'The Wall', the lead story in this collection, introduces three political prisoners on the night prior to their execution. Through the gaze of an impartial doctor--seemingly there for the men's solace--their mental descent is charted in exquisite, often harrowing detail. And as the morning draws inexorably closer, the men cross the psychological wall between life and death, long before the first shot rings out.
This brilliant snapshot of life in anguish is the perfect introduction to a collection of stories where the neurosis of the modern world is mirrored in the lives of the people that inhabit it.
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic, considered a leading figure in 20th-century French philosophy and Marxism. Sartre was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism (and phenomenology). His work has influenced sociology, critical theory, post-colonial theory, and literary studies. He was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature despite attempting to refuse it, saying that he always declined official honors and that "a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution." Sartre held an open relationship with prominent feminist and fellow existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. Together, Sartre and de Beauvoir challenged the cultural and social assumptions and expectations of their upbringings, which they considered bourgeois, in both lifestyles and thought. The conflict between oppressive, spiritually destructive conformity (mauvaise foi, literally, 'bad faith') and an "authentic" way of "being" became the dominant theme of Sartre's early work, a theme embodied in his principal philosophical work Being and Nothingness (L'脢tre et le N茅ant, 1943). Sartre's introduction to his philosophy is his work Existentialism Is a Humanism (L'existentialisme est un humanisme, 1946), originally presented as a lecture.
鈥淚 wanted my own words. But the ones I use have been dragged through I don't know how many consciences.鈥� 鈥� Jean-Paul Sartre, The Wall
The focus of this review is on the book's title piece - The Wall. This existentialist story has the feel of a film shot in stark black and white; the prose is as hard boiled as it gets and is told in first-person. The opening scene takes place in a large bare room with white walls where the narrator, Pablo Ibbieta, a man we can visualize with a thin, chiseled face, slick back hair and looking a bit like Albert Camus or Humphrey Bogart - a visualization in keeping with the tone of one of those 1940s black and white films - is interrogated, and, along with two other men, sentenced to be shot dead. The three condemned are taken to a cellar with bench and mats, a room shivering cold and without a trace of warmth or humanity. The story unfolds in this hard, dank, ugly cellar room. Absurdity and despair, anyone?
Sartre has us live through the evening and night with Pablo and the two other convicted men: Tom, who has a thick neck and is fat around the middle (Pablo imagines bullets or bayonets cutting into his flesh), and Juan, who is young and has done nothing, other than being the brother of someone wanted by the authorities. We watch as Pablo and Tom and Juan turn old and gray; we smell urine when Tom unconsciously wets his pants; we hear Tom speaking of men executed by being run over by trucks to save ammunition.
A doctor enters the room and offers cigarettes and asks if anyone wants a priest. No one answers. Pablo falls asleep and wakes, having no thought of death or fear - what he is confronting is nameless; his reaction is physical - his cheeks burn and his head aches. Meanwhile, the doctor, referred to as the Belgian by Pablo, takes Juan's pulse and writes in his notebook. All is clinical; all is calculating. The cold penetrates - the doctor looks blue. Pablo sees that he himself is drenched in sweat. Sartre has written philosophical works such as Being and Nothingness where he addresses the meaninglessness of life and the reality of death in conceptual terms but in this story his ideas are given flesh and blood.
The core of the tale is all three men dealing with their own death. Juan sobs. Tom talks so he can recognize himself, that is, talk as a way of anchoring his sense of self in the world. He says something is going to happen he doesn't understand: death is a blank for Tom. And also for Pablo, who observes how the doctor entered the cellar to watch bodies, bodies dying in agony while still alive.
Pablo remembers living as if immortal and reflects he spent his life counterfeiting eternity, although he missed nothing, he understood nothing. Meanwhile, Tom touches the wooden bench as if touching death. Now that Pablo is looking at things through the lens of death, objects appear less dense - several hours or several years are all the same when you have lost the illusion of being eternal. Pablo feels a horrible calm, a distance from his body; his feeling of being with his body is as if he is tied to an enormous vermin. Feeling your body as an enormous vermin - how disgusting and alienating. Just in case if you are wondering if this is existentialism, this is existentialism.
The Doctor lets everyone know it is 3:30. At the mention of the time, Juan loses it and become hysterical but Pablo simply wants to die cleanly. After some agonizing minutes, the guards come in and take away Tom and Juan. Pablo hears shots fired out in the yard and wants to scream, but simply grits his teeth and pushes his hands in his pockets to stay clean. What does it mean to die cleanly? We are not given anything more specific.
Pablo is taken to the first floor where he is given a chance to live by revealing the whereabouts of one Ramon Gris. What happens from this point offers a twist, a twist, that is, for a tale soaking in absurdity, dread, alienation and death. Please read The Wall. You will be chilled; you will have an existentialist experience, you just might laugh so hard at the end you will start to cry.
The first (undoubtedly the best) gives its title to the collection. "The Wall" is an impeccable and gripping text of around thirty pages, which accounts for human reactions to an extreme existence situation. The plot is set in the Spanish Civil War of 1936, between Republicans and Nationalists. Francoist troops took three Republicans prisoner. After a botched interrogation, they were locked in a hospital's cellar. A commander comes to tell them the sentence: they will be shot the next day at dawn. A Belgian doctor is introduced to the prisoners to note their reactions to the idea of 鈥嬧€媎eath. From there, while imbuing his text with a ghastly atmosphere, Sartre extracts the pure ore of anguish. The condemned cannot escape their situation; they perceive their death as almost material. They are confined and stuck in a fixed attitude, which no longer relates to existence but the essence because the end, very close, will justify them. Sartre brilliantly exploits this extraordinary metaphor of the wall. The symbol then accesses a great philosophical power. In the proper sense, he adjusted the wall section against which the condemned had placed and brought down. The barrier prevents the cannons of pointed rifles from escaping. But figuratively, the wall is infinite, impenetrable; it prevents us from fleeing our existence and the present situation we have to face. Death is just one of many cases. It is impossible to flee its existence, freedom, and responsibility because an opaque, invisible, omnipresent wall stops any attempt to escape. The impasse of reality will never allow us to escape. You can never run away from yourself. It's an excellent text.
When I first read this so many years ago - back in 1968 - I thought I was close to beginning my first year at university.
I was wrong. The Lord was about to enrol me at his Graduate Centre for Hard Knocks. Upon reading this, He then selected me for accelerated adulthood.
Folks were having fun in those heady years of awakening, but for me, my fun was in burrowing closer to the Heart of Darkness. Why? I had forever been asleep at the switch. I was playing catch-up.
This book was an apt beginning to my awakening, along with Joyce's Ulysses, which I had just finished with the help of a Skeleton Key.
In that book, James Joyce inferred that adulthood is really Nightworld. At least it was becoming that to myself and poor old James.
The other kids did what came naturally, but being unnaturally shy I didn't.
My Sun wasn't shining, so I couldn't make Hay.
A stunted mess.
So Sartre made it worse. Ever the showman, he wanted to dramatically foist on North Americans the same kinda anguished pain he had felt - while they kept positive - during the German Occupation.
So he gave it to us with both barrels: "death isn't fun. It is long-drawn agony."
While he was never averse to making as much hay on the side as he pleased, he saw himself as a saint manqu茅, and like his idol Jean Genet, a Martyr to Brute Reality. So he pads the envelope. Overplays it.
Yes, he overplayed his hand with this story. But he was bluffing, playing the macho wiz kid. He too loved his fun, no matter how ugly he made it look. His existentialism was not saltpetre.
God save the guy! The first of the wokes - and the first to fall on his sword.
Or was he only, in his pride, seated under the overhanging Sword of Damocles?
The Gleaming Sharp Sword of the Void...
I only wish the Lord had saved Sartre as well from the nattering devils that drove him into that emptiness - just as He has saved me from mine:
In the ordinary, nondescript and smiling joys of my simple senior's life.
You gotta love Sartre's sexy objectification of women. I totally think Sartre was an ass man. Exempli gratia:
"Her tail is small, yes, a lot smaller than mine, but you can see more of it. It's all around, under her thin back, it fills the skirt, you'd think it was poured in, and besides it jiggles."
Hell is other people... other people who can't appreciate a nice jiggling booty!
If Sartre was alive today, I'm sure he'd give that comment a high five or whatever the French existensialist equivalent of that is (maybe a quiet snooty glare?)
In fact, how can you appreciate someone who is perhaps the biggest influence on rap music in this century, still 20 years after his death? Allow me to demonstrate:
The first example I have occured in 2005, with a song stemming from a famous Sartre quote from Nausea (and the idea that he was an ass man):
Sartre: "I exist. It's sweet, so sweet, so slow."
Juvenile:
"Uh I like it like that \ she working that back \ I don't know how to act \ Slow motion for me\ slow motion for me\ slow motion for me\ Move it slow motion for me."
Sweet slow motion indeed. That's why I exist!
To further belabor the point, we have the well known example from Lil Jon and the Eastide Boys's hit with the following lyrics:
"Let me see you get low\ you scared you scared \ Drop dat ass to the floor \ you scared you scared \ Let me see you get low \ you scared you scared \ Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre differed in view of \ the abserd the abserd"
Unfortunently, the rap community felt that this rift between Camus and Sartre would result in yet another (possibly violent) dichotomizing of the rap world. To avoid this, the final lyics were changed, altering the course of the song tremendously, also resulting in the removal of 20 other verses leaving only the tale of a shorty getting krunk thus avoiding any deep philosophical discussion.
Varolu艧莽uluk, 枚l眉m, eylem eylemsizlik. 陌nsana dair ne varsa sosyoekonomik d眉zeyde insan 枚yk眉leriyle kar艧谋m谋zda. En 莽arp谋c谋 枚yk眉s眉 ise Kitapla ayn谋 ismi ta艧谋yan "Duvar".
Sartre has applied his existential depth to perhaps the most basic of themes here, but it works. This collection of 5 short stories written in late 1940's are a worthy read for any Sartre fan. The first story 'The Wall' is set during the Spanish Civil War with Pablo, one of the prisoners, being the protagonist. The story is one about the absurdity of life and how Pablo coincidentally and accidentally causes one of his comrades to be caught even though Pablo was not aware of it at all. The second story 'The Room' is much more spookier and the stereotypical bourgeois values are criticised with a woman who chooses to share the absurd world of her psychopathic husband. 'Erostratus' again sees the protagonist reject the accepted values of society and decides to go against society by randomly shooting people on the street. There is an autobiographical element in this book too as the main character is very much portrayed as Sartre. The stories are demanding in terms of engaging the reader emotionally and thoughtfully, and are extremely rewarding if you are willing to open to your mind to Sartre's way of thinking of people, and of the world. Should have read in French though, as the translation on my copy wasn't the greatest. I also can't help thinking he was a better writer of non-fiction and essays than he was of fiction.
Oh you know those whacky existentialists . . . just a typical beach read, really. Early chick-lit. Love the stories, they are colorful and fairly realistic in the way they depict the ridiculous, repetitive or futile behaviors people exhibit (other peeps, not me, of course). I'm guessing that Sartre must have been hella good times at cocktail parties. Wonder who would have won in a death match between Jean-Paul, Al Camus and lil' Freddie Nietzsche? (I'm betting Nietzsche, he was uber-efficient.)
Each of the pieces in this collection of short fiction has much to recommend it, but the final novella "Childhood of a Leader" stands out as one of finest novellas I've ever read. Even though the title story "The Wall" is considerably more famous, "Childhood of a Leader" is more ambitious and more groundbreaking. Written in the 1930s, this piece explores gender, class, sexuality, homo-eroticism, antisemitism, social-constructedness, and several key philosophical issues -- though it does all this in a prose that at once lyric and breezy. You can turn any page at random and find at least one passage that is beautiful merely on the level of sentence structure, imagery, or turn of phrase. I haven't been this impressed with a piece of short fiction in quite a while.
[Side note: I read this collection several years ago when I was in undergrad, and I am now re-reading it for my PhD exams. I fell in love with the entire book back then, and I am enamored with it now, but interestingly, there are only a small handful of overlaps between my previous love and my current one. Of course, we change as we age, and that obviously explains this, but my point is that there was something for me in this book when I was in early twenties and even more now in my early thirties. Not many books age so well.]
Un lucru e clar: Sartre isi construieste impecabil povestirile. Cuvintele te poarta pe nesimtite de la un cadru la altul si te scufunzi in poveste ca intr-o mare (mai limpede sau mai tulbure, dupa voia autorului). Si uneori mai ca nu-ti vine sa mai iesi de acolo :)
Imi pare bine de cunostinta, Sartre! Ne mai vedem!
Per apprezzare questa raccolta al meglio, e per comprenderne fino in fondo la genialit脿, credo che si debba essere preparati sull鈥檈sistenzialismo molto pi霉 di quanto lo sia io, di conseguenza mi sono limitata a considerare questi racconti come un mero prodotto letterario, pur avendo colto (a tratti) la grandiosit脿 dell鈥檃llegoria filosofica che ci sta dietro. Queste 猫 la classifica dei racconti ivi contenuti in ordine di mio gradimento personale, ma come si evince dal voto complessivo, il livello 猫 magistrale:
- la camera - intimit脿 - infanzia di un capo - erostrato - il muro