In a section on commitment in the novel, the programme for the first Edinburgh International Literary Festival quotes the American writer and activist Dwight Macdonald:

In its select coordinates Macdonald's broadside is emblematic of discussions of its time – both positive and negative – on literary commitment. In these discussions, commitment is a phenomenon of the left, and the left as defined at its communist pole; political ideology is caricatured as dogma; Jean-Paul Sartre's notions of littérature engagée are evoked; and overall, the issue of commitment is cast in relation to a specific historical temporality, often leading out of a mythic and prelapsarian 1930s.

Doris Lessing's 1957 essay ‘The Small Personal Voice’ is another such discussion of literary commitment. Less willing to equate commitment tout court with the phenomena that Macdonald describes, Lessing's essay is still troubled by the potential of these phenomena to represent committed writing. So, for example, Lessing's historical temporality is more nuanced than Macdonald's – both more expansive and less simply linear – although the iconic, originary charge of the 1930s remains. This said, Lessing's points of reference diverge from those of Macdonald regarding Jean-Paul Sartre. ‘The Small Personal Voice’ evokes the Sartre not of littérature engagée, but instead an earlier Sartre, included in a list alongside Albert Camus, Jean Genet and Samuel Beckett as evincing a ‘pleasurable luxury of despair’ – an ‘acceptance of disgust’, which is ‘as much a betrayal of what a writer should be’ as doctrinaire socialist realism and its ‘acceptance of the simple economic view of man’ (Lessing 1994: 15). Lessing's omission is in many ways remarkable: Sartre's notions of commitment were not only the most prominent – and most thoroughly theorised – of the post-war period, but also intersect at key points with ‘The Small Personal Voice’.