316
PARTISAN REVIEW
him. By indifference, those on earth make them die again. "I've left my
fate in their hands," says Garcin. "To
be
dead is to
be
the prey of the
living," says Sartre
in
L'Etre et le Neant.
It is the final victory of the
others.
This brief and brutal play deserves to
be
considered in other terms
than these inadequate interpretative ones. As means to a philosopher's
ends,
No Exit
is certainly successful, as theater it is a work of enormous
talent. Sartre's theatrical genius is partly in his technique; that tense,
intense dialogue torn from characters who, in life, would be burdened
with the incommunicable. Submerged
in
the grotesque, they name their
crimes, and speak their anguish. Despite Sartre's expressed disinterest
in psychology,
No Exit
is a piercing psychoanalytical study.
Unfortunately for the American reader who does not have the
French text at hand, Stuart Gilbert is obviously irresponsible as regards
Sartre's stylistic brilliance. For example,
"Nous voici, nus comme des
vers,"
becomes "Now you have us in the nude all right." As for
The Flies,
the combination of slang and extraordinary beauty of dialogue is almost
completely lost in Mr. Gilbert's dullard English- and with it goes most
of its value as a work of art.
PATRICIA BLAKE
THE WORLD AS INFERNO
THE TowER
OF
BABEL..
By Elias Canetti. Translat ed by
C.
V. Wedg-
wood. Knopf.
$3.50.
T
HE THREE TITLES of this book specify its vision of evil :
Die Blendung
it was originally called, in the English edition
Auto-da-fe,
and now
The Tower of Babel ;
on those three levels of metaphor it apprehends
our predicament: as hallucinatory displacement, as immolation by fire,
as failure of communication. The specification of our world as Inferno
has become so commonplace a concern of recent novelists (the genera–
tions brought up to the heresies of Optimism and Progress have com–
pulsively to as ert Hell, and our being in it, over and over) , that we
wince a little at the prospect of yet another fable on the theme. But this
is essentially an honest vision, translated into a sound and autonomous
fiction; I mean a fiction verifiable point by point as experience and per–
ception, not completely reducible to the total revelation of alienation
and corruption that prompts it.
First of all, there is a thick, literal sense of Europe between the wars
(the book was first published in 1935), of the City (our hells are inev–
itably urban), the terribre seediness of the pawnshop, the dive, the police
court, the hotel corridor, the streets where ennui waits the cue to become
terror. It is into this world that Peter Kien, Sinologist, is thrust from the
quiet alienation of his study, after his gesture at human engagement,
the sudden marriage to his cretinous housekeeper. He emerges into it
quite mad, but is, in a sense, at home among its less spectacular derange-
