word and image, the ensuing interviews, public lectures, and adaptations of Native Son for stage and screen can be seen as co-actors in the dynamic formation of engaged literature, gathering and exchanging symbolic and cultural capital for literary fame and political intervention� Wright was a handsome man with gentle looks, whose portraits were featured in Life and Ebony, while his political essays (he was a card-carrying communist for a while) appeared in the Atlantic Monthly and New Masses� And as his literary stardom and his political activism supported each other, he used both to help aspiring Black writers (such as Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Chester Himes, and Gwendolyn Brooks) with his public standing and institutional ties� That these writers positioned themselves (in essays, reviews, and literary works) against Wright’s daunting presence augmented the transformation of public discourse which the publication of Native Son had set in motion� It is indeed apt to say that Native Son’s reach as a work of engaged literature spans from Baldwin’s “parricidal” essays “Everybody’s Protest Novel” and “Many Thousands Gone” (collected in a volume with the title Notes of a Native Son) to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s protest essay Between the World and Me (which borrows its title from Wright’s first published work, an anti-lynching poem that appeared in Partisan Review in 1935), and, most recently, to the HBO adaptation (starring Ashton Durrand Sanders, best known for his performance in the Academy Award-winning film Moonlight), which came out earlier this year— an armada of bonding agents, transhistorically linking the pre-Civil Right era with the era of Black Lives Matter� But how could Native Son have such an impact? Am I not conjuring up yet another “master actor” here? Well, not if we consider the co-actors conjointly at work in making this impact happen� A vast factor in turning Native Son into a monumental work of engaged literature was the Book of the Month Club selection of the novel in its March 1940 edition� With close to half a million subscribers, this vast mail order business was, at the time, perhaps the most powerful marketing engine of literature� And if being selected came in tow with an instant exposure to a mass audience, in the case of Native Son, the Book of the Month Club selection (another first for a Black author) launched a real media event, catapulting Wright practically overnight into his new role as the most famous and influential Black American writer of his age� As a writer committed to engaging his readers with the pressing realities of racism and white supremacy that were haunting in U�S� society at this Sartre, Wright, and the Relational Aesthetics of Literary Engagement 181 time, Wright seized the opportunity to maximize his outreach—even though this involved grave changes in the manuscript (cutting a masturbation scene, editing out the white millionaire philanthropist’s daughter’s desire for the black servant), which remained in place until the Library of America published a restored version of the text in 1991, long after Wright’s premature death� These changes have often been viewed as market forces impinging on—crippling—an original artwork� 17 But one can just as well see them active participants in turning Native Son into the work that propelled Wright into becoming one of most renowned authors and public intellectuals of his age� It needs to be stressed that this view does not diminish the gravity of the revisions imposed by the Book of the Month Club� The magnitude of the interference is indeed a crucial measure of the co-actor’s agency� Yet in shifting the weight from what is—in the cultural logic of racism—done to an individual artwork on to the actors and institutions conjointly involved in this operation, the Book of the Month Club selection becomes tangible as a formative stage both in the making of a monumental work and a committed writer� And it also makes mistakenly clear that distribution channels are neither neutral nor transparent� They are bonding agents in their own right, with a set of interests of their own, and considerable stakes in creating a work and its author. In targeting specific audiences (the mostly white, bourgeois, and often female members of the Book of the Month Club; the academic clientele of the Library of America) with a custom-made product, these channels (along with the institutions using them) had a sizable impact in both shaping Native Son’s literary form and its reading public� In judging a work of engaged literature like Native Son, these complex and conflicting relations must be taken into account� Interactions between the publisher/ distributor and writer are by no means external to a work. Rather, they are part and parcel of its production, affecting the formal and physical shape and reach of the work, thus affecting all further relations forged by it� They affect, for instance, those relations forged by the hundreds of reviews, notices, essays, editorials, letters to the editor, and poems prompted by Native Son’s publication� The sheer number of these responses points toward another formative site of engaged literature in Wright’s age, namely, its flourishing magazine culture. It is indeed hard to imagine Native Son’s sustained impact on American culture and beyond without this powerful echo chamber� Responses appeared both in prestigious magazines such as the Atlantic Monthly and Partisan Review, which (like Sartre’s Les Temps Modernes) targeted the intellectual elite� But they also appeared in the many “little magazines” that were a staple of the literary scene at the time (among them Anvil, International Literature, The Daily Worker, Left Front, New Masses, Présence Africaine). Featuring progressive literature in tandem with radical politics, some of these magazines published just a single issue, but together they forged bonds with readers, who, in migrating from one magazine to another, formed a series of short-lived yet closely related publics� Wright was an avid 17 For accounts along these lines see Kinnamon; Cossu-Beaumont, “Wright and his Editors�” 182 l aura B ieger participant in this magazine culture—as reader, writer, editor, with contributions including poetry, short fiction, reviews, essays on literature and radical politics� In some of those pieces (for instance in his famous essay “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” first published in response to a devastating review and now, in some recent editions, featured as an introduction to the novel), Wright defends Native Son� It is safe to say that Native Son was written with this formative site of literary engagement in mind� And since Wright did not have much literary education before becoming involved with this culture, it must have also been formative for him as a maturing reader and aspiring writer� But back to Native Son: entering the literary scene when modernism had exhausted itself even in the socially engaged form that had been the hallmark of the depression era, it captured the interest of its readers with its blunt style (it opens with the ring of an alarm clock) and its boldly unsympathetic protagonist (Bigger Thomas is a rapist and murderer)� Its crude brand of modernism has been viewed as naturalism, psychological realism, Existentialism, Marxism, African American Modernism, gothic and detective fiction, and it is tempting (and certainly not inaccurate) to think of this style as a token of a literary system deeply pervaded by modern mass media� 18 And yet, it is important to bear in mind that the elements of this style could only become part of Wright’s repertoire once he himself had managed to gain access to practicing literature—which, in the segregated South of his upbringing, was a closed system for a Black person like him. Bourriaud defines style as “[t]he movement of a work, its trajectory” (114)—a line that, in Wright’s case, connects Native Son with the autobiography Black Boy, which features him becoming a reader (and thus an active practitioner of literature) as a formative act of selfauthorization� After coming across several issues of the American Mercury with thought-provoking essays by H� L� Mencken, Wright persuades a coworker of the ocular laboratory, where he works after his arrival in Memphis, to let him use his membership card of the segregated library, where he is only able to check out the books that, based on Mencken’s articles, would lay the foundation for his literary career, because he pretends that he is loaning them for the white cardholder� This is a striking episode in the book that becomes Wright’s second international bestseller (and his second Book of the Month Club selection, this one with even graver interferences), enforcing Wright’s standing as a writer with the factual weight of a real-life story� Moreover, and crucially so, the episode sets in motion a feedback loop that might be seen as a retroactive authorization of Native Son, both in terms of its style (the list of books checked out at the Memphis library closely resembles the list of books mentioned by many of Native Son’s reviewers) and its subject matter (the horrors of growing up as a Black man in a racist society)� So, if one views Black Boy and Native Son as co-actors rather than individual works, Wright’s moving back and forth between fictional and non-fictional writing, which had become a staple of his work in the years after publishing Native Son, becomes tangible as an extended attempt of authorizing a creation so 18 See, for instance, Fabre; Werner; Pudaloff; Smethurst� Sartre, Wright, and the Relational Aesthetics of Literary Engagement 183 controversial that it could not be authorized in one single publishing act� And it becomes tangible as part of concerted (and lucrative) effort to broaden the range of his work—by lecturing and writing about “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born” in prominent places and publications such as the New York Public Library, Chicago’s Church of the Good Shepherd, in Sunday Review, and Negro Digest, by collaborating with Life magazine on a tribute to Native Son’s notorious setting in Chicago’s South Side (which was never produced), and by working on adaptations of Native Son for stage and screen with such illustrious collaborators as the southern playwright Paul Green, the Hollywood director Orson Welles, the acting star Canada Lee, and the experimental French filmmaker Pierre Chenal� It is easy to see how these collaborative, multi and trans-medial activities set into practice Sartre’s ideas about unfolding the transformative potential of engaged literature by remaining invested in writing books while also engaging new bonding agents� And yes, they bring into view Wright as a prominent actor within the formation of engaged literature of this age, forcefully moving beyond the confines of national literature, linking intellectuals around the Black Atlantic (among them Sartre, Beauvoir, Fanon, Baldwin, Wertham), and engaging readers with the problems of racism, colonialism, and economic exploitation on an increasingly global scale. 19 But they also make tangible the extent to which the actions of Sartre’s model writer were not so much the making of a singular and self-determined individual as they were the collective doings and makings of a multiplicity of agents in a historically specific and transhistorically operative formation. So, where does this leave us in terms of revaluing the artistic, social, and critical value of engaged literature? And, circling back to Bourriaud, where does it leave us in terms of “judging artworks on the basis of the inter-human relations which they represent, produce or prompt” (112)? Aesthetic Engagement as Reflective Practice Aesthetic judgment is a loaded term, which brings to mind Kantian investments in disinterestedness, beauty, and taste� And yet, it is important, if not essential, to hold on to a particular mode of aesthetic judgment if we want to make claims about the value and use of art and literature—which, in the proposed understanding of the artwork as a dynamic formation, an interactive site of ‘engaging encounter’ rather than a stable object, must be located in the set of practices defining that work. And this is precisely what Georg W� Bertram agues in the neo-pragmatist aesthetics introduced in his recent book Art as Human Practice� Dealing with art, he contends (in an artful modulation of Kant’s and Hegel’s ideas about aesthetic judgment), always involves 19 For Wright as an actor in literary and intellectual world of the Black Atlantic see Gilroy; Cossu-Beaumont, “Paris Noir.” Wright’s non-fictional works Pagan Spain, Black Power, White Man, Listen! , and The Color Curtain, written during his year in Paris, are an impressive record of his move from the Black Atlantic to an increasingly global theatre� On Wright’s globalism see Rinehart� 184 l aura B ieger making judgments, and it is this evaluative and normative thrust of art which sets it apart from other human practices� Just as Sartre and Bourriaud, Bertram views art as an interactive practice, but more (or rather, more explicitly) than the other two, he conceives this practice as constitutively involving “normative and evaluative activities” (205; emphasis his)� For Bertram, engaging with an artwork always and inherently entails “relat[ing] critically to the artwork’s claim to realize art, and take an evaluative stance to the artwork,” a process which involves “compar[ing] the merits and relations of various artworks as well as their dynamics, comment[ing] upon their way of functioning and evaluat[ing] their aesthetic success” (204)� (For me, these lines bring to mind people like my parents in an exhibit of modern art.) The reason why this mechanism of critical reflection is built into the practice of art, according to Bertram, is that art has no intrinsic meaning or fixed value� The concept of art can never be merely descriptive; it must always forward a claim about what art is, and this makes the practice of art inherently self-reflective. Both Sartre’s What Is Literature? and Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics wear the prescriptive claim of defining (or re-defining) what art is (or should be) on their sleeves, and in doing so, they contribute to a (distinctly not ontologically but pragmatically driven) competition about (and negotiation of) the meaning of art, which drives and defines art as a human practice. (And one could indeed write an entire essay about how the two books, in their function as manifestoes—that is, as works of engaged literature par excellance—, participate in this process by not only envisioning but re-enacting the artistic practice they endorse, one in the form of a powerful narrative, the other in the form of meaningful pieces to be correlated by the generous reader�) And this brings me to one of Bertram’s overarching claims—and to the reason for bringing him into my concluding remarks� As an interactive, intersubjective practice revolving around making collective judgments about its own meaning and value, art “is not simply a specific kind of practice, but rather a specific kind of reflective practice, a specific formation of practices by means of which we take a stance towards ourselves in the midst of practicing our culture” (3). And while there are many different practices of reflection (speaking about speech, religion, therapeutic conversations, philosophy), art is the practice we use to reflect upon what it means to be human. Being human, according to Bertram, means in a most general sense that “we have to define what we are always anew” (3). I should add that, for Bertram, what it means to be human is not a matter of defining the ontological status (or essence) of humankind but of defining the relations with and within the world that define (and express) human subjectivity. And in this constantly evolving process of becoming rather than being human, art (as a collective and reflective practice) gives occasion to take a stance on ourselves and grasp our “taking a stance” as “a practical occurrence” (3)� Understood in this way (and this is important), reflection is decidedly not theoretical; it has practical value and use� And aesthetic judgment, because it remains strictly focused on art, is the component of art as a set of practices (or “form of practice” [2; emphasis his]), which affords this practical value and use� Sartre, Wright, and the Relational Aesthetics of Literary Engagement 185 Bourriaud insists on precisely this practical value and use when he proposes that judging relational art (and, for that matter, art in general) should be based on the co-existence criterion� Assuming that “[a]ll works of art produce a model of sociability,” Bourriaud’s criterion asks: “Does this work permit me to enter into a dialogue? Could I exist, and how, in the space it defines? ” (109; my emphasis)� And while Bourriaud has been much criticized for this mode of critical judgment (for equating openness and dialogue with desirable politics, for failing to offer an aesthetics of social change), it is important to note that the flaw lies on the level of applying his own criterion and not on the conceptual level of formulating it� For while it is most certainly true that some dialogues are better than others and not all forms of participation are politically desirable or socially progressive, the “Could I exist, and how …? ” is nevertheless a valid intervention, for it opens up a space of reflection in which we are asked (i�e� required) to take a stance� Taking a stance is always engaged in the sense that it expresses a relation to the world. In fact, riffing on Sartre, we could say that the act of expressing a relation is, regardless of the form of that relation, an action in the world and on the relations existing within it. Moreover, it seems to me that an amplified version of Bourriaud’s co-existence criterion—a “Can I... you... we exist, and how…? —is driving the practice of a committed writer as exemplified here by Richard Wright. The shift from the hypothetical to the practical, from could to can, makes tangible the overt politics that animates engaged literature without leaving the realm of aesthetic judgment� So, with Bertram in mind, we can view both Bourriaud’s ideas about relational art and Sartre’s ideals about engaged literature as pleas for an artistic practice that prompt us to reflect and take a stance on what it means to be human based on what it means to be in social relations� Moreover, and crucially, Bourriaud’s covert and Sartre’s overt aesthetic politics come into view as two sides of the same coin, both thriving on an interactive and dialogical practice of reflection as an integral part of the artistic practice which they endorse, both invested in using their version of the co-existence criterion as art’s reflecting shield for and bonding agent with the social world. 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