To fashion a persona out of one’s own undisguised self is no easy thing. A novel or a poem provides invented characters or speaking voices that act as surrogates for the writer. Into those surrogates will be poured all that the writer cannot address directly—inappropriate longings, defensive embarrassments, anti-social desires—but must address to achieve felt reality. The persona in a nonfiction narrative is an unsurrogated one. Here the writer must identify openly with those very same defenses and embarrassments that the novelist or the poet is once removed from.

C.S.: Let’s summarize. There are several means of grasping the self. First, through action. Next, through the interior life. As for yourself, you declare: The self is determined by the essence of its existential problem. This view has a number of consequences for your work. For example, your insistence on understanding the essence of situations seems to you to render all descriptive techniques obsolete. You say almost nothing about the physical appearance of your characters. And since the investigation of psychological motives interests you less than the analysis of situations, you are also very parsimonious about your characters’ past.

COLLABORATOR. Historical situations, always new, unveil man’s constant possibilities and allow us to name them. Thus in the course of the war against Nazism, the word “collaboration” took on a new meaning: putting oneself voluntarily at the service of a vile power. What a fundamental notion! How did humanity do without it until 1944? Now that the word has been found, we realize more and more that man’s activity is by nature a collaboration. All those who extol the mass media din, advertising’s imbecilic smile, the neglect of the natural world, indiscretion raised to the status of a virtue- they deserve to be called collaborators with the modern.

NOVEL. The great prose form in which an author thoroughly explores, by means of experimental selves (characters), some themes of existence.

The novelist is one who, according to Flaubert, seeks to disappear behind his work. To disappear behind his work, that is, to renounce the role of public figure. This is not easy these days, when anything of the slightest importance must step into the intolerable glare of mass media, which, contrary to Flaubert’s remark seems to me a kind of warning: in lending himself to the role of public figure, the novelist endangers his work; it risks being considered a mere appendage to his actions, to his declarations, to his statements of position.