All posts tagged Iron In The Soul

The Last Chance by Jean-Paul Sartre (1)

Introduction

When I first read Sartre’s trilogy of novels, The Roads to Freedom trilogy, back in the 1970s, we all thought that’s all there was, three books and fini! But it turns out that Sartre published parts of an intended fourth novel (in the magazine he edited, Les Temps Modernes) in 1949, and he continued working on this fourth novel for several more years, producing substantial fragments before abandoning it sometime around 1952. He also made quite a few public statements about how he intended this fourth volume to turn out, and so did his partner Simone de Beauvoir.

Without a doubt the trilogy was originally intended to continue on to become a tetralogy.

This volume, The Last Chance, brings together everything we have of this fourth novel – known to the editors as Roads To Freedom IV – that could be found among Sartre’s papers after he died in 1980. This consists of:

  • two long sections titled Strange Friendship and The Last Chance
  • four fragments about individual characters in the text
  • a draft ‘conclusion’ passage

This assembly of texts is surrounded by quite a lot of editorial apparatus putting them in the context of the times, of Sartre’s career, and explaining their complex textual history. Before we get to the Sartre texts, the volume presents four items:

  • the translator’s introduction
  • a fascinating interview with Sartre from 1945 (just after the first two novels in the series were published)
  • two short notes Sartre made about the first two books in the trilogy, but which were never included in the English translations

Then the book publishes all the text and fragments we currently have – before going on to present four further essays:

  • a general introduction to the trilogy
  • critical notes on each of the two long sections by Sartre scholar Michel Contat
  • a concluding note about the Sartrean idea of ‘bad faith’, by the translator, Craig Vasey

In fact, there is so much material in this editorial apparatus that I am obliged to write two blog posts: one about the fictional texts themselves, which I’ve titled The Last Chance (2), and this blog post titled The Last Chance (1) which addresses only the points made in the editorial essays.

1. Translator’s introduction by Craig Vasey

American 

The translator and general overseer of this edition (i.e. the author of all the annotations at the back of the text) is American. Craig Vasey is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Mary Washington, Virginia. As well as meaning we have to read Americanisms like ‘pants’ instead of ‘trousers’ and ‘mad’ instead of ‘angry’ throughout the translation, this also means he lacks a feel for the European experience. He has no first hand empathy for your country having been bombed, blitzed, conquered, ruined, rationed and only slowly rebuilt, which radiates from the latter parts of the Roads to Freedom trilogy. My Dad lived in London during the Blitz. Walking round London you can see the shrapnel damage from those long ago bombs, and places where bombs demolished several in a row of houses, which were replaced with modern buildings. Or visiting the abandoned RAF airfields, and reliving the real sense of danger. We might have lost.

Communism

I grew up in a country which had a powerful labourite tradition and even a (small) communist party in the 1970s and 80s. Becoming a communist was a plausible political choice in the 1970s and even more so in the polarised society of the 1980s, which saw the rise of the Marxist Militant Tendency which worked to undermine the traditional Labour Party from within and was partly responsible for keeping it out of power for so long. In the 1970s and 80s George Orwell’s visions of a totalitarian society, or Sartre’s characters’ agonising over how to change society, how to overthrow capitalism and whether to join the Communist Party – all these still seemed pressing and urgent questions.

Nowadays, as Vasey candidly admits, he finds it difficult to persuade his students that there was ever any merit in communism. As it does to my teenage children, communism now seems to Vasey’s students a barely-understood and irrelevant relic from a buried past.

This means that, alas, for most modern readers Sartre’s trilogy is emptied of not just one of its key ideas, but a key imaginative presence, a cultural pressure, a social compulsion, the option of joining with men and women around the world to try and bring about a better society, which was so fashionable among students in the 60s, 70s and 80s.

In those days communism was an entire climate of thought, it was a threat which both the Right and the liberal Left saw as menacing society. And America never experienced any of this. It was never bombed, blitzed, conquered or crushed. Even in the depths of the Great Depression the Communist Party never presented a serious threat to the U.S. government and in the 1950s it was successfully demonised and repressed. The reverse, the opposite of Communism, America represented to the world, then as now, the triumph of shiny consumer capitalism, all movie starts, coca cola and blue jeans. If its fiction deals in any kind of dissent it is the isolated revolt of miserable loners, beatniks and drunks, from Kerouac to Raymond Carver.

Americans neither had the experience of conquest by a totalitarian regime nor the national humiliation of military defeat nor the experience of communism as a serious imaginative and political option, which the French knew and experienced.

All this is by way of explaining why the introduction and many of the essays in this volume had, for me, a curiously detached, clinical feel. They could be dissecting a dead text from the Middle Ages and relating it to the theology of Thomas Aquinas for all the relevance, the sense of feeling the issues, which they convey.

Mistranslations

Vasey clears up some mistranslations. In the original French the trilogy is called Les Chemins de la Liberte i.e. The Roads of Freedom not The Roads To Freedom. Sartre didn’t intend there to be a finished destination. Admittedly, in some interviews, he did sketch out a conclusion to the characters’ narratives but in the event proved incapable of providing one. During the reading of these 1,400 or so pages I kept thinking of the old proverb, ‘It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive.’ Sartre’s philosophy is one of radical indeterminism; there is no God or plan or telos. It’s surprising, in a way, that he ever thought the series could be concluded.

Another egregious mistranslation is that the third book, titled in French La Mort Dans L’Ame, should be translated as Death in the Soul, not Iron in the Soul as the Penguin translation has it.

Plot summaries

Vasey gives good plot summaries of the previous three novels though, in my opinion, underplaying the avant-garde techniques which Sartre uses – especially in The Reprieve with its cast of over a hundred characters whose thoughts and experiences meld and jump from one to another in a disconcerting but ultimately very pleasing way.

And Vasey’s summaries in no way convey the sheer weirdness of Sartre’s prose style and worldview, the way the narratives are constantly portraying the characters’ hallucinatory visions of themselves and the strange world they find themselves in – delirious visions of an alienated world, in prose which is routinely studded with great abstract ideas abstract qualities like freedom, peace, night and death.

Present tense

The one really useful insight I learned from this introduction is that part two of Iron In the Soul – the part that deals with Brunet trying to recruit some of the defeated French prisoners of war into the Communist Party – is, in the original text, told entirely in the present tense. It isn’t in the English translation. This is a vital fact to know for so, apparently, is the section about Brunet in these fragments.

I guess Sartre took this artistic decision is to emphasise the immediacy, the permanent present, which Brunet, as the most political, the most engagé character,  operates in.

Two fragments

Strange Friendship was published in Sartre’s magazine in 1949 so has been available for a long time. But it was only in 1981, when Sartre’s complete works were published, that the editors included for the first time a second fragment titled The Last Chance. This latter part has been reconstructed by scholars from three extended segments and a series of fragments, and it is this reconstruction which is presented in this volume.

2. Interview with Sartre at the Café Flore

The day after Sartre gave his public lecture Existentialism is a Humanism in October 1945, a young journalist, Christian Grisoli, scooped an interview with the celebrity philosopher. Unsurprisingly, in the interview Sartre echoes many of the phrases and ideas he’d used the night before, for example:

We say that there is no human nature, there is no eternal and unchanging essence of man – abstract potentiality, Platonic Form – that would determine individual existences. We say that in the case of man, freedom precedes essence, that he creates that essence through acting, that he’s what he makes himself through his choices, that it’s his lot to choose and make himself good or evil, and that he’s always responsible. (p.15)

And:

Man is free. It is he who makes there be a world. It’s by his choice that he decides its meaning. He cannot refuse to choose, because his refusal is itself a choice. And he has to choose on his own, without aid, without recourse. Nothing is coming to him from outside that he could receive or accept. He has to make himself, down to the slightest detail: that’s his abandonment – a consequence of his freedom. As for anguish, that’s the consciousness of his freedom, the recognition that my future is my possibility, that it depends on me to bring it into existence and sustain it. (p.16)

Critical outrage

It is interesting to learn from the interview that a lot of contemporary critics disliked the two novels for their focus on the squalid and the sordid: specifically disliking the centrality of the abortion plotline in The Age of Reason and the scene in The Reprieve where patients who are unable to walk are evacuated on a train and obliged to defecate into bedpans in the company of the opposite sex.

Things have changed. I can catch an echo of the outrage of Daily Mail-style philistines, I understand where they’re coming from, I appreciate that the latter scene in particular crosses boundaries of good taste. But I, personally, found the scene where the woman, Jacqueline, deprived of the use of her legs, forced to lie on a stretcher in a cattle truck being taken along with all the other evacuated disabled patients to some unknown destination, for hours on end – how she eventually has to give in and defecate right next to the man, Charles, who she was becoming friendly with, was tremendously sensitive and sympathetic and beautiful.

Having wiped my children’s bottoms and cleared up their vomit (and coped with the various bodily fluids of my partner in sickness and in health) I read this kind of frank depiction of the reality of the human body as liberating and profoundly compassionate.

Nonetheless, it is interesting to learn that Sartre was an innovator not only in his technical experimentations but in his subject matter, too. He was deliberately pushing the boundaries. And he had to fight against the ‘right-thinking’ conformists, the defenders of ‘good taste’, of his age, as we have to in ours.

The interview also makes it clear that Sartre was already well-established by 1945 as a celebrity intellectual, a philosopher superstar, criticised for being ‘the great corruptor’, a wicked influence on young people, a fashionable curiosity. He already had enough of a scandalous reputation to laugh about it.

Sartre uses the interview to set the philosophical issues addressed in his fourth novel in the context of its predecessors:

Man is free in the fullest and strongest sense. Freedom isn’t in him as a property of his human essence. He doesn’t exist first, and then be free later. He is free by the fact that he exists. There’s no distance between his being and his freedom. But man, who is thus condemned to freedom, still has to free himself, because he doesn’t immediately recognise himself as free, or, because he misunderstands the meaning of his freedom. This working-his-way-along the road to his freedom is the paradox of freedom, and it’s also the theme of my novel. It’s the story of a deliverance and a liberation. But it’s not finished yet. The Age of Reason and The Reprieve are only an inventory of false, mutilated, incomplete freedoms, a description of freedom’s roadblocks. It’s only in The Last Chance that the conditions of a true liberation will be defined. (p.18)

1. Note how wonderfully fluent Sartre is. He’s like a tap: turn him on and a dazzlingly articulate flow of prose streams out, perfectly blending his philosophy with anything he’s asked, his fictions, issues of the day, the critics, Paris society.

2. Note how repetitive Sartre is. The same handful of ideas – total freedom, total responsibility, the ‘anguish’ of realising your ‘abandonment’ – are repeated over and over. In a fluent persuasive stream of rhetoric, it’s true, but, still, highly repetitive. Like advertising slogans or the hook of a pop song, repetition is designed to lodge them in your brain.

3. As to his meaning, it is a bit of a bombshell that the existing three books are all just foreplay leading up to The Last Chance, that only in this final book will ‘the conditions of a true liberation will be defined’.

4. Especially considering it was never finished. The Last Chance was never written. ‘The conditions of a true liberation’ never were defined. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that, just as Sartre repeats in his lectures and interviews the same basic idea that man is abandoned to total freedom and must make himself, invent himself, by choosing, by making a commitment – so in his fiction his characters are always seeking freedom, worrying about their freedom and trembling on the brink of their freedom – but never quite arrive.

After all, what happens after Man has made his Commitment? Sartre’s philosophy is silent about this and so is the fiction. Maybe Sartre didn’t know. He himself was happy to be identified as a Marxist but he refused to join the Communist Party and vacillated between criticism and support of the Communist Party throughout his adult life. There is no settled position. Life is a process.

We know from his biography that Sartre’s political position was strongly affected by the war, forcing him to switch from a rather anarchistic, subjective, irresponsible position in the late 1930s into acknowledging the need for full political commitment as a result of his wartime experiences, but… but… He never could bring himself to completely commit to the main revolutionary party of his day. He remained a man of the opposition.

And, mirroring Sartre’s indecision is the wavering attitude of the central character of the trilogy, Brunet the Communist organiser. In the trilogy, Brunet is presented as an almost comically manful man, tall, strong with knotted muscles and complete self-confidence (the central character of the trilogy, feeble philosophy teacher Mathieu Delarue, is in awe of his manliness).

But by the final section of book three he is shown in a much more complicated light, assailed with doubts about how to handle ‘the men’, making mistakes, unable to recruit the men he hoped for, and very effectively criticised by his alter-ego Schneider, who is a much more genuine ‘man of the people’. In book four, much to my surprise, Brunet completely loses his faith in monolithic communism. In fact, his communist comrades decide he is such a traitor to the cause they decide to kill him.

So much for the one and only really politically committed figure in the series.

Put simply, the Roads To Freedom series breaks down when it comes time to actually show what ‘commitment’ means in action. Over and again Sartre’s plays, interviews, essays and his grand philosophical work Being and Nothingness, emphasise the need for decision and commitment. But when push comes to shove, when he has to put his money where his mouth is, when he has to really show what making a decision and living a decision look like… he can’t.

Back to the interview. Sartre is eloquent in explaining that Mathieu is the embodiment of complete uncommittedness, always prevaricating, always putting things off, always making excuses. And explaining that Brunet is the opposite pole – Brunet believes in the transcendent values of the Marxist interpretation of History. History has laws, the Party understands and is following a pre-set plan; the Revolution will occur. In his faith in this process he, also, is not free. And where will all these characters end up? Where will their Roads To Freedom take them?

That’ll be the subject of The Last Chance. (p.19)

It is interesting to learn that Sartre’s huge philosophical tome, Being and Nothingness, which he wrote in tandem with the Roads To Freedom novels, similarly ends on a question mark – ‘on the need and the promise of an ethics’. Sartre publicly said he was working on this sequel to his big philosophical work at the same time he was writing The Last Chance. Everything would be revealed in both of them. Instead of which, neither was ever delivered.

Camus

Sartre’s name is often twinned with Camus, but in the interview Sartre is crystal clear about why they’re different, and it’s worth quoting his explanation at length.

Camus is not an existentialist. Even though he refers to Kierkegaard, to Jaspers, to Heidegger, his real influences are the French moralists of the seventeenth century. He’s a classical man, a Mediterranean. I’d call his pessimism solar, thinking of the blackness in the sun. Camus’ philosophy is a philosophy of the absurd, and for him the absurd is born from the relation of man with the world, man’s rational expectations and the irrationality of the world. The themes he draws from there are the themes of classical pessimism. For me there’s no such thing as the absurd in this sense of scandal and disappointment that Camus sees.

What I call absurd is something quite different: it’s the universal contingency of the being who is, but who is not the foundation of his being. It’s what there is in being of the given, the unjustifiable, the always primary. And the consequences that I develop from this feature of being are developed on a completely different level from where Camus put himself, which is the level of dry contemplative reason, in the French style. (p.20)

Hard not to think that in the second section Sartre is trying to bamboozle us with technical terminology and verbiage. The first half, though, seems to me spot on. The Absurd is the mismatch between our ‘rational’ expectations that the world will be orderly and comprehensible – and the profoundly irrational, disorderly nature of the world as we actually experience it.

Conformist people expect life to be decent, rational, you work hard you’re rewarded, and so on. They believe what their mummy told them. Absurdists know you can keep fit all your life and drop dead of a stroke while out jogging, be killed by a street sign falling on your head or a terrorist bomb blowing up your plane. There is no correlation between human intention and outcome. There is no God overseeing everything to make sure we get our just deserts. Constantly the rift rises up between the sensible, decent morality we think we subscribe to, and the random nature of the world around us which has no concern whatsoever for human beings.

That is Camus’ territory, and his solution is to revolt against this condition, to rebel against existing values, to master yourself and the world. Camus’s is a more emotive, psychological worldview than Sartre’s. It has always seemed to me – and apparently this is the common view – far more life-affirming and positive.

Sartre’s characters have weird hallucinations in which they are overcome by profoundly physical sensations of disgust, repulsion, hatred of the body and its slime and excretions (see my reviews of his novels for numerous quotes to this effect). Camus loves the warmth of the sun on his body, the feel of the waves as he swims through them. I have experienced the former, but I definitely prefer the latter.

3. ‘Please insert’ 1

This is a useful one-page introduction which Sartre wrote to the first two novels explaining, in particular, why he used the experimental technique in The Reprieve. In this novel characters’ thoughts often bleed into each other, scenes cut not only in mid-paragraph but sometimes mid-sentence to new scenes and characters. I found it a thrilling read. Sartre references Virginia Woolf and John dos Passos as precursors.

4. ‘Please insert’ 2

Sartre’s one-page introduction to Iron in the Soul namechecks the main male characters from the trilogy and gives teasing hints as to their fates. (These are direct quotes from page 24):

  • Daniel, at his basest and without knowing it, begins the ascent that leads him to freedom and death.
  • Brunet undertakes a project, but he is far from suspecting that through it his sword of certainties will be broken, and that he will be left naked and free.
  • Seeking the death that has been stolen from him, Boris flies towards London, but it is not death that he will find there.
  • And Mathieu… learns that no one saves himself alone. In fact, he has the most to lose: the others have lost their principles, but he – he loses his problem. Rest assured, he will find himself another.

1. Note Sartre’s fluency, along with his tendency to grandiloquence, his fondness for profound abstract terms – freedom, death, naked, sword.

2. Note also how it sounds like the trailer for any of a thousand TV series: [Say the following in a corny American accent]

Will Daniel complete his seduction of the innocent Philippe? Will Brunet rouse the demoralised French prisoners of war? What will young gadabout Boris find waiting for him in London? And is Mathieu, who we saw heroically killed in the church tower at the end of part three – really alive after all? Tune in next week, for another thrilling episode of ROADS TO FREEDOM!!!

Except that next week’s episode never arrived. [For a summary of what did come see my review of The Last Chance (2).]

PART TWO

At this point, this volume introduces the fragmentary texts of Strange Friendship and The Last Chance, which I review in another blog post. Having read the Sartre texts, the reader is then presented with the remaining four short essays in the volume, which I summarise below:

5. General introduction for Roads of Freedom by Michel Contat

This is a very interesting slice of Sartre’s biography which explains the personal and historical context the books were written in. Contat gives half a dozen reasons why the final novel was never finished.

Sartre, pushed by world events in the burgeoning Cold War of the late 1940s, and then by the start of the Korean War in 1950, not only had to reconsider his approach to contemporary politics (which he saw as choosing either the USA and reaction or the USSR and human freedom) but was forced to completely reconsider the role of writing as a form of political commitment or engagement in the new Cold War.

Sartre developed his complex ideas about the role of writing in the essays collected as the volume What Is Literature? in 1947, but these themselves underwent further evolution as the Cold War progressed. By the early 1950s his attitude towards writing, his thoughts about the role of the writer, had evolved so far beyond the position of the man who began the series in the early 1940s, that he found it impossible to go back and depict with any enthusiasm the development of his alter-ego, the philosopher Mathieu. He had moved on.

On another level, by the time of the Liberation of France in 1944, Sartre had become a celebrity, a rock star among philosophers and writers, with a battery of writings promoting his brand on all fronts – a series of smash hit plays packing in audiences; long critical essays on contemporary authors and artists; his own magazine Les Temps Modernes publishing with-it commentary on politics and current affairs; and the heavy-duty masterwork Being and Nothingness providing something for philosophy students to chew on.

Getting back to depicting characters who were meek and unknown, like the unworldly Mathieu and his modest personal quest for meaning, was now difficult for Sartre to imaginatively recapture.

And there’s an even simpler reason. Sartre’s fictional technique is consistent in one important respect. The stories tend to happen over a very short time period, without recourse to flashbacks or backstories. Thus the 300 pages of The Age of Reason cover just 48 hours in the characters’ lives. The Reprieve‘s dense 400 pages cover just a week.

The fragments we have of The Last Chance are even more like this, cut down and pared back to read, at moments, almost like scenes from a play, just action and dialogue.

Quite simply, there is no way Sartre could have used this technique to cover everything which happens to his protagonists in the period from spring 1941 (when the novel kicks off) to the liberation of Paris in the summer of 1944, in one book. He had set himself far too much of a task. In fact, given the tiny timescales of the previous novels, using this approach would probably have required a whole further suite of novels. You can see why he might have slowly come to the conclusion that it was just impossible to do.

6. Critical note on ‘Strange Friendship’ by Michel Contat

Like Dickens, Sartre published his novels in instalments in the periodical which he himself edited, Les Temps Modernes. It is instructive to learn that Iron in the Soul was published in six instalments from January to June 1949, was published in book form in September 1949 – and that the two parts of Strange Friendship followed immediately afterwards, being published in the November and December 1949 issues.

It must have looked to regular readers as if the next book was already written and would come out in the same steady manner. But no. It was to be 14 years before readers heard anything more of Mathieu Delarue. When they did, it was in the third volume of Simone de Beauvoir’s autobiography, Force of Circumstance, published in 1964. Contat quotes the passage of de Beauvoir in its entirety because it sets out a comprehensive synopsis of what Sartre had told de Beauvoir the book would contain.

Apparently, Brunet was to successfully escape from the prison camp and make it to Paris in time to learn that Germany had invaded the USSR and the Communist Party had completely reversed its position (yet again) and was now calling for CP members to sabotage the German war effort. It turns out that Brunet’s anti-German views in the camp were right all along. Brunet joins the Resistance but with a will now undermined by the subjectivism which we see him experiencing in the early part of the book.

Meanwhile, Mathieu continues his journey to becoming a man of action. Daniel (the amoral conflicted homosexual from the earlier books) gets Mathieu freed from the prison camp and brought to Paris to edit a pro-German journal, but escapes and goes underground to join the Resistance. Mathieu has an affair with his brother’s wife, Odette, who we saw falling in love with him in The Reprieve.

Mathieu is then captured by the Germans and dies under torture, having made himself into a hero.

Philippe, the pompous young pacifist we met in earlier books, becomes a resister and is killed in a German raid on a café.

Daniel, the conflicted gay man who had become his lover, takes revenge by taking a hand grenade along to a meeting with senior German officials and blowing himself and them up.

Boris, who had earlier escaped to England, parachutes back into France to join the Resistance.

Phew! What a novel that would have been. Sounds like a very dramatic movie. And note how everybody joins the Resistance. As is well known, everybody in occupied France was a member of the Resistance. All the French were heroes.

When it’s summarised like this, maybe we can again see why Sartre couldn’t bring himself to write this twaddle. His preferred milieu is anguish and uncertainty: all the characters in this scenario sound like they could be played by Bruce Willis or Tom Cruise.

7. Critical note on ‘The Last Chance’ by Michel Contat and George H. Bauer

This is less interesting than the previous essay. It is a scholarly note about the conjectured order of the surviving fragments. It sheds a little more light, or rephrases, the importance of Sartre’s ‘conversion’ to supporting the Communist Party in 1952. A fairly staunch opponent of Stalinism, Sartre changed his view in light of the Cold War. Broadly speaking, he saw the choice as between Reaction and the Right (embodied by America) and Freedom and Hope, albeit a bit shop soiled, embodied by the USSR. Hard to believe, but there you are.

This ‘conversion’ entailed Sartre in a revaluation of the role of the ‘committed writer’ in creating ‘engaged literature’ and this seems to have carried his thinking about what creative writing should be far beyond the goals set in the original conception of these essentially ‘realist’ novels.

In fact it seems to have carried him beyond the idea of writing novels at all, and he never wrote another one. Works of philosophy followed (The Critique of Dialectical Reason), and critical essays on artists and writers, but the new project seems to have been a vast politico-biographical-critical study of Jean Genet. Novel writing ceased to seem the appropriate form for a ‘committed writer’ to engage in. Sartre moved on, leaving behind these fragments.

8. ‘Bad faith’ and Roads of Freedom by Craig Vasey

These last three pages address the simple issue of why all the passages featuring Brunet – in Iron in the Soul as well as in these fragments – are in the present tense. Vasey thinks this is stylistically appropriate to the character of Brunet, a man who rejects thought, who rejects the notion of a past, who lives entirely for Right Action in the present.

He doesn’t experience himself as an issue, as a question mark, as a problem to be addressed. (p.207)

The notion of ‘bad faith’ is relevant because, for existentialists, bad faith, or mauvais foi in the original French, denotes any strategy for denying or hiding from our fundamental ineluctable freedom of choice, to decide how we live and who we make of ourselves. Saying that we were born thus or brought up thus and so never had a chance to do x, y or z, is bad faith. We can always choose. We are always free to say yes or no. Bad faith means making excuses large or small in order to escape the anguish of realising how very free we are and how totally responsible we are for our own lives.

It always refers to a strategy of life by which one disburdens oneself of responsibility for oneself. (p.208)

Being a Catholic or any kind of religious believer is probably the classic example of bad faith, claiming we are made such and such by God, that there is a fixed human nature, that as a result our actions are limited, we are not free etc. It leads, on a more superficial level, to saying that, as a result, we must follow the rules and regulations of the Church, the local priest, tradition etc etc.

‘Well, no you don’t,’ reply the existentialists. You are free at every moment. You don’t have to do anything.

Sartre typifies the French context of his outlook by the way he directly compares adherence to the global organisation of the Communist Party with being a member of the global Catholic religion: they both have their leaders, their theology, their hierarchy, and a thousand and one rules and regulations to help members or believers conceal from themselves their immutable freedom.

(In the Anglo-Saxon countries, especially America, we don’t have one monolithic Christian church, but a plethora of Protestant and non-conformist congregations and so the stark choice between two forms of totalitarian belief, two types of all-encompassing bad faith, which European writers take as natural, simply don’t exist here. The kind of hyperbole and extremity of thought natural to so many French thinkers is just not applicable to the Anglo-Saxon situation.)

Anyway, the permanent present tense of the Brunet sections not only represents his living without a past, but is also an aspect of the way Brunet, the Communist disciple, lives without a self. His life and mind are entirely devoted to the Communist Party, which dictates pretty much everything he does and says all day every day. He is not a man in the sense that he has no sense of the selfhood which acknowledgement of his aloneness, his abandonment and the anguish prompted by his freedom, ought to create (in the Sartrean system).

Only once he is cut off from the Communist communion with the arrival of Chalais, does Brunet begin experiencing some of the alienation and therefore the painful thoughts and the sense of abandonment, which non-communists have to contend with on a daily basis. Only then does he become a ‘man’.

(I would add to Vasey’s analysis that this change of heart is also represented by the increasing infection of the Brunet passage with the kind of hyper-self-consciousness and the histrionic prose poetry which has characterised the other ‘afflicted’ characters right from the start of the series. Not only does Brunet’s character being to acquire selfhood – but the prose style depicting it acquires the florid poetry of selfhood.)

All in all this is a very thorough, scholarly, responsible and useful series of essays, notes and editorial apparatus.

Credit

This edition of The Last Chance by Jean-Paul Sartre was published in French by Editions Gallimard in 1981. This English translation by Craig Vasey was published by Continuum International Publishing in 2009. All references are to the CIP paperback edition.

Reviews of other books by Jean-Paul Sartre

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The Last Chance by Jean-Paul Sartre (2)

Never again, never, will I think about what I am – but only about what I do.
(Mathieu in his diary – p.134)

The Last Chance brings together all the fragments published during his lifetime, and then found among his papers after his death, of what was intended to be the fourth volume of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Roads To Freedom trilogy (1945-49).

I read the first three books (The Age of Reason, The Reprieve, Iron in The Soul) when I was at school in the 1970s and they made a profound impression on me.

This scholarly edition – which brings together all the known fragments for the intended fourth book in the series, along with a number of essays about it and about the tetralogy as a whole – was published in France in 1981, but only translated into English in 2009.

The ideas and issues raised in the introductory material and essays are so numerous that I discuss them in a separate blog post, The Last Chance (1).

In this blog post I am commenting solely on the two large fragments of the uncompleted novel itself. These were given by Sartre the titles of: A Strange Friendship and The Last Chance.

1. A Strange Friendship (68 pages)

In 1939 Sartre was drafted into the French army, where he served as a meteorologist. He was captured by German troops in 1940 in the village of Padoux, and spent nine months as a prisoner of war, first in Nancy and finally in Stalag XII-D. (Wikipedia)

Mathieu and Brunet at the end of Iron in the Soul

In the third novel of the published trilogy, Iron In the Soul, we followed the activities of Mathieu Delarue, the ineffectual philosophy teacher – a sort of self-portrait by the author – and Brunet, the tough-minded Communist organiser, as they both, separately, retreated in June 1940 before the German advance in France and ended up in a small French village.

Here Mathieu finds himself deciding to quit the squad of demoralised men he’d arrived with, and instead throw in his lot with a still-pugnacious lieutenant and his platoon, who have arrived in the village after carrying out a fighting retreat.

Almost before he knows it, Mathieu has accompanied some of the soldiers to the top of the village church tower where they wait anxiously for the first German scouts to arrive. When the first Germans enter the village, Mathieu and comrades begin shooting at them, sparking a fierce firefight, which is only ended when the Germans bring up a field gun and blow the tower to pieces. The reader assumes that Mathieu, until the last minute firing from this church tower, was killed.

Meanwhile, by a large coincidence, without realising the closeness of his boyhood friend, Mathieu, the tough-minded communist, Brunet, has also ended up in the same village, but here he makes a very different decision. He decides to surrender to the Germans in the hope of recruiting and organising what is obviously going to be a larege number of French prisoners of war into a communist cell.

The final part of Iron in the Soul had followed Brunet’s journey, along with thousands of other POWs, to a holding camp in France, where there is no food and his condition deteriorates along with all the others, Decent feeding arrangements are finally made and, after a long period of lassitude, the prisoners are marched to a train station, loaded into cattle trucks and shipped off to a prison camp in the Fatherland.

In other words, both Mathieu and Brunet’s stories rely very heavily on Sartre’s own experiences of capture and imprisonment in 1940.

Throughout the long second section of Iron in the Soul, Brunet had found himself in conflict with a fellow prisoner, Schneider, who declares himself broadly sympathetic to Brunet’s communist intentions, but is much more a genuine man of the people – in contrast with Brunet’s well-educated background. At key moments Schneider points out the flaws in Brunet’s approach, in the way he’s handling the men and so on.

A Strange Friendship

A Strange Friendship opens with Brunet, Schneider and thousands of other French POWs imprisoned in a German prison camp in freezing winter conditions in January 1941. Because it’s based so closely on Sartre’s own identical experiences, we can be confident that the descriptions of the camp and of the horrible conditions are accurate.

What gets the action of A Strange Friendship going is the arrival of new prisoners at the camp, one of them being Chalais, a former Communist Party deputy. He turns Brunet’s world upside down by announcing:

a) that Schneider is none other than ‘Vicarios’, a French Communist Party official who had denounced the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 and was therefore expelled from the Party
b) that Brunet’s entire strategy within the camp, namely organising the prisoners, recruiting the willing ones to a communist cell, with the long term plan of undermining the Germans, is wrong

Chalais is a representative of the French Communist Party (which was, of course, a mouthpiece for Soviet Foreign policy).

He tells Brunet that the views he’s been putting about – that the war isn’t over yet, that the USSR will crush Germany, that the workers should reject the armistice, that the defeat of the Axis will be a victory for the proletariat, that the French prisoners should still consider themselves as soldiers (p.55) – are wrong.

Chalais ridicules de Gaulle’s recent radio broadcast saying the USSR and USA will enter the war, that the Vichy government is illegitimate, that the armistice the new french government signed with the Nazis was treason. With typical bullying insults, in his ‘loudspeaker voice’, Chalais says that Brunet has been dead wrong. He has, ‘objectively’, i.e. in the eyes of the inflexible Party, been merely a propagandist for Churchill and British imperialism.

Chalais tells him that he and his men must not oppose the Germans; the Germans are allies of our heroic Soviet Union. The Soviet Union will never enter the war. (Indeed, at this point and until it was invaded in June 1941, the Soviet Union for nearly two years supported the Nazi regime with food, oil and raw materials). The Soviet Union will wait until Europe has fought itself to a standstill and then dictate the peace in the interests of the proletariat.

So, instead of subverting the Germans, the communist party ought to cosy up to the Nazis in a bid to become officially recognised and to get a foot into the French National Assembly again.

To Brunet’s astonishment Chalais says they must work to attack the imperialism of the bourgeois ‘democracies’ (i.e. Britain), attack de Gaulle – who is merely a mouthpiece for British imperialism – and direct the workers towards pacifism, not towards enmity to the Germans (p.63).

Brunet listens with astonishment to this interpretation of the situation which is completely opposite to everything he has been telling the men he’s recruited to the communist cause. Chalais has the impeccable authority of being a senior party member, and of having been free – and so in touch with the communist hierarchy – more recently than Brunet himself.

Brunet tries to quell his misgivings, to make himself a servant of the Party and to obey.

This is an example of Sartre depicting how a man – Brunet – denies his absolute freedom, represses his own thoughts and feelings, in the name of Obedience to External Law.

(There is also a massive authorly irony at work here, because the reader knows that Chalais is dead wrong – when Hitler invades the Soviet Union in June 1941, Stalin immediately declares Germany the enemy and reverses every one of the policies which Chalais had been championing. Brunet was to be proved right. But not yet.)

The second section of A Strange Friendship jumps to a month later. The result of Brunet following Chalais’s instructions is that the camaraderie Brunet had carefully built up over the previous 6 months in the camp has evaporated, and Brunet is now regarded shiftily by the men he has so suddenly deserted. They no longer trust him.

In another one-on-one scene Chalais confronts Brunet with this problem – the men don’t trust Chalais and now think Brunet was lying to them. Chalais floats the possibility emerges that Brunet should co-host a Party meeting and stand up, validate Chalais and the Party line, and then humiliate and implicate himself – just as so many old Bolsheviks did in the Stalin Show Trials of the late 1930s (as depicted in the classic novel, Darkness At Noon by Arthur Koestler).

Brunet refuses. His unwavering faith in the Party is for the first time broken. For the first time he sees that the Party might be wrong, that the USSR might be wrong. If it loses the war, if the Party is abolished, Man will continue i.e. History is bigger than the Communist Party.

1. Here is Brunet explaining (to himself) his previous attitude to his own free thought i.e. that it was merely a bourgeois self-indulgence which he needed to repress.

So much for ideas. He’d always had them, like everyone, they’re just mildew, leftovers from brain activity; but he never used to pay them any mind, just let them sprout like mushrooms in the basement. So let’s just put them back in their place and everything will be alright: he’ll toe the line, follow orders, and carry his ideas around inside him without saying a word, like a shameful disease. This will go no further, this can go no further: we do not think in opposition to the Party, thoughts are words, words belong to the Party, the Party defines them, the Party controls them; Truth and the Party are one and the same. (p78)

(It’s worth remembering that Sartre was writing these passages just as George Orwell’s terrifying vision of totalitarian thought control, Nineteen Eighty-Four was published [June 1949]. Orwell’s book now stands alone as a classic of dystopian fiction, like an isolated mesa in the desert; but once it was part of the vast ocean of discourse about communism, for and against, which washed over European culture all through and for long after the war.)

2. And here is Brunet, moments later, for the first time in his life considering what it would mean if the USSR did lose the war, and if the communist cause was defeated.

He blows through the roof, flying in the dark, explodes, the Party is below him, a living jelly covering the globe, I never saw it, I was inside it: he turns above this imperishable jelly: the Party can die. He’s cold, he turns: if the Party is right, then I am more alone than a madman [to oppose it]; if it’s wrong, we’re all on our own, and the world is fucked. (p.79)

It seems to me he is undergoing the classic Sartrean awakening to the fact of his abandonment, to his complete aloneness, to the shocking reality of his freedom.

Back in the plot, Brunet realises some men have been despatched from a Party meeting chaired by Chalais to go and beat up Schneider – a traitor to the Party because he criticised Stalin’s Nazi-Soviet Pact with Hitler.

Recalling all their talks and all the help he’s given him, Brunet comes to Schneider’s rescue and interrupts the pair of thugs beating Schneider. But the two men – who Brunet himself recruited to the communist cause – don’t understand why he’s protecting Schneider. Chalais has explained that Schneider is a traitor, why is Brunet defending him? Is Brunet a traitor too?

In the childlike simple-mindedness of the Communist Party, well, yes, Brunet is a traitor. Sticking up for a bad guy makes you a bad guy. Brunet smashes one of the thugs in the face and the pair of thugs slope off, at which point Brunet realises that he has burned all his bridges. Now ‘his’ men belong to Chalais and everything he and Schneider achieved is destroyed, in fact his entire life to date has been negated. He has fought all his adult life for the Communist Party. Now the Party has decreed that he is a traitor and so he is a traitor. He must get away.

Brunet makes plans for him and Schneider to escape. In the face of a blasting howling January gale, they lay planks over the barbed wire fence surrounding the POW camp and escape – only for the floodlights to come on and them to be shot at from all sides. Brunet realises they’ve been betrayed, probably by ‘the comrades’, who want them more dead than the Germans.

As they run for the woodline Schneider is hit. Brunet helps him on and they fall down a wooded slope, coming to rest against a tree which is where Schneider dies in Brunet’s arms, not at all romantically, but vomiting and blaming Brunet for his death.

Brunet stands up and walks back towards the guards. His death is only just starting.

Commentary

1. You can immediately see why Sartre ran into problems trying to finish this story. The more it plunges into the minutiae of the argument between communists loyal to the Soviet-Comintern party line, and every other non-communist brand of leftist, as it stood in the winter of 1940-41, the more obscure this story becomes. Not least because, as the notes in this edition point out, the official Party line was itself continually changing and would, of course, undergo a complete volte-face when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941.

In addition, a vast amount had happened between spring 1941 and the post-war, Cold War era of the early 1950s when Sartre was writing. The Korean War broke out in June 1950, increasing general hysteria that the Cold War might escalate into a nuclear apocalypse.

Why write about the arcane disputes of this increasingly remote period of time, when your own times are so pressing and urgent? As you read the fragment it becomes increasingly obvious why Sartre gave up struggling with The Last Chance and switched to writing political commentary on the very fraught times he found himself in in the early 1950s.

2. Looked at from this distance of time, nearly 80 years later, all the characters seem like idiots – Brunet and Schneider and Chalais, all blindly defending the Soviet Union which a) they should already have realised was one of the most repressive regimes in human history b) went on to prove it in the brutal repression of Eastern Europe in the 1950s and 60s c) collapsed in 1990 and is now remote, dusty, ancient history.

3. The entire plot exemplifies the way that the communists’ main talent appears to have been carrying out witch hunts against all other leftists, and then among themselves. This is the central theme of George Orwell’s terrifying memoir of the Spanish Civil war, Homage to Catalonia, which shows how the Communist Party systematically suppressed, arrested, tortured and executed all its opponents on the same side in the civil war – in the opinion of historian Antony Beevor, a major contributory factor to why the Republican side lost The Battle for Spain.

And the war of the Communist Party against itself is the subject of Arthur Koestler’s fictional recreation of the interrogation and show trial of an old Bolshevik in his classic novel, Darkness At Noon.

4. Looked at in its broader historical context, the entire sequence is more evidence to add to the 680-page analysis by historian Alistair Horne in his classic account, To Lose a Battle, that France’s defeat by Germany was entirely her own fault and overwhelmingly due to the ruinous divisions in her political culture. The french hated each other much more than they hated the Germans.

At one point Chalais, the hard-line Communist Deputy, actually says out loud that he prefers the Nazis to so-called ‘radicals’ i.e. to left-wingers operating outside the Communist Party (p.64) who he despises and calls ‘dogs’.

(It is important to remember that the French Communist Party called on workers to sabotage the war effort against Germany – to sabotage their own country’s war effort.)

Chalais prefers the Nazis to non-communist left-wingers. This is an amazing thing to really process and let sink in. And Chalais exactly mirrors the attitude of many right-wingers in pre-war France who declared ‘Better Hitler than the reds’.

Taken together it is a picture of a country in which nearly all sides wanted Hitler to beat them. I can see how this section was intended as an ‘analysis’ of the Communist Party line at a particular historical moment, and as a portrait of how it undermines and preys on a man (Brunet) who wants to be a loyal Party servant but finds himself torn between ideology and loyalty to the men he’s recruited.

I can see how it carries out Sartre’s mission to show his ‘heroes’ emerging from various types of ‘bad faith’ into the desolate realisation of their inescapable freedom: as, for example, Brunet realises that his ongoing presence is undermining Chalais’ Communist Party mission, that his own elimination is called for by strict Party logic – but refuses, in the end, to give up and insists on living.

But at this distance of time, the entire sequence seems like just a further example of the complete moral and political bankruptcy of mid-twentieth century French culture.

5. From a literary point of view, more interesting for me is the almost complete absence of any of the prose poetry which characterised the earlier books (and which I quote liberally in my reviews of them). The text is almost completely functional. It often reads like directions for a play: ‘X looks at Y. Y Says Z. X Gets up, leaves through the door.’  This suggests that a lot of the impressionistic poetry, the floods of feeling, the great waves of death and night and futility and emptiness which wash over the characters in the earlier books, that all this was put in later, during the revising, once the narrative scaffold was in place.

This text as we have it consists almost entirely of this very basic scaffold, bare present tense prose used to convey the dry-as-dust theological squabbles of a discredited belief-system and the toxic power struggles it led to.

Only at the end, in the final few pages, when the scales fall from Brunet’s eyes, does his mind then entertain some of the delirious hallucinations so common to the other characters in the series; and only in the escape over the wire and through the howling gale does Sartre let rip with some impressionistic prose.

I’m guessing this is deliberate. Maybe the grindingly boring, factual prose of most of the section is intended to enact the grindingly boring nature of revolutionary politics and its squalid betrayals.

Whereas the moments of high delirium which Brunet experiences in the last few pages, and then the intensely impressionistic description of the escape in the snow storm, represent the return of Freedom, the flooding into Brunet’s consciousness of the confusions, the overwhelming and bewildering sense of finally throwing off his disciplined devotion to The Party, and his arrival in the bewildering abandonment of his human Freedom.

To be free, in Sartre’s fiction, is to be overwhelmed with sensations and thoughts.

6. The whole thing is written as a tragedy but, to an Anglo-Saxon eye it has a certain grim humour. It is notable the way no Germans feature at all anywhere in the story: sure, they’re referred to a lot as the people who run the camp, but:

a) there’s no analysis of Nazi strategy, no mention of Hitler’s likely plans and intentions for Europe (which, though interesting, I can see would be extraneous to the core subject, which is the drama of Brunet’s disillusionment with the Party)
b) no individual Germans appear, even right at the end when they’re pursuing Schneider and Brunet in their escape. The Germans always remain disembodied shouts and bullets.

Again, to the sceptical outsider this is partly because – comically enough – the Germans don’t need to do anything. They know they can leave the French to carry on fighting among themselves, the right-wingers against the radicals, the communists against the Catholics. The French can be relied on to display not a shred of solidarity or patriotism.

Sartre is inside the French political world and so he takes endless internecine fighting for granted. I come from the Anglo-Saxon countries which had a bit more backbone and where patriotism really did unite the country against the potential invader: from a place where Canadians, Australians, Poles and other European exiles came together to fight the Nazis; not, as the French did, to betray each other to the Nazis.

For Sartre this squalid little squabble among communists can be represented as a kind of noble tragedy – but for the reader outside the snake pit of French culture, it’s just another example of the Communist talent for eliminating each other, and the French talent for ruinous infighting.

Vive la France! Vive la Revolution! are essentially comic declarations.

2.The Last Chance (76 pages)

All the readers of the original trilogy of novels thought that Mathieu Delarue – the most obviously autobiographical character in the series, an ineffectual philosophy teacher much like Sartre – had been blown to smithereens at the end of part one of Iron in the Soul. But no, folks, he’s back and more plagued by philosophical doubts than ever!

Nothing is explained. The other sizeable fragment of the unfinished novel – titled The Last Chance – just starts with Mathieu in a German prisoner of war hospital, from which he’s soon transferred out into the wider camp.

The section opens with him helping a young man who has lost both his legs, amputated after being hit by a shell, put on his ‘pants’ (all the way through the text are reminders that this is a translation into American prose). Apparently, Mathieu was shot through the lungs and still feels weak, but survived otherwise unscathed. Huh.

As usual, two things happen immediately with Mathieu: he is nervous around other human beings, over-sensitively noticing all aspects about them, and his reactions to them, and their reactions to his reactions to them, and so on.

And his consciousness is, as usual, susceptible to being flooded with overwhelming, uncontrollable perceptions and sensations. His perceptions flood his mind. This is the Sartre of his first novel, Nausea, and a feature of almost all the characters in the first two novels in the sequence.

He opened his eyes, and saw nothing. He was nowhere. Between two wooden frames with rectangular holes, there were a table and benches, but it was nothing, not even furniture, not even utensils, not even things; the inert underside of a few simple gestures; suspended in emptiness. The emptiness enveloped Mathieu with a glassy dissolving look, penetrating his eyes, gnawing at his flesh, all there was was a skeleton: ‘I’ll be living in emptiness.’ The skeleton took a seated position. (p.110)

This is just the latest in a long line of occasions when Sartrean characters cease to perceive the world normally, cease even perceive themselves as human, instead become perceiving objects, lose all their personality, are suffused with grand abstractions like death, night, freedom and so on.

I like them. I like this way of thinking and writing. The world, very obviously, is far far weirder than official discourse permits, and Sartre is a great poet of this weirdness, the weirdness of being a walking, sentient nervous system adrift in a sea of things.

Just as characteristically, Mathieu then hallucinates that the dour defeated inhabitants of the wider POW camp are sub-human, insects, crustaceans.

Even though they filled him with a slight repulsion, and even fear, like the crazies he had seen in Rouen in 1936, he knew perfectly well that he was not in an insane asylum: rather, he was in a breeding ground of crabs and lobsters. He was fascinated by these prehistoric crustaceans who crawled around on the tormented ground of an unknown planet, suddenly his heart sank and he thought: in a few days, I’ll be one of them. He would have these same eyes, airs and gestures, he would understand these incomprehensible creatures from inside, he would be a crab. (p.113)

Weird, huh? And reminds me of the notion I developed in reading The Reprieve that there is something distinctly science fiction-y about much of the altered states Sartre describes.

He was most certainly not in Africa, not even anywhere on a human planet. He was walking dry and crisp, between the glass panes of an aquarium. The horror was not in him yet, he could still defend himself against it: it was in things, and in the eyes of those who saw what he didn’t see. But soon, because of the water pressure and the great sea-spiders, these panes would break. (p.121)

The contrast between the histrionic, science fiction prose poetry of the Mathieu section and the spare functional prose of most of the Brunet section clinches the idea that Sartre alters his prose style to match the subject/character. I am genuinely impressed by the range of styles and rhetorical effects Sartre can pull off.

The structure of the complete novel

As to the plot, all we have is fragments. In the notes, the editor Craig Vasey, explains that the plan for the entire book appears to have been something like:

  • Novel opens with Mathieu in the infirmary. He helps the amputee put on his ‘pants’.
  • Mathieu transfers to the camp where he thinks the defeated soldiers look like undersea crabs.
  • Cut to Brunet smoothly running his circle of comrades, until Chalais arrives and turns everything upside down.
  • Back to Mathieu: through his eyes we see fragmentary descriptions of camp life and mentality.
    • Ramard: someone has stolen a fur coat from the German stores, Mathieu helps a fellow inmate hide some stolen champagne.
    • The only first-person narrative anywhere in the series, apparently from Mathieu’s diary, as he meets the disconsolate architect Longin.
    • One of the prisoners gets hold of a newspaper from a new inmate and reads it out to Mathieu’s room-mates, with Mathieu interpolating his usual philosophic ruminations.
    • The Dream of killing: Mathieu has a recurrent waking dream of killing his room-mates. A form of post-traumatic stress triggered by his shooting German soldiers back in the church tower. Interestingly, there are seven fragments on this one theme which are obviously reworkings of the same scene: Mathieu is sitting in a prison office watching his colleague, Chomat, doing paperwork and imagines killing him with a knife slipped into the nape of his neck. Over and over.
  • Cut back to Brunet. It’s 40 days after he was captured trying to escape, the snow-bound escape attempt in which Schneider died. Surprisingly, he wasn’t shot but put in the punishment block. Now, released, Brunet returns to his old barrack with trepidation only to discover that Chalais and the cohort of comrades who had it in for him have all been shipped out. Gone as if they never were. He is no longer under imminent threat of assassination. Then Brunet gets wind of an escape committee, is taken to see it and discovers…
  • That it is run by his childhood friend, Mathieu. The book seems to have been intended to climax with the encounter between Mathieu and Brunet, each assessing the road the other has travelled. They don’t particularly like each other. In fact the main tone is one of boredom and mild dislike.
  • The novel climaxes with a dramatic and philosophical encounter between Brunet and Mathieu.

The encounter between Brunet and Mathieu should have triumphantly completed the circle. They met in the first book, The Age of Reason, where the manly and convinced communist Brunet tried to persuade the ineffectual philosopher Mathieu to join him.

Now Brunet has been disowned by the communist party and discovered how tough life is on the ‘outside’, whereas Mathieu has not only ‘become free’ by shooting German soldiers from that church tower, but also – we now learn – runs the team that organises escapes from the camp. He has become the man of action while Brunet has become the man of uncertainty.

And, in a final rather melodramatic twist, it is revealed that the snitch who betrayed Brunet and Schneider’s escape attempt wasn’t Chalais the Commissar, it was the fat, thieving prole Moûlu. And in fact, while they’ve been chatting, Mathieu now reveals that his fellow escape committee members have just tried and executed Moûlu by strangling him. Brunet is more angry than shocked.

But the reader is shocked.

Mathieu says Brunet will be suspected by the Germans when Moûlu’s body is found, so they’ll arrange for his escape early the next morning. And it’s here that this long, fragmented section ends.

American translation

The translation is by an American, Craig Vasey, Professor of Philosophy at the Mary Washington University, Virginia.

This is a shame because Sartre’s demotic French is translated into demotic American, which jars with the English reader. ‘Mad’ means angry’; ‘pants’ mean ‘trousers’; the Germans become ‘the Krauts’, so that it feels like we’re in a U.S. war movie.

Worst of all, all the men or blokes are referred to as ‘the guys’. Innocuous though this trivial verbal choice may sound, it has major ramifications because the word appears numerous times on every page. For me it dominated the entire reading experience and its continual repetition had the effect of making it seem like we’re in a movie about the mafia.

  • Twenty guys are washing quickly under a shelter.
  • The guys are putting on their coats; they are heading off for work.
  • Brunet looks at his guys with satisfaction.
  • ‘This guy’s name is Schneider.’
  • ‘Our guys in Algiers have the proof.’
  • ‘My guys can’t stand him.’
  • ‘He’s not that kind of guy.’
  • ‘Don’t say anything to the guys.’
  • ‘I’m going to send you up one of my guys.’
  • ‘These Dutch guys don’t speak a word of French.’
  • ‘Hey,’ say the guys, ‘it’s Brunet.’
  • ‘What do you guys want?’
  • All the guys are there, all the guys looking at him…
  • ‘Don’t think about it too much guys…’
  • ‘You guys are assholes…’

Credit

The French edition of The Last Chance by Jean-Paul Sartre was published by Editions Gallimard in 1981. This English translation by Craig Vasey was published by Continuum International Publishing in 2009. All references are to the CIP paperback edition.

Related links

Reviews of other books by Jean-Paul Sartre

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Iron In The Soul by Jean-Paul Sartre (1949)

He felt himself filled with a sense of vast and pointless freedom.
(Iron in the Soul p.92)

349 pages long in the Penguin paperback edition, Iron in The Soul repeats the format of the previous two novels in The Roads To Freedom trilogy by following a set of French characters over a very specific, and short, timeframe connected with the Second World War, in this case right at the end of the Battle of France.

Part one

Part one is 200 pages long, its first chapter has the dateline ‘New York: Saturday 15 June 1940 9am’ and the final chapter is dated ‘Tuesday 18 June 5.45am’. So it covers four days towards the end of the Battle of France.

In part one there is not much of the ‘experimental’ technique Sartre used to such effect in The Reprieve. In that novel I counted some 130 named characters, and the text made a point of cross-cutting unpredictably from one character’s actions and thoughts to another’s, from one scene to another, continually introducing new characters, sometimes just for brief cameos. This made it quite a challenging read but the reward was in the quite wonderful, almost musical, sense of rhythm in the interleaving of episodes, people and their deepest thoughts.

Part one of Iron in the Soul is more traditional, establishing fixed and static scenes and then following characters within them for substantial lengths of text, before starting new chapters or chapter sections to reflect new scenes and characters. Much more clear and comprehensible.

Timeline

Maybe a recap of the historical background would be useful. In spring 1940:

May 10 Germany invades France, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands
May 11 British and French forces begin a long line of strategic defenses to defend Belgium
May 12 German General Guderian with his three divisions reaches the Meuse River
May 13 the first German forces emerge from Ardennes onto the Meuse
May 14 German Panzer Corps fifteen and nineteen break through Allied defenses at Sedan allowing German forces to bypass the Maginot line
May 15 German forces push on toward Paris and the English Channel
May 20 General Weygand replaces General Gamelin as Allied commander
May 17-18 Antwerp and Brussels fall to Germany
May 21 Allied forces try to counter attack German forces but are repulsed
May 24 The Luftwaffe bombs Allied defensive positions around Dunkirk
May 25 German forces take Boulogne as more retreating Allied forces reach Dunkirk
May 26 850 British civilian ships and vessels help Allied forces evacuate Dunkirk in the largest military evacuation in history
May 28 King Leopold of Belgium orders his army to surrender to German forces
May 29 around 47,000 British forces are evacuated from Dunkirk
May 30 around 120,000 Allied forces evacuated from Dunkirk
May 31 around 150,000 Allied soldiers arrive in Britain

June 3 The German Luftwaffe bombs Paris
June 4 Allied forces continue evacuation of the coast. In all some 338,326 British and 113,000 French forces are evacuated from Dunkirk to Britain
June 5th Second part of the Battle of France begins with the German striking south from the River Somme
June 9 German forces launch an offensive on Paris
June 10 Norway surrenders to Germany and Italy joins the war by declaring war on France and Great Britain
June 13 Paris is declared an open city by the French government which flees to Bordeaux
June 14 German troops enter Paris
June 16 Marshal Petain becomes Prime Minister of France
June 17 French government asks Germany for armistice terms. Germans cross the river Loire in the west and reach the Swiss frontier in the south-east
June 18 General de Gaulle broadcasts on the BBC telling the people of France to resist
June 22 France signs an armistice with Germany
June 23 Adolf Hitler begins a tour of the captured city of Paris
June 24 The French officially surrender at Compiegne, site of the German surrender in 1918
25 June All hostilities cease. France has fallen

Part one of Iron In the Soul tracks its characters over the four days during which Parisians flee their city before it is taken by the Germans and when retreating Second Tier armed forces are abandoned by their officers and find themselves at a loss what to do. Key characters from the first novel recur:

  • Gomez is in New York scrabbling for a job in the art world.
  • His wife, Sarah, and son Pablo are caught in the huge stream of refugees fleeing Paris.
  • Daniel, the gay banker who married Mathieu’s mistress, Marcelle, has packed her off and roams the streets of an empty Paris like the last man in the world – until he encounters Philippe, the spoilt youth we met in The Reprieve, and sets about seducing him.
  • Boris Serguine, who we saw join the Army in The Reprieve, was wounded in the fighting but is well enough to go to the apartment of his mistress, the nightclub singer Lola Montero who, however, has been diagnosed with a stomach tumour but can’t bring herself to tell him.
  • We saw Boris’s sister, the prickly Ivich, give herself to a unnamed man in The Reprieve partly as rebellion against her bourgeois parents, partly because she thought war was about to break out and the world end. Nearly two years later, we discover she got pregnant, the man married her, she had a miscarriage, he’s off at the front fighting where, characteristically, she hopes he gets killed.
  • Mathieu’s intolerably pompous self-serving brother, Jacques, a lawyer, forces his wife to pack in a hurry and flee from Paris only to get half way across France and realise he wants to go back, and blames the whole thing on her. She is livid. She goes to sleep in the car dreaming of Mathieu.
  • And the ‘hero’ of the first book – over-sensitive, over-thinking, angst-ridden but ineffectual philosophy tutor Mathieu Delarue? We find him with a platoon of second string infantry who never saw any fighting. For 200 pages they laze around wondering what to do after their officers have treacherously abandoned them, smoking and getting drunk – until a platoon of Chasseurs arrive who are battle-hardened and disciplined. On a whim – or more accurately, as a result of the incredibly complicated and tortuous meditations about the nature of ‘freedom’ which have filled the previous 800 pages – Mathieu decides to join them, is given a rifle, sent with a squad to be sharp-shooters up a church belfry and when the Germans finally arrive, is involved in a fierce firefight which ends with the belfry being blown up by artillery and Mathieu blazing away till the last minute like a Hollywood hero.

Part two

Part two is significantly different. It took me a few pages to realise that the entire part – all 120 pages – consists of just three paragraphs. With the exception of just two small breaks, these 120 pages make up a solid block of print, with no incidental breaks or indentations. Possibly this is to reflect the subject matter.

(Craig Vasey’s introduction to The Last Chance: Roads of Freedom IV, the unpublished fourth book in the series, tells me that in the original French there weren’t even the two small breaks: the entire 120 pages consisted of one paragraph. Moreover, all the verbs in the original were in the present tense, something the English translation here rejects.)

The ‘plot’ picks up (with savage irony / comedy  / bleak farce) at exactly the point where Mathieu is killed – because taking refuge in a cellar of a house off the very square where Mathieu keeps shooting till he’s blown up, is his friend and contemporary, the strong, manly Communist Brunet. (In The Age of Reason, there’d been a passage where Brunet tries to persuade Mathieu to become a communist, but the timid philosopher, as with everything else in his life, hesitates and puts the decision off.)

Anyway, Brunet has no idea Mathieu is up in the church tower about to be blown to smithereens. He has his own concerns. He has fought bravely but most of his platoon were killed. Now, as the Germans finally enter the village, he surrenders to the Germans. He falls in with a trail of French POWs which grows and grows till it is maybe 10,000 strong, a vast concourse of defeated and demoralised men stumbling along dusty roads in blinding heat. Finally, they arrive at a disused barracks which has become converted into a POW camp.

Here the French are easily shepherded inside and locked up. The next hundred pages give in great detail the dialogue between a cast of about a dozen peasant and proletarian infantrymen, while Brunet makes his plans to create a Communist cell among them. While they fuss about food and the weather and gossip, Brunet is planning for the future.

In this he is sort of helped by Schneider, a tough, surly man who is not exactly a Communist, but agrees to help him. The spine of the section is the wary dialogue between these two men, with Schneider proving himself both more of a man of the people, and smarter than Brunet in various situations. It is difficult to know what this section is ‘about’. Possibly it is a prolonged examination of the nature of a ‘Communist Activist’, with Brunet given Schneider as a foil to dramatise different approaches to handling men, creating a cell, combating cynicism and fatigue, and so on.

Whatever the precise intention, the overt or political purpose of the section now feels completely redundant, part of a long-lost history. It doesn’t even – as with so much Sartre – lead to any real action, for next to nothing happens to this vast concourse of freed men. After five or six days without food, trucks eventually arrive with soup and bread. One madmen runs amok screaming and the Germans shoot him. For the rest the defeated Frenchmen adopt a holiday mood, sunbathing, playing cards, establishing billets in every available building, nicking stuff, squabbling. Both Brunet and Schneider find it almost impossible to motivate anyone. No Germans of any authority appear. They don’t confront the camp commandant or organise a strike or anything really decisive or dramatic. Instead Brunet and Schneider squabble with each other, and with the dozen or so named characters around them.

In the last of the three ‘sections’, the setting jumps a bit to being aboard the massive train of cattle trucks in which thousands of POWs have been packed as it rattles north through France. A teeny tiny bit of suspense is given to this passage because the more intelligent among them (i.e. Brunet, Schneider, a few others) are pretty sure they’re being taken to Germany to become slave labour.

This section depicts the various forms of denial, fear, and panic among the POWs as they wonder which way the train will turn at the fatal set of points which will steer them either further north into France or East across the border. One character, a young printer who Brunet had recruited for his Communist cell, panics, jumps from the train when it slows at a cutting, runs away a little, then panics more and tries to return and catch up – only to be picked off by the German guards and fall dead beside the rails. That’s as dramatic as it gets.

When the train reaches the points, they are set East, confirming Brunet and Schneider’s gloomy assumptions. They are heading East to a dark future. The final words are:

Above the dead body, above the inert freight-van, the darkness wheeled. It alone was living. Tomorrow’s dawn would cover all of them with the same dew. Dead flesh and rusted steel would run with the same sweat. Tomorrow the black birds would come. (p.349)

Themes

The futility of life

As to the mood and feel of the text, we are back in bleak Sartre-land where the sunshine is futile, life is pointless, breathing is an effort, and the hyper-sensitive characters are oppressed by life, by other people, by other people looking at them, dammit – and everyone agonises about their ‘freedom’, panting after this mystical chimera without ever quite grasping what this much-abused term actually means.

Gomez, the artist has escaped to New York, where he walks around hating the heat, the sunshine, the big buildings, the streamlined cars, the adverts, the magazines and, everywhere, pictures of happy smiling people – Not to grin is a sin, he thinks bitterly – while ‘over there’ i.e. back in Europe, people are suffering, suffering I tell you! This is intercut with the plight of his wife, Sarah, a Jewess, and small son Pablo, who are caught in a vast traffic jam of refugees fleeing Paris. These are Gomez’s thoughts:

He looked at the street, at the meaningless sun, at the whole meaningless day. There would be nothing now, any more, but meaningless days. (p.9)

These are Sarah’s thoughts:

We are no more than the feet of an interminable insect. Why walk when hope is dead? Why live? (p.25)

Sartre’s novels could almost be designed to validate teenage depressives’ most suicidal thoughts and, above all, to make the depressive feel special, superior to what Gomez calls the ‘human tide’ of people in New York with their ‘bright dead eyes’, and Sarah’s description of the refugees as ‘insects’ (a favourite insult term of Sartre’s; he memorably describes Hitler as having an insect face; Mathieu looks down from the church tower on the villagers like ‘frightened ants’; Lola feels that Boris while screwing her is like an insect, when the Germans arrive in the village Mathieu feels they have ‘the eyes of supermen and insects’, p.212).

Everyone else is an insect, or an inane grinning American with dead eyes, part of the machine, part of the bourgeoisie – I, I alone, suffer – look how I suffer – look how special I am!

Suicide

Both The Age of Reason and The Reprieve contain extended sequences describing the thoughts and sensations, the hyper self-awareness, of two men on the brink of committing suicide – Daniel with a razor and Mathieu jumping into the Seine, respectively. Having tried to kill myself, I can vouch for the exquisite sense of self-pity you feel at such a moment, looking at your doomed hands, your tragic face in the mirror, afflicted by sentimental thoughts that this is the last time you’ll look at your face, the last time you’ll turn out the bedroom light (or whatever), after you slash your wrists, take an overdose etc.

So, Ivich invites her brother, Boris, to join her in a suicide pact (p.72) though she isn’t really a serious character, just a spoilt wilful girl. Daniel comes across Philippe, the spoilt son of bourgeois parents, hesitating on the brink of the Seine, trying to nerve himself to throw himself in. Various other characters – for example Mathieu’s sister-in-law, Odette, who is secretly in love with him – think they can’t go on, life is so damn pointless. What’s the point?

In Sartre’s novels, death, and suicide, are all around us. Describing the plot to my son he said, ‘sounds like teenage angst on steroids’.

Rootless, directionless, abandoned

You can’t help feeling that what many of these people need is a sound spanking (as Mathieu’s sister-in-law, Odette, memorably puts it). Or maybe just the support of a loving family, a job, some stability, something to focus their energy on.

But Sartre has chosen his characters carefully to be bohemian types, drifters, people without settled jobs or any real family commitments. Sartre selects a group of people with very few responsibilities and who we never see doing a single day’s work in their lives – thus allowing them all to give vent to maximum feelings of alienation and anomie, thus permitting them all to have lengthy and repetitive soliloquies about the pointlessness of life, about their feelings of abandonment.

As a married father of two, I see both marriage and especially fatherhood, as demanding, responsible roles, taking a lot of time and commitment. Significantly, none of Sartre’s characters are married or have children in the traditional manner:

  • Gomez is married but has dumped Sarah and his son to run away and fight in Spain, then flee to America.
  • Daniel only married Marcelle as an existential dare, in reality he hates her and can’t wait to get away from her.
  • Boris is going out with Lola the singer, but routinely hates her, and in fact dumps her for the army.
  • Ivich got married to Georges after he got her pregnant but, inevitably, hates him, and hopes he’s killed in the fighting (p.66). Ivich loathes her in-laws, and she ‘detests’ the French (p.68), but then she hates more or less everyone.
  • Sarah looks at her crying son and realises she hates him (p.25).
  • The villagers hate the French soldiers who’ve been billeted on them (p.97).
  • Mathieu realises he hates his drunken comrades (p.132).
  • Philippe tells Daniel that he hates his step-father, the general (p.149).
  • Pinette’s girlfriend hates Mathieu (p.157)

In fact, most of the characters hate most of the other characters most of the time. Do all French people hate all other French people? It would explain their notorious surliness.

So if you’re a drifter without a proper job, without any family ties or support, who hates everyone and despises bourgeois society, it’s highly likely this is how you will end up feeling: full of despair and anomie. It’s hardly rocket science.

Alone

It is a key axiom of existentialism that every individual is alone, completely alone, and condemned to complete freedom. We are not hemmed in or supported by social structures or traditions or morality, for we choose whether or not to accept those: to blame society or others in any way for any of our acts is bad faith, is a denial of our utter freedom.

But Sartre’s philosophy of life – or his melodramatic poetry about the horror of existence – all begins in this primal, fundamental sense of your complete solitude, the basic feeling of alienation from others, from your fellow soldiers, or your family, from everyone else in the bar or cafe or nightclub, some sudden feeling of your complete aloneness in the face of an utterly indifferent universe.

This is the moment in the characters’ lives which the text keeps returning to like a moth to a flame.

  • He shivered. He felt suddenly naked and alone, a man, I. (p.102)
  • No one needs me. he sat down on the edge of the road because there was nowhere for him to go. Night entered into him through mouth and eyes, through nose and ears. He was no one now; he was nothing – nothing any longer but misery and darkness. (p.162)
  • Mathieu saw the smile and felt utterly alone. (p178)
  • She felt lost in a world of which she could make no use. (p.191) [Odette]
  • She thought: ‘I am alone.’.. He speaks to me and kisses me, but when I come to die I shall be alone… (pp.205-6) [Lola]
  • Where are the Comrades? Brunet felt lonely. Never, in all the past ten years, had he felt so utterly alone. (p.239)
  • [When the French prisoners of war arrive in a huge fences barracks] They were going to bury their filthy old war among these high buildings, were going to stew in their own juice, unseen of the outer world, isolated and alone. (p.241)

Even sex doesn’t unify people, it merely emphasises their inescapable isolation. There are two memorable acts of sex in the book and both of them emphasise the essential loneliness of the male protagonist: first the peasant Pinette screwing the post office girl he’s picked up in a field outside the village where Mathieu and the other soldiers are mooching about; then handsome young Boris making love to Lola the ageing singer.

Lola has discovered she has a tumour of the belly and/or the menopause, both of which conspire to make sex very painful, but not as painful as the self-image she has, loathing her dry husk of a body and thinking of Boris as a repellent insect squirting her with sticky fluid. There are lots of disgusting, viscous fluids in Sartre.

It is through a wound that you will enter me. When he used to touch me in the old days, I became like velvet: now, my body is like dried earth: I crack and crumble under his fingers… He rent her to the roots of her belly, he was moving in her belly like a knife. On his face was a look of loneliness, of morbid concentration. She saw him as an insect, as a fly climbing up a window-pane climbing, falling, climbing again. She was conscious only of the pain he was causing her… (p.204)

No, not even sex is an escape from the ubiquitous sense of aloneness, of abandonment, which Sartre sees as the permanent basis of the human condition.

In the climaxes of the two parts, the male protagonist is invincibly alone. Mathieu, wounded, and the only survivor of an artillery shell which has brought the roof of the church tower down on all his comrades, struggles to continue shooting for just a few seconds more before being obliterated. In those moments:

He fired. He was cleansed. He was all-powerful. He was free. (p.225)

On the last page of part two, after the little printer has been shot dead and the train moves mechanically onwards.

Brunet was alone, rigid and uncomfortable. (p.349)

It is an oddity than a man so obsessed with the fundamental and irreducible aloneness of each human being became a communist, devoted to the idea of international solidarity. And that a man so obsessed with man’s terrifyingly absolute freedom, adopted the Marxist worldview which is characterised by the inevitability of History, that Marx had uncovered scientific laws of History which dictated that a Communist revolution was inevitable i.e that at some deep level human beings are not free. I leave this to the scholars to disentangle: it would certainly be good to reach a better understanding.

Science fiction states of mind

Not much happens in a Sartre novel. Page after page is filled either with lengthy dialogue between its ineffectual characters, or with even lengthier descriptions of their feelings of abandonment and futility. The firefight at the climax of part one, and the death of the printer at the climax of part two, are very much the exceptions which prove the rule. They are more or less the only bits of ‘action’ in the entire trilogy.

Every page features descriptions of the characters’ inner thoughts, lengthy internal monologues but these are not as they would be in a comparable English novel. The distinctive and unnerving feature of them is the extent to which they develop into often almost delirious hallucinations of the world around them, with objects coming alive, with great abstract ideas entering the sky or room or drowning them, with parts of their bodies becoming external objects (arms and particularly hands often seem to their owners to have become alien objects). Here is Mathieu in the bell tower of the village church.

Under their feet was the fragrance of spices and incense, coolness, and the stained-glass windows feebly shining in the shadows of the Faith. Under their feet was confidence and hope. He felt cold. He looked at the sky, breathed the sky, thought with the sky. He was naked on a glacier at a great height. Far below him lay his childhood. (p.200)

In a proliferating multitude of ways, the world around Sartre’s characters, including their own bodies, including their own ideas and sensations, come alive, infuse their thoughts, colour the sky, invade the world.

The effect is often bizarre, surreal or even druggy. ‘He thought with the sky.’

And very often these hallucinations go one step further by infusing these trippy states of consciousness with poetic renderings of grand abstract concepts like Death or Defeat or Despair. Characters frequently become dead men, anticipating their death (by suicide or in battle), realise that they are a dead man walking or thinking. Or death invades whole scenes, the huge vista of prisoners of war becomes a sea of the dead (to Brunet’s eye) or Paris becomes a vast tomb (in Daniel’s imagination), and so on.

Thus Daniel wandering the empty streets of Paris experiences what amount to such intense imaginative transports that they are effectively hallucinations. n a memorable simile the Boulevard St Michel becomes a vast beached whale. In fact, it was while reading the Daniel-wanders-round-empty-Paris section that it suddenly struck me that a lot of Sartre’s scenes have the feel of science fiction.

Everywhere, as far as the eye could reach, was silence and emptiness, an abyss stretching horizontally away from him… The streets led nowhere. Without human life, they all looked alike. The Boulevard Saint-Michel, but yesterday a long southward spread of gold, seemed now like a stranded whale, belly upwards. He made his feet ring out upon the great, sodden, hollow carcass. (p.93)

This scene suddenly reminded me of all those science fiction novels in which a man finds himself more or less the only survivor of a disaster, a great plague or nuclear apocalypse.

Anyway, the passage quoted above could be categorised as a Level One hallucination, one which is still a metaphor of a recognisable state. But (as noted above) routinely Sartre’s characters progress to Level Two hallucinations in which the ‘reality’ around them becomes infused with great Abstract Concepts.

He looked at the empty bridge, at the padlocked bookboxes on the quay, at the clock-face that had no hands… A shadow slipped past the Prefecture of Police…Paris was not, strictly speaking, empty. It was peopled by little broken scraps of time that sprang here and there to life, to be almost immediately reabsorbed again into this radiance of eternity. (p.91)

‘Scraps of time reabsorbed into this radiance of eternity.’ This is a kind of philosophical prose poetry, in that it invokes ‘deep’ ideas, but without any systematic application, merely for effect. It is a kind of pseudo-philosophical lyricism for its own sake.

I am here. Time, with its great fanning future, collapsed. All that was left was a tiny flickering patch of local moments. (p.108)

Suddenly this visionary quality reminded me of the prose of the great psychological sci-fi writer, J.G. Ballard. In the 1960s Ballard famously rejected ‘space opera’, the whole sci-fi tradition of rockets going to outer space, aliens and death rays – in order to concentrate on weird mental states achieved here on decaying planet earth. His characters wander landscapes of entropy and decay littered with empty swimming pools, abandoned motels, are attracted to car crashes or go schizo in high-rise buildings. They explore the altered states of inner space. Like Sartre’s.

All about him was once more swallowed in a planetary silence. He must walk, walk unceasingly, over the surface of a cooling planet. (p.134)

Reading Daniel’s visions of abandoned Paris I suddenly saw the surprising similarity between Ballard’s psychological explorations and the many many passages in Jean-Paul Sartre’s novels which obsessively depict mental states of hallucinatory intensity – not for any philosophic or propagandistic purpose, well, OK, partly to promote the feel of his existentialist world-view — but much more for their weirdness, to bring out the strangeness of what it’s like to be the animal who thinks, the animal with self-consciousness, the animal lost in the fever of its own compulsive hallucinations. Here’s Mathieu among his soldiers hanging round the village waiting for something to happen.

We are a vermin’s dream: our thoughts are becoming muddied, are becoming less and less human: thoughts, hairy and clawed, were scurrying around, jumping from head to head; the vermin was on the point of waking up. (p.102)

At which point it dawned on me that Sartre’s philosophy of freedom, the so-called existentialist philosophy, is maybe a rationalisation, an attempt to give a structure and a meaning to what in fact, in the fiction, on the page, comes over as an unstoppable torrent of weird hallucinations.

His mind felt completely empty. He was dead: the afternoon was bleached and dead. It was a tomb. (p.76)

Mathieu is not at all dead as he thinks this, just like none of the other characters who let thoughts of death and the dead ceaselessly invade their thoughts are actually dead. But then maybe ‘think’ is the wrong word. Maybe it would be better to say that this is a poetic description of an intense feeling which is passing through Mathieu’ consciousness. Mathieu is merely the vessel for these delirious psychological states.

All Sartre’s characters are. They are channels for Sartre’s uncontrollable gush of weird mental states. One of the soldiers hanging round with Mathieu begins to tell the others the armistice with Germany has been signed, but hesitates… and suddenly they all grasp the dreadful truth without having to be told.

A dazzle off steel, then silence. The blue, flabby flesh of the afternoon had taken eternity like the sweep of a scythe. Not a sound, not a breath of air. Time had become frozen; the war had withdrawn… (p76)

Is hallucination the right word for this kind of writing? Sometimes. Other times it’s just a peculiar, a very distinctive, way of conceiving human beings and human consciousness, in which ‘thought’ is perceived as an almost organic process and – this being Sartre – generally a revoltingly nauseating one involving slime.

At one moment he was just an emptiness filled with vague forebodings, at another, he became just like everyone else. His forebodings faded; the general mood welled sluggishly up in his mind and oozed from his mouth… (p.97)

The vermin eyes had ostracised him, were looking up at him with an air of astonished solemnity, as though they were seeing him for the first time, as though they were looking up at him through layers of slime. (p.102)

The fact that the French prisoners of war are made to trudge through the heat for hours before reaching the camp, and then aren’t fed for five days gives Sartre the opportunity to let rip with the altered states caused by starvation and dehydration. For an extended sequence Brunet passes into a delirium somewhere between dreams and hallucinations. For example, he imagines all the soldiers are chimpanzees.

There were chimpanzees in the next cage, pressing inquisitive faces to the bars. They had sad and wrinkled eyes. Monkeys have sadder eyes than any animals except man. Something had happened, he wondered what. A catastrophe. What catastrophe? Perhaps the sun had gone cold? (p.274)

Note, again, the tinge of apocalyptic science fiction.

In fact this long second part is a strange mixture of very realistic slangy chat between rough Frenchmen, arguing, crying, going mad, blaming their officers, squabbling, cadging fags etc – and passages of quite stunning prose poetry. Sartre’s philosophy I leave to the experts on Husserl and Heidegger to nail down; it belongs to the European tradition which is difficult for us Anglo-Saxons to really understand.

But for me the revelation of these books is the surprising amount of purple prose and lyricism they contain, the extent to which they are truly writerly. As a last example, imagine a huge prisoner of war camp with thousands of dusty, downcast men lying, squatting, standing, leaning about everywhere, as far as the eye can see. And then:

The airplane passed overhead with a shattering din. The crowded faces lowered, then upturned, passed from black to white, like a field suddenly bursting into flower: in place of hard, black heads, thousands of camelias broke into blossom. Spectacles glittered like scraps of glass in a garden bed. (p.243)

There are lots of passages like this. Whereas his analyses of the political situation have passed into dusty history and his existentialist philosophy may or may not still have adherents – the vibrancy, the unexpected imaginativeness and continual weirdness of Sartre’s continues to haunts with its strange power.

Credit

La mort dans l’âme by Jean-Paul Sartre was published by Editions Gallimard in 1949. This translation is not by the translator of the first two in the trilogy, Eric Sutton, but by Gerard Hopkins. It was published as Iron In The Soul by Hamish Hamilton in 1950. Iron In The Soul was issued as a Penguin paperback in 1963. All references are to the 1967 Penguin paperback reprint, which cost the princely sum of five shillings (25p).

Reviews of other books by Jean-Paul Sartre

2 Comments
by Simon on August 26, 2017  •  Permalink
Posted in Books, French literature, Novel, Second World War, War
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Posted by Simon on August 26, 2017

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2017/08/26/iron-in-the-soul-jean-paul-sartre/

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