Sartre's fiction and its resistance to the "living principle"
SARTRE Bibliotheque Nationale (site Francois Mitterrand), Paris, until August 21
SARTRE. 292pp. Bibliotheque Nationale / Gallimard. By Mauricette Berne et al.
48euros. - 2 7177 2312 9
It requires an effort to see Jean-Paul Sartre as a risque writer. Gallimard, the publishers of his first novel, La Nausee, demanded forty-five cuts to the manuscript, for reasons of obscenity, before accepting it for publication in 1938.
His second work of fiction, a collection of short stories published in France the following year as Le Mur, came out in Britain under the coyly enticing title Intimacy, from a small London publisher known for his liking for provocative books (Peter Nevill). The title story, "Intimite", concerns the relationship between a frigid woman, Lulu, and her impotent husband, Henri.
Only when she forsakes him for a rendezvous with her lover in a Montparnasse hotel does she realize that her married life suited her better:
My God, to think that's life, that's why you get dressed and wash and make yourself pretty and all the books are written about that and you think about it all the time and finally that's what it is, you go to a room with somebody who half smothers you and ends by wetting your belly.
Despite the surgery to La Nausee (and a change of title: Sartre's original manuscript bears the scrawl "Melancholia / roman"), the author managed to retain the joyless sexual relationship between Antoine Roquentin and the patronne of his local cafe, an arrangement that is all biology and no romance ("she needs it at least once a day", etc). His early reviewers invoked the gutter, the latrine, the "depot d'ordures". Sartre was probably the first French writer to provide a description of a man's mucky drawers ("Intimite"); in a later novel he had a woman hoist her skirts, squat over the chiottes and piss loudly, a portrait from which the author at least draws some pleasure - pleasure, that is, in his disgust. Sartre was much sought after by women, and welcomed their devotion, but disgust displaces the erotic impulse in his work.
It is pervasive in his eve-of-war novel L'Age de raison, from Mathieu Delarue's disgust at the thought of fathering a child -the story tracks Mathieu's search for money for his girlfriend's abortion -to his notion that families are "the smallpox that leaves you marked for life". Roquentin cannot pick up pebbles from the shore without a shudder: "I am afraid of entering into contact with them, just as if they were living animals". In his war diaries, Sartre posed the question: "Why is it that Roquentin and Mathieu, who are me, are so gloomy?". Typically unsparing, he decided that the reason is that they are "stripped of the living principle".
