Critical Essays on Jean-Paul Sartre

329 Pages·1988·36.258 MB·English

by  Robert Wilcocks (ed.)

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