Sartre: Romantic Rationalist

  Another critic, however, while agreeing with Sartre that introspection does not show character, sees this as a reason for keeping the internal monologue method on a short leash, and regards the popularity of the method as a symptom of literary disease. George Lukacs writes (Studies in European Realism, p. 8): ‘The psychologists’ punctilious probing into the human soul and their transformation of human beings into a chaotic flow of ideas destroy no less surely every possibility of a literary presentation of the completely human personality’, no less surely, that is, than does a crude ‘objectivist’ naturalism. It is between these two extremes, of an impoverished black-and-white objectivism (Upton Sinclair) and an isolated aesthetic subjectivism (James Joyce) that Lukacs sees literature in the western world as condemned to move. For want of the inclination and ability to put the ‘decisive social determinants’ of character and action into the picture, the western writer, Lukacs says, has made his characters pale and empty or (if his technique is psychological and subjectivist) eccentric or pathological. That is, to put the accusation in the terms used in the previous chapter, Lukacs charges the western writer, who has evidently lost the aspiration to truth (since such an inspiration would require him to come to terms with Marxism) with portraying his characters in a static monistic manner, as denizens of a simple ‘factual’ world or an equally simple emotional world, rather than as active beings who can only be properly characterised by being shown in reciprocal connexion with the society they inhabit. And he picks on the introspective technique of the modern novelist as a symptom of a neglect of the complexity of what he takes to be the real nature of human personality.

  Now there is a sense in which it is obviously inexact to say that introspection does not reveal character. It is true that self-analysis ‘breaks up’ the firm configuration to which we usually give the name ‘character’—and the ‘purer’ the analysis the harder, perhaps, to name what is revealed in terms of virtues and vices. Yet an ‘impure’ analysis will give itself away and readily receive a name. Good glass is invisible, inferior glass can be seen as well as seen through. In Constant’s novel Adolphe, for instance, which is a prolonged self-analysis with only one voice, we confidently pass judgment, from the quality of the analysis itself, upon the bad faith of the narrator. Adolphe, of course, is told retrospectively in the mode of ‘the remembered’, not of the immediate. The same applies however to the analysis which is presented as ‘happening now’. To see the person concerned through the eyes of another may help our evaluation of him—but we do not need this if the author has given sufficient colour to the monologue to enable us to ‘place’ the narrator. (Narration through a non-reflexive consciousness may of course be equally revealing—as when, in Anna Karenina, we learn not only the intensity but the quality of Levin’s joy from his finding a tiresome meeting delightful, of Anna’s misery from her seeing inoffensive people as beastly.)

  If, however, the author cuts up the inner landscape too finely, or, from indifference or some other reason, fails to give us the material on which to judge the quality of the monologue, we may cease to be interested in estimating the good faith of the narrator, and may simply turn to enjoying the subtlety and finesse of the author as this displays itself in the various moments of the analysis. I think this is our situation where certain of Virginia Woolf’s people are concerned. The person is presented as a series of more or less discrete experiences, connected by tone and colour rather than by any thread of consistent struggle or purpose—and both person and author seem content. This is certainly one way of ‘killing the hero’—but it is not the way which Sartre commends. In La Nausée Roquentin experiences a disintegrated world, but, unlike the heroine of that other lyric upon the absurdity of everything, Mrs. Dalloway, he does so with acute distress; he feels it ought not to be so. In Les Chemins de la Liberté the story is related entirely through the moment-to-moment consciousness of the characters, and considerable space is devoted to self-analysis on the part of the main persons; but the interest of the story appears to lie in the demand for sense, the characters’ determination to find a meaning in their lives. Does Sartre, in spite of his use of the introspective technique, really succeed in creating people who are neither ‘pale’ nor ‘pathological’? Sartre has recommended moral concern as a recipe for good writing. We shall wish to see how the vertical aspiration to truth (which I have no doubt Sartre would consider Virginia Woolf to lack) affects his portrayal of his own people, and in what exactly that aspiration consists.

  The character of whom we see most, and on whom our interest centres in the first three volumes of Les Chemins, is Mathieu. We receive plenty of oblique information about Mathieu through Ivich’s tart comments, Boris’s admiration, Daniel’s contempt. What do we learn, however, from Mathieu himself, whose monologues occupy so many pages? It seems that, as soon as Mathieu begins to reflect, tout fout le camp. In Le Sursis, for instance, when he pauses on the Pont Neuf and contemplates suicide, his reflexions fall apart into a dry senselessness. ‘He was alone upon the bridge, alone in the world, and no one could tell him what to do. “I am free for nothing”, he thought with lassitude’ (p. 286). This is typical of Mathieu’s reflexions. At the crises in his life, it is the same note of emptiness and weariness which is struck always. At the close of L’Age de Raison, after his break with Marcelle: ‘He felt nothing except an anger without an object and behind him the act, naked, smooth, incomprehensible: he had stolen, he had abandoned Marcelle when she was pregnant, for nothing’ (p. 288).

  This effect of a void at the centre is of course perfectly deliberate. Nor is the random air of this ‘freedom of indifference’ in itself unconvincing. When Mathieu starts to say ‘I love you’ to Marcelle, and says ‘I don’t love you’, when he tells Pinette resistance is pointless and then reaches for his gun: this is indeed how we behave. In a way too, one might say, it is ‘only because’ Myshkin fails to reach the door in time, after the scene between the two women, that he stays with Nastasya and does not wed Aglaia (in The Idiot). It is ‘only because’ Varenka makes an inopportune remark about mushrooms that Sergei Ivanovich fails to propose to her (in Anna Karenina). Yet these latter cases affect us differently; they lose their air of total randomness because of the pressure upon them of the whole work of which they are a part.

  The danger is that, if a character is presented with an excess of lucidity and transparency, a sense of futility may overcome the reader as well. What is typical of Mathieu is not only his ‘anguish’ and ‘lack of reasons’ for doing A rather than B—it is his chill self-consciousness about the whole affair. We might compare Sartre’s descriptions of Mathieu’s choices with the description in Daniel Deronda of Gwendolen’s decision to marry Grandcourt. The anguish and the ‘bad faith’ of the heroine are presented in a mixture of external detail and introspective description: the urgent ‘picture book’ recollections, the warm sense of a possible escape, the ‘yes’ which she speaks as if in a court of justice.1 Gwendolen’s predicament moves us in a way in which none of Mathieu’s manages to do—and a part of the reason for this is the extreme transparency of Mathieu’s consciousness. Now Sartre might well answer that to present the matter thus was exactly his purpose. Yet his position as a philosopher has set him a difficult task as a novelist: that of maintaining our interest and our sense of reality in spite of the drying and emptying effect of the perpetual analysis. In their private self-communings Sartre’s people do seem in danger of losing our concern either because of their abstraction (Mathieu might indeed be called a ‘pale’ character) or else because of their abnormality (Daniel is certainly a ‘pathological’ character). We cannot here discover any clear answer to the question: what does Sartre himself really value? By the magnetic power of what ‘truth’ is he led into ‘seriousness’? So let us now consider the relation of Sartre’s people with each other.

  The lesson of L’Etre et le Néant would seem to be that personal relations are usually warfare, and at best represent a precarious equilibrium, buttressed as often
as not by bad faith. We find nothing in the novels which openly contradicts this view. It is not only that the relationships portrayed in Les Chemins are all instances of hopelessly imperfect sympathies—Mathieu and Ivich, Mathieu and Odette, Mathieu and Daniel, Mathieu and Brunet, Mathieu and Marcelle, Gomez and Sarah, Boris and Lola. This in itself is nothing to complain of. Indeed it is in Sartre’s ruthless portrayal of the failure of sympathy that we often most feel his penetration and his honesty. What does deserve comment is that Sartre acquiesces in the lack of sympathy in a way which suggests that his interest is elsewhere. He is looking beyond the relationship; what he values is not the possibility which this enfolds but something else. One feels this particularly perhaps in the treatment of Marcelle, who is dealt with hardly not only by Mathieu but by her author. Sartre is not really very interested in the predicament of Marcelle, except from the technical point of view of its effect upon Mathieu. Similarly we feel a touch of hardness in the portrayal of Boris’s relations with Lola. We are not moved by Lola’s situation—whereas we are pierced to the heart by the somewhat similar situation of Ellénore in Adolphe. And a part of the reason is that Lola’s author does not care very much either; he accepts the position. It is not here that he has entered absorbingly into his work.

  The tragic and magnetic unattainability of the loved other is not presented; and neither is the terribly concrete presence of the hated other shown to us with the force which one might have expected from the author of L’Etre et le Néant. This, on second thoughts, is not surprising either. If we are to be either touched or terrified there must be that concrete realisation of what George Eliot called ‘an equivalent centre of self from which the shadows fall with a difference’—and this I have suggested Sartre does not give us in the novels. The grasp which his characters have of each other seems flimsy if we compare it with the joyful and terrible apprehension of each other of, for instance, Anna Karenina and Vronsky—or with the relations of Dorothea and Casaubon in Middlemarch, that brilliant study of being-for-others. In one place only do we feel that Sartre has entered deeply into the encounter which he portrays, and that is in the friendship between Brunet and Schneider. Only here, and with a momentary intensity verging on the sentimental, is there the flicker of a real ‘I—Thou’. One may suspect that some thwarted political passion, connected perhaps with a disappointed love-hate of the Communist Party, lies behind the semi-sexual relation between these two characters. In any case, it is only a flicker; what we are left with is the meaning, in terms of the intellectual concerns which rule Les Chemins, of the symbolically named and slain Vicarios.

  Sartre has commended moral seriousness in the writer. He would agree that the emphasis and configuration of a novel are decided by what the author really values. We have seen that Sartre attaches no value to the intellectual’s lonely meditations, nor does he seem to attach much value to the muddled and frustrated efforts of human beings to understand each other. It remains possible that value lies in ‘social relations’—in something to do with politics. Here we seem to be closer to the mark. It is certainly clear that the central theme of Les Chemins is communism. Yet how is this treated? Its presentation to us in Brunet’s first phrase is very largely criticism. We acquire a respect for Brunet but not for his ideas. Nor is there any other ‘political’ character in the book (certainly not Gomez) whom we are encouraged to regard as on the way to salvation. What is it then that Sartre considers valuable, what is the ‘truth’ to which he aspires, and which will give us the key to Les Chemins de la Liberté?

  * * *

  1 That ‘yes’ hits off with beautiful accuracy the kind of bad faith which Sartre too attempts to characterise in L’Etre et le Néant by his example of the girl who leaves her hand inert and ‘unnoticed’ in the grasp of her admirer (p.95). See also F.R. Leavis’s analysis of the Deronda passage in The Great Tradition.

  V

  VALUE AND THE DESIRE TO BE GOD

  The answer is of course given in the title: what is valuable is freedom. But before we can see exactly what this means we must turn to a brief consideration of Sartre’s philosophy. Sartre is a traditional Cartesian philosopher in that an analysis of ‘consciousness’ is ‘the central point of his philosophy. This analysis is presented in L’Etre et le Néant and also, more picturesquely, in La Nausée. Sartre is also Cartesian in his insistence on ‘the supremacy of the cogito’; that is, he relies finally upon the direct deliverance of a consciousness wherein there can be no more than what appears. But Sartre is un-Cartesian in that he does not want to conceive consciousness as a single unitary process of intellection or awareness which is radically separated from physical activity. On the other hand, he is not prepared to go as far as certain British empiricists in the direction of identifying mind or intelligence with its observable concomitants. His interests are psychological rather than semantic. He is concerned with the actual varying quality of our awareness of things and people, rather than with the question of how, in spite of these variations, we manage to communicate determinate meanings; he is concerned with a study of the phenomena of awareness, and not with the delineation of concepts.

  Sartre pictures consciousness by means of two contrasts. The first is the contrast between the flickering, unstable, semi-transparent moment-to-moment ‘being’ of the consciousness, the shifting way in which it conceives objects and itself—and the solid, opaque, inert ‘in-themselvesness’ of things which simply are what they are. The consciousness, however, is not constantly in a state of translucent or empty self-awareness (we are not always reflecting); usually we are unreflectively engaged in grasping the world as a reality which is coloured by our emotions or intentions. Alternatively, we may be aware of ourselves, not as transparent to our own reflective gaze, but as solidified and judged by the gaze of another. In these ways the consciousness moves from a state of open self-awareness towards a more opaque and thing-like condition; only since the consciousness is not a thing, but however absorbed or fascinated retains a certain self-awareness, or flexibility, or tendency to flicker, it is more appropriate to picture it as a gluey or paste-like substance which may become more or less solidified—and which retains something of its heavy inert sticky nature even in reflective moments. (Introspection is not the focusing of a beam upon something determinate.) ‘Glueyness’ (le visqueux) is for Sartre the image of consciousness; and fascinates us for that reason. It is in terms of a solidification, or closing of the texture, that Sartre pictures insincerity or bad faith (mauvaise foi): the more or less conscious refusal to reflect, the immersion in the unreflectively coloured awareness of the world, the persistence in an emotional judgment, or the willingness to inhabit cosily some other person’s estimate of oneself. It is in terms of a dispersion of this gluey inertness that Sartre pictures freedom; ‘freedom’ is the mobility of the consciousness, that is our ability to reflect, to dispel an emotional condition, to withdraw from absorption in the world, to set things at a distance.

  The other contrast which Sartre uses is that between the flickery discontinuous instability of consciousness (we are moody, lacking in concentration, the ‘depth’ or ‘richness’ of our apprehension of our surroundings varies, we cannot hold an object steady for long in our attention, however intense or delighted) and a condition of perfect stability and completion towards which it aspires. This notion of the consciousness as an emptiness poised between two totalities we have already met with in La Nausée: as soon as Roquentin has ‘seen through’ the thin categories of words, and classes, and social labels, he feels himself immersed in the ‘glue’ of nameless ‘thinginess’, and his own thoughts seem as shapeless as the rest; yet he still aspires to the realm of circles and melodies. This aspiration Sartre describes in L’Etre et le Néant in these terms when he speaks of suffering. ‘We suffer, and we suffer from not suffering enough. The suffering of which we speak is never quite the same as that which we feel. What we call “true” or “real” or “proper” suffering, suffering which moves us, is what we read on t
he faces of others, or better still in portraits, on the face of a statue, on a tragic mask. That is suffering which has being’ (p. 135). The translucence of our own suffering seems to spoil its depth. It is a suffering which we have to ‘make’—and so we feel it to be a sort of sham. ‘It speaks incessantly because it is insufficient, but its ideal is silence. The silence of the statue, of the stricken man who bows his head and covers his face without a word’ (p. 136). We wish our experience to become full, steady, and complete, without losing its self-aware transparency: the expressive immobility of the statue, the timeless motion of the melody, are images of this steadiness. Consciousness is rupture, it is able to spring out of unreflective thing-like conditions—but it is also projet, it aspires towards a wholeness which forever haunts its partial state.

  Sartre then goes on (in the passages that follow those quoted above) rather unexpectedly to say this: we are now able to determine more precisely what the being of the self is—it is value (la valeur). Value is something but it is not some thing. It has the double character of being unconditionally and yet of not being. It is not to be identified with any actual real quality or state of affairs; if it is, ‘the contingency of being kills the value’. This much is familiar ground: compare G. E. Moore’s insistence that value is ‘non-natural’; Wittgenstein’s: ‘it must lie outside all happening and being so. For all happening and being so is accidental’ (Tractatus 6.41). What is harder to understand is that Sartre seems to be identifying value with that stable lived totality for which the consciousness is nostalgic. ‘The supreme value towards which consciousness, by its very nature, is constantly transcending itself is the absolute being of the self, with its qualities of identity, purity, permanence’ (p. 137).