21 It must be noted that the custom in American prisons is to move the condemned man into another cell on the eve of his execution while announcing to him the ceremony in store for him.
22 This is the name of the innocent man guillotined in the case of the Courrier de Lyon.
23 The condemned man was accused of having killed his wife. But her body had not been found.
24 We congratulated ourselves on having reprieved Sillon, who recently killed his four-year-old daughter in order not to give her to her mother, who wanted a divorce. It was discovered, in fact, during his imprisonment that Sillon was suffering from a brain tumor that might explain the madness of his deed.
25 Revue de Criminologie et de Police Technique (Geneva), special issue, 1952.
26 Jean Bocognano: Quartier des fauves, prison de Fresnes (Editions du Fuseau).
27 My italics.
28 As everyone knows, the jury’s decision is preceded by the words: “Before God and my conscience …”
29 By Francart.
30 See the report on the death penalty by Representative Dupont in the National Assembly on 31 May 1791: “A sharp and burning mood consumes the assassin; the thing he fears most is inactivity; it leaves him to himself, and to get away from it he continually braves death and tries to cause death in others; solitude and his own conscience are his real torture. Does this not suggest to you what kind of punishment should be inflicted on him, what is the kind to which he will be most sensitive? Is it not in the nature of the malady that the remedy is to be found?” I have italicized the last sentence, for it makes of that little-known Representative a true precursor of our modern psychology.
31 Tarde.
The Artist and His Time
THE WAGER OF OUR GENERATION
(Interview in Demain, issue of 24–30 October 1957)
The notion of art for art’s sake is obviously alien to your thinking. That of “commitment” as it has been made fashionable of late is equally so. Taken in its present meaning, commitment consists in making one’s art subservient to a policy. It seems to me that there is something more important, which is characteristic of your work, that might be called inserting that work into its time. Is this correct? And, if it is, how would you describe that insertion?
I CAN accept your expression: inserting a work into its time. But, after all, this describes all literary art. Every writer tries to give a form to the passions of his time. Yesterday it was love. Today the great passions of unity and liberty disrupt the world. Yesterday love led to individual death. Today collective passions make us run the risk of universal destruction. Today, just as yesterday, art wants to save from death a living image of our passions and our sufferings.
Perhaps it is harder today. It is possible to fall in love every once in a while. Once is enough, after all. But it is not possible to be a militant in one’s spare time. And so the artist of today becomes unreal if he remains in his ivory tower or sterilized if he spends his time galloping around the political arena. Yet between the two lies the arduous way of true art. It seems to me that the writer must be fully aware of the dramas of his time and that he must take sides every time he can or knows how to do so.
But he must also maintain or resume from time to time a certain distance in relation to our history. Every work presupposes a content of reality and a creator who shapes the container. Consequently, the artist, if he must share the misfortune of his time, must also tear himself away in order to consider that misfortune and give it form. This continual shuttling, this tension that gradually becomes increasingly dangerous, is the task of the artist of today. Perhaps this means that in a short time there will be no more artists. And perhaps not. It is a question of time, of strength, of mastery, and also of chance.
In any case, this is what ought to be. There remains what is; there remains the truth of our days, which is less magnificent. And the truth, as I see it at least, is that the artist is groping his way in the dark, just like the man in the street—incapable of separating himself from the world’s misfortune and passionately longing for solitude and silence; dreaming of justice, yet being himself a source of injustice; dragged—even though he thinks he is driving it—behind a chariot that is bigger than he. In this exhausting adventure the artist can only draw help from others, and, like anyone else, he will get help from pleasure, from forgetting, and also from friendship and admiration.
And, like anyone else, he will get help from hope. In my case, I have always drawn my hope from the idea of fecundity. Like many men today, I am tired of criticism, of disparagement, of spitefulness—of nihilism, in short. It is essential to condemn what must be condemned, but swiftly and firmly. On the other hand, one should praise at length what still deserves to be praised. After all, that is why I am an artist, because even the work that negates still affirms something and does homage to the wretched and magnificent life that is ours.
When a man speaks as you do, he is not speaking solely for himself. He is inevitably speaking for others. And he is speaking for something. In other words, he is speaking in the name of and in favor of men for whom those values count. Who are those men and what are those values?
To begin with, I feel a solidarity with the common man. Tomorrow the world may burst into fragments. In that threat hanging over our heads there is a lesson of truth. As we face such a future, hierarchies, titles, honors are reduced to what they are in reality: a passing puff of smoke. And the only certainty left to us is that of naked suffering, common to all, intermingling its roots with those of a stubborn hope.
In the battles of our time I have always been on the side of the obstinate, on the side of those who have never despaired of a certain honor. I have shared and I still share many of the contemporary frenzies. But I have never been able to get myself to spit, as so many others do, on the word “honor.” Doubtless because I was and am aware of my human weaknesses and of my injustices, because I instinctively knew and still know that honor (like pity) is an unreasonable virtue that takes the place of justice and reason, which have become powerless.
The man whose blood, and extravagances, and frail heart lead him to the commonest weaknesses must rely on something in order to get to the point of respecting himself and hence of respecting others. This is why I loathe a certain self-satisfied virtue, I loathe society’s dreadful morality because it results, exactly like absolute cynicism, in making men despair and in keeping them from taking responsibility for their own life with all its weight of errors and greatness.
The aim of art, the aim of a life can only be to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in every man and in the world It cannot, under any circumstances, be to reduce or suppress that freedom, even temporarily. There are works of art that tend to make man conform and to convert him to some external rule. Others tend to subject him to whatever is worst in him, to terror or hatred. Such works are valueless to me. No great work has ever been based on hatred or contempt.
On the contrary, there is not a single true work of art that has not in the end added to the inner freedom of each person who has known and loved it. Yes, that is the freedom I am extolling, and it is what helps me through life. An artist may make a success or a failure of his work. He may make a success or a failure of his life. But if he can tell himself that, finally, as a result of his long effort, he has eased or decreased the various forms of bondage weighing upon men, then in a sense he is justified and, to some extent, he can forgive himself.
At the source of every work there is an experience. It may be a brief and brutal experience, a trauma. It may also be a protracted experience, generally the experience of childhood and adolescence. For you, to begin with, there was the Mediterranean and poverty. But with maturity come other experiences to influence and color one’s early impressions. For you they took the form of war and Resistance. Have not the last few years likewise been the source of a new experience? In what way, and what have they brought you?
Yes, there was the sun and poverty. Then sports, from which I learned all I know about ethics. Next the war and the Resistance. And, as a result, the temptation of hatred. Seeing beloved friends and relatives killed is not a schooling in generosity. The temptation of hatred had to be overcome. And I did so. This is an experience that counts.
Then the years
