The Age of Defeat

by Colin Wilson

  What Is to Be Done?

  But his limitations appear when it comes to a question of a remedy. It might be objected that becoming fully conscious of the disease is at least half the battle, but this only makes the need for a solution more obvious. Sartre’s solutions are the most dubious part of his analysis. It is true that he does not offer “solutions” in the way that Billy Graham or Karl Marx does. Nevertheless, he speaks of “commitment,” of the “need to choose,” and, finally, of the working-class movement as if they provided the answers for the problems he has expounded in such detail. After the war Sartre had a great deal of success as a lecturer and demonstrated his ability to stir his audience to intense enthusiasm; he expounded the doctrine that man is free and that each individual has to assert his freedom by “choosing.” It is reported that his audiences left the hall fired with determination to alter their lives but that the enthusiasm never lasted long because Sartre had omitted to tell them what to choose, and they too had no idea. This pinpoints the weakness of Sartre’s existentialism. It is a little too close to the vagueness of romantic revolt, as typified in The Robbers. “Choose anything, so long as you choose.” In its method, his analysis bears close resemblances to that of Gurdjieff. There is the same emphasis on psychology and human self-deception. But Gurdjieff made an attempt to prescribe certain disciplines by which a man might establish his “inner reality.” Sartre is less precise. He declares that a man must learn to become a member of the community, but never to relinquish his inner-direction. Like Whyte, he would probably advise the organization man to defy the organization as often as possible (although he fails to make clear what happens when the organization is a totalitarian government).

  But the final index to an author’s insight into inner-direction is his ability to write of the inner-directed man, the hero. For the most part, Sartre’s central characters are as negative as those of any American novelist. There are two important exceptions: Orestes, in Les Mouches, whose defiance of Zeus in the last act has a purity of purpose that makes it one of Sartre’s most moving works, and Goetz, the hero of Le Diable et le Bon Dieu, a man who proves his transcendence of concepts of good and evil by showing his ability to devote himself first to evil, then to good, then to evil again, with complete wholeheartedness, and thus to demonstrate the freedom of his will. But considered as his most important and ambitious work, Les Chemins de la Liberté has nothing to add to his analysis of freedom, and might almost have been written in America by an American. The promise of Dostoevskian power contained in La Nausée and Les Mouches is not justified in his longest novel.

  It is not easy to decide just where along the line the failure occurred. But it is certain that it has to do with the connection between his politics and his existentialism. In an interview in Les Nouvelles Littéraires in 1951, he admitted that before the war his attitude had been relatively unpolitical; he supported the idea of democracy because it seemed to guarantee most freedom for the writer. But the war, his internment in Germany, his work in the resistance, produced a change of heart. He decided to become a “militantly democratic writer.” He had already demonstrated an instinctive distaste for the bourgeois in La Nausée and Le Mur; when he launched Les Temps Modernes in 1945, he declared himself for the social revolution, the working classes, and the Communist Party. In What is Literature? he declares, “I know there is no other salvation for man than in the liberation of the working classes.” Obviously, “salvation” here has quite a different meaning from the salvation that Mathieu dreams about.

  What must be quite plain to any sympathetic reader of Sartre is that there is no real connection between his philosophy and his politics. His philosophy deals basically with the great hero problems and brings a new psychological subtlety to bear on the Faust dilemma. But Sartre is also a writer of considerable ambition, one who feels a desire to be a writer of his time in every sense. The impressive range of his work bears witness to this—novels, plays, short stories, philosophical treatises, argumentative pamphlets, literary criticism, political journalism—as well as his reply to a young admirer who asked him what makes a good writer: “Moral seriousness.” His energies appear to be so broad and adaptable that it is hardly surprising that he should plunge into politics. Les Temps Modernes has taken a firm left-wing stand on political matters for the past fourteen years. Sartre has never been a member of the Communist Party and has on occasions been bitterly attacked by them for criticizing their old-fashioned materialism and political incompetence. The French Communists have labeled him, at various times, a Trotsky fascist hyena, a decadent bourgeois, a slimy rat, and a lubricious viper. But Sartre has always shown a great tolerance towards these attacks and has frequently formed an alliance with the Communists in particular campaigns (against the present De Gaulle government, for example, although in this case his intervention was late). When he was interviewed by the Paris Express at the time of the Hungarian rising, he was not afraid to say: “What the Hungarian people are teaching us with their blood is the complete failure of socialism as a Soviet-imported product.”

  This emphasis on politics has inevitably weakened Sartre as a philosopher and creative writer. As Philip Thody has pointed out, his attempts to defend the left have always lacked creative drive, while his attack on communist ideas, Les Mains Sales, is a tour de force. Worse still, Sartre’s notions of commitment seem to have led to the idea that satire is the best medium for attacking the French right, and his latest play, Nekrassov (1955), is his weakest yet (it deals with a confidence trickster who poses as a Soviet government official who has escaped through the iron curtain).

  The obvious complaint against Sartre is that he has ceased to be an existentialist. If “truth is subjectivity,” then he has become steadily less concerned with truth since 1945. The Sartre of pre-war days, whose psychological explorations held promise that he might become a French Dostoevsky, has become a political commentator. His positive achievement remains in his early analyses of the varieties of human self-deception. Whether his political interests will produce works of literary importance still remains to be seen.

  The Contribution of Camus

  The position of Albert Camus provides some interesting contrasts with Sartre’s. One of the most obvious differences between the two exponents of existentialism is a temperamental one: Camus is an Algerian with a deeply ingrained love of physical life. Therefore, the tension in his work has tended to stretch between two basic attitudes: a feeling of the absurdity and misery of human life, and intense physical affirmation of it. (A reader who comes to Sartre for the first time is struck by the sense of physical disgust; I have said elsewhere that no other writer gives such an oppressive sensation of the mind being trapped in physical filth.)

  This is an interesting starting point for a writer. There is an obvious connection between the idea of the heroic and physical affirmation. It is difficult to imagine a hero who finds the physical world disgusting. Sartre is like Aldous Huxley in his attitude of detachment from physical reality; Camus is far closer to Hemingway.2

  Camus’s earliest work shows his love of physical reality; it is there in his early essays, L’Envers et L’Endroit and Noces. In a preface written in 1958, he speaks of the unique source in every artist that “feeds all that he is and all he says,” and declares, “Pour moi, je sais que ma source est dans L’Envers et L’Endroit, dans ce monde de pauvreté et de lumière où j’ai longtemps veću.” In a footnote to an essay in Noces, he criticizes Gide’s attitude to the body, and says, “My friend Vincent, who is a cooper, and junior breast-stroke champion, has an even clearer view. He drinks when he is thirsty, if he desires a woman tries to go to bed with her, and would marry her if he loved her (this hasn’t yet happened). Afterwards he says ‘I feel better.’ ” Camus’s affirmation of physical reality takes the form of a dismissal of anything that robs a man of his communion with the world. “I do not want to believe that death opens out into another life. For me it is a closed door… a horrible and dirty adventure. All
the solutions that are offered to me try to rob man of the weight of his own life. And watching the flight of the great birds in the sky at Djémila, it is exactly a certain weight in my life that I ask for and receive.”

  Here, then, is the simplest form of existentialism, a rejection of all “hereafters.” Camus calls it “living without appeal.” The world and man’s life must be made to yield their own realities, without recourse to myth or “sacred” text.

  The next step in Camus’s development occurs in his novel L’Etranger and the “essay in the absurd,” Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus). The proposition at the basis of L’Etranger could be summarized as “The world is a beast of a place” (in which the novel strongly resembles A Farewell to Arms: “They would get you in the end.”) Mythe de Sisyphe compares man’s position in the world with that of Sisyphus, condemned forever to roll a rock up a mountain and watch it roll down again—the symbol of utter futility. Yet he concludes: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” At the end of L’Etranger, Meursault, who has been condemned to death for a crime of which he is not guilty, has a sudden vision of the utter indifference of the universe, and concludes, “I had been happy, and I was happy still.” It is a gospel of complete inner-direction, that in spite of physical bondage, man is free and will always remain free. He may not know it, but his freedom is indestructible. When he knows it, as Meursault does in a sudden vision, he is happy as well as free, but it doesn’t really matter whether he is happy or not; he is always free.

  But the absurdity of the world remains a terrible and hostile force. In Le Malentendu, a play, a man comes back to a country inn without telling his mother or sister—who keep the inn—of his identity. They murder him in the night. The next day, when they find out (through his wife), they kill themselves. But the absurdity of their fate is only a tiny part of the “monstrous injustice that is done to man.”

  In his later work, Camus ceases to lay so much emphasis on the world’s monstrous absurdity. In La Peste, he symbolizes man’s position in the world in his story of a city trapped by plague; no one is allowed in or out. The final message of La Peste is of human solidarity.

  Camus’s next major work, L’Homme Révolté (The Rebel), caused a quarrel with Sartre, who had had nothing but praise for L’Etranger and La Peste. It is true that L’Homme Révolté can be construed as reactionary. It is an examination of various types of rebellion and a demonstration that they all end by becoming false to their original spirit. “It is a question of finding out whether innocence, the moment it begins to act, can avoid committing murder.” The book should be read immediately after Whyte’s The Organization Man (especially the chapters on literature), for it is a kind of handbook for aspiring rebels. Its main thesis is that the only kind of rebellion that does not end by contradicting itself is that of the man who retains his full integrity and power of choice. “The revolutionary mind… must… draw its inspiration from the only system of thought which is faithful to its origins: thought which recognizes limits.” In this sentence, Camus has aligned himself with T. E. Hulme and T. S. Eliot as a supporter of classicism, and an opponent of romanticism.

  For Sartre, who was at this time (1951) a declared communist sympathiser, this was a declaration of disagreement. As a preacher of a vague notion of “freedom” and “choice,” Sartre was open to a charge of romanticism. As a man who had committed himself to the communist ideology, he was open to an accusation of compromise. As a writer who had drawn a sympathetic portrait of a would-be dictator who regards the end as more important than the means (Hoeder in Les Mains Sales), he was open to an accusation of totalitarianism. Les Temps Modernes accordingly attacked Camus as a reactionary, condemning his “ivory tower” attitude, and a correspondence between Sartre and Camus ensued, which generated more heat than light.

  The original review of the book was by François Jeanson, who denounced it as insidious and accused Camus of providing the forces of reaction with a weapon. Camus replied in a scathing and irritated letter to “the editor of Les Temps Modernes,” and this provoked a reply from both Jeanson and Sartre. In the course of the correspondence, certain fundamental differences became quite clear: for instance, that Camus conceives himself primarily as an influence, while Sartre is more concerned with constructing a doctrine that will turn the potential energy of his ideas into kinetic energy, a force. Sartre declared that his concern is with present injustice, not with theorizing about the impossibility of remedying injustice. Jeanson stated that for Camus the problem of God is of more concern than the problem of man. Camus was accused of distorting history for his own purposes and of having an active dislike of history. (This allegation was based on a passage in Camus’s Lettres à un Ami Allemand, in which he complains that the war has torn him away from his metaphysical conflicts and forced him to take part in the boring and banal struggles of mankind.) Camus’s replies are mainly a defense of his arguments in L’Homme Révolté and a further attack on Marxism; he accuses Sartre and Jeanson of equating critical intelligence with reaction. Sartre’s objection to these replies could be summarized: “I agree with most of your accusations against communism. The fact remains that something must be done about injustice, and your book gives lazy people an excuse for not doing anything.” Sartre summed up the whole argument: “Many things brought us together, few separated us, but even those few were too many.”

  Camus’s next two important volumes deepen his position without enlarging it. His stories in L’Exil et le Royaume (Exile and the Kingdom) all deal, in different ways, with people who feel themselves to be spiritual exiles and who search for some way out of their exile, towards some “kingdom.” One of the stories, “The Guest,” seems to be a return to the old theme that “the world is a beast,” the absurdity and injustice of life. Another deals with a famous painter who lets too many hangers-on waste his time and finally has to retreat into solitude. When he falls ill, a single word is found scrawled on his canvas, which might be either “solitary” or “solidarity”—Camus’s implication being that they are the same thing, that an artist can best serve the community by remaining solitary. Perhaps the most interesting story in the collection is “The Woman Taken in Adultery,” a strangely D. H. Lawrence-like work in which a middle-aged married woman has an experience of mystical marriage with the earth in the North African night. Together with the end of L’Etranger and the passage I have cited about the “great birds in the sky at Djémila,” it is a statement of Camus’s positive belief, a sort of mysticism.

  The novel La Chute (The Fall) is certainly Camus’s most important work to date, although it is barely a hundred pages long. It is a study in bad faith and the attempt to transcend it. Jean-Baptiste Clamence begins life as a lawyer, well known for his charities and his championship of the oppressed. Camus portrays him as a man who is an ideal member of society, generous, good-natured, “well adjusted.” Then he pulls the lever, and reveals that Clamence’s altruism is a form of self-deception; he is a do-gooder because it makes him feel good on a purely personal level. Society may approve of him, but Clamence’s greatest moment occurs when his own conscience ceases to do so. This happens when he is crossing a bridge and hears a woman throw herself into the water. It is late at night, and he hurries on, preferring not to retrace his steps and make futile gestures to save her. For a while he can rationalize his failure to attempt a rescue, but the real reason forces itself on him: his altruism was not a real love of human beings, but a love of being regarded as an altruist. He throws up his practice and goes to Amsterdam, to become a kind of Ancient Mariner, sitting in a café, getting into conversation with compatriots, and trying to give them the same insight into their own self-deceptions. He regards life as wholly composed of types of self-deception and absurdity.

  Camus’s attitude towards Clamence is not wholly one of approval. He has said, in conversations, that Clamence is a typical French left-wing intellectual, capable of criticizing everybody and everything in the world (including himself) but not capable of doing
much else besides talk. Nevertheless, Clamence demonstrates effectively Camus’s most important assertion: that being a “good member of society” is not enough. Camus keeps returning to the individual. In this, he is a true existentialist—in rejecting all attempts to fit the individual into some larger social pattern.

  In many ways, Camus is a more interesting figure than Sartre, although his range as a writer is narrower. At the age of forty-six (he was born in 1913) he has achieved in France a curious eminence that is based entirely upon his recognized integrity. His influence among the younger generation of French intellectuals might well be compared to that of T. S. Eliot in England before he became an Anglican. In some way, he is felt to typify the dilemma of the average Frenchman of intelligence. His position is enviable, for without having compromised himself, without joining any religious or political group, he has succeeded in becoming a figurehead in French intellectual life. He has also avoided the greatest danger of being “uncommitted”: being admired by a clique, and generally ignored (in the manner of a Ronald Firbank or L. H. Myers).