by Iris Murdoch
Sartre by-passes the complexity of the world of ordinary human relations which is also the world of ordinary moral virtues. Oreste in Les Mouches remarks that ‘human life begins on the other side of despair’. It begins with the denuding experience of a radical reflexion. Till then, all is bad faith. The primary virtue is sincerity. In Les Chemins we constantly feel the violent swing from a total blindness to a total freedom, from the silence of unreason to an empty and alarming babble of reflexion. Human life begins. But the complexity of the moral virtues, which must return, more deeply apprehended perhaps, with the task of ‘going on from there’, this we are not shown. Sartre takes his heroes up to the point of insight, realisation, despair—and there he leaves them. They may fall back, but they do not know how to go on. There is only one hint of deep commitment, of real emotion, in the personal sphere, and that is in the relationship of Brunet and Schneider—and here one feels that the gaucherie and embarrassment of Brunet are somehow shared by his author. There is the touch of an intensity which remains unanalysed. The waters are troubled. But Schneider perishes and it was after all, as Sartre entitles it in Les Temps Modernes, un drôle d’amitié.
The more we look at Les Chemins the more the fundamental pattern which emerges is the same as that of La Nausée. All human communion is impure and opaque, and reflexion dissolves it without purifying it. Fruitless and precarious cogitation is the alternative to a descent into the meaningless. The loss of sense in human relations is asserted rather than displayed; there is no tormenting entanglement of misunderstanding between Sartre’s characters. They bump into each other in an external fashion; they are deeply involved with each other. If not analysed they remain impenetrable. We are touched indeed by a fear of the senseless, but it takes a different form. In La Nausée it attended the hero’s awareness of the crowded superfluity of things. In Les Chemins it appears rather as a horror of the flesh. The flesh symbolises the absolute loss of freedom, and references to its inertness, flabbiness, stickiness, heaviness form a continual accompaniment to the narrative. Mathieu’s distress presents itself to us not as a spiritual involvement with Marcelle, but as a sheer horror of her pregnancy.
Yet what is it to defeat senselessness? To find some comment on this we may look at Mathieu’s adventures in Volume III. There is, first, the intuition of a possible innocence, a possible human victory, which comes with the complete loss of hope. Touching as this is, it comes to Mathieu simply as a vague and sentimental nostalgia, with no clear significance. Then there is the question: have I the right to die for nothing? This is what the existentialist martyr asks himself. What sort of losing of one’s soul will save it? Kierkegaard once asked himself if any man had the right to die for religion; but the background of Kierkegaard’s question is a transcendent religious truth. Mathieu’s question has no background. It simply expresses his sense of the absurdity of his act, and his refusal to regard it as a ‘better thing’ than seeking safety in the cellar. He has had his nostalgic intuition of a purity and human communion which he never found in experience. But his final achievement lies in sheer violence, and what he achieves is simply the density and completeness of action which excludes reflexion. ‘Liberty is terror.’ This is the final ‘going away’, the final ‘losing of oneself’; this is, in a thin disguise, the old familiar romantic answer to the problem.
It is clear that Sartre is attached to this answer—the zest of Mathieu’s dying speech is unmistakably personal. But it is not the one which he is responsibly anxious to endorse. To see the sketch of what this may be, we must look at the other emotional climax of the work, the death of Schneider. ‘No human victory can efface this absolute of suffering.’ Here too there is the same sense of a ‘paradise lost’—a paradise of human companionship—and of a final isolation. But here something more is affirmed, namely that the moment of human love had its absolute value, that its loss is an absolute loss. In contrast to the Marxists, Sartre may appear as a moralist of a Christian type. His theological and his philosophical ancestry (Pascal on the one hand and Descartes on the other) come together in his view of the individual consciousness as an absolute. It is on the lonely awareness of the individual and not on the individual’s integration with his society that his attention centres. In Sartre’s world rational awareness is in inverse ratio to social integration; as soon as his characters begin to reflect they detach themselves from their background. Only the unreflective and implicitly condemned ‘bourgeois’ (Jacques Delarue for instance) is depicted as socially at home. There is no social context which is blameless and which increased awareness does not disrupt. But neither is there any stability in relationships on the personal plane. The Christian philosopher Marcel broods upon the tenacity and reality of human communion in the midst of its obscurities and perversions. Here by contrast Sartre shows as a non-Christian thinker. The individual is the centre, but a solipsistic centre. He has a dream of human companionship, but never the experience. He touches others at the fingertips. The best he can attain to is an intuition of paradise, un drôle d’amitié.
III
THE SICKNESS OF THE LANGUAGE
Sartre says: ‘The function of a writer is to call a spade a spade. If words are sick, it is up to us to cure them . . . If one starts deploring the inadequacy of language to reality, like Brice Parain, one makes oneself an accomplice of the enemy, that is, of propaganda . . . I distrust the incommunicable; it is the source of all violence.’1
What is this sickness of the language? It is impossible to give a neat answer to the question. The fact is that our awareness of language has altered in the fairly recent past. We can no longer take language for granted as a medium of communication. Its transparency has gone. We are like people who for a long time looked out of a window without noticing the glass—and then one day began to notice this too. The beginnings of this new awareness lie far back (in England, one may find it in Hobbes and Locke) but it is only within the last century that it has taken the form of a blinding enlightenment or a devouring obsession. The more one looks at the phenomenon the more one has that feeling of discovery which is made in all spheres simultaneously; the sort of feeling which tempts people to invoke the useless notion of the Zeitgeist. One suddenly begins to connect The Concept of Mind with the marble sugar lumps of surrealism (attacks on the notion of essence) and Hegel’s Logic with Finnegans Wake (attempts to present the universe concretely and non-discursively as one huge pulsating interpenetrating particular).
This age may or may not deserve to be called one of ‘existentialist’ thinking, but it is certainly the ending of a period of ‘essentialist’ thinking. In every sphere our simple ‘thingy’ view of the world is being altered and often disintegrated at an unprecedented rate; and a crisis in our view of the operation of language is inevitable. This fragmentation may sometimes appear as the pure joy of a new discovery, a more exact observation. It was with no sense of loss that Monet declared that the principal person in a picture was the light. In the delighted vision of the impressionist painter the world of hard self-contained objects was transformed into a scintillating haze of ‘appearances’, a dance of ‘sense data’. This was done too in the name of a new realism, an observation which, set free from the stale domination of ‘essences’ and general notions, could be faithful to the true momentary looks of the world. The writer, however, whose business was words, seemed to suffer a more distressing upheaval, and was less ready with new techniques. A sense of the desperate rapidity of change, the responsibility of speech in an incomprehensible situation, a feeling of being ‘left out’, obscure guilt at the inhumanities of a materialistic society: all these may have contributed to his malaise. But whatever the ‘causes’, it was the poet, whose relation to language is always more sensitive and more easily deranged than that of the prose writer, who first showed an extreme reaction. With the symbolists, poetry seemed to take a plunge into a perverse and deliberate obscurity.
The language of poetry is not in the ordinary sense ‘communicative’; but
it has usually taken for granted the normal power of reference possessed by words and sentences, their power to point fairly unambiguously at items in the world. Precision of reference had been sometimes more, sometimes less, important to the poet; but now suddenly it seemed that the whole referential character of language had become for him a sort of irritant or stumbling block. It was as if the poet began to see the world with a dreadful particularity, as a great ineffable mass of inextricable processes. To lose the discursive ‘thingy’ nature of one’s vision and yet to feel the necessity of utterance is to experience a breakdown of language—which may be met in either of two extreme ways. The poet may accept and even intensify his sense of the chaotic interpenetration of reality, and attempt to make his language into the perfect expression of this over-rich world. To do this is to weaken the referential character of language by overloading it. On the other hand, the poet may attempt to draw language out of the ineffable flux altogether, and to erect it into a pure and non-referential structure on its own. The former reaction was that of Rimbaud, the latter that of Mallarmé.2
Rimbaud seems to seek to achieve a dream-like plenitude wherein language disintegrates through an over-determination of meaning; the thick accumulation of exact and highly sensory imagery produces a rich blending all-enveloping confusion in the mind of the reader. Mallarmé seeks rather to make language perform the impossible feat of simply being without referring at all. The reader is held by a pure incantation wherefrom the ordinary senses of the words have been systematically purged. Meaning has been destroyed in the one case by being crowded in, in the other by being charmed out. Characteristic of both poets is the way in which language appears to them like a metaphysical task, an angel to be wrestled with. Their attention is fixed upon language itself to the point of obsession, and their poems are thing-like, non-communicative, non-transparent to an unprecedented degree; they are independent structures, either outside the world or containing the world. Language loses its character of communicative speech. For both poets, the conclusion is silence: for Rimbaud a real silence, for Mallarmé the self-contradictory ideal silence of a totally pure poetry. Both enterprises have, too, a touch of madness about them. If a certain magical effect can be produced by conjuring with words it is as if some cosmic problem will have been solved, or some cosmic event induced. One is reminded of Kirillov in The Possessed, who felt that if one free act could be performed the bonds would fall from the whole human race; or else of that imagined splitting of the atom which would dissolve the universe.
Does the world change first and pull language after it, or does a new awareness of language suddenly make us see the world differently? In the various fields where our experience of language was undergoing change, the new thing had the air of being a pure discovery, something which burst unexpectedly upon us, and which was unique, peculiar to the field in question. The philosopher’s new self-consciousness about language seemed to him more like an enlightenment than a sickness. ‘No one of our recent revolutions in thought is more important than this progressive rediscovery of what we are talking about’, wrote I. A. Richards in 1924, in Principles of Literary Criticism. It was science, not poetry, however, which revolutionised the philosopher’s consciousness of language. The nineteenth-century efflorescence of scientific methods, and the mathematical symbolisms which accompanied them, made the philosopher see the relation of symbols, including words, to reality in a new light. Language was suddenly construed on the model of the scientific definition: the meaning of a sentence being exactly determined by an explanation of the particular sensible observations which would decide its truth. Language was no longer thought of as naming things, even empirical things; it was seen as a way of delimiting, interpreting and predicting sense experience. Metaphysical objects were eliminated and physical objects disintegrated into the appearances, or sensa, which justified statements about them. ‘The limits of my language are the limits of my world’, Wittgenstein said. With a new sense of power, the philosopher, his attention fixed upon language, began to see words as the determining framework of reality.
With criteria of meaning drawn from the sciences, however, this framework was as yet an extremely restricted one. The meaning of poetry, of religious and theological statements, and of statements in morals and political theory remained problematic. The search, in any case a vain one, for strange objects named by such propositions was gladly discontinued; but it was some time before a patient study was made of their more complex functioning (or ‘logic’). Boldly, the language was divided between descriptive (empirical) uses, and emotive uses; and the propositions in question were then said to have ‘emotive meaning’, to be expressions of feeling without external reference. Even the meaning of poetry became a subject for psychological measurement rather than logical investigation. The immediate result of this move was a loss of confidence in the communicative power of language in these spheres. Language as exact communication seems possible only against the background of a common world, to whose reliable features the uses of words can be related by firm conventions. In the realm of morals and theology, and even political philosophy, a greater sophistication about the function of words seemed to lead to a weakening of that sense of a common world. ‘Good’ was no longer thought to name an objective quality, nor ‘democracy’ an identifiable form of government; and the alternative appeared to be to regard such words as the recommendatory cries of beings who, after all, turned out to be a blend of neat reason and neat passion. It was this aspect of the enlightenment, obscurely grasped by lay critics, which occasioned the intermittent storming against ‘logical positivism’ as a breeder of cynicism and under-miner of belief in the young. The possibility of honest affirmation seemed to have been taken away. On the other side, however, of this counsel of ‘despair’ lay a more patient and self-aware return to the complexities of ‘human life’. Gradually the philosopher came to see language not as a structural mirror, or even as a categorical frame, of experience of the sensible world, but as one human activity among others. Language and the world no longer stood apart; language now fell into focus as a part of the world, and with this came a readiness to study, on their own merits, the complex ways in which ethical, political, and religious propositions operated.
Yet the powerful fascination of the emotive-descriptive distinction still lingers. It appeals, of course, not purely on account of its dubious philosophical merits. It also gives an intellectual expression and ‘justification’ to a real sense of loss: the loss of a world of ideas and values assumed to be common to all thinking beings. The view that political and ethical remarks are simply expressions of emotion might well occur to any critical reader of the daily press. (Just as the view that poetry is sheer disorder might well occur to a reader of Rimbaud!) This weakening and obscuring of the sense of moral and political terms is not an accident, however, or even a plot. The smaller, expanding world of the nineteenth century, where the disruptive forces were not only dispossessed and weak, but incoherent, disunited, and speechless, could think itself a single world wherein rational communication on every topic was a possibility. This assumption can no longer be made. The breakdown of the notion of meaning in certain spheres, which might appear to be an achievement of the linguistic philosophers working in isolation, or as the handmaids of science, may also be seen as the consequence of a tragic discovery: the discovery that rational men can have different ‘natures’ and see the world with a radical difference. So perhaps it was the loss of an actual common background, after all, which occasioned the linguistic sophistication, and not the latter which exposed the former as an illusion. Whatever the reason, we can no longer even imagine that all reflective men have common purposes and common values. In such circumstances, it might be comforting to be able to attribute the resultant difficulties of communication, not to the amendable world or to our corrigible selves, but to an innate peculiarity of the relevant terms. This, in its way, was a surrender to ‘the incommunicable’, which is said to be ‘the source of all viole
nce’.
Poetry was affected first by the linguistic disturbance; prose literature in general, and the novel in particular, were drawn later into the storm area. This was not surprising. The novel, traditionally, is a story, and the telling of a story seems to demand a discursive referential use of language to describe one event after another. The novelist seemed to be, by profession, more deeply rooted in the ordinary world where things were things and words were still their names. Yet, in time, a deep change came about both in the structural technique of the novel and in its page-to-page use of language. The novelist, too, seemed now to turn to literature as to a metaphysical task whereon the sense of the universe was at stake. Compare the attitude of Proust to his work with that of Tolstoy or even Conrad. The writings of the two latter show forth, are nourished by, their answers to life’s questions; Proust’s work is his answer to life’s questions. The human task has become a literary task, and literature a total enterprise, wherein what is attempted might be called reconciliation by appropriation.
Many obvious factors combined to unnerve the writer: the rapid change of the social and moral world which formed his subject-matter, war and ideology and new elements of violence and extremity in daily life, the advent of psychoanalysis. And it was within the ranks of literary people that there then developed the most deliberate and savage attack which had yet been made upon language: Surrealism. Surrealism was born after the 1914 war, under the godmotherly influence of Tristan Tzara’s Dadaism, a destructive hate movement, anti-social, anti-literary, anarchical. It developed, under the leadership of André Breton, into a curious revolutionary enterprise. Literature had begun to encroach upon life. The Surrealists set to work to reverse the process, They professed themselves indifferent to art and morality; they were animated by a profound hatred of their society, and an abounding belief in the liberating value of an untrammelled exploration of the unconscious. Poetry was a voyage into dream, language itself simply a medium for automatic utterance, a net for trawling in the depths of the mind, and so extending the bounds of the real; an end which could equally well be reached by other means: collages, the fabrication of unnerving objects, or the impact of shocking or pointless acts. For what was sought was not the here today, gone tomorrow, value of ‘truth’, but the undiscriminated richness and particularity of ‘reality’.