Bypassing Edgar

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 425, 15 August 1947, Page 32

Bypassing Edgar

E FLIES, and IN CAMERA, By JeanPaul Sartre.. Hamish Hamilton, ARTRE belongs to a school; perhaps I should say the school belongs to him, as he fs its greatest writer. He adheres to the philosophy called existentialism. That word is a little more gtaceful in French, but in English it is so hideous that I ask your leave to substitute the code name "Edgar." Edgar, elusive, austere in manners, fs an adept at hiding from observation fn a thicket of words. When you do run him to earth, you notice that he is wild-eyed and is apt to break out at any moment into peals of inconsequential laughter or make with his hand some embarrassingly lewd gesture, but this should not hide from you his intense seriousness and’ his capacity for courage, for stoicism, But even one of his admirers has called him "gratuitously paradoxical"; then some of his cleverest remarks seem on ‘closer examination to boil down to something like this: "This thing is, therefore everything that is, not this thing, is not it, and what is not, is

not." Could Edgar and I make ourselves clearer? : Edgar’s way of life has been described as "to have both youthful libido and balanced dignity of personality, even though one knows that one’s life work is going to fail. To be positive, harmonious, and extroverted in the midst of one’s deepest introvVersion, pessimism, and neurosis, that is the dialectic Existenz and the mark of greatness." (R. Friedmann in Horizon, December, 1944.) Edgar then has guts. Don’t let me give you the idea that Edgar is by way of being a bore, but to please is not his object. : : os * ES S to how Edgar’s ideas translate themselves into literature, Sartre may speak for him. Sartre believes that literature should be responsible, should take sides in the social struggle, should accept the fact that the writer is born into a particular time. "We are convinced . ... that one cannot sneak away. Were we as dumb and immobile as stones, our very passivity would be an action . ... by becoming a part of the uniqueness of our time, we finally merge

with the eternal and it is our task as writers to cast light on the eternal values which are involved in these social and political disputes." In practice Edgar’s own literary ventures constitute a form of realism, but the cynical courage which is the constant background of his thought will often lead him to make a gtand for a motal idea. Edgar, whatever his eccentricities, is after all a moralist. It is the old gambit once again, the heresy of the totalitarian state (whether Fascist or Communist): "literature must make itself useful, must serve the cause." It is a strange thing that so many have been so blind for so long, that such irrelevancies as the gods’ persecution of Ulysses, the amours of Clerk Saunders, the passion of Lear, and the misconduct of; Moll Flanders should have pre-occu-pied the minds of writers through so many centuries. It is Edgar himself whom I find irreleyant. The palaver is finished. me * ae Se can stand alone. His work "does not need the support of a theory. It is understandable that he should be so ready to put himself in a posture to take the whole weight of the world’s woes on his shoulders, when we remember the agony of the German occupation of France. Sartre wrote for the resistance movement, for the clandestine presses which never gave up. But

his plays were produced openly. In The Flies there is much to be plucked out to keep warm in a French bosom the cherished hatred of France’s enemies, but what could be "safer" than a play whose theme is drawn from the drama of ancient Greece? Who could possibly identify Zeus with Hitler or Aegistheus with a more virile Pétain? But this play, is not allegory or parable. It is the moral strength of Orestes, his unswerving courage, or the defiance of Electra, which interprets the French resistance. It is the noisome atmosphere of Argos with the nastiness of its guilt-obsessed population which interprets the France which collaborated. N * I suspect that it will not be many» years before the political background of The Flies will be as little .remembered or understood as the _ political allusions in Shakespeare, that is, temporarily, until an examination has been passed, The Flies is a supreme work of art, It brings to mind these words of William Butler Yeats, written when he , was recovering from an illness: ". .:, . life returned as an impression of the uncontrollable energy and daring of the great creators; it seemed that but for journalism and criticism, all that evasion and explanation, the world would be torn to pieces." Even though they should be cursed with the sinister power of preventing the dismemberment of the

universe, the critic’s evasions and ex-} planations are almost an impertinence | beside the uncontrollable energy and! daring of Sartre. * ) The theme of The Flies is the return | of Orestes to Argos, to take vengeance on his mother, Clytemnestra, for the murder, by herself and her lover, Aegis- | theus, of his father, Agamemnon. Argos swarms with flies, as though the body of Agamemnon, had remained through a fifteen-year putrescence,. always rotting but never consumed. These symbolise | the remorse and guilt of the people of | Argos. The tyrannicvide Orestes braves | even the anger of the gods, represented | on the stage itself by Zeus, the not-| quite-omnipotent. . Superficially there are in The Flies some borrowings from Cgcteau. Sartre’s choice of a classical theme was made easier by the success 10 or 15 years before of Cocteau’s plays on the Orpheus and Oedipus legends. And like Cocteau in The Knights of the Table Round, Sartre does not scruple to use magic and incantation on a modern stage. Like Shaw and James Bridie, Sartre obliges his ancient characters to chatter in modern idiom. Sartre, however, has written a tragedy, though the almost unbearable tension of the play is here lightened by touches of comedy. The power and scope of the play owe nothing to either the dignity or the insignificance of the characters in some thousands-of-years-old legend; they are living and actual people, not heroes and gods; but there is much of heroism and of godhead in Jones and Smith. % % %* a ’ N the long one-act play In Camera Sartre had a somewhat easier task. Its characters are modern and its scene is laid in Hell. Hell is not a seventimes heated fiery furnace, but a room furnished with the meretricious pomp common to the drawing rooms of hotels and the foyers of theatres.. "Hell is other people, and in the play a man and two women are shut in. together, to. talk and talk and talk-until Hell freezes. The man is a pacifist whose | nerve failed him and who suffered martyrdom for his opinions, not voluntarily, but abjectly, after failure in an attempt to run away. One woman had killed her child, the other driven her woman friend to murder and suicide. They are not meant to be nice people, but they are admirably adapted to the excitement of both love and hatred (in In Camera the two are almost interchangeable) in each other. The tortures each can inflict upon the other two are inexhaustible. In this short, venomous, and. terrifying play, Sartre stands in the main line of one of the peculiarly French achievements in literature. The French have the gift of ruthlessness, denied the English or never sought for--the ruthlessness of the masochistic diabolism of Baudelaire, of the cruelty of Flaubert, of de Maupassant (realism without sympathyTout comprendre est rien pardonneér); the English have not this persecuting zeal. Jean-Paul Sartre has it. He is perectly prepared to crucify humanity, It is guilty; why should it not die the death? Bring out your Christians; my lions have good teeth and a seven-days’ hunger. Humanity shall die that the outraged moralist may glow with selfrighteousness. Calvin too was a Frenchman. : I look forward with intense interest to seeing these great plays acted.

David

Hall