The room was filled with stale heat which had spent its force outside, and left its radiance in the folds of the curtain, and was stagnating there, inert and ominous like a human destiny. (p.66)
Sartre was one of great cultural icons of the mid-twentieth century, the popular face of French existentialist philosophy which he wrote about in countless essays, articles, books and plays, and summarised in his epic and impenetrable treatise, Being and Nothingness.
Most people prefer to sip their Sartre-lite via his half dozen plays (including Huis Close with its famous line ‘Hell is other people’), his début novel Nausea, or the Roads To Freedom trilogy, three novels about France just before World War Two – The Age of Reason, The Reprieve, and Iron In The Soul.
The Age of Reason
The Age of Reason is the first of the trilogy, a third-person narrative set in Paris in 1938 which focuses on two days in the life of Mathieu Delarue (French for ‘of the street’). Mathieu is a 34-year-old, tall, gangly philosophy teacher who spends a lot of time mooching round the streets of Paris feeling sorry for himself. He has a sickly lover, Marcelle, who has just announced she’s pregnant and so Mathieu immediately decides she must have an abortion. He visits his fat placid friend Sarah to ask her help, watched by the aloof Brunet, a committed communist and old friend. Slowly Mathieu realises the cheap abortionists he had been considering (400 Francs) risk seriously injuring Marcelle; Sarah knows a high class abortionist, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Austria, but he charges 4,000 Frances – where on earth can Mathieu get that kind of money?
Mathieu asks his sleek gay friend Daniel for the money. Daniel has it but maliciously refuses. He visits his older brother, Jacques, a successful lawyer, who reads him a lecture about his bohemian lifestyle and says he’ll give him 10,000 Francs if he’ll marry Marcelle. Mathieu refuses. He wants to stay free. He is obsessed with his freedom to do and be. Jacque says he is being childish, he is refusing to grow up – he has now reached the age of reason and he must choose to be an adult, to settle down, to marry, to accept that he has a nice government job (as a tenured professor at the Lycée Buffon) a nice government pension and a nice obliging mistress: in what way is he any kind of rebel or non-conformist?
While he ponders these ‘moral’ quandaries Mathieu hangs out with Ivich, kid sister of Boris Serguine, one of his pupils. Ivich is plain and prickly but Mathieu finds himself making a pass at her in a taxi on the way to an art exhibition. Bad mistake. She is prickly and resentful for the rest of the book.
Boris, meanwhile, is having an affair with Lola Montero, the ageing (well, 40 makes her ageing in this book) nightclub singer. He likes the way her face and body are wrinkled, he likes her ‘experience’, whereas she rather more straightforwardly likes having a young lover – it makes her feel young; she tells Mathieu that Boris is her ‘last chance’. If Boris left she would throw herself in the river (p.37). All the characters are like that – hysterical.
Boris like all the other characters doesn’t appear to have a job and is oppressed by his own ‘freedom’ – which some among us might relabel his lack of a job, a career or any responsibilities. So he’s invented a pastime of shoplifting, to give himself a heady sense of ‘being in the moment’.
Meanwhile, we have several long sections devoted to the sleek, plausible homosexual Daniel Sereno. First of all he elaborately packs up his three cats into a basket, takes a succession of trams across town to the Seine and gets as far as tying a paving stone to a string and to the basket, preparing to drown them – for no particular reason, out of motiveless malice – when he realises he can’t go through with it, cuts the string and retraces his step to his apartment.
Later there’s a description of Daniel going to a covered amusement arcade to watch young toughs hanging around waiting to be picked up by gay cruisers. He is filled with contempt and longing for both types. He eyes a sleek 50-year-old man picking up one of the toughs and is boiling over with hatred and self-loathing, when he is himself unexpectedly accosted by a young catamite he got a job at a chemist’s shop. The lad has lost the job and now wants some money. The 50-year-old observes all this and gives Daniel a wink of complicity as he walks by. Daniel is revolted with himself, with the world.
The most frequent word in the text (apart from ‘the’ and ‘and’) is ‘disgust’. All the characters are disgusted with their lovers, with sex, with Paris, with life, but most of all with themselves. The whole novel is an orgy of self-conscious self-loathing.
Mathieu handed her [Lola] the bag: she took a powder-box out of it, and eyed her face with disgust. (p.210)
In a long sequence towards the end of the book Mathieu drops in on a nightclub to meet Boris and Ivich and watch Lola sing. All four characters go through flashes of loathing and hating each other, but also need each other. Boris tries to touch Lola for the money he knows Mathieu needs but makes up a clumsy cover story and causes a big argument with the singer. He loathes her. She hates him. Etc.
Meanwhile, left at the table together, Ivich and Mathieu spend some time loathing each other – why on earth did he kiss such a plain pasty prickly young woman, thinks Mathieu. Ivich is on edge because she’s certain she’ll fail her exams and be forced to return to her parents’ smotheringly bourgeois home in provincial Laon. Boris had bought a large clasp knife and on a whim Ivich uses it to cut a deep slash right across her palm. Not to be outdone Mathieu lets the knife drop point-downwards into his own palm. It pins his hand to the table beneath. When Lola and Borins come back from their argumentative dance it is to find Ivich and Mathieu bleeding badly and linked by a new complicity. The waiter takes them to the cloakroom attendant who patches them up.
Next morning Mathieu meets Ivich at the Dome cafe and they start drinking to get rid of their hangovers, when Boris appears completely dazed. Lola is dead. They went back to her apartment, she took some more drugs (she snorts heroin) and in the morning was cold, still, with her eyes open. Boris begs Mathieu to go to Lola’s apartment and retrieve his bundle of love letters from her suitcase. Mathieu does so partly to impress Ivich and when he is there, in the darkness of the death room, comes across the bundles of thousands of Francs which Lola has been saving for years. All he need do is take 4,000 and he will have the fee for the high class abortion and ensure Marcelle’s well-being. But stupid scruples prevent him – he drops the notes back in the case and is half way across the room when Lola calls out.
She is not dead at all! This was a genuinely dramatic moment, a Grand Guignol moment, and I was as surprised as Mathieu. Turns out Lola was in a drug-induced fugue and now she slowly stirs and recovers. Recovering from his surprise, Mathieu makes sure she is alright and returns to Boris and Ivich at the café. Here, Boris refuses to believe that Lola is still alive; and, when Mathieu finally persuades him, Boris refuses to accept it. To him Lola is dead; he has got used to it, he had moved on. He doesn’t want to go back to her, to the woman he thought was a corpse.
Meanwhile, in another strand of the plot, it turns out that the sleek homosexual Daniel has been visiting Mathieu’s mistress, Marcelle, for some time, unbeknown to Mathieu. Daniel is revolted by her (‘He despised Marcelle profoundly’, p.89) but also fascinated by her as a specimen. When Mathieu comes to him to ask for a loan of 4,000 Francs, Daniel wickedly conceives a plan to persuade Marcelle to admit to herself that she wants to keep the baby – and to make her say this to Mathieu – and thus to force Mathieu into having to marry her. The thought of manipulating his ‘friend’ amuses the cynical Daniel (‘When Mathieu adopted a Quakerish attitude, Daniel hated him’, p.94).
Towards the end of the story, Mathieu sneaks back into Lola’s apartment with the key Boris gave him and this time does steal 4,000 of her Francs. He goes to Marcelle’s flat and now finds her strangely attractive and solicitous. (What he doesn’t realise is that Marcelle has been led on by Daniel to believe that Mathieu would propose to her.) When he does nothing of the sort but instead proudly brandishes the money for the abortion, Marcelle’s face falls, she is ashen, she says, ‘So that’s what you think of me’. Mathieu tries to make the situation better, but then, finally, admits – he doesn’t love her any more.
They part. Mathieu goes back to his apartment, where in fact he’d left Ivich sobering up after getting paralytic at lunch time after she’d learned she’d failed her exams and would be sent back to her wretched bourgeois home in the country. The two of them are struggling with whether they love or hate each other, when Lola storms in clutching a bag which probably contains a gun.
On the verge of hysterics, Lola accuses Boris of stealing the 4,000 Francs from her. Mathieu persuades Lola to let the terrified Ivich depart and then confesses that he, Mathieu, stole the money. Around about here it struck me that all these characters are French; maybe that’s why they all hysterically over-react to everything.
He felt ridiculous and detestable… He felt absolutely alone… He felt as though he were plunged in a sinister and preposterous nightmare… Her eyes were glittering with impotent hatred… He saw the back of that tall black figure moving with the blind momentum of catastrophe… ‘I’m even more disgusted with myself…’ Daniel filled him with horror… He was alone… ‘You hate me’ …
Lola is still shrieking her accusations when Daniel dramatically enters stage right, and proffers her an envelope containing the very same amount of bank notes she’s shrieking that Mathieu stole from her. It seems that he visited Marcelle soon after Mathieu left, she gave them the money to give back to Mathieu, and he has stumbled upon this ridiculous scene. Daniel hands the money to Lola. Voilà!
(Some of the writing feels like it’s from a pulp novel. The hysterical over-reacting to everything feels like an Edgar Allen Poe short story. Stripped of the relentless nihilism, it is, in fact, a bedroom farce. Mathieu should be played by Brian Rix.)
Lola is eventually pacified and stumbles off wailingly asking why Boris won’t come back to her.
Once alone with Mathieu, Daniel announces with a flourish that he is going to marry Marcelle. They are going to keep the baby. Mathieu feels like fainting. Daniel goes one step further and reveals to Mathieu that he is gay. What? They both need a drink and broach Mathieu’s bottle of rum. Gay? And going to marry Marcelle? Eh bien – Mathieu, the author and the reader all give a deep Gallic shrug – pourquois pas?
Disgust and loathing
As you can see there’s a fair bit of toing and froing among this cast of deadbeats and losers, but the ‘plot’ is mostly beside the point. The purpose of the novel is to show the Sartrean worldview through six or seven glutinously imagined characters – and that worldview is one of gloomy despair, morbid fear of getting old, of disgust at other people’s decaying, wrinkled, smelly bodies, revulsion at your own physical existence, and a pervasive, sickly hyper-sensitive self-awareness.
The characters ‘suddenly feeling old’, like they do in so many middle-class novels, is trite enough:
- Good Lord she’s getting old (p.14)
- ‘I’m getting old. Here I am, lounging in a chair and believing in nothing…’ (p.48)
- She had suddenly aged. (p.275)
And white bourgeois fictional characters feeling ashamed of their bodies is fairly commonplace. Mathieu is continually oppressed by his sense of his own body, ugly and lank:
- … a tall and naked figure, moulded out of dough (p.43).
- Mathieu felt uneasily obtrusive: a heap of refuse against a wall. (p.72)
- Mathieu made a gesture of disgust. (p.100)
It’s a little unusual that all the characters are consumed with disgust.
- She disliked her body. (p.68)
- Daniel envisaged himself with disgust. (p.85)
- Daniel eyed him with disgust. (p.132)
- ‘She revolts me.’ (Boris on Lola, p.213)
But the universal revulsion at the physical, at being human, is an incessant chorus of dismay and revulsion which envelops the whole book, gushing forth on every single one of the 300 pages. One strand is Mathieu’s dislike (and fear) of children:
- Mathieu felt uneasy, without quite knowing why. He had the sense of being engulfed by the child’s eyes. ‘Children are greedy little devils,’ he thought, ‘all their senses are mouths.’ (p.43)
- He looked at the child and he looked at the fly. A child. A bit of thinking flesh that screams and bleeds when it is killed. (p.44)
- A child: another consciousness, a little centre-point of light that would flutter round and round, dashing against the walls, and never be able to escape. (p.46)
But this fear of the physical reaches orgasms of revulsion in Mathieu’s revolting imagining of a) sex b) of the little blister of flesh, the foetus growing inside his mistress’s heavy, smelly pink body, and c) how it will be pricked, slashed and sucked out in the abortion.
- And what about the others? Those who have solemnly decided to become fathers, and feel progenitively inclined when they look at their wives’ bodies – do they understand any more than I do? They go blindly on – three flicks of a duck’s tail. What follows is a gelatinous job done in a dark room, like photography. (p.21)
- In a pink room within a female body, there was a blister, growing larger… There was no time to lose, for the blister was expanding at that very moment: it was making obscure efforts to emerge, to extricate itself from the darkness, and growing into something like that, a little pallid, flabby object that clung to the world and sucked its sap. (p.44)
- And she thought: ‘It’s there’. In that belly a little strawberry of blood was making haste to live, with a sort of guileless urgency, a besotted little strawberry, not even yet an animal, soon to be scarped out of existence by a knife. (p.69)
Unpleasant enough, but the text goes way beyond a universal physical revulsion into metaphysical disgust. Consciousness itself is seen as an impossible heavy, wearing, and disgusting phenomenon. It starts with his dislike of children, progresses through his disgust at the growing foetus, and spreads like a stain into a helpless horror at the sheer disgustingness of being alive, at being conscious, at having:
An absurd, superfluous life… (p.70)
Walking down the street is a trial for several of the characters: the heat, the sunlight, the other people, the noise threatens to overwhelm and drown them, to flood and erase their sense of self.
His solitude was so complete, beneath a lovely sky as mellow and serene as a good conscience, amid that busy throng, that he was amazed at his own existence: he must be somebody else’s nightmare, and whoever it was would certainly awaken soon. (p.150)
And this morbid self-consciousness reaches new heights in a disgust at being seen. It is bad enough to be a consciousness trapped inside a revolting body: but in some sense other people trap you in their gaze. You become an object for others, with no escape from their controlling gaze. Thus, when Mathieu leaves the pink prison of Marcelle’s bedroom he is so oppressed by the sense that she is still imagining him, that he feels he is still there – he has to go out of his way into a bar and chat to the staff and customers solely in order to exist for someone else.
He felt the need of being seen. Just of being seen. (p.19)
Boris is similarly self-conscious. In the nightclub he feels Lola’s scrutiny as a physical sensation.
He had a pain in his right side as a consequence of being looked at. (p.24)
This is one aspect of Sartre’s existential philosophy: the aspect he called being-for-others, the external objective side of ourselves which is permanently on display, unfree, trapped. On the other hand it can sometimes restore us to a sense of ourselves when we are lost. Daniel, after having sex with a rent boy, is so disgusted he contemplates suicide and, holding the razor in his hand, becomes almost completely empty of thought and feeling, just a pinprick of consciousness, an arm, a slice of sharpened metal. Eventually, he tears himself free and runs hysterically down into the street.
He must run, he must get away as far as possible, immerse himself in noise and light, in a throng of people, he must become a man among his fellows, and feel the eyes of other men upon him. (p.268)
Freedom
This brings us to the issue of ‘freedom’. Critics I’ve read say the novel is a meditation on freedom, in particular Sartre’s convoluted idea of freedom which is not a positive, but a kind of terrifying nothingness into which we’re hurled and from which we have to create our own lives from scratch, with no help or guidance from outworn creeds or dead religions. And hence the over-arching title of the series, Roads To Freedom as it indeed dramatises different characters’ journeys towards different definitions of freedom.
But this gives an inaccurately optimistic sense of the novel; in reality it is Mathieu’s gloomy meditations on his directionless life which have the most power. The bus he’s riding in brakes suddenly and Mathieu suddenly realises:
‘No, it isn’t heads or tails. Whatever happens, it is by my agency that everything must happen.’ Even if he let himself be carried off, in helplessness and despair, even if he let himself be carried off like an old sack of coal, he would have chosen his own damnation: he was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate: to marry, to give up the game, to drag this dead weight around with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he brought them into being. All around him things were gathered in a circle, expectant, impassive, and indicative of nothing. He was alone, enveloped in this monstrous silence, free and alone, without assistance and without excuse, condemned to decide without support from any quarter, condemned forever to be free.’ (p.243)
Maybe. Maybe that is the ‘human condition’ but why give it such a negative spin? Why ‘condemned’, why not ‘liberated in the sunshine’ to walk and run and skateboard and surf and buy a Harley Davidson and travel the world? The freedom part may be right (I disagree) but the immensely negative emotional interpretation Sartre gives it is entirely his own (and his own problem).
Anyway, I am with Mathieu’s brother, Jacques, when he says that Mathieu is a self-centred good-for-nothing who has no direction or purpose, who’s kept his mistress dangling for seven long years, and makes a fetish of his own inability to make decisions.
The most schematic part of the book is the character of Brunet, who is an almost comical stereotype of the Strong, Conscientious Communist. He invites Mathieu to join the Party. He explains that being a member has given him a sense of purpose and brotherhood with other members all round the world.
‘You are the son of a bourgeois, you couldn’t come to us straightaway, you had to free yourself first. And now it’s done, you are free. But what’s the use of that same freedom, if not to join us…You live in a void, you have cut your bourgeois connections, you have no tie with the proletariat, you’re adrift, you’re an abstraction, a man who is not there… You renounced everything in order to be free… Take one step further, renounce your freedom: and everything shall be rendered unto you.’ (p.118)
By sinking his individuality into a strong disciplined political movement he has gained his individuality. Mathieu listens sympathetically – Brunet is an old friend, and also an imposing presence, tall, physically superb, muscular hands, a man of the people – but as with his mistress or his friends or his job, Mathieu can’t quite bring himself to make a decision. One day he will, he tells Brunet, he tells himself, one day he will make the Great Decision which demonstrates his freedom… just not yet, not yet…
Reading the Brunet sections makes you wonder whether the aim of the book is Communist propaganda (after the war, when this book was being written, Sartre came out as a self-proclaimed Marxist). Maybe the entire novel is designed to show up the pettiness and negativity of the petit bourgeoisie, to show the pointless, aimless lives of modern people who have not accepted The Cause, who have not given their lives a Purpose by committing to the Communist Party. Maybe.
Alternatively, the young student Bruno – who hates being described as Mathieu’s ‘disciple’ – has his own, rather immature definition of freedom.
The individual’s duty is to do what he wants to do, to think whatever he likes, to be accountable to no one but himself, to challenge every idea and every person. (p.138)
Put like that, maybe Sartre and his philosophy have disappeared because they have been so thoroughly subsumed into our modern attitude. Boris’s credo pretty much sums up the attitude of my daughter, aged 16. Maybe these ‘freedom’ sections which caused so much debate in 1945, now seem thin and lifeless because we all think like that, talk like that, and have the t-shirt. Maybe.
Either way, the dozen or so ‘freedom’ sections feel like plasters strapped onto the groaning seething mass of disgust, appalled descriptions of physical functions and an apparently never-ending series of ways for the characters to feel disgusted and revolted by each other. The pregnant Marcelle has morning sickness:
A long filament hung from her lips, she had to cough it away… She watched the dabs of mucus sliding slowly towards the drainpipe leaving glossy, viscous tracks behind them, like snails. (p.68)
This is just one of hundreds and hundreds of vividly described moments of revulsion, nausea, disgust and loathing which saturate the text.
Back in the day, educated people agonised about how to find meaning in a world stripped bare of religion and the old certainties, and threatened by Nazism and totalitarianism. Sartre’s novels and plays, on one level, set out to dramatise that predicament and are of fascinating historical interest. But that predicament, that sense of a personal crisis inextricably linked to the crisis of an entire continent (at a central moment Mathieu buys a newspaper and reads about the latest nationalist atrocity in the Spanish Civil War and is possessed by nausea and fear), and the burning necessity to Make a Choice, to throw in your lot with one political party or the other… all that is long gone.
What has really endured of this book is the relentlessness of everyone’s misery and of their super disgust at being human, at having bodies, at ageing, at living.
- I am my own taste, I exist. That’s what existence means: draining one’s own self dry without the sense of thirst. Thirty-five years. For thirty-five years I’ve been sipping at myself and I’m getting old.’ (p.48)
- ‘I am utterly immured in my own self.’ (p.186)
- He spoke with disgust and in short spasms. ‘I’ll try to change,’ he said. ‘I’m contemptible,’ he thought… They walked in silence, side by side, immersed in sunlight, and in mutual detestation. But, at the same time, Mathieu saw himself with Ivich’s eyes, and was filled with self-contempt. (p.80)
- That ghastly self-contempt, that utterly weak, futile, weak, moribund self-contempt, which seemed at every moment on the point of self-annihilation, but always survived. (p.270)
Fat unhappy Marcelle – trapped by illness in her pink bedroom, stifled by the mother she shares her apartment with – is the central symbol of the squalid reality of the physical body, of nausea at its revolting fecundity, a claustrophobic image of unhappiness.
She sometimes had the feeling that her life had come to a stop one day at noon, and she herself was an embodied, eternal noontide brooding upon her little world, a dank and rainy world, without hope or purpose…. She felt sick…then a sense of uttermost disgust gathered upon her tongue… She disliked her body… the sight of women suckling their babies in the Luxemberg: a feeling beyond fear and disgust…she dreaded having to despise him… (p.67)
But she is only the most extreme example of the quality all the characters share, Sartre’s own disgust and revulsion at life, of being alive, of being human.
In a few days she would be nothing but a lump of misery… A slime of pity had engulfed him. He had no sympathy for Marcelle, and he felt profoundly disgusted… (p.160)
‘The slime of pity’ – Sartre likes slime, viscous trails, vomit, mucus, semen, blood.
I read this book on a lovely sunny day and couldn’t help thinking that all the characters in it needed to get out more, to get a hobby, get some exercise, and generally get a life. None of them have jobs (Mathieu has stopped work for the vacation) or children – they are completely free of timetables and responsibilities, utterly free to be as unhappy and negative as they please.
‘Oh,’ Ivich said vehemently, ‘how I hate the summer.’ (p.73)
The absolute determination of all the characters to be as miserable as possible eventually becomes quite funny. Sometimes it felt like ‘Monty Python and the French Philosopher’, with John Cleese saying in a heavy French accent, ‘Oh no, I feeel ze anguish of freedom oppressing my consciousness and feeelling me with despair at ze ‘uman condeetion’. Some bits made me laugh out loud, they were so over the top.
Love was not something to be felt, not a particular emotion, nor yet a particular shade of feeling, it was much more like a lowering curse on the horizon, a precursor of disaster.’ (p. 250)
Yes, Jean-Paul – love is a curse and a disaster.
If you hate summer, loathe being touched, are so morbidly self-conscious that other people looking at you hurts you, if you are revolted by your bodily functions and oppressed by a feeling of futility and pointlessness, ‘burdened by events to come’ and prey to ‘an intolerable anguish’ (p.83) – then this is the book for you!
Scandal
A footnote in The Last Chance explains that the right-wing Vichy regime which ran unoccupied France till 1944, executed a woman for providing an abortion. The subject of abortion appeared squalid to me, in 1977, but we all miss a lot if we don’t realise that the subject matter was so scandalous that Sartre couldn’t think of publishing the novel till after the Liberation, and even then it called down on his head a ton of criticism from all the respectable, right-thinking critics of his day.
Translation
L’Age de Raison was translated into English by Eric Sutton in 1947. Or at least into a form of English.
‘Glad I am to see you, Ivich.’
‘Good morning,’ said she. (p.52)
As with Darkness at Noon, which I’ve just read, the text’s source in another language is obvious on every page in an English which often clings to French word order and phraseology. The continual alien cadence of the sentences helps to ease the entrance, facilitates acceptance, of what is at the end of the day, a very very alien worldview.
Credit
L’Age de Raison by Jean-Paul Sartre was published by Editions Gallimard in 1945. The translation by Eric Sutton was published by Hamish Hamilton in 1947. This was issued as a Penguin paperback in 1961. All references are to the 1976 Penguin paperback reprint which I bought 40 years ago for 75p.
Books & Boots 
misstangyinbucharest
/ August 20, 2020Thanks for this interesting review and discussion of the text, it’s interesting to see how Satre’s philosophical ideas and themes are incorporated into a novel. I found your comments about the way ideas about freedom seem less revolutionary interesting. I agree, we have incorporated ideas of individual freedom into our general beliefs about individual identities and now see this as less of a burden. I am planning on rereading existentialism is humanism and wanted to find out about some of the themes in Satre’s novels. Thanks