Book Review: Sartre and Fiction

People usually encounter Sartre either from the direction of his philosophy or from his fiction and then stay where they are. This is an academic conceit since it is obviously the same person who wrote both. Consequently other books about Sartre tend to concentrate on the philosophy as philosophy or the fiction as fiction. I suspect that most readers of this journal will be more familiar with the philosophy. This is their loss. Sartre found that the different genres illuminated the same issues differently and therefore his work needs to be read as a whole. Sartre and Fiction does something almost unique which is to reveal the extent to which Sartre's fictional writings are an integral part of his overall intellectual vision. The genre of the philosophical novel is problematic and is fraught with obstacles, the most common of which is that the characters simply represent philosophical positions and do not become believable as lives which are being lived. The other is to tack the philosophy on as a running commentary. Part of Sartre's genius was to transcend this and write novels and plays about real people who are encountering and struggling with the dilemmas and paradoxes of existence. The book opens with a short introduction to Sartre's non-academic writing. As Cox states 'there is no better way to capture philosophically the existential realities of human life than through literary fiction'. I became familiar with his literature long before I was able to read his philosophy. Maybe one day there will be a module on Existential training courses that only uses novels and dispenses with overtly philosophical texts entirely. If other existential writers were as able as Sartre to transcend boundaries so skilfully I am sure we would have a better understanding of what their ideas actually mean when they are lived. The second chapter is an exposition of the main points of Sartre's philosophy, presumably written for the non-philosophers. There may be a temptation for people who think they know Sartre's philosophy to skip this chapter but this is not recommended as it is impressively clear and also flags up some references to what is in store in the rest of the book. The next chapter is devoted to Sartre's short stories. Sartre is a master of the short story and his first was published in 1939, the year after Nausea. As any writer knows, it is easier to write something long than something short. To write a short story the themes have to be kept simple but not simplistic. In art there is a world of difference between a sketch and a cartoon. The best short stories are sketches where a delicate balance is maintained between detail and ambiguity. Sartre does this and each story takes a different theme. The Wall explores the psychology of prisoners of war facing execution. Erostratus enters the mind of a psychopath detailing the progression from fantasy to violent action. What many consider to be his most accomplished story, Childhood of a Leader, has a strongly political theme that shows the interlocking of the personal and the political in the sense that 'the slide into anti-Semitism[….] is not[…] a political journey but a personal journey into[…] bad faith'.

The next chapter tackles the novels, Nausea and the Roads to Freedom series, all published before 1950. Nausea was published in 1939 after being rejected and re-written a number of times but it achieved almost immediate success. It is a curious book in which almost nothing happens in a conventional sense, but it is also an example of a truly philosophical novel because it does not depart from its core narrative to make philosophical reflections. It inspired Camus' The Stranger and has achieved cult status as the archetypal existential novel. It was also the second novel I read in my novel reading career. Cox quotes Iris Murdoch who says, 'its power resides in its character as a philosophical myth, which shows us in a memorable way the master-image of Sartre's thinking'. But Nausea's timeless strength shows up a weakness of the Roads to Freedom which Cox says are becoming more period pieces, being set before and during World War 2 and recounting the occupation of Paris. But none the less worth reading. The first of the series, The Age of Reason, takes place over a period of two days and vividly describes how the various characters see themselves not as dynamically co-constituted in-the-world, but rather as objects who are caused by the world, but are unable to see their way out. The second, The Reprieve, Cox says 'dispenses with a continuity of place and action – though not continuity of time – to produce a multifaceted view of a Europe teetering on the brink of total war'. In the third, Iron in the Soul, Paris has been occupied and we catch up with some of the characters from the first book. They have been changed though, in the same way as Sartre was changed by the war. He started writing The Roads to Freedom at the same time as he wrote Being and Nothingness, during the war, and the series shows his evolving ethic of political action as being an integral part of the existential life. Sartre used his own experience to inform his philosophy and his fiction as he would - what else is there - and it is interesting to read his philosophy, his fiction and the excellent biographies in parallel.

For Sartre, who had always an interest in drama, his plays were the best way of expressing his resistance to the Nazi occupation. Consequently all his plays are overtly political in intent but allegorical in content and narrative and in this way they were able to be staged in occupied Paris. The Flies (1943), for example, is based on the Greek legend of Orestes and explores the theme of freedom and responsibility through the conversion of one of the characters from peace loving intellectual to warrior, while No Exit is rather more abstract but still deals with the theme of imprisonment. Readers will recall that Sartre's quote 'hell is other people' is from this play. The Respectable Prostitute resulted from Sartre's first visit to the USA and is about racism and double standards in that country.

One book not given the consideration it deserves, although it is mentioned, is Words, presumably because it is autobiography rather than fiction. Written and revised over a period of ten years and eventually published in 1964 it is the work that was to have given him the Nobel prize. It is a complex multi-layered book that is simultaneously autobiography, biography, novel and philosophy and has stood the test of time and needs to be more widely known. It opens up the question, 'Existentially, what is the best way to describe a life?' I think would have been worthwhile stretching the remit of Sartre and Fiction to include it.

Martin Adams