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Sartre, Camus, and the Triumph ofExistentialismArmand E. SingerPublished online: 30 Apr 2008.

To cite this article: Armand E. Singer (2008) Sartre, Camus, and the Triumph of Existentialism, TheEuropean Legacy: Toward New Paradigms, 13:3, 339-341, DOI: 10.1080/10848770802052772

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The European Legacy, Vol. 13, No. 3, pp. 339–341, 2008

Reviews

Sartre, Camus, and the Triumph of Existentialism

Sartre’s Nausea: Text, Context, Intertext. Editedby Alistair Rolls and Elizabeth Rechniewski(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), v þ 213 pp.$55.00/E44.00 paper.

Caligula et Camus: Interferences transhistoriques.By Sophie Bastien (Amsterdam: Rodopi,2006), xiiiiþ 309 pp. $86.00/E64.00 paper.

Armand E. Singer

France has always been acceptive of philoso-phies, conservative or innovative, almost fromits very beginnings as a nation. Let me ventureto refresh one’s memories. Chartres in thetwelfth century and Paris in the thirteenth werecenters for religious Scholasticism, where nativeand visiting scholars spent their years teachingand writing. Even as early as the ninth centuryJohn Scotus Erigens was living at the Court ofCharles the Bald. St. Anselm, the very founderof Scholasticism and enunciator of the muchargued ontological proof for the existence ofGod, held forth for many years (1057–93) atthe Abbey of Bec in Normandy, though bornin Italy.

If France has not always initiated thephilosophies of the day, it has not uncommonlynurtured and spread them, almost always givingsomething of its own special conformity––acultural habit that still holds to this day. See notonly the Existentialism we will discuss here,but for instance the glories of the Renaissance itappropriated from Italy or the positivism itinherited from John Locke.

To continue: more France’s own this timewas the emancipated Rabelais with his Abbayede Theleme, and its motto ‘‘fay ce quevoudras’’ and the more contemplativeMontaigne in the sixteenth century. They, in

turn, give way to the mysticism of Blaise Pascaland the hard logic of Descartes in theseventeenth, the latter to pave the road forthe philosophes of the eighteenth: Montesquieu,Voltaire, Diderot in his Encyclopedie. Thenext century brought the flowering ofRomanticism, the reaction of Realism andNaturalism in art and literature, the preachingsof Marxism in economics and political science.If the philosophes adopted Locke, and theromantics the emblandishment of theGermans and the half Swiss Rousseau, Franceas usual remained in the thick of the action.The twentieth was to prove no different.Rather, the tempo accelerated and complexitybecame more bewildering. Not just France butthe whole intellectual scene as we know itpresent an especially rich brew of endlessideologies. There are the leftovers fromMarxism, strong as ever, the new arrival ofFreudianism, the advent of Henri Bergson,Merlot-Ponty’s phenomenology, Unanimism,the literary-artistic arguments of modernismand post-modernism, not to speak of decon-struction, seeking to negate almost every beliefliterature has held sacred, Maurice Barres andhis anathema against rootlessness, a whole bevyof the usual French philosophical novelists(cf. Paul Bourget, Andre Gide, MarcelProust), poet-innovators like the symbolists(from the previous century) and the newerSurrealists, playwrights like Jarry and Ionescoand the absurd. Truly it was a century ideal fora nation that has always prided itself on itsintellection, its clarity, its skill with ideasexpressed with truth, verve, and wit.

Of all of this almost infinite palette ofcolors and shades, none had the force and thespread of Existentialism, itself many-faceted.If it came out of Denmark with Kierkegaardand Germany with Husserl and Heidegger,

West Virginia University USA (deceased).

ISSN 1084-8770 print/ISSN 1470-1316 online/08/030339–3 � 2008 International Society for the Study of European Ideas

DOI: 10.1080/10848770802052772

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once again it was France that brought it tofruition. Internationally, the pictureExistentialism presented was painted by Jean-Paul Sartre in such novels as his Nausee and byhis coeval Albert Camus. The Stranger was thehero who tried to make some kind of sense outof a world that seemed to have lost its reason.To someone in the street with a philosophicalbent, Existentialism belongs to Sartre–Camus.

Two works, both appearing in 1938,initiated future success for both authors.Sartre’s La Nausee, which adumbrated his latersignal treatise, L’Etre et le Neant, quickly caughtfire with France’s youth, though Camus’sCaligula, if it first began to give him recogni-tion, had to wait for Le Mythe de Sisyphe andL’Etranger for a fuller reward. Which explainswhy the Sartre collection of essays are all inEnglish (even the quotations are translated).The editors want to show what La Nauseemeans internationally even today. The fact thatthe volume has attracted two distinguishededitors from faraway Australia pretty wellmakes their point. Sophie Bastien, to thecontrary, is demanding an audience for a fineplay that has never reached the intensity ofinterest afforded La Nausee.

Both volumes achieve their goals. Bastienpretty well covers any questions possible to askof Caligula (the book comes from her disserta-tion, Montreal, 2002): its historical origins inthe real Roman emperor, treatments by manyauthors over the centuries, and what Camusmade of his opportunities. Her style and formatare slightly marred by such dissertation tricks asdivision into sections and subsections (1.1 to4.1—the table listing them runs to almost fourpages). Besides pretty much a bibliographicalfootnote for every point taken, she furnishes uswith an exhaustive general bibliography at theend (predictably divided into ten subsections),not all of which reduplicates the smallerreferences in the notes. This aside, the scholar-ship is sound if not particularly original. In anycase, no one will leave this volume without asatisfactory understanding of Camus’s finedrama.

For Sartre’s novel the two editors havegathered some solid contributions that prove itsinternationally lasting worth, eight in all plustwo equally fine offerings of their own. If theyare all interesting, I would like particularly topoint out Lawrence Schehr’s take on theAutodidact’s homosexuality and even possibly

that of Roquentin himself, Schehr treatingthe former like a prosecutor condemning acriminal.

Among the ‘‘intertext’’ offerings, Rollsdiscusses the poststructuralist version of thereader’s role in a literary work, where theformer is not so much asked to comprehendauthorial textual intentions as to generate (i.e.,write) the text itself, something Rolls admitshas been treated for Sartre in general, but notfor La Nausee. Depending on any individualreader’s acceptance of deconstruction theory,Rolls’s article makes for a fascinating read.

Another satisfactory chapter is DebraHely’s look at how Sartre plays with truthsand half truths in his novel. The town isfictional and we may also be reading a fictionalaccount of what transpires in it; Roquentin’sresearch into the fictional Rollebon may be aput-on; the Parrottin brothers are fictional;Anny mentions acting against a male actornamed Thorndyke (in real life a woman);Roquentin’s relations with her do not workout chronologically; the song ‘‘Some of TheseDays’’ and the singer and the composer are allmixed up––the list goes on and on––a fittingmetaphor for Sartre’s existentialist view of thenature of existence? Is this the still youthfulauthor enjoying himself as he plays tricks on thereader or making the more serious existentialistobservation about the tenuousness of truth?

Rechniewski’s contribution demandsrecognition for Andre Suares, who wroteabout things Sartre was to feature a generationlater. Critics, she laments, have somehowmissed his influence, including mention of a1909 Suares essay entitled ‘‘L’Autodidacte.’’Finally Thomas Martin notes that Roquentinseems to be alienated from both things andpeople (cf. Camus’s Stranger).

All the selections, however, can object tomy singling out these precious few.

This said, and all due praise given boththese good books, they have scarcely sproutedfrom arid ground. Pulling up Google attests,world-wide, to 2,945 volumes with somethingsignificant pertaining to Sartre (59 dating from2006 alone); Camus rates 2,749 (only 43 from2006). They do not all deal simply with thetwo authors alone, but they all promise some-thing worth digesting. Who has the stomach toencompass even a fair percentage of them?How to choose? How to dare to add one morebook or article of one’s own? Even the minor

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specialty additions have probably been alreadyattended to. Well, take heart, however reck-lessly. The volumes I have just reviewedindicate the possibility of something not onlynew but estimable. Until Google begins furtherto refine raw data, the infinite capacity to thinkanew must act as a substitute for certainty aboutwhat has already been researched. Meanwhile,here are a few more general volumeswell worth our consideration: For Camus,P. H. Rhein, Albert Camus (New York:Twain, 1969); Germaine Bree, Albert Camus(New York: Columbia University Press, 1967);John Cruickshank, Albert Camus andthe Literature of Revolt (London andNew York: Oxford University Press, 1959);

R. F. Roeming, Camus: A Bibliography(Milwaukee: Datafilm Corporation, 1976).For the problems between two rivals, DavidSprintzen, Sartre and Camus: A HistoricalConfrontation (Amherst, NY: HumanityBooks, 2004). For Sartre himself, FredericJameson, Sartre after Sartre (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 1985); Simone deBeauvoir, Images d’une vie (Paris: Gallimard,1978); Bernard-Henri Levy, Le Siecle de Sartre(Paris: Gasset, 2000).

A good seven years into the new centurycould be said to present a fine opportunity togive a more final evaluation of what these twoprime intellectual-literary movers have meantto the hundred years just past.

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