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PARTI-5AN REVIEW
which is the meaning of
existence
for the Sartrians. Or we can view
the future in apocalyptic terms as a radical break with the present, as
the advent of a hoped-for reign of Glory, Happiness and Justice.
Originally,
this
latter view of the future was religious and supernatural,
but in the eighteenth century, Mme. de Beauvoir writes, "through the
idea of progress, an idea of the future was elaborated in which these
two aspects coalesced: the future appeared at
the
same time as
the meaning of our transcendence, and as the immobility of being."
This apocalyptic hope, which Mme. de Beauvoir calls
l'Avenir-Chose
(the future-as-thing), is anathema to the Sartrians; for in looking
forward to achieving the "immobility of being," the deluded
pour-soi
is
once again running down the same infinite regress after our old will-o'–
the-wisp friend, the
en-soi.
And Marx is raked over the coals because–
while he may have known that the triumph of Socialism wouldn't be
the end of history-he still thought of it as a victory over man's aliena–
tion. But the dream "of a harmonious development in which men
reconciled with each other would realize themselves as pure positivity ...
is not permissible," writes
Mme .
de Beauvoir, firmly laying down
the
law, "since man is originally negativity." And she states bluntly that
"no social upheaval, no moral conversion can suppress the lack in
[man's] heart ... "
As a result, Mme. de Beauvoir explicitly cites Trotsky's idea of a
"permanent revolution" as coming close to what the Sartrian Ex–
istentialists recognize as the only truthful image of the
future.
And
Sartre himself, in
Qu'est-ce que la litterature,
speaks of his future
ideal society as being in "permanent revorution," and as "without
classes, without dictatorship, without stability." With this perspective
of
the
future, what sort of positive artistic symbol can Sartre create?
The very vision of social stability is denied him
if
he is to be consistent
with himself: no Fortinbras can appear at the end of a Sartrian tragedy
to establish the order of the state and the cosmos, nor can
the hope
for a Fortinbras even be expressed.
If
Sarire persists in searching for
positive symbols, as I think he will, he may very possibly resign himself
to glorifying the eternal human virtues, like Albert Camus in
La Peste,
thus forgetting about class conflicts; or he may use
the
French Resistance
as a collective symbol, as he has already done in
Morts sans sepultures,
though in effect this would be a surrender to a bourgeois nationalism
that he rejects on the theoretical level. However that may be, I take
Goetz's paradoxes at the end of
Le Diable et le Bon Dieu
as themselves
a symbol, though not in the sense that Sartre intended. I take them as
a symbol of Sartre's inextricable artistic confusion at the present time.
Joseph Frank
