18
ROBERT JAY LIFTON
My patient was by no means a happy man, but neither was he in–
capacitated. And although we can see the strain with which he
carries
his
"polymorphous versatility," it could also be said that, as a
teacher and a thinker, and in some ways as a man, it served him
well.
In contemporary American literature, Saul Bellow is notable for
the protean men he has created. In
The Adventures of Augie March,
one of his earlier novels, we meet a picaresque hero with a notable
talent for adapting himself to divergent social worlds. Augie himself
says: "I touched all sides, and nobody knew where I belonged. I had
no good idea of that myself." And a perceptive young English critic,
Tony Tanner, tells us: "Augie indeed celebrates the self, but he can
find nothing to do with it." Tanner goes on to describe Bellow's more
recent protean hero, Herzog, as "a representative modern intelligence,
swamped with ideas, metaphysics, and values, and surrounded by
messy facts. It labours to cope with them all."
A distinguished French literary spokesman for the protean style
- in his life and in his work - is, of course, Jean-Paul Sartre. In–
deed, I believe that it is precisely because of these protean traits that
Sartre strikes us as such an embodiment of twentieth-century man.
An American critic, Theodore Solotaroff, speaks of Sartre's funda–
mental assumption that "there is no such thing as even a relatively
fixed sense of self, ego, or identity - rather there is only the sub–
jective mind in motion in relationship to that which it confronts."
And Sartre himself refers to human consciousness as "a sheer activity
transcending toward objects," and "a great emptiness, a wind blow–
ing toward objects." These might
be
overstatements, but I doubt that
they could have been written thirty years ago. Solotaroff further char–
acterizes Sartre as
constantly on the go, hurrying from point to point, subject to sub–
ject; fiercely intentional, his thought occupies, fills, and distends its
material as he endeavors to lose and find himself in his encounters
with .other lives, disciplines, books, and situations.
This image of repeated, autonomously willed death and rebirth of
the self, so central to the protean style, becomes associated with the
themes of fatherlessness - as Sartre goes on to tell us in his auto–
biography with
his
characteristic tone of serious self-mockery:
