The expression "socially conscious" writing already confesses its guilty knowledge of contradiction. Social reality presupposes consciousness, yet the idea of socially conscious writing typically asserts an ontological priority of social forms over esthetic forms (forms of consciousness) that is not sufficiently reasoned. Moreover, the implied invidious comparison between politically committed fiction and mere estheticism has too narrowly determined popular expectations about the novel of social consciousness pitting realists against esthetic formalists in a fruitless antagonism. This assimilation of esthetic practice to social practice has been most systematically argued in our time by Sartre, whose notion of commitment or engagement prompted the existentialist critique of solipsistic estheticism: "prose ... is by nature significative ... words are not objects but designations. In short it is a matter of knowing what one wants to write about."' In the Sartrean perspective, a politically committed literature defers to the forms of a pre-existing social reality for its historical authority. But before we leap too quickly to privilege empirical practice on this basis, it might be useful to observe that the debate between esthetic formalists and social/existential realists about the relative priority of language and forms of life actually recapitulates an older theoretical debate about the difference between literary work and world: the enduring problematic of representation. Particularly since Wittgenstein, language philosophers and literary critics alike have shown us that if we want to make effective use of the concept of representation, we must shed the moral framework that situates the writer visa-vis an essentialist truth and concern ourselves more with the variable condi-