”All over France - torn and twisted railway-lines glistening in the sun, and golden sunlight on the yellowing leaves of uprooted trees, water gleaming at the bottom of bomb-craters, dead men turning green in the cornfields, their upturned bellies chanting paens to a cloudless sky. Have you forgotten so soon?”
”As Tempting As Suicide”
’Iron In the Soul’ (1949, also known as ’Troubled Sleep’) concludes Sartre’s Road To Freedom trilogy, following ’The Age of Reason’ and ‘The Reprieve’. (And as before, some VERY OLD PLOT SPOILERS crop up here.)
It’s set in the summer of 1940, after the fall of France. Which means that war hovered over the first book, casting everything in its shadow, riddled and infested the second without actually erupting - then is quite consciously withheld from the third. Like a storm which gathers only to pass, the much-heralded event never really arrives. Few of the main characters even witness combat, for them the war is over almost before its begun. (‘“They had lost the war much as a man loses an hour – without noticing it.”)
Which would seem to violate the most fundamental rule of drama, the part about it being dramatic. So why should Sartre do such a thing? Of course, as seen in the previous books, he’s more interested in psychology than events. There’s not a single scene which is not seen subjectively, through the eyes of a character. But the answer’s more precise. He needs this moment to evoke his concept of bad faith.
In his philosophical writings he explains this with the example of the waiter who plays his role a little too readily, who sports his uniform as if it were an expression of his own self. His ‘faith’ in this role is ‘bad’ because he suppresses his own subjectivity to take up an identity which does not come from but has been made for him.
But the enlisted man is perhaps a better example still. From the moment he receives his sealed orders telling him where and when to report, his actions are not his own, he’s to perform his functions as a limb of the French army.
And so the fall of France isn’t portrayed as tragic, the one-proud citizen having to face his country defeated. Characters feel less trauma than nothing. Both in the sense of a lack of feeling, and of sensing an absence the way you can a presence. The officer class are described only through symbols and synecdoches, a window referred to as the General’s eye. But when they finally appear they simply leave, without a word to the enlisted men.
Suddenly, at a stroke, France was revealed as a system devised by men which could at any time have been undone by other men. Hence Matthias’ reflection “we’ve never really seen France: we’ve only been in it.” So they come to inhabit a kind of limbo world, an orderless interregnum between the departing French officers and the arriving Germans. When the frog-marched defeated troops pass a bunch of discarded gas masks, they see in them their nation:
”They were filled with hatred of the parasitic grubs of which once they had been so frightened, yet had to care for and keep efficient. Now they lay between their feet, smashed, useless, and the sight of them was a further reminder the war was over.”
And consequently they and everything around them falls into a kind of stasis. Daniel finds that “nothing is more monotonous than catastrophe. He had begun to get used to it.” This is even true of time. He comes across an empty square where “water lay stagnant in a fountain’s basin,” where clocks lack hands. There’s persistent comparisons to a perpetual Sunday, the un-day where nothing happens.
Daniel’s wanderings through a deserted Paris almost prefigure the SF staple of the last man on Earth, alone in a once-bustling city. But at the same time it’s almost the epitome of the book. We don’t just see the inside of a character’s head the same time as we see what they’re doing, we see the world through their eyes - their subjectivity acting as a kind of filter. If other characters appear we don’t then see their subjectivity, we see them through our current protagonist’s subjectivity. Much of the enjoyment of reading comes from what Sartre can do with this, his ability to take outwardly ordinary objects and situations and charge them with significance.
So a whole city which has effectively one character in it, later encountering another as if they’re the first two people ever to meet, going on to discuss whether life can really be lived… peak Sartre achieved.
The fall of France, then, does not cancel out bad faith so much as leave it exposed. Not unnaturally, characters speculate over how their new German masters might be. When some reassure themselves with the notion they surely can’t be that bad, Sartre (writing post-war) must have been aware of the irony. But so many characters blithely assume Britain will be next to fall, it becomes almost like reading one of those parallel histories where the Nazis won the war.
Bad faith drives such speculation and so makes it idle. The Germans might make them prisoners of war, enlist them into the occupying army or for that matter think to turn them all into waiters. But, whatever it is, their decision will be their decision. With the arbitrariness exposed, they simply sit and await the new arbitrary. (Notably, when time does start again it follows German time, set an hour after French.)
Asked for his educated opinion on events from his fellow conscripts, Matthieu replies:
“How can it possibly matter what we decide or what we don’t decide? Is anyone asking for our opinion? D’you realise the situation we’re in?”
And even when the Germans arrive they remain inscrutable:
“He tried, in vain, to make out their faces: they had none. Two slim figures, four long, parallel legs, a pair of round, smooth heads with neither eyes nor mouths… They had the stiff nobility of the figures that move forward on old-fashioned clocks, when the hour strikes.”
This situation, being inescapable, even becomes something to revel in. Political surrender can lead to personal surrender, the weight of choice removed from your shoulders:
“They were making the great refusal, spurning, in the name of all the guttersnipes of the world, the obligation of greatness. Why worry so long as one had good health, and enough to eat and drink..? Their austere lucidity had driven them to put aside the consolations of greatness. They were denying even their right to suffer, were refusing to strut as tragic or even historic figures. They could not so much as bring themselves to say we’re just a lot of cheap heels, a bundle of predestined failures; could not even comfort themselves with the thought that life was a gamble. All they could do was laugh, blundering against the walls of Absurdity and bouncing back from them. Their laughter was an instrument of self-punishment, of self-purification, of vengeance.”
Matthieu even fantasies about retreating into a vegetable existence:
“The sky was red, the earth cool and blue-shadowed. Matthieu could feel, beneath his hands, beneath his buttocks, a vast expanse of rank, moist hair running with lice. To feel it was agony. Cornered! Millions of men cornered between the Vosges and the Rhine - all possibility of existing like men taken from them. This flat forest of living things would still be there when they were dead. It was as though the world had no room for anything but fields and grass and a sort of impersonal ubiquity. Beneath his hands the earth was as tempting as suicide.”
Though among his fellow enlisted men, Matthieu mostly observes them as they do things. He accompanies others in succession, one by one, but creates no real attachments. As one gets drunk before him he finally tries to join in, only to cry he can’t. Even carving his name in a tree “takes too long”. So he resolves to join a company who will try to hold off the already inevitable German advance.
Remember the ‘Beyond The Fringe’ sketch where the officers need a volunteer for a futile gesture at this stage of the War? The only difference here is that Matthias needs a futile gesture for himself at the end of the War.
This stand-off marginally slows the German advance, but its effect is really only on the little troupe themselves. Their aim is not to buy time for something else to happen, or to provoke further resistance. It’s more, in a very real sense, something to do. He explicitly thinks to himself beforehand “I am going to die for nothing.” For if there is no readymade meaning or morality which we can wrap around overselves like a comfortable blanket, then the only meaning that counts is the one each of us make for ourselves. So that becomes each of our tasks.
“For years he had tried, in vain, to act. One after the other his intended actions had been stolen from him: he had been no firmer than a bat of butter. But no one had stolen this! He had pressed a trigger, and, for once, something had happened, something definite…. He fired. He was cleansed. He was all-powerful. He was free.”
Not for the first time Sartre represents the overcoming of Bad Faith as a transient epiphany, something achievable only with the most extreme effort and which cannot possibly be maintained. (It’s significant that he gave the term no antonym, Good Unbelief or the like.) Matthias doesn’t do the right thing even at the cost of his life so much as sacrifice his life to it, like going out on a high:
”He shook his head angrily. I’m fed up: the chaps down there can think what they like, the world can think what it likes. I’m through with remorse, with hesitations, with mental reservations. No one has the right to judge me; no one is thinking about me; no one will remember me; no one can make up my mind for me. He had reached a decision without remorse, with full knowledge of the facts. He had made up his mind, and, on the instant, his scrupulous, his sensitive heart went tumbling down through the branches. No more sentiment for him! That was over now. Here and now I have decided that death has all along been the secret of my life, that I have lived for the sole purpose of dying. I die in order to demonstrate the impossibility of living.”
Sartre disdained suicide as, in essence, dodging the problem of being. In the previous book, Matthias considers then rejects the option. Yet his actions here are little more than suicide by proxy. It’s common to suggest that the more furiously atheistic a thinker is, the closer their thought comes to resemble religion. And something similar is happening here. Matthias’ placing himself in the way of death isn’t so dissimilar to Saints embracing their ‘martyrdom’.
There’s an essentially similar scene to this in Bertolucci’s film ‘The Dreamers’ (2003), set during the ’68 revolt. In an argument on political violence, one character demonstrates his stance by throwing a rock at some nearby cops. And this way of framing things has something intensely annoying about it. Such acts did happen at that time, but neither as self-expression nor therapy. They were to hold back cops who were trying to attack the crowd in order to disperse it; their meaning came from their context, it wasn’t imposed onto it. Moving away from that context, going back to the perennial focus on the self, moves us away from the point.
Similarly, the need to fight against Nazis is effectively the default anti-pacifist position. (Or at least it used to be, until the alt.right discovered memes and everybody else lost their mind.) But the very same necessity insists on fighting Nazis effectively. We don’t just need to fight them for fifteen minutes to prove a point to ourselves, we need to beat them. And that involves working collectively. Whereas Sartre takes one of the most significant incidents in Twentieth Century history and makes it a backdrop for his psychodrama. (In another example of this uber-individualism, every description of sex throughout the trilogy is negative, never an act of consummation between two people.)
Though, never one to lack the courage of his convictions, Sartre goes out of his way to play this up. In my review of the first book I counterposed Matthieu’s gesture of deliberately stabbing his own hand to Gomez’s fighting against fascists in Spain. Yet when he voluntarily picks up a gun to fight the advancing German army, his mind repeatedly flicks back to that moment. It’s slightly bizarre to recall that Sartre always insisted it was his War experiences which made him a Communist.
Sartre and Communism, that takes us onto Part Two…
”They Slouched Obedient”
This stand-off marginally slows the German advance, but its effect is really only on the little troupe themselves. Their aim is not to buy time for something else to happen, or to provoke further resistance. It’s more, in a very real sense, something to do. He explicitly thinks to himself beforehand “I am going to die for nothing.” For if there is no readymade meaning or morality which we can wrap around overselves like a comfortable blanket, then the only meaning that counts is the one each of us make for ourselves. So that becomes each of our tasks.
“For years he had tried, in vain, to act. One after the other his intended actions had been stolen from him: he had been no firmer than a bat of butter. But no one had stolen this! He had pressed a trigger, and, for once, something had happened, something definite…. He fired. He was cleansed. He was all-powerful. He was free.”
Not for the first time Sartre represents the overcoming of Bad Faith as a transient epiphany, something achievable only with the most extreme effort and which cannot possibly be maintained. (It’s significant that he gave the term no antonym, Good Unbelief or the like.) Matthias doesn’t do the right thing even at the cost of his life so much as sacrifice his life to it, like going out on a high:
”He shook his head angrily. I’m fed up: the chaps down there can think what they like, the world can think what it likes. I’m through with remorse, with hesitations, with mental reservations. No one has the right to judge me; no one is thinking about me; no one will remember me; no one can make up my mind for me. He had reached a decision without remorse, with full knowledge of the facts. He had made up his mind, and, on the instant, his scrupulous, his sensitive heart went tumbling down through the branches. No more sentiment for him! That was over now. Here and now I have decided that death has all along been the secret of my life, that I have lived for the sole purpose of dying. I die in order to demonstrate the impossibility of living.”
Sartre disdained suicide as, in essence, dodging the problem of being. In the previous book, Matthias considers then rejects the option. Yet his actions here are little more than suicide by proxy. It’s common to suggest that the more furiously atheistic a thinker is, the closer their thought comes to resemble religion. And something similar is happening here. Matthias’ placing himself in the way of death isn’t so dissimilar to Saints embracing their ‘martyrdom’.
There’s an essentially similar scene to this in Bertolucci’s film ‘The Dreamers’ (2003), set during the ’68 revolt. In an argument on political violence, one character demonstrates his stance by throwing a rock at some nearby cops. And this way of framing things has something intensely annoying about it. Such acts did happen at that time, but neither as self-expression nor therapy. They were to hold back cops who were trying to attack the crowd in order to disperse it; their meaning came from their context, it wasn’t imposed onto it. Moving away from that context, going back to the perennial focus on the self, moves us away from the point.
Similarly, the need to fight against Nazis is effectively the default anti-pacifist position. (Or at least it used to be, until the alt.right discovered memes and everybody else lost their mind.) But the very same necessity insists on fighting Nazis effectively. We don’t just need to fight them for fifteen minutes to prove a point to ourselves, we need to beat them. And that involves working collectively. Whereas Sartre takes one of the most significant incidents in Twentieth Century history and makes it a backdrop for his psychodrama. (In another example of this uber-individualism, every description of sex throughout the trilogy is negative, never an act of consummation between two people.)
Though, never one to lack the courage of his convictions, Sartre goes out of his way to play this up. In my review of the first book I counterposed Matthieu’s gesture of deliberately stabbing his own hand to Gomez’s fighting against fascists in Spain. Yet when he voluntarily picks up a gun to fight the advancing German army, his mind repeatedly flicks back to that moment. It’s slightly bizarre to recall that Sartre always insisted it was his War experiences which made him a Communist.
Sartre and Communism, that takes us onto Part Two…
”They Slouched Obedient”
However, Sartre then manages to do something so much the opposite it seems almost as strange. Matthias’ exploits have taken up the bulk of Part One. (Interspersed with other characters, but they often get only a single scene.) Brunet, though an established character, doesn’t appear throughout any of this.
But bizarrely the character who’s served as our protagonist, who opened and closed the first book, has to himself the most dramatic scene of the whole trilogy, which causes his death - but that doesn’t end the book. Instead we reach Part Two and the focus falls and stays onto Brunet. Some effort is spent in placing him in the vicinity of Matthias’ death, though he’s unaware of it. But rather than cross-cut the ensuing one hundred-plus pages stick to Brunet; there’s a sum total of three breaks, separated into three paragraphs in the English translation and not even that in the French original. It differs in other details. For example, this time the occupying Germans are characterised (if to a small degree).
And, spiking this still further, this section also includes hefty sections of political discussion. (Mostly where Brunet arrogantly yet hopelessly seeks to defend Stalin’s Non-Aggression Pact.) Which is quite a detour, for up to now the War’s just been a backdrop for individual psychodramas. So should we see this not as Part Two at all, but as finding a separate novella inserted two-thirds into a novel?
Not quite. In the very inverse of Matthias, Brunet takes his own affiliations for absolute granted. He’s a recruiting sergeant, for a different army to the uniform he wears, but a recruiting sergeant all the same. France may have fallen but he remains a Communist Party cadre, and thinks only of how to bring influence upon his surroundings. “I’m a militant and nothing but a militant”, he rages. And his being made a, so to speak, rival protagonist - literally bookending Matthias - only underlines this contrast.
And if he’s always looking out not in, at those around him, it’s almost entirely without sympathy. “You don’t seem particularly fond of us”, one opines. Indeed he sees the defeated French troops as a herd, sheep in need of shepherding, and he flickers between disdain and dispassion. The few workable exceptions to this he labels “useful tools”. A Priest is immediately seen as a rival.
’Where were the Comrades? Not hard to tell a Communist when you see him. Oh, for one face, one hard, calm, controlled face, for something that might have betokened a man! But no: under-sized, nimble, mean, they sloped along, their ferrety muzzles pressing ever onwards, the facile mobility of their race showing through the dirt, twitching their mouths like the mouths of puppets… no good for anything but to appraise, to draw fine distinctions, to argue and judge and criticise, to weigh the pros and cons, to savour objections, to demonstrate, to draw conclusions - an interminable syllogism in which each of them was a term. On they slouched obedient, argumentative, unworried by their fate.”
He rails against not their imprisonment but the lack of labour discipline this leaves, the way they’re left with time to dream.
“God in Heaven! if only they could get rid of all this ridiculous hoping! - if only they could be put to doing something! Before the war, work had been their touchstone: work had been their test of truth: work had decided their relation to the world. Now that they cared about nothing they had come to believe that anything was possible: they lived in a dream-state, no longer capable of knowing the truth when they saw it.”
In his scheming way he’s as oblivious as the foolish idealist pacifist Philippe, both looking to the workers but only for what they want to see. When his men report back that things aren’t working out as planned, his tongue-lashing betrays him. He’s unable to see that, not only does their failure stem from his orders, every single defect he throws at them is his not theirs. (And how many bosses have you had like that?)
But the reverse happens. What’s infected the men comes to infect him. First he disdains them for wanting to be fed, oblivious to his own need for sustenance till he collapses. Then his own interior self slowly steals up on him. At first, quite literally through his dreams. Though, inevitably enough, this doesn’t end with him in a happier-now state, finally in touch with his feelings. Arguably it makes him a neither-nor creature, neither a friend to his follows nor a decent party cadre.
Yet we should remember that at this time Sartre was a public Communist Party supporter. What can be made of this? In fact, much like his author surrogate Matthias, Sartre expressed sympathy for the Party without ever joining it. And this ‘support’ doesn’t seem to have ever been uncritical in practice, and may have been partly due to his taking them for the only show in town. (In later years, when other options emerged, he associated with anti-Stalinist Leftists.)
And, while I might be looking for what I want to find here, I think you can see this critique already incipiently developing. If so, it’s a journey which ends with Jean Barot’s dismissal: “The political mind always tries to act first upon the others, to organise or force them to do something, while it stays outside of the social movement. [Whereas] our task is political only in so far as it deals with the destruction of political power.”
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