Wednesday 2 March 2011

Hell is other people


I have a generally poor opinion of Jean Paul Sartre, the doyen of post-war French intellectual life, a poor opinion of his politics, his philosophy and his style as a writer, prolix and tedious in the extreme. Being and Nothingness, his magnum opus, is in my estimation the greatest of the gas giants on the horizon of European thought. I also despise him as a man, vain, shallow, self-absorbed, cavorting in his Parisian café cocoon, embracing, when he was alive, one repellent left-wing cause after another in the name of ‘proletarian authenticity.’

There is one exception, one brilliant piece of work of his that I admire hugely. It’s his existential play Huis Clos, most often translated into English as No Exit. It’s the best piece of ‘closet’ theatre that I have ever seen, one of intense and uncomfortable emotions, sparse and uncompromising. If acted well, with maturity and conviction, the themes can cut deep.

The premise is straightforward: three people, two women and a man, have died and gone to hell. They find themselves in a room alone together, which they assume is the antechamber for the tortures to come, the tortures ‘promised’ by Catholic theology and medieval imagination. The room has no windows and only one door. The lights never go out and there is no sleep; they can’t even blink anymore, can’t escape in any way

There they are, Joseph Garcin, the man, along with Inèz Serrano and Estelle Rigault. Concerns about themselves, concerns about what is to come, leads to mutual explorations. Bit by bit they each realise why they are there, what aspects of their conduct led to this. Confessions become weapons, ways of probing and attacking each other.

Worst still, they are totally incompatible as individuals, totally at variance with each other: Garcin, the self-obsessed and callous coward; Serrano, the malevolent and manipulative lesbian; and Rigault, the shallow and thoughtless socialite. All three have used and abused other people while alive.

As the verbal torture continues Garcin has a moment of epiphany. He demands that the door opens; it does. All three are afraid to leave, afraid of what is beyond. What is beyond? Nothing, there is nothing; there is only this room and those three forever and forever. The hell of gothic imagination does not exist; this room is hell; these people are the demons, doomed to torture one another endlessly, dissecting each other with words sharper than weapons. Hell, as Garcin shouts out, is other people.

Now imagine yourself in eternity, eyes never closing, sleep never coming, in the same confined space with two other people, people with whom you would be at total variance. There is no way out, no escape, no exit: this is eternity. You might then think that traditional notions of hell were a blessed comfort. :-)

24 comments:

  1. Or Hell is being oneself with no prospect of change. Are we born already complete -all that we can be - or do we learn and evolve into something different through trial and discovery and experience? There is no doubt that we undergo growth and metamorphosis - but is that butterfly predetermined in the egg?

    Religion offers the prospect of 'improvement' or even the hope of perfection, but it isn't clear whether that is to be accomplished by accretion of virtues or the discarding of faults. Is that really change, anyway, or just dressing and undressing the pig?

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  2. I'm constantly evolving in so many ways. I simply cannot imagine life as stasis; I can't imagine that kind of sterility.

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  3. Hell is a state of mind, usually of our own making.

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  4. Ana, you are not evolving. You are already perfect like you are.

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  5. I have similar views on Sartre, Ana. The only thing of his I've ever liked is Huis Clos. His philosophy reads like a kind of pseudo-theology, which is odd given that he prided himself on his rejection of religion.

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  6. Not a Determinist, then? I find it is one reason I am so hostile to the idea of Perfectibility. I refuse to entertain the prospect of a closed-ended future. I suppose that makes me an enemy of Millennialism, too. I intend to treat life as an adventure of infinite possibility until the last possible moment.

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  7. Jean Paul, flattery will get you everywhere.:-)

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  8. Calvin, I'm determined not to be. :-) I admire the way you look at this, this adventure of infinite possibility.

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  9. Good morning Ana,

    I enjoyed a few too-brief years friendship with a committed existentialist, who advised me that there is much more to the creed than those collectively-depressed coffee-house wafflers like Sartre depict. But let that wait.

    'Hell is other people' is badly flawed, I think, if only because people imprisoned in isolation will most likely reach an accommodation of each other ; but Hell allows no such luxury. I think CS Lewis had it more truly in his Great Divorce ; it isn't Hell that is other people, but Purgatory. Hell is the torture of utter selfness, of complete self-love and self-belief with their latent poison.

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  10. I enjoyed Les Mains Sales when I read it many years ago and Huis Clos is brilliant. I agree with you on the man and his political beliefs though. The Maoism espoused by much of the French intellectual establishment including Sartre in the '60s was particualrly repellent, given what Mao was up to in China at the time.

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  11. The great contradiction in Sartre's philosophy: on the one had, he thought the human subject was completely free and responsible only to itself for its decisions and actions; on the other hand, as exemplified in No Exit, he thought each person was completely under the power and at the mercy of every other.

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  12. I saw this as a film, many years ago (1958). It was called Vicious Circle.

    As a Christian I assume Hell to be banishment from the presence of God.

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  13. It is annoying listen always discuss us our ideas, more when we have a big ego aND short tolerance, but it is very boring listen oh yes oh yes you are so right... we expect speak with smart people not with slaves but always with the best arguments and in peace. I believe this room could be hell with dumb, simple and egomaniacal people but could be fine with smart and humble ones. Hell is in our own mind too, to the same time I believe that hell are the others, so true. I like Sartre book La nausée I think it is a piece of art. Greetings. Mario.

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  14. Good evening, Jamie. Thanks for your comments, as perceptive as always, especially when it comes to theological points. It seems to me that the only accommodation the three people involved could have reached is to lapse into mutually agreed silence. But then they would have to spend eternity simply staring at one another, which may be even worse. The themes explored though are really about existence about the limits of freedom, the limits imposed by others.

    There is a sub-text here that I haven’t touched on, something that you may be familiar with. Huis Clos premièred in Paris during the occupation. It was a time when the French had taken to referring to the Germans obliquely as ‘Les autres’ – the others. So when Garcin shouts out that hell is Les autres the audience would known exactly what Sartre’s reference was.

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  15. Falaise, indeed so. A very warm welcome to the Impdom. Thanks so much for your comment.

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  16. NP, yes, absolutely; it's the classic dilemma of freedom, I suppose – existing for oneself yet existing for others.

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  17. David, good evening to you also. That's certainly an idea that I'm very familiar with.

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  18. Mario, yes I've read Nausea also and the Roads to Freedom trilogy, so I'm reasonably familiar with literary existentialism! As a philosophy I have to say that I found it exciting and sterile and one and the same time.

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  19. I also love Huis Clos - though have only read it in English translation... no idea how much is lost this way - but that's another debate.

    In a similar vein, have you read Michael S Graziano's "The Divine Farce"? Equally thought-provoking and I'd go so far as to say it's a more masterful exploration of people together in confinement. It's probably my all-time favourite book and definitely worth reading if you haven't already.

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  20. Sandie, I have not. But be assured - I will.

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  21. Among other atheist philosophers, Sartre (1905–1980) is perhaps the most interesting and playful. He knows how to coin simple phrases with profound ideas. At the helplessness of man in his freedom to shift for himself in a Godless universe, he exclaims: '... man is condemned to be free.' (Existentialism & Humanism. 1975, Eyre Methuen Ltd., London, p.34).

    By this he means that the responsibility to make choices for himself, which lies on every human shoulder, is a challenge extremely difficult to meet. There is no one else to help him or guide his steps in the dreary wilderness of existence. Commenting on the episode of Abrahamas, he explains the presence of angels as a psychic phenomenon. To him, that Divine revelation which the angels brought to Abrahamas was no more than the anguish of his soul. Wrong as we may consider Sartre's explanation, we must pay homage to his fiery outburst of desperation and vengefulness. This applies far more befittingly to Sartre himself who may have suffered pangs of anguish and exasperation in the emptiness of his Godless philosophy. Revelation is the anguish of the soul, is indeed a profoundly revealing statement from the vantage point of an atheist—if atheists ever admit to possessing souls. Bernard Shaw is close to Sartre, but not quite, when he defines revelation as 'inner voices'—at best, a smart remark of a dramatist lacking the depth and force of Sartre's reflection! All said and done, Sartre fails to distinguish between inspiration and revelation, terms that simply do not exist in his philosophy; what does exist is the agony of soul—a tongue of fire that leaps out in occasional outbursts of desperation. No revelation descends from on high, whatever rises, rises from the depth of human frustration.

    (Hadhrat Mirza Tahir Ahmad - Khalifatul Masih IV. Revelation, Rationality, Knowledge & Truth. Islam International Publications Ltd, 1998. 50, 51).

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