Jean-Paul Sartre

Adrian van den Hoven

Sartre the novelist

Sartre began his career as a novelist in 1938 with Nausea, and ended it with the third volume of the Roads to Freedom series (Sartre 1949a), as well as fragments of a fourth volume (posthumously published as The Last Chance; Sartre 1981a, 2009). In 1940, as a prisoner-of-war in Trier, Germany, Sartre wrote (and performed in) his first play, a Christmas mystery called Bariona, or the Son of Thunder (Sartre 1962b); he ended his playwriting career in 1965 with his adaptation of Euripides’s The Trojan Women.

Nausea is a perfect illustration of Fernandez’s conception of the novel “as unfolding in the present, as does life itself” (Sartre 1947a: 15). Events in this diary unfold in a discontinuous, haphazard manner, and Roquentin, the solitary narrator, adopts it “in order to see more clearly” (Sartre 1981a: 5). Its core passage “In the Public Park” illustrates Roquentin’s experience of contingency, and, since it takes place towards the end of the novel, it requires that one keep this revelation constantly in mind if one wishes to arrive at a proper interpretation. Roquentin discovers that the “essential is contingency”, that it is “the absolute … or the absurd”, and that the universe is “perfectly gratuitous” (ibid.: 153–5). As a result, he views most human endeavours as pathetic attempts to disguise reality and to obscure, or embellish and prettify man’s real position in the world. This applies to such arts as novel-writing, sculpture, architecture, theatre. The ragtime “Some of These Days” and geometrical figures escape from this stricture because as intangible non-existents they inspire in Roquentin the hope that perhaps he can save himself retrospectively by writing “an adventure that couldn’t not have happened … and that would allow people to guess at something that didn’t exist, be beyond existence … and make people ashamed of theirs” (ibid.: 210).

Nausea represents a quest for a lucid understanding of man’s place in the universe. Therefore Roquentin satirizes the Autodidact’s attempt to embrace the world’s knowledge by reading the library’s holdings in alphabetical order; he also realizes that novels rearrange events in order to suit the ending and abandons his biography of Rollebon because he appears to be resuscitating himself rather than his subject. In turn, Anny, his ex-mistress, rejects him. This actress had viewed life in theatrical terms as “privileged situations” that required the creation of “perfect moments” (Sartre 1981a: 169). She has given up that belief but is not willing to reconcile with him notwithstanding his recounting his epiphany in the Public Park. He also loses the Self-Taught Man. The humanist turns out to be a pederast and is caught fondling boys in the public library. After being punched in the face by the librarian, he disappears. After this series of abandonments, losses and painful discoveries, Roquentin is ready to return to Paris, live as a rentier and vegetate. Now his second epiphany occurs while he is listening to the ragtime “Some of These Days” a final time. Since neither geometrical figures nor music exist, he projects music as a possible solution to his dilemma. It does not add to the superabundance of existents and permits one to posit the creation of a purely imaginative work.

Roquentin’s first experience with nausea is revelatory. At the beach he attempts to emulate young boys who are skimming stones. He picks up a pebble but stops before he can throw it: “the pebble feels flat and dry, especially on one side, damp and muddy on the other. I held it by the edges with my fingers wide open so as not to get them dirty” (ibid.: 6). The pebble’s admixture of certain basic elements – mineral, water and mud – as well as the pseudo-homosexual encounter with the young boys relate this experience of absurdity to his epiphany in the Public Park and the Autodidact’s fateful encounter in the library. Next Roquentin attempts to describe a cardboard container; it is “a parallelepiped rectangle” (ibid.: 5) but then gives up. Perspective, introduced by Dührer, and since then used to provide a stable viewpoint on the world is failing him. However, once he feels again “quite at home in the world” he is able to describe the world outside his window from a stable vantage point: “Here is my room facing north-east. Below the Street of the War Amputees and the construction site of the new station. I see the red and white flame of the ‘Railroad Workers’ Rendezvous’ at the corner of Boulevard Victor-Noir” (ibid.: 6). But this stable perspective is illusory; when he brings his face close to the mirror, he remarks:

what I see is well below the monkey, on the fringe of the vegetable world, at the level of jellyfish … The eyes are glassy, soft, blind, red-rimmed, they look like fish scales … A silky white down covers great slopes of the cheeks, two hairs protrude from the nostrils: it is a geologically embossed map. And, in spite of everything, this lunar landscape is familiar to me.

(Ibid.: 23)

As a human he has descended to the aquatic, the vegetable and the mineral realm. The traditional hierarchal view of man has collapsed; its substitute is a phantasmagorical conception of man in which all the universe’s elements are intertwined. This lucid awareness of himself as a composite creation provokes him to reject the bourgeoisie in scathing terms: the “worthy citizens who did their duty and have rights” (ibid.: 98–113) and whose portraits hang in Bouville’s (“Mudville” or “Cow-town”) museum. They look down on Roquentin, this solitary individual “without social importance” (ibid.: 1) but he considers them “a bunch of bastards” (ibid.: 113). This satirical, parodical and critical work clears the air. It forces us to see beyond the distorting and illusionary veils that art, culture and philosophy (humanism) have imposed on us and recognize reality in all its overwhelmingly raw, and non-human manifestations. Nausea represents a comprehensive confrontation with the absurdity of mankind’s existence and, paradoxically, it is also a valiant attempt to see beyond it and create a “human” space for us.

The collection of stories in The Wall (Sartre 1939c, 1969a) conform to Fernandez’s conception of the récit in which “the action takes place in the past; it explains and the chronological order barely disguises the underlying causal framework” (Sartre 1947a: 16). “The Wall”, set in the Spanish Civil War, deals with Tom, Juan and Pablo, who have been condemned to death. It succeeds admirably in depicting the psychological anguish of the condemned men who are sharing the knowledge that these are the last days. However, Pablo, the narrator, is set free after he accidentally betrays his leader Juan Gris in an attempt to make the enemy look ridiculous. Upon discovering that, Pablo bursts out in “laughter” (Sartre 1981a: 233). He now finds himself with his back to the wall rather than staring at it but his attempted farce has turned tragic.

“The Room” tells the story of Mr and Mrs Darbédat, their daughter Eve and her husband Pierre, who appears to be going mad. Mr Darbédat is the picture of rugged health, his wife is a hypersensitive homebody and Eve is colluding with Pierre in his plunge into the world of madness. This story views madness as a flight into an imaginary universe that “common sense” people find impossible to penetrate.

In “Erostratus”, the modern counterpart of the eponymous mythical “hero” fails pathetically to gain fame posthumously. In the surrealist manner he takes a loaded revolver into the street, pulls the trigger three times but mistakenly goes down the wrong street only to find himself in the midst of a crowd. He pulls the trigger two more times and hides in a washroom. Instead of using the sixth bullet for himself, he opens the door at the last moment. The ultimate surrealist’s gesture has resulted in a pointless tragedy.

“Intimacy” satirizes modern romances as found in women’s magazines. Lulu lives with her “impotent” husband Henri (ibid.: 280) but imagines a romantic getaway with her lover Pierre. Rirette, Lulu’s girlfriend, eagerly attempts to have Lulu leave her husband and move to the Midi with Pierre. But Pierre turns out to be a mother’s boy and Lulu soon returns to her impotent husband because in fact she prefers his helplessness to Pierre’s ostensibly masculine ways. Another failure: Lulu prefers dramatic “gestures” to real change.

“The Childhood of a Leader,” inspired to a degree by Sartre’s own childhood, is first an attempt to satirize the bourgeoisie’s pretentions to “duty”, “responsibility” and to its deserving a “dominant role” in French society. Lucien is anything but a leader; he experiments with homosexuality, surrealism, women and right-wing fascist politics yet finally follows in his father’s footsteps. He may well think that he has undergone a “metamorphosis” and become a “leader” but a look in the mirror reveals his “childish appearance”. At that moment he decides “to grow a moustache” to appear “more terrible” (ibid.: 388). These dexterous verbal exercises illustrate Sartre’s perfect mastery of the genre and clearly demonstrate his ability to pinpoint people’s flights into bad faith and the imaginary.

Unlike Nausea, the Roads to Freedom series paints a much broader social and political canvas. Sartre’s discovery of John Dos Passos’s Nineteen Nineteen leads him to attempt to incorporate the most intimately personal and most social and public aspects of human existence in a novel. Hence, the series takes the form of a chronicle that deals with the lives of a philosophy professor Mathieu Delarue, his pregnant mistress Marcelle, the younger Ivich and others as these lives unfold in the late 1930s. The series begins with The Age of Reason (Sartre 1945a, 1947e). The second volume is the most successful. In The Reprieve (Sartre 1945c, 1947f), Sartre adapts Dos Passos’s and others’ technique of multiple perspectives to deal with the signing of the Munich Accord, which brought temporary peace to Western Europe but was disastrous for Czechoslovakia. It illustrates perfectly Sartre’s eclectic talents as a novelist as it succeeds admirably in recreating the period’s anguish, confusion and false relief that was the result of the politics of appeasement. Iron in the Soul (Sartre 1949a, 1950b) concludes with the apparently last moments of Mathieu shooting at the advancing Germans from a tower. He “blazes away” at all his past “failures” for “fifteen minutes” (Sartre 1981a: 1344); but is not killed. In The Last Chance (included in Sartre 1981a), the incomplete fourth volume, we encounter Mathieu and others in a POW camp. Ultimately, Sartre had hoped to demonstrate the “conversion” of his main characters into committed persons. But their highly dramatized metamorphoses would also have revealed the limits of Sartre’s project. His very realistically drawn “types” could hardly have been expected to have become “genuinely” existential heroes or villains.

Sartre the playwright

Sartre’s first play Bariona (Sartre 1962b; also included in Sartre 2005a, as are all Sartre’s other plays discussed below) mixes elements of his own philosophy with biblical and literary sources and demonstrates his conception of the theatre as a world apart and distinct from ours in which speech, gestures and objects operate in a synecdochic relationship with the spectators’ psyche and thereby allow a complete grasp of the underlying message. Bariona accepts the Romans’ demand for an excessive tax increase but then imposes enforced celibacy on his people so that that the tribe will die off. He even insists that his wife abort. However, when the people hear about the Saviour, they disobey his commands and rush to Bethlehem. Bariona follows them and when he looks into Joseph’s eyes he is instantly converted and decides to take on the Roman army to save the life of the Saviour. The “look” will play a significant role in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, published in 1943. Bariona’s act of defiance prefigures Orestes’s defiant refusal to bow to Jupiter’s authority and Hugo’s quixotic refusal to accept the Party’s latest change of direction.

Sartre’s second play The Flies performed during the Occupation is a reformulation of the Orestes story. He returns to Argos to find his roots but instead discovers that the city is living under a curse. The city stands for the Vichy regime. Like Pétain, Jupiter has imposed a fake hierarchy of values and the king and queen are colluding with him and imposing a sense of guilt on their citizens. His sister Electra begs Orestes to murder his mother Clytemnestra and her new husband Egisthus, who are responsible for their father’s murder. He does so, but, overcome with guilt, Electra decides to stay and Orestes declares himself free, abandons the city and accepts full responsibility for his murderous act. Orestes’s decision has often been criticized; he should have stayed and assumed the throne. But by refusing it and rejecting Jupiter’s fake value system, he ends up playing an exemplary role and telling Parisians they don’t have to accept the Vichy’s fake value system either because they too are free!

Sartre’s play No Exit is deservingly his best-known drama. It fits his criterion that action should be set in a distant place: hell, and hence it becomes pure theatre. Since Garcin, Inès and Estelle are dead, all their acts are reduced to mere gestures. Sartre’s hell turns the traditional depiction upside down, there is neither fire nor brimstone nor instruments of torture; these characters are tortured by their past and those still alive, they torture each other in the present and will forever continue to do so. This impossible trio composed of Garcin, the cowardly but macho womanizer, Inès, the hard-nosed lesbian and sado-masochist, and Estelle, the frivolous society woman and child killer, become each other’s mirrors and judges. They can no longer undo their past and they must “live” forever fully aware of what they have become. As in Bariona, the look is crucial; the “multiple eyes” staring at him make Garcin realize that “Hell is other people” (Sartre 2005a: 127–8). None will ever escape the others’ accusing glare and they will forever be trapped on their infernal merry-go-round.

The Victors and the farce Nekrassov deviate from Sartre’s rule that dramatic action should be situated far away in time and space but in a sense the extravagant farce creates its own space and time. The Victors, similar in many ways to “The Wall”, is set in the Vercors and deals with the French milice and the maquis but unlike in “The Wall” where the men’s suffering is psychological, the maquisards are tortured on stage and, consequently, Sartre sins against a capital rule of neo-classical French theatre that excluded violence. Given Sartre’s bourgeois audience the reaction was predictable and the play was a failure. When in “The Wall” Pablo accidentally betrays his leader, he is set free but that is not the case with the maquisards. They too will send the miliciens on a wild goose chase and they succeed in their ruse because Jean, their leader, is set free but in spite of the miliciens’ promise, the maquisards are executed anyway. On the other hand, their torture is pointless because up until Jean is introduced into their midst they do not know his whereabouts.

The Respectful Prostitute resulted in Sartre being accused of anti-Americanism. Sartre had visited the USA in 1945 and written about racism in Le Figaro and subsequently he became a well-known advocate for the Third World; however, this play is as much an illustration of the Deep South’s fraught race relations as it is a denunciation of that hierarchical society’s value system. Sartre had read about the Scottsboro Boys trial and knew his Faulkner and the result is a play where the dominant whites get away with murder as they terrorize blacks and subjugate “white trash”. Lizzie is a New York prostitute who is travelling South on a train hoping to settle down and be provided for by some rich elderly gentlemen. This improbable scenario is complicated by the fact that in the segregated South she shares her compartment with two blacks. When a group of white men enter a fight breaks out, one of the blacks is shot and one escapes. Lizzie is picked up in a nightclub by Fred, the murderer’s cousin, and they spend the night together in Lizzie’s newfound apartment. Next morning the escaped black man knocks on her door and begs her to testify in his favour in court. The honest Lizzie agrees but she had not counted on Fred, the puritanical, lustful racist. He has left two ten-dollar bills on the table to entrap her so that when the police arrive, who are in collusion with Fred, there is proof that she is a prostitute. Lizzie also has a sentimental and socially upward mobile side to her and when Fred’s father, the senator, pleads the case of the murderer’s mother he succeeds in forcing Lizzie to sign and declare her son Thomas the innocent victim. In the meantime the lustful Fred shoots at another black who is being lynched and sees Lizzie’s face in the flames. If his father had made much of the superiority of whites over blacks, Fred in turn sings the praises of the white elite over such social outcasts as prostitutes. When Lizzie agrees to become his kept woman, Fred proclaims that everything is back in order. When Sartre became a fellow traveller of the Communist Party, he allowed to have the ending changed and at the last moment Lizzie and the black man escape in a waiting police car. Given that the police had been shown colluding with the white elite, that ending appears improbable. Yet the play is a good indication of Sartre’s thinking about the pervasive power the elite exercise over groups they consider social outcasts.

Dirty Hands is rightly considered a masterpiece, but its seemingly anti-communist conclusion caused great embarrassment to Sartre, the fellow traveller. It conforms to Sartre’s conception of theatre: it is set in a far-away country and presents us with a universe where the standard laws of space and time are suspended. We move from Olga’s house to Hoederer’s office and back to Olga’s. In three hours we move from the present to the past during which most of the action is played out in a sort of suspended present. It pits the young idealist Hugo against the realist politician Hoederer but what makes it interesting is the extended flashback that recreates the period that Hugo spent as Hoederer’s secretary and designated assassin. But Hugo ends up killing Hoederer not for political reasons but because he sees his wife in this “father figure’s” arms. When, at the last moment he discovers that the Party has rehabilitated Hoederer, he rejects this latest political twist and defiantly allows himself to be eliminated to justify his own beliefs and Hoederer’s tactics. The play leaves us suspended between his youthful idealism and the exigencies of realpolitik. “To lie or not to lie” has become the ultimate question (Noudelmann & Gilles 2004: 297–9).

The Devil and the Good Lord, once again set in a faraway place and time, plays on the paradox of good and evil and illustrates that Goetz, by alternatively playing both roles, is only fooling himself and that it is not the ultimate act of defiance that he thought it was. It is only when he accepts to do what he can do best, lead the army, that he realizes his true role. Ironically, he tells Nasty that he is not “born to command” but wants to “obey”, which results in Nasty ordering him to assume leadership “of the army” and thus “to obey” (Sartre 2005a: 499). When next he kills a chief who would rather “die” than “obey” him, he proclaims: “I take the command against my own will; but I won’t give it up. Believe me, if there is a possibility of winning this war, I will win it … There, the reign of man has begun”. And finally: “I will remain alone with this empty sky above my head because I have no other way of being with you. We have to fight this war and I will fight it” (ibid.: 501). Once again, a series of empty gestures conclude with a definitive final act but it also brings out the forlornness of the modern hero who must act without the divine guidance he had previously sought in vain.

Sartre’s adaptation of Dumas’s Kean shows his marvellous grasp of the importance of gestures and acts and “theatrality” in general. Kean is admired as a genius on stage but despised as a lowly actor. This bastard is full of resentment against the aristocracy but it is only when he transgresses the rules, steps out of his role and orders the aristocrats to “keep quiet” because “on stage he reigns supreme” (ibid.: 638) that he regains his dignity. It represents the victory of meritocracy over the aristocracy and Kean confirms it by marrying Anna who will be his manager during the day and his lover at night.

Nekrassov satirizes not only the French right-wing press but also his own philosophy. It is a marvellous tour de force but it fails to convince us that all defectors from the Soviet Union are impostors. Sartre’s dislike of the bourgeoisie was a well-known fact but this play shows the limits of his “fellow-travelling”. If one can ignore the obviously fallacious message, it can be seen as a masterful display of his grasp of the spoofing done by the Keystone cops and others.

Unlike The Victors, The Condemned of Altona is a much subtler attempt to denounce torture as practised by the French army in Algeria. Set in Germany, it embraces a vast period from Luther and the rise of capitalism to the post World War II German Wirtschaftwunder. Hence it can also be viewed as a biting commentary on the collusion between leading industrial figures and whatever government is in power. Since Sartre was at the same time working on the Freud Scenario, it illustrates again, as did Dirty Hands, the fateful father-son relationship in which, in this case, the son, unable to loosen the bonds that bind them, becomes the “Butcher of Smolensk” and, hence, Sartre succeeds in “demystify[ing] military heroism by showing its link to unconditional violence” (ibid.: 1015). In this theatrical masterpiece Sartre exploits all the media resources, from cinema, to radio and the tape recorder, and illustrates the tenets of existential psychology in which the flashbacks and prolepses ultimately force Frantz to admit to his own war crimes. As in No Exit, the action takes place on two levels. Frantz’s deliberate sequestration and feigned madness are desperate attempts to justify Germany’s defeat as a disaster because he needs to deny Germany’s evident economic rebirth and hide from his own failure. Father and son commit suicide together; their blindness to the horrific reality they have created leaves them no other way out. Yet, to the extent that we identify with Frantz, we recognize our own “complicity in that horrific universe’s creation” (ibid.: 1028). It was Sartre’s hope that the French public would “recognize that they are like the Germans portrayed” and that ‘the theatrical mirage would disappear to leave room for the truth that hides behind the mirage” (ibid.: 1016).

Let us conclude with Sartre’s remarks about his adaptation of the Trojan Women, which was a box-office failure and ended his career as a dramatist. This denunciation of war: “ends on a note of total nihilism … In it the Gods die as well as the humans, and that death is the moral of the tragedy” (ibid.: 1051). Ultimately, Sartre’s vision of a world without God thrives always on dramatic moments: both in his prose and his theatre it is the transforming act that makes man and … makes all the difference.

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Walter Skakoon for his insightful suggestions.