204
PARTISAN REVIEW
In
L'Etre et le Neant,
Sartre was more or less inclined to throw
up his hands at this unfortunate state of affairs. Man was in the soup,
the poor, bedeviled creature was apparently doomed to spend the
next couple of millennia with the
pour-soi
eternally and despairingly
chasing the
en-soi
like a greyhound chasing an electric rabbit. But in
the same year that
L'Etre et le Neant
was published, Sartre produced
his first play,
Les Mouches;
and here we find him trying to take a
somewhat more encouraging line about the future. Not that
Les
M ouches,
based on Greek myth, is exactly cheerful: there are two
murders in it, one a matricide, and Orestes at the end goes off into
solitude pursued by the Erinnyes. But at least he finds out that Jupiter
is powerless once man knows that he is free, and there is a vague hint
that better times can be expected with God out of the way. Where shall
we go? Electra asks Orestes. And he answers: "I do not know; toward
ourselves. Behind these rivers and mountains there is an Orestes and
Electra awaiting us."
Electra, with traditional feminine caution, isn't very happy about
this answer. Neither, for that matter, was Sartre himself, though he
didn't take up this theme again for eight years. In the interim he
wrote a number of other plays (at least one of which,
Huis Clos,
is a
masterpiece), but they all might be summed up under the English title
of
Huis Clos:
No Exit. Each play, that is, dramatized one or another
existential dilemma from which there was no way out. Sooner or later,
however, Sartre had to come back again to his main theme, especially
since the attacks against his brand of Existentialism began to mount
and he was accused of having nothing to offer but nihilism and despair.
That these attacks stung Sartre is proven by his pamphlet,
L'Existen–
tialisme est un humanisme,
and by Simone de Beauvoir's book,
Pour
une morale de l'ambiguite,
which is an attempt to show that Sartrian
Existentialism has a concrete ethical doctrine. Sartre himself has an–
nounced that he is writing an ethics, to be called with majestic simplicity:
L'Homme,
but while he is said to have piled up over a thousand pages
of notes, no part of a finished text has yet been published.
Meanwhile, in
Le Diable et le Bon Dieu,
Sartre has re-written
Les Mouches
without benefit of the Greeks and on a much vaster scale.
The relation between God and man, which, in
Les Mouches,
was
happily subordinate to the Greek revenge motif, is now placed at
the center of the piece; and the ending is an obvious attempt to invent
some positive dramatic symbol with a bit more punch than Orestes'
