2

Engaged Theatre

Sartre as engaged writer was, above all, a playwright. His very first lectures on theatre presented it as a locus of conflict and action – not reflection or psychological exploration.¹ The Supreme question of his own theatre was that of choice – choice in situations, amidst events. He wrote for the stage in order to act in history, to engage his audience in issues of collective concern, and to change – or explore what it means to change – social reality. Here, as much as in the novel, the basic theses of Quest-ce que la littérature? were the working precepts of artistic composition.

    Sartre's plays confirmed his break with the timeless concerns of L'Etre et le Néant and La Nausée. They were specifically of the present, plays that took sides on contemporary issues. They enacted sharp denunciations of mid-twentieth-century capitalism, racism in the American South, German and French fascism, war and imperialist expeditions, torture and doctrinaire Communism. On the other hand, they also included affirmations of an undoctrinaire revolutionary realism that accepted people as they were and acknowledged the necessity of violence in the process of their social liberation.

    These plays met the demand for commitment. Franz, appealing to the crabs in his room (Les Sequestrés d'Altona); the intense triangle of Hugo, Hoederer, and Jessica (Les Mains sales) – these are powerful moments of theatre, as is Goetz's decision to take command of the peasant army in Le Diable et le bon Dieu and Henri and Julie's decision in Mort sans sépulture to lie to their torturers and live. Their power lies in their historicity: Franz, sick with guilt at having served as a torturer on

     1. See ts, p.30-33; st, pp.14-17. See also ibid., p.61; pp.38-39.

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the Russian front; Hugo's tragic unwillingness to accept, and see the connection between, self-acceptance, personal warmth and political realism; Henri and Julie overcoming their guilt and self-hatred sufficiently to be able to think politically and serve the Resistance; and Goetz's intense illumination that helping people begins by accepting them as they are, by accepting the reality we live and seek to change. Commitment is never a given here; it is always in question. Sartre brought his pressing personal theme onto the stage, there to voice its rich and complex tensions.

    The plays place the individual in history, among others, and subject him to, or demand from him, violent action. How can the individual become a real historical actor, free from mystification, capable of effective action yet genuinely working towards positive goals? This was Sartre's own question after 1940, and his theatre presented both its deepest philosophical meanings and its most accessible, everyday incarnations. It was, therefore, intimately associated with the themes and concerns that we have already identified and explored. The individual whom Sartre's plays plunge into action is, after all, Roquentin – one conscious of being de trop, cut off from commitment, an intellectual isolated from others, unsure of how to act, caught up in questions of personal salvation.

'Les Mouches'

Orestes, the protagonist of Les Mouches, is such an individual. Les Mouches deserves its reputation as a play of the Resistance. It stressed what was politically the most demanding theme of L'Etre et le Néant – that humans are always free to resist – and did so in a way that enabled it to elude censorship. Sartre's first political message to his fellow-countrymen was that it was an act of bad faith to accept the regime of guilt and penitence, and that the only authentic course was that of struggle. Nevertheless, as I indicated earlier, the conception of freedom developed in Les Mouches faithfully reflected the contradictory position Sartre had arrived at by 1943. It expressed both the energy and the hopelessness of L'Etre et le Néant, both the activism and the isolation of 'consciousness-in-the-world'. Les Mouches re-located this ontological predicament in a situation demanding action.

    Orestes does not kill Aegistheus and his mother, Clytemnestra, for any of the motives originally presented by Aeschylus: not to avenge his father, or to claim his throne, or even to liberate the Argives from

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the usurper. Although he proclaims his mission as liberator at several places, the claim remains hollow and rhetorical.² He is too well aware that he is a total stranger to Argos: 'these folk are no concern of mine'.³ Orestes begins as a young scholar having no bonds with anyone in Argos but his sister Electra, and from the start is burdened by his empty, detached freedom. 'Some men are born engaged', he laments, 'a certain path has been assigned them, and at its end there is something they must do, a deed allotted.'⁴ Rootless and aloof, he kills for one reason: in order to lay claim to something of his own, even – or perhaps especially – if it be a crime. It is as if Sartre had turned Roquentin away from writing and towards action. Orestes acts ostensibly under the pressure of events, but ultimately for the old reason: so that he will no longer be de trop. In his personal drama of alienation Orestes tries to earn a sense of belonging, to acquire a weight of his own, by heaping upon himself all the crimes of Argos. 'The heavier it is to carry, the better pleased I shall be; for that burden is my freedom.'⁵ He will own his crime: unlike the people of Argos, unlike Aegistheus and Clytemnestra themselves, Orestes will claim it without guilt. And so he will have no need to repent or to pretend that someone else has done it.

    Electra, on the other hand, shrinks from her role as accomplice and embraces Zeus's regime of penitence. She has wished for her mother's and Aegistheus's death in her every waking moment, but passively and strictly in the imaginary. Orestes's act explodes her fantasy. Electra discovers that she wanted them not to die but to live on as objects of her hatred. She will now wholly give herself over to guilt.

    Guilt (and Oreste's freedom from it), violence (and his proud owning of it) and the passage from aloofness to engaged freedom: these are central themes of Les Mouches. They begin to define what Pierre Verstraeten describes as the original problematic of Sartre's theatre.⁶

     2. Francis Jeanson makes this abundantly clear in Sartre par lui-même, pp.18-20. Jeanson argues that 'the work of Sartre in its totality could without exaggeration be considered as the commentary, critique, and transcendence of the conception of freedom this play proposes' (p.24). This excellent little book is the pioneering study of Sartre's theatre: it sketches broad and basic Sartrean preoccupations – even if it too often uncritically adopts Sartre's own point of view.

     3. Les Mouches, p.26; trans. Stuart Gilbert, The Flies, No Exit and Three other Plays, p.63.

     4. Ibid., p.24; p.61 (translation changed).

     5. Ibid., p.84; p.108.

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This problematic defined Sartre in 1943: fully a stage beyond the internalized and metaphysical ponderings of La Nausée yet still marked by aloofness and unreality. The tension of this problematic is best registered in the most puzzling aspect of Les Mouches: Oreste's final departure from Argos. To be sure, Orestes spurns Zeus's offer of the throne of Argos – his own throne – in exchange for repudiation of his crime. But this is a device: Jeanson has found more telling, internal reasons for Orestes's departure. First, it stems from what is, finally, the personal rather than political character of his engagement.⁷ His crime does not lessen his distance from the Argives and make him 'a man among men'. His 'coronation' is to be stoned by the angry crowd, who are too miserably comfortable in subservience and penitence to applaud his act. If at the end 'all here is new, all must begin anew'⁸ this is true only for Orestes. Sharing nothing with this mob, Orestes remains detached even in his new-found situated freedom and refuses to claim his throne. He refuses any commitment which deeply links him with other people or creates permanent relationships of dependency. His ideal of freedom, even after the murders, remains aloofness and independence.⁹ But why, then, does he call the Argives 'my people' and tell then, 'I love you, and it was for your sake that I killed?¹⁰ The question must be referred to the specific history of Orestes's creator. For Sartre in 1943 engagement did not yet mean solidarity and collective 'work which should be accomplished patiently in history, in the relative, through uncertain and groping acts, none of which are truly good, none truly evil.'¹¹ Political action in Les Mouches was accordingly, rather a single hero's blind and theatrical gesture, his defiance of Zeus, his freeing people by example and contagion; his need of others was primarily a need for verification of his own act. Did Les Mouches faithfully reflect

     6. See Pierre Verstraeten, Violence et éthique; Esquisse d'une critique de la morale dialectique à partir du théâtre politique de Sartre, Paris 1972, pp. 7-31. This original book is by far the best full-length study of Sartre, even if it is somewhat abstract, limits itself to certain aspects of Sartre's theatre, and exaggerates the achievements of his dramatic project. Verstraeten probes deeply into Sartre's plays and elicits some of their key lines of development. This chapter is indebted to his penetrating discussion.

     7. Jeanson, Sartre par lui-même, p.19.

     8. Les Mouches, p.108; The Flies, p.127.

     9. Jeanson, p.19.

     10. Les Mouches, Théâtre, p.108; The Flies, p.126.

     11. Jeanson, p.21.

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Sartre's own attitudes at the time? According to his famous essay, 'La République du silence', written immediately after the Liberation, it did. In this essay, Sartre described the Resistance as an individual, not a collective struggle. He saw it as a new kind of experience in which the fighters were alone in all circumstances. 'They were hunted down in solitude, arrested in solitude. It was completely forlorn and unbefriended that they held out against torture, alone and naked in the presence of torturers, clean shaven, well-fed, and well clothed. . . . Alone. Without a friendly hand or a word of encouragement. Yet, in the depth of their solitude, it was the others that they' were protecting, all the others, all their comrades in the Resistance. Total responsibility in total solitude – is this not the very definition of our liberty?'¹²

    It is not, unless in exceptional conditions. This vision of heroic isolation excluded the sense of solidarity in struggle, the sense of direct mutual dependence that members of the Resistance certainly shared. But this dimension of the struggle lay beyond Sartre's reach in the first years of his political involvement. It was this partial vision that Les Mouches reflected: an isolated hero commits a liberating murder and then marches off guiltlessly on his own path, pursued by the outraged flies and furies of remorse, watched by an astonished crowd. Yet Orestes's spectacular act was, for Sartre, a declaration of engagement. Orestes defied Zeus (and by implication, the German conquerors). The blood on his hands symbolized concrete historical action.

    Orestes represented an answer to Roquentin's total detachment, but one that fell short of full engagement in history.¹³ In introducing the problematic of Sartre's theatre, Les Mouches reasserted the problem of his entire career: given his starting points, the basic terms of his outlook and his concrete historical situation, how was effective engagement possible? Could the stiff, rhetorical, abstract Orestes of 1943 be transformed into a convincing and historical 'man among men' who acted with people and for them, stayed among them to fight for their common goals, understanding that action was 'patient work' and not theatrical gesture?

     12. 'La République du silence', Situations, III, Paris 1949. p.13; trans. Ramon Guthrie, 'The Republic of Silence,' The Republic of Silence, A.J. Liebling, ed., New York 1947, p.499.

     13. Verstraeten, p.27.

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'Huis Clos'

A year later Sartre wrote his only wholly non-political play, whose answer to this question was given in its most notorious line: 'Hell is other people'-which is to say, in effect, 'Hell is ourselves.' Utterly estranged from anything like common goals, Garcin, Estelle and Inez have been thrown together for all eternity as each other's torturers. Huis Clos has already been cited as expressing Sartre's pessimistic view of the relation between the self and the Other. Twenty years after its composition, in a preface to a recording of the play, Sartre insisted that' 'hell is other people" has always been misunderstood. It has been thought that what I meant by that was that our relations with other people are always poisoned, that they are invariably hellish relations. But what I really mean is something totally different. I mean that if relations with someone else are twisted, vitiated, then that other person can only be hell.'¹⁴ However, this was said after a further eight plays and many years of struggle with his original view of human relations. To be sure, Garcin does not say 'Other people are hell', but rather 'hell is other people' – a far less categorical claim. But a play erects a total world, its own world. Were it to portray its only Jew as a money-grubber we would rightly think it anti-semitic, if its only woman were portrayed as susceptible to fainting fits, or its only black as shiftless, we would rightly think it sexist, or racist. If the playwright has an alternative version, this can only have countervailing effect if suggested or presented within the world of the play. It tells us nothing about Huis Clos when Sartre claims, twenty years later and outside the play, that other human relations are possible. In itself, Huis Clos contains not even the hint of an alternative. Sartre's attempt at clarification does not address the fact the he places his three characters in hell: Garcin, the pacifist-coward, Inez, the sadist-lesbian, and Estelle, murderess-coward, who is totally self-centred and entirely dependent on others' view of her. Garcin wants to be alone to hide from his own cowardice; Estelle desperately needs his interest and approval. Just as they begin to accept each other's self-deceptions, Inez breaks in with the icy truth. None of the three can rest, be left alone, or not affect the others. With classical simplicity and power, Sartre portrays them as unable to do anything but torture each other. Arguing abstractly, Sartre may claim that 'of their own

     14. ts, p.238; ts, p.199.

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free will they put themselves in hell.'¹⁵ But they act out of necessity. Huis Clos presents these particular characters and no others; it gives no hint that they might possibly act otherwise; and contains no explanation for their behaviour that suggests an alternative. The door suddenly flies open and they have the chance to leave – but for where: somewhere else in hell? Each chooses to remain with the others. But when they are at their most real, arguments for their freedom seem quite rhetorical: Inez, Garcin, and Estelle need each other, need their particular hell. They are stuck. 'Well, well,' Garcin says at the end, 'let's get on with it.'¹⁶

    If Huis Clos presents this brutal vision so effectively it is because it is such an accomplished play. It totally lacks the stiffness and rhetorical flavour of Les Mouches. Built upon a powerful image of hell as a Second-Empire drawing-room containing two other people, the play has a sureness of touch missing from any of Sartre's later plays until Les Sequestrés d'Altona. The characters are realistically drawn without artifice, incongruence or superfluity. It is worthwhile to Speculate on what lay behind the artistic difference between Sartre's classic existentialist play and his first engaged play. If the drama of timeless pessimism is so much better than its predecessor, it is because Sartre was intellectually so much more at home in it. Engagement was not a given for Sartre, but a project whose strains we have already seen dramatized in the person of Orestes. The issues raised by Les Mouches would have to be worked through and mastered before Sartre's historical and committed characters could attain the realism of the timeless, isolated individuals of Huis Clos, before rhetorical flourishes could become human speech, and dramatic gestures, comprehensible social acts. It was to be fifteen years before Sartre developed an engaged theatre that approached the artistic quality of Huis Clos.

    Huis Clos adds a key question to that posed by Les Mouches: is it possible to develop human relations that are not infernal? By placing his original vision on the stage, Sartre put it in the context of action, and subjected it to renewed reflection. Just as virtually every one of his

     15. ts, p.239; st, p.200.

     16. Huis Clos, p.168; No Exit, p.47.

     17. See Dorothy McCall's judgment in The Theatre of Jean-Paul Sartre. New York 1969, p.125. This is a useful but uneven book; McCall misleadingly groups Sartre's plays thematically rather than according to his development and lacks an adequate grasp of the political issues involved, but generally has a sure sense of dramatization and character.

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plays presented and recast the theme of human action, so they also worked and reworked the theme of human relations until the negativism of Huis Clos had been superseded by the more positive approach of his retrospective comments in 1965. 'Hell is other people' was not Sartre's last word on human relations, but his first.

'La Putain Respectueuse' and 'Morts sans Sépulture'

Sartre's next four plays, and the screenplay, L'Engrenage, took him significantly beyond these dramatic starting points. In La Putain respectueuse, for the first time, he presented a concrete historical situation. In so far as social issues figured in Les Mouches, they were refracted through Orestes's self-centred quest for a positive identity. But Lizzie, Fred, the Senator and the hunted black man are above all social beings whose words and actions are shaped by the socio-historical setting: the American South of the 1930s. In fact, the plot is taken from the Scottsboro Case of 1931 in Alabama. Here is no timeless drama of consciousness, but the interaction of people firmly set in a very definite social structure – Southern aristocrat, poor white, and black. Indeed, the characters remain virtual stereotypes, never emerging as more than generic social determinations. This aspect of the play defined the limit of its artistic achievement. But it was due to Sartre's effort to break new ground. His energy in this simple play was not concentrated in his customary philosophical exploration of moral issues, but rather in an attempt to capture the social dimension of consciousness and action: the aristocrat who arranges things by appealing to his family's rootedness and superiority; the unnamed Negro who momentarily defends himself but cannot bring himself to shoot whites; the poor white woman who momentarily identifies with the Negro but ultimately succumbs to the mythology perpetuated by her social superiors.

    If La Putain respectueuse, attempted one kind of development beyond Les Mouches and Huis Clos, Morts sans sépulture, first performed on the same occasion in 1946, attempted another. This play ends tragically, as do many of Sartre's engaged plays, but its core action is affirmative: Henri and Julie overcome the shame, despair and isolation of their situation, and decide once again to live and struggle. The two protagonists are captured when their maquis unit fails in its mission. They are tortured by their Vichy captors and Julie suffers the

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added violence of rape. Henri, with Julie's assent, strangles her fifteen-year-old brother François when it is realized that he will talk under torture and betray their leader, Jean. Unlike Canoris, the Communist militant, Julie and Henri. are reduced to despair by the torture that drives their comrade Sorbier to leap from a window to his death. Sick with guilt and shame, they come to hate themselves so much as to look forward to death. However, at Canoris's urging, they decide in the end that life is worth living, that as Canoris says, 'we have no right to die for nothing.'¹⁸ Resolving to serve the Resistance, they lie to their torturers in order to protect Jean, withstand the 'look of triumph' in their torturers' eyes, and, in this spirit, submit to eventual death. Their death is shocking, but a victory nevertheless, for it now signifies resistance rather than defeat, solidarity rather than self-hatred.

    In this play there is room only for deliberate and affirmative political acts or for resignation, and no one chooses resignation. Isolation, the sense of superfluity and aimlessness- these are not ontological states, but specific conditions imposed by the situation, which Henri and Julie eventually overcome. Their decision to lie to protect Jean is the most unambiguously positive moment in Sartre's theatre until Goetz's conversion at the end of Le Diable et le bon Dieu. Morts sans sépulture moves towards the presentation of real, non-rhetorical collective action based on solidarity, and in this, achieves an advance over its predecessors.

    Yet the protagonists' decision is taken amidst appalling extremes of personal terror and degradation. Sartre was right to insist that the play is really about torture – and also, therefore, that the political situation is merely the 'frame'. Morts sans sépulture was not, in fact, 'a play about the Resistance'. Moreover, Sartre has written, the play was a failure, because 'the victims' fate was absolutely predetermined, no one could suppose that they would talk, so there was no suspense, as it is now called.'¹⁹ The play's weakness lies equally in its characters: the torturers are never developed as characters, and the victims are, like Lizzie in La Putain respectueuse, impossibly lucid and rational.²⁰ Morts sans sépulture suffered at once from an excess of 'reality' – the

     18. Morts sans sépulture, Théâtre, Paris 194,6, p.246; trans. Lionel Abel, The Victors,

Three Plays, New York 1948, p.26.

     19. ts, p.94-9; st, p.203.

     20. See McCall, pp.52,86.

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extremism of the situation – and a dearth of moral-psychological probability. In this play and in its companion, Sartre pressed more strongly than ever towards a theatre of historical situations. In both, the difficulty he experienced in presenting realistic historical individuals and actions was evident. The assurance of Huis Clos had not yet been recovered.

'L'Engrenage'

L’Engrenage, a little-known screenplay written in 1946 but never filmed, was adapted for the stage first in Switzerland, Italy and Germany, finally appearing in Paris in 1969. Originally called 'Les Mains sales', it portrayed the fate of a socialist revolution in a small, non-industrialized but oil-rich eastern European country bordering on a threatening capitalist power. Its leader, Jean Aguerra, is overthrown in a coup by forces wishing to realize the original aims of the revolution: nationalization of the foreign-owned oil industry, freedom of speech and press, and election of a parliament. Aguerra has betrayed these promises and become a bloody tyrant: his campaign of terror included attempts at a bloody forced collectivization of agriculture, and brought about the death of his former best friend and comrade-in-arms, Lucien Drelitsch, thrown into a concentration camp for violating a decree on press censorship; and he leads a life of drunkenness and debauchery. Aguerra, deposed, is brought to trial, and the story unfolds in a threefold movement.

    An overwhelming personal and political indictment is presented which he mostly accepts, scarcely moved by it to defend himself. At the same time, the compelling reasons for Aguerra's brutal policies become clear, both in flashbacks and in the situation faced by the new government: the neighbouring power will invade if its oil concessions are nationalized; a free press and parliament would certainly raise the demand for nationalization and must therefore be suppressed. It emerges that Aguerra's sole goal was to buy time. If the revolution can hold out until the great power is drawn into the anticipated war with another state, the thirty-five enemy divisions will be withdrawn from the border, and the revolution's goals can be carried out. 'In a few years the deported will be able to return home. They will be able to nationalize oil and men will be happy.'²¹

     21. L’Engrenage, Paris 1948, p.188; trans. Mervyn Savill, In the Mesh, London 1954, p.125.

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    On a third level, these political reasons become the basis of Aguerra's personal appeal to Hélène, Lucien's widow, for understanding and forgiveness. In his only serious defence of himself, we see him as detesting violence but absorbing it into himself and using it as the only means of struggle against oppression. He is totally committed to the survival of the revolution, but his violence has consumed him and, succumbing to self-hatred, he has sought relief in alcohol and debauchery. At the end of the play, these three themes are reunited: Aguerra is condemned to die by the court, forgiven by Hélène – and by history – and François, the new leader, submits as he must to demands from the oil cartel and the foreign ambassador that the oil concessions must not be nationalized.

    In L’Engrenage, for the first time, history – the 'frame' of Morts sans sépulture, present but fixed and frozen in La Putain respectueuse, obviously behind but not actually present in Les Mouches, and totally absent from Huis Clos – became the theme of Sartre's theatre. L’Engrenage was thus a turning point in his development as a dramatist. In every succeeding play, history was to permeate his characters and their actions.²²

    This screenplay also broached a topic which was to be central in virtually all of Sartre's plays: that of violence. Aguerra has embarked, deliberately and with open eyes, on a course of systematic terror, which he sees as a lesser evil than foreign invasion. He has 'dirty hands' and hates himself for it, but he believes that one who wants to abolish poverty in his historical situation can take no other course. Developing Sartre's theme, Pierre Verstraeten has argued that the problem of violence is central in any effort to come to grips with history: indeed, he identifies history with violence. He traces in Sartre's plays the development of an ethic of worldly action whose essential structure is 'the conflict between a dialectical vision and two visions which ought to be transcended: the ethical vision and the realistic vision.'²³ The dramatic and political mainspring of L’Engrenage is the struggle between the partisan of an idealist and purist revolutionary morality, Lucien Drelitsch, and a more realistic advocate of revolutionary effectiveness, Jean Aguerra.

    In the person of Lucien, the ethical vision refuses all traffic with violence. It insists that the non-violent and humane society of tomor-

     22. See Verstraeten, p.35.

     23. Ibid., p.18.

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row can never be built by violence and inhumanity today – only dean hands can ensure clean hands. It is an idealism that insists on acting as we ought, regardless of consequences. The dialectical vision, on the other hand, insists that violence and inhumanity are all around us and within us, that we tacitly sanction them, partake of them, and benefit from them even as we pretend to keep our own hands clean. Furthermore, violence and inhumanity can be abolished only by a sustained political struggle against their cause, class society. This is a struggle to the death in which all available means must be utilized, and whose prime criterion is victory. If Aguerra's dialectical vision sounds more compelling than Lucien's ethical alternative this is because it is constructed as such. There is no authentic conflict of equals in L’Engrenage. Lucien is absolutely moralistic about the revolutionary situation, while Aguerra truly understands it. The real and pertinent conflict is within Aguerra himself. Although he does what must be done, he is torn by the contradiction between his humane intentions and their inhumane results, by the need to become brutal in order genuinely to do good in history. This struggle is represented as the real meaning of history. Jean internalized this objective tension and it destroys him in the end. Yet he succeeds: he buys time and protects the revolution.

    L’Engrenage attempts to take the full weight of history, its ability to find and shape the people who do its work, its ability to transform the meaning of their acts into the opposite of what they intended. Nevertheless it has certain decisive weaknesses in common with the coeval Morts sans sépulture: although history is placed at the heart of the action, its specifics are scarcely made convincing or real. The 'situation' is schematically drawn, too simply dependent on the threatening foreign power. The same oversimplifications make the characters unconvincing. Lucien is politically unbelievable – a revolutionary who insists on non-violence, remains on the central committee of the revolutionary party, and preserves his purity while his comrade, Aguerra, carries out politically and morally distasteful tasks on his behalf. The character of the latter, on the other hand, is unconvincing in a different direction: both a monster and a completely committed, ultimately humane revolutionary, sickened by but willing to do the violence to which history summons him, Aguerra is most deeply flawed in his complete lucidity – as if his political and moral degeneracy was psychologically compatible with a clear and honest insight into

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the process of self-destruction, or a cogent view of the historical process and his own contradictory role in it. His strength as a character however, is that these tensions are charged with historicity: not personal eccentricity but the unbearable contradictions of his position make him into the man we see brought to trial.

    This is not true of the action as a whole. The play's peculiar set of personal relationships – characteristically reminiscent of Huis Clos – are superimposed on, not integral to, the story's significant historical tensions. Jean loves Hélène who marries Lucien: all are on the central committee, except Suzanne, who acted as Jean's nursemaid and becomes his chief accuser at his trial. Jean destroys Lucien but wins Hélène's forgiveness, and Suzanne succeeds in destroying Jean. Important as these personal relationships are, they never lose the timeless quality of Huis Clos, and unlike Aguerra's own tensions never become charged with concrete historical meaning. It is as if two quite distinct actions unfold – the personal and the political, rather than a single, deeply integrated and historically situated struggle. But to make engagement real in the theatrical context entails the integration of concrete history into the most intimate substance of characters, their actions and the issues embedded in them. This was the challenge that Sartre's theatre had yet fully to meet.

'Les Mains sales'

Les Mains sales, which exploded on the Paris stage in April 1948, was the first dramatic success of Sartre's engaged theatre and its most popular product. It is perhaps Sartre's most exciting drama, charged with tension and ambiguity; and furthermore, it is politically and personally rich at the same time, depicting individuated character., whose actions embody significant historical issues.²⁴

    This judgement may seem inapposite on a first reading of the play. Hugo is apparently another Orestes: alienated, de trop, able to experience himself only through other people's eyes, given to rhetoric and gesture rather than real action, and contemptuous of those he would help. And as with Orestes, his main passion is seemingly to save himself, to establish his identity through a spectacular, bloody crime.

     24. See Philip Thody's acute discussion in Sartre: A Biographical Introduction, London 1971, p.92. This informed and detailed little book is especially good on Sartre's politics and literary works.

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But Hugo differs from Orestes in one decisive respect. He has committed himself to a life of political action: this is his goal, the lens through which he sees himself and the measure of his inadequacy. This crucial circumstance sets Hugo in a context which, first of all, deprives him in advance of any absolute role in the drama. In Les Mouches Sartre spoke through Orestes whose alienation, by and large, can hence be regarded as the frame of reference of the play as a whole, not a posture to be explored and criticized in terms of one or more alternatives. But in Les Mains sales, the existentialist hero has ceased to be Sartre's philosophical point of reference. The 'Orestes figure' has become a tormented young man searching for his identity in the context of a new reference-point, the undoctrinaire Communist, Hoederer. The philosophical-moral-political framework of Les Mains sales is Hoederer's commitment to a socialist future, his love of people, his human warmth and directness, his sense of realism, effectiveness and flexibility, his refusal to posture, his sense of historical perspective.²⁵

    Hoederer is, as critics have noted, the one positive character in Sartre's plays.²⁶ It was through his committed humanism that Sartre was able for the first time to contest the Orestes figure of Hugo, to point to an authentic satisfying course of action; and through Hoederer's generous approach to the tormented adolescent bent on killing him that he was able to point beyond the self-Other conflict.²⁷ In Quest-ce que la littérature? the idea of socialism brought Sartre beyond the theoretical impasse of his early work; in the delineation of the sociologist Hoederer, he glimpsed individual human possibilities beyond the personal shortcomings of his early characters.

    Furthermore, in representing the alienated man as an adolescent, Sartre begins to explore the causes of his condition. Why is gesture Hugo's most appropriate mode of action? In part, the reasons stem from Hugo's bourgeois background: his rebellion against his rich father, his guilt at never having known hunger, his sense of not belonging in the Party and need to win a place there, the abstractness and one-sided purity of his commitment, his self-absorption. In so delineating Hugo, Sartre achieved a major advance. He historicized

     25. Les Mains sales, Paris 1948; trans. Lionel Abel, Dirty Hands, No Exit and Three Other Plays.

     26. See Thody, p.93; and McCall, p.73.

     27. See Jeanson, p.40.

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many of the characterizations of Les Mouches and began to explore their concrete social origins. Even the most intimate tensions of Les Mains sales are implicated in wider historical antagonisms. Hugo, trying to escape his background, seeks to kill Hoederer in order to prove to himself and to his Party mentors, Louis and Olga, that he is real; Jessica, coming from the same background as Hugo and as a woman at least equally unsure of her own reality, lives for make-believe and is drawn to seduce Hoederer so as to win confirmation from a real

man.

    Yet there are also dramatic weaknesses which reveal that Sartre had not yet completely synthesized historical and personal concerns. The characters, it might be said, stand as individuals on the threshold of historicity. All exhibit a certain thinness, a slightly stereotyped quality, and remain, therefore, not fully integrated. Jessica, for example, is more complex than most of Sartre's female characters, but she shares with them a typical lack of identity, an inability to confront the man's world on anything like his own terms or even to be aware of this as an issue. Sexuality and irrationality are her main dimensions. Hugo's naiveté and political ignorance are improbable in the editor of the party paper. And his confrontation with Slick and George casts him as too adolescent, them as too brutish to be credible. Too often the dialogue of the play is stiff and awkward, abstracted equally from either the political or the personal.

    Yet on balance, Les Mains sales is one of Sartre's greatest dramatic achievements. In order to appreciate this, however, it is necessary to free the play from the confusion surrounding its political meaning.²⁸ From the play's first appearance onwards, Sartre disowned its political content by claiming (for example) that Les Mains sales was 'not a political play in any sense'.²⁹ This process continued through the remarkable interview in 1964 in which Sartre persisted in holding Hugo completely in the wrong even while Paulo Caruso confronted him with the play's objective thrust: to make the audience sympathize with Hugo against the Proletarian Party.³⁰ The politics of Les Mains sales have been confused largely by Sartre's and Simone de Beauvoir's

    28. McCall, for example wrongly sees the play's political theme as confused (The Theatre of Jean-Paul Sartre, p.64); while Thody accepts its critique of official Communism but fails to understand that Hoederer stands for a humanistic, nondoctrinaire Communism (Sartre: A Biographical Introduction, pp. 89-90).

    29. ts, p.246; st, p.207.

    30. ts, pp.250-67; st, pp.211-25.

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statements about it. Taken in itself, the play is politically quite clear. It sharply criticizes the orthodox Communists, Louis and Olga, for making Hoederer, an opponent on tactics, into an enemy who must be assassinated. It criticizes them for being doctrinaire, incapable of flexibility or creative thought; for falsifying history after pretending to denounce political deception; and for using people as if they were machines. Hoederer, on the contrary, respects his opponents and wishes to struggle politically with them; and analyses situations rather than apply formulae to them, having a strong appreciation of reality even while remaining committed to the goal of socialism. He accepts the idea of lying as a political tactic, as the situation dictates and within the framework of a broader revolutionary morality, and he has a genuine regard for people. Finally, while the orthodox faction are quite willing to use Hugo's immaturity for their own ends, Hoederer, at the risk – and eventual loss – of his life, offers Hugo a relationship of genuine respect, in full knowledge of his intentions.

    Between the poles of these two very different types of Communist, Hugo is struggling to establish his identity, to overcome his feeling of utter inadequacy, to become real and effective. Chance – or rather Jessica's own yet deeper sense of unreality – leads him to discover her with Hoederer, just as he comes to accept the latter's offer of help. And so he commits the murder whose motivation eludes him until the final moment when Louis's men come to apprehend him. But is his suicide merely a repetition of his act of murder – an adolescent gesture expressing an inability to change and, more generally, total personal failure?³¹ He is ready to rejoin the party and return to work until he hears the news that Hoederer's oppositional line is now Party policy, having been ordered by the ussr; Hoederer is to be rehabilitated and his murderer, who killed him for obscure personal reasons, is presumed dead. Hugo's response combines theatrical posturing with a real critique of the Party. If his approach is clearly wrong, so too is the Party's. Sartre later justified the Party's falsification of the past as 'an imperative of praxis,'³² suggesting that had Hugo really understood Hoederer he would have accepted Olga's view, changed his name, and stayed in the organization. But if Hoederer advocated though never actually practised temporary compromise and deception in the name of revolutionary goals, he also

     31. See Jeanson, p.44.

     32. ts, p.257; st p.217.

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stood for a humaneness and undogmatic outlook notably lacking in Louis and Olga.

    The play clearly does not vindicate the dominant party faction. It shows them rather as Stalinist hacks parroting the twists and turns of an externally imposed line, and as subjecting Hugo to his fatal dilemma: either submission to their cynicism and dogmatism, or the persistence of his personal sense of unreality and dependence on gesture. A Communist like Hoederer posed a genuine alternative, but necessity – both Hugo's and that of Olga and Louis – the necessity of the orthodox Party faction entwining itself with that of the bourgeois intellectual unsure of his own reality, led to his murder. Thus, the audience identifies with Hugo not merely because his is the last voice of the play, but because of his despair, his inability to find an authentic alternative, his wish to redeem not himself, but Hoederer. Rehabilitation and the change of line are insufficient: Hugo demands that the death of this humane and undogmatic revolutionary be redeemed in a more fitting way. But what paths are open? The way of the Party leadership is to assassinate and then to rehabilitate, to falsify history. But acquiescence in this is not merely 'growing up': it is also giving up. To do so is to risk destroying one's integrity in the name of the very ideals that sustain it. For Hugo to refuse Olga's offer, then, is not merely weakness: it reveals, positively, his dogged attachment to some residue of his positive reasons for joining the Party. But he has no exit. In order to affirm Hoederer against the Party, Hugo uses the only way open to him, a false one, and the only language available to him, also false. Inevitably then, the main focus of identification is not the specific character of his gesture, but its underlying sense of protest against Party orthodoxy and its cynical affirmation of Hoederer.

    It should by now be obvious that the political achievement of Les Mains sales is inseparable from its dramatic achievement. But one cannot lay it down or leave the theatre without a feeling of futility similar to that produced by Les Mouches or Huis Clos. For after all, even this exploration of effective engagement leaves 'no exit'. The one fully positive character in Sartre's theatre is assassinated both by intention and by accident, the dominant party faction adopts his line on orders from the ussr, Hugo learns nothing and kills himself. If the major concern of the Sartrean theatre was to explore the prospects of acting humanely and effectively in the world, it must be concluded

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that by the time of Les Mains sales this goal had not been achieved.

    But might it be that Sartre was delineating not his own limits but the limits of effective action in 1948, in a society where the Communist Party was the only significant potentially revolutionary force? Were not his own perspectives, for the first time, beginning to coincide with the objective historical situation? Was it possible for Sartre to dramatize possibilities beyond those historically present? As we know, during the Paris run of Les Mains sales, Sartre actively tried, and failed, to create in the rdr a 'third way'. His failure led him back, after 1949, to the pcf as the only possible route to personal political involvement. This returns us to perhaps the most interesting fact about Les Mains sales, that Sartre in a certain sense 'rewrote' it after it appeared, both denying its criticism of the Communist Party and trying to control where and how it could be performed. He had been compelled to choose between swallowing his criticism of the pcf or becoming defined as its enemy. History imposed a kind of submission-which concretely entailed, among other things, denying the critical meaning of his own play. In dealing with the Communists' response to Les Mains sales, then, Sartre took precisely the unsettling path that Hugo had refused. But in following it, he learned a lesson beyond Hugo's grasp, the lesson that Hoederer stood for in the abstract; and in the process he transformed the moral and political framework of Les Mains sales. Le Diable et le bon Dieu was the dramatic fruit of this transformation. As he himself observed in 1951, 'Goetz is a Hugo who is converted.'³³

'Le Diable et le bon Dieu''

Goetz's conversion is one of the high points of Sartre's theatre, and of his entire career. Step by step, we have followed the slow transformation of the Sartrean protagonist. Orestes was a Roquentin thrown into history; Hugo was Orestes committed to the revolution; and Goetz is a Hugo who matures into a whole and responsible being. By the final curtain Goetz has overcome, one after another, his thirst for absolute evil, then for absolute good and finally for asceticism. Realizing that God is dead, Goetz for the first time discovers his need for other people and resolves to pursue liberation with them. In Goetz's transformation, an engaged individual takes shape from one who had been absorbed in moral dilemmas. Goetz goes beyond

     33. ts, p.270; st, p.228.

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unreal gestures and acting for others and begins to act for authentic reasons; he gives up his obsession with personal salvation to join with the struggling masses; he abandons the demand for immediate liberation and accepts the exigencies of a prolonged struggle; he accepts solidarity in this struggle as the only way of loving his fellow humans as long as they are unfree; and he takes his place as a leader, recognizing in this role his only way of being 'a man among men' until genuine equality is possible. In Goetz, Sartre rendered dialectical the vision of Qu’est-ce que la littérature? and 'Matérialisme et révolution': the city of ends was attainable only in history, only through a long-range revolutionary project which both kept the humane society as its motivating principle and fully acknowledged the violence of present society.

    Pierre Verstraeten rightly sees Goetz's conversion as the decisive step in the evolution of Sartre's ethics. Hoederer had understood and advocated a dialectical ethics, one which accepted violence as vital in the struggle to suppress the causes of violence. But his ideas were presented schematically, not arrived at through lived experience as in the several stages of Le Diable et le bon Dieu: 'Goetz, by his commerce with failure, solitude, nothingness, is able to assume the contradictory practice imposed by the situation; he can decipher the necessity of transcending all morality, as well as all violence, at the same time as the impossibility of transcending it in present circumstances; he is capable of confronting and operating a synthesis which detotalizes itself before his eyes; he can lead a contradictory enterprise: a dialectic which de-dialecticizes itself in the very moment it constitutes itself.'³⁴ Goetz understands, through his own experience, both the goal of a non-violent future and the need to use specific forms of violence to achieve it: he is no longer either a cynical realist or a naive idealist. He no longer resigns himself and the world to pure evil, or pretends that pure goodness is possible. He attempts with full awareness to accept revolutionary action: to utilize violence without thereby destroying the revolutionary goal.

    Goetz gives up trying to be good: that project was based on, and supported, the world's evil. He gives up trying to help people: that project had contempt built into it. His love for the poor had been totally abstract as well as condescending. More, it had been fundamentally self-centred: his goal was to win, earn their love: 'I wanted

     34. Verstraeten, p. 115.

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pure love: ridiculous nonsense. To love anyone is to hate the same enemy. Therefore I will adopt your hates.'³⁵

    Thus, Goetz learns the only love possible in a time of social upheaval: solidarity. This is not love itself: it will remain 'too early' for love until conditions are created which make it possible. In joining with others to create those conditions, Goetz cannot yet be a 'man among men' – his dream as it was Oreste's – for the insurrectionaries do not need one more militant, but, 'in this period of reflux, a leader, hard, and intransigent: Goetz is this leader; it is therefore as such that he will serve these new brothers in misfortune – that is, in still denying them, in the anticipation of a long term where all constraint will be abolished.'³⁶

    Goetz is presented to the captains as their new leader:

nasti: . . . I have news for you which is worth a great victory: we have a general, and he is the most famous military leader in Germany.

a captain: This monk?

goetz: Everything except a monk! (He throws off his robe and appears dressed as a soldier.)

the captains: Goetz!

karl: Goetz! For God's sake! . . .

a captain: Goetz! That changes everything!

another captain: What does it change, tell me? What does it change? He is a traitor. He's probably drawing you into a fine ambush.

goetz: Come here! Nasti has named me chief and leader. Will you obey my orders?

a captain: I'd rather die.

goetz: Then die, brother! (He stabs him. ) As for you others, listen to me! I take up this command against my will, but I shall be relentless. Believe me, if there is one chance of winning this war, I shall win it. Proclaim immediately that any soldier attempting to desert will be hanged. By tonight, I must have a complete list of troops, weapons, and stores; you shall answer for everything with your lives. We shall be sure of victory when your men are more

     35. Le Diable et le bon Dieu, Paris, 1951, p. 275; trans. Kitty Black: The Devil and the Good Lord, New York 1960, p.145.

     36. Verstraeten, p.105.

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afraid of me than of the enemy. (They try to speak.) No. Not a word. Go. Tomorrow you will learn my plans. (They go. Goetz kicks the body.) The kingdom of man is beginning. A fine start! Nasti, I told you I would be a hangman and butcher. (He has a moment of weakness.)

nasti: (laying his hand on Goetz’s shoulder): Goetz . . .

goetz: Never fear, I shall not flinch. I shall make them hate me, because I know no other way of loving them. I shall give them orders, since I have no other way of obeying. I shall remain alone with this empty sky over my head, since I have no other way of being among men. There is this war to fight, and I will fight it.³⁷

    One central fact about Le Diable et le bon Dieu prevents acceptance of it as the fulfilment of Sartre's theatrical project: it is not, for all the importance of its ideas, a dramatic success. We have just seen Goetz kill the captain in demonstration of his willingness to be violent in the pursuit of good. But this killing lacks dramatic necessity. It is a rhetorical device chosen to make a point, rather than a 'natural' development of the play's action. Similarly, Goetz's final statements are too abstract, too general. They show that an intellectual problem has been resolved and a moral choice made, but not that a concrete person has changed. They lack detail and individuality, as does Goetz himself throughout the play. His remarks show that the main action is a philosophical struggle, not concrete individual life-experience. If performing before God transforms all Goetz's acts into rhetorical gestures, Sartre is able to show this to us and make it intellectually comprehensible, but not to bring it to life before us as a dramatically credible obsession. In the same way, the evil with which Goetz grapples is abstract and remote; and his own evil is unmotivated, has no effect on him, is instantly forgiven and easily abandoned.³⁸ We need not quarrel with Sartre for placing God at the centre of Le Diable et le bon Dieu, but rather for his manner of doing it. Having predicated the whole play on belief in the existence of God, Sartre suddenly has Goetz undergo conversion at the end and cease believing – an unmotivated conversion lacking continuity with Goetz's past, and only now posed as a central theme. The play works best as a drama of ideas – and even then it does not adequately explore its own chosen

     37. Le Diable et le bon Dieu, pp.281-82; The Devil and the Good Lord, pp.148-49.

     38. See McCall, pp.38-41.

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themes. The problem here is not one of detail: it lies at the core of the play, in its characters, its language, its issues. Sartre's most positive, most ambitious, most spectacular play is also his stiffest and least convincing. In Les Mains sales, Hugo is the young bourgeois intellectual filled with revolutionary righteousness and the need to be seen. In Le Diable et le bon Dieu, however, the 'truths' stand out: they are abstract, not adequately integrated into character and event. Goetz makes little sense as a person: he is above all the bearer of a theme. The characters scarcely interact, their words scarcely affect others. They are interconnected as ideas, as components of a problem, but not as individuals. It is fitting that Le Diable et le bon Dieu should have been set in the sixteenth century, turning on religious and other questions remote from Sartre. This historical distance from our own time and its issues betokens the distance within the play itself, between its half-realized characters and events and its profound dénouement.

'Kean' and 'Nekrassov'

However one may criticize it, no one can see or read Le Diable et le bon Dieu and not understand it as a beginning. The Party of Louis and Olga has become the peasant organization headed by the one-dimensional yet admirable Nasti. The oppressive demand that Hugo stifle himself and all he values has been transcended by the realistic appreciation that only in the struggle can Goetz fully become himself. Goetz is no longer against the struggle, or above it, or outside it: he is now with the peasants, in the midst of it. He is ready to begin afresh.

    Simone de Beauvoir has said that Goetz represented the transcendence of the contradiction that had torn Sartre since his politicization – the contradiction between his commitment to freedom, and the 'discipline of solidarity with all men'. In Le Diable et le bon Dieu, Sartre brought his reflection on commitment to a close by resolving on a realistic revolutionary stance: acceptance of the collective struggle, with all its limitations, as the locus of effective individual engagement. 'I made Goetz do what I was unable to do,' Sartre wrote in his unpublished notes. By the next year, de Beauvoir continued, he 'had reached the same point as Goetz: he was ready to accept a collective discipline without denying his own liberty'³⁹ – that is by aligning

     39. La Force des choses, pp.262, 280; Force of Circumstance, pp.243,261.

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himself with the Communists, as the only possible revolutionary force.

    This new revolutionary-realist commitment had a striking effect on Sartre's plays. In fact the period between 1952 and 1956, when his relations with the pcf were at their closest, was the only time when his drama was not primarily reflective. The plays of these years did not meditate upon action and its consequences; they seemed themselves to be actions.

    Neither Kean nor Nekrassov is very profound; compared with the rest of Sartre's theatre, both are positively light-hearted. Nekrassov is Sartre's only wholly comic drama, and in adapting Kean, Sartre altered Dumas's original to heighten its comedy and minimize its melodramatic elements. Equally important, neither was publicly very successful; they are, besides Morts sans sépulture, the two least known of Sartre's plays. To be sure, both plays treat serious issues, but by presenting rather than exploring them. The Sartre who adapted Kean was dearly on the side of reality rather than gesture; the Sartre who wrote Nekrassov was unambiguously opposed to the anti-Communist manipulations of the bourgeois press. He posed no great moralpolitical dilemmas and no genuine ambiguities which could not be resolved on the stage.

    Kean depicts the actor's decision to leave the stage and become real. At the beginning of the play, it is shown that Kean is not a man, but an actor. He can do nothing in his private life but play roles, conjuring up grandiose and dramatic feelings without experiencing them himself, living in the illusion of wealth while owning nothing and indebted to everyone. He attracts vacuous aristocrats who value his glamour and reward him by supporting, befriending, or falling in love with him. This life of grand gestures has rendered Kean incapable of knowing who he is. In a moment of insight he sees what it has meant: 'You cannot act to earn your living. You act to lie, to deceive, to deceive yourself; to be what you cannot be, and because you want to forget yourself. You act the hero because you are a coward at heart, and you play the saint because you are a devil by nature. You act a murderer because you long to poison your best friend. You act because you are a born liar and totally unable to speak the truth. You act because you would go mad if you didn't act. Act! Do I know

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myself when I am acting? Is there ever a moment when I cease to act? . . .'⁴⁰

    Kean lives in the irréel, as do Goetz, Hugo, and in a sense, Orestes. In play after play, Sartre explored this preference for the world of fantasy and gesture, and the reasons why its emptiness came, sooner or later, to weigh so heavily. In his first novel, Sartre sought to dispel Roquentin's illusions, but, paradoxically, left him no alternative to the imaginary; nearly twenty years later, Kean opened the passage to the real world. The play traces Kean's collapse as an actor, both onstage and off. Caught in a complicated love affair, he breaks down during a performance, departs from his scripted role and publicly insults the Prince of Wales and other notables. In the wake of this disaster, he decides to leave England and the stage – and the imaginary – to live as Mr Edmund; to become sober, to marry and settle into an ordinary life. Saying goodbye to noble gestures and overwhelming passions, Kean finally finds his own bearings in the real.

    Kean presents a clear and unambiguous choice. The real world seems less grand than the irréel, but is infinitely preferable to it. As with Goetz, people are central to Kean's life and decision. Like Goetz he changes, but this time the familiar Sartrean theme is rendered crisply and conclusively. Kean is as light and bracing as Le Diable et le bon Dieu is dense and ponderous. The whole play, in short, is charged with the optimism and energy of Goetz's conversion.

    Nekrassov, Sartre's one wholly comic play, is also perhaps his most wholly political. It contains no personal or philosophical explorations: its characters are identical with their actions and social positions. Nekrassov is also Sartre's most 'Brechtian' play, vigorously poking fun at the capitalist press, its personnel and practices.

    The delightful first meeting between Inspector Goblet and the journalist Sibilot, for example, is one of the play's best touches, deftly situating both men as petits bourgeois. Goblet, searching for the swindler de Valera, has entered Sibilot's apartment and immediately feels at home:

     40. Kean, Paris 1954, p.81; trans. Kitty Black, Kean, The Devil and the Good Lord and Other Plays, pp. 199-200.

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inspector (with a sweep of his hand): The furniture: nineteen twenty-five?

sibilot: Ah, 1925? Oh, yes.

inspector: The Decorative Arts Exhibition, our youth . . .

sibilot: The year of my wedding.

inspector: And mine. Our wives chose the furniture with their mothers; we weren't even consulted. The in-laws lent the money. Do you like those 1925 chairs?

sibilot: You know, in the end one no longer sees them. . . .

They go on to confide in each other: each one sadly admits his professional-social servility. Goblet recognizes in Sibilot 'a face like mine. A sixty-thousand-francs-a-month face'. Each one recognizes in the other his essential self, his petit-bourgeois self, and responds accordingly. 'My poor Sibilot,' says the Inspector:

sibilot: My poor Inspector. (They shake hands.)

inspector: Only we can appreciate our poverty and our greatness. Give me a drink.

sibilot: Gladly. (He fills two glasses.)

inspector: (raising his glass) To the defenders of Western culture. (He drinks.)

sibilot: Victory to those who defend the rich without loving them. (He drinks.). . .⁴¹

To criticize these characters as too generic or stereotypical would be misguided. Sibilot and Goblet are intentionally made interchangeable, not distinctly individual petits bourgeois. Sartre's purpose here was to distill each man into his class identity and function as his deepest self.

    He achieved a number of such satirical-political successes in Nekrassov: the fall of Mouton after de Valera-Nekrassov ingeniously omits him from the Soviet list of victims; the come-down of the Lilliputian Palotin; Demidov, the Communist so pure as to become a rabid anti-Communist, and his exchanges with de Valera-Nekrassov; the scene where de Valera convinces Palotin that he is Nekrassov because Palotin needs him to be; the story of the suitcase filled with radioactive dust; the obsessive anti-Communism of Soir à Paris; the

     41. Nekrassov, Paris 1955; trans. Sylvia and George Leeson, Nekrassov, The Devil and the Good Lord and Two Other Plays, pp.339-42.

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reduction of de Valera, the master manipulator, to a cog in the capitalist machine which comes to dominate the stage; and finally, the improbable transformation of Sibilot into the powerful editor of Soir à Paris. Sartre himself later criticized Nekrassov as only half-successful because it focused too much on de Valera and not enough on how he became 'enmeshed in the paper's machinery'.⁴² This self-criticism was excessive. Certainly Sartre toyed with making de Valera into his traditional dramatic hero, preoccupied him with the hero-impostor dilemma, but he did not succumb to this temptation. He went on instead to show, with marked success, the system creating, swallowing up and recreating its personnel. Whatever its faults, Nekrassov remains Sartre's most underrated play.⁴³

    It may be that Sartre's negative attitude towards the play was conditioned by its unusual position in his theatre as a whole. Nekrassov after all – and not coincidentally – is both uncharacteristically political and at the same time, was 'welcomed unreservedly by the Communists, the cgt and the tec [the pcf-sponsored play-going society]. Their papers wrote about it, seats were set aside for them at cheaper prices.'⁴⁴ In fact, its lack of resemblance to his usual theatre notwithstanding, Nekrassov marked Sartre's closest approach to being an activist playwright connected with a movement. Had he continued to develop in the direction indicated by it, perhaps it would now be better known and less harshly judged by its author. But in fact it represented the outer limit of his theatre, a rare moment of political integration.

'Les Sequestrés d'Altona'

The mood of Sartre's next play was strikingly at odds with his earlier optimism. In fact, Les Sequestrés d'Altona invariably provokes comparisons with Huis Clos: its five characters seem locked away from the world, bent on judging and destroying each other. Sartre himself saw it as a kind of historical variation on the earlier play, in which 'characters are dominated, gripped by the past throughout just as they are by each other.'⁴⁵

    Sartre's apprenticeship to history, completed formally in Le Diable et

     42. ts, p.297; st, p.252.

     43. See crw, 55/265, p.307.

     44. ts, pp.69-70; st, p.45.

     45. ts, p.314; st, p.268.

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le bon Dieu, only now bore fruit artistically. In Les Sequestrés d'Altona, he recaptured the dramatic power of Huis Clos, the ease and sureness of touch he had shown when not preoccupied with the theme of engagement. Now, depicting the inferno of the twentieth century, Sartre wrote a play to rival his depiction of the timeless hell. In Les Sequestrés d'Altona, for the first time since Huis Clos, Sartre created individual characters fully integrated in word and deeds with their situation.

    What does it mean to call Les Sequestrés d'Altona an 'historical Huis Clos'? The play's entire action turns on the experience of Nazism and the Second World War in the family of a wealthy industrialist. The Gedach family, Germany's largest shipbuilders, is dying – the old man has throat cancer, while Franz is locked in his room, mad with guilt and pride and waited on by Leni, who ministers both to his madness and to his sexual needs. A supreme realist, the father wants to settle the family accounts before he dies, and so induces Werner's wife, Joanna, to see Franz to arrange one last meeting of father and eldest son. Joanna's presence fascinates Franz and brings him back to reality – the reality of his own wartime role as Nazi collaborator and then torturer, and the post-war reality of Germany's recovery. Leni, willing to see Franz die if she must lose him to Joanna, reveals each of these, telling the true story of Franz to Joanna, and the truth of 'the German miracle' to Franz and so banishing the madness which conceals his guilt from him. The play ends with the fall of the house of Gerlach: Franz and his father commit suicide together, Leni moves into Franz's room, and Joanna and Werner leave the family home and shipbuilding empire.

    The play's most significant personal tensions are, at root, historical: the Gerlach family's power and sense of superiority; the old man's opportunistic decision to collaborate with the Nazis, to the point of selling them land for a concentration camp; the Protestant morality in which Franz so fervently believed. Franz was broken by the sight of the Rabbi whom he had rescued being killed by ss men summoned by his father, and by his subsequent exemption from punishment, as a Gerlach. Forced to enlist in the army, his sense of powerlessness, combined with an ingrained passion for power, made of him 'the butcher of Smolensk', a torturer of partisans. These events, far in the past, are the truth that Franz lives with and yet tries to escape by his flight into the imaginary. He hides in the irréel by defending his century against the judges of the future, by deceiving

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himself about Germany's fate (he is convinced that it still lies in ruins and that its people are starving) and by lying about his own role (he claims to feel guilty for not having done enough to avert Germany's defeat). At the same time, his father has become unnecessary to a capitalist economy dependent now on managers and technicians – the family firm will continue in spite of the old man's death. Yet everyone in the family has been broken by his once awesome power. Leni is a misfit who feeds off Franz's madness, and Werner knows only submission to his father's will. By the play's end, collaboration with the Nazis, the transformation of capitalism and its own related internal decay bring the house of Gerlach to destruction. 'Hell', still a central image in Sartre's work, is no longer simply 'other people': it is the curse of a particular history, the inability to overcome the specific evils that certain human beings have done to others in the twentieth century.

    Sartre's overriding concern in Les Sequestrés d'Altona was to explore the individual as historical agent. His achievement was to make a particular individual, Franz, come alive as and because he embodied a vital historical issue, to show both his individual actions as they arose from historical forces and the historical forces as they were affected by the action of individuals like him. Sartre's treatment of Franz's guilt revealed how far he had advanced in his understanding of the relationship of individuals to history. Franz is not a Nazi and not a mass murderer. In wartime, in exceptional circumstances, he has tortured and murdered. But these are emphatically his acts. By denying Franz the evasions of 'collective guilt', or obedience to higher orders, Sartre left him unable to displace responsibility for his acts on to Hitler, the military command structure or Germany as a whole. He chooses sequestration and madness as his only alternative to confronting what he himself has done, to an immersion in guilt which could only end in his suicide. How did Franz come to torture and murder to begin with? His attempt to save the Rabbi was prompted not by human sympathy for prisoners (whom he despised) but by pride and a desire to redeem his father: by the arrogance inbred in the scion of one of Germany's leading families. Thwarted and defeated, the son of the all-powerful industrialist himself counted for nothing, not even forced to bear the consequences of his moral act. Raised to value power but discovering himself powerless, he became an officer of a regime based on a cult of power. In this way, Franz absorbed Nazism into his very

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character, and became an eager collaborator: 'I was Hitler's wife. The rabbi was bleeding and I discovered at the heart of my powerlessness some strange kind of approval. (He is back again in the past.) I have supreme power. Hitler has changed me, made me implacable and sacred, made me himself. I am Hitler, and I shall surpass myself. (Pause. To the father) No rations left. My soldiers were prowling around the barn. (Back in the past.) Four good Germans will crush me to the earth, and my own men will bleed the prisoners to death. No! I shall never again fall into abject powerlessness. I swear it. It's dark. Horror has not yet been let loose. . . . I'll grab them quickly. If anyone lets loose, it will be me. I'll assume the evil; I'll display my power by the singularity of an unforgettable act; change living men into vermin. I alone will deal with the prisoners. I'll debase them into abject wretches. They'll talk. Power is an abyss, and I see its depths. It is not enough to choose who shall live and who shall die. I shall deride life or death with a penknife and a cigarette lighter. (Distractedly.) Fascinating! It is the glory of kings to go to hell. I shall go there. (He stands as though in a trance, downstage.)'⁴⁶

    Why is there no exit at the end, no possibility of redemption? Why can Franz only die, Franz who has been torturing himself for thirteen years? He knows himself completely at the end but cannot accept himself. For even now he remains in some sense 'Hitler's wife' – not merely because he has a portrait of Hitler on his wall, or wears a tattered military uniform, but above all because of his enormous pride.⁴⁷ Old Gerlach, with his characteristic pragmatism, condemns Franz's crimes as individual murders of a common criminal who only 'risked prolonging the massacre and hindering reconstruction'.⁴⁸ But Franz had been raised as a prince; and, defending himself before the tribunal of the thirtieth century, he dementedly adopts this role: he 'alone speaks the truth: the shattered Titan, the eyewitness, ageless, regular, secular, in saecula saeculorum. Me. Man is dead, and I am his witness.'⁴⁹ A prince locked in his own bedroom, still insane with pride and lust for power and, in the post-war capitalist world, utterly impotent and useless – Franz must die because of his guilt and because

     46. Les Sequestrés d'Altona, Paris 1960; trans. Sylvia and George Leeson, New York, 1961, pp.163-4.

     47. See McCall, p.137.

     48. The Condemned of Altona. p.170.

     49. Ibid., p.58.

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there is nothing left for a prince to do. Produced by the twentieth century, for a moment its active agent, he is also its victim.

Negativity and History: The Limits of Sartre's Theatre

Why did Les Sequestrés d'Altona, Sartre's last and in many respects his best major play, end so negatively? Why did Sartre's theatre culminate in an historical Huis Clos rather than an historical Le Diable et le bon Dieu? Was Sartre rendering his own negativity in historical terms, giving political coloration to the dilemmas that had engaged him since the thirties, or was he discovering, and rendering in terms appropriate to them, fundamental negativities of the twentieth century? Why did his theatrical project lead to Franz, someone who has embraced the irréel, overwhelmed by the weight of his acts? We have seen that Goetz's past violence left no strain: forgiveness was not even an issue. Why then was there no exit for Franz?

    First performed in 1959, Les Sequestrés d'Altona was designed to call attention to the torture then being perpetrated by the French in Algeria. 'My subject,' Sartre writes, 'is a young man returning from Algeria who has seen certain things out there, has perhaps had a share in them, and keeps his mouth shut.'⁵⁰ He went on to identify the specific motivation of the play: 'the political situation in France makes it imperative to recover such people for society and despite the filthy brutalities they may have perpetrated.'⁵¹ By 'recover' Sartre meant, very specifically, to make active in the struggle against the war. But this play about a family beyond redemption, whatever else it may do, explores no alternatives to Gerlachs' destruction, explores no basis for a positive struggle. Franz is emphatically not recoverable.

    As with Huis Clos and Les Mains sales, Sartre's statements about his intentions distract us from what his play actually presents on the stage. He suggested, for example, that he .had created a German bourgeois family in order to clarify the issue of collaboration with the Nazis, and that this choice was meant to heighten his audience's identification with the issues and ultimately, their self-understanding. But, after all, who are the Gerlachs? A family of shipbuilders employing tens of thousands, who despised the plebeian Nazis yet accepted

    50. ts, pp.305-6; st, p.259-60.

    51. ts, p.306; ts, p.260.

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their regime because it expanded the navy and conquered foreign markets. The Nazis served the Gerlachs' interests just as they served the Nazis. Thus the family's guilt extends beyond Franz's actions, into the heart of its economic empire, and the social order at whose head it stands. It is doubly condemned by history, having once eagerly collaborated with Hitler and now been rendered anachronistic by the economic and technical growth of post-war Germany. We may indeed sympathize with Franz as much as we condemn him – an important achievement of the play – but we can feel little sadness at the fall of the house of Gerlach. Long before the first act the family has lost all vitality. Franz becomes a war criminal because of its displacement, which leaves his power-lust no other means of satisfaction. Les Sequestrés d'Altona is a play of indictment, not of struggle. Unlike Le Diable et le bon Dieu, it contains no hopeful anticipation of the future, no sense of historical possibility. Its only question is, how will the doom of the Gerlachs be played out?

Sartre had earlier resolved the problems of effective revolutionary action in the abstract; he had now integrated individuals into history, in concrete representations. But he never created a modern-day Orestes who stayed with his people, a Hoederer who lived, a Hugo who changed, a Goetz after his conversion – or a Franz who was recovered 'for society'. Here we reach the conclusion of Sartre's project in the theatre, and its political limits as an intervention in history.

    Sartre created a rich and original body of plays, a connected series of explorations into some of the most profound dilemmas of his time. To mark its incompleteness is not to detract from its achievement. However, it is impossible to overlook the shift that occurred in Sartre's concerns after 1955, when he completed the last of his three most 'positive' plays. Why did he return to his earlier negativity? Why did his work in the theatre come finally to close with Les Troyennes, a play that concluded:

Soon you are going to pay.

Make war, imbecilic mortals,

ravage fields and cities,

violate temples and tombs,

and torture the vanquished.

You will die from it.

All of you.⁵³

     52. ts, pp.303-4; st, p.257-8.

     53. Euripides, Les Troyennes, adaptation de Jean-Paul Sartre, Paris 1965, p.130.

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Sartre had evidently not abandoned struggle: but his point of view had shifted with his mood. His attention, in his last two plays, was focused now on the enemy – capitalists, collaborators, European colonialists. At the same time – and this is the most important shift – he deliberately constructed Les Sequestrés d'Altona so that his audience would identify the enemy as itself. Franz-France. Was it France whose crimes were so great that it must hide in madness, so great that Sartre must uncover them through images of Nazi Germany? This was precisely the point: Sartre was writing about the war in Algeria from the point of view of a European sympathetic to the Algerians. By 1959 his theatre no longer explored questions of action and effectiveness on behalf of those in or near a revolutionary movement. In drawing the audience to identify with Franz, Sartre was suggesting that they were the enemy. His adaptation of Euripides made this explicit:

Men of Europe.

You despise Africa and Asia

And you call us barbarians, I believe,

But when vainglory and greed

Throw you on our land,

You pillage, you torture, you massacre.

Where are the barbarians then?⁵⁴

    One of Sartre's main reasons for translating The Trojan Women was to present a 'denunciation of war in general and colonial expeditions in particular.'⁵⁵ Three other considerations stood out in his comments: his interest in this play, which 'ends in total nihilism', after it had already been newly translated and performed during the Algerian war;⁵⁶ his scholarly approach to problems of translation; and his change of focus from the Greeks to Europeans in general. The play's action takes place after the fall of Troy, and portrays the terrible fate of the Trojan women and Hector's child. Its bitter mood continues the gloom of Les Sequestrés d'Altona: the war is over, we are witnessing a further stage of disaster, and more misery and retribution are to come. But why did Sartre turn to Euripides for this story, why at this point become a translator, why become so uncharacteristically fascinated with scholarly questions? Furthermore, why did he now search for continuity with the past, and why depict such generaliz-

     54. Ibid.

     55. ts, p.364; st, p.313.

     56. ts, p.365; st, p.314.

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ed and motiveless suffering unredeemed by any struggle to end it?

    Sartre's shift, and his inability to go further than Goetz's new beginning before relapsing into the mood of his two final plays, was conditioned by events in France after 1955: the pcf's automatic support for the Soviet invasion of Hungary, the Communist Deputies' vote in the National Assembly for emergency powers to prosecute the war in Algeria; the pcf's generally passive attitude towards the Algerian struggle; de Gaulle's assumption of power in 1958 with only token opposition from the Left; and the subsequent referendum confirming the Fifth Republic. De Beauvoir has recalled that those opposing the war felt their isolation keenly, that they grew to be hated by – and themselves to hate – their fellow-countrymen. The years between 1956 and 1962 are revealed as the most dismal of all in her memoirs, unredeemed even by victory in Algeria: 'for seven years we had desired this victory; it came too late to console us for the price it had cost.'⁵⁷ Sartre no longer felt in solidarity with the Left, 'that corpse, lying on its back and full of worms' which 'was so characterized by assent that one day in the autumn of 1958 it expired murmuring a final yes.' Worse still, by 1960 he had come to feel deeply pessimistic about the efficacy of his own efforts: 'fifty years of living in the backward province which France has become are very degrading. We shouted, protested, signed and countersigned. We declared, according to our habits of thinking, "It is not permissible...,' or, "The proletariat will not tolerate...' And now at last, here we are. So we have accepted everything. Shall we communicate our wisdom and the glorious fruits of our experience to these unknown young men? Sunk lower and lower, we have learned only one thing – our basic impotence. This is the beginning of Reason, I agree, of the fight for life. But our bones are old, and at the age when most people think about writing their will, we are discovering that we have done nothing. . . .'⁵⁸

    This self-lacerating vision also recalls Sartre's original negativity. 'Man is a useless passion' – this, after all, was one of his basic tenets. We have now seen that although his plays carry him beyond it, they in some sense remain entangled in the problematic to which it belonged. He certainly took giant strides forward from his timeless

     57. La Force des choses, p.671; Force of Circumstance, p.642.

     58. 'Paul Nizan', Situations, IV, pp.138, 143; Situations, pp.123, 126.

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pessimism, from his sense of the world's overwhelming weight. Yet the world's negative aspects remained overwhelming, and action could never merge with positive struggle and fully drawn characters. A token of this ultimate defeat is that play after play remained preoccupied with the irréel: not only Orestes and Electra, but also Hugo, Goetz, Kean, de Valera, and Franz were haunted by the irréel. Sartre never entirely abandoned his old refuge; from beginning to end and in spite of profound changes, we almost never witness a struggle whose key question is not the character's problematic relation to action in the real world. In relation to the crucial question – how far has Sartre been able to transform his thought to accommodate his new activism? – the testimony of the plays is deeply equivocal. They struggled to reach the world, and to re-orient their audience in it. But the very tenacity of this struggle, and its concluding pessimism, signified that in some sense the original Sartrean problematic prevailed.

    Inasmuch as his original limits could have been overcome only in a dialectic with history, it is difficult to conceive of Sartre's fully transcending his original dilemmas and moving towards a concrete, historically rooted revolutionary optimism in the Europe of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Whether the ultimate limits of his theatre were those of his original problematic, or of the historical situation in which he laboured, or, more likely, of the interaction and mutual reinforcement of the two as his dramatic project struggled to break new ground, Sartre ceased to write plays and to meditate on problems of individual-revolutionary ethics. Deeply disappointed in his political hopes for Europe, he now turned to a direct and passionate practice of solidarity with the revolutionary struggles of the Third World. The place of this phase in his political writing, and its substantive relationships with his work as a whole, will be analysed in the course of an examination of his political essays.