Les Mots (The Words) - Jean-Paul Sartre

I’ve come to expect a certain Sartean methodology within his prose: his writing is both playful and beautiful (remind me to tell you about the jellyfish)…and dare I say almost straightforward? But buried within and between the lines is a vast world of incomprehensible complexity…most of which I’m afraid I miss. I breezed through the 254 pages of The Words, but then spent the last week trying to read his short 48 page essay The Transcendence of the Ego, and I can’t do it. I mean…I can actually read the words I just have no idea what he’s talking about. So there’s the great divide. How is Sartre capable of such transparent prose and simultaneously opaque, to the point of incoherence, philosophical treatises? 

I think a good simile would be: Sartre’s writing style is like a drive on an existential Grand Prix. It’s cyclical and a tad dangerous. His autobiography moves forward chronologically, but within each anecdotal pause we run through the themes of Sartre’s philosophical oeuvre: Spiritually destructive conformity/ bad faith vs. authenticity, existence precedes essence, nothingness, hell is other people, and the transcendence of the ego.

The Words is only part one of an unfinished multivolume set. Early on he describes these years, 1905-1914 as the years of the “undefined person.” (pg.39) (There is also something about a kiss without a mustache being like an egg without salt…an idiom lost in translation? Not to bring up every reference to mustaches that Sartre has made…but the awesome psychological breakdown in Nausea does have that incredible riff on Descartes: “I do not think therefore I am a mustache!”…This needs to be on a t-shirt…is there a cultural reference that I’m missing here?…A hat doffing to Nietzsche? …but I digress.) 

Between the lines are constellations of questions: What is writing? Why does one write and for whom? How does a man become someone who writes, who wants to speak of the imaginary? “What makes a child, like Sartre, fall into the neurosis of literature"? (1)

Sartre takes fifteen pages to arrive at his birth and when he finally does so the language is a harbinger for what is to follow: 

“In 1904, at Cherbourg, the young naval officer, who was already wasting away with the fevers of Cochin-China, made the acquaintance of Anne Marie Schweitzer, took possession of the big, forlorn girl, married her, begot a child in quick time, me, and sought refuge in death.” (p.15)

Wasting. Forlorn. Death.

Sartre has been thrown into existence and is saturated with the nausea inducing sensation that he’s not sure who he is or what he is for: 

“…nobody, beginning with me, knew why the hell I had been born.” (p.87)

This is ‘existence precedes essence’ in a nutshell…and it’s agonizing. It’s not like he’s born and then a few days later his life is imbued with meaning, instead he is so evidently aware that his life is devoid of meaning. To compensate for this he play acts at life. 

“I was a fake child.” (p.84) 

I keep creating myself; I am the giver and the gift…Only one mandate: to please; everything for show. What a riot of generosity in our family.” (p.32)

He blames a bit of his childhood existential crisis on his lack of a father. He is without a super-ego. He is the plaything of the adults, etc. and with all of this comes a very temporal way of existing. He is a stranger, an orphan, without possessions or identity. 

“Worldly possessions reflect to their owner what he is; they taught me what I was not. I was not substantial or permanent, I was not the future continuer of my father’s work. I was not necessary to the production of steel. In short, I had no soul.” (p.88)

His family expects a certain behavior from their little toy child. They wind it up and it performs its routine. And yet, there is tension between his play acting hell, where he is forever a one dimensional child, dictated to and defined by the whims of the adults around him and the ‘Paradise’ (p.34) of being the doted on apple of many adoring eyes. There is a temptation to submerge oneself beneath the waters of inauthenticity, to play act until you are unrecognizable to even yourself. 

This is a good example of: “Bad faith” He has no ability to see himself without the gaze of those around him, they tell him he is good, or valued or ugly and without their verdict he doesn’t exist. This reminds me of Roquentin looking at himself in the mirror (a frequent motif in Sartre works):

“It is the reflection of my face. Often in these lost days I study it. I can understand nothing of this face. The faces of others have some sense, some direction. Not mine. I cannot even decide whether it is handsome or ugly. I think it is ugly because I have been told so. But it doesn’t strike me. At heart, I am even shocked that anyone can attribute qualities of this kind to it, as if you called a clod of earth or a block of stone beautiful or ugly.” (Nausea, p.25)

For young Sartre, with his beautiful locks of golden hair, his beauty was a subject shrouded in…hair. His hair covered his walleye that had developed from a bout of virulent influenza…and then one day his grandfather took him out for a ‘special’ treat, a haircut that would no longer make him look like a girl, and to everyone’s horror his face was now fully exposed with all its distortions. When his mother walked into the drawing room for her ‘surprise’ she ran away crying. Little ‘Poulou’ had been exchanged for Quasimodo.  

“The mirror was of great help to me: I made it teach me that I was a monster. If I succeeded, my sharp remorse would change into pity. But, above all, as the failure had revealed my servility to me, I made myself hideous so as to make it impossible, so as to reject human beings, and so that they would reject me. […] By combined twists and puckers I was distorting my face; I was vitriolizing myself in order to efface my former smiles.

The remedy was worse than the disease; i had tried to take shelter against the glory and dishonor in my lonely truth. But I had no truth. All I found in myself was an astonished insipidness. Before my eyes, a jelly-fish was hitting against the glass of the aquarium, wrinkling its flabby collared, fraying in the darkness. Night fell, clouds of ink were diluted in the mirror, swallowing up my final embodiment. Deprived of an alibi, I fell upon myself.

[…] The mirror had taught me what I had always known: I was horribly natural. I have never got over that.” (p.109-110)

Sartre’s ‘ugliness’ is a leitmotif throughout his writing. His characters struggle to see themselves beyond the constraining definitions of those around them. “Idolized by all, rejected by each..” doomed to be the “object par excellence.” 

“I was nothing.” (p.90)

Being soulless is different from a state of nothingness. 

In The Words Sartre is reaching into a different demographic pool than with his 1943 philosophical treatise Being and Nothingness. He tries a different take on his “Where is Pierre” example of nothingness: 

Young Sartre finds himself at a party with his family when all of a sudden his grandfather announces: “There’s someone missing here: Simonnot.” 

“In the center of a tumultuous ring, I saw a column: M. Simonnot himself, absent in the flesh. That prodigious absence transfigured him. The attendance was far from complete: certain pupils were sick, others had asked to be excused, but these were merely accidental and negligible facts. M. Simonnot alone was missing. The mere mention of his name had sufficed for emptiness to sink like a knife into the crowded room. It astounded me that a man had his place marked out for him. His place: a nothingness hollowed out by universal expectations, an invisible womb from which, so it seemed, one could suddenly be reborn. Yet if he had sprung up from the floor amidst an ovation, even it the women had rushed to kiss his hand, I would have calmed down: bodily presence is always a surplus. But intact, reduced to the purity of negative essence, he retained the incompressible transparency of a diamond.” (p.91)

Here’s what I think, but don’t quote me on any of this: 

I think The Words is Sartre’s attempt to walk us through the origination and maturation of his ontological framework in the genre of biographical sketch. (With a touch of irony and a wink wink at Proust.) 

In Hazel Barne’s Essay  “Sartre’s ontology: The Revealing and Making of Being” she argues: 

“In Sartre’s ontology what differentiates human being from all other being is precisely nothing. Or more accurately, it is a nothingness. In rewriting the sentence I have subtly changed it. Human being is not the same as the rest of being but is distinguished from it by a separate nothingness…” 

What does this mean?  

In order to exist as a Pierre or a M. Simonnot, you must first have substance or rather authenticity to give personhood to your absence. Young Sartre is nothing, but without substance his nothingness is accidental and negligible. And so he begins his escape by reading, by ingesting the world and possibility of words. At first it’s just avaricious reading, not just the grandfather approved classics, but the sneakily read dime store novels of childhood heroes. Reading has always been a form of escape for Sartre, he says early on: “I began my life as I shall no doubt end it: amidst books.”  (p.40) (There’s a great section about “sentences emerging” like centipedes…But I will resist the temptation to delve into his tree/fly/centipede fixation.) 

Initially books offer Sartre a world to hide within. He can bury himself within them and disappear: 

“I never tilled the soil or hunted for nests. I did not gather herbs or throw stones at birds. But books were my birds and my nests, my household pets, my barn and countryside. The library was the world caught in a mirror.” (p.49)

“Everything took place in my head. Imaginary child that I was, I defended myself with my imagination.” (p. 113)

This sounds almost idyllic…but it’s actually a clarion call for the dangers of passivity. The world is ‘caught,’ trapped in a two dimensional frame, as are those dependent on the mirror for their identity.  Reading stories is exchanged for play-acting elaborate narratives of his own invention, where routinely ‘janissaries brandish their curved scimitars’ and exclaim: “Someone is missing here: It’s Sartre.” (p.114) These imaginings save him in a sense from the gaze of others, within this cocoon of a world he is free. And yet this freedom is still within the confines of a false reality, as he play-acts at being a person of substance. 

The last installment of his childhood pilgrimage to personhood, and ultimately essence, is a veritable swamp of despair, i.e. the cinema. During the 1960’s Sartre was disgusted by the insipid “Americanization” of his compatriots. The french working class would rather watch movies dubbed in French than agitate for a revolution. (2) (Somewhat of a harsh criticism since Sartre also loved the movies…) But here, in the cinema, humans begin a slow regression, language is exchanged for confused murmurs. Etiquette is exchanged for ‘adhesion.’ As the crowd is pressed together, they share communal joy and sorrow as they watch the screen in front of them project a world they can only imagine. 

“I was utterly content, I had found the world in which I wanted to live, I touched the absolute. What an uneasy feeling when the lights went on: I had been wracked with love for the characters and they had disappeared, carrying their world with them. I had felt their victory in my bones; yet it was theirs and not mine. In the street I found myself superfluous.” (p. 125) 

Like Roquentin, another Sartean double, there is always something pricking at him, always something unsettling, just around the corner, threatening to make itself visible and expose his life as a sham. He is never able to completely disappear into the world of passive reading. And so he is pushed forward into another imposture: the world of writing. We’ve come full circle and now begin the cycle again. He writes not because he has something to say but because he is Charles Schweitzer’s grandson. He plagiarizes with abandon. He play acts at being a writer. He writes as an object that his family hovers around and publicizes..until they grow tired of this new game. 

“Ignored and barely tolerated, my literary activities became semi-clandestine. […] In short, I wrote for my own pleasure.” (p.146) 

And this is the beginning of a road to authenticity. The freedom to write for your own pleasure without the labels and definitions of others, without the gaze constraining and constricting your hand. 

And then he begins to write and we get a ‘who’s who’ of the Sartrean oeuvre: the chestnut tree, the quay, trees, crabs, an octopus with eyes of flame etc. His plagiarism and boredom are exchanged for the glimmer of personhood. And then he begins to find himself. It is alone with himself that he is finally able to escape from play acting for the world around him. For his entire life, he had believed that in order to “feel necessary” someone would have to express a need for him. (p. 165) Now he realizes that being superfluous is a choice between passivity and action. 

“I faced my Destiny and recognized it: it was only my freedom.” (p.171)

This is part one. It can’t end entirely on a good note. He confuses truth and fiction. He has a hard time with crustaceans of all kinds (p.164) and a little Proust envy (p.163)…but by age nine he’s not doing so badly. 

“The past had not made me. On the contrary, it was I, rising from nothingness by an act of creation which was always being repeated. Each time I was reborn better, and I made better use of the inert reserves of my soul for the simple reason that death, which was closer each time, lit me up more brightly with its dim light.” (p. 237)

Sartre referred to The Words as his farewell to ‘literature.’ I can sort of see this…towards the end so many authors are being referenced or name dropped it begins to feel a bit chaotic. (“There’s someone missing here. It’s Dickens!” (p.168) Almost a last call for authors of all distinctions. 

Sarah Bakewell argues that whatever “farewell” meant for Sartre it didn’t mean an end to writing, but rather an even more prodigious output of writing than before, “in an ever greater mania, while abandoning the attempt to revise and give careful shape to his thoughts. Words was, rather, Sartre’s farewell to careful crafting and polishing..” (3) Whether this was due to worsening vision problems or the tolls of a brain addled from years of heavy drinking and mescaline…I guess we’ll never know, but his ‘editing’ becomes almost nonexistent as he continues to write, and he says curmudgeonly things like ‘editing is for the bourgeoisie .’

Speaking of editing, I’m way past my word count and I think I hear a prehistoric crab, or jellyfish calling my name or gently throwing itself against a mirror. Better go check it out. 

1. Bakewell, Sarah. At the Existentialist café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone De Beauvoir,    Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others. Vintage, 2017. p.220

2. Bond. 1967, p.26

3. Bakewell, p. 225

Nausea - Jean-Paul Sarte

I found Nausea to be more comprehensible than No Exit, maybe because I’m no stranger to a good existential crisis. While I haven’t riffed on the cartesian dictum to the point where everything becomes unintelligible and I am left shaking in the corner whimpering: “I do not think therefore I am a mustache,” (p.147) I have wandered through the streets of Florence whispering palindromes under my breath as if they were a sacred incantation… “Able was I ere I saw Elba….” I didn’t go insane…but the fear of madness was the background noise to my daily existence. 

And this is where the book begins, on the razor thin edge separating the sane from the mad. 

“Perhaps it was a slight attack of insanity after all. There is no longer any trace of it left. The peculiar feelings I had the other week strike me as quite ridiculous today: I can no longer enter into them. […] There’s nothing more to fear. […] I’m going to bed. I’m cured, and I’m going to give up writing my impressions, like a little girl, in a nice new notebook. There’s only one case in which it might be interesting to keep a diary: that would be if *

*The text of the undated sheet ends here.” (p.11)

Immediately we know we are in for a ride. 

In some sense, Nausea is an existential atheistic version of Pilgrims Progress. As a modernist novel the plot is not developed through action, but rather through aimless wandering and lots of introspection. Our protagonist, Antoine Roquentin occasionally has conversations with an Autodidact, who represents Socialism and Humanism without substance, and his ex-girlfriend Anny who represents Stoicism and Cynicism without hope. 

Roquentin is our unreliable narrator and tour guide into the chaos of meaninglessness. In the ‘undated sheet’ at the beginning of the project we are told that this will be an attempt to classify the unintelligible details of life. We are also warned about how limited his view of reality is: 

“I think that is the danger of keeping a diary: you exaggerate everything, you are on the look-out and you continually stretch the truth.” (p.9)

As we get to the last page, Roquentin has made the progression from obscure biographer, to hopelessly ‘un-projected’, to author of fiction which is more honest than reality:

“…not a history book: history talks about what has existed - an existent can never justify the existence of another existent. My mistake was to try and resuscitate Monsieur de Rollebon. Another kind of book. I don’t quite know which kind - but you would have to guess, behind the printed words, behind the pages, something which didn’t exist, which was above existence. The sort of story, for example, which could never happen, an adventure. It would have to be beautiful and hard as steel and make people ashamed of their existence.” (p.252)

And this is the book we now hold in our hands. Something that doesn’t quite exist, a story behind a story, an adventure where the hero must come to terms with the fact that complete and total freedom actually results in the oppressive weight of personal responsibility. If there is nothing larger than yourself, no preordained meaning or labels to hide behind, each action you take defines meaning not just for yourself but for the rest of humanity. 

If Roquentin has stumbled onto something, a vague methodology for living, then the other two characters, the Autodidact and Anny are foils for what it is not. 

While we don’t meet Anny until the end of the book, she haunts its pages from the beginning. The two things that have given Roquentin meaning for his existence are his biography project of Monsieur de Rollebon and Anny. While arguably Anny is a verbal abuser and Roquentin is suffering the after effects of PTSD, she has framed his reality and he sees himself through her eyes. 

“In the past - even long after she had left me- I used to think about Anny. Now, I don’t think about anybody any more; I don’t even bother to look for words. It flows through me, more or less quickly, and I don’t fix anything, I just let it go. Most of the time, because of their failure to fasten on to words, my thoughts remain misty and nebulous. They assume vague and amusing shapes and are then swallowed up: I promptly forget them.”(p.17)

Misty and nebulous. I love that. 

Anny is the antithesis of Roquentin and yet they arrive at the same crisis of meaning. While Roquentin is suspicious of words and their ability to actually penetrate the nexus of meaning, Anny believes words, with a certain scientific precision, are foundationally reliable. In their exchange Roquentin asks her six times what a ‘perfect moment’ is and she bludgeons her way through with more and more words, entire stories and anecdotes, assuming that behind the verbosity is an easily accessible kernel of truth. 

Anny’s thoughts are not vague and nebulous. Instead they are strangely rigid, scientific, almost mathematical…but behind her words is the same understanding that everything is meaningless. There are no perfect moments. There are no privileged situations. So Anny chooses to give up the projects and goals that gave her life meaning, (albeit her project was the quest for the allusive ‘perfect moment’ that seems closer to play acting than authenticity)…and in doing so she has untethered herself. She is condemned to be free…but she rejects freedom, if everything is meaningless what’s the point? She chooses to stay alive, but no longer attempts to wrestle with meaning. Instead, she chooses to becomes a ‘kept woman,’ a label pinned to a specimen of wriggling humanity. She wears the clothes, plays the part and disappears into the herd, to live as Thoreau would describe “a quiet life of desperation”. 

Granted…Anny’s projects are terrible. She’s constantly perfecting the set design for the impromptu beautiful moments of life…which Roquentin is destined to misunderstand and destroy. It reminds me of Pessoa, in the Book of Disquiet: 

“…I, who did not even know whence I came, having only woken up at the crossroads. I realized that I was on a stage and did not know the words that everyone else picked up instantly even though they did not know them either. I saw that though I was dressed as a pageboy they

 had given me no queen to wait on and blamed me for that. I saw that I had in my hands a message to deliver and when I told them the paper was blank, they laughed at me. I still don’t know if they laughed because all such pieces of paper are blank or because all messages are only hypothetical.” (fr. 306) 

As he once again begins the process of ruining everything he watches her graceful languid forms harden, she puts on her exoskeleton and begins her “ ant-like tasks” of fixing everything. Occasionally shouting out the directives: “Go back, go and sit in the shadow; you understand what you have to do? Oh, come now! How stupid you are! Speak to me!” (p. 93)

“I could feel that the success of the enterprise was in my hands: the moment had an obscure significance which had to be trimmed and perfected; certain gestures had to be made, certain words spoken: I was bowed under the weight of my responsibility, I opened my eyes wide and saw nothing, I struggled in the midst of rites which Anny invented on the spur of the moment and I tore them with my long arms as it they had been spiders’ webs. At those times she hated me.”  (p. 93-94)

Pausing to discuss insects. 

There is some super disturbing insect imagery throughout the novel…second only to Jeremias Gotthelf’s Black Spider… for example, towards the end as Roquentin is once again wandering through the streets of Bouville…wondering what it would take to shake humanity from their stupor he wonders what would happen if: 

“…somebody else will feel something scratching inside his mouth. And he will go to a mirror, open his mouth: and his tongue will have become a huge living centipede, rubbing its legs together and scraping his palate. He will try to spit it out, but the centipede will be part of himself and he will have to tear it out with his hands.” (P.226)

Yikes. That might be the mescaline talking…but I think that would work. I think most people would instantly be awoken from apathy to deal with their bizarre and terrifying centipede tongue.

After another even more disturbing ‘what if’ scenario that involves male anatomy growing out of the ground like “bulbous onions,” predatory birds, claws, talons and spewing sperm etc. he pauses and says: 

“Or else nothing like that will happen [thank God!!], no appreciable change will take place, but one morning when people open their blinds they will be surprised by a sort of horrible feeling brooding heavily over things and giving the impression of waiting. […] I shall lean against a wall as they go by and I shall shout to them: ‘What have you done with your science? What have you done with your humanism? Where is your dignity as a thinking reed?” (p.227)

This is the atmosphere of the book: A horrible feeling brooding heavily over things, with the impression of waiting. 

Back to Anny. 

There’s a moment where Roquentin is having obligatory sex with the pattron of his cafe. It’s not particularly pleasant sex. (I’m not sure that’s a thing for existentialists…) He participates absent-mindedly while thinking about his novel that he’s writing. Situationally, the two things that are trapping him in a lifestyle of inauthenticity converge: The pursuit of a reality that doesn’t exist, i.e. the writing of a biography, and Anny. Even though he’s having sex with another woman, Anny perpetually haunts him. As he notices his arm, moving alongside the woman, almost disembodied with a life of its own, he is thrown into a post coital insect dream/vision: 

“…Suddenly I saw a little garden with low, wide-spreading trees from which huge hairy leaves were hanging. Ants were running about everywhere, centipedes and moths. There were some even more horrible animals: their bodies were made of slices of toast such as you put under roast pigeon; they were walking sideways with crab-like legs. The broad leaves were black with animals. Behind the cacti and the Barbary fig trees, the Veleda of the municipal park was pointing to her sex. ‘This park smells of vomit,’ I shouted.” (p.89)

‘Ants’ are mentioned twice in the novel. The first time is in the passage above, he’s having sex, which reminds him of Anny and the second time five pages later to describe Anny scurrying about tending to her set design. What’s the point? How do terrible visions of insects relate to his ex-girlfriend? 

I think relationships tend toward play-acting which then tends to induce apathy. Which results in seeing the world through someone else's vision and taking their word for it. Or seeing yourself in their eyes and being judged ugly. And what is ‘ugly’? It is a derivation from the ‘norm’ or what is deemed by consensus/the masses to be ‘beautiful’…an equally futile representation. 

Being ‘ugly’ is a motif throughout the book. We first encounter ‘ugliness’ in Rollebon: 

“Monsieur de Rollebon was extremely ugly. Queen Marie Antoinette was fond of calling him her ‘dear monkey’. Yet he had all the women of Court, not by clowning like Voisenon the baboon, but by a magnetism which drove his beautiful victims to the worst excesses of passion.” (p. 24)

Roquentin thinks his face is ugly because he has been told so. (p.30) His characterization of himself has been based on what others have told him, through their gaze he sees himself, and when confronted with an actual mirror, he sees nothing. His reflection is without significance. He looks alive, or at least he’s been told so by Anny, (p.31) but when he observes himself, nothing seems to makes sense, he’s not sure what’s looking back at him resembles something that is even human. 

His crisis leads him to a place where he redefines his existence. 

“The world was so ugly, outside me, these dirty glasses on the table were so ugly, and the brown stains on the mirror and Madeline’s apron and the kindly look of the patronne’s burly lover were so ugly, the very existence of the world was so ugly, that I felt completely at ease, at home. (p.245)

Recognizing the absurdity of life should ultimately be freeing. The definitions and labels you’ve been burdened by evaporate and you’re left alone, standing in front of the grand cosmos. A universe before you, waits for you to speak into it definition. 

“I am free: I haven’t a single reason for living left, all the ones I have tried have given way and I can’t imagine any more. I am still quite young, I still have enough strength to start again. But what must I start again? Only now do I realize how much, in the midst of my greatest terror and nausea, I had counted on Anny to save me. My past is dead, Monsieur de Rollebon is dead, Anny came back only to take all hope away from me. I am alone in this white street lined with gardens. Alone and Free. But this freedom is rather like death.” (p. 223)

It’s hard to comprehend how revolutionary some of these ideas were in the 1940’s. The ‘existential crisis’ has become ubiquitous, a rite of passage of sorts.  In At the Existential Cafe: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Mzerleau-Ponty and Others by Sarah Bakewell she argues: 

“…existentialist ideas and attitudes have embedded themselves so deeply into modern culture that we hardly think of them as existentialist at all. People (at least in relatively prosperous countries where more urgent needs don’t intervene) talk about anxiety, dishonesty and the fear of commitment. They worry about being in bad faith, even if they don’t use that term. They feel overwhelmed by the excess of consumer choice while also feeling less in control than ever.” (317)

Throughout the novel is woven the question of authenticity, a question that perhaps we would do well to consider. As we take our world for granted, as we get lost in the identifiers given to us by others, as we choose to believe we have little choice, agency or the ability to change, we have become Annys…disappearing into the void. 

Even though Sartre speaks from an almost incomprehensible world of bourgeois luxury (his hero spends all his time walking back and forth between the library and cafes…and his nightmares involve specific toast that you put under roast pigeon….) I think his point is still valid. We are what we make of ourselves. We can’t hide behind an online avatar and think we’re contributing to society…and yet how to wake up a populace that seems to be drifting farther and farther into self-induced apathy? 

I think Sartre would suggest reading books. 

Sources: 

Bakewell, Sarah. At the Existential Cafe: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Mzerleau-Ponty and Others. Great Britain: Chatto & Windus, 2016.

Pesso, Fernando. The Book of Disquiet. Ed. Jeronimo Pizarro and trans. Margaret Jull Costa. London: Serpent’s Tail’s, 2018. 

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Nausea. London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2000. 

No Exit - Jean-Paul Sartre

No Exit seems relatively straightforward. That’s instantly concerning…one of my greatest fears is to read poorly, but at this point, reading Sartre poorly seems inevitable. No Exit is the 50 page theatrical distillation of Sartre’s 700 page philosophical manifesto Being and Nothingness…yikes? Since I have not had time to familiarize myself with all his exciting vocabulary, this month will serve as a general introduction as I plod my way through No Exit and begin my 5 month trek down the existential rabbit hole. 

In his very helpful book How to Read Sartre Robert Bernasconi sets the stage: “Sartre is not merely difficult; he courts misunderstanding. He seems almost incapable of issuing a measured statement when an exaggeration might be more provocative. He writes to get the reader’s attention rather than to solicit their agreement.” (1)

That being said, here it goes: 

Concept: Three strangers (Garcin, Inez and Estelle) trapped together in a single room for the rest of eternity. Each one is a reprehensible human for a variety of different reasons, one has drowned her infant daughter, one has been a philanderer, one has crawled into a marriage and slowly destroyed it from within...but that's not why they are here in hell, Sartre is not concerned with "sin" but rather the inability to be honest with oneself. They are not victims of a clerical error, they have not arrived in hell flukishly and without merit...and yet initially they are willing to pretend, to lie to themselves and to others that this is the case. 

Famous Quote: (quite possibly the most famous Sartre quote of all time) “Hell is other people”.

The Scene: Second Empire drawing room with: three sofas, one hideous bronze sculpture on the mantle piece by Barbedienne and no windows, or mirrors, or reflective surfaces of any kind. The air is stale and stifling, not the heat one would expect to find in a “fire and brimstone” scenario, but enough to make one constantly uncomfortable. 

During the 1930’s and 1940’s writers and historians saw the Second Empire with all it’s lavish pomposity as a precursor to fascism.(2) (This is no longer the case for historians of the late 20th century onward…which seems somewhat disconcerting and in need of more research on my part.) Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte quickly amassed substantial control as an authoritarian president and on December 1852 threw out his old title of Prince President and became Napoleon III, Emperor of the French. While it would be easy to say he tyrannically power grabbed, his Empire was officially elected with 97 percent of the vote…although there were rumors that these votes materialized out of thin air. Sartre seemed to loath this whole voting set-up and found the trend of the secret ballot very disconcerting. (See Sartre's ‘Elections: A Trap for Fools’)

After a little sleuthing I discovered that Ferdinand Barbedienne was famous during the 1840’s-1890’s for democratizing art, a miniature bronze statue in every home! What could possibly be wrong with that? Why does he end up in hell? I think it may have something to do with authenticity. He created a machine that could produce miniature bronze replicas of famous Greek and Roman statues…so in some sense, sitting on the mantle in hell is a shrine to the disingenuous. The fake. The inauthentic. 

Symbolically the statue also represents the finality and immovability of where they are. It is indestructible, too heavy to move, and will remain for the rest of eternity watching the occupants trapped in their Second Empire hell. 

Garcin, the first occupant of the room, finds everything somewhat shocking and unexpected:

GARCIN: Yes, of course you're right. And why should one want to see oneself in a looking-glass? But that bronze contraption on the mantelpiece, that's another story. I suppose there will be times when I stare my eyes out at it. Stare my eyes out— see what I mean?. ..All right, let's put our cards on the table. I assure you I'm quite conscious of my position. Shall I tell you what it feels like? A man's drowning, choking, sinking by inches, till only his eyes are just above water. And what does he see? A bronze atrocity by— what's the fellow's name?— Barbedienne. A collector's piece. As in a nightmare. That's their idea, isn't it?. ..No, I suppose you're under orders not to answer questions; and I won't insist. But don't forget, my man, I've a good notion of what's coming to me, so don't you boast you've caught me off my guard. I'm facing the situation, facing it. So that's that; no toothbrush. And no bed, either. One never sleeps, I take it?

The valet finds the futility of brushing ones teeth in hell amusing: 

VALET: That's good! So you haven't yet got over your— what-do-you-call-it?— sense of human dignity? Excuse my smiling.

You could argue that this “sense of human dignity” is the problem. It distorts reality with desires and demands that are not situationally realistic…the idea of who we are trumps the reality of what we are and this is a prime example of ‘bad faith’. Hell is represented as our individual self deceptions and “the refuge we seek (in others?) in lieu of facing the anguish and terror of existence.” (3)

In the above quote, we see Garcin talking with the valet, which is interestingly the only time he has a dominant personality. Even with the valet there is the tension of competitive subjectivity, and the isolation that results from the failure of language. (More on that later.) The valet is not really participating in this dance of social constructs…but Garcin still feels the need to win his approval, to be ‘seen’ by him and prove he is not a coward. He’s lived his life “facing the situation” head on, but he died poorly and now in hell he must confront the fact that beneath his bravado was always a shirking coward. He can’t do this of course…that’s why he’s in hell, and so instead he eaves drops on the world below hoping to hear one positive assessment of his life. He’s seeking his validity and value in the opinion of others and not in owning up to his own actions. 

Garcin seems to operate in a moderate level of bad faith. He clearly desires to be an agent of change in his ‘life’, he wants to ‘work out his salvation’ through quiet contemplation and introspection (another form of self deception according to Sartre) …and yet he’s trapped in the delusion that the opinion of others can redefine his reality: 

GARCIN: Still there? Now listen! I want you to do me a service. No, don't shrink away. I know it must seem strange to you, having someone asking you for help; you're not used to that. But if you'll make the effort, if you'll only WILL it hard enough, I dare say we can really love each other. Look at it this way. A thousand of them are proclaiming I'm a coward; but what do numbers matter? If there's someone, just one person, to say quite positively I did not run away, that I'm not the sort who runs away, that I'm brave and decent and the rest of it— well, that one person's faith would save me. Will you have that faith in me? Then I shall love you and cherish you for ever. Estelle— will you?

(Side Note: Arguably ‘love’ is not at the heart of the issue here…Estelle and Garcin have their correlating anatomy going for them and eternity…that’s about it. This is lust and as such is another scenario of bad faith. They are seeking to evade their situation by apparently engaging in awkward sex for eternity…)

Sartre argues that you make yourself what you are, the ‘self’ is defined repetitively through choice and action. So at any moment it’s kind of like being Schrodinger's cat, you have both the potential to be brave or a coward in every scenario, but if you act like a coward that is what you are, there’s no going back. Instead of admitting that he is a coward, he feels shame at the others perception of him as such. 

GARCIN: I died too soon. I wasn't allowed time to— to do my deeds.

INEZ: One always dies too soon— or too late. And yet one's whole life is complete at that moment, with a line drawn neatly under it, ready for the summing up. You are— your life, and nothing else.

Inez seems to be the most Sartrean, she is completely aware of what and who she is. She makes no excuses for herself and is the first to vocalize that they are in hell. She comes up with the theory that this is the self-service economy of manpower version of hell, where instead of torture devices like the rack, they are all perfectly designed to torment each other in one intricately designed “vicious circle.” And yet, she needs Estelle. She needs her to see her, value her, want her. While she’s honest about her jealousy she is still relying on another for her sense of self and as such operating within bad faith. 

Estelle is the poster child for bad faith, completely in denial about her surroundings. She steps into the drawing room without missing a beat, telling the valet/gatekeeper of hell that she’ll ring for him when she needs him. Initially her biggest complaint is that her dress doesn’t match the color scheme of the room. Perseverating on the aesthetics of hell…seems to be missing the point. But to acknowledge her surroundings would be to acknowledge her reality, something she seems incapable of doing. And so she powders her nose and fixes her lipstick and makes the best of things, demanding that Garcin change sofas with her and keep himself in a state of formal dress while sanitizing his language to remove crude words like “dead” in exchange for “absentee.” 

She demands the gaze of others and needs to be able to see and watch herself to feel alive. 

ESTELLE: I feel so queer. Don't you ever get taken that way? When I can't see myself I begin to wonder if I really and truly exist. I pat myself just to make sure, but it doesn't help much.

She needs to be looked and desired and exemplifies Sartre’s concept of ‘being-for-others’ in that she is incapable of generating a sense of identity without the other’s gaze. Sex and desire also end up as categories of bad faith because they reduce both parties into objects…I’m not sure how this is different from the everyday competitive subjectivity sans sex…I need to do more research. 

In the end, the characters are incapable of change, and this for Sartre is the definition of encrustation: 

“Encrustation refers to the difficulty of changing ourselves since others through their gaze transmit an image of us that constrains us and so restricts our freedom. Sartre can be taken as saying that if one lives in the world as if everything is unchangeable, then one has created hell.” (4)

The play is bookended with an object: the pen knife. In the beginning of the play the pen knife seems strangely out of place in a world where there are no paper items to open. It is meaningless in an environment without paper. At the end, the penknife becomes a weapon, and yet murdering or even wounding someone in hell is futile. And so again, symbolically the characters are confronted with the fact that context doesn’t generate meaning for humans, they must make their own meaning. 

The last line, spoken for the benefit of the audience is: “so, let’s get on with it.” For those still in the land of the living it’s not too late to become an authentic version of oneself, all that’s needed is a good dose of honesty and the ability to embrace both growth and change. 

Notes:

All No Exit quotes from: Sartre, Jean-Paul. No Exit And Three Other Plays: No Exit. Vintage International, 1989.

1. Bernasconi, Robert. How to Read Sartre. W.W. Norton & Co, 2007.

2. Price, Roger. Documents on the Second French Empire, 1852-1870. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. pp.272

3. Shmoop Editorial Team. "No Exit." Shmoop. Shmoop University, Inc., 11 Nov. 2008. Web. 28 Nov. 2019.

4. Bernasconi, Robert. How to Read Sartre. W.W. Norton & Co, 2007.

Further Reading: 

Bakewell, Sarah. At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone De Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Karl Jaspers, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others. Vintage, 2017.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Communists and Peace, New York: George Brazier, 1968.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Atria Books, 2019.

Slime Mold, Whitman & Pessoa

I am large, I contain multitudes.

Song of Myself - Walt Whitman

I was researching slime molds the other day and came across this short little video about Physarum polycephalum…and all of a sudden it hit me. This is a great metaphor for Pessoa! 

Slime molds are described as single-cell organisms that defy classification; not quite fungus, not quite plant, exhibiting intelligence in an incredibly unique way. This mold path-finds. It “solves” mazes. But more to the point, it communicates with itself in a way described as “waves pulsing across the body.” At the plasmodium stage, a drop of water is given to the tendrils on one side of the cell, and you can visibly see the cell pulse as the fluid flows across the body. Again, food is placed within reach of it’s tendrils and you see the closest tendrils reach out and swell as they ingest the food and then again pulsate throughout the rest of the body. 

This is Pessoa. An amorphous cell, ingesting and disseminating information throughout his many nuclei. I can picture a drop of Whitman causing “rhythmic contractions” and as each member of the cell ingest and consume, they express Whitman in distinct and yet traceable ways. 

I have spent the past three months with the many faces of Pessoa: 

Vicente Guedes, the decadent, self absorbed, sensationist, with his head in the clouds. He’s extreme, conceited, and an avid dreamer who is still working out his metaphysics. In fragment 54 [1914]: “How to dream metaphysics” he writes:

“The pulverization of the personality: I don’t know what my ideas are or my feelings or my character…If I do feel something, I feel it in the visualized person of some creature who appears inside me. I have replaced myself with my dreams. Each person is merely his dream of himself. I am not even that. 

[…]

I never knew what I felt. When people spoke to me of this or that emotion and described it, I always felt they were describing some part of my soul, but when I thought about it later, I was unsure. I never know if the person I feel myself to be really is me, or if I merely think I am. I am bits of characters from my own dramas.” 

Guedes takes Whitman’s sentiment about dreams/dreamers to another level. In “Sleepers” Whitman writes:
I go from bedside to bedside, I sleep close with the other 

sleepers each in turn,

I dream in my dream all the dreams of the other dreamers, 

And I become the other dreamers.

In fragment 83 [1915] Guedes adds layers of complexity to dreaming: 

All I’ve ever done is dream. That, and only that, has been the meaning of my existence. The only thing I’ve ever really cared about is my inner scenario…

My mania for creating a false world is still with me and will leave me only when I die. I no longer line up in my desk drawers cotton reels and pawns- with the occasional bishop and knight thrown in- but I regret not doing so…and instead, like someone in winter, cozily warming himself by the fire, I line up in my imagination the ranks of constant, living characters who inhabit my inner world. For I have a whole world of friends inside me, each with his or her own real, definite, imperfect life. 

Some go through hard times, others lead bohemian lives, picturesque and humble. Others are traveling salesmen (dreaming of being a traveling salesmen was always one of my greatest ambitions - unfortunately never realized!).

Complexity and contradiction. It’s not enough to say you become the other dreamers. That’s empty and impersonal; the demarcating lines hover around the “me” and the “other.” For Guedes the lines have blurred, and he often can’t tell where “he” begins and the “others” end. Like the other heteronyms, Guedes struggles to recognize his own image and identity in the reality reflected and refracted from both his waking life and his subconscious dream world. What for Whitman had been a cry of democracy, for Pessoa is saturated in the crisis of modernity, where the fragmented self is beyond assimilation. 

Bernardo Soares feels like a kindred spirit. I’ve met this person before…maybe I am Bernardo Soares, or rather Soares has anticipated me and creates the taxonomy for the thoughts and feelings that have been previously without vocabulary. 

While Soares writes more than half of the Book of Disquiet, numerically he has a third of the “dreams” (300 out of the 953). Reading through Jeronimo Pizarro’s edition, we can see the transformation chronologically play out. The constellations of words shift, the dreams change, the subject and object are frequently out of place and disjointed. 

Fragment 166 [22 Mar 1929] (excerpt):

In the bay, between the woods and the meadows, there rose out of the uncertainty of the blank abyss the inconstancy of flaming desire. There was no need to choose between the wheat and the myrtles, and the distance continued to recede among the cypresses. 

The magical power of words, whether isolated or brought together to form a musical chord, full of intimate resonances and meanings that diverge even as they converge, the pomp of sentences placed in between the meanings of other sentences, malicious vestiges, hopeful woods, and nothing but the peaceful pools in the childhood gardens of my subterfuges…

Thus, between the high walls of absurd audacity, among the lines of trees and the startled shivers of things withering, someone other than me would hear from sad lips the confession denied to the more insistent. Not even if the knights were to ride back down the road visible from atop the castle wall would there be more peace in the Castle of the Last Lost Men, […]

Then, again, as a consequence of the magic, the dead shouts rang out again, and the dogs could be seen hovering and havering on the garden paths. It was like an absurd wake, and the princess of other’s people’s dreams strolled endlessly about at their ease. 

The above is a long chunk, but so much will be relevant to what I want to talk about. For now, I want to mention that once again the “I” is no longer the subject who is dreaming and as such has no agency or control. There is a ‘blank abyss’ that is insurmountable and in the end language has failed and the simulacra have become meaningless. The dogs hover. The dream princesses of other people’s dreams stroll without purpose or direction. The only communicable action is the “havering” or indecisive babbling of the dogs. 

It’s not a surprise that each person in the Pessoan cell would ingest Whitman (and so many others) and then that the output would be different. But what I have found surprising is how different each voice is. It's a “Gesamtkunstwerk” or “total work of art.” This aesthetic ideal was championed by Richard Wagner and also referred to as ‘the integrated drama' which is even more to the point.

Pessoa outlines his heteronymic structure in “Bibliographical Notice” in part as: 

“The works of these three poets form, as said, a dramatic set; and the intellectual interactions among these personalities, as well as their own personal relations, are studied in detail. All this will contain biographies to be made, together, when published, with horoscopes and, maybe, with photos. It is a drama in people, instead of a drama in acts.” 1

Each heteronym is a total work of art, and the drama is played out within the tension between their integration and disintegration. They have their own reading notebooks and read widely different things. In Alexander Search’s reading notebook we find reference to six books written by an Italian psychiatrist, Cesare Lombroso and references of four books written by Max Nordau, the renowned physician and social critic. Both Alexander Search and Pessoa seem to have had ownership of Poems by Walt Whitman and his/their copy looked like “a veritable palimpsest, showing stratified comments made by different hands and at different times.” 2

This past month I spent time getting acquainted with Alvaro de Campos, the provocative futurist 3, globe trotting engineer and the most public and acerbic of the heteronyms I’ve met thus far.

In an essay “Sensationism began with the friendship between Fernando Pessoa…” (1916) Campos describes himself as:

“Álvaro de Campos is excellently defined as a Walt Whitman with a Greek poet inside. He has all the power of intellectual, emotional and physical sensation that characterised Whitman. But he has the precisely opposite trait — a Power of construction and orderly development of a poem that no poet since Milton has attained.” 

In Campos’ poetry we see the insatiable desire not only to feel all the feels but also to be all the feels:

My entire life—in its nervous, hysterical, absurd ensemble— 

The great organism in which every act of piracy ever committed 

Would be a conscious cell, and all of me would spin As a huge, rocking putridity, embodying all of this! 

The feverish machine of my teeming visions Now spins at such frightening, inordinate speed 

That my flywheel consciousness

Is just a blurry circle whirring in the air. 

Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest, Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum! 

Campos is not just the dreamer living the dreams of the multitudes, he’s also the environment, he’s the totality of being in one conscious seething cell. 

My initial reading of the Maritime Ode was that is was almost an extreme satirization of the Futurist Manifesto. As Pasciolla says "... Campos uses onomatopoeia and innumerable typographical devices to sing the praise of modern life, the crowd, speed, electricity and the machine." 4 Marinetti et al. wrote up their manifesto in the feverish days of 1909, when monarchies and archaic regimes were being overthrown and the future seemed actionable and within their grasp (futurism is the precursor to fascism so…things may have gotten a little out of hand.) The whole manifesto is applicable but for now I’ll just mention a few points: 

1. We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness. 
3. Up to now, literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy and sleep. We intend to eat aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap. 
5. We want to hymn the man at the wheel, who hurls the lance of his spirit across the earth, along the circle of its orbit. 
9. We will glorify war - the worlds only hygiene - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for women. 

We see all of this, the totality of the futurist manifesto, within the poetry of Campos. And yet it’s more than that. It’s not just the ideals and mantras of futurism, he has ingested futurism, and Marinetti, and Whitman and everything else. Whitman’s “barbaric yawp” is titrated with Marinetti’s danger song and Campos’ “old aunt” singing lullabies before bed. No priority is given. The democratic experience is lived out in both death and song.  

Maritime Ode (1915) begins with the poet standing on a pier and watching a ship slowly depart. We feel the same uncertain blank abyss from before, the separation between the self and the other, the failure of identity, of knowledge and of language. The poet retraces the “better life” (Whitman’s “Passage to India” - Rousseau's “noble savage” - Richard Wagner’s folk legends - etc) and slowly the rational (“to look”/“to see”) is replaced with sensation. (“to dream”/ “to feel”). 5

The uncertainty of the blank abyss the inconstancy of flaming desire builds to a climax and then comes screeching to a halt in song, or rather noise. This is the dogs havering from above, the frantic and yet unintelligible noise that is a metonym for the chaos of the twentieth century. 

Astern he dies, howling his song: 

Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest, Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum! 

And then yells in a blasting, unreal voice: 

Darby M’Graw-aw-aw-aw-aw!

Darby M’Graw-aw-aw-aw-aw-aw-aw-aw! Fetch a-a-aft the ru-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-um, Darby! 

Ah, what a life! what a life that was! Hey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey! Hey-la-oh-la-oh-la-OH-la-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah! Hey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey! 

Split keels, sunken ships, blood on the seas! Decks awash in blood, sectioned corpses! Severed fingers left lying on gunwales! Heads of children here and there! 

People with gouged eyes shouting, screaming! Hey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey! Hey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey!

I bundle up in all this as in a cloak when it’s cold!

I rub against all this like a cat in heat against a wall! I roar for all this like a famished lion! 

I rush at all this like a crazed bull!

I dig my nails into this, break my claws on it and chew it till 

my teeth bleed! Hey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey! 

Suddenly I hear the old cry, Now harsh, angry, metallic, Like a bugle blasting at my side, Calling the sighted prey, 

The schooner that’s going to be seized: 

Aho-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o- - - - yyyy . . .

Schooner aho-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o- - - - yyyy . . . 

Eventually his aunt's lullaby brings his focus back to the present and the glories of modernity: 

I’m no longer interested in the incoming steamer from before. It’s still far away.

Only what’s close now cleanses my soul.

My healthy, rugged, pragmatic imagination

Is concerned now only with useful, modern things,

With freighters, steamers and passengers,

With rugged, immediate, modern, commercial, real things. The flywheel in me is slowing down. 

Eventually as the ecstasy of modernity ebbs, he's again standing at the pier, watching the ship sail away. As the distance between them infinitely expands, he whispers: 

Disappear, follow your destiny and leave me...

Who am I to weep for you and question you? 

Who am I to speak to you and love you? 

[...]

Then nothing, just me and my sadness,

And the great city now bathed in sunlight,
And the real, naked hour like a wharf without ships,

And the slow turning of the crane, like a turning compass, 
Tracing a semicircle of I don’t know what emotion

In the staggered silence of my soul . . . 

I’m not sure how to end this, perhaps there is no ending. To quote Jonathon Culler: “there will always be new contextual possibilities that can be adduced, so that the one thing we cannot do is to set limits.” I think this is a good summation. There are no limits. 

I think maybe my parting salutation will be to say that I find Pessoa enchanting. He’s brilliant and yet playful, he doesn’t have the temperament or patience to become an acolyte of a singular doctrine or theory and instead tries them all. Reads everything. Experiences everything. And then in response creates heteronyms, distinct people within himself to live out the “spectacular view of the consciousness of the twentieth century” from different perspectives. He is the poet exemplar. He’s all of it. 

Like Physarum polycephalum, Pessoa is a phylum of his own. As the mycologist says of her beloved slime mold: we lack the words and vocabulary to perfectly describe what is happening.

Notes:
All Pessoa texts translated by Richard Zenith.

1. Fernando Pessoa, “Tabua Bilbliografica,” in Presenca No. 17 (1928) 10. Found in The Transformation Book: Edition Notes & Introduction by Nuno Ribeiro & Claudia Souza

2. Francesca Pasciolla, Walt Whitman in Fernando Pessoa (London: Critical, Cultural and Communications Press, 2016), 15.
3. Francesca Pasciolla, who makes the case that Pessoa/ Campos is not futurist, in that only a few of his works would fit within the parameters of this description. 

4. Francesca Pasciolla, Walt Whitman in Fernando Pessoa (London: Critical, Cultural and Communications Press, 2016), 23.
5. Fernano Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems, ed. Richard Zenith (London: Penguin, 2006) xiii.