The Day of the Owl - Leonardo Sciascia

This month I'm reading Leonardo Sciascia's Day of the Owl and going down a rabbit trail researching the Sicilian Mafia:) Book report to follow.

Homage to Catalonia - George Orwell

One day in December of 1936, Eric Arthur Blair did what many young idealists of the time were doing: he made his way from England to Barcelona, (wife in tow) to join the Spanish militia to fight against Franco and the global specter of fascism. As a journalist, he had originally anticipated writing articles documenting the brutal civil war, but almost immediately the revolutionary atmosphere of Barcelona persuaded him to abandon his pen and join arms with his fellow revolutionaries. The International Brigade, comprised of volunteers from around the world, were taking their stand to fight for the “last great cause.”

Blair would eventually adopt the pen name “George Orwell,” and his experience would be written into a short memoir, Homage to Catalonia, but at this exact moment in time, Orwell was standing in line to register for one of the “kaleidoscope of political parties” and somewhat arbitrarily getting assigned to the POUM or the The Workers' Party of Marxist Unification. Not knowing there were differences to each political faction, the “plague of initials” and the myriad of political parties seemed chaotic and unnecessary. Weren’t they all revolutionaries? Weren’t they all there to fight against the Hitlers and Mussolinis that had slowly been sucking the countries of Europe (and Abyssinia) into their vortex? The democratic peoples of the world had stood by and watched their governments do nothing, one altercation at a time and then the people of Catalonia had decided to take their stand, and volunteers from around the world had traveled to stand with them. 

“If you had asked me why I had joined the militia I should have answered: ‘To fight against Fascism.’ and if you had asked me what I was fighting for, I should have answered: ‘Common decency.’ I had accepted the News Chronicle-New Statesmen version of the war as the defense of civilization against a maniacal outbreak by an army of Colonel Blimps in the pay of Hitler…

As a militiaman one was a soldier against Franco, but one was also a pawn in an enormous struggle that was being fought out between two political theories. When I scrounged for firewood on the mountain-side and wondered whether this was really the war or whether the News Chronicle had made it up, when I dodged the Communist machine-guns in the Barcelona riots, when I finally fled from Spain with the police one jump behind me- all these things happened to me in that particular way because I was serving in the POUM militia and not in the PSUC. So great is the difference between two sets of initials!” [p. 198]

And so, like Alice, he fell down a rabbit hole and emerged into a type of Wonderland that festered with chaos and disorganization and perpetually defied reason.

Ostensibly, he was volunteering for the Republicans, (a coalition of pro-democracy left wing parties,) but this ‘plague of initials’ had ominous implications. He was joining forces with an “idea” that had been fractured by internal division amongst the many differing views of socialism and communism, and without a unifying stance the infighting amongst the left was precariously poised to collapse. Stalin had greatly reduced his military commitment to the leftist rebels, out of fear of becoming overextended in territorial disputes closer to home, practically this resulted in lack of supplies and an impoverished militia, forced to cobble together weaponry to throw at Franco’s Nationalists (comprised of right-wing conservative Catholics), well supplied by Hitler and Mussolini. 

“I have spoken of the militia ‘uniform’ which probably gives a wrong impression. It was not exactly a uniform. Perhaps ‘multiform’ would be the proper name for it. Everyone’s clothes followed the same general plan, but they were never quite the same in any two cases.” [p.7]

Frequently without blankets, guns that worked or the ammunition to fire with, the revolutionary battalion seemed to have materialized from another era, if not an entirely different dimension.

‘On my second day at the barracks there began what was comically called ‘instruction’. At the beginning there were frightful scenes of chaos. The recruits were mostly boys of sixteen or seventeen from the back streets of Barcelona, full of revolutionary ardor but completely ignorant of the meaning of war. It was impossible even to get them to stand in line. Discipline did not exist; if a man disliked an order he would step out of the ranks and argue fiercely with the officer. ” [p.7] 

Drill practice usually dissolved into a swarm of men stopping over at the corner grocers and drinking cheep wine. There was the occasional troop transport that got lost en route with the volunteer militia wandering in the mist for hours looking for their battle station. The disorganization was epic. 

With attacks from the enemy infrequent and rarely concerning, Orwell finds the majority of his time taken up with matters of survival rather than war, as he forages for kindling, food, tobacco, candles and the enemy. 

“War, to me, meant roaring projectiles and skipping shards of steel; above all it meant, mud, lice, hunger, and cold. It is curious, but I dreaded the cold much more than I dreaded the enemy. The thought of it had been haunting me all the time I was in Barcelona; I had even lain awake at nights thinking of the old cold in the trenches, the stand-to’s in the grisly dawns, the long hours on the sentry-go with a frosted rifle, the icy mud that would slop over my boot tops. I admit, too, that I felt a kind of horror as I looked at the people I was marching among. You cannot possibly conceive what a rabble we looked. We straggled along with far less cohesion than a flock of sheep; before we had gone two miles the rear of the column was out of sight…It seemed dreadful that the defenders of the Republic should be this mob of ragged children carrying worn-out rifles which they did not know how to use.” [p18]

The trenches were filled with excrement; the weaponry was so awful that Orwell spends a good deal of time recording in detail the specific atrocities: one machine gun to fifty men, twenty year old Mausers that continually jammed, ammunition so scarce that each man was issued only fifty rounds…total, no tin hats, no bayonets, grenades that only detonate half the time, etc. 

But perhaps the most inconvenient and troublesome thing became the perpetual trouser louse. 

“The human louse somewhat resembles a tiny lobster, and he lives continually in your trousers. Short of burning all your clothes there is no known way of getting rid of him. Down the seems of your trousers he lays his glittering white eggs, like tiny grains of rice, which hatch out and breed families of their own at horrible speed. I think the pacifists might find it helpful to illustrate their pamphlets with enlarged photographs of lice. Glory of war, indeed! In war all soldiers are lousy, at least when it is warm enough. The men who fought at Verdun, at Waterloo, at Flodden, at Senlac, at Thermopylae - every one of them had lice crawling over his testicles. “ [p. 54]

In April, after four months at the front, Orwell is given leave and returns to Barcelona to find his wife. The lice had been multiplying in his trousers faster than he could kill them, he had no socks and his boots had worn such a variety of holes that he was essentially barefoot. He wanted a hot bath, to fall asleep between clean sheets and for a few days re-emerge into civilized society.  Despite the lack of adequate…everything, he had retained an aura of hope: 

“When we went on leave I had been a hundred and fifteen days in the line, and at the time this period seemed to me to have been one of the most futile of my whole life. I had joined the militia in order to fight against Fascism, and as yet I had scarcely fought at all, had merely existed as a sort of passive object, doing nothing in return for my rations except to suffer from the cold and lack of sleep. Perhaps that is the fate of most soldiers in most wars. But now that I can see this period in perspective I do not altogether regret it…They formed a kind of interregnum in my life quite different from anything that had gone before and perhaps from anything that is to come, and they taught me things that I could not have learned in any other way.” [p. 86] 

What he learned was that despite the deprivations, despite their lack of experience and having virtually done nothing of military value: “One had been in a community where hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism, where the word ‘comrade’ stood for comradeship and not, as in most countries, for humbug. One had breathed the air of equality.”  [p.87]

During his absence, the atmosphere of Barcelona had changed. No more revolutionary spirit, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity!” had been exchanged for disparity. Hierarchies had reemerged between class and the bourgeoisie had reinstated itself. While food and commodities were scarce for the working class, the wealthy luxuriated in their blackmarket goods and pleasantries. Perhaps more disturbing was the militarized in-fighting between the Communists and the Marxists. Barricades had been erected and the communists accused the POUM of being fascist traitors. 

The political turmoil is disillusioning. The division between the left is far greater than he had initially realized, it is fractured beyond repair and threatens to cripple the Republicans’ war effort against the Nationalists. Rather than idealists fighting for home in humanity, the communists have been revealed to be undemocratic manipulative aggressors, like any other political party vying for power. 

And while the civil war rages in its own Spanish way, and while the political factions are bent on tearing each other apart, the general population has grown indifferent. Their attention span for war and deprivation has run its course and they seem less enthused about revolution than they are about the occasional trip to the beach for a quick sunbathe. The ‘front’ had become a sort of ‘mythical far off place’ where men and boys went off and disappeared or returned home with wealth (their back pay) if not glory. In just a few short months, being a revolutionary was no longer fashionable. 

Orwell returns to the front and is subsequently shot in the neck. Once again he makes his way back to Barcelona where the political infighting has now spilled over into the citizenry. There is an atmosphere of “suspicion, fear, uncertainty and veiled hatred.” The war that seemed impossible to find has now emerged in the streets of Barcelona.

“The whole huge town of a million people was locked in a sort of violent inertia, a nightmare of noise without movement. The sunlit streets were quite empty. Nothing was happening except the streaming of bullets from barricades and sandbagged windows…What the devil was happening, who was fighting whom and who was winning, was at first very difficult to discover.” [p.117] 

The rest and luxury of Barcelona has been exchanged for the deprivations of the frontline, and Orwell and his wife live off the occasional sardine and bits of goat cheese. Orwell had picked the wrong political party and now his membership in POUM has made him a fugitive. His friends and compatriots are being thrown into jail en masse, in what can only be described as a reign of terror. The law, for now, was what the police decided to make it. 

As the Spanish hope for democracy seems to be over, the only hope seems to be if Franco and his mercenaries can be driven into the sea and exchanged for any other form of stifling dictatorship, even that would have been worth fighting for. 

Orwell and his wife miraculously manage to get on a train and leave the country, escaping to France, only too eager to leave the chaos of Barcelona behind them. Despite the horror, despite all of the mess and disorganization, as Orwell looks back on his experience rather than disillusionment or horror he has a sense of hope and in a strange way a cemented “belief in the decency of human beings.”  In every climate, on every battlefield, there exists the potential for both the cowardly and the heroic. And despite the odds, people will continue to fight for what they believe in. 

Gabriele D'Annunzio

Last summer we went to Croatia with Matthew’s parents and brother and as we wound our way through the city we stopped in every bookstore we could find. Books are our scavenger hunt item. Living in a non-English speaking country, English books are harder to find then one would expect. But the real treasure quest are for English books that are also on the Western Canon. It’s very rare and incredibly exciting when it actually happens. 

So, miraculously, in a little Croatian bookstore I found Alfred Doblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz…and what has followed has been an incredibly long and complex rabbit trail…or perhaps series of rabbit trails. 

80 pages in I realized I needed to stop and give myself a history lesson. What was the difference between fascism and communism, and how was Rosa Luxembourg (a Marxist) supported by both? Or was it neither? Men in different colored shirts (green, brown, black) are continuously starting brawls about politics in bars. There are oblique references to “Arras” and hyperinflation and the Dawes Act, etc. 

So I moved Alexanderplatz to the back burner and picked up Existentialism instead…and between the lines of the existentialists is this background radiation in the shape of Nietzsche… so I put a pin in that and decided to take a class about European Dictators between WWI and WWII.  After this class and all the subsequent rabbit trails it has led me down I think I will finally be able to read Alexanderplatz in good faith. 

I’m four weeks into the class. Last week we discussed the rise of fascism in Italy and I came across someone very interesting: Gabriele D’Annunzio, the hero-poet. And it is here, with D’Annunzio, that all the rabbit trails converge. 

Disclaimer: While Gabriele D'Annunzio is on the list (Mais: In Praise of Life) I could not find a translation in English, so this month is more of query into the history of fascism than a traditional book report. 

Gabriele D’Annunzio was the father of fascism. He was a poet, a playwright, a national hero, an aviator for the Italian air force, a womanizer, the first “Il Duce,” the first to bring back the Roman salute, and quite possibly a psychopath. 

D’Annunzio began his international fame and notoriety with his attempt to rescue/ seize the port city of Fiume in September of 1919. The war had ended and the Austro-Hungarian empire needed to be reorganized along new lines recognizing new nations. Fiume had increasingly become a source of international tension. President Wilson argued that Fiume should become a buffer state between Italy and the Kingdoms of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later what would become Yugoslavia.) Wilson also suggested as an independent state, Fiume could be the future home of the League of Nations.

But not on D’Annunzio’s watch. He quickly cobbled together a makeshift army, easy for him to do as a celebrated national hero-poet, and began his march on Fiume to take back what was rightfully Italian. Followed by 186 soldiers, his big red (new) Fiat, so filled with flowers it was regularly mistaken for a hearse, slowly made it’s way forward. Even the Allied blockades were no match for D’Annunzio, being comprised of sympathetic Italian soldiers, who largely agreed with what D’Annunzio was doing. Rather then mount a resistance, one by one the soldiers would step aside, some even deserting to join ranks with D’Annunzio’s DIY militia.

“By the time he reached Fiume his following was some 2,000 strong. He was welcomed into the city by rapturous crowds who had been up all night waiting for him. An officer passing through the main square in the early hours of that morning saw it filled with women wearing evening dress and carrying guns, an image that nicely encapsulates the nature of the place - at once a phantasmagorical party and a battleground - during the fifteen months that D’Annunzio would hold Fiume as its Duce and dictator, in defiance of all the Allied powers.” (1)

D’Annunzio was described as a man of vehement and simultaneously incoherent political views. As a poet and artist he was an expert at crafting a turn of phrase and molding the emotions of the body politic. With his words and his guidance the populace was willing to rabidly follow his lead wherever it would take them. 

“He called his Fiume a “searchlight radiant” in the midst of an ocean of abjection.” It was a sacred fire whose sparks, flying on the wind, would set the world alight. It was the “City of the Holocaust.”  (2)

And with his charismatic presence and powerful rhetoric he attracted the most heterogeneous of advocates to his ‘city on a hill.” Lucy Hughes-Hallet describes this environment bristling with energy: 

“The place became a political laboratory. Socialists, anarchists, syndicalists, and some of those who had begun, earlier that year, to call themselves fascists, congregated there. Representatives of Sinn Fein and of nationalist groups from India and Egypt arrived, discreetly followed by British agents. Then there were the groups whose homeland was not of this earth: the Union of Free Spirits Tending Toward Perfection, who met under a fig tree in the old town to talk about love and the abolition of money, and YOGA, a kind of political-club-cum-street-gang described by one of its members as “an Island of the Blest in the infinite sea of History.””  (3)

So, here we see the origination of fascism with a nebulous political agenda. I think it’s easy to disregard the idealism of fascism. What it became has become synonymous with evil…but I think what was initially so appealing to such a wide variety of people was the hope that it proclaimed. A new future, a new vision with endless potential and possibility. [Granted, the ever present bullying regularly tipped over into murder/ hate crimes and the murders were frequently  directed against perceived outsiders like the Vietnamese-French soldiers, stabbed to death along the quay…] Eventually there would be clearly defined structures, but those would not fall into place until after almost twenty years of being slow boiled in a culture medium of volatile rhetoric. 

This is how fascism starts. Through poetry, through associations, through the deep almost dreamlike quality of associative propaganda…no one begins with the “death to the democrats” (Mussolini)…you get there slowly by first arguing for small injuries, like Mussolini’s 1922 summation of his political program: “It is to break the bones of the democrats…and the sooner the better.”  What’s a little bone breaking? Am I right? 

Here’s an example of fascist poetry, written by D’Annunzio in 1917:

THE DAWN DIVIDES THE DARKNESS FROM LIGHT

The dawn divides the darkness from light,

And my sensual pleasure from my desire,

O sweet stars, it is the hour of death.

A love more holy clears you from the skies.

Gleaming eyes, O you who'll ne'er return,

sad stars, snuff out your uncorrupted light!

I must die, I do not want to see the day,

For love of my own dream and of the night.

Envelop me,

O Night, in your maternal breast,

While the pale earth bathes itself in dew;

But let the dawn rise from my blood

And from my brief dream the eternal sun!

And from my brief dream the eternal sun!

So much is happening between the lines of this poem. At first glance it seems so benign. The first line alludes to a division: 

“The dawn divides the darkness from light,”

Fascism is ultimately a policy of us vs. them. It quickly capitalizes on mankind’s predilection for tribalism and then shifts it into a more aggressive form of division. With an emphasis on nationalism, the “us” gets used to being defined with heroic rhetoric, marking them apart from the rest of humanity. They represent the “light” while everyone and everything else represents the “dark” opposition. (We see this in policies like Manifest Destiny and the Monroe Doctrine.) 

In How Fascism Works: Politics of Us and Them Jason Stanley describes the danger of these divisions as coming from: “The particular way in which it dehumanizes segments of the population. By excluding these groups, it limits the capacity for empathy among other citizens, leading to the justification of inhumane treatment, from repression of freedom, mass imprisonment, and expulsion to, in extreme cases, mass extermination.”  (4)

O sweet stars, it is the hour of death.

A love more holy clears you from the skies.

In May of 1919, D’Annunzio’s rhetoric became more religious/ blasphemous and increasingly seditious. Italy had emerged as a victor, but was politically unstable and financially depressed. What D’Annunzio would refer to as a “mutilated victory.” He pandered to a populace that felt disadvantaged, both financially and geopolitically. For D’Annunzio the war wasn’t over. This was the moment to rise up and claim victory for the Italian soldiers lying dead, scattered throughout European soil. 

“He said that Christ was calling out to the Italians to “rise up and not be afraid.” He led his listeners in chants in which the word “blood” tolled repeatedly - the blood shed already, the blood which yet must flow to cleanse Italy of the filthy shame of a negotiated peace. He was blasphemous, unreasonable, electrifying.” (5)

And so we see the “hour of death” being described as both necessary and heroic. The skies themselves represented the realm of the Übermensch or Superman, and those risking the sky-high missions of WWI had now taken their place as these super-human beings, beyond the judgment of a human tribunal. 

“Mass slaughter clears the space from which the superman can soar. D’Annunzio mourned the flyers, his friends, but he did not regret their deaths.” (6)

In both the second and third stanza again we see an emphasis on this need for a heroic cleansing death. “I must die, I do not want to see the day,” and again “But let the dawn rise from my blood."

Gleaming eyes, O you who'll ne'er return,

sad stars, snuff out your uncorrupted light!

The dead soldier would become a leitmotif throughout much of D’Annunzio’s subsequent work, symbolizing the mythology of war and emerging as the sacrificial victim, hero, and martyr. Their lives and more heroic deaths would become the rallying cry to join the dead saints and pursue the promise of a future glory.  

This is one out of four poems written for the operatic singer Francesco Paolo Tosti. Does this in a way represent a subterranean anthem of sorts? This poem would have been sung with passion or hummed while doing the dishes and going about the banality of daily domestic life. It seems like it would be impossible to sing the lines “But let the dawn rise from my blood” without in some capacity becoming “weaponized.”

I think tracing these patterns of thought through history are relevant because as the adage says: history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy the second time as farce. The Italians after WWI were struggling with their national identity and wanted an authoritative figure to give them guidance, at one point, that figure was internationally expected to be D’Annunzio. Instead they ended up with Mussolini. Madeline Albright describes fascism as being constructed through the politics of fear. 

“Fear is why Fascism’s emotional reach can extend to all levels of society. No political movement can flourish without popular support, but Fascism is as dependent on the wealthy and powerful as it is on the man or woman in the street -on those who have much to lose and those who have nothing at all.” (7)

I would argue that equally seditious is blinding patriotism and a charismatic leader. One hundred years after D’Annunzio marched his militia into Fiume, once more the world finds itself in the throes of populist movements. Fascism isn’t something that happened once a hundred years ago, it’s something always lurking beneath the surface. And maybe this is how it begins: With a leader charismatic enough to be equated with the second coming of Christ. As soon as religious language becomes the lingua franca of the political spectrum, we are sinking into miry propagandized rhetoric. 

There’s a great Neal Gabler quote that says “True religion, I believe, begins in doubt and continues in spiritual exploration. Debased religion begins in fear and terminates in certainty.” 

I wonder if it’s a good time to pause and wonder what it is that we’re humming. What subterranean rhetoric influences our opinions and values possibly to the point that we’re no longer recognizable to ourselves? Have our emotions been radicalized for someone else's agenda? What hot button topics do we find ourselves senselessly enraged over, ready to pick up our sabers and fight for to the death? Maybe metaphorically we’re always standing across the boundary line, one foot in Fiume pursuing the idealism of politics buttressed by hate, with the other foot in the nomads land of contested soil. 

We can’t know which way we’re going unless we can see. Here’s to civil discourse and the pursuit of wisdom!

1. Hughes-Hallett, Lucy. The Pike: Gabriele DAnnunzio Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War. Fourth Estate, 2013.p.15

2. Ibid. p16

3.Ibid. p17

4. Stanley, Jason. How Fascism Works: the Politics of Us and Them. Random House Publishing Group, 2018. p.xiv

5. Hughes-Hallett, Lucy. The Pike: Gabriele DAnnunzio Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War. Fourth Estate, 2013. p. 951

6. Ibid. p.839

7. Albright, Madeleine, and Bill Woodward. Fascism a Warning. William Collins, 2018. p.8

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.