World Within The Word

by William H. Gass

  Great events are perhaps so only for small minds. For more attentive minds, it is the unnoticed, continual events that count.

  It was these small movements of which Valéry was such a master, if we think of them as the movements of a mind which has practiced passage to the point of total purity, compressing those steps, those postures and attitudes which were learned at the mirror so painfully, into one unwinding line of motion; and as we follow the body of his thought as we might that of an inspired dancer, leaving the source of his energy like flame, we have presented almost to our eye other qualities in addition to those normally thought vital and sufficient for the mind, though rare and prized like clarity and rigor, honesty, openness, interest, penetration and brevity, truth; that is to say, lightness, tact in particular, and above all, elegance and grace.

  1 In his translation of Rilke’s “Orpheus, Eurydice and Hermes,” Lowell adds the line, “The dark was heavier than Caesar’s foot.” That is how, as Valéry might have said, the undisciplined mind moves: in a lurch through Valéry and Caesar to Lowell and Rilke, and, considering the curious accumulation of references, remains to touch Borges as if he were home base.

  2 In 1972, when this was written. The edition is now complete.

  Sartre on Theater

  Enter: Stage Left

  Exit: Stage Right

  Act One

  The curtain rises, and Sartre, coming forward to address his audience, says:

  The chief source of great tragedy—the tragedy of Aeschylus and Sophocles, of Corneille—is human freedom. Oedipus is free; Antigone and Prometheus are free. The fate we think we find in ancient drama is only the other side of freedom. Passions themselves are freedoms caught in their own trap.1

  Observe the speech and not the speaker. There is first the round unguarded expression of essence, and the little exemplary list, riotable for what it leaves out, then the ritual invocation of freedom (better than patrie, gloire, or god), followed by an outrageous falsehood (Oedipus is free) which is rhetorically removed with one rub of a paradox put epigrammatically. There will be a lot of this.

  But what should we expect from a character on the stage? Surely not argument, fairness to fact, or niceness of distinction. Eloquent outcry, rather. Soft soap. Pithy remark. Snappy retort. Short shrift.

  Four years earlier, in 1943, Sartre had described his own play, The Flies, as a tragedy of freedom composed in direct contrast to the Greek tragedies of fate. Using the same formula—that fate is inverted freedom—Sartre then said of his character, Orestes: “I have shown him as a prey to freedom, just as Oedipus is a prey to his own destiny.” Sartre had not yet seen how to liberate Oedipus, but we can follow the maneuver quite easily now. Over the years the mind drifts, Sartre’s most especially, and by philosophically freeing Orestes in his own play, Sartre came to feel that he had freed Oedipus in the two plays of Sophocles.

  For freedom is not some vague abstract ability to soar above the human predicament; it is the most absurd and the most inexorable of commitments. Orestes will go onward, injustifiable, with no excuse and with no right of appeal, alone. Like a hero. Like all of us.2

  And beneath the weight of such flattery we rise like balloons.

  The theater today, Sartre said, when interviewed in 1959, must be philosophical. Philosophy itself? It is dramatic.3 And Sartre has always been theatrical. In this same interview, for example, we find the following stagey sentences: “If literature is not everything, it is worth nothing,” and “What is the literature of an epoch but the epoch appropriated by its literature?” and “You have to aspire to everything to have hopes of doing something,” again “literature finds its initial impulse in silence,” or “Any string of words whatsoever … calls everything we have done into question …” He warns us that his long study of Flaubert is a kind of fiction. “It might indeed be called a novel. Only I would like people to say it was a true novel.”4

  Our complicity in Sartre’s passions is presumed to be complete. We are embarrassed by psychology in the theater, he tells us. We are unmoved by inevitability. We are pressed into this “we” like the buttocks of a crowd on bleachers. Antigone’s dilemma—the antagonism between family loyalty and civic duty—no longer makes much sense, Sartre insists. It is foreign to the Kennedys, we begin to ask; it was out of place at Watergate? But the act has changed; we don’t want to miss the seals; our objections slip through the seats and disappear among the struts and props of our support. No indeed, it can’t be the world we’re in. It must be the theater.

  In any case the formula is familiar enough: the duty of any drama is to unify its audience by depicting human beings in extreme existential situations: extreme because one outcome can be death; existential because choice, though limited, is unconditioned and unconditional; and situational because it is the context of challenge which counts, not the character or the character’s fossilized past.

  This is a dramatic disjunction indeed. We are compelled to wonder whether Macbeth, as he allows his lady to stiffen his resolve, is choosing what he will become or expressing what he is. He is not permitted to do both.

  Immerse men in these universal and extreme situations which leave them only a couple of ways out, arrange things so that in choosing the way out they choose themselves, and you’ve won—the play is good.5

  As easy as talking on the phone. And so this performance begins.

  Sartre on Theater is a beautifully edited collection of all the bits and pieces of opinion which Sartre has left behind in this place or that while he’s had his show on the road: a sanatorium at Bouffemont or the main hall of the Sorbonne, a reel of tape here, another there, as though he had forgotten his coat in Tokyo or lost his left shoe in New York—feuilletons, fusillades, conversations, interviews, debates, book blurb, a bit of letter, record liner, squib, a casual talk, a few formal lectures—now raked together the way Isis gathered the body of her brother, and restored not to Sartre exactly but to us; for we might not have recognized the first time that these apergus and appraisals were gifts, we might have naïvely thought they were merely left shoes.

  The earliest piece dates from 1940, but except for the most recent, which consists of a few short selections on “the paradox of the actor” from Sartre’s study of Flaubert, L’Idiot de la famille, these are responses to specific questions or occasions, directed toward particular audiences, the shots of an author zigzagging under fire more than the reflections of a philosopher calmly waiting on his stool to be dunked, and in that way they partake of the theater in terms of form, occasion, and delivery, as well as subject.6

  So these are the notes of an old campaigner; they focus on present issues as if the present were of more than passing importance; theories are regarded as presented with three-line simplicity; slogans are flashed; there is much easy assessment and plenty of name-calling; and it is thought very important that the masses think alike and rightly.

  The distance between Sartre’s serious work as a philosopher (in Being and Nothingness, say, or the Critique of Dialectical Reason) and the mainly momentary verbal encounters recorded here is more than customarily enormous. Sartre’s changes of mind are legendary, and he now confesses to being shocked by some of his earlier opinions.

  The other day, I re-read a prefatory note of mine to a collection of these plays—Les Mouches, Huis Clos and others—and was truly scandalized. I had written: “Whatever the circumstances, and wherever the site, a man is always free to choose to be a traitor or not …” When I read this, I said to myself: it’s incredible, I actually believed that!7

  Sartre will doubtless find some of his current opinions equally extreme, since he likes to look over the edge of an idea like a tourist at a canyon; and his mind has always been both centrifugal and parochially sensitive to the present; so when he uses the word ‘universal,’ it most often means, “generally obtaining at the time.” That’s why the Greeks grow out of date. And why the conflict between clan and city can no longer interest us. That’s why the recurrent w
ord in these interviews and statements on the theater is ‘now,’ though in this volume “now” lasts thirty years; why it made sense to devote a half of What Is Literature? to “The Situation of the Writer in 1947,” and why, in reply to criticisms, Sartre can calmly say: “I wrote L’Etre et Le Néant after the defeat of France, after all …”8 or respond to the suggestion that The Flies is perhaps not the best play to perform before Germans because it “bestows a gigantic pardon,” by admitting that the issue turns “on the question how far a play which may have been good in 1943, which was valid at that time, still has the same validity and, in particular, validity in 1948. The play must be accounted for by the circumstances of the time.”9

  So throughout these pieces he serenely repeats the collective “we don’t think that way now” when he means that although most of us are always out of step, we ought to keep up, perceive the immediate situation, just as, when existentialism became passé, Sartre nonetheless kept au courant (in 1943 anxiety was a universal sickness of the spirit, but mankind had so recovered by 1947 that the disease was confined to the bourgeoisie), and who can predict what character will follow the letter Mao?

  It is this recurrent certainty, this calm acceptance of the nonce, this franchising of fads, which has made his readers morally uneasy.10 There is in the reduction of ideas to praxis, in a too noisily vibrating intelligence, a not very carefully concealed determinism of circumstances like the song of the wind-harp; just as one might praise or excuse Plato by saying that after all, the Republic was written after the disgrace of Greek democracy, the fall of Athens, and the death of Socrates—facts which no one will dispute, and facts which remain philosophically irrelevant. To suggest that a work is principally a reply to local conditions is to suggest that it is unimportant.11 Ideas have their sordid grounds and conditions, their secret social motives, a private itch they are a public scratch to, but what is exactly central to philosophy is the effort to propose and argue views whose validity will transcend their occasions, and not to manufacture notions which, when squeezed, will simply squirt out causes like a sponge. If that effort cannot succeed (as we know in many cases it does not), then philosophy becomes a form of conceptual fiction, and new determinants of quality, equally harsh and public, must be employed.

  As a space, the present has been oversold. It is simply what the future, pushed roughly by the past, falls flat in. That’s rather nice, I think. So shall I say that I believe it?

  The moment overwhelms in other ways. The lively force and narcissistic drama of one’s situation, like a passion or a toothache for which the world shuts shop, so only one’s wound is open, only one’s pain is beating, easily leads to the conviction that the rush of lust through the loins, the ache, the ear which won’t stop ringing, are universal conditions of consciousness, and that the utterly personal solutions one has adopted constitute a program of relief and reform.12 What a change being out of love brings; what a blessing silence is, or the departure of pain; and what a rush, then, of opinion in the opposite direction.

  One is reminded of similar contradictions in Sartre’s great opposite, Bertrand Russell: the careful, profound, and creative logician displaced by a careless and unoriginal historian; the shrewd and sophisticated epistemologist coupled with a naïve social critic and marital adviser—one pictures a unicorn hitched to a beer wagon—so that cautious investigation alternates with a pellmell rush into opinion; the genuine lifelong though abstract concern for humanity unbalanced by an occasional personal indifference and even fickleness and cruelty; the deeply private work and pure reflection which is weakened by the need to embrace popular causes and at great cost fight the good fight when from the public there is nothing to be caught but the clap; the adversary psychology, the small boy who will suddenly dash from ampersand and implication, anguish and en soi, to pee on a bed of pansies (in round: the English dervish and the French hoop); however, it is symptomatic of their profound difference as philosophers that when Russell tells us he has a passion for knowledge, it is easy to believe him, because Russell wanted desperately to discover the real way the world was, while Sartre’s concern has never been for reality as such, but for his own relation to it, and consequently for the quality and character and content of what he would eventually come to think about it.

  Act Two

  Imagine that I am a man who eats his dinner daily and that I am in a restaurant, gazing at the menu. If I ask for something not on the carte, chances are I won’t get it, but I’ve no grounds for complaint since I could have gone to La Bête Noire where the bête à laine is always superb, as are each of the other bêtes; however I wanted the fine view of the square one has from Café Cul de Sac, and all the girls. I feel the weight of custom, too: not to order soup as a side dish or begin with pie. Some of the entrees are too expensive for me; the Chateaubriand is for two; I hate tongue; the last time I was here the stew gave off a pale gray taste like Auschwitz smoke, an experience I’d just as soon not repeat; a newspaper review has described the culotte de boeuf as a gourmet’s delight. All of these factors, in varying degrees, limit and condition my choices. I can decide to impress the waiter, pamper my ulcer, defy my childhood training, overcome my horror of beets, ignore religious taboos, or honor my vow to remain a vegetarian until my first poem is published.

  Or I can choose as the kind of man I wish to become would choose, for no matter how loose or straitened my circumstances, there is always an alternative for my future self to select, so when I indicate to the waiter that I shall have escargots and salad with perhaps a half-carafe of quiet white, I am arranging my meal as a part of a project (a series of acts with a unifying aim), as a dancer might diet or a weightlifter gorge on meat.

  Since the act of ordering is itself a mere snip from a lengthy trajectory, it cannot possibly be the simple sum of my present limitations and my past conditioning, as the bourgeois would prefer to describe it, because my act would then be deprived of both freedom and purpose, and I should be relieved of any responsibility for it. But I do not fly south as blindly as the birds; I choose to be a person of a certain sort: saint or sinner, ruler or servant, philosopher or fool. I can justify my diet on the grounds that I want to be a dancer, but the final self I desire to be is simply chosen—I am free—and there is no rational way to justify picking one long-term project rather than another.

  As for myself, well, I’m in training to be the ultimate gentleman, a man of supreme refinement like white sugar, and so I order escargots. I am engaged and mealtimes are a part of my situation; that is, all my surrounding circumstances are seen and weighed and evaluated in the light of my long-range plans. Not for me is life a meaningless scatter. The café gives me another opportunity to discriminate further among garlic butters. It is my projects which bring values into existence. They make my perceptions particular, and it is my particular perceptions which make me. Some projects are plainly less encompassing than others, hence the great advantage in choosing to be a novelist or philosopher: nothing now falls outside my situation.

  “I am the self I will be, in the mode of not being it,” Sartre explains, rather badly, in Being and Nothingness. The paradox of purpose to which he refers is best exemplified by Aristotle’s famous teleological proof for the existence of God. God is that condition of complete actuality or self-absorbed thought toward which the material world is continuously straining, but of course if this is so, as the proof claims, then God’s existence lies ahead, around some bend in Becoming, and all we have at present to consider divine are small as droplets, though one day they’ll be parts of a sacred sea; here or there the whistle of pure thought through a soul, this or that Russell-like mind brooding on the structures of argument and looking for interstices in demonstrations. “The decisive conduct will emanate from a self which I am not yet.”

  Although modern biologists have washed purpose out of nature the way we scrub down walls, they have never denied what Aristotle had so carefully observed and documented: that among plants, animals, and men (if not
among things), there were very predictable patterns of growth and development: that each growing season carrots pushed themselves like pegs into the ground, onions layered, the dogwood fought its way through the raining air; that flowers did not bloom before bursting into bud and then sow their petals like seeds, sometimes on sand, sometimes on snow, or the maples burn with colors hitherto unseen, and then, having lost their leaves, commence to grow; that human infants became men and women of much the same color and configuration as their parents on a rather regular basis, though with generally discouraging results.

  Aristotle tried to explain these interesting but he thought innocuous phenomena by supposing that living things could be more than merely described (which is all Sartre seems ready to allow is possible for persons); they could be defined. There was a discoverable list of interrelated characteristics which earned any individual its place in a species, and Aristotle quite reasonably believed that some of these characteristics were developmental, so that the essence of a human infant included not only the baby it was but the adult it would become.

  In a sentence with considerable Germanic presumption, Sartre tells us how he wants that relationship (of present to future self) understood:

  Thus the self which I am depends on the self which I am not yet to the exact extent that the self which I am not yet does not depend on the self which I am.

  (Being and Nothingness)

  To display the relation in other words: I shall love you only if you do not love me … an odd but not unheard-of arrangement, one which exists so long as it is not symmetrical. But that is odd indeed, because the relationship constitutes and sustains itself. Fatherhood is asymmetrical too, but I am not the father of my children precisely to the extent that they are not a parent of mine.