All posts tagged The Age of Reason

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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The Age of Reason by Jean-Paul Sartre (1945)

The room was filled with stale heat which had spent its force outside, and left its radiance in the folds of the curtain, and was stagnating there, inert and ominous like a human destiny. (p.66)

Sartre was one of great cultural icons of the mid-twentieth century, the popular face of French existentialist philosophy which he wrote about in countless essays, articles, books and plays, and summarised in his epic and impenetrable treatise, Being and Nothingness.

Most people prefer to sip their Sartre-lite via his half dozen plays (including Huis Close with its famous line ‘Hell is other people’), his début novel Nausea, or the Roads To Freedom trilogy, three novels about France just before World War Two – The Age of Reason, The Reprieve, and Iron In The Soul.

The Age of Reason

The Age of Reason is the first of the trilogy, a third-person narrative set in Paris in 1938 which focuses on two days in the life of Mathieu Delarue (French for ‘of the street’). Mathieu is a 34-year-old, tall, gangly philosophy teacher who spends a lot of time mooching round the streets of Paris feeling sorry for himself. He has a sickly lover, Marcelle, who has just announced she’s pregnant and so Mathieu immediately decides she must have an abortion. He visits his fat placid friend Sarah to ask her help, watched by the aloof Brunet, a committed communist and old friend. Slowly Mathieu realises the cheap abortionists he had been considering (400 Francs) risk seriously injuring Marcelle; Sarah knows a high class abortionist, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Austria, but he charges 4,000 Frances – where on earth can Mathieu get that kind of money?

Mathieu asks his sleek gay friend Daniel for the money. Daniel has it but maliciously refuses. He visits his older brother, Jacques, a successful lawyer, who reads him a lecture about his bohemian lifestyle and says he’ll give him 10,000 Francs if he’ll marry Marcelle. Mathieu refuses. He wants to stay free. He is obsessed with his freedom to do and be. Jacque says he is being childish, he is refusing to grow up – he has now reached the age of reason and he must choose to be an adult, to settle down, to marry, to accept that he has a nice government job (as a tenured professor at the Lycée Buffon) a nice government pension and a nice obliging mistress: in what way is he any kind of rebel or non-conformist?

While he ponders these ‘moral’ quandaries Mathieu hangs out with Ivich, kid sister of Boris Serguine, one of his pupils. Ivich is plain and prickly but Mathieu finds himself making a pass at her in a taxi on the way to an art exhibition. Bad mistake. She is prickly and resentful for the rest of the book.

Boris, meanwhile, is having an affair with Lola Montero, the ageing (well, 40 makes her ageing in this book) nightclub singer. He likes the way her face and body are wrinkled, he likes her ‘experience’, whereas she rather more straightforwardly likes having a young lover – it makes her feel young; she tells Mathieu that Boris is her ‘last chance’. If Boris left she would throw herself in the river (p.37). All the characters are like that – hysterical.

Boris like all the other characters doesn’t appear to have a job and is oppressed by his own ‘freedom’ – which some among us might relabel his lack of a job, a career or any responsibilities. So he’s invented a pastime of shoplifting, to give himself a heady sense of ‘being in the moment’.

Meanwhile, we have several long sections devoted to the sleek, plausible homosexual Daniel Sereno. First of all he elaborately packs up his three cats into a basket, takes a succession of trams across town to the Seine and gets as far as tying a paving stone to a string and to the basket, preparing to drown them – for no particular reason, out of motiveless malice – when he realises he can’t go through with it, cuts the string and retraces his step to his apartment.

Later there’s a description of Daniel going to a covered amusement arcade to watch young toughs hanging around waiting to be picked up by gay cruisers. He is filled with contempt and longing for both types. He eyes a sleek 50-year-old man picking up one of the toughs and is boiling over with hatred and self-loathing, when he is himself unexpectedly accosted by a young catamite he got a job at a chemist’s shop. The lad has lost the job and now wants some money. The 50-year-old observes all this and gives Daniel a wink of complicity as he walks by. Daniel is revolted with himself, with the world.

The most frequent word in the text (apart from ‘the’ and ‘and’) is ‘disgust’. All the characters are disgusted with their lovers, with sex, with Paris, with life, but most of all with themselves. The whole novel is an orgy of self-conscious self-loathing.

Mathieu handed her [Lola] the bag: she took a powder-box out of it, and eyed her face with disgust. (p.210)

In a long sequence towards the end of the book Mathieu drops in on a nightclub to meet Boris and Ivich and watch Lola sing. All four characters go through flashes of loathing and hating each other, but also need each other. Boris tries to touch Lola for the money he knows Mathieu needs but makes up a clumsy cover story and causes a big argument with the singer. He loathes her. She hates him. Etc.

Meanwhile, left at the table together, Ivich and Mathieu spend some time loathing each other – why on earth did he kiss such a plain pasty prickly young woman, thinks Mathieu. Ivich is on edge because she’s certain she’ll fail her exams and be forced to return to her parents’ smotheringly bourgeois home in provincial Laon. Boris had bought a large clasp knife and on a whim Ivich uses it to cut a deep slash right across her palm. Not to be outdone Mathieu lets the knife drop point-downwards into his own palm. It pins his hand to the table beneath. When Lola and Borins come back from their argumentative dance it is to find Ivich and Mathieu bleeding badly and linked by a new complicity. The waiter takes them to the cloakroom attendant who patches them up.

Next morning Mathieu meets Ivich at the Dome cafe and they start drinking to get rid of their hangovers, when Boris appears completely dazed. Lola is dead. They went back to her apartment, she took some more drugs (she snorts heroin) and in the morning was cold, still, with her eyes open. Boris begs Mathieu to go to Lola’s apartment and retrieve his bundle of love letters from her suitcase. Mathieu does so partly to impress Ivich and when he is there, in the darkness of the death room, comes across the bundles of thousands of Francs which Lola has been saving for years. All he need do is take 4,000 and he will have the fee for the high class abortion and ensure Marcelle’s well-being. But stupid scruples prevent him – he drops the notes back in the case and is half way across the room when Lola calls out.

She is not dead at all! This was a genuinely dramatic moment, a Grand Guignol moment, and I was as surprised as Mathieu. Turns out Lola was in a drug-induced fugue and now she slowly stirs and recovers.  Recovering from his surprise, Mathieu makes sure she is alright and returns to Boris and Ivich at the café. Here, Boris refuses to believe that Lola is still alive; and, when Mathieu finally persuades him, Boris refuses to accept it. To him Lola is dead; he has got used to it, he had moved on. He doesn’t want to go back to her, to the woman he thought was a corpse.

Meanwhile, in another strand of the plot, it turns out that the sleek homosexual Daniel has been visiting Mathieu’s mistress, Marcelle, for some time, unbeknown to Mathieu. Daniel is revolted by her (‘He despised Marcelle profoundly’, p.89) but also fascinated by her as a specimen. When Mathieu comes to him to ask for a loan of 4,000 Francs, Daniel wickedly conceives a plan to persuade Marcelle to admit to herself that she wants to keep the baby – and to make her say this to Mathieu – and thus to force Mathieu into having to marry her. The thought of manipulating his ‘friend’ amuses the cynical Daniel (‘When Mathieu adopted a Quakerish attitude, Daniel hated him’, p.94).

Towards the end of the story, Mathieu sneaks back into Lola’s apartment with the key Boris gave him and this time does steal 4,000 of her Francs. He goes to Marcelle’s flat and now finds her strangely attractive and solicitous. (What he doesn’t realise is that Marcelle has been led on by Daniel to believe that Mathieu would propose to her.) When he does nothing of the sort but instead proudly brandishes the money for the abortion, Marcelle’s face falls, she is ashen, she says, ‘So that’s what you think of me’. Mathieu tries to make the situation better, but then, finally, admits – he doesn’t love her any more.

They part. Mathieu goes back to his apartment, where in fact he’d left Ivich sobering up after getting paralytic at lunch time after she’d learned she’d failed her exams and would be sent back to her wretched bourgeois home in the country. The two of them are struggling with whether they love or hate each other, when Lola storms in clutching a bag which probably contains a gun.

On the verge of hysterics, Lola accuses Boris of stealing the 4,000 Francs from her. Mathieu persuades Lola to let the terrified Ivich depart and then confesses that he, Mathieu, stole the money. Around about here it struck me that all these characters are French; maybe that’s why they all hysterically over-react to everything.

He felt ridiculous and detestable… He felt absolutely alone… He felt as though he were plunged in a sinister and preposterous nightmare… Her eyes were glittering with impotent hatred… He saw the back of that tall black figure moving with the blind momentum of catastrophe… ‘I’m even more disgusted with myself…’ Daniel filled him with horror… He was alone… ‘You hate me’ …

Lola is still shrieking her accusations when Daniel dramatically enters stage right, and proffers her an envelope containing the very same amount of bank notes she’s shrieking that Mathieu stole from her. It seems that he visited Marcelle soon after Mathieu left, she gave them the money to give back to Mathieu, and he has stumbled upon this ridiculous scene. Daniel hands the money to Lola. Voilà!

(Some of the writing feels like it’s from a pulp novel. The hysterical over-reacting to everything feels like an Edgar Allen Poe short story. Stripped of the relentless nihilism, it is, in fact, a bedroom farce. Mathieu should be played by Brian Rix.)

Lola is eventually pacified and stumbles off wailingly asking why Boris won’t come back to her.

Once alone with Mathieu, Daniel announces with a flourish that he is going to marry Marcelle. They are going to keep the baby. Mathieu feels like fainting. Daniel goes one step further and reveals to Mathieu that he is gay. What? They both need a drink and broach Mathieu’s bottle of rum. Gay? And going to marry Marcelle? Eh bien – Mathieu, the author and the reader all give a deep Gallic shrug – pourquois pas?

Disgust and loathing

As you can see there’s a fair bit of toing and froing among this cast of deadbeats and losers, but the ‘plot’ is mostly beside the point. The purpose of the novel is to show the Sartrean worldview through six or seven glutinously imagined characters – and that worldview is one of gloomy despair, morbid fear of getting old, of disgust at other people’s decaying, wrinkled, smelly bodies, revulsion at your own physical existence, and a pervasive, sickly hyper-sensitive self-awareness.

The characters ‘suddenly feeling old’, like they do in so many middle-class novels, is trite enough:

  • Good Lord she’s getting old (p.14)
  • ‘I’m getting old. Here I am, lounging in a chair and believing in nothing…’ (p.48)
  • She had suddenly aged. (p.275)

And white bourgeois fictional characters feeling ashamed of their bodies is fairly commonplace. Mathieu is continually oppressed by his sense of his own body, ugly and lank:

  • … a tall and naked figure, moulded out of dough (p.43).
  • Mathieu felt uneasily obtrusive: a heap of refuse against a wall. (p.72)
  • Mathieu made a gesture of disgust. (p.100)

It’s a little unusual that all the characters are consumed with disgust.

  • She disliked her body. (p.68)
  • Daniel envisaged himself with disgust. (p.85)
  • Daniel eyed him with disgust. (p.132)
  • ‘She revolts me.’ (Boris on Lola, p.213)

But the universal revulsion at the physical, at being human, is an incessant chorus of dismay and revulsion which envelops the whole book, gushing forth on every single one of the 300 pages. One strand is Mathieu’s dislike (and fear) of children:

  • Mathieu felt uneasy, without quite knowing why. He had the sense of being engulfed by the child’s eyes. ‘Children are greedy little devils,’ he thought, ‘all their senses are mouths.’ (p.43)
  • He looked at the child and he looked at the fly. A child. A bit of thinking flesh that screams and bleeds when it is killed. (p.44)
  • A child: another consciousness, a little centre-point of light that would flutter round and round, dashing against the walls, and never be able to escape. (p.46)

But this fear of the physical reaches orgasms of revulsion in Mathieu’s revolting imagining of a) sex b) of the little blister of flesh, the foetus growing inside his mistress’s heavy, smelly pink body, and c) how it will be pricked, slashed and sucked out in the abortion.

  • And what about the others? Those who have solemnly decided to become fathers, and feel progenitively inclined when they look at their wives’ bodies – do they understand any more than I do? They go blindly on – three flicks of a duck’s tail. What follows is a gelatinous job done in a dark room, like photography. (p.21)
  • In a pink room within a female body, there was a blister, growing larger… There was no time to lose, for the blister was expanding at that very moment: it was making obscure efforts to emerge, to extricate itself from the darkness, and growing into something like that, a little pallid, flabby object that clung to the world and sucked its sap. (p.44)
  • And she thought: ‘It’s there’. In that belly a little strawberry of blood was making haste to live, with a sort of guileless urgency, a besotted little strawberry, not even yet an animal, soon to be scarped out of existence by a knife. (p.69)

Unpleasant enough, but the text goes way beyond a universal physical revulsion into metaphysical disgust. Consciousness itself is seen as an impossible heavy, wearing, and disgusting phenomenon. It starts with his dislike of children, progresses through his disgust at the growing foetus, and spreads like a stain into a helpless horror at the sheer disgustingness of being alive, at being conscious, at having:

An absurd, superfluous life… (p.70)

Walking down the street is a trial for several of the characters: the heat, the sunlight, the other people, the noise threatens to overwhelm and drown them, to flood and erase their sense of self.

His solitude was so complete, beneath a lovely sky as mellow and serene as a good conscience, amid that busy throng, that he was amazed at his own existence: he must be somebody else’s nightmare, and whoever it was would certainly awaken soon. (p.150)

And this morbid self-consciousness reaches new heights in a disgust at being seen. It is bad enough to be a consciousness trapped inside a revolting body: but in some sense other people trap you in their gaze. You become an object for others, with no escape from their controlling gaze. Thus, when Mathieu leaves the pink prison of Marcelle’s bedroom he is so oppressed by the sense that she is still imagining him, that he feels he is still there – he has to go out of his way into a bar and chat to the staff and customers solely in order to exist for someone else.

He felt the need of being seen. Just of being seen. (p.19)

Boris is similarly self-conscious. In the nightclub he feels Lola’s scrutiny as a physical sensation.

He had a pain in his right side as a consequence of being looked at. (p.24)

This is one aspect of Sartre’s existential philosophy: the aspect he called being-for-others, the external objective side of ourselves which is permanently on display, unfree, trapped. On the other hand it can sometimes restore us to a sense of ourselves when we are lost. Daniel, after having sex with a rent boy, is so disgusted he contemplates suicide and, holding the razor in his hand, becomes almost completely empty of thought and feeling, just a pinprick of consciousness, an arm, a slice of sharpened metal. Eventually, he tears himself free and runs hysterically down into the street.

He must run, he must get away as far as possible, immerse himself in noise and light, in a throng of people, he must become a man among his fellows, and feel the eyes of other men upon him. (p.268)

Freedom

This brings us to the issue of ‘freedom’. Critics I’ve read say the novel is a meditation on freedom, in particular Sartre’s convoluted idea of freedom which is not a positive, but a kind of terrifying nothingness into which we’re hurled and from which we have to create our own lives from scratch, with no help or guidance from outworn creeds or dead religions. And hence the over-arching title of the series, Roads To Freedom as it indeed dramatises different characters’ journeys towards different definitions of freedom.

But this gives an inaccurately optimistic sense of the novel; in reality it is Mathieu’s gloomy meditations on his directionless life which have the most power. The bus he’s riding in brakes suddenly and Mathieu suddenly realises:

‘No, it isn’t heads or tails. Whatever happens, it is by my agency that everything must happen.’ Even if he let himself be carried off, in helplessness and despair, even if he let himself be carried off like an old sack of coal, he would have chosen his own damnation: he was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate: to marry, to give up the game, to drag this dead weight around with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he brought them into being. All around him things were gathered in a circle, expectant, impassive, and indicative of nothing. He was alone, enveloped in this monstrous silence, free and alone, without assistance and without excuse, condemned to decide without support from any quarter, condemned forever to be free.’ (p.243)

Maybe. Maybe that is the ‘human condition’ but why give it such a negative spin? Why ‘condemned’, why not ‘liberated in the sunshine’ to walk and run and skateboard and surf and buy a Harley Davidson and travel the world? The freedom part may be right (I disagree) but the immensely negative emotional interpretation Sartre gives it is entirely his own (and his own problem).

Anyway, I am with Mathieu’s brother, Jacques, when he says that Mathieu is a self-centred good-for-nothing who has no direction or purpose, who’s kept his mistress dangling for seven long years, and makes a fetish of his own inability to make decisions.

The most schematic part of the book is the character of Brunet, who is an almost comical stereotype of the Strong, Conscientious Communist. He invites Mathieu to join the Party. He explains that being a member has given him a sense of purpose and brotherhood with other members all round the world.

‘You are the son of a bourgeois, you couldn’t come to us straightaway, you had to free yourself first. And now it’s done, you are free. But what’s the use of that same freedom, if not to join us…You live in a void, you have cut your bourgeois connections, you have no tie with the proletariat, you’re adrift, you’re an abstraction, a man who is not there… You renounced everything in order to be free… Take one step further, renounce your freedom: and everything shall be rendered unto you.’ (p.118)

By sinking his individuality into a strong disciplined political movement he has gained his individuality. Mathieu listens sympathetically – Brunet is an old friend, and also an imposing presence, tall, physically superb, muscular hands, a man of the people – but as with his mistress or his friends or his job, Mathieu can’t quite bring himself to make a decision. One day he will, he tells Brunet, he tells himself, one day he will make the Great Decision which demonstrates his freedom… just not yet, not yet…

Reading the Brunet sections makes you wonder whether the aim of the book is Communist propaganda (after the war, when this book was being written, Sartre came out as a self-proclaimed Marxist). Maybe the entire novel is designed to show up the pettiness and negativity of the petit bourgeoisie, to show the pointless, aimless lives of modern people who have not accepted The Cause, who have not given their lives a Purpose by committing to the Communist Party. Maybe.

Alternatively, the young student Bruno – who hates being described as Mathieu’s ‘disciple’ – has his own, rather immature definition of freedom.

The individual’s duty is to do what he wants to do, to think whatever he likes, to be accountable to no one but himself, to challenge every idea and every person. (p.138)

Put like that, maybe Sartre and his philosophy have disappeared because they have been so thoroughly subsumed into our modern attitude. Boris’s credo pretty much sums up the attitude of my daughter, aged 16. Maybe these ‘freedom’ sections which caused so much debate in 1945, now seem thin and lifeless because we all think like that, talk like that, and have the t-shirt. Maybe.

Either way, the dozen or so ‘freedom’ sections feel like plasters strapped onto the groaning seething mass of disgust, appalled descriptions of physical functions and an apparently never-ending series of ways for the characters to feel disgusted and revolted by each other. The pregnant Marcelle has morning sickness:

A long filament hung from her lips, she had to cough it away… She watched the dabs of mucus sliding slowly towards the drainpipe leaving glossy, viscous tracks behind them, like snails. (p.68)

This is just one of hundreds and hundreds of vividly described moments of revulsion, nausea, disgust and loathing which saturate the text.

Back in the day, educated people agonised about how to find meaning in a world stripped bare of religion and the old certainties, and threatened by Nazism and totalitarianism. Sartre’s novels and plays, on one level, set out to dramatise that predicament and are of fascinating historical interest. But that predicament, that sense of a personal crisis inextricably linked to the crisis of an entire continent (at a central moment Mathieu buys a newspaper and reads about the latest nationalist atrocity in the Spanish Civil War and is possessed by nausea and fear), and the burning necessity to Make a Choice, to throw in your lot with one political party or the other… all that is long gone.

What has really endured of this book is the relentlessness of everyone’s misery and of their super disgust at being human, at having bodies, at ageing, at living.

  • I am my own taste, I exist. That’s what existence means: draining one’s own self dry without the sense of thirst. Thirty-five years. For thirty-five years I’ve been sipping at myself and I’m getting old.’ (p.48)
  • ‘I am utterly immured in my own self.’ (p.186)
  • He spoke with disgust and in short spasms. ‘I’ll try to change,’ he said. ‘I’m contemptible,’ he thought… They walked in silence, side by side, immersed in sunlight, and in mutual detestation. But, at the same time, Mathieu saw himself with Ivich’s eyes, and was filled with self-contempt. (p.80)
  • That ghastly self-contempt, that utterly weak, futile, weak, moribund self-contempt, which seemed at every moment on the point of self-annihilation, but always survived. (p.270)

Fat unhappy Marcelle – trapped by illness in her pink bedroom, stifled by the mother she shares her apartment with – is the central symbol of the squalid reality of the physical body, of nausea at its revolting fecundity, a claustrophobic image of unhappiness.

She sometimes had the feeling that her life had come to a stop one day at noon, and she herself was an embodied, eternal noontide brooding upon her little world, a dank and rainy world, without hope or purpose…. She felt sick…then a sense of uttermost disgust gathered upon her tongue… She disliked her body… the sight of women suckling their babies in the Luxemberg: a feeling beyond fear and disgust…she dreaded having to despise him… (p.67)

But she is only the most extreme example of the quality all the characters share, Sartre’s own disgust and revulsion at life, of being alive, of being human.

In a few days she would be nothing but a lump of misery… A slime of pity had engulfed him. He had no sympathy for Marcelle, and he felt profoundly disgusted… (p.160)

‘The slime of pity’ – Sartre likes slime, viscous trails, vomit, mucus, semen, blood.

I read this book on a lovely sunny day and couldn’t help thinking that all the characters in it needed to get out more, to get a hobby, get some exercise, and generally get a life. None of them have jobs (Mathieu has stopped work for the vacation) or children – they are completely free of timetables and responsibilities, utterly free to be as unhappy and negative as they please.

‘Oh,’ Ivich said vehemently, ‘how I hate the summer.’ (p.73)

The absolute determination of all the characters to be as miserable as possible eventually becomes quite funny. Sometimes it felt like ‘Monty Python and the French Philosopher’, with John Cleese saying in a heavy French accent, ‘Oh no, I feeel ze anguish of freedom oppressing my consciousness and feeelling me with despair at ze ‘uman condeetion’. Some bits made me laugh out loud, they were so over the top.

Love was not something to be felt, not a particular emotion, nor yet a particular shade of feeling, it was much more like a lowering curse on the horizon, a precursor of disaster.’ (p. 250)

Yes, Jean-Paul – love is a curse and a disaster.

If you hate summer, loathe being touched, are so morbidly self-conscious that other people looking at you hurts you, if you are revolted by your bodily functions and oppressed by a feeling of futility and pointlessness, ‘burdened by events to come’ and prey to ‘an intolerable anguish’ (p.83) – then this is the book for you!

Scandal

A footnote in The Last Chance explains that the right-wing Vichy regime which ran unoccupied France till 1944, executed a woman for providing an abortion. The subject of abortion appeared squalid to me, in 1977, but we all miss a lot if we don’t realise that the subject matter was so scandalous that Sartre couldn’t think of publishing the novel till after the Liberation, and even then it called down on his head a ton of criticism from all the respectable, right-thinking critics of his day.

Translation

L’Age de Raison was translated into English by Eric Sutton in 1947. Or at least into a form of English.

‘Glad I am to see you, Ivich.’
‘Good morning,’ said she. (p.52)

As with Darkness at Noon, which I’ve just read, the text’s source in another language is obvious on every page in an English which often clings to French word order and phraseology. The continual alien cadence of the sentences helps to ease the entrance, facilitates acceptance, of what is at the end of the day, a very very alien worldview.

Credit

L’Age de Raison by Jean-Paul Sartre was published by Editions Gallimard in 1945. The translation by Eric Sutton was published by Hamish Hamilton in 1947. This was issued as a Penguin paperback in 1961. All references are to the 1976 Penguin paperback reprint which I bought 40 years ago for 75p.

Related links

Reviews of other books by Jean-Paul Sartre

1 Comment
by Simon on August 21, 2017  •  Permalink
Posted in Books, French literature, Novel
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Posted by Simon on August 21, 2017

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2017/08/21/the-age-of-reason-jean-paul-sartre/

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