Sartre: Literature and Theory

256 Pages·1986·14.825 MB·English

by  Rhiannon Goldthorpe

SARTRE:
LITERATURE AND THEORY
RHIANNON GOLDTHORPE
Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford
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University of Cambridge
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CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
CAMBRIDGE
LONDON NEW YORK NEW ROCHELLE
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Cambridge Studies in French
General editor: MALCOLM BOWIE
Also in the series
1. M. COCKING
Proust. Collected Essays on the Writer and his Art
LEO BERSANI
The Death of Stephane Mallarme
MARIAN HOBSON
The Object of Art.
The Theory of Illusion in Eighteenth-Century France
LEO SPITZER
Essays on Seventeenth-Century French
Literature, translated and
edited by David Bellos
NORMAN BRYSON
Tradition and Desire. From David to Delaeroix
A. MOSS
Poetry and Fable. Studies in Mythological
Narrative in Sixteenth-Century France
Published by the Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 lRP
32 East 57th Street, New York, NY 10022, USA
10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia
© Cambridge University Press 1984
First published 1984
First paperback edition 1986
Printed in Great Britain at the Bath Press, Avon
Library of Congress catalogue card number: 83--24055
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Goldthorpe, Rhiannon
Sartre. - (Cambridge Studies in French)
1. Sartre, Jean-Paul-Criticism and interpretation
I. Title
848'.91209 PQ2637.A82Z
ISBN 0 521 23791 2 hard covers
ISBN 0 521 33878 6 paperback
BP
For Sian and David
CONTENTS
General editor's preface page viii
Acknowledgements ix
Abbreviations x
Introduction 1
1 LaNausee 4
Reflection and facticity 4
Transcendence and intentionality 23
Writing and meaning 38
2 Les Mouches: Emotion and reflection 62
3 Huis clos: Distance and ambiguity 84
4 Les Mains sales: Words and deeds 97
5 Les Sequestres d'Altona: Imagination and illusion 134
6 Commitment and writing 159
Sketch for a theory of commitment 159
A practical example: L' Engagement de Mallarme 184
Postscript 198
Notes 203
Works cited 237
Index 241
vii
GENERAL EDITOR'S
PREFACE
This series aims at providing a new forum for the discussion of
major critical or scholarly topics within the field of French studies.
It differs from most similar-seeming ventures in the degree of
freedom which contributing authors are allowed and in the range of
subjects covered. For the series is not concerned to promote any
single area of academic specialisation or any single theoretical
approach. Authors are invited to address themselves to problems,
and to argue their solutions in whatever terms seem best able to
produce an incisive and cogent account of the matter in hand. The
search for such terms will sometimes involve the crossing of
boundaries between familiar academic disciplines, or the calling of
those boundaries into dispute. Most of the studies will be written
especially for the series, although from time to time it will also
provide new editions of outstanding works which were previously
out of print, or originally published in languages other than
English or French.
viii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The first two parts of Chapter 1 and the whole of Chapter 3 first
appeared in French Studies (vols XXII (1968), xxv (1971) and XXXIV
(1980) respectively). An earlier version of Chapter 5 was published
in the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology (vol. IV
(1973». I am indebted to the editors of these journals (Professor
Malcolm Bowie and Dr Wolfe Mays) for permission to use this
material. A version of the third part of Chapter 1 was read to a
colloquium on 'La Fiction de Sartre' at the University of Warwick
in January 1981; Chapter 2 and the first part of Chapter 6 grew out
of papers read to the Society of French Studies in March 1968 and
March 1981. I am grateful to the organisers of those meetings
for giving me the opportunity to present and discuss my views.
The second section of Chapter 6 first appeared in Baudelaire,
Mallarme, Valery. New Essays in Honour of Lloyd Austin, ed.
Malcolm Bowie, Alison Fairlie and Alison Finch (Cambridge
University Press, 1982). My thanks go to Professor Austin, and to
the editors and publishers, for permission to reprint. I am also
grateful to the Principal and Fellows of St Anne's College, Oxford,
for a period of sabbatical leave which gave me time to write and
rewrite.
It gives me particular pleasure to thank the following: Malcolm
Bowie, for the generous encouragement and help which made this
book possible, and John Goldthorpe, for his unfailing sense of
proportion. Finally, lowe a long-standing debt of gratitude to
Professor Ian Alexander, who first helped me to read Sartre, and
whose teaching I recall with deep appreciation.
ix
ABBREVIATIONS
References to Sartre's works are given in the text, with the
following abbreviated titles:
CRD Critique de la raison dialectique
EM L'E ngagement de Mallarme
EN L'Etre et Ie Neant
ETE Esquisse d'une theorie des emotions
GM La Grande Morale
IF L'ldiot de lafamille
1m. L'I maginaire
O. r. (Euvres romanesques
S I-X Situations, vols I to X
SG Saint Genet, comedien et martyr
TE La Transcendance de I' Ego
TS Un Theatre de situations
When a sequence of references is given to the same text, the abbre
viated title appears with the first reference only.
x
INTRODUCTION
It may verge upon paradox to suggest that a writer as voluminous as
Sartre is a master of ellipsis. But his explicit recognition of the
power of ellipsis in expression and his own recourse, whether con
scious or unconscious, to the unsaid or to the unwritten mean that
the task of the reader is often one of unfolding the highly implicit.
The essays which follow, although written over a number of years,
share a common preoccupation. They aim primarily to explore the
not always overt relationships between Sartre's theoretical and
literary writing. The first term is taken broadly. It refers mainly to
his philosophical and psychological works, but also includes
aspects of his dramatic theory and his theory of commitment.
Although the opening section of each essay tends to be expository,
my discussion of theoretical issues does not claim to be systematic
or exhaustive, and it later becomes more allusively interwoven
with an analysis of a specific literary work, whether fictional,
dramatic or critical. The literary texts themselves are not primarily
discussed as illustrations or examples of a philosophical position.
They may be seen to anticipate, confirm or question the authority
of theoretical discourse. Each mode implicates the other. Indeed,
there are times when the form of the literary writing itself crystal
lises theoretical issues which are thematically dispersed
throughout Sartre's works and which are not of necessity those
which may at first sight appear to be dominant in a given literary
text. Thus, La Nausee, which powerfully dramatises the rela
tionships between consciousness and the world explicitly
analysed later in L' Etre et Ie Neant, also dramatises the philosophi
cal problems involved in thinking and writing about such rela
tionships - problems which are the subject of theoretical discussion
(or sometimes, more accurately, of allusion) in a wide range of
earlier, contemporary and later works.
But although, in Sartre, theoretical and literary writing may
implicate each other, they do not necessarily validate each other.
1