238
PARTISAN
REVI~W
Stalinist religion supplied them with absolute imperatives to resist as
soon as Germany was at war with Russia, the French were without clear
and definite political ideas on which to act.
If,
for the most part, they
resisted out of an instinctive hatred for the Germans, as foreigners and
masters, they also felt they could not retain their humanity without
resisting. This resistance was
absurd :
it was necessary if one were still
to remain a man, but there was no well-defined end outside the act
justifying it. Every act of resistance became a Heideggerian "project."
As we get close to the state of mind of the Resistance, Sartre's philoso–
phic categories become remarkably and luminously applicable. And he
himself, in tum, is modified by the Resistance. The difference between
the disgust of
La Nausee,
1938, and the heroism of
Les Mouches,
1943,
is the measure of how far he has changed with the changing situation
of France. Both experiences-nausea and heroism-have their place in
Sartre's philosophy, but the change in emphasis is unmistakable, and
just as unmistakably dictated by the external pressure of events. ·
Which brings us again before the perpetual and recurring problem
of the writer and his limelight. The writer in America can continue to
exist only by fleeing the limelight. The admiration in France for Amer–
ican fiction may soon indicate a situation of publishers, writers, and read–
ers, not altogether unlike America's. The limelight can make good use
of Sartre's extraordinary talents for the publicity of ideas. But the lime–
light, like a woman, rejects as well as accepts: a public figure, a leader,
a
chef
(to use the word so hated by Sartre) must be "positive" rather
than "negative," even
if
this involve sacrifice of the particular quality
which had previously resulted in his best writing. Sensational public
success makes the writer believe in the immaculate rightness of his first
draft, which he now gives to the world as a finished novel. The public's
clamor to know about his ideas makes him tum out an enormous mani–
festo, bandaged and limping at a hundred points, as a finished philoso–
phical treatise.
In a world full of cheating, Sartre says in one of his stories, it is
difficult to
be
honest. This idea of "bad faith," which runs through all
his writing, is developed most explicitly in his
L'Etre et le Neant.
Bad
faith is not merely the characteristic of the habitual liar and cheat, but
a universal threat to the human condition. We practise bad faith when
we confuse our status with our human reality. A waiter or a bourgeois
declares: that's what I am, waiter or bourgeois. He thinks he possesses
his being, as waiter or bourgeois, as stone or table is what it is, stone or
table. He gives himself up to the mechanism of his function . His bad
faith consists in concealing from himself that his function too depends
upon his human choice. Afraid of his freedom, he conceals it from him–
self by pretending-and indeed striving-to be what he is and no more.
Sartre himself, now playing a public role, is compelled to practise
