Words that are sick. Literary guile and narrative trouble in sartre

摘要

This article suggests a new analysis of Jean-Paul Sartre’sQu’est-ce que la literature? (1948) by examining a densely intertextual passage in the text where Sartre associates words with sickness. By the ‘sickness” of words Sartre understands not only wartime ideological contamination of language but also modern literary expression in some of its forms. The hyperbolic statement that is, in itself, marked by wartime rhetoric includes amongst its references a satiric comment on Georges Bataille’sL’Expérience intérieure (1943). The aim of the article is to think out the association between the ideologically contaminated words and the literary words in Sartre’s post-war writings. This involves, first, an explication of what the diagnosis of words consists of, that is, how words can besick for Sartre. Second, the purpose is to investigate the ambiguity in Sartre’s statement concerning literary language. The idea of the morbidity of literary expression is another indication of Sartre’s ambivalent relation to fiction and poetry that characterized his whole career. The satiric diagnosis, therefore, is a symptom of a larger question of resistance to literature that can teach us something about the persistence of literature.