Sartre's Theatre: Acts for Life (Modern French Indentities) (v. 34)

Sartre's Theatre: Acts for Life

Modem French Identities Edited by Peter Collier Volume 34

PETER LANG Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt a.M. • New York • Wien

Benedict O'Donohoe

Sartre's Theatre: Acts for Life

PETER LANG Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt a.M. • New York • Wien

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ISSN 1422-9005 ISBN 3-03910-280-X US-ISBN 0-8204-7207-7

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To my children Biddy, Tom, Oli, Izzy - with love

Contents

Acknowledgements

9

Chapter 1 Questions of life and death

11

Chapter 2 Myth-making Bariona, ou le Fils du tonnerre Les Mouches Huis clos

29 32 53 72

Chapter 3 Too much reality Morts sans sépulture La Putain respectueuse Les Mains sales

89 91 106 117

Chapter 4 From Hispano-German melodrama to Anglo-French farce Le Diable et le bon Dieu Kean Nekrassov

13 7 13 8 168 188

Chapter 5 Madness and Armageddon Les Séquestrés d'Altona Les Troyennes

219 221 251

Chapter 6 Curtain call

267

Bibliography

283

Index

295

Acknowledgements

My thanks are due to the Dean and Faculty of Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences, in the University of the West of England, Bristol, for according me one semester's sabbatical to complete this book, and to the Arts and Humanities Research Board for the award of a £10,000 Study Leave Research Grant in respect of this project.1 I want to express my thanks to my editors at Peter Lang AG Graham Speake and Joanna Turner - who have tolerated delays with polite patience, and answered asinine questions with friendly forbear­ ance. Their assistance has been invaluable. I am indebted to many other scholars in the field, especially those who have written extensively on Sartre's theatre: Ingrid Galster, John Ireland, Francis Jeanson, Franck Laraque, Robert Lorris, Dorothy McCall and Pierre Verstraeten. Above all, I owe an immense debt to the Herculean labours of Michel Contât and Michel Rybalka, whose punctilious and comprehensive works of bibliography, biography and editorship - notably, Les Ecrits de Sartre, Œuvres romanesques, and Un Théâtre de situations - have been literally indispensable. Finally, I wish to record my affectionate gratitude to Rhiannon Goldthorpe (Senior Research Fellow, St Anne's College, Oxford). An internationally renowned and respected Sartre scholar, Rhiannon Goldthorpe tutored me for the 'optional' paper on Sartre, in my final undergraduate year at Magdalen College, then supervised the greater part of my postgraduate research. Without her unfailingly sympathetic encouragement and incomparably expert advice, my doctoral thesis and, so, this monograph - might never have come to fruition. BPO'D UWE, Bristol June 2004 1

The AHRB funds research in UK universities on the basis of academic excellence, and is not responsible for the views or results of its awardees.

9

Chapter 1 Questions of life and death

Sartre is best known in the English-speaking world as a philosopher and novelist, and next as a left-wing intellectual and political activist. Perversely, however, his most frequently cited (and imperfectly interpreted) dictum: 'Hell is other people', is taken from his notorious play, Huis clos. In France, by contrast, he is equally well-known as a dramatist, and with good reason.1 Sartre is the author of ten very different plays - eleven if we include Bariona, although it was never professionally produced - three of which are adapted from sources ancient or modern (Les Mouches, Les Troyennes, and Kean\ and seven of which are wholly original. Of these, at least two (Huis clos and Les Mains sales) are universally regarded as modern master­ pieces. Add to this profile several screenplays,2 and we have a sub­ stantial body of work that places Sartre firmly in the front rank of twentieth-century French playwrights. This being so, it is surprising that his theatrical output remains relatively neglected by academic commentators.3 If we set to one side a number of useful critical editions and study guides, available in French and English,4 there are very few monographs focusing exclu­ sively on Sartre's theatre, and fewer still devoted to the complete works. Francis Jeanson's seminal study, Sartre par lui-même, for 1 2

3

4

See O'Donohoe ( 1979), p.337. Only one of which, Les Jeux sont faits, was faithfully translated to the screen: see O'Donohoe (1990). The screenplay L'Engrenage, although never filmed, has had several theatrical adaptations, notably in Paris in 1969 (see Contât and Rybalka [eds], Les Écrits de Sartre, pp. 185-6). For illustration, of 170 articles published to date in seven issues of Études sartriennes and seventeen of Sartre Studies International, only ten (6%) address the theatre, and three of those are on the same play (Le Diable et le bon Dieu). See, for example, Bagot and Kail, Bradby, Buffat, Contât (1968), CornudPeyron, Gore, Launay, Lecherbonnier, Reed, Roy le, Thody (1976), etc.

11

example, although still a key text, was first published in 1955, and scarcely mentions the later plays, even in re-editions. Robert Lorris's Sartre dramaturge (1975), and Franck Laraque's La Révolte dans le théâtre de Sartre (1976), both have great merit, but the former is dauntingly technical and magisterially dry, while the latter is arguably narrow in its thematic focus. The philosopher Pierre Verstraeten's book, Violence et éthique (1972), full of exhaustive exegeses and sparkling insights, deals only with the few plays constituting Sartre's 'political theatre', as does John Ireland's more recent Sartre, un art déloyal: Théâtralité et engagement (1994). Ingrid Galster, one of the liveliest scholars working_at present on Sartre's dramatic œuvre, has so far published only the first volume of her projected series, Le Théâtre de Sartre devant ses premiers critiques (second edition, 2001), covering the first three plays. In the anglophone domain, the situation is still more patchy. Whereas Rhiannon Goldthorpe's brilliant book, Sartre: Literature and Theory (1984), treats the four best-known pieces, inter alia, only Dorothy McCall has written a full-length study in English devoted to the whole corpus, The Theatre of Jean-Paul Sartre (1969). Although providing a valuable overview, her monograph is now beginning, inevitably, to show its age. It is, therefore, a primary objective of the present book to update scholarship in this field by giving a coherent critical account of Sartre's trajectory as a dramatist, from the defiantly optimistic pièce d'occasion written and produced in his POW camp in 1940 (Bariona), to the salutary pessimism of Les Troyennes in 1965. In each case, we shall first be concerned with the genesis of the play, in the context of Sartre's private and public lives, and with its reception in the prevailing political climate of the day. This prefatory historical orientation will provide the appropriate perspective for a detailed analysis of each play's thematic preoccupations, as they are enacted by its characters, or 'agents'. It is my co-equal objective to redress the balance of critical opinion in favour of Sartre's optimism. For, as we shall see in due course, the general tendency of journalistic reviewers and academic critics alike has been to depict Sartre, qua playwright, as a lifedenying doom-monger, a nay-saying nihilist, a pessimist fixated on violence and obsessed with death. This is quite simply wrong. Sartre 12

is no more an apostle of violence, an advocate of chaos, a proponent of death and despair than, say, Racine or Shakespeare, in whose plays there is a comparable abundance of internecine strife and bloody corpses. Indeed, as Michel Contât has explained, with his customary perspicuity, the air of morbidity that hangs over many of Sartre's plays derives from the martyric aspect of the protagonist's aspiration to sacrifice himself for others, in the dual mission to ameliorate the world morally and to achieve a personal apotheosis of glory and immortality: Sartre, dans les années qui suivent [1945], va batailler à la fois avec sa célébrité bruyante qui ne lui procure aucun plaisir et qui dément ses anciens désirs d'immortalité, et contre le nœud névrotique qui le destine à une vie d'écrivainmartyr. Ces thèmes vont apparaître peu à peu, à mesure que la célébrité de Sartre se négocie politiquement et que son désir de gloire se fait jour dans des personnages dramatiques qui lui permettent d'évacuer en l'objectivant son désir névrotique. Répétons-le d'un mot, ce désir est celui de la mort. Le chemin de la gloire est le contraire d'un chemin de la liberté, c'est un chemin de croix: au bout, il y a le martyre. Tout le théâtre de Sartre peut ainsi être lu comme un parcours christique - critiqué, contredit, réaffirmé en douce -, à la condition de garder à l'esprit que, dans cette perspective, le Christ est un suicidé qui offre sa vie pour sauver les hommes, comble d'orgueil et de narcissisme.5

In fact, by transposing his own youthful dreams of glorious death into his dramatic heroes, Sartre has created protagonists who assert and affirm the value of life, to the point at which they are prepared to jeopardise and lose their own. This contrapuntal theme of life and death suffuses Sartre's drama on both literal and metaphorical levels. On the former, we meet characters both living and dead, confronted with impossible choices between life and death; we witness deaths of all sorts, birth in its messianic manifestation, and the afterlife in the underworld's most uncomfortable drawing-room. On the latter, we find abundant imagery of life and death, with atmosphere and landscape evoked in terms of growth and decay, light and dark, heat and cold, motion and stasis. More significantly, certain living characters are described as 'dead', sometimes even by themselves. Sartre's morbid chiasmic metaphor is 5

Michel Contât, 'Sartre et la gloire', in Galster (2001c), pp.29-41 (p.33).

13

no mere rhetorical trope, but has - especially where his characters or 'agents' are concerned - a particular and important moral meaning in the taxonomy of existentialist ontology and ethics. In order to approach our exploration of that meaning in each of the plays, it will be helpful to establish a theoretical platform because, Sartre says, 'the theatre is philosophic, and philosophy is dramatic', insofar as they are both concerned with 'people in action, that is to say with people, full-stop'.6 Sartre's problematisation of death is not a study of the phenomenon for its own sake: death is only ever a second-order question, postulated by the material transience of life. When writing about death* Sartre is careful to insist: 'Ces remarques, on le notera, ne sont pas tirées de la considération de la mort, mais, au contraire, de celle de la vie [...].'7 And he holds fast to this conceptual perspective in his later philosophical work also: Mais il ne s'agit pas ici de questionner la conscience sur elle-même: l'objet qu'elle doit se donner est précisément la vie, c'est-à-dire l'être objectif du chercheur, dans le monde des autres en tant que cet être se totalise depuis sa naissance et se totalisera jusqu'à la mort.8

Death is akin to birth, for Sartre, insofar as both are random data of our facticity (that is, of our contingent, historical being-in-the-world).9 Life has an inherent tendency to perpetuate itself,10 and the ineluctability of death merely signifies that life is a biologically closed system.11 Human life is characterised by consciousness, the capacity to reflect and to choose, what Sartre calls the 'pour-soi', which is necessarily embodied, and finds itself (again, as a matter of fact) in the midst of other, similar embodied consciousnesses: we are all,

6 7 8 9 10 11

14

See his interview with Madeleine Chapsal in Les Écrivains en personne (Paris, Julliard, 1960), also in Situations IX, pp.9-39 (p. 12). L'Être et le néant, p.624. Critique de la raison dialectique I, p. 142. See L'Être et le néant, p.630. See L'Être et le néant, p.519 and Critique de la raison dialectique I, p.255. See L'Être et le néant, p.619.

therefore, 'un être-pour-soi-pour-autrui', all subjects with a dimension of objectivity insofar as we have a being for others.12 Set over against Têtre-pour-soi' (the 'for-itself ) is Têtre-ensoi' (the Mn-itself ), which is the material realm of the inanimate and unconscious.13 Whereas the human subject is a maker of projects for future fulfilment, a constant becoming, things already are themselves: human beings become what they do, whereas the in-itself is what it is. In this sense, Sartre can speak of the for-itself as 'being what it is not and not being what it is'.14 The capacity of consciousness to transcend the gap between itself (which is nothing without an object of which it is conscious) and the 'in-itselfiiess' of which it is conscious, is both the kernel of human freedom and the source of all our anguish, because we experience it, says Sartre, as a lack or void. The disjunc­ tion between for-itself and in-itself, between mind and immanence, generates frustration which we commonly seek to assuage by contriv­ ing a coincidence of these two fundamental categories of being, that is to say by trying to become 'in-itself for ourselves, to be, like God, the very foundation of our beings, ens causa sui - but that way lies madness: 'Mais l'idée de Dieu est contradictoire et nous nous perdons en vain; l'homme est une passion inutile.'15 It is one of life's bigger and more cynical ironies that the ontological status of the in-itself is attained by the existential human individual only by the supervention of death. In life, we humans define our essence by our free acts, secreting and accumulating a past 12

13

14 15

In this respect, Sartre is anti-Cartesian; his premiss is not 'Cogito ergo sum', but rather 'Sum ergo cogito': 'Consciousness, for Descartes, is the mind's awareness of its activity. For Sartre it is the body's presence to the world' (Wider, p. 14). A point reinforced when, in the course of an interview for the film Sartre par lui-même, Sartre inadvertently says at one point: 'Le "je suis donc je pense", non, "je pense donc je suis", de Descartes a été vraiment et est toujours ma pensée philosophique essentielle...' (Sartre, p.85). As one of his interlocutors, Jean Pouillon, rightly remarks, to general amusement, 'Le lapsus est significatif, quand même!' As well as of other sentient animals which, so far as we know, do not possess the human attribute of self-consciousness - at least, not in the sense in which Sartre defines the 'pour-soi'. See L'Être et le néant, p.33. L'Être et le néant, p.708.

15

which has an unstable objective reality, whose 'sense' can be modified by each new act so long as we have breath to commit them. When we die, however, that past is closed and totalised, our lives become suddenly thing-like, we have acquired an essence whose interpretation is entirely at the discretion of those who survive us. So, death entails a complete and irreversible swap of our subjectivity in the world for an unalloyed objectivity, it converts our being of 'poursoi-pour-autrui' into a being of 'en-soi-pour-autrui'. Moreover, this catastrophic ontological sublimation is always gratuitous and mean­ ingless: death can never be retrieved or 'owned' by us as an harmo­ nious conclusion, we cannot, as it were, domesticate it and regard it as one of our many potentialities. On the contrary, it is always an extraneous irruption which, by definition, deprives us of all our possibilities (j u s t a s birth, equally gratuitously, endowed us with same). This means, inter alia, that suicide (a strong temptation for several of Sartre's protagonists) is a hybrid project which para­ doxically rejects and negates the very future which all projects must posit in order to have purpose and meaning. Thus, while suicide is undeniably an option, it is self-defeating because it neither absolves us from the contingency of being, nor frees us from antagonistic interpersonal relations. In this sense, it is just one mode among others of being in the world, 'une absurdité qui fait sombrer ma vie dans l'absurde'.16 Sartre's repudiation of Heidegger's definition of the human condition as Sein zum Tode (being-for/towards-death),17 leads him to conclude not only that death is not among my possibilities, but also that it cannot even impinge upon them. He rejects Heidegger's notion of authenticity as defined by the individual's attitude towards his own mortality,18 insisting upon the factitiousness of death and its discrete­ ness from finitude, which is a necessary intrinsic structure of freedom (there simply has to be a future upon which I predicate decisions taken in the present). Death, in itself, is not a construct of time (we can and do conceive of endless time, or infinity), and does not delimit 16 17 18

16

L'Être et le néant, p.624. See L'Être et le néant, p.630. See L'Être et le néant, p.651.

freedom which, by its nature, postulates the future regardless of whether that future ever 'arrives'.19 Sartre asserts that the inherent liberty of the 'pour-soi' is inviolable except insofar as the presence of the Other represents the 'hidden death' of all my possibilities in the world.20 However, this jeopardy is double and mutual, since I am also an Other to the Other. The deliberate aggravation of this threat by one party leads to hatred, which Sartre defines as 'pursuit of the other's death', culminating in murder, which is nevertheless an equally futile and self- defeating conduct as suicide.21 For, just as suicide expedites the moment at which the subject becomes an object for the Other, so the death of a victim arrests or suspends indefinitely his judgment upon his killer: there is a sense in which the living become a prey to the dead, as well as vice-versa. Such are the concepts that underpin Sartre's theatrical represen­ tations of violence and death. The same philosophic schema also informs, of course, the ubiquitous metaphorical language of life and death in the plays. Basically, life is the province of the subject and of action, death is the domain of the object and of being. The theatre, being concerned with 'l'homme en acte (c'est-à-dire l'homme, tout simplement)',22 naturally focuses upon the former. Yet, inasmuch as we necessarily have an objective dimension for others in whose midst we are, there is arguably a sense in which we already participate in death. (You are an object to me when we are together, just as I am to you; and, if I do not know or recognise you, you are indistinguishable from any other face in the crowd of object others. Moreover, when we no longer fall within each other's field of vision or sphere of aware­ ness, we might as well each be dead so far as the other is concerned.) The reciprocal objectification which constitutes the consciousness19

20 21 22

The potential for paradox inherent in the fact that death randomly interrupts human projects is most vividly illustrated in Morts sans sépulture: the pro-life choices finally made by Canoris and Lucie are not invalidated by the fact that they are then gratuitously killed. In a sense, Sartre's own rather sudden death, at a time when he anticipated living, possibly, another ten years, exemplifies the same paradox (see the last paragraph of Chapter 5, below). See L'Être et le néant, p.323. See L'Être et le néant, pp.481^. 'Les Écrivains en personne', in Situations IX, p. 12.

17

driven dynamic of interpersonal relations is self-cancelling. However, there are many among us, says Sartre, who, for whatever reason, exaggerate their status as objects, or who allow others to do so. They conform to a preconceived image which they themselves project or which others project upon them, because they cannot accommodate that 'gap' at the heart of their existence, by virtue of which they are not what they are; they yearn instead for a complete and unitary identity, fleeing from their freedom to take refuge in an imaginary essence.24 Such people, by masking the truth from them­ selves, are in what Sartre calls 'mauvaise foi', bad faith,25 and he generally refers to them as 'morts vivants', living dead. This premature 'death' of the free consciousness is the original (and evidently mortal) sin in the canon of existentialist ethics, for it flies in the face of the fundamental tenet that existence precedes essence. The dogma that 'we are what we do' is stood on its head, 'pour-soi-pourautrui' is surreptitiously and deceivingly transformed into 'en-soipour-soi-et-pour-autrui', and the 'futile passion' to be like God is allegedly consummated.26 The enterprise to totalise oneself while still alive entails adopting the point of view of the Other, or - which amounts to the same thing the perspective of death, both of which contortions are equally unfeasible.27 Nevertheless, essentialist thinking of this kind is endemic in the Manichaean, monotheistic moral tradition of the West.28 By contrast, the Sartrean existentialist (following Kierkegaard and Nietzsche) privileges consciousness, the for-itself, countenances the 23 24 25 26

27 28

18

See /, 'Être et le néant, p.283. See L'Être et le néant, p. 96. See L'Être et le néant, p.87. See Jeanson, Sartre par lui-même, pp.27-30, for a fuller account of how Sartre's formal analysis of death translates into the metaphor of Ma mort vivante'. For a critique of this metaphor as applied by Sartre to Tintoretto, see O'Donohoe (1981a). For a fuller account of Sartre's analysis of death and cognate questions, see O'Donohoe (1981b), and Birault. See L'Être et le néant, p.630. Consider, for example, the implicit syllogisms of tabloid 'ethics', such as: Iraq must have WMD (weapons of mass destruction) because it is a. rogue state; the Americans must be well-intentioned because they are good; the Prime Minister must be telling the truth because he is honest; and so on.

void at the heart of his being without flinching, accepts that we are 'condemned to be free', and shoulders the burden of daily selfrecreation. With that come an inescapable responsibility for all our actions, and a lucid apprehension that these alone will make of us what we shall be at the time of our death. Such a person is authentic, in good faith, morally alive. In the course of his plays, Sartre created a number of living-dead characters, most memorably and literally so in Huis clos. Some of these are moral suicides - Oreste and Hugo, for example - who strive for an essence which they then don like a mantle of identity, exempting them from further exercise of free will. Others are moral murder victims - Lizzie or Kean, for instance - so comprehensively brutalised by their social conditioning that unquestioning adherence to the strictures of their 'betters' leads inexorably to a life in bad faith. Others, again, aspire to moral martyrdom - Goetz and Frantz - in order to bear witness to the paradoxes of freedom and its concomitant ethical relativities. Paradigms of each of these character types can be found in Sartre's analyses of, respectively, Baudelaire, the Jewish question, and Jean Genet. A quick conspectus of these case studies will be a helpful prelude to our exploration of their counterparts in the theatre. Baudelaire, Sartre argues, converted the temptation of physical suicide into a symbolic suicide which preserved his physical life and enabled him to derive the desired benefits from his premature demise: Il demande à l'idée de suicide ce léger secours, cette chiquenaude qui lui permettra de considérer sa vie comme irrémédiable et accomplie, c'est-à-dire comme un destin éternel ou, si l'on préfère, comme un passé clos. Il voit surtout, dans l'acte de mettre fin à ses jours, comme une récupération ultime de son être: c'est lui qui tirera le trait, c'est lui, enfin, qui, en arrêtant sa vie, la transformera en une essence qui sera, à la fois, donnée pour toujours et pour toujours créée par lui-même. Ainsi se délivrera-t-il du sentiment insupportable d'être de trop dans le monde. Seulement, pour jouir des résultats de son suicide, il faut de toute évidence qu'il y survive. C'est pourquoi Baudelaire a choisi de se constituer en survivant. Et s'il ne se tue pas d'un coup, au moins a-t-il fait en sorte que chacun de ses actes soit l'équivalent symbolique d'une mort qu'il ne

19

peut pas se donner. Frigidité, impuissance, stérilité, absence de générosité, refus de servir, péché: voilà de nouveau, autant d'équivalents du suicide.29

There is an obvious analogy here with Sartre himself, whose childish literary ambitions provoked him to a 'veritable frenzy' of morbid aspiration: c[Je] choisis pour avenir un passé de grand mort et j'essayai de vivre à l'envers. Entre neuf et dix ans, je devins tout à fait posthume.'30 The conspicuous comparators in Sartre's theatre are Oreste and Hugo, each dreaming of becoming the avenging assassin, the legendary hero, consecrated by historical record as the finished product of his spectacular actions, yet surviving to bask in his own posthumous glory. In Hugo's case, this self-delusion will lead him, in effect, to suicide proper, an unequivocal defeat. No less self-defeating is the strategy of existential murder, by which the subject-victim is constrained to conform to a self-image imposed upon him by the virtual assassin, whose intention is to dehumanise and objectify him without actually killing him, to make of his victim, in ontological terms, 'un être-en-soi-pour-autrui-et-poursoi'. This is the démarche of the sadist, says Sartre, and also of the colonialist, as we shall see in connection with Bariona. However, given the reciprocity of human relations, this kind of moral murder (reduction of the other to a state of inescapable inauthenticity) can only succeed with the connivance or, at least, acquiescence of the victim - in which case it is an amalgam of murder and suicide - or if (meeting with resistance) it culminates in murder tout court. We shall find that Lizzie and le Nègre and Kean, in their various ways, exemplify the former case, while Frantz experiences the frustrating conundrum of the latter, from the side of the perpetrator. Sartre explored the oxymorons of hatred in Réflexions sur la question juive: Destructeur par fonction, sadique au cœur pur, l'antisémite est, au plus profond de son cœur, un criminel. Ce qu'il souhaite, ce qu'il prépare, c'est la mort du Juif. Certes, tous les ennemis du Juif ne réclament pas sa mort au grand jour, mais les mesures qu'ils proposent et qui, toutes, visent à son abaissement, sont des succédanés de cet assassinat qu'ils méditent en eux-mêmes: ce sont des

29 30

20

Baudelaire, pp.219-20. Les Mots, p. 165.

meurtres symboliques. [...] Ainsi l'antisémite s'est choisi criminel, et criminel blanc: ici encore il fuit les responsabilités, il a censuré ses instincts de meurtre, mais il a trouvé moyen de les assouvir sans se les avouer.31

Mutatis mutandis, this describes the modus operandi of bigots of every stripe: the racists who persecute le Nègre because 'blacks have always done something [wrong]'; the same class warriors who despise Lizzie for her sex, her social origins, her 'immoral' profession (of which they nevertheless avail themselves); the aristocrats who amuse themselves with Kean the comedian, yet reject and denounce him when he purports to be a man like any other. These are so many 'sym­ bolic murders' (the extroverted analogues of Baudelaire's 'symbolic suicides'), in which the victim's reification flows back upon the would-be terminator of the existential life, and envelops him also in its fiasco of falsification and futility. The racist WASPs of La Putain respectueuse and the decadent nobles of Kean, representatives all of establishment power and privilege, by rejecting the pariahs that threaten to sap the foundations of their hegemony, wind up every bit as dead, morally speaking, as those whom they condescend to oppress. Existential murder and suicide are indeed amalgamated in the working-out of martyrdom, a complex process which Sartre describes at length in Saint Genet, comédien et martyr. That process began for Genet with his being 'slain by the vertiginous word "Thief!", uttered by the grown-ups'.32 Genet's reaction, Sartre claims, was collabor­ ation: he chose to become 'un être-en-soi-pour-autrui-et-pour-soi', affirming 'la priorité de l'objet sur le sujet; de ce qu'on est pour les autres sur ce qu'on est pour soi'.33 It is this existential suicide, colluding with an original 'symbolic murder', this headlong plunge into enforced and embraced inauthenticity, that makes of Genet a 'martyr': he will be what others have made him so as to bear witness to the impossibility of a life which is already 'death'. At first, crimin­ ality and homosexuality appear to be ideal essentialist disguises to wear,34 but the contradiction inherent in living one's death necessitates 31 32 33 34

Réflexions sur la question juive, pp. 59-60. See Saint Genet, comédien et martyr, pp.9-10. Saint Genet, comédien et martyr, p. 15. See Saint Genet, comédien et martyr, pp. 117, 129.

21

a continual compromise between the existentially incompatible ethical categories of 'Être' (including 'mort, évanouissement'), on the one hand, and 'Faire' (including 'vie, volonté de vivre') on the other.35 Genet's incessant shuttling to and fro - what Sartre calls 'tourniquets' - between Being and Doing, or exis and praxis, is a pragmatic tactic, but it cannot be a lasting solution to the paradox of the 'mort vivante': Nous avons vu, plus haut, Genet s'acharner à vouloir ses échecs pour les transformer en victoires et nous l'avons surpris tentant de prendre le point de vue des autres sur ses propres aventures: [...] il est déjà par-delà sa mort et c'est un autre qui se penche avec amour sur son lamentable naufrage pour y découvrir une secrète réussite. Comme si la victime expiatoire qu'on mène au lieu du sacrifice tentait d'emprunter la mémoire éblouie de la foule qui lui survivra pour se remémorer sa mort future. Cet effort constant de transfi­ guration ne paie pas: il demeure verbal et abstrait.36

Poetry, argues Sartre, was for Genet (as previously for Baudelaire) his preferred exit from this vicious circle, 'a means of salvation, a way of living, an attempt to become that Other that he is in the eyes of others',37 a means of assuming responsibility for his precocious 'death'. As for Baudelaire, Genet's art became at once a symbolic suicide and an attestation of his survival: En voulant dissoudre l'être dans le non-être, Genet reconquiert le non-être pour le compte de l'être; il l'enferme dans ses livres comme le Diable dans une bouteille. Ses ouvrages sont par un côté des suicides recommencés et par un autre l'affirmation renouvelée de la grandeur humaine. Nous retrouvons ici le jeu de qui perd gagne.38

In contrast to Baudelaire, Genet is viewed by Sartre as accomplishing a further and final stage of evolution, involving recovery from his martyric delusions and rebirth to a new existential life:

35 36 37 38

22

Sartre tabulates these categories in Saint Genet, comédien et martyr, p.17. Saint Genet, comédien et martyr, pp.306-7. See Saint Genet, comédien et martyr, p.33 7. Saint Genet, comédien et martyr, p.616.

Le vrai, c'est qu'un certain Genet vient de mourir et que Jean Genet m'a prié de prononcer son oraison funèbre: [...] il faut tenter de vivre. [...] Le poète avait enterré le Saint; à présent, l'homme enterre le Poète.39

Genet's real-life counterpart is (once more) none other than Sartre himself, whose own recovery, as he evokes it towards the end of Les Mots, was prefigured by that of his earlier biographical subject: 'J'ai changé. [...] depuis à peu près dix ans je suis un homme qui s'éveille, guéri d'une longue, amère et douce folie [...] et je me demande parfois si je ne joue pas à qui perd gagne [...].'40 Genet's theatrical counterpart is his authorial contemporary, Goetz, hero of Le Diable et le bon Dieu, as numerous intertextualities will demonstrate in due course. Although not unique as a would-be martyr in Sartre's theatre, Goetz emerges as the only protagonist whose ethical itinerary (murder, suicide, martyrdom, rebirth) replicates Genet's in its pur­ posive plenitude. This is not, of course, to say that Goetz is an isolated example of authentic moral disposition amongst Sartre's characters, a lone beacon in a black morass of 'mauvaise foi'. The theatre, like philosophy (we have seen), is concerned with acts, with what we do because that alone defines what we are at any given moment, and each of Sartre's protagonists is seen to be striving for the coveted status of agent. It is axiomatic for him that: 'Ce que le théâtre peut montrer de plus émouvant est un caractère en train de se faire, le moment du choix, de la libre décision qui engage une morale et toute une vie.'41 This does not mean, Sartre states elsewhere, that he 'rejects psychology, which would be absurd', but rather that he is 'integrating life'.42 In this sense, 'le théâtre présente l'action de l'homme aux hommes spectateurs et, à travers cette action, le monde où il vit et la personne qui fait

39 40 41 42

Saint Genet, comédien et martyr, p. 63 5. Les Mots, pp.2\0, 211,212. Tour un théâtre de situations', La Rue, no. 12, November 1947, in Un Théâtre de situations, pp. 19-21 (p.20). See 'Forgers of Myths: the Young Playwrights of France', Theatre Arts, vol.30, no.6, June 1946, translated into French as 'Forger des mythes', in Un Théâtre de situations, pp.57-68 (p.62).

23

l'action.' The deed is the thing: acts determine character, not viceversa. And all manner of consequences, Sartre goes on to say, including failure, impotence and death, can reveal themselves as the 'meaning' of actions. According to this reasoning, the playwright might dramatise authentic acts (Oreste's punishment of Agamemnon, for example), which nonetheless have negative consequences insofar as the agent construes, elaborates or extends them inauthentically (Oreste settles for posturing, and the people remain enslaved). Conversely, inauthenticity is not an inevitable corollary of flawed or consequentially disastrous actions: Canoris's commitment is not compromised because his ruse precipitates his summary execution rather than his survival; the seeming error of Hugo's assassination of Hoederer could still be constructively rectified, if the young man were to toe the party line instead of opting for grandiloquent and selfregarding self-sacrifice; and so on. In short, 'good faith' is always an option. We are, in the fullest sense, free agents, our actions are not pre-programmed by innate characteristics or personality traits, nor are they pre-determined (although they are inevitably constrained) by prior conditioning or present circumstances: L'homme libre dans les limites de sa propre situation [...] - voilà le sujet de nos pièces. Pour remplacer le théâtre de caractères nous voulons un théâtre de situations; [...] Les personnages de nos pièces différeront les uns des autres non pas comme un lâche diffère d'un avare ou un avare d'un homme courageux, mais plutôt comme les actes divergent ou se heurtent, comme le droit peut entrer en conflit avec le droit.44

Essentialist character is anterior to action: for example, this man acts cruelly because he already is cruel (i.e. cruelty is in his 'nature'). By contrast, existentialist character is posterior to action: the cruel actions of this man lead us to say that he is cruel (i.e. because he acts cruelly, and his acts are always the only evidence we have, we can deduce, on the basis of them, that he is cruel). The agent in Sartre's theatre is not 43 44

24

'Théâtre et cinéma', notes for a lecture given in May 1958, in Un Théâtre de situations, pp.93-8 (p.95). 'Forger des mythes', in Un Théâtre de situations, pp.60-1.

synonymous with a 'character' in the conventional (bourgeois) sense of the term, but is the indeterminate individual in-the-making, encoun­ tered through his actions: Pour commencer, puisque nous nous intéressons avant tout à la situation, notre théâtre la montre au point précis où elle va atteindre son paroxysme. Nous ne prenons pas le temps de recherches savantes, nous n'éprouvons pas le besoin de détailler l'évolution imperceptible d'un caractère ou d'une intrigue: [...] En projetant dès la première scène nos protagonistes au paroxysme de leurs conflits, nous recourons au procédé bien connu de la tragédie classique, qui s'empare de l'action au moment même où elle se dirige vers la catastrophe.45

This affinity with classical and neo-classical models extends to the concept of catharsis or self-recognition: Faut-il donc penser que nous allons rester impassibles sur nos sièges pendant qu'on crie, qu'on torture, et qu'on tue sur la scène? Non, puisque ces assassins, ces victimes, ces bourreaux ne sont autres que nous.46

This empathy arises from the universality of the situations in which his protagonists are located, Sartre argued,47 and not from any pseudorealistic phenomenon of 'participation' which he denounced as selfdeluding and (worse!) bourgeois.48 He later illustrated this idea from Hamlet's soliloquy, which ought to be whispered monotonously in order to indicate the agent's 'reflexive distance' from his 'spoken passions': Et ses soucis sont les nôtres: la vie, la mort, l'action, le suicide. Tout est généralité: être ou ne pas être? Qui pose la question? N'importe qui, si l'on n'en juge que par les mots. Donc moi, dans ma réalité présente.49

45 46 47 48

49

'Forger des mythes', in Un Théâtre de situations, pp.65-6. 'Brecht et les classiques', 1957, in Un Théâtre de situations, pp.88-92 (p.90). See 'Forger des mythes', in Un Théâtre de situations, p.59. See 'Deux heures avec Sartre', interview in L'Express, 17 September 1959, reprinted as 'L'auteur, l'œuvre et le public' in Un Théâtre de situations, pp.99112 (pp. 108-9). Extract from L'Idiot de la famille I, reprinted as 'L'Acteur' in Un Théâtre de situations, pp.211-26 (pp.213-14).

25

After all, Hamlet does not really exist, whereas I do. Sartre's dramas repeatedly re-frame, re-formulate and re-pose Hamlet's profoundly ontological enquiry, which is at once an existential and a radically moral question of life or death. Sartre's theatre, then, is one of situations in which free agents make critical choices - and the more exacting their situation, the more dramatic the action flowing from it: Et pour que la décision soit profondément humaine, pour qu'elle mette enjeu la totalité de l'homme, à chaque fois il faut porter sur la scène des situationslimites, c'est-à-dire qui présentent des alternatives dont la mort est l'un des termes. Ainsi, la liberté se découvre à son plus haut degré puisqu 'elle accepte de se perdre pour pouvoir s'affirmer.50

The italicised sentence is a master-key to interpreting the abundant violence, pervasive morbidity and high death toll in Sartre's theatre: readiness to give up life is the ultimate assertion of its value. (This is a leitmotiv of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, and one increasingly borne in upon us by the contemporary narrative of fundamentalist Islam.) What Sartre calls 'extreme situations' are typically saturated with the 'myth' of death, a term which he uses to mean 'subjects so sublimated that they are universally recognisable',51 such as the 'great myths of death, exile and love'.52 If it is the first of these that predominates, this is not surprising in view of the relentless backdrop of war against which the playwright wrote his plays (the Second World War, the Cold War, French colonial wars in Indo-China and Algeria, the Vietnam war, the Cold War, again...). In an age when, according to 50

51 52

26

Tour un théâtre de situations', in Un Théâtre de situations, p.20 (emphasis added). Note the magisterial euphony and Racinian rhyme - if not quite the scansion - of this quasi-Alexandrine couplet. See 'Interview with Kenneth Tynan', The Observer, 18, 25 June 1961, trans­ lated in Un Théâtre de situations, pp. 165-81 (p. 178). See 'Forger des mythes' in Un Théâtre de situations, p.65. Sartre exemplifies this sense of 'myth' by reference to Camus's play Le Malentendu (June 1944, contemporaneous with Huis clos): '[Ces] personnages sont mythiques en ce sens que le malentendu qui les sépare peut servir d'incarnation à tous les malentendus qui séparent l'homme de lui-même, du monde, des autres hommes' (ibid.). See also Galster (2001a), p.31.

Freud, 'at bottom, nobody believes in his own death',53 war had brought humankind face to face with the unconscionable truth of its destiny: Les circonstances souvent atroces de notre combat nous mettaient enfin à même de vivre, sans fard et sans voile, cette situation déchirée, insoutenable qu'on appelle la condition humaine. L'exil, la captivité, la mort surtout que l'on masque habilement dans les époques heureuses, nous en faisions les objets perpétuels de nos soucis, nous apprenions que ce ne sont pas des accidents évitables, ni même des menaces constantes mais extérieures: il fallait y voir notre lot, notre destin, la source profonde de notre réalité d'homme; à chaque seconde nous vivions dans sa plénitude le sens de cette petite phrase banale: Tous les hommes sont mortels.'54

This eloquent deconstruction of the psychological effects of Nazi occupation during which, paradoxically, Frenchmen 'were never more free',55 was written and recorded by Sartre in 1944. Sixty years later (at the time of writing), Sartre's metallic tones resonate still with all the rhetorical skill of a classical actor announcing the assassination of Agamemnon (as Oreste in Les Mouches), or declaiming the death of humankind (as Poseidon in Les Troyennes).56 We might say this is an apposite authorial assimilation of act and agent, myth and situation; a suitably dramatic evocation of an infernal epoch which transformed ordinary people into heroes and villains, and a philosopher novelist into a playwright.

53 54 55 56

Freud, cited by Kaufmann, in Feifel, p.48. La République du silence', Les Lettres françaises, 1944, in Situations III, pp.11-14 (p. 12). See 'La République du silence', in Situations III, p. 11. This recording is preserved on the commercially available video of Astruc and Contât's film, Sartre par lui-même, at the beginning of the second cassette.

4

27

Chapter 2 Myth-making

Sartre first came to the art of dramaturgy as a mature writer through the experience of the 1939^5 war and, specifically, through that of his own captivity and the German occupation of France. It is undoubt­ edly these circumstances, rather than any desire to emulate distin­ guished contemporaries, such as Jean Cocteau and Jean Giraudoux, that led Sartre to experiment with the mythological theatre,1 whereas his pre-war literary endeavours had concentrated on realistic prose fiction in the form of La Nausée and Le Mur? War is in itself a dramatic event, generating extreme situations in which the petty preoccupations of the quotidian are suddenly swept aside, and ordinary people find themselves compelled to make extra­ ordinary decisions, which might have far-reaching and even fatal consequences for themselves, their family, colleagues, neighbours and friends - as well as for their enemies, real or imagined. Daily, hourly, war asks fundamental questions demanding primordial responses: fear and trembling, fight or flight, and - especially in the contexts of captivity and occupation - collaboration or resistance. Individuals find themselves called upon to balance their own good against that of the wider community, to confront trials and choices which may, implicitly or explicitly, require them to risk their own lives or to endanger those of others, to set aside the norms that govern inter-personal relations in 1

2

Compare Cocteau's Antigone (1928) and La Machine infernale (1934), or Giraudoux's La Guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu (1935) and Electre (1937). Still less was Sartre interested in imitating or competing with the critic, philosopher and self-styled exponent of l'existentialisme chrétien, Gabriel Marcel, whose dramas of conscience, mostly composed in the 1920s, reflect his moral journey towards Catholicism, to which he converted in 1929. 1938 and 1939, respectively - in addition, of course, to earlier academic and abstruse works of theory, such as La Transcendance de I 'Ego and L 'Imagination (both 1936).

29

peace-time, and to entertain instead the possibility of actions which would customarily put them beyond the pale of the co-operative group. Deceit, betrayal, violence in all its forms, including torture and murder, present themselves as the necessary means or the inevitable ends, depending upon the stance one adopts, perpetrator or victim. 'Seuls ne méritent pas la guerre les hommes qui ont accepté d'être les martyrs de la paix', writes Sartre in one of his 'Phoney War' notebooks during December 1939: 'Complice ou martyr, telle est l'alternative. Et votre décision fait l'Histoire. En refusant la guerre, j'aurais payé pour les autres. En l'acceptant, je paye aussi, mais pour moi seul.'3 The nodal point, the pivotal moment of moral engagement is the decision to obey one reflex or another: whether to survive personally or collectively, to privilege oneself or the group; whether to have a life of sorts, or to risk life itself, in order to have one worthy of the name. For Sartre, as for most of his compatriots, the 'Phoney War' nevertheless offered few opportunities for heroic self-commitment or courageous action. Indeed, the very uneventfulness of this period is almost embarrassing in retrospect. Three days before the outbreak of war, Sartre confidently predicted, in a letter to Louise Védrine, that: 'Il est impossible qu'Hitler songe à entamer une guerre avec l'état d'esprit des populations allemandes. C'est du bluff.' And he went on to remind her, with pedagogical pomposity, that (the impending general mobilisation notwithstanding), 'la mobilisation n'est pas la guerre'.4 The very day on which Great Britain and France declared war on Germany, provoked by Hitler's refusal to comply with their ultimatum to withdraw his troops from Poland, Sartre wrote a typically lengthy letter to Simone de Beauvoir in which occasional metaphysical reflections - 'C'est vraiment la "solitude en commun". On est investi par l'humain, au sens allemand de l'humain, [...] Et pourtant on est seul, sans pouvoir rien faire de sa solitude'5 incongruously punctuate his workaday complaints about the paucity of his equipment, or his broken night's sleep due to the incessant 3 4 5

30

Les Carnets de la drôle de guerre, pp. 162, 163. 31 août [ 1939], Lettres au Castor et à quelques autres /, p.271. Dimanche 3 septembre [1939], Lettres au Castor et à quelques autres /, p.277.

comings and goings, and the desultory sexual banter, of his new-found comrades. This bathetic banality was to characterise the next nine months for Sartre, which he would spend in various meteorological units in eastern France, reading voraciously and writing voluminously (letters, philosophy, fiction, journals, more letters), as if the entire event were a kind of uncomfortable sabbatical, spatially disagreeable but temporally convenient for this aspiring man of letters and nascent scourge of the bourgeoisie. Intermittent excursions to launch weather balloons and measure wind-speed were minor disruptions to Sartre's routine of reading, writing and conversing with his co-conscripts, most of whom could offer what no amount of book-learning could bring - the perspective of the common man: 'Grande conversation hier soir avec Grener. Avec ce gros homme brutal et grossier, qui rote et pète comme il respire, je fais la putain parce qu'il est ouvrier.'6 This was an environment in which Sartre, socially immersed in his putative audience, would suddenly come to think of himself as a dramatist: Et puis songez aussi que je ne suis pas malheureux du tout. Au contraire imaginez ce que ça peut être pour un écrivain de connaître tout son public et d'écrire précisément pour ce public-là - et pour un auteur dramatique de monter et de jouer lui-même ses pièces. J'ai fait un mystère de Noël qui émeut fort paraît-il, au point qu'un des acteurs a envie de pleurer en jouant. Pour moi, je tiens le rôle du roi Mage. J'écris la pièce le matin et nous répétons l'après-midi. Trente personnages. J'ai rencontré ici deux ou trois types qui m'intéressent véritablement et pris contact avec une forme d'art théâtral toute neuve pour laquelle il y a beaucoup à faire. Je lis Heidegger et je ne me suis jamais senti aussi libre.7

This letter articulates a formative change in Sartre's evolution. The morose novelist, who had hitherto created 'sinister, pessimistic' characters in his own image (but etiolated, 'decapitated'),8 meta6 7 8

Les Carnets de la drôle de guerre, p.431. 10 décembre [ 1940], Lettres au Castor et à quelques autres //, p.301. 4 [P]ourquoi Antoine Roquentin et Mathieu, qui sont moi, sont-ils, en effet, sinistres, alors que, mon Dieu, la vie ne se présente pas si mal pour moi? Je pense que c'est parce que ce sont des homoncules. Par le fait, c'est moi, à qui l'on aurait arraché le principe vivant. [...] La "tristesse cosmique" se pose pour soi. C'est ce que j'ai fait: j'ai ôté à mes personnages ma passion maniaque

31

morphoses into a man of the theatre: writing, rehearsing, performing, almost simultaneously, enthused by the collaborative enterprise, the good fellowship, the shared feelings - and, no doubt, revelling also in fame and acclaim - meanwhile, in his endearingly ingenuous way, unashamedly reading the philosopher noted above all others for his collaboration with the Nazi régime, and paradoxically proclaiming himself, immured in his captivity, freer than ever. From the outset, the theatre is essentially a life-affirming project for Sartre.

Bariona, ou le Fils du tonnerre This play was conceived, written, and rehearsed within a matter of a few weeks towards the end of 1940, and had its only performances on 24-26 December at Stalag 12D, Triers. Sartre never authorised any public production of it, and it was thirty years before he permitted its commercial publication as an appendix in the first major bibliography of his work, Les Écrits de Sartre, by Michel Contât and Michel Rybalka.9 This rather bleak history, of a project about which he was originally so enthusiastic, manifests Sartre's subsequent ambivalence towards a work which he feared might be construed as indicating some sentimental conversion to a religious worldview: Si j'ai pris mon sujet dans la mythologie du Christianisme, cela ne signifie pas que la direction de ma pensée ait changé, fut-ce un moment, pendant la captivité. Il s'agissait simplement, d'accord avec les prêtres prisonniers, de trouver un sujet qui pût réaliser, ce soir de Noël, l'union la plus large des chrétiens et des incroyants.

9

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d'écrire, mon orgueil, ma foi en mon destin, mon optimisme métaphysique et j'ai provoqué en eux de ce fait un pullulement sinistre. Eux, c'est moi décapité' (Les Carnets de la drôle de guerre, pp.409-10). See Les Écrits de Sartre, pp.372-5 and 565-633. Textual references are to this edition of the play.

So wrote Sartre in 1962, anxious to clarify his position at the height of the Cold War.10 By contrast, when addressing a specifically American audience in earlier and more optimistic times, he had sounded more upbeat about his first excursion into the theatrical medium: My first experience in the theatre was especially fortunate. When I was a prisoner of war in Germany in 1940, I wrote, staged and acted in a Christmas play which, while pulling wool over the eyes of the German censor by means of simple symbols, was addressed to my fellow-prisoners. [...] No doubt it was neither a good play nor well-acted: the work of an amateur, the critics would say, a product of special circumstances. Nevertheless, on this occasion, as I addressed my comrades across the footlights, speaking to them of their state as prisoners, when I suddenly saw them so remarkably silent and attentive, I realised what theatre ought to be - a great collective, religious phenomenon.11

Of these two aspects, it was naturally the circumstantial rather than the religious that Sartre emphasised in another rare allusion to Bariona, in an interview given just as the 'events' of May 1968 were about to find their fullest expression: Pour moi, l'important dans cette expérience était que, prisonnier, j'allais pouvoir m'adresser aux autres prisonniers et évoquer nos problèmes communs. Le texte était plein d'allusions à la situation du moment et parfaitement claires pour chacun de nous. L'envoyé de Rome à Jérusalem, dans notre esprit, c'était l'Allemand. Nos gardiens y virent l'Anglais dans ses colonies!12

This last remark highlights one of the most controversial questions surrounding Sartre's wartime writing for the theatre, namely: how did he manage, with apparent ease, to dupe the German censorship (presumably not inherently stupid) into believing that the themes of occupation, oppresssion and rebellion in Bariona and Les Mouches, or of imprisonment and torture in Huis clos, were not in fact thinly10 11

12

Letter to Yves Frontier, 31 October 1962, cited in Les Écrits de Sartre, p.565. 'Forgers of Myths: the young playwrights of France', Theatre Arts, vol.30, no.6, June 1946, pp.324-35 (p.330). This article has been re-translated by Michel Contât as 'Forger des mythes' in Un Théâtre de situations, pp.57-69 (pp.63—4), and future references will be to that version. Sartre, interview with Paul-Louis Mignon, L'Avant-Scène Théâtre, no.402/403, 1-15 May 1968, extract in Un Théâtre de situations, p.266.

33

veiled critiques of German brutality, and implicit appeals to French resistance? I do not propose to tackle this issue specifically, not least because it has already been dealt with in comprehensive detail by Ingrid Galster.13 However, in respect of Bariona in particular, I shall enquire to what extent Sartre's instinct for the theatre, as a live and life-affirming medium, was attuned to the potential of the pièce d'occasion to prompt an awareness of the historical moment and, therefore, of the possibility to intervene and change it. Bariona treats all three of the great 'myths', in Sartre's sense: death, exile and love.14 The third of these (theologically speaking, the first) is explicit in the-bond between Bariona and his people, and implicit in the millennial gesture of God made man. The second defines the Jewish condition: separated from God by sin and apostasy, divorced from the unifying power of tradition by internecine faction and dissension (note that Bariona's brother-in-law has been unjustly crucified by a 'tribunal juif). 15 Above all, the Jews have been colonised by the Romans, alienated, exiled in their own land. The first 'myth', death, is at the centre of this story of an oppressed people, tempted by abortion, murder, suicide, the surrender to quietism, as seemingly feasible responses to their conditions of slavery: '[Ils] n'ont plus rien à espérer, depuis leur enfance. Ils n'ont plus rien à espérer sauf la mort' (p.579). But these are counsels of despair: 'Le quiétisme, poussé à l'extrême, ce serait la mort.'16 Colonialism is, for Sartre, an essentially murderous and selfcontradictory political system, '[qui] veut à la fois la mort et la multiplication de ses victimes'.17 Its aim is to dehumanise the subject people in the fullest sense, to sustain them 'entre la vie et la mort toujours plus près de la mort que de la vie [...] à considérer des hommes comme des bêtes qui parlent'.18 The coloniser intends to 13 14 15 16 17 18

34

See Galster (2001a). See cForger des mythes', in Un Théâtre de situations, p.65. Bariona, p.572. Further references are in the text; where successive quotations concern the same page, only the first is referenced. Sartre, Saint Genet, comédien et martyr, p.293. Sartre, 'Portrait du colonisé', Les Temps modernes, nos. 137, 138, 1957, in Situations V, pp.49-56 (p.54). 'Portrait du colonisé', in Situations V, p.55.

commit existential murder, to obliterate his victim without actually taking his life: 'On laissera vivre les corps mais on tuera l'esprit.'19 This 'perfect crime', whose 'heavy weapon' is the colonialist's 'petrified ideology',20 although ultimately an unrealisable project, nevertheless establishes an interim régime of stasis, characterised by the inverted anger of the oppressed indigenous population. In due time, the pressure of this suppressed resentment, Sartre argues, must inevitably explode in a bloody revolt, whereby the institutionalised violence of the colonisateur is reproduced as the counter-violence of the colonisé?1 Until that purgative insurrection, however, this violence is interiorised as a 'collective unconscious' and provokes the disuni­ ties which plague a subjugated people: [Dans] le temps de leur impuissance, la folie meurtrière est l'inconscient collectif des colonisés. Cette furie contenue [...] ravage les opprimés euxmêmes. Pour s'en libérer, ils viennent à se massacrer entre eux: les tribus se battent les unes contre les autres faute de pouvoir affronter l'ennemi véritable [..].22

However, although this spontaneous ingestion of the coloniser's agression is destructive in the short term, in the longer term it is what restores the expropriated humanity of the colonised: '[Par] leur désir permanent de nous tuer, par la contracture permanente de muscles puissants qui ont peur de se dénouer, [les colonisés] sont hommes: par le colon, qui les veut hommes de peine, et contre lui.'23 Some years before he problematised colonialism in these theo­ retical modes of discourse, Sartre had approached the subject theatri­ cally in a play which traces the progress of a leader, and his oppressed people, from the 'quietism' of colonised stasis (the tyranny of exis) to

19 20 21 22 23

Sartre, 'Une victoire', L'Express, no.350, 1958, in Situations V, pp.72-88 (p.86). See 'Portrait du colonisé', in Situations V, p.55. See Critique de la raison dialectique /, p.209. Sartre, 'Préface', in Frantz Fanon, Les Damnés de la terre, 1961, reprinted in Situations V, pp. 167-93 (p. 179). 'Préface aux Damnés de la terre\ in Situations K, p. 178.

35

the revitalising re-assertion of action (the triumph of praxis). Bariona offers its audience the representation of an archetypal situation-limite, for the dilemma faced by the villagers appears to be insoluble other than by death. On the one hand, accession to the Romans' demand for increased taxes will bleed the village dry: '[Nous] ne pouvons pas payer cet impôt. Nos bras sont trop faibles, nos bêtes crèvent' (p.578). On the other, failure to comply with Rome's demands will elicit retribution resulting, probably, in the loss not only of their livelihoods, but of their very lives: T u veux te révolter, [...] tu nous ferais tous massacrer'. The physical environment reflects and symbolises-this situation-limite: the atmosphere is stonecold; the village is repeatedly evoked as a dying body or a rotting corpse. There is a worryingly low birth-rate, and the ageing hamlet of Béthaur is disgorging its life-blood to Bethlehem, where the young people migrate in search of work: 'Depuis que nos colons romains ont créé les scieries mécaniques à Bethléem, notre plus jeune sang coule en hémorragie et cascade de rocher en rocher' (p.575). The sawmills are the heavy machinery of colonialist repression, bearing down upon the people who therefore turn against each other in their rage and privation. Bariona's beau-frère is already a victim of such inverted violence, and Bariona himself foresees only death and oblivion for Béthaur: 'Ce village agonise [...] Dans cent ans il ne restera plus trace de notre hameau, ni sur cette terre, ni dans la mémoire des hommes.' The villagers are scarcely more optimistic; le Choeur des Anciens echoes the refrain, 'Notre village agonise', adding: 'Notre coeur est en cendres' (p.576). Human hearts are reduced to ashes amid the dust of their decaying dwellings, set in the harsh and pitiless landscape so chillingly described by Lélius, while their heads are full of 'thoughts of impotence', the condition of death itself- a condition, moreover, to which many of them are apparently resigned, huddled in holes in the ground, not as the savages they are in the colonists' eyes, nor even as 'beasts' (the status of the colonised), but as 'des bêtes malades'

24

36

Sartre increasingly used these Greek terms in his later work in preference to Être and Faire (see Saint Genet, comédien et martyr, p.77, for a succinct definition of these ethical categories).

(p.577). Their prayer - 'Qu'on nous laisse crever en paix!' - echoes the despair of their village chief, Bariona. Into this bleak, moribund and sterile landscape of despair enters the promise of new life in the form of Christ's nativity. This good news is announced in extraordinary physical signs, first reported by le Passant whom Sartre ironically names Pierre ('stone'), so that the archetypal symbol of the en-soi is chosen to be the harbinger of life.25 The first supernatural manifestation is 'une odeur épaisse comme un brouillard [...] on aurait dit qu'elle était vivante, [...] comme ces gros nuages de pollen qui courent sur la terre féconde des plaines au printemps' (p.587). This sweet and living perfume countervails the putrid stench of Béthaur and the air is filled with the breath of fecundity, as if the season of new life would repel the barren winter at the very nadir of its infertility: '[On] aurait dit que la nature avait choisi ces plateaux déserts et glacés pour se donner à elle seule, pendant une nuit d'hiver, la fête magnifique du printemps' (p.588). The old man's lyrical ramblings are reinforced by the testimony of the shepherds, who have seen the heavens stretched out upon the earth (like two lovers lying together), and who sense a night which will 'give birth to something' momentous - although, ironically, they guess at the death of a king rather than the birth of one: 'Les morts des rois, c'est des histoires pour occuper les oisifs dans les villes. Mais nous n'avons pas besoin de ça ici' (p.591). However, it is precisely for the likes of 'old Father Peter' and the shepherds, Simon and Caïphe the poor, the humble, the dispossessed, the meek - that Christ has come into the world: 'Je suis transi jusqu'aux moelles par une vie qui n'est pas la mienne et que je ne connais pas. Je suis perdu au fond d'une autre vie comme au fond d'un puits' (p.592). Caïphe's intuition of an alien life, which pervades and possesses him, predicts the 'new life in Christ' which the faithful are promised, just as his image of a

25

Sartre draws attention to the meaning of the name with an unsubtle play on words: 'Il a pourtant la tête solide, le Père Pierre' (p.590). We note also that Bariona is Bar-Jonah, or 'son of Jonah', i.e. Simon, the disciple whom Christ called Peter, the 'rock'.

37

well adumbrates baptismal immersion in rejuvenating waters. These intimations of new life are the message that the shepherds bring to Bariona. In this scene of the first evangelists, Sartre keeps up a sustained duologue of life and death images: Caïphe describes the night as 'fertile as a woman's belly', while Chalem complains of having been dragged from his sleep 'which resembles death', and Simon's 'cries of joy' are met with churlish rebukes.27 Yet, if Béthaur's sepulchral silence is broken by the word of life, the enthusiasm of the shepherds is shortlived when Bariona pours scorn upon their expectations of an earthly paradise. That would be the inversion of the present world order, he insists, 'l'univers d'un fou', revealing that his philosophy is firmly rooted in the Genesis tradition of paradise lost: 'Ce monde est une chute interminable, vous le savez bien' (p.601). Were it not for the intervention of Balthazar (played by Sartre), who undermines Bariona's authority, this cataclysmic vision of an irredeemably fallen world would prevail. But, as it turns out, so strong is the people's will to believe in the new life forecast by the messianic incarnation, however implausible that may be, they abandon Bariona and set out to worship the Christ child. Deserted even by Sarah, his wife, Bariona's 'dead village' becomes the scene, the 'théâtre vide' (p.579), of the bitter monologue in which he ridicules the very idea of a God made man: Le tout-puissant, au sein de sa gloire, contemplerait ces poux qui grouillent sur la vieille croûte de la terre et qui la souillent de leurs excréments, et il dirait: je veux être une de ces vermines-là? Laissez-moi rire, (p.607)28

26 27 28

38

Compare: '[Le] baptême est une façon de créer la liberté dans l'individu commun' {Critique de la raison dialectique /, p.491, footnote 1). See p.597. Sartre's hero Mathieu, in Le Sursis, also refers to the face of the earth as 'the crust of a dead star'. The term 'vermin' recurs throughout Sartre's work as a simile of the dehumanised person, the existentially dead human being, notably in the later play Les Séquestrés d'Altona, in which Frantz speaks of his acts of torture as attempts to turn people into 'living vermin'.

So much for scene-setting and the establishment of a radical life/ death dialectic in the natural and supernatural dimensions of the play's context. But what of its action? Where are the 'acts for life' to defy the stultifying burden of despair which weighs upon the central protagonist and inclines him towards a quietism which verges on suicide? Where action is concerned, Bariona has a quasi-classical purity traceable to the tragedies of Racine, and affiliating it more closely with Les Troyennes than with any of Sartre's intervening plays. Events occur in the wings and reach the stage only by report, whereas the acts the audience witnesses consist exclusively of decision-making: the confirmation, revision or reversal of a project; the hero's struggle to reconcile conflicting intellectual convictions and emotional reactions under the intolerable pressure of his situationlimite. That extreme situation is created for Bariona and his people by the Romans' imposition of a new tax. This is a veritable sentence of death, in effect an ultimatum which calls upon the Jews to choose between compliance, which means a slow and lingering death by exploitation, or resistance, which means a swift and sudden death in the suppression of their eventual revolt. In either case, death would be the inevitable outcome, yet the logic of violence and counter-violence demands, as we have seen, the assertion of the value of life, however overwhelming the circumstances: [Quand] un peuple n'a d'autre ressource que de choisir son genre de mort, quand il n'a reçu de ses oppresseurs qu'un seul cadeau, le désespoir, qu'est-ce qui lui reste à perdre? C'est son malheur qui deviendra son courage; [...].29

While the village elders debate the respective merits of submission or rebellion, Bariona paradoxically proposes a middle way which purports both to submit and to rebel simultaneously: 'Nous paierons cet impôt. {Un temps.) Mais personne, après nous, ne paiera plus d'impôts dans ce village!' (p.579). Underpinning this seemingly perverse decision is a deeply pessimistic, even fatalistic, worldview,

29

'Portrait du colonisé', in Situations V, p.56.

39

allied with a sophisticated insight into the villainy of the colonialist project: La vie est une défaite, personne n'est victorieux et tout le monde est vaincu; tout s'est très mal passé toujours et la plus grande folie de la terre, c'est l'espoir. [...] Mes compagnons, refermez vos coeurs sur votre peine, serrez fort, serrez dur car la dignité de l'homme est dans son désespoir. [...] Nous paierons l'impôt pour que nos femmes ne souffrent point. Mais le village va s'ensevelir de ses propres mains. Nous ne ferons plus d'enfants. [...] et je souhaite que notre exemple soit publié partout en Judée et qu'il soit à l'origine d'une religion nouvelle, la religion du néant et que les Romains demeurent les maîtres dans nos villes désertes et que notre sang retombe sur leurs têtes, (pp.580, 581)

At first sight, Bariona's decree is both desperate {désespéré) and lifedenying, infected with the nihilistic counsels of hopelessness which his successor, Oreste, will transcend when he asserts that 'human life begins on the far side of despair'.30 And yet, so far from simply giving up, Bariona exhibits a ruthless logic in his reasoning. On the one hand, if the villagers do not meet the Roman demands, retribution will be swift and terrible; equally, if they were actively to resist them, they would no less certainly be crushed. On the other hand, by refusing to procreate (thereby saving their unborn children from slavery), the villagers will both deprive the Romans of their dominion (since one cannot be a master without slaves), and clarify their guilt for the shedding of Jewish blood. What Bariona enjoins upon them is martyr­ dom: by abjuring procreation, his people will bear witness not only to their suffering but also to the intractability of their situation. Their example will go forth into the wider world and found what he calls 'the religion of nothingness', a euphemistic forerunner of the atheistic humanism of Oreste. Like Oreste, most other rebels in Sartre's theatre will express their resistance through action which is generally violent, whereas Bariona's superficial quietism subverts that norm, just as it inverts the violence of the coloniser. This ironic thrust is the secret weapon of his unique revolt by continence, an early prototype of the self-validating strategy of 'loser wins', subsequently invoked to such devastating 30

40

See Les Mouches, p. 114.

effect by Goetz von Berlichingen or Frantz von Gerlach. But this point is apparently overlooked by some critics, such as Bernard J. Quinn, who denounces Bariona for 'decreeing] national suicide [...] negat­ ing] life instead of trying to invent ways of affirming it as a primary value', or Christine Mohanty, who accuses him of 'retreat[ing] into "objectivity" via an emphasis upon the suffering of the body', and of 'sign[ing] his own death certificate'.31 By contrast, Franck Laraque, rightly in my view, takes it as axiomatic that 'le droit à la vie [est l'un des] thèmes fondamentaux du drame', yet argues that, given Bariona's dilemma, 'la seule solution consiste à éteindre la source de vie'.32 It seems obvious to me that Bariona's strategy is neither an abject negation of life, nor a flight into the bad faith of in-itselfiiess. On the contrary, he ingeniously invents a surprising third way between two equally impossible and potentially destructive options, whereby he will preserve the life of his people for the present generation, perhaps for 'a quarter of a century', he surmises. The villagers' endurance will not only demonstrate their own right to life, but their observance of continence and eschewal of reproduction will mutely insist upon the right of future generations to expect a life which offers more to hope for than death. The village will, in the long term, 'inter itself with its own hands', but its gradual demise will be that of a martyr whose mission is, precisely, to affirm life as a 'primary value'. It is true that, in the interim, the village will be preoccupied with 'the contemplation of evil, injustice and suffering', as Mohanty justly observes, but we need not infer that Bariona views this prospect with any pleasure; his scheme is simply the least bad way to put an end to their suffering: 'Nous ne voulons plus perpétuer la vie, ni prolonger les souffrances de notre race' (p.580). Life is a defeat and synonymous (above all, for the Jews) with misery, and Béthaur's next generation could expect only a destiny which, whatever form it took, hid the seeds of death, even crucifixion, at its heart: 'Quel destin souhaitez-vous pour vos enfants futurs?' (p.581). Franck Laraque, arguing that Bariona makes the only feasible response in the light of his own realistic analysis of the situation, 31 32

Quinn, p. 100; Mohanty, p.l 105. Laraque, pp.58, 60.

41

suggests that Sartre's first protagonist intuitively anticipates the primary phase of the disintegration of the colonialist project, what Sartre would later call 'the time of detonation [...] the boomerang moment': Réclamer et renier, tout à la fois, la condition humaine: la contradiction est explosive. Aussi bien explose-t-elle, vous le savez comme moi. Et nous vivons au temps de la déflagration: que la montée des naissances accroisse la disette, que les nouveaux venus aient à redouter de vivre un peu plus que de mourir, le torrent de la violence emporte toutes les barrières. En Algérie, en Angola, on massacre à vue les Européens. C'est le moment du boomerang, le troisième temps de la violence: e!4e revient sur nous, elle nous frappe et, pas plus que les autres fois, nous ne comprenons que c'est la nôtre.33

Bariona sees no point in creating children for whom life is not worth living, nor in unleashing the flood of violence in which his own people would necessarily be swept away. His clever compromise, in fact, compromises above all the colonialist project which is predicated upon the indefinite cooperative subjugation of the subject people, whose cooperation extends to the complicit procreation of generation upon generation of slaves. Nevertheless, Quinn's charge of 'national suicide' is not so far­ fetched for, in this first movement, Bariona stalls at the point of what Laraque calls 'revolt', as distinct from 'revolution', a reflex charac­ terised by its retrospection and orientation towards death: La révolte se caractérise par un certain messianisme, une confiance dans la fatalité ou la providence, un désir d'affronter la mort. Tournée vers la mort elle rêve du rétablissement du passé qui a précédé la situation intenable qu'elle veut abolir.34

Although his motives are beyond reproach, Bariona tends to regard the future as immutable, closed and entire, which is tantamount to regarding it as the past or, put another way, to viewing life from the vantage point of death. Whereas the pre-ordination of the future would objectify humans by nullifying their freedom, Sartre would insist that 33 34

42

Sartre, 'Préface aux Damnés de la terre\ in Situations V, p. 181. Laraque, p.48.

thefriturecannot be pre-ordained so long as there is human life and in this sense, therefore, Bariona's despair approximates to suicide and to the 'resignation unworthy of men' which he explicitly repudiates. However, the Jews, insofar as they exhibit the attributes of a colonised people, are already existential ly dead, and when the metaphysical murder of the colonist is compounded by the suicide of his victim, the conflated product is martyrdom, if we follow the example of Sartre's rationale in Saint-Genet, comédien et martyr?5 Just as Genet opted to 'be the thief which the grown-ups made of him in order to bear witness (be a martyr) to the impossibility of his freedom, so Bariona decrees that the Jews shall be what the Romans have made of them: existentially deceased people. And, just as martyrdom invariably connotes radical religious conviction (not to say mania), the process which Sartre assimilates to a religious rite in the case of Genet, calling it 'a liturgical drama', is foreshadowed, in Bariona's terms, by 'the religion of nothingness', and liturgically dramatised by the 'martyred hands' of crucified Sion. His policy of slow self-extinction is not simply a ploy to 'deprive the Romans of manpower', which is how Lélius sees it, but a more subtle and incisive blow at the very identity of the Romans. Like the sadist, the colonist wants his victim simul­ taneously dead and alive: real death thwarts this self-contradictory project, and that is the challenge which Bariona's bid for collective martyrdom lays down. So, this 'national suicide' is, in reality, a constructive protest against the Roman tyranny: however 'unnatural' Bariona's vow of celibacy may seem (because it flies in the face of the ontological 'law' that being has an inherent tendency to perpetuate its being),36 his eloquence nevertheless persuades the people of the virtue of taking it. This is what they are about to do when they are deterred by the timely entrance of Sarah, who will oppose it by asserting (more than just verbally) the 'natural' laws of being. The brute fact of Sarah's pregnancy brings out the terrible implications of Bariona's oath in sharp relief, insofar as it effectively 35 36

See Chapter 1, above. See L'Etre et le néant, p.519, and Critique de la raison dialectique /, p.255. It also runs counter to the instinctive percept that the immortality of the group (tribe, race, nation, species) compensates for the mortality of the individual.

43

pronounces a sentence of death on his own unborn child, prompting him, 'for the child's own sake', to insist she abort the baby. This peculiarly modern moral dilemma (which also preoccupies Mathieu Delarue throughout the first volume of Les Chemins de la liberté) springs from the equally modern conviction that 'man is the master of life and death', according to Bariona. At first glance ironic, there is nevertheless some truth in this claim: as leader of the 'sworn group' he is seeking to establish, Bariona would indeed exercise that ultimate sanction invested in the sovereign repository and executor of the general will.37 However, nothing could be more contradictory to the Old Testament ethos, which implicitly constitutes the moral frame­ work of the play's action, whereby God alone wields the creative power. He alone decrees the prosperity or destruction of this or that tribe, the fertility or sterility of this or that couple. Sarah is living proof of this since, as she tells us, her pregnancy is Jehovah's answer to their prayers, and this divine endorsement (which parallels the privilege of Mary and Joseph, of course) should therefore, of itself, suffice to ensure the child's right to life. Yet none of this alters the fact, argues Bariona, that his ineluctable destiny is one of misery and suffering in an enslaved Judaea: BARIONA: [...] Personne ne pourra souffrir pour lui ses souffrances; pour souffrir, pour mourir, on est toujours seul. [...] SARAH: Je veux lui donner aussi le soleil et l'air frais et les ombres violettes de la montagne et le rire des filles. Je t'en prie, laisse un enfant naître, laisse encore une fois une chance se courir dans le monde. BARIONA: Tais-toi. C'est un piège. On croit toujours qu'il y a une chance à courir. Chaque fois qu'on met un enfant au monde, on croit qu'il a sa chance et ce n'est pas vrai. Les jeux sont faits d'avance. La misère, le désespoir, la mort l'attendent au carrefour, (pp.582, 583)

Here we have one of the most explicit dialogues of life and death anywhere in Sartre's work, with Sarah articulating an optimistic, even lyrical, paean to life which takes little account of the political realities, and Bariona propounding a pessimistic, even fatalistic, counsel of despair which takes little account of anything else. Whereas Sarah 37

44

See Critique de la raison dialectique /, pp.447-51 and 597-603.

appears to estimate new life as a good in itself, in a kind of Nietzschean amor fati, Bariona regards it as already a curse, an eternal recurrence of misery, compounded in the present circumstances by the probable perpetuation of Roman mastery and Jewish enslavement. This confrontation of antithetical ethics is lent additional dramatic force by the emotional proximity of the protagonists and the political superiority of one of them, which enables him to command her obedience - although, in doing so, he lays himself open to charges of 'pride' and 'ill-will' which, taken together, are scarcely indistinguish­ able from the Sartrean cardinal sin ofmauvaise foi. The intervention of Lélius, however, inadvertently underscores the political soundness of Bariona's position, somewhat to the discomfiture of Sarah. Whether at war or in peace, Rome needs the Jewish offspring for cannon-fodder or factory-fodder, particularly at a time when demand for manpower is outstripping supply, he explains, in a disarmingly cynical exposition of the economics of exploitation: Faites-nous des ouvriers et des soldats, chef, cela est votre devoir. C'est là ce que Madame sentait confusément et je suis fort heureux d'avoir pu lui prêter mon modeste concours pour expliquer son sentiment, (p.584)

Needless to say, this is not at all what 'Madame' had dimly grasped, and the blundering insensitivity of the Roman official (no doubt reflecting the naïvety of the POW camp authorities in allowing this dissident propaganda to be broadcast at all) merely reinforces Bariona's arguments. Sarah's perspective is not political, but partly religious and predominantly maternal (in other words, entirely affective), so it is in graphic, emotive metaphors that Bariona appeals for her co-operation: L'existence est une lèpre affreuse qui nous ronge tous et nos parents ont été coupables. Garde tes mains pures, Sarah, et puisses-tu dire au jour de ta mort: je ne laisse personne après moi pour perpétuer la souffrance humaine, (p.585)

The exhortation to 'keep clean hands' is as pregnant with moral resonance as is Sarah with her child: Pontius Pilate will wash his hands of the blood of the Messiah, so exonerating himself and

45

ensuring that blame for the Christ-killing will fall throughout history upon the heads of the Jews themselves, and not on their Roman oppressors. This kind of mauvaise foi is roundly denounced by Sartre's political pragmatist, Hoederer, who will lecture his idealistic secretary, Hugo, on the necessity to get his hands dirty in order to achieve political objectives. As a prototypical pioneer of political action, Bariona is caught in a double-bind, contending that a dubious moral blamelessness, based upon a radically self-defeating meta­ physics, provides an adequate basis for political resistance. The flaw in his reasoning, if not quite amounting to 'bad faith', is that it is shot through with negativity JSarah ought not to bear her child, in order not to bear the concomitant responsibility of regenerating this irredeem­ ably fallen world around the 'scandalised consciousness' of a new human life. Evidently, Bariona is enmeshed here in a defective logic, which purports to produce a positive conclusion from entirely negative premisses, and he has some way to go before we can speak credibly of his 'acts for life'. He covers that ground with the assistance of the Magus, Balthazar, played at the time by Sartre himself: 'Je jouais un des rois mages. [...] Mais j'exprimais des idées existentialistes en refusant à Bariona le droit de se suicider et en le décidant à combattre.'38 We need to gloss this as 'post-war existentialist ideas', discontinuous with those of the pre-war worldview enunciated by Antoine Roquentin, with whose conception of existence - the repulsive abundance of the contingent 'natural' world, framing the 'scandal' of consciousness in all its random and inchoate gratuitousness - Bariona's exhibits a striking congruence. The difference, however, is that Bariona presses his melancholic Weltanschauung into service as a rationale for collect­ ive (in)action, whereas Roquentin's merely explained his 'nausea' and legitimated a solipsistic apathy and retreat from society. In this sense, then, Bariona has already taken some steps towards a revolutionary stance even before he encounters the crucial influence of the Magi: 'Semblable à une colonne d'injustice, je veux me dresser contre le ciel; je mourrai seul et irréconcilié, et je veux que mon âme monte 38

46

Sartre, interview with L'Avant-Scène Théâtre, in Un Théâtre de situations, p.266.

vers les étoiles telle une grande clameur de cuivre, une clameur irritée' (p.599). Balthazar's rhetoric is central in converting this arguably futile gesture of defiance into an authentic act of revolt. As such, his speeches are a unique record of Sartre's evolving political thought in the war years, for, as Bernard-Henri Levy rightly asserts, Sartre's dramatis personae, unlike his characters in prose fiction, are generally also his mouthpieces.39 Bariona's gloomy affirmation that Ma dignité humaine est dans son désespoir' (p.603), is diametrically opposed to Oreste's later rallying cry that Ma vie humaine commence de l'autre côté du désespoir',40 and the transition from the first attitude to the second is due largely to the intervention of Balthazar/Sartre. This begins with what is, in effect, a reasoned reproach evoking Bariona's present existential death: he is wilfully insensible, says Balthazar, with the 'immobility of a bloody pagan statue' (such as that of Jupiter which will dominate the scene of Les Mouches). Balthazar teaches that man - unlike the fulfilled but ethereal being of the angel, on the one hand, or the dense material being of a stone, on the other - is so constructed that hope is an integral element of his constitution, indeed it is his very nature. His lesson in ontology presages the fundamental tenet of L'Être et le néant, expressed in the formula that Têtre du pour-soi se définit au contraire comme étant ce qu'il n'est pas et n'étant pas ce qu'il est':41 Mais lorsque Dieu a façonné la nature de l'homme, il a fondé ensemble l'espoir et le souci. Car l'homme, vois-tu, est toujours beaucoup plus que ce qu'il est. Tu vois cet homme-ci, tout alourdi par sa chair, enraciné sur la place par ses deux grands pieds et tu dis, étendant la main pour le toucher: il est là. Et cela n'est pas vrai: où que soit un homme, Bariona, il est toujours ailleurs, (p.604) 39

40 41

See B-H Lévy, p.515. Lévy analyses Bariona as 'une sorte de corps-à-corps, dans le texte et par le texte, entre le premier et le second Sartre' (p.513), by which he means the apolitical, pre-war Sartre of La Nausée, on the one hand, and the politically and socially committed, post-war Sartre of Les Temps modernes, on the other. See B-H Levy, pp.513-21, for a penetrating analysis of Bariona along these lines. Les Mouches, p. 114. L'Être et le néant, p.33. The phrase 4au contraire' marks the distinction from Têtre-en-soi', which is defined in the same paragraph as 'being what it is'.

47

By refusing to hope for change, Bariona reduces himself and his people to mere beasts, thus confirming the status assigned to them by their Roman oppressors.42 Worse yet, he exchanges his very humanity, the flux of freedom which is the 'pour-soi', for the rigid pétrification of the 'en-soi': 'Alors tu ne seras plus un homme, Bariona, tu ne seras plus qu'une pierre dure et noire sur la route' (p.605). However, Bariona remains unmoved by the wise king's teaching, whereas it is enthusiastically received as a message of life and hope by the villagers: 'Eh bien, si je n'étais pas né, moi, je le regetterais' (p.589). This oxymoronic non-sequitur, uttered by Simon, stands in sharp contrast to Bariona's life-denying remonstrations with 'the God of the Jews', which denote his growing despair and isolation: 'Je veux vivre longtemps, délaissé sur cette roche stérile, moi qui n'ai jamais demandé à naître et je veux être ton remords' (p.606). This flight into futile passivity is stigmatised by Sartre as a self-deluding gesture in bad faith, a pointless attempt to evade the responsibility which is a given of our situation by, more or less, blaming our bad luck.43 Bariona is indeed 'délaissé', but his abandonment is increasingly of his own making as even his wife, Sarah, deserts him, naturally interpreting news of the nativity as 'permission to bring her own child into the world'. There follows the pivotal scene of the Soothsayer's predictions, in which the quick and witty dialogue, larded with potent symbols and significant allusions, builds to the climax of Bariona's second major decision. The advent of Christ, according to le Sorcier, will occasion 42

43

48

Compare: 4Le colon vit sur "Pile du docteur Moreau", entouré de bêtes effroyables et faites à l'image de l'homme mais ratées, dont la mauvaise adaptation (ni animaux ni créatures humaines) se traduit par la haine et la méchanceté: ces bêtes veulent détruire la belle image d'elles-mêmes, le colon, l'homme parfait. Donc, l'attitude pratique immédiate du colon est celle de l'homme en face de la bête, vicieuse et sournoise' (Critique de la raison dialectique /, p.677). Compare: 'Pourtant cette responsabilité est d'un type très particulier. On me répondra, en effet, que "je n'ai pas demandé à naître", ce qui est une façon naïve de mettre l'accent sur notre facticité. Je suis responsable de tout, en effet, sauf de ma responsabilité même car je ne suis pas le fondement de mon être' (L'Être et le néant, p.641).

'much infant mortality among the Jews', a reference to the slaugher of the Innocents, and yet, in his subsequent ministry, he will not preach revolt nor insurrection. Rather, his mission will be that of a collabor­ ator, unmitigated (in Bariona's estimation) by miraculous tricks like the raising of the dead (Lazarus), or the propagation of paradoxical precepts, such as: 'Celui qui veut gagner sa vie la perdra' (p.612). For Bariona, these visions forecast 'a wasted life' culminating in an 'igno­ minious death', entailing the 'assassination of the Jewish people'. Although he had demanded the gradual disappearance of his village at its own instigation, he is enraged by the prospect of genocide resulting from the supervention of a charismatic jforce majeure. The people, he is told, will espouse Christ's doctrine, leading to the humiliation of the Jews: 'O Jérusalem humiliée!' (p.614). So far from delivering his people out of bondage, the boy Messiah will endorse it: '[Nous] attendions un soldat et on nous envoie un agneau mystique qui nous prêche la résignation et qui nous dit: "Faites comme moi, mourez sur votre croix, [...]"' (pp.614-15). Resignation is not the same thing as the radical passive revolt Bariona envisaged, for, ultimately, it would make of his people suicides, not martyrs, 'une nation de crucifiés consentants' (p.615). Bariona is therefore goaded into action by the anger he feels at the predicted consequences of the messianic mission: ironically, he is compelled to act in order to perpetuate passivity, to prevent it tipping over into complicity. His decision to 'tordre le cou frêle d'un enfant, fût-il le Roi des Juifs!', although superficially indefensible, is a piece of impeccable political reasoning, which represents an important step away from the necrotic realm of exis, towards the existential life of praxis: resistance will be translated into action.44 Little matter that his pre-emptive moral justification of this action - as merely the precipi­ tation of an inevitable event - is disingenuous in that it overlooks the fact (made clear by the Soothsayer) that Christ's life and ministry will be an indispensable prologue to his death, for that is the outcome which Bariona repudiates. It is doubly ironic, therefore, that the reversal of his resolve has nothing to do with political expediency and 44

See Laraque, p.61, for a persuasive exposition of this irresistible political logic: 4 Une seule solution s'impose: la mort du Christ.'

49

everything to do with the paternal sentiments which, in his own case, he was more than ready to set aside: Bon, cet enfant, je ne l'ai pas vu, mais je sais déjà que je ne le toucherai pas. Pour trouver le courage d'éteindre cette jeune vie entre mes doigts, il n'aurait pas fallu l'apercevoir d'abord au fond des yeux de son père. Allons, je suis vaincu, (p.620)

Bariona's 'defeat' is an important victory for life because his feelings for Joseph are not sympathetic but empathetic. He sees Jesus both in and through Joseph's eyes so that he becomes that formerly childless father (which he already is), and Jesus becomes, in effect, his son.45 Bariona's lengthy soliloquy, following his apocalyptic conver­ sion, evinces a mixture of conflictng emotions. On the one hand, he regrets his re-discovered tenderness and rebukes his own inconstancy; on the other, he envies his fellows their faith and is pained by his exclusion from their joy. Once more, it is Balthazar (in the person of Sartre) who introduces some order into his confusion, with a peda­ gogical intervention which is both an exegesis of the ambiguous Christian message of suffering and redemption ('in the midst of death we are in life', 'he who would save his life will lose it', etc.), and a lesson in modernised Cartesian dualism. Mind and body, transcend­ ence and immanence are distinct, says Balthazar; the static and selfindulgent contemplation of one's own suffering is vain and morbid, being an extreme concession to materiality. Christ's way with suffering is neither to dwell on it, nor to pride himself on it, nor to surrender to it. The good news is that man is not his suffering, because he transcends it by virtue of his responsibility for it. Whoever lucidly shoulders his daily burden of suffering (his cross, in the Christian metaphor) will find it lightened (in Christian terms) by Christ, and (in Sartrean terms) by the cognizance of his freedom, the certainty that man is a continuous recreation of himself: '[Tu] es à toi-même un don perpétuellement gratuit' (p.625). The corollary of this precept is that each new freedom constitutes both a challenge to and a pact with God, an assertion of the human right to suffer and a triumph over suffering: 45

50

For an analysis of this critical moment, see O'Donohoe (1995), pp.44-5.

4

Le Christ est né pour tous les enfants du monde, Bariona, et chaque fois qu'un enfant va naître, le Christ naîtra en lui et par lui' (p.626). It follows that the Jews, in general, must not abstain from procreation and that Bariona, in particular, 'must let his child be born'. In fact, Balthazar's speech is more rhetorically exhortative than it is philosophically rigorous, yet it prompts Bariona to reflect further upon his strategy. What brings about his conclusive transition from passive to active is the news of Herod's massacre of the Innocents, a catastrophe which seems to announce the ineffectuality of the new­ born Messiah, and causes the villagers to look again to Bariona for leadership. To the general surprise, this is the point at which he commands their obedience, not to his original injunction, but to his revised plan of action, now worthy of the name: 'Voici revenu le temps de combattre, le temps des moissons rouges [...]. Refuserezvous de combattre? Préférez-vous mourir de misère et de vieillesse dans votre nid d'aigle, là-haut?' (p.630). These speeches mark his accession to existential life, and he is aptly cheered to the echo: 'Vive Bariona!'(p.631). In the closing scenes of this play, the themes of life and death modulate, conflict and combine in a crescendo of ambiguity and equivocation, which rehearses the inscrutable Christian message, and spells out the conditions in which the colonised individual has to seek freedom: [Cet] homme neuf [ce combattant] commence sa vie d'homme par la fin; il se tient pour un mort en puissance. Il sera tué: ce n'est pas seulement qu'il en accepte le risque, c'est qu'il en a la certitude; ce mort en puissance a perdu sa femme, ses fils; il a vu tant d'agonies qu'il veut vaincre plutôt que survivre; d'autres profiteront de la victoire, pas lui: il est trop las. Mais cette fatigue du cœur est à l'origine d'un incroyable courage. Nous trouvons notre humanité en deçà de la mort et du désespoir, il la trouve au-delà des supplices et de la mort.46

For the first time in his work - but by no means for the last time in his theatre - Sartre effectively translates the language of the Christian enigma ('whoever would save his life shall lose it') into the political 46

'Préface aux Damnés de la terre\ in Situations V, p. 185.

51

paradox of revolutionary resistance ('a cause worth living for is a cause worth dying for'), by juxtaposing the realities of colonialist oppression with the mystical promises of the Messiah's nativity: SARAH: Est-ce que tu veux vraiment mourir...? Le Christ exige au contraire que Ton vive... BARIONA: Je ne veux pas mourir. Je n'ai aucune envie de mourir. J'aimerais vivre et jouir de ce monde qui m'est découvert et t'aider à élever notre enfant. Mais je veux empêcher qu'on ne tue notre Messie et je crois bien que je n'ai pas le choix: je ne puis le défendre qu'en donnant ma vie. (p.631)

The ownership indicateéby the possessive pronoun 'notre' signifies a conversion on Bariona's part which some critics have found uncon­ vincing,47 but which Laraque has rationalised as consistent with his automatic opposition to the Roman tyranny: '[Bariona] a choisi de défendre le Christ seulement lorsqu'il a su que les Romains avaient décrété la mort de celui-ci.'48 Contrary as this logic may seem, it chimes with the radical conviction of the resistant, but it does not wholly account for the almost manic mood which suddenly seizes Bariona and bespeaks a quasi-religious apotheosis: Je veux que vous mouriez dans la joie. Le Christ est né, ô mes hommes, et vous allez accomplir votre destin. Vous allez mourir en guerriers comme vous le rêviez dans votre jeunesse et vous allez mourir pour Dieu, (p.632)

This note of fanaticism, worthy of a Racinian demagogue, is both the aspect of the play which exposed Sartre to speculation about his own religious experience (to which he was sensitive, as we have seen), and the camouflage which enabled him to field a protagonist baying for the blood of the oppressor, under the very nose of that oppressor, with impunity. In any event, it is clear from his final soliloquy that Bariona (like Sartre) places his faith in men before - indeed, against - God, just as his successor, Oreste, would do two years later on the Paris stage: 'Je serai libre, libre. Libre contre Dieu et pour Dieu, contre moi47 48

52

Thure Stenstrôm, for example. Laraque, p.66.

même et pour moi-même...' (p.627). And it is equally clear from his closing speech, as Quinn has noted, that 'espoir itself becomes the locus around which men are called upon to die, not in some senseless suicidal gesture, but in a courageous assertion of the primacy of life and freedom.'49 The life-affirming energy of the nativity, menaced by the murderous intent of Herod (the arch-collaborator with the coloni­ alist project), is transformed, via a pseudo-religious fervour, into the battle-cry of resistance and the dynamic thrust of revolt: Car, en ce premier temps de la révolte, il faut tuer: abattre un Européen, c'est faire d'une pierre deux coups, supprimer en même temps un oppresseur et un opprimé: restent un homme mort et un homme libre; le survivant, pour la première fois, sent un sol national sous la plante de ses pieds.50

A similar exhortation would resound from Sartre's second play, couched this time in a less familiar, but arguably more apposite, mythology.

Les Mouches According to Simone de Beauvoir, the thematic link between Bariona and Les Mouches was explicit, although it seems the idea for Sartre's second foray into the theatre came to him fortuitously. The eminent director, Jean-Louis Barrault, had apparently told two of their mutual actress-friends (Mes deux Olga', Barbezat and Kosakiewicz, alias Olga Dominique) that, if they wanted the opportunity to act in 'real roles', they should 'get someone to write a play for them': Et Sartre pensa: 'Pourquoi pas moi?' Au Stalag, il avait composé et mis en scène une pièce, Bariona; le sujet apparent de ce 'mystère' était la naissance du Christ; en fait, le drame traitait de l'occupation de la Palestine par les Romains, et les prisonniers ne s'y étaient pas trompés: ils avaient applaudi, la nuit de

49 50

Quinn, p. 104. 'Préface aux Damnés de la terre\ in Situations V, p. 183.

53

Noël, une invitation à la résistance. Voilà le vrai théâtre, avait pensé Sartre: un appel à un public auquel on est lié par une communauté de situation. Cette communauté existait entre tous les Français, que les Allemands et Vichy exhortaient quotidiennement aux remords et à la soumission: on pouvait trouver un moyen de leur parler de révolte, de liberté. Il commença à chercher une intrigue à la fois prudente et transparente.51

It might seem a touch incongruous, not to say infradig, to connect Sartre's high-minded aspiration to issue a public 'invitation to resist­ ance' with a private and spontaneous whim to write parts for a couple of aspiring young thespians. Nevertheless, Beauvoir records that, inspired from this unexpected quarter, Sartre began work on Les Mouches in summer 1941, during a tour of the Zone libre, where he had hoped, in vain, to drum up support for his proposed clandestine movement, Socialisme et liberté:52 [...] Sartre resta travailler au café. Il écrivit les premières répliques d'un drame sur les Atrides. Toute nouvelle invention, ou presque, prenait d'abord chez lui une forme mythique et je pensai que bientôt il expulserait de sa pièce Electre, Oreste et leur famille. [...] Non, il ne renonçait pas aux Atrides; il avait trouvé le moyen d'utiliser leur histoire pour attaquer l'ordre moral, pour refuser les remords dont Vichy et l'Allemagne essayaient de nous infester, pour parler de la liberté.53

So, Greek mythology would be the pretext and the camouflage of Les Mouches, just as the Judaeo-Christian legend had provided cover for the subversive message of Bariona. During the war, therefore, Sartre naturally had to insist upon the abstract dimension of his ethical illustration, and justified his choice of a mythical subject, an assassin from Antiquity, in those terms: [M]on héros commet le forfait d'apparence le plus inhumain. [...] Par ce geste, qu'on ne peut isoler de ses réactions, il rétablit l'harmonie d'un rythme qui dépasse en portée la notion du bien et du mal. Mais son acte restera stérile s'il n'est pas total et définitif, [...].

51 52 53

54

La Force de l'âge, p.499. See La Force de l'âge, p.504. La Force de l'âge, pp.508, 510.

Libre en conscience, l'homme qui s'est haussé à ce point au-dessus de luimême ne deviendra libre en situation que s'il rétablit la liberté pour autrui, si son acte a pour conséquence la disparition d'un état de choses existant et le rétablissement de ce qui devrait être. Le raccourci du théâtre exigeait une situation dramatique d'une intensité particulière. Si j'avais imaginé mon héros, l'horreur qu'il eût inspirée le condamnait sans merci à être méconnu. C'est pourquoi j'ai eu recours à un personnage qui, théâtralement, était déjà situé.54

Immediately post-war, however, Sartre repudiated such obfuscation and contended that the drama he 'really wanted to write' was 'celui du terroriste qui, en descendant des Allemands dans la rue, déclenche l'exécution de cinquante otages.'55 Nevertheless, he insisted that the resistance meaning of Les Mouches had been unequivocally under­ stood by those to whom it was addressed: [J]'ai essayé de montrer que le remords n'était pas l'attitude que les Français devaient choisir après l'effondrement militaire de notre pays. [...] Il fallait alors redresser le peuple français, lui rendre courage. La pièce fut admirablement comprise par les gens qui s'étaient levés contre le gouvernement de Vichy, le regardaient comme un avilissement, par tous ceux qui, en France, voulaient s'insurger contre toute domination nazie.56

Sartre adduces in support of this interpretation the critique penned by Michel Leiris in the twelfth issue of Les Lettres françaises [clandestines], six months after the play's première at the Théâtre de la Cité on 3 June 1943, under the punning title: 'Oreste et la Cité'.57 It was manifest to Leiris that Oreste was setting an example of commitment and autonomy, which 'all men alienated from themselves by their respect for the established order' were called upon to emulate. However, this fact was less evident to most other critics, who panned 54 55 56 57

Interview in Comœdia, 24 April 1943, in Un Théâtre de situations, pp.267-9 (pp.268-9). Interview in Carrefour, 9 September 1944, in Un Théâtre de situations, p.269. Verger, no.2, June 1947, and no.5, 1948, in Un Théâtre de situations, pp.272-9, (pp.273, 275). First published anonymously, then reprinted in Michel Leiris, Brisées (Paris, Mercure de France, 1966), and in Lecarme (1973), pp.73-7. Also, see Galster (2001a), pp. 169-74.

55

the play, principally on aesthetic rather than on moral grounds. A notable and somewhat odd exception to this rule is the critic of the German paper Pariser Zeiïung, Frédérique Straub, who predicted 'certain success' for the play, while finding its treatment of the theme of remorse defective: Car nous ne pouvons appeler tragédie du remords ce spectacle dont le remords n'est ni l'âme, ni l'axe, mais tout au plus le complément. La pièce de M. Sartre n'en est pas moins développée sur une trame digne de la mythologie grecque. [...] La ligne de la tragédie est fort belle. Mais elle se perd dans de longs et monotones débats, dans une endormante perquisition des caractères.59

Indeed, Mme Straub generally praised the quality of the production, although (ironically) she savaged the performance of Olga Dominique in the role that Sartre had so thoughfully created for her (Electre). By contrast, she appears to have raised no objection at all to the rallyingcry to resistance that Sartre intended to make.60 Here, as with Bariona, I do not intend to enter this debate about Les Mouches - was it an audacious act of resistance on Sartre's part, or a self-serving piece of opportunism? - because I want to come on to the text itself in order to see how well it bears out Sartre's claims for it, and whether there is, indeed, a life-affirming message to be salvaged from the mayhem of ancient Argos.61 58

59 60

61

56

See Un Théâtre de situations, pp.279-80, note 4, for a selection of the more extravagant comments made elsewhere, including accusations of 'adoration épileptique de la mort', and 'un certain état d'obsession scatophagique'! Pariser Zeitung, 18 June 1943, p.5. Ingrid Galster, in her minute dissection of the play's reception, has noted that remarkably few critics cottoned on to the 'capital notion of freedom' in Les Mouches: 'Rares sont ceux qui reconnaissent que le thème occupe une position centrale dans la pièce ou qui essaient de faire de celle-ci une concrétisation qui dépasse le cadre mythologique' (Galster [2001a], p.l 17). Jacques Lecarme has pointed to evidence that Sartre was very nearly dismissed from his post at the Lycée Condorcet, so unambiguous was the clarion call to resistance in Les Mouches, and claims that the collaborationist press delib­ erately 'missed the point' out of enlightened self-interest: 'Il n'était pas alors un seul élève de Sartre, un seul spectateur des Mouches pour imaginer un Sartre attentiste et ambigu. [...] Si les critiques de la presse collaborationniste (et il n'y

The prospects for this do not look promising, as the Atrides are a mythical Greek dynasty congenitally afflicted by internecine strife. Atreus himself 'égorgea lâchement ses neveux'.62 Agamemnon sacrificed Clytemnestra's daughter, Iphigenia, then in turn died at the hands of his wife's lover, Aegistus, with Clytemnestra's connivance. So, the Argos to which Sartre's Oreste comes is under the heel of assassins, a city 'oppressed, dominated by flies, envoys of the dead';63 a pseudo-theocratic dictatorship in which 'the religion of the state is a religion of mortification and repentance',64 and whose régime is 'not rooted in a future living order, but in a past petrified in death'.65 The Argives collude in their own oppression because they were the passive accomplices to Agamemnon's murder: 'Les gens d'ici n'ont rien dit parce qu'ils s'ennuyaient et qu'ils voulaient voir une mort violente' (p. 18). They are all 'guilty of regicide',66 and in order less to expunge their guilt than to wallow in it, the people go dressed permanently in mourning, 'le costume d'Argos' (p.19), make regular libations to Jupiter, the god of death, and annually celebrate the macabre 'Fête des Morts', at which the living invoke their predecessors with selfdeprecating incantations: 'Pardonnez-nous de vivre alors que vous êtes morts!' (p.54). It is the prerogative of the living to assign mean­ ings to what they do, but guilt and shame incapacitate that vital function.67 The Argives subsist in diametrical opposition to Jesus's injunction to 'let the dead bury their dead', for they are continually exhuming and re-burying their dead in their effort to inter themselves.

62

63 64 65 66 67

en avait pas d'autre à Paris) n'ont pas marqué cette signification des Mouches, c'est qu'ils ne voulaient ni ne pouvaient perdre leur gagne-pain' (Lecarme [2000], p. 174). Les Mouches, in Théâtre I, pp.7-121 (p.56). Further references are mostly in the main text; where consecutive quotations concern the same page, only the first is referenced. Goldmann, p. 106. Cranston, p.31. Spoerri, p.58. SeeBoros, p.211. Compare Daniel's reflection about the self-conscious, guilty homosexual: 4Les pédérastes qui se vantent ou qui s'affichent ou simplement qui consentent [...] ce sont des morts; ils se sont tués à force d'avoir honte. Je ne veux pas de cette mort-là' (L'Age de raison, p.312).

57

In self-mortification, the nearer they come to fixity, the more closely they resemble their forebears, and the less offensive they are to them and to Jupiter: 'Je suis une charogne immonde' (p.50), cries one penitent. The Argives are the carrion on which the flies of remorse grow fat, and once a year they become Mes grasses proies vivantes' (p.53) of the spirits of the dead themselves. As in Bariona, the socio-political situation finds its reflection in the physical environment, which assails all the senses with the morbidity of Argos. The oppressive heat of the sun beats down on the 'deserted streets and closed courtyards', drawing off a 'stench of butchery', and the sepulchral silence of this 'corpse of a town' is broken only by the 'unbearable cries' of its guilty citizens beating their breasts behind the 'blood-smeared walls' of their wretched hovels.68 Dominating the town, materially and morally, is the statue of Jupiter, whose 'face d'assassin' - 'Yeux blancs, face barbouillée de sang" (p. 13), in Sartre's description, which juxtaposes red and white as ambivalent and complementary symbols of life and death - is a constant reminder of the crime which brought Égisthe to the throne. By way of contrast to this miserable litany, Oreste's memories of Corinth afford tantalising glimpses of its 'places ombragées [...] où l'on se promène le soir' (p.34), where the sounds are of music, laughter and life. Oreste is drawn by a fatal curiosity about his beginnings to this unwelcoming necropolis in which there are no 'agents', in the true sense of the word, and where the only impetus towards life emanates in chaotic and sporadic convulsions from the tortured soul of Electre. All other characters are either morally or actually dead: shadows, ghosts. Even Oreste's mentor advocates a futile and self-deluding liberal humanism, 'la liberté d'esprit' (p.24), an atheistic, solipsistic ethos akin to the Gidean dogma of disponibilité, 'libre pour tous les engagements et sachant qu'il ne faut jamais s'engager' (p.26).69 The Pedagogue's dualistic doctrines - which disdain the material world and aspire to the refinement of being as pure intelligence - do not 68 69

58

See pp. 14-21. Compare: 4I1 n'y a pas d'esprits. Pas plus qu'il n'y a d'âmes. Cela, nous le savons déjà' {Critique de la raison dialectique /, p.527).

produce a 'superior man' so much as a non-existent one, hence the levity and vacuity of which Oreste complains. Although the master is right to insist that 'there are only men', his conception of them as essentially cerebral beings inclines towards a dogma of moral desti­ tution and has done his pupil, Oreste, a great disservice in contributing to his sense of ephemerality. As for Jupiter - whether we see him as primarily the embodiment of religious superstition, and therefore a chimera, or the allegorical figure of German occupation, and therefore a very present reality - we know that, as the 'god of death', he is both these things, at once unreal and imaginary, but also ubiquitously influential. Although human, Égisthe - Jupiter's 'creature and mortal brother' - and Clytemnestre share the god's being-as-image: their crime is fifteen years in the past and since then they have devoted themselves entirely to being the sum of their act, to being the assassins of Agamemnon through and through. This is the identity they have acquired, nurtured, projected, and which they annually renew at their ghoulish ritual of the dead. Having become the essence they distilled themselves, they are, like Genet's Querelle, 'des suicidés moraux': 'Un mort c'est un être qui n'existe jamais plus pour soi-même mais seulement en soi, c'est-à-dire par l'opinion que les autres ont de lui. On tue pour pouvoir parler de soi à la troisième personne: [...].'70 Égisthe, in particular, admits he is 'more dead than Agamemnon' and that he is merely play-acting: 'tous mes actes et toutes mes paroles visent à composer mon image' (p.85). When he meets his violent end at the hands of Oreste, he submits 'like a lamb' because this is merely the logical accomplishment of a process long since underway. Death consecrates him as the 'real tyrant' he sought to be,71 and above all satisfies his lust for order (mechanistic and inherently inimical to the organic self-propagation of life): C'est pour Tordre que j'ai séduit Clytemnestre, pour l'ordre que j'ai tué mon roi; je voulais que l'ordre règne et qu'il règne par moi. J'ai vécu sans désir, sans amour, sans espoir: j'ai fait de l'ordre. O terrible et divine passion! (p.86)

70 71

Saint Genet, comédien et martyr, p.86. Gore, p. 56.

59

To establish the inert reign of 'order', Égisthe murdered Agamemnon, and if he yields meekly to Oreste, it is because 'it's in the order of things'. Simone de Beauvoir remarks that 'ce sont les fascistes qui attachent plus d'importance à la façon de mourir qu'aux actes', and Égisthe's mania for order is nothing if not fascistic, that is to say the practical application of an impossible aesthetic ideal of human perfectibility:72 Il y a une morale de la Beauté; elle exige de nous une sorte de stoïcisme démiurgique: optimisme sans espoir, acceptation du Mal comme condition de l'unité totale, affirmation de la réalité humaine, créatrice par-delà ses échecs, d'un univers qui l'écrase, assumption par la liberté des souffrances, des fautes et de la mort; il nous faut vouloir l'être comme si nous l'avions fait. [...] Je l'ai dit, il y a un optimisme stoïque et salaud de la beauté: elle nous demande d'accepter les douleurs et la mort pour l'amour de l'ordre, de l'harmonie, de l'unité.73

Égisthe accepts his violent death under the same imperative as the townspeople accept their living death of remorse, consoled by the belief (at once right and wrong) that the totalitarian order he founded will survive unchanged: 'Tout n'est pas fini' (p.88). His death is satisfying both dramatically and ethically, in that he achieves a kind of integrity which eludes Clytemnestre throughout. Like Shakespeare's Thane of Cawdor, 'nothing in life became him like the leaving it'.74 The only spark of life in the ghost town of Argos can be found in Electre, from her earliest appearance when she rubs her body lubriciously against the cold white wood of Jupiter's statue: 'Sens mon odeur de chair fraîche. Je suis jeune, moi, je suis vivante, ça doit te faire horreur' (p.30). Oreste remarks that her youth and vitality radiate from her face and that she is unlike the rest of the Argives, the reason being that she does not share their raison d'être of remorse: 72

73 74

60

La Force des choses, p.32. Even at the present historical distance, it is impos­ sible not to hear in Égisthe's rantings the echoes of a twentieth-century tyrant, and the bureaucratic refrain of the all-pervasive surveillance of occupation: 'Ailes ist in Ordnung!' Saint Genet, comédien et martyr, pp.551, 552. Macbeth, I, 4 - although we must agree that Égisthe 'messily takes too long to die' (Goldthorpe, p.78).

'Ce sont leurs morts, non les miens' (p.42). At the Festival of the Dead, she flouts the solemnity of the occasion by dancing 'pour la joie, [...] pour la paix des hommes, [...] pour le bonheur et pour la vie' (p.59). She alone has a tendency towards action, entertaining visions of revolt and liberation, setting praxis above exis in the ethical scale. How, then, does she reach the point of giving Jupiter this morally suicidal undertaking at the end of the play's action: 'Je consacrerai ma vie entière à l'expiation' (p. 116)? The answer lies in her relationship with Oreste and in the discrepancy between her imagination of revenge and his realisation of it: La démarche d'Electre est très exactement opposée à celle de son frère: elle passe de la fermeté au refus alors qu'il va du non-engagement à l'acceptation; leurs trajectoires se croisent au point d'intersection marqué par le meurtre.75

That relationship begins with Oreste's return to his 'ville natale' (p.67), a double-edged epithet, for this is also the town where he will be re-born.76 A wandering exile, he goes by the ironical pseudonym of Philèbe (lover of youth), and his steps are dogged by Jupiter (the deity of death) going under the equally ironical alias of Démétrios.77 The victim of his tutor's upbringing - 'J'existe à peine [...] j'ignore les denses passions des vivants' (p.67) - Oreste scarcely feels himself alive at all and is bent on securing access to being, which he can only accomplish by doing, by overcoming the 'absence' to which his heritage, his education and his place in popular lore have consigned him. In Argos, he is believed dead, so his recent discovery of his 75 76 77

Lorris, pp.41-2. See Royle, pp.45-6. 'Philebus means "lover of youth". In the case of Orestes we are dealing with an educated, abstract, "absent" adolescence' (Champigny [1959], p.86). The name can also be construed more broadly as Mover of life', in the sense of one who places equal values upon reason and sentiment (see Grand Larousse encyclopédique, vol.8 [1963], p.409). Demeter is the goddess associated with the 'theme of the immortality of the race, then of the individual' (see Grand Larousse encyclopédique, vol.3 [1960], p.902). Sartre may also have had in mind any of the following Demetrioses: the Magician, the Epicurian, the Sceptic, the Cynic - for all of these attributes apply to his characterisation of Jupiter.

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origins has compounded his uneasy sense of himself as illusory, ethereal, unborn, une existence en sursis. The frustrated youth who rejects his teacher's notions of a rarefied intellectual freedom is highly disposed to act, as it were intuitively cognizant of the Sartrean precept that 'la réalité humaine n'est pas d'abord pour agir [mais] être pour elle, c'est agir et cesser d'agir, c'est cesser d'être'.78 By taking posses­ sion of the memories, hopes and fears of the Argives who ought, by rights, to be his subjects, Oreste seeks to commit the act that will 'fill up the void of his heart', and entitle him to share their present through an appropriation of the past which he lacks, but which they have in super-abundance. Like-most tragic heroes, he is drawn towards the violent action which is endemic in the genre: murder, the crime which ensures a definitive change in the world.79 Envisaging, as he does, the heinous crime of matricide, Oreste relishes in advance an act of revenge and retribution which will confer emphatically upon him the objective sense of being in which he is deficient, drawing down upon him the opprobrium of the people to whom he has never belonged, and confirming his belated advent in the world.80 Clytemnestre is, in every sense, the natural enemy of Oreste: not only has she conspired to kill his father and to ruin the life of the sister whom he admires, but she is also, of course, to blame for his exile, or (as she believed) his death - hence her initial hostility towards the Corinthian stranger 'young enough to be her son'. She is responsible for his dearth of being, for the fact that he is only 'Philèbe', and she needs to perpetuate his non-entity for the sake of her own living death. Mothers are supposed to give life, but Clytemnestre witholds it. The 78 79

80

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L'Être et le néant, p.556. Consider the murderous ambitions of Paul Hilbert, the eponymous 'Érostrate' (in Le Mur), or the apocalyptic moment of Mathieu in Les Chemins de la liberté: 4I1 avait appuyé sur la gâchette et, pour une fois, quelque chose était arrivé. Quelque chose de définitif, pensa-t-il en riant de plus belle' {La Mort dans l'âme, p. 187). Compare Sartre's explanation of Genet's admiration for killers: '[S]'il admire tant de criminels, s'il regrette de n'oser tuer, c'est que d'un même coup le meurtre change la victime en chose et l'assassin en objet [...] commettre un crime, c'est faire exister par avance son objectivité pour les policiers' (Saint Genet, comédien et martyr, p.86).

logic of Oreste's mythic destiny drives him towards matricide - Ml a le crime et le malheur dans le sang' (p.64) - but so too does the logic of human being, for Clytemnestre is the obstacle standing between Philèbe and Oreste, the impediment to his very existence: 'Oreste est libre pour le crime et par-delà le crime: je l'ai montré en proie à la liberté comme Œdipe est en proie à son destin.'81 Oreste both emulates and inverts the crime of Œdipus: whereas that banished son, propelled by providence, inadvertently loves his mother to death, Oreste knowingly hates and kills his mother by a deliberate exercise of his will. His conversion from the ethereal Philèbe to the substantial Oreste is intimately influenced by his quasi-incestuous relationship with the single life-force in Argos, Electre.82 Oreste begins to feel that influence from his first meeting with Electre, as he listens to her vituperative account of life under the tyrants, without the rational and stabilising presence of le Pédagogue to counterbalance her passion. When she asks how 'a young man from Corinth' would react to the situation in Argos, he comes under unexpected moral pressure to take a view, if not a stand, and already the non-committal attitude he has learnt from his tutor is giving way to uncertainty: 'Je ne sais pas' (p.35). But this first indication of reflection reveals no inclination towards action until he also meets Clytemnestre, whose indiscreet questions about his parentage (exacerbating his sense of non-existence) result in a violent skirmish with Electre, which culminates in her begging him to stay, while his mother begs him to leave. His defiance of the parent and alliance with the sibling - 'Je ne pars plus' (p.43) - are the essential pre-requisites of his act: the new generation combines to overthrow the order and values of the old, setting in train a fatal process which makes the assassination (if not the matricide) unavoidable, and yet which flows from an expressly free decision. Electre's sway over Oreste (like Lady Macbeth's over the new Thane of Cawdor) is potent but not over­ whelming and, although he gains an initial impetus from her spirit of 81 82

Sartre, Trière d'insérer de l'édition en volume' (1943), in Les Écrits de Sartre, p.88. For an analysis of this relationship in the context of Sartre's incest phantasies, see O'Donohoe (1996).

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revolt, he will increasingly think and act under his own authority as her strength is gradually sapped (again, bearing out the comparison with Macbeth). The first evidence of that new-found autonomy comes at the Festival of the Dead, when Égisthe announces the imminent arrival of Me plus grand des morts [...] celui que j'ai tué de mes mains, Agamemnon' (p.55). Oreste reacts violently to this, 'drawing his sword', a spontaneous impulse to avenge his father, and therefore a tacit disclosure of his ancestry. Were it not for the intervention of Jupiter, who physically restrains him, followed immediately by the scandalous entrance of-Electre, a more hot-blooded assassination might occur at this point than we subsequently see.83 As it happens, however, Electre dominates the scene for several minutes, clothed in sacrilegious white and impressing the crowd with her audacious apostrophe to Iphigenia and Agamemnon. Oreste is also impressed 'Chère Electre!' (p.60) - but again is reined in by Jupiter, anxious to snuff out his spark of existential life, whose 'party trick' (of causing the massive sepulchral stone to crash into the temple steps) has the desired effect of turning the crowd against Electre. Oreste, however, is not so fickle and when Égisthe threatens her with 'exile or death', 'Philèbe' makes his first voluntary declaration of his true identity to Jupiter: 'Cette femme est ma soeur, bonhomme! Va-t-en, je veux lui parler' (p.61). This new air of authority bespeaks the awakening will to freedom in Oreste, against which Jupiter knows he is ultimately powerless - so, he 'shrugs his shoulders' as he leaves. That awakening is fully accomplished in the course of the ensuing lengthy scene between brother and sister, which begins with Electre calling him 'Philèbe' and ends with her acknowledging that he is indeed her 'elder brother'. Before he can achieve that trans­ formation, Oreste has to understand two things: first, that hatred of Égisthe and Clytemnestre is her raison d'être; second, that only violence can cure the sickness of Argos, 'car on ne peut vaincre le mal que par un autre mal' (p.63). Both facts seem to preclude the intervention of the mild and unasssuming Philèbe, who in no wise 83

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For an analysis of Les Mouches as a transposition of Sartre's urge to avenge his own father's death, see O'Donohoe (1999b).

resembles the brother Electre imagines, '[qui] est de notre race, [qui] a le crime et le malheur dans le sang, comme moi' (p.64). Hence her contemptuous rebuttal of his suggestion that the awaited avenger might be different from the man of her imagination: ORESTE: Et s'il n'était pas comme tu l'imagines? ELECTRE: Comment veux-tu qu'il soit, le fils d'Agamemnon et de Clytemnestre? ORESTE: S'il était las de tout ce sang, ayant grandi dans une ville heureuse? ELECTRE: Alors je lui cracherais au visage et je lui dirais: 4Va-t-en, chien, va chez les femmes, car tu n'es rien d'autre qu'une femme. Mais tu fais un mauvais calcul: tu es le petit-fils d'Atrée, tu n'échapperas pas au destin des Atrides. [...]'

In order to prove her wrong, Oreste must name himself at last, but inevitably he shatters her illusions in doing so: Tu mens!... Oreste... Ah! j'aurais préféré que tu restes Philèbe et que mon frère fût mort' (p.65). This gentle young Corinthian is clearly not the stuff of which avenging sons are made, and Electre is distraught to hear he has never even used his sword: 'Je me sentais moins seule quand je ne te connaissais pas encore: j'attendais l'autre. Je ne pensais qu'à sa force et jamais à ma faiblesse.' The 'other' brother of her dreams does not and never has existed, and the nature of her self-avowed weakness is a refusal to face reality. As the life-force drains from Electre, we see that she had merely been playing the 'self-assigned role of tragic heroine with theatrical passion',84 while her challenge to the tyranny was predicated upon faith in a pre-ordained destiny, verging upon determinism.85 So she clings to the notion of the 'fate of the Atrides' and refuses to countenance flight, insisting that Oreste is dead, for all intents and purposes, since she and 'Philèbe' are strangers with no shared experi­ ence to unite them. However, the more she rejects him, the more unreal he feels himself to be, and the greater is the incentive for him to emerge from his 'ghostly' unreality and appropriate the substantial 84 85

McCall,p.l8. A flawed moral perspective, which Sartre anathematises as 'cowardly' in L'Existentialisme est un humanisme (see pp.84-5).

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history which Argos has to offer: 'Je veux mes souvenirs, mon sol, ma place au milieu des hommes d'Argos' (p.68). Ignoring Électre's pleas, he insists he will not leave Argos which offers him the chance he seeks to be 'un homme parmi les hommes', and it is only to placate her that he turns to Jupiter for a sign, creating a moment of suspense in which we wonder whether he is about to abnegate the very freedom which he is on the threshold of discovering. Sensing victory, Jupiter melodramatically rubs his hands and gives the sign which Oreste is supposed to interpret as a prohibition - yet the Freudian slip in his next speech confirms his predisposition towards violent selfaffirmation: 'Est-ce là ta volonté? Je ne puis le croire. Et cependant... cependant tu as défendu de verser le sang... Ah! qui parle de verser le sang, je ne sais plus ce que je dis...' (p.69). His need to act in a definitive fashion, his affection for Electre, and his sense of exile from Argos, all conspire to orientate Oreste towards the 'criminal' act he subconsciously contemplates, and which risks becoming an ejacu­ lation of selfhood, an aesthetic end in itself.86 Like Bariona before him, Oreste seeks guidance only in order to assert himself against it - 'Elle n'est pas pour moi, cette lumière; et personne ne peut plus me donner d'ordre à présent' (p.70) - and his divergence from Electre is most marked at this critical moment: ORESTE: Comme tu es loin de moi, tout à coup..., comme tout est changé! Il y avait autour de moi quelque chose de vivant et de chaud. Quelque chose qui vient de mourir. [...] qu'est-ce donc qui vient de mourir? ELECTRE: Philèbe... ORESTE: Je te dis qu'il y a un autre chemin..., mon chemin. Tu ne le vois pas? (P-70)

As Ida Petazzoni Cases points out, 'C'est effectivement Philèbe qui vient de mourir, pour laisser place à Oreste.'87 The warm and 86

87

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Compare: %[P]uisque l'être se subordonne le faire, puisqu'on tue pour être criminel et parce qu'on l'est déjà, le criminel que je serai, que je suis de toute éternité, suscite en moi un meurtre qui se choisit ses prétextes. Dès lors, l'acte devient esthétique: c'est une finalité sans fin. [...] La victime est pur prétexte pour faire un geste dont la beauté se suffit' (Saint-Genet, comédien et martyr, pp. 115-16). Cases, p.94.

enveloping cocoon of abstraction is sloughed off, and Oreste emerges from the chrysalis of Philèbe to claim Argos as his city and Electre as his sister.88 But there has been a double 'death', in that Électre's will has ebbed away as Philèbe's demise threatens to deprive her of her dreams, so it is with great reluctance that she acknowledges: 'Oui. C'est bien toi. Tu es Oreste' (p.73). By wilfully accomplishing his own transformation from youthful intellectual to avenging son and brother, Oreste assumes responsibility for his destiny and for the act which that destiny puts in his way: Il y a des psychanalystes qui disent quelque chose qui me paraît dans une grande mesure juste, à savoir que la responsabilité d'un criminel n'est pas donnée dans l'instant où il tue, mais dans l'instant où il se décide à entrer avec la victime dans un système de relations qui le conduit plus ou moins irrévo­ cablement au meurtre. Je partage tout à fait cette idée.89

By freely asserting his identity, Oreste has knowingly entered into such a 'system of relations' with Égisthe and Clytemnestre, so it seems to me that he is neither 'acculé au meurtre', as Henri Rabi argues, nor that his matricide is 'deliberately gratuitous', as Hugh Dickinson would have it.90 Rather, he dons the mantle of avenger, en connaissance de cause, because it suits him to do so: Oreste '43 vient, certes, à Argos dans le projet de venger la mort de son père, mais il ne le sait pas encore, car ce qu'il poursuit, ce n'est pas la vengeance pure, c'est le geste, l'acte qui puisse lui 'donner droit de cité' parmi son peuple. [...] Quand il implore Zeus de lui indiquer son chemin [...] son choix en vérité est déjà fait.91

88 89 90 91

For a study of this and other name-changes in Sartre's theatre, see O'Donohoe (1999a). Sartre, interview with Der Spiegel, 11 May 1960, in Un Théâtre de situations, pp.383-^07(p.401). Rabi, p.434; Dickinson, p.239. Koefoed(1949),p.63.

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Undoubtedly, Oreste seeks 'a justification of his own individual existence',92 and interpretations of his conversion which overlook its introverted, ontological motivation appear incomplete.93 Oreste explicitly believes the killing of Égisthe is 'just' and, since Clytemnestre is equally guilty, her commensurate punishment should pose no particular moral problems (although for some critics it evidently does).94 Sartre justified it in the same terms as his hero: Son geste est celui d'un justicier puisque c'est pour venger le roi son père, assassiné par un usurpateur, qu'il tue à son tour ce dernier. Mais il étend le châtiment à sa propre mère, la reine, qu'il sacrifie parce qu'elle fut la complice du crime initial.95

But author and hero are disingenuous in claiming that Clytemnestre is just another guilty party, as if her relationship to Oreste gave her no special status.96 In fact, we shall see that what is difficult to justify ethically is less intractable ontologically. For, although the slaying of the mother is an extraneous act insofar as it is superfluous to the exaction of revenge and the exercise of justice, it performs crucial functions in the existential lives of both protagonists. Having urged Oreste to strike Égisthe, Electre begs him not to strike Clytemnestre as well, for she dreads the loss of her hatred, the motive force which will die with her enemies: the reality of revenge will correspond no more closely to her dreams than did Philèbe to her image of Oreste. As Oreste returns, she is already falling prey to remorse and an ominous darkness begins to obscure her vision, whereas the unrepentant hero senses a new dawn:

92 93

94 95 96

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Gore, p.60. See, for example, Cohn, p.201, Champigny (1959), p.94, and Laraque, pp.7980. Pierre Verstraeten (1972), by contrast, rightly insists upon the ontological (as well as the historical) dimension of the play (pp.27-8). See, for example, Dickinson, p.239, and Royle, pp.45-6. Sartre, interview with Yvon Novy, Comcedia, 24 April 1943, extract in Un Théâtre de situations, pp.268-9 (p.268). Consider the trouble that Camus's protagonist, Meursault (L'Étranger), gets into for not shedding tears at his mother's funeral, never mind killing her!

Il ne fait pas nuit: c'est le point du jour. Nous sommes libres Electre. Il me semble que je t'ai fait naître et que je viens de naître avec toi; je t'aime et tu m'appartiens. [...] Le sang nous unit doublement, car nous sommes de même sang et nous avons versé le sang, (p.91)

But this is not quite the birth of twins that Oreste so exultantly announces. On the contrary, Electre shuns the new life she is offered, while he grasps it with both hands. For her, matricide is a millstone which will anchor them forever in this criminal moment - 'Peux-tu empêcher que nous soyons pour toujours les assassins de notre mère?' - whereas for him, it is the longed-for burden which at last sets his feet firmly on the path towards himself: 'J'ai fait mon acte, Electre, et cet acte était bon. [...] Dieu sait où il mène: mais c'est mon chemin' (pp.91-2). Oreste's matricide conforms perfectly to what Edgar Morin called '[la] signification de véritable naissance virile' of murder in modern tragedy, 'l'initiation elle-même qui comporte mort et renais­ sance'.97 His decision to kill had marked the demise of Philèbe, and his remorseless massacre of Clytemnestre consummates the birth of Oreste. By taking the life of the mother who had withheld life from him - note the Furies tell us that he struck at her belly - he brings himself into the world at last, and Clytemnestre dies in confinement, invariably a bloody business. Électre's decline into complete collusion with Jupiter, reflected physically in her growing resemblance to Clytemnestre (remarked on by Oreste), is the reverse image of the latter's ascent to authentic autonomy, what Dorothy McCall has dubbed 'the symbolic murder of Jupiter'.98 Sartre presents this antithesis in their attitudes very much in terms of the life/death dialectic, which he locates at the heart of the moral debate, just as he had done in Bariona. For Oreste, his deed has brought a new dawn, but dreams evaporate when we awake, and it was dreams that had enabled Electre to 'viv[re] tranquille' (p. 101). But was she living, or partly living? Oreste, as we have just seen, dates their new life from the moment of his matricide, and imagines that this now bonds them in a common experience: '[Qu]'as-tu done

97 98

Morin, p. 164. McCall, p. 17.

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vécu que je n'aie vécu?' (p. 103). Beforehand, he claims, they were both 'trop légers' (p. 115), but while he embraces his burden as a vouchsafe of substance, Electre allows it to make her an object for others and for herself: PREMIÈRE ÉRINNYE: N'est-ce pas, petite poupée, nous te faisons moins peur que lui? Tu as besoin de nous, Electre, tu es notre enfant. [...] tu as besoin de souffrir dans ton corps pour oublier les souffrances de ton âme. Viens! Viens! [...] ORESTE, la saisissant par le bras: N'y va pas, je t'en supplie, ce serait ta perte. ELECTRE, se dégageant avec violence: Ha! je te hais. (pp. 103-4)

Electre's suffering is of her own making, and the more she succumbs to it, the more thing-like she becomes (and the more she resembles her mother). By contrast, Oreste increasingly asserts his independence of the objective world and of its god, Jupiter, who warns him Mes choses t'accusent de leurs voix pétrifiées' (p. 110). Yet he has no reason to fear the taunts of the mineral realm because, as a self-consciously free human being, he has no need of the en-soi to sustain him in being, as it sustained the tyrants and will sustain Electre. Tempting though re­ morse and sleep ('death's counterfeit')99 might be, Oreste aspires instead to show the citizens of Argos, in spite of Jupiter and of them­ selves, 'leur obscène et fade existence qui leur est donnée pour rien' (p. 114). Only by confronting this truth and abandoning false hopes can they learn, as Oreste has done, that Ma vie humaine commence de l'autre côté du désespoir'. This bespeaks an optimistic orientation towards a constructive future, which finds an ironic echo in Electre's abject surrender to Jupiter: c[R]oi des Dieux et des hommes, mon roi [...] je consacrerai ma vie entière à l'expiation' (p.l 16). It has been argued that Oreste's departure from Argos, leaving it as he does in the grip of the same wretched self-torment as he found it, makes of his actions hollow and mock-heroic gestures, devoid of courage and commitment. However, the text lends this view little support. Indeed, Oreste's valedictory speech is nothing if not an

99

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Macbeth, H, 3.

injunction to follow his example of altruistic and iconoclastic selfassertion: Mon crime [...] est ma raison de vivre et mon orgueil [...] c'est pour vous que j'ai tué [...] je prends tout sur moi. [...] Adieu, mes hommes, tentez de vivre: tout est neuf ici, tout est à commencer. Pour moi aussi la vie commence. Une étrange vie. (p. 120)

The 'strangeness' of that life will reside in the consciousness of his total self-dependence, the continuous prise de conscience of the inher­ ently free man, not necessarily of one politically or socially com­ mitted, but of a man radically aware of his humanity: Il va le premier sur la voie de la libération, au moment où les masses peuvent et doivent prendre conscience d'elles-mêmes; il est celui qui par son acte leur montre le premier la route.100

Oreste can perhaps be charged with 'mythifying' himself,101 but this sounds a tad tautological in view of his provenance, and is arguably anachronistic given what we know of Sartre's ongoing transition at the time from what he would later call his pre-war period of metaphysics, moralism and individualism.102 Finally, considering that he needed to circumvent the Nazi censorship, it is reasonable to assume that Sartre would have been unwise to stage any more overt a call to arms, as this might well have proved counter-productive. In short, I concur with Royle that there is 'no question of a betrayal'103 in Oreste's exit. He has surely set a good example of authenticity, and he cannot be blamed if others do not follow it as he urges them to do. We find out what happens to stubborn souls like that in Huis clos.

100

Sartre, 'Discussion autour des Mouches\ Verger, no.5, 1948, in Un Théâtre de situations, pp.273-9 (p.279). 101 See, for example, Gore, p.62, and Cases, p. 159. 102 See Sartre, pp.98-101, and 'Autoportrait à soixante-dix ans', Le Nouvel Observateur, 23, 30 June, 7 July 1975, in Situations X, pp. 133-226 (pp. 176-80). 103 Royle, p.50.

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Huis clos Sartre's third play, widely regarded as his chef d'œuvre, also has its roots (according to one of his accounts, at least) in the experience of POW camp: Pour Huis clos, je suis parti d'une double préoccupation, de fond et de forme. De fond: si j'avais le souci de dramatiser certains aspects de l'inexistentialisme, je n'oubliais pas le sentiment que j'avais eu au stalag à vivre constamment, totalement, sous le regard des autres, et l'enfer qui s'y établissait naturellement. De forme: je voulais tenir compte des exigences des comédiens qui ne sup­ portent pas que leurs partenaires aient plus de lignes de texte qu'eux. D'où l'idée de laisser les personnages tout le temps ensemble.104

The passing mention of 'actors' demands for equal shares of dia­ logue', points to another common denominator with Bariona and Les Mouches, namely the desire to accommodate a number of friends: [Au] moment où j'ai écrit Huis clos vers 1943 et début 1944, j'avais trois amis et je voulais qu'ils jouent une pièce, une pièce de moi, sans avantager aucun d'eux, [...] je voulais qu'ils restent ensemble tout le temps sur la scène, [...].,05

The friends in question were Wanda Kosakiewicz, Olga Barbezat and Albert Camus, who was both to direct and take the role of Garcin. Had this original casting held good, Paris would certainly have seen the first significant collaboration between Sartre and Camus, whose sub­ sequent destinies might therefore have been more closely linked than they actually were (despite the popular conjugation of their names as the co-equal kings of the post-war vogue of existentialism). However, fate decreed otherwise, as Simone de Beauvoir records: 104 105

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Sartre, interview with L'Avant-Scène Théâtre, no.402/403, 1-15 May 1968, extract in Les Écrits de Sartre, p. 100. 'Préface parlée à l'enregistrement sur disque de Huis Clos\ Deutsche Grammophon, 1965, in Un Théâtre de situations, pp.281-4 (p.281). Compare: Tai toujours écrit mes pièces pour des acteurs' ('Entretien avec Bernard Dort', Travail théâtral, no.32/33, 1980, in Un Théâtre de situations, pp.237-60 [p.243]).

Quand Olga Barbezat avait été arrêtée, Sartre avait abandonné le projet - [...]. Le directeur du Vieux-Colombier, Badel, s'y intéressa; Camus jugea qu'il n'était pas qualifié pour diriger des acteurs professionnels, ni pour se produire dans un théâtre parisien, et il envoya à Sartre une petite lettre, charmante, qui les déliait de leur accord.106

Thus it was that this play - originally entitled 'Les Autres' - reached the stage of the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, Paris, on 27 May 1944, with a quite different cast from the one that Sartre had envisaged, under the direction of another metteur-en-scène than the relatively young (30-year-old) and seemingly bashful Albert Camus, and just ten days before the beaches of Normandy became the stage for the biggest sea-borne invasion of'others' in history. None of which prevented its becoming an instant box-office success, revived almost immediately in the rentrée of the same year.107 This is a fact that we might easily overlook if we were to be guided solely by the reactions of the collaborationist press, at a moment which would prove to be the beginning of the endgame for the occupying armies of the Reich. The critics of the 'authorised' Paris papers were uniformly hostile, and quick to convert Sartre's thought­ ful eschatology into unmitigated scatology, with gratuitous references to bodily functions not usually talked about in polite company. Robert Francis accused Sartre of having 'déposé son petit pipi sur la scène du Vieux-Colombier' for the delectation of 'de jeunes gens impubères et de vieillards impuissants'.108 André Castelot called the play 'une ordure' no fewer than four times in a single sentence,109 while Jean Silvain went so far as to claim that 'shit' was the characters' 'raison d'être'.110 Why this critical obsession with excreta, when it is copu­ lation rather than defecation that preoccupies the characters for the latter part of the action? We must infer that Sartre had hit a nerve, and that the play's clear lesson, that 'your sins will find you out', was an uncomfortable message for all those who had thrown in their lot with 106 107 108 109 110

La Force de l'âge, pp.597, 598. For more detail, see Les Écrits de Sartre, pp.98-100. Réveil du peuple, 4 June 1944. La Gerbe, 8 June 1944. Appel, 15 June 1944.

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the Teutonic conqueror, soon to be in full and undignified retreat. Only Pierre Chapuis, writing in Combat (under the editorial control of Camus), admired the redemptive qualities of a drama set in hell, where the look of the other confronts us unavoidably with our 'image essentielle'.111 Ironically, this little masterpiece did not begin to earn serious critical acclaim until it transferred to Blitz-battered London in July 1946, where it was promptly banned by the Lord Chamberlain for daring to pretend that lesbians exist, even in Hades.112 The Lord Chamberlain was by no means alone in missing the point of the play. Journalistic and academic critics alike have custom­ arily done so too, generally citing the infamous punch-line: Tenfer, c'est les Autres',113 as evidence of its black and despairing pessimism. Not until twenty years after its war-time première did Sartre take the opportunity to set the record straight, so to speak, on the occasion of the play's recording on gramophone: Les trois personnes que vous entendrez dans Huis clos ne nous ressemblent pas en ceci que nous sommes vivants et qu'ils sont morts. Bien entendu, ici, 'morts' symbolise quelque chose. Ce que j'ai voulu indiquer, c'est précisément que beaucoup de gens [...] ont sur eux des jugements dont ils souffrent mais qu'ils ne cherchent même pas à changer. Et que ces gens-là sont comme morts. En ce sens qu'ils ne peuvent briser le cadre de leurs soucis, [...] et qu'ils restent ainsi victimes souvent des jugements qu'on a portés sur eux. [...] S'ils ont commencé à être lâches, rien ne vient changer le fait qu'ils étaient lâches. [...] c'est une mort vivante que d'être entouré par le souci perpétuel de jugements et d'actions qu'on ne veut pas changer. De sorte que, en vérité, comme nous sommes vivants, j'ai voulu montrer par l'absurde l'importance chez nous de la liberté, c'est-à-dire l'importance de changer les actes par d'autres actes.114

By stressing the metaphorical character of the play, Sartre forestalls literal-minded misinterpretations of it as a bizarre, imaginary evo111 112

Combat, 20 September 1944. For details of the play's reception in London and New York, see O'Donohoe (2001b). 113 Huis clos in Théâtre /, pp. 122-82 (p. 182). Further references are in the text; where consecutive quotations concern the same page, only the first is referenced. 114 'Préface parlée à l'enregistrement sur disque de Huis Clos\ 1965, in Un Théâtre de situations, pp.281-4 (p.283).

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cation of the after-life (which, of course, does not exist, in Sartre's view). Equally, he makes it clear that he was not concerned to examine the phenomenon of death itself which, he had argued in L'Être et le néants is an external event of which we have no knowledge and which is therefore not susceptible to analysis, whether in philosophical or dramatic discourse.115 At the same time, by asserting the distinction between 'dead' characters and 'living' audience, he contradicts the critical commonplace that Huis clos is essentially 'une image de la vie telle qu'elle est décrite dans L'Être et le néant9.116 Sartre was not saying that all human beings behave like this in their lives, and that personal relationships are therefore inevitably vitiated; but rather that the temptation to behave like this is inevitable, and we need to make a conscious effort to resist it. So, the play is a cautionary tale: '[C]'est, si vous voulez, notre "partie morte" qui est représentée'.117 But Huis clos is not only a modem, metaphorical, moral parable; it is also, and primarily, an accomplished piece of theatre. There is a paradoxical conjunction of qualities between the dead and the theatrical. The paradox lies in the fact that theatre is a live medium par excellence - the living human body and voice are the medium - yet the scripted situation necessarily mimics death. The future is closed and predictable, nothing can be changed: Mercutio will never win his duel, he will die every time, for he is mired in the immutability of life theatrically transposed. Sartre compounds this natural antithesis in Huis clos, by daring to present death itself as 'lived' by three characters who richly deserve to suffer the unique and (literally) inhuman fate of being dead as if they were alive. As Michel Contât has observed, 'les personnages [...] sont des consciences mortes [...] leur existence est avant tout une existence théâtrale'.118 This is not a naturalistic play, as Sartre's next three were to be, but one no less mythological than its predecessors from biblical and Greek antiquity. Like his neo-classical masters, Sartre has remoteness of place (a Second Empire salon in hell) compensate for proximity in 115 See 'Ma mort' in L'Être et le néant, pp.615-33, especially p.624. 116 Roy le, p. 105. 117 Sartre, interview with Der Spiegel, in Un Théâtre de situations, p.404. 118 Les Écrits de Sartre, p. 100.

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time,119 as if he intended - by a Hegelian negation of a negation - to realise the unimaginable.120 We are asked to suspend our disbelief, faced with a scenario in which three figures have lived, died and gone to hell, not resurrected, but dead, where - on account of their impossible 'survival' - they experience all the consequences of death at first-hand. They learn what it is to be the total accumulation of one's past, suffer their objectification in the minds of others, and discover their inability to change themselves or the world around them. This is all thoroughly unbelievable - given that the obliteration of consciousness is death's defining feature for Sartre - yet he has managed to render dramatically convincing the self-contradictory concept of 'conscience morte' by boldly exploiting the natural, yet paradoxical, existential affinity between drama and death. As with his reflections upon death in L'Être et le néant, Sartre's drama of the dead derives not from 'la considération de la mort, mais, au contraire, de celle de la vie',121 and his focus of interest is by no means 'la mort proprement dite',122 but, rather, human life. These characters are in the ultimate situation-limite, death being the all-important datum of their facticity: the future, and the changes which it makes possible, are not options. Worse, the present in which they are petrified (or, rather, not as petrified as they might wish) lays them open to the continuous unblinking look of each other, persist­ ently making objects of them in their here-and-now, just as they have become objects on earth: 'Ainsi l'existence même de la mort nous aliène tout entier, dans notre propre vie, au profit d'autrui. Être mort, c'est être en proie aux vivants.'123 Being simultaneously alive and dead - apparently the former, but actually the latter, in Sartre's ingenious fiction - his characters are also a prey to one another, incessantly renewing their deaths by their very presence to each other.

119 120

121 122 123

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See Racine's preface to Bajazet. '[La] mort comme néantisation d'une néantisation est position de mon être comme en-soi, au sens où, pour Hegel, la négation d'une négation est affirm­ ation' (L'Être et le néant, p.625). L'Être et le néant, p.624. Jeanson(1955),p.27. L'Être et le néant, p.628.

This unremittingly mortifying context is appositely concretised in the ostensibly innocuous incongruity of their peculiar perdition. The space itself is confined and enclosed, a perfect mimetic extension of the theatre; the door cannot be opened from the inside at will; there are no windows, no artefacts of illusory space (pictures, mirrors) unless we count the stage itself, which brings us round in an infernal circle! The scene is overseen by the impassive and immovable bronze bust on the mantelpiece: 'L'homme échoue devant le bronze, massif, inerte, l'être-en-soi de la philosophie sartrienne qui tient dans Huis clos le rôle dévolu à la statue de Jupiter dans Les Mouches,'124 Likewise, other things in the room display a disconcerting degree of what Sartre calls 'the coefficient of adversity': there is no light switch, the bell to summon the waiter works only when he is already there, the delicate sofas are too heavy to be moved, and the paper-knife is both literally and figuratively pointless. Truly a 'situation fausse' (p. 127) as Garcin quickly dubs it, doubly anachronistic (both out-of-date and outside time), and intrinsically incoherent insofar as nothing in it is quite what it seems, nor relates to other things quite as it ought to do. Both these last comments apply equally to the characters - physically, but especially morally. Garcin first realises that they will never sleep, and that even the luxury of blinking ('quatre mille petites évasions', p.130) is denied to them. Their bodies cannot express emotion ('Ici les larmes ne coulent pas', p. 160), and it gradually becomes clear that their tentative flight into sensuality is doomed because they appear incapable of experi­ encing pleasure or pain or - least of all - death, which is why they are 'together forever'. Their 'false situation' is one of 'life without a break', and yet which is not life at all: GARCIN: Très bien. Alors, il faut vivre les yeux ouverts... LE GARÇON, ironique: Vivre... GARCIN: Vous n'allez pas me chicaner pour une question de vocabulaire. (pp.131-2)

124

Lorris, p.68. 77

But, of course, any physical defects are merely metaphorical reflec­ tions of the moral deficiencies afflicting these wretched souls, flaws which they will exhibit clearly by their actions in hell, and which flow inexorably from the 'essences' they created for themselves by their actions in the world. In Sartrean metaphysics, we finally become what we have done, 'being is what has been', in the phrase he borrows from Heidegger: 'Wesen ist was gewesen ist.'125 Thus, the audience become their judges from the privileged perspective of God (or Satan) himself: do their actions in hell bespeak the well-meaning innocence each seeks to project, or are they rather conditioned by a now irrevocable character, defined in a less favourable light by the deeds of their done lives? The characters of Huis clos are each responsible, more or less directly, for the death of someone who loved them. Estelle murdered her own baby and thereby provoked her lover's suicide. Inès also drove her lover to suicide, having first ruined her cousin's life. Garcin predeceases his wife, but still has to answer for her death, which swiftly ensues, owing to the 'chagrin' (p. 173) induced by his cruel treatement of her. Inès rightly remarks: 'Il y a des gens qui ont souffert pour nous jusqu'à la mort et cela nous amusait beaucoup' (p. 146). So, they are well qualified to be the executioner of each other, and ideally suited to a triangular relationship which mirrors the relationships they created and destroyed in life: Garcin, his wife and his mistress; Inès, her cousin and Florence; Estelle, her husband and Pierre. They are indeed 'entre assassins', but does this wholly account for their damnation, as Inès implies? No doubt it satisfies the precept of natural justice enshrined in the lex talionis, but if the ideal is that the punishment fit the crime, the penalty is arguably excessive in these cases since all three are condemned to suffer death not once, but repeatedly throughout eternity. The explanation is that their wicked deeds are only symptoms of an over-arching mode of being which is radically immoral in Sartrean ethics, and it is this, more than their several maleficent actions, which has brought their infinite punish­ ment upon them.

125

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L'Être et le néant, p. 164.

Garcin's early admission that 'je vivais toujours dans des situ­ ations fausses; j'adorais ça' (p. 127), supplies a key to his character and that of his companions. Reassurance about the falsity of the situation restores his 'human dignity', as the waiter cuttingly observes, and enables him to insist upon his determination to 'face facts', a theme on which he harps so much as to make us think he 'doth protest too much'. Garcin is anxious chiefly to persuade himself that reality has to be faced - an impression reinforced by his obvious alarm at the prospect of 'la vie sans coupure' (p. 130), and his candid nostalgia for 'le sommeil douillet' and his self-induced 'rêves simples' (p.131). As the true horror of 'living with eyes wide open' begins to dawn on him, he panics and hammers on the door to recall the waiter, yet is ashamed to confess his fear in front of Inès, doing so only obliquely: 'Vous n'avez pas peur, vous?' (p. 136). This is as close as Garcin gets to acknowledging what he is: a coward. Fear is the outward sign of his inward state, his essence, 'la lâcheté'.126 However he might try to re­ interpret his life, everything Garcin says or does subsequently will tend to confirm this first impression, and we shall continue to deduce that he was a coward then because he is a coward now. Although he is the first to call himself 'un mort' (p. 140) when he brags of his violent death, Garcin is nevertheless quick to adopt Estelle's euphemism of 'absent' and persists in the delusion that he can 'put his life in order'. Reminiscing about nights at the newspaper on which he was a journalist, he unwittingly reveals more of his taste for role-playing in false situations: 'J'aimais vivre au milieu d'hommes en bras de chemise' (p.141).127 So it is a cruel irony that he is incarcerated with two women who will not let him remove his jacket, though he prefers to ascribe this fact to 'le hasard' (p. 142) than to attach any significance to it. His machiste mindset, now as then, facilitates an evasiveness disguised as courtesy; he advocates an enquiry into their lives, yet he stands back to let Estelle speak first, in order to assess the reactions of the jury (Inès). Having readily absolved Estelle, he prefaces his own case with this prejudicial 126 See Roy le, p.85, and Lorris, p.79. 127 Garcin's profession is clearly inspired by the war-time activity of the young Albert Camus, whom Sartre originally intended for the part.

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rhetoric: 'Et vous, trouvez-vous que c'est une faute de vivre selon ses principes?' (p. 145), before delivering a seemingly no-nonsense account of himself in a tough, staccato style which elicits the desired reaction from Estelle, but only further contempt from Inès. Her relentless inquisition upsets their pact of mutual comfort and reminds Garcin of his suffering wife, who represents an aspect of his earthly conduct on which he would prefer to remain silent. That explains why he raises his hand against Inès, who then enunciates the more general truth which encapsulates their situation: 'Le bourreau, c'est chacun de nous pour les deux autres' (p. 147). As we should expect a coward to do, Garcin recoils from -this unwholesome fact and proposes a retreat into complete silence as their only means of respite. This is a seminal moment in Sartre's theatre, precursing the absurdist drama of Samuel Beckett or the naturalism of Harold Pinter: silence as spectacle, the deliberate deadening of the sensory experi­ ence that is at the very heart of theatre, and embedded in the word 'audience', meaning 'those who hear\ Belief is beggared, a tension is set up between the attention of the spectators and the silence they are abusively called upon to witness. The theatrical convention is trans­ gressed, and the mockery of the audience's goodwill underscores the bad faith of the dissembling Garcin, who has lurched from one unreliable utterance to another, before lapsing into sullen silence, like a mendacious drunkard passing out. Silence cannot persist in the theatre, it would eventually have to be broken by the audience itself, which is the unthinkable scandal that stands the medium's logic on its head: when hearer becomes speaker, what becomes of the speaker/ actor? Just as the characters are each other's executioner, so they are each other's audience, and cannot bear the silence any better than the paying public for whom they perform. Inès breaks it first by singing a macabre ditty about the busy guillotine in revolutionary Paris, then Estelle becomes anxious about her appearance and begins asking for a mirror so that, very soon, Garcin's strategic escape is frustrated and he too breaks his silence in order to urge them to try to 'oublier la présence des autres' (p. 152) - a futile injunction, as Inès makes clear:

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Ah! oublier. Quel enfantillage! Je vous sens jusque dans mes os. Votre silence me crie dans les oreilles. Vous pouvez vous clouer la bouche, vous pouvez vous couper la langue, est-ce que vous vous empêcherez d'exister? (p. 153)

Their very presence to each other is irrefragable: they cannot not exist, any more than they can cease to be the characters they have become by their earthly deeds. Wearily, Garcin suggests another round of self-examination, intended to discover why they have been damned, again goading the fragile Estelle to begin, but taking over when she demurs: 'Mais je me connais. [...] Je ne suis pas très joli' (p. 154). But his ready selfdeprecation is just another rhetorical device, and Ines's typically incisive interjection: 'Ça va. On sait que vous avez déserté', is angrily dismissed. So, we suspect that the 'truth' we are about to hear is strictly a truth which suits Garcin's macho self-image: 'Je suis ici parce que j'ai torturé ma femme. C'est tout' (p. 155). As Lorris has noted, Garcin's cruelty to his wife is not in itself a form of behaviour which defines him, but rather indicates a constant, underlying attitude of cowardice.128 Like the typical bully, he made her suffer 'parce que c'était facile'. She was a natural victim both because her exaggerated respect for him made her vulnerable, and because her stoic endurance constituted a challenge to his own lack of courage: 'C'est une femme qui a la vocation du martyre.' His assaults upon her emotional balance culminated in his installing his mistress in the house, as the final insult, an outrage that he presents as an extreme act of male boorishness, and the sole cause of his damnation: 'Un goujat, disiez-vous? Dame: sinon, qu'est-ce que je ferais ici? Et vous?' (p. 156). On two occasions, therefore, Garcin has supposedly confessed, and each time shied away from the truth. The cowardly cruelty that was the hallmark of Garcin's conjugal conduct on earth, comes to the fore again in his ruthless interrogation of Estelle. Here, he takes evident pleasure in joining forces with Inès to goad Estelle into a full confession of her most heinous crime: infanticide. He then sketches a putative alliance between himself and Inès, intended to exclude Estelle and minimise his own vulnerability 128

See Lorris, pp.78-9.

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by casting him in the flattering role of the voice of reason and pity; but Inès sees through him again - 'Garcin, il y a aussi beaucoup de pièges pour vous, dans cette chambre' (p. 163) - and easily buys him off with a promise 'not to hurt him' if he leaves her free to seduce Estelle. As if this self-serving volte-face were not damaging enough to Garcin's public image, he soon emulates the tormenting machinations of his lesbian counterpart. When he sees possible advantage in striking up a purely sexual liaison with Estelle, of the kind that Inès had failed to engineer, he does not hesitate to repel Inès's objections by force. In short, Garcin's violence against the women with whom he shares this hell replicates the machismo which, in his earthly exis­ tence, was a poor disguise of the unmanly cowardice for which he becomes a by-word among those who have survived him. What is Gomez saying about him to make Garcin call him: 'Un beau salaud' (p. 170)? Why the pressing anxiety to win Estelle's confidence? 'Ah! il faut bien que tu aies fait un bien mauvais coup pour me réclamer ainsi ma confiance' (p. 171). What is Garcin's dark secret, that is beginning to leak like puss from an infected wound, as he pre-emptively justifies himself? 'Je voulais témoigner, [...] Je comptais y ouvrir un journal pacifiste.' It becomes clear at this point how well-chosen are these tormentors of Garcin. Estelle is intellectually too unsophisticated to realise what he is driving at, so she has no idea how painful it will be for him to hear: 'Que veux-tu que je te dise? Tu as bien fait puisque tu ne voulais pas te battre.' By contrast, Inès understands perfectly what Garcin wants Estelle to say and, more importantly, she understands why: 'Mon trésor, il faut lui dire qu'il s'est enfui comme un lion. Car il s'est enfui, ton gros chéri. C'est ce qui le taquine.' The hitherto unspeakable truth is implicit in Garcin's question: 'Estelle, est-ce que je suis un lâche?' Once this fatal word has been pronounced - the word which describes what Garcin is - it recurs thereafter like a refrain, labelling him forever. His naïve hope that the manner of his death could 'prove' he was not a coward ('si je meurs proprement', p. 172), did him a disservice, since we learn that he did not die 'cleanly' in any case.129 129 Garcin was mistaken in thinking he could adopt an authentic attitude towards death: 'Nous ne saurions donc ni penser la mort, ni l'attendre, ni nous armer

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Inès is now free to classify him, and Estelle gives up all pretence at 'confiance': 'Et toi, Estelle? aimes-tu les lâches?' (p. 173), Inès enquires; 'Si tu savais comme ça m'est égal. Lâche ou non, pourvu qu'il embrasse bien', replies Estelle, with depressing candour. Judg­ ment is passed on earth - 'Ils pensent: Garcin est un lâche. [...] Dans six mois, ils diront: lâche comme Garcin' - and takes on the solidity of a proverbial truth, since neither Inès nor Estelle will challenge it, and Garcin can do nothing to alter it: Ah! revenir un seul jour au milieu d'eux... quel démenti! Mais je suis hors jeu; ils font le bilan sans s'occuper de moi, et ils ont raison puisque je suis mort. Fait comme un rat. (// rit.) Je suis tombé dans le domaine public, (p. 174)

Garcin learns the hard lesson that when the 'for-itself dies, all subjectivity is lost and the personal self persists only as an 'object of prey to others'. It is an illusion that there is redemption to be had in the trust of Estelle, because this would change nothing of Garcin's finished life, even supposing she could be bothered to make the necessary effort: 'Même si tu étais un lâche, je t'aimerais, là! Cela ne te suffit pas?' (p. 175). In a word, no. Just as he fled from danger in this earthly world, so Garcin now attempts to flee from his hellish companions, who know him for what he is. Yet, when the door is opened, he is too afraid to step through it and is predictably the victim once again of his own cowardice, for the scarcely preferable alternative is to stay and be judged. Naturally, he tries to rationalise his craven behaviour, at the same time tarring Inès with the same brush: Et si tu dis que je suis un lâche, c'est en connaissance de cause, hein? [...] Je ne pouvais pas te laisser ici, triomphante, avec toutes ces pensées dans ta tête; toutes ces pensées qui me concernent, (p. 178)

contre elle; mais aussi nos projets sont-ils, en tant que projets - non par suite de notre aveuglement, comme dit le chrétien, mais par principe - indépendants d'elle. Et, bien qu'il y ait d'innombrables attitudes possibles en face de cet irréalisable "à réaliser par-dessus le marché", il n'y a pas lieu de les classer en authentiques et inauthentiques, puisque, justement, nous mourons toujours pardessus le marché' (L'Être et le néant, pp.632-3).

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It would be bravery of a sort to venture into the corridors of hell, leaving behind a reputation he could never change or defend. But, as a coward, Garcin is necessarily incapable of bravery. Inès insists that what he willed or intended, whether on earth or here and now, is irrelevant. All that matters is what he did: 'Seuls les actes décident de ce qu'on a voulu. [...] Tu n'es rien d'autre que ta vie' (p. 179). This uncompromising moral tenet, at the very core of Sartrean ethics, sends Garcin fleeing again into the arms of Estelle - a reaction that is the final vouchsafe of his cowardice, which Inès mercilessly reprimands with her punning, punishing taunt: 'Ha! lâche! lâche! Va! Va te faire consoler par les femmesr-f...] Lâche! Lâche! Lâche! Lâche! En vain tu me fuis, je ne te lâcherai pas' (pp. 180, 181). Garcin is what he was, as if forever frozen at that minuscule moment of death when we are the present perfection of our past: 'A la limite, à l'instant infinitésimal de ma mort, je ne serai plus que mon passé. Lui seul me définira.'130 By making the same analysis of Inès and Estelle, we could show that in death, they too are what they made of themselves in life, the sum of their acts.131 Estelle is irremediably egocentric, even narcissistic; Inès is wantonly callous, even sadistic.132 Lorris rightly summarises Sartre's eschatological ethics as follows: 'Huis clos met en scène trois personnes condamnées à être ce qu'elles ont été; leur peine réside, en somme, dans l'éternité de leur passé.'133 Yet one question remains unresolved: if it is not 'chance' that has brought this trio together, what is the common denominator in their earthly lives that makes them deserving of the same hell? The answer, I think, is moral cowardice, a consummate mauvaise foi.

130 L'Être et le néant, p. 158. 131 Compare: 4La doctrine que je vous présente est justement à l'opposé du quiétisme, puisqu'elle déclare: il n'y a de réalité que dans l'action; elle va plus loin d'ailleurs, puisqu'elle ajoute: l'homme n'est rien d'autre que son projet, il n'existe que dans la mesure où il se réalise, il n'est donc rien d'autre que l'ensemble de ses actes, rien d'autre que sa vie' (L'Existentialisme est un humanisme, p.55). 132 Lecherbonnier (p.42) argues that each personality is immediately recognisable from the characters' first entrance. 133 Lorris, p.83.

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In the foregoing investigation of Garcin, we have seen how his evident physical cowardice was complemented by and, in a sense, flowed from an equal moral frailty. So compulsive was his urge to be 'un homme. Un dur' (p. 179), that he allowed himself 'mille petites faiblesses parce que tout est permis aux héros', as Inès sarcastically observes. Garcin's emphasis upon being rather than doing is already misplaced and radically unsound, according to Sartre's ontological discourse, in which the following premiss is axiomatic: 'Ainsi, la réalité humaine n'est pas d'abord pour agir, mais être pour elle, c'est agir et cesser d'agir, c'est cesser d'être.'134 When image is everything, there are 'toutes les saletés qu'on cache' (p. 172), in the hope of deceiving others - and oneself- about oneself, and self-deceit is the very definition of mauvaise foi: Certes, pour celui qui pratique la mauvaise foi, il s'agit bien de masquer une vérité déplaisante ou de présenter comme vérité une erreur plaisante. La mauvaise foi a donc en apparence la structure du mensonge. Seulement, ce qui change tout, c'est que, dans la mauvaise foi, c'est à moi-même que je masque la vérité.135

In death, as we have seen, Garcin necessarily persists with his selfdelusions, repeatedly rejecting, distorting, and finally trying, by a series of spurious self-justifications, to evade the unconscionable truth about himself: 'Lâche!' Estelle, though less obviously so, is equally loath to confront the truth about herself and her situation. She baulks at the word 'mort' and suggests the euphemism 'absent' (p. 140); she is the last to confess her crimes and finally does so only under savage interrogation, exclaiming loudly: 'Je suis lâche! Je suis lâche!' (p. 160). Certainly, she is cowardly because she was cowardly. No less than Garcin, she had striven in her worldly incarnation to conform to an image, the perfect counterpart and antithesis of his machismo: ideal femininity. And, like him, she had become entirely dependent upon the judgment of others in order to experience herself as real - hence her flirtations

134 L'Être et le néant, p.556. 135 L'Être et le néant, p.87.

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with him and Inès, which represent deeply-felt ontological needs, not mere sexual urges. The same is true of Inès although, at first sight, it is less simple to build a case against her. She alone appears to square up without compromise to the essential self which her acts have made of her, and to harbour no illusions that she could be other than what she was. But closer inspection reveals that her assertive and acerbic knowingness is a blind, a cover for a squeamish reluctance to examine her life at all: 'Elle est en ordre, ma vie. Tout à fait en ordre. Elle s'est mise en ordre d'elle-même, là-bas, je n'ai pas besoin de m'en préoccuper' (p. 141). In psycoanalytic terms,-4his amounts to denial and resistance. In present company, it passes for self-knowledge, moral honesty, frankness; but, in fact, it is the pretext of her essential cruelty. By dismissing any reflection upon her own life, Inès is free to play ruthlessly on the foibles of her colleagues. She insists upon the irrevocability of their situation because it distresses Garcin, and she flatters Estelle's vanity because it is the easiest way to torment her: 'Moi, je suis méchante: cela veut dire que j'ai besoin de la souffrance des autres pour exister' (p. 157). Inès's 'bad faith' is typical of the sadist: morally, she is as cowardly as Garcin. Like her companions, she needed (so, needs) to be objectified by others (in her case, as 'bourreau', p. 135), in order to reflect an image behind which her fundamental conduct of flight could be performed, with impunity. This explains her terror at the prospect of being cast out of this company, and her immediately subsequent admission that she knows what it is to be a coward. Without the reassuring presence of her fellows to confirm her in her identity as tormentor, Inès would be nothing else. Garcin, Inès and Estelle are three of a kind, cowards who fear and flee from their freedom by striving to conform to idealised, objective images of themselves - people who lived, in short, as though already dead: 'Seulement, l'ambiguïté nécessaire à la mauvaise foi vient de ce qu'on affirme ici que je suis ma transcendance sur le mode d'être de la chose.'136 In Sartre's deontology, pretending to be a thing is wrong: 136

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L'Etre et le néant, p.96.

S'ils ont commencé à être lâches, rien ne vient changer le fait qu'ils étaient lâches. C'est pour cela qu'ils sont morts, c'est pour cela, c'est une manière de dire que c'est une mort vivante que d'être entouré par le souci perpétuel de jugements et d'actions qu'on ne veut pas changer. De sorte que, en vérité, comme nous sommes vivants, j'ai voulu montrer par l'absurde l'importance chez nous de la liberté, c'est-à-dire l'importance de changer les actes par d'autres actes.137

The chillingly simple justice of this hell is that its inmates, having lived as though dead, are condemned to be dead as though alive, and this is the radical meaning of their having to be what they were: 'dead'. And, because their mutually tormenting relationship leads them relentlessly to a searing new prise de conscience, there is more than mere irony in Estelle's rhetorical whimsy: 'Peut-être n'avonsnous jamais été si vivants' (p. 140). Yet this new consciousness of self is cruelly counter-balanced by a progressive passage to oblivion in the world they have left, and the pain of being dead-as-alive is com­ pounded by the pain of watching their earthly memory die too. Each turns to the other for consolation when they sense this inevitable disintegration beginning to occur, but in vain: '[...] "vie tombée dans l'oubli" représente aussi un destin spécifique et descriptible qui vient à de certaines vies à partir de l'autre.'138 To be forced to witness one's own consignment to the dustbin of history - Inès and Estelle actually see themselves replaced - is an exquisite torture for characters who predicated their lives upon the image others had of them. And the steady erosion of that image (of any image) has the punitive effect of pushing them closer together, of making them increasingly inter-dependent. For example, Garcin at first envies the women's wordly annihilation when he hears how he will be immortalised on earth: 'Dans six mois, ils diront: lâche comme Garcin' (p. 173). Moments later, he is relieved to have 'entered history', but at the same time he 'sobs', as if pained to have died a second time; to be remembered as a coward might, after all, be prefer­ able to not being remembered at all. The sadistic effect of this earthly 137

'Préface parlée à l'enregistrement sur disque de Huis Clos\ in Un Théâtre de situations, p.283. 138 L'Être et le néant, p.626.

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oblivion is to make him throw himself on the mercy of his hateful judge in hell: Je ne les entends plus, tu sais. C'est sans doute qu'ils en ont fini avec moi. Fini: l'affaire est classée, je ne suis plus rien sur terre, même plus un lâche. Inès, nous voilà seuls: [Estelle] ne compte pas. Mais toi, toi qui me hais, si tu me crois, tu me sauves, (p. 178)

As before, Garcin's hopes of salvation will prove ill-founded, for there is none to be had in this place, by definition. Yet the slow extinction of their terrestrial personae leaves them no alternative but to seek succour from their torturers: 'Ha! c'est à mourir de rire! Nous sommes inséparables' (p. 177). This being the 'after-life', it follows logically that there is no imaginable end - chronological or teleological - and that a stoic 'carrying-on' is the best that can be counselled: 'Eh bien, continuons' (p. 182). Huis clos constitutes a powerful metaphorical framework for the dramatic dialectic of life and death: une vie de mort is punishable by une mort vivante, and Sartre's claim to have 'montr[é] par l'absurde l'importance chez nous de la liberté' is amply vindicated. Lugubrious, if not macabre, as it may seem to present us with three dead and thoroughly disagreeable characters, justly damned, it does not follow that Sartre was making a statement about the hopelessness of the human condition. On the contrary, the infamous dictum: 'l'enfer, c'est les Autres' (p.182), is not a counsel of despair but a 'description of the historical moment',139 and this cautionary tale - implicitly asserting the moral primacy of life andfreedom- was heard, by those with ears to hear, as no less a rallying cry than Les Mouches: 'Puisqu'on était au milieu d'autres, il fallait bien en faire quelque chose.'140 Happily, the historical moment which had prompted this mythifying parable, and its mythologically-inspired predecessors, was very nearly at an end.

139 140

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Francis Kaplan, paraphrased in O'Donohoe ( 1998), p.91. Dominique Desanti, cited in ibid.

Chapter 3 Too much reality

At the beginning of June 1944 (a few days after the première of Huis clos), Allied troops disembarked on the beaches of Normandy, and by the end of August, Paris had been liberated (a few days before the revival of Huis clos in the first post-war rentrée). The brutal reality of enemy occupation and war gave way to the scarcely less brutal reality of purge, recrimination and blood-letting. In company with millions of others in Europe, Sartre's life underwent another abrupt and irrevoc­ able change: La guerre a vraiment divisé ma vie en deux. Elle a commencé quand j'avais trente-quatre ans, elle s'est terminée quand j'en avais quarante et ça a vraiment été le passage de la jeunesse à l'âge mûr. [...] C'est là, si vous voulez, que je suis passé de l'individualisme et de l'individu pur d'avant la guerre au social, au socialisme. C'est ça le vrai tournant de ma vie: avant, après.1

Sartre's new engagement with 'the social' manifested itself in a number of concrete acts - notably his founding of the cultural and political review Les Temps modernes in September 1944, and his refusal of the Légion d'honneur in 1945 - as well as in a new kind of literary theory and practice.2 He ceased teaching in order to devote himself entirely to writing, which then became a quite different activity from what it had been before, or even during, the war. Journalism commanded his time and energy, with a tour of the USA as special correspondent of Combat and Le Figaro from January to May 1945. He began to assume public prominence, with the publi­ cation of the first two volumes of Les Chemins de la liberté in 1945, 1 2

'Autoportrait à soixante-dix ans', in Situations X, pp. 133-226 (p. 180). For these and more detailed biographical data, see Œuvres romanesques, pp.LIX-LXHI. Sartre chose this title for his review as a homage to Chaplin's satirical movie, Modern Times.

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and by his participation in open fora on philosophy, notably at the Club Maintenant in Paris, in October of the same year, to debate the question whether existentialism is a form of humanism.3 And from February 1947, he began to publish in Les Temps modernes his essay 'Qu'est-ce que la littérature?', which would quickly be identified as the existentialist manifesto of the committed writer: 'L'écrivain "en­ gagé" sait que la parole est action: il sait que dévoiler c'est changer et qu'on ne peut dévoiler qu'en projetant de changer.'4 The act of prose writing is axiomatically an appeal to the freedom of the reader, issued by the freedom of the writer, in the name of the fundamental and irreducible quality of human being: freedom. Transposed into the socio-political domain, this connotes an espousal of the cause of liberty on the writer's part: 'On n'écrit pas pour des esclaves. L'art de la prose est solidaire du seul régime où la prose garde un sens: la démocratie.'5 The post-war Sartre, by contrast with his pre-war self, saw political commitment as the ineluctable vocation - nay, duty - of the serious writer. Specifically in Sartre's writing for the theatre, this 'turningpoint' in his life, and his consequently new-found mission, could hardly be more starkly illustrated. Gone are the verbose dialogues about action, free will and destiny, placed in the mouths of mytho­ logical personnages, plucked from ancient sources and endowed with the argumentative skills of an agrégé de philosophie. Gone, too, are the no less mythical monsters of egotism condemned to their incongruous inferno. In their place, we find gritty social realism in abundance: ordinary contemporary characters caught up in desperate 'extreme situations', deftly articulated, sharply observed colloquial exchanges in readily recognisable locations, accompanied by all the crude concomitants of violent political struggle - torture, rape, and 3

4 5

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Sartre published the text of his speech as L'Existentialisme est un humanisme in 1946, but immediately regretted it as a 'serious mistake', because the necessary brevity and rhetorical simplicity of its exposition inevitably do violence to the integrity of his philosophical stance, and therefore make of this little book a handy stick for his opponents to beat him with (see Œuvres romanesques, p.LXII, and Les Écrits de Sartre, pp. 131-2). 'Qu'est-ce que la littérature?', in Situations II, pp.55-330 (p.73). 'Qu'est-ce que la littérature?', in Situations //, p. 113.

murder. These hideous but everyday crimes are the ostensible themes of Sartre's first three post-war plays, Morts sans sépulture, La Putain respectueuse and Les Mains sales,, respectively. In fact, however, they have more in common with their war-time predecessors than at first appears, for their over-arching theme is also the affirmation of life and freedom.

Morts sans sépulture According to Simone de Beauvoir, this little play was written during the autumn of 1945, 'où les anciens collaborateurs commençaient à relever la tête', and sprang from a desire on Sartre's part to 'rafraîchir les mémoires':6 Pendant quatre ans, il avait beaucoup pensé à la torture; seul, et entre amis, on se demandait: ne parlerais-je pas? Comment faut-il s'y prendre pour tenir le coup? Il avait rêvé aussi sur le rapport du tortionnaire à sa victime. Il jeta dans la pièce tous ses fantasmes.7

As usual, Sartre had pre-cast the play with familiar associates, including Michel Vitold (as Henri, who also directed) and R.-J. Chauffard (as Sorbier), who had respectively played Garcin and le Garçon in Huis clos. Finding a theatre manager willing to stage a play containing graphic scenes of torture, fewer than eighteen months after D Day, proved more difficult, however, and it was only after several 'démarches irritantes', undertaken by Beauvoir while Sartre was in America, that Simone Berriau finally accepted it. Thus, Morts sans sépulture - in a double-bill with La Putain respectueuse - had its Paris premiere at the Théâtre Antoine on 8 November 1946.8

6 7 8

La Force des choses, p. 127. Ibid. For reasons which remain obscure, it had previewed in Copenhagen a few days earlier.

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This is a decision whose boldness Berriau might well have rued, given the public outcry. Beauvoir records that the screams of the 'tortured' Vitold 'me parurent presque insupportables'.9 There was uproar in the theatre, with slow hand-claps, cries of 'Au Grand Guignol!', and members of the audience walking out in disgust: 'La femme d'Aron partit à l'entracte, ayant manqué s'évanouir, et il la suivit.'10 Sartre himself was 'saisi par l'angoisse qu'il suscitait', and took to drinking large amounts of whisky during the performances. For Beauvoir, 'Le sens de cet esclandre était clair: la bourgeoisie se préparait à se réunifier et elle jugeait de mauvais goût qu'on réveillât de désagréables souvenirs*'11 Certainly, the reaction of the new tabloid weekly, France-Dimanche, bears out her interpretation, as she notes,12 and Jean-Jacques Gautier, writing in the quintessential^ respectable Le Figaro, dismissed the play as 'rien qu'un mélodrame vague et superficiel'.13 By contrast, Le Monde applauded the 'documentary function' and 'noble intentions' of 'ce réalisme destiné à vous tordre les nerfs', and implicitly blamed those who could not stomach this surfeit of historical truth: 'Si j'étais de ceux qui s'étaient enfuis du théâtre, je n'aurais pas la conscience tranquille.'14 And, predictably perhaps, Jacques Lemarchand's review in Combat was eulogistic: '[Ces deux pièces] sont du genre qui répond aussi clairement que possible aux interrogations et aux angoisses qui forment la base inquiète d'une conscience moderne.'15 So, despite the public scandal by which he was ingenuously both surprised and embarrassed - Sartre was not without admirers of his first theatrical experiment in liberated Paris. 9 10

11 12 13 14 15

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La Force des choses, p. 128. Ibid. Le Grand Guignol was a nineteenth-century Paris puppet theatre, renowned (like Punch and Judy) for its playful and gratuitous violence. It was also invoked, in terms of disapproval, by reviews in The Times (18 July 1947) and The Spectator (25 July 1947) when Men Without Shadows [sic] was directed by Peter Brook at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith. Ibid See ibid Le Figaro, 13 November 1946. Robert Kemp, Le Monde, 15 November 1946. Combat, 9 November 1946.

For his part, Sartre insisted that this was 'not a play about the Resistance' - he had thought of setting the scene in Spain or China, for example - and sought to distance himself from the undeniably shocking effects of the violence depicted by focusing on the ethical question: 'Comment tiendrais-je devant la torture?'16 - a question which had been hypothetical for the previous generation, but which was all too real for his own. Since the theatre must be contemporary, he averred, he would not write another play like Les Mouches: Comme je considère que le théâtre moderne doit être contemporain, je ne récrirais pas aujourd'hui une pièce comme Les Mouches. J'ai choisi pour cadre une aventure de la clandestinité en France, et j'ai voulu montrer en particulier cette espèce d'intimité qui finit par naître entre le bourreau et sa victime, et qui dépasse le conflit de principes.17

It is not clear what Sartre means by the 'intimacy' between torturer and tortured, nor what cause he had to believe it existed. But it is clear that he was evoking a conflict of principles, a clash between ethics and pragmatism: 'Il y opposa encore une fois morale et praxis: Lucie se bute dans son orgueil individualiste tandis que le militant commu­ niste, à qui Sartre donne raison, vise l'efficacité.'18 The fact that this conflict was, in a sense, obscured by the scenes of violence which dominated the proceedings (although relegated to the wings after the first few performances), led Sartre in time to feel that the play was deeply flawed: C'est une pièce manquée. [...] le sort des victimes était absolument défini d'avance, [...] donc pas de suspense, comme on dit aujourd'hui. [...] C'est une

16 17

18

Sartre, interview with Combat, 30 October 1946, extract in Un Théâtre de situations, pp.285-6 (p. 285). Ibid. Nevertheless, Sartre the dramatist would indeed revert to distant times and climes (medieval Germany, Regency England) following his relatively unsuc­ cessful dalliance with modernity, even returning to Greek antiquity in his final play. Simone de Beauvoir, La Force des choses, p. 127.

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pièce très sombre, sans surprise. Il aurait mieux valu en faire un roman ou un film.19

Contât and Rybalka consider this self-critique 'a little harsh' and claim for the piece a 'place apart' in Sartre's theatre - 'elle a une rigueur et une dureté qui finissent par devenir étranges' - while at the same time noting that it was 'mal accueilli par la critique et n'a jamais été repris sur une scène parisienne.'20 Among the more distinctive features of this play are the contem­ poraneity, proximity and veracity of its narrative content: 'Sans être un "documentaire" au sens strict, elle s'inspire d'événements réels: les opérations du Vercors qui eurent lieu en juin et juillet 1944.'21 Sartre's captive maquisards - François, Sorbier, Canoris, Lucie, Henri and (later) Jean - have been embroiled in the catastrophic exercise to support the Allied landings in Provence, which led to the futile loss of at least 700 résistants and civilians.22 Specifically, their own part has already resulted in the deaths of 300 villagers, and a further sixty of their comrades are now at risk, unless their leader, Jean, remains at liberty (as he is when the play's action begins). These, then, are individuals who had rejected the 'depersonalisation' which stems from the stifling oppression of occupation, and opted instead for a 'future of their own making', albeitfraughtwith mortal danger: Cette déshumanisation, cette pétrification de l'homme étaient si intolérables que beaucoup, pour y échapper, pour recouvrer un avenir se sont jetés dans la Résistance. Étrange avenir, barré par les supplices, la prison, la mort, mais que du moins nous produisions de nos propres mains.23

19 20

21 22 23

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Interview with Les Cahiers libres de la jeunesse, no.l, 15 February 1960, extract in Un Théâtre de situations, p.286. Les Écrits de Sartre, p. 134. Its poor critical reception in Paris was no bar to the play's transfer to London barely six months after its sensational Paris début (see above), and to New York (as The Victors, from Sartre's more tendentious working title, 4Les Vainqueurs') by spring 1949 (see O'Donohoe [2001b]). Galster (2001b), p.53. See Galster (2001b), pp.53-4. 4 Paris sous l'occupation', La France libre (éditée à Londres, 1945), in Situations III, pp. 15-42 (pp.29-30). Sartre's rhetorical use of the pronoun

'Heroes', in a word, who have exchanged the living death of auto­ matism for an autonomous exploration of the limits of their freedom, who risk death in an assertion of moral life: 'Car le secret d'un homme, ce n'est pas son complexe d'Œdipe ou d'infériorité, c'est la limite même de sa liberté, c'est son pouvoir de résistance aux sup­ plices et à la mort.'25 This is a succinct description of the situationlimite in which the protagonists of this play find themselves. In the first phase of their situation (before Jean's capture), the prisoners have to choose between attitudes towards their imminent deaths, which they take to be inevitable: can they impart a meaning to their lives? 'Et cela, peut-être, tout le monde le comprendra: ce qui est terrible, ce n'est pas de souffrir ni de mourir, mais de souffrir, mais de mourir en vain.'26 The contemptuous perspective of the collaborator, says Sartre, is that the self-martyring resistant 'dies twice', personally and collectively: 'Ceux qui se sont dévoués à une cause perdue, pensaient les collaborateurs, [...] meurent deux fois puisqu'on enterre avec eux les principes au nom desquels ils ont vécu.'27 His characters will strive to refute that cynicism. Lucie, for example, manifests initially a diginified submission, nourished by the consolation of Jean's survival and, through him, of the cause: 'Il ira trouver les autres, ils recommenceront le travail ailleurs.'28 Her stoicism, however, is reinforced by her love for Jean - 'Jean est avec moi' - and a romantic envisioning of a 'tranquil' post-war Paris. Canoris, by contrast, represents a hard-nosed pragmatism. Since, thanks to Sartre's clever plot premiss, they have no information to trade - because they do not actually know Jean's whereabouts - their duty is chiefly to

24 25 26 27 28

'nous' begs the controversial question about his own commitment to the Resistance: see, for example, Galster (2001b), pp.95—121. See Les Écrits de Sartre, p. 13 3. 'La République du silence', Les Lettres françaises (1944), in Situations HI, pp.11-14 (p.13). Taris sous l'occupation', in Situations HI, p.31. 'Qu'est-ce qu'un collaborateur?', La République française (éditée à New York, août 1945), in Situations III, pp.43-61 (p.52). Morts sans sépulture, in Théâtre /, pp. 183-268 (p. 191). Further references are in the main text; where consecutive quotations concern the same page, only the first is referenced.

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themselves: 'Nous ne savons rien, nous n'avons rien à taire. Que chacun se débrouille pour ne pas trop souffrir' (p. 197). The question of saving their lives does not enter into it: 'Je vivais pour la cause et j'ai toujours prévu que j'aurais une mort comme celle-ci' (p.202). Having freely chosen the danger of death, it matters little, Canoris tells Henri, how one regards the eventual fact of it: 'Espère ou désespère: il n'en sortira rien.' For Sorbier and Henri, by contrast, the manner and meaning of their deaths are of utmost importance. Sorbier, tormented by vivid recollections of the many innocent victims of their failed mission, is obsessed by the 'how?'-while Henri is preoccupied by the 'why?'.29 They are both convinced of the certainty of their own deaths, but neither is comforted by the fact that they have nothing to hide. On the contrary, they see this irony as robbing their deaths of any purpose, as Sorbier observes: 'Mais je suis volé: je vais souffrir pour rien, je mourrai sans savoir ce que je vaux' (p.198). Henri's anxiety is more intellectual than visceral: Jean's survival will be no consolation, he argues, reminding Lucie how quickly dead comrades are generally forgotten. His despair is more profound than Sorbier's, his guilt an existential experience of contingency. A purposeful death would have retrospectively justified his life, but the pointless death in prospect casts its shadow of futility over everything that has gone before: 'Ma vie n'a été qu'une erreur' (p.201). Henri had thought to 'salvage his life', and only a meaningful death for the cause could do that - raison de mourir equating to raison de vivre - but this is far from being the case: 'Nous avons essayé de jusitifier notre vie et nous avons manqué notre coup. A présent nous allons mourir et nous ferons des morts injustifiables' (p.202). The young François is equally frustrated, but rather by the inevitability of death than by its meaninglessness. He alone rejects notions of guilt and vicarious consolation in the survival of Jean, and sets himself dangerously aside from his comrades by making known that he would welcome a secret, not as a reason to die, but as a barter for his life: 'Vous m'avez dit: la Résistance a besoin d'hommes, vous ne m'avez pas dit qu'elle avait besoin de héros. Je ne suis pas un héros, moi, je ne suis pas un héros!' (p. 196). By contrast 29

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See Lorris, p.90.

with the physical torpor of the others - Lucie is 'morte et calme' (p. 190), Henri sleeps - Francois's agitation articulates his will to live. In a second, inventive narrative twist, Sartre introduces Jean into the action - captured under a false name so that the miliciens do not appreciate his significance - thereby rendering the whole situation morally more complex and, so, dramatically more tense. When he later criticised the play for failing to generate 'suspense' (see above), Sartre overlooked the fact that the reactions of Sorbier and François are far from predictable at this juncture, given what we already know of their misgivings and temerity. Lucie, no doubt, can be relied upon to welcome Jean both as her lover and as her moral rationale. She knows that sixty comrades depend upon his safety, so there is now nothing to gain and everything to lose by disclosure. Moreover, her emotional connection with him offers her the prospect of a surrogate survival: '[Tu] emporteras dans tes yeux mon dernier visage vivant, [...] Moi, c'est toi. Si tu vis, je vivrai' (p.213). Similarly for Henri, Jean's capture is a reason to rejoice, in that it answers his question, 'pourquoi?': Écoute! si tu n'étais pas venu, nous aurions souffert comme des bêtes, sans savoir pourquoi. Mais tu es là, et tout ce qui va se passer à présent aura un sens. [...] je pourrai peut-être me dire que je ne meurs pas pour rien.

In other words, Henri construes this new situation as giving him access to a meaningful life through a purposeful death, a logic Sartre later endorsed: 'Je ne discute pas le principe: si l'on ne donne pas sa vie pour "quelque chose", on finira par la donner pour rien.'30 Whereas for Canoris, the situation is effectively unchanged and the crucial thing is that the milice should not discover Jean's true identity. His encouragement of Sorbier, his own steadfastness and his insistence that, in any event, they will not be spared, all confirm his paramount devotion to the cause, to which he continues unhesitatingly to subordinate his own life.

30

'Sommes-nous en démocratie?', Les Temps modernes, no.78, 1952, in Situations VI, pp.69-76 (p.69).

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Not so for Sorbier or François. The former, once tortured, is convinced he would divulge any information in order to appease his tormentors, so that Jean's arrival presents him with a bald moral dilemma: his life, or Jean's? There is a possibility of survival, but attainable only at the cost of moral bankruptcy. This putative reso­ lution is seized upon and extrapolated by François, whose will to resist is weakened and whose will to live is strengthened, in equal measure, by Jean's presence. The sight of Sorbier's broken body and then of the violated Lucie compounds his resentment that they should have to suffer for Jean, and - defying all his companions - he declares his readiness to trade the -moral high ground for life itself: 'Je veux n'importe quelle vie. La honte, ça passe quand la vie est longue' (p.239). It is one of the play's several ironies that François, clinging so tenaciously to life, is the first to lose it, and at the hands of his own comrades. Jean, too, now finds himself in a situation-limite which is, if anything, ethically still more complex and intractable than that of his colleagues. If he remains incognito, he will probably be freed unharmed (as eventually he is), but at the expense of the suffering and, possibly, death of his friends; by the time of his release, both Sorbier and François will have died to save him. On the other hand, if he discloses his identity, he will certainly pay with his own life, and endanger all his comrades, both here and outside, as Henri twice reminds him. His dilemma is practically the reverse of the others: he must choose his life ahead of theirs (for the greater good), while they must choose their deaths in order to save Jean's life and those of the 'sixty comrades who are counting on him'. Theirs is the better part 'Tu ne comprends donc pas que je suis plus malheureux que vous tous?' (p.238) - and his impotence to help them (recalling his inability to save his wife dying in childbirth) contrasts with their reassuring self-righteousness. His very vitality - 'trop vivant' (p.233) - excludes him from this company of martyrs, standing the natural order of things on its head: the man bound to live is the moral inferior of those about to die. They appear to be in charge of their destiny, while Jean's autonomy has been neutralised: 'Vous m'avez exclu, vous avez décidé de ma vie comme de ma mort: froidement' (p.242). In an ironie echo

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of the fate that befalls François, Jean, who would willingly give his life, is constrained to keep it. It is clear that Sartre has located his characters in a persistent dialogue of life and death, a dialectic of the individual and the shifting historic circumstance, which continually demands a re-orientation towards death, and an unrelenting personal evaluation of the weight we give to life in the scale of moral imperatives. What is less clear is how we are to adjudicate morally upon the actions of these agents with their backs to the wall, or indeed whether we should try to do so. Canoris's caveat - 'Que chacun se débrouille pour ne pas trop souffrir' (p. 197) - held good so long as Jean's whereabouts remained mysterious, but once he is in their midst, the first and most obvious means of reducing their suffering is to tell their torturers what they want to hear. In short, their freedom is severely compromised by the concerted efforts of the miliciens to dehumanise them through the infliction of pain: 'Les miliciens s'acharnent à nier la liberté des résistants; ils veulent réduire leur comportement à de pures réactions physiques.'31 The sadist or torturer seeks to assert himself as pure subjectivity, without a pour-autrui dimension for his victim, while annexing the victim's freedom to objectify him as fully as possible. So, Clochet resolutely forces the courageous Henri to scream, while Pellerin instructs him to 'baisser les yeux' (p.224). In the face of over­ whelming coercion, to what extent is the human will free, and what criteria can we legitimately adduce to assess the morality of actions? Sorbier's suicide leap - thwarting his tormentors' second session of interrogation - is one such morally complex action, which Franck Laraque, for example, finds inappropriately playful, unconvincingly motivated, and inherently self-contradictory: 'L'impression de jeu [...] déforme l'héroïsme des résistants, [...] Son geste crée un malaise et non une émotion.'32 This is harsh comment, considering Sartre's own evolving ideas on the place of 'conditioning' in human agency, as expounded notably in Saint Genet, comédien et martyr, and elsewhere too: 'Il y a des circonstances où il est impossible d'être un homme: on

31 32

Lorris, p.95. Laraque, p.92.

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devient un singe ou un mort.' This describes Sorbier's situation well, and he prefers a self-willed death to the reduction to merest objectivity ('monkey') which his torture imposes. No doubt his final words - 'J'ai gagné, j'ai gagné!' (p.227) - suggest game-playing, but what matters is that he is right: his death is a defeat for the militia, who have neither extorted any information nor reduced him to a living object. More importantly, in the collective perspective, Sorbier's death makes Jean's betrayal less likely, thereby improving the survival prospects of all the other comrades depending upon him, and tipping the scales decisively in favour of the Resistance. Lucie's wrapping herself in Sorbier's coat, after her own ordeal, is a symbolic gesture of her solidarity with him and of his réintégration into the group. In this sense, Sorbier's suicide is a statement of the determination to sustain life, even at the cost of his own. The reassurances he was offered previously by Canoris - the first homme engagé in Sartre's theatre endorse this reading: Crois-tu qu'un moment de faiblesse puisse pourrir cette heure où tu as décidé de tout quitter pour venir avec nous? Et ces trois ans de courage et de patience? [...] Pourquoi serais-tu plus vrai aujourd'hui, quand ils te frappent, qu'hier quand tu refusais de boire pour donner ta part à Lucie? Nous ne sommes pas faits pour vivre toujours aux limites de nous-mêmes. Dans les vallées aussi, il y a des chemins, (p.210)

Sorbier can be seen, therefore, through the eyes of Canoris, as a positive illustration of the Sartrean precept: 'Tu n'es rien d'autre que ta vie!', enunciated by Inès for the edification of Garcin, whose moral cowardice led him to believe that the manner of his death alone could put a favourable gloss on his entire life. More problematic still is the murder of François, partly because it is murder, and partly because it results from a collective decision whose rationale is 'good', insofar as it aims to preserve many other lives. François is evidently the weakest link in the chain of resistance, having openly declared his preference for life {any life) to the cause or the good opinion of his comrades. In keeping with the perverse 33

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"Julius Fucik', Les Lettres françaises, 17-24 June, 1954, in Les Écrits de Sartre, pp.708-13 (p.710).

morality that stamps irony throughout the action of this play, Francois's attachment to life will precipitate his death, because the cause must be defended against his will to live: 'Il ne faut pas que tu parles, François', Henri warns him, 'Ils te tueraient tout de même, tu sais. Et tu mourrais dans l'abjection' (p.239). And whereas Jean demurs - chiefly because, if he can share their suffering, he will begin to bridge the moral gulf that separates him from the others - Lucie is equally adamant that François must be silenced: 'Il faut qu'il se taise. Les moyens ne comptent pas' (p.240). It is a mark of Jean's imma­ turity as a leader that he refuses to play any executive part either in the decision or in the act of 'silencing' François, although it is he alone who can save the 'Soixante qui t'ont fait confiance et qui vont crever mardi comme des rats', as Henri reminds him: 'C'est eux ou c'est lui. Choisis.' The later itinerary of Goetz, hero of Le Diable et le bon Dieu, will emphasise the responsibility of the leader to assume and exercise violence in the prosecution of the collective good. However, once the living child has been reduced to a corpse by the strangulating hands of Henri, remorse sets in. Jean accuses Henri of pride; Henri retorts that Jean made no attempt to defend the boy, but fails to attack his obvious desire to dislodge them from their moral pedestal, the 'beau rôle' that he envies. Instead, Henri embarks upon a potentially destructive introspection, questioning the real motivation of this collective deed of which he happened to be the designated agent. 'Il ne fallait pas qu'il parle', (p.242) Lucie reassures him, but Henri cannot so easily convince himself of the objective necessity of this assassination. Like Hugo after him, the undeniable reality of his 'dirty hands' interferes with his taking a dispassionate perspective upon the willed consequences of his act, although he knows that what Canoris says is true: Il fallait qu'il meure: s'il avait été plus près de moi, c'est moi qui aurais serré. Quant à ce qui s'est passé dans ta tête [...] Ça ne compte pas. Rien ne compte entre ces quatre murs. Il fallait qu'il meure: c'est tout, (p.243)

Here, Canoris anticipates the notion of 'fraternité-terreur', which Sartre would subsequently formulate in the Critique:

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Cependant, nous avons vu se préciser un rapport proprement commun de chacun avec tous et avec chacun qui est le pouvoir diffus de vie et de mort sur le traître ou, si l'on préfère, lafraternité-terreur,comme détermination fonda­ mentale de la socialite.34

As a 'sworn group',35 the résistants have all assumed the same rights and privileges, obligations and risks - the supreme right being that of life and death over each other member of the group in the name of the group - with the ultimate objective that this latently violent nexus of relations replaces the threat of death by the safeguarding of life: Par la souveraineté, le~groupe s'aliène à un seul homme pour éviter de s'aliéner à l'ensemble matériel et humain; chacun éprouve, en effet, son aliénation comme vie (comme vie d'un Autre à travers sa propre vie) au lieu de l'éprouver comme une mort (comme réification de toutes ses relations).36

It is this alienation, of the individual self to the greater good of the group as a whole, that François refused to accept, and for that refusal he is duly sanctioned - and rightly so, according to Canoris. For this act to be wholly justified, however, beneficial consequences for the group must flow from it, and those consequences will depend largely upon the agents themselves: 'C'est par leurs actes futurs qu'Henri et les autres résistants [...] décideront du sens qu'il faudra donner au meurtre de François.'37 This is what Canoris will try to persuade them of, after Jean's release. Jean's subterfuge - to disguise the corpse of an already dead comrade as his own, so that the prisoners can safely 'betray' him when next interrogated - is his first authentic act of leadership, inasmuch as it responds to the practical exigencies of the situation, and prioritises the survival of the group above his own pride or his relationship with Lucie. As such, it contributes to a reunion of the other four which embraces (literally and metaphorically) François, even in death - which Lucie and Henri still conceive to be the only 34 35 36 37

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Critique de la raison dialectique /, p.587. For a definition of the 'groupe assermenté', see Critique de la raison dialectique /, pp.447-54. Critique de la raison dialectique /, p.603. Boros, p. 143.

possible and tolerable outcome. For the miliciens, too, there is now a sense of game-playing, in which the stakes are heroic martyrdom or demeaning submission. The actual discovery of information has become secondary: 'Gagné! Nous avons gagné!' (p.259), this is Lucie's triumphant exclamation when Landrieu offers to spare them 'if they talk'. Yet, although it is an option on life, it is not one she is ready to consider, any more than Henri, whose defiance provokes the sadistic Clochet into urging further torture. Canoris, then, has to combat an overwhelmingly negative attitude in his comrades in order to convince them that 'nous n'avons pas le droit de mourir pour rien' (p.263): Écoute, Henri: si tu meurs aujourd'hui, on tire le trait: tu Tas tué par orgueil, c'est fixé, pour toujours. Si tu vis... [...] Alors, rien n'est arrêté: c'est sur ta vie entière qu'on jugera chacun de tes actes. (Un temps.) Si tu te laisses tuer quand tu peux travailler encore, il n'y aura rien de plus absurde que ta mort.

This is an explicit statement of the moral imperative to choose life wherever possible, and Canoris conveys it successfully to Henri by presenting the duty he owes to others as a duty to himself (which, in the context of the sworn group, it equally is). However, he has less success with Lucie, whose self-disgust is so great that oblivion seems to her the only fitting destiny: 'J'ai pris tout le mal sur moi; il faut qu'on me supprime et tout ce mal avec. Allez-vous-en! Allez vivre, puisque vous pouvez vous accepter' (p.264). This foretaste of Goetzian self-aggrandisement bespeaks an overweening pride, that deafens Lucie both to Canoris's accusations and to his pleas on behalf of others. It takes a shower of rain to cause her to 'renaître à la vie',38 in a sudden access of nostalgia for the natural beauty of the world (reminiscent of Meursault's apotheosis at the end of Camus's novel, L'Étranger, of which Sartre had written one of the first critiques).39 At this point she entrusts the moral judgment which she is incapable of making to Canoris, who categorically affirms: 'Nous faisons bien. Il faut vivre' (p.266).

38 39

Lorris, p.110. See 'Explication de / 'Étranger', in Situations /, pp.92-112.

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This is the unambiguous message of the play, despite the sub­ sequent and supreme irony that the résistants 'meurent au moment où ils acceptent la vie, à l'instant où la mort n'a plus aucun sens.'40 Some critics take the view that this narrative perversity undermines or invalidates the Greek's final moral certainty. Boros writes of 'une mort absurde, qui leur arrache toute possibilité de justification',41 and Lorris refers to the militia's 'victoire [qui] apparaît complète'.42 But these literalist readings overlook the dramatic coherence of this admirable coup de theatre, which need have no ulterior significance. Until the penutimate moment of the action, all three militiamen expect to execute their prisoners in any case. Only Landrieu had thought to make a bargain with them, in the face of strong opposition from his subordinates, both of whom are anxious to see their victims dead. So, the dénouement is no real surprise. Canoris himself reckoned their chances at no better than fifty-fifty ('pile ou face', p.260), but he was in no doubt that it was their duty to take that chance. There is no good reason to think that Clochet's unimaginative disposal of the prisoners wrests the moral victory from them, and Dorothy McCall is right to say they 'are not deprived of any virtue [...] because they give a false confession and are killed nevertheless.'43 Their execution does not diminish the fact that they dominated their individual pride and obses­ sions sufficiently to assert life as the overarching value. Indeed, Laraque has argued that Clochet's double-cross hands them both the moral and the tactical victories (making them the 'victors' of Sartre's working-title, 'Les Vainqueurs'): [Clochet] est d'ailleurs trop bête pour comprendre qu'il leur a rendu service. Morts, sans sépulture, ils ont rejoint la cohorte des résistants qui se sont insurgés contre le cours de l'histoire que le nazisme modelait. Les morts ont gagné. La révolte a triomphé de la torture, des tortionnaires; Jean poursuivra la

40 41 42 43 44

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Lorris, p. 102. Boros, p.20. Lorris, p. 102. McCall, pp.49-50. Laraque, p.89.

On this reading, then, it is Clochet's complacency that is unjustified, for he is the dupe of his victims, not vice-versa. Having stupidly believed that Canoris (contrary to all probability) had 'talked' to save his skin, he (Clochet) has now sealed their silence forever, and their ruse remains just that. Moreover, he has performed that act which confers upon him and his colleagues an equally immutable objectivity: Ce que j'étais pour l'autre est figé par la mort de l'autre et je le serai irrémédi­ ablement au passé; [...] La mort de l'autre me constitue comme objet irrémédiable, exactement comme ma propre mort. Ainsi, le triomphe de la haine se transforme, dans son surgissement même, en échec.45

By contrast, the maquisards remain eternally the partisans of life. Although I cannot share Oleg Koefoed's enthusiasm for the play as 'la pièce de Sartre jusqu'ici la mieux réussie', I certainly endorse his dismissal of the shallow critical focus upon its alleged obscenity.46 The explicitly violent scenes no doubt make great demands upon theatrical convention, and the script would perhaps have been better suited to the cinema, as Sartre's own adverse criticism of it suggests. Yet, despite its shortcomings, Morts sans sépulture also has distinct virtues, not the least of which is the tragic irony of its climax. By resolving the life/death dialectic in the death of his heroes, Sartre sardonically applauds the courage of their last act, encapsulated in Canoris's final words: 'Il faut vivre' (p.266). There is no more fitting epitaph for those who have no headstone on which to engrave it.

45 46

L'être et le néant, pp.483-4. See Koefoed, pp.77-8.

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La Putain respectueuse Simone de Beauvoir records that Sartre wrote this play 'in a few days' in order to 'complete the show', and that he based the plot on a con­ temporary true story from the American deep South, which he had read in Vladimir Pozner's book, Les États désunis?1 Sartre himself appears to have said little (if anything) about the genesis of this short piece, perhaps believing (with good reason) that having written and directed it, his contribution was sufficient. In his professional directorial début - working, for a change, without extraneous pressure from friends eager for roles or theatre managers imposing constraints - Sartre was reviving skills which he had first exercised in his satirical thespian exploits at the École Normale.48 Perhaps this explains why he felt free to label the play a 'comédie-bouffe' (not an immediately ob­ vious classification), which set it up as an appropriate antidote to the grim realism of Morts sans sépulture, whilst at the same time modest­ ly apologising for his 'timides débuts [...] dans la mise-en-scène'.49 Predictably, some observers were neither amused, nor inclined to make allowances for Sartre's virginity as a metteur-en-scène: [Les] communistes regrettaient que Sartre n'eût pas présenté au public, au lieu d'un Noir tremblant de peur et de respect, un vrai lutteur. [...] Ils réclamaient des œuvres exaltantes: de l'épopée, de l'optimisme.50

Citing Sartre's unpublished notes, Beauvoir goes on to explain his determination to show the world 'as it is', in order to prompt the will to change it, rather than to create some palliative fiction: '[L'Jceuvre la plus sombre n'est pas pessimiste dès qu'elle fait appel à des libertés, en faveur de la liberté.'51 This is chapter and verse from the theory of 47 48 49 50 51

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See La Force de l'âge, pp. 127-8. For an account of Sartre's brilliant part in the controversial student revue of 1927, in particular, see Sirinelli (1988), pp.323^13. These comments, culled from contemporaneous newspaper interviews, are reported in Les Écrits de Sartre, pp. 138-9. Simone de Beauvoir, La Force des choses, p. 129. Ibid

authorial 'commitment' that Sartre would shortly expound in 'Qu'estce que la littérature?'. Notwithstanding such high-minded intentions, La Putain respectueuse 'provoked the indignation of its audiences', causing Sartre to re-think its somewhat dark dénouement. For Marcel Pagliero's screen version of 1952, he re-wrote the ending so that Lizzie is seen to salvage her self-respect by escaping the clutches of the white ruling élite; and he permitted the same modification to be used in the theatre when the play was produced in Moscow in 1954.52 Meanwhile, if Sartre's treatment of his subject drew fire from the political left, the subject itself attracted flak from the right. The Paris municipal authorities protested about the very title, so that it was advertised in public places as La P... respectueuse, inadvertently creating a brand new euphemism {'une respectueuse') for a very old profession.53 More seriously, Sartre was stung by the accusation of 'anti-American ism', made notably by Thierry Maulnier in Spectateur, and by a correspondent to the New York Herald Tribune, to whom he replied via the same letters page, to the effect that he was far from anti-American, and did not even understand what the term might mean: 'Le devoir d'un écrivain et sa mission spéciale envers le public est de dénoncer l'injustice partout où elle se trouve, et ceci d'autant plus lorsqu'il aime le pays qui laisse commettre cette injustice.'54 However, this self-vindication did not convince all Sartre's detractors. The Catholic philosopher and playwright, Gabriel Marcel, for example, berated him for his 'one-sided satire of present-day America', and denounced it as an 'attack on the United States, [and on] respectability itself.55 None of which impeded its progress to London in July 1947 - where it was broadly well received as an 'entertaining but bitter onslaught on racial prejudice'56 - nor even to New York early in 1948, where it got a surprisingly warm reception as

52 53 54 55 56

See Les Écrits de Sartre, p. 137. See Les Écrits de Sartre, p. 136. Les Écrits de Sartre, pp. 136-7. The relevant dates are 19 November 1946 for Spectateur, and 13 and 19 November 1946 for NY HT (European edition). Theatre Arts, February 1947, p.44. Lewis Ladbroke, The Spectator, 25 July 1947, p. 108.

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'a rather remarkable tour deforce'. In short, as Contât and Rybalka attest, La Putain respectueuse has enjoyed much greater success than the longer play it was designed to complement.58 This is, superficially, a curious fact, given that the action could be summarised as follows: the attempted rape of a white prostitute, and the consequential manslaughter of a black American, set in train a sequence of events which culminates in the lynching of an innocent 'negro'; meanwhile, the witness of these outrages - le Nègre - is wrongfully accused and strives to escape the murderous clutches of his white American persecutors, with the assistance of the eponymous prostitute. This is a stylistically and substantively complex mixture: are we dealing with melodrama, satire, black comedy or high tragedy? Does Sartre have a philosophical, sociological or political message? And where is the affirmation of life to be found in such a bleak scenario? Or should we say 'black scenario', for that is a clue to these questions? Blackness is a myth in the sense that Sartre understands the term, a pervasive yet untouchable reality, an abstract concrete: Mythe douloureux et plein d'espoir, la Négritude, née du Mal et grosse d'un Bien futur, est vivante comme une femme qui naît pour mourir et qui sent sa propre mort dans les plus riches instants de la vie; [...].59

Born of the 'evils' of slavery and colonialism, yet 'pregnant' with the 'goods' of emancipation and freedom, 'blackness' is the dialectical phase between historical states of past and future, origins and destin­ ations. This is what Sartre sought to characterise in the case of his hero, the nameless archetype, le Nègre. As the paradigmatic emblem of all his fellow successors to slavery, he is the focus of an inherent social conspiracy, continuously threatened with death: 'Quand des blancs qui ne se connaissent pas se mettent à parler entre eux, il y a un 57 58 59

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Margaret Marshall, The Nation, 28 February 1948, p.257. For more on the play's reception in London and New York, see O'Donohoe (2001b). See Les Écrits de Sartre, p. 138. Sartre, 'Orphée noir', introduction to Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache, by Leopold Sédar Senghor (Paris, Presses Universitaires, 1948), in Situations III, pp.229-86 (p.283).

nègre qui va mourir.' As Lorris observes, the purpose of the black man's role is purely to be that 'object' of white oppression and hatred, to provide the pretext for the essentialist worldview of the ruling élite to be set forth and acted out.61 In the white man's ethos, it is axiomatic that whiteness confers a constitutional right to life and respectability, as well as the concomitant right to subjugate and objectify others (especially, black others). Death has no meaning for the whites, except as the instrument by which they control their social inferiors. Dynas­ ties do not die, they simply transmit their accumulated wealth and privilege from one generation to the next. Fred's forebears live on in the renown of their exploits, as his own father already does and as he will too, in his turn. The life of the Clarke family is indivisible from that of the nation itself: 'Nous avons fait ce pays et son histoire est la nôtre'(p.315). Insofar as they are stereotypes, neither the dominant whites nor the submissive black are potential agents. They have no real prospects for action, unlike the heroine, Lizzie, who faces a real choice in her situation-limite: should she tell the truth or tell lies? The former course of action threatens her welfare, and even her life; the latter would condemn a poor black man, whom she knows to be innocent. Crucially, what is at stake here is Lizzie's moral integrity and her freedom of choice - her existential life - and it is her efforts to save that moral life, rather than the black man's to save his physical life, which make up the dramatic action and narrative interest of the play. In this sense, Sartre's scenario is, arguably, unconsciously raceinsensitive: le Nègre is de-personified, inasmuch as he is reduced to a mere construct of the whites' societal organisation.62 It is not the questions of racial segregation or socio-economic oppression that the playwright tackles (except where the latter applies also to Lizzie), so much as the more abstract questions about moral responsibility and

60

61 62

La Putain respectueuse, in Théâtre I, pp.269-316 (p.275). Further references are in the main text; where successive quotations concern the same page, only the first is referenced. SeeLorris, p. 130. In rather the same way as Jewish identity is reduced to the status of an 'object for others' in Réflexions sur la question juive.

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freedom of action. The radical unfreedom of le Nègre is taken as read (as his anonymity clearly indicates). He has been conditioned by the same Manichean worldview - placing 'white' (symbolic of light, propriety and purity) at the zenith of the moral universe, and 'black' (connoting darkness, evil, sin) at the nadir - as his persecutor, Fred: 'Les nègres, c'est le diable' (p.279). This explains why le Nègre 'ne peu[t] pas tirer sur des blancs. [...] Ce sont des blancs, madame' (p.309), for this would be too scandalous an inversion of the 'natural' moral order: white is good; black is bad. Only Lizzie - inhabiting the twilight world of her profession, as a sort of existential take on the corny old theme of the.'scarlet woman with a heart of gold' - is in a position to understand that night and day, black and white, good and evil, life and death, are the obverse and reverse of the same coin. In the play (as opposed to the less pessimistic screenplay), she finally renounces that insight and succumbs to the essentialist ethic of her seducer, Fred. One can understand why. Lizzie's subscription of her signature to a charge of molestation against an innocent (black) man is ostensibly the critical event of the drama, seemingly pregnant with terrible consequences, yet it turns out to be irrelevant. The accused man escapes and another is indiscriminately lynched in his place, indicating Lizzie's impotence to affect an environment in which she unwittingly becomes the mediator of the violence inherent in the status quo. Much like Electre before her, Lizzie has to choose between autonomy and dependence, freedom and slavery, the two conditions embodied by the stereotypical characters who constitute this alien environment into which she is plunged, and with whose violence she is abruptly acquainted even before her train has reached its destination. The perpetrators of the sexual assault against her, and the murder of a black bystander, are young white males who are casually exercising their tribal rights. Therefore, her straightforward (and truthful) account of the incident is naïve and, in a sense, misleading insofar as it fails to appreciate the moral context: 'Il a relevé tes jupes, il a tiré sur un sale nègre, la belle affaire; ce sont des gestes qu'on a sans y penser, ça ne compte pas. Thomas est un chef, voilà ce qui compte' (p.289). This tension between the moral status of doing and

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being, between gesture and act, between existentialist and essentialist ethics, provides the dramatic impetus of the play. In his later biography of Genet, Sartre would elaborate a sche­ matic distinction between the ethical categories of Being and Doing, which he attributes to Genet, as follows: Au vrai, il y a chez Genet deux systèmes de valeur irréductibles, deux tables de catégories dont il use simultanément pour penser le monde. 1. Catégories de Y Être. Objet. Soi-même comme Autre. Essentiel qui se révèle inessentiel. Fatalité. Tragédie. Mort, évanouissement. Héros. Criminel. Aimé. Principe mâle.

2. Catégories du Faire. Sujet, conscience. Soi comme soi-même. Inessentiel qui se révèle essentiel. Liberté, volonté. Comédie. Vie, volonté de vivre. Sainte, [sic] Traître. Amant. Principe femelle.

Comment s'étonner de cette dualité de principes? Genet n'est-il pas lui-même une synthèse aberrante de deux attitudes? Produit simultané du substantialisme naïf des campagnes et du rationalisme des villes, n'appartient-il pas à deux groupes à la fois?63

These are the very principles which are at war with each other in La Putain respectueuse, with (appropriately) all the men (including le Nègre) aligned on the lefthand side, and the solitary female character ranged on the right. Equally, the conflict arises in part from the disparity between the cosmoplitan urban background (New York) whence Lizzie hails, and the atavistic, red-neck, rural mentality that she encounters in the South. Like the 'salauds' in the Bouville museum, Fred and (by implication) all his white social confederates explicitly have Me droit de vivre',64 whereas le Nègre and all his kind equally explicitly do not: what matters here is not what men do, but what they are. Thus, when Lizzie takes the common-sense view that 'c'est le blanc qui est coupable' (p.288), she is automatically contra63 64

Saint Genet comédien et martyr, p. 77. See La Nausée, pp. 117-33.

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dieted by Fred, from whose essentialist perspective guilt is at best a relative concept, and at worst a meaningless one. Guilt is not an attribute which one acquires consequentially, but a quality with which one is endowed a priori (in the way that blacks are, for example), or not, as the case may be. If what one does has no bearing upon one's essential being (the view of all those ranged in the lefthand column), then all acts are mere gestures (as Fred argues in respect of Thomas). Whereas, in Sartre's analysis, of course, acts change both the world and the agent, and where they fail to do the latter, they become the hollow mimes of a person as good as dead: 'Un acte qu'on accomplit pour être, ce n'est plu^un acte, c'est un geste.'65 The super-models of this spectacular bad faith are, in Sartre's theatre, Garcin and, in his philosophy, the notorious garçon de café who is 'too much' waiter and not enough living man.66 In the white mindset of the American deep South, Lizzie finds essentialist thinking caricatured to the point of comedy, and her dramatic struggle to resist its allure will (if we follow Sartre's schématisation) convert comedy into tragedy, and the will to live into a being-for-death. The chosen living-death of the whites, and the imposed livingdeath of the blacks, are complementary and symbiotic, both stemming from the essentialist principle that doing is subordinate to being. The white, because he is good and innocent, cannot be said to have 'acted', properly speaking, unless his action confirms what he is. By contrast, 'Un nègre a toujours fait quelque chose' (p.289) - that is, something wrong, of course - because he is, by nature (in his essence), bad, transgressive and guilty. By running counter to common-sense, this ethic places Lizzie between a rock and a hard place, so that she is, paradoxically, 'mise en position d'agresseur'67 by Fred, whereas she is herself the victim of one agression and the witness of another. Telling her that the guilty party, Thomas, is 'her victim', Fred is both playing upon her sense of foreignness - which then seems to be blameworthy, because she does not know how things operate in the South - and upon her own social marginalisation, which makes her suspicious of 65 66 67

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Saint Genet comédien et martyr, pp.87-8. See L'Être et le néant, pp.98-9. Lorris, p. 125.

authority and reluctant, for example, to involve the police. She is therefore susceptible to the absurd proposition that her instincts for fairness, justice and truth, amount to a threat of death (to Thomas) in a perverted moral climate which she cannot understand, yet in which such self-evidently respectable characters as the Senator hold sway. Le Sénateur is a splendid parody of the tastelessly oleaginous American politician, best exemplified, perhaps, by Richard Nixon in his memorable television broadcasts to the American people.68 Having won Lizzie's confidence by rebuking Fred and the police officers for their brutish behaviour, he then plays upon her vulnerability by invoking the name of Thomas's mother, thereby making Lizzie (indirectly) responsible also for the misery and possible death of '[cette] pauvre chère vieille qui va en mourir' (p.296). This is clever sophistry: Lizzie the assaulted becomes Lizzie the assailant, her offensive weapon, the truth! Naturally, she begins to recede from her moral position, wishing that the truth were indeed otherwise, the first step towards averring that this is so. Pressing home his advantage, the Senator assures her there are 'plusieurs espèces de vérité' (p.298) and, presuming to speak with the voice of the whole American nation, calls into question the Negro's right to life, in any event: 'Il est né au hasard, Dieu sait où [...]: est-ce qu'il mène une vie d'homme? Je ne m'apercevrais même pas de sa mort' (p.299). This is, of course, true for all of us in the Sartrean worldview: contingent through and through, accidental, unjustifiable, none of us leaves a gap in the world when we die. Not so for the essentialist: just as birth denotes gratuitousness and dispensability in some cases (e.g. blacks), so it also confers necessity and indispensability in others (e.g. whites - or some of them, at least). Thomas, we are told, is 'le descendant d'une de nos plus vieilles familles, il a fait ses études à Harvard, il est officier -[...] Il a le devoir de vivre et toi tu as le devoir de lui conserver la vie' (p.299). It follows, in this analysis, that Thomas's killing of a black was, albeit 'très mal' (p.299), a mere 68

For instance, in his preposterous, pre-resignation, 'Watergate' speech - 'There will be no whitewash at the White House!' - in 1973, or his equally men­ dacious, and risibly nauseating, telecast about his 'little dog', Checkers, in the early 1950s.

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gesture, and that Lizzie has the rare opportunity to do a good service for the entire nation by, in effect, sparing the life of this 'leader', this 'solide rempart contre le communisme, le syndicalisme et les Juifs'. So, it is not the 'true' version of events that matters, but the 'right' version, the one that would be endorsed by '[la] ville tout entière, avec ses pasteurs et ses curés, avec ses médecins, ses avocats et ses artistes, avec son maire et ses adjoints et ses associations de bienfaisance' (pp.300-1). This parade of portraits, recalling again the 'salauds' of the Bouville museum, depicts the major players of the essentialist domain, the bourgeois convinced of their necessity and justification, their worthiness and immortality. Led by the hand into this lookingglass world of ethics, and intoxicated by the Senator's heady cocktail of rhetoric, casuistry and pseudo-patriotic expediency, the 'respectful prostitute' signs a paper exonerating her attacker and accusing le Nègre. This is the key moment of Lizzie's moral capitulation, but it is not altogether the end of her existential life. Her hand was literally forced (according to the stage direction, p.301), and she is quick to have second thoughts and to realise that she has been 'roulée' (p.305), a realisation which grows when Thomas's mother rewards her with a $100 bill, and it becomes clear to her that the whites intend not only to apprehend le Nègre, but also to lynch him. It is this insight, coupled with her righteous indignation at having been 'had', which prompts her to do the right thing by the Negro, so far as she can, when he comes to her door to plead for his life. Lizzie is angry to think that they are each equally manipulated, and she momentarily imagines them both dying heroically in a hail of bullets, resisting their pursuers: 'Alors, autant crever en nombreuse compagnie' (p.309). However, her exhortations to him to defend himself with her revolver reveal a failure to appreciate the extent to which he - still moreso than herself - is an object in this essentialist universe, condemned to inertia and impotence: he cannot fire upon whites because they are white and he is black. Her bravado resembles Electre's lascivious dancing, a futile gesture of revolt which is not plugged into the real demands of the situation. Like Electre's dreams, her visions of bloody resistance evaporate when she realises that she and the Negro are alike, and that

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their common denominator is cowardice. This is what prevents them from committing their act, from making an assertion of the truth. Lizzie is repelled by Fred's account of the lynching of an inno­ cent negro, not least because of the apparent association he makes between violence and sex. As he ponders whether he has come to rape her or to kill her, her new status as object (on a par with her black visitor) is confirmed. The assassin and the sexual sadist both want to objectify their victims: 'Je regardais le nègre et je t'ai vue. Je t'ai vue balancer au-dessus des flammes. J'ai tiré' (p.313). Lizzie will retain some shred of moral life, so long as she can resist this total assimi­ lation of herself to the anonymous lynched martyr of the whites' prejudice. However, although she makes a valiant attempt to protect le Nègre, by allowing him to escape, she is finally incapable of per­ forming the one act that would change the meaning of her earlier, untruthful denunciation: she cannot shoot Fred. Indeed, yielding to his taunts about the futility of her life as compared with the necessity of his, she hands over the revolver as a token of her submission, and the phallic object of power returns to the white male in whom power resides. Le Nègre may have escaped, but no matter: another has died in his place, the sentence of white upon black has been duly executed, the relationship of master/slave, subject/object has been reaffirmed, and the 'natural' order of this perverse moral microcosm is restored. Lizzie succumbs to the caresses of Fred, consenting to be literally manipulated, just as Electre ultimately surrendered herself to the dominion of Jupiter. Henceforth, she will be kept like a bird in a gilded cage, her objectification complete. We have already noted Sartre's dissatisfaction with the effect of the play's final, life-denying emphasis. Yet - and not for the first time - he was unduly severe with himself, for the play's total philosophical impact derives not only from what actually happens, but also from the degree of the protagonist's responsibility. Electre, for example, cowardly committed moral suicide, although she had the chance to follow Oreste on the road to existential health. The résistants of Morts sans sépulture, by contrast, struck a blow for moral life by their final choice, their gratuitous execution notwithstanding. Arguably, Lizzie falls somewhere between the two. Certainly, she makes a deliberate

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and culpable decision to deny her freedom, and some critics have pilloried her for this. Lorris is categorical: Lizzie n'est certainement pas une héroïne selon les critères de la morale sartrienne: elle ne lutte pas pour son authenticité, mais pour son confort; [...]. Lizzie est la face sombre d'Oreste: partie du même désir d'appartenence à une communauté qui la rejette, elle en reste esclave alors qu'il la transcende.69

He even taxes her with cynically using the black man to 'get her revenge on the whites'.70 Koefoed is still more unforgiving: Peu de critiques onfcompris que la vraie accusée est Lizzie, [...]: 'Coupable de respect envers des préjugés et des idées qu 'elle ne comprend ni ne professe. ' Le nègre, ce ne sont ni les habitants furieux, ni [le Sénateur] Clarke, ni Fred qui le tuent, mais avant tout Lizzie.71

But these pitiless adjudications are partial, in both senses of the word. No doubt, Lorris has in mind Lizzie's leitmotiv, 'Je ne veux pas d'histoires!', but she equally often asserts that she wants to 'dire la vérité' - which is also, of course, how one might literally interpret: 'Je ne veux pas d'histoires!'. She does indeed fight for her authenticity, but it is an unequal struggle which she finally gives up in extenuating circumstances. Unlike any other Sartrean hero, Lizzie is entirely alone and disorientated in this alien moral wilderness, with only native instinct and (inappropriate, northern) common-sense for compasses. If, like Oreste, she wants to 'belong', it is neither surprising nor culpable, especially as the membership she seeks is marginal, at best, whereas his ambitions are no less than sovereign. And, so far from killing le Nègre, as Koefoed alleges, Lizzie is reluctant to denounce him in the first part (until she is forced to sign), and willing to shelter him in the second. In both instances, she displays audacity and integrity which outstrip any moral decisions or actions performed elsewhere in this profoundly corrupt, radically essentialist milieu. 69 70 71

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Lorris, p. 138. See Lorris, p. 130. Koefoed, p.78. There is some slight confusion here, in that le Nègre escapes Fred's final armed pursuit (unless Fred is lying). However, it is not unreason­ able to suppose that he will be tracked down and killed in due course.

Nevertheless, we cannot gainsay the critical consensus that Lizzie's itinerary charts a gradual and irreversible decline from beingfor-self to being-for-others, a transition from subjectivity to object­ ivity more definitive and depressing than any to be found elsewhere in Sartre's theatre, outside the confines of hell. Admittedly, Lizzie's profession pre-disposes her towards self-objectification - in a sense, it is her stock-in-trade - but that does not mitigate the fact that she allows her intelligent self-consciousness as an autonomous subject to be steadily eroded. Consequently, she at last becomes enthralled by the legendary and mystic power attributed to the Clarke family and their ancestors and, by implication, to the white ruling élite as a whole. Ironically, her nemesis is precipitated by her objectification of them too. Mesmerised by the heroic history evoked in Fred's con­ clusive mental seduction - 'Nous avons fait ce pays et son histoire est la nôtre' (p.315) - Lizzie's 'respectfulness' supervenes, and she pays obéissance to these generations of heroes by surrendering the revolver which her 'respect' prevents her from using. So doing, she steps backwards from the right-hand column of 'doing' to the left-hand one of 'being', exchanging 'the will to live' for 'swooning and death' (see above). As she melts into the arms of her seducer, one object in the hands of another, the scene is as gloomy, and the prospects as dire, as if Garcin and Estelle had been thrown together without Inès. 'Allons, tout est rentré dans l'ordre' (p.316), declares Fred smugly in the last speech of the play. Pessimistic? Perhaps. Or just too realistic to bear?

Les Mains sales The same ambiguity characterises Sartre's next play, Les Mains sales, which has attained the same notoriety as Huis clos, in large part because the author banned its production for over a decade in the Cold War period (1952-64). That self-censorship was due, as we shall see, to the very ambiguity inherent in the play's theme of idealism versus

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pragmatism, of the eternal moral and political question of ends and means: [J']ai mis en scène le conflit qui oppose un jeune bourgeois idéaliste aux nécessités politiques. Ce garçon a déserté sa classe au nom de cet idéal et c'est encore en son nom qu'il tuera le chef qu'il admirait mais qui a préféré la fin au choix des moyens. J'ajoute que ce droit, il le perdra en l'exerçant. A son tour il aura les mains sales.72

According to Simone de Beauvoir, this intractable ethical dilemma had been suggested to Sartre by the assassination of Trotsky and, more specifically, by an account related to her by one of Trotsky's former secretaries whom she had met in New York: [11] m'avait raconté que le meurtrier, ayant réussi à se faire engager comme secrétaire lui aussi, avait vécu assez longtemps aux côtés de sa victime, [...]. Sartre avait rêvé sur cette situation à huis clos; il avait imaginé un personnage déjeune communiste né dans la bourgeoisie, cherchant à effacer par un acte ses origines, mais incapable de s'arracher à sa subjectivité, même au prix d'un assassinat; il lui avait opposé un militant entièrement donné à ses objectifs. (Encore une fois, la confrontation de la morale et de la praxis.)73

This story may well have provided the bare bones of Sartre's narrative, but it leaves untouched the aspect of the assassin's filial affection for his victim. This introduces psychological complexity and emotional ambivalence, compounding the fundamental moral ambi­ guities of the piece, which are the engaging inventions of the play­ wright himself. Before the play's première, at the Théâtre Antoine, Paris, on 2 April 1948, there was a press preview on 21 March at which the journalists present were invited to meet the author afterwards. This was a canny piece of marketing which led to at least half-a-dozen trailers in the press (including Le Monde, Combat and Le Figaro), indicating that Sartre was by now a well-established and fashionable playwright, whose every project was regarded as an intrinsically 72 73

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Sartre, interview with J.B. Jeener in Le Figaro, 30 March 1948, extract in Un Théâtre de situations, pp.291-2, (p.291). La Force des choses, p. 166.

newsworthy event. Contât and Rybalka note that these various inter­ views, unsurprisingly, reiterate the same basic point, namely that Sartre did not see himself as 'choosing between' Hoederer's prag­ matism and Hugo's idealism, but rather as impartially illustrating Saint-Just's maxim: 'Nul ne gouverne innocemment.'74 Reviewing the première itself, some critics cheerfully echoed this line - 'Il ne s'agit pas d'une pièce politique. L'auteur pose les données du problème et s'abstient de prendre parti'75 - while others implicitly unmasked Sartre's disingenuousness: Ce serait un peu [...] trahir [...] sa pièce que de dire: Sartre pose le problème des fins et des moyens. Parce que Sartre parle très précisément des attitudes possibles des membres du parti communiste faisant de la résistance en un pays occupé par les Allemands.76

For others again, the political context was irrelevant, because unrealistic, and what mattered were the play's theatrical qualities, notably the dramatic force of the dialogue and the dynamic interaction of the characters: [...] Les Mains sales, dès le début, vous prennent à la gorge et ne vous lâchent pas. La claire vigueur du dialogue [...], l'originalité de la présentation [...], l'intérêt du caractère de Hugo [...], de Jessica [...], surtout de Hoederer [...], ne permettent guère de discuter. Vers où penche M. Sartre? Il ne le dit pas avec clarté. Mais son horreur du fanatisme est manifeste. Les Mains sales sont une pièce plus psychologique que partisane.77

The leading right-wing daily was still more enthusiastic, hailing the piece as 'the greatest' since the Liberation, 'and even long before that', and verging on rapture in its accolade: Pleine, solide, multiforme, puissante, violente, tragique, bouffonne, et surtout vivante. [...] Mais, le voilà Y Hamlet de notre temps! [...] Bref, il arrive qu'on

74 75 76 77

See Les Écrits de Sartre, pp. 178-80. G. Joly in L'Aurore, 4 April 1948. Anon, in Combat, 6 April 1948, p.2. Robert Kemp in Le Monde, 4 April 1948.

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rencontre des œuvres devant lesquelles on éprouve le besoin de sacrifier les réserves à l'éloge... En ce qui me concerne, Les Mains sales sont de celles-là.78

Conversely, the communist critic, Pol Gaillard, could scarcely have been more vehement in his denunciation: [Je] ne croyais pas que l'anticommunisme militant de Jean-Paul Sartre pût le condamner si vite, lui aussi, à nous offrir sur une scène une histoire aussi bête, lui faire perdre à ce point tout honneur artistique. [...] Je n'en finirais pas d'analyser les absurdités de la pièce: aucun des personnages n'existe vraiment, ce sont des mannequins animés, comme Olga, ou des porte-parole de l'auteur, comme Jessica et Hugo, c'est-à-dire de purs détraqués existentialistes. [...] Si quelqu'un a les mains sales dans cette histoire, c'est Jean-Paul Sartre lui79

même...

And so on, in similar vein: a piece 'of no literary value' by a play­ wright 'of no talent', whose success (if it had any) would merely prove that 'anticommunists are certifiable imbeciles' (in addition to the evidence that existentialists are mad). Yet, Gaillard's ideologically motivated rant, for all its passion, is less telling than the subtle and scathing comments of Sartre's eminent contemporary, Marguerite Duras, who evoked the play's 'irresistible Courtelino-Shakespearian atmosphere', which, 'whatever Sartre's intentions', was ideally suited to 'satisfy the voyeuristic appetite of its (bourgeois) audience'.80 It is manifest, even from a rapid conspectus of these widely differing views, that Les Mains sales was destined to be judged according to the political provenance of its critics, with left and right both tending to see it as a critique of communist party politics, and only those in the centre capable of appreciating its more abstract moral and psychological dimensions. On account of this inevitable political bias, Sartre was to prohibit its production (except with the agreement of national communist parties) throughout the 1950s, despite the immense success it had enjoyed both in Paris and on provincial tours.81 In so doing, he was acknowledging that it is 78 79 80 81

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Jean-Jacques Gautier in Le Figaro, 4-5 April 1948, p.3. Les Lettres françaises, 8 April 1948, p.7. See Action, April 1948. Almost 1,000 performances altogether: see Un Théâtre de situations, pp.293-4.

inherent in the theatrical medium that works quickly assume a life of their own and that, in spite of his intentions (as Duras had observed), the play had taken on an 'objective meaning' of anti-communism: [Une] pièce assume un sens objectif qui lui est attribué par un public. Il n'y a rien à faire: si toute la bourgeoisie française fait un succès triomphal aux Mains sales, et si les communistes l'attaquent, cela veut dire [...] que la pièce est devenue par elle-même anticommuniste, objectivement, et que les intentions de l'auteur ne comptent plus. [...] Mon point de vue a un peu changé, mais il reste essentiellement le même; je continue à penser, subjectivement, c'est-à-dire dans la mesure où je l'ai écrite, que ce n'est pas une œuvre anticommuniste et que c'est, au contraire, au moins une œuvre de 'compagnon de route'.82

Yet, whether the play is 'objectively' anticommunist or not is of less interest to us than to establish whether it prolongs the despairing, lifedenying strains of La Putain respectueuse, or whether it reprises the muted, life-affirming statements of the earlier plays. First indications are not promising. The protagonist, Hugo Barine, is an assassin whose actions (in the flashback past) consist largely of his wrestling with the prospect of the assassination he will finally commit, and whose deliberations (in the dramatic present) concern whether he will choose to renounce his action (and live), or lay claim to it (and die). The nub of the question is personal respon­ sibility, what Sartre called the 'solution of continuity' which we, as autonomous agents, constitute between the motives of an action and the commission of it: 'C'est de cela que nous sommes avant tout responsables: responsables de ce que l'acte ne découle pas naturelle­ ment des mobiles.'83 In this sense, Hugo's story is as acutely focused upon human life as possible, in that it interrogates the fundamental relationship between our freedom and our acts. Yet his dilemma springs from a highly personal frustration which is typically the lot of the intellectual in times of political and social upheaval. How can his words alone change the world, while his comrades risk life and limb -

82 83

Sartre, interviewed by Paolo Caruso for the Italian translation, Le Mani sporche, 1964, in Un Théâtre de situations, pp.294-312 (pp.295-6). Les Carnets de la drôle de guerre, p. 169.

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demythifying and demystifying death - in order to perform real actions with real consequences? As editor of the Proletarian Party's journal in war-torn 'Illyria',84 Hugo feels excluded from the Party's active resistance, the moreso as his paper publishes second-hand news gleaned from BBC broadcasts, and goes largely unread by the activists.85 His choice of the nom de guerre 'Raskolnikoff denotes an anxiety to perform 'direct actions' which make a real impact in the world, such as comrade Ivan's explosive demolition of bridges. 'Direct action' would confer upon him, Hugo supposes, the status of 'un dur' which he so admires and envies in his immediate colleagues, especially Louis and Olga. But this literary nom de guerre also betrays an education and a socioeconomic background which mark him out from his comrades, and make it doubly difficult for him to gain the kind of acceptance he craves. Like the characters of La Putain respectueuse, Hugo is firmly situated by his social class and is all too aware of its having a determining effect upon his life, notably generating the antithetical tensions between his native and his adoptive allegiances. Like Oreste, he struggles to escape the facticity against which he rebels, and specifically the grip of the bourgeois industrialist father whom he physically resembles. Yet his revolt is more perverse than Oreste's. Whereas the earlier hero went in search of a life that had been witheld, Hugo becomes reckless of a life that has been too carefully nurtured: 'Olga, je n'ai pas envie de vivre.'86 The repudiation of the gift implies rejection of the giver: Hugo's contempt for his own existence encom­ passes scorn for his father's. Whereas Oreste reproached his mother with having starved him of life, Hugo resents his progenitor for having endowed him with it. When Karsky rebukes him to the effect that he will be 'to blame for his father's death', Hugo retorts: 'Il est à peu près certain qu'il porte la responsabilité de ma vie. Nous sommes quittes'(p. 145).

84 85 86

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The Latin name for Hungary. See Les Mains sales, p.38. Les Mains sales, p.44. Further references are in the text; where consecutive quotations concern the same page, only the first is referenced.

As the events of 11 September 2001 showed all too clearly, there is nothing and nobody more dangerous than an angry young man with a cause to die for and no care for his own life. Such is the agent Hugo, a character who finally commits the murder for which he had so eagerly volunteered, yet whose real motives remain mysterious, even to himself, despite three years of contemplative incarceration: 'Un acte, ça va trop vite. Il sort de toi brusquement et tu ne sais pas si c'est parce que tu Tas voulu ou parce que tu n'as pas pu le retenir. Le fait est que j'ai tiré...' (p.33). Hugo's insecurity about the exercise of his free will, as compared with the impact upon him of extraneous forces, stems from the fact that he has always been, like Lizzie, profoundly susceptible to the influence of others. His relationships with his father, with the Party, with Olga and Jessica, and above all with Hoederer, are of crucial importance, with the first four all impelling him towards the assassination he eventually carries out, while only Hoederer is a force for restraint. If his action is not strictly speaking determined, it is nevertheless heavily conditioned by an emotional and intellectual dynamic that makes Hugo, like Hamlet, an assassin in spite of himself. Hugo's relations with the Party, first of all, are mediated by guilt and inferiority. Guilt is the bequest of his privileged background, as a result of which Hugo joined from the Party from conviction rather than need; his high-minded talk of 'self-respect' is so much intel­ lectual self-indulgence to the no-nonsense minds of his working-class comrades, Slick and Georges, for whom the Party is their natural home. And a sense of inferiority dogs Hugo, because he feels himself to be in the margins of the group's activity; his journalistic talents are effectively redundant, and he enjoys neither the confidence of his colleagues, nor the prestige accorded to those who perpetrate spectacular acts of resistance. His very status (or lack of it) is there­ fore an incitement to direct action and, in this sense, he is pre-disposed to violence, an influence which his relationship with Olga amplifies. She, like Louis, is 'un dur' - loyal, reliable, obedient, fearless - so that she both represents all the qualities Hugo admires, and embodies the Party's tacit reproaches to his many shortcomings as a mere intellectual. Their mutual affection necessarily complicates matters: his feelings for her become confused with his impulses towards action; her feelings for him cloud her political judgment, which is 123

overtaken by her desire to salvage his reputation with the Party hierarchy. Her single-handed attempt on Hoederer's life, for example, is intended to alleviate the pressure on the procrastinating Hugo, yet has precisely the reverse effect. By underlining the Party's distrust of him, and calling into question his special relationship with Olga herself, her untimely bomb leaves him still more susceptible to the charisma of Hoederer. Hugo's relations with Jessica are equally important, for he is as anxious to disprove her doubts as he is to allay the Party's misgivings, so he is ready to kill a complete stranger, 'Pour que ma femme me prenne au sérieux' (p.73). Yet their habit of game-playing makes him unable to acquire the density that the prospect of such an act should confer: 'Bon Dieu, quand on va tuer un home, on devrait se sentir lourd comme une pierre. [...] C'est vrai que je vais le tuer: [...] Quelle comédie!' (p. 120). As Jessica points out, 'si tu veux me convaincre que tu vas devenir un assassin, il faudrait commencer par t'en convaincre toi-même'. Her scepticism, therefore, is a spur to him, and yet - once she begins to take him seriously - she also has the reverse effect, pleading with him not to kill Hoederer when he no longer knows what he intends to do.87 Paradoxically, Hugo's self-confidence diminishes commensurately as Jessica's belief in him increases, reflecting the contradictory tenor of their relationship, the incompati­ bility that makes Hugo deaf to his wife's eloquent advocacy of life: Pourquoi m'avez-vous laissée dans l'ignorance, si c'était pour [...] m'obliger à choisir entre un suicide et un assassinat? Je ne veux pas choisir: je ne veux pas que tu te laisses tuer, je ne veux pas que tu le tues. [...] Je ne connais rien à vos histoires et je m'en lave les mains. Je ne suis ni oppresseur, ni social-traître, ni révolutionnaire, je n'ai rien fait, je suis innocente de tout. [...] A present il faut que je choisisse. Pour toi et pour moi: c'est ma vie que je choisis avec la tienne et je ... Oh! mon Dieu! je ne peux pas. (p. 192)

This impassioned plea for life - reminiscent of Francois's, and similarly futile because equally disconnected from the reality of the context - founders on the falsity of their relationship: 'Est-ce que tu ne sais pas que notre amour était une comédie?' (p. 193), asks Hugo, 87

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See pp. 133, 183.

reproachfully. Jessica has no claim on his attention, on the basis either of love or of intellectual respect, and he childishly makes a point of doing the opposite of what she wants or expects, so that by the end of this scene {tableau V), he perversely commits himself more resolutely than before to his mission: 'Demain matin, je finirai le travail' (p.214). Thus, the Party, Olga and Jessica are three forces driving Hugo towards violence, and specifically the assassination of Hoederer. Set over against these are his relationships with his father, himself and, above all, Hoederer. These are intimately bound up with each other, insofar as Hoederer is a positive reflection of the very negative attitude that Hugo has towards his father and (concomitantly) himself, and ultimately it is the dangerous proximity of the objects of Hugo's affection and hatred that proves fatal. We know that Hugo dislikes his father and joined the Party mostly as a revolt against his family background, anxious to refute his father's cynicism: 'Moi aussi, dans mon temps, j'ai fait partie d'un groupe révolutionnaire; j'écrivais dans leur journal. Ça te passera comme ça m'a passé...' (p.43). So here is another incentive for Hugo to undertake 'direct action', in order to differentiate himself from the father whom he both loathes and resembles.88 But whom does he really hate when he complains of having been born: his father, himself, or his father in himself? His life as the killer Raskolnikoff is the merest fantasy - 'Je vis dans un décor' (p. 132) - while in reality he suffers from all the youthful complexes of Oreste, aggravated by the weighty super-ego of the father pressing down upon him: '[La jeunesse] c'est une maladie bourgeoise. (77 rit.) Il y en a beaucoup qui en meurent' (p.142).89 His repeated deathwish90 expresses equally the will to parricide as to suicide, an act which is potentially a means to self-liberation and apotheosis for Hugo, echoing the matricide of Oreste and adumbrating the parricidal 88 89

90

See p.68. Sartre facetiously claims in Les Mots to have been spared the fate of Œdipus (and Hugo Barine, and Frantz von Gerlach), by his own father's premature death: 4[J']ai laissé derrière moi un jeune mort qui n'eut pas le temps d'être mon père et qui pourrait être, aujourd'hui, mon fils. Fut-ce un mal ou un bien? Je ne sais; mais je souscris volontiers au verdict d'un eminent psychanalyste: je n'ai pas de Sur-moi' (Les Mots, p.l 1). See pp.45, 142, 228 and 232.

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suicide of Frantz. As his relationship with Hoederer develops, Hugo becomes emotionally dependent in an explicitly filial way, so that his eventual assassination of his mentor takes on a distinctly Œdipal aura. These Freudian emotional ambiguities are still more clearly articulated in the cinematic adaptation, in which Hugo's father, who does not actually appear in the play itself, is embodied as the quintessence of pompous, patronising and unfeeling bourgeois capitalism, thus as the antithesis of everything that Hoederer comes to represent for Hugo.91 Here is a character who can satisfy his intellectual and emotional needs in a way that neither his father nor his wife is able to do. With his pragmatic approach to politics, Hoederer puts Hugo in touch with reality and begins to wean him off his youthful idealism, yet without condescending to him, paternal but not paternalistic. By placing trust in Hugo, Hoederer fills the void left by his father's cynicism, Olga's misgivings and Jessica's scorn. Hugo's affections - repulsed, reduced or ridiculed elsewhere - are in search of a new cathexis when he takes up his post as Hoederer's secretary. Hugo's first impressions of Hoederer are that he is tough and a man of the people, yet he does not find him intimidating, as Jessica suggests. He is also courageous but cautious, according to his body­ guard, Slick. So he is the opposite of Hugo, who is a 'delicate rich kid', foolhardy but feeble, whose inability to communicate with those of different social and intellectual levels is demonstrated by his quarrel with Slick and Georges. This is the context in which Hoederer first appears as the conciliatory voice of reason, the father-figure and advocate of life: 'Mes enfants, vous êtes mal partis. Quatre hommes qui vivent ensemble, ça s'aime ou ça se massacre. Vous allez me faire le plaisir de vous aimer' (pp.95-6). Although he initially refuses Hoederer's help in this embarrassing altercation, Hugo is inevitably impressed by his mental agility (notably, his equation of hunger with

91

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Sartre was deeply unhappy with the film (which opened in Paris on 29 August 1951), chiefly because it was viewed by the PCF as a renewed and persistent attack on the left at a crucial moment of the Cold War, and he effectively disowned it, with the most apposite of metaphors - 4Je m'en lave les mains' (Paris-Presse-L 'Intransigeant, 7 June 1951) - despite having sold the rights and written the dialogue himself (see Les Écrits de Sartre, pp.487-8).

self-respect), and by his firmness in insisting that the room be searched, even when the need for that seems to have passed: 'J'ai confiance en toi, mon petit, mais il faut que tu sois réaliste' (p. 102). This little sentence sums up everything that Hugo will find irresistible in Hoederer: the confidence, the paternal attitude, the lesson in realism. Jessica will justly remark that Hugo was 'ému' (p.l 16) at this moment, which he does not trouble to deny: 'As-tu vu comme il est dense? Comme il est vivant?' (p. 120). It is his unique ability, to combine the density of things (the in-itself) with the vivacity of human existence (the for-itself), that makes Hoederer so alluring: 'Tout ce qu'il touche a l'air vrai' (p. 132). Hugo remains abstract by comparison, and Jessica's continual teasing makes him all the more susceptible to the charisma of the mature man. During their first scene together, the two men unexpectedly find common ground in their shared attitudes towards life and death. Hoederer (who has 'no objection in principle to political assassin­ ation') expects to be assassinated, and Hugo expects to become an assassin. Hoederer is not afraid, but 'pressé' (p. 140), anxious to get things done in the time that remains. Hugo is also in a hurry, rightly anticipating an early death. Hoederer (who went 'straight from childhood to manhood') is especially well placed to help Hugo graduate from the morbidity of adolescent ideals to the vitality of virile political commitment. But this tacit understanding between the mature realist and the juvenile idealist is fragile and will have to undergo certain trials. The first of these is Hoederer's strategy for an accommodation with the Prince and Karsky, to which Hugo is so violently opposed in principle that he reaches for his revolver, and comes as close as he ever will to killing Hoederer for political reasons. Yet, even at this moment, there is a powerful admixture of purely personal and emotional urges. For Hugo, Karsky and the Prince 'sont les mêmes [...] qui venaient chez mon père [...] et ils me poursuivent jusqu'ici' (p. 158). They are tainted, in other words, by their class association with his father and are thereby implicated in the hatred he has for the man 'responsible for his life'. In a double irony, Olga's bomb both saves Hoederer's life, in that it defuses Hugo's angry reaction at a critical moment, and prompts a life-saving gesture on Hoederer's part towards his future 127

assassin: '// saisit Hugo par les épaules et le jette par terre' (p. 159). It has the equally unpredictable effect of reinforcing Hugo's attachment to Hoederer, by underlining the Party's mistrust of its agent: 'Tu peux penser ce que tu veux de Hoederer,' Hugo tells Jessica after the bomb outrage, 'mais c'est un homme qui m'a fait confiance. Tout le monde ne peut pas en dire autant' (p. 164). Trust is a life-sustaining gift in Hugo's estimation - 'Et comment veux-tu vivre si personne ne te fait confiance? [...Olga] était la seule qui croyait un peu en moi' (p. 182) and the implicit withdrawal of Olga's trust in him makes Hoederer's offer of that gift all the more attractive. Nevertheless, ideological divisions persist between the two men, although they do not achieve their full destructive potential until they are doubled with emotional complications. This occurs in their setpiece confrontation (V, 3) which begins with Jessica's over-optimistic prediction of mutual understanding: '[Vous] avez frôlé la mort, ça rend plus conciliant' (p.201). On this basis, Hugo (egged on by Jessica) ventures an outright challenge to Hoederer's realist policies of political cohabitation, only to find himself hopelessly out-manœuvred and lured into a dogmatic statement of his own untenable credo: 'II n'y a qu'un seul but: c'est de faire triompher nos idées, toutes nos idées et rien qu'elles' (pp.205-6). Unwittingly, Hoederer retorts with the patronising phrase used by Hugo's father in similar circumstances: 'C'est vrai: tu as des idées, toi. Ça te passera' (p.206). The dialogue is no longer one of equality and Hugo's hackles rise, the moreso when his protestations that 'our comrades died for their ideas' are just as peremptorily dismissed: 'Je me fous des morts. Ils sont morts pour le Parti et le Parti peut decider ce qu'il veut. Je fais une politique de vivants pour les vivants.' This is Hoederer's defining moment, the confession of faith which locates him unarguably on the side of life and opposes him to Hugo, who sees the Party as, first and foremost, giving one a cause for which to die. Crucially, too, this pragmatic attitude sanctions the Party's sub­ sequent interpretation of Hoederer's own death, and it is Hugo's even­ tual inability to come to terms with that compromise which indicates that he truly remains an unreconstructed idealist and, consequently, 'non-récupérable'. Praxis prevails in Hoederer's world-view, and that is incompatible with the purity of ideals: 'Comme tu as peur de te salir 128

les mains. Eh bien, reste pur!' (pp.208-9). Hugo is painfully aware of being talked down to, of having his bourgeois intellectualism thrown in his face - not, this time, by the uncouth working men, Slick and Georges, nor by his condescending father, but (much worse) by the mentor who had begun to resemble the father figure he craved. Outwitted by his cerebrally more sophisticated opponent, Hugo is soon forced to admit that he places principles above men's lives, so that he assents to the kind of clerical murder - Mis décident qu'un homme va mourir, c'est comme s'ils rayaient un nom sur un annuaire' (p. 185) - with which he had earlier reproached the Party's hierarchy. And, in a petulant outburst, he reveals the profoundly personal emotions which underpin his radically principled stance: 'Les hommes? Pourquoi les aimerais-je? Est-ce qu'ils m'aiment?' (p.211). Hoederer's piercing reply is a psychoanalytic insight that sums up the difference between the two men. One is a pragmatic activist, advocate and architect of life; the other a misanthropic idealist, apologist and disciple of death: 'Les hommes, tu les détestes parce que tu te détestes toi-même; ta pureté ressemble à la mort et la Révolution dont tu rêves n'est pas la nôtre: tu ne veux pas changer le monde, tu veux le faire sauter.' Dominated intellectually and bereft emotionally - feeling that the longed-for confidence of the surrogate father, Hoederer, has been suddenly transformed into the familiar contempt of his real father Hugo seems at last determined to execute his mission: 'Demain matin, je finirai le travail' (p.214). In the light of the next day, however, things look different again, and their relationship quickly flourishes into one of almost explicit mutual affection. Hoederer brushes aside 'sentiment' when Jessica asks: 'Vous avez de l'amitié pour lui, n'estce pas?' (p.220), but he does not deny it. Indeed, he stresses that he wants to persuade Hugo, but not to humiliate him, and to that end he is willing to risk his life, by turning his back on his would-be assassin. Once he has done so, with impunity, it seems certain that the crisis has passed and that a new bond has been sealed between them: 'Hoederer, j'ai manqué mon coup et je sais à present que je ne pourrai jamais tirer sur vous parce que... parce que je tiens à vous' (p.233). This open avowal of emotional dependence (while Hugo continues to stress their ideological differences) marks a critical moment: it makes the 129

shooting of Hoederer both less and more likely because, as Hugo feels growing attachment to Hoederer, so he becomes more vulnerable to betrayal. Given this final bond of affection and respect between the two men, we must ask why, when Hugo returns intending to accept Hoederer's invitation to co-operate, does he shoot him instead? Is it because he finds Jessica in Hoederer's arms? And, if so, in what sense is that the cause of his action? Presumably, Hugo's crime lies somewhere on the spectrum between cold-blooded killing and crime of passion, but where precisely, he cannot say. Minutes earlier, Hugo had appeared to prove Hoederer's assertion that 'on ne peut pas-buter un homme de sang-froid, à moins d'être un spécialiste' (p.229). Yet, at the moment of the murder, he is composed and cold-blooded: 'Vous voyez, Hoederer, je vous regarde dans les yeux, et je vise et ma main ne tremble pas et je me fous de ce que vous avez dans la tête' (p.240). What factors have supervened in the interim, apart from the obvious one of Jessica's seduction? First, the ideological conflict of dialectics and ethics has not gone away.92 Hugo admitted that he had been out-smarted by Hoederer, but he never concedes that the older man is 'right', despite confessing an emotional attachment to him. Hence, when Hugo's feelings are slighted, the intellectual, ideological dispute resurfaces to justify his anger. Likewise, Hugo's orders from the Party are not of themselves sufficient to compel an act, as he later realises: 'Ça vous laisse tout seul les ordres, à partir d'un certain moment' (p.21). Nevertheless, orders certainly incentivise a character who admits: 'J'ai besoin d'obéir. Obéir et c'est tout' (p. 112). More significant than either of these motivations, however, is the aspiration to ontological stability 'Bon Dieu, quand on va tuer un homme, on devrait se sentir lourd comme une pierre' (p. 120) - which relates Hugo to his predecessor, Oreste, and his contemporary, Genet: Ce n'est pas la mort ressentie qu'il apprécie dans le meurtre: c'est la mort objective et l'acte objectif qui la provoque. Encore l'une et l'autre ne l'intéressent-ils que dans la mesure où ils confèrent / 'être de criminel au meurtrier.93

92 93

130

See Verstraeten ( 1972), pp. 95,101. Saint Genet, comédien et martyr, p. 107.

Hugo is aiming to become the fictional Raskolnikofif, much as Philèbe strove to become Oreste, by embracing the burden of his act. But Oreste belongs to the analytic phase of Sartre's thought. By the time of Hugo (and moreso of Genet), his growing dialectical perception has converted the linear progress from doing to being into a vicious circle, which circumscribes those individuals who mistakenly elevate a looked-for state of being into their chief raison d'agir: 'Ainsi par un cercle vicieux propre à toute morale de l'être, on tue pour être criminel, mais il serait vain d'essayer seulement de le devenir si on ne l'était d'avance.'94 Hoederer postulates this idea, of a kind of essentialist predestination, for the sake of argument: 'On est tueur de nais­ sance. Toi, tu réfléchis trop: tu ne pourrais pas' (p.227). Whether or not he believes this is irrelevant, because the point of the remark is to taunt Hugo, amounting to an accusation of impotence from the man he is tempted to regard as a new father. As such, it is another provocation to demonstrate by his actions that he can become, wilfully, what by nature he is not.95 Yet, persuasive as the ontological argument is, it does not wholly account for Hugo's act of assassination, which turns out to be a special kind of crime passionnel The crime of passion as popularly conceived is a misconception, according to Sartre: 'Car, qu'est-ce que c'est la passion? Un jaloux, par exemple, qui essaie de vider un revolver sur son rival, tue-t-il par passion? Non, il tue parce qu'il croit qu'il est dans son droit.'96 We respond aggressively when we believe our rights are violated, but this is a logical, even rational, response. Hugo's rights here are violated not because of the conventional sexual possessiveness which he, as a man, might legitimately assert over his wife, but rather because it appears that his confidence has been abused. It looks as if Hoederer had made a show of trusting him, of caring for him in a paternal way, in order to have the opportunity to seduce Jessica: 'Jaloux? Peut-être.

94 95

96

Saint Genet, comédien et martyr, p. 108. Jeanson has argued that, for Sartre, the intellectual's preoccupation with vio­ lence is always fundamentally a struggle with the nature of being: see Jeanson (1955), p.46. Sartre, 'Théâtre épique et théâtre dramatique', lecture given at the Sorbonne, 29 March 1960, in Un Théâtre de situations, pp. 113-64 (p. 147).

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Mais pas de Jessica' (p.242), he tells Olga. What he experiences is rather jealousy for the affection of Hoederer, so keenly sought after and so abruptly lost. His passion is what Rabi has called '[ce] vertige de l'humiliation et de l'orgueil',97 a heady mixture which affords him the 'pleasure' of seeing Hoederer 'disconcerted', and enables him to take aim and to fire without trembling. Hoederer, not Hugo, has succumbed to a banal sexual 'passion', and Hugo is within his rights because the father figure has betrayed the love of the son: Laisse donc, Jessica, laisse tomber. Je ne t'en veux pas et je ne suis pas jaloux; nous ne nous aimionsj>as. Mais lui, il a bien failli me prendre à son piège. 4Je t'aiderai, je te ferai passer à l'âge d'homme.' Que j'étais bête! Il se foutait de moi. (p.240)

It is this sense of having been taken for a ride, 'screwed over' by the man who had promised to help him 'grow up', that constitutes Hugo's legitimate 'passion' and will engulf him also in Hoederer's death, despite the latter's attempt to save him with his dying breath: 'Ne lui faites pas de mal. [...] Il a tiré par jalousie' (p.241). Hugo becomes the victim of his own passion because Hoederer was his lifeline, and it is impossible to derive life from the destruction of its proponents, because that would amount to a creation ex nihilo, a resuscitation of'le vieux mythe héraclitien selon laquelle la vie naît de la mort'.98 Verstraeten glosses this as confirmation of the necessary triumph of dialectical praxis over the morbidity of theory: 'Le sacrifice suicidaire de Hugo confirme [...] que les principes sont mortifères: le rêve d'une adolescence magique, et que le réalisme de son père préservait l'essentiel: la vie, [...]•'" The father is, of course, as much Hoederer as Monsieur Barine senior. This tacit conspiracy of aged pragmatism, transcending socio-economic demarcations, is more than the alienated adolescent can bear, as Sartre himself made clear: Mon héros est un jeune bourgeois qui, par idéologie, s'est engagé dans un parti prolétarien, mais qui, devant le réalisme exigé par l'action, ne peut se dégager 97 98 99

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Rabi, p.443. 'Qu'est-ce que la littérature?', in Situations II, p.228. Verstraeten ( 1972), p.96.

des catégories idéalistes qui, précisément, l'ont poussé à se désolidariser de sa classe. D'où son malaise qui ne peut déboucher que dans la mort.100

This does not mean that Sartre saw Hugo's suicide as literally pre­ determined, but rather as a choice which makes best sense to him, necessarily, as an unrepentant idealist who persists in ignoring the very lessons that Hoederer was trying to teach him: 'Plutôt que de tremper dans une violence ambigiie, [Hugo] préfère rester fidèle au mythe et à la pureté; il mourra donc, fondamentalement attaché à une vision éthique, [...].'101 The operative word is 'prefers': Hugo's suicide is still a free choice, albeit heavily conditioned. With three years' hindsight, Hugo's most cogent explanation of the assassination is this: 'Moi, je vivais depuis longtemps dans la tragédie. C'est pour sauver la tragédie que j'ai tiré' (p.242). Notice how he automatically adduces the ambiguity of the theatre as a living space in which, nevertheless, pre-determined actions lead inexorably to fatal outcomes. Since then, Hugo has led 'cette drôle de vie perplexe' (p.245), vacuous, oppressed, suspended, incomplete, a tragedy without apotheosis: '[Mon crime] est devenu mon destin, [...] il gouverne ma vie du dehors mais [...] il n'est pas à moi, c'est une maladie mortelle qui tue sans faire souffrir' (p.246). Are these any more than the ramblings of a madman who takes himself, at last, for Raskolnikoff? There is a useful clue in one of Sartre's earlier works on psychology: 'Ce n'est pas le crime commis par Raskolnikoff qui s'incorpore à l'Ego de celui-ci. Ou plutôt, pour être exact, c'est le crime mais sous une forme condensée, sous la forme d'une meur­ trissure.'102 That 'contusion' is the crime insofar as it is interiorised by the agent, constituting a dominant part of the past which we continu­ ously become: 'Ce n'est pas mon crime qui me tue, c'est sa mort', is Hugo's more melodramatic way of articulating the same idea. Unless something happens to alter his (mis)conception of human beings and the world as mere embodiments of ideas, or to cause him to step outside the 'décor' in which he acts out his own tragedy, Hugo's death

100 Sartre, interviewed in L'Aube, 1 April 1948, in Les Écrits de Sartre, p. 180. 101 Verstraeten ( 1972), p.95. 102 La Transcendance de l'Ego, p.65.

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must follow as surely as Hamlet's or Macbeth's: '[Hugo] se fascine sur sa propre mort et, à travers son suicide, sent peser sur lui le regard absolu de tous les amateurs de tragédie.'103 The convention of tragedy exacts Hugo's suicide. Only a change in the Party's principles could obviate it, since Hugo refuses to revise his idealist stance. However, the Party remains as resolutely pragmatic as was Hoederer himself, and has indeed adopted his modus vivendi with the ruling élite: 'Nous avons peut-être économisé cent mille vies humaines', (p.252) boasts Olga. But for Hugo, who Moves' people for what they might be (ideas), not for what they are (living flesh and blood), this trade-off is-not worth Raskolnikoff s demise, and he will not accept that 'Ce type qui a tué Hoederer est mort' (p.251). If he could but quit the persona of Raskolnikoff (as Oreste shed the skin of Philèbe), Hugo might yet find a pathway to life. As things stand, this false identity is all the subjectivity he possesses, in the context of the Party: 'Je n'arrivais pas à séparer le meurtre de ses motifs' (p.244). He will not sacrifice that sense of selfhood to the collective good of history, refusing to countenance his objectification in the unforeseen consequences of his actions, as Sartre implies we should: Or, nous avons vu que le seul résultat permet d'apprécier la fin réelle de l'agent et, ce qui revient au même, l'agent lui-même. [...] Il s'agit donc de se recon­ naître comme Autre dans sa propre objectivation singulière à partir d'un '

i

104

résultat autre.

The Party, by contrast, as the organism of the working class en masse is bound (like Hoederer) to think strategically and objectively: 'Car le prolétariat engagé dans la lutte a besoin de distinguer à chaque instant, pour mener à bien son entreprise, le passé du futur, le réel de l'imagi­ naire, et la vie de la mort.'105 Since Hugo declines to conform, there is only one possible outcome: 'Le Parti, ça se quitte les pieds devant' (p. 180). So, there is an unstoppable progression from Hugo's murder of the life-spokesman Hoederer to his own suicide, a final and irrevocable passage into the identity of Raskolnikoff, a veritable self103 Verstraeten ( 1972), p.62. 104 Critique de la raison dialectique /, p.284. 105 'Qu'est-ce que la littérature?', in Situations II, p.220.

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annihilation, and this is the meaning of his otherwise enigmatic last words as he leaves Olga to face the Party's executioners: 'Je n'ai pas encore tué Hoederer, Olga. [...] C'est à présent que je vais le tuer et moi avec' (p.258). He had not yet killed Hoederer in the sense that he had not yet killed himself, for it was Hugo he had killed in killing Hoederer: [Si] Ton ne parvient pas à changer une situation inacceptable, c'est tout un que de la vouloir ou de la refuser [...] Dans le premier cas, on s'acharne à vouloir un désastre qu'on suppose inévitable pour que la mort de l'homme s'identifie avec le triomphe de sa volonté; dans le second, le refus a pour but de détacher l'âme de l'être pour la modeler à la ressemblance des valeurs; [...] mourir en refusant, c'est s'assurer le triomphe au-delà de la défaite, c'est refiler à l'absolu la consigne de dire non. Les deux conduites ont le même principe: l'homme est impossible.106

Hugo will, precisely, 'die refusing' in order to 'ensure victory beyond defeat'. Both he and Hoederer will have died for the young man's misguided principles. With more than half a century's hindsight, it seems surprising that critics should have identified Sartre's position with Hugo rather than Hoederer, and construed the play as an attack on socialist totali­ tarianism when it is rather a denunciation of the insidious liberalhumanist agenda that Hugo, in spite of himself, espouses and represents. His journey takes him from a mortifying moral idealism to a physical and moral death, despite glimpses of 'la vie dialectique' (Verstraeten's term) provided en route by the mentor whom he chooses to kill. Hugo is impossible and, extrapolating from the par­ ticular to the universal, he concludes that man is impossible too, or as he puts it: 'Non récupérable!' (p.258).107 Like many of his critics, Sartre had also had too much reality by the time Les Mains sales attained its scandalous success in 1948. A couple of years respite from

106 Saint Genet, comédien et martyr, pp.389, 390. 107 See Goldthorpe (1984), p. 114, for a penetrating exegesis of this 'complicated oxymoron'.

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the theatre would be followed by a fanciful reversion to more distant times and climes, contexts in which difficult questions about means and ends, appearance and truth, good and evil, life and death, seem more hypothetical, less intractable, or simply less serious.

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Chapter 4 From Hispano-German melodrama to Anglo-French farce

Amid the brouhaha surrounding Les Mains sales, at home and abroad, and on both sides of the growing east/west divide, Sartre's energies were devoted more to political than to literary activity. Increasingly associated with the RDR (Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnairé) until its break-up in late 1949, Sartre recorded Entretiens sur la politique with David Rousset and Gérard Rosenthal in the autumn of 1948, and identified himself with various causes, notably the foun­ dation of the State of Israel and the creation of a 'new' Germany. He also continued to extend his influence (and notoriety) through a con­ troversial attack on André Malraux in Les Temps modernes (Decem­ ber 1948), and a polemic with the revered Catholic novelist, François Mauriac, in Spring 1949. The Pope himself- or the Holy Office of the Vatican, to be more precise - contributed additional relief to Sartre's profile by placing all his work on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, thereby making it offensive to God (no less) for Catholics to read him. Sartre could hardly have wished for a more suitably medieval and totalitarian prelude to his next theatrical foray. However, in the three years elapsing between the première of Les Mains sales and that of Le Diable et le bon Dieu, Sartre was far from idle as a writer. Projects for a book on ethics (which he had promised at the end of L'Être et le néant) and another on Mallarmé (both later abandoned, but published posthumously) occupied him during 1948, while the third volume of Les Chemins de la liberté, La Mort dans l'âme, and his third collection of essays, Situations III, were published in 1949. During 1950, he wrote numerous prefaces - notably that for the complete works of Jean Genet, which turned into a massive tome of existential psychoanalysis - and renewed his interest in music and theatre, while becoming politically disillusioned and disorientated, following the dissolution of the RDR. Les Mouches enjoyed a Paris 137

revival in January 1951, and at about the same time Sartre started writing his extraordinary melodramatic epic set in the Peasants' Revolt of medieval Germany, Le Diable et le bon Dieu. This peculiar departure interrupted the preceding flow of contemporary realism, yet addressed essentially the same fundamental themes in a more abstract and conceptual mode: means and ends, right and wrong, life and death.1

Le Diable et le bon Dieu His reputation as France's leading post-war playwright now firmly established, Sartre could count on the ready co-operation of the professional élite. Simone Berriau agreed to produce the play at the Théâtre Antoine, even before seeing a finished script, and enlisted the celebrated classical actor, Louis Jouvet, to direct a star cast including Pierre Brasseur as Goetz, Jean Vilar as Heinrich, Maria Casarès as Hilda and Marie-Olivier as Catherine.2 Rehearsals got under way before Sartre had finished writing, and Simone de Beauvoir remem­ bers him saying that Berriau, anxious about the play's excessive length, 'would automatically imitate a pair of scissors with her fingers' whenever she saw him in the theatre.3 Despite these tensions, which also affected relations between Sartre and Jouvet, the play's début was the 'main event of the theatre season' and enjoyed 'huge success', despite the offence it caused in Catholic circles.4 Ever alert to the prospects for publicity, Sartre gave a number of lengthy newspaper interviews around the date of the play's première, including one to the popular weekly, Samedi-Soir. These indicate that he owed some inspiration to Louis Jouvet's account of Miguel de 1 2 3 4

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For fuller biographical details, see Œuvres romanesques, pp.LXVI-LXX. Le Diable et le bon Dieu opened at the Théâtre Antoine on 7 June 1951, ran until March 1952, and was revived for thirty performances in September 1952. See La Force des choses, p.259. See Les Ecrits de Sartre, p.23 3.

Cervantes's Golden Age drama, El Rufiân dichoso (The Lucky Brigand) - from which his plot line is loosely derived - but none to Goethe's drama based on the life of Goetz von Berlichingen (as some critics supposed), although that historical character is also Sartre's hero.5 In the main, however, his remarks concern the intended meaning of the play rather than its genesis, and some of these are perplexing at first sight. His claim, for example, that 'Le Diable et le bon Dieu, c'est à sa manière une suite des Mains sales avec une conversion de Hugo',6 is by no means immediately intelligible, not least because the widely different contexts of the two plays discourage the making of such connections. Equally striking and provocative (no doubt deliberately so) is Sartre's assertion that his 'meanings' in this play are that 'tout amour est contre Dieu. Dès que deux personnes s'aiment, elles s'aiment contre Dieu'; and, 'Si Dieu existe, l'homme n'existe pas, et si l'homme existe, Dieu n'existe pas'.7 These heterodoxical syllogisms had the calculated effect of scandalising the Catholic establishment, and exposing Sartre to exorbitant accusations that he was a corruptor of France's youth. His riposte is interesting, both for the association of his name with that of a certain celebrated contemporary, from whom he would shortly dissociate himself in spectacular fashion, and for his explicit reference to an ethical purpose: 'On nous attaque comme des corrupteurs, Simone de Beau­ voir, Camus et moi, parce que nous proposons une morale.'8 Should we infer that the champion of individualistic freedom was then poised to assume the role of guru? Simone de Beauvoir's gloss of that moral intention emphasises Sartre's move away from an abstract or metaphysical conception of morality, by which Hugo had remained enthralled, towards an ethic of

5 6

7

8

See Les Écrits de Sartre, pp.231, 237. 'Le Diable et le bon Dieu, nous dit Sartre, c'est la même chose... moi je choisis l'homme', interview with Marcel Péju, Samedi-Soir, 2-8 June 1951, extract in Les Écrits de Sartre, p.237. 'Dès que deux personnes s'aiment, elles s'aiment contre Dieu', interview with Louis-Martin Chauffier, et ai, Paris-Presse-L'Intransigeant, 7 June 1951, extract in Les Écrits de Sartre, p.23 8. Ibid

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effective action, and it is in this sense that the play can indeed be construed as a sequel to Les Mains sales: En vérité, Sartre opposait de nouveau à la vanité de la morale l'efficacité de la praxis. Cette confrontation va beaucoup plus loin que dans ses pièces anté­ rieures; dans Le Diable et le bon Dieu se reflète toute son évolution idéo­ logique. Le contraste entre le départ d'Oreste à la fin des Mouches et le ralliement de Goetz illustre le chemin parcouru par Sartre de l'attitude anarchiste à l'engagement.9

This was by no means the perception of the majority of critics, however, who were misled (according to Contât and Rybalka) by Brasseur's interpretation of Goetz, in his saintly phase, as 'a hypo­ critical clown', into construing his newly found political commitment as a plain and simple return to evil-doing.10 Jean-Jacques Gautier, for example, while admitting that the first half possessed a certain 'power, ardour and virulence', complained of the play's inordinate length and of Sartre's difficulty in reaching any conclusion via the endless 'meanderings of his dialectic'. However, 'the gravest defect of this play', he pointedly protested, was its 'inhumanity': 'Nulle part l'auteur n'est parvenu à nous communiquer le sentiment de sympathie qu'il prétend éprouver pour les hommes.'11 If this was true, then Sartre could hardly have been wider of his mark. Similarly, Maxime Almont found merit in the first part, but saw Sartre succumbing to a tedious introspection in the second: '[Sartre] trahit [...] à travers un long débat sur le bien et le mal, les préoccupations d'un esprit obsédé par l'impossibilité d'atteindre à l'absolu, et aussi par l'idée de l'au-delà.'12 The Catholic philosopher, playwright and critic, Gabriel Marcel, predictably complained that the 'blasphemous character of certain scenes' was 'perfectly odious', and found the play an 'uneasy compromise between the historical and the metaphysical, with a preponderance of the latter', and a superabundance of boring political

9 10 11 12

140

La Force des choses, p. 261. See Les Écrits de Sartre, pp.233-4. Le Figaro, 13 June 1951, p.6. Combat, 13 June 1951, p.2.

circumstance.13 Another dogmatic ideologue, the Communist critic Guy Leclerc, was more damning still. Under the scarcely subtle headline: 'La nouvelle pièce de M. Jean-Paul Sartre a fait bâiller le "Tout Paris'", the reviewer of the official PCF organ concurred implicitly with Gautier and Marcel by denouncing the play's lack of 'soul [...] human warmth [...] and intellectual honesty'.14 By contrast, Robert Kemp, so far from 'yawning', seems to have been touched by the same fascination as the play evidently held for the theatre-going public, calling it 'une pièce riche d'idées, excitante, blessante parfois; une grande pièce'.15 His enthusiasm is shared by Contât and Rybalka who consider Le Diable et le bon Dieu, 'du point de vue proprement théâtral, [la pièce de Sartre] la plus réussie, celle en tout cas qui répond le mieux aux exigences d'un théâtre moderne, n'ayant pas renoncé aux pouvoirs du texte'.16 Whilst it undoubtedly has a dramatic sweep of epic proportions, Le Diable et le bon Dieu seems to me nothing like so theatrically congenial as, say, Huis clos, La Putain respectueuse, Kean or Nekrassov, precisely because it is overwhelmed by the power of the text - to which we shall now turn. Sartre's seventh play opens on scenes of devastation and violent death, unfolds against a backcloth of disease and bloody revolt, and culminates in two brutal killings. Its characters are mostly unscru­ pulous and vengeful, fixed in pessimistic world-views, and the broad impression is of a desert of unrelieved despair. Yet we meet a hero who develops through the negativity of idealism to commit his free­ dom in a positive cause; who abandons a dehumanising quest for absolutes to accept the relativity of contingent human reality; and who outgrows a cultivated death-wish to proclaim: 'Tout est changé, je veux vivre!'17 Goetz comes to life much like Bariona before him, except that his re-birth is inspired by God's death rather than his

13 14 15 16 17

See Les Nouvelles littéraires, 14 June 1951, p. 10. See L'Humanité-Dimanche, 17 June 1951. Le Monde, 13 June 1951, p.9. Les Écrits de Sartre, p.235. They also considered (at the time of writing, in 1970) that academic criticism had 4not yet done the play justice' (see ibid.). Le Diable et le bon Dieu, p.222. Further references appear in the main text; where successive quotations concern the same page, only the first is referenced.

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nativity, and in this sense his apotheosis is more profoundly human, a self-liberation from the yoke of transcendent law: [Goetz] se trouve acculé au choix décisif: rester fidèle à lapositivité vitale [...], ou s'attacher à la logique suicidaire [...]. Le choix est ouvert: le développement de la pièce est celui de cette alternative dans le devenir de l'option de Goetz.18

Goetz will make that choice in a succession of contexts suffused with the myth of death. In the besieged city of Worms, a grieving mother gets no explanation for her son's death besides: 'Quand les riches se font la guerre, ce sont les pauvres qui meurent' (p.23). Nasty's cynical but realist analysis has the merit of exposing a truth about societal organisation, which the priest Heinrich's pious pro­ nouncements about the 'will of God' signally fail to address. The misery of the poor is a situation-limite in the fullest sense, as Heinrich later puts it: 'Nous autres, nous n'avons que deux manières de mourir. Ceux qui se résignent meurent de faim, ceux qui ne se résignent pas sont pendus' (p.82). The mother is unconsoled by the thought of rejoining her child in heaven (as Heinrich assures her she will) because Me Ciel, c'est autre chose' (p.22): death is the consummation of despair, life is the highest expression of hope. Jesus himself fed the bodies of those who listened to him in the here-and-now, and Heinrich (rebel and baker) capitalises on the cleric's ineptitude by promising a Utopia in which God's reign will begin on earth and nobody will be hungry - but for which blood must be shed: 'Allons, levez-vous, mes frères, il faut tuer pour gagner le ciel' (p.33). In short, revolution is the necessary means to put an end to suffering. The crowd whom Nasty incites to violent insurrection is also integral to the backcloth against which the principal characters play their parts. In the first tableau alone, the people suffer, die, despair, hope anew, rebel and kill (the Archbishop of Worms, specifically, at Nasty's behest). Subsequently, they fight and are slain, slaughter one another in the Cité du Soleil, and are massacred by the barons in pitched battle. Thus the crowd is like a chorus whose commentary is implicit in their misfortunes and

18

142

Verstraeten(1972), p.74.

who make up the socio-historical and dramatic framework in which the action unfolds. This early exchange between Heinrich and Nasty sets up the dichotomy between theological and political constructions of the world, which will exercise Goetz throughout. Surrounded by a mutinous army, accompanied by a hateful mistress (Catherine), and threatened by an epidemic of cholera, Goetz is also in a situationlimite, inasmuch as his life is continuously in jeopardy and he is repeatedly obliged to make radical choices affecting his own survival. During the siege of Worms, in the first phase of his itinerary, the universal danger of war becomes specific for Goetz through the plot of the rebellious officer, Hermann. In the second phase - the transition from siege to 'City of Sunlight' - Goetz is threatened by the very people he is trying to assist, and suffers violence at the hands of his peers. In the third phase - that of the Cité itself- Goetz is warned by Karl that he and his citizens are bound to become the objects of revenge for whichever side wins the civil war. And in his fourth phase - as a hermit - Goetz courts death and thinks of it as the only possible release from present torments. Finally, as a leader once more, he implicitly puts his own life at risk by assuming responsibility for that of the men he leads. In this crucial regard, therefore, Goetz can identify more closely with the trials and frustrations of the people he finally represents than most (if not all) of his predecessors.19 More so than his physical life, Goetz's existential life is at risk, originally put in question (like Hugo's) by his facticity. Sartre depicts this as having much in common with Genet's: born a bastard and a social outcast, Goetz progresses through the different ontological stages of existential murder, suicide, martyrdom and rebirth in a parallel moral odyssey. Each is originally made the pariah by the 'vertiginous word' spoken by 'the Other', and each then tries to take on that identity by virtue of his own will: 'Curé, je me suis fait moimême: bâtard, je l'étais de naissance, mais le beau titre de fratricide, je ne le dois qu'à mes mérites' (p.56), Goetz boasts to Heinrich. 19

In this aspect of shared experience, Goetz is certainly closer to Canoris or Bariona than to Hugo or Oreste, both of whom are marked by their experiential separation from the reality of the causes they espouse.

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Reaction against their respective 'monstrous' periods takes each man through a transition of idealism: 'Étrange enfer de la beauté' for Genet, 'la Cité du Soleil' for Goetz.20 These are both essentially aesthetic quests which promise illuminating solutions to the conun­ drum of their being, but which prove to be false dawns. In the third ontologico-moral stage of martyrdom, Genet and Goetz both seek to transcend all being, to annihilate all matter - and especially the self qua matter - in order, as poet and ascetic respectively, to create the pure essence which will attest to life's impossibility. So doing, they are inevitably caught in the paradox that they must sustain the self in being, in order to be aWe to testily that being is impossible. Finally, however, Genet and Goetz (by contrast with Hugo) grow through their existential deaths and come to a new birth of the man initially slain by the Other. Goetz's situation is therefore of the broadest sociohistorical, moral and ethical kind, a truly existential situation-limite■, what Verstraeten calls '[un] destin imparablement suicidaire': Destruction brouillonne, générosité provocatrice ou consomption ralentie, on le voit, Goetz ne fait qu'actualiser la figure, délibérément prématurée et anticipée, de F autodestruction suicidaire qui hante la maîtrise féodale.21

By following Goetz through each of these successive periods, we shall see how he eventually exploits the original situation-limite of his facticity to escape the seemingly unavoidable 'self-destruction at the heart of feudal hegemony'. Goetz's governing delusion - which he eventually sheds, having empirically laid it bare - is that he is (or can be) master of his own destiny, fils de ses œuvres (to pre-empt Valera's favourite claim), an embodiment of pure will. Yet it quickly becomes clear that his actions are heavily conditioned by the environments in which he finds himself and the characters who inhabit them.22 The opinions of others, which anticipate our acquaintance with him, indicate as much: he is volatile and capricious, cruel and malevolent.23 These unflattering epithets are 20 21 22 23

144

See Saint Genet, comédien et martyr, pp.397-447. Verstraeten ( 1972), pp. 125, 126. What Lorris calls 'forces orientatrices' (p. 187). See pp. 17-19.

expressed by both parties to the conflict in Worms and are not mere propaganda, so that for us (the audience), just as for Goetz himself, his essence precedes his existence, and the cruelty and morbidity of his first lines of speech do not disappoint. His paradoxical little epigram 'il faut bien tuer ce qu'on aime' (p.45)24 - reveals his perversity and sets the tone for all his relationships, whether with Catherine (for whose death he is later responsible), with the people of the Cité du Soleil (also his victims), with Hilda or Heinrich or God, or even with himself. In all of Goetz's relationships, the medium of love transmutes mysteriously, inexorably, messianically, into death. This phenomenon is most evident in his 'fraternal' relationship both bastards, both traitors - with the unhappy priest, Heinrich, who is enmeshed, from the outset, in an insoluble dilemma. Ought he to side with the Church, to which he owes obedience, or with the people, who command his moral sympathy? Should he believe Goetz's promise to spare the people of Worms, if he admits him to the City? And should he trade the possible 'massacre' of the populace for the certain 'few murders' of the clergy? In either case, he will have betrayed: 'Cette nuit tu as pouvoir de vie et de mort sur vingt mille hommes' (p.50), is Goetz's envious taunt, although in reality he has no such power. Indeed, Heinrich's impotence continuously tortures him, much as Hugo's did him, and - again, like Hugo - he is incapable of making decisions. Unable to make up his mind whether to give Goetz the key to the city, his bastard 'brother' taunts him again: i l ne s'agit pas pour toi de disposer de leur mort ou de leur vie, mais de choisir pour eux entre deux genres de mort' (p.51). Heinrich's pitiful response - 'Tu n'existes pas. Tes paroles sont mortes [...]. Je rêve, tout est mort' (p.52) - is the child's reaction of blocking his ears, humming loudly and refusing to listen. It is typical 'magical' behaviour, as Sartre describes it in Esquisse d'une théorie des émotions: the real world is

24

Compare Saint Genet, comédien et martyr, pp. 149-50, 358-9, and this verse from Oscar Wilde's Ballad of Reading Gaol: 4Yet each man kills the thing he loves, / By each let this be heard, / Some do it with a bitter look, / Some with a flattering word. / The coward does it with a kiss, / The brave man with a sword.' If Wilde is right, Goetz graduates from the cowardice of his Utopian city to the courage of military leadership.

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annihilated by abstracting the self from it. This is a sublimation, a simulacrum of suicide, foreboding an eventual Hugo-like death for Heinrich, and anticipating the conduct of Goetz in his ascetic phase. Goetz's tormenting insistence upon Heinrich's impotence and treachery reveals him as an essentialist, like Genet, a subscriber to the ethics of Being or exis: 'On trahit quand on est un traître' (p.54), says Goetz, believing that a pre-existing 'character' determines our actions. Describing his own sense of exclusion and gratuitousness - compare again the orphan boy, Genet - Goetz encourages Heinrich to be the pariah society makes of him, thus implicating him in an existential suicide which he, Goetz-, has already committed. Whereas Hugo and Oreste railed against their 'lightness of being', Goetz revels in his: 'Fais le Mal: tu verras comme on se sent léger' (p.55). By acting as the world expects, but of his own volition, Goetz has the mistaken impression of defying it, of being his own master. He chooses to be the nobody society excludes, just as Genet chose to be the 'voleur' adults took him for. But both men are deceived by the same ontological illusion, because Sartre insists that acts committed for the sake of being rather than of doing are not acts but mere gestures. Lorris rightly points out that 'la liberté de Goetz est fortement sujette à caution, car chacune des décisions qui orientent sa démarche semble lui être soufflée par autrui'.26 To become the evil monster the Church and the people expect him to be is a manner of conforming his will to the mandate of others, however much Goetz might claim to make that decision autonomously and en connaissance de cause. Goetz's delusion of self-determination is fuelled by the news of Conrad's death, for which he cheerfully claims responsibility, gran­ diosely imagining his consecration in the eyes of God as a latter-day Cain: 'Dieu me voit, Curé, il sait que j'ai tué mon frère et son coeur saigne. Eh bien, oui, Seigneur, je l'ai tué. Et que peux-tu contre moi?' (p.57). Goetz's radical bad faith, his attitude of existential suicide, rests upon both eternal and temporal pillars: his opposition to God himself ('Je ne daigne avoir affaire qu'à Dieu, les monstres et les saints ne relèvent que de lui', pp.56-7); and his socially and politically 25 26

146

See Esquisse d'une théorie des émotions, pp.45-6. Lorris, p. 194.

validated role in society which justifies his 'evil-doing' ('je suis militaire, donc je tue', p.69). Yet this is a deeply unstable structure on which to erect one's essence, because of the inherent contradiction between the claims to be completely self-willed, on the one hand, and to be wholly conditioned, on the other. Goetz unwittingly articulates this antithesis a little later on, in a reply to Nasty explaining why he cannot (will not) simply discard the keys to the city of Worms once they are in his possession: 'Parce que je ne peux pas être un autre que moi' (p.94), is the first line of his speech, implying an a priori belief in a pre-determined 'self. Yet, in the course of the same speech he asserts: 'Haine et faiblesse, violence, mort, déplaisir, c'est ce qui vient de l'homme seul; c'est mon seul empire et je suis seul dedans: ce qui s'y passe n'est imputable qu'à moi' (p.95). In effect, Goetz confuses a second-order question for a first. The question should not be, 'How monstrous?', but rather: 'Why a monster at all?' By the end of the third tableau, he is ready to raze Worms, to massacre its citizens and to torture and kill Heinrich, Nasty and Catherine, rejoicing in the thought that each of these crimes is gratuitous and therefore the more appalling in God's eyes. So long as he thinks in this way, Goetz privileges third-party opinion over his own autonomy, and remains mired in bad faith. Contrary to what he believes, Goetz does not improve upon this situation one jot when he 'converts' himself from monster to saint. Both 'depend upon God', both aspire to an 'absolute' status which pre-supposes a pre-emptive existential death: Le héros et le Saint, au contraire, s'ils veulent mériter l'approbation sociale, n'ont rien d'autre à faire qu'à opérer sur eux-mêmes la grande destruction magnifique qui représente l'idéal de leur société. [...] Dans les sociétés aristocratiques, le soldat de carrière est un oisif que la communauté entretient parce qu'il a fait serment de mourir. Il meurt à chaque guerre: s'il survit, c'est hasard ou miracle; en droit, dès sa première bataille il est mort. [...] le Saint, lui aussi, est un mort; dans ce monde il n'est plus au monde. Il ne produit pas, il ne consomme pas, il a commencé par offrir à Dieu ses richesses. Mais cela n'est pas assez: c'est le monde entier qu'il veut offrir; offrir: détruire dans un potlatch magnifique.27

27

Saint Genet, comédien et martyr, pp.227-8.

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Goetz's moral trajectory is an excellent particular illustration of this general argument, especially if we read 'soldier-hero' as 'mercenaryvillain'. His determination to sack Worms - a completely futile gesture, as the other characters insist and as Goetz himself admits will confirm his status as 'un monstre tout à fait pur' (p.87), or so he claims. This is a hollow boast, however, and the counter-claim which touches him (because it attacks his absolutist self-image at its very core) is Heinrich's postulation of the banality of evil: 'Voici le visionnaire le plus étrange: l'homme qui se croit seul à faire le Mal' (p.96). Goetz's rebuttal - that he is different from other evil-doers '[parce qu'] ils font le Mal par luxure ou par intérêt: moi je fais le Mal pour le Mal' - is again refuted by Heinrich's theological contention that only evil is feasible on earth: HEINRICH: Qu'importent les raisons s'il est établi qu'on ne peut faire que le Mal. GOETZ: Est-ce établi? HEINRICH: Oui, bouffon, c'est établi. GOETZ: Par qui? HEINRICH: Par Dieu lui-même. Dieu a voulu que le Bien fût impossible sur terre. GOETZ: Impossible? HEINRICH: Tout à fait impossible: impossible l'Amour! Impossible la Justice! Essaie donc d'aimer ton prochain, tu m'en diras des nouvelles, (pp.96-7)

Heinrich's persuasive exposition of this thesis naturally aggravates Goetz's hubris. God must still be challenged, confronted, defied, so that the impossible saint will supplant the impossible monster: Tu as tort; tu m'apprends que le Bien est impossible, je parie donc que je ferai le Bien: c'est encore la meilleure manière d'être seul. J'étais criminel, je me change: je retourne ma veste et je parie d'être un saint, (pp.98-9)

Theologically speaking, the form or accidents of Goetz's obsession change, but the essence or substance of it are unchanged. He 'turns his coat inside out', but the wearer remains the same. Several paradoxes reflect the over-arching self-contradiction of this pseudo-conversion. On the one hand, Goetz freely accepts the challenge to achieve the impossible; on the other, he tosses a coin in 148

order (apparently) to make providence (God) responsible for the outcome. Then again, he cheats, making himself responsible again, but does not admit his trickery, allowing providence to take the blame except that Catherine is not deceived! Moreover, Goetz is still doing what others expect of him insofar as becoming a saint, 'c'est relever le défi d'Heinrich'.28 So, Goetz's first 'good' deed is a deceit, and Me Bien' comes into the world courtesy of Me Mal': 'Voilà un acte comme je les aime: à facettes. Est-il bon? Est-il mauvais? La raison s'y perd' (p.88). By opting to do the impossible in preference to the futile, Goetz is certainly performing gestures rather than acts, since their purpose is still to fix his essence (formerly monster, now saint), whereas only the material consequences of an act can characterise it morally, for Sartre, its self-reflexive intentions being a distracting irrelevance. Subsequent events will reinforce this ethical perspective, as the products of Goetz's 'saintly' actions, viewed in their wider historical context, are seen to be indistinguishable from his earlier 'monstrous' deeds. Feverishly dispensing unrequited 'love' in his new role, Goetz is again reviled by both parties. The revolutionary, Karl, threatens him with death for daring to call him 'brother', and the Baron Schulheim denounces him as an 'assassin' for reducing the nobles to 'a choice between death and destruction'.29 Pariah status pleases Goetz, of course, because isolation tends to confirm saintliness: 'Je livre la bataille du Bien et je prétends la gagner tout de suite et sans effusion de sang' (p.l 11). The grand gesture is within Goetz's reach, because of his personal wealth, and Nasty's realistic objections (that his plans can only result in massacre) go unheard: Trente mille paysans meurent de faim, et je me ruine pour soulager leur misère et tu m'annonces tranquillement que Dieu m'interdit de les sauver. [...] Je ne ferai pas le Bien à la petite semaine. [...] Je ne serai pas modeste, (pp.l 12, 115)

Like many of Sartre's characters, 'Goetz crève d'orgueil': '[II] fera le bien "dût le monde en périr" tout comme Hugo était prêt à faire sauter 28 29

Lorris,p.l94. See pp. 106-7, 109.

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le monde pour les principes.' A parallel is equally apposite with Oreste, determined to act, 'dussé-je tuer ma propre mère'.31 Oreste convinced himself that the act he really sought for his own sake would also benefit others, yet he evaded the obligation to realise that benefit fully. Likewise, Goetz makes a show of 'saving the victims' of Nasty's proposed seven-year delay, but scarcely attempts to disguise the underlying egocentricity of his ambition: 'Moi, je dis que le Bien est possible, tous les jours, à toute heure, en ce moment même: je serai celui qui fait le Bien tout de suite. [...] Je serai témoin, martyr et tentation' (pp.l 16, 117). The consequences of Goetz's acts are secon­ dary for him; only bis wilful intention that they should be good matters, regardless of the realities of the situation. In short, the ethics of exis dominate his thinking, and for that reason Nasty threatens to kill him if needs be: 'Goetz, si tu me gênes, je t'abattrai.' This would be another pseudo-conversion, from morally dead to physically dead. The extent of Goetz's moral morbidity is indicated by the peasants' rejection of his brotherly advances. The self-appointed lifegiver, Goetz, is compelled to compete for their attention with the indulgence-selling monk, Tetzel, whose technique is to concentrate the conservative and superstitious peasant mind more on death than on life: 'Toujours travailler, c'est bel et bon, mais des fois, [...] on se dit: "Qu'est-ce qui va m'arriver après la mort?"' (p. 123). More interested in the hereafter than the here-and-now, the people scoff at Goetz's offer of Utopia, paying good money for the sake of their souls instead. Even the leper prefers a free indulgence from Tetzel to Goetz's fra­ ternal kiss, bearing out Heinrich's prophecy that loving one's neigh­ bour is not so easy as it looks. This unpredictable moral ambivalence of actions is underlined by Catherine's impending death. Heinrich blames this on Goetz, who had abandoned her at the moment of his 'conversion', a 'crime' which he attributes to his former, 'dead', wicked self: 'Deux [Goetz], oui. Un vivant qui fait le Bien, et un mort qui faisait le Mal' (p. 134). But Heinrich relentlessly points out the flaw in his argument: 'Seulement ce n'est pas le mort qui est en train d'assassiner la petite, c'est le beau Goetz tout pur qui s'est voué à 30 31

150

Laraque, p. 124. Les Mouches, p.29.

l'amour.' So-called 'love' can kill. The moral of the parable appears to be: 'Observe the spirit, not the letter of the Law.' By leaving Catherine, because 'a saint cannot live with a whore', Goetz broke the very rule of love he purported to incarnate, and flouted Christ's own example.32 Catherine's agony is the first perverse result of Goetz's 'goodness', yet even as he realises this, he cannot quite believe it immodesty forbids, as it were: [Catherine est] ici, malade, couchée sur la pierre. Par ma faute. [...] Rien, je sonne creux. Tu veux de la honte, je n'en ai pas. C'est l'orgueil qui suinte de toutes mes plaies: depuis trente-cinq ans je crève d'orgueil, c'est ma façon de mourir de honte. Il faudra changer ça. (p. 141)

Here, Goetz begins to glimpse that his pretended change of life has in fact changed nothing, yet he shies away from this frightening insight and asks God to relieve him of a new and morally burdensome luci­ dity: 'Ote-moi la pensée! Ote-la! Fais que je m'oublie! Change-moi en insecte!' (p. 141). He prays for objectifïcation in the eyes of the abso­ lute Other, much as Hugo had sought to be an assassin in the eyes of the Party. Just as Olga came to Hugo's aid, so Hilda will come to Goetz's. Hilda is a counterbalance to Goetz in that she is a humanitarian 'du parti des hommes' (p. 146) - who doubts God's goodness and his very existence. The daughter of a wealthy miller, she has left the reli­ gious life in order to devote herself to the poor, and Goetz is intrigued that she has found love and respect whereas he, on the same mission, has found only indifference and scorn. As one of the peasants explains, 'Elle est aimable' (p. 147), which Goetz mistakenly interprets as an inherent attribute which she possesses and he does not, a gift withheld from him by a vengeful deity: 'C'est gagné ou perdu d'avance; le temps et l'effort n'y font rien. {Brusquement.) Dieu ne peut pas vouloir ça, c'est injuste. Autant dire qu'il y a des gens qui naissent damnés' (p. 150). But this implies belief in pre-destination and human impotence, which is another form of bad faith. So long as Goetz is obsessed with earning the peasants' love, he will fail to 32

Jesus befriended Mary of Magdala, and forgave the woman taken in adultery.

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accomplish any real improvements in their lived situation. By contrast, Hilda has so immersed herself in the plight of the poor that she enjoys an empathy with them, unhindered by preoccupations with her own sense of self: Moi, je sens mon corps à peine, je ne sais pas où ma vie commence ni où elle finit et je ne réponds pas toujours quand on m'appelle, tant ça m'étonne, par­ fois, d'avoir un nom. Mais je souffre dans tous les corps, on me frappe sur toutes les joues, je meurs de toutes les morts; toutes les femmes que tu as prises de force, tu les as violées dans ma chair, (p. 152)

This Christ-like identification with the oppressed and impoverished masses - reminiscent also of Olga's and Hoederer's lessons to Hugo on the setting-aside of subjectivity - is wasted on Goetz at this stage, because he is still focused on attaining a fixed, thing-like status in the eyes of God. To that end, he conceives the plan of wresting the peasants' love from Hilda, in a kind of ontologico-moral beauty contest. Goetz's first opportunity to shine is at the deathbed of his former mistress, Catherine. Tormented by visions of hell (like Electre tormented by the Furies), Catherine craves divine intervention in her hour of need. Driven by a combination of compassion, guilt and ingenuity, Goetz promises to absolve her by taking her sins upon himself, like the scapegoat of the Old Testament and the sacrificial lamb (Christ crucified) of the New. So, here again, the life/death duologue around the moral character of Goetz is couched in familiar theological terms - the living Goetz will bring eternal life to the dying Catherine: 'Ton âme sera pure comme au jour de ta naissance' (p. 157). The means of this salutary re-birth will be Goetz's suffering of Christ's stigmata, at once the symbols and the means of physical death and metaphysical life. 'Est-ce que tu m'écoutes, Dieu sourd?', Goetz cries out to the Deus absconditus from the pulpit of the church in which Catherine lies dying: 'Es-tu mort pour les hommes, oui ou non? Alors vois: les hommes souffrent. Il faut recommencer à mourir. Donne! Donne-moi tes blessures!' (pp. 157-8). By taking on these ambiguous wounds (signs of death and resurrection alike), Goetz intends both to let Catherine die in peace, and to acquire the life of

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sainthood by earning the devotion of the people: 'Ils sont à moi. Enfin' (p. 159). However, he cheats again, inflicting the sacred marks upon himself, just as he had once turned the dice to lose his wager with Heinrich. God's silence (for Goetz as for Sartre) betokens his non-existence, but to counterfeit his will, instead of supplanting it honestly with one's own, is to collude in the universal deceit of the Absolute. So long as Goetz remains in thrall to this false concept, his relationships with his fellows are vitiated by it. Catherine - who had seen him cheat to ensure his original 'conversion' - rejoices with her dying breath that Goetz has 'shed his blood' for her, while he insists (for the sake of sainthood) that it is not his blood, but Christ's. By this further imposture, he multiplies his transgressions and compounds the moral death which his incorrigible quest for Being entails. Goetz extends this pretence into the Cité du Soleil, repeating the trick of the stigmata every day in order to retain the peasants' admir­ ation and to strengthen their resolve to build a 'community of love', in the face of Karl's angry contention that 'la haine, les massacres, le sang des autres sont les aliments nécessaires de votre bonheur' (p. 167). Unable or unwilling to grasp this irony, the people listen avidly to the preaching of Goetz's ministers, who play rhetorically upon the double register of life and death in a classic Christian dis­ guise of social reality: 'Nous baiserons la main qui nous frappe, nous mourrons en priant pour ceux qui nous tuent' (p. 170). This much vaunted, and universally disregarded, moral principle (of loving one's enemy and turning the other cheek) enables the citizens to subscribe to a myth of sanctity which Hilda (because of her standing with the people) attacks more successfully than Karl: Il est vrai, mes frères, que votre Cité du Soleil est bâtie sur la misère des autres: [...] Sur cette terre qui saigne toute joie est obscène et les gens heureux sont seuls. [...] Votre Goetz est un imposteur, (pp. 170-1)

Goetz feels able to dismiss Karl's threats with pious complacency 'Ainsi soit-iP (p. 172) - but Hilda's challenge offers an empirical critique of exis (Goetz's ethic) by praxis (Hilda's), coming from a position of strength, namely an empathy with wretchedness. 'Toujours la misère! Toujours le malheur! N'y a-t-il rien d'autre?', Goetz asks 153

despairingly, to which Hilda replies: 'Pour moi rien. C'est ma vie' (p. 174). The problem for Hilda is that the happiness apparently enjoyed by the poor, under the stewardship of a charismatic saviour such as Goetz (or Jesus), amounts to a kind of animal satisfaction 'ce bonheur de brebis' (p. 175) - which both dehumanises them (the sheep of the Good Shepherd) and makes her, as a revolutionary, redundant. Since her 'love' for the people diminishes in proportion as their lot improves, she is forced to question her motives: 'Il faut que je sois un monstre: [...] Est-ce que je suis méchante?' As Goetz has already discovered, the solitude of the monster is little different from that of the saint: 'Plus ils- m'aiment et plus je suis seul.' Sartre there­ fore engineers a marriage of Goetz's idealistic will to do good, with Hilda's realistic will to effect change, in order to open up a path to moral authenticity, to existential life, for his protagonist who would otherwise remain trapped in self-delusions about attaining the absolute in the here-and-now.33 In his first steps on that path, however, Goetz uses Hilda as an alibi for inertia. Invited by Nasty to lead the peasant army in battle against the barons, he still recoils from the prospect of having to 'waste lives' in order to save others. And although Nasty's arguments appeal to the former soldier in Goetz, he cannot forget that his hardwon purity is at stake: is he really God's butcher, just as Nasty is his baker? The enduring allure of sainthood militates against a commit­ ment to practical revolt, and he cowardly defers to Hilda, making her his reluctant accomplice in this latest sin of omission: 'Pourqoui me donnes-tu puissance de vie et de mort sur mes frères?', she asks reproachfully, 'Ah! Tu as gagné: [...] Je te défends de verser le sang' (p. 180). As he had done with Karl, Goetz has dodged the really difficult issue of political engagement, and his next question - 'Et nous en porterons les conséquences ensemble?' - is a moral emer­ gency exit. When he advises the massed peasants not to fight because they cannot win (echoes of the early Bariona), this is a counsel of 33

154

Hilda is the outstanding example of a whole series of influential female characters - Sarah, Electre, Inès, Lucie, Lizzie, Olga, Hilda, Anna, Véronique and Johanna - without whom Sartre's dramatic heroes would stand no chance of finding an ethical orientation (see O'Donohoe [2001a]).

passivity and despair, an inversion of Oreste's exhortation to the Argives, but stamped with the same grandiloquent, egocentric and futile gesture: 'Je descends parmi les hommes pour sauver la paix' (p. 182). But only gods 'go down' among men. Goetz's performance is certainly that of a saintly prophet, if not quite of a god. His visions of the 'danse macabre' (p. 186) of jangling skeletons, and the renewed miracle of the stigmata, frighten and fascinate the superstitious people, distracting them from the reality of the situation in which he, Goetz, is a traitor ('objectivement parlant', as Hugo would have observed). But two can play at this game - for that is what it has always been for Goetz, an audacious gamble which he means to win - and Karl apparently goes into a trance, speaking with the voice of God himself and exhorting the peasants to take revenge on the nobles in general, and Goetz in particular. It becomes clear that Goetz's doomed experiment of brotherly love is drawing to a close, but he remains blind to the cause of its failure, blaming that upon others rather than on his own mania to achieve absolute ends in relative conditions. 'C'est vrai, Goetz: tu n'as rien vu' (p. 193), Nasty tells him, introducing a metaphor of moral blindness which Goetz echoes in his soliloquy, a powerful invocation to God to possess him wholly: 'Je viens à toi, Seigneur, je viens, je marche dans ta nuit: donne-moi la main' (p. 195). Goetz's obstinate pride in his continuing solitude - 'La solitude du Bien, à quoi la reconnaîtrai-je de la solitude du Mal?' - culminates in a prayer for light which bespeaks his ongoing delusion: 'Sois béni de me donner ta lumière: je vais voir clair' (p. 196). This heralds a second false dawn for Goetz, a new 'con­ version' which, like thefirst,will leave him morally destitute. Having repulsed Heinrich, Karl and Nasty, Goetz has only Hilda left to help him to 'voir clair' in his benighted state, a mission which (fortunately for him) becomes her raison d'être: 'La mort, ça m'était égal, mais je voulais te revoir. [...] Tu es là: [...] une vie - une pauvre vie. C'est cette chair et cette vie que j'aime. On ne peut aimer que sur terre et contre Dieu' (p. 197). This enunciation of one of the play's central themes denotes Hilda as the apologist of life, who undertakes to save Goetz's life (moral and physical) by means of a love which is entirely person-centred, earth-bound and self-consciously atheistic: 'Nous n'irons pas au Ciel, Goetz, et même si nous y entrions tous les 155

deux, nous n'aurions pas d'yeux pour nous voir, pas de mains pour nous toucher' (p. 197). This describes exactly the posthumous experience of the protagonists of Les Jeux sont faits, for whom the after-life is an effective, and affective, annihilation.34 Goetz perversely takes the opposite view to Hilda and Sartre, employing a negative theology to construe annihilation as plenitude, perfect density of being: La nuit, c'est toi [Seigneur], hein? La nuit, l'absence déchirante de tout! Car tu es celui qui est présent dans l'universelle absence, celui qu'on entend quand tout est silence, celui qu'on voit quand on ne voit plus rien. (p. 195)

That perfective nothingness is to be achieved by annihilating the human within the human: 'Je détruirai l'homme puisque tu l'as créé pour qu'il soit détruit' (p. 198). Perverted as this may sound, it is orthodox Christian theology, which - with its emphasis upon ascetic self-denial and, particularly, upon the sublimation of carnal impulses and the vilification of the sinful flesh - advocates the subordination of the human for the sake of elevation towards the divine. In this last scene of the ninth tableau, the life/death duologue reaches a crescendo. Hilda's remorse for the death of the peasants in the Cité clearly derives from a Sartrean ethic that postulates life as the primary value: La volonté, en effet, se pose comme décision réfléchie par rapport à certaines fins. [...] La passion peut poser les mêmes fins. Je puis, par exemple, devant une menace, m'enfuir à toutes jambes, par peur de mourir. Ce fait passionnel n'en pose pas moins implicitement comme fin suprême la valeur de la vie.35

This reflects a universal morality which is, for Sartre, the 'natural' law of the existential, that is human, individual: D'une part, en effet, la possibilité de s'ôter la vie n'est pas donnée avec la vie même, dont la réalité réside dans la seule perpétuation de son être: [...] Dans le

34 35

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For detailed discussion of this neglected screenplay, see O'Donohoe (1990). L'Être et le néant, p. 519.

milieu de la vie organique comme position absolue d'elle-même, Tunique but de la praxis est la reproduction indéfinie de la vie.36

These brief quotations from Sartre's two great books of philosophy summarise Hilda's theoretical stance and its practical application to the historical situation of the peasants, to whose cause she is committed: 'Sans moi ils vivraient encore' (p. 198), is therefore her self-reproach. Goetz will not join in this breast-beating, however, because, in God's grand design, people are mere puppets: 'Nous ne sommes rien, nous ne pouvons rien sur rien. L'homme rêve qu'il agit, mais c'est Dieu qui mène.' Not yet having 'acted', in the Sartrean sense, Goetz naturally concludes that men in general are impotent, whereas the truth is that he has so far viewed his own existence from the perspective of death, as a finished object, 'monster' or 'saint'. Having inevitably failed in that futile project, he now proposes to go one stage further and to anticipate his death by living (like Baudelaire, like Genet) as if dead: 'Je n'aurai d'yeux que pour la terre et les pierres. [...] je tourmenterai ce corps par la faim, le froid, et le fouet: à petit feu, à tout petit feu. Je détruirai l'homme [...].' This is the final twist in the tourniquet of the essentialist ethic of exis. The moment of martyrdom has come, when moral suicide compounds the original existential murder perpetrated by the Other on the outcast: 'Mes sujets sont morts' - therefore they can no longer guarantee Goetz's sanctity - 'et moi, le vif, je meurs au monde et je passerai le reste de ma vie à méditer sur la mort' (pp. 198-9). Ironically, Goetz is not (nor ever has been) sufficiently 'alive' to be able to 'die' to the world, except in the most literal sense, so he cannot credibly propose to contemplate death except by experiencing it (and it is famously not a 'lived experience'). So, he is unwittingly right when he tells Hilda to 'chercher ailleurs la misère et la vie' (p. 199), because he can offer her misery, but not life. Hilda chooses to stay, however, believing that where there is life there is hope; her tenacity makes it possible for Goetz to triumph in his final life-affirming confrontation with Heinrich. At first, Hilda manages to deflect Heinrich: 'Celui qui t'a offensé n'est plus: il est mort au monde' (p.202), and the collision is briefly 36

Critique de la raison dialectique /, p.255.

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postponed. But the two men are 'brothers in bastardy', and Heinrich knows full well that neither of them has changed, that both remain mesmerised by the look of the absolute Other: 'Hilda, la seconde, tente de réaliser avec [Goetz] des rapports humains; mais elle échoue parce qu'il tue l'homme en lui, n'étant en rapport qu'avec Dieu.'37 Goetz's eremitical existence abstracts him from the quotidian world 'Tu es une horloge arrêtée qui dit toujours la même heure' (p.205) and his exercises of self-mortification - 'dying of thirst', 'dying of desire'38 - stop short of death itself only through the good offices of Hilda: 'Dieu te souhaite maniaque et gâteux, mais non point mort. Donc, il faut boire' (p.2^6). Goetz reacts by trying to degrade Hilda, as a way of debasing himself: 'Il parle à la femme comme Claudel', notes Sartre: '"Si tu m'aimes, torture-moi.'"39 But Hilda (like Jessica with Hugo) refuses to play the game once the stakes are so high, and Goetz acknowledges that she has the credit for any shred of humanity he retains: 'Tant que tu resteras près de moi, je ne me sentirai pas tout à fait immonde' (p.208). Hilda's love, uncompromising and allconsuming, unimpeded by the objectifying gaze of God, represents freedom and life: 'Si tu meurs, je me coucherai contre toi et je resterai là jusqu'à la fin, sans manger ni boire, tu pourriras entre mes bras et je t'aimerai charogne: car l'on n'aime rien si l'on n'aime pas tout' (p.210). This conception of love is quite different from the futile exercise of reciprocal appropriation analysed in L'Être et le néant (and evoked as an eternal triangle in Huis clos), or from Goetz's osten­ tatious embrace of the leper. Hilda's love does not seek to objectify, to possess, or to impress: it is truly disinterested, not claiming any tran­ scendent authority, but focusing upon the quintessential^ human, taking life itself as its source of value. Her final gesture of sado­ masochistic devotion is ironic, therefore, in that Goetz - incapable of returning a love based on exclusively human principles - has indeed

37 38 39

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Sartre, interview with Samedi-Soir, 2 June 1951, in Un Théâtre de situations, pp.313-7(p.317). See pp.205, 207. Interview with Samedi-Soir, in Un Théâtre de situations, p.317.

merited the punishment she is about to mete out: 'Oui, je te fouetterai, sale moine, je te fouetterai, parce que tu as ruiné notre amour.' Heinrich begins his arraignment of Goetz by accusing him of the massacre of the 25,000-strong peasant army, routed by the barons. 'Nous sommes nés pour mourir' (p.212), Goetz shrugs coolly, in a feigned philosophical detachment, which is given the lie by his initial outburst: 'Il ne fallait pas la livrer, cette bataille. Les imbéciles!' This indicates, by contrast, the heart of a soldier still beating in the breast of the saint, and augurs well for his re-conversion. He promotes his own prosecution, dismissing Hilda and laying himself open to Heinrich's accusations: 'La moitié de moi-même est ta complice contre l'autre moitié. Va, fouille-moi jusqu'à l'être puisque c'est mon être qui est en cause' (p.214). Then, with a sudden access of lucidity, Goetz attacks his persistent will to Being, 'l'intention', denouncing his 'gifts' as 'dead leaves' and his 'good deeds' as 'corpses', images of death which preface the crucial admission: 'Je n'ai pas agi: j'ai fait des gestes. [...] monstre ou saint, je m'en foutais, je voulais être inhumain' (pp.216, 217). He confesses that his 'conversion' to Good was the merest sham and looks forward to his execution at the peasants' hands as a just retribution for his guilt: 'Je leur tendrai le cou et tout finira: bon débarras pour tout le monde' (p.218). Yet, despite his eagerness for death, Goetz survives, thanks to one last meander in the snaking dialectic of good and evil, life and death. If Goetz failed to surpass this stage of development, he would be morally retarded by comparison with some preceding heroes, notably Bariona and Oreste, for he is on the verge of extending metaphysical into physical death, in the mistaken belief that he will thereby salvage his life. Garcin, Sorbier and Hugo had all pretended to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, by seeing violent death as an expiation of impotence, a mitigation of cowardice, and a consecration of the self in Being. Luckily for Goetz, Heinrich inadvertently helps him to take the next (literally) vital step on his via dolorosa by over-doing the mental torture. Death may appear as a total release for Goetz, but it is too easy an option. Death ends nothing, hell changes nothing (consider Huis clos), one simply is: 'La mort, c'est un attrape nigauds pour les familles; pour le défunt, tout continue' (p.219). Heinrich is acting out a personal vendetta here. Goetz is his 'brother' in bastardy and 159

treachery, and he has longed to exact his revenge since Goetz claimed to have found an exit from the impasse in which their facticity placed them. Heinrich's taunts - 'tu ne comptes pas. [...] meurs de privations ou de volupté: Dieu s'en fout' (p.220) - are intended to suck Goetz into his own despair. Yet his black assertion that 'L'homme est néant', contradicts his idea that men are, in reality, responsible agents: 'Les ordres que tu prétends recevoir, c'est toi qui te les envoies.' Goetz's previous sleights of hand bear out this Sartrean precept: orders only ever have the authority that the agent ascribes to them (Hugo had already learnt this, Frantz will do so too). The oxymoron that man is nothing, and yet responsible, is key to perceiving that he is nothing but his freedom: Je me demandais à chaque minute ce que je pouvais être aux yeux de Dieu. A présent, je connais la réponse: rien. [...] Il n'y avait que moi: j'ai décidé seul du Mal; seul, j'ai inventé le Bien. [...] Si Dieu existe, l'homme est néant; si l'homme existe... [...] Heinrich, je vais te faire connaître une espièglerie considérable: Dieu n'existe pas. (pp.220-1)

The theology is problematic, but the reasoning is logical in terms of the ontology to which both men subscribe. Indeed, Goetz might well have reached this conclusion sooner, were it not for his tenacious ambition to feel objectified by the absolute look. Now, however, far from sharing Heinrich's despair, he exults at his overdue apprehension of God's non-existence and man's concomitant moral autonomy, borrowing a famous phrase from Pascal's Mémorial: 'Il n'existe pas. Joie, pleurs de joie! Alléluia! Fou! Ne frappe pas: je nous délivre. Plus de Ciel, plus d'Enfer: rien que la Terre' (p.221).40 Seeing his victim escape his grasp again, Heinrich attacks Goetz in order to punish him for, and deprive him of, this life-saving insight. Goetz's killing of Heinrich is his first real 'act', in the Sartrean sense, and this has prompted some critics to claim that action and violence are synonymous for Sartre. Robert Champigny, for example, notes that '[the] creative aspect of freedom finds its immediate appli-

40

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Pascal's 'tears of joy' are, by contrast, prompted by his overwhelming intuition of the existence of God.

cation in violence',41 and Gabriel Marcel argues that '[le] crime apparaît comme la condition d'une communion réelle entre les hommes'.42 They are overlooking, however, that Goetz acts in selfdefence. As such, this killing is unique in Sartre's theatre, having none of the gratuitousness of Oreste's matricide, or the miliciens' execution of the résistants, or the whites' lynching of an innocent negro, or Hugo's suicide. As Verstraeten has rightly observed,43 Goetz makes a legitimate riposte to a lethal attack: 'Parbleu, si l'un de nous doit mourir, autant que ce soit toi!' (p.223). Heinrich is provoked because the death of God means that other men are his only judges, and they have long since condemned him: 'Si Dieu n'existe pas, plus moyen d'échapper aux hommes. [...] Notre Père qui êtes aux cieux, j'aime mieux être jugé par un être infini que par mes égaux' (pp.221-2). Heinrich's sin is hubris. Like Goetz, he had always set himself above his fellows, both in the Church and among the people. But whereas Goetz has experimented empirically to resolve his contradictions, to solve his solitude, Heinrich has settled for despair and the company of the Devil. Goetz has learnt by experience and acquired a certain moral fortitude, which enables him to face the death of God with confidence and optimism: GOETZ: [...] Je recommence tout. HEINRICH {sursautant): Tu recommences quoi? GOETZ: La vie. HEINRICH: Ce serait trop commode. (// se jette sur lui.) Tu ne recommenceras pas. Fini: c'est aujourd'hui qu'il faut tirer le trait. GOETZ: Laisse-moi, Heinrich, laisse-moi. Tout est changé, je veux vivre. (p.222)

It is the word 'life' that triggers Heinrich's attack. Resigned to his own living death (spokesman of the Law, accomplice of the Devil) for at least a year (since the fatal gamble with Goetz), he cannot bear to see his alter ego find life in a godless universe where he, Heinrich, has

41 42 43

Champigny ( 1959), p. 177. Marcel, p.218. See Verstraeten ( 1972), p. 103.

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embraced death: 'Quelle chance que tu veuilles vivre: tu crèveras dans le désespoir! ' By repelling Heinrich's assault, Goetz saves his life in the fullest sense, both literal and metaphorical, physical and metaphysical, material and moral. He is no longer willing to surrender to the peasants' rough justice (as he was only minutes before), and, more importantly, he is ready to begin 'living' authentically: 'Car on ne meurt à la loi morale, forme supérieure de toute idéologie, que pour naître à la liberté.'44 In a sense, then, this is a further and final 'suicide' for Goetz, a slaying of his possession by Good and Evil: 'Killing Heinrich, the reductive mirror image of his servitude, Goetz kills himself - that part of himself which depended on an absolute to guarantee the reality of his own existence.'45 This is a moral or existential suicide - Laraque calls it 'mental' - which the agent survives in order to bring himself to re-birth in a new life: 'Goetz, en s'affranchissant de la notion du bien, commet son second suicide mental. [...] ne représente-t-il pas la fin d'une essence et la naissance d'une autre?'46 For Goetz, this 'new birth' is the prise de conscience of his freedom, the ascent from the ethical plane of exis, or death, to that of praxis, or life. In Verstraeten's terms, he finally settles the choices he faced between 'la logique suicidaire [ou] la positivité vitale', and 'l'idéal moral [ou] la vie dialectique'.47 Goetz's access to authentic human freedom and responsibility has resonances of the apotheoses of Bariona and Oreste, except that it exceeds them. Sharing Oreste's rootlessness and Bariona's 'solitude de chef, Goetz 'proves' empirically that there are no transcendent values, only the practical exigencies of historical situations, and assumes the consequences of that moral position. This was the very thesis Sartre wanted to convey, according to Simone de Beauvoir.48 Moreover, the slaying of Heinrich has none of the mythical connotations of Christ's nativity, for example, or of Clytemnestre's murder, 44 45 46 47 48

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Verstraeten ( 1972), p. 108. McCall, p.32. Laraque, p. 128. Verstraeten ( 1972), pp.74, 101. See La Force ces choses, p.261.

the central events of Bariona and Les Mouches, respectively. On the contrary, it is a necessary response to a brutal reality, 'tuer pour vivre ou être tué'.49 So, although it is true that Ma mort de Heinrich symbolise la répudiation de la morale, de l'éthique féodale',50 Goetz's legicide (so to speak) is not merely symbolic. It is what it signifies, it is self-referential, both in the sense that Goetz puts an end to his former self as well as to Heinrich, and in the sense that this act is the first demonstration of the practical morality it initiates. In other words, Goetz does not kill Heinrich simply in order to proclaim his liberation from the petrifying look of the Other, but because the situation demands it - kill or be killed: Avec Goetz, pour la première fois dans le théâtre sartrien, le héros possède le double sens rétrospectif et prospectif de son meurtre: à la fois fin d'une liberté imaginaire [...] et début d'une action aux prises avec les choses.51

The irrevocability of this act assures its authenticity, as compared with the trickery of former conversions: 'La comédie du Bien s'est termi­ née par un assassinat; tant mieux, je ne pourrai plus revenir en arrière' (p.223). The question remains how to go forward in this new ethical enlightenment, how to live the hard-won moral life. Goetz begins by risking his physical life in a confrontation with the peasant soldiers, and appropriately so, both because Heinrich's death implies a reciprocal threat that he ought to assume, and because jeopardising his own life is the most effective way of asserting its value: 'C'est toujours face à un risque de mort que le héros sartrien définit sa qualité humaine.'52 The risk is well calculated, because the peasants, perplexed by this re-invented Goetz, bring him before Nasty and Karl instead of simply massacring him. Goetz's speeches at first echo those of Oreste, Jean and Hugo. The desires to belong, to par­ ticipate in violence and pain, and yet to elude responsibility, are present in equal measure, and it looks initially as if he will tread the

49 50 51 52

Verstraeten ( 1972), p.94. Laraque, p. 128. Verstraeten ( 1972), pp.98, 100-1. Verstraeten (1972), p.95.

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path of individualistic, self-regarding 'salvation through action', leav­ ing the historical situation unchanged: GOETZ: [...] Je ne suis pas né pour commander, je veux obéir. NASTY: Parfait! Eh bien, je te donne l'ordre de te mettre à notre tête. Obéis. GOETZ: Nasty, je suis résigné à tuer, je me ferai tuer s'il le faut; mais je n'enverrai personne à la mort: à présent je sais ce que c'est que de mourir. Il n'y a rien, Nasty, rien: nous n'avons que notre vie. (p.229)

Goetz's reluctance to lead is based on an understanding of the overwhelming value of life, learned from his own experience of existential death, and reinforced by Heinrich's dying words: 'Il n'y aura rien, rien, rien. Et toi, demain, tu verras le jour' (p.223). However, the same valorisation of life will prompt him to obey Nasty's command, because the likely alternative is a catastrophic débâcle resulting from dissent in the ranks. Goetz is eventually persuaded by ethical arithmetic, beyond Good and Evil, a statistical evaluation of the lesser evil or the greater good, what Verstraeten calls 'la comptabilité funèbre de la violence':53 Ainsi naît un dialecticien, c'est-à-dire un leader révolutionnaire: en assumant la guerre et la violence, Goetz condamne les paysans à 25.000 morts; s'il les abandonnait à la répression des féodaux, il y en aurait 100.000.54

Like Bariona, Goetz finally grasps the moral imperative to opt for the lesser evil, instead of aiming at some abstract and unattainable 'absolute good'. Goetz's acceptance of the leadership that he dreads, with its associated burden of solitude, is an unequivocal affirmation of life as the only value that can require and justify complete subordination of the self. This act of modesty is the final necessary step that none of his predecessors had taken (although Bariona came close, and Canoris was impeded only by his premature death). In Goetz, it is elicited by a sudden insight into the frailty of the peasants' revolt: 'Mais toi, [Nasty], si tu souffres, la dernière chandelle s'éteint: c'est la nuit. Je 53 54

164

Verstraeten (1972), p. 139. Verstraeten ( 1972), p. 117.

prends le commandement de l'armée' (p.231). Having signed up to the revolution in an act of deicide55 - disposing of God, his transcendent laws, and Heinrich in one fell blow - Goetz eventually realises that means are dictated by their projected ends in the real world.56 In other words, he discovers the 'historical dialectic': C'est là que l'histoire se dévoile, car l'histoire n'est dialectique que dans la mesure où elle ménage en son sein ces rencontres de contradiction dont l'alternative réside entre la mort et la vie, la barbarie et le socialisme.57

History authorises compromise. This being so, Goetz's summary execution of the rebellious captain - his first act as general of the people's army - needs no further explanation, although it led many critics into 'l'énorme erreur de croire que Goetz [...] retournait au Mal'.58 The debunking of 'absolute' standards privileges the useful and the necessary before the Good: Ou la morale est une faribole, ou c'est une totalité concrète qui réalise la synthèse du Bien et du Mal. Car le Bien sans le Mal, c'est l'Être parménidien, c'est-à-dire la Mort; et le Mal sans le Bien, c'est le Non-Être pur.59

Contât and Rybalka rightly remark that this text is key to under­ standing Goetz's peremptory dispatch of le Chef the inaugural authentic act by which 'il commence la moralisation pratique d'un monde où régnent la violence et la lutte des classes'.60 So far from being '[un] meurtre inutile', as Laraque surprisingly dubs it,61 this is a necessary and useful act, no less legitimate than the killing of Heinrich, and also a kind of self-defence. The mutinous 55

56 57 58 59 60 61

Compare Camus's analysis: 4La plupart des révolutions prennent leur forme et leur originalité dans un meurtre. Toutes, ou presque, ont été homicides. Mais quelques-unes ont, de surcroît, pratiqué le régicide et le déïcide' {L'Homme révolté, p.518). On the theme of Sartre's theatre as 'deicidaF and 'patricidal', see Davies. Verstraeten ( 1972), p. 139. Simone de Beauvoir, La Force des choses, p.261. Saint Genet, comédien et martyr, p. 177. Les Écrits de Sartre, pp. 23 5-6. Laraque, p.248.

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captain is a traitor in the making (Goetz should know), and must be dispatched for the general good. There is no evidence of gratuitous brutality, nor any return to former malfeasance. On the contrary, Goetz thereby demonstrates his solidarity with the men whose cause he has finally espoused, butfromwhom he remains separated by rank: 'Goetz est un aventurier don't l'échec ne fera jamais un militant, mais qui s'alliera au militant jusqu'à la mort.'62 The violence that discipline requires, and which his position authorises him to use, is the lingua franca for communication between Goetz and the men he now leads: La solidarité mécanique des aventuriers et des militaires engendre le rêve éternel de réaliser par la destruction une union indissoluble: 'Le plus court chemin d'un coeur à l'autre, c'est l'épée', dit le féodal Claudel. Et Malraux s'exprime à peu près dans les mêmes termes. Puisque la mort qu'ils donnent unit des frères d'armes à l'ennemi plus étroitement que la camaraderie militaire ne fait entre eux, chacun nourrit en secret le désir de tourner ses armes contre les autres.63

In Goetz's case, this 'secret desire' has to be realised in the line of duty as leader: 'Allons, Nasty, je serai bourreau et boucher. [...] Je leur ferai horreur puisque je n'ai pas d'autre manière de les aimer, [...] je resterai seul [...] puisque je n'ai pas d'autre manière d'être avec tous' (p.233). In short, Goetz's taking of the captain's life is an assertion of the value of life, and in particular of the group's right to defend its collective life - an illustration of what Sartre would later call 'sovereignty': Par la souveraineté, le groupe s'aliène à un seul homme pour éviter de s'aliéner à l'ensemble matériel et humain; chacun éprouve, en effet, son aliénation comme vie (corne vie d'un Autre à travers sa propre vie), au lieu de l'éprouver comme une mort (comme réification de toutes ses relations).64

In this perspective, Goetz's execution of le Chef represents a personal and collective triumph of life over death. Crucially, it is a beginning and not an end: 'Voilà le règne de l'homme qui commence. Beau 62 63 64

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Sartre, interview with Samedi-Soir, in Un Théâtre de situations, p.315. Saint Genet, comédient et martyr, p. 3 5 8. Critique de la raison dialectique /, p.603.

début' (p.233). This differentiates it from similar climactic events in previous plays. The deaths of Clytemnestre, the negro, the résistants, Hoederer and Hugo, are all ends in themselves, walls beyond which there is no further development. Only Goetz, by first killing Heinrich to end the 'comédie du Bien', and then killing the captain to instigate 'le règne de l'homme', both embraces and enacts the future that confronts him, with all its imponderable risks and insoluble contra­ dictions. He is the moral philosopher turned man of action: 'J'ai fait faire à Goetz ce que je ne pouvais pas faire.'65 Given the historical moment, that future could scarcely be less secure: 'Dans un an, voyons, nous serons tous morts' (p.230), says Hilda, laughing cheerfully (or perhaps cynically). It may seem strange to call such a prospect 'life-affirming', but this is simply the truth of the matter, and it is precisely in order to make this possibility less probable that Goetz assumes command.66 No doubt the future holds violence, and certainly death, but that is there and then, while life is here and now. If Goetz is ready to take life and to risk his own, it is because life is that invaluable commodity whose worth can only be measured by our willingness to lose it in order to save it.67 Oreste had shouldered the burden of his past, but failed to look to the future. The maquisards died having chosen life retrospectively rather than prospectively. Hugo, given the option of a future, opted out. Bariona, it is true, had dared to hope, but his inspiration was the advent of the Absolute, whereas Goetz survives its demise: 'Mais Goetz, au dernier tableau, accepte la morale relative et limitée qui convient à la destinée

65 66

67

Sartre, cited by Simone de Beauvoir, La Force des choses, p.262. Compare Camus: 'Si [le révolté] tue lui-même, enfin, il acceptera la mort. Fidèle à ses origines, le révolté démontre dans le sacrifice que sa vraie liberté n'est pas à l'égard du meurtre, mais à l'égard de sa propre mort' (L'Homme révolté, p.689). Comparisons like this heighten the irony of Sartre's break with Camus shortly after the success of Le Diable et le bon Dieu. 'Ainsi, la liberté se découvre à son plus haut degré puisqu'elle accepte de se perdre pour pouvoir s'affirmer' (Sartre, 'Pour un théâtre de situations', in Un Théâtre de situations, p.20). A theological variant of this principle - the concept of 'losing' one's (worldly) life in order to 'gain' a (heavenly) life - is an underpinning moral precept of the great world religions.

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humaine: il remplace l'absolu par l'histoire.' He alone embraces life in its solitary fullness, its violent instability, its moral relativity, and undertakes to defend it to the death. His successor, Kean, earns his living by doing more or less the reverse.

Kean Tendant quatre ans [1952-56], à l'exception de Kean, ses activités vont être presque exclusivement dominées par la politique.'69 Contât and Rybalka's summary implicitly classifies Kean as apolitical and its successor, Nekrassov, as mostly political - both of which implications are open to some question. Nevertheless, it is surely true that Sartre was preoccupied with things political in this period, and notably by his rapprochement with the PCF as a 'critical fellow traveller'. This orien­ tation is articulated especially in his commentaries on L 'Affaire Henri Martin, and the essay Les Communistes et la paix, the first part of which he published in Les Temps modernes in July 1952. The next issue (August's) carried Sartre's 'Réponse à Albert Camus', which marked the definitive break between the two men whose names remain inseparably associated in the 'popular' perception of existen­ tialism, their public quarrel notwithstanding. As Contât and Rybalka have emphasised, this was no mere literary polemic, much less a personal one, but rather a difference of ideology and therefore of political perspective: Il faut signaler enfin que ce texte a été écrit entre les deux premières parties des Communistes et la paix. Comme le remarque Simone de Beauvoir: 'Ces deux écrits avaient un même sens: l'après-guerre avait fini de finir' (La Force des choses, p.281).70 68 69 70

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Sartre, interview with Catherine Chonez, L'Observateur, 31 May 1951, extract in Un Théâtre de situations, p.319. Œuvres romanesques, p.LXXl. Les Écrits de Sartre, p.251. See pp.249-51 for an admirably succinct account of Sartre and Camus's friendship and divorce. For a sharp and useful analysis of

At a time when he was busy making new enemies and losing old friends in the political sphere, Sartre was perhaps more amenable than ever to flattering approaches from associates in the arts and media. In any event, when Pierre Brasseur (who had recently created the role of Goetz) suggested to him that he might modernise a play about a great actor (Kean) as a vehicle for another great actor (Brasseur), Sartre apparently accepted without demur and dashed the thing off in a few weeks, with great gusto: [Brasseur] demanda à Sartre d'adapter pour lui le Kean de Dumas et Sartre qui adore les mélodrames ne dit pas non. [...] Sartre avait écrit en quelques semaines et en s'amusant beaucoup l'adap­ tation de Kean demandée par Brasseur; pour une fois, les répétitions se passèrent sans drame. Je vis En attendant Godot?n

This is the extent of Beauvoir's commentary on Kean, whereas she devotes a total often lines to En attendant Godot, from which we can deduce that she regarded the latter as a more significant theatrical event - an opinion which the two plays' subsequent careers have certainly confirmed. Sartre himself was more forthcoming about his eighth play (and second adaptation),72 writing a substantial programme note for the première at the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt, on 14 November 1953, in which he traces the play's colourful history.73 It is clear from this why the theme must have appealed so readily to him, for it is almost a mise-en-abîme of one of his central preoccupations, namely the inter­ face between reality and illusion in human conduct, between action

71

72 73

the specifically political dimension of Sartre's differences with Camus, see Drake, pp.82-6. For the fullest and most recent analysis, see Aronson. La Force des choses, pp.309, 320. This is an outstanding example of Beauvoir's (presumably) unintentional wit and bathos in her memoirs. Apart from the amusingly ambiguous implication that 'rehearsals without drama' are a good thing, she begins her paragraph with Sartre and ends it with Beckett, having bridged the two parts with the random assertion that she had 'seen Waiting for Godot'- a non-sequitur worthy of Beckett's own dialogue! If we count Les Mouches as an adaptation of the Oresteia. In Un Théâtre de situations, pp.327-8: all quotations in this paragraph are from here.

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and play-acting, between authenticity and bad faith. According to Sartre's account, the greatest French actor of the Romantic period, Frederick Lemaître, sought to establish his supremacy as the 'greatest actor in the world' by appropriating the mantle of the greatest English actor of the time, Edmund Kean - immediately after the latter's premature death - through a specially commissioned melodrama: Kean, ou Désordre et génie. The author of this was in fact a 'wellknown polygraph' called de Courcy, but - for whatever reason ('we shall probably never know', says Sartre) - the popular Romantic playwright and novelist, Alexandre Dumas, got the sole credit and the royalties. The success of the play was such, adds Sartre, that Lemaître 'finit par se confondre tout à fait avec son confrère anglais', and was mortified to discover, towards the end of his own life, that the piece was being revived in Paris with another actor in the title role: '[Dans] sa rage, il couvrit Paris d'affiches qui portaient ces mots: "Le véritable Kean, c'est moi.'" Others before Brasseur had been similarly seduced by the role - notably, Lucien Guitry and Ivan Mosjoukine - such that Kean 'a cessé d'être un personnage historique; il s'est élevé au rang des mythes: c'est le patron des acteurs.' And Sartre concludes that, if the 'miracle works again' for Brasseur, his audience will not know whether 'vous voyez Brasseur en train déjouer Kean ou Kean en train déjouer Brasseur'. In short, Sartre's Kean is a play about an actor requested from him by an actor, and adapted from a play about an actor requested by another actor from an unknown author, but signed by a great novelist and playwright of the day - not unlike Sartre himself, in this respect! By adapting Dumas (or de Courcy), whom he virtually plagiarises in some scenes and completely rewrites in others, Sartre inserts himself into this crazy hall of mirrors, in which image and reality are inextricably confused and overlaid with each other, so that nobody quite knows where their role-playing ends and 'real life' begins: 'C'est le Mythe même de l'Acteur. L'acteur qui ne cesse déjouer, qui joue sa vie même, ne se reconnaît plus, ne sait plus qui il est. Et qui, finalement, n'est personne.'74 There is scarcely a single authentic 74

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Sartre, interview with Renée Saurel, Les Lettres françaises, 12 November 1953, in Un Théâtre de situations, pp.331-6 (p.332).

character, says Sartre, except for Anna Damby, the 'pure and puri­ fying' young woman whom Kean finally marries. Yet Sartre explicitly denied that there was 'any philosophical theme of any kind',75 in his adaptation, while nevertheless ascribing to it 'a sort of revolutionary force' in the moving story of 'cet homme qui devint acteur pour s'évader de son ressentiment contre la société'.76 Sartre's conclusion that, 'Il y a de YHernani en Kean, et j'aime bien Hernani\71 gives the lie to the suggestion that, in a vigorously politicised period of his life, he 'took time out' to write a rigorously apolitical play. Be that as it may, the critics chose to focus more on the literary and philosophic than on any latent political aspects of the play. Thierry Maulnier saw the drama of the 'Sartrean Kean' as that of existence itself, but felt that there had been something theatrical lost, as well as something philosophical gained, in the transfer: 'Je soup­ çonne qu'en se chargeant ainsi de Sartre et en se déchargeant de Dumas, Kean, qui a gagné de la profondeur a perdu de son relief, de son relief mélodramatique.'78 Jean-Jacques Gautier detected 'un héros modernisé [...] devenu pirandellien' at Sartre's hands, deprived of any 'gravity' by an 'irksome, jokey tone', and redeemed only by the virtuoso performance of Pierre Brasseur: 'Sans Pierre Brasseur, Kean nous laisserait assez tièdes. Pierre Brasseur met le feu à cette brassée de mots.'79 His complacent pun aside, one wonders whether Gautier realised that he had simultaneously seen and missed the point. Com­ missioned as a vehicle for Brasseur's thespian talents (just as Dumas's / de Courcy's was designed for Lemaître's), Sartre's Kean achieves its objective precisely by affording the star the scope he needs to exhibit his genius. And it is a signal tribute to Sartre's skill as a playwright that it has fulfilled this function equally successfully in Frank

75 76 77 78

79

See interview with Les Lettres françaises, in Un Théâtre de situations, p.331. Interview with Les Lettres françaises, in Un Théâtre de situations, p.336. Ibid Combat, 19 November 1953, p.2. Given the recent rupture between Sartre and Camus, Maulnier - the critic of the former Resistance journal, of which Camus had once been editor - might well have been more ferocious. Le Figaro, 18 November 1953, p. 10.

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Hauser's English translation. By contrast to the grudging Gautier, Robert Kemp gave Sartre full credit for his 'brilliant improvement upon Dumas', in a rapturous review of this 'fascinating analysis of the actor's soul'.81 Kean is in some ways the least typical of Sartre's plays. It is an adaptation, but not from classical sources like Les Mouches and Les Troyennes. It improves upon the original romantic melodrama of Alexandre Dumas, whereas the plays taken from Antiquity lose some of the theatricality of their models by Sophocles and Euripides.82 Kean is a comedy revealing humour, charm and whimsicality such as one might not expect from the author of Les Mouches, Huis clos or Morts sans sépulture. It is set in a time and place (Regency England) neither proximate nor remote, and deals with no sinister political or social events. Moreover, the hero has no specifically political aspirations and is not devoted to any grand cause. Physical violence is notable by its absence (although there is some in Dumas), and the death of the body, whether as threat or event, does not figure. This silence on the literal level of the life/death dialogue makes Kean unique in Sartre's theatre, and ideal for the study of the metaphor of life and death. This is ubiquitous in the play, with figures of speech ranging from the most banal of amorous clichés to highly-charged expressions of existential identity. If Sartre owes many of the former to Dumas, the latter are decidedly his own.

80

81 82

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This was true for Alan Badel, in Oxford and London in 1970-71 (see O'Donohoe [2001b], pp.9-10), and for Anthony Hopkins towards the end of that decade. At the time an established star of the English stage, Hopkins was highly praised in the press for his small-screen portrayal of Kean: 'Anthony Hopkins gave a sparkling, marvellously dramatic and thoroughly witty per­ formance last night in Jean-Paul Sartre's Kean on BBCl's Play of the Month. [...] M. Sartre's Kean is exceptionally funny, full of polished lines which are reminiscent of the best comedies of manners, and with a plot which at times makes one think of Bernard Shaw, but Shaw without the lectures' (Stanley Reynolds, The Times, 27 November 1978, p.6). See also Sean Day-Lewis writing in The Daily Telegraph of the same date, p. 15. See Le Monde, 19 November 1953, p. 12. For useful comparisons of Sartre's play with Dumas's, see Lorris, pp.290-306, and David Bradby's edition of Kean (which includes Dumas's text), pp.30-7.

'L'acteur', said Sartre in 1953, 'c'est l'opposé du comédien qui, lorsqu'il a fini de travailler, redevient un homme comme les autres, alors que l'acteur "se joue lui-même" à toutes les secondes'.83 Terms of illusion and annihilation - 'mirage, nothing, nobody', etc. - recur regularly in Kean's descriptions of himself, as he conforms ideally to Sartre's preconception of 'l'acteur': 'Je joue à être ce que je suis.'84 Like the notorious café waiter in L'Être et le néant, Kean gives up his freedom in a total self-projection into the imaginary, becoming '[la] victime de Shakespeare: je me crève pour qu'il revive, le vieux vampire!' (p. 121). Caught in a life-and-death struggle for identity 'Mais pourquoi ne suis-je rien?' (p.69) - Hamlet's ontological intro­ spection - 'Être ou ne pas être. Je ne suis rien, ma petite' (p.75) naturally comes to 'haunt' Kean's musings: 'Hamlet, n'est-il pas en effet tout ensemble le mort-vivant qui se laisse dévorer par un mort et le velléitaire qui se prend pour un homme d'action?'85 Hamlet's question is about being and, strictly speaking, it is being rather than life that the actor lacks. He is, after all, a dynamic person whose business is to breathe life into the dead, to impart an illusory being to the non-existent. Elena tells him: '[Les auteurs morts] se renouvellent chaque fois qu'ils sont joués par des acteurs nouveaux. [...] L'homme que j'ai vu hier était Hamlet en personne' (pp. 13-14). And Kean himself says of Romeo: 'Voilà vingt ans que je l'empêche de mourir' (p.55). But the actor's dilemma is that his very act of creation brings his own existence into question: 'Est-ce qu'il y a un Kean?' asks Eléna (p. 14). Unlike God, or the simple artisan, whose artefacts testify to their maker's existence, the actor surrenders his life so that the chimerical might live. He is by vocation a simulacrum, a distorting prism through which reality is refracted and projected like a hologram, for the entertainment of his audience. Initially, Romeo, Hamlet and Othello are mere figments of the dramatist's imagination, characters whose very essence (contrary to the natural order of things,

83 84 85

Interview in Combat, 5 November 1953, extract in Un Théâtre de situations, pp.328-9 (p.329). Kean, p.75. Further references are in the main text; where successive quotations concern the same page, only the first is referenced. Jeanson(1955),p.79.

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in Sartre's metaphysics) precedes their existence. The actor's exis­ tence is absorbed into that essence, making self-annihilation an occupational hazard for the professional actor, an animate 'analogon', 'existant à peine' (p. 134), in Kean's own phrase.86 Like the youthful and anguished Philèbe before him, Kean complains of an airy levity which detains him in a kind of pre-natal limbo, from which he must either evolve towards life, or succumb to his living death. Like Oreste, too, Kean is the victim (as he sees it) of his original and contingent facticity. The bastard son of a madman and a pros­ titute, he is a natural social outcast whose wretched childhood engen­ dered the will to escape -.jeven, if needs be, by suicide: 'Vingt fois j'ai voulu me pendre' (p.43). Like Hugo, he is obsessed with his child­ hood and apt to 'blame' it for his life's predicament: 'la basse nais­ sance' (p. 18) is at once 'low birth' and 'no birth', inextricably linking social and existential insecurities - 'c'est un damné, fou d'orgueil, qui enrage de n'être pas né', says Amy, with no irony intended. Kean himself also assimilates 'good birth' to 'birth' tout court: 'Toi [Eléna], tu es née fille; lui [le Prince de Galles], il est trop bien né; moi trop mal: [...] Je risquais la mort parce que je n'étais pas né' (pp.199, 206). Again, like Oreste, whose itinerant scholar's life does nothing to cure his profound sense of ethereal non-existence, so Kean's work as an actor does not begin to advance him towards the 'life' he is denied by his lack of 'birth'. On the one hand, he blames fate - 'on est acteur comme on est prince: de naissance' (p.80) - on the other he blames conditioning by 'les hommes sérieux [qui] ont besoin d'illusion' and who, in order to satisfy their need for fantasy, 'prennent un enfant et le changent en trompe-PoeiP (p.64). But to lay the blame at the door of the Other - whose interference is alleged to have created unlivable personal circumstances - does this not amount to an exit strategy in bad faith on Kean's part? Manifestly, the historical moment and the social environment contextualise and, in some sense, determine every life within broad limits. Just as Oreste, Garcin, Hugo and Goetz were orientated this way or that by their facticity, so Kean has had to come to terms with 86

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Sartre defines the 'analogon' as the 'presence of an absence': see L'Imaginaire, pp.72-3 and pp. 154-84.

his humble and irregular origins in a rigidly stratified, hereditary hier­ archy. However, this is not to say that he had no option but to take flight into an imaginary world, agreeing to become whatever others made of him: 'Qui suis-je, sinon celui que vous avez fait de moi?', he angrily asks the Prince of Wales. Public adulation is not really a form of summary execution, depriving its victim of autonomy and selfcreativity, as Kean extravagantly claims: '[...] permission de l'abattre à vue, sans sommation et comme un chien: la gloire, c'est ça' (p.78). This defeatist advice (directed at Anna, possibly for her own good) resembles the bad faith of Lizzie and the 'Negro', lacking awareness of the dialectical interplay of facticity and freedom, that indispensable (vital) lucidity which Goetz achieved empirically, and which Sartre spelt out in the case of Genet: A présent, il faut vivre; au pilori, le cou dans un carcan, il faut encore vivre: nous ne sommes pas des mottes de terre glaise et l'important n'est pas ce qu'on fait de nous mais ce que nous faisons nous-même de ce qu 'on a fait de nous?1

Like Jean Genet, the 'comédien et martyr', Kean will discover that his profession - itself the insitutionalisation of the fictive, the ritualisation of impotence - surprisingly supplies the key to life proper, 'car jouer c'est exprimer les réalités de la vie'.88 By the practice of his art in his situation, Kean will demonstrate the truth enunciated by Sartre in various contexts, and nowhere more explicitly than in the post-war essay 'Écrire pour son époque' (1946): 'Nous affirmons contre ces critiques et contre ces auteurs que le salut se fait sur cette terre, qu'il est de l'homme entier par l'homme entier et que l'art est une méditation de la vie, non de la mort.'*9 At first sight, this looks an implausible assertion when applied to Kean's art: 'Eh bien oui: je me suis mis encore dans une situation fausse: mais que voulez-vous, c'est professionnel; les situations fausses, j'en vis [...]' (p.30). Yet, this is no different from Garcin, 87 88 89

Saint Genet, comédien et martyr, p.63 (emphasis added). Lords, p.303. In Les Écrits de Sartre, pp.670-6 (p.670, emphasis added). Sartre was rebutting criticism of his 4Présentation des Temps modernes* (see Les Ecrits de Sartre, pp. 152-3).

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who 'always lived in false situations', or Hugo who 'lived in a stage set'. Artificial environments are the natural habitats of Sartre's heroes in their primitive phase, just as the 'comédie familiale' was his as a child. But the professional actor colludes with the artifice of his décor, connives at his own incarceration in a framework for mere gestures, and by 'making his living from that' (an ironic oxymoron in terms of Sartre's over-arching metaphor) compounds his original mauvaise foi, The play's action begins at the critical moment of Kean's nascent consciousness of his personal existential paradox: the actor is socially acceptable, but unreal; the man is real but socially invisible (at best) and unacceptable (at worst). 'Malheureusement, l'on ne peut inviter le comédien sans l'homme' (p.24), writes Kean in his letter to the Comte de Koeffeld, displaying an acute awareness of the gulf between his public and private personae. For example, his 'word of honour' is worthless: 'Madame [...] n'a pas su voir l'honneur de l'homme derrière les extravagances de l'acteur' (p.33). The Prince of Wales, with improbable psychoanalytic perspicacity, observes that Kean's sense of alienation is reaching a crisis - 'C'est nous, c'est nous que tu poursuis en Eléna, nous les vrais hommes' (p.67) - which Kean does not deny: 'Et quand cela serait?'. Kean's love for (or infatuation with) Eléna is both the pretext and the catalyst of his belated aspiration to escape the smoke and mirrors of his fame, and acceed to the third dimension of depth: Un trompe-l'oeil, une fantasmagorie, voilà ce qu'ils ont fait de Kean. [...] A part cela, rien. Ah! si: une gloire nationale. Mais à la condition que je ne m'avise pas d'exister pour de vrai. [...] Voilà vingt ans que je fais des gestes pour vous plaire; comprenez-vous que je puisse vouloir faire des actes? (pp.64— 5)

This plaintive reproach echoes Oreste's dilemma faced with the Pedagogue, or Hugo's in front of his father, or Goetz's in the eyes of God. It is the primordial existential plight of the free inidvidual vis-àvis the authoritative Other (or super-ego, in Freudian terms). Like each of those predecessors, Kean will need the selfless assistance of a 'good woman' to help him to struggle towards the life he lacks - and that is not Eléna, but Anna.

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Kean's meeting with Anna (like Oreste's with Electre or Goetz's with Hilda) is both fortuitous and decisive, because it occurs at a pivotal moment in his disillusionment with his profession and his concomitant way of life: 'On ne joue pas pour gagner sa vie. On joue pour mentir, pour se mentir, pour être ce qu'on ne peut pas être parce qu'on en a assez d'être ce qu'on est' (p.81). Anna's innocence and wide-eyed enthusiasm are antidotes to Kean's philosophic cynicism. Like Oreste and Electre, Hugo and Olga, Goetz and Hilda, Kean and Anna tacitly establish a pact of mutual assistance: his skill will help her to act, while her simplicity will reconnect him to action. As the least sophisticated character by far, she becomes a paradigm of the capacity to distinguish appearance from reality, a veritable life-line, both physically and morally.90 When Kean laughs at the plight of Romeo - 'Rester et mourir! C'est idiot! (// rit.y (p.88) - he does so self-mockingly because his own options are similar: 'I must be gone and live, or stay and die.'91 To remain the star-crossed lover, imprisoned in the limbo space of his dressing-room, from which he emerges nightly to incarnate one or another of Shakespeare's imaginary heroes, strikes Kean increasingly as an intolerable prospect. At first, he conceives of the way out as a way back, a return to his roots as a saltimbanco in the troupe where he not only enjoyed simple and authentic pleasures but in which, crucially, he was accorded the same status as other men: 'Pour eux, je suis un homme, comprends-tu, et ils le croient si fort qu'ils finiront par m'en persuader. Allons, Salomon, [...] je change de vie' (p.99). Kean remembers and re-enacts his former life as one in which reality could be ingested as a vouchsafe of existence: 'Savez-vous pourquoi je suis ici?' he asks Anna, surrounded by his old comrades in the Black Cock Tavern; 'Pour boire et pour manger. Ça c'est vivre. J'ai le droit de vivre, non?' (p. 101). Like Oreste yearning to share the pain of the Argives, or Hugo envying the 'real taste' of coffee in Hoederer's mouth, or Goetz pushing his body to extremes of excess and abstin­ ence, Kean is fascinated by sensual experience as the gateway to life itself. But, even in a godless universe, we do not live by bread alone, 90 91

See Lorris, p.303. Romeo and Juliet, III, 5.

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and life must be inscribed upon us more than carnally if we claim to have the right to live it - we must also do it. In order to achieve this, as Anna rightly perceives, Kean has need of a helpmate: 'Vous avez besoin d'une femme. [...] pour mettre un peu d'ordre dans ta vie. [...] l'ordre, ce serait ma partie; le génie, ce serait la vôtre' (p. 105). Anna envisages a truly conjugal relationship, in which two halves are part of a whole, and whereby the 'disorder and genius' of the individual life of Kean become the order and genius of their shared life. Her verbal allusion ('le calme, le luxe [...] la volupté') to Baudelaire's poem, 'L'Invitation au voyage' (which begins, 'Mon enfant, ma soeur'), both prompts Kean's reply (-Viens là, petite soeur'), and establishes an affinity between them that mimics the sibling and pseudo-sibling relationships found elsewhere in Sartre's theatre.92 Like the surrogate sister who was in fact his mother, Sartre's Anna is a natural source of the life force. It is Anna who inspires Kean to bait the appalling Lord Mewill in the tavern - 'je me sens vivre' (p. 109) - lambasting him with a tongue as sharp as Cyrano de Bergerac's, and winning the applause and affection of his old boon companions: 'Vive Monsieur Kean!' (p. 112) And when Anna re­ hearses Desdemona, Salomon criticises her excess of strength: 'C'est que j'en ai', she retorts, 'Je suis jeune, moi, j'ai du sang!' (p.118). That vitality is so much absorbed and reflected by Kean that, when Elena interrupts their rehearsal, she immediately assumes she has stumbled upon something other than play-acting. Again, it is Anna who exhorts Kean to defy the jealous Elena's ultimatum (that he must not go on stage with her young rival), by reminding him of his promise to his pals in Old Bob's troupe, people for whom his word has some value, whereas it is meaningless to his aristocratic patrons. It is therefore with a sense of himself as a man that he plays the scene with Anna, the muse who has promulgated his moral revival and primed him for the extraordinary performance he will therefore give. Life and death, as the irreconcilable polarities of the human condition, are the leitmotivs of Othello's apostrophe to the dormant Desdemona: 'Si la mort pouvait te prendre toute vive et te garder chaude et blanche comme le sommeil, je t'aurais tuée pour mieux 92

178

See O'Donohoe (1996).

t'aimer' (pp. 154-5). That we cannot be simultaneously living and dead is the lesson that Kean himself is gradually learning. As the dialogue unfolds, erring wildly at times from Shakespeare's text, the dialectic of life and death recurs insistently: whilst Othello repeatedly threatens to kill his unfaithful wife, so she swears her innocence upon her very life. Yet, in terms of Sartre's dominant metaphor, it is Kean who is striving for life - the moral life of authenticity - and Anna who inadvertently assists him by stuttering over her lines, so breaking the theatrical illusion and laying bare the real elements of the situation: when Kean (as Othello) acts out his anger towards Anna (as Desdemona), his jealous rage is really directed at the flirting couple in a prominent box, namely Elena and the Prince of Wales. Kean's threat: 'Quand on m'offense, je tue' (p. 162) is uttered by him 'facing the box', and signals his break with the character of Othello. Pretence is put aside, but ambiguity remains: who, if anyone, is to be killed? Sartre invents this pathetic and grandiloquent line for Kean, which has no counterpart in Shakespeare or Dumas, and its impact as the expres­ sion of a truly felt emotion is heightened by contrast with Anna's frantic and comic efforts to reintegrate him into the fictional dramatic context (she even goes so far as to offer him the pillow!). The death that ensues is not Desdemona's by the hand of Othello, but rather that of Kean the actor by the hand of Kean the man. This begins with a dramatic flourish which is subverted by its very theatri­ cality: Kean threatens to show the audience 'human blood' and draws his sword only to reveal a 'minuscule stub of blade', which denounces the weapon as the prop it is, the merest toy, the analogon of a sword just as Kean is the analogon of a man. Thus, although he has quit the role of Othello, Kean finds he cannot step fully armed (so to speak) into the 'real' world. On the contrary, he is initially all the more conscious of his non-existence: 'Ah! prince de Galles, prince de Galles, tu as de la chance: si j'étais vrai, tu n'en mènerais pas large' (p. 164). Indeed, the harder he tries to express Othello's fury on his own behalf, the less articulate and convincing he becomes: C'est à tort qu'on prenait Othello pour un grand cocu royal. Je suis un co... co... un... co... co...mique. {Rires. Au Prince de Galles.) Eh bien,

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Monseigneur, je vous Pavais prédit: pour une fois qu'il me prend une vraie colère, c'est l'emboîtage, (p. 165)

Yet this is not simply the inarticulacy of the actor deprived of his script. In an important sense, Othello's anger is not the same as Kean's, whose outburst has less to do with unrequited love and proprietorial envy, than with his sense of himself as a person whom others regard as having the right to experience and express such feelings. Thus, when he rounds on the audience and gives vent to his true grievance, instead of 'piggy-backing' on the emotions of Shakespeare's Moor, Jie is suddenly endowed with a fluency that shocks his audience as much as it shocked Lord Mewill the night before: Vous veniez ici chaque soir [...] mais dites donc: qui applaudissiez-vous? [...] 'Notre grand Kean, notre cher Kean, notre Kean national.' Eh bien le voilà, votre Kean! (// tire un mouchoir de sa poche et se frotte le visage [...].) Oui, voilà l'homme. Regardez-le. Vous n'applaudissez pas? (Sifflets.) C'est curieux tout de même: vous n'aimez que ce qui est faux. [...] Kean est mort en bas âge. (Rires.) Taisez-vous donc, assassins, c'est vous qui l'avez tué! [...]: il n'y a personne en scène. Personne. [...]: je n'existe pas vraiment, je fais semblant. (pp.165-6)

The commanding authority of this speech - which is a dramatic transposition of Sartre's theorisation of Jean Genet's experience - is a surrogate for violence, because this tirade is a verbal replication of antecedent murders. Kean's professional self-destruction is the existential equivalent of Oreste's matricide, Hugo's parricide (where Hoederer is the ersatz father), and Goetz's fratricide (of Heinrich qua brother). Lorris calls this moment 'l'instant de vérité de toute pièce sartrienne', and sees a comparison also with 'la révolte tardive de Lizzie', insofar as 'Kean y risque sa carrière et sa liberté, sa fausse liberté'.93 In fact, there is more certainty than risk in Kean's attack on his public: once he has irrevocably smashed the illusion in this way, and laid the blame at the door of his audience, there is no scope for a return to the imaginary world. The sensitive equilibrium that subsisted 93

180

Lorris, p.298.

between artist and spectator has been disturbed, and relations with the Other have necessarily to be placed on a new and more realistic footing (as were those of Oreste, Hugo and Goetz after their respective apotheoses). Just as Genet (in Sartre's analysis) had seized the 'murder weapon' of 'the righteous' - language - and turned it against them in his poetry, so Kean has confounded illusion and reality to the point where his audience - who, in one sense, are responsible for bringing the actor into being - no longer have the right to treat him as the translucent figure through whom Shakespeare's heroes become visible, because he has dared to take on the opacity of a real man. Whether we view Kean's thespian suicide as a gesture or an act must depend upon his manner of assuming its consequences. Lorris fears that Kean's self-liberation is tarnished with the same trickery as Goetz's conversions: 'Mais entre l'enfant d'Argos et l'acteur anglais s'étend l'ombre de Goetz le tricheur, et le défi au Prince n'est rien d'autre que le coup de dé truqué du reître allemand.'94 Naturally, the Prince of Wales also dismisses Kean's outburst as an 'admirable performance',95 implicitly confining the performer to the realm of make-believe from which he aspires to escape. Indeed, it appears that Kean would slip un-self-critically from one idealised incarnation to another - that of the common man, Monsieur Edmond, for whom a life of simple pleasure and good fellowship supposedly awaits - were it not for the timely intervention of the life-proponent, Anna Damby. A new name would denote a new start in life, and the prospect of prison (as a punishment for his insubordination) would clearly indi­ cate 'qu'ils me tiennent pour un homme', says Kean: 'Je préfère ça' (p. 175). To be punished is to be taken seriously - compare attitudes from Oreste to Goetz, via Garcin, the maquisards, and Hugo. Kean's days as the prevaricating and pusillanimous Prince of Denmark are over, and those of the frank and forceful Fortinbras have begun: 'C'est vrai, c'est vrai que je suis un homme fini' (p. 176). There is deliberate word-play here: Kean the actor, the national idol, is 'finished', where­ as Monsieur Edmond is a 'finite' man, an ordinary human being such as Kean, the cultural construct, could never be. 94 95

Lorris, p.298. See p. 167.

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However, Kean is in danger of swapping one two-dimensional character for another, by assimilating his new identity of Monsieur Edmond to that of Fortinbras: '[Ils] sont de la même espèce: ils sont ce qu'ils sont et disent ce qui est' (p. 175). Only the en-soi is what it is: stable, unchanging, dead. If Monsieur Edmond becomes just another part to play, then Kean will not have released himself at all from the imaginary realm. He admits as much when Salomon draws attention to his new posturing: 'Tu as raison, parbleu: je voulais faire un geste' (p. 177). Ironically, the act by which Kean slew the gestures of the actor becomes itself suspect as a gesture because, so long as he con­ tinues to role-play a new character, he cannot claim to have acted. His dilemma is that play-acting is all he knows; quite literally, it is his life. The simplicity of the common man will have to be learnt and re­ hearsed, yet not as another dramatic part: 'Il faut être simple. [...] Ah! cabotin, tu as la vie dure.' Life might henceforth be hard, but it is at least beginning to resemble a life. Like Hugo before him, Kean agonises over this fundamental moral question: act or gesture? Hugo had spent three years reflecting on this in prison without reaching any conclusion, comparing the shooting of Hoederer with the trigger-pulling performed by an actor on stage: 'Moi, là-dedans, qu'est-ce que je deviens?'96 How can you have an act without an agent? The problem is still more insoluble for Kean, a professional actor whose deed leaves no visible trace, whereas Hugo at least had a corpse to show for his action. Kean echoes Hugo's crucial question - 'Était-ce un geste ou un acte?' (p. 178) - but he appears to have a prejudice for the less onerous alternative: 'C'était un geste [...] Je me prenais pour Othello [...].' This might explain his rebuke of the Prince, but it does not begin to account for his assault on the audience, which must surely be an act 'puisqu'il a ruiné ma vie', as he claims in argument with Salomon. But Oreste, Garcin, Hugo and Goetz all discovered that grave consequences alone do not suffice to make acts; the agent must be willing to assume those consequences, not for the sake of some ontological consecration, or exis (Oreste and Garcin wanting to be heroes, Hugo to be an assassin, Goetz to be a monster or a saint), but for the sake of changing the world, or praxis: 96

182

Les Mains sales, p. 243.

Est-ce que je l'ai voulu, ce crime? Ou Pai-je rêvé? Ai-je voulu risquer ma fortune et ma vie? [...] Allons, c'était un suicide pour rire. Mais on avait chargé le pistolet et le grand Kean s'est tué pour de bon!

Again like Hugo, Kean is evading the issue here by saying, in effect, that he performed a gesture which accidentally got out of hand and became, by virtue of its unforeseen gravity, an act. But the agent is by definition the author of his act, not the victim of it, and so this casuistry will not stand up. Kean's futile wish to 'travel back' and re-enact his 'suicide' knowingly is equally a sort of evasion, inasmuch as it claims that what he did was not done deliberately: Si je pouvais revenir en arrière, ce serait pour refaire sciemment ce que j'ai fait à l'aveuglette. [...] Si l'on doit se perdre, que ce soit du moins au grand jour. Moi j'ai vécu et je suis mort dans les ténèbres. [...] Tu vois, je suis passé d'un monde à l'autre; me voici du côté des souffleurs et des marchands de fromage: et je n'y vois pas plus clair, (pp. 158-9)

His insistence upon his 'blindness', before and after the event, is a manifest attempt to divest himself of moral responsibility, so that talk of transition 'from one world to another' rings hollow; morally, he is unchanged so long as he peddles this self-exculpatory line. It is not true, therefore, to say that 'tout ce qui [lui] reste de Kean [est] une passion folle et sans espoir' (p.180)97 - although this prise de conscience of his own folly and futility is his best safeguard against them. Nevertheless, the life-enhancing influence of the young actress, Anna Damby, will be indispensable to introducing some order into the chaotic convolutions (or tourniquets) of Kean's moral hide-and-seek. Anna's sudden announcement that she intends to leave England prompts further soul-searching on Kean's part, in which his unavowed affection for her becomes entwined with his moral interrogation, in what he wittily calls '[F]improvisation de la fin' (p. 183): end of Kean, end of scene, end of relationships with Anna, with Elena, with public, 97

This is surely a conscious echo of the line in L'Être et le néant (p.708), which summarises the pointless quest to be, like God, the foundation of our own being, simultaneously 'en-soi' and 4pour-soi': '[...] l'homme est une passion inutile.'

183

with self- all of these endings are in prospect. He portrays his former life as a dream from which he has awakened: 'Tu te pinces, tu te réveilles: hier soir je me suis pincé. Un joli suicide, non? La gloire et Pamour, c'étaient des boniments, mais la prison, crois-moi, ce sera du vrai.' Here, Kean clings to the delusion that punishment guarantees authenticity (a common mistake, as we have noted). Human existence is mundane, fortuitous, arbitrary, contingent, and we search in vain for teleological connections. History is not a linear narrative of cause and effect, consequences are unpredictable, yet still they must be willed and assumed, even (especially) where the latter differ from the former. Who would have guessed, for example, that Anna's stage début would be spotted by a correspondent of the New York Theatre (or so she claims)? The persisting disjunction between reality and Kean's essen­ tially theatrical conception of it is well brought out by their juxta­ position in this rejoinder: 'Il a eu le toupet de te trouver bonne pendant que j'agonisais sur la scène! Cet homme n'a pas de coeur' (p. 184). No doubt self-mocking, this nonetheless suggests that Kean still regards his 'suicide' as a performance, whose dire consequences he now blames on Anna, accusing her of having 'capriciously' wrecked his life and abandoned him to his fate - a nice irony, given that she is both the bringer of his life and his femme fatale. As a prelude to grasping his feelings for Anna, Kean has first to appreciate the artificiality of his feelings for Elena, which emerges in his final duologue with her. Adjusting the look on his face (as the stage direction pointedly stipulates), Kean embarks upon a bantering lovers' quarrel, full of cliché and thinly-veiled facetiousness: ELÉNA: Et mon mari? KEAN: Je m'incline devant sa douleur future. ELÉNA: Il en mourra. KEAN: Si ce n'est lui, ce sera moi. Autant sauver le plus jeune. ELÉNA: Et plus tard, quand nous aurons retrouvé la raison, comment suppor­ terez-vous d'avoir causé sa mort? KEAN: Allègrement. ELÉNA: Et s'il vous tuait d'abord? KEAN: Hypothèse improbable. ELÉNA: Ah! Qu'en savez-vous? KEAN: Trop myope, (p. 190)

184

This vaudevillean exchange, worthy of Groucho Marx and Margaret Dumont, indicates that Kean is far from taking the sentiments ser­ iously. As Elena's speech becomes more histrionic and extravagant with references to infanticide and the desolation of her own life - so Kean is reminded of the typical dialogue of lovers, and the pretence of their relationship is laid bare: KEAN: [...] Eh! Parbleu, Madame, vous attendiez la réplique. ELÉNA: Comment osez-vous... ? KEAN: Eh! Je n'ose rien: je ne joue plus, voilà tout. Pouce! Rideau! (p. 191)

When Kean stops playing, and play-acting, he can begin to live; the end of this little scene, therefore, really brings down the curtain on the 'suicide' of the night before. Coincidentally, Elena seeks to indict Kean's inauthenticity 'J'avais eu la folie de vous prendre pour un homme et ce n'est pas votre faute si vous n'êtes qu'un acteur' (p. 194) - at the very moment when he resists her encouragement to go on playing a part, thereby implicitly accusing her insincerity. Indeed, his first act as a man is to expose her imposture by offering her a life of obscurity at his side, a test which she fails: 'Vous voyez bien que c'était de la comédie' (p. 196). Kean's new lucidity enables him to analyse the existential situation of this doomed love-triangle. Elena, the Prince of Wales and he himself are all implicated in the same strategy of ludic evasion: Beauté, royauté, génie: un seul et même mirage. [...] Nous vivons tous trois de l'amour des autres et nous sommes tous trois incapables d'aimer. [...] Trois reflets: chacun des trois croit à la vérité des deux autres: voilà la comédie. (pp. 199-200)

Eléna points out that if they had been characters in Shakespeare, they would all have been dead long ago, the victims respectively of duel, murder and suicide. The more apposite comparison, though, is with characters in Sartre's drama: three mere shadows, abstracted from the real world, credible only to one another, vying vainly for each other's love and respect. It is the infernal scenario of Huis clos once more, except that the icon of femininity is now a Countess, the philandering sadist a Prince, and the cynical androgynous parasite an actor on the 185

threshold of conversion: 'the great Kean' has slain himself in public, and the humble 'Monsieur Edmond' remains. 'Que dois-je souhaiter à Monsieur Edmond?' enquires Eléna, 'D'être passionnément aimé?' (p.201). But Kean (as Monsieur Edmond) would prefer to love: 'Souhaite-moi plutôt d'aimer, ça me changera.' This is truly a 'vital' sign for it denotes Kean's aspiration to migrate at last from the status of passive object - which has been not only his stock-in-trade but also his existential rationale - to that of active subject: to desist from being a thing that is, and to become instead a person who does. Kean has rather more difficulty in explaining his metamorphosis to Elena's husband, an-aristocrat of limited intellect for whom the vicissitudes of ontological insecurity are best left unexplored. Never­ theless, Kean patiently tries to elucidate his transformation, using ana­ logies of birth and coming-of-age that are reminiscent of Oreste's renaissance, in particular: Monsieur, c'est inutile: je ne peux pas me battre avec vous. Ce sont les enfants qui se battent. Et les nobles. Et je me suis aperçu cette nuit que je n'étais plus des uns et que je ne serai jamais des autres. Bien sûr, j'ai donné quelques coups d'épée, dans ma vie: mais c'était encore de la comédie. Je risquais la mort parce que je n'étais pas né. [...] Mais la comédie est finie: Monsieur Edmond ne se battra pas. (p.206)

'He risked death because he was not yet born' might be the poetic epitaph of all Sartre's dramatic protagonists in their pre-lucid phases of inauthenticity: Oreste's urgency to belong, Garcin's or Sorbier's dreams of heroism, Hugo's determination to 'be' an assassin, Goetz's to be a saint, Valera's to be a fraud, Frantz's to be the witness of his century. All of these more or less grandiose ambitions entail reckless mortal danger because the hero is existentially pre-natal, morally unenlightened, labouring under the misapprehension that the purpose of 'to do' is 'to be'. Whereas the objective of praxis is not exis, but change, dialectic, dynamic dialogue between man and history - none of which would cut much ice with the Count, who still wants to know, above anything else, whether Kean's veiled visitor was the Countess! Enter Anna Damby again, who sees her chance to salvage Kean for a new life, even at the expense of her own reputation for virtue.

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The Count is persuaded that she was the mysterious femme fatale, while the Prince of Wales is persuaded that Kean still finds Elena 'fascinating' (a pre-requisite to his doing so too), and Kean himself is convinced that Anna loves him for who he really is beneath the grease-paint. Touched by her selfless devotion to him, Kean chooses exile (and marriage) with Anna, in preference to the vainglory of manly duels and the tangible punishment of prison walls: 'Miss Anna Damby n'a l'air de rien, mais elle obtient tout ce qu'elle veut' (pp.212-13), as Kean admiringly puts it. Her canny combination of female guile and no-nonsense pragmatism ensures a happy ending, in which Kean discards his last vestige of role-playing (as the obscure Dutch jeweller, Monsieur Edmond), and embraces his future as Kean - comédien, no longer acteur - in company with his 'two only true friends', Salomon and Anna. Aptly, Kean has the last word, fracturing the theatrical illusion by drawing attention to it, and thus opening out the perspective on reality. He rebuffs the Prince's melodramatic insult - 'Et vous, Monsieur Kean, vous êtes un ingrat!' (p.217) - with the role-reversing put-down: 'Ah, Monseigneur, le beau mot de théâtre. Ce sera, si vous voulez bien, le mot de la fin.' The end of the play and the end of Kean's life of self-delusion are suitably co-terminous.98 Sartre's Kean is a character haunted by the dead, chief among whom is the historical Edmund Kean. As such, he feels impelled to discover a vitality which is, for once in his life, unscripted. Aided by the 'only authentic character', Anna Damby," Kean finally achieves that accession to moral life in a manner which, despite - or possibly, even, because of - its facetiousness, is evidently no less willed or applauded by his existentialist re-creator: J'ai récrit la pièce dans un esprit de respect absolu, sans jamais tomber dans la parodie, qui me paraît un genre impuissant, valable seulement pour le cabaret. 98

99

By contrast, Dumas's Kean responds to the same insult with a craven apology: 4 Que votre Altesse me pardonne!' (p.305), leaving the social hierarchy intact and the actor no more a man than he ever was. In Sartre's variation, we can safely assume that the Prince has not given up role-playing, although Kean himself has. See interview with Les Letteres françaises, in Un Théâtre de situations, pp.332-3.

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Et avec sympathie pour ce Kean qui a été un extraordinaire bonhomme, dépassant de loin son époque, ahurissant les critiques d'alors, trouvant des attitudes que Ton eût admises... cinquante ans plus tard.100

'An extraordinary fellow, fifty years ahead of his time, outraging the critics...' This might equally well be an evocation of Kean's successor, Georges de Valera - not to mention of Sartre himself! The hero of Nekrassov also leads the hybrid existence of a simulacrum, wilfully representing what he is not in order to earn his 'living', until the intervention of a good woman offers him a prospect of life.

Nekrassov The book of Kean was published in February 1954, as the production continued to enjoy its success at the Sarah-Bernhardt, where it ran until June of that year. Meanwhile, Sartre already had it in mind to write a new play, to be called 'Le Pari' (an allusion to Pascal's cele­ brated 'wager'), which would illustrate his conception of freedom.101 However, that project was submerged beneath increasingly exigent political commitments, including a speech to an extraordinary meeting of the World Council for Peace in Berlin (May 1954), and his first visit to the USSR (in June), where he was hospitalised for ten days with high blood pressure, and from which he took some months to recover.102 In September, Sartre was in Vienna to protest against an unauthorised production of Les Mains sales, which he had decided to embargo whenever and wherever it seemed to him likely to be ex­ ploited as anti-communist and anti-proletarian (and, therefore, procapitalist and pro-bourgeois) propaganda. In December, he reaffirmed his eastward-leaning sympathies in the Cold War by accepting the vice-presidency of the Association France-URSS, an affiliation which

100 101 102

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Interview with Les Lettres françaises, in Un Théâtre de situations, pp.335-6. See Œuvres romanesques, p.LXXIII. See Œuvres romanesques, p.LXXIV.

would also find theatrical expression the following year in his brilliant political satire, Nekrassov. In the course of his travels during 1954, Sartre had met Bertolt Brecht at a convention of writers from east and west, held at Knokkele-Zoute in Belgium. Brecht was little known and rarely produced in France at the time, but Sartre had seen Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera) in Paris in 1930, and probably Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (Mother Courage and her Children) in 1951.103 After Brecht's death in 1956, Sartre would contribute an article - 'Brecht et les classiques' - to the brochure Hommage international à Bertolt Brecht, marking the Berliner Ensemble's productions of Leben des Galilei (The Life of Galileo) and Mutter Courage at the Théâtre des Nations in April 1957.104 Eighteen months earlier (in autumn 1955), he had made extensive reference to Brecht during an interview with Bernard Doit for the review Théâtre populaire, in which, notably, he credited Brecht with being the only modern playwright 'qui ait compris que tout théâtre populaire ne pouvait être qu'un théâtre poli­ tique, le seul à avoir réfléchi à une technique de théâtre populaire.'105 This was an aspiration Sartre had set himself with Nekrassov, but of which he felt he had fallen far short: C'est qu'il y a une extraordinaire résistance des ouvriers au théâtre. Voyez mon cas. Nekrassov a été soutenu, inconditionnellement, par les communistes, [...] Leurs organes de presse en ont parlé, des places ont été mises à leur disposition à des prix moins élevés... Eh bien! Les ouvriers ne sont venus que lentement, petit à petit. Pour les ouvriers, le théâtre est encore quelque chose de céré­ monieux - qui participe de la cérémonie bourgeoise. [...] C'est dire qu'il faut leur donner leur théâtre: dissiper leur méfiance - un mot suffit à les détourner du théâtre. [...] Tandis qu'avec les bourgeois, c'est le contraire. Le théâtre, c'est leur chose à eux.106

No doubt the facts of this analysis are true, but the implication that the play itself fails, insofar as it does not conform to some self-assigned 103 104 105 106

See Un Théâtre de situations, pp.86-7, note 4. See Un Théâtre de situations, pp.88-92. Théâtre populaire et théâtre bourgeois', in Un Théâtre de situations, pp.74-87 (p.84). Théâtre populaire et théâtre bourgeois', in Un Théâtre de situations, p.76.

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Brechtian principle, is unduly self-deprecating. On the contrary, Nekrassov - in many ways a contemporary political transposition of its predecessor, Kean - is, by some distance in my opinion, the most witty, inventive and entertaining of all Sartre's plays, and the one that qualifies him unequivocally as a man of the theatre.107 We know relatively little about the genesis of Nekrassov, al­ though we do know that (by contrast with a number of antecedents), it was neither requested by thespian friends, nor conceived expressly for them. Sartre averred that he was moved by the desire to mount a satirical attack upon the McCarthyite witch-hunts taking place in early 1950s' America: Eh bien! j'ai voulu retrouver la tradition de la satire en l'adaptant à notre goût pour la pièce construite... Vous connaissez le sujet de Nekrassov, un escroc qui se fait passer pour un ministre soviétique en fuite et fait des révélations sensa­ tionnelles à la 'grande presse' à la veille d'une élection partielle... C'est là une vérité grossie, je veux dire typique. Devant Nekrassov, on peut songer à Matusow, le fameux témoin à charge (anticommuniste) des tribunaux américains. [...] Or, je ne cache nullement mon intention: je veux montrer, dans Nekrassov, le mal que peut faire une campagne de presse anticommuniste.108

Nekrassov would be, in other words, Sartre's 'contribution as a writer to the struggle for peace' (as the interview was headlined), a way of making the theatre 'useful through its negative aspect, that is to say 107 Notwithstanding their admiration for Le Diable et le bon Dieu (see Les Écrits de Sartre, p.235), Contât and Rybalka also contend that cà la lecture, en effet, [Nekrassov] apparaît comme l'une des meilleures [pièces] que Sartre ait écrites' (Les Ecrits de Sartre, p.283). 108 Interview with Guy Leclerc, 4En dénonçant dans ma nouvelle pièce les procédés de la presse anticommuniste, je veux apporter une contribution d'écrivain à la lutte pour la paix', L'Humanité, 8 June 1955, extracts in Un Théâtre de situations, pp.338^0 (p.339). McCarthy is mentioned in the play by Valera/Nekrassov in just this context: in V, 4, when Georges is striving to persuade the faint-hearted Sibilot that he (Georges de Valera) is indeed Nekrassov at least as certainly as (if not more so than) Sibilot is Sibilot - a wonderfully funny dialogue in the style of the Marx Brothers - one of the pieces of evidence he adduces to support his argument is a telegram from McCarthy: Tiens; lis ce télégramme: il est de MacCarthy [sic] qui me propose un engagement de témoin à charge permanent' (Nekrassov, p. 130).

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through satire' and, in this sense, it represented his 'will to approach social reality without myths', albeit refracted through the distorting lens of 'farce'.109 And, despite alluding to Matusow as a model for Nekrassov, Sartre was insistent that 'une satire de gauche doit être une satire des institutions et non des individus', and that, therefore: 'Mes journalistes ne sont pas de méchants hommes. C'est la cause qu'ils servent qui est mauvaise.'110 This is an unwontedly casuistical conces­ sion on Sartre's part to the agents of harm - one he would not extend to Frantz von Gerlach, for example - the very utterance of which emphasises the special status of Nekrassov as 'farce-satire'. Simone de Beauvoir confirms that Sartre's motivation had been to ridicule 'les anticommunistes professionnels' of the French estab­ lishment,111 and, by contrast with the author's rather dry intellectual reflections, offers some more colourful detail. Apparently, Sartre had trouble finishing the piece because he did not want either to 'make his hero a complete bastard', nor to 'convert him into a champion of the people'. He also had his habitual difficulty in keeping the play to a manageable length, and was still writing scenes when the director, Jean Meyer, started rehearsals with Michel Vitold in the title role. While Meyer was fretting about the running time ('C'est beaucoup trop long!'), Simone Berriau (artistic director of the Théâtre Antoine) was fretting about the possible reaction of her middle-class audience ('On me cassera mes fauteuils!'). She was not wrong, in that the public response was indeed hostile (although it stopped short of seatsmashing), but the audience, claims Beauvoir, could not help laughing in spite of themselves. The right-wing press, however, finding itself mercilessly lampooned, was unambiguous: 'Mais la presse ne par­ donna pas à Sartre d'avoir osé la moquer; elle voulut sa peau.' Nekrassov opened at the Théâtre Antoine on 8 June 1955, and the voracity with which Sartre's victims in the media 'wanted his hide', in revenge, is exemplified by Jean-Jacques Gautier in Le Figaro. He 109 110 111

See interview with L'Humanité, in Un Théâtre de situations, pp.340, 338. Interview with J.-F. Rolland, L'Humanité-Dimanche, 19 June 1955, extracts in Un Théâtre de situations, pp.340-3 (p.341). This and other quotations in this paragraph are from La Force des choses, p.343.

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bemoaned the 'much ado about nothing' surrounding the production, dismissing Sartre's crusade against anti-communism and the popular press as worthy of a couple of revue sketches, not of a play lasting four hours which was not even, properly speaking, a play: Il n'y a pas de pièce. [...] Les seuls bons moments sont démarqués de certaines scènes classiques trop connues, les meilleures répliques décalquées sur Molière ou Marivaux. A part cela, les scènes se succèdent interminablement, un ennui mortel s'abat sur la salle interdite, car ce qu'on a le plus de peine à croire, c'est qu'un homme comme Jean-Paul Sartre puisse descendre (que dis-je? dégrin­ goler serait plus juste) à un tel degré de simplisme mental.112

In short: overblown, derivative, tedious, simplistic - a virulent enough attack, from so eminent a critic, to bury any lesser playwright, no doubt. Nor was Gautier's a lone voice. Thierry Maulnier, in the leftof-centre Combat, echoed these sentiments, albeit with apparent reluctance: Je voudrais pouvoir écrire que Nekrassov de Jean-Paul Sartre est une bonne pièce. [...] Ce qui est certain, c'est que ce n'est pas parce que la pièce [...] 4 sert' le communisme, [...] qu'elle est une mauvaise pièce. [...] A vrai dire, il n'a pas écrit une pièce [mais] une sorte de revue satirique avec un argument prétexte. [...] Cela commence à devenir ennuyeux dès la fin de la première partie, et le devient tout à fait pendant la seconde: et cela est long, terriblement long, d'une longueur qui finit par devenir accablante.113

Not so much politically incorrect as aesthetically incorrect, there­ fore!114 These reactions tend to bear out Simone de Beauvoir's analy-

112 113 114

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Le Figaro, 13 June 1955, p. 12. Combat, 13 June 1955, p.2. Maulnier is the particular butt of one satirical side-swipe in dialogue between Palotin (the editor of Soir à Paris) and his adjutant, Tavernier, in IV, 1. Palotin, threatening to sack Sibilot, wonders whom he might hire to replace him: Tavernier volunteers Maulnier, describing him as 4un esprit distingué, qui a grand'peur du communisme' (Nekrassov, p.92). Palotin dismisses the idea with the insinuation that Maulnier's journalism is so inept as to achieve the opposite of what its author intends: 'Oui, mais il n'a pas la peur communicative et j'en connais deux qui, pour avoir lu ses articles, sont allés droit s'inscrire au P.C.'

sis, that even those who 'could not help laughing' felt duty-bound to claim that they had, in fact, been 'yawning'.115 More vehement yet in his denunciation of the play was Robert Kemp, who had previously raved about Le Diable et le bon Dieu and Kean, and had appeared to be one of Sartre's most enthusiastic admirers. For Nekrassov, by con­ trast, his scorn was unbridled: Pour rire aux huit sketches de M. Jean-Paul Sartre, il faut vraiment être décidé à rire; être doué d'une sympathie effrénée pour le marxisme, et d'une haine féroce contre ses adversaires. Alors tout paraît bon, même le genre ennuyeux. [...] Je me demandais s'il n'y avait pas un méchant improvisateur qui s'était fait passer pour M. Sartre, un faux Sartre; tant ce début défigurait l'image que je garde de l'auteur des Mouches et des Mains sales. [...] Le sujet n'était pas tout mauvais. Mais quelle peine s'est donnée M. Sartre, pour le gâter!116

This evening of unremitting awfulness, asserts Kemp, was due to the theatre's mistake of having accepted the play 'on the author's name alone': 'Jamais on ne devrait s'engager ainsi...' he concludes, with equal measures of portentousness and pomposity. It would appear that Sartre should no longer be allowed to trade upon his well-earned reputation, once he took it upon himself to attack the right-wing press in place of the left-wing party machine!117 However, the critical traffic was not all one-way. Only two days after publishing Thierry Maulnier's rant, Combat carried a witty and spirited rebuttal of it by Henri Magnan, in which he challenged his fellow journalists - who had, predictably, proved 'insufficiently masochistic to let themselves be whipped with the scourge of satire' to answer this rhetorical question: 'Pourquoi suis-je allé voir deux fois en quatre jours une pièce aussi "ratée" que Nekrassov sans m'y être embêté une seule minute?'118 Magnan 'adored' Nekrassov and vowed

115 116 117

118

We can assume that Maulnier was simultaneously flattered to be singled out, and angered to be given such sarcastic treatment. See La Force des choses, p.343. Le Monde, 14 June 1955, p.l 1. Mike Scriven's excellent article on Nekrassov shows, from a brief review of press reception in UK and France (including revivals), how 'Different historical periods quite clearly elicit different critical reactions' (Scriven [1988], p.269). Combat, 15 June 1955, p.2.

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to continue going to see it so long as it was not 'mortally wounded' by the onslaught of his confrères. Nevertheless, the play was indeed badly scarred by the widespread beating it took in the press. Despite polemical defences, such as Magnan's, and Jean Cocteau's lavish eulogy in Libération - where Sartre's 'comic opera' is favourably compared to Beaumarchais's Le Manage de Figaro119 - the produc­ tion endured for only sixty performances, representing a real reversal in Sartre's hitherto unstoppable ascendancy as a playwright of popular and critical acclaim. As Beauvoir's brief account concludes, he had evidently picked upon the untouchable target: Une pièce peut braver les critiques quand elle a les faveurs de l'orchestre; c'est le cas du théâtre d'Anouilh: il plaît aux riches. Mais Nekrassov s'en prenait précisément aux gens qui assurent les bonnes recettes; ceux qui vinrent s'amusèrent mais se firent une loi de dire à leurs amis qu'ils s'étaient ennuyés. La bourgeoisie digère, sous prétexte de culture, bien des avanies: cette arête-là lui restait dans la gorge. Nekrassov n'eut que soixante représentations.120

So, the lesson of this story seems to be: mock the middle classes, and their favourite media, at your peril! Mockery is the dominant tone, facetiousness the essential mood of this irreverent and ironic satire, which is above all self-parodying. Death itself, that central myth of the Sartrean situation and essential pole of the continuous manichean struggle with life, is mocked from the outset in Valera's half-hearted suicide attempt. His reluctant rescue, at the hands of the interfering tramps, provokes a stream of comic banter in which Sartre both satirises his own theory of the act of self-killing, and reveals some of his hero's ruling prejudices: GEORGES: Je ne suis pas mort parce que vous avez violé ma dernière volonté. LE CLOCHARD: Laquelle? GEORGES: Celle de mourir. LE CLOCHARD: Ce n'était pas la dernière. GEORGES: Si! LE CLOCHARD: Non, puisque vous nagiez.

119 120

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See 4Jean Cocteau prend parti pour Nekrassov\ Libération, 20 June 1955. La Force des choses, pp.343-4.

GEORGES: La belle affaire! Je nageais un tout petit peu en attendant de couler. Si vous n'aviez pas lancé la corde... LE CLOCHARD: Eh! Si vous ne l'aviez pas prise... GEORGES: Je l'ai prise parce que j'y étais forcé. LE CLOCHARD: Forcé par quoi? GEORGES: Tiens: par la nature humaine. C'est contre nature, le suicide! LE CLOCHARD: Vous voyez bien! GEORGES: Qu'est-ce que je vois? Tu es naturiste, toi? Je savais bien qu'elle protesterait, ma nature, mais je m'étais arrangé pour qu'elle proteste trop tard: [...] Tout était prévu, tout, sauf qu'un vieillard stupide irait spéculer sur mes bas instincts! LE CLOCHARD: Nous ne pensions pas à mal. GEORGES: Voilà bien ce que je vous reproche! Tout le monde pense à mal: est-ce que tu ne pouvais pas faire comme tout le monde? [...] Ton intérêt, c'était que je meure.121

The myth of death is located firmly in the comic register by a series of flippant remarks that Valera makes in this tone-setting dialogue with the meddlesome tramps (I, 2). For example, he paranoically imputes absurdly malicious motives to them: 'Votre suprême jouissance, c'est de faire manquer leur mort à ceux qui ont manqué leur vie' (p. 19). Or, he waxes nonsensically lyrico-philosophical: 'Ah! la vie est une partie de poker où la paire de sept bat le carré pointu, puisqu'un Caligula de la pouille peut me faire danser au clair de lune, moi qui manœuvrais les grands de la terre!' Or, again, he incongruously juxtaposes a redundant commonplace concern with the contemplation of his own death: 'Que de temps perdu! Je devrais être mort depuis dix minutes' (p.20). For good measure, Georges argues that one ought to have 'reasons to live', not 'reasons to die', as the clochards conventionally assume, and tries to inveigle them into a suicide pact: 'Prenez la chance que je vous offre; donnez-moi la main et sautons: à trois, la mort devient une partie de plaisir' (p.21). His supporting expatiation on 'life as a panic in a theatre on fire', concludes with a rousing asser­ tion that the nobility of man resides in his suicidal potential: 'Sautons, camarades: l'unique différence entre l'homme et la bête, c'est qu'il peut se donner la mort et qu'elle ne le peut pas' (p.22). Notwith­ standing this diatribe, Sartre then crowns the fast and furious comic 121

Nekrassov, pp. 16-17. Further references appear in the body of the text; where consecutive quotations concern the same page, only the first is referenced.

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action of this scene by allowing Georges to make a quick and com­ plete volte-face. He suddenly decides against suicide, and becomes equally tenacious of his life as he was formerly careless of it, as soon as the police are in the offing. Conversely, the tramps, afraid of being implicated as accomplices, now begin to encourage him to jump back into the water from which they have just rescued him - which elicits from Georges an indignant accusation of infanticide: 'Je suis votre enfant. [...] J'ai des droits sur vous, infanticides! A vous de protéger le fils que vous avez mis au monde, contre son gré!' (pp.23-4). Reluc­ tantly, the tramps play the role of Georges' parents in his impromptu charade designed to divert the police, but it is they who then despair of life and hurl themselves into the murky waters of the Seine - only to be fished out in their turn by the police! The crazy, perverse and self-subverting life/death dialectic of this early scene is a touchstone indicator of flippancy and sarcasm in Sartre's treatment of this focal theme. This is self-mockery, an autoderision, of which we are periodically reminded throughout the play, whether by the maudlin introspection of ridiculous characters 'SIBILOT: On s'aperçoit qu'on va bientôt mourir et que le provisoire était du définitif. / GOBLET: Nous mourrons comme nous avons vécu: en 1925' (p.84)122 - or by melodramatic moments of pseudo­ danger, such as Mouton's would-be 'assassination' of Georges, and Demidoff s misinterpretation of his escape attempt as a suicide bid.123 Not least, of course, the pervasive sensationalism of tabloid journal­ ism valorises death, war, terror, menace and fear above all their antonyms, for - then as now - they are the stock-in-trade of the populist press obsessed with sales ratings (see Mouton's lecture on the subject to Palotin in II, 7): 'Donnez-nous peur de vivre plus encore que de mourir' (p.52). This is the bizarre injunction of the news­ paper's proprietor to its editor: the myth of death must be diffused through the myth-making machine that is the propagandist press. Throughout, Sartre rehearses his favoured metaphors of life and death, but exploits them in inherently comic situations, or delivers them through unquestionably preposterous characters. The outrageous 122 Note the deliberate parody of familiar terms in Sartrean thanatology. 123 See pp.172, 180.

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lie of the 'Futurs Fusillés', Valera's most audacious hoax, intended both to flatter his hosts (those considered sufficiently anti-communist to figure on the Soviet hit-list when the Revolution comes), and to furnish him with credentials as Nekrassov, provides a long-running context for the subversion of a central topos. In fact, the threat eman­ ating from this non-existent black list is as spurious as that of the 'perfectly ordinary suitcase', whose very ordinariness is shown to be its most sinister feature (because it is such an effectively disguised 'weapon of mass destruction', to use the post-Saddam vernacular).124 Spuriousness characterises the Sartrean death-myth in Nekrassov. Whereas, in earlier plays, we have found that myth embedded in the dramatic situation as a real threat to the moral or material life of the protagonists, in Nekrassov it is consistently ironised by the superficial frivolity of the entire scenario. As Lords rightly remarks, 'Dès la première scène, la pièce s'installe dans l'univers de la fantaisie grin­ çante.'125 Death - along with most other things in this fantastical universe - is not what it appears to be: everything is possible or virtual, admittedly, but nothing is actual or real.126 The premiss that the whole of western civilisation might be convinced by a con-man that he is a high-ranking Soviet defector, is about as plausible as it is that the audience should care whether the con-man in question kills himself, is assassinated, or matures into a morally authentic human being with a sense of political commitment. We are, in other words, implicitly prevented from considering 'serious' outcomes, so that Sartre can concentrate his entirely negative fire on his chosen targets. It is as incoceivable that Georges, or any other character, might get physically hurt as it is that the Keystone Cops should be wounded in the course of their duty. And it is equally improbable that we, the audience, might be moved by the existential angst, or the ontological identity crisis, of a comic anti-hero, whose predecessors' agonies re­ hearsed those of Hamlet himself. In short, Lorris is right again when

124 125 126

Seep.115. Lorris, p.225. See Lorris, p.229.

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he asserts that, in Nekrassov, 'Sartre démonte le mécanisme au moyen duquel on forge les mythes.'127 In a sense (as Lorris also points out), Sartre satirises his own dramatic aesthetic by creating 'des fausses mises en situation résultant d'une logique poussée aux confins de l'absurde'.128 Sartre himself had said as much: 'Ce sont les institutions, les structures qui déterminent les hommes. J'ai montré mes personnages victimes d'une situation plutôt que d'un caractère.'129 The formula of the 'theatre of (extreme) situations' gets a new gloss with the use of terms such as 'determine' and 'victims'. Hitherto, impossible situations could be changed and finally resolved by resort to free and authentic action: the allconquering liberty of the human being, analysed in L'Être et le néant, might always, eventually, win the day. Now, however, Sartre's protag­ onists are in transition to the more constraining world of the historical dialectic, the subject of his analysis in Critique de la raison dialectique: a world in which the onward march of history crushes men beneath it, a world which the madman Demidoff would rather see destroyed than to let it slide inexorably away from the Bolchevik revolution towards the iron grip of capitalism (see VI, 17). This is a world where it is tacitly understood that the achievement of Goetz might be unrepeatable. In most of Sartre's plays, the historical situation is massive and overbearing, beyond the control of any single character, yet amenable to modification by momentous and life-changing decisions and con­ sequent actions. Broadly speaking, it takes one of two forms: (i) war and its aftermath, be that occupation and repression, resistance and revolution, or dejection and defeat (Bariona, Les Mouches, Huis clos [in the case of Garcin], Morts sans sépulture, Les Mains sales, Le Diable et le bon Dieu, Les Séquestrés d'Altona, Les Troyennes); and (ii) violence or oppression inherent in, and exerted through, the social hierarchy (Huis clos [in the cases of Inès and Estelle], La Putain respectueuse, Kean). Nekrassov fits neither of these categories except, 127 128 129

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Lorris, p.236. Lorris, p.228. Interview with L'Humanité-Dimanche, extracts in Un Théâtre de situations, pp.340-3(p.341).

as we might expect, parodically. The war is the Cold War, i.e. no war, and the revolution is a figment of the bourgeois imagination, a chimera embodied in the lunatic Demidoff ('half-head'?), founder and sole member of the Bolchevik-Bolchevik party. Similarly, the down­ ward pressure of the social pyramid, of which first Lizzie then Kean were the hapless victims, is inverted in Nekrassov, with powerful pillars of the establishment (politicians, policemen, journalists) becoming the helpless playthings of a virtual vagabond with a genius for devious schemes. The prevailing ideology is capitalism, the political climate is right-wing, and the economic environment is essentially benign and comfortable. Were it not for the fact that Georges and Sibilot are thrown together, at a moment when the former needs a new disguise and the latter needs a bright idea, one might say that God was in his bourgeois heaven and all was right with the world. For the common denominator of Sartre's dramatic situationslimite is the inherent threat of death, yet that is missing in these cases. Sibilot, for example, is no doubt right to consider his livelihood in jeopardy, but that is not synonymous with life itself, and we are more likely to be moved to laughter than to grief by his grandiloquent and unconvincing threat of suicide: Véronique! Sais-tu ce qui est en train de mourir? L'Homme: Travail, Famille, Patrie, tout fout le camp. [...] Le Crépuscule de l'Homme. [...] Ma vie n'a été qu'un long enterrement, personne ne suivait le cortège. Mais ma mort, pardon, elle fera du bruit. Quelle apothéose! [...] Crevons tous ensemble et vive la guerre! (Ils'étrangle et tousse.) (pp.74, 75)

This personal apocalypse may echo the disillusionment of Heinrich, but it has none of the poignancy, none of the tragic connotations of the incorrigible idealist brought low by the impossibility of reconciling conflicting loyalties and moral imperatives. Sibilot's delusions about 'Man' are couched in terms of the obsolete mantra of the discredited Vichy régime, and this cliché has no more power to move us than his ridiculous self-strangling has to make us fear for his life. Sibilot is a weak character, prone to faint at awkward moments, or to betray Georges when drunk. It serves him right, so to speak, to become the victim of a situation which he (reluctantly) helped to create, and it is

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entirely congruent with comic irony that he comes to an undeserved 'happy ending' as the new editor of Soir à Paris. It is obvious that he will run the paper in much the same way as his disgraced predecessor, Jules Palotin, and a defining principle of comedy is thereby honoured: nothing has really changed. As for Georges, it is in his original situation that he resembles Sartre's other heroes: Sais-tu que j'ai porté longtemps du poison dans le chaton d'une bague? Quelle légèreté: j'étais mort d'avance, je planais au-dessus de l'entreprsie humaine et je la considérais avec un détachement d'artiste. Et quelle fierté! Ma mort et ma naissance, j'aurai touf tiré de moi; fils de mes œuvres, je suis mon propre parricide, (p.22)

The boasts of Goetz, and Sartre's analysis of his prototype, Genet, resonate throughout this speech, just as, elsewhere, Kean's claims to be a social pariah of self-made genius are explicitly rehearsed: J'ai donc le temps de me présenter: orphelin de père et de mère, acculé depuis l'enfance à choisir entre le génie ou la mort, je n'ai pas eu de mérite à choisir le génie. Je suis génial, Monsieur, comme vous êtes honnête, (pp.81-2)

We recognise this categorical essentialist from Sartre's previous play, a man of unabashed self-contradiction, in thrall to a determinist view of social development, yet radically confident that he is master of his own destiny. Not only Kean and Goetz, but also Hugo, Lizzie, Garcin and Oreste, all evinced the same faulty psychological understanding, and similarly exploited Sartre's favourite metaphorical idiom of exist­ ential choice, the duologue of life and death. Here, Valera's claim to 'patricide' through suicide (because he is his own creation, his own father, in effect), clearly lampoons an aspect of the Freudian Œdipal theory, never far from the obsessive scorn of the paternally-bereft Sartre.130 And the choice between death or genius is, of course, a self-

130

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See O'Donohoe (1995), and Robert Harvey's fascinating, full-length study, which sets out to show that 'Sartre ties [his] preoccupation with paternity to his search for a paradigm for all ethical interaction between human subjects' (Harvey, p.5).

aggrandising dramatisation of the choice that, Sartre contends, Genet was compelled to make. But, as with Sibilot, death is not a real threat or possibility for Georges. We have already seen how abjectly he fails in his suicide bid, whose prime function, in one sense, is to indicate his inability to control the situations he purports to create, to give the lie to his trademark claim to bsfils de ses œuvres. Death eludes him because, in this comic universe, the alternatives are nothing like terrible enough: 'La mort ou cinq ans de taule? Voilà la question' (p.23). The comic bathos of Hamlet's famous refrain stresses the relative levity and inconsequentiality of Valera's flawed situationlimite; it has not even the resonance of Kean's use of the same phrase, in whose mouth it does indeed articulate an ontological question. It turns out that Valera can escape his 'situation', as usual, by resort to an ingenious ruse. Not only are Valera's successive situations intrinsically false (comic situations), but they are also extrinsically falsified by other characters, who tend to exercise greater influence over them than he. Alone with Véronique, for example, he remarks: 'C'est une situation fausse: compromettante pour vous, désagréable pour moi' (p.59). Things are never as they seem (or ought to be) for Georges de Valera, however much he alleges that he controls them: Charmante soirée! Je dois la vie à un clochard qui a du goût pour les actes gratuits et la liberté à une révolutionnaire qui a le culte du genre humain: il faut que nous soyons dans la semaine de bonté! (Un temps.) Vous devez être contente: [...] Vous avez fait de moi un objet, le malheureux objet de votre philanthropie, (p.68)

At the mercy of the clochards, then of Véronique, then of Sibilot, Valera is an object from the outset, robbed of his vaunted subjectivity by the random intervention of other subjects with different agendas (as other subjects will always have). And the more he appears to com­ mand the situation, the less substantial he in fact becomes. Even when, at the height of his powers as Nekrassov, he has the western world under his spell, his own being is at its most ethereal: 'Rassure-moi, Sibilot: ce n'est pas moi qu'on aime, ce n'est pas moi qu'on déteste; je ne suis qu'une image?' (p. 158). In the hands of the newspaper and the

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police, Georges becomes the means to various unintended ends, in­ cluding increased press circulation, oppression of the working class and reaffirmation of the status quo. As such, he achieves none of the autonomy to which he repeatedly lays claim: he is the hero of a classic farce in which the biter is bit, the manipulator manipulated, and the subject made object. It is fitting, therefore, that the eponymous hero of the play never actually appears and, in effect, does not exist. The identity and where­ abouts of the real Nekrassov are speculated upon only insofar as they contribute to verifying, or falsifying, the identity of his impersonator. Indeed, all we know of him is one caricatural physical feature (an eyepatch), and the fact that he is (probably) holidaying on the Black Sea, both of which personal details make Valera's job a bit easier.131 In another sense, it is harder than Kean's, for example, in his portrayals of Hamlet or Othello. Those dramatis personae are fictions, yet they have a life within the confines of their plays, which contain them completely and tell us all it is possible to know about them. However, Valera has to work at one further remove from reality, having no script to follow nor any known personality to imitate. He must impro­ vise at every moment, not only playing the part of Nekrassov, but inventing it on the hoof as well. When Véronique enquires what he does for a living, he replies: 'Je parle' (p.59). Valera's constant cre­ ation of Nekrassov necessitates a continuous annihilation of himself. He lives by his wits, making things and people (especially himself) appear as they are not, and he is so good at it that he has become a 131

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I strongly suspect that Sartre has a bit of fun at his own expense with the story of the eye-patch. Valera wears this over his right eye (as Sartre himself might have chosen to do, given the unsightedness and unsightliness of his own wall­ eye), although there is nothing obviously wrong with it, and the first use he makes of the patch has the desired effect of prompting Palotin to 4recognise' him as Nekrassov (p.99). Later on, he ingeniously explains away the fact that he wears a patch over a good eye by alleging that his Russian secret service double has a right eye of glass, so that the patch became necessary to conceal the discrepancy (p. 126)! Therefore, in any confrontation, the soundness of Valera's right eye would 'prove' that he was the real thing, whereas the diseased eye of the real Nekrassov would 'prove' that he was an impostor, in much the same way that Valera's lack of proof of identity 'proves' conclusively that he is who he claims to be (see IV, 2 and V, 4).

living legend, Tescroc génial' (compare Kean, 'la gloire nationale'), spoken of with awe and admiration by journalists and detectives alike. Kean suffered the same stigma of 'genius' and the concomitant anguish of a mercurial identity, but had the perspicacity to see that his talent had become a barrier between him and 'real' life, as he once knew it in Old Bob's troupe. By contrast, Valera's stage is, prover­ bially, 'all the world'; play-acting is both his livelihood and the only way of life he has ever known, whereas Kean can at least remember the distinction between performance and life that obtained in his days as a saltimbanco. Intermittently, it is true, Valera's unreality appears to pain him, but there is no sign of a personal crisis on the scale of Kean's, nor of any striving for the social emancipation and psycho­ logical integration sought by Kean. For Georges, the incessantly vola­ tile situation is always a battle of wits, a game to be played by deploy­ ing a new tactic of falsification, not by imposing any congruence with the truth. He is a professional falsifier whose every action, therefore, is predeterminately a gesture. Valera's failed suicide serves as a model of his ineffectuality in the field of human action. The tramps first trivialise it by 'commen­ tating' upon it like radio sports announcers ('Il se penche, [...] Fière­ ment plongé, hein?', p. 12), then 'steal' it from him by throwing him a line 'because he is swimming'. This instinct of self-preservation belies Valera's suicidal resolve, as did his neat folding of his clothes on the quayside, the deed of a man going for a dip, not of one bent on selfdestruction. It is at once logical and comical that he then berates the tramps, whose 'kindness' so thoughtlessly contradicted his 'last wishes', in an attempt to shift responsibility for his failure from himself to them. The comic philosophical dialogue (cited in part above) indicates that he sees himself more as a slave to his 'base instincts' than as a free agent, and that he has associated precon­ ceptions about human nature in general (chiefly, the Rochefoucauldian conviction that we are always and only motivated by selfinterest), which make it impossible for him to understand or forgive the tramps' 'gratuitous act'. These rigid and simplistic views on hu­ man psychology affiliate him to predecessors such as the Banker in Le Diable et le bon Dieu, or the Prince of Wales in Kean, unrepentant essentialists both. And, like the early Goetz, he has no insight into his 203

own contradictions when he insists upon his ethical independence: 'A qui est-elle, ma vie?', he angrily asks the clochards, whom he suspects of thinking he is in their debt: Oui, vieillard, elle est à moi; je ne la dois à personne, pas même à mes parents qui furent victimes d'une erreur de calcul. Qui m'a nourri, élevé? [...] Moi! Moi seul! C'est à moi seul que je dois mes comptes. Je suis fils de mes œuvres! (pp.17-18)

Georges confuses his physical life (which he does indeed 'owe' to the clochards) with his existential life, of which he claims to be the sole author. His indiscriminate*conflation of literal facts and philosophical propositions amounts to a parody of the potent life/death metaphor, which is an ethical leitmotiv throughout the plays. In Nekrassov, the correlation between the moral and physical well-being of the Sartrean hero is debased by the general assumption that corporal life is of over­ whelming importance. This subversion is reinforced by the sudden reversal of Valera's attitudes. His will to suicide is transformed into a tenacious grasp on life, and the proud boast of self-reliant orphanhood gives way to an absurd charade in which he becomes the tramps' son - a volte-face due to genius at work, Georges responding to a new challenge (sudden arrival of police), like an automaton endowed with unimaginable computing power. The familiar life/death duologue is neutralised, ironised for comic effect: Georges cannot take his life because he does not possess it, no more than any clown. His deeds have the stamp of melodrama. When he escapes from Goblet's clutches at the end of the first tableau, nothing has changed, and the tramps are no more likely to drown than was Valera before them. The second tableau establishes a plot and a dramatic framework based around Soir à Paris, and notably the pathetic Sibilot and his rabidly anti-communist newspaper boss, Jules Palotin. By way of antidote and comic contrast, the third tableau presents Sibilot's antiestablishment, 'progressive' daughter, Véronique. Although not a prominent character (because she does not become involved in the ludicrous action), Véronique (the 'true image') assumes importance in due course, when she tries to exert a positive influence on Georges, not unlike earlier heroines from Sarah in Bariona to Anna in Kean. 204

When she and Valera first meet (III, 1), his behaviour shows that he is more a neurotic bundle of reflex responses than a free human agent. He automatically raises his hands in surrender, a particularly incongruous gesture, since Véronique is neither armed nor alarmed. He repeatedly sneezes, which he blames on a cold - 'Unique et ridicule vestige d'un acte manqué' (p.60), a veiled reference to his unsuccessful drowning - and allows Véronique to blow his nose rather than 'risk' lowering his hands, unless and until she agrees to raise hers! Such vaudevillian business illustrates Bergson's analysis of the comic process as, in part, 'une mécanisation de la vie'.132 It also alludes tacitly and parodically to the stagey stand-off between Lizzie and le Nègre in La Putain respectueuse, where there was nevertheless rather more at stake. Unlike the 'Negro', who has 'always done something [wrong]', Valera's speciality is doing nothing at all, or precious little: 'Je travaille avec la langue' (p.58). Georges de Valera is a particularly cunning linguist, for he does not even have to make use of his body, as the actor Kean must do, preferring, as we have noted, to insist that the 'real' Nekrassov should resemble him, rather than (as is conventional with impersonation) vice-versa. He oozes passivity, asking Véronique what she intends to 'do' with him, eliciting a crushing reply that makes it quite clear that she inhabits a different ethical world, one in which it is what people do that matters, not what happens to them: 'De vous? Que puis-je faire? Êtes-vous une guitare pour que je vous pince? Une mandoline pour que je vous gratte? Un clou pour que je vous tape sur la tête? [...] Alors, rien. Je n'ai que faire de vous' (pp.62-3). The embedded lesson that action is morally superior to inaction is lost on Georges, who complains of being made '[le] malheureux objet de votre philan­ thropie' (p.68), not because he resents being made an object as such (it is his ontological premiss about his place in the world), but because it offends his prejudices about an orderly world in which (like the mercenary Goetz), Valera, 'escroc génial', is in fact a buttress of the status quo:

132

Bergson, p.77.

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Incroyable! Regardez-vous, regardez-moi et dites lequel de nous a le droit d'être mécontent! Eh bien! je ne le suis pas. Pas du tout: jamais je ne me suis plaint; de ma vie je n'ai manifesté. Au seuil de la prison, de la mort, j'accepte le monde; vous avez vingt ans, vous êtes libre, et vous le refusez. (Soupçonneux.) Vous êtes rouge, en somme, (pp.67-8)

The operative words are 'j'accepte' for Georges and 'libre' for Véronique; Valera's inertia confers on him object status, makes him a moral non-entity, a virtual thing. The words 'life' and 'death', loaded with ethical meaning for Sartre, remain firmly literal, as they do again when Georges complains: 'Ce n'est pas tout de sauver les gens, ma petite; il faut leur donner le moyen de vivre. Vous êtes-vous demandé ce que j'allais devenir?' (p.69). Material assistance is what he demands, not misplaced ideological philanthropy, and his proposed strategy (to exploit his master-crook reputation in an interview for Véronique's newspaper) points in the diametrically opposite direction from what passes for action in Sartre's metaphysics. Her contemp­ tuous refusal - 'Franchement, non. Les escrocs, vous savez, géniaux ou non...' (p.71) - angers Valera because it reminds him of what he actually is, and singles Véronique out as the sole character with a grip on reality. Having been the 'victim' of the tramps' inexplicable altruism and Véronique's equally eccentric humanism, Georges is relieved to dis­ cover the more orthodox and predictable social attitudes and moral instincts of Sibilot. In the course of a marvellously comic scene (III, 4), Véronique (in a 'progressive', anti-establishment gesture) urges her father not to 'shop' Valera, a request to which he improbably accedes, until the intruder's sneezing becomes intolerable - again, a classic comédie juxtaposition of the grave and the trivial. Delighted by the sheer 'normality' of Sibilot's reactions - 'Paisible certitude d'une conscience sans reproches! On voit, monsieur, que vous n'avez jamais douté du Bien...' (p.79) - Georges spots another opportunity to deploy his genius to extricate himself from a sticky situation. Sibilot, being the epitome of the Sartrean honnête homme, the caricatured representative of les justes (whose forebears are the salauds of La Nausée, and the whites of La Putain respectueuse), affords a

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reassuring prospect of fixed world views ('Un criminel est un criminel'), with which Valera can deal confidently: Après ce bref tour d'horizon, notre identité de vue est manifeste, ce qui ne saurait m'étonner: [...] vous, l'honnêteté même, et moi le crime, par-dessus tous les vices et toutes les vertus, nous nous donnons la main, nous condamnons ensemble les juifs, les communistes et les idées subversives? [...] Allez, Monsieur, votre fille voulait me sauver; vous, vous m'avez dénoncé, mais je me sens plus proche de vous que d'elle. La conclusion pratique que je tire de tout cela, c'est que nous avons le devoir, vous et moi, de travailler ensemble. (pp.80-1)

There is an unimpeachable logic here: the righteous and the miscreant define themselves and each other in relation to a common set of rules. Valera's brilliant insight is that his combination of creative ideas ('j'en produis à chaque minute par douzaines', p.82), with Sibilot's mindless and stable Weltanschauung ('vous n'en avez pas, ce sont [les idées] qui vous ont'), can produce a world-beating 'pensée nouvelle'. Tantalised by the possibility of a solution to his dilemma at the newspaper, Sibilot emerges from a scene of mutual commiseration and homespun philosophy with Inspector Goblet (III, 7), so convinced of Valera's genius that he eventually agrees to the fraudster's scheme. In typically melodramatic style, the curtain falls on Georges poised to expound his plan to an attentive Sibilot. We have had the pleasure of seeing Valera at work - using his tongue to good effect - but we are far from having witnessed an act, except in the theatrical sense of a performance. An instinct for self-preservation combined with pleasure in his craft (especially as Sibilot is the ideal material), have motivated Georges to invent this audacious ruse (impersonation of an alleged Soviet defector), in order to retain a freedom that is purely physical (staying out of prison), having no relation whatever to the metaphys­ ical freedom sought by every preceding Sartrean hero, from Bariona to Kean. Repeatedly, it is Valera's ethereal attribute, his genius, which is stressed. Yet he exploits his exceptional mind not to conceive pro­ jects which, by changing the world and himself, might transform his original false situation, but rather to create a new and bigger charade in which he will necessarily play the central, fantastical part.

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Given the pressure that the editor of Soir à Paris, Jules Palotin, is under from his board of directors to come up with a sensational story, Valera's plan is opportune, as he helpfully points out: 'Vous avez grand besoin que je sois Nekrassov' (p. 101). He succeeds in selling this idea, however implausible, to a sceptical Palotin by evoking the myth of death in its ironic mode: 'Si je parle, vous serez en danger de mort' (p.98). This sends a frisson of fear and excitement through Jules and his colleagues, seemingly confirming the veracity, and therefore the dramatic potential and newsworthiness, of the stranger's identity. And, much as that identity is proved by 'nothing' (no pass­ port, no identity card), so the aura of danger is merest invention, a wisp of nothing which Georges conjures to fascinate his gullible audience: 'Le véritable Nekrassov a tué cent dix-huit personnes de sa propre main! [...] Ah! je vous ferai mourir de peur, tous, vous verrez si je suis Nekrassov!' (pp. 100, 101). The triumphant bid in this imaginative auction of terror is the 'liste des futurs fusillés'. This not only appeals to the morbid strain in the right-wing mentality and conforms to its expectations of the ideological adversary (who is bound to have a black list of class enemies to be sent to the wall), but also flatters its vanity. These antithetical (but, for Georges, desired) effects are encap­ sulated by the very funny exchanges in the scene where he is intro­ duced to the directors (IV, 4): 'JULES: M. Charivet. / CHARIVET: Enchanté. / GEORGES: Exécuté' (p. 107). The farcical effect is achieved by repetition (the same exchange is heard four times in a row), then sudden rupture. When Georges responds with 'Enchanté' in place of 'Exécuté' to Mouton, the latter objects that 'there must be some mistake'! Besides the excellent comic fodder here, there is a subtle parody of erroneous attitudes towards death (as a badge of honour, a vouchsafe of authenticity) adopted by Valera's antecedents, notably some of the résistants in Morts sans sépulture, but also Bariona, Garcin, Hugo, and (for a time) Goetz. Infected by his audience's excitement, Georges cannot resist raising the stakes. When the message goes out from Moscow for its agents to open their 'perfectly ordinary suitcases', each containing 'seven kilos of radio­ active powder', the results will be apocalyptic, 'cent mille morts par jour' (p.l 16)! By the end of this tableau, Georges has created a wholly 208

false situation: not the work of an authentic Sartrean agent, by which the world is changed, but that of its moral antonym, by which the world is sublimated and subverted, but fundamentally kept the same. Although Nekrassov is a satire on its contemporary political culture, its hilarious flights of fancy transport us further away from 'real life' than any other of Sartre's plays. Cue Véronique who, as her name suggests, reflects a 'true like­ ness' of Georges and the world. As Robert Lorris has rightly noted, names are significant in Nekrassov, indicating the 'nature bouffonne de ces personnages'.133 But he does not comment on the importance of the name Véronique for the character who, as the cipher of Sartre's political perspective, stands for an undisguised representation of an otherwise tenuous reality 'dans cet univers de masques et de nonmasques'.134 The cryptic Biblical analogy makes of Georges a bur­ lesque Messiah, who dies and is reborn to save western (JudaeoChristian) civilisation: 'Je meurs Valera pour renaître Nekrassov' (p.123).135 Lorris complains that Véronique's intervention diverts the play from its comic satirical trajectory, to the detriment of the whole: Ce tableau [V, 7] est placé sous le signe de la haine, de la délation, du crime; la comédie n'est plus un jeu badin, elle met en jeu des convictions, des vies mêmes. [...] On ne peut que déplorer le ton trop sérieux de ce tableau V, mais il ne faudrait pas en conclure qu'il se détache complètement de la satire.136

The 'too serious tone' to be deplored is surely Lorris's, not Sartre's. Ostensibly, lives may be at stake, and that is arguably incongruous in farce, but are they really in any greater danger than those of the 'futurs fusillés', for example, or of Anna Damby in the role of Desdemona? It is precisely because o/the overarching facetiousness of the tone, that

133 Lorris, p.245. 134 Lorris, p.252. 135 Other pointers to this irreverent metaphor include Sibilot's utterance of Christ's dying words (Tout est consommé!') as he faints (IV, 2, p.99); his Pilate-like denial of responsibility ('Je me lave les mains de toute l'affaire!', p. 102); and Valera's own three-fold denial (cf. Simon Peter) of Nekrassov (V, 7, p.140). 136 Lorris, pp.237, 238.

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the play can absorb a corrective injection of realism from the straightfaced Véronique. Yet, elsewhere, he further objects: Le tableau V assure la continuité de Nekrassov avec le reste de l'œuvre dramatique de Sartre, mais ce faisant crée une dissonance à l'intérieur de la pièce. [...] Sartre a imposé un héros à une pièce qui ne devait pas en avoir; il a créé un protagoniste qui détourne au profit de la tragi-comédie les forces qui devaient être réservées à la satire.137

Continuity with foregoing themes, yes; but dissonance and tragi­ comedy, no. The crucial point is that Valera is (and remains) a parody of the Sartrean hero. The conversion striven for by his antecedents (briefly, from 'actor' to 'agent') and achieved by some (notably Goetz and Kean) does not figure among his aspirations. Crises of existential identity are a déformation professionnelle for Georges, not a motiv­ ation for moral metamorphosis. A foretaste of the hard reality that will infiltrate Valera's fictional domain is provided by Madame Castagnié (V, 5), who blames Nekras­ sov (with some reason) for her dismissal from the newspaper. Georges appears genuinely upset and sympathetic, and keen to dispel any suspicion of malice on his part - 'Mais je n'ai rien dit! Je n'ai rien fait! [...] Au contraire, Sibilot m'est témoin que j'ai voulu vous faire augmenter' (pp. 133, 134) - he attempts in vain to get her reinstated. Certainly, he deplores the hatred that the 'salauds' on the newspaper can exhibit for political foes, but this does not make hatred a theme of the tableau. We are, by now, embroiled in an unambiguous farce, where the passions of 'buffoons', such as Mouton and Palotin, are no more life-threatening than the misanthropy of Molière's Alceste, or the unpaternal behaviour of Orgon (the paterfamilias in Tartuffe), or of his miser, Harpagon. The vices of imbeciles are ultimately inno­ cuous, or we are not in comedy, and they are dangerous madmen instead. As for Valera himself: 'La haine est une passion que je n'éprouve pas moi-même' (p. 136), an assertion which we have no cause to doubt. So long as this protagonist remains essentially innocent (albeit, Lorris might add, culpably naïve), we remain in

137

210

Lorris, p.251.

comedy and orientated towards a 'happy ending' (Sartre was not aiming to be Beckett!). Valera's grandiose and fanciful vision of the reinstatement of Mme Castagnié and her sacked colleagues - 'Je les couvrirai d'or, le Conseil d'Administration les attendra devant la porte, avec des roses, des brassées de roses...' (pp. 136-7) - is sufficient indication that he is still firmly bogged down in the fiction of his own making, despite this initial confrontation with the veritable consequences of his 'actions' to date. With her evident sincerity and conspicuous humourlessness, it falls to Véronique to try to connect Georges with the real world, and here too the comparison with Molière is illuminating. For he famously has his indispensable raisonneurs, and Véronique's voice of reason is no more dissonant in Nekrassov than is Chrysalde's in L'École des femmes, or Philinte's in Le Misanthrope. Moreover, just as they have often been held to articulate, at least partially, Molière's own moral point of view, so Véronique evinces some characteristically Sartrean attitudes. In particular, she rebukes Valera for his declaration in yesterday's paper that 'l'ouvrier russe est le plus malheureux de la terre' (p. 142) because, so far from being 'une plaisanterie sans consé­ quence', as he protests, it is the kind of propaganda that deals a body blow to the working-class readership of Soir à Paris : Mais sais-tu ce que cela veut dire à Billancourt? [...] Touchez pas au capitalisme ou vous tomberez dans la barbarie. Le monde bourgeois a ses défauts, mais c'est le meilleur des mondes possibles.' (pp. 142-3)

Like Voltaire's naïve hero, Candide (easily persuaded that the world he travels, although full of violence, misery and all manner of evil, is nevertheless the 'best of all possible worlds'), Georges is an uncritical ingénu responsible, wittingly or otherwise, for shoring up the inequit­ able status quo. Moreover, the evocation of Billancourt is surely a conscious echo of Sartre's own rebuke to Camus: Un enfant mourait, vous accusiez l'absurdité du monde et ce Dieu sourd et aveugle que vous aviez créé pour pouvoir lui cracher à la face; mais le père de

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l'enfant, s'il était chômeur ou manœuvre, accusait les hommes: il savait bien que l'absurdité de notre condition n'est pas la même à Passy et à Billancourt.138

Yet, even if Véronique is a kind of porte-parole for Sartre, it does not follow that we should take seriously everything she says (any more than the juste milieu advocated by Molière's voix de raison neces­ sarily reflects his own opinion). Her accusation, for example, that Georges is effectively 'an assassin' is under-cut by her flippant allu­ sion to his proletarian readers 'drinking themselves to death or opening the gas tap', if they were to believe the press's bourgeois propaganda.139 And the dominant tone of facetiousness is sustained by Valera's chirpy attitude towards the moral dilemma which (according to Véronique) confronts him: VÉRONIQUE: Il faut tout de même choisir: tu es dupe ou criminel. GEORGES: Le choix sera vite fait: vive le crime! VÉRONIQUE: Georges! GEORGES: Je désespère les pauvres? Et après? Chacun pour soi; ils n'ont qu'à se défendre! Je calomnie l'URSS? C'est exprès: je veux détruire le commu­ nisme en Occident. Quant à tes ouvriers, qu'ils soient de Billancourt ou de Moscou, je les... VÉRONIQUE: Tu vois, Georges; tu vois que tu commences à devenir méchant. GEORGES: Bon ou méchant, je m'en moque. Le Bien et le Mal, je prends tout sur moi: je suis responsable de tout. (p. 144)

These sentiments rehearse those of Goetz, when he is similarly reproved by Nasty, and, like Goetz, Georges proves to be only an impostor of evil. He is genuinely taken aback when Véronique points out that he is said to have denounced two of her colleagues, Duval and Maistre, and promises to do what he can to retrieve the situation. His seeming defiance of the powers circling to manipulate him to their own ends - 'Je fais toujours le contraire de ce qu'on attend de moi' (p. 145) - is more a perverse claim to moral autonomy ('Désespérons 138

'Réponse à Albert Camus', Les Temps modernes, no.82, August 1952, in Situations IV, pp.90-125 (p.l 18). 139 See p. 143. For good comic measure, Véronique has gained access to the closely-guarded 'Nekrassov' in this scene by passing herself off as a journalist on Le Figarol

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Billancourt!'), than any statement of evil intent. The same is true of his extravagant claim to the anonymous phone-caller (V, 8) that 'Mes prochaines révélations provoqueront des suicides en chaîne' (p. 146). Valera's méchanceté is a petulant, puerile naughtiness, exemplified by his kicking the heads off the flowers at the end of the tableau. So, in spite of Véronique's poker-faced anxieties about Nekrassov's impact on the real world, the mood remains satirical and the tone comic. The hero's every move has the stamp of gesture, and he is no more the persecutor of the poor than he is fils de ses œuvres. At Mme Bounoumi's high society party {tableau VI), the life/ death duologue continues to play ironically in an increasingly chaotic atmosphere of farce. The central moral dictum of Huis clos ('Tu n'es rien d'autre que ta vie') is, according to Demidoff, the stick with which the unhappy Mouton should beat himself: 'Ma vie serait truquée de bout en bout? {Signe d'assentiment de Demidoff.y (p. 154). Demidoff s condemnation of Mouton - 'Vous êtes un communiste objectif* - satirises the dogmatic party thinking that denounced Hoederer as 'a social traitor, objectively speaking'. Meanwhile, Valera's identity crisis continues to mount as he seeks reassurance from Sibilot that he is nothing more than a phantasm, 'une image' (p. 158), turning on its head the neurosis of his ancestor, Kean, who strove to become more, not less, substantial. As an adjunct to Valera's preoccupation to evade the onward rush of historical necessity, Sartre cannot resist an opportunity to lampoon the materialist dialectic per se. Demidoff, the genuine Soviet defector, rambles on at some length about his place in history and its likely judgment upon him, in a drunken peroration climaxing in the battle cry: 'Vive le processus historique!' (p. 185), a sentiment which his expedient 'militant' apostle, Georges, can hardly share with any enthusiasm. There are also premonitions here of the more sober (if not less mad) historical interrogations of Valera's self-sequestered suc­ cessor, Frantz von Gerlach: 'J'ai tort, Mesdames et Messieurs, tort devant les siècles futurs. Levez vos verres, je me sens seul.' These lines anticipate those of Frantz and would not be out of place at his 'birthday party'. Unlike the tormented Nazi ideologue of Altona, however, Demidoff (a caricature of torment and of communist ideo­ logy) views the historical process optimistically as the means to 213

vindication, self-justification and immortality. But this is a vain hope, of course, whose absurdity is highlighted when Demidoff hails Baudouin and Chapuis, the government agents who, he thinks, have come to arrest him, with the 'ecstatic' and grandiloquent greeting: 'Voilà l'histoire!' (p. 187). Bathos crowns hyperbole when the agents pursue Valera instead! The already well-established inversion of normal attitudes to life and death is also reaffirmed incidentally in the course of this tableau (VI). Palotin founds the 'Club des Futurs Fusillés', whose unwittingly witty and contradictory rallying-cry is 'Vivent les F.F.!' (p. 152). The same mock-heroic complacency informs Valera's exhortation to his captive audience chez Mme Bounoumi - who hails him as 'notre sauveur' - to salvage European civilisation: 'Mesdames, Messieurs, les civilisations sont mortelles, l'Europe ne se pense plus en termes de liberté, mais en termes de destin; le miracle grec est en danger: sauvons-le' (p. 162). The unthinking chorus to this Malraux-like injunction - 'Mourons pour le miracle grec!' - bespeaks a romantic conception of death that defies any comprehension of the real thing, as the company's terrified reaction to Goblet's gunshots shortly reveals. Moments of harmless, virtual violence include Mouton's attempt to kill himself and Georges ('Remerciez-moi, messieurs; je débarrasse la terre d'une canaille et d'un communiste objectif!', p. 172), and Demidoffs construction of Valera's escape bid as a suicide attempt: 'Le suicide, on y songe les trois premiers mois. Ensuite, tu verras, on s'y fait. J'ai passé par là' (p. 180). These patronising words of reassurance, spoken by the founder and (hitherto) sole member of the BolchevikBolchevik party (Demidoff), to his protégé and 'militant wing' (Valera), parody the paternalistic words of wisdom uttered by Hoederer to his rather more earnest disciple, Hugo. As elsewhere in Nekrassov, the tone remains facetious and the purpose subversive. There is no more danger of assassination or suicide, in this pantomime world, than there is of a real blow from a rubber hammer. Although suicide is now far from Valera's mind, flight (both physical and moral) is still his main preoccupation. Finding himself impotent in the situation he inadvertently helped to create (causing the persecution of the alleged subversives on the newspaper's staff),

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Georges deems the time has come to revert to the Protean identity of the master crook: Nekrassov, adieu! [...] Vive Georges de Valera! [...] Georges, mon vieux Georges, tu n'imagines pas le plaisir que j'ai de te retrouver! [...] Nekrassov étant mort, Georges de Valera va filer à l'anglaise, (pp. 179-80)

In terms of the life/death discourse, the narrative so far can be sum­ marised as follows: 're-born' from his original suicide bid, Georges de Valera then 'brought to life' Nekrassov, whom he is now about to 'kill off, so that he, Valera, may 'live' again. What we are not about to witness, however, is the birth of a man. At this point, Georges is no more mature, morally speaking, than Kean when he shed Hamlet's robes and became 'himself again. Like Kean, he has yet to slay the 'genius' of the consummate pretender. Nekrassov's 'death' merely indicates a return to the comédie of the con-artist. The situation is superficially different, but, like Goetz after his conversion to Good, the protagonist remains an 'actor' rather than an 'agent', a sparkling harlequin, highly visible but lacking stable, substantive moral identity. In the next scene (VII, 1), Valera bemoans with Véronique (as Kean did with Anna), the eclipse of his 'star', and the existential consequences for the human être-en-soi-pour~autrui that he now perceives himself (late in the day) to be: Tu vois: la chance m'a quitté. Véronique mon étoile est morte, mon génie s'obscurcit: je suis fait. (// marche.) On arrêtera quelqu'un cette nuit, sois-en sûre. Mais qui? Qui arrêtera-t-on, peux-tu me le dire? Goblet court après Valera et la D.T. après Nekrassov. Le premier qui met la main sur moi, je deviens ce qu'il veut que je sois. Pour qui paries-tu? P.J. ou D.T.? Georges ou Nikita? (pp. 189-90)

This agony of self-doubt - rightly described by Lorris as 'les mailles du filet sartrien classique'140 - sets a tone for the tableau which comes close to sounding inappropriately solemn and polemical, owing less to the characteristic gravitas of Véronique, than to the uncharacteristic seriousness of Georges. This third encounter between them is the only 140

Lorris, p.240.

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occasion on which his hitherto egocentric conscience begins to con­ template the possible objective consequences of his game-playing. Specifically, he becomes interested in the fate of Véronique's col­ leagues, whose arrest now appears imminent, and he is baffled by their reluctance to heed his warnings and flee: 'Duval tient à sa peau,' explains Véronique, 'mais il n'y pense pas tous les jours. Il a son Parti, son activité, ses lecteurs: s'il veut sauver tout ce qu'il est, il faut qu'il reste' (p. 193). As she harshly points out, 'Toi, tu n'es pas grand'chose de plus que ta peau: tu veux la sauver, rien de plus naturel.' Here is an exemplary lesson in the moral superiority of the politically committed militant over the dilettante individualist, that Valera is par excellence. Naturally, he is angry that his gesture of goodwill has in effect been rebutted - 'C'était la première fois de ma vie que je voulais rendre service. Ce sera très certainement la dernière' - and he feels humiliated to have been taken for a 'provocateur' when his motives were, at least in part, altruistic. His melodramatic outburst of resentment, however, reintroduces a note of satire just in time to save the comedy of the scene: Tiens! Je devrais me tuer sous tes yeux et souiller de sang ton parquet. Tu as de la chance que je n'en ai plus le courage. (// se rassied.) Je ne comprends plus rien à rien. J'avais ma petite philosophie, elle m'aidait à vivre: j'ai tout perdu, même mes principes. Ah! je n'aurais jamais dû faire de politique! (p. 195)

Another meaningless threat of suicide, for which he had not the courage in the first instance, either; regret for the loss of a philosophy and principles of which we have never seen any evidence; the laughable assertion that he has been 'involved in polities', when he has actually been caught up in game-playing on a grand scale - such are the delusions of the radically falsified and falsifying hero, whose genius for invention is not quite dead. As a way out of this impasse, he proposes a final cunning plan. He will tell the true story of his career as Nekrassov to Véronique's liberal, left-wing paper: 'J'ai fini par gagner: il publiera la prose d'un escroc, ton journal progressiste' (p. 196). This triumphant moment, again, marks not the emergence of an agent, but the resurgence of a gamester and actor.

216

In some respects, Valera's situation here is similar to Hugo's after his release from prison. Enmeshed in a political row which he has catalysed, but which surpasses him, he has lost all sense of autonomy. 'Manœuvré comme un enfant' (p. 194), Georges needs, like Hugo, to invent a way out which will allow him to recover some selfrespect: 'Mais moi, bande de salauds, moi, qu'est-ce que je deviens dans tout cela?' (Hugo had asked the very same question.)141 Valera's solution is as self-regarding and futile as Hugo's, a parody of the 'heroic self-sacrifice' of the disillusioned young militant. Whereas Hugo (dispensable scapegoat of the proletarian party) finally offered himself to the guns of its 'clean-up' squad, Valera (sole member of the 'militant wing' of Demidoff s Bolchevik-Bolchevik party) leaps to freedom through the nearest window, while the ludicrous party boss fights off his pursuers single-handed.142 The final tableau (VIII) confirms that we have indeed been watching a comedy: nothing has changed. The world returns to the safe, if boring, dichotomy of the Cold War; Sibilot becomes the editor of Soir à Paris in place of the discredited Palotin, but it is clear that the paper's problems will remain the same, and he will deal with them in identical fashion. In particular, we may rest assured that Georges de Valera will continue to be the unreconstructed con-man, the master of illusion, the crook of genius. He is the remorseless phantasm for whom reality is too grim and tedious to behold: not for him the dirty hands of Oreste, Hugo or Goetz, nor even the will to live authentically of the rejuvenated Kean. As a thorough-going farce, Nekrassov con­ ceals no corpses, but it hardly boasts a living soul, either. With the arguable exception of Véronique, herself a sarcastic take on militancy, its characters are ruthless caricatures, implausible and derisory. Nevertheless, Valera himself is unquestionably a dynamic - albeit ephemeral - vital force, a startling satirical creation, admirably irrepressible, yet diverted deliberately and irretrievably into the amoral byways of incorrigible inauthenticity, much like his real-world 141 See Les Mains sales, p.243. 142 Compare Hugo who, having shot his party boss, Hoederer, is also protected by him with his dying breath from the retribution of his bodyguards. Moreover, in the screen version, Hugo also flees via the window, as it happens.

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forebear.143 The life-affirming optimism of Le Diable et le bon Dieu and of Kean is mocked at and parodied, to great comic effect, in Sartre's ruthless satire of what Karl Marx called 'the immediate tragicomic conquests' of the proto-revolutionary phase of the class struggle.144 In Sartre's next play, Les Séquestrés d'Altona, that optimism is completely overwhelmed and subdued, to pseudo-tragic effect.

143

To judge by a recent characterisation of Harvey Matusow (see above, pp. 190— 1 ), he was, perhaps, a still more apposite role model for Georges de Valera than even Sartre realised: 'But Morgan also notes that others who cooperated with McCarthy were unattractive opportunists, particularly Harvey Matusow, an excommunist turned informer turned anti-McCarthyite who changed his story so often that it became hard to know when he was telling the truth and when he was lying' (Harvey Klehr, 'Devils in America', a review of Ted Morgan's book, Reds McCarthyism in Twentieth-Century America, New York, Random House, 2003, in The New Republic [Online], 12 February 2004, @ http://www.powells.com/review/2004_02_12.html, consulted 11 June 2004). This is a near-perfect profile of Sartre's protean protagonist! 144 See Karl Marx, Les Luttes de classes en France, 1848 à 1850, Paris, Gallimard (Folio Histoire 108), 1994, p.9.

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Chapter 5 Madness and Armageddon

Vociferously and vehemently vilified by the right-wing Paris press, Nekrassov lasted little more than two months at the Théâtre Antoine. Sartre published the text in successive issues of Les Temps modernes? ahead of Gallimard's publication of the book in 1956. In late 1955, he began to write a screen adaptation of Arthur Miller's more successful (but infinitely less entertaining) satirical allegory of McCarthyism, The Crucible, which was filmed by Raymond Rouleau, and released as Les Sorcières de Salem in April 1957. If we set this project of cinematic transposition to one side, we can say that Sartre had begun his longest creative absence from the theatre since his successful war­ time début with Les Mouches in 1943. Throughout 1956, Sartre was busy taking positions on a series of political issues: for the French communists in the February elections, against the Soviets in their November invasion of Hungary; for the nationalists and against the imperialist powers in Algeria and Egypt (over the Suez Canal). In his personal life, the encounter with the young Jewish Algerian scholar, Ariette Elkaïm, was to prove momen­ tous. Successively admiring pupil, then close companion, then adoptive daughter, then executor of his literary estate, Ariette would play an increasingly significant role in Sartre's mature years.2 In January 1957, Sartre travelled to Poland for the opening there of Les Mouches, and contributed a paper to the 'Hommage à Brecht' at the Théâtre des Nations in April. Otherwise, his activities remained much more political than theatrical. He repeatedly protested against the French government's reactionary colonial repression in Algeria, and especially against its use of torture, a stance which saw him reconciled

1 2

Nos. 114-117, June-September 1955. See Annie Cohen-Solal, pp.489-96, for Arlette's irruption into Sartre's life, and her presence around the time of Les Séquestrés d'Altona, in particular.

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with his old camarade de classe, Raymond Aron, for the first time in ten years. He published Questions de méthode in Les Temps modernes in the autumn, and began drafting his second major philosophical work, Critique de la raison dialectique. The following year, 1958, was characterised by Simone de Beauvoir as 'exhausting', an epithet which, if applied to Sartre's own experience, would surely be an undertstatement.3 In addition to starting work on Les Séquestrés d'Altona (originally destined for production in the autumn, but eventually not finished until the summer of 1959), Sartre accepted a commission from the movie director, John Huston, for a screenplay on the life of Freud. Meanwhile, he was working 'furiously' on the Critique, fuelling his efforts with amphetamines and taking extravagant risks with his health as a con­ sequence. In the political field, too, his commitments were undiminished. His principled opposition to the government's imperialist policies in Algeria led him to join forces with Malraux and Mauriac, amongst others, in order to 'condemn unequivocally the use of torture'. Sartre was the most prominent and vigorous of De Gaulle's critics, deploring 'la solitude de cet homme enfermé dans sa grandeur',4 and advocating a 'No' vote to the September referendum on the constitution of the Fifth Republic, with its provisions for sweeping new presidential powers. Little wonder that his health almost collapsed towards the end of the year, under the combined pressures of political disappointment, and mental and physical stress.5 3 4

5

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'C'est d'un coeur morose que je terminai cette accablante année' (La Force des choses, p.477). 4 Le Prétendant', L'Express, 22 May 1958, in Situations V, pp.89-101 (p.100). The same paragraph contains one of the most succinct distinctions to be found anywhere in Sartre's work between existentialist and essentialist perspectives of moral discrimination. Having defined the relationship between the French people and De Gaulle as 4un lien de vassalité', Sartre goes on: 4Je ne prétends pas que cette liaison soit sans valeur humaine: mais précisément parce que ces relations sont chargées de mort et de passé, surchargées de sacré, elles sont aux antipodes de la relation proprement démocratique, qui consiste à juger les hommes à leurs actes et non les actes sur les hommes, à communiquer à travers les entreprises communes, à partager les responsabilités, à apprécier une action par rapport à son but et à son résulta? (ibid., emphases added). For more details of this time, see Œuvres romanesques, pp.LXXV-LXXIX.

Les Séquestrés

d'Altona

Sartre's longer than usual 'creative absence' from the theatre was interpreted by some commentators as a conscious retreat from the public domain, a misconception which the intellectual activist chal­ lenged (with good reason, as we have seen): Il n'y a pas eu de silence. En ce qui concerne le théâtre, c'est une habitude que j'ai de faire une pièce tous les trois ou quatre ans. Je ne suis d'ailleurs pas un auteur dramatique, mais un écrivain qui croit devoir écrire pour le théâtre, et qui aime cela.6

Typically, his tenth and, as it turned out, last original play was trans­ parently a tribune for his political preoccupations at the time. Indeed, initially (early 1958), he had conceived of a drama dealing explicitly with French torture in Algeria, but subsequently considered that it would be less vulnerable to censorship if he transposed it allegorically to the context of post-war Germany.7 No doubt the ambitious moral scope and innovative formal complexity of the project accounted for the difficulty Sartre found in writing to schedule: 'C'est, de toutes ses œuvres théâtrales, celle qui lui coûta le plus d'efforts.'8 Consequently, the final product was redirected from Simone Berriau at the Théâtre Antoine, for the rentrée of 1958, to Véra Korène, artistic director of the Théâtre de la Renaissance, for the rentrée of 1959. Simone de Beauvoir recalls that Sartre started writing Les Séquestrés d'Altona after an old friend had advised him to exorcise the 'failure' of Nekrassov quickly, before he lost his nerve in the

6

7

8

'Jean-Paul Sartre fait sa rentrée après quatre ans de retraite', interview with Pierre Berger, Paris-Journal, 12 September 1959, extract in Les Écrits de Sartre, p.326. See Les Écrits de Sartre, p.324. Sartre appeared to deny any deliberate 'trans­ position' in an interview with Le Monde (17 September 1959), but stressed his wish to focus on 'a problem of a general nature', and the necessity of 'distan­ ciation' for the purposes of 'avoiding a lapse into socialist realism' and 'retain­ ing the aspect of myth' (see Les Écrits de Sartre, pp.328-9). Contât and Rybalka, Les Écrits de Sartre, p.324.

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theatre altogether.9 Annie Cohen-Solal records that - as with Huis clos - he was once again committed to writing two major parts for rivalrous actress friends, namely Leni for Wanda Kosakiewicz (known as Marie-Olivier), and Johanna for Evelyne Rey, whilst actually dividing his personal time uneasily between Simone de Beauvoir and Ariette Elkaïm (a fact which Beauvoir herself does not mention).10 There emerges from these disparate accounts the same picture of the playwright himself as anxious, harassed and full of self-doubt, fearful for the public success of the play and also, perhaps, for its potential fallout in his private life. On the first count, at least, his fears would prove largely unfounded^ Cohen-Solal notes that there was 'almost unanimous' approbation in the press for Sartre's theatrical 'come­ back', echoing Beauvoir's own summary of the critical reception: 'Presque tous les critiques estimaient comme moi que Les Séquestrés l'emportaient sur les autres pièces de Sartre.'11 And, since the critics were in agreement with Simone de Beauvoir, they had evidently got it right, for once! Sartre gave numerous interviews around the time of the production's opening, extracts of which are as usual collected in Les Écrits de Sartre. Of particular interest in these are the comparisons he makes with Huis clos - 'five characters in thrall to each other in place of three'12 - and the emphasis he places upon the power of the past to shape present circumstances which condition, if not determine, the way we act: 'C'est à cause du passé, du leur, de celui de tous, qu'ils agissent d'une certaine façon. Comme dans la vie réelle.'13 Or, again: 'Je n'ai pas voulu seulement mettre en scène des caractères, mais suggérer que des circonstances objectives conditionnent la formation et le comportement de tel ou tel individu, à un moment donné.'14 If we set these reflections over against Sartre's theoretical problematisation 9 10 11 12 13 14

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See La Force des choses, pp.496-9. See again Cohen-Solal, pp.489-96. La Force des choses, p.497. See Les Écrits de Sartre, p.325. Interview with Madeleine Chapsal, L'Express, 10 September 1959, extracts in Les Écrits de Sartre, pp.325-6 (p.326). Interview with Charles Haroche, France nouvelle, 17 September 1959, extracts in Les Écrits de Sartre, p.328.

of the theatre, we can begin to surmise that his increasingly pessimistic perspective on the historical dialectic would inevitably lead him away from the medium for good: Nous savons tous que le monde change, qu'il change l'homme et que l'homme change le monde. Et si ce n'est pas cela qui doit être le sujet profond de toute pièce de théâtre, alors c'est que le théâtre n'a plus de sujet.15

In any case, the twin postulations of behavioural determinism, on the one hand, and the power of human agency, on the other, certainly constitute the antithetical poles of the play's radical ambiguity: Volontairement ambiguë, la pièce met en scène des personnages totalement impuissants qui sont les victimes consentantes d'un processus sur lequel ils n'ont aucune prise et dont ils restent pourtant entièrement responsables, [...].16

Contât and Rybalka conclude that the intractability of this moral paradox represents the 'darkest and most pessimistic moment in all of Sartre's work'.17 This lengthy, troubled and overdue play at last had its delayed première at the Théâtre de la Renaissance on 23 September 1959. Pace the consensual summaries of Simone de Beauvoir and Annie Cohen-Solal, endorsed by Contât and Rybalka - 'Les Séquestrés d'Altona fut en général accueilli avec faveur par les critiques qui s'accordèrent, pour la plupart, pour saluer la pièce comme l'une des plus importantes de Sartre, sinon la meilleure'18 - press reaction was not universally favourable. Jean-Jacques Gautier, an old sparringpartner, lambasted Sartre's 'intellectual heaviness, disorganisation, verbal incontinence and complacency', and ironically hailed Nekrassov as a 'pure masterpiece' by comparison.19 Le Canard enchaîné, a natural ally of Sartre's by virtue of its anti-establishment

15 16 17 18 19

Interview with Robert Kanters, L'Express, 17 September 1959, extracts in Les Écrits de Sartre, p.327. Contât and Rybalka, Les Écrits de Sartre, p.325. See ibid Les Écrits de Sartre, p.324. See Le Figaro, 26/27 September 1959, p. 16.

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mission, nevertheless complained about the play's inordinate length in no uncertain (if amusingly graphic) terms: 'Mais sacré bon dieu de cher maître, si pendant vos représentations vous vous étiez installé au strapontin 126 bis, vous auriez su où faire vos coupures, et sans chinoiseries!'20 By contrast, a long-standing opponent of Sartre's, the Catholic existentialist thinker and dramatist, Gabriel Marcel, accorded the play his 'esteem and admiration' for its 'strong and original conception, magisterial exposition and rigorous construction', despite its representing the very 'antipodes' of his own thought.21 What are those 'antipodes', and are they, in some respects, also the antitheses of Sartre's own foregoing philosophico-dramatic discourse? Les Séquestrés d'Altona certainly marks a break in Sartre's thea­ trical presentation of familiar themes. Freedom, action, commitment, responsibility; guilt and judgment, good and evil, life and death - all of these are exposed and explored in their ethical complexity and contradictoriness: 'Jusqu'alors, j'avais fait des pièces avec des héros et des conclusions qui, d'une manière ou d'une autre, supprimaient les contradictions.'22 Now, however, Sartre saw the theatre as primarily a locus of explicit contradiction: 'Le théâtre est un lieu où apparaissent nos contradictions: Hegel a été le premier à le constater, mais le fait remonte à l'Antiquité.'23 The manner in which the conceptual para­ doxes of Les Séquestrés d'Altona are laid bare and resolved, only by remaining unresolved, makes this the first of Sartre's plays in which the myth of death prevails. As the protagonist father and antagonist son plunge to their premeditated deaths, the hitherto predominantly life-affirming thrust of Sartrean drama is seen to have undergone a terrible reversal:

20 21 22 23

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T., Le Canard enchaîné, 30 September 1959. See Nouvelles littéraires, 15 October 1959, p. 10. Interview with France nouvelle, 17 September 1959, extracts in Un Théâtre de situations, pp.363-6 (p.366). Interview (dated 4 January 1960) with Bernard Dort, Théâtre populaire, no.36, 4th quarter, 1959, in Un Théâtre de situations, pp.346-62 (p.362).

Oreste était au début de sa vie; Frantz est au bout de la sienne. Dans Les Mouches, l'homme naissait à l'existence; dans Les Séquestrés d'Altona, 'l'homme est mort et je suis son témoin', affirme Frantz (II, l). 24

In this capital sense at least, therefore, the mature Sartre would indeed appear to be at the 'antipodes' of his own earlier metaphysics. Sartre stressed the 'mythic' aspect of his theme because he wanted to deter purely political readings of the play: 'Il ne s'agit pas d'une pièce politique, notez-le, mais d'un sujet d'actualité vis-à-vis duquel j'ai tenu à garder mes distances, pour le dépasser et réserver ainsi la part du mythe.'25 What he sought to convey was an allegory of modern man, insofar as he is inexcusably engaged in an ethical struggle, 'witness or accomplice'.26 For the allegory to work, for the play to pose what Sartre called 'la question principale: qu'as-tu fait de ta vie?',27 he thought it essential to create distances - between the author and his ideas, between his ideas and his theme, between his theme and his characters, and between his characters and his audience. Distance alone enables the valid discussion of eternal questions, and the creation of distance is the very function of serious drama, 'le théâtre prend toujours les choses au niveau du mythe'.28 As we have seen, the dominant mythical axes of the Sartrean dramatic dialectic are life and death (or life and the absence of it, to be more precise), and the second of these is nowhere more pervasively present (insofar as an absence can be present) than in Les Séquestrés d'Altona. Von Gerlach and Frantz, mythic representations of father and son, set the morbid tone of the piece by virtue of their negative symbiosis, sharing death rather than life. The old man's cancerous death sentence is paralleled by the pre-emptive legal and existential 24 25 26

27 28

Lorris, p.287. Interview with Le Monde, 17 September 1959, extract in Un Théâtre de situations, pp.366-7 (p.366). See 4Wir aile sind Luthers Opfer' ['Nous sommes tous des victimes de Luther'], interview with Der Spiegel, 11 May 1960, in Un Théâtre de situations, pp.383^t07 (p.383). 'La Question', Théâtre vivant, 1965, in Un Théâtre de situations, pp.408-10 (p.410). Sartre, interview with Alain Koehler, Présence du théâtre, no.3, March 1960 and no.4, April 1960, extracts in Un Théâtre de situations, pp.367-83 (p.380).

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demise of his elder son, so that their eventual suicide appears as the conjugal consummation of an event which has already occurred for both of them.29 Like their undead forebears in Huis clos, these incarcerated characters are conceived by Sartre as showing forth 'notre "partie morte"':30 'Cette famille a perdu ses raisons de vivre', observes Leni, characteristically caustic, 'mais elle a gardé ses bonnes habitudes' (p. 19). Like all contingent existants, the von Gerlach family 'naît sans raison, se prolonge par faiblesse et meurt par rencontre'.31 Old Gerlach's planned 'industrial death' (his euphemism for suicide), will 'rectify nature' (which has been his vocation in life) and ensure the smooth continuation of the status quo. Leni most fully shares the moral necrosis of father and son, resembling the former, and identifying with the latter to the point of incest, an inherently false relationship by which she sustains him in his false perception of the world outside his room. Her 'real' life is also already at an end ('je suis déjà morte', p.92) and, like her brother, she sees her past as unalterable by future action; she is therefore the ideal replacement, when he does at last kill himself, of a witness who 'did not want to live'.32 Johanna, too, is cursed with a beauty that is a 'mirror of death'.33 A faded star, she is the ideal counterpart to Frantz's tarnished hero and, like their ancestors Estelle and Garcin, they embrace each other only in death. Werner too, despite his protestations ('Je tâche de vivre', p.37), is stamped with the family hallmark of premature death, anxious to obey his cruelly domineering father in a desperate bid to please him, and thereby displaying the 29

30

31 32 33

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Frantz has been sequestered for 13 years and legally deceased for the last three; his father has been effectively posthumous since he became superfluous to his own business, about ten years ago (see Les Séquestrés d'Altona, I, 2, pp.22-3: further references appear as page numbers only in the text; where successive quotations concern the same page, only the first is referenced). The décor is dominated by large portraits of Frantz, bearing the black ribbons that indicate his late status. 'Oui, dans les deux cas [Huis clos, Altona] ils [les héros] sont morts et dans les deux cas c'est, si vous voulez, notre "partie morte" qui est représentée' (Sartre, interview with Der Spiegel, in Un Théâtre de situations, p.404). La Nausée, p. 184. Seep.221. See p. 119.

impotence to which he was always condemned. His readiness to substitute for the elder son, by succeeding his father as the company boss, bespeaks a submissiveness which Johanna despises, and an effective identification with Frantz akin to Leni's incestuous attachment. In this sense, Frantz steadily becomes, as the father predicted, the inescapable 'destiny' of them all, and their climactic suicide becomes a vouchsafe of family unity, both a symbol of and a signal for a collective self-immolation. Moreover, death suffuses the environment of this family in the form of threat, infecting the whole nexus of relationships. The contin­ gent and ostensible source of this threat is old Gerlach's throat cancer, and through him it is diffused to each of the family members, via the coerced oath on the family Bible. This has as its explicit purpose to protect Frantz ('le dernier des vrais von Gerlach [...] le dernier monstre', p.35), and thereby to perpetuate the status quo, although it is in fact Werner's issue who would eventually continue the father's industrial dynasty. Unnaturally, old Gerlach is ready to sacrifice his other children and their posterity for the sake of the beloved but already deceased elder son, Frantz. The 'choice' he offers them is to swear their lives away at Altona, or to face the likely legal conse­ quences of Frantz's sequestration becoming publicly known. Accord­ ingly, as each of them is drawn into Gerlach's tortuous plan for a meeting with Frantz, they find themselves implicated in a process that becomes a conspiratorial suicide pact, a conspiracy in which their culpable complicity is relentlessly assured by the machinations of the overbearing paterfamilias, Werner is prepared to sacrifice his marriage to his father's will. Johanna, in a bid to countermand that injunction, becomes the instrument of fatal judgment upon Frantz, 'l'outil d'un assassin' (p. 103). And Leni, whose self-interest dictates that she defend Frantz and her relationship with him, gradually comes to the realisation that the only way to possess him wholly may be to precipitate his actual death: 'Mort ou vif, il est juste que tu m'appartiennes puisque je suis la seule à t'aimer tel que tu es' (p. 191). This explains why the two women will finally accuse each other of

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having killed Frantz: they had both become the unwitting puppets of the father's manipulation, in a sense, his hired assassins. Therefore, old von Gerlach's dissemination of his personal death threat places every family member in a situation-limite, faced with unrealistic choices, the more compelling of which is a sort of living death: the status quo. Leni favours this, as guarantor of Frantz's alienation. Werner comes to favour it because of his slavish devotion to the father's will that 'ma mort, à présent, c'est ma vie qui continue, sans que je sois dedans' (p.39). And Johanna too, even though she appears at first to have an option on 'life' in Hamburg, subscribes inadvertently to the status quo as she falls progressively under Frantz's spell, 'leurs deux "folies" [étant] au fond pareilles', as Contât justly remarks.35 These options on death reflect the father's own quandary, of course: death now (or soon) by his own hand, or later by natural causes? As for Frantz himself, the 'mort industrielle' his father envisages - 'la Nature pour la dernière fois rectifiée' (p.20), as he puts it in his inimitable engineer's poetry36 - extends inexorably until it embraces his elder son quite literally: their 'symbiosis' requires it. As the father's futile, living death approaches its culmination in his impending physical death, he naturally reaches out to the son whose 'sole human relationship' he constitutes,37 seeking to save him (out of love) from the death of perpetual flight to which he has condemned himself: 'Le sens de la pièce est que le Père, qui aime son fils, préfère la mort de son fils à cette fuite. [...] Cette fuite est dégradante, et pour cette raison le Père veut la transformer en suicide.'38 Paternally, parodically, the archetypal expression of hatred (murder) is trans34 35 36

37

38

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Seep.221. Contât (1968), p.48. I wonder what echoes there might be here of Sartre's step-father, Joseph Mancy, a prosaic naval engineer who strove to teach the recalcitrant boy maths (see Sartre, pp. 16-17). 'Au fond, le seul rapport humain de Frantz s'établit avec son père' (interview with Le Monde, in Un Théâtre de situations, p.368). Sartre is here contrasting the father with Johanna and Leni, whom he calls 'vampires' and whom he blames for 'killing' Frantz {ibid., p.367). What he means by 'human', in this context, appears to be 'informed by love'. Sartre, interview with Der Spiegel, in Un Théâtre de situations, pp.387-8.

muted into the ultimate show of love (giving one's life for another). For Frantz, too, hatred and love will become conflated, and his suicide will be simultaneously an obedience to the father's will and a parri­ cide. This is not new: Hugo evinced precisely the same contradiction vis-à-vis the father-figure Hoederer, and iconic antecedents of this primitive, paradoxical sacrifice can be found in the mythic ethical narratives of the Judaeo-Christian discourse (Isaac and Jesus are examples). In a sense, Frantz merely finds in death what he has always sought: 'Il courait après la mort: pas de chance, elle courait plus vite que lui' (p.56). When he and his father climb into Leni's Porsche '[pour] faire de la vitesse', he at last catches up with his elusive quarry. Beyond the claustrophobic family circle and the oppressive walls of Altona, lies a 'real' world completely at odds with the fictions of sequestration. These are dominated by the theological and social legacy of Lutheranism: a thirst for absolutes, a Weltanschauung shaped by predestination, and a sense of guilt demanding active expiation of sin. 'Tout ce que je peux vous dire,' announces von Gerlach, 'c'est que les Gerlach sont des victimes de Luther: ce prophète nous a rendus fous d'orgueil' (p.49). Pride is the father of all the deadly sins: hubris cast Lucifer out of heaven and Adam from the Garden of Eden. By contrast, the 'real' world outside displays the perverse socio-economic consequences of defeat: Germany is booming. This would be intolerable to Frantz, because wickedness should be punished not rewarded. If Germany wins the peace by virtue of having lost the war, then there is neither logic nor justice: 'qui perd gagne' - that way lies madness. Specifically, Frantz's own total commitment to victory, which led him into a brutal crime, is thereby invalidated: how can you justify striving to win if winning and losing are indistinguishable? The implicit moral dictum which Frantz wrestles with is that 'l'homme adulte d'aujourd'hui [...] est forcément témoin ou complice'.39 Worse, the accomplice is also a witness and the witness (by virtue of his customary acquiescence) is often enough an accomplice. In their midst, also accomplice and witness, is the victim, the unifying principle whose function is martyrdom: bearing 39

Sartre, interview with Der Spiegel, in Un Théâtre de situations, p.383.

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witness by complicity in his own destruction, a mystery perfectly exemplified in the self-sacrifice of Jesus, the God/man member of Christianity's triune deity. Whereas old Gerlach emphasises victimhood (victims of Nazism, as well as of Luther), Frantz dwells upon their complicity, to which he intends to bear witness: 'Hommes, femmes, bourreaux traqués, victimes impitoyables, je suis votre martyr' (p.86). The scene that parodies the Last Supper (IV, 8) leaves no doubt about his messianic delusions, but to carry conviction, his martyrdom must allege that Germany has indeed met its deserved Armageddon. He must play fortune at its own game, 'qui perd gagne', transforming his personal defeat into triumph by denying the truth of Germany's 'economic miracle'. Suicide is the inevitable corollary of that martyrdom, both because it will atone for his own and Germany's sins, and because it will shut out forever the unpalatable truth that the irrepressible industrial giant has indeed re-arisen from the ashes of Allied bombing. Lorris sums up this logic neatly: Frantz est un produit fini dans un monde en processus de transformation. Le suicide final des séquestrés est l'acte de décès d'un milieu enfermé dans un moment historique qui ne correspond plus aux conditions actuelles.40

The historical moment of Les Séquestrés d'Altona is a detailed illus­ tration of what Lorris calls Sartre's 'last myth', history itself - or rather, 'la toute-puissance de l'Histoire'.41 History is the outermost and indefinable circle of Frantz von Gerlach's situation-limite, the time, place and facticity which determine his being in all its impotence and passivity: Ici, les personnages sont tout le temps commandés, tenus par le passé comme ils le sont les uns par les autres. C'est à cause du passé, du leur, qu'ils agissent d'une certaine façon. Comme dans la vie réelle.42

40 41 42

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Lorris, p.281. Lorris, p.282. Sartre, interview with L'Express, in Un Théâtre de situations, p.363.

Frantz's despairing comment: 'La guerre, on ne la fait pas: c'est elle qui nous fait' (p. 173), encapsulates a determinist view of history, a post-Critique realism which stands in stark opposition to Sartre's early optimism: Ainsi n'y a-t-il pas d'accidents dans une vie; un événement social qui éclate soudain et m'entraîne ne vient pas du dehors; si je suis mobilisé dans une guerre, cette guerre est ma guerre, elle est à mon image et je la mérite.43

In the face of historical omnipotence, Frantz's noble efforts to reverse or deny the tide of history amount to action of a sort, though the dominion of history is complete: '[L'histoire] use les hommes qu'elle emploie et les tue sous elle comme des chevaux.'44 So complete, in fact, that Frantz even becomes the victim of the counter-history which he himself invents. The human world's end is implicit in his taperecorded plaidoyers, addressed to the crustacean tribunal of the thirtieth century, his own death being one small but significant step towards that counter-historical telos. However, neither his living death, nor the 'act' of suicide can be vindicated or rendered meaningful by the relentless onward thrust of the historical dialectic: 'Mais l'Histoire récupère tout sauf la mort: [...].'45 An act changes the world and the agent who commits it, and the theatre is a medium concerned with acts. Les Séquestrés d'Altona is a play at whose centre is a man obsessed with his own failed attempts to act, surrounded by other agents manques, whose obsession culminates in a final act of self-destruction. If Les Mains sales is Sartre's Hamlet, Les Séquestrés d'Altona is his Bérénice: no-one does anything. Werner is an extreme case of inherited impotence, transformed into a 'flower-pot' at an early age. Leni makes a show of autonomy but, in truth, is manipulated by her father (constantly stroking her hair, as if she were a faithful lap-dog); so far from seeking to change the world, she is dedicated to its remaining the same. Johanna appears to have the spirit required of an agent, but her flaw is that she is an actor, 43 44 45

L'Être et le néant, p.639. Sartre, 'Merleau-Ponty', Les Temps modernes, Numéro spécial (October 1961), in Situations IV, pp. 189-287 (p.242). 'Merleau-Ponty', in Situations IV, p.222.

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caught up in the existential dilemma of Edmund Kean, conditioned to play parts; this is what she does at the father's behest, her moral independence initially traded for lifestyle, then fascinated into neutrality by Frantz's charisma, then outraged by his terrible secret. Von Gerlach, the puppet-master, is a man who has acted in his life, a self-made man, both in the classic bourgeois, capitalist sense, and in the Sartrean sense that he is flls de ses œuvres (to borrow an epithet from Goetz and Valera). But the problem is, precisely, that he is made: he no longer becomes, he is; he no longer does, he has - power, wealth, status, everything but the potential to act. Puppet-master becomes puppet mastered by his industrial enterprise, castrated by the very monster he created. His elaborate scheme of self-interested manipulation, set in train at the outset of the play, is by no means an act; it is the project of an already dead, dying man to prolong the world unchanged, to enable his 'life to continue in his absence'. In the context of the von Gerlach family milieu, one of industrial power and economic wealth, Sartre sees Frantz as 'un homme voué à l'impuissance par la puissance de son père'.46 Yet Frantz is, in more senses than one, like a caged tiger whose pent-up potential for action, which Sartre has so skilfully inscribed in this character, lends impetus to the drama: what kind of act can this madman commit? And can he commit it before his father engineers his definitive disempowerment? We learn of three moments in his past when Frantz strove to act momentously, in matters of life and death, to leave his mark, like Hugo, to write his name. These are, in chronological order, the episodes of the escaped rabbi, the tortured partisans, and the amorous GI. For reasons of dramatic impact, however, Sartre saves the second of these till last in the narrative stream, and we shall do likewise in analysing these aspirations of the still-born Frantz to come to life. The first is evoked in the second of six flashbacks used in the play (I, 2), a cinematic technique that Sartre had also essayed in Les Mains sales. Ostensibly, Frantz had committed a humane and unselfish act, sheltering an escaped rabbi, and risking his own life by doing so: 'Mais lui aussi, Frantz, devait s'attendre à la mort: il s'était opposé à un pouvoir, il savait ce qu'il faisait, il risquait sa vie, il aurait 46

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Interview with Théâtre populaire, in Un Théâtre de situations, p.356.

donc dû être tué.' But his motivation was more complicated than simple philanthropy. The camp from which the Jew had escaped was on Gerlach's land, sold off to the government for that very purpose. Frantz had censured his father for this cynical bit of business, so that his own action in 'saving' the rabbi was firstly an atonement for von Gerlach's unrepentant crime of doing deals with the architects of the 'final solution', a guilt he felt on behalf of his father: 'Pourquoi l'as-tu mis dans ta chambre? Pour me racheter?' (p.51), asks old Gerlach, 'Réponds: c'est pour moi.' Frantz replies: 'C'est pour nous. Vous, c'est moi', to which the father assents, 'Oui'. The sins of the father shall be visited upon the son (call it identification, or imposition of the super-ego), and the son shall expiate them on his own and his father's accounts, which are one and the same (Jesus on the Cross). By inter­ vening to betray the rabbi and save Frantz from the worst probable consequences of his action, old Gerlach stood this act of charity and remorse upon its head: the rabbi's life is lost, Frantz's is spared - the diametrical opposite of what the young idealist had intended. Gerlach robs his son of an act of humane heroism, then of the outcome that would have proved it was such an act: catastrophe followed by impunity, a double gift of impotence. Johanna's analysis is, as Gerlach points out, spot-on: C'était un petit puritain, une victime de Luther, qui voulait payer de son sang les terrains que vous aviez vendus. [...] Vous avez tout annulé. Il n'est resté qu'un jeu pour gosse de riches. Avec danger de mort, bien sûr: mais pour le partenaire... il a compris qu'on lui permettait tout parce qu'il ne comptait pour rien, (pp.55-6)

And, for good measure, the condition of Frantz's impunity (enlist­ ment) merely provided him with infinite opportunities to exercise his death-wish and experience repeated failure; Johanna calls his military decorations for bravery 'Douze échecs de plus', adding: 'Il courait après la mort, pas de chance: elle courait plus vite que lui' (p.56). The second episode to be rehearsed is that of Frantz's brawl with an American GI, after the Allied occupation of Germany. Old von

47

Sartre, interview with Der Spiegel, in Un Théâtre de situations, p.395.

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Gerlach remembers how Leni used to amuse herself by teasing the soldiers, then declaring herself a Nazi, 'en les traitant de sales juifs'. When this practical joke got out of hand on one occasion, the GI tried to rape Leni, and Frantz intervened to defend her. These bald facts (as bald facts will) gloss over some significant details. Frantz, a decorated war hero, had to endure the ignominy of seeing his family home over­ run by conquering troops, who then presumed to flirt with his sister. When, on the relevant occasion, he went to her aid, he was over­ powered by his opponent (Me type avait le dessus', Leni tells us, p.57), so that it was then Leni herself who rescued Frantz, putting the GI in hospital for six weeks by-smashing a bottle over his head. However, the father adds that, 'Naturellement, Frantz a tout pris sur lui'. Well, naturally! Otherwise, here was another instance in which Frantz, having envisaged a selfless and heroic action, saw it stolen from him (this time by his sister!), and transformed yet again into an exempli­ fication of his impotence. This was further confirmed by the inter­ ference of his father, just as it had been in the case of the rabbi. Using friends in high places, von Gerlach once more had the incident dismissed as 'foolishness', and plea-bargained a term of exile in place of execution - much less glamorous, and lacking the definitive impri­ matur that death endorses upon heroic deeds. Moreover, whereas the earlier exile of enlistment had sent Frantz into action, in every sense, the subsequent prospect of banishment to South America promised a one-way ticket to redundancy and futility. There is hard logic, there­ fore, in his choice of an illusory purposiveness (as mankind's witness before the tribunal of history), in preference to the slow death of agon­ ising pointlessness that would have been his as a refugee in Argentina. The third episode is skilfully trailed by Sartre for dramatic suspense, before the truth of the matter becomes clear. In II, 1, for example, we gather that Frantz is deeply ashamed, but that he has something more onerous than incest on his conscience. 'Tu seras invulnérable', Leni assures him, 'si tu oses déclarer: "J'ai fait ce que j'ai voulu et je veux ce que j'ai fait'" (p.92). To which Frantz know­ ingly (but, for the audience, enigmatically) replies: 'Non, Leni, ce n'est pas de l'inceste que tu parlais', then asks: 'Qu'est-ce que j'ai fait?' Leni, so it appears, underestimates both the gravity of Frantz's

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crimes (about which she knows, but refuses to speak), and the potency of their impact on his conscience. Sartre clarifies: Elle ne voit pas du tout que ce n'est absolument pas la même chose de revendiquer son inceste dans une famille déjà pas mal détruite, à une époque où la moralité est très assouplie, ou de revendiquer tranquillement le fait d'avoir fait souffrir des hommes jusqu'à la mort. Leni, donc, mentira tant que Frantz ne sera pas capable de dire: 'Moi, j'ai fait cela et je l'assume.'48

Or, again (in II, 3), Sartre teases our curiosity with another flashback in which Frantz is seen issuing opaque orders about the treatment of captured partisans. His ensuing soliloquy, apostrophising the thirtiethcentury tribunal of posterity, more than hints that he does indeed harbour some terrible dark secret: Le Mal, Messieurs les Magistrats, le Mal, c'était l'unique matériau. On le travaillait dans nos raffineries. Le Bien, c'était le produit fini. Résultat: le Bien tournait mal. Et n'allez pas croire que le Mal tournait bien, (p.96)

However, the most important prelude to the delayed revelation comes in IV, 2, the lengthy scene between Johanna and Frantz in which he has the opportunity to recruit her as a moral adjudicator who might yet save his life. Instinctively life-affirming, Johanna gives Frantz a watch, thereby introducing a measure of real-world spacetime into this other-worldly, timeless space: 'Puisque je vis encore, autant que vous viviez' (p. 154), she explains, when Frantz objects that this present (like her presence) is suspect. Their natural rivalry, arising from the implicit threat each poses to the other's conjugal relationship, quickly becomes an alliance of sorts, a 'complicity' whose moral direction is signified by the progress of the hands of time. 'Nous avons de la chance: elle marche', announces Frantz, excitedly scrutinising the face of the watch: 'Quatre heures trente et une; l'Éternité plus une minute. Tournez, tournez, les aiguilles: il faut vivre. (A Johanna.) Comment?' Johanna shrugs: she does not know how they might live, merely that they ought to do so. Frantz claims he has no wish to die, but sees no promising exit strategy from the 48

Interview with Présence du théâtre, in Un Théâtre de situations, pp.368-9.

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impasse into which history and his father (history incarnate) have led them: 'Nous ne pouvons ni mourir, ni vivre', he concludes, 'Nous sommes drôlement coincés' (p. 164). They make common cause, united against the rest of the family. Johanna subscribes to Frantz's madness: 'Je ne vous ferai jamais de mal; je ne songe pas à vous guérir: votre folie, c'est ma cage. J'y tourne en rond' (p. 165). And Frantz becomes her 'accomplice': 'Vous m'ouvrez les yeux parce que vous essayez de me les fermer. Et moi qui, chaque fois, vous déjoue, je me fais votre complice parce que... parce que je tiens à vous' (p. 166). Echoes, there, of Hugo's devotion to the mature pragmatist, Hoederer, and (like Hoederer) Johanna represents a truth which threatens Frantz unless he learns to love her more than the idealist illusions that sustain him in being (like Hugo). He begs her to be his judge, therefore (as Garcin begged Estelle), to be his lifeline by supplanting the intolerable silence of the 'crabs' with a human word of approval: 'Qu'est-ce que je deviens, moi, sans tribunal? [...] Une vie qui n'est pas sanctionnée, la terre la boit. [...] vous me ferez oublier les siècles, je vivrai' (p. 169). Johanna is Frantz's chance to evade the relentless scrutiny of eternity, and to re-enter the current of history as a living being capable of action, to reverse the inertia that has characterised his life to date: 'Savez-vous ce que je me reproche: je n'ai rien fait. [...] Rien! Rien, jamais!' (p. 172). Johanna's reaction to Frantz's eventual 'confession' will be a matter of life or death, so far as he is concerned. His plea that he has 'never done anything' is, of course, ambiguous: on the one hand he was destined a priori to impotence by his father, so it is true; on the other hand, his resentment of that impotence led him to commit a warcrime, so it is false. In order to prime Johanna to reach the judgment he craves, Frantz tells the tale of the mutilated German woman - a real memory, or 'a dream, a nightmare', he leaves us in doubt - who rebuked him for not having done everything possible to assure victory, however wicked and extremist: Pas assez de camps! Pas assez de bourreaux! [...] chaque fois que tu épargnais la vie d'un ennemi, fût-il au berceau, tu prenais une des nôtres; [...] Le coupable, c'est toi! Dieu ne te jugera pas sur tes actes, mais sur ce que tu n'as

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pas osé faire: sur les crimes qu'il fallait commettre et que tu n'as pas commis! (p. 176)

Here, we find the famous dictum of L "Existentialisme est un humanisme and Huis clos turned inside out. Man is not the 'sum of his acts', but of his omissions; in the perspective of total war, restraint and humane behaviour are synonymous with irresponsibility and cowardice. Frantz needs Johanna to share this point of view, if she is to exonerate him when he unburdens himself of the episode on the Russian front. This tale is told in IV, 5. Frantz and another lieutenant, Klages, and an NCO, Heinrich, are cut off from their line by partisans. Klages ('idealist, head in the clouds') cannot restrain Heinrich ('feet on the ground, 100% Nazi') who is threatening to torture two captured peasants. Only Frantz, who commands his colleagues' respect, can decide their fate: 'Sur le front russe, coupé de ses arrières, Frantz a un pouvoir de vie et de mort sur les populations. Puissance enivrante et provisoire!'49 Frantz projects himself as a hard man with no illusions about human dignity ('Le respect de l'homme, je m'en moque', p. 180), for whom the exhilarating power of life and death (war's gift) has meant a liberation from his inherited impotence. He scornfully berates the scrupulous Klages: 'La guerre passe par toi. En la refusant, tu te condamnes à l'impuissance: tu as vendu ton âme pour rien, moraliste. La mienne, je la ferai payer' (p. 182). Frantz here resembles the final Goetz, Klages the final Heinrich, and he attacks the hypocrisy of the casuistical idealist in the same way. 'C'était le champion de la restriction mentale', he complains to Johanna: 'Klages condamnait les nazis dans son âme pour se cacher qu'il les servait dans son corps. [...] Il disait à Dieu: "Je ne veux pas ce que je fais!" mais il le faisait' (pp. 181-2). And here the central ethical principle of Sartrean existentialism is again triumphantly asserted. It is inauthentic to say that we do not will what we do, since we are free; we must indeed be judged by our acts, since these alone reveal what we wanted to do. Frantz is proud to contrast himself with Klages and to seize the theoretical moral high ground ahead of the disclosure of his 'crimes': 49

Sartre, interview with France nouvelle, in Un Théâtre de situations, p.365.

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'La guerre était mon destin et je l'ai voulue de toute mon âme. J'agissais, enfin! Je réinventais les ordres; j'étais d'accord avec moi' (p. 182). Johanna asks: 'Agir, c'est tuer?' and Frantz admits: 'C'est agir. Écrire son nom.' However, moral and rational alarm bells ring when action and violence are so closely assimilated as to be synonymous. Mathieu firing from the church tower: is he making a principled stand of military and political resistance, or avenging his lost illusions?50 Like Oreste, Hugo and Goetz before him, Frantz had come to identify act and impact. At the same time, however, wary of Johanna's censure, he manages to present the facts (V, 6) in such a way that his guilt lies in having tried to prevent the torture of the prisoners, and therefore in failing to protect his own men: 'Je n'ai pas tout fait pour les empêcher de mourir' (p. 185). So the chief charge against him is not that he committed atrocities, but that he did not do so when he ought to have done: 'Celui qui ne fait pas tout ne fait rien: je n'ai rien fait. Celui qui n'a rien fait n'est personne. Personne? (Se désignant comme à l'appel.) Présent!' (p. 186). This rejoins the ruthless logic of the mutilated woman: sins of omission can be just as damning as sins of commission. Yet, again, Frantz's claim is wilfully equivocal. It is true inasmuch as what he did was 'almost inevitable', in Sartre's own words,51 but false inasmuch as he did do something rather than nothing. Johanna 'acquits him' on her intuition of the false sense, of which Leni will shortly disabuse her. Leni's threat to do so is a mortal threat. If Johanna believes Leni, it will be the death of Frantz, who has glimpsed the prospect of a new life through the redemptive love and trust of a woman who does not deal in lies:

50

51

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'C'était une énorme revanche; chaque coup de feu le vengeait d'un ancien scrupule. [...] Il tira: il était pur, il était tout-puissant, il était libre' (La Mort dans l'âme, p. 193). Tai essayé, en même temps que je montrais le crime de Frantz, de montrer ce crime comme presque inévitable. Il y a un bref instant de liberté mais en fait tout concourait à conduire Frantz à son acte' (interview with Der Spiegel, in Un Théâtre de situations, p.399).

Aujourd'hui, j'entrevois une chance. Une chance sur cent pour qu'elle m'accepte. (Remettant le revolver dans le tiroir.) Si tu es encore vivante, Leni, c'est que j'ai décidé de courir cette chance jusqu'au bout. (p. 191)

Killing Leni is a temptation, but not a solution; the argument has to be had and won if there is to be redemption. So, he takes the risk of letting Johanna hear Leni's epilogue: JOHANNA: Je veux savoir la fin de l'histoire. FRANTZ: L'histoire n'en a pas: tout le monde est mort, sauf moi. [...] JOHANNA: [...] Vous n'avez rien fait, n'est-ce pas? FRANTZ (c 'est presque un grognement): Rien. JOHANNA (avec violence): Mais dites-le, il faut que je vous entende! Dites: je n'ai rien fait! FRANTZ (d'une voix égarée): Je n'ai rien fait. JOHANNA (elle le regarde avec une sorte de terreur et se met à crier): Ha! (Elle étouffe son cri) Je ne vous reconnais plus. FRANTZ (s'obstinant): Je n'ai rien fait. LENI: Tu as laissé faire, (pp. 195-6)

Leni makes clear that Frantz's crime was not so much to have acted as to have allowed others to act: his abuse of power resides in his not having exercised it. Once more, his plea of innocence - 'Je n'ai rien fait' - is ambivalent and ironie: at the apogée of his potency, he made a virtue of impotence. Subsequently, it seems, he might have tortured with his own hands, 'but it's the first step that counts', as the inex­ orable Leni observes. Frantz offers to tell Johanna 'the whole truth' because he 'loves her more than his own life', but his trial is already lost, and she reviles him: 'Lâchez-moi! [...] {avec une sorte de haine): Vous avez torturé! Vous!' (p. 196). This loss of faith amounts to a sentence of death for Frantz, and he agrees to meet his father within the hour, having nothing left to strive for, and obscurely knowing what that reunion will lead to. Is it 'fair' of Johanna to condemn Frantz so categorically? Sartre said that he wanted to evoke, in Les Séquestrés d'Altona, 'le sentiment de l'ambiguïté de notre temps', but also to make it clear that some acts can never be justified: 'La morale, la politique, plus rien n'est simple.

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Il y a cependant des actes inacceptables. Torture is archetypally such an act: 'La torture représente l'acte radical qui ne peut être aboli que par le suicide de celui qui Ta commis.'53 Fascism has a distinctive taste for and affinity with torture: 'Le fascisme ne se définit pas par le nombre de ses victimes, mais par sa manière de les tuer.'54 What we learn from torture, as practised by the Nazis, is that 'il y a des circon­ stances où il est impossible d'être un homme: on devient un singe ou un mort.'55 As a mode of conduct, torture exhibits the same vice as sadism: striving to make objects of its victims (monkey or corpse) without, however, depriving them of their subjectivity. This is a selfcontradictory project because it is, of course, ontologically impossible to make the pour-soi and the en-soi coincide. Frantz may claim to have 'chang[é] l'homme en vermine de son vivanf (p.207, his emphasis), but he is of course deluding himself: men cannot actually be transformed into vermin or monkeys, and yet remain men. The fundamental conversion into object can ultimately be accomplished only by death. Like sadism, 'la torture se solde par un échec' because, in order to objectify his victim, the torturer must finally make him a corpse - but, then, he cannot avert the reciprocal objectifying effect of the victim's death, the moment when 'l'impuissance change de bord'.56 Suicide is the fitting retribution for torture because the perpetrator is thereby reified (by himself, for others), just as he intended his victim to be. We have noted that Sartre saw Frantz's crime as largely con­ ditioned (though not quite determined) by his situation, whilst allowing for a 'brief moment of freedom'.57 Frantz similarly had a sense of destiny - 'Sur toutes les routes, il y a des crimes [...] 52 53

54 55 56 57

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Interview with L'Express, in Un Théâtre de situations, p.363. Sartre, quoted by Jean-Paul Lacroix, 'Le "Séquestré cTAltona" condamné à un deuxième suicide', Paris-Presse, 29 April 1966, cited in Les Écrits de Sartre, p.333. Sartre, 'Les Animaux malades de la rage', Libération, 22 June 1953, in Les Écrits de Sartre, pp.704-8 (p.707). Sartre, 'Julius Fucik', Les Lettres françaises, 17-24 June 1954, in Les Écrits de S0r/re,pp.7O9-13(p.711). Ibid See interview with Der Spiegel, in Un Théâtre de situations, p.399.

préfabriqués qui n'attendent que leur criminel' (pp. 177—8) - though he lays claim to 'Une minute d'indépendance' (p.217), a fleeting access of autonomy in which he appears to have exercised moral discretion, but for which his motivation remains obscure (unlike Oreste's, for comparison). It is incredible that he tortured partisans merely to save the skins of Klages and Heinrich, both of whom he clearly despised. It is equally improbable that he was influenced by concern for his own survival, since we know that he went to war looking for death. Nor does the matter-of-fact explanation he first offers to his father carry much conviction: 'Les partisans nous harcelaient; ils avaient la complicité du village: j'ai tenté de faire parler les villageois' (p.204). Von Gerlach's evidently sceptical assent ('slow, heavy, inexpressive'), indicates that he too knows there is something more profound and personal, less practical, behind Frantz's motivation: 'Mon cher père, autant vous prévenir: je suis tortionnaire parce que vous êtes dénociateur.' This encapsulates the psychological mechanism operating behind Frantz's crimes: he 'went to the very limits of power', as he puts it later in the same dialogue, because, as his father acknowledges, 'Une fois dans ta vie, tu as connu l'impuis­ sance' (p.205). Yet this is more an explanation of Frantz's con­ ditioning, than of his 'moment of freedom'. In search of that elusive, decisive moment, Frantz recalls the 'indefinable assent'59 he detected, 'at the very core of his impotence', on that dreadful day when his father's interference resulted in the refugee rabbi being killed before his eyes. To will what one cannot prevent necessarily creates an illusion of power, hence of independence from the overweening force that imposes impotence upon one (the father, in Frantz's case, and in most others). Translated to the war-time context of the Russian front, the temptation for Frantz to contrive similar moments of pseudo-power was all the greater

58

59

Compare Oreste's same sense of fatedness: 'Il y a des hommes qui naissent engagés: ils n'ont pas le choix, on les a jetés sur un chemin, au bout du chemin il y a un acte qui les attend, leur acte' (Les Mouches, p.26). Note that Oreste's 'act' has become Frantz's 'crime': Oreste punished the guilty, Frantz tormented the innocent. See p.206.

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because of the myriad possibilities for transgression endemic in uncircumscribed conflict. Torture can always be spuriously legitim­ ised as necessary, as a form of self-defence: Plus de vivres; mes soldats rôdaient autour de la grange. (Revivant le passé.) Quatre bons Allemands m'écraseront contre le sol et mes hommes à moi saigneront les prisonniers à blanc. Non! Je ne retomberai jamais dans l'abjecte impuissance. [...] L'horreur est encore enchaînée... je les prendrai de vitesse: si quelqu'un la déchaîne, ce sera moi. Je revendiquerai le mal, je manifesterai mon pouvoir par la singularité d'un acte inoubliable: changer l'homme en vermine de son vivant, je m'occuperai seul des prisonniers, je les précipiterai dans l'abjection: ils parleront. Le pouvoir est un abîme dont je vois le fond; cela ne suffit pas de choisir les morts futurs; par un canif et un briquet, je déciderai du règne humain, (pp.206-7)

The 'shortage of rations' points to a potential practical justification for the action Frantz chose to take, but that is quickly discarded in favour of the memory of a previous taste of impotence. Never again would he tolerate the double humiliation of being restrained himself, while others perfom inhumane acts which he cannot impede, and which he must therefore secretly endorse in order to salvage some semblance of power. He had, in other words, to pre-empt his own ineffectiveness as a commander: had he ordered his men not to maltreat their prisoners, he could not be sure that they would not have defied him, in any case. The solution, when doubtful of being obeyed, is to issue the order your subordinates want to hear; Frantz went one better, and led by example. Thus at the very zenith of his power (or illusion of it), he was still haunted by his impotence. On the first count against him of torture, Frantz had allowed others (Heinrich) to perform an action he knew he could not prevent; on the second count, he had performed the act himself, for fear of being unable to prevent it otherwise. His 'unforgettable act', however, is a snare and a delusion, as we have already noted: the victim can never be simultaneously living (subject) and dead (object). The idea that one can 'settle the human realm with a lighter and a penknife' is almost comic, both in its bathos and in its incongruent juxtapositions of abstract and concrete, philosophical and banal, high-minded and humdrum. And the self-contradictory futility of Frantz's grandiose ambition is shown forth by the fact that his

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prisoners died before talking: 'Qui perd gagne', as his father laconically remarks, their deaths affirming the redundancy of the act and reifying the agent, Me règne humain, ce sont eux qui en ont décidé' (p.207). If this was Frantz's 'momentarily free' act, it was a spectacular failure, despite his claim to have 'retained his authority'. This leaves Frantz with one last, supposedly free act at his disposal: suicide. However, most critics agree that there is an ineluct­ ability about it, a moral and existential logic: Johanna, his lifeline, abandons him;60 symbiosis with the father means that the creator's death entails the creature's;61 it is the 'tragic conclusion' of their shared 'coming to lucidity';62 death is the only possible exit from incarceration;63 or, it is inevitable in the historical perspective of the class struggle,64 the logical outcome of 'le projet de sa vie, qui était la grandeur',65 and the only feasible atonement for 'crimes beyond the possibility of redemption'.66 Sartre himself stressed that Frantz's rela­ tionship with his father so conditioned his freedom as to make his choice of death an inescapable one: Ce que son père va lui expliquer, c'est qu'au fond il ne pouvait rien faire d'autre que ce qu'il a fait, et qu'il était par conséquent aussi impuissant dans le mal que dans le bien. A partir de là, Frantz ne peut rien choisir d'autre que la mort.67

The problem with all these fatalistic readings of father and son's final action is that they do not explain how and why two men who both aver that they do not want to die (j u s t yet) - 'Cela n'arrange rien de mourir: cela ne m'arrange pas', says Frantz (p.217), and moments later his father asks for a 'respite', a stay of execution - nevertheless 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67

See Goldthorpe (1973), p. 120 See Contât (1968), p.57. See Dort, p.98. See Boros, p.45. See Laraque, p.248. Fields, p.626. Cohn, p. 136. Interview with Der Spiegel, in Un théâtre de situations, p.399. Or again: 'Il ne se suicide pas parce qu'il a tué ou torturé, mais parce qu'il a découvert qu'il ne peut plus rien faire. C'est son impuissance qui le tue' {ibid., p.404).

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choose to do so, and with breathtaking immediacy. 'Je t'ai fait, je te déferai', says the father, with all the arrogance of the life-giver: 'Ma mort enveloppera la tienne et, finalement, je serai seul à mourir. (Un temps.) Attends. Pour moi non plus, je ne pensais pas que tout irait si vite' (p.218). Where, notwithstanding this maelstrom of high emotion, might we find the scintilla of free will that could still make of this suicide Frantz's first and only 'act', in Sartre's sense of the word? It appears that Frantz eventually agreed to meet his father in order to shock him, by divulging his crimes and boasting of his 'independence'. But old Gerlach is unmoved, and Frantz, frustrated by his refusal to pass judgment, threatens to lock himself away again: 'Ah, je n'aurais pas dû vous revoir! Je m'en doutais! [...] De ce qui m'arriverait' (p.209). This foreboding stems from Frantz's realisation that he has told his father nothing he did not already know; knowledge is power, his omniscience is of a piece with his omnipotence. Frantz is by turns 'stupéfait, violent, décontenancé' (p.210), as he learns that old Gerlach already knew about his grisly exploits via two survivors and would-be blackmailers; that he silenced them (by implication, had them killed); and that he then registered Frantz's death in order, for the third and last time in his son's life, to 'settle matters'. This revelation comes as a terrible blow to Frantz. For thirteen years he has nourished his spirit with these few moments of autonomy, only to find that, once more, his father had stolen his acts from him by intervening to clear up the consequences. The obvious inference to draw is that, with his insatiable appetite for 'settling things', the father will settle the present situation too, in his own 'imperious' manner. 'Vous me travaillez!', Frantz complains, suddenly conscious of being manipulated even now: Quand vous montrez vos sentiments, c'est qu'ils peuvent servir vos projets. [...] quand vous me jugerez à point... Allons! Vous n'avez eu que trop de temps pour ruminer cette affaire et vous êtes trop impérieux pour n'avoir pas envie de la régler à votre façon, (pp.211-12)

With 'dark irony', his father denies that he is still 'imperious', yet agrees, 'with an implacable gentleness': 'Mais pour cette affaire, oui; je la réglerai' (p.212). This is an invitation to suicide which is also a

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thinly veiled threat, an instance of the father at his most subtly controlling. Von Gerlach reinforces that control by insisting that Frantz cannot resume his 'play-acting', now that he knows the true fate of Germany and shares the guilt of the Nuremberg convicts, to which Frantz counters: 'Je ne veux pas mourir' (p.214). His pride (a family trait) will not allow him to accept death as a 'common criminal'. His father, he argues, can accept death because he has 'inscribed his name' upon the world through his industrial empire: 'Mort, vous serez une flotte.' Whereas Frantz amounts to a succession of failed attempts to act, a concatenation of non-events, 'Rien': FRANTZ (avec égarement): Voilà pourquoi je vivrai cent ans. Je n'ai que ma vie, moi. (Hagard.) Je n'ai qu'elle! On ne me la prendra pas. Croyez que je la déteste, mais je la préfère à rien. LE PÈRE: Ta vie, ta mort, de toute façon, c'est rien. Tu n'es rien, tu ne fais rien, tu n'as rien fait, tu ne peux rien faire, (p.214)

This categorical and comprehensive summary of Frantz's nullity is hardly calculated to make him feel good about himself! Indeed, it is the father's bullying at its most brutal, persuading his son that the proposed transition to death effectively alters nothing, in his case. In this context, Frantz is admirably bold to withstand this pressure and to assert his tenacity on life so emphatically, even though what he calls 'life' is really a parody of it. Old Gerlach's next ploy is to 'blame' Frantz's impotence upon the Frankenstein's monster of the business itself, which has no need of the king he once was, or the 'prince' that Frantz would have become. The industrial machine itself is responsible for his castration: Pour agir tu prenais les plus gros risques et, tu vois, [l'Entreprise] transformait en gestes tous tes actes. Ton tourment a fini par te pousser au crime et jusque dans le crime elle t'annule: elle s'engraisse de ta défaite, (p.215)

This deeply dishonest attempt, to shift the onus of Frantz's failure from himself to the faceless industrial giant, overlooks the fact that, in this scenario, Gerlach himself is the Frankenstein who created the monster in the first place. It is once more to Frantz's credit that he 245

nevertheless forces an admission to that effect from his father, that he was 'voué à l'impuissance [et] au crime' (p.216) by von Gerlach's 'passions': 'Dis à ton tribunal de Crabes que je suis seul coupable - et de tout.' However, this turns out to be a Pyrrhic victory for Frantz, because it is this admission that finally loosens his grip on life, and draws him into the suicide pact that his father has plotted for them: 'Voilà ce que je voulais vous entendre dire', says Frantz, as he descends the stairs for the last time to 'accept' the deal he is being offered. From this moment, it would seem that the life-denying agenda of the father has ensnared the son and snuffed out his will to action (to life) altogether. So, have we sought in vain for the 'moment of freedom' in which Frantz gains a fleeting moral independence of his father? We can contend that this is to be found in Frantz's timing of what happens next. He had long since sentenced himself to death and had merely lived in reprieve: 'J'ai vécu treize ans avec un revolver chargé dans mon tiroir. Savez-vous pourquoi je ne me suis pas tué? Je me disais: ce qui est fait restera fait' (p.217).68 Now he sees that his part in his own past was a role written for him by his heredity and history, Frantz moves quickly to execute that sentence upon himself. Thus, for the first time ever, he is not doing exactly as his father wants or expects, and their relationship is reversed, with the father now disconcerted by the son: 'Alors, j'accepte', he announces, '[mais il y a] une seule condition: tous les deux, tout de suite.' Von Gerlach is literally choked by this sudden, breakneck speed of events. 'Je viens de te retrouver', he protests sentimentally - emotional blackmail, which Frantz rebuts with an all-too-lucid rejoinder: 'Vous n'avez retrouvé personne. Même pas vous' (p.216). Frantz cleverly turns his father's arguments against him: if it is true that he has never done anything, then he is indeed nobody. The relentless rigour of this analysis hands Frantz an initiative which he has never before held, and in which he delights because of his father's evident emotion, offering 68

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Compare: '[Frantz] a depuis longtemps pris conscience de son crime et [...] s'épuise à se défendre devant des magistrats invisibles pour se cacher la sentence de mort qu'il a déjà portée sur lui-même' (Sartre, programme note, Théâtre vivant, in Un Théâtre de situations, p.409).

him a unique opportunity to comfort the older man for his own selfloathing: LE PÈRE: [...] Ma mort enveloppera la tienne et, finalement, je serai seul à mourir. [...] Tu sais, moi non plus, je ne m'aimais pas. FRANTZ (posant la main sur le bras du Père): Cela me regardait. LE PÈRE (même jeu): Enfin, voilà. Je suis l'ombre d'un nuage; une averse et le soleil éclairera la place où j'ai vécu. Je m'en fous: qui gagne perd. L'Entreprise qui nous écrase, je l'ai faite. Il n'y a rien à regretter, (p.218)

Gerlach's refusal to regret the suddenness of this common death, to which Frantz is resolved to precipitate them, is explained by his wish to prove the unity of father and son that Frantz had disputed: 'Tant que nous vivrons, nous serons deux' (p.217). This challenge to Gerlach's egotism (solipsism, even), reinforced by childhood memories of fast cars, secures Frantz's Pyrrhic victory. The father yields to a demand for urgency which (on examination) is completely specious, except insofar as it permits Frantz to impose his will modestly upon the situation - 'qui perd gagne', in this case. In order to win this modest but crucial victory, Frantz dominates his own instinct to live: 'Cela n'arrange rien de mourir: cela ne m'arrange pas. J'aurais voulu... vous allez rire: j'aurais voulu n'être jamais né' (p.217). Sartre specifies that Frantz is 'profoundly sincere' when saying these lines, making the most fundamental reproach to his father that he can possibly make, echoing Oreste's to Clytemnestre: 'Why did you give me life?' To wish oneself unborn is futile, if under­ standable, and is not synonymous with wishing to die; death cannot reverse birth or abolish life, it merely reifies them. Sartre argued in L'Être et le néant that suicide is 'one way among others of being in the world', and that, paradoxically, it bespeaks a responsibility for one's own birth: '[J']ai honte d'être né ou je m'en étonne, ou je m'en réjouis, ou, en tentant de m'ôter la vie, j'affirme que je vis et j'assume cette vie comme mauvaise. Ainsi, en un certain sens, je choisis d'être né.'69 Nevertheless, suicide is as close as Frantz can get to rejecting his father's unwanted gift of life (albeit, a life of sorts), and to punishing him for the additional imposition of impotence (the 69

L'Être et le néant, p.641.

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confiscation of a life worthy of the name). By making a show of willing his own death, Frantz can appear at last to break the father's stranglehold. And yet: if suicide is invariably a sterile and senseless gesture 'Le suicide est une absurdité qui fait sombrer ma vie dans l'absurde'70 - how can Sartre speak of 'une libération véritable dans les deux suicides'?71 No doubt, father and son will both be released from the misery of impotence and superfluousness, but each must then pass into the domain of the Other and, like all the dead, become profoundly objectified. In what sense is this a liberation? The answer, I think, lies in the martyric aspect of Frantz's life and death. Sartre sees his pro­ tagonist, despite all his posturing, as a true witness of his time: 'Frantz, quand il meurt, ce bourreau, c'est nous, c'est moi.'72 And as a witness, too, of humankind, sacrificed on the altar of history in the ritual dialectic of the act, the agent changed by the world he changes: 'Il n'y a pas de mystère révélé', Sartre cautions, 'Il y a une dialectique.'73 Frantz's death becomes a testimony to the impossibility of life as a wholly free, autonomous, undetermined and unconditioned human project, a signpost to the inescapable logic of the historical dialectic. It is Frantz's martyrdom that imparts value to his death: Inversement, les valeurs sauvent la mort et la naissance même du vaincu: par l'effet bien connu de l'illusion rétrospective, la défaite terminale nous paraît être le sens et la fin suprême de cette vie perdue; on naît pour perdre, on se voue dès l'enfance à l'échec. Du coup, la mort est un achèvement: délivrée de son aspect accidentel, elle devient l'acte d'une subjectivité qui se résorbe dans la valeur qu'elle a posée. [...] Ainsi le vaincu s'arrache à la contingence originelle et devient valeur-sujet.74

If we interpret the foregoing generously in respect of Frantz, we can view him as snatching, from the jaws of existential and ontological 70 71 72 73 74

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L'Être et le néant, p.624. Interview with Oreste F. Pucciani, Tulane Drama Review, March 1961, extract in Un Théâtre de situations, pp.407-8 (p.408). interview with Madeleine Chapsal in Les Ecrivains en personne (Julliard, Paris, 1960), in Situations IX, pp.9-39 (p.30). Interview with Tulane Drama Review, in Un Théâtre de situations, p.408. Saint Genet, comédien et martyr, p. 216.

defeat (his death, which definitively objectifies the object that he pre­ maturely was in life), a scrap of subjectivity, of authentic life, because his suicide transforms his inherent 'échec' into an assertion of irre­ ducible value (originally expressed in his rescue of the rabbi). Yet, to elevate self-inflicted death to the moral status of 'value-subject', this is surely to subvert the value that Sartre has hitherto asserted as supreme, namely life itself? Frantz's victory, if such it is, is strictly in the mode of 'qui perd gagne', but that is a perplexing dogma of moral confusion. To say 'qui perd gagne', or 'qui gagne perd', is the same as to say 'qui perd perd' and 'qui gagne gagne' - which are just meaningless tautologies. The only winner, it seems, is history; but, without human agents, history is nothing. The unmanned tribunal never responds - 'Hein, quoi?' (p.223) - and the rest is silence. Any glimmer of hope in Les Séquestrés d'Altona is so feint and cryptic that it is easy to share Verstraeten's conclusion: 'Pour la première fois dans le théâtre sartrien, une pièce s'achève sans perspective positive.'75 Sartre's own comments support this view: 'Je n'ai voulu montrer que le négatif. Ces gens-là ne peuvent pas se renouveler. C'est la déconfiture, le "crépuscule des dieux".'76 It seems to me that Sartre's purpose in this play was much the same as in the contemporaneous Critique de la raison dialectique, namely to salvage the concrete individual from the abstract mass of Marxian historical theory: 'Au contraire, existentialisme et marxisme visent le même objet mais le second a résorbé l'homme dans l'idée et le premier le cherche partout où il est, à son travail, chez lui, dans la rue.'77 Frantz stands heroically alone, like an existentialist Canute facing the over­ whelming incoming tide of history. Sartre questions his earlier assumptions about moral values, but in order to vindicate them by implication. The 'negative' side he sought exclusively to explore in this drama implies a 'positive' side which he had certainly dramatised elsewhere (conspicuously in Le Diable et le bon dieu). However, his mistake, perhaps, was to leave that gesture towards positivity too 75 76 77

Verstraeten ( 1972), p. 186. Interview with Les Lettres françaises, 17 September 1959, extract in Un Théâtre de situations, p. 367. Questions de méthode, p.28

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recondite; overtly, despair dominates hope. Frantz's brief moments of existential liberty do not amount to a life-affirming statement capable of countering the overall impression of death (physical and moral) triumphant. However, the Critique is an essentially hopeful work, in which the individual is conceived as re-appropriating his sovereignty through the medium of the sworn group, and exchanging 'death' for 'life': Par la souveraineté, le groupe s'aliène à un seul homme pour éviter de s'aliéner à l'ensemble matériel et humain; chacun éprouve, en effet, son aliénation comme vie (comme vie d'un Autre à travers sa propre vie) au lieu de l'éprouver comme une mort (comme réification de toutes ses relations).78

If history can be managed through an understanding of the dialectical process involved in its making, why does Les Séquestrés d'Altona emit such an air of pessimism? I suggest that, for Sartre, Frantz's 'twilight' is shared by the theatrical medium. In this sense, Les Séquestrés d'Altona is also a companion piece to his 'farewell' to literature, Les Mots. It is the first of his plays to manifest the theatre's inability to fulfil the mandate he assigned to literature in general, and to the theatre in particular, in his post-war theoretical writings. The whole burden of Qu 'est-ce que la littérature? is that the writer should speak from his freedom, about freedom, to the freedom of the reader.79 In his presentation of Les Temps modernes, Sartre had aspired to 'faire en sorte que l'homme puisse, en toute circonstance, choisir la vie',80 a luxury denied to Frantz von Gerlach, as we have seen. Or again: Plongez des hommes dans ces situations universelles et extrêmes qui ne leur laissent qu'un couple d'issues, faites qu'en choisissant l'issue ils se choisissent eux-mêmes: vous avez gagné, la pièce est bonne.81

Yet, Frantz chooses himself in death! A 'bad' play, therefore, or one in which the author, along with his protagonists, plays at 'loser wins'? 78 79 80 81

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Critique de la raison dialectique I, p.603. See, for example, Situations II, pp. 111-12, 251, 265, 313. Situations II, p.28. Tour un théâtre de situations', in Un Théâtre de situations, p.21.

Whatever the case, it seems that Frantz's impotence became conflated with that of the dramatic genre itself: Sartre would never return to the theatre as an original playwright. His last piece was to be an adaptation of Euripides' Trojan Women, an apt choice both in form and content. Having depicted the 'twilight' of an individual, a family, a social stratum, in Les Séquestrés d'Altona, Sartre went on to evoke the death throes of a whole society, a civilisation, and an entire species, in Les Troyennes.

Les Troyennes There would be a lengthy pause of five and a half years between the première of Sartre's last original play, Les Séquestrés d'Altona, in autumn 1959, and that of his last play tout court, an adaptation of Euripides' Trojan Women, in spring 1965. Yet there is a unifying theme: Algeria. The new decade began with the death of Albert Camus in a car crash on 4 January 1960, an event that stunned France and rever­ berated around the world. The recent Nobel laureate for literature was an internationally famous and fashionable intellectual. Of humble stock, the son of French and Spanish settlers, Camus's pied noir roots in Algeria had lent special authority to his controversial opinions, and studious silences, on the French government's handling of the decol­ onisation process. These had been a source of ongoing disagreement between him and Sartre. Nevertheless, the latter wrote a touching and generous tribute to his erstwhile interlocutor in France-Observateur, on 7 January 1960: Il représentait en ce siècle, et contre l'Histoire, l'héritier actuel de cette longue lignée de moralistes dont les œuvres constituent peut-être ce qu'il y a de plus original dans les lettres françaises. Son humanisme têtu, étroit et pur, austère et sensuel, livrait un combat douteux contre les événements massifs et difformes de ce temps. Mais, inversement, par l'opiniâtreté de ces refus, il réaffirmait, au

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cœur de notre époque, contre les machiavéliens, contre le veau d'or du réalisme, l'existence du fait moral.82

An earlier and closer friend, Paul Nizan, was also commemorated in a North African context by Sartre's lengthy and affecting preface to the re-edition of the former's Aden-Arabie, which (according to Contât and Rybalka) brought Sartre to the notice of a new generation of intel­ lectuals.83 His own contemporaries, however, or at least the conser­ vatives amongst them, were less favourably impressed by his expressly anti-establishment stance on the Algerian question. Specifically, his interventions at the National Congress for Peace in Algeria (in June), and his signature on the 'Manifesto of the 121' (in August) - vindicating all those who assisted the indigenous population, by whatever means, to throw off the colonialist yoke incurred the implacable wrath of the OAS {Organisation de Varmée secrete\ a movement of service veterans dedicated to the retention of French Algeria. These angry middle-aged and old men demonstrated on the Champs-Elysées in October 1960, demanding that Sartre be shot as a traitor, and Paris-Match hysterically dubbed him 'une machine à guerre civile'. Despite widespread calls for Sartre's arrest, De Gaulle himself allegedly forbade any police action against the troublesome philosopher, with the memorable pronouncement: 'On n'arrête pas Voltaire!'84 The OAS was less respectful, however, and 'bombed' Sartre's apartment twice within six months (July 1961 and January 1962). Sartre was unhurt and undaunted, continuing to protest loudly throughout these years, against the activities of the OAS in general, and the brutal repression of pro-Algerian demonstrations in particular. Nevertheless, the advent of Algerian independence in July 1962 was undoubtedly a political triumph for De Gaulle and his faction.85 82 83

84 85

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'Albert Camus', in Situations IV, pp. 126-9 (p. 127). See Œuvres romanesques, p.LXXIX. As usual, this chronology is the main source of biographical information in these prefatory remarks, and should be consulted for fuller detail. Œuvres romanesques, p.LXXX. For an admirably clear and coherent account of this period, see Drake, pp. 11727.

Things theatrical had not been excluded form Sartre's increasingly politics-focused agenda during the early 1960s. In March 1960, for example, he gave his longest (and last) lecture on the theatre at the Sorbonne, entitled Théâtre épique et théâtre dramatique'. In this, he considered whether the two poles of this Brechtian dichotomy - epic, demonstrative, socialist drama on the one hand, and dramatic, participative, bourgeois drama on the other - might be reconciled in a new, modern conflation, concluding as follows: Dans ces conditions, il semble que toutes les forces que le jeune théâtre peut opposer aux pièces bourgeoises que nous avons actuellement, doivent être unies, et qu'il n'y a pas de vraie opposition entre la forme dramatique et la forme épique, sinon que Tune tire vers la quasi-objectivité de l'objet, c'est-àdire de l'homme, et va ainsi vers l'échec, puisqu'on n'arrive jamais à avoir un homme objectif, avec l'erreur de croire qu'on peut donner une société-objet aux spectateurs, tandis que l'autre, si on ne la corrigeait pas par un peu d'objectivité, irait trop vers le côté de la sympathie, de YEinfuhlung [empathy], et risquerait de tomber du côté du théâtre bourgeois. Par conséquent, c'est entre ces deux formes de théâtre, je crois, que le problème aujourd'hui peut se 86

poser.

Arguably, Sartre would strive to attain this middle way in Les Troyennes by combining the distancing, objectifying effect of Antiquity with the eternal theme's allusive appeal to empathy. A few weeks after giving this important lecture, he visited Belgrade, in May 1960, for the productions of Huis clos and Les Séquestrés d'Altona. The latter also had its Czech première in November 1963, in Prague, and once more the author was there. In March 1964, Sartre lifted his twelve-year embargo on Les Mains sales for a new Italian production in Turin.87 Meanwhile, John Huston's film, Freud, the Secret Passion - for which Sartre had drafted the original screenplays, but from which he withdrew his name after their mutilation at the hands of Hollywood re-writers - reached the screen by the end of 1962, as did Pedro Escudero's Argentine movie adaptation of Huis clos, as No

86 87

'Théâtre épique et théâtre dramatique', in Un Théâtre de situations, pp. 113-63 (p.163). See Œuvres romanesques, p.LXXXIV.

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Exit. The following year saw Vittorio de Sica's cinematic adaptation of Les Séquestrés d'Altona. Sartre had begun to contemplate a new play in late 1962, planning an adaptation of Euripides' Alcestis, within a feminist perspective. However, this evidently proved a less fertile source of inspiration than another Euripidean text, which offered him the prospect of marrying his political preoccupations with his evolving theatrical aesthetic. He adapted The Trojan Women during the summer of 1964, and Les Troyennes had its première with the TNP {Théâtre national populaire) at the Palais de Chaillot, Paris, on 10 March 1965, appositely produced by a team of Greek extraction: Jean Tsarouchis (designer), Jean Prodromides (musical director), and Michel Cacoyannis (director). In an interview with Bernard Pingaud for the TNP's monthly review, Bref, subsequently published as the intro­ duction to Gallimard's edition of the play, Sartre explained, inter alia, the Algerian connection: Les Troyennes [d'Euripide] ont été représentées pendant la guerre d'Algérie, dans une traduction très fidèle de Jacqueline Moatti. J'avais été frappé du succès qu'avait obtenu ce drame auprès d'un public favorable à la negotiation avec le FLN. C'est évidemment cet aspect qui m'a intéressé d'abord. Vous n'ignorez pas que, du temps même d'Euripide, il avait une signification politique précise. Il était une condamnation de la guerre en général, et des expéditions coloniales en particulier.88

Clearly, therefore, Sartre had espied a new opportunity to use the theatre as a place of protest and political persuasion, although - to judge by Simone de Beauvoir's account - that opportunity was pretty much squandered by the uneven quality of the production: La première fois que nous nous sommes rendus au théâtre, peu de jours avant la générale, nous avons été atterrés: une musique fracassante couvrait la voix des acteurs. Ils jouaient bien; [...] Mais les chœurs étaient très mal réglés. [...] Sartre a obtenu qu'on supprimât quelques effets scéniques désastreux. Le soir

88

254

'Introduction', in Les Troyennes, pp.2-8 (p.6). Future page references are in the body of the text; where consecutive quotations concern the same page, only the first is referenced.

de la générale le public a beaucoup applaudi mais nos amis manquaient comme nous d'enthousiasme.89

The press, happily, was more enthusiastic than the playwright and his coterie. Notably, Sartre's old adversary, Jean-Jacques Gautier (at whom he had poked fiin in his Sorbonne lecture on 'epic and dramatic' theatre),90 rhapsodised about the 'beauty, grandeur and purity of the spectacle', and eulogised the adaptation itself as 'intelligent, free, measured and faithful': 'Elle a les qualités d'une œuvre originale, car son auteur a su lui donner un tour moderne sans lui enlever son caractère d'éternité.'91 Indeed, so rapturous is this review that one wonders whether Gautier had missed the play's anti­ war and anti-colonialist message altogether. His colleague, Jacques Lemarchand, had evidently not missed the point when his equally affirmative review defended Sartre's 'politicisation' of his ancient source on the grounds that 'ces tragédies d'Euripide [...] sont politiques - mais tout dans Athènes était politique: le mot avait conservé sa noblesse'.92 His enthusiasm for Sartre's adaptation was fulsome, describing it as 'more faithful than any pious translation'. Claude Mauriac, reviewing the published text, went further still in his admiration of Sartre's poetic gift, claiming for it a 'tragic beauty and grandeur' not to be found in Euripides, and concluding that 'après cette adaptation des Troyennes, les meilleures traductions risquent de nous décevoir'.93 In short, despite his own doubts and reservations, Sartre's Les Troyennes was a critical triumph.94 Although undoubtedly an adaptation - Gallimard published it under the name of Euripides, 'adaptation de Jean-Paul Sartre' - Les Troyennes is replete with Sartrean themes: why else would he have chosen to adapt it? War, love, faith, honour, glory, violence, inter89 90 91 92 93 94

Tout compte fait, p.216. See Un Théâtre de situations, p. 115. Le Figaro, 19 March 1965, p.26. Le Figaro littéraire, 25 March 1965. Le Figaro, 14 February 1966, p. 16. It is an intriguing contrast that English critics of the 1966 Edinburgh Festival production - which tried to re-focus the allegory on Vietnam - ranged in their reactions from grudging to hostile (see O'Donohoe [2001b]).

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personal, especially internecine, relationships are the transcendent topoi that can be subsumed under the over-arching Sartrean question: life or death? The situation - devastation in the aftermath of a long and pitiless war - is saturated with death. Troy itself is nothing but 'flammes et flocons noirs' (p. 13), whose few surviving citizens (the eponymous Trojan women) devote their dwindling present to lamen­ tations of their past and future misfortunes. These three time-zones are pervaded by destruction and bereavement: the past evokes mourning for Priam and Hector, and all the lost generation of Trojan men; the present sees the murders of Polyxène (scene 7) and Astyanax (scene 11); and the future holds the various deaths foretold (in scene 5) by the clairvoyant Cassandre, namely those of Agamemnon and Clytemnestre, of the entire Atrides' dynasty, and of Cassandre herself. Even the distant future of posterity is closed off by the death of Astyanax, 'le destin de notre famille' (p.73), emblem of the entire future male line, slain by the Greeks precisely in order to snuff out any hope of Trojan resurrection. Where there is hope, there is life; where there is no hope, there is death: HÉCUBE: Ma fille, que dis-tu? Tu le sais bien, pourtant: la mort c'est le vide; Dans la vie la plus misérable Il reste au moins Pespoir. (p.69)

Hope is a crucial component of the existential condition, a prerequisite of authentic action, of the moral life. Sartre summarised this long-held precept in one of his last publications, the controversial interviews with the former Maoist militant, Benny Levy (alias Pierre Victor), published in Le Nouvel Observateur during March 1980: Je pense que l'espoir fait partie de l'homme; l'action humaine est transcen­ dante, c'est-à-dire qu'elle vise toujours un objet futur à partir du présent où nous la concevons et où nous tentons de la réaliser; elle met sa fin, sa réalisation

256

dans l'avenir; et, dans la manière d'agir, il y a l'espoir, c'est-à-dire le fait même de poser une fin comme devant être réalisée.95

Altogether bereft of hope, the Trojan women are, in an existential sense, already dead: 'Dans l'impossibilité d'agir, devant un futur qu'elle n'a pas choisi, Hécube est morte, aussi morte que l'était Garcin.'96 This is a literally desperate analysis, which the women themselves share: 'Les Grecs, sortis de leur cachette, / égorgeaient nos hommes et tous nos enfants mâles. / Notre dernier jour de bonheur s'achevait, / le premier jour de notre mort commençait' (p.62). Death is a denial of choice, an absence of the defining human characteristic of freedom (compare Huis clos), the ultimate situation-limite, 'une absence totale de liberté d'action [...] tous les personnages [étant] tenus captifs dans l'attente de leur destin'.97 Is the condemnation of these miserable zombies, these living dead, really as hopeless and irre­ vocable as that of their modern forebears? The inferno of Les Troyennes consists of three concentric circles, whose common centre is captivity and victimisation or, ontologically speaking, objectification. Caught in the innermost circle, suffering in the here-and-now, are the Trojan women, subjugated by the Greeks. Trapped in the second circle are the Greeks themselves, dominated by the gods, to whose decrees all humankind is subject. The death sentence passed by Poseidon and Pallas applies equally to Greeks and Trojans alike, fixing the immediate future and stealing human discretion, destroying any prospect of meaningful action. In the third and outermost circle, which cannot be delimited, the gods too are ensnared and doomed. The gods may abandon men (scene 9), but in so doing they also annihilate themselves, because there are only men, and the gods have need of us to sustain them in being. Hécube foretells their demise:

95

96 97

L'Espoir maintenant: les Entretiens de 1980, p.21, originally published in three parts in Le Nouvel Observateur (nos.800, 801, 802), 10, 17, 24 March 1980, then in book form in 1991, with foreword and afterword by Benny Levy. Lords, p.314. Lords, p.309.

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Dans deux mille ans encore Notre nom sera dans toutes le bouches; On reconnaîtra notre gloire Et votre stupide injustice Et vous n'y pourrez rien Car vous serez morts depuis longtemps, Olympiens, Comme nous. (p. 121)

- as does Sartre: 'Les Dieux crèveront avec les hommes, et cette mort commune est la leçon de la tragédie' (p.6). This indescribable third circle is the infinite perspective of posterity, the unending and universal dialectic of history. The pessimistic message of Les Séquestrés d'Altona - that humankind is in peril of becoming the plaything of history, and that the judgments of posterity might indeed be the death of us - is reaffirmed emphatically by Les Troyennes, in its iconoclastic explosion of all myths. In a final promise of irre­ versible apocalypse, Poseidon (god) joins Trojans (oppressed) and Greeks (oppressors/oppressed) in that cataclysmic 'common death which is the lesson of tragedy'. Is there any room at all for action in this uniformly objectifying situation? Lorris, we have seen, suggests not; but where is drama without action? Action can be reduced to a choice of mental attitude (a funda­ mental tenet of Sartre's doctrine, as expounded in L'Être et le néant, for example). Broadly speaking, Sartre's dramatic heroes fall into two groups. Those who rise above despair, and choose hope, find existential life, even if paradoxically in death (Bariona, Oreste, Canoris, Goetz, Kean, Valera). Those who succumb to despair and abandon hope, find existential (and usually physical) death (Garcin, Lizzie, Hugo, Frantz). In this last play, Hécube and the chorus of Trojan women fluctuate between hope and despair, but, vitally, they retain the power to choose between the two, and this is their sole prospect of future action, amid the desolation of actions past. Troy has been sacked, and controversy rages as to the apportionment of blame: Andromaque blames Hécube for not having slain Paris as the gods had commanded (scene 7); Hécube blames Hélène for having seduced Paris (scene 10); Hélène, in turn, blames Aphrodite for having beguiled her. But these recriminations are sterile; insofar as they focus 258

upon the past, they do not assist the women to choose between despair and hope, which necessarily postulates a future. Only Cassandre appears to hold out hope of future action. In her rambling tirade (scene 5), she sees herself as the agent of vengeance, bearing a torch whose 'flamme légère' is significantly 'vive et sacrée' (p.45), yet she incarnates death itself ('Je suis la mort', p.55), which she intends to bring upon Agamemnon and the house of Atreus ('notre grand lit nuptial sera son lit de mort', p.47). It is also significant, however, that her compatriots regard her as mad. Even to conceive of action in their present circumstances strikes them as lunacy, much as Sarah's intention to bear her baby, in Bariona, seemed to bespeak a fatal delusion, a failure to connect personal and historical facticities. If hope is the prerequisite of action, grounds for hope are nonetheless the prerequisite of hope itself: '[...] mais cet espoir, il faut le fonder'.98 Crucial to the moral choice confronting them is the question whether the death of the Trojan men has been worthwhile, whether their sacri­ fice has been an heroic martyrdom or a futile massacre. As their opinion on this varies, so the disposition of the women veers from inconsolable despair to defiant hope, and back again. Prominent in these mental triumphs and defeats is Hécube, whose striving after hope is arguably the main action of this otherwise static drama. Initially, Hécube is unequivocally despairing, seeing no prospect of action: 'Je ne sais qu'une chose / le pire est sûr. [...] Vieillarde piteuse, / plus morte que vive, / inutile frelon dans une ruche étrangère, / à quoi puis-je servir?' (p.29). Her emphasis on death and futility, present and future, is picked up by the women, one of whom complains: 'Déracinée, / arrachée à l'Asie, / il me faudra vivre et mourir en Europe. / Cela veut dire: en enfer' (pp.30-1). The vision is of hell itself, and despair is as profound as for the damned of Huis clos, such that Talthybios (the Greeks' messenger, factotum and master of ceremonies) fears mass suicide when he sees what he takes to be Cassandre's tent on fire: 98

'En tout cas, le monde semble laid, mauvais et sans espoir. Ça, c'est le désespoir d'un vieux qui mourra là-dedans. Mais justement, je résiste et je sais que je mourrai dans l'espoir, mais cet espoir, il faut le fonder' (Sartre, L'Espoir maintenant, p. 81).

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Vite! Allez voir si les Troyennes N'essaient pas de se faire brûler vives. Je comprends qu'un cœur libre N'accepte pas facilement le malheur, Mais je ne veux pas de suicide! Compris? Et surtout pas de torches vivantes. Ce serait trop commode pour elles Et c'est moi qui aurais les ennuis, (p.41)

The carbon-black humour of these grisly remarks ironises the tiresome banality of evil - Talthybios rejoins Lélius {Bariona\ le Garçon {Huis clos), Landrieu and Pellerin {Morts sans sépulture), and all those petty bureaucrats who serve great causes of wickedness, because they are ethically unconscious. Consciousness is, in a sense, the enemy of tranquility and quietude, but suicide, however tempting, is always a delusion of last resort. When Hécube collapses in a dead faint - in what we might call a suicide attempt by despair - she does not thank the chorus for reviving her: Je voulais épouser la terre étroitement et me confondre avec son inconscience inerte. Car nous sommes inertes, comprenez-vous? Nous ne pouvons plus rien sauf attendre et subir. Inertes mais, hélas, conscientes, (p.59)

Conscious but inert, living but dead, this is the zombie condition that afflicted Garcin, Inès and Estelle, who also discovered that they could not kill themselves, being already deceased. Between these moments of despair for Hécube, Cassandre had uttered hopeful sentiments (scene 5), predicting dire consequences for the Greeks, making promises of vengeance, comparing the heroism of the Trojan dead ('Remercie les Grecs! / Hector était modeste et doux. / C'est eux qui en ont fait un héros malgré lui', p.51), with the wretched stupidity of their foes ('Ceux qui font une sale guerre et qui en meurent, / leur mort est plus bête encore que leur vie'). Yet, as we have noted, these exhortations fall on deaf ears, because Cassandre is considered to be out of touch with reality. It is rather the challenge of having to console a woman still more grief-stricken than herself 260

Andromaque - that prompts the first signs of hope in Hécube, which then grow in strength as she strives to counter the profound pessimism of the younger widow (scene 7). Andromaque's protestations that the slain Polyxène is 'happier than I who live', are rebuked by Hécube's rejoinder, 'where there is life there is hope' (cited above), which begins to turn the tide of despair. Lorris detects the 'vocabulary of existentialist characters in Andromaque's revolt':99 'Menteuse! La vie, c'est l'espoir, dis-tu? / Eh bien, regarde-moi, je vis et l'espoir est mort / car je sais ce qui m'attend' (p.71). Certainly, there are resonances here of Hugo and Frantz, and of Goetz in his ascetic phase. By contrast, Hécube now finds the authentic Sartrean voice of the lifeinspiring women - Olga, Johanna, Hilda - who ministered to those monsters of despair: Hector est mort, ma fille, Tes pleurs ne le feront pas revivre. Oublie-le. Par ces mêmes vertus qu'il aimait Et dont tu es si fière, tâche de plaire à ton nouveau mari. [...] Fais-le pour ton fils, pour Astyanax, fils de mon fils, prince de Troie et dernier de sa race, pour qu'un jour par lui ou par ses fils cette ville morte renaisse et nous venge. Le destin de notre famille est dans tes mains, (pp.72-3)

Rebirth and resurrection: these are grounds for hope, as the sine qua non of action, of vengeance. This apogée of optimism is bright but brief, however, because news follows shortly of the Greeks' intention to slaughter Astyanax. Andromaque affects the murderous motherliness of Lady Macbeth 'J'étais fière, quand je t'allaitais. / Si j'avais su, j'aurais mieux aimé t'étouffer sur l'instant / de mes mains / en t'embrassant' (p.81)100 juxtaposed to tragi-comic effect with the quasi-apologetic, but self99 See Lorris, p.315. 100 Compare Lady Macbeth's speech, 4I have given suck', etc., in Macbeth, I, 7.

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regarding, mutterings of the minor official of this particular holocaust, Talthybios: 'Mission vraiment désagréable! / On aurait pu me l'épar­ gner. / J'ai un cœur, moi. / Enfin, c'est la guerre' (p.82). Facetious though the tone may be, these lines contain a central moral of the play: war is dirty, there is no room in it for the faint-hearted, proverbially 'all is fair', including the murder of innocent children (what we have now learnt to call 'collateral damage'). The German woman survivor reproached Frantz for not having gone far enough, for not having committed every conceivable cruelty in order to secure victory; with a shrug of his ineffectual shoulders, like every clerical accomplice caught up in big events, Talthybios tacitly agrees. Indeed, Sartre wants to say that it is predominantly the innocent who suffer and die in war, and that, however it may appear, there are always many victims and never any victors; this is a poetic reiteration of the central theme of Les Séquestrés d'Altona.m The capture of Astyanax puts an end to hope: 'les Dieux nous ont abandonnés' (p.88) - Christ himself said as much in his darkest moment of despair on the Cross. Hécube clings, however, to one possible consolation: the punishment of Hélène. Her beauty ('ses beaux yeux de mort', p.95) is responsible for the death of every Trojan male, including even Astyanax, therefore. Life is once more a burden to Hécube, but so long as she has breath she can at least denounce the 'bitch', and demand retribution: 'Moi, hélas, je suis vivante / et voici mon témoignage' (p. 104). She fears, however, that Ménélas, despite his undertaking to punish Hélène by death, will (on account of being a weak and feeble man of flesh and blood) succumb once more to her charms - and this fear proves well-founded. In the penultimate scene, the sight of Hélène boarding his ship is the first of several blows dealt to the women's dwindling morale: 'On dénoue les cordages, / nos hommes sont morts pour rien, / Hélène s'embarque, / Elle régnera sur Sparte, / le crime paie' (p. 113). Husbands, fathers, brothers, sons are evoked as so many 'morts sans tombeau' - morts sans sépulture 101

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Writing these lines in autumn 2003, the truth of Sartre's manifesto is daily, disastrously, depressingly borne out by the ongoing fiasco which is the after­ math of the illegal invasion of Iraq, by British and American forces, in April of this year.

wandering aimlessly among the stones of the desolate Troy, because the guileful architect of their destruction will escape unpunished. The realisation of Hélène's impunity is swiftly followed by the sight of Astyanax's corpse, visible proof of the extinction of hope. Hécube grieves over him: Tu es mort sans avoir vécu. [...] Tu étais bien malade et je t'ai guéri, T'épargnant une mort de hasard Pour te réserver à cette mort ignoble!

t-] Il faut qu'un homme soit fou pour se dire heureux Avant le dernier moment de son dernier jour. (pp. 118-19)

This last couplet is an axiom from Greek letters to which Sartre alludes more than once in L'Être et le néant.102 Here, it bears the full weight of Hécube's despair as she contemplates the dead hope of the Trojan people. Her last words over the body have the tone and rhythm of a lullaby, but they evince resignation rather than hope. Like a lullaby, they usher in sleep, yet they elicit no expectation of awakening; we already know, from her dialogue with Andromaque, that Hécube envisages nothing but the void beyond the grave. A premonition of that void fills the last moments of the play, in which Hécube foresees, and even wishes for, her own death and that of the gods too. If there is immortality, it is to be found only in the tales we tell: Dans deux mille ans encore Notre nom sera dans toutes les bouches; On reconnaîtra notre gloire Et votre stupide injustice Et vous n'y pourrez rien Car vous serez morts depuis longtemps, Olympiens, comme nous.

102

See p. 158, for example.

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Je mettrai ma gloire à mourir ici: Ma patrie en feu sera mon bûcher, (pp. 121, 122)

Even that last consolation is denied, for, as Troy is 'rayée du nombre des cités vivantes' (p. 123), Hécube is dragged away to slavery with her fellow Trojan women, defiant up to a point, but bereft of hope. In the final scene, which is entirely original, Sartre shows Poseidon keeping his bargain with Pallas, sparing the Trojan women the indignities of 'exile and slavery' to which they are destined. He uses the occasion to make a last apostrophe to 'foolish mortals', which spells out the futility of war and the inevitability of mutual selfdestruction. He delivers this terrible warning in an emotive, dying cadence: A présent vous allez payer. Faites la guerre, mortels imbéciles, Ravagez les champs et les villes, Violez les temples, les tombes, Et torturez les vaincus. Vous en crèverez. Tous. FIN

This speech looks as impressive as it sounds - it is surely no accident that its shape is that of a mushroom cloud? - not least because the word 'FIN' appears in bold print at the foot of the text. Like Frantz's last tape, this parable illustrates that the terrible equation of human conflict - 'Un et un font un' - will always hold good, so long as we remain unmastered by our higher reason: 'Homo homini lupus' ('man is a wolf to man'), in the Hobbesian formula preferred by Sartre in the Critique.103

103 This phrase originates in Plautus, Asinaria, and is in fact less pessimistic than its commonly-cited abbreviation implies: 4Lupus est homo homini, non homo, quom qualis sit non novit\ that is: 4A man is a wolf rather than a man to another man when he has not yet found out what he is like' (see Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 3rd edition, Oxford, OUP, 1983, p.374).

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The gist of Les Troyennes is no less macabre or melancholy than that of Les Séquetsrés d'Altona, but it is more precise. In the earlier play, Sartre was at pains to demonstrate human vulnerability in the face of history, where we are neither its master nor an intelligent interlocutor with it in the materialist dialectic. In Les Troyennes, like Euripides, he is more explicitly concerned with the dangers of war in general, and the vicissitudes of imperialist expansion in particular, given what we already know (but obdurately ignore) about the unpre­ dictability of the dialectical process. This much is made clear from his preface, to which we have already referred. But it is both interesting and instructive to see that Sartre adumbrated these themes in a much earlier text: A la prochaine [guerre], la terre peut sauter: [...] Pourtant, il fallait bien qu'un jour l'humanité rut mise en possession de sa mort. Jusqu'ici elle poursuivait une vie qui lui venait on ne sait d'où et n'avait même pas le pouvoir de refuser son propre suicide, faute de disposer des moyens qui lui eussent permis de l'accomplir. [...] Après la mort de Dieu, voici qu'on annonce la mort de l'homme. Désormais, ma liberté est plus pure: cet acte que je fais aujourd'hui, ni Dieu ni homme n'en seront les témoins perpétuels. [...] Il n'y a plus d'espèce humaine. La communauté qui s'est faite gardienne de la bombe atomique est au-dessus du règne naturel car elle est responsable de sa vie et de sa mort: il faudra qu'à chaque jour, à chaque minute elle consente à vivre. [...] Ainsi, au moment où elle finit cette guerre, la boucle est bouclée, en chacun de nous l'humanité découvre sa mort possible, assume sa vie et sa mort.104

This petrifying, apocalyptic problematisation of a world equipped for nuclear war, finds its dramatic illustration in this last of Sartre's plays, with its concluding prophecy of Armageddon and extinction. When hope is deleted from the human enterprise, teleology gives way to eschatology: 'fin' can no longer mean 'end' qua objective, project, life, but only 'end' qua completion, totalisation, death, Although he would not return to the live medium of the theatre, Sartre continued to hope - even to exhort and demand - that human beings would continue to choose to hope. Indeed, this is the all-

104

4

La fin de la guerre', Les Temps modernes, October 1945, in Situations III, pp.63-71 (pp.68-9).

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embracing theme of the last major interviews published before his death, L'Espoir maintenant: Avec cette troisième guerre mondiale qui peut éclater un jour, avec cet ensemble misérable qu'est notre planète, revient me tenter le désespoir: l'idée qu'on n'en finira jamais, qu'il n'y a pas de but, qu'il n'y a que de petites fins particulières pour lesquelles on se bat. [...] On peut penser une chose comme ça. Elle vient vous tenter sans cesse, surtout quand on est vieux et qu'on peut penser: eh bien, de toute façon, je vais mourir dans cinq ans au maximum - en fait je pense dix ans, mais ça pourrait bien être cinq. En tout cas, le monde semble laid, mauvais et sans espoir. Ça, c'est le désespoir tranquille d'un vieux qui mourra là-dedans. Mais, justement, je résiste et je sais que je mourrai dans l'espoir, mais cet espoir, il faut le fonder. Il faut essayer d'expliquer pourquoi le monde de maintenant, qui est horrible, n'est qu'un moment dans le long développement historique, que l'espoir a toujours été une des forces dominantes des révolutionnaires et des insurrections et comment je ressens encore l'espoir comme ma conception de l'avenir.105

This dogged tenacity represents a triumph of the spirit for Sartre, and is an example to us. The fact that he then died, not five years, but a mere five weeks after the first publication of these interviews, simply proves what he already knew about the biologically closed system that is life, and the random, contingent absurdity that is death.

105

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L'Espoir maintenant, p.81.

Chapter 6 Curtain call

Remembering Sartre's last illness, Michel Sicard records: 'Il avait pris en horreur la cuisine de l'hôpital, se faisant apporter du thé de l'exté­ rieur, comme une attention extrême à la vraie vie, avant de prendre congé, méprisant encore une fois les morts-vivants.'1 Whatever the veracity of this reminiscence, it has the satisfying ring of poetic truth: Sartre reserving his dying breath for one final excoriation of the selfrighteous, the determinists, the cowards, the salauds, the bastards, the traitors, the excuse-makers, the essentialist disciples of destiny, the existentially deceased, the 'living dead', the zombies of bourgeois respectability, who had been the object of his contempt and the target of his scorn throughout his literary career, from Jésus la chouette to L 'Idiot de la famille, and nowhere more so than in his plays.2 It was to all these 'others' that Sartre fell prey in April 1980, when sudden death plunged his life irrevocably into the 'public domain', a fate in store for all of us, yet one that possesses a peculiar quality in the writer's case: A la fin de la vie le choix originel s'est inscrit dans la réalité, le tout s'est réalisé. Mais il faut ajouter que la réalisation du tout est, en même temps, sa suppression: l'écrivain est devenu ce qu'il était dans la mort. Tel qu'en luimême enfin l'éternité le change. D'autre part la mort soutient un double rapport d'immanence et d'extériorité avec l'homme. Elle est son extériorité puisque c'est le dehors qui décide que la vie est finie. Ainsi le hasard décide de l'aboutissement de la dialectique, la vie s'atteint elle-même dans la mort. Et la mort est négation du sens de cette vie. Ainsi la dialectique existe dans la mesure où elle est sur le mode de n'être pas. Il y a dialectique enfin sur le plan du dépassement de la situation (négation qui dépasse en conservant).

1 2 3

'Le dernier rendez-vous', Obliques, no.24/25, pp.3-9 (p.4). For Jésus la chouette, see Écrits de jeunesse, pp.51-136. Sartre, Cahiers pour une morale, p.478.

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The writer leaves a body of work, with which posterity continues to dialogue. The ontological nature of the dialectic rejoins that of the pour-soi, transcending the situation by negation, yet 'preserving' as it does so: the 'meaninglessness' of the annihilated life is, to a degree, mitigated, and a measure of meaning restored. As if by way of illus­ trating this hypothesis, Sartre appeared in some ways more alive, during the decade following his death, than he had done in the decade preceding it, a period in which, according to Simone de Beauvoir, 'Réduit au présent, il se considérait comme mort'.4 It was to be anticipated that Sartre's death would precipitate a torrent of secondary material, and so it did, with the publication of numerous books and articles, ranging from the weightily academic to the frivolously gossipy, and from the unabashedly hagiographical to the frankly vindictive.5 Of such stuff are dreams of immortality made, and thus are the 'neuroses' of an ambitious young writer realised!6 More gratifying, however, from the putative perspective of this aspirant to the literary pantheon, was the steady flow of posthumous primary works throughout the 1980s, from Œuvres romanesques in 1981, to L'Espoir maintenant in 1991: no fewer than a dozen new titles, amounting to Sartre's most prolific decade since the 1940s.7 4 5

6

7

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La Cérémonie des adieux, p. 151. Needless to say, the twentieth anniversary of his death unleashed a similar flood in 2000; in particular, the publication of Bernard-Henri Levy's book, Le Siècle de Sartre, became, in France, a major cultural event in itself. L'Année sartrienne (formerly Bulletin d'Information du Groupe d'Études Sartriennes) is the best indicator of the ebb and flow of the secondary tide in Sartre studies; a new high-water mark can be expected for his centenary in 2005. Once he had claimed to be 'guéri d'une longue, amère et douce folie' (Les Mots, p.211) - that is, cured of his dreams of immortal 'salvation' through literature - Sartre repeatedly referred, in later interviews, to his youthful ambitions as the neurotic symptoms of his bourgeois, Catholic education, e.g. 4 Ma gloire d'écrivain commencerait le jour de ma mort' ('Les Écrivains en personne', in Situations IX, p.33); '[...] mon sens de la survie littéraire, c'était évidemment une sorte de décalque de la religion chrétienne' (Entretiens, in La Cérémonie des adieux, p.222); etc. 1981: Œuvres romanesques, Entretiens avec Jean-Paul Sartre; 1983: Cahiers pour une morale, Les Carnets de la drôle de guerre, Lettres au Castor I, II; 1984: Le Scénario Freud; 1985: Critique de la raison dialectique II; 1986:

Whereas his semi-blindness had prevented him from writing throughout the 1970s, his death apparently enabled him - or, rather, his executors on his behalf - to publish additional output, equivalent to a life's work for some writers. It is an ironic coincidence that the first of these should have been the Pléiade edition of his novels. Sartre had for years eschewed consecration by what he called the 'tomb­ stone' of this ultimately luxurious scholarly collection, fearing to be 'buried alive' on that Mount Parnassus of the great and defunct. Having at last assented to this elevation, he did not live to see it accomplished.8 This first post-mortem tome, and those which have followed, are reminders of a feature common to many of Sartre's works: they are unfinished. Fragments of the projected fourth volume of Les Chemins de la liberté, in Œuvres romanesques, and the Cahiers pour une morale - a sketch for the book of ethics promised at the end of L'Être et le néant - are perhaps the most telling testimony to tasks under­ taken yet unfulfilled. But also, L Idiot de la famille was supposed to comprise at least one more volume, and Critique de la raison dialectique II was never concluded to Sartre's satisfaction. Moreover, his war diaries, and his letters to Simone de Beauvoir, abound in evidence of projects abandoned prematurely. These data emphasise, by contrast, one salient and distinctive feature of Sartre's work for the theatre: its completeness. Not only is each play a finished entity, but the whole corpus of his dramatic production has a cogency and coherence that set it apart from his writing in other genres. Each of his plays, as we have seen, deals primarily with the most fundamental of human themes imaginable - the conflict between life and death, the primal struggle for existence, material and moral - which informs every aspect of our experience, and is especially apt for theatrical represen­ tation. The persistence of this theme in Sartre's philosophic concep­ tualisation, and dramatic transposition, of the human reality is under­ scored by the fact that one of his earliest projects for the stage 'J'aurai un bel enterrement' - and one of his last - 'Admète et

8

Mallarmé', 1989: Vérité et existence; 1990: Écrits de jeunesse; 1991: L'Espoir maintenant. See 'Autoportrait à soixante-dix ans', in Situations X, pp.205-6.

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Alceste' - both drew their inspiration and dramatic impetus from the hero's meditation on the prospect of death.9 The theatre is also a privileged medium, within the impressive range that Sartre encompassed, by virtue of its unique versatility, in that it is simultaneously literary and philosophical. He had felt drawn to the theatre from an early age: J'ai toujours pensé que je ferais du théâtre, puisque quand j'étais môme, à huit ans, je m'installais au Luxembourg avec des poupées de guignol qu'on enfile sur les mains et qu'on fait jouer. [...] J'ai écrit [dans l'adolescence] des pièces parodiques, des opérettes; j'ai découvert l'opérette à La Rochelle où j'allais au théâtre municipal avec mes camarades [...].10

Yet, as a young man, Sartre tells us, he had regarded theatre as 'un genre un peu inférieur'.11 However, his empirical experience as a playwright over twenty years, beginning with the hybrid success of Bariona in 1940, led him to postulate in 1960 (as we have noted), that Me théâtre est philosophique et que la philosophie est dramatique', because each is equally concerned with 'l'homme en acte (c'est-à-dire l'homme, tout simplement)'.12 Moreover, he ultimately considered that Ma partie "littéraire" de mon œuvre, ça a plutôt été le théâtre que les romans.'13 This dual functionality of the theatre makes it the unifying bond in Sartre's otherwise diffuse and disparate output, for it reconciles the primacy of literature - 'Mais il y a une hiérarchie, et la

9

10 11 12 13

270

Sartre remembered 'J'aurai un bel enterrement' as 'une pièce comique sur un type qui décrivait son agonie' (Entretiens, in La Cérémonie des adieux, p.237) - a novel theme, and a prophetic title! The project on Admetos and Alcestis would deal with 'les relations entre mari et femme', in the Greek mythical context of the king who allowed his wife to die in his stead, so that he could get on with governing and waging wars, only to find that he thereby ceded to her all the power he had sought to retain (see 'Sartre talks to Tynan', The Observer, 18, 25 June 1961, extracts translated in Les Écrits de Sartre, pp.366-7). Entretiens, in La Cérémonie des adieux, pp.236-7. Entretiens, in La Cérémonie des adieux, p.237. 'Les Écrivains en personne', in Situations IX, pp. 13, 12. 'Interférences', interview with Michel Sicard and Simone de Beauvoir, Obliques, no. 18/19, pp.325-9 (p.327).

hiérarchie c'est la philosophie en second et la littérature en premier'14 - with the essentially philosophie content of all his work: Je ne pense pas que la philosophie puisse s'exprimer littérairement. [...] Je con­ sidère quand même la philosophie aujourd'hui comme l'unité de tout ce que je fais, c'est-à-dire, si vous voulez, la seule unité qu'il peut y avoir entre les dif­ férents livres que j'ai faits à une époque donnée, c'est l'unité philosophique.15

In short, only the theatre overcomes the perceived impossibility for philosophy to articulate itself in literary form, thereby reconciling the twin pillars of the Sartrean enterprise: Il me semble que le théâtre ne doit pas dépendre de la philosophie qu'il exprime. // doit exprimer une philosophie, mais il ne faut pas qu'on puisse à l'intérieur de la pièce poser le problème de la valeur de la philosophie qui s'y exprime.16

In addition, theatre has the unique capacity of breathing life into ideas: '[Un] livre, c'est mort, c'est un objet mort. [...] Une pièce de théâtre pendant un certain temps, c'est différent. On vit, on travaille, mais, tous les soirs, il y a un endroit où une pièce de vous continue à se jouer.'17 Little wonder, then, that an ambitious young writer, who read Shakespeare's plays '[comme] des œuvres qui semblent écrites d'hier',18 and who 'wagered on life, with half an eye on immortality', should have been seduced by the live and living medium, par excel­ lence: 'Alors, il vaut mieux ne pas penser, sauf du coin de l'œil, à l'immortalité, et parier sur la vie; moi vivant j'écris pour des vivants, en pensant que si c'est réussi, on me lira encore quand je serai mort; [...].'19 Sartre liked to see new productions of his plays20 - in English, we aptly call these 'revivals'. 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Entretiens, in La Cérémonie des adieux, pp.200-1. Sartre, p.42. Interview with Présence du théâtre, in Un Théâtre de situations, p.376, emphasis added. Entretiens, in La Cérémonie des adieux, p.241. Entretiens, in La Cérémonie des adieux, p.201. Entretiens, in La Cérémonie des adieux, p.200. See Entretiens, in La Cérémonie des adieux, p.241.

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In view of the foregoing, we might enquire why Sartre neglected the theatre during the last fifteen years of his life, devoting the most precious of them - those when his eyesight still permitted him to write - to a massive (but unfinished) study of an archetypal mort-vivant, Gustave Flaubert. When Simone de Beauvoir posed this very question in 1974, Sartre cited three reasons. First, old age: Les bonnes pièces ne sont pas écrites par des vieux. Il y a quelque chose d'urgent dans une pièce. [...] Et vous la retrouvez en vous-même, cette urgence, parce que ce sera celle des spectateurs. Ils vivront dans l'imaginaire un moment d'urgence.21

It is obvious from Beauvoir's rejoinder that she is not much convinced by this; after all, she objects, might not the proximity of death, impli­ cit in old age, be the ideal source of 'urgency'? Sartre weakly con­ cedes: 'Oui, mais j'ai rien à dire au théâtre pour l'instant.'22 Next, he cites the eclipse of Me théâtre d'auteur', but only when this explan­ ation has been suggested to him by Beauvoir: Certainement. [...] Oui; mon théâtre devient une chose passée. Si je faisais une pièce maintenant - ce que je ne ferai pas - je lui donnerais une autre forme pour qu'elle soit d'accord avec ce qu'on tente aujourd'hui.23

There is detectable here a certain alacrity (not to say 'urgency'), on Sartre's part, in consigning his plays to literary history, and a discon­ certing definitiveness in his renunciation of any future theatrical pro­ jects. This is all the more striking in light of his earlier agreement (again, with Beauvoir's proposition) that, 'pour le théâtre, il y a un grand travail préliminaire qui se fait dans votre tête, tandis que pour les nouvelles et les romans, le travail se fait sur le papier.'24 One might have thought, therefore, that it would be, if anything, precisely thea­ trical projects that would survive his blindness. The third cause (or

21 22 23 24

272

Entretiens, in La Cérémonie des adieux, p.243. Ibid Entretiens, in La Cérémonie des adieux, p.244, emphasis added. Entretiens, in La Cérémonie des adieux, p.240

pretext) for Sartre's senile abandonment of the drama - namely, the inevitability of the bourgeois audience - is also volunteered by his interviewer, Beauvoir: Et puis il y a une chose ennuyeuse dans le théâtre, c'est ce public qui est presque toujours bourgeois. A un moment, vous disiez: 'Mais finalement, je n'ai rien à dire à ces bourgeois qui vont venir voir ma pièce.'25

Although tacitly assenting, Sartre hardly bothers to pursue the issue, instead reminiscing desultorily about a couple of rare occasions when his plays - specifically, Nekrassov and La Putain respectueuse - were indeed performed before 'des gens des grandes usines, des faubourgs parisiens'.26 In short, Sartre's 'answers' to Simone de Beauvoir's question, and ours, merely beg it. To judge by Sartre's public statements, his break with the theatre was relatively sudden. In 1970, he claimed to be still writing plays, and to retain his belief in their power as myths: - Vous continuez aussi à écrire des pièces de théâtre? - Oui, parce que le théâtre, c'est encore autre chose. Pour moi, c'est essentielle­ ment un mythe. [...] L'auteur dramatique présente aux hommes Yeidos de leur existence quotidienne; il leur montre leur propre vie comme s'ils la voyaient de l'extérieur.27

In 1971, he felt he 'ought' to write a play, but did not 'want' to: 'Pour diverses raisons, je devrais maintenant écrire une pièce, mais je n'ai pas envie de faire une pièce, alors cela me barbe...'28 And by 1974, as we have just seen, his resolution to quit the theatre sounded firm and final. However, I suggest it is evident, from our reading of the plays, that Sartre's disillusionment with the genre was a much more gradual and protracted process than these few utterances imply.

25 26 27 28

Entretiens, in La Cérémonie des adieux, p.244. Ibid 'Sartre par Sartre', New Left, reprinted in Le Nouvel Observateur, 26 January 1970, in Situations IX, pp.99-134 (pp. 123-4). 'Sur L Idiot de la famille", interview with Michel Contât and Michel Rybalka, Le Monde, 14 May 1971, in Situations X, pp.91-115 (p.l 13).

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To essay a more comprehensive answer to the question why Sartre left the theatre, we need to consider his motives for entering it in the first place. Here, again, Simone de Beauvoir is more eloquent than Sartre himself: Puis, c'était un genre littéraire qui vous convenait très bien, parce qu'il y a des héros dans les pièces: vous aviez eu une enfance qui a donné une grande importance aux héros comme Pardaillan et d'autres, non que je veux dire que Goetz ressemble à Pardaillan, mais il y avait cette idée du héros, de l'homme qui fait des actes assez extraordinaires - pas dans toutes vos pièces, bien sûr, mais il y a beaucoup de ça.29

And, once more, Sartre's own recollections echo and reinforce Simone de Beauvoir's assertions: Une des œuvres héroïques que j'avais écrites à onze ans, à douze ans, s'appelait 4 Gôtz [sic] von Berlichingen' et, par conséquent, annonce Le Diable et le bon Dieu. Gôtz était un héros remarquable; il battait les gens, il faisait régner la terreur mais en même temps il voulait le bien.30

Sartre's theatre is a theatre fit for heroes, and it is not, I suggest, an oversimplification to say that he abandoned the genre because he ran out of protagonists fit to be heroes, or - more exactly - because he ceased to believe in them. It is significant that both Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir invoke Goetz as the prototype, the archetypal hero, for he is the character of whom Sartre once wrote: 'J'ai fait faire à Goetz ce que je ne pouvais pas faire.'31 Goetz is the epitome of the Sartrean hero because he reconciles and resolves his contradictions, while transcending the limits of his situation; because he acts to change the world in equal proportion as the world changes him; because he interacts with history (speaks the dialect of the dialectic, if I dare say so), and lives to tell the tale. Yet, he does not merely tell the tale:

29 30 31

274

'Interferences', Obliques, no. 18/19, p.327. Entretiens, in La Cérémonie des adieux, p. 166. 'Notes inédites', quoted by Beauvoir in La Force des choses, p.262.

C'est ce qui dupe les gens: un homme, c'est toujours un conteur d'histoires, il vit entouré de ses histoires et des histoires d'autrui, il voit tout ce qui lui arrive à travers elles; et il cherche à vivre sa vie comme s'il la racontait. Mais il faut choisir: vivre ou raconter.32

Thus spake Antoine Roquentin in the amoral latency period of the precommitted Sartre. Such tales, more often than not - those that Oreste, Garcin and Hugo tell themselves, for instance - signify nothing much. Goetz, by contrast, prefers 'living' to 'narration'. Once he has told the story of the death of God, like his Nietszchean precursor, he assumes the sequel and lives it out, beyond the confines of orthodox trans­ gression, exemplifying the truth that human beings are the unique source of ethical value. His predecessors are only pale adumbrations of this consummate dialectical super-man. Bariona, the hero of Sartre's first, flawed and yet, in some ways, most satisfying play - 'c'est ça qui m'a donné le goût du théâtre'33 learned to deploy his freedom, not in a redundant gesture of defiant self-destruction, but in a positive and life-affirming act of resistance, which derived from, and insisted upon, his inherent capability to trans­ form the situation. In this sense, Bariona is Goetz's closest existential ancestor. By contrast, Oreste realised his freedom, grasped it, used it, but then petrified it into some blunt instrument, cherishing his acts like shiny badges of identity, instead of developing their consequences by renewing and re-engaging his moral autonomy with continuing effect. He settled, in other words, for telling the tale. Canoris, on the other hand, accepted the option on life because he cared more strongly for what could still be done, than for what he and his surviving comrades could, otiosely, be: posthumous heroes. It was nobody's fault that they then fell foul of the inexorable onward march of history, entrapped and done to death by circumstances beyond their control (the sadistic mania of their captors), the first such victims of political and moral realism; the first to be pitted against temporal powers by which their 32 33

La Nausée, p.62. Entretiens, in La Cérémonie des adieux, p.237. Also: 4Oui, on jouait Bariona devant un public qui était impliqué, il y avait là des hommes qui auraient arrêté la pièce s'ils avaient compris. Et tous les prisonniers comprenaient la situation. C'était vraiment du théâtre en ce sens' (ibid, p.238).

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mythological forebears were unhindered, since mythology imposes no constraints, once the gods have been overthrown. Hoederer - clearly a direct and amplified moral scion of Canoris - likewise expounded an unequivocally yea-saying ethical stance, privileging praxis and change above exis and stasis. And he acted accordingly, investing in a future envisaged as an improvement upon (and a moral progress from) the past and the present, which could be brought about only by the dynamic dialogue of Realpolitik, pragmatism and compromise, not by the totalitarian imposition of absolute ideals, and the fruitless pursuit of impossible goals. Nice try - bang! Hoederer also found death, the pincered prey of an immature, neurotic, bourgeois intellectual (pro­ duct of his social class), on the one hand, and of a dogmatic, unbend­ ing, proletarian party machine (product of the class system), on the other. Briefly, another victim of history. These early protagonists struggle to have life - material and moral, physical and metaphysical - to assume that void at the heart of their being, which is their freedom, and to shoulder responsibility for the outcomes of their actions, whatever those might be. They are un­ afraid to act out of their ontological instability, that perma-flux of being in the mode of not being what we are, in order to create them­ selves, to become themselves.34 Set over against these nascent heroes are the existentially moribund, motivated by the impulse to close the gap between consciousness and phenomenon, to contrive the impos­ sible coincidence of pour-soi and en-soi, to attain that identity which occurs naturally only in death: Electre, so consumed by her passion to embody vengeance that, once vengeance is wrought, she seeks another equally substantive incarnation, the personification of remorse; Garcin, Inès, Estelle, each so driven by the ambition to be - hero, per­ secutor, beauty, respectively - that they are each condemned to live out their essence eternally, to reap an infinite harvest of the moral cowardice they had sown; Hugo, so obsessed by the desire to be someone - Raskolnikoff, or Julien Sorel, or Rastignac, or Muichkine, or... anyonel35 - that he remains oblivious of the one opportunity he gets to embrace life in all its imponderable complexity, its harrowing moral 34 35

276

See L'Être et le néant, p.33. See Les Mains sales, p.255.

relativity and practical contingency; and Lizzie, the pariah so eager to please and to belong that she pays respect where none is due, although she knows that to be the case, and allows herself to be the life-sized doll whose dimensions, albeit drawn from life, are those of a nature morte. This continuous confrontation between the apologists of life and the disciples of death, in which the former appear to have the advan­ tage until history supervenes, reaches its apogée in Le Diable et le bon Dieu, Sartre's favourite play.36 Here, the existentially defunct (includ­ ing, and especially, Goetz) predominate until the moment of the hero's final (and real) apocalyptic conversion - God is dead, the law is a chimerical shibboleth, moral absolutes are atavistic nonsense, people are the unique source of values, imperatives are relative, they acquire only the force we lend them: 'Il y a cette guerre à faire et je la ferai.'37 Goetz survives his mania to be, as none of his predecessors had done, and as Heinrich, his brother in bastardy (inauthenticity) fails to do.38 He transcends our contradictions, notably that between life and death, although they are indissolubly associated in his eclectic experience. In one sense, he is just incredibly lucky, sited at an historical confluence of circumstantial exigency and (inferred) moral and political laxity: Goetz is empowered to obey and yet to command; to risk death and deal it out, yet to save and valorise life; to espouse a cause without succumbing to the spell of ideology; to lead men while remaining among them, at once individual subject and collective group-member; to become that elusive simultaneity, un chef and n'importe qui?9 To risk a paradox, Goetz enters absolutely into the realm of the relative: 'Mais Goetz, au dernier tableau, accepte la morale relative et limitée qui convient à la destinée humaine: il remplace l'absolu par l'his­ toire.'40 In another sense, Goetz is incredibly audacious: he dares to 36 37 38

39 40

See Entretiens, in La Cérémonie des adieux, p.242. Le Diable et le bon Dieu, p.233. 'Avec Goetz la pièce est plutôt optimiste. Avec Heinrich surgit son côté nocturne' (Sartre, interview with Samedi-Soir, in Un Théâtre de situations, p.316). See Le Diable et le bon Dieu, p.229. Sartre, interview with Claudine Chonez, L'Observateur, 31 May 1951, extract in Un Théâtre de situations, p.319.

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assume (almost to become) that nothingness at the core of his being his freedom - without striking poses (e.g. striding into the sunset, like Oreste, or sacrificing himself on the altar of his wrong-headed prin­ ciples, like Hugo), and without bragging about it: he learns modesty. Sartre said: 'Toute la pièce est précisément l'histoire d'un miracle qui ne survient jamais.'41 Yet we could say that Goetz's final conversion is by far the most impressive, and even miraculous, of his many tricks. After 1951, the Sartrean dramatic hero enters a relentless decline. Kean and Valera - although dynamic and life-enhancing, in their own idiosyncratic ways - are paltry, parodie successors to Bariona, Oreste, Canoris, Hoederer or (above all) Goetz. No doubt, in their comically inconsequential fashion, they struggle to salvage existential life from the chaos created by their bright, if superficial, ideas, and their frightening talents for falsification. We might say their hearts, like Sartre's, are 'in the right place'.42 However, their shallow assaults on the establishment - which not only leave it intact, but actually shore it up - are pitiable, ironic reflections of Bariona's just resistance to colonial tyranny, Oreste's dispensation of justice, Canoris's hope in the face of despair, Hoederer's pragmatism in the teeth of ideology, or Goetz's revolt against feudal hegemony. Kean and Valera - these twodimensional farceurs, these shadow-boxers, reminiscent of the glovepuppets their creator played with as a child - presage a four-year silence on the playwright's part, in the late 1950s. It is clear that, by the end of that decade, Sartre had lost all faith in - or, illusions about - the hero as a dramatis persona. Without heroes, the theatre was, for him, an empty space, a medium without life. The post-war, Cold-War, no-war world of the 1950s was morally more complex than the war-torn Europe of the previous decade, in which ethical questions could be framed in unambiguous terms, and elicit straightforward (though never easy) answers: 'Jamais nous n'avons été plus libres que sous l'occupation allemande.'43 This is not a case of Sartre indulging a Gallic predilection for gratuitous paradox. 41 42 43

278

Interview with Samedi-Soir, in Un Théâtre de situations, p.314. Sartre once quipped: Tai le cœur à gauche, bien sûr - comme tout le monde, d'ailleurs!' 4 La République du silence', in Situations III, p. 11.

It is no mere coincidence that those of his heroes who most assuredly accede to existential life (Bariona, Oreste, Goetz), do so in opposition to unequivocally malevolent adversaries, conjured from the mists of myth and legend (biblical, ancient or medieval), but manifestly modelled upon the demonic Nazi experiment to re-value all values. However, once that experiment had, thankfully, failed, and the indus­ trial world divided itself instead into two equally dogmatic, equally plausible, equally powerful, yet radically antagonistic value systems, the moral landscape changed. The individual's potential either to change the historical situation, or to achieve any personal fulfilment in striving to do so, became deeply problematic, as moral dilemmas became increasingly intricate and their solutions commensurately complex. Nekrassov made a joke of it, and marked time, but there was no disguising Valera's (and everyone else's) underlying impotence including the playwright's: - [...] Diriez-vous que certaines choses ont changé, à cause de ce que vous avez écrit? - Pas une. Au contraire, j'ai fait l'expérience depuis ma jeunesse jusqu'à maintenant de la totale impuissance. [...] Voilà l'action littéraire: vous voyez qu'elle ne produit pas l'effet qu'on voulait obtenir.44

If Nekrassov is the comedy of powerlessness, Les Séquestrés d'Altona is its tragedy: whereas Valera survives his impotence, Frantz von Gerlach is killed by his.45 The later play was intended to provoke '[l]e sentiment de l'ambiguïté de notre temps. La morale, la politique, plus rien n'est simple.'46 It is impossible to be heroic in so volatile a moral climate: '[D]ans cette pièce j'ai essayé de démystifier l'héroïsme (militaire) en montrant le lien qui l'unit à la violence inconditionnée.'47 It is not only military heroism, but heroism tout

44 45 46 47

'Les Écrivains en personne', 1960, in Situations HI, p.25. 'C'est son impuissance qui le tue' (Sartre, interview with Der Spiegel, in Un Théâtre de situations, p.404). Sartre, interview with Madeleine Chapsal, L'Express, 10 September 1959, in Un Théâtre de situations, pp.362-3 (p.363). Sartre, interview with Bernard Dort, in Un Théâtre de situations, pp.346-62 (p.348).

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court that Sartre is both demystifying and deserting in Les Séquestrés d'Altona. When Frantz eats his chocolate decorations, he swallows so many of Sartre's illusions. The theatre is still the forum in which our contradictions are laid bare, but our 'hero' no longer knows how to resolve them. At best, he ignores them by shutting them out, or analyses them pointlessly by prattling about them incessantly, or dissolves them by ingesting them symbolically. And he dies unreconciled, a conspirator in his own suicide, a victim of his father, of the war, of Hitler, of Luther, of history - an object, a thing, a terminal case of impotence. Frantz is the paradigmatic avatar of existential death, much as Goetz was the exemplary embodiment of existential life. Les Séquestrés d'Altona represents, to paraphrase Sartre's own characterisation of it, le crépuscule des héros.4* Sartre's hero became extinct partly because of the march of history, but partly too because he is innately impossible: for he is, ideally, n'importe qui. But the common man, 'everyman', can be heroic only in exceptional situations; normally, the hero must be quelqu'un, somebody special - Pardaillan, for example! Only Goetz succeeds in becoming this amazing Janus bifrons, and he does so in the context of an artfully wrought epic melodrama - that is, a fiction. Sartre himself, engaging though his modesty is, could never effect­ ively dissimulate his conspicuous uniqueness behind his disingenuous claims to be n'importe qui: 'Si je range l'impossible salut au magasin des accessoires, que reste-t-il? Tout un homme, fait de tous les hommes, et qui les vaut tous, et que vaut n'importe qui.'49 There is arguably an insoluble conundrum at the core of Sartre's ethic. The hero is a person who leads his or her existence on its given, contingent terms, who not only accepts but, as it were, inhabits the ontological gap between consciousness and our being-in-the-world, who makes a virtue of our being not what we are - in short, who assumes freedom, responsibly. Yet we intuitively sense that it is impossible to be our own nothingness, and we instinctively resist the implication that this makes us into nobody: 'Personne? (Se désignant comme à l'appel.) 48 49

280

See interview with Les Lettres françaises, extract in Un Théâtre de situations, p.367. Les Mots, p.213.

Présent!', as Frantz wryly, but justly, remarked. This insight was the immediate prelude to his self-abolition. Hence our compulsive 'futile passion' to close, fill, or bridge that gap, to be somebody, to which the only alternative appears to us to be annihilation. By 1960, Sartre had evidently come to appreciate that, if his conception of the hero as n 'importe qui was not actually false, it was, at least, no longer feasible to depict that conception convincingly in the theatre. The common man as hero, performing impossible feats like the 'Gôtz' of the eleven-year-old's imagination (or even the Goetz of the 45-year-old's), could henceforth be made flesh only in the form of parodie subversion (Valera), or that of ironic self-abnegation (Frantz). 'Qui perd gagne' becomes the circular motto of the 'nobody' hero, incapable of reconciling his contradictions, except in death - a resolution looking decidedly more like a defeat than a victory, unless you happen to be Jesus Christ. This does not mean that Sartre lost his avowed 'passion de comprendre les hommes',51 but it does mean that he ceased to regard the theatre as a suitable genre in which to pursue that understanding.52 Sartre channelled his enquiry, instead, into biography: 'L 'Idiot de la famille est la suite de Question [sic] de méthode. Son sujet: que peut-on savoir d'un homme, aujourd'hui?'53 And, as his eyesight inex­ orably failed, both he and others increasingly asked this question of Sartre himself, diverting that same enquiry into oral autobiography. Interesting and illuminating as many of Sartre's mature interviews are, they are necessarily ephemeral and, in a sense, inherently unreliable.54 50 51

52

53 54

Les Séquestrés d 'Altona, p. 186. Sartre, quoted by Jeanson on the title page of Sartre par lui-même. Compare: 'Une fois que j'ai un homme devant moi, j'ai la passion de le comprendre, mais je n'irai pas me déplacer pour le voir' (Sartre, 'Autoportrait à soixante-dix ans', in Situations X, p. 163). Consider also that the 'common man' was increasingly being canonised in the theatre as the emblematic hero of failure (what I call the 'mankind as cock-up' thesis), by writers such as Beckett, Ionesco, Osborne, Pinter, and Miller (see O'Connor, pp. 102-9). L 'Idiot de la famille /, p.7. We have, for example, seen the extent to which Simone de Beauvoir 'leads' her interviewee in her Entretiens avec Jean-Paul Sartre; and Sartre's apparent

281

They cannot possess the reflective craftedness that characterises writing, and particularly Sartre's writing for the theatre, which con­ stitutes a coherent corpus within a corpus. Multi-faceted, generically variegated, bewilderingly catholic and promiscuously allusive in its frames of reference, Sartre's theatre comprises eleven very different plays, defying easy categorisation as they span the spectrum from classical tragedy, via epic melodrama, to scintillating comédie de mœurs. Yet, with few exceptions, they are unified thematically by their affirmation of life and freedom, concepts that are synonymous for Sartre. The preceding chapters represent an inevitably imperfect attempt to 'totalise' Sartre's dramatic opus: [D]ans les romans et les œuvres dramatiques, la lecture est une totalisation (comme la vie du lecteur). A partir de la double totalisation qui s'opère par PHistoire et comme sa propre vie singulière le lecteur aborde l'œuvre comme totalité à retotaliser dans sa singularité propre.55

The 'specific singularity' of Sartre's plays is beyond the scope of any single study; they will continue to assume new life, and new meanings - according to time, place and audience - each time they are revived, and they will continue to be the most accessible, if not (oddly) the best-known, dimension of his multifarious and polyvalent work. Beyond this confident assertion, the present chapter refrains from concluding because, as Gustave Flaubert wrote to Louis Bouilhet, on 4 September 1850: 'La bêtise consiste à vouloir conclure' - and he was right.

55

282

susceptibility to the influence on his interlocutor, Benny Levy, in L'Espoir maintenant, has been a major source of controversy. Critique de la raison dialectique /, p. 159, footnote 1.

Bibliography

Primary AU titles published by Gallimard, Paris, unless indicated otherwise.

The Plays (in chronological order, by date of première): Sartre, Jean-Paul, Bariona, ou le Fils du tonnerre (Stalag 12D, Triers (Trêves), 24 December 1940), in Contât and Rybalka, (eds), Les Écrits de Sartre, 1970, pp.565-633. —, Les Mouches (Théâtre de la Cité, Paris, 3 June 1943), in Théâtre 7, 1947,pp.7-121. —, Huis clos (Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, Paris, 27 May 1944), in Théâtre 7,1947, pp. 122-82. —, Morts sans sépulture (Théâtre Antoine, Paris, 8 November 1946), in Théâtre 7, 1947, pp. 183-268. —, La Putain respectueuse (Théâtre Antoine, Paris, 8 November 1946), in Théâtre 7, 1947, pp.269-316. —, Les Mains sales (Théâtre Antoine, Paris, 2 April 1948), 1948. —, Le Diable et le bon Dieu (Théâtre Antoine, Paris, 7 June 1951), 1951. —, Dumas, Alexandre, Kean, adaptation de J.-P. Sartre, (Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt, Paris, 14 November 1953), 1954. —, Nekrassov (Théâtre Antoine, Paris, 8 June 1955), 1956. —, Les Séquestrés d'Altona (Théâtre de la Renaissance, Paris, 23 September 1959), 1960. —, Euripide, Les Troyennes, adaptation de J.-P. Sartre, (Théâtre du Palais de Chaillot (TNP), Paris, 10 March 1965), 1965.

283

Other works (in alphabetical order): Sartre, Jean-Paul, L 'Affaire Henri Martin, 1953. —, L 'Age de raison, {Les Chemins de la liberté I), 1945. —, Baudelaire, 1947. —, Cahiers pour une morale, 1983. —, Les Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 1983. —, Les Chemins de la liberté I: L'Age de raison; II: Le Sursis, 1945; ///: La Mort dans l'âme, 1949. —, Critique de la raison dialectique I: Théorie des ensembles pratiques, précédée de Questions de méthode, 1960. —, Critique de la raison dialectique II: L'Intelligibilité de l'histoire, 1985. —, Ecrits de jeunesse, 1990. —, Les Écrits de Sartre, (includes Bariona, inter alia), 1970. —, L'Engrenage, Paris, Nagel, 1948. —, Entretiens avec Jean-Paul Sartre, in Simone de Beauvoir, La Cérémonie des adieux, 1981. —, Entretiens sur la politique, avec Gérard Rosenthal et David Rousset, 1949. —, L'Espoir maintenant: les Entretiens de 1980, (with Benny Levy), Lagrasse, Verdier, 1991. —, Esquisse d'une théorie des émotions, (1939), Paris, Hermann, L'Esprit et la main, 1975. —, L'Être et le néant, Bibliothèque des Idées, 1943. —, L'Existentialisme est un humanisme, (1946), Paris, Nagel, 1970. —, L'Idiot de la famille: Gustave Flaubert de 1821 à 1857, l II, 1971;///, 1972. —, L'Imaginaire, (1940), 1975. —, L'Imagination, (1936), Paris, PUF, 1969. —, Les Jeux sont faits, Paris, Nagel, 1947. —, Lettres au Castor et à quelques autres I: 1926-1939; II: 19401963, 1983. —, Mallarmé: la lucidité et sa face d'ombre, 1986. —, La Mort dans l'âme, (Les Chemins de la liberté III), 1949. —, Les Mots, 1964. — Le Mur, 1939. 284

—, La Nausée, 1938. —, Œuvres romanesques, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1981. —, On a raison de se révolter, avec Philippe Gavi et Pierre Victor (Benny Lévy), 1974. —, Questions de méthode, in Critique la raison dialectique I, 1960. —, Réflexions sur la question juive, (1946), 1954. —, Saint Genet, comédien et martyr, 1952. —, Sartre, (Texte intégral du film Sartre par lui-même, réalisé par Alexandre Astruc et Michel Contât), 1977. (Film available on video from Éditions Vidéo Montparnasse, 1998.) —, Le Scénario Freud, 1984. —, Situations I: Essais critiques, 1947. —, Situations II: Qufest-ce que la littérature?, 1948. —, Situations III, 1949. —, Situations IV: Portraits, 1964. —, Situations V: Colonialisme et néo-colonialisme, 1964. —, Situations VI: Problèmes du marxisme 1, 1964. —, Situations VII: Problèmes du marxisme 2, 1965. —Situations VIII: Autour de '68, 1972. —, Situations IX: Mélanges, 1972. —, Situations X: Politique et autobiographie, 1976. —, Le Sursis, {Les Chemins de la liberté II), 1945. —, Un Théâtre de situations, 2nd edition, Folio/Essais, 1992. —, La Transcendance de VEgo, (1936), Paris, J. Vrin, Librairie philosophique, 1965. —, Vérité et existence, 1989.

Secondary jEschylus, The Oresteian Trilogy, trans. Philip Vellacott, London, Penguin Classics, 1959. Albérès, R.-M., Jean-Paul Sartre, 7th edition, Paris, Éditions Universitaires, Classiques du XXe Siècle 11, 1964.

285

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286

Champigny, Robert, Stages on Sartre 's Way 1938-52, Bloomington, IUP, 1959. —, Le Genre dramatique, Monte Carlo, Regain, 1965. Choron, Jacques, La Mort et la pensée occidentale, Paris, Payot, 1969. Cohen-Solal, Annie, Sartre, 1905-1980, Paris, Gallimard, 1985. Cohn, Ruby, Currents in Contemporary Drama, Bloomington, IUP, 1969. Colombel, Jeannette, Sartre, ou le parti de vivre, Paris, Grasset, 1981. Contât, Michel, Explication des 'Séquestrés d'Altona' de Jean-Paul Sartre, Paris, Archives des Lettres modernes 89, 1968. —, and Michel Rybalka, (eds), Les Écrits de Sartre, Paris, Gallimard, 1970. —, and Michel Rybalka, (eds), Œuvres romanesques, Paris, Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1981. —, and Michel Rybalka, (eds), Un Théâtre de situations, 2nd edition, Paris, Gallimard, Folio/Essais, 1992. —, and Michel Rybalka, (eds), Sartre: Bibliographie 1980-1992, Paris, CNRS, 1993. —, 'Sartre et la gloire', in Galster (2001c), below, pp.29-41. —, See also under Astruc, above. Cooper, D.G., and R.D. Laing, Reason and Violence: A Decade of Sartre's Philosophy, 1950-1960, London, Tavistock, 1964. Cornud-Peyron, Mireille, 'Les Mouches \ 'Huis clos ', de Sartre, Paris, Nathan, Balises 33, 1991. Cranston, Maurice, Sartre, Edinburgh/London, Oliver and Boyd, 1962. Davies, Howard, 'L'Idéologie théâtrale du Diable et le bon Dieu\ Études Sartriennes I (Cahiers de sémiotique textuelle 2), pp.219, 1983. Desan, Wilfrid, The Tragic Finale, Cambridge (Mass.), Doubleday, 1954. —, The Marxism ofJean-Paul Sartre, Toronto, Doubleday, 1965. Dickinson, Hugh, Myth on the Modem Stage, Urbana, IUP, 1969. Domenach, Jean-Marie, Le Retour du tragique, Paris, Seuil, 1967. Dort, Bernard, 'Frantz, notre prochain?', Théâtre populaire, no.35, 1959, in Lecarme (1973), below, pp.94-9.

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Drake, David, Intellectuals and Politics in Post-War France, Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2002. Dumas, Alexandre, Kean, ou Désordre et génie, in Alexandre Dumas, Kean, adaptation de Jean-Paul Sartre, Paris, Gallimard, 1954, pp.219-305; also in Bradby, above, pp.205-67. Études Sartriennes, occasional review published by RITM, Université Paris X, Nanterre, nos. 1-8, 1984-2002 (ongoing). Euripides, Medea, and Other Plays, trans. Philip Vellacott, London, Penguin Classics, 1963. —, Orestes, and Other Plays, trans. Philip Vellacott, London, Penguin Classics, 1972. —, The Bacchae, and Other Plays, trans. Philip Vellacott, London, Penguin Classics, 1973. Fanon, Frantz, Les Damnés de la terre, Paris, Maspéro, 1961. Feifel, Herman, (éd.), The Meaning of Death, New York, McGrawHill, 1959. Fields, Madeleine, 'De la Critique de la raison dialectique aux Séquestrés d'Altona\ PMLA, no.78, pp.622-30, 1963. Fox, Nik Farrell, The New Sartre, New York / London, Continuum International Publishing, 2003. Freeman, Ted, (éd.), Theatres of War: French Committed Theatre from the Second World War to the Cold War, Exeter, UEP, 1998. Galster, Ingrid, Le Théâtre de Jean-Paul Sartre devant ses premiers critiques, 2nd edition, Paris, L'Harmattan, 2001 (a). —, Sartre, Vichy et les intellectuels, Paris, L'Harmattan, 2001 (b). —, (éd.), La Naissance du phénomène Sartre, Paris, Seuil, 2001 (c). Garaudy, Roger, Literature of the Graveyard, trans. Joseph M. Bernstein, New York, International Publishers, 1948. Goldmann, Lucien, 'The Theatre of Sartre', The Drama Review, vol.15, no.l, pp. 102-19, Fall 1970. Gerassi, John, Jean-Paul Sartre: Hated Conscience of his Century, vol.1, Protestant or Protester?, Chicago/London, UCP, 1989. Goldthorpe, Rhiannon, 'Sartre's Theory of the Imagination and Les Séquestrés d'Altona\ Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, vol.4, no.2, pp.113-22, May 1973. —, Sartre: Literature and Theory, Cambridge, CUP, 1984.

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Gore, Keith, Sartre: 'La Nausée ' and 'Les Mouches ', London, Arnold, 1970. Guicharnaud, Jacques, Modern French Theatre from Giraudoux to Beckett, New Haven, Yale UP, 1961. Harvey, Robert, Search for a Father: Sartre, Paternity, and the Question of Ethics, Ann Arbor, UMP, 1991. Hayman, Ronald, Writing Against: A Biography of Sartre, London, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1986. Hobson, Harold, The French Theatre of Today: An English View, London, Harrap, 1953. Hoffman, Frederick J., The Mortal No: Death and the Modern Imagination, Princeton, PUP, 1964. Howells, Christina, (éd.), The Cambridge Companion to Sartre, Cambridge, CUP, 1992. Idt, Geneviève, 'Les Mots ' de Sartre: une autocritique en 'bel écrit ', Paris, Belin, 2001. Ireland, John, Sartre, un art déloyal: Théâtralité et engagement, Paris, Jean-Michel Place, 1994. Jacquot, Jean, (éd.), Le Théâtre tragique, Paris, CNRS, 1962. Jeanson, Francis, Le Problème moral et la pensée de Sartre, Paris, Myrthe, 1947. —, Sartre par lui-même, Paris, Seuil, Écrivains de toujours, 1955. —, Sartre dans sa vie, Paris, Seuil, 1974. Jolivet, Régis, Le Problème de la mort chez Heidegger et chez Sartre, Abbaye de Saint Wandrille, Fontenelle, 1950. Joseph, Gilbert, Une si douce Occupation: Simone de Beauvoir et Jean-Paul Sartre, 1940-1944, Paris, Albin Michel, 1991. Kail, Michel, see under Bagot, above. Kaufmann, Walter, Tragedy and Philosophy, New York, Doubleday, 1969. —, 'Existentialism and Death', in Feifel, above, pp.39-61. Keefe, Terry and Edmund Smyth, (eds), Autobiography and the Existential Self, Liverpool, LUP, 1995. Kern, Edith, (éd.), Sartre: A Collection of Critical Essays, Englewood Cliffs, Prentice Hall, 1962.

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Koefoed, Oleg, 'L'Œuvre littéraire de Jean-Paul Sartre: Essai d'inter­ prétation', Orbis litterarum, vol.6, pp.209-72, 1948, and vol.7, pp.61-141, 1949. Laing, R.D., see under Cooper, above. Laraque, Franck, La Révolte dans le théâtre de Sartre, vu par un homme du tiers monde, Paris, Jean-Pierre Delarge, 1976. Launay, Claude, Sartre: 'Le Diable et le bon Dieu\ Paris, Hâtier, Profil d'une œuvre 15, 1970. Leak, Andrew, The Perverted Consciousness: Sexuality and Sartre, London, Palgrave MacMillan, 1988. Lecarme, Jacques, (éd.), Les Critiques de notre temps et Sartre, Paris, Gamier, 1973. —, 'Réponse à Ingrid Galster', Bulletin d'Information du Groupe d'Études Sartriennes, no. 14, pp. 171-6, June 2000. Lecherbonnier, Bernard, Sartre: 'Huis clos', Paris, Hâtier, Profil d'une œuvre 31, 1970. Levy, Benny, L'Espoir maintenant: les Entretiens de 1980, Lagrasse, Verdier, 1991. Lévy, Bernard-Henri, Le Siècle de Sartre: Enquête philosophique, Paris, Bernard Grasset, 2000. Lilar, Suzanne, A propos de Sartre et de l'amour, Paris, Grasset, 1967. Lorris, Robert, Sartre dramaturge, Paris, Nizet, 1975. Malachy, Thérèse, La Mort en situation dans le théâtre contemporain, Paris, Nizet, 1982. Marcel, Gabriel, L'Heure théâtrale, de Giraudoux à Jean-Paul Sartre, Paris, Pion, 1959. McCall, Dorothy, The Theatre of Jean-Paul Sartre, New York / London, Columbia UP, 1969. Mohanty, Christine, 'Bariona, the Germination of Sartrean Theater', French Review, no.47, pp. 1094-109, 1974. Morin, Edgar, L'Homme et la mort dans l'histoire, Paris, Corréa, 1951. Murdoch, Iris, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, London, Bowes and Bowes, 1953. O'Connor, Garry, French Theatre Today, London, Pitman, 1975. O'Donohoe, Benedict, 'Connaissez-vous Sartre?', Obliques, no. 18/ 19, pp.335-41, April 1979. 290

—, 'Sartre tuant Saint Georges', Obliques, no.24/25, pp. 163-6, April 1981 (a). —, 'Sartre's Theories on Death, Murder and Suicide', Philosophy Today, vol.XXV, no.4, pp.334-56, Winter 1981 (b). —, (éd.), Jean-Paul Sartre, Les Jeux sont faits, (Introduction: 'Sartre: playwright and polygraph', pp.vii-xxi; 'Sartre and the cinema', pp.xxi-xxvii; 'Genesis and reception', pp.xxvii-xxxvii; 'Structure and techniques', pp.xxxvii-xlii; 'Themes and ideas', pp.xliilviii; Select Bibliography, pp.lix—lxii; Notes, pp.144-61), London, Routledge, 1990. —, 'Sartre, Orphan Playwright: the Place of the Father in Bariona, Les Mains sales, and Les Séquestrés d'Altona\ in Keefe, above, pp.39-59, 1995. —, 'Fraternity: Liberty or Inequality? Incest in Sartre's Drama', French Studies, vol.L, no.l, pp.54-65, January 1996. —, Report on: 'La Naissance du "phénomène Sartre": raisons d'un succès (1938-1945)', International Colloquium at the Catholic University of Eichstàtt, Germany, 5-8 November 1997, Sartre Studies International, vol.4, no.l, pp.89-94, 1998. —, 'The Anonymous Hero in Sartre's Theatre', Sartre Studies International, vol.5, no.l, pp.64-73, 1999 (a). —, 'Sartre's Melodrama: Les Mouches, or the Stepson's Revenge', French Studies Bulletin, no.72, pp.6-8, Autumn 1999 (b). —, 'Sartre's Heroine Addiction: Leading Women in his Theatre and the comédie familiale', French Studies, vol.LV, no.l, pp.47-58, January 2001 (a). —, 'Dramatically Different: the Reception of Sartre's Theatre in London and New York', Sartre Studies International, vol.7, no.l, pp.1-18, 2001(b). —, 'L'Auto-dérision chez Sartre et Camus: "L'Enfance d'un chef et "Jonas, ou l'artiste au travail'", in Albert Camus, 19: 'L'Homme révolté': cinquante ans après, Paris/Caen, Minard, Revue des Lettres modernes, pp. 151-70, 2001 (c). Pacaly, Josette, Sartre au miroir, Paris, Klincksieck, 1980. Perrin, Maurice, Avec Sartre au Stalag 12D, Paris, Jean-Pierre Delarge, 1980.

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Index

Action 120 Aden-Arabie (Nizan) 252 Affaire Henri Martin, L ' (Sartre) 168 Age de Raison, L ' (Sartre) 57 Alcestis (Euripides) 254 Almont, Maxime 140 Année sartrienne, L ' 268 Anouilh, Jean 194 Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache (Senghor) 108 Antigone (Cocteau) 29 Appel 73 Aron, Raymond 92, 220 Aronson, Ronald 169 Asinaria (Plautus) 264 Astruc, Alexandre 27 Aube, L'133 Aurore, L' 119 Avant-Scène Théâtre, L'33, 46, 72 Badel,Alan 172 Badel (directeur du Vieux-Colombier) 73 Bagot, Françoise 11 Bajazet (Racine) 76 Ballad of Reading Gaol, The (Wilde) 145 Barbezat, Olga 53, 72, 73 Bariona (Sartre) 11, 12, 20, 31, 32-53, 54, 56, 58, 69, 72, 163, 198, 204, 259, 260, 270, 275 Barrault, Jean-Louis 53 Baudelaire, Charles 19, 21, 22, 178 Baudelaire (Sartre) 20 Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin Caron de 194 Beauvoir, Simone de 30, 53, 54, 60, 72, 91,92,93, 106, 118, 138, 139, 162,

165, 167, 168, 169, 191, 192, 194, 220, 221, 222, 223, 254, 268, 269, 270,272,273,274,281 Beckett, Samuel 80, 169, 211, 281 Bérénice (Racine) 231 Berger, Pierre 221 Bergson, Henri 205 Berriau, Simone 91, 92, 138, 191, 221 Birault, Henri 18 Boros, Marie-Denise 57, 102, 104, 243 Bouilhet, Louis 282 Bradby, David 11, 172 Brasseur, Pierre 138, 140, 169, 170, 171 Brecht, Bertolt 189 Bref25* Brisées (Leiris) 55 Brook, Peter 92 Buffat, Marc 11 Bulletin d'Information du Groupe d'Etudes Sartriennes 268 Cacoyannis, Michel 254 Cahiers libres de la jeunesse, Les 94 Cahiers pour une morale (Sartre) 267, 268 Camus, Albert 26, 68, 72, 73, 74, 79, 103, 139, 165, 167, 168, 171, 211, 212,251,252 Canard enchaîné, Le 223, 224 Carnets de la drôle de guerre, Les (Sartre) 30, 31, 32, 121,268 Carrefour 55 Caruso, Paolo 121 Casarès, Maria 138 Cases, Ida Petazzoni 66, 71 Castelot, André 73 Cérémonie des adieux, La (Beauvoir) 268, 270, 271, 272, 273, 274, 275, 277

295

Cervantes, Miguel de 138-9 Champigny, Robert 61, 68, 160, 161 Chaplin, Charlie 89 Chapsal, Madeleine 14, 222, 248, 279 Chapuis, Pierre 74 Chauffard, R.-J. 91 Chauffier, Louis-Martin 139 Chemins de la liberté, Les (Sartre) 44, 89, 137,269 Chonez, Catherine 168 Chonez, Claudine 277 Claudel, Paul 158 Cocteau, Jean 29, 194 Cohen-Solal, Annie 219, 222, 223 Cohn, Ruby 68, 243 Combat 74, 89, 92, 93, 118, 119, 140, 171, 173, 192, 193 Communistes et la paix, Les 168 Comœdia, 55, 68 Contât, Michel 11, 13, 27, 32, 75, 94, 108, 119, 140, 141, 165, 168, 190, 221,223,228,243,252,273 Cornud-Peyron, Mireille 11 Courcy, M. de 170, 171 Cranston, Maurice 57 Critique de la raison dialectique (Sartre) 14, 35, 38, 43, 44, 48, 58, 101, 102, 134, 157, 166, 198, 220, 231, 249, 250, 264, 268, 269, 282 Crucible, The (Miller) 219 Daily Telegraph, The 172 Damnés de la terre, Les (Fanon) 35 Davies, Howard 165 Day-Lewis, Sean 172 Desanti, Dominique 88 Descartes, René 15 Diable et le bon Dieu, Le (Sartre) 11, 23, 101, 137, 138-68, 190, 193, 198, 203,218,274,277 Dickinson, Hugh 67 Dominique, Olga (see Kosakiewicz, Olga)

296

Dort, Bernard 72, 189, 224, 243, 279 Drake, David 169,252 Dreigroschenopfer, Die (Brecht) 189 Dumas, Alexandre 169, 170, 171, 172, 179, 187 Dumont, Margaret 185 Duras, Marguerite 120, 121 École des femmes, L ' (Molière) 211 Écrits de jeunesse (Sartre; Contât, Rybalka (eds)) 267, 269 Écrits de Sartre, Les (Sartre; Contât, Rybalka (eds)) 11, 32, 33, 63, 72, 73, 75, 90, 94, 95, 100, 106, 107, 108, 119, 126, 138, 139, 140, 141, 165, 168, 175, 190, 221, 222, 223, 240, 270 Écrivains en personne, Les (Chapsal (éd.)) 14, 248 Electre (Giraudoux) 29 Elkaïm, Ariette 219, 222 En attendant Godot (Beckett) 169 Engrenage, L ' (Sartre) 11 Entretiens avec Jean-Paul Sartre (Sartre, with Beauvoir) 268, 270, 271,272,273,274,275,277 Entretiens sur la politique (Sartre, Rosenthal, Rousset) 137 Escudero, Pedro 253 Espoir maintenant, L' (Sartre, with Benny Levy) 257, 259, 266, 268, 269 Esquisse dune théorie des émotions (Sartre) 145, 146 États désunis, Les (Pozner) 106 Étranger, L ' (Camus) 68, 103 Être et le néant, L' (Sartre) 14-18, 43, 47, 48, 62, 75, 76, 78, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 105, 112, 137, 156, 158, 173, 183, 198, 231, 247, 248, 258, 263, 269,276 Études sartriennes 11 Euripides 172, 251, 254, 255

Existentialisme est un humanisme, L' (Sartre) 65, 84, 90, 237 Express, L ' 25, 35, 220, 222, 223, 230, 240, 279

Grand Larousse encyclopédique 61 Guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu, La (Giraudoux) 29 Guitry, Lucien 170

Fanon, Frantz 35 Feifel, Herman 27 Fields, Madeleine 243 Figaro, Le 89, 92, 118, 120, 140, 171, 191,212,223,255 Figaro littéraire, Le 255 Flaubert, Gustave 272, 282 Force de l'âge, La (Beauvoir) 54, 73, 106 Force des choses, La (Beauvoir) 60, 91, 92, 93, 106, 118, 138, 140, 162, 165, 167, 168, 169, 191, 193, 194, 220, 222, 274 France-Dimanche 92 France libre, La 94 France nouvelle 222, 224, 237 France-Observateur 251 Francis, Robert 73 Freud, Sigmund 27, 220 Freud, the Secret Passion (a film by John Huston) 253 Frontier, Yves 33

Hamlet (Shakespeare) 119, 231 Haroche, Charles 222 Harvey, Robert 200 Hauser, Frank 171-2 Hegel, G.W.F. 76, 224 Heidegger, Martin 16, 31, 78 Hernani (Hugo) 171 Hitler, Adolf 30 Hommage international à Bertolt Brecht (Théâtre des Nations) 189 Homme révolté, L' (Camus) 165, 167 Hopkins, Anthony 172 Huis clos (Sartre) 11, 19, 26, 33, 71, 7288,89, 117, 158, 159, 185, 198,213, 222, 226, 237, 253, 257, 259, 260 Humanité, Z/190, 191 Humanité-Dimanche, L' 141, 191, 198 Huston, John 220, 253

Gaillard, Pol 120 Galster, Ingrid 12, 13, 26, 34, 55, 56, 94, 95 Gaulle, Charles de 220, 252 Gautier, Jean-Jacques 92, 120, 140, 141, 171,172,191,192,223,255 Genet, Jean 19, 21-3, 43, 59, 62, 111, 130, 131, 137, 144, 146, 175, 180, 200 Gerbe, La 73 Giraudoux, Jean 29 Goethe, Wolfgang von 139 Goldmann, Lucien 57 Goldthorpe, Rhiannon 12, 60, 135, 243 Gore, Keith 11, 59, 68, 71

Idiot de la famille, L ' (Sartre) 25, 267, 269,273,281 Imagination, L ' (Sartre) 29 Imaginaire, L'(Sartre) 174 Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Holy Office of the Vatican) 137 Ionesco, Eugène 281 Ireland, John 12 Jeanson, Francis 11, 18, 76, 131, 173, 281 Jeener,J.B. 118 Jeux sont faits, Les (Sartre) 11, 156 Jésus la chouette (Sartre) 267 Joly,G. 119 Jouvet, Louis 138 Kail, Michel 11 Kanters, Robert 223

297

Kaplan, Francis 88 Kaufmann, Walter 27 Kean, Edmund 169, 170, 171, 187 Kean (Sartre, adapted from Dumas) 11, 21, 168-88, 190, 193, 198, 203, 204, 218 Kean, ou Désordre et génie (Dumas) 170, 187 Kemp, Robert 119, 141, 172, 193 Kierkegaard, Sôren 18 Klehr, Harvey 218 Koefoed, Oleg 67, 105, 116 Koehler, Alain 225 Korène, Véra221 Kosakiewicz, Olga (alias Olga Domi­ nique) 53, 56 Kosakiewicz, Wanda (alias MarieOlivier) 72, 138,222 Ladbroke, Lewis 107 Laraque, Franck 12, 41, 42, 49, 52, 68, 99, 104, 150, 162, 163, 165,243 Launay, Claude 11 Leben des Galilei (Brecht) 189 Lecarme, Jacques 55, 56 Lecherbonnier, Bernard 11, 84 Leclerc,Guy 141, 190 Leiris, Michel 55 Lemaître, Frederick 170, 171 Lemarchand, Jacques 92, 255 Lettres au Castor et à quelques autres (Sartre) 30, 31,268 Lettres françaises, Les 27, 55, 95, 100, 120, 170, 171, 187, 188, 240, 249, 280 Levy, Benny (alias Pierre Victor) 256, 282 Lévy, Bernard-Henri 47, 268 Libération 194,240 Life of Galileo, The (Brecht) 189 Lorris, Robert 12, 61, 77, 79, 81, 84, 96, 99, 103, 104, 109, 112, 116, 144, 146, 149, 172, 175, 177, 180, 181,

298

197, 198, 209, 210, 215, 225, 230, 257,258,261 Luttes de classes en France, 1848 à 1850, Les (Marx, Karl) 218 Macbeth (Shakespeare) 60, 64, 70, 261 Machine Infernale, La (Cocteau) 29 Magnan, Henri 193 Mains sales, Les (Sartre) 11, 91, 11736, 137, 139, 140, 182, 188, 193, 198,217,231,232,276 Malentendu, Le (Camus) 26 Mallarmé, ou la Face d'ombre (Sartre) 269 Malraux, André 137, 220 Mancy, Joseph 228 Mani sporehe, Le 121 (see Les Mains sales) Marcel, Gabriel 29, 107, 140, 141, 161, 224 Mariage de Figaro, Le (Beaumarchais) 194 Marie-Olivier (see Kosakiewicz, Wanda) Marshall, Margaret 108 Marx, Groucho (Brothers) 185, 190 Marx, Karl 218 Matusow, Harvey 190, 191, 218 Maulnier, Thierry 107, 171, 192, 193 Mauriac, Claude 255 Mauriac, François 137, 220 McCall, Dorothy 12, 65, 69, 104, 162 McCarthy, Senator Joseph 190, 218 Mémorial, Le (Pascal) 160 Men Without Shadows 92 (see Morts sans sépulture) Mercure de France 55 Meyer, Jean 191 Miller, Arthur 219, 281 Misanthrope, Le (Molière) 211 Moatti, Jacqueline 254 Mohanty, Christine 41

Molière, Jean-Baptiste Poquelin 210, 211 Monde, Le 92, 118, 119, 141, 172, 193, 221,225,228,273 Morgan, Ted 218 Morin, Edgar 69 Mort dans l'âme, La (Sartre) 137, 238 Morts sans sépulture (Sartre) 17, 9 1 105,115,198,208,260 Mosjoukine, Ivan 170 Mother Courage and her Children (Brecht) 189 Mots, Les (Sartre) 20, 23, 125, 250, 268, 280 Mouches, Les (Sartre) 11, 27, 33, 40, 47, 53-71, 72, 77, 88, 93, 137, 140, 150, 163, 169, 172, 193, 198, 219, 225, 241 Mur, Le (Sartre) 29, 62 Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (Brecht) 189 Nation, The 108 Nausée, La (Sartre) 29, 111, 206, 226, 275 Nekrassov (Sartre) 168, 188-218, 219, 221,223,273,279 New Left 213 New Republic [Online], The2\% New York Herald Tribune 107 Nietzsche, Friedrich 18 Nixon, Richard 113 Nizan, Paul 252 No Exit (a film adaptation of Huis clos, by Pedro Escudero) 253-4 Nouvel Observateur, Lel\, 256, 273 Nouvelles littéraires, Les 141, 224 Obliques 267, 270, 274 Observateur, L' 168, 277 Observer, The 26, 270

Œuvres romanesques (Sartre; Contât, Rybalka, et ai (eds)) 89, 90, 138, 168, 188, 220, 252, 253, 268, 269 O'Connor, Garry 281 O'Donohoe, Benedict 11, 18, 50, 63, 64, 67, 74, 88, 94, 108, 154, 156, 172, 178,200,255 Oresteia 169 Osborne, John 281 Pagliero, Marcel 107 Pariser Zeitung 56 Paris-Journal 221 Paris-Match 252 Paris-Presse 240 Paris-Presse-L'Intransigeant 126, 139 Pascal, Blaise 160, 188 Péju, Marcel 139 Pingaud, Bernard 254 Pinter, Harold 80, 281 Plautus 264 Play of the Month (BBC1) 172 Pouillon, Jean 15 Pozner, Vladimir 106 Présence du théâtre 225, 235, 271 Prodromides, Jean 254 Putain respectueuse, La (Sartre) 21, 91, 106-17, 121, 122, 198, 205, 206, 273 Qu'est-ce que la littérature? (Sartre), see Situations II Questions de méthode (Sartre) 220, 249, 281 Quinn, Bernard J. 41,42, 53 Rabi, Henri 67, 132 Racine, Jean 13, 39, 76 Reds: McCarthyism in TwentiethCentury America (Morgan) 218 Reed, Paul 11 Réflexions sur la question juive (Sartre) 20,21, 109

299

République française, La 95 Réveil du peuple 73 Révolte dans le théâtre de Sartre, La (Laraque) 12 Rey, Evelyne 222 Reynolds, Stanley 172 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare) 177 Rosenthal, Gérard 137 Rouleau, Raymond 219 Rousset, David 137 Royle, Peter 11, 61, 71, 75, 79 Rue, La 23 Ruflân dichoso, El (Cervantes) 139 Rybalka, Michel 11, 32, 94, 108, 119, 140, 141, 165, 168, 190, 221, 223, 252, 273 Saddam Hussein 197 Saint Genet, comédien et martyr (Sartre) 21-3, 34, 36, 43, 59, 60, 62, 66, 99, 111, 112, 130, 131, 135, 144, 145, 147,165,166,175,248 Saint-Just 119 Samedi-Soir 138, 139, 158, 166, 277, 278 Sartre (texte intégral du film Sartre par lui-même, d'Alexandre Astruc et Michel Contât) 15, 271 Sartre dramaturge (Lorris) 12 Sartre- Literature and Theory (Goldthorpe) 12 Sartre par lui-même (un film d'Alexandre Astruc et Michel Contât) 15,27 Sartre par lui-même (Jeanson) 11, 18, 281 Sartre Studies International 11 Sartre, un art déloyal (Ireland) 12 Saurel, Renée 170 Scénario Freud, Le 268 Scriven, Michael 193 Senghor, Leopold Sédar 108

300

Séquestrés d'Altona, Les (Sartre) 38, 198, 218, 219, 220, 221-51, 253, 254, 258, 262, 265, 279, 280, 281 Shakespeare, William 13, 60, 177, 179, 180, 181, 185 Shaw, George Bernard 172 Sica, Vittorio de 254 Sicard, Michel 267, 270 Siècle de Sartre, Le (Lévy, B.-H.) 268 Silvain, Jean 73 Sirinelli, Jean-François 106 Situations I (Sartre) 103 Situations II (Sartre) 90, 132, 134,250 Situations III (Sartre) 27, 94, 95, 108, 137,265,278,279 Situations IV (Sartre) 212, 231, 252 Situations V (Sartre) 34, 35, 39, 42, 51, 53, 220 Situations VI (Sartre) 97 Situations IX (Sartre) 14, 17, 268, 270, 273 Situations X (Sartre) 71, 89, 269, 273, 281 Sophocles 172 Sorcières de Salem, Les (screen version of Miller's The Crucible, adapted by Sartre, directed by Rouleau) 219 Spectateur 107 Spectator, The 92, 107 Spiegel, Der 67, 75, 225, 226, 228, 229, 233, 238, 240, 243, 279 Spoerri, T. 57 Stenstrom, Thure 52 Straub, Frédérique 56 Sursis, Le (Sartre) 38 Tartuffe, Le (Molière) 210 Temps modernes, Les 34, 89, 90, 97, 137, 168,212,219,231,250,265 Theatre Arts 33, 107 Théâtre de Sartre devant ses premiers critiques, Le (Galster) 12

Théâtre de situations, Un (Sartre; Contât, Rybalka (eds)) 33, 34, 46, 55, 56, 67, 68, 71, 72, 74, 75, 87, 93, 94, 118, 120, 121, 131, 158, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 173, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 198,224, 225, 228, 229, 230, 232, 235, 237, 238, 240, 243, 246, 248, 249, 250, 253, 255, 271, 277, 278, 279, 280 Theatre of Jean-Paul Sartre, The (McCall) 12 Théâtre populaire 189, 224, 232 Théâtre vivant 225, 246 Thody, Philip 11 Threepenny Opera, The (Brecht) 189 Times, The 92, 172 Tintoretto 18 Tout compte fait (Beauvoir) 255 Transcendance de I 'Ego, La (Sartre) 29, 133 Travail théâtral 72 Trotsky, Leon 118 Troyennes, Les (Sartre, adapted from Euripides) 11, 12, 27, 39, 172, 198, 251-66

Tsarouchis, Jean 254 Tulane Drama Review 248 Tynan, Kenneth 26, 270 Védrine, Louise Verger 55, 71 Vérité et existence (Sartre) 269 Verstraeten, Pierre 12, 68, 130, 132, 133, 134, 135, 142, 144, 161, 162, 163,164, 165,249 Victor, Pierre (see Levy, Benny) Victors, The 94 (see Morts sans sépulture) Vilar, Jean 138 Violence et éthique (Verstraeten) 12 Vitold, Michel 91, 92, 191 Voltaire, Jean-Marie Arouet le Jeune 211,252 Wider, Kathleen V. 14 Wilde, Oscar 145

301