In fact the term “committed literature” is an antique, dating back to the post-war period and designating an alliance of certain writers with the then-Stalinist Party. It has no other meaning—as was demonstrated, if that was necessary, by the two speakers’ reluctance to define it—and for the radical young that meaning has been drained of significance by the desacralization of the Party, following the Twentieth Congress, Hungary, the Moscow-Peking split. In any case, outside the Soviet Union, where a state literature, “socialist realism,” had to meet rather strict norms of commitment to official policy, the slogan never had much connection with actual novels and poems. Unlike, say, surrealism, it did not denote a school or “way” of composition. A writer in the West was judged to be “engagé” by the number of manifestos and petitions he signed, the initiatives he took, the demonstrations he marched in. Those may be legitimate criteria to measure the activism of a citizen but they do not throw any light on what literature can do. Hence the shadow character of the debate at the Mutualité, where a practicing school of young writers with an overt body of aesthetic doctrine was opposed by elderly generalities of the kind usually found in the book pages of conservative magazines and newspapers. The students in schism with the Party had asked a serious question and got from those they had most counted on, Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, a very dusty answer. That was maybe what the young man meant when he interpreted the evening for his girl friend: “Those are the reactionary writers of the Left.”