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after Mathieu has stolen the money for an abortion, Marcelle refuses his
help and marries the homosexual, Daniel, who is willing for her to
have another man's child. Mathieu's most significant act is the an–
nouncement that, even after he has been released from his obligation to
Marcelle, he is no freer than before, still alone.
In speaking of the hero's temperament, Sartre says, "Various tried
and proved rules of conduct had already discreetly offered him their
services: disillusioned epicureanism, smiling tolerance, resignation, flat
seriousness, stoicism-all the aids whereby a man may savor, minute by
minute, like a connoisseur, the failure of a life." But Sartre has not
really shown Mathieu in the act of living through the "proved rules of
conduct" and so his rejection of them isn't very interesting. Mathieu
starts out just as he ends, a peculiarly flat character divided into three
distinct parts-indiscriminate sexual needs, Marcelle; romantic love,
Ivich; personal needs unconnected with others, his love of freedom
and desire to be himself. The fact that he ends just as he started is
one of Sartre's points and, in finding this characterization meaningless,
one does not thereby imply that human beings must through their
experiences become fundamentally altered or any less relentlessly alone.
The point is that we are alone
plus;
alone and unhappy, alone and
maladjusted in a particular way, alone and full of contraries. For some
reason Sartre will not look the psychological ambiguities and motiva–
tions in the eye.
Furthermore, the dramatic situation in which Sartre has cast
Mathieu is not a fundamental moral issue of our time. For better or for
worse it is understood, if not condoned, that a man
will
edge out of his
responsibilities for pregnancy and so this crisis, in spite of its general
dramatic content, lacks tragic, fateful inevitabilities for the hero. Mathieu
is faced with a concrete dilemma which, as Sartre has treated it, tests
man's practical, animal ingenuity far more than it illustrates the uni-
. versa! problem of man's freedom to act in accordance with his own
knowledge of himself. In the hands of another writer this situation would
be more than adequate for a novel, but Sartre lacks so much
of
the
traditional novelistic equipment that we ask, as a substitute for char–
acters, a significant parable of the human condition.
The Age of R easO'n
offers neither one man nor mankind.
Nothing could be further removed from Sartre and his notion that
the writer cannot "sneak away" from his times than E. M. Forster's
stories in
The Celestial Omnibus
and
The Eternal Moment,
now is–
sued in one volume by Knopf. Forster looks backward to Greece or,
with the passionate intensity of the heroine of "The Eternal Moment,"
to twenty years before when a charming hotel had not been defiled by
electric signs and modern conveniences.
