242
PARTISAN REVIEW
the intimate texture of the hero's experience and sensibility. The quo–
tation from CCline on the flyleaf is no idle gesture, for Celine has been
as much an influence as Heidegger, and in the same direction. The
Heideggerian Nothing and the nihilism of Celine are equally authentic
expressions of the life of the twentieth century. Modern man has looked
into the abyss, and his conception of being must now be inseparably
involved with the Nothing. The book has been criticized for its disgust–
a criticism which is itself a little disgusting. It forgets that no disgust
could possibly be adequate to modern life. We have a right to demand
of the author only that his disgust be interesting.
Sartre's disgust is perhaps less interesting than Celine's. More intel–
lectually self-conscious and philosophically subtle, but also more static,
it does not become embodied, like Celine's, in the desperate picaresque
of common life and in the anonymous depths of the characters of the
street.
La Nausee
is not so much a novel as an extraordinary fragment
of a novel. Much as one prized its intensity and narrowness, one could
also hope that the author would go on to a more straightforward novel
embodying his ideas more completely
in
plot and character. Alas that
his later novels should turn off in the direction of Jules Romains!
The collection of short-stories,
Le Mur,
falls below the level of this
first novel. These stories have moments of intensity-in
Le Mur, L'En–
fance d'un Chef,
and in
LaChambre,
perhaps the best of the collection–
but they are also somewhat forced, and do not leave us with any power–
ful and lasting impression. Sartre does not have the gift of pregnant
concision, which the shorter form demands, and the book reveals one
thing so far lacking in him as a writer: an authentic style-the quality
which can make a single page by Gide of consuming interest.
Mter
La Nausec, Huis Clos
is Sartre's best work. His other play,
Les M ouches
is something of a set piece which exists mainly for the sake
of the thrilling eloquence in the final clash between Orestes and Jupiter.
In
Huis Clos
we are closer to the center of Sartre's real talents: its
intense driving energy is something we can recognize as authentically his.
The three characters are planted in Hell, where they are to be
punished, as in Dante, by being given simply the logical consequence of
their sin. Having practised "bad faith" in life, they now
have
what
they had sought to surrender themselves to: their lives are what they
are and nothing in them can be changed. They have no more being than
what they have in the eyes of others. A torment, in fact, which people
do choose on earth. The bourgeois and the anti-semite, Sartre says, have
chosen to become only what they are in the eyes of others, to possess
their being like a
thing.
But after acknowledging the excitement and intensity of the play
as theatre, we have to repeat our reservations as to the narrowness of
the author's gifts. The three characters are thinly blocked out figures,
