Her Heart Belongs Again to Darkness
Her middle belongs to Camus
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Baronial thirteen, 1972
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Both were trained in philosophy; both, from a very early historic period, had literary ambitions. Chance brought them together as friends and made them comrades in the aforementioned struggle. They had the same ethical passion and seemed to belong to the same literary school. A celebrated feud momentarily divided them; decease brought them together once again and drove the survivor to cry out that. he had never stopped thinking of his friend. Facing the problems of the day, Sartre has continually asked himself what would Camus take said and how would he take acted. In the cease, however, their works are utterly dissimilar; and with the passage of time their dissimilarities increased.
Germaine Brée offers an explana tion that in general I believe is right: Their differences are deter mined by their conflicting attitudes toward reality. Toward physical re ality, toward historical reality, to ward human; and, because they are writers, toward literature. In this respect, the behavior of each dur ing the Algerian war is revealing. Camus had intimate knowledge of both sides, and loved them both. For a long time he failed to have a position and was reproached for his silence. When he did speak, he did not speak of philosophy; he merely wanted to diminish the suffering and the hurting. The programme he offered was a mediocre one, and many re ceived it with great suspicion.
Sartre, on the other mitt, knew neither the Pieds‐noirs nor the Arabs. Just he nevertheless elaborated theory of the disharmonize in which he painted i side entirely black and the other side entirely white. He concluded with an apology for abso lute violence, which would take been hideous had ane been able to be lieve that he had imagined the hor rors it would lead to. Sartre ration alizes the real, judges and cuts in favor of the side he thinks embodies the perfect good; Camus, never los ing sight of the flesh and bone of individuals, states that it is impos sible to separate expert from evil, that they are inextricably spring to gether.
Mme. Brée does not hide the fact that she has chosen her hero. She has given her heart to the man from the Mediterranean, with his love of life and women. In addi tion, Camus was handsome and pre possessing. Sartre, on the other hand, is an abstract puritan, cold and aloof. (This, I insist, is unjust, simply such is her vision of him.) She has no sympathy for this moralizing, logical, French petit‐bourgeois, who constructs an platonic world in which the guilty are punished, the proficient re warded—and in which he, Sartre, patently remains innocent.
I believe I'm non mistaken in say ing that Mme. Bree is from the aforementioned general region equally Camus: a region of intense smells and bright colors, in which the men are tearing, con fused and improvident, in which dis trust, resentment and generosity are mingled. How bland and faded Sartre'southward universe seems by compari son! If one excepts the war and the cursory and questionable Resistance, she argues, the historical feel of the average Frenchman today does not amount to much; and Sartre, a soldier without glory, a prisoner who was released immediately, is typical of this boilerplate human being. Witness the depths to which French literature has sunk, she continues: boring descriptions of objects, or bom bast of revolutionary pretensions, promoted to the rank of literary fine art! Witness the poverty and slight ness of the works.
One begins to suspect that, in a higher place and across Sartre, Mme. Bree is settling some old scores with Pari sian literary circles—vivid, sure of themselves, only nevertheless out of engagement, feeble and incapable of han dling the great passions, the pain and misery of men. Using her evi dence, it is not hard to decide against them. I have no doubt that the firm ness of her opinions, strengthened by her perfect clarity and fantabulous, well-baked fashion, will seduce the Ameri can public.
Still, it would non be out of place to wonder if Professor Bree, in her turn, has not committed the sin of brainchild. In crushing Sartre in favor of Camus, she has, I think, given in to the very dan gerous intellectual pleasure of cre ating a double portrait that puts all the light on one side and all the darkness on the other. For, in spite of everything, Sartre remains the greatest living French writer. And this fact must be dealt with.
She states that Sartre's style is academic; in general, it is dazzling. On the other hand, she says nothing about Camus'due south frequent pomposity. How can one believe in the common cold ness of a writer who has accumu lated, year after year, thousands of often irritating but ever astonish ing and tumultuous pages? In that location is ever passion in literary crea tion; one must ask what is Sartre's passion, and what this passion has produced. For Sartre has also fought against injustice and oppression, and ardently wishes a just world for all men. After the state of war he was the beginning to call attending to the condi tion of the blacks and the Jews. And not merely as abstruse victims: against the Marxists of the menstruation, he insisted on the singularity of the private. "Les Chemins de la Lib erte," "Nausea," and "The Wall" testify to his efforts in this management. Later, it is truthful, Sartre's piece of work— which had hesitated between fiction and essay—finally swung toward theory. What are the reasons for this?
Fortunately, Sartre has given an explanation himself; we have only to reread "Words." As a child, awkward and uncomfortable in his body, with no trend toward so ciability, Sartre already lived in his imagination; his study of philosophy accentuated the divorce. This with drawal, this recourse from reality, in no manner contradicts the vocation of literature. In fact, Sartre decided to get a writer at a very early on age. He chose literature and then passion ately that it took the place of every matter else in his optics—the friends he did non really take, his babyhood games, the morality and religion of his parents, and fifty-fifty work, the oth er sacred virtue of conservative Prot estants. For Sartre, the literary deed was sacred. Then the war came, with the camps, the Resistance, and past the time it was over Sartre had discovered the horrors of Fascism, social injustice and the overwhelm ing necessity of reforming the earth. And it was in literature, his habitual weapon, that he plant the style to deal with this new ache. He de veloped the theory of committed lit erature and founded Les Temps Modernes.
Only here, for the first time, litera ture betrayed him: the literary act is neither a political act nor a dem onstration of virtue. Information technology might deal with them, but they are not essential to it. And reverse to what has been said again and again, Sartre knew this. Disappointed, he became impa tient with literature and writers. He questioned Genet, Baudelaire and Flaubert in order to understand how they had conquered their own an guish: how should a writer comport politi cally? And because he discov ered that they answered this question equally writers, non as air-conditioning tivists, he attacked them— while in all probability they had found the only answer that suited them. From that point on, Sartre ceased to believe in literature, and his creative works suffered the consequen ces. "Les Chemins de la Li berte" remained unfinished. He withal wrote for the theater, but it was a didactic theater that only embellished his reflec tions. In brusque, he became an essayist, unquestionably one of genius—but he never returned fiction.
Must nosotros really choose be tween Sartre and Camus? In sophisticated Parisian circles, Camus's teachings are not tak en very seriously; most often they are equated with a kind of mediocre wisdom. And what wisdom is non mediocre, faced with the immensity and multifariousness of our problems, with the dark ness of our fate? Without re flouncing his ethical preoccu pations, Camus never pretend ed to be transforming the world or the human status by writing novels; that is why he continued to write them. Sartre has never resigned him cocky to our impotence. Curious ly, the Communist party would have been easier for Camus than for Sartre: Son of a work er and a laundress, there would take been no demand for him to break with his background to aid the Revolution. Sartre, the intellectual son of a bour geois, was forced to renounce his heritage.
In the end, far from existence a cold abstraction, Sartre's philosophy begins with anguish and ends with despair. The contempo political deport of the swell philosopher, which has shocked so many of his advertisement mirers, probably has no other explanation. In any case, it is nearly unjust to say that Sartre has sacrificed his humanity to literature; it is actually the op posite that is truthful: For the sake of his humanity Sartre sacrificed what was ever most precious to him, his pas sion for literature. And this is one of the most moving sacrifices a author has ever made.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1972/08/13/archives/camus-and-sartre-crisis-and-commitment-by-germaine-bree-287-pp-new.html
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