Introduction Literature and engagement

A major challenge of literature is that it is stubbornly indeterminate. Both a vice and a virtue, the indeterminateness of literary language has acquired the status of an impasse, one which was perhaps most directly and resolutely faced by Jean-Paul Sartre and Stéphane Mallarmé. The question of whether the indeterminateness of literary language is a vice or a virtue, however, has rarely been treated without some degree of ambiguity. Not even for Sartre and Mallarmé was the issue so neatly polarized. Although for Sartre indeterminateness was clearly a vice, for Mallarmé it was not necessarily a virtue. Mallarmé too saw it as a vice, but one which he, unlike Sartre, did not want to, or did not think could be, overcome. Whereas Sartre, as his What is Literature? (1947) and The Roads to Freedom (1945–1949) demonstrate, wanted to correct the propensity of literature to defer and diffuse meaning, and make literary language and what it talks about coincide by finding a transparent language in which words – in a twist on J. L. Austin – would do things, Mallarmé chose to follow the imprudence of literary language and, because it could be neither ignored nor directly contested, accepted the stakes and decided to defeat language at its own game. What these two projects, in their ever intensifying versions – the increasing frenzy of Sartre’s writing that could not hide the anxiety that if it came to a standstill it would expose the unsteadiness of its language, and Mallarmé’s growing obsession with silence and the vision of the blank page, as his preface to Un Coup de dés reveals – bring to our attention is that both the effort to stabilize meaning and the attempt to dispose of it prove equally futile. The more one tries to make literary language convey the intended meaning, the more it slips away; and the more one attempts to eradicate it, the more obvious it becomes that referentiality will not go away. As meaning can be neither fixed nor destroyed, literary language is forever suspended between the referential and the figural. This book discusses writers and critics who related to the indeterminateness of literary language in a new and original fashion: by way of suspending