Jean-Paul (Charles Aymard) Sartre (1905-1980) is a French philosopher and dramatist for whom theater is a way to express his philosophical ideas of atheism and existentialism. He is also a philosophical essayist (e.g. The Transcendence of the Ego, 1936; Sketches for a Theory of the Emotions, 1939; The Imaginary, 1940; Anti-Semite and Jew, 1946; and a series of ten Situations, 1947-1976, etc.) and screenwriter (e.g. Typhus, 1944; The Chips are Down, 1947; Freud: The Secret Passion, 1962—where he has his name removed from the movie; etc). He is the author of several novels (The Age of Reason, 1945; The Reprieve, 1945; Troubled Sleep, 1949; The Last Chance—left unfinished) and autobiographies (e.g. Sartre By Himself, 1959; The Words, 1964, War Diaries: Notebook from a Phony War, 1984, etc.). In 1948, the Catholic Church included Sartre’s works in the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (List of Prohibited Works). In 1964, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature as an acknowledgment of his literary work, but he declined it because “a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution”—an argument that, most probably, was clearer to the philosopher than to the Nobel Committee.
Sartre is attracted by philosophy upon reading the essay by Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Date of Consciousness. Raymond Aaron and Martin Heidegger later influenced his philosophy, too. In Paris, he frequents Café de Flores to write and to meet other intellectuals. Café de Flores is one of the two cafés in Paris, popular for gathering political activists, intellectuals, and artists. The other one is Café de la Rotonde frequented by Pablo Picasso, Diego Rivera, Federico Cantú, and others. However, during WWII and during the Paris occupation, many of them preferred to avoid frequent meetings in these cafes because they feared the so-called ‘mouches’ (in English, ‘flies’) and the ‘corbeaux’ (in English, ‘ravens’). They were the nazi regime’s ‘informers’ and ‘anonymous denunciatory’. It is said that in 1940, the nazi regime recruited 32,000 informer ‘flies’ and in 1942, the regime received 1,500 letters from anonymous ‘ravens’. Sartre writes essays (e.g. Paris under Occupation) and he publishes articles in Albert Camus’ newspaper. His articles are mainly about disadvantaged minority groups. After the war, he wrote about the abandoned newly released Jews from concentration camps and about the neglected Black Americans. Therefore, for Albert Camus, Sartre is a “writer who resisted, not a resister who wrote”. Sartre writes his first play, Bariona—a play about Christmas—in 1940 when he is captured by the nazis and imprisoned for nine months. After WWII, he gives up teaching and moves into an apartment on Bonaparte Street where he focuses on writing and where he writes most of his works. As a man, Jean-Paul Sartre’s life companion was Simone de Beauvoir (1929-1980), known as a feminist political activist and thought to have a bi-sexual orientation. The couple prefers a third partner in their relationship, usually young women such as high school girls that Simone de Beauvoir was said to have ‘recruited’ and have worked on their ‘introduction’ to Sartre. As a man, he wants to be remembered through the extraordinary historical circumstances he had to live. As a playwright, Jean-Paul Sartre wants to be remembered for Nausea, No Exit (1944), and The Devil and the Good Lord (1951). Other plays he wrote are: The Flies, 1943; The Respectful Prostitute, 1946; Men without Shadow, 1946; In the Mesh, 1948; Dirty Hands, 1948; Intimacy, 1949; Kean, 1953; Nekrassov, 1955; The Condemned of Altona, 1959; Hurricane over Cuba, 1961; The Trojan Women, 1965. For this Writing Blog, I will review the following five plays: The Flies, No Exit, Men without Shadow, The Devil and the Good Lord, and The Condemned of Altona. Sartre’s plays have an original structure divided into acts, tableau, and scenes. And the rhythm of the dialogue is impeccable. But they are not plays to be read or understood by children. The topic is, usually, death—as expected from a philosopher on existentialism—and the morbid language is so vivid that for some may be difficult to digest. For example, in the play The Flies, a character will dress in clothes that are still warm of the dead king. Another example is in the play No Exit, the story takes place in hell where one man and two women are trapped. Sartre imagines that two of his characters, Estelle and Garcin, are making love. The theater audience encompasses a large variety of people, and some prefer what is morbid. Personally, the morbid is not my favorite topic. My imagination and my writing pleasure do not take me as far as to imagine stories taking place in hell or people making love there—let alone a ménage à trois in hell! That might be due to the different understandings of the word ‘hell’ that Sartre and I have. My understanding of the concept of ‘hell’ is religious, but Sartre is an atheist. For him, the ‘hell’ is we, the people: “Hell is other people.” I do not want to speculate on the reasons why he reached this conclusion. Is it because of his wandering eye? Children were mean to him because of this completely irrelevant physical imperfection, particularly in a context in which nobody is perfect—although some may think they are. When people judge others with the illusion of perfection existing in their heads, they translate their conclusions into words and attitudes that hurt like hell. However, despite the philosopher’s understanding of the concept of ‘hell’, Sartre’s three characters in the play No Exit die and their souls go to hell in the religious sense of the word. Not all the plays Jean-Paul Sartre wrote promote his philosophical ideas about existentialism, some are adaptations, such as the play The Flies on the ancient myth of Electra first used by the Greek playwright Aeschylus and, then, by Sophocles. THE FLIES The play The Flies is among the first plays Jean-Paul Sartre wrote. The first to have written about the Electra myth is Aeschylus in the trilogy, Oresteia. In short, in the first part of the trilogy (Agamemnon), the king returns victorious from Troy, but he is murdered at home by his wife and his brother who takes his place as a king—as in Hamlet by Shakespeare. In the second part of the trilogy (The Choephori), the son of the dead king, Orestes, returns from exile, reunites with his sister, Electra, and revenges the death of his father, King Agamemnon, murdering his mother and the brother of his father. In the third part (Eumenides), the so-called ‘Eumenides’ are chasing Orestes. They are the voice of the consciousness represented as minor goddesses who used to remind people about their sins, such as reminding Orestes about his murders. With the support of Apollo—the Greek God of Beauty—Orestes arrives in Athens, where the goddess Athena holds him accountable. Sophocles’ s play Electra might be the first literary adaptation. Sophocles only focused on the second part of Aeschylus’s trilogy—the moment when Orestes returns, reunites with his sister, Electra, and revenges the death of his father, Agamemnon, killing his mother and his uncle, Aegisthus. He keeps the same characters, the same Apollo (and a long list of other gods), and he focuses on Electra’s sufferance who had to live with a murderous mother, Clytemnestra Furthermore, he focuses on the relationship between Electra and her sister, Crysotemis, and the sorrow and the joy to reunite with her brother Orestes that she thought dead. The revenge of Orestes (and Electra) is presented in the last one-third of the play. Sartre’s entire play, The Flies, is about the revenge of Orestes and the murder of Clytemnestra and of Aegisthus, his uncle that murdered Agamemnon. He borrows the same characters from Sophocles, but the entire play is based on the trilogy of Aeschylus. The Flies is a play in three acts—where Act 2 has also two tableaux. Tableau 1 has six scenes and Tableau 2 has eight scenes. Both Act 1 and 3 have precisely six scenes each. The flies in the title are Aeschylus’ eumenides. He keeps Aeschylus’ idea of monsters or of something hideous, but it could not be the voice of the consciousness because this is the voice of God and this would be the opposite of Sartre’s atheism. The flies are the souls of the dead people following us. Therefore, Sartre’s idea about our existence is that people return to nature as larva and we return as hideous little monstrous flies. In his adaptation, Sartre places the action fifteen years after King Agamemnon’s death on the day of his commemoration (an idea he kept from Sophocles). Furthermore, he replaces Apollo with Jupiter—a more inspired choice. Jupiter is, here, the god of death and revenge, and the flies are his angels. Sartre’s premise, for which Orestes undertakes a character arch from a good young man to a murder and Electra from a beautiful young lady to an old lady, is that nature can’t stand the man and Jupiter can’t stand the man either. Sophocles’ premise is death for death—a common premise for the ancient times: “No, that thou may’st not have thy wish in death. I may not stint one drop of bitterness. And would this doom were given without reprieve, If any try to act beyond the law, To kill them. Then the wicked would be few.” Last, compared to Aeschylus and Sophocles, whose characters believe in predestination, Sartre’s characters do not. In Electra, Orestes consults the Oracles before returning to his city-state to avenge his father. Other examples are: “God gave me to your sight when so he willed” (Oreste), “Is my prayer heard?” (Electra), etc. In The Flies, “(…) each man has to find his way”. (Act 3) To understand a play, the author’s biography or the historical context it refers to or when the play was written are helpful tools. To fully understand the play The Flies, the reader should have some previous understanding of Sartre’s philosophy and be familiar with the works of the Greek ancient dramatists. But even without this biographical and historical context, the play stands by itself, the dialog flows, the language is precise, the world that Sartre built for Orestes is coherent, and he includes some philosophical lines to his characters such as that people love sufferance, they love to maintain it, and they rake it with dirty nails—subjective conclusions (of a philosopher who writes drama) that we may or may not agree with, but that are perfectly integrated in a dialog and plot that unfolds logically. NO EXIT The play No Exit is a one-act play with five scenes. It was first staged in May 1944 at Theater du Vieux-Colombier. It has four characters: Joseph Garcin who was a pacifist journalist who died in Rio because somebody shut him several bullets, from which one in his head; Estelle Rigault who was from Paris, an orphan who died of pneumonia, and Inèz Serrano who was a lesbian post clerk who seduced the wife of her cousin who, then, dies in an accident and his wife asphyxiated. The fourth character is a valet, a man on duty—an employee welcoming people… in hell. The play opens in a great décor, with furniture Napoleon III style, somewhere a statue, somewhere else some sofas. Although the sofas have different colors, all chambers are the same. And in those chambers, the characters can’t speak and can’t move. People get there not in an order of a certain preference, but random in the arrival order. The characters are dead, they are in coffins, and they are in hell. And, as if it was not enough, they also wear the clothes they died in. For example, Garcin has a big hole in his forehead and his clothes bear the marks of the bullets that perforated his clothes. But there is life in hell, too. Two of the characters make a couple and make love. From an artistic point of view, the way Sartre suggests the idea of death as ‘no exit’ and the way he describes the coffin as a door that closes, the hell as a road of no return is highly imaginative. Sartre describes the death of some innocent people: Garcin militated for peace and died murdered; Estelle was an orphan and suffered all her life, made pneumonia, and died young. He places them in hell for things they did in their personal lives. For example, Garcin was not a good husband, Inèz murdered her child, etc. And, in hell, these characters have to live with each other. “There is no need for flames and pitch, the hell is the others”. But there is hope for salvation, too: “Let’s be silent. Let’s look in ourselves without raising our heads”. MEN WITHOUT SHADOW The play Men without Shadow is a play in one act and four tableaux. And each tableau has acts. It was first staged at Theater Antoine, in November 1946. The entire play is a debate about life and death, and the hesitations to make the right decisions when between four walls and no other decision matters more. Several partisans are captured, held prisoners, and tortured to betray their leader. After three months of detention, one of them, Sorbier, who is also a Jew, jumps out of the widow of the investigation room and dies. “You died and my eyes are dry; forgive me: I don’t have any tears left, and death doesn’t have any meaning. Outside, three hundred corpses lying in bushes, and tomorrow, I am a frozen and naked corpse, too…” (Tableau 4, scene 3) Their life options are escape or imprisonment for life in a salt mine. There is also a third option: to betray their leader and to be set free—at least, this is what they were said. And their arguments are many on both the life and death side. At some point, a life sentence is also a good option because ‘there are other people in the salt mine: old and sick people, women that can’t resist any longer. They need us”. (Tableau 4, scene 3) Short scenes of a couple of lines give great dynamism to the dialog. The lines that present both the inner and the outer worlds of the characters are the arguments of the philosopher either for life or for death. “Each pain of ours is a rape because the others imposed it on us”. (Tableau 3, scene 2) “And they suffer on our back. This gives people a clear conscious”. (Tableau 3, scene 1) “I won’t move from this place, I won’t talk to you anymore, I will hide in the shadow and you’ll forget that I exist”. (Tableau 3, scene 2) “I feel like a dry tree, I feel alone, and I cannot think but of myself”. (Tableau 4, scene 3) In the end, they decide that “life is worth living”. Therefore, they betray the leader: “On the way to Grenoble, at kilometer 42, take the road to the right. After a 50-meter walk through the woods, you’ll see a thicket, and behind the thicket, there is a cave. The leader is hidden there with all the guns.” (Tableau 4, scene 4) Sartre ends the play with three gunshots to convey the idea that Lucie, Henri, and Canoris are dead. THE DEVIL AND THE GOOD LORD The Devil and the Good Lord is a play in three acts and eleven tableaux, and each tableaux has its own scenes. It was first staged at Theater Antoine in June 1951. The action of the play takes place in Worms where the inhabitants rise against the archbishop. Conrad and Goetz are leaders and brothers, but Conrad dies because Goetz betrayed him motivated by inheritance. Goetz has a girlfriend, Catherine, who loves him dearly and whom he treats in a despicable way. This play gives voice to Sartre’s ideas of atheism (sometimes, with satanist accents) and the language is hard: “The Church is a bitch: it sells its favors to the rich”. “The woman is a pet”. “Brothers, we don’t need priests: all people can baptize, all people can forgive sins, all people can preach, or God doesn’t exit”. (Act I, Tableau 1) “Not everybody has the luck to murder, but everybody has the appetite to do so”. “I am the Father, the devil is my Son, hate is the Holy Spirit”. The attacks on the Church continue with the impossibility of a priest to explain to a mother the death of her 7-year-old son or the nonsensical explanation he gives to the mother: that her baby is in her womb and that she has to suffer for another seven years for the baby to be reborn. When Goetz rejects Catherine, she does not have where to go and not even the monastery is an option for her because to enter the covenant, she must have a certain dowry, which she does not—so, it is again the idea of the Church who loves the rich while the others suffer in hunger and poverty. The antimetaboles, “A dog watches the archbishop and sees an archbishop with the head of a dog”, continues Sartre’s attacks on the Church. Furthermore, Goetz does the work of the devil because “the Good is already done. The evil does not copy, it destroys to reinvent”. (Act I, Tableau 3, scene 4) In the end, Goetz misses Catherine, repents, and acknowledges that “God is with us”. (Act 2, Tableau 7, scene 5). Does Sartre truly believe that a man like Goetz can undertake such a transformation to miss a dear person, repent everything he said or did to her, and, on top of it, acknowledge God’s existence? Or does he only fulfill a drama writing requirement of a character arc? I would better stop here and pass to reviewing the next play because the longer I reflect, the more chances I have to start philosophy-ing. THE CONDEMNED OF ALTONA The play The Condemned of Altona is organized in five acts and it was first staged on the stage of the Theatre de la Renaissance in September 1959. It is a family drama, it is a drama about politics, and with sex a la Sartre: where two brothers share the same woman who is the wife of one of theirs. The Gerlachs are a family who had a business with ships in Hamburg, in Northern Germany. During WWII they had to collaborate with the nazi regime. In this sense, the nazi government bought from them a piece of land that the family was not using, and, lately, the government used it to build a concentration camp. Furthermore, Goebbels paid the family a visit in Hamburg. But the family believes that Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, and the nazi regime are a group of criminals, but this is “just a personal and unuseful opinion”. However, when a Jewish rabbi escapes from the concentration camp, the Gerlachs hide him undertaking all the risks. When discovered, the rabbi dies and Franz—one of the sons – is somehow forgiven given the high contacts the family had in the government, but on the condition that he enrolls and goes to war in 1941. Because Franz obeyed Göring’s orders, he was afraid of the Nüremberg trial. Therefore, the family had declared him dead somewhere in Argentina, and had even a death certificate, but he was hiding in the house behind a door at which one had to knock four times, then five times, and then, two times three knocks. The other brother is Werner. He is married to Johanna. And the two brothers share Johanna. Sartre’s word choice is precise in that he only needs a few words to convey an entire scene in the reader’s mind: “Each brother was searching on her body the touches of the other one”. The Gerlachs have also a daughter, Leni. The father is ill, he only has six more months to live, and they have a family reunion about the family business. The play unfolds as a debate about the war, about the offense they are all criminals because they are Germans, and the drama they live as they think the winners of the war prepare the extermination of the Germans: “Great winners! We know them: in 1918, they were the same, with the same hypocrite virtues. (…) Judges? They never robbed, they never massacred, they never raped? Did Göring launch the bomb in Hiroshima? If they judge us, who’s going to judge them? They speak of our murders to justify the murder they discretely prepare: the systemic extermination of the German people (…).” (Act I, scene 2) In this post-WWII context, in which God does not exist and the Gerlachs feel helpless and their country betrayed, Gerlach the father and Franz go take a Porsche and commit suicide on the Bridge of the Devil (Teufelbrücke). In conclusion, Sartre as an atheist and as an existentialist philosopher, does not separate from the playwright. And his drama serves the interest of the atheist and the philosopher. Due to the topics of morbidity, promiscuity, suicide, the heavy words one of his characters thinks and says about the Church and women, the despicable behavior towards women, etc. sometimes, I had to push myself to continue reading. But I did continued reading for the sake of the impeccable dialogue flow and rhythm. I pushed myself to finish reading by focusing more on the structural way he unfolded his plays. Sartre the atheist and the existentialist philosopher, chose a topic and then developed around it a coherent and profound story that unfolds logically according to an original structure, and that is alive because of a great dialog flow. While I was reading, many times I wondered about the essence of his plays and what I would change so that not push myself to read. Is the author’s atheism and existentialism only the fundament of his plays or it is embodied in the text? I have concluded that the essence of his plays is the topic and that the author’s ideas are embodied in the dialog. If one changes the topic, it is not Sartre anymore. If one removes an idea from the enchainment of dialog lines, Jean-Paul Sartre’s plays do not have sense anymore.
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