Dramat przeciw powieści. Nowe pojęcie twórczości w transformowanym sartryzmie

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.