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Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) | |
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French novelist, playwright, existentialist philosopher, and literary critic. Jean-Paul Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1964, but he declined the honor in protest of the values of bourgeois society. His longtime companion was Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), whom he met at the École Normale Superieure in 1929. "Thus, there are only good and bad novels. The bad novel aims to please by flattering, whereas the good one is an exigence and an act of faith. But above all, the unique point of view from which the author can present the world to those freedoms whose concurrence he wishes to bring about is that of a world to be impregnated always with more freedom." (What Is Literature? by Jean-Paul Sartre, translated from the French by Bernard Frechtman, Philosophical Library, 1949, p. 63) Jean-Paul Sartre was born in Paris. His father, Jean-Babtiste Sartre, was a naval officer, who died when Jean-Paul was fifteen months old. Sartre never wrote much about his biological father. More important person in his life was his mother, the former Anne-Marie Schweitzer, a great nephew of Albert Schweitzer. Sartre lived first with her and his grandfather, Charles Schweitzer in Paris, but when his mother remarried in 1917, the family moved to La Rochelle. At school, Sartre was brilliant, but his behavior was behavior was often unpredictable and arrogant. When his friend Raymond Aron played tennis, Sartre preferred giant swings on the horizontal bar. He graduated in 1929 from the Ècole Normale Supérieure. From 1931 to 1945 he worked as a teacher. During this period he also traveled in Egypt, Greece, and Italy. In 1933-34 he studied in Berlin the writings of the German philosophers Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. At the Left Bank cafés Sartre gathered around him a group of intellectuals in the 1930s. During WW II Sartre was drafted in 1939, imprisoned a year later in Germany, but released in 1941 (or he escaped). However, he lost his freedom he valued above all for a short time. In Paris he joined resistance movement and wrote for such magazines as Les Lettres Française and Combat. Sartre and Beauvoir met Albert Camus in Paris at the opening performance of Les Mouches in 1943; they talked about books. Sartre had given Camus's works good reviews in the Alger Républicain. After the war he founded a monthly literary and political
review, Les Temps modernes, and devoted himself entirely to
writing and political activity. The magazine took its title from
Chaplin's film. Sartre wrote both about and for the cinema. On a visit
to the United States in 1945 he saw Citizen Kane and said in a
review that it illustrated "the drama of the American intelligentsia
which is rootless
and totally cut off from the masses." (The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and
Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles by David E. James,
University of California Press, 2005, p. 462) Sartre was never a member of Communist party, although he
tried to reconcile existentialism and Marxism and collaborated with the
French Communist Party. When Camus, with whom Sartre was closely linked
in the 1940, openly criticized Stalinism, Sartre hesitated to follow
his example. Camus's novel L'Homme
révolté (1951), which
explores the theories and forms of humanity's revolt against authority,
caused a break between the two friends. Unwilling to review the book
himself, the task was assigned to Francis Jeanson, a junior member of Les
Temps modernes, whose article was violent and slashing. Camus was
offended and wrote a seventeen-page reply to "M. Le Directeur" (To the
Editor), never once mentioning Jeanson. Sartre responded with a
scornful letter: "You do us the honor of contributing to this issue of Les Temps modernes, but you bring
a portable pedestal with you." (Camus, a Romance by Elizabeth Hawes, Grove Press, 2009, p.171)
After accusing Camus of setting himself
above criticism and being pompous, he continued: "Perhaps you were poor
once, but you aren't any longer, you are a bourgeois like Jeanson and
me." (Ibid., p. 172)
The letter is long, at one point Sartre shifts his tone and tells how
much Camus has meant to him and hopes that this polemic is soon
forgotten. It was not. "If anyone had asked me what existence was, I would have answered, in good faith, that it was nothing, simply an empty form which was added to external things without changing anything in their nature." (Nausea, translated from the French by Lloyd Alexander, The New Classics Series, [no date], p. 171) Sartre's first novel, La Nausée (1938, Nausea), expressed under the influence of German philosopher Edmund Husserl's phenomenological method, that human life has no purpose. The protagonist, Antoine Roquentin, observes the world around him, and in his own solitude he feel psychological nausea of the way things are. "I glance around the room. What a comedy! . . . Each one of them does one small thing and no one is better qualified than he to do it. No one is better qualified than the commercial traveller over there to sell Swan Toothpaste. No one is better qualified than that interesting young man to put his hand under his girl friend's skirts. And I am among them and if they look at me they must think that no one is better qualified than I to do what I'm doing. But I know. I don't look like much, but I know I exist and that they exist. And if I knew how to convince people I'd go and sit down next to that handsome whi-haired gentleman and explain him just what existence means." (Ibid., pp. 150-151) The diversity of things and solidity of this world, Roquentin thinks, is only an appearance, a veneer. Le Mur (1938, The Wall) was a collection of five stories and a novella, which concentrated on the theme of self-decption (or "bad faith"). In 'The Childhood of a Leader' the pitiful hero, Lucien, believes that he does not really exists, he only an actor in his own life. He seeks a feeling of strength through a homosexual affair. Encouraged by his friend, Lucien ends up in the ultra-conservative organization of the Action Française, with a desire to purify the French blood and beat the Jews. Lucien's choices are not authentic, he acts in conformity. "I am abandoned in the world, not in the sense that I might remain abandoned and passive in a hostile universe like a board floating on the water, but rather in the sense that I find myself suddenly alone and without help, engaged in a world for which I bear the whole responsibility without being able, whatever I do, to tear myself away from this responsibility for an instant." (Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, translated and with an introduction by Hazel E. Barnes, Methuen & Co, 1957, pp. 555-556) In his non-fiction work L'Être et
le Néant (1943, Being and Nothingness) Sartre formulated
the basics of his philosophical system, in which "existence is prior to
essence." Sartre made the distinction between things that exist in
themselves (en-soi) and human beings who exist for themselves (pour-soi).
Conscious of the limits of knowledge and of mortality, human beings
live with existential dread. But "the individual in a socialist society is defined at birth
by the totality of possibilities which all give to each one, and at his
death, by still new possibilities—small as they may be—which he has
given to all. Thus all is the road of each man towards himself and each one
the way of all towards all. But the necessities of administration,
industrialization and war forced the Soviet Union into first forming a
policy of a trained elite . . . And from this follows the danger of
this whose culture, profession and standard of living sharply affects
those of the mass, produces in its turn values and myths, that
"amateurs" bred in its midst create a special demand for artists." (Situations, translated from the French by Benita Eisler, George Braziller, 1965, p. 211) Sartre developed his philosophical ideas further in L'existentialisme est un humanisme (1946), and Critique de la raison dialectique (1960). According to Sartre, human being is terrifying free. We are responsible for the choices we make, we are responsible for our emotional lives. In a godless universe life has no meaning or purpose beyond the goals that each man sets for himself. In Being and Nothingness Sartre argued that an individual must detach oneself from things to give them meaning. Sartre's first play, Les Mouches (1943, The Flies),
examined the themes of commitment and responsibility. In the story, set
in the ancient, mythical Greece, Orestes kills the murderers of
Agamemnon, thus freeing the people of the city from the burden of
guilt. According to Sartre's existentialist view, only one who chooses
to assume responsibility of acting in a particular situation, like
Orestes, makes effective use of one's freedom. In his second play, Huis
Clos (1944, In Camera / No Exit), a man who loves only himself, a lesbian, and a
nymphomaniac are forced to live in a small room after their deaths. At
the end - although realizing that the "hell
is other people" - they
remain slaves to their of passions. The play was a sensation and was
filmed in 1954. Les Mains sales
(1948, Dirty Hands) was set in a fictional country named Illyria in the
final years of World War II. The central characters are Hoederer, a
Communist party leader, who represents realism, and a young bourgeois
idealist, Hugo, who is ordered to assassinate him. Hoederer is
considered a traitor to the cause of the proletariat. Anticipating the
arrival of the Red Army, he plans to establish an union with political
enemies to triumph over the country's pro-Nazi regime.
"My own opinion is that politics requires us "get our hands dirty," and
this is the way things have to be," Sartre said in an interview. (The Writings of Jean-Paul
Sartre. Volume 1: A Bibliographical Life by Michel Contat and
Michel Rybalka, 1974, p. 189) The Finnish stage production of the play, directed by Eino
Kalima and premiered at
the National Theatre in October 1948, was denounced by the Soviet
Embassy as "hostile propaganda against the USSR". Aku Korhonen, a
charismatic comedy actor, brought warmth to his role as Hoederer but
daringly,
he was masked to look like Stalin. The Embassy sent a note to the
Finnish
Foreign Minister Carl Enckell. As a result, the play was closed down.
In an American adaptation from 1948, produced under the name Red Gloves,
Charles Boyer was cast in the role of Hoederer. Sartre opposed the
anti-Soviet agenda of the Broadway version, in which Boyer gives Hugo a
speech on Abraham Lincoln. Unhappy with cold war interpretations of his
work, Sartre decided not to authorize any performance of Dirty Hands without the approval of
the Communist parties concerned. During the war, Sartre worked briefly as a scriptwriter for the Pathé film company. Among his most notable screenplays are Les jeux sont faits (1947, The Chips are Down), directed by Jean Delannoy, and Les sorcières de Salem (1957, The Crucible), adapted from Arthur Miller's play. Typhus, which he wrote in 1944, was produced in 1953, starring Michèle Morgan and Gérard Philipe. The director was Yves Allégret. Qu'est-ce que la littérature? (1947,
What
Is Literature?)
is Sartre's best-known book of literary criticism. A writer is always a
watchdog or a jester, but the primarly
function of the writer is to act in such a way that nobody can be
ignorant of the world: "the writer should engage himself completely in
his works, and not as an abject passivity by putting forward his vices,
his misfortunes, and his weaknesses, but as a resolute will and as a
choice". (Ibid., p. 35) The final goal of art is
"to recover
this world by giving it to be seen not as it is, but as if it had its
source in human freedom."(Ibid., p. 57) The
reader brings to life the literary object -
it is not true that one writes for oneself. On
the other hand Sartre saw that literature is dying. "Not that talent or
good will is lacking, but it has no longer anything to do in
contemporary society." (Ibid., p. 241)
The newspaper, the radio and the movies speak to crowds. Writers must
learn to transpose the ideas of their books into the language of the
mass media. From 1946 to 1955 Sartre wrote several biographical studies, of which the most important was Saint Genet, comédien et martyr (1952, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr), about his friend Jean Genet (1910-1986), a convicted felon and writer. "Moreover, Genet addresses not the criminologist or sociologist but the "average Frenchman" who adorns himself with the name of good citizen; for it is he who preserves the idea of Evil, while science and law are tending to break away from it; it is he who, burning with desires that his morality condemns, has delivered himself from his negative freedom by throwing it like a flaming cloak on the members of a minority group whose acts he interprets on the basis of his own temptations. What a prey!" (Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, New American Library, 1963, p. 494) Jean Cocteau said of the book in his journal: "As all real books of criticism, it is a monumental portrait of Sartre, for which Genet is only the bronze or the stone. . . . it represents Genet no more than the Statue of Liberty, in New York, represents American freedom." (Sartre: A Life by Annie Cohen-Solal, translated by Anna Cangogni, edited by Norman MacAfee, Pantheon, 1987, p. 316) François Mauriac described Genet's work as nothing nor less than a "turd." (Ibid., p. 316) After Stalin's death in 1953, Sartre accepted the right to criticize the Soviet system although he defended the Soviet state. He visited the Soviet Union next year and was hospitalized for ten days because of exhaustion. With his interpreter, Lena Zonina, he had a love affair. In 1956 Sartre spoke out on behalf of freedom for Hungarians, condemning the Soviet invasion, but not the Russian people, and in 1968 he condemned the Warsaw Pact assault on Czechoslovakia. In the Soviet Union, Sartre was privately criticized by the Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev. The O.A.S. (Organisation de l'Armee Secrete), engaged in terrorist activities against Algerian independence, exploded a bomb in 1961 in Sartre's apartment on rue Bonaparte; it happened also next year and Sartre moved on quai Louis-Blériot, opposite the Eiffel tower. A superb conversationalist, Sartre unexpectedly lost his debate with the philosopher Louis Althusser, perhaps the only time in his public life. Althusser had joined the French Communist Party in 1948, and during the 1960s and 1970s he was considered the most influential voice in Western Marxism. At the height of the student rebellion, which Sartre supported, his main interest lay on his study called L'Idiot de la famille (The Family Idiot). The wide biography of Gustave Flaubert used Freudian interpretations and Marxist social and historical elements, familiar from his philosophical work. Sartre had been preoccupied with Flaubert since childhood. In this study Sartre showed how Flaubert became the person his family and society determined him to be, and how Flaubert's choices summarized the historical situation of his class. While writing this work, Sartre used Corydrane. The drug, a combination of aspirin and amphetamine, was popular among students and intellectuals. Also race bicyclists used it in the 1960s. Sartre became also closely involved in movement against Vietnam War. He headed in 1967 the International War Crimes Tribunal, set up by Bertrand Russell to judge American military conduct in Indochina. Among the New Left Sartre was a highly respected figure and his stand on the French colonial policy in Algeria was widely known in the Third World. One of his most powerful texts, written under the influence of Corydrane, was the foreword to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (1961), published toward the end the of the Algerian War. The book was soon translated into seventeen languages. In 1970 Sartre was arrested because of selling on the streets the forbidden Maoist paper La cause du peuple. Sartre was familair with the though of Mao Tse-tung and he had traveled in China in 1955 with Beauvoir, who decided to write a whole book about the country. However, in the early 1960s the Cuban economic and social revolution fascinated Sartre more. He also met Fidel Castro, but broke with his dictatorship later. In 1974 Sartre visited the terrorist Andreas Baader at the prison of Stammheim in Germany. When de Gaulle died in 1970, Sartre noted, "I've never held him in any esteem." (Sartre: A Life, p. 472) The Family Idiot was Sartre's last large work. It was left
unfinished (like Being and Nothingness, the "Roads to Freedom" novels, which he began with The Age of Reason in 1945, and Critique
of Dialectical Reason)
– Sartre called the book his "most total failure . . . I wonder why I
always plan books that are so much longer than the ones I actually
write." (Ibid., p. 472) Sartre suffered
from failing eyesight and near the end of his life he was blind. Jean-Paul Sartre died in Paris of oedema of the lungs on April 15, 1980. "Under a gray and leaded sky, in a meditation that no notable incident broke, thousands of people accompanied the mortal remains of Jean-Paul Sartre from the Broussais hospital, where he rested since his death, until Montparnasse cemetery," reported Agence France Presse. Arlette Elkaïm, Sartre's mistress whom he had adopted in 1965, received the rights to his literary heritage, not Simone de Beauvoir. Like
Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald after WWI, Sartre was
considered after WW II the leading spokesman of the postwar
generation. In his essays Sartre dealt with wide range of
subjects, sometimes in provocative manner. 'The Republic of Silence'
starts, "We were never more free than under the German occupation,"
explaining this later that in those circumstances each gesture had the
weight of a commitment. In 'The Humanism of Existentialism' he
condensed the major theme of atheist existentialism as follows: "if God
does not exist, there is at least one being in whom existence precedes
essence, a being who exists before he can be defined by any concept,
and that this being is man, or, as Heidegger says, human reality. What
is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means that,
first of
all, man exist, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards,
defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is
indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will
he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be." (Existentialism: Basic
Writings,
second edition, edited, with introductioons, by Charles Guignon and
Derk Pereboom, Hackett Publishing Company, 2001, pp. 292-293)
Selected works:
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