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thrope), or as the expression of a passion, is of no value to the spectator
because the character does not touch upon his true preoccupations.
Sartre is concerned with putting on the stage certain universal
situations, in which his characters make their choices as free men, that
is, in which they choose their own being. More exactly, Sartre's aim is
to lead the spectator to
participate
in those choices. This notion of par–
ticipation can have one of two implications: either an ethical, or a thera–
peutic one. Sartre would reject the former, since for him there is no
absolute morality, no ethical frame of reference, from which basis the
playwright can point out the good choice from the bad one. It seems
that Sartre's intentions are purely therapeutic. In an article in the June
1946
Theatre Arts,
Sartre states, "We believe our the.ater would betray
its mission if it portrayed individual personalities ... because
if
it is to
address the masses, the theater must speak in terms of their most general
preoccupations,
dispelling their anxieties
in the form of myths which
anyone can understand and feel deeply."
An apparent contradiction to this idea of cathartic participation is
Sartre's interest in increasing the distance between spectator and spectacle.
"To us a play should not seem too familiar," he says. "Its greatness
derives from its social, and in a sense, religious functions: it must remain
a rite; even as it speaks to the spectators of themselves it must do it in
a tone and with a constant reserve of manner which, far from breeding
familiarity, will increase the distance between play and audience." But,
less pretentiously, keeping the image of man's conflicts at a respectful
distance is probably also meant to increase the liberty of the spectator.
If
Sartre's plays were so horrifying, so close to the audience's immediate
sufferings, he would no longer be proposing freely to a free spectator,
but he would be imposing by fear on a defenseless public.
1
The Orestes-Electra plot of
The Flies,
and the
No Exit
hell in a
Second Empire salon are, then, "mythical" situations-no open stock–
pattern symbols, but the embodiment of eternal conflicts of rights and
values. The fact that these situations are not
realistic,
in the classic sense,
keeps the participating public at least at first row balcony distance.
The
Flies
is an easier play in the matter of participation: Orestes has two
concrete alternatives, either to play yogi or to kill. No conflict could
have been clearer to the play's original audience, in a German-occupied
Paris-and if Orestes' choice needed simplification, Sartre was there to
supply sufficient polemic dialogue. Sartre's point is inescapable: Orestes
kills Aegisthus and Clytemnestra, the forces of enslavement, with a
1.
This is what Simone de Beauvoir termed "aesthetic rules," in a recent
talk at the Museum of Modern Art, in New York. In this connection, it is
interesting to consider how useful such theatrical rules can be to Sartre, whose
work is essentially cerebral. With or without the justification of his theories,
Sartre's cold and highly convoluted intellect restricts communication between
playwright and audience.
