Existentialism and American Novel

8/13/2019 Existentialism and American Novel

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Existentialism and the American NovelAuthor(s): Jean BruneauSource: Yale French Studies, No. 1, Existentialism (1948), pp. 66-72Published by: Yale University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2928860.

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JEANBRUNEAU

ExistentialismndtheAmericanNovelExistentialism s the first rench literarymovement n which the modernAmerican novel has exerciseda strongand' acknowledged nfluence.Jean-Paul

Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir have enrolled in the school of Faulkner, DosPassos, Hemingway, Caldwell and Steinbeck; they have gone so far as tocanonize even Dashiel Hammett and James M. Cain in the Temple of Tasteof the Cafe de Flore. In thewake of Sartre nd de Beauvoir,Camus, Moloudji,Magnane, Desforkts, .-L Bory . . . have in their turn borrowed attacks anddevices fromthe New World writers hanksto whom the Existentialists aveeffected a revolution n Frenchnovelistictechnique .-It is no accident that the Existentialists re responsiblefor what Sartrecalls the passage [of the novel] fromNewtonian dynamics to generalizedrelativity .2 e and Simone de Beauvoir, thinkers rimarily, ecame novelistsbecause theirphilosophywas an attempt to reconcile the objective and thesubjective,the absolute and the relative,the timeless nd the historical , ndbecause only in the novel is it possible to evoke the primordialgushing-forthof life in all its concrete,particularand temporal verity .8 uch a positionabolishes the distinctionbetween philosophical treatise and literary work;certainpages of La Naust.e read like excerptsfromL'Etre ct le ndant,andcertain abstractanalyses, uch as that of the caress, mightwith all fitness einserted nto the love-storyf Marcelle and Mathieu. The traditionalFrenchnovel-forms an unsatisfactorynstrument or the Existentialistwriter; thenovelist's technique is always a reference o his metaphysics ,writesSartre'.

How indeedcould Sartreand de Beauvoir work within an esthetic reatedout of philosophiestheyhad leftbehind? The Existentialist ero cannotreveal

1 Cf. Sartre, AmericanNovelists n FrenchEyes , The AtlamticMonthly,August 1946.2 Sartre, Qu'est-ceque la littmrature?, Les Temps Modernes,June 1947,p. i631-8 S. de Beauvoir, Litt~ratureet m~taphysique ,Les Temps Moderner,April 1946,p. ii6a.4 A propos de Le Bruitet la fureur: a temporalityhezFaulkner ,NRF,1 June, 1939.66

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JEAN BRUNEAUhimself through the devices used to present the realist or naturalisthero.Flaubertand Zola, Duhamel, Romains, Martin du Gard and Mauriac-all thesedescribeonlyhollowmen,men who die in the mind of the author beforetheyare born in thepages of thenovel. In such a novel it matters ittle whether hehero is presentedfromwithin or without, nalyzed as an entityor studied inrelation to his environment; is existence s no longer a life,but a fate, rientedas it is by theomnipotentnovelisttoward a logical and ineluctableend.

Things happen in a certainorder;when we recountthem,we reversethe order. It seems as thoughwe were beginningat the beginning-'It was one finefall eveningin 1922. I was a notarypublic's clerk atMarommes'-and actuallywe have begun at the end.5The author who does this setshimselftoo easy a task; his novel is then onlyan account,thestory f a lived,ratherthan a living ife.

But the Existentialist elieves in freedom,n the unpredictability6fmen'sactions; human life,forhim, cannot,mustnot be degraded into automatism.A character n a novel must vibrate with the same anxieties and anguish asthe man-in-the-world , ust be, in the present tense, and not have been, inthe past.Since the only novels we could write were novels of situation . . .we had to people oux books with half-lucid,half-obscure onscious-nesses, present creatureswhose realities resided in the muddled andcontradictoryabric of the judgmentsthat each creaturemade of all(including tself) and all of each . . . in short,we had to leave doubts,hesitations, nd uncrystallizedmatter everywheren our work.7The Existentialist annot, then, accept either the sentimentalfinalism f theromantic, r the naturalist's cientific eterminism. he novel must no longerbe a game (no matterhow serious) between authors nd characters. ife cannotbe slicedup; it mustpass whole into literature.But this has been one of the chief aims of the modern Americannovelist:

to fillhis books with life in its unmutilated,primitivecomplexity nd evenconfusion.As Malraux says: The essential characteristic f contemporaryAmerican writing is that it is the only literaturewhose writers are notintellectuals .8 artreand Simone de Beauvoir found in thiswritingfirst fall a fundamental mphasison action. Frenchand Englishnovels seenmo tellstoriesonly to analyze them and to explain theirmeaning.The basic unit oftheAmericannovel is the act,whichforthe Existentialist onstitutes heunityof life. We must plunge Things into action . . . ; the world and man are5 La Nausie (ed. NRF), p. 59.6 Aury,Dominique, Qu'est-ce que 1'existentialisme? an interviewwithSartre)Lettresfranvaises, 4 Nov. 1945.7 Qu'est-ceque la litterature , Les TempsModernes,June 1947,p. i6pi.8 Horizon, January1945. 67

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Yale French tudiesrevealed hroughnterprises .9nalysiss not a valid means fknowledge,sBergsonhas alreadypointedout, nor is it a valid approach n literature.[Americaniterature]resentedtscharactersous synthetically.t made themperformefore ur eyesacts whichwerecomplete n themselves,mpossibleto explain, ctswhich twas necessaryo grasp ompletely,ith ll theobscurepowers f oursouls .'9 ortheExistentialistsheheroes fThe SunAlsoRises,of Of Mice and Men, of God's Little Acre, of Light in August were just suchsyntheticharacters.ide and Malrauxhadalready elt hisyearningor ction,and the atterhad evenpartlybandoned nalysis ordescription,n La Con-dition humaineand L'Espbor. nstead of carefully reparing very ctionpsychologicallyas had Stendhal nd thepsychologicalovelists) r materially(as wasthe case withBalzacand histradition), xistentialistovelistshose oimitate herapidmultiplicationf actionswhichDos Passoshad so effectivelyutilized n his U.S.A. Camus'snovelL'Etranger s the best exampleof thistechniquen French iterature.

He [Raymond]rank glass fwine ndgotup. He pushed way heplates nd the ittle itof coldsausage hatwe had left.He carefullywipedoff hewaxed table-cloth. e tooka sheetof paper,ruled nsquares, ut ofa drawer fhisnight-table.Camus'shero s shown o us just thewayotherhumanbeings ppear to us:byact after ctwhichweare left o interpret.The second eature ftheAmerican ovelwhichppealstotheExistential-ist is the pure objectivityf the authortowardhis charactersnd of thecharactersoward ach other. f human ife s a string f irrational eeds, tfollows hatthewriter annot afford o understandhem.Furthermorehecharacters ustnot understandach other. The heroesof HemingwayndCaldwellneverexplainthemselves;o not allow themselveso be dissected:they ctonly.To analyze hemwouldbe to killthem .12Thisnotonlymeansthatthe critic houldnotattempto treat hehero n A Farewell o Arms rthefamilyn TobaccoRoa4 as he doesPolyeucter PhMdre;hewhole ctofliteraryreation s transformedy suchan attitude. artre s convinced hattheonlywaytowrite truenovel s to leavethe characterss mysteriousndobscures they eally re. ntellectualnderstandingust iveway ofreedom.Whatdo weknow boutRoquentin rMarcelle, or nstance?n what ategorycan we put them?Whatdo they eachus? If Sartre s successful,hesemerespecimensfhumanityhould ttainuniversalityytheir ery oncreteness.

9 Sartre, Qu'est-ceque la littdrature , Les Temps Modernes,June 1947,p. 1640.10 Sartre, AmericanNovelists n FrenchEyes ,op. cit.,p. 117.11L'Etbanger,P. 49.12 Sartre,American ovelistsn French yes , p. cit.,p. 117.68



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JEAN BRUNEAUThirdly,Faulkner and Dos Passos have evolved new techniquesfordealingwithone of the most mportant roblemswithwhichthe novelist s faced: that

of representing ime. The habitual story was purely chronological,thus un-faithfulto the real nature of time for the individual. Moreover the writercould onlycenterhis story n one character r a group of characters, nd couldonlydescribe theflowing f time through heseverynarrowchannels.Faulknerabandons chronologicalorder in The Sound and the Fury, and Simone deBeauvoir uses his new,more sensitivemethodin her Le Sang des autres.DosPassos attemptedto describea whole epoch in his trilogyU.S.A. by using hisprofile technique which enables him to vary and multiply ndefinitelyhecharacters f his novels.It was afterreading a book by Dos Passos that I thoughtfor thefirst imeof weavinga novel out of various simultaneous ives,withcharacterswho pass each otherby without knowingone anotherandwho all contribute to the atmosphereof a moment or a historicalperiod.'8

Thus the classic concept of unity of action is destroyed. n Le Sursis Sartredepicts the birth of war in the lives of various people: Frenchmen,Czechs,workers,prime ministers,Mathieu, Brunet, Jacques, etc.-In one way Sartrehas not gone as far as Dos Passos: he uses neitherthe Camera eye nor thenewsreel,which contribute at least as much as the stories to creating theatmosphereof the period. But he does tryto expressthe idea of group-con.ventionality hrough he individual characters,uch as, forinstance,theAuto-didacte of La Nausee, the characters f L'Enfance d'un chef or the coupleJacquesand Odette:

She [Odette] had learned very quickly to wear mourningveils withjaunty sadness,to gaze into people's eyeswitha certain nnocentwar-orphan look. 4Furthermoren the beginningand in the end of Le Sursis,Sartrehas compli-catedDos Passos'spatternof stories nto a patternof sentences:Chamberlain,Hitler and Schmittwerewaitingforthewar in silence,it was going to come in a moment . . Mathieu was eating,Marcellewas eating,Daniel was eating . . . theyhad little instantaneous oulsfull to thebrim with smallgooeypleasures; n a moment, nd itwouldcome in, fully armed,feared by Pierre, accepted by Boris,desiredbyDaniel, war, the greatwar of Men Standing Erect, the mad war ofthewhites.15It would not be difficulto find other resemblancesbetween Americanand Existentialistnovels. An emphasis on sex, for instance,dominates both

18 Sartre, American ovelistsnFrench yes , p. cit., p. 115.14 Sartre,Le Sursis (ed.NRF), p. 25.i5 Ibid., p. 59.69



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Yale French tudiesliteratures.But this emphasis is a characteristic f the whole historyof themodernnovel since the naturalisticperiod, and American and French writersalike have simply followed a more general trend. More striking eems to bethe tragic element which runs through the works of Faulkner, Hemingway,Dos Passos and through hose of Sartre,Simone de Beauvoir and Camus. Butthe similarity here s very uperficial. n Faulkner'sworks,for nstance, ragedyis a consequence of fate: man is a problem of impure properties carriedtediouslyto an unvarying nd: the stalemate of dust and desire'6 Anguishcomes fromthe realizationof helplessness, f hopelessness:man does not carrywithin himself the means of the solution of his life's problems. But this isobviously not true of Sartre's Existentialism,where anguish is linked withfreedom. I am free, he thought uddenly, and his joy immediately hangedinto an overpowering nguish .'7 Sartre has criticized Faulkner's mutilationof time , the fact that he has taken away fromtime its future, hat is, thedimensionsof actions and freedom'8 Dos Passos goes even further, y sup-pressingthe presentas well, thusmakingtime a dead and closed memory '9Existentialist houghtbelieves in the existence, n differentorms, f the past,the presentand the future, the last not less importantbecause it is unpre-dictable; Sartre'sconceptionof time differswidelyfromthat of the Americannovelists.

But if,as Sartre ays, technique s alwaystherevelationof a metaphysics,how can Existentialists orrowAmericandevices, as theyhave done, withoutsome danger of contradiction?We have seen the incompatibilityf Faulkner'sand Dos Passos's conceptionsof time with Sartre'sown ideas. Does not theiremphasison action also clash with the Existentialist's tress n situation?Thetechnique of the continual unfoldingof action after action is of little use towriterswho believe so stronglyn the importance f thepresent nd the future.Sartreand Simone de Beauvoir want to describe situations: the Existentialistnovel, therefore, ill not tell a story; t will choose a particularly mportantrelationshipbetweena character nd theworld,or society, r othercharacters,and develop all its possibilities. a Nausie, La Chambre,Le Mur, are workedon this pattern, s is Simone de Beauvoir's L'Invitee. The only evolution inthebook will be provided by thegrowing onsciousness f the hero.Progressiverealizationof the human condition is the vital machinery f the Existentialisthero. As Sartreputs it at the end of L'Etre et le niant, purifying onscious-ness is the only way out of viscosity .The metaphysical ifference etween

18 Faulkner,The Sound and theFuiy.17 Sartre,Le Sursis,p. 276.18 Sartre A proposde Le Bruitet la fureur.La Temporalith hezWilliamFaulkner. NRF, 1 July 1939, p. 148.19 Ibid.70



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JEAN BRUNEAUOrestes and the inhabitantsof Argos will be reflected n the respectivetech-niques used to describe them.

As for the author's objectivity, t can only be partly retained by theExistentialistwriter.f the leading characters re to grow more and more awareof their existence, heymust be lucid, they must know their own minds. Thechief interestof Les Chemins de la liberte' eems to be in the characterofMathieu, whose situation is objectivelyvery much the same at the beginningof L'Age de raison and at the end of Le Sursis. True, he has come to under-stand whathuman life really s, but he can only expresshis growingknowledgethrough elf-analysis. artre is thus condemned to describing thoughtsratherthan actions, to using the techniques of the psychologicalnovel, including themonologue20,where he follows Flaubert, Proust, and Joyce much more thanAmericannovelists. n the end, the epoch described in Les Chemvins e leaUlebrtds seen in two differentnd entirely eparate ways: through he profiletechnique , to be sure, but also through he leading characters.A recognitionof the differences etween Existentialistthoughtand thephilosophy f the American writers ontributes reatly o explaining the some-what incoherent spect presented by some of the later novels of Sartre andSimone de Beauvoir.They use in the same book devices whichtheyhave found

in severalwriters ttached to divergent hilosophies.L'Age de raison is on thewhole a traditional, ealistic and psychologicalnovel, and a verygood one atthat; but Le Sursis combines this approach with devices borrowedfrom DosPassos. The welding of the two is attempted n the last pages of the novel,whichalternately elate the Munich conference nd the first ove-affairf oneof the main characters,vich. But the opposition between a historicaleventof world importance nd a momentof an individual life seemsveryartificial.So does the non-chronological tory f Le Sang des autres.On the otherhand,La Nausde, Le Mur, L'Etranger and L'Invitde, where only one technique(L'Etranger generally differingfrom the others mentioned here) is usedthroughout he novel, are more effective rom n estheticpoint of view.It does not seem, therefore, hat Existentialistwriters have solved theproblem with which they were confrontedwhen theystarted to use literaryexpressionfor theirphilosophy.Their thoughthas many points in commonwiththatof Americanwriters, ut the differencesppear as even greater.Thetraditionalnovel could not satisfy artre and Simonede Beauvoir; nor can theAmericannovel. Camus seemsto have sensedthis, incehis last novel,La Peste,owes nothingto Faulkner, Hemingwayor Dos Passos. Sartreand Simone deBeauvoir are still trying o evolve a techniqueof theirown, which will arise

20 See the remarkablemonologues of Mathieu, Daniel, Brunet in LesChemins de la libertd.71



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Yale French tudiesnaturally, s it should, out of theirown philosophy.Esthetically peaking, heyhave been more successfulwith the other medium theyuse: the stage. ButLes Chemins de la libertd s not yet finished: the search for new novelisticdevices s not over.

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Existentialism and American Novel

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