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.
Books & Boots 