PARIS LETTER
203
By this time, with everybody thoroughly confused, the curtain was
ready to go up at the Theatre Antoine. What emerged was a mammoth
historical play running for about four hours, in three acts and eleven
tableaux
(these latter more or less indicating shifts in time and space) ;
and as I sat watching it, I had an irresistible image of Sartre as the
Miltonic figure who meditates
Of Providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate
Fix'd fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute;
And found no end, in wand'ring mazes lost.
For Sartre, in
Le Diable et Ie Bon Dieu,
has decided to have it out
with God once and for all, and this is apt to be a decidedly lengthy
business. Renan once remarked, if I remember correctly, that it had
taken him twenty-five years, and the completion of head-splitting
Semitic studies, to come to the same conclusion that every Parisian
street
gamin
imbibed with his mother's milk-namely, that God was
a myth. Sartre doesn't take twenty-five years, but some of the scenes
in
Le Diable et Ie Bon Dieu
don't make it seem much shorter.
That Sartre a:nd God have never gotten along well is by now
an old story. But Sartre becomes so vehement in
Le Diable et Ie Bon
Dieu
that a Catholic like Fran($ois Mauriac publicly wondered-in
his front-page
feuilleton
in
Le Figaro-why
Sartre worked himself up
to such a pitch about Something (or Somebody) he is sure doesn't
exist. The answer, I think, is not that Sartre has a secret hankering
to be a Christian (as Mauriac complaisantly implies), but rather that
Sartre is suffering from a much more run-of-the-mill frustration. There
could
be
few things more infuriating, I should imagine, than to keep
swinging at Somebody (or Something) on whom you can't, by definition,
ever hope to land a blow. And if we glance at Sartre's thought, we
shall find that paradoxically he has nobody else to fight but this
imaginary Opponent.
Reduced to its simplest terms, Sartre's philosophy sees the tragic
error of human life in man's desire to attain the exalted state that
Sartre, after Hegel, calls
Ie pour-soi-en-soi
(for oneself-in-oneself). Man,
in other words, desires to be both the tranquil, unchanging, unthinking
essence of a thing
(en-soi)
and the continually changing existence of
his consciousness as a human being
(pour-soi)
; but the fact of conscious–
ness brings with it the irrecoverable loss of the
en-soi.
By nature, there–
fore, man for Sartre is a
conscience malheureuse
(unhappy conscious–
ness) because he wants to reach this impossible totality. Now the image
of this totality is God, and Sartre writes in
L'Etre et Ie Neant
that
"human reality is a pure effort to become God...."
