-PARIS LETTER
479
self through the
·fall
(into error, "inauthenticity") from which he can
rise only through the "clear night of his anguish." There is no need, for
the moment, to go any further into detail. Existentialist thinking shifts
every emphasis, every problem, to this center: man's sense of his own
situation. The problem of Death, to cite a celebrated example, becomes
the problem of "I am dying." Speaking of H enri Gouhier, in the weekly
Carrefour,
Jean Grenier says: "He makes us see that wars have
placed
existence under a menace
... As (man's) existence was more and more
endangered, he attached ever more value to it ; and, pressed by necessity,
disgusted with the intelligence, he adopted for wisdom what would
have appeared a folly to his predecessors, for salvation what would
have appeared a flight and a denial. The very notion of philosophy, as it
had been traditionally conceived, i.e. as the quest for a truth lasting and
valid for all ... has been completely placed in question." And further,
Grenier has an excellent formula for the new philosophy: "It presents
itself as an explosion of individuals, a revolt of pure subjectivity. But,
by an unforeseen reversal, this attitude pushed to the extreme ends by
destroying itself: if there exists nothing but a truth valid for a concrete
and individual subject, this subject can itself be studied in its intimate
structure, its value judgments can become the object of knowledge."
Sartre's critics, of course, accuse him of denying the role of society in
the evolution of the individual's values; the same critics accuse Camus
of sapping the philosophical basis of all social action. Sartre, who is
founding a new review this fall, devoted to the cause of
la litterature
engagee,
replies that he is simply consummating the final death of the
gods. In
L es Mouches,
Sartre's most important play, Jupiter says to the
rebellious Orestes : "Remember, Orestes, you were part of my flock....
Your liberty is only an itching mange, it is only an exile ... the evil
is not deep, it dates from yesterday. Come back to us. See how alone
you are, even your sister abandons you. You are pale, and anguish
dilates your eyes. Do you hope to live? You are gnawed by an inhuman
evil, foreign to my nature, foreign to yourself. Come back, I am oblivion,
I am repose."
To which Orestes replies: "Foreign to myself I know. Beyond
nature, against nature, without excuse, with no recourse but myself.
But I will not come back to your law: I am condemned to have no
other law than my own.... For I am a man, Jupiter, and each man
must make his own path."
Actually, a great deal more is involved. But one must make a
distinction between Sartre the artist and Sartre the philosopher of
L'Etre et Le Neant.
This would bring us, first, to the interesting ques–
tion of how this murky metaphysics functions as a literary ideology (for
I believe that these people, like almost all philosophical litterateurs, are
idolaters, in the Proustian sense of the word) and, secondly, to the
important differences between writers like Sartre and Camus-whom
