My table in the restaurant seats me in the center of a real situation because the entire meal is eaten in a context of significant action, action which will in part alter the world and move me closer to the fulfillment of my project—the realization of a value. Sartre sometimes writes as if one’s project involved the wholesale rejection of the present, but this is clearly not so. One sometimes acts to slow change, or to employ the present the way one uses a library, reaffirming values while bringing about others.
In all this my essence is hardly my enemy, although Sartre acts as if essence were some dark blot on the family past which ought to be kept secret. In fact, Aristotle’s definition of man limits his behavior about as much as a mesh fence around the solar system, and the ends ascribed to any class are so general I should never think to mention them if someone were to question me, for the purposes of my species are rarely mine. I do not exist to breed, but from the point of view of biology, what else am I fit for?
Camus’s Caligula chooses to be a tyrant, Macbeth chooses to become a murderer and usurper, I choose to become a connoisseur. In effect, to choose one’s destiny is to choose not to be free, even if Sartre would dislike this formulation. It is either to create a character and then to insist on acting within it (that’s the way I am and the way I intend to remain), or it is to set in motion causes whose consequences increasingly compress the future into a narrow channel, as one who robs or kidnaps finds the rituals of chase and capture, courts and confinement, quickly close around him like fingers in a fist.
To choose a destiny, however, as Sartre insists, is not to obtain one, because I must continuously will my future. I can have them clear the snails away and bring me franks and beans. You must call yourself a saint again tomorrow and suffer another nail. The intellectual’s position is both easier and more perilous than most because writing effects little (Sartre sometimes says),13 and is normally accompanied by fewer risks, while crimes and coups can box you in. At the same time, a blow struck today may require another be struck tomorrow. The violent man will always find public support for his conception of himself. But opinions do nothing but implant in others the expectation that their owner will continue to cherish them like children. In short, every free act imperils its own base by creating conditions that encourage its repetition, a trap which Sartre has so far managed to avoid. Yet if I am to carry out my project, what else can I do? The existentialist wants to will himself … no … the existentialist wills to want to will himself: “I choose to be such and such a sort”; but he hates it when others say of him: “Oh, he’s such and such a sort”; because he knows it is his will which daily denies the flesh, and my will which impels me from escargots to Dobosch Torte, whereas others see him as a fearful neurotic and myself as a gluttonous gourmet, a slave to the snobbery of my stomach.
Aristotle had argued that virtue ought to be a habit; that honesty was second nature to the honest man (who thus has, after all, a created essence), but Sartre prefers the Christian position: that virtue consists of a continuous self-conscious triumph over temptation; and it would appear that in order to prove that the temptation is there, it is periodically necessary to succumb to it. How will les autres know I’m free, if my behavior is consistent?
There is no such thing as an isolated freedom—any circumstance will contain the intersection of my projects with others—and the new religious theater of the folk which Sartre speaks about will give us agons—conflicts of right in the form of reenacted clashes of passion; because only by means of passion can we portray the whole man. In 1944 Sartre was saying that “anyone performing an act is convinced that he has a right to perform it.” In 1960 he is making this claim about the passions: “passion is a way of finding oneself in the right, of referring to a whole social world of claims and values to justify the fact that one wishes to keep, take, destroy, or construct something.” I happen to agree with Sartre that feelings are cognitions (though frequently faulty) and that values are fundamental ingredients of them, but Sartre draws a thick line between feelings and passions and rolls with characteristic unconcern over an entire series of faulty implications like a train over a bad track.
For what is passion? Does a jealous man, for instance, emptying a revolver into his rival, kill for passion? No, he kills because he believes he has a right to kill.… jealousy implies a right; if you have no right over the person with you, you may be very unhappy because she does not like you any more, because she is deceiving you; but there will be no passion.
(“Epic Theater and Dramatic Theater”)
Let us take a case and see what we can discriminate within it.
I am furious because this nigger’s dog has just shit on my lawn. I strike him smartly across his sassy black face with a length of sprinkler hose. Then it turns out that it was not his dog but a neighbor’s. Man … am I mad at that nigger now.
First, when I strike anyone, I usually strike those whom I dare to strike. Second, those whom I dare to strike are rarely the ones whom I should like to strike. So I frequently strike substitutes … like my children. Do my feelings claim the right to do that? Or I mistake my enemy and call the wrong dog to a duel. Do my feelings claim the right to revenge myself in the wrong way, at the wrong time and place, toward the wrong persons, and with respect to the wrong things? Third, even when it is really the person who has wronged me whom I’ve struck, and even if I feel I have then a right to my anger, does it follow that I have a right to the blow? If, frustrated, tired, and angry, I beat my baby, will I want to claim my feelings claimed a right? Anger often arises from the recognition that one is in the wrong, and it is the wronged one I blame and beat. This person has been the instrument of my mistake, so I hate him all the more. He has made me look bad.
What Sartre’s language unwittingly suggests is this: I come home unexpectedly and find my wife in bed with the black man I had beaten with the hose. As soon as I assess the scene, I realize no jury will convict. I have a right to kill my rival. So naturally I do so. Of course this is a travesty of Sartre’s intention. When he says that the jealous man kills “because he has a right” he means that the man is free of moral scruples.
Observe not the speaker or the speech then, but the techniques. Sartre first locates something that may sometimes be true of some feelings (and perhaps ought to be true of them all). This is universalized. Then objectified. We may begin with a claim, but we end with an implication. The ontological proof got along on less. Finally, if someone produces a case where there is a feeling but clearly no right, let alone a claim of one, as in the case of the mother who beats her child, he points out that he was not speaking of mere feelings, but of passions (which always do claim a right). In short, he turns his statement into a definition and begs the question.14
The point I am belaboring is essential to Sartre’s theory of the theater: it is an arena in which we perceive ultimate projects in collision, these represented to us through the display of passions which claim a right to the acts which express them. These actions, furthermore, are irreversible and must be ridden like a bobsled to the end, becoming more and more radical, picking up speed. Language must be seen as a kind of action, too. Its function is not to describe conditions or reveal character, but in effect to do battle.
We are once again confronted by an emotional definition like still another snake on the trail. “A real action is irreversible,” he says. Then the following are not real actions: (1) I write “phooey” in the margin of a book and then decide the word is too adolescent so I erase it; (2) I buy a TV but return it to the store when I find that it’s defective; (3) I sign your death warrant but countermand the order before the soldiers reach your cell; (4) I swallow rather too many sleeping pills but help is at hand and they pump out my stomach in time. Of course there is a trivial sense in which nothing done can be wholly undone, and there are always varying degrees of doing and undoing, but that is not what Sartre has in mind.
I think we can detect in Sartre’s attitude here, as elsewhere, a cont
empt for common sense, as though it were the condition of a cowardly mind. There is the need to push a thought toward an extreme formulation, and to hurtle every obstacle, logical or otherwise, which may lie in the path of that push. The free act may be irreversible, but the theatrical act must be irrevocable; the free man can always stop, abandon his project, change direction, for actions do not stay up to party after their agents have gone to bed, but Sartre is perfectly aware that an aborted tragic action will not look well on the stage; that we cannot have Macbeth decide he’s had enough of the usurpation business and refuse to murder Banquo, who, after all, is a fine brave fellow. The theatrical act, as he says, “wipes out the characters who were there at the beginning” in its demand to express itself. Yet this dramatic necessity gives us a Macbeth who is overpowered by his passions, who is weaker than his wife, who is increasingly constrained by circumstances, who is ridden by the actions he once rode.
Antigone and Creon represent opposing terms of a fundamental political contradiction which rent but also animated Greek society. According to Sartre, the contemporary theater places such conflicts inside the protagonist, and the action of the play arises from and reflects these contradictions. However, Sartre immediately slips from the stage into psychology. “A man,” he says, “only acts insofar as internal contradictions are the driving force of his action.” By his action he severs himself from these contradictions (how this happens isn’t clear), escaping them to achieve an end, but the act itself must continue to embody contradictions (whether the same ones or others isn’t clear).
Freud provides us with many examples of such acts—the inappropriate gift, for instance. You can’t drive, hate every shade of red, all ostentation, and own a house with a dinky garage, so I give you a pink Cadillac. This gift beautifully blends my generosity and my meanness, my knowledge of your likes and my disdain for them, my sense of indebtedness to you and my dislike of that situation. But Sartre’s principal case (Brecht’s Galileo, who both pioneers a new science and abjures it) reveals the contradiction by successive actions, and furthermore the conflict is not truly an inner one. Left to himself, Galileo would have continued to advance science. Left to himself, he would not have abjured his doctrines.
The bourgeois theater tries to persuade people (for its own foul purposes) that all acts are failures, and so the People’s Theater, which Sartre supports, must show that this simply isn’t so. The tragic action achieves success in the radicalization of itself, but it is hard to imagine what the success of inherently contradictory acts would be, for the various aims are likely to inhibit one another, making it impossible for any one of them to fully express itself—neither my meanness nor my generosity. They are crippled by the conflict which gave rise to them, and of which they are an expression.
Act Three
We may understand what this flummery-mummery on the stage is all about, but what is it for? It is for the good of the Folk, and the reformation of the Bourgeoisie? O dear.
There are two kinds of theater which are satisfactory to Sartre: dramatic theater and epic theater. The difference lies mainly in the relation established between those on the boards and those in the seats. It is characteristic of epic theater to put the audience at an esthetic distance from the action, as Brecht famously does; to insist that what is being seen is a performance; and to inhibit participation and identification. In dramatic theater the audience is presented with an image of itself which it recognizes and joins, but bourgeois theater also does this, and Sartre begins by rejecting the idea of participation because the bourgeois use it so effectively as a weapon.
The distinction is a general one, and can be drawn between novels with equal ease. I can identify with David Copperfield, regardless of my sex, and participate in his growing up. Dickens certainly does nothing to discourage this identification. In the first place, Copperfield’s life transcribes a successful arc, as I should like mine to, and passes through socially defined and acceptable stages which I have traversed or can expect to. His problems are those which anyone might have. In the second place, Copperfield has only soft or sympathetic vices; evil occupies itself with other people; and there is no ambiguity about values. I can fling myself wholeheartedly into his life, share his joys, his griefs, mistakes too, without danger to my self-esteem.
Humbert Humbert, on the other hand, is clearly a fabrication; he is scarcely nice; he is embarked upon a most dubious sexual adventure; he is subtle, devious, complex; there is no telling what will turn up. Certain sexual titillations may invite my deeper participation, but I cannot trust the style. It is cold and cutting, too careful, intellectually too superior, too self-conscious. It obtrudes itself like a head in the beam of the projector, and my satisfactions are short-lived and uneasy.
As Sartre sees it, the advantage of dramatic theater is its greater emotional effect. It fashions an image of my situation. It plays my song. I sing along. Dickens can effectively expose the Victorian exploitation of children, for example; but he can also encourage me to be sentimental about poverty and find the poor in some ways privileged. It is difficult, furthermore, to limit identification. A bourgeois can worm his way into the soul of a militant radical who dies for his cause, because “while he rejects the substance of the play, he will be attracted by the formal design of heroism.” In any case, when I am singing my song, I do not quite hear it, and epic theater forces me to listen as if I were hearing my voice on tape. It is a pedagogically superior technique. That’s how I sound? My god.
Another reason why Sartre waffles on this issue is that he really wants a religious theater. He longs for the interpenetration of values characteristic of the Greek arena. Sartre certainly approves of Brecht’s effort to educate his audiences concerning the social determinations of individual action, but Sartre wants to involve his audience in myth, to touch them at their deepest emotional level, while showing them their common situation (and, in later Sartre, the contradictions which comprise it). He wants to enlist the people’s participation in breaking the chains which the system has fastened around them and which the play has shown are there. Brecht’s theater is not sufficiently kinetic. It informs, it does not energize, its audience. It does not create a true community.
Common interests don’t necessarily unify. If six of us have flu, we have indeed the same disease, but we aren’t sharing an illness like a blanket, and our common desire—to recover—may be quite divisive; thus if I am brought to realize that my interests are the same as yours, I may be recognizing you as an enemy. Diverse and divergent aims often promote peace. Separation and indifference are frequently as benevolent as openness and quiet. The recognition, then, that you and I are in the same boat may please neither of us; common descriptions do not signify common interests; common interests do not necessarily unify; unification is not always desirable.
So the drama cannot rest with revealing a mutual plight, nor is any play able to appeal to human universals of whatever sort (sin and salvation, for example, happiness or entelechy), because for Sartre there aren’t any; therefore the appeal must be to a concept of collective action: the need to hold property in common or to unionize, to seize the utilities or run the railroads. The formula for successful plays of this kind consists first in revelation: this is your situation and here is the enemy mainly responsible for it (early Sartre might have bravely blamed the masses for their own enslavement); second, the individual’s only hope lies in collective action; third, there is value in collective action which transcends utility: cooperation becomes brotherhood. This last part is vital, because in establishing a common cause through a common enemy, one must be careful that the joint venture isn’t nevertheless still held together by self-interest, in which case the collective will dissolve like a team at the end of the season, or incorporate itself and become a business. In this country at present, government, business, and labor are each agents of reaction.
One of the qualities which make a great play, especially a great tragedy, is (exactly contrary to Sartre’s fo
rmula) that justice be done every opposition, all aspects, each element. When a pie is cut there is pie on both sides of the knife. Brecht regularly wrote plays which were too artful, too original, too just, to be acceptable to the narrowly political mind which invariably expects the poet to condemn other wars than his, other lies than his, other necessary disciplinary actions, expediencies, confinements, interrogations, tortures, murders, than his—and never wars, lies, secrecy, or tyranny in general.
In play after play, even the most dogmatic and didactic (The Mother or The Measures Taken, for example, The Trial of Lucullus), the text undermines its intended message, and the party growls its displeasure, admonishes and threatens.15 One part of Brecht wanted to sell out to discipline, order, and utility, to replace religion with politics, to take a belief like a Teddy bear to bed; another part wanted to compose great plays and have them properly performed. And while that first half tried to submerge us all in the collective, the other continued rather shrewdly to define the special divided self that was Brecht.
Sartre is himself a sufferer from this saving split of feeling and value. His own play Dirty Hands was “misunderstood” because the characters for once escaped the program they were tied to and became problems.16 Sartre, at his deepest point, is anarchistic, playful, ironic, proud, lonely, detached, superior, unique. It is a painful position and it is not surprising that the surface flow of his life and his thinking should run so strongly in the direction of humorless moralizing and the obliteration of the self.
Hugo von Hofmannsthal, writing about Brecht’s play Baal in 1926, anticipated the future as he summed up the past:
Our time is unredeemed; and do you know what it wants to be redeemed from?… The individual … Individuality is an arabesque we have discarded … I should go so far as to assert that all the ominous events we have been witnessing in the last twelve years are nothing but a very awkward and long-winded way of burying the concept of the European individual in the grave it has dug for itself …17
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