Throughout the essays of Situations 1 one finds a recurrent preoccupation with the problems of language and silence, with the artist's perception of the insufficiencies of language, the perception that language disintegrates the wholeness of the artist's silent intuition. It is precisely those writers who vainly attempt to use language to express silence and a world that precedes words who fascinate Sartre—Parain, Bataille, Blanchot, Camus, Ponge, Faulkner. (p. 19)

Sartre's preoccupation in these early essays appears in an understanding of the novel as a form of action and not as language, and in an antipathy for wordiness (shades of Carlyle!); in other essays, it centers on attempts, particularly by the surrealists, to destroy language and on the twentieth-century "obsession with silence" and the "crisis of language" following World War I. The problem of language and action weaves gradually into the paradoxes of language and silence.

"Aller et retour" concerns...