| dc.description.abstract | The transformed Sartrism of to-day undertakes a self-critical analysis of the
primary concepts of freedom, choice and heroism, as they were enunciated by Jean-
Paul Sartre in the first stage of his radical early existentialism. Sartre renders these
concepts historically relative interpreting them as a reflex of certain historical situations.
He divests his concepts of their initial absolute form, which becomes evident
even in Sartre's ideas on theory of literature. Our view is convincingly supported by
an interview with Jean-Paul Sartre published in 1970 in England in "The New Left
Review” and then in Germany in the review "Konkret" (also in 1970). First of all,
the conception of a hero — as well as of dramatic characters in general — has been
changed. At the same time Sartre criticizes the poetics of his own early dramatic
pieces of the time of resistance-movement, not acknowledging any more his initial
thesis that man is free in his choice at all times and under all circumstances.
Further, Sartre gives a new interpretation and evaluation of the expressive powers
of novel and drama, touching even upon some genological questions. In his new
conception Jean-Paul Sartre disqualifies novel, and what is even more important,
he abandons novel at all—in spite of the fact that he is a novelist himself. He
opposes drama to novel and establishes a kind of very simplifyving hierarchy. At one
pole of the hierarchy there is novel with the allegediy debased, decreased noetical
value, concurring with other, extra-aesthetic systems of interpretation (e.g., with psychoanałytic or Marxist interpretationsj. At the other poie of the hierarchy there is
drama conceived as myth which is not obliged to live as a parasite on ideological philosophical
systems and on their conceptual apparatuses. This simplifying model
«Drama versus Novel", however, is merely a pattern that is connected more or less
with a certain situation of the individual poetics of Sartrism. From a theoretical,
i.e. objective, point of view this disjunction can hardly be maintained and scientifically
generalized. Sartre admits that, from his point of view, theatre means myth,
and from this very standpoint he motivates his devaluation of novel. He denies
that novel is able to constitute "archetypes”, Such a radical cut between drama and
novel necessarily leads to hypostazing of genological difference within literary
structures. | pl_PL |
