existentialism: a spurned nobel prize calls the world's attention to a lonely philosophy of...

7/27/2019 EXISTENTIALISM: A spurned Nobel Prize calls the world's attention to a lonely philosophy of despair

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A spurned Nobel Prize calls the world's attention

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a lonely philosophy of despairDr. Nommn Alcork. a pacifist

,,/,)'sin'si. 5/(111<15<II," U,kr O"",do

iN floe 10 "((I11""i", lois 1'/"" far ""'{lU.

can counl on no one but himself: he is alone. abandoned on earlh

of his infinite responsibilities. without help, with no other

than the one he selS himself. " ';Ih no olher destiny than Ihe one

on this earth:' This is the philosophy of existen

set down by J e ; t n - S;mrc, a 59-year-old Frenchman who

astonished the world by turning down the Nobel I' rizc for

The picture above is an accidenwl but Slriking symbol of

The scientist on the icc noc not only looks as poig

M. Sarcre says all men arc. but just by being in

odd situation he shows that he has commiued himsclf- as Sanrc

So."lys all men are obligcd to do if thcy He to cscape a mcaningless lifc.

Existcntialism. as propoundcd by Sanre. who is introduced on thc

next pagc. is a philosophy ba>cd on despair- somber. dcmanding and

godless. O"cr the past two dcrades il has brought about radical changcs

in Weste rn thought ~ l I 1 d Westcrn socicty. Although it is sub tle and elu

sivc, its man ifestations can casil y be seen around us-as the phow-

graphs on pages 90- 93 show. It s mood is felt and expressed by>corcs

of today's Icnding writers- somc of whom arc ponrayed on p<lgcs 94-95.

And its perplcxitics again and again prompt people 10 ask: What is

im 'm ialism'! A dctailed n n ~ w c r 10 this qucstion is givcn on pages96-110.

CONTINUE D 87

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Sartre, the walleyed little man whoTo those who know Jean-Paul Sartre. hi s refusal of the Nobel Prize-with its $53,000 award - wa s nosurprise. " I don' t align myself withanybody else's descriptions of me,"

he told L IFE just before the prize."Peopic can think of me as a genius, a pornographer, a Communist.a bourgeois, however they like.Myself. I think of other things."

Sarlre, who is resigned to beingwalleyed and short, has for yearsacted on his thoughts--as befitsany existentialist - with bravado.He quit teaching philosophy to

JOin the Resistance movement inWorld War II , and was once a German captive. After the war- whenthe portrait below of him on thePont des Arts was taken- he out

spokenlychampioned Marxism butnever joined the Communist partyand was appalled by the Hungarian revolution. For hi s anticolonialist views on Algeria. his Parishome was bombed in 1961. Alwayshe kept on writing: plays. novels,stories and essays and, JUSt now,an autobiography. Th e Words,

which is selling phenomenally ev-

erywhere. (The U.S. edition is published by Geo rge Braziller,)

Sarlre' s exclusive interview withLIFE began in his apartment, onthe Left Bank in Paris. and con

tinued wi th a visit to Simone deBeauvoir. She is Sartre's lifelongcompanion (by a deliberate pactthey have nOt married) and isherselfa brilliant writer- The Sec

ond Sex, The Mandarins . Someof his other remarks to LlFI;'s Rudolph Chelminski and Jan e Howard, together with some selectionsfrom The Words. are offered here.

"Ail ihe dislinclions a wriur

r " c e i ' loy his readers Q ~ J / /0

p,e.ssU,el lhol l do nOljudge desirable.

It 's nol Ihe Jame lhing i f

I sigll ktill-Paul Sari"

or Jean-Paul Sari", "'inner

oflhe Nobt-I Prize."

"I" 'as prepared al all eadyage

10 regard uochiJ/g as a prlf'sl"ood (JIrd

lileral"", as a passion.

Booh 1I'f'r" my birds {JI/d my ""SIS.

my "auSl!hold my bam IIIrd

my coulliryside and Ihe library "'OJ

Ihe WQfId Mllghl In a mirror.'!'!

"M y holies are made of emher IIl1d

cllrdboard. my parchmem-sJ,:iI/lled

/ lnh smf'lIs o fglue ami mushrooms .

1 sil ill s t o l ~ Ih,ough 1)0 pollllds

o f p a ~ r , l"artJlllfhly aleoy. I

am ",OOrll. I at last becomf' a ,,·/rolefflOlI.lhillkitlg. tolking. singing.

IhulUiering, a mon II'M osstrlJ himself

"'il" Ihe peremplory inf'rlia o f

mollf'r. Halldslake medo,,'n, ~ n _ ,spread me/lol OJIIM lable. smoolh

me ami somnimes moke me r f o k .

"111m 1101. as has bun MIid. u

pessimist: 10 m a persoll ...ha I r i ~ ,{a make peaple nlO" lucid "is-IH'iJ

Ihemse/"eJ. {/lid it i l or thil lhal

l am disliktd. 1 righlen peaple,

I would say IhOllhe majorilyofpeople

ha,'e alll'oys been afraid la think.

Slendhlll, in his lime. ""Ole

'all good reol(ming ilojfensi>'e'

Ihal iJ JliII "ery much IrUf.

"I see 110 rNISO II "'hy the family UJ

such should 1101 cOlI/inut. allholllfh

"'''el''er or 'IO{ lhe parenll are

married hOJ lillie Imporltlllce 10

£"f'1I in "'''al .. now consider

rf'lordtd parliollS o f he globe,

II"it,k Ihal illihe future falhf'rs

will nal be so lnconleslably dominalll

lwr "'(Jmfll SO /lntqlwlos Ih"y hal'"

bu". The imporlalll Ihil'8 is Ihol

Ih e relOlianshlp bt-Iween Ihe porelllS

omllhe childrell '101 sufff" . !' !



it all out, says: (I frighten people'

T h e r f ' is 110 gO(ul fOIIl<", 11",(s tire

rill .. Do,,', 10)' Ih,' blu",,. 011 "'ell bill 011

Ihe oo",{ o[pat"mily. ~ ' h i c l , is

rolll'''. To begn cltildr.·/I. 1I1J1ltillg

bellu; 10 haw Ihl>!, H'/I<I( i l l i"IIi ly' !'i i l ll my molhe"3 qel "-"s" {O-IIwtlliI

child. Mila huh-" Ihlll l l l", ",hus,

mort' gl<lud. crispit', {IS a n'S''!1 o f

slUyilrg illlh" o\'m/ung,·r.! '

" , hun, lUll "" eIlQm",//s differellce

btl"'u tl Simo,,<' de B .ullovir' • "",lillY

gellulltiQII "'heu , ... W"'t' 5111c/"/IIS

"" d Ihe 1O-year....,lds o f IO;/oy. IV .

"'ere sOJI ollli ullomsrhms, ",,,"I<

"II{/II"Jedt/ed: roda,' 'hq 'Ir" milch

mort' or",,,,/ for lIft' I/I{III M'" ",,-rt ',

Thq ore milch mort' Op<'11 , ,"'/I/W),

know many thillgs " ' f ' did I/(J/,"

'''w,. 11m'" lost uligioll, bill w" ,,"'..

gained hll",o"ism, TI,,. it/",,{ "" W

i.< {o liberale om//o IIdp mUlllcipdll'

nllJllkiml, wilh ,II . ,eslIlI lIun "'0"

beconlt's ,mill' all "bsa/Ille for """,."

"f dmire rhe ... II fa "'e/rame 1.',·eq,IIilll!

- rhe s'"pid "iolell("e of dum("e.

Ille mello("illg orde, o feu"St's SIIdd"lIly

tII,masked. If 0111.' like • slIrprises.

OIW milS' 1." '1.'11 like ,I", m,e 1/(lshes

"'hieh ,e"eol,o ,lie d""ol<'es II""

Ihr furlll is "0 ' mmle for I I 1 e " , . ~

h Ne.w ill my lif<' 110 ... / girell Oil

on"' , Mil/WIII ""'g/,illg .... lltoll/

",,,killg olilers 1''''KIt. /1 is bu,,,,.,,/ om 110' ("oll."",ed Mi,II r/,,, ("0"1",,ofpower: I .. "s ""'/lIIICh, ob<'diellt"<'."

. 'Oe GOllile is ra y "'If: / "m"ery sho" . Nei,h", il l h<'ig'" II", ill UIlY

o,her respt"C1 "" "'e sho,e""yrllillg wllmerer ill romlllOlI."

,., do,,', mimi If my felf"'" me"

forgel o/Jour me ,II . day "fler I (1m

hllri"d. As 10llg as rhey', . olire 1"11

1,,""11 Ihem. 1I111"IIII .d. impt"rap'ibie.

preselll ill erer), one o f IIIemjllsl

"s ,h . hilliolls of'/<'(u/ wllo /ire W, k IlO"'1I

10 me IIl1d "'I",m I p,es"rI'" from

mmiili/mi"" <If<' presem ill me."

CONTINUED 89



It finds an eternal absurdity

I

mes Square, NO"cmMr 22, 1963 A lx,,'(>, Q boy ill a Pimburgh Slrl'r/ Bela",. ",,, , iSIS"'''Ol}: some m",,,,,,il'$

•

In deathTo SaTire, death is an overpower

ing absurdity. The bitter contm·

diction is that while man has a

duty to shape hi s own life and the

world around him. he is constant

ly threatened by death. which SarIre calls a "cancellation always

possible of what I can be."

The tragic cancellation. on Nov.

22. 1963, of what one man could

have been was a drdmalic illus

tration of Sartre's thesis. The pho

tognlpher (opfmsi lf' {!liKe) empha

sized the existentialist overtones of

absurdity by picturing the out-

rageous news against the stricken

billboard face of a model whose

anguish stemmed not from ever-

present death but the ever-present

threat of the common cold. Many

people, Sartre says. unaware of

the omnipresence of death, main

tain an inauthentic aUi ludc 10-

ward it like the little boy with the

cap piSIOI, to whom it is somc sort

of joke. Or like the young couple

in the Mexican catacombs. who

pup.;ue their preoccupations obliv

ious of death all around them.

They see nothing untimely in it.

But Sarlre says that death, except

in the case of suicides and mad

men. is always untimely and there

fore existentially absurd. It does

not give a life its meaning- it de

prives it of any meaning whatever.



It sees a lonely world of the alienated;\ long ... ith Ihc conceptSof the ab-

surdity in life and death. the C\j , ·

lentiaiisl concept ",hich has had

the most po"crful influence on

post·war r l i ~ l s and wnlers Ihal

of "a lienation:' This mean

s mon:lhan si mple CSIr'..lngcmcn l from

others. The alienated person c\ -

periences himself as an ou tsider.

r . thcr tllan as the center of his

0"" u n i ~ e r s c and the originator

of his 0"" actions. In II sense

he is eSlmngcd from himself. and

he is ccrwinly cSlrllngcd from any

God.

Th is estrangement is c x p r c ~ s c din contemporary art and li lcrmurc

as an o,·crwhclming loneliness. II

may be the loneliness of the in-

dividual " 'ho. consciously or un·

consciously. made an c\;Slcntial·

iSI gesture in Ie(wing Ihal might y.

imllld ible shout on Ihe plain (righll

"ith no object for his alTection

but the sky.

It may be thc solitudc. the more

terrifying because it is in the midst

of multitude. of the \loman (QI"

pt)sill' pagl') caught by Ihe pho

togl1lphcr clutching a doll a chi ld

had givcn he r to hold. Shc stands

tllere liS II symbol of peoplc so es

tr.mged from life tll:u they can

hold only an imi tation of it.

Or il may be the aloneness of

the m:m below. sep.lrntcd. wi ll fully

and witll absurd elabor'J lcllcSS. notmerely from hi s fc llow man bUI

from a fellow man not evcn there.

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WordJ ill salld ,m Colorado drlul

·WI1ITE ·

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/ ( J ~ , . W ilmilrglOll, H.C. wtlJhroom RighI, OIl Q SlrUI (II Nl ' ... ) 'ork CII)



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It shapes

the mood

0/ a whole

generation

a/writersSince the war. Western literature

has had a pronoun ced existential·

ist strain. although few writers c.x-

plic itly identify themselves as Sar-

Ireans. or c\"cn existentialists. In

Europe. authors lik e Ducrrenmatl

(The Visit) and Nathalie Sarrautc

(The Golden Fruils) grapple with

absurdity and the anguish of mor

tal man isolated from his fellows

and himself. Samuel Beckett iso

lates his characters by cocooning

them in jugs and ashcans. or. as

he does wilh Bert Lahr in Wait-

ing for GOdOf (righl). olTering an

absurd temptation: a carrot. lon

csco changes his characters into

animals in Rllinoreros. Genet

scrdmbles the identities of his by

means of masks and grotesque

costumes.

John Updike said that no lan

guage is so unexistcntial as Eng-

1"sll. Yet Updike. whom Sartre

greatly admires. lias increasingly

dealt with alienated heroes. as inRabbil. Rutl . Other American

write rs attack the hypocrisies of

Western morality. Heller'sdubious

hero of CUid. 12. Yossarian. hope

lessly sane in an insane world.

makes a monstrous war look like

an old Marx Brothers film. Oon-

leavy's Gitlger Mati pushes his

pregnant wife dowlI the stairs and

makes this savagery seem hilari·

..

JOHN UPD I KE

J.D. SA Ll t"GER

TE Nt"ESSEE WILLI AMS

ous. Southern. who says he " digs

Sartre the most: ' un masks sc -x ual

mores in Candy by wi ldly embrac

ing and violating them. deadpan.

In The Naked Lutlch. William

Burroughs inverts values to deride

our ideas of criminality. John Os

borne. in Look Bark in Anger.

lambaste s the bourgeoisie; so

does Mailer in The Deer Park. The

nonheroes of Bellow in I Irr:Qg

and Malamud in The AssiJ(alll

are classic misfits. In Salinger's

novels it is youth that is alienated;in Baldwin·s. his entire raox . Albee

derides U.S. values by usi ng an

emasculated. adopted son to sym

bolize them in The American

Dream. Tennessee Williams made

"of Blanche Ou Bois in A Slreel-

car Nalllf'li Desire an alienated

heroine who turned to prostitution

bc<:ause she couldn't relate 10 any

one bUI a stranger. Gelber in his

novel On Ice created an apothegm

that might ha ve come from Sartre

himself: " It 'sa random universe."

t"ORMAN MAILER JA MES IIALDWtN

JOSEPH HELLER SAUL IIELLOII

EDWA RD ALIIEE ANI) HtS 'A MEIIIC" N D REA M'

BER NARO MAL"MUD

J" C K GELBE R



J. P. DO:-':lEAVY

IlI: RT LA II R IN IIECK l,"T"S 'WAITING FO R GO DOT'

I.UCt.'IIC IO .. t:SCO

\I ILUA \1 IIURROUCItS

TF.RRY SOlJTltF.R'"

JOUN OSBORNE

JEAN GENET

NATllALIF. SARRAUTt:

CONTINU( D 9S



Its shy champion flees fame. : i a n ~ tried to a'old the pn:ss

after he r e ~ l e d 1M Nobtl Pria:.

oot a sharp-eyed pholOllmpher found

him and he flashed an i m p i ~ h ITin.

CON TI NUED



I na 1946 portrait Sartre is seenwith the two dominant women in his

life, Simone de Beauvoir( I ~ J i ) and his mother, now 82.

SARTRE TRAVELS A TORTUOUS ROAD TOWARD HIS NEW MORALITY

Today he works surrounded by books

in an apartment in Montparnassc.with Mme. Sartre down the block andMme. de Beauvoir no t far away.

Dealing with Earthly Hellsby FRA NK KAPPLER

A ll men liveenvclopcd in whalelines." wrote Herman Melville."A ll are born with halters round

their but it is only whencaught in the swift. sudden turn of

death . thai mortals realize the si-

lent. subt le. ever-present perils of

life...."We have lost lauch so much

that occasionally we cannot helpfeeling a sort of disgust with 'reallife.' " observed Fyodor Dostoevsky, "and that is why we areso angry when people remind us of it: '

Hamlet had a dilTerent problem: " To be or not to be." he

asked. " Tha t is the question." Andfor Lord Greystoke. Edgar RiceBurroughs' jungle hero. the complexities of human relationships

were summed up in a single, perplexing concept: "You Jane, meTarzan. "

Whatever else the above quota-

tions may have in common, theunifying thread that cau<;cs themto be anthologized here is existentialism. Advertently or otherwise.all arc manifestations of existential thought. Exi stentiali sm hasbeen around for a long time. andmany people have been waitingfor it to make up its mind about

what it really is. or just hoping it

would go away. The possibilitythat it will do either is remOte-

especially now that its most vocal

contemporary apostle. Jean-Paul

"

Sartre, has published the lirst volume of his long-awaited autobiography and created a literary furorby spurning the Nobel Prize forLiterature.

It was Sartre, with his novels

and especiall y his plays. helpedby the novels of his then-closefriend Albert Camus. who afterWorld War I[ channeled what had

been primari ly a preoccupationof phi losophers into what is today the mainstream of artistic creation. Sartre took the turgid soulsearching of the modern Germanphilosophers and gave it a Frenchlucidity: Camus took from theCzech novelist Franz Kafka andthe Russian Dostoevsky their alienated heroes. helpless in an absurd world. and etched them with aGallic economy of line. These werethe two who first caught the at

tention of the avant-garde. BUI

hard on the heels of the avantgarde always come the popularizers. and now. like it or not. we

arc aU consumers of e ~ i s t e n t i a l -ism. buying it in aU kinds of packages- novels with faceless characters. plays without exits. nouveUe vague films, whose commonperceptible message we alreadyknow: human existence is absurd.h has been written about endlessly. but the philosophers' verbiageis written in code. and so a consumers' guide is not amiss.

Much of the popular confusionabout the nature of existentialism

stems from its wide variety. Sar-

trc's is the check-rated brand. butit is only one of many_ Even exis

tentialists differ about what it

means to be an existentia list. buton one thing they aTe genera lly in

agreement : they hate to define it.

It is a rare book on existentialismthat does not sta rt out by teUingthe reader that. if he e x p ~ t s adefinition, he's got another think

coming. An excellent new guide to

existential thought. TIll' Worlds ofExis/f'ntialism by Professor Mau

rice Friedman of Sarah LawrenceCoUege. wastes no time settingthe reader straight on this point.It s opening words arc: .. 'Give me

a one-sentence definition of existentialism: This statement is of

ten more a ritual defense againstthe insecurity aroused by not be-

ing au courant than a genuine desire ror knowledge."

W th somewhat less asperity.Dr. Friedman goes on 10 explainthat existentialism is not a singlemovement within philosophy buta Stream welling up from underground sources and convergingand diverging: not a philosophy

but a mood. embracing a numberof dispar3te philosophies whose

differences are more basic than thegenera l feeling which unites them.

When it comes to the areas on

whiCh most existentialists agree.Webster'S New Co llegiate D ic tionary. at least. is unequivocal. [t de

fines existentialism as " I . Phi/o.<_

An introspective humanism or

theory of man which expresses theindividuars intense awareness of

his contingency Ithat is. existingas an individual human bei ng. de-

pendent on others for existence,

menaced by death and dependenton oneself for shaping the courseand qua lity of one's life] and free

dom: a theory which states ttlat

the existence of the individual precedes his essence. Specif.: a . phi/a-

sophiral exislentia/ism, a theorywhiCh stresses the ind ividuars re-

sponsi bility for making hi mselfwhat he is. b, Chris/Ian f'xis/en-

liaiism. a theory which Slresses thesubjective aspects of the humanperson considered as a creature ofGod . . . . "

T his is a good sta rt ing point. It

isn't complete, but many omittedelements are things over which ex

istentialists disagree. Before dissecti ng existentialism. a few definitions of the key words in theexistenti aI lexicon arc in order. Thedistinction between eXiSleilCe and

essence is not merely a semanticinnova tion of existentialists: it haslong been part of the language of

philosophy. Existence. which is nOt

the passive continuance in being

of common s ~ h , imp lies something active, an emergence frompassiveness. (" Don't just he there---do something! Ex/sI!")

Essence is the name fo r the common nature of all members of one

species. T raditionally it has been

assumed that Ihis na ture is ready-

CONTINUED



The price of awareness

is often despair

EINUED

and unalterable . By contraStus forms of existentialism

e that man exists only insofarshapes his own existence andconfers an essence upon it

ow n conscious choice-theHamlet wrestled with

oqucmly. From this idea fol Sartre's famous formula,

not all existentialists accept :recedes essence:'

of SaTIre's philosophysummarized (oversimpli lied,

as follows: Man comes

a totally opaque, undifferenti·meaningless universe, By theorhis mysterious conscious

wh ich Sartre calls neanl, manof the universe a habitable

d. Whatever meaning and val-has comes from his

choice. These choicesone man to another.

in his own world, or,also says, each creates

situation. Frequently thischoice is buried in a

of consciousness. Butone must be

of oneself as an ',\"'is, a true exis/enlial subject,

r alone the responsifor his own situation.

s dreadful f ~ d o m to choose

the e:>;istential subject.the man who is clearly con·

s of the necessity he is underworld will suf

sense of absurdity and oftenr. What values is he to

Systems of philosophy. remorality

e:>;cuses for evadliberty, or du ty, to deter

oneself. They canto the ultimate

maul'aise Joi (bad fai th). Onelives in maumiseJoi leads an

existence, and theresn't anything worse than that.

is possible to emerge, Sartre

state ofengagement,

a resolutefree choice to a positive part

man affairs. This leads to an

of the freedom of othth is commitment in turn

shape for one's owncommon. inte

end, SaTIre has sot made up his mind. Whcn

roached the idea of salvationngagemf'nI in 1946 in L"Exis*

es t un humanismI',

many saw it as an optimistic twistin Sartre's pessimistic philosophy,and the humanists, who place theirfaith in man and not in God,

started to welcome him aboard.

But Same waved them off. He insisted God was dead, but he reo

fused to substitute man for Him.He refused 10 go beyond what hehad said earlier, that "man is the

being who aspires to be God." It

is only in this latter sense that hewould accept the humanist label.

In the sense that existentialismis not a system but a mood of phi·losophy, a reaction against the

Ex istentialism's most eloquentnovelist, Albert Camus, won Nobel Prize in 1 9 ~ 7 , died inanautomobile accident three years later.

static and the abstract in of

the dynamic and the concrete, ithas been on the scene e ~ e r s i n ~ eHeraclitus (500 B.C.) took issuewith Parmenides' assertion that

only The Unchanging One is real.and insisted that al1 was flux . Hecited the bow and the lyre as e:l:am-pies of the harmony of opposites .

Scholars have found intimationsof existentialist thought in the OldTestament Psalms, and one contemporary critic argues that whenJesus said, "Ye are the salt of theearth: but if the salt have lost hissavor, wherewith shall it be

salted?"' he was really expressingthe existential theme of {'ngage-

menl, or authentic inauthenticexistence. this kind of lat i-

tude, existentialism can be provento had more fathers than theatom bomb.

lust when did modern e:l:isten

tialism itself emerge from the ne-ant? The re arc any number of

places to sta rt, beginning with theLuther-dn gnostic Jacob Boehme(1575 - 1624), the first Europeanphilosopher to worry much about

existence as an abyss of nothing-

CONTINUED

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D!5chol/, A IR ·P ILLOI N SO L E S

He is equipped

to trigger revolutionSA RT RECONTINUED

ness. Traces of his thinkin g ca n be

found among taler philosophersfrom Niet:uche to Paul Till ich. The

French genius Rene Descartes( 1596--1650), as every college f eshman kn ows, is the author of thefamous " 1 think. therefore 1am: '

and the true fathe r of mod ern phi·

losophy. As such . he may also bethe father of existen t ia lism. If so.he is the sort of fat ller againstwllom offspri ng rebe l, for eversi nce. one of tile favor ite pastimesof e ~ i s t e tllinkers like Dostoc:vs ki and Camus has been torewrite Descartes' theories according 10 their own lights.

But Descartes is a true forefa

ther of Sartre if only for tile factthat he was a pllilosopher willi alilerary styk. In a field where language is characterized more byprofundity tha n clarity. where sentence·long German nouns stretchto the hor izon ""ith scarcely an ac·live ve rb in sight. the essays of thebrill iant Frenchman stand o ut li kebeacons in their lucidity.

Another Frenchman. Bla ise Pasca l (1623- 62 ). also pre-echoes Sartre with his reflections on the misery and grandeur of man. borna terrified "thinking Te(:d ," and

tOTn bet""een the contradictions of

existence that the moderns catc

gorize as the absurd it y of life. Butthe o rt hodox, textbook precursorof mode rn existentialism was theDan ish theologian Soren Kicrk egaard ( 1813- 55 ). a lonely. hun chbacked writer who denounced theesta bli shed church and rejectedmuch of the then-popular doctrines of German idea lism- io

which thought an d ideas. rather

tha n things perceived through these nses. were held to constitute reality. He built a philosophy basedin part on the idea of permane ntcleavage between faith and reason . This was an existentialismwhich st ill had room for a God

whom Sart re la ter expelled. butwhich sta rted t he great pendulumswi ng toward the modem concepts

of the absurd.Ki<:rkeg1lard spent h is life think

ing existent ially and converting remarkably few to his ideas. Butwhen it oomcs to the absurdity of

existence. wa r is a great oonvincer;and it was at the end of WorldWar J that two German philosophers, Karl Jaspers and MartinHei deggcr. took up Kierkcgaard 'sideas. ela bo rated and systemat izedthem. By th e 1930s. Kierk egaard 's

thinkin g mad e new impact on

French intellectuals who. like Sartre. we re nauseated by the sta ticpre· Munich hypocrisy of the European middle class. Afler Wo rld

War II . with the human condi tionmore precarious than ever, wi th

humanity facing the mushroo mshaped ultimate absurdi ty, existen tialism and our ti me ca me to

gether in Jean-Pau l S ~ H l r e .

T o understand Jean- Paul Su·tre," nove list-crit ic Iris Murdoc hhas said . "i s to understa nd so me·thi ng impor tunt abou t the presenttimc. As philosopher. as polit icianand as novelist Same is profoundly and self-consciously contemporary; he has the style of the age:'

A s a philosopher Sartre has been

obsessed with probing the natureof being and reality. and wrestl ingwith the mys te ries of perception( Is the color f see when we say"red" the same color you see?).

Fell' pw ple who are nO I journeyman philosophers and lor masochists can get through his 194)eE/f'(' f"1 If" Niom ( /king Qnd

Nolhing"f"ss), beside whose ont olog ical semantics the chestnutabout angels dancing on the headof 3 pin seems like a simp le, sensible question . ASa political theori sthe has been naive and inconsisten t.On the one hand his need for f"1!'

gagl'lUtl!l had led him to espouse

Co mmunist causes. On the otherhand his di staste for what M issMurdochca lls thc Marxists' " theologica l vie w of the Di alectic, " andhis fierce intellectua l independencehave made him pu ll back.

It is as a writer that a ll his selves~ i l o s o h e r . political being and

p o l e m i c i s ~ m toge th er : awriter. moreover, equipped to tr igger revolutio n. For unlike h isteachers. he possesses a scintillaling litera ry style and a sense of hu mor. Unlike Kierkegaa rd , he hasalways had a sympathetic audience: of all pe ople. the French arethe mOS t disposed to read any.

thing, if it is brill ia ntly expressed.And Hnally. in Sartre thTe(: greatmodem streams of th ought Howedtogether: Marxism, existentialismand phenomenol ogy- a distinct lyZOth Cent ury and highly technicalmovement "'hieh allempl5 to ap-

prchend I he Irue essences of things.Saved by hi s Gallic skepticismfrom "buying" the whole of any

of them. he di stilled from each avita l ingredient: from the Marxians the pa ssion for (ICl io n, fromKie rkcg.1ard the image of an guished man isolated in a mean·

ingless world. fro m the pheno m-

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We're still making "just

a little extra sausage

for the neighbors"It 's bt:en like th at here on the Jones Dai ry Farm (or a

hundred years. A'ld though you ma y live a thousand milesaway, we like to chink of you as a neighbor and we want

you to be pleased with J ones Sausage. So we take extra

pains. Ou r cen tury uld recipe calls for selec t c n d ~ rhams, shoulders and loins, seasoned with freshly ground

herbs and spices. We follow it re ligiously. An d though

J ones Sausage costs a bit more than o ther kinds,

our neighbors agret: it's wo rth it. Tr y it for breakfast

next Sunday .

ONESD " ,R Y"'' 'RM

An anti-hero learns

there is no past

SARTRECONTJNUEO

enologists the compulsion to define

"human reality" and consciousness. The distillate he flavored with

two SanTian ingredients, sardonichumor and a proround sympathy

for the anguished. ridiculous in·dividual man.

Not all of Sartre's writing is

equally incisive. H is plays have

communicated better than his nov

els his idea of man's frcedom -

and necessity-to decide what he

wants to do and to do it, what

ever the consequences, as in usM u c h e . ~ ( The Flies) which he basedon the Orestes legend. In Huis Clos

(No Exit) he probes the baffling

relationship of self to 01hers: threecharactersconfi ned to Hell grad ual

Iy learn that what is infernal is simply other people- and ultimately

oneself. In La Mains Sules (Dirt)'

Hands. produced in the United

States in 1948 as Red GIMes) he

dealt with the self-defeating short

sightedness of the Communists'

belief that ends juslify means.

As novelist he is didactic. using his novels as platforms for his

mctaphysics. and his usually lucid

style glows fitfully from the depths

of the gray, gluey mass that Sartre

loves to describe as the very imagcof the unawakened, uncommitted

human consciousness.In his first novel (1938), La Nau·

set: (Nau;'eu). which was translated

into English as The Diury of An-

lOine Roquenlin, Sartre sloshes

Ihrough t his same ul igi nousground

in the person of Antoine Roquentin , a Iypical Sartrian hero, fasci- .

nating but totally untouching. In

the course of the book, Roquentin, a writer, is ove rcome as he

r e a l i ~ c s thaI things, objects. events

which he has always before been

able to classify and categorize no

longer make any sense to him. The

things that surround him are sim·ply there, grotesque, huge, stub

born- and meaningless. In a pic

lure gallery he studies the facesof the bourgeoisie. These peopleclearly don't think their existence

unjuslified; surrounded by their

sta tus symbols, they appear to be

convinced they are necessary to the

universe and have a right to beal ive. Things get worse. Roq uentin

feels totally alienated from the

most familiar surroundings. Hestares at a seat in a st reetcar. . . I

murmur: ' Irs a sea t : as a so rt of

exorcism. But the word remains

on my lips; it refuses to go and rest

upon the thing. . . . Things are

livered from their names . . .

seems crazy to cal! them seats or s

anything whatever about them,

Roquent;n realizes that he h

~ I w a y s befo re thought of th ings

terms of classes and kinds ; n

what he sees in front of him i

particular. exi sting, disconnec

thing. That's not all. He d iscov

there no such things as indents or ad ve ntures. An inciden

a story, which one ca n tell la

complete with its conclus ion. O

I n a chilling 1944 dl1lma.£xil. Same showed that helthe suffe ring thai people inupon each other and themselv

can live a story or leU it. but nboth at once. When one is liv

an event, the future, which give

shape and meaning, is not alrea

there. (Thorn ton Wilder hauntinly illustrated this same phenom

non in Our To"",,. in which

dead Emily. choosing a signific

day to relive. finds that on th e ditself she was so unaware of

significance thaI she was ba rco nscious of the events

around her, And contempora

playwrights illustrate it unce

sciously by failing to write a tel!

play ab out the revolution in LJ

racial relations l:Je(;ause , while co

scious of it, they are inside il a

cannot yet see it whole, from o

side.)

Suddenly Roquentin reali

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Jean Genet's rich,

full life of crime

SARTRECOHl lNUEO

tha t his lifc cann ot be wha t he

wanted. a succession of mome ntsfollo wi ng one another inevitably .li kc a tife read in a boo k. All atonce it is clear; the past docs not

exist. Th ere are tatters and traces.likc thc t rails of subatom ic pa rti·cles in a cloud chamber. wi th noth·

ing behind the m.He has discove red that every

thing in the world. induding hi mself, is contingent- dependent on

others, but also dependent o n hisown efforts to give life meaning.Finally Roquentin decides that ifonly he can create something. anovel perhaps. hiscreativity wouldmean commitment. and commit

ment would mean engagemf'lll. Hisexistence would acquire meani ng.

and perhaps he would evcn be able10 sce his own past without disgust.Thus ends La Nausee. the mostapt ly named novel of our time.

Al most everybody accepted Roquentin as Sanre himself and de-manded to know whether Roq ue nt in's hope of s a lva t io n

th roug h artistic crea t ion eve rproved foun ded. Sanre said he'd

answer that part icular question inlat er wo rk s. Jt was to be 26 years

before he got around to it.In the interven in g period. Sa rtre

mainly concerned himsel f with try

ing to go beyond mere d isc uss ionof pe rsonal salvat ion throug h artand li terature. He wanted, as Iris

Murdoch put it . " to eonn e<: t, in agreat equation, literature. meaning, truth and democracy." Awa rethat words may disguise or j ustifyviolence. he wanted to find a middle way between the petrifactionof language and its deteriorat ioninto meaninglessness. between themau"aise /o i of the oourgeois and

spiritual chaos. betwee n the blackand-white standards ofooth Com·

munism and capitalism on the onehand, and poli tical cynicism on

the othe r.

"The fun cti on of a writer: ' Sar·tre wrote in Whal is Lirerature?,"i s to call a spad e a spade, lfword sare skk . it is up to us to cu re them.. . . I distrust the incommunicable: it is the source of all violence."

Language had been getting sicklong before Sartre's time. The ac-cent on subject iv ity that followedKi erkegaard made more peop lethan ever aware that all thingsdo not loo k the sa me to al l people. First, the traditional painter'sworld of spatially defined , self

conta ined figures was shattered byimpressionism, which became the

"

new '"rea lism. " a ne w way of trutfully capturing the look of thworld right now. at this instant.

Writers didn' t respond to th

new ideas of perception so quic klWhe n they did. it was the poetwho are most inti mate lyconcernewith word s and their connotation

""iho showed a reaction first. Thdel berate obscurity of Be<:kell an

lonesco. of Lasl Year al Marie

bad and started with the symbolis ts Rimbaud and Ma llarmc.

In the wa ke of Rim baud an

Mallarmc came the most savagattack of a ll on meaning, surreaism. born (natura lly) afte r WorWar I, animated by a ha tredbourgeois soc iety, and dedicatedtu rn ing meaning upside down bidenti fying reality with the d ream

S artre. 13 at war's end. gf'ew uin the shadow of surrealism. Hshared the surrealist s' hatred of thbourgeoisie and their delight upending bourgeois va lues, SaIre' s method was to sub :; titute fothe litemry hero an anti-hero heroic proportions.

He pulled off a tour de. forcethis department when, in [952 .Saint Gl'nrl: Comedil'lJ 1'1 Marlyhe canonized l ean Genet. the ootempomry French poet and plawright who used hi s life of crim

and degeneracy as a springboarto literary fame. Sartre lauded Gnet for choosing the existence o

thief. traitor, pederast and ponographer. In an earl ie r essa y, Sa

tre had pol ished off Baudelaire foa ~ i n g made, when he was only

years o ld. an admirablet ial choice. anti social solitude, anthen spoiling it all by feeling guand thu s show in g that he acceptet ile bourgeois Catholic moral ity othose around him.

Gen et was a perfect anti-herA bastard, he wa s sent from a

orphanage to be brought up

Mo rvan by peasant foster parent(Sartre envied Genet hi s bastardand referred to himself as an "hoorary ba stard" ; Sartre'S father, a

though ma rried to hi s mother, diealmost immediately after JeanPaul was OOrn .) Naturally, be indeprived. Genet pilfered th ingWhen he was found out . peopcalled him a thief. When he heartha t " ve rt iginou s word; ' Sartsays, Genet de<: ided to be whhe was sa id to be and, gloriousfree of guilt feelings, lived a liof crime and every kind of whthe {Wl il bourgeois consid ers vil

ness. Genet' s cr im es and debaucheries and sojourns in prisons an

CONTINUE

- - • • - . +'," .

)1 ';'" .r. . . . . ... , '"



Being existential

is very hard workPuff

••

you

need not

inhale

, , to enjoy

rmatories he transcended by

the mltleria! of lit

re.o eap th c irony, of course. ascritic Maurice Cranston has

, Genet. the persecuted

having tormented the

as It thief. and thenefft!Ctively as a talented poetauthor. commun ica ting \0

too well hi s h o m o s e ~ u a lhe thrill of his c rim

ife. has become a literary ce. Freed from prison because

hi s literary achievements (ViI't

FraM't'!) and made prosperousthem, Gene t no longer has an y

stealing. He has b«ome

for his gen tility and gener

. the typica l bourgeois.

he ironies of Ihe bourgeois reb

e not limited 10 Genel, EquatSanre's savagely antibourgeo is

his own mode of exisl

has been a paradox bo th

philosop hy after 1944 and to

tourists who came 10 gape at

I n .lean Genet's The B/uch.

a prime example of existential

theater, Negro actor; don whilemasks in a symboli<:: display of

the 5 C l c s s n c : s s of mcial cruelty.

him in St. Germa in and later at

the beatniks in G ~ n w i c h Village.

Th e ringing, marvelously nega

ti,"e apothegms (, ' Man is a uselesspassion: ' "Ufe is meaningless : '

" The bo urgeoisie an: swine" )

inevi tably aroused the young, the

dispossessed, and the disoontented,

and conjun:d up visions around

the Lions clubs of a picturesquenonconformist advocating mora l

anarchy in the streets and bed

roo ms of 51. Gennain. The Iruth

about Sartn: comes as quite a

blow 10 adolescenl nihilists. Helurns ou t to be a stern moralist,

speaking and ....-ri l ing in beau tifully articulated sentences. While he

happily that life is miserable, he pleads above all for respon

sibililY and malurity. He opincsthat virtue is possible, even though

diflkult. And I 'ngagl!IIIl!nI , il devel·

ops, means Ihal with resolute effOTllhe world can be changed for

the better.

SaTIre's personal life, moreover,

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Is the greengrocer

the modern saint?

SARTRECO NTIN UED

contrasts nicely wi th what he rec

ommends for others. A quietlyweB-dressed middle-aged man , heis a retired teacher who lives nextdoor to his mother in an elevatorapartment. You can' t get much

more bourgeois than that. And thepact that he made with Simonede Beauvoir)O yeal"li ago. flouting

bourgeois matrimony and permit·ting what they callcd "'contingentloves" (but al the same time making no provision for divorce) hasproved, as one observer put it,"more binding than a stack of

marriage licenses."Worst of all for Sanrc's existen

tialist image, of course, is hi s pros

perity. H s books sell Ii ke crepes suzelle (when Le.f Mars came out inFrench early this year it headed thebest-seller list for months) and hisoccasional lectures draw crowdswhich cou ld be duplicated in theUnited Slates only by the Beatles.

But Sanre has clearly learned to

bear what one critic calls "'the indignit ies of success."' Anot her critic, Melvin Maddocks, asks howthe post-Bohemian anist, "'suffe r-

ing acceptance instead of rejection,"' will relate 10 this new humble, even overadoring, aud ience.Not like Truman Capote . preciously defiant in his hammock.

Maddocks ventu res. Nor like bellicose Norman Mailer. No, Maddoc ks thinks the hipster may "'turnout to be in the likeness of the lateWa llace Stevens, poet and insurance executive, sitting behind avice president's polished desk atthe Accident and Indemnity Company of Hartford." '

One thinks, says Maddocks, of

Kierkegaard's suggestion that theChristian saint, the " knight of

faith." ' may not be the holy hermit in the desert no r the monk inhis conspicuous hair shirt. but Ihegreengrocer down the street.

Or a retired teacher wi th a rest

less pen.II is no mere happenstance that

the fil"lit volume of Sanre's autobiography should be titled The

Words. In the beginning, was TheWord- -and for this pamperedonly child. whose father died whenhe was a baby and was replaced bybooks, there was linle clse thatmallered. Words were read to him

by his mother. boomed at him byhis language· teacher grandfather,wrinen and recited by him to audiences of ooh-ing and ah-ing adults.Words were the first preoccupationof the child who was father to the

sardonic philosophers of St. Ge

main, and th is latest work is

Freudian ana lysis of his lo ve affawith them as well as a word-po

tra it of the psyche of the most precocious lillIe boy within memory

What is noteworthy about TI

Words is that it recan ts much o

Sartre's earlier writing- and in thprocess answers, obliquely, hown 26-year-old question abou

the possibilityof a l ~ a t j o n througlite rary creation. What is gloriouis that Sartre is at the peak o

his style- terse. pungent. sardonicwriting with a pen so sharp thatshowers effortlessly the philosophical an d litera ry attitudes of thbourgeoisie from which he sprangand an eye so penetr.ating that

sees through even himself.

~ it became known tha

Sanre was working on his autobography, there was much conjeclUre about how many volumes hwould require to get to age 5. Buin this 255-page volume he carriehis life to a point several yea rs beyond his ea rly novel-writing st!!S(which was his 8th year). "UnlikRoquentin. his fictional creatiowho morosely concluded the pasdidn't even exist, Sanre is exqu

sitely able ex posl [aclo to reconst ruct these early years with sucinsight and total recall that on

thought does indeed follow another almost with the inevitabilitof the notes of a familia r tunecreating the impression that thwhole thing is being written con

temporaneously by a frighteninglgifted child--which may not b

far from the truth.The dea th of Sartre's fathe

meant. among other things. thawhen he turned to books. they wer

the lite rature of an earlier genera tion, the works vene rated by higrandfathe r. So importan t was thliterature to that generation tha

the boy was overwhelmed by thidea that li terary creation was th

route to salvation. ("One writefor one's neighbors or for God.

dedded \0 write for God with thpurpose of saving my neighbors."

Today he takes a dim view o

the idea of sa lvation through creation. He regards his former pose aa sort of selfish idealism in whiche set himself apart from the human condition by describing it andwelt upon the meaning lessnesand absurdity of other lives in order to pump meaning and necessitinto his own. '" [ was Roquentin:

used him to show, without complacency, the te){ture of my life. At th

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Ultimately, he may

be called religious

SAR TRECONTINUEO

same time I was I , the eiec::l. chron

icler of Hell.... I was a prisonerof that obvious contradiction, but

I did nol see il. I saw the worldthrough it. Fake to the marrow of

my bones and hoodwinked. I joy

fully wrote about OUf unhappystate . . . .

" J have changed ... illusion

has been smashed \0 bits: martyr-dom, salvation and immortality

are falling \0 pie<;cs; the edifice isgoing to rack and ruin: I collared

the Holy Gh ost in Ihe cellar andthrew him Olll; atheism is II cruel

and long-range affair: I lhink I've

carried it through."

After Us Mots was published in

France, there was a great brouhaha about how much of his previous work he was rejecting. At that

time he told an interviewer: "Wha t

J wrote about thi s in LeJ /IIo/s has

been misunderstood. There is nobook of mine that J reject. Tha t

does not mean that J find them all

good. What I regreued in LA Nau·

sl e was not having put myself

completely into the thing. J re

mained outside my hero' s disease ,

protected by my neurosis which,

through writing. gave me happiness . . . Jhave always been happy.Even if I had been mor e honest

wi th regard to myself at that mo

ment. I should still have writtenLA Naush· . What I lacked was a

sense of reality. J have changesince. I have slowly learned to ex

perience reality. J have seen chi

dren dying of hunger. Against

dying child, Lo Naus/e carries nweight."

K ierkegaard started out by d

nouncing his church and woun

up in the textbooks as the exponent of "Ch ristian existentialism

as against Sartre's "atheistic exi

tentialism". Today, Sanre stand

in danger of the same fate. Hwould hate to hear his anguish fo

man called love. Won.e, of coun.

is to hear his phi losophy calle

humanism-or, worst of all , region. But the very hean of hi s s

cial philosophy, to choose fredom for oneself is to choose fredom for al l mankind, is on ly

hairsbreadth (though a few m

lion words) away from the Golde

Rule. Having th rown the Ho

Ghost out of the cellar, havinfound there is no God and no li

after death, and having nonetheleopted for an engagement fo r th

common benefit of mankind,may now suffer the sup reme indi

nity of being told : "You in t

most rea l sense are tru ly religious

I n the till">e_honored mannerParisian writc!"$, SaTtre takcs hease at a sidewalk cafe Be ar hleft-bank llpartmcnt and Sl:ribles new I I IN3 in his noteboo

existentialism: a spurned nobel prize calls the world's attention to a lonely philosophy of...

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