Critical Essays on lean-Paul Sartre Robert Wilcocks G. K. Hall & Co. • Boston, Massachusetts Critical Essays on lean-Paul Sartre Critical Essays on World Literature Robert Lecker, General Editor McGill University Copyright 1988 by Robert Wilcocks All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data (Critical essays on world literature) "Selected bibliography of books in English on Jean-Paul Sartre": p. Includes index. l.Sartre, Jean Paul, 1905- - Criticism and interpretation. I. Wilcocks, Robert. II. Series. PQ2637.A82Z634 1988 848'.91409 87-24879 ISBN 0-8161-8839-4 (alk. paper) This publication is printed on permanent/durable acid-free paper MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA for Genevieve Idt CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 Robert Wilcocks "On the Other Side of Despair": The Politics of a Philosopher Sartre Remembered 13 Lionel Abel On Maoism: An Interview with Jean-Paul Sartre 34 Michel-Antoine Burnier LImagination au Pouvoir: The Evolution of Sartre's Political and Social Thought 45 Thomas R. Flynn This Place of Violence, Obscurity and Witchcraft 65 Robert Denoon Cumming Sartre's EExistentialisme est un humanisme 81 Terry Keefe The Selves in the Texts: Sartre and Literary Criticism Three Methods in Sartre's Literary Criticism 97 Fredric Jameson Eldiot de la famille: The Ultimate Sartre? 119 Ronald Aronson Sartre's Concept of the Self 137 Hazel E. Barnes The Texts in the Self: Sartre and His Fiction The Prolapsed World of Jean-Paul Sartre 161 W. M. Frohock Sartre's Nausea: A Modern Classic Revisited 172 John Fletcher The Ending of Sartre's La Nausee 182 Terry Keefe viii Contents "The Nine of Hearts": Fragment of a Psycho-reading of La Nausee 201 Serge Doubrovksy "Looking for Annie": Sartre's La Nausee and the Inter-War Years 209 Nicholas Hewitt Erostrate: Sartre's Paranoid 224 Gary Woodle Paris as Subjectivity in Sartre's Roads to Freedom 237 Prescott S. Nichols Politics and the Private Self in Sartre's Les Chemins de la liberte 254 S. Beynon John Sartre Resartus: A Reading of Les Mots 272 Jane P. Tompkins "The Play's the Thing": Three Essays on Sartre's Theater Sartre's Kean: The Drama of Consciousness 281 C. R. Bukala Sartre's Kean and Self-Portrait 294 Catharine Savage Brosman Les Sequestres d'Altona: Sartre's Black Tragedy 308 Jeremy N. J. Palmer SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF BOOKS IN ENGLISH ON JEAN-PAUL SARTRE 321 INDEX 323 INTRODUCTION A Quasimodo of matter, with an enormous torso buckled into ropelike muscles, I see his lantern jaw, his acrobat's arms, his terrifying agility, I see him sliding from a skylight, hanging on to the gutter by his fingers, pressing the flesh of his face against a sordid window-pane, I see him, half-man, half-monster, all biceps and brain, sniffing everywhere the strongest human odors and reigning over a world of dark shadows peopled with shapeless" masses, kneading with his hands the very paste of things. 1 Such was the bourgeois nightmare that Sartre had become for many some forty years ago when Pierre Brisson, then director of Le Figaro, crafted this bravura passage into an article ostensibly on Sartre's play about the French Resistance, Morts sans sepulture (Men without Shadows). Brisson's high-voltage gothic imagination certainly reflected a popular response to Sartre in 1947 and one that, in many respects, he was doomed to live with until his death in 1980. The choice of Quasimodo, indicative of Brisson's reading habits and of his sensitivity to those nineteenth-century literary figures who had passed into the cultural myths of popular imagination, was also, of course, determined by Sartre's dwarfish stature and his propensity for causing discomfort to the various bourgeois hierarchies of his times. But the choice also has a certain romantic accuracy to it. Quasimodo was not a villain, after all-just a deformed monster. If the creature's heart contained vitriol, it also contained gold or a memory of it. I have not asked Michel Contat whether he discovered during his many tete-a-tetes with Sartre what the latter thought of Brisson's article which he had probably read. I suspect that Sartre's response to Brisson may have been a wry appreciation tinged perhaps with that melancholy which intrudes when one knows that another is right for the wrong reasons. Monsters, in one form or another, were the leitmotiv of Sartre's writings. Even without considering the film script, Le scenario Freud, which John Huston had commissioned from him in 1958,2 Sartre may well be thought of as the Freud of the existentialist movement. The interests and the influence of both men far beyond the original narrow r~nged 2 Critical Essays on Jean-Paul Sartre confines of their early research disciplines (neuroanatomy and Husserlian phenomenology, respectively). Freud, it is true, generally abstained from the cut and thrust of politics, national or international; whereas Sartre (after, as he claimed, the experience of "radical conversion" in the prison camp Stalag XIID) entered this arena gladiatorial zest, brandishing wi~h his polemical verve in the face of former friends and newly reGognized . enemIes. But it was not this aspect of Sartre's later notoriety (which gave rise to editorials like the one in Paris-Match with the headline: "Sartre: Une machine it guerre civile,,)3 that disturbed the complacencies of Brisson and his contemporaries. It was precisely, as was the case with the furor that surrounded some of Freud's publications, the depth and the explicitness of his probings of the sexual and emotional entanglements of human beings often in a situation of perversion (or at least of perversity) and nearly always with a rhetorical force that was later to be directed toward political targets. Nor, again as with Freud, were the descriptions limited to those of physically expressed encounters with others. The imagination, which for Sartre was both a curse and the core of human possibilities, was ruthlessly examined for its production of sexual fantasies. The masturbatory halluci nations of Roquentin or ,Genet or, later, Flaubert are described with such literary persuasiveness that the reader is left in a state of vicarious arousal or vicarious disgust. Indifference before such passages, however desirable it may be felt to be, is virtually impossible. And such is the insidious strength of the writing that a desire to experience indifference becomes itself suspect and the reader is led to question, to challenge, those regions of the psyche normally left undisturbed, even by the self-reflecting consciousness. A monster looms on the periphery of the inner eye: ourselves. As Frantz declares posthumously on the tape recorder at the end of Les Sequestres d'Altona: "One and one make one, that's our mystery." He continues: "The beast was hiding. All of a sudden we caught its glance in the intimate eyes of our fellow creatures; so we struck: legitimate self defense. I surprised the beast. I struck. A man fell. In his dying eyes I saw the beast, still alive. Me." (Act 5, Sc. 3). The confused, murderous intensity that Frantz experienced, and glimpsed, has nothing to do with sexual fantasy or what Freud would have called "displacement of libido.,,4 And whatever monstrosities may occur in Frantz's experience, and expression, of his sexuality, they are not, for Sartre, the consequence of damage to his libidinal development; they are, rather, a "chosen" expression of his total being. In this respect, and unlike Freud, Sartre attempted to situate sexuality within a philosophical de scription of man (which is what phenomenology is); he refused to see philosophy as some sublimated manifestation of libido. Even toward the end of his life, as for example in the interview with Michel Sicard,5 he was highly critical of what he saw as the simplifications inherent in the Freudian hypotheses on sexual sublimation. His studies as a young man of Robert Wilcocks 3 Karl Jaspers's Allgemeine Psychopathologie (General Psychopathology) no doubt contributed to his skeptical attitude toward Freud's pansexualism. Furthermore, also in contradistinction to Freud, he never appears to have given some kind of moral "imprimatur" to procreative genital coupling. The strain of Judaeo-Catholic teleology that runs implicitly through the canon of Freud's writings is absent in Sartre. This made his own frank investigations of the world of fantasy and of sexuality the more outra geous. He did not deny that sexual energies could be displaced - in sadism, in authoritarianism, in acts of judgment and condemnation6-indeed, much of his early explicit material is concerned precisely with this (in the philosophical writings as much as in the fiction). But what interested him was to discover the meaning such displacement had for the person within a specific situation. Jaspers distinguishes between erkliirende Psychologie (broadly speaking, explanatory psychology going from necessary cause to necessary effect) 7 and verstehende Psychologie (a nondeterminist ap proach that tries to comprehend the meaningful unity of the individual). Sartre, who refers to this distinction in Cahiers pour une morale8 opts for a verstehende approach that will grasp the individual discovering himself within a dialectical framework that includes his projects (and his under standing of them) as well as his formative past experiences. For Sartre, the formative past is not a block of repressed traumatic memories with a "once and for all" given significance; it is a constantly shifting set of values and lived or imagined experiences whose significance changes with the deter mining project in the present. This leads me to one of the biggest confusions - one among many perpetrated by Simone de Beauvoir. Her suggestion that Sartre's concept of "bad faith" was a kind of substitute-replacement for Freud's "unconscious" had led many people to "decode" Being and Nothingness in the light of this and to forget the crucial philosophical dimension of Sartre's description of human activities. Even the Jungian concepts of the "shadow" or the "anima" are not helpful here. To try to read Sartre through the veil of Freud or Jung is like trying to decipher a Braille text with a knowledge of the Morse Code. There are indeed dots in both systems; but they do not they cannot - correspond. One has to read Sartre's philosophy on its own terms. This means with an awareness of the German philosophers Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Jaspers, and Heidegger by whom he was undoubtedly influenced and with whom he engaged in a lifelong public philosophic debate. Heidegger's Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) was a crucial discovery for the Sartre who was to write Being and Nothingness, and his descriptions of modes of being owes much to his reading of Heidegger. There was, however, an important difference between the philosophies of the two men; where Heidegger was abstract and academic, Sartre, whatever abstractions he used, was determined to bring concrete (one might almost say clinical)