Pressing engagement

Jean-Paul Sartre and the aesthetic problem of the political

pp. 163-190

in: Geoffrey A. Baker, The aesthetics of clarity and confusion, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016

Abstract

While Sartre's What Is Literature? is often seen as the crystallization of a political aesthetic driven by clarity and disclosure, this chapter finds in it and other writings a deep-seated uncertainty about how to politicize literature. In essays like "Black Orpheus," Sartre even explicitly champions the revolutionary potential of precisely the sort of Surrealism that he had earlier disparaged as disengaged art. "Black Orpheus' suggests what Sartre later acknowledges openly: realistic disclosure became too confining and limited a strategy to adequately communicate the political tremors of his time. In the Roads to Freedom trilogy, Sartre mixes strategies of clarity and disclosure with those of experimentation and confusion, a strange and intermittent deference to uncertain form over clearly communicated content.