Aesthetics in Sartre and Camus. The Challenge of Freedom (Dialoghi Dialogues: Literatur Und Kultur Italiens Und Frankreichs)

HeinerWittmann

Aesthetics in Sartre and Camus The Challenge of Freedom Translated by Catherine Atkinson

PETER LANG Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften

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ISSN 0944-7717 ISBN 978-3-631-58693-8 © Peter Lang GmbH International Verlag der Wissenschaften Frankfurt am Main 2009 Alle Rechte vorbehalten. Das Werk einschlieBlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschutzt. Jede Verwertung auBerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulassig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere fur Vervielfaltigungen, Ubersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. Printed in Germany 12 3 4 5 www.peterlang.de

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"The artist was the supreme laborer, depleting and exhausting matter, in order to produce and to sell his visions." Sartre, The Prisoner of Venice "Don Juan knows and does not hope. He reminds one of those artists who know their limits, never go beyond them, and in that precarious interval in which they take their spiritual stand enjoy all the wonderful ease of masters." Camus, The Myth ofSisyphus "The absurd man is he who is not apart from time. Don Juan does not think of "collecting" women. He exhausts their number and with them his chances of life." Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus "The absurd world can receive only an aesthetic justification." Camus, Notebooks 1942-1951

Table of Contents Foreword

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Introduction

9

Sartre and the arts 1. Wols and the blue phantom

13

2. From the portrait studies to theory 2.1. Art and freedom 2.2. From William II to Flaubert 2.3. The work and its readers

19 19 23 29

3. The method of portraiture 3.1. Critique of Marxism 3.2. Reconstructing theprojet 3.3. Dialectics and hermeneutics

37 37 41 49

4. Sculptures and mobiles: From Giacometti to Calder

55

5. Tintoretto and the "school of vision"

61

6. The intellectual is a suspicious person

81

Albert Camus. Art and Morals 7. Albert Camus: In search of morals 7.1. Literary beginnings: The Wrong Side and the Right Side and Nuptials 7.2. The Stranger's art form

95 96 98

8. Art as an answer to the absurd 8.1. The absurd is not the end of the matter: The Myth of Sisyphus 8.2. Thefightagainst disaster: The Plague

103 103 108

9. Morals und revolt 9.1. The history of revolt 9.2. Aesthetics of revolt

113 113 121

10. Art as a moral obligation 10.1. The artist and freedom: Summer 10.2. The Fall and Exile and the Kingdom 10.3. The Nobel prize 10.4. The First Man

129 130 132 135 137

11. Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre

141

Conclusions

153

Bibliography

155

Index

166

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Foreword The present work is the first comprehensive survey of the aesthetics of the two exponents of French existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. The way was paved for this volume by the author's two monographs. The first, on Sartre, is entitled Von Wols zu Tintoretto, Sartre zwischen Kunst und Philosophies 1987; a second, revised edition was published in 1996: Sartre und die Kunst, Die Portratstudien von Tintoretto bis Flaubert and appeared in French in 2001: L'Esthetique de Sartre. Artistes et Intellectuels. The year 2002 witnessed the publication of the second monograph, Albert Camus. Kunst und Moral, which also evoked interest both on a national and international level. Heiner Wittmann then resolved to produce a summary account in English to present this fundamentally new perspective on the oeuvres of two influential 20thcentury authors to a wider audience. However, the present study is more than an addition of the two earlier monographs; it is a concentrated account and an analysis of the aesthetics of Sartre und Camus. Expressed as they are in concrete terms and in case-studies, their notions of aesthetics prove to be an elementary medium of the two philosophers' basic philosophical and ideological statements - ones which influenced European thinking in the 20th century. The Editor

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Introduction Being the province of freedom, art is superior to all ideologies and thus to politics, too. In their works on art, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus express this conviction both clearly and subtly. In writing on aesthetics, Sartre set out to unite philosophy and literature. One finds this confirmed when examining his numerous portraits of a range of artists, from Baudelaire through Tintoretto to Flaubert. As regards Camus, his reflections on aesthetics are centred on the creative relationship between literature, art and philosophy. Using art as his foundation, he developed his ideas on revolt as an answer to man's absurd situation in the world. Nowadays, Sartre is usually viewed in connection with his unsuccessful political involvement, while Camus, as numerous interpretations of The Stranger continue to demonstrate, is often equated with the concept of absurdity. In both cases this amounts to an oversimplification of the authors' ideas and works, sometimes even to the point of falsification. A careful look at Camus' works shows that he by no means concluded that the absurd is the pessimistic purpose of life; indeed, he actually derives from the absurd an obligation towards art. Sartre meanwhile, by analysing the works of both visual artists and writers, shows how they left their mark on their own times, yet at the same time transcended them. He seeks to explain that man'sfreedom,as defined in Being and Nothingness, is an important precondition of art. It is the close link between art and philosophy in Sartre's works, rather than his political ideas, that will ensure his oeuvre's lasting significance. Likewise, art and freedom also permit us to recognise the continuity of thought - beyond all inconsistencies in his ideas that runs through Sartre's entire work.l Art andfreedomare also the pivotal aspects of Camus' works. If his concept of freedom is not understood, his oeuvre's aesthetic content will be overlooked. In a conversation on art in 1978, Sartre mentioned his intention of writing a theoretical work on aesthetics,2 and in February 1950 Albert Camus noted in his diary the idea of writing a book on art, in which to summarise his reflections on aesthetics.3 Neither of them put his plan into effect. Sartre instead wrote a large number of artist portraits, in which he investigated the artists' relationships to their works. In these studies he developed an aesthetics, central to which is the question of man'sfreedom.As regards Camus, an analysis of his works enables ' With its more than 120 new publications, a ten-day international colloquium in Cerisy-laSalle and many conferences throughout the world, the Sartre Year 2005 confirmed the continuing interest in Sartre's work, with a particular focus still on his philosophy. 2 Sartre, M. Sicard, Penser Part. Entretien, in: Obliques 24/25, Nyons: Editions Borderie, p. 15. J Camus, Notebooks 1942-1951. Translated by J. O'Brien. New York: Marow & Company, 1995, p. 243.

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us to recognise his conception of the autonomy of art, with which he countered the ideologies of the 19th and 20th centuries. The tasks that both authors assign to the artist and the intellectual enable us to recognise a remarkable consensus of opinion, in comparison with which their personal quarrel over The Rebel in 1952, which led to the break-up of theirfriendship,pales into insignificance. In the literature on Sartre and Camus, the role of art is usually only dealt with in a somewhat marginal manner or not at all.4 In contrast to this, the present study focuses very much on the meaning and function of aesthetics in their works. My enquiry into aesthetics in Sartre's oeuvre was originally written in 1987, while my essay on art in Albert Camus' works was effectively a continuation of the work on Sartre.5 In 2006, the editor of the series Dialogues/Dialoghi. Literatur und Kultur Frankreichs und Italiens, Dirk Hoeges, offered to have the central theses of the two texts published in an English version, thus uniting in a revised form the main results of the monographs on Sartre and Camus. The present volume represents the first comprehensive study of the role and function of art in the works of these two leading French and European intellectuals, arguing that there is much common ground between them. It also underlines the continuity of my intellectual exchange with Professor Dirk Hoeges over the past thirty years, for which I am much indebted to him.

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G. H. Bauer's study, Sartre and the Artist, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1969, is an exception in this respect. 5 Detailed references, especially to the secondary literature, are to be found in my two earlier investigations and are not repeated here: H. Wittmann, Von Wols zu Tintoretto. Sartre zwischen Kunst und Philosophie, Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 1987; the work on Sartre and art is based on the extended version of a doctoral thesis, accepted by the Philosophical Faculty of the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universitat in Bonn in the winter semester 1986/87. The book was extended by a further chapter ("L'intellectuel est un suspect") in 1996: ditto, Sartre und die Kunst. Die Portrdtstudien von Tintoretto bis Flaubert, Tubingen: Gunter Narr, 1996. In 2001 a French translation was published: ditto, L'esthetique de Sartre. Artistes et intellectuels (Collection L'ouverture philosophique). Translated from German by N. Weitemeier and J. Yacar. Paris: Editions L'Harmattan, 2001. Ditto, Albert Camus. Kunst und Moral, Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 2002. Further bibliographical references are to be found at the author's website: www.romanistik.info/sartre-camus.html.

Sartre and the arts

13 "The great whole reveals itself in an unending number of circles; all the elements move in circles, the water proves it. The world exists through its rhythms." Wols1

1. Wols and the blue phantom In 1963, Jean-Paul Sartre encountered the artist Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze2 (Wols, for short) in Paris and wrote the foreword for an exhibition catalogue of Wols' water colours and drawings. In this foreword, which amounts to a portrait of the artist, Sartre not only analysed the artist's works, he also employed the basic concepts he had developed in his own philosophical investigations. In almost all of his artist portraits Sartre examines specific topics. In the case of Andre Masson, he focuses on myths; in Flaubert's, he was concerned with the many different approaches towards interpreting literary aesthetics; in Stephane Mallarme's, he was interested in the poetry and history of literature in the Second French Empire. Here, in Wols' case, he seizes the opportunity to demonstrate how well his own philosophical tenets could be applied to the analysis of art. In doing so, Sartre speaks more of his own philosophy than of Wols' art. Yet he does give instructions on how to understand art and trains the eye of the viewer, who might perhaps be standing in front of Wols' "The blue phantom" in the Wallraff-Richartz Museum in Cologne. Because of its exemplary nature, the Wols study has been placed at the beginning of the present work. Later chapters in the first part of this book will present different aspects of the theory of portraiture with which Sartre analyses the relation between artists and their works. According to Sartre, Wols' pictures of large numbers of people depict individuals who do not appear to relate to one another. In his descriptions of these pictures Sartre explains how in his view the artist is attempting to insert a third dimension. This third dimension, which exists in the viewer's imagination alone, is a trick used by the artist. Sartre draws on it to illustrate how one is to understand the relationship between reality and the artist. This involves the question of mediation. What does the artist see and how does he transfer his ideas to the work? By answering such questions, Sartre is trying to obtain an insight into the artist's powers of imagination.3 Wols (A. O. W. Schulze), Cites et Navires [exhibition catalogue, 15 May-30 June 1964], Paris: Michel Couturier et Cie, 1964, no page no. (quotation translated by C. Atkinson). Cf. Sartre, Doigts et non-doigts, in: ditto, Situations, IV. Portraits, Paris: Gallimard, 1964, p. 408-434. Cf. Sartre parle ..., interview by Y. Buin, in: Clarte, no. 55, Paris, Union des etudiants communistes de France, March/April 1964, p. 42-47, p. 46

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Wols' small images of towns such as "Soleil sur la ville deserte"4 (1948) interweave the areas of the house walls with those of the roofs and the open shutters that look out onto the numerous town squares. Although the pictures seem to capture an observation just made, the play with perspective becomes recognisable on closer inspection, reminding us of cubist forms: sometimes one sees the sharply defined edges of houses, while at other times these same edges form the outline of a room into which the viewer's gaze is directed. With Sartre's reference to 'totalisation' we encounter another topic of the portraiture study that derives from his philosophy. 'Totalisation' defines the relationship between painter and object, but at the same time both painter and object embody entities themselves, such that each represents a 'totalisation' independently of the other. The object, like the painter, reveals itself through its functional relationship to the world. In describing individual objects Sartre shows their relation to the picture's overall composition. In connection with this description Sartre mentions the 'universal singular': a dialectical approach used to determine the effect of art and the role of artists. The relationship of 'the individual to the whole' is a further topic in the artist portrait, and one which is taken up by Sartre in his discussion of Wol's picture "Circus", which is subtitled "Prise de vues et projection simultanees"5. Sartre understands "Circus" as an illustration of the idea of the painter Paul Klee (1879-1940), who shows in his book The Thinking Eye6 how a shape is formed in the eye. Here the various lines run together and build a synthesis, in a way that an object's physical aspect can hardly present. The parallels Sartre draws between Wols and Klee are an opportunity to introduce notions that relate to his own philosophical works. None of the works by Wols or Klee shows the author's or the world's 'being' one-sidedly as an object.7 Sartre illustrates the metaphysical attitude adopted by Wols with an idea that is reminiscent of the following idea from Being and Nothingness (1943): in art, it is also a question of seeing what is, what exists, and at the same time of discovering one's own nature in the Being of the Other; and since seeing is identical with being, the otherness will only appear to one's own inner otherness. This observation is connected with Sartre's attempt to establish a reader-response criticism, which engages the viewer of a work of art in completing the work.8 With the term of the 'other', Sartre introduces the idea of relating the outward forms of Being to one another with the help of the viewer, or rather the Other, who in Being and Cf. Wols, Soleil sur la ville deserte, 20.5*14.7 cm, 1948, in: ditto, Cites et Navires. Cf. Sartre, Doigts et non-doigts, p. 415. Cf. P. Klee, Notebooks, Volume 1, The Thinking Eye. Translated by R. Mannheim, Woodstock. New York: The Overlook Press, 1961, p. 67. Cf. for the following: Sartre, Doigts et non-doigts, p. 417—419. Ditto, What is Literature? Translated by B. Frechtman. New York: Harper and Row, 1965, p. 36 f.

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Nothingness is given the role of the mediator9. The centrality of this idea in the portrait study of Wols leads to a discussion of the painter's relationship to the depicted objects, thus pointing to the problematic nature of 'Being' as a further topic in the study. Being is also one of the main questions in Being and Nothingness: the 'Being' of phenomena cannot be divided up into phenomena of Being, yet the relationship between these and the 'Being' of phenomena has to be explained. Until 1940 Wols worked along the principle of the 'otherness of Being'. The objects received their meaning from the presence of other objects, which in turn did not necessarily disclose their Being. But there were recognisable reference points that offer the eye guidance. At first Wols drew 'towns', animals', 'humans' and 'plants'; later their functions changed. Before 1940 he conceals the nature of the things in his pictures, now he shows their nature and only intimates the objects themselves. The result is that the viewer is involved more strongly - a factor that, in this study of Wols, Sartre uses to recall how he had presented his concept of the 'look'10 in Being and Nothingness. The experience that the nature of things conveys to Wols lets him portray the world in a way that one would not normally encounter. The aquarelle "Nombril du monde"1!, shown in the London exhibition in 1985, contains various round forms drawn with thin strokes of the pen. They suggest figures and faces and construct different levels that can be distinguished from one another. In contrast, in the "Circus Wols"12, roughly two years earlier, the various people played exactly defined roles as lookers-on, musicians or clowns. "The large burning barrier"!3 is an aquarelle created by Wols between 1942 and 1945. Here, Sartre suggests that beams of differing sizes in changing shades of red are suggestive of an obstacle. The way the beams are interwoven and the intense colour intimate a construction reminiscent of chaos and destruction rather than stability. At first glance "The large burning barrier" is remarkable on account of its well arranged use of space, which is in sharp contrast to the previous period's numerous curves and interruptions. One is also struck by the dynamism of Sartre's description: it lets the reader participate in his careful observation and imparts a gradual understanding. The picture's subject is of a reddish 9

Cf. for the following: Sartre, Being and Nothingness. An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Translated by H. E. Barnes. London and New York: Routledge Classics, 2003, p. 258, p 5. '0 Cf. the chapter of the same name, in: Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 276-326. 11 Wols, Nombril du monde, Aquarell and Tuschfeder, 25.2x19 cm, in: ditto, Drawings and Water-Colours. Zeichnungen und Aquarelle. Edited by E. Rathke. Exhibition in the Goethe Institute, London, 17 May-29 June 1985, London: Goethe-Institut, 1985, ill. 14, p. 41. 12 Wols, Zirkus Wols, Aquarell and Tuschfeder, 24x31 cm, in: ditto, Drawings, ill. 2, p. 27. 3 Cf. for the following: Sartre, Doigts et non-doigts, p. 426 ff. Wols, La Grande Barriere qui brule, encre de chine, aquarelle et gouache, 22x16 cm, E. Fischer Collection, Krefeld, in: Obliques 24/25, Sartre et les arts. Edited by M. Sicard. Nyons: Ed. Borderie, 1981, p. 16.

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colour, and represents painted wood that might depict a lattice fence. In the lower part of the picture lie further trunks, which appear unnecessary. The first impression evaporates; it is the movement, intruding upon the eye, that actually effects the change. The angles of the elements to one another and the shadows contribute to an undeniable unity, which forces one to see the substance's unity: the work of art features rocky and wooden elements, and the motionless Being of matter is thus all that remains. Sartre suggests 'transubstantiation' and the 'compression of Being' as vague possibilities for interpreting the picture's subject matter: perhaps it is a one-legged person or a crucifixion with two or threes crosses. Such assumptions are dismissed again, and the explanation of the whole appears impossible. Despite much effort no unity is recognisable. But it is precisely the details that show themselves to be part of a whole - a totality that despite its absence is omnipresent at the heart of the picture. Being reveals itself at once; its virulence is too much for the frame, as Sartre graphically expresses it. This Being is at first inexistent, then the picture's emptiness changes, because the look itself, as already hinted at, actually becomes a part of the picture with all the concomitant conclusions. By relinquishing words and turning to abstract painting the painter finds a new perspective in his work. Sartre understands it as a chance for painting to distinguish itself successfully from literature. This simply leaves Wols with a writing bereft of characters or letters - one generally termed fine or beautiful. *4 Its dissociation from literature emphasises the importance of the beautiful, which characterises here the unity of the individual and the whole. In What is Literature? Sartre refused to concede to the painter the possibility of becoming committed. He discusses at length the distinctions between the painter's position and that of the author, and since these reflections are placed at the beginning of his manifesto on literature, he assigns them the status of definitions: notes, colours and shapes are not signs, because they refer to nothing that is connected with anything else.15 The painter is mute; he shows something, and the viewer is free to see in it what he wants. A sound or a colour does not have any inherent meaning, because here the meaning itself is sound or colour. This definition is in agreement with the artist's intention not to paint signs. Instead, the artist places the colours next to each other. Taken on its own, such combinations of colours have no meaning that necessarily refers to another object. This conclusion is not itself meant as a devaluation of painting; for the viewer, it opens up various ways of understanding the work. The yellow sky over Golgotha painted by Tintoretto is not a sign of fear, Sartre explains, it is a fear that has been made into an object. Fear and its connection with the object in 4

Sartre, Doigts et non-doigts, p. 433. 5 Cf. for the following: ditto, What is Literature?, p. 1-4.

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Wols' picture are to be understood in the same sense: the object is Being, just like fear or an idea, but materially it is an aquarelle that only refers to itself. "The blue phantom" (1951), one of Wols' last pictures, did not derive its title from the colour of the phantom. It is not blue at all, it is black. It has five pink dots that look like eyes, and their background colour lets the black object stand out from the blue background. This surround, which has lent the object its name, is not uniform. Lines of contrasting colour suggest a movement, that, very similar to Monet's water lilies in the Orangery in Paris, reminds one of ruffled water. In this artist portrait Sartre does not want to present a definite result; he provides stimuli that the viewer will remember when standing in front of "The blue Phantom". He does not dictate or even suggest how one should analyse Wols' pictures; he merely indicates possible approaches. A visit to the museum shows that Sartre's method of analysing art with the help of his philosophical concepts is convincing, not only in the case of Wols' works. The reconstruction of this method - one that enables Sartre to fathom out how art was produced and determine its effect - is the object of the present study.

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2.

From the portrait studies to theory

2.1. Art and freedom Sartre's concept of art is closely connected with his interpretation of freedom in Being and Nothingness. In his first large philosophical enquiry he explains the notion of freedom by pointing to the difference between the planning of a project (of whatever kind) and its realisation. Every project's intention is free, even when confronted with its outcome. This outcome or result, when it emerges, is by no means pre-determined or inevitable.1 Sartre transfers this postulate of complete freedom to art itself. The artist employs his freedom to create works of art; but the task of interpreting them is left to their recipients. The only dictate conveyed by art is that of freedom. And only by using his freedom can the recipient make something of the work of art and surpass it. One can accuse Sartre of many mistakes, but he never questioned the connection between art and freedom, which he regarded as indissoluble. In his aesthetics Sartre aims to take into consideration the references made by literature to all other arts and he maintains that aesthetics claims to be comprehensive rather than normative. The artist first realises his freedom through the work of art; it is free because it is created outside of nature.2 Literature occupies a special position here, because it expresses itself through signs and cannot represent a symbolic whole divorced of meaning. All other arts can represent an object in its totality aesthetically. With this in mind, we should also remember the distinction Sartre had already made in What is Literature? in 1947 between the beauty of nature and the beauty created in art. Art serves no purpose; in this respect he is in agreement with Kant. Art is an end in itself.3 Here, Sartre questions Kant's notion of disinterested pleasure, on the grounds that it cannot explain the relationship between the work of art and its viewer. Kant believes that the work exists first, and only then is it seen. For Sartre, works of art do not exist until they are looked at.4 In his foreword to the exhibition catalogue on Robert Lapoujade he extends the definition of beauty by reflecting on painting as a medium and shows how every work demands of the eye or of the viewer that it be reconstructed.5 This accords with Being and Nothingness, where Sartre had already defined beauty as a value, the essential nature of

Cf. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 455-503, esp. p. 484 f. Sartre, Sicard, Penser Tart, in: Obliques 24/25, p. 16. Cf. Sartre, What is Literature?, p. 42. Cf. Kant, Critique of the power of judgment. Translated by P. Guyer and E. Matthews. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 90: "§ 2. The satisfaction that determines the judgment of taste is without any interest." Cf. Sartre, Le peintre sans privileges, in: ditto, Situations, IV, p. 364-386, p. 370 ff.

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which is only revealed by the viewer's repeated efforts to understand it. Beauty is implicitly recognisable as being a part of things by its perceived absence.6 In What is Literature? Sartre reminds one of the advent of a work of art: as a new event it cannot be explained by anterior circumstances and appeals exclusively to the reader's freedom, inviting him to collaborate in its production.7 This connection between his philosophical oeuvre and a remark on aesthetics in his artist portraits explains here by way of example the portraits' importance as "concretisations of Sartre's basic philosophical ideas".8 While a realistic work can reveal a certain amount of truth, Sartre writes, it nonetheless addresses the reader's imagination, precisely because the work is evoking something that does not exist or is absent.9 Because they are created in the sphere of freedom, a book and work of art appeal to their recipients' own freedom - an appeal that demands of them that they complete the work, that they pass universal judgement in the sense of an aesthetic evaluation, while at the same time challenging them to surpass the work.10 Man is being addressed here as a free being, and Sartre is developing here the aesthetic distance, H which takes into account the reader's disposition, not placing him under obligation, but rather presenting him with a task in the sense of an invitation.l2 In Sartre's aesthetics, art is given a particular function: it points the way into the future, it anticipates something by revealing what a human being can one day make of himself, of his life or of his work and even of the world. The appeal is a product of the work of art's autonomy. Sartre interprets freedom as the state of being condemned: "To be free is to be condemned to be free."13 At the basis of this destiny lies the link between nothingness and freedom as man's continual 'project' (projet). This project, which is constantly aimed at the future, constitutes man's very nature. A human being is never sufficient unto himself, as the saying goes. He is always sepa6

Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 218. Cf. for the following: ditto, What is Literature?, p. 40. 8 The term is taken from D. Hoeges, Jean-Paul Sartre, in: Kritisches Lexikon der romanischen Gegenwartsliteraturen (KLRG). Ed. by W.-D. Lange. Tubingen: Gunter Narr, 1984. 9 Cf. for the following: Sartre parle, interview by Y. Buin, in: Clarte, no. 55, p. 42 f. 10 Cf. Sartre, The Responsibility of the Writer, in: Reflections on our age. Lectures Delivered at the opening session of UNESCO at the Sorbonne, Paris. New York: Columbia University Press, Morningside Heights, 1949, p. 67-83, here p. 73 f. 1 1 As in this lecture, Sartre also expounded on the meaning of "recul esthetique" in What is Literature?, p. 43 ff, p. 49. Cf. H.-G. Gadamer, Truth and Method. Translated by J. Weinsheimer and D. G. Marshall. Second, revised edition, New York: Continuum, 1989, p. 295: "The true locus of hermeneutics is this in-between." 12 Cf. Sartre, The Responsibility of the Writer, p. 72. 1 3 Ditto, Being and Nothingness, p. 152. Cf. compare Sartre's explanation in: ditto, Notebooks for an Ethics. Translated by D. Pellauer. Chicago, London: The University Press, 1993, p. 330 f. Cf. Y. Salzmann, Sartre et I'authenticite. Vers une ethique de la bienveillance reciproque, Geneva: Labor et Fides, 2000, p. 11-106. 7

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rated from his own past and from the future by nothingness. Even the present existence is annihilation "sous la forme du 'reflet-refletant'". So the conclusion reads: "Human reality is free because it is not enough"^ With his concept of freedom, which he equates with the "autonomy of choice"15, Sartre develops in Being and Nothingness the absolute claim that he attributes to freedom. In 1468, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola had had something similar in mind in his oration On the dignity of man, when he let the creator of man say: "In conformity with thy free judgment, in whose hands I have placed thee, thou art confined by no bounds; and thou wilt fix limits of nature for thyself."16 In this sense French existentialism as coined by Sartre links up with a Renaissance concept formulated by Pico della Mirandola, who explains the responsibility one has for one's actions - attributed to man alone - with his freedom, even if in doing so he, Pico, departs from the Christian 'weltbild'. For his statement he has no less a guarantor than God himself, who announces to man that he is neither mortal nor immortal: "Thou, like a judge appointed for being honorable, art the molder and maker of thyself; thou mayest sculpt thyself into whatever shape thou dost prefer." Humans have to make a choice: "Thou canst grow downward into the lower natures which are brutes. Thou canst again grow upward from thy soul's reason into the higher natures which are divine". In this manner Pico della Mirandola had already linked freedom inseparably with the condition of man. The relationship to the Other is a determining factor of freedom, for human reality demands to be both for-oneself and for-others.17 The dependence on the Other as a fundamental reality is demonstrated in Being and Nothingness by the analysis of the 'look'. Sartre illustrates this with the story of the eavesdropper at the door, who at the sound of approaching footsteps feels he has been caught and seen in the act.18 The relations to the other person are transferred to the act of viewing a work of art. Just as someone is restricted by someone else in his movements, the work of art as a material form of the 'look' likewise influences the viewer's reactions. The mutual dependence of freedom and situation that Sartre calls 'the paradox of freedom' appears as an extension of the idea of the 'situation', and explains the conditions of the 'choice'.19 The 'situation' is defined by the contingency of freedom in the world and by the goal determined in the choice. Thus a decision can never be dictated by the cause or matter at hand, for this can only become the motive, when one has attributed a purpose to it. 4

Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 462. Cf. op. cit., p. 505. " For the following: G. Pico della Mirandola, On the Dignity of Man. Translated by Ch. G. Wallis. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hacket Publishing Company, Inc. (1965), 1998, p. 5. 1 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 306. 8 Op. cit., p. 284, 276-306. 9 Cf. op. cit., p. 509 ff. 5

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This mutual dependence of the terms is summarised by equating situation and motivation. Commitment or involvement (engagement) is thus defined as an important element of consciousness. Every situation always belongs to one person in particular: "... each person realizes only one situation - his own."20 The singularity of his situation confronts a person with a choice, which by being equated with human reality points to the correlation of freedom and responsibility. This is shown on stage by performing borderline situations, in which the choice confirms its outstanding significance. The connection with the title of his volume on situations, in which he collected political articles and interviews, is manifest. The applicability of the concept of 'choice', with which Sartre investigates the emergence of artistic interests, is a topic in Sartre's study of Stephane Mallarme.21 One's relationship with the world is not pre-determined, it has to be lived. Sartre calls this existence, which he equates with transcending or surpassing contingency, the 'praxis', which includes stepping beyond a situation. With the concept of choice22 Sartre announces his intention to reconstruct the artist's choices by interpreting the latter's works. It is precisely this aim that motivates Sartre's study of individual biographies in his artist portraits. In a lecture at the Sorbonne on 1 November 1946, on the occasion of the foundation of UNESCO, he criticises the idea that a work of art does not entail an obligation on the part of the artist, equating this with reverting back to the irresponsibility of the writer,23 against which he vigorously protests. There is no art without responsibility, just as there is no freedom without responsibility, one might add. Sartre understands the creation of a work of art as an autonomous act - one that reveals its contrasts and opposites and is not simply a logical outcome of other laws. The freedom within which the work emerges justifies the author in claiming freedom for himself. This freedom also has to be conceded to the reader, otherwise the reader would not be in the position to form his own aesthetic opinion. The Flaubert study, The Family Idiot (1970/71), complements the theoretical reflections Sartre had already set down in What is Literature? in 1947 by adding a practical approach. He had by no means renounced literature with his Les Mots (1960), as he once intimated. On the contrary, the significance he attached to it as a means of artistic expression confirms its outstanding role in his aesthetics. As a consequence, his theory of literature, together with his observations on history, is a further important element of his theory of portraiture.

20

Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 571. Ditto, Mallarme, or the Poet of Nothingness. Translated by E. Sturm. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University, 1987. 22 Cf. ditto, Mallarme, or the Poet ofNothingness, p. 90. 2 ^ Cf. for the following: ditto, The Responsibility of the Writer, p. 71. 21

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2.2. From William II to Flaubert After having read Guillaume II by Emil Ludwig and La Commune by Albert Ollivier in March 1940, Sartre made a note in his diary about man's role in social eventsl: a topic that would later appear in each of his portrait studies. While reading Guillaume II Sartre began to take an interest in developing a portrait of him. In his war diaries there are passages that contain sketches for a portrait of William II and references to the method that formed the basis of his portraiture technique.2 In this case it only concerns "an example for a method" and not the historical truth. Emil Ludwig himself explains in his preface that his book dealt with neither the epoch nor the history of the Emperor, it was purely a portrait of William II. In his portrait sketch of the Emperor, Sartre mentions terms that in Being and Nothingness will prove to be the foundation of his philosophy. The heir to the throne's personality is very much determined by the perspective of obtaining the crown. So Sartre embarks on interpreting the dimension of the future, for which he will later provide theoretical reasoning in the corresponding chapter "Temporality"3 in Being and Nothingness. The perspective of things to come determines the individual's position, so the future itself, as Sartre might express it, is part of the facticity that is constitutive for consciousness (the "pour-soi" or "for-itself). One finds a similar parallel between the portrait of William II and the analyses in Being and Nothingness in the description of William IPs "mauvaise foi" (bad faith or dishonesty), which William is supposed to have developed due to his handicap. The attempt to cover up this handicap at every opportunity has consequences of a both personal and political nature, for his dishonesty demands, as Sartre expresses it, the dishonesty of his subjects on the basis of divine right. Bad faith then becomes a key concept in Being and Nothingness, for it is by means of bad faith that the meaning of nothingness is explained. A human being can under certain circumstances negate something with the aim of evading it. The interdependence of these two factors - dishonesty and the future - gives rise to the concept of 'choice'; Sartre equates this with annihilation, in the sense that the decision for one option cancels out others. Indeed, he intends to establish an overall context within which various facts in someone's life for which no common ground can be ascertained are linked by concepts such as

Sartre, Lettres au Castor et a quelques autres. Edited by S. de Beauvoir. Vol. II, 1940-1963, Paris: Gallimard, 1983, p. 119 f. Cf. E. Ludwig, Guillaume II, Paris: Simon Kra, 1927, A. Ollivier, La Commune (1871), Paris: Gallimard, 1939. Cf. for the following: Sartre, The War Diaries. November 1939 - March 1940. Translated by Q. Hoare. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984, p. 315-319. Cf. for the following: Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 130-193 and p. 68-72.

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choice, dishonesty, situation and contingency. Thus his artist portraits, though also dealing with individual aspects, take on the character of a synthesis. In his War diaries Sartre criticises reducing a multidimensional explanatory model to a one-dimensional one, which derives a supposed totality from one event.4 The interpreter should rather adapt the analysis to the different circumstances, in order to grasp someone's totality and thus the sum of his possibilities. As early as 1938, in Nausea, Sartre had described this manner of understanding one's own possibilities in the portrait of Roquentin. Roquentin reports how he observed the guests in the Brasserie Vezelise while reading Balzac's "Eugenie Grander". One man was drumming a march on the table. No-one was speaking. Silence seemed to be the guests' normal state. Only occasionally did they say something;5 otherwise they were simply there. All were evidently dependent on the company of the others to be able to exist at all. It is only when Roquentin, in the public park beneath a chestnut tree, discovers existence in its facticity as a feeling of revulsion, of nausea, that he fathoms out 'contingency'. Everything around him is devoid of meaning, and the people do not even understand that they are superfluous. He asks in disbelief whether one can justify one's own existence, breaks off his sojourn and decides to embark on writing a new book. Later, in his various portrait studies, Sartre will continue to develop the method which enables the behaviour and the possibilities open to each individual in society to be analysed and interpreted. Among the artist portraits one finds the study of Baudelaire in the shape of a foreword6, the two works on Stephane Mallarme7, which are a continuation of the Jean Genet study8 that appeared in 1952 titled Saint Genet: Comedien et martyr, and the study of Gustave Flaubert. The decision to take up writing and the realisation of such a project are derived, in the case of Baudelaire, Genet and Flaubert, from formative influences in their childhood. The unusual kind of interpretation that Sartre presented in his foreword to Baudelaire's Ecrits intimes in 1946 provoked criticism. The study is related almost exclusively to those statements of Baudelaire that confirm a theoretical position previously formulated by Sartre. In Being and Nothingness Sartre first describes his idea of transcendence and combines it with a fundamental critique: 4

Cf. for the following: Sartre, The War Diaries. November 1939 - March 1940, p. 294, 303 f. Cf. for the following: ditto, Nausea. Translated by R. Baldick. London: Penguin Books, (1963) 2000, p. 75-80, 187 f., 251-253. 6 Ditto, Baudelaire. A Critical Study. Translated by M. Turnell. New York: New Directions Publishing, 1967. 7 Ditto, Mallarme (1842-1898), in: Situations, IX, Politique et autobiographic, Paris: Gallimard, 1976, p. 191-201; ditto, Mallarme, or the Poet ofNothingness. ° Ditto, Saint Genet. Actor and Martyr. Translated by B. Frechtman. New York: George Braziller, 1963. 5

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people do not take into consideration the circumstances they are constantly transcending; they use them to concentrate on the goal they are pursuing.9 Sartre uses this definition of transcendence in the foreword as a criterion for assessing Baudelaire. Admittedly, the outcome is more oriented to Sartre's philosophy than to the artist's actual life. The description of Baudelaire's choice simply underscores the fact that authors and artists only play minor roles in the artist portraits. The original choice that Baudelaire had made for himself corresponds to the absolute commitment made by everyone who decides in a particular situation what he or she will be. 10 No individual can evade a choice. This choice is placed in close connection with the three dimensions of time - past, present and future - which are not to be separated from one another, since they form a synthesis.11 This idea bears itself out in the case of Baudelaire, who is constantly torn between options, and indeed for anyone one cares to study: a human is always something else. 12 According to Sartre's hypothesis, Baudelaire elevated his feeling of having been abandoned when his mother remarried in 1828 to his "original choice" ("choix originel"). This is also true of Roquentin.13 With such observations of a general nature, Sartre recalls his idea of a person's life as being the expression of that person's choice and poses the provocative question of whether Baudelaire actually deserved his life. The question is transferred to humans in general. Perhaps they only have the life they deserve?14 Baudelaire's creative freedom derived from nothing. Its contingency and lack of reason make it appear superfluous. The artist can only create something new out of contingency, which is to say, out of both nothingness and the impossibility of justifying oneself. Autonomous existence becomes a condition of his art. This feature of creative work in fact becomes a criterion for Sartre when selecting the protagonists of his artist portraits. Moreover, criteria such as independence and novelty are also valid for Sartre's own work. Voltaire's characterisation of the homme de lettres as the flying fish that is always in danger of being attacked in the water or in the air is evidence of a tradition of the French Enlightenment that Sartre continues.15

Cf. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 102 f. Cf. ditto, Baudelaire. A Critical Study, p. 18. Cf. ditto, Being and Nothingness, p. 130. Ditto, Baudelaire, p. 18. Ditto, Being and Nothingness, p. 58 f. Cf. ibid: ditto, Baudelaire. A Critical Study, p. 18: "The abrupt revelation of his individual existence made him feel that he was another person...". Cf. ditto, Baudelaire. A Critical Study, p. 16. Voltaire, Lettres, Gens de lettres ou Lettres, in: Dictionnaire philosophique. Edited by R. Naves. Paris: Classiques Gamier, 1961, (p. 271 ff.), esp. p. 273, cited in D. Hoeges, Aujklarung and die List der Form. Zur Zeitschrift "// Caffe" and zur Strategic italienischer and franzosischer Aujklarung, Krefeld: Scherpe, 1978, p. 11 f. (English edition: Voltaire,

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The definition of the man of letters as someone who is constantly exposed to hostilities and has to guard against attempts to monopolise him from all quarters, is also true of the author. Sartre was conscious of the efforts to monopolise him, as the generalising remarks in the portrait study of Baudelaire demonstrate. In Being and Nothingness the observation that the story of someone's life is always the story of a defeat serves Sartre as an occasion to introduce the "coefficient of adversity in things"!6, which measures the resistance with which a thing opposes a wish someone has expressed. Sartre's analysis of Stephane Mallarme, an English teacher from Tournon published as a fragment: Mallarme, or the Poet of Nothingness - provides the opportunity for a further investigation into how an author manages to assert his opinions in the face of his readers. As with Flaubert and Tintoretto, Mallarme succeeded in transcending his own times by creating something new on the basis of his uncompromising attitude. In this study Sartre deals with Mallarme's relationship to his times and with his success as a poet, expressing his conviction that Mallarme's strategy of unshakeability was his own decision. The study searches for reasons for the Mead' Mallarme had over other poets, concluding with the following questions: which method should dictate the manner of the enquiry - dialectical materialism or psychoanalysis? Can the two approaches complement one another, even though they are mutually exclusive? These questions show that Sartre connects the Mallarme study with ideas on method by weighing up the benefits of a psychoanalytic interpretation against those of a Marxist one.17 The first part of the fragment of the Mallarme study examines how the fall of the monarchy in February 1848 changed the conditions of bourgeois existence. With the fall of both God and man, the poets lost two of their traditional topics.18 Without religion every moral was gone and the social hierarchy too. What else did the bourgeoisie have? The poets reacted immediately: their anger was terrible,19 Sartre writes. One of them, Leconte de Lisle, read the sign of the times; he did not rebel and did not criticise what had happened. He just made notes and played along. Sartre's contempt for Leconte de Lisle20 is politically motivated, because the latter is supposed to have become involved with the bourgeoisie and just faked his unsuccessful behaviour as a poet. Sartre succeeds Philosophical Dictionary, Part 2, Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2003, Men of Letters II. Band, II, p. 110). 16 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 504. 1 ' Ditto, Mallarme, or the Poet of Nothingness, p. 87. 18 Cf. for the following: ditto, op. cit., p. 19-20. 19 C f ditto, op. cit., p. 21. 20 Cf. for the following: ditto, The Family Idiot. Gustave Flaubert 1821-1857. Translated by C. Cosman. Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 1993, vol. V, p. 320-394. Cf. M. Sicard, "Le Continent Flaubert," in: ditto, Essais sur Sartre. Entretiens avec Sartre (1975-1979), Paris: Editions Galilee 1989, p. 59-181.

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in reconstructing Leconte de Lisle's development by showing his disappointment after 1848. By contrasting him with his contemporary, Flaubert, who reacted differently, Sartre concludes that with his nervous breakdown in 1844 Flaubert was actually anticipating the general objective neurosis that in Sartre's opinion many authors and artists suffered in France after 1848/52. The novellike features of the Flaubert study and its fictional elements become apparent when Sartre speculates on whether Flaubert was pursuing his own plans or whether he modified his plans on account of the changed political situation. The longish portraits within the Flaubert study that are devoted to Leconte de Lisle and his friend Le Poittevin demonstrate how Sartre checks his results against research into the works of other artists and in doing so continues to develop his method of portraiture. His criticism of the poets in the salons of Leconte de Lisle and Nina de Villard is devastating. Not one of them was able to integrate the contradictory aspects of his situation,2! and every attempt at exchange among the poets came to nothing. The poets and writers developed their own strategies and made the idea of writing poetry into their one and only reference point. A novel's superiority to its author - a notion mentioned in Sartre's interview with Madeleine Chapsal - corresponds to the task that a work of art sets its viewer. Sartre's study of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary is based on these initial considerations. The principles applied in The Family Idiot reveal that it is only here that Sartre's aesthetics is actually established: by being put into practice. The hypothesis reads: Gustave Flaubert chose the imaginary as an opportunity to turn the destiny he had been given in his youth on account of his upbringing into the starting point of his career.22 In this sense The Family Idiot is a continuation of The Imaginary.23 The Family Idiot examines the fundamental problem of the relationship between the author and his own day by asking whether Flaubert's 'neurosis' might be connected with his times. Flaubert thus becomes an 'example' for Sartre, as were the other artists24, because this portrait study is likewise not intended as a biography. On the basis of its results, Sartre hopes to contribute insights into how an individual develops into a personality. The neurosis is a hypothesis with which Sartre attempts to establish the prerequisites that enabled Flaubert to write the modern novel Madame Bovary, which for Sartre stands at the heart of

Cf. for the following: Sartre, Mallarme, or the Poet of Nothingness, p. 64 f., p. 67-79. Cf. ditto, The Family Idiot. Gustave Flaubert 1821-1857. Translated by C. Cosman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987, vol. II, p. 16. Cf. ditto, The Imaginary. A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination. Translated by J. Webber. London, New York: Routledge, 2005. The term is taken from F. Bondy, cf. ditto, Jean Genet - der Dichter, der sich freischrieb, in: Merkur 347, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1977, p. 347-357.

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all our current literary problems.25 In fact, he cast doubt on the hypothesis that he himself has set up when linking Flaubert's neurosis of 1844 with the defeat of 1848, for Flaubert's readers of 1857 may not have seen the defeat in 1848 as their own, he concludes.26 He thereby demonstrates that the assertion that a writer expresses his own times is invalid. In doing so, Sartre expressly contradicts the 'scientific' studies that Marxism was supposed to have made easier. He is thus protesting against the untenable simplifications of critics who understand a piece of literature as the witness and expression of an epoch and ignore the relations between the author and his readers. For Sartre, a work's means of exerting influence are a constituent part of his theory of literature. The literary work itself and the readers of the epoch in which it is written constitute a unit. Two perspectives result from this: a book bears witness to an epoch, and at the same time it is a place where a number of generations encounter one another. In his work of literature, the author has to present a synthesis of the two temporal dimensions by falling short of the reader and at the same time by going ahead of him.

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26

Cf. Sartre, The Family Idiot. Gustave Flaubert 1821-1857. Translated by C. Cosman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991, vol. IV, p. 249. Cf. for the following: ditto, The Family Idiot. Gustave Flaubert 1821-1857, vol. V, p. 391-394.

29 "'What's it all about? Engaged literature? [ . . ] ' What nonsense. They read quickly, badly, and pass judgment before they have understood. So let's begin all over. This doesn't amuse anyone, neither you nor me. But we have to hit the nail on the head." Sartre, What is Literature? l "But we must know also that the work never reveals the secrets of biography..." Sartre, The Problem of Method2

2.3. The work and its readers Sartre's theory of literature, with which he repeatedly and explicitly objected to every form of the "l'homme et l'ceuvre" method forms the basis of his portraiture technique, connecting as it does practical analysis with theoretical reflections. He presented his theory of literature in What is Literature? It is closely connected with his basic philosophical ideas. Just as his early philosophical works influenced his literary works, the latter served again and again as an opportunity to continue developing his theoretical works. It is only when both authors and readers have finished working on a piece of work that this piece is completed. Author and reader (or spectator) necessarily have to collaborate, for it is only through their joint effort that a work of art becomes recognisable as such.3 The collaboration between author and reader is based on the acknowledgement of each other's freedom.4 The feeling that accompanies and complements the creative process is called by Sartre 'aesthetic joy'5 and will only be attained through the reader's contribution, whereby the work "undergoes an increase in being"6. For this reason Sartre is only prepared Sartre, What is Literature?, p. XVII f. Ditto, The Problem of Method. Translation by H. E. Barnes, London: Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1963, p. 143. Cf. H. Wittmann, Kunst und Moral, in: P. Knopp, V. von Wroblewsky (eds), Carnets Jean-Paul Sartre, Eine Moral in Situation, Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 200, p. 159-170. Ditto, What is Literature?, p. 37: "... the operation of writing implies that of reading as its dialectical correlative and these two connected acts necessitate two distinct agents. It is the conjoint effort of author and reader which brings upon the scene that concrete and imaginary object which is the work of the mind. There is no art except for and by others." Cf. ditto, The Plea for Intellectuals [Three lectures delivered by Sartre at Tokyo and Kyoto in September and October 1965], in: ditto, Between Existentialism and Marxism. Sartre on Philosophy, Politics and the Arts. Translated by J. Mathews. New York: Pantheon Books, 1975, p. 225-485. Cf. ditto, What is Literature?, p. 52. The phrase is taken from H.-G. Gadamer, cf. ditto, Zwischen Phanomenologie and Dialektik, 1985, in: ditto, Hermeneutik II. Wahrheit und Methode (= Gesammelte Werke, Bd. 2), Erganzungen, Register, Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck) 2 1993, p. 3-23, p. 19 f.: "Even if reading does not amount to reproducing, every text one reads is only realised when

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to ascribe an aesthetic quality to the work if the author in some way loses control over it.7 The smaller the author's influence, even when writing the work, and the more independent the words become that instruct readers in how to continue the work on their own, the better the book will be and the more its influence will grow. This value judgement underscores the work of art's autonomous character as the product of a process, for the work of art is something new that anterior data cannot explain.8 This insight is presented as the logical conclusion of earlier observations. The work is only completed by being read, and therefore every artistic and literary work becomes an invitation to the reader and spectator. This explains the work's character as an appeal. Sartre introduces the second part of his reasoning with a reversal of the appeal in order to be able to define the process of writing better.9 To write is to make an appeal to the reader: he or she should give the revelation or act of disclosure that the author has undertaken by means of language an objective existence. Sartre's second condition is the author's subjectivity, which the latter only shows as a possibility by means of his work ("this directed creation" 1°), without being able to attain it on the level of objectivity. In his article on Husserl, Sartre showed in 1939 how Husserl's idea of 'intentionality' was linked with Heidegger's "being-in-the-world" and transferred it to his own idea of depassement (surpassing or transcending): H Being has to be understood as movement, for without movement it will annihilate itself. And this craving to surpass oneself is for Husserl 'intentionality', i.e. the desire to transcend a situation. In his review of Giraudoux's "Choix des elues"12, Sartre portrayed transcending as a continual choice: in Giraudoux's case the people were not dependent on predestination; on the contrary the author shows them in confrontation with their destiny. In doing so he succeeds in revealing the nature of a human being as something that comes into being through actions. The message of

it is understood. So for the text to be read one can say that it undergoes an increase in being [Seinszuwachs] that gives the work its full presence." (Translated by C. Atkinson). 7 Cf. in the following: Sartre, What is Literature?, p. 203: "A work is never beautiful unless it in some way escapes its author." 8 Cf. ditto, What is Literature?, p. 39-41. 9 "Reading" and "Writing" are the headings in Sartre, Words. Translated by I. Clephane. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1965. 10 Ditto, What is Literature?, p. 40. 1 * Ditto, Une idee fondamentale de la phenomenologie de Husserl: L'intentionnalite, in: ditto, Critiques litteraires (Situations, I), Paris : Gallimard, 1947, p. 38^42, p. 40 f. 12 Cf. ditto, Jean Giraudoux and the Philosophy of Aristotle, in: Sartre, Literary and Philosophical Essays. Translated by A. Michelson. New York: Criterion Books, 1955, p. 42-55.

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the dictum 'existence precedes essence'13 is anticipated in this review, which at the same time is a portrait of the author and his attitude. Like the study on Baudelaire quoted above, this portrait contains statements that relate more to his philosophy than to Giraudoux's work, because Sartre is repeating here one of his main ideas. Just as a human being realises his nature spontaneously, so too does he choose himself as he is. This results in the responsibility that everyone bear for everyone else. 14 The moral that Sartre attributes to Giraudoux is his own: "Man must freely realize his finite essence, and in so doing, freely harmonize with the rest of the world."!5 With his analysis of "Choix des elues" Sartre recalls the task of giving people freedom if they are to live 16 , referring thus to the irritation he had mentioned at the beginning of the review which the contrast between the artist and his work had often provoked in him.17 This remark refers here to Giraudoux; but it indicates a principal approach in all of Sartre's artist portraits that leads to two questions. How does the contrast between the artist and his work arise? And is the artist conscious of the influence his work will exert? The artist portraits investigate whether an author's life can be explained by analysing his works. The works certainly contain references to the author's life; however, Sartre emphasizes, an analysis that restricts itself to searching for insights of this kind will overlook the work's actual aesthetic content, namely the new ideas and perspectives that actually put the reader or viewer in the position to transcend this work. So the author's life does not amount to instructions on how to understand a work of art. It is the reader's task to decipher the statement - Sartre calls it here the work's "silence". The writer influences the development of the meaning that the reader recognises, or rather, indirectly makes that meaning accessible to the reader. The meaning does not result from words that are strung together, it is rather an "organic totality" or whole18 that ensues from them. The judgement of a work depends on what the recipient makes of it for himself. Interpretations often show merely the critic's horizon of thought and not always the work's implications. The reader can only transcend the work if he accepts the reading of it as a "guided creative process". In Being and Nothingness^ Sartre argues explicitly against a description of the 'milieu' as an explanatory method. The milieu can only influence someone 1

^ Cf. Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism. Translated by C. Macomber. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2007, p. 20. 14 Ditto, Jean Giraudoux and the Philosophy of Aristotle, p. 52. 15 Ditto, op. cit.,p. 53. 16 Ditto, Francois Mauriac and Freedom, in: Sartre, Literary and Philosophical Essays, p. 723, p. 7 f. 17 Cf. ditto, Jean Giraudoux and the Philosophy of Aristotle, p. 42. 18 Cf. for the following: ditto, What is Literature?, p. 38 19 Cf. ditto, Being and Nothingness, p. 593.

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to the extent that the person converts it into a 'situation', i.e. makes something of it for him- or herself. But in this sense the milieu cannot explain anything on its own. Nonetheless the milieu deserves a certain amount of attention if one is attempting to ascertain the artist's degree of consciousness and freedom. But Sartre does not simply ask what became of the artists and their lives. The decisive questions reads: what did they make of their origins? In What is Literature?, alluding to Taine's milieu theory, he reflects on whether one should not simply take into account a writer's origins as a determining factor.20 He rejects this option, for the milieu is purely self-referential and therefore has no explanatory value. In contrast, the public, which Sartre, with reference to his analysis in Being and Nothingness21, calls "the Other", is with its expectations and its possibility to transcend a work of art far less static. Sartre always understands writing as an answer to the reading public's expectations and also as transcending a situation. Thus an author's life cannot explain his work, since his origins do not determine the decision, made in a particular situation, to take up writing. The work creates its own milieu. The founder of the reader-response criticism Emile Hennequin had realised this at an early stage, explaining in his Critique scientifique that milieus had no existence of their own before the works were created.22 Rene Etiemble had criticised the opinion that a writer was immediately caught up in whatever he had started to write about and recalled Pascal's "we have embarked"23 in order to cast doubt on the idea of commitment (engagement); this, he thought, was too banal, since it only expresses an obvious human condition. Sartre picks up this criticism of his idea of commitment and recalls that it does not imply a concrete commitment for a particular cause; it means that everyone is involved and at the same time responsible in his situation; noone can escape. The idea of commitment should not be viewed in isolation within Sartre's theory, because it refers to the writer's responsibility in a situation. It is more controversial than any other concept in his oeuvre, has frequently been misunderstood and often interpreted as a political concept. In the conversation with Madeleine Chapsal mentioned above Sartre explains that if literature did not encompass everything, it would not be worth an hour's effort. His concept of commitment is aimed at a kind of literature that encompasses all spheres of human life and society; if literature cannot achieve this then it has no meaning. 20

Cf. for the following: Sartre, What is Literature?, p. 68 f. 1 Cf. ditto, Being and Nothingness, p. 260: "The mediator is the Other." 22 Cf. E. Hennequin, La Critique Scientifique, [Paris 1890]. Edited by D. Hoeges. Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitatsverlag, 1982, p. 156: "It is in fact evident that the milieus, far from having shaped the artists, since they have no previous known existence, were actually shaped by them, at the same time as they were producing their works." (Translated by C. Atkinson) 2 ^ For the following: ditto, What is Literature?, p. 89. 2

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Sartre's criticism of those who do not commit themselves is also aimed indirectly at the critics, for their consensus or rejection of a work is one way of continuing that work. They make their work easier for themselves if they only read books that stand lined up on a shelf like urns24 and do not put them at risk when assessing them, since others have already passed judgement. Critics are wary about placing a wager on things that are doubtful;25 alternatively, their moral judgement had been made before they start reading, for example when they question Rousseau's humanism, knowing of course that he had put his children into an orphanage. In Sartre's excursion into the history of literature, the distinction between the real and the potential public serves to determine a writer's social function: which options does an author have and how much influence can he exert? As soon as authors reach their potential readers, new dependencies arise at once. This holds true particularly for the 19th century, because the mid-century revolution changed the nature of the reading public. Social upheaval and the triumph of the bourgeois class caused readers to unite, so that after 1848 this left authors the sole option of writing in opposition to all readers. Sartre employs the notion of 'imprisonment' - a feature of every situation to characterise the situation of an author in 1947 who wants to support both Socialism and a person's freedom.26 With a side-glance at his 'situation theatre', he recalls that humans always define themselves through the choice they make.27 Choice is not only a question of deciding between various options, it can also be a prerequisite for re-orientation. A great variety of topics does not explain an author, they explain rather the interrelations between him and his work, with which he transcends the totality of what he is - and there is no talk here of any predisposition. He understands the concept of transcendence as a form of existence in which the "being-in-the-world"28, the "for-oneself, is capable of annihilating the world: "[...] Man is the being through whom nothingness comes to the world,"29 one reads in Being and Nothingness. The ontological 24

Cf. Sartre, What is Literature?, p. 22. Op. cit., p. 24. Cf in the following, p. 28. 26 Op. cit., p. 270 f. 27 Op. cit., p. 287 f. - Cf. M. W. Roche, Why Literature Matters in the 21st Century. Yale University Press: New Haven and London 2004, p. 8: there are presumably various reasons why Roche does not mention Sartre and Camus in his bibliography. Roche's notion of morals "as guiding principles of all human efforts" and his suggestion that "... but it does suggest that the modern autonomy of art ist not in every respect welcome." (p. 8), might be taken as an indication of why the two authors are not named. This example is indicative of the fact that the aesthetic studies of Camus and Sartre are also still not as well known in thefieldof literature as they deserve to be. 2 ^ Cf. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 41. 29 Op. cit., p. 48.

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debate on human existence, the future of which is a kind of annihilation, appears again in Notebooks for an Ethics and is explained there through the example of a work that slips out of the author's control after being completed, with the result that the author's ego becomes something of the past, something he cannot escape being.30 By rejecting the biographical method Sartre is not far away from the opinion of Gustave Lanson, the director of the Ecole Normale Superieure, where Sartre studied from 1924 to 1929. Lanson turned down the application of psychology to literature on the grounds that it was unscientific, because it was only based on a hypothesis formulated about a person's fate.3i An author's originality inevitably remains obscure if his influence in literary and social life is not traced.32 Gustave Lanson's approach via literary history correlates in part with that of Sartre, who compares a writer's commitment with his 'project' and like Lanson does not permit a purely psychological explanation, especially if this relates to the person's origins. In none of the artist portraits does Sartre draw conclusions about how the artist completed his works solely from his biography. On the whole Sartre uses biographical facts when trying to analyse, as in the Flaubert study, how the person in question overcame certain situations in life by means of his artistic activity. The biographical data is part of the construction that targets a particular result. The result is actually formulated before searching for the evidence. In the case of Flaubert, Sartre presumes that Flaubert's initially difficult relationship to words decided his future career.33 The temptation to use the "L'homme et l'ceuvre" method is there again and again, for every work poses questions about life. But Sartre corrects the meaning of this approach. As the 'objectivation' of a person - a process of making an object out of someone - a literary work is more complete and comprehensive than life itself. It is only by understanding this that one begins to expect a different answer to the question of whether a work can by explained by it's author's life. That the piece of literature has its roots in the author's life, and that it can also contribute to understanding the biography, Sartre does not deny, but it is only fully explained in and through itself.34 One outcome of this is the reader's independence, which Sartre wishes to prove by distinguishing between the real and virtual public. Through his own efforts the artist can enlarge the real circle of recipients, in order to reduce his dependence on the real readers. If 30

Cf. Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics, p. 132 f. 1 Cf. G. Lanson, La litterature et la science, in: ditto, Essais de methode de critique et d'histoire litteraire. Edited by H. Peyre. Paris: Hachette 1965, p. 97-125, esp. p. 121. 32 Cf. G. Lanson, La methode de Fhistoire litteraire, in: ditto, Essais de methode, p. 31-56, esp. p. 36. 33 Cf. Sartre, The Family Idiot. Gustave Flaubert 1821-1857. Translated by C. Cosman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981, vol. I, p. 3-4. 34 Ditto, The Problem of Method, p. 141 f. 3

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the work really does play this role, then the author's 'project' is an indication of the influence that he can consciously exert on a reader's understanding. His work, the result of his project, thus gains an importance that even surpasses the author's personal project. In his theory of literature, from the very start Sartre systematically argued for the 'upgrading' of the reader35 and thus contributed to founding a readerresponse criticism - and to a much greater extent than later representatives of reader response criticism wished to concede. He emphasises the reader's role again and again, and the special significance that is awarded to the work itself confirms his rejection of a method that constantly wishes to consult the author's life for a better understanding of a book. On Andre Gorz's "Le Traitre" he writes: it is a surprising work that one holds in one's hands, namely a work that is on the point of creating its author.36 He thus confirms the conclusion he arrived at in The Problem of Method that the work towers above its author and should be considered in this light. In Nausea, and more specifically, in the context of his theory of literature, Sartre had already summed up the particular significance due to the work. Before Roquentin turns his back on Bouville, after the failure of his book project, he is already thinking about the new book he wishes to write. It is not to be a book about history: he has had enough of Rollebon, the hero of his failed book. He is fascinated by his own plans for the future and realises that he has made definite progress despite the failure of his sojourn in Bouville. And Sartre lets Rollebon summarise his own theory of literature: "Another kind of book. I don't quite know which kind - but you would have to guess, behind the printed words, behind the pages, something which didn't exist, which was above existence. The sort of story, for example, which could never happen, an adventure. It would have to be beautiful and hard as steel and make people ashamed of their existence."37

These sentences from Nausea sum up all aspects of Sartre's theory of literature. The new story has to be as hard as steel, and it must make the readers blush with shame at the thought of their existence; he means all the missed and future opportunities that the readers can discover for themselves and others when reading literature. Even the act of reading itself amounts to transcending the work. The reader-response theory is also named here, and Sartre underlines it by letting the reader discover something that is hidden behind the words. The author loses his influence over the work. It is now up to the reader to make something of it. The autonomy that is conceded to the work here is also an autonomy of art. 35 36 37

Cf. Sartre, The Problem of Method, p. 141 f. Cf. ditto, in: ditto, Situations, p. 327-371, here p. 336. Ditto, Nausea, p. 252.

37 "A discovery as important as the steam engme suppresses the very conditions in which Marxism had a chance of being true." Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics*

3. The method of portraiture 3.1. Critique of Marxism In 1975 Sartre refused to be called an existentialist.2 Nevertheless, on being asked whether he preferred to be called an existentialist or a Marxist, he answered: an "existentialist". His support of left-wing groups was not always beneficial for the independence he himself always emphasized. But even if he did start to make approaches to the P.C.F. in the fifties, it is not clear whether he was thereby calling into question some of the principal statements of his works. It is remarkable that his fundamental critique of Marxism's ideological excesses still does not receive due attention. Even today, his ingratiating behaviour towards the Communist Party in the fifties is an opportunity for his critics to reproach him with indecisiveness, fickleness and opportunism. There is no doubt that he was not successful in a political sense, and his involvement alongside the P.C.F. failed. As early as 1946, Sartre considered the politics of Stalinist Communism to be irreconcilable with a writer's honesty.3 His criticism of the P.C.F. followed their reaction to his article Materialisme et revolution*, in which he refused to transfer dialectics to nature and criticised materialism, on the grounds that he considered materialism a doctrine that destroys thinking.5 Sartre continued to scrutinise his relations with Marxism after 1956, and he had not finished doing so on completing his Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960). Moreover, once one has examined both his philosophical and literary work, it proves even more untenable to label Sartre a Marxist. Sartre's open criticism of the P.C.F.'s ideology, where he draws on existentialism, makes the two theories appear antagonistic. The events in Hungary in 1956, following which Sartre demonstratively turned away from the P.C.F. and criticised the failure of Soviet writers, immediately preceded the drafting of The 1 Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics, p. 81. 2 Cf. ditto [conversation with Michel Contat], Self-Portrait at Seventy, in: ditto, Life/Situations. Essays, Written and Spoken. Translated by P. Auster and L. Davis. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977, p. 3-92. p. 60. 3 Cf. ditto, What is Literature!, p. 250. ^Cf. ditto, Materialisme et revolution, in: ditto, Situations, HI, Paris: Gallimard, 1949, p. 135-225, cf. for the following: p. 146 f., p. 135. 5 Op. cit, p. 172. Cf. on this: A. Cohen-Solal, Sartre, London: Random House, 1985, p. 287290.

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Problem of Method£ The text appeared in the Polish journal Tworczosc1 in April 1957, then in Les Temps modemes in October 1957. In 1960 Sartre extended it by adding his concluding remarks, in which he calls existentialism irreplaceable, and republishes it as the introduction to the first volume of Critique of Dialectical Reason* In this text, he examines firstly the relations between Marxism and existentialism, and there then follows a section on mediation and auxiliary sciences. The results of this led him to the progressive-regressive method, the practical application of which was later be shown in the Flaubert study. In the introduction to Critique of Dialectical Reason, which followed The Problem of Method, Sartre presents his plan for explaining dialectics. He names structural and historical anthropology as topics of Marxist philosophy and explains that as a philosophy Marxism cannot be surpassed - a view that his opponents like to quote. In the same paragraph, however, he asks about the supposed omnipotence of Marxism. He clings on tightly to the ideology of existence and calls it an 'understanding' method in Marxism.9 This is a contradiction in his line of reasoning; despite the evident differences he clearly cannot resolve to renounce Marxism altogether, although he is aware that it rejects existentialism, or the "ideology of existence", as Sartre calls it here. With his goal of winning back the human aspect within Marxism, Sartre wants to influence dialectic materialism, which he accuses of withering away to a skeleton, because it rejects certain western disciplines, though he does not name them more precisely.10 On the other hand, he considers Marxism the only possible anthropology that can be both historical and structural. He gives Marxism the credit for being the only ideology that takes account of the idea of totality. But this observation is followed up with a fundamental critique of this ideology: it should adjust to human beings and not vice versa. In this text he hints, 6 Cf. Sartre, "Apres Budapest, Sartre parle", quoted from: M. Contat, M. Rybalka, Les Ecrits de Sartre. Chronologie, Bibliographie commentee, Paris : Gallimard 1970, p. 305: "I utterly condemn without reserve the Soviet aggression. Without making the Russians bear the responsibility, I repeat that its present government has committed a crime and that a struggle between the factions among the ruling classes has given the power to a group ('hard* militaries, ancient Stalinists), who today take Stalinism even further, after having denounced it. [...] It is with regret, but with complete conviction, that I cut off my relations with my friends, those Soviet writers who do not denounce (or cannot denounce) the massacre in Hungary. One can no longer have any friendship with the ruling group of Soviet bureaucracy: it is horror that rules." (Translated by C. Atkinson) ' Tworczosc, no. 4, 1957. 8 Cf. M. Contat, M. Rybalka, p. 310-312. 9 Cf. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason. Theory of Practical Ensembles. New Edition. Translated by A. Sheridan-Smith. Foreword by F. Jameson. Edited by J. Ree. London, New York: Verso, 1990, vol. I, p. 822. 10 Cf. ditto, The Problem of Method, p. 83 f.

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in 1956, at his intention of wanting to contribute to the dissolution of existentialism, which appears to him to be feasible, once Marxist theory had accepted a human dimension as the foundation of anthropological knowledge. But this undertaking was doomed to fail from the start, because if Marxism were to change - which was theoretically possible - Sartre himself had already announced in The Problem of Method that existentialist positions would nonetheless be included in future concepts, albeit in a different context. Those searching for evidence of a certain attitude taken by Sartre happily overlook his unconditional and uncompromising adherence to existentialism. Even if Marxism were to overtake existentialism, the latter would form the basis of all future investigations.11 The obstinacy with which Sartre, despite criticism from all sides, strove to influence the P.C.F.'s dogmatism is evidence of the continuity in his works, even though it did not make him immune to ideological temptations. This lazy Marxism, as Sartre describes it, turned real people into symbols of its myths and the only philosophy capable of encompassing human complexity into a paranoid dream.12 This is a fundamental critique, aimed at the effects of Marxist ideology, and echoes attacks he made elsewhere on Marxist theory itself. Sartre found it inexcusable that Marxists let themselves be deceived by a mechanistic materialism. He was disappointed above all by the results of Marxist investigations. Among these he included the manner in which complex ideas were oversimplified or those of a book were reduced to its author's situation in bourgeois society at a certain point in time. The criticism that assailed him from among the ranks of Marxists shows that they were not prepared to adapt their positions in the manner Sartre hoped for.13 As long as integrating existentialism within Marxism remained a hopeless venture, both sides necessarily opposed each other irreconcilably. At no point in time did Sartre cast doubt on his own principles of freedom. Especially in the fifties, while writing his Critique of Dialectical Reason and later still during his talks with the Maoists in On a raison de se revolter, he carefully weighed up, more than almost any other thinker, the ideological constraints against independent commitment, both theoretically and practically, and in every case freedom - with all its consequences - prevailed over ideology. Freedom thus became the leitmotiv of his artist studies. In November 1972, Pierre Victor wished to hear from Sartre whether the P.C.F. had always respected his approaches. The answer shows that Sartre had been well aware of the implications of his relationship as "compagnon de 1

1 Cf. Sartre, The Problem ofMethod, p. 180 f. Cf. for the following: ditto, The Problem ofMethod, p. 51-53, p. 96 f. 13 Cf. J. Kanapa, L'existentialisme nest pas un humanisme, Paris 1947, p. 98, who remains irreconcilable: "Existentialist humanism is nothing more than a myth. But it is a dangerous myth: it is the reactionary ideological bromine." 12

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route"14. Apart from a certain amount of friction, they did respect his role, he replied. He also acknowledged that he was bound to fail, for they did not, as he himself declared, accept his critical companionship. The conclusions that in 1951 Albert Camus drew in The Rebel from his critique of Marxism led to the controversy that he conducted with Sartre publicly in 1952,15 and that was triggered by the irreconcilability of their ideological positions. The Rebel appeared at a point in time when Sartre was attempting to gauge his influence on the P.C.F. as the party's political 'fellow-traveller'. The dispute, conducted on the pages of Les Temps modernes and with which Camus and Sartre proved the incompatibility of their stances, disguises the links between their basic aesthetic and moral concepts. The rift in their friendship took place on an entirely political level, as the comparison of their positions in the last chapter of the present book will demonstrate. It is only when the theoretical and aesthetical foundations of the two men's works are known that it becomes possible to categorise their dispute and evaluate both its impact and its acrimony. In the third section of The Problem of Method Sartre characterises the theoretical approach of the Flaubert study as the 'progressive-regressive' method.16 At the beginning of the preface to The Family Idiot he explains that the Flaubert study is a continuation of The Problem of Method, and closely links the study with his critique of Marxism. Basically, the study is concerned with examining Flaubert's project, analysing his work and his epoch, and then returning to his biography in order to comprehend how he was able to put himself in the position of writing Madame Bovary. The progressive-regressive analysis, with which he investigates both Flaubert's work and life and his relations to the literature and history of his day, belongs to that part of Sartre's work in which he verifies and continues to develop his theoretical ideas on man's 'project'. His theory of the project, which he derives from his critique of psychoanalysis, will be explored in the following section. After this Sartre's explanation of dialectics will be examined, as far as is necessary in the context of the present work, together with the critique of structuralism hinted at here.

14

Cf. P. Gavi, Sartre, P. Victor, On a raison de se revolter, Discussions, Paris : Gallimard 1974, ch. 1.: Compagnon de route du Parti Communiste, p. 23-35, esp. p. 30, 31 f. - Cf. M Winock, Le siecle des intellectuels, Paris: Seuil, 1997, p. 491-500. !5 Cf. chapter 11 below: "Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre". 16 Cf. Sartre, The Problem of Method, p. 85-166.

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3.2. Reconstructing the projet The 'projet' or (life-)project - a further concept of Sartre's technique of portraiture - extrapolates a person's possibilities into the future and then, having assessed how far these had been realised, attempts to draw conclusions about that person's commitment or involvement. German philosophers and others authors are cited on a number of occasions as the sources and reference points of his work. It is necessary here to introduce several different examples. Sartre's collaboration in translating Karl Jaspers' Allgemeine Psychopathologie^ in 1928 was an opportunity for him to become acquainted with fundamental concepts and problems of psychology. Sartre's comment, made during his stay at the Institut Fran9ais in Berlin in 1933, that he had benefited from the works of Jaspers, Husserl, Scheler and Heidegger2 certainly poses a number of questions especially concerning the latter's political activity.3 Heidegger had lapsed in to activism, Sartre wrote4, a remark that clearly shows that Sartre can hardly have kept abreast of the discussion current at the time about the works of Husserl and Heidegger. The political indifference of the then 28-year-old Sartre has been judged as an omission and, mostly in hindsight, as quite neglectful. A certain sympathy with Heidegger's standpoints, beyond those of his philosophical work, cannot be deduced from this, although such a distinction is problematic, especially in Heidegger's case5, and is also not reconcilable with the definition 1 K. Jaspers, Psychopathologie generate, traduit d'apres la 3 e edition par A. Kastler et J. Mendousse, Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1928: cf. p. XI: "Nous remercions MM. Sartre et Nizan, eleves a FEcole normale superieure, d'avoir bien voulu mettre au point le manuscrit et participer a la correction des epreuves." - ditto, General Psychopathology. Vol. I. Translated by J. Hoenig, M. W. Hamilton. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, (1963) 1967. 2 Cf. Sartre, The Problem ofMethod, p. 38. 3 Cf. V. Farias, Heidegger et le nazisme. Translated by M. Benarroch, J.-B. Grasset. Lagrasse: Verdier, 1987; p. 95-101. Cf. R. Safranski, Ein Meister aas Deutschland. Heidegger und seine Zeit, Munich: Hanser, 1994: "Die Rektoratsrede and ihre Wirkungen", p. 291-308. 4 Sartre, ibid., cf. H. Ott, Martin Heidegger. Unterwegs zu seiner Biographie, Frankfurt/ New York: Campus, 1988, p. 142-166. 5 On Heidegger: cf. D. Hoeges, Kontroverse am Abgrund. Ernst Robert Curtius und Karl Mannheim. Intellektuelle und "freischwebende Intelligenz" in der Weimarer Republik, Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1994, p. 188: "His behaviour (i.e. that of Curtius, H.W.) confirms what is generally true of this epoch: politics was everyone's fate, inevitable and with that all-embracing quality characteristic of supremacy." In a footnote to this paragraph: "The question whether those concerned had been 'National Socialists' overshoots the mark and leaves those questioned an arsenal of easy ways of denying it; the person asking the question necessarily has to produce all kinds of evidence; it is more relevant to ask whether Heidegger, Schmitt, Benn supported National Socialism after the seizure of power in what they said and wrote; for an answer one does not have to question them; the findings themselves are clear enough." (ibid., p. 208; above text translated by C. Atkinson), and cf. ibid. p. 144 f.

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of an intellectual in Sartre's understanding of the term. It should rather be assumed that Sartre presumably knew Heidegger's ideas through the lectures of Georges Gurvitch - which had appeared as a book (Les tendances actuelles de la philosophie allemande) in 19306 - and that before 1933 he was little concerned with Heidegger's work and in the subsequent years only looked at them selectively. He will presumably have become acquainted with his works (What is Metaphysics?, On the Essence of Reason, and extracts from Being and Time) in Henry Corbin's (liberal) translations.7 Apart from an cursory look at Being and Time in Berlin, he probably did not read it properly before 1940, when Marius Perrin helped him to read it in the prisoner-of-war camp.8 His comments on the translation problems that arose from Heidegger's language show that he regarded them as stimuli rather than as philological problems in any strict sense ("I am against this literary positivism").9 There is a striking contrast between Sartre's later political involvement and his alleged disinterest during the occupation period in Paris - especially when we also recall that he passed over the National Socialists' atrocities in silence. This contrast is all the more apparent when we consider that Sartre succeeded in publishing Being and Nothingness in occupied Paris - a book that discusses man's freedom and his responsibility for that freedom. The accusations addressed to Sartre do at first sound grave/ He never wrote anything denouncing the persecution of the Jews in the underground newspapers of the Resistance. Similarly he accepted that The Flies and No Exit were played in theatres that denied access to Jews. Those making such reproaches lose their own moral authority, however, if at the same time they describe Being and Nothingness as a 'dark' and little read book that is difficult to understand, and whose title many at the time believed to mean 'L'homme devant la mort'10. - Cf. D. Hoeges, Die wahre Leidenschaft des 20. Jahrhunderts ist die Knechtschaft (Camus). Die Nationalintellektuellen contra Menschen- and Burgerrechte. Ernst Junger, Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, in: W. Bialas, G. I. Iggers (eds), Intellektuelle in der Weimarer Republik [Schriften zur politischen Kultur der Weimarer Republik, Band 1], Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 1996, p. 91-104. 6 On the reception of German philosophy in France around 1930: cf. T. Konig, Zur Neuubersetzung, in: Sartre, Das Sein unddas Nichts. Versuch einer phdnomenologischen Ontologie. Translated by T. Konig. Reinbek near Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1991, p. 1076. 1 On Corbin, cf. J. P. Faye, Heidegger and his French translators, in: Vermittler. H. Mann, Benjamin, Groethuysen, Kojeve, Szondi, Heidegger in Frankreich, Goldmann, Sieburg, (ed. J. SieB), Frankfurt/Main: Syndikat Autoren- und Verlagsgemeinschaft, 1981, p. 161-196, esp. p. 161 f. and p. 165. 8 Cf. T. Konig, Zur Neuiibersetzung, p. 1080, cf. p. 1080-1083. 9 Sartre, L'ecrivain et sa langue [conversation with P. Verstraeten], first in: Revue d'esthetique, July-December 1965, in: ditto, Situations, ZAT, p. 71 f. 10 Cf. G. Joseph, Une si douce occupation. Simone de Beauvoir et Jean-Paul Sartre, 19401944, Paris : Albin Michel, 1991, p. 373. Nor does Joseph mention Sartre's Reflexions sur la question juive, Paris: Gallimard, 1954, that appeared as early as 1946.

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As well as reading Husserl and Heidegger, Sartre's collaboration in translating Jaspers' Allgemeine Psychopathologie produces some remarkable parallels to his artist portraits. His reminder of the particular significance of portrait studies in his oeuvre - such as in his interview with Jacques Chancel, where he explains how he made the individuals in his studies more tangible* * - recalls the task set by Jaspers: "The biographer on the other hand is confronted with the unending task of comprehending a concrete personality ...".I 2 At the beginning of his account Jaspers states that in the psychiatric practice one always has to do "with individuals, with the human being as a whole"!3, and elsewhere he defines his intention more precisely. He is concerned with understanding connective relationships. All information flows into a synthesis that reconstructs an individual whole, which he calls the 'personality'.14 The phenomenological approach in Being and Nothingness is not fundamentally different from that upon which Jaspers bases his psychopathology. To be sure, the term 'phenomenology' is to be understood in Jaspers' case more in the sense of a description of symptoms that is as objective as possible, but the exacting task he formulates is similar to the basic ideas with which Sartre is supposed to have become acquainted in 1933 15 . Jaspers believes that phenomenology is only occupied with experiences that were really felt and not with any kinds of mechanisms outside consciousness. In his Psychopathologie he points out that his discipline lacked an objective theory, but that there was a series of basic concepts. He explains the gaps in theory with a lack of terminology. 16 The desideratum described by Jaspers has in fact been fulfilled by Sartre with the terms described by him in the context of his own theory and with his portraiture method. Sartre's concept of man as a 'universal singular' is related to the approach sketched out by Jaspers of recreating the connections between a person and his environment. Jaspers himself formulated this question more clearly by pointing in the direction of social relations. By way of example, he names neuroses that can arise from accidents, whereby specific circumstances, precisely described in social terms, might give rise to pathological phenomena.17 It is a fairly obvious step to see a possible connection between this concept and the neurosis that Sartre describes, or rather constructs, in The Family Idiot. He describes it there as a 1

1 Cf. J. Chancel, Radioscopie, Paris: Robert Laffont 1973, p. 182-215, here p. 196. K. Jaspers, General Psychopathology. Vol. I, p. 432. 13 Ibid., p. 1. 14 Ibid., p. 433. 1^ Cf. A. Cohen-Solal, Sartre, p. 91 : C.-S. names E. Levinas, Theorie de I'intuition dans la phenomenologie de Husserl, (Paris : Alcan 1930. Sartre is supposed to have read the book in about 1932.) 16 Cf. K. Jaspers, General Psychopathology. Vol. I, p. 19. 1 1 Cf. ditto, Psychopathologie generate, p. 572. 12

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lack of consensus, for example with one's own times, calling it an "objective neurosis". From his criticism of Freudian psychoanalysis Sartre developed his existential psychoanalysis.I8 He calls Freud's psychology an "empirical psychology": one that wishes to describe human reality by assuming that man defines himself through his desires. Sartre rejects the description of desires as the mere contents of consciousness. For him desire is actually part of consciousness, and consciousness itself is always consciousness of something.*9 Furthermore, he accuses empirical psychology of restricting its investigations to listing individual desires. Essentially he criticises psychoanalysis as being an incomplete theory, because it has no method of creating a synthesis of its observations. In contrast to this, Sartre wants to develop his own theory in such a way that it will be able to describe a person's fundamental 'project'20 and, by comparing the results of various studies, gain insight into human reality. It is only when it has been proved that the analysis is no longer reducible that a person's project is revealed. The relationship between an action and someone's project is determined by the need for continuous choice. The individual does not, however, have to be aware of this.21 Only if a particular individual's story is accessible can his project be ascertained, his choice be judged, and statements of a general nature be formulated.22 Sartre's entire oeuvre shows a structure that runs parallel to this approach. The artist portraits follow the main philosophical work on phenomenological ontology without leaving the plane of methodical reflection. In attempting to reconstruct an epoch in the third volume of The Family Idiot, the study contributes to assessing the artist's relationship to his own times and to his work, in order to ascertain how and to what degree of success the artist reacted to his epoch and his personal situation of his own accord. In one of the numerous methodological remarks that lend the Flaubert study its precise structure, Sartre applies the principle of the theory discussed here to the case of Flaubert to find out whether the latter's illness had provoked a mental weakness or whether it was a prerequisite for him for even being able to write his works.23 Methodological clues of this nature, in which Sartre announces that he is continuing to develop his investigations and claims that the outcome is still uncertain, lend these studies a dynamic character, which he aptly renders with the term "enquetes individuelles"24. With his opinion that transcendable Being and the project of Be18 Cf. for the following: Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 578-596, here p. 578. 19 Cf. Sartre, Une idee fondamentale de la phenomenologie de Husserl: L'intentionnalite, in: Critiques litteraires (Situations, I), p. 38-42, p. 40. 20 Cf. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 585. 2 1 Cf. op. cit., p. 483 f. 22 Cf. op. cit., p. 502. 23 Ditto, The Family Idiot, vol. V, p. 31 f. 24 Ditto, Being and Nothingness, p. 585.

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ing are indistinguishable, he is repeating the approach he had adopted from Heidegger25, extending and formulating it as the basis of the investigation at the beginning of Being and Nothingness: "[...] consciousness is a being such that in its being, its being is in question in so far as this being implies a being other than itself:"26 The project contains statements about an individual that give one some indication as to his future behaviour. When equating existence with choice and thus with an individual, it is not a question of how correct or true a project is; rather, it is a matter of the project's meaning in the sense of "the truth of freedom"27, which encompasses all an individual's possibilities. The aim of being objective that Sartre connects with his psychoanalysis justifies the later formulation of general principles that equates human reality with the choice of one's own goals. He does not wish to restrict existential psychoanalysis to dreams, neuroses and obsessions, it should also take account of plans, failures, successful actions and style. He announces his intention of conducting this analysis on the basis of two examples, Flaubert and Dostoyevsky. He would like to reveal the subjective choice by which an individual discloses what he or she can be. In his criticism of Freud's theories, Sartre is primarily objecting to the generalisation of individual observations, from which Freud attempts to deduce laws. This ties in with Jaspers' critique, who despite all his appreciation of Freud's work denies that it is possible to find a theoretical explanation. Jaspers' account of the Freudian term of the unconscious28 reveals detachedness and criticism, when he suggests that Freud replaced the connections that he was not able to explain with the notion of the unconscious.29 Thus there are clear parallels between his account and Sartre's critique of the concept of the unconscious. In Being and Nothingness Sartre refers to the unconscious in his chapter on bad faith30 as a concept of psychoanalysis with which an instance is created that could be made responsible for the effects of untruthfulness. The resultant division of the psyche ("the distinction between the 'id' and the 'ego'")31 permits one to suppose the existence of some kind of censure, the structure of which however corresponds exactly to the untruthfulness described by Sartre. The doubt surrounding the unconscious itself lets its effects appear equally questionable. Sartre assessed the possible symbolic content of 'instincts' or 25

Cf. M. Heidegger, Being and Time. A Translation of Sein und Zeit. Translated by J. Stambaugh. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996, p. 82 f. 2 6 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 18 (italics in original text). 27 Op. cit., p. 589. 28 K. Jaspers, General Psychopathology. Vol. II, Baltimore, London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997, p. 537 ff. 29 Cf. ditto, General Psychopathology. Vol. II, p. 537-546, esp. 539. 30 Cf. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 70-94. 31 Ibid.

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'drives' as just one further confirmation of the untruthfulness he is illustrating.32 With his representation of freedom, Sartre examines the meanings that are implied by an action and recalls Freud, who also observed that an action refers to deeper structures.33 Sartre does not wish to reject Freud completely; nonetheless their two concepts diverge on this point, because Freud, Sartre thinks, only paid attention to an individual's past and did not attach much importance to the future dimension.34 Like Jaspers35 he opposed the determination derived from Freudian psychoanalysis with which humans are confronted from without and which, in an interview, he later compares with Marxist theory36, thereupon calling them both theories of external conditioning. From his critique of Freud, Sartre gained a number of basic stimuli. The existential psychoanalysis, which he compares with those parts of Freudian theory familiar to him,37 relates as applied in the artist portraits more to a kind of humanism as a basic attitude than to any sort of pathology. Despite the differences, Sartre's attitude to Freud deserves our attention, since he conceived his own technique of portraiture in the course of his critical analysis of Freud's psychoanalysis. Sartre's general rejection of psychology is a reference to his own philosophy. He considers psychology to be one of the most abstract sciences, because it investigates the mechanisms of our passion, without wanting to understand them in their real human context. For him it is an individual's totality that matters first and foremost: he calls the individual an entire undertaking in itself, fuelled by passion.38

32

Cf. ditto, Being and Nothingness, p. 77 f. Op. cit., p. 455-503, esp. p. 479 f.., p. 480: "Freud, however, aims at constituting a vertical determinism. In addition because of this bias his conception necessarily is going to refer to the subject's past. ... Consequently the dimension of the future does not exist for the psychoanalysis." 3 ^ Op. cit., p. 480: "[...] the dimension of the future does not exist for psychoanalysis." 3 5 K. Jaspers, Allgemeine Psychopathologie fur Studierende, Arzte und Psychoiogen, 3rd enlarged and revised edition, Berlin: Springer, 1923, p. 331, ditto, General Psychopathology. Vol. II, p. 537-546, esp. p. 538. 3 *> Sartre par Sartre, in: Situations, IX, p. 103. 3 ? Cf. S. de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life. Translated by P. Green. London: Andre Deutsch and Weidenfeld and Nicolson Ltd., 1963, p. 23. She and Sartre knew Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Cf. S. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1997 and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Translated by A. Tyson. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975. 38 Sartre, Forgers of Myths, in: ditto, Sartre on Theatre. Documents assembled. Edited, introduced and annotated by M. Contat et M. Rybalka. Translated by F. Jellinek. New York: Pantheon Books, 1976, p. 33-43, p. 37. 33

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Jean-Baptiste Pontalis,39 a French psychoanalyst, believes that the screenplay for Scenario Freud, a piece of work that was commissioned by John Huston,40 opened up for Sartre the possibility of gaining a whole new image of Freud. But these insights did not alter his rejection of Freudian theories, as evidenced by the 1970 interview (Sartre par Sartre) quoted above and the theoretical approach in The Family Idiot. His critique of psychoanalysis, repeated in The Problem of Method in 1960, is also a refutation of Pontalis, who had pointed out Freud's influence on the Flaubert study.41 The particular significance of the neurosis42 in The Family Idiot does not in essence contain an approval of Freud: from his neurosis, Flaubert developed a strategy with which he succeeded in making an artist of himself. Despite Sartre's fundamental critique of psychoanalysis, it has played its part in his portrait studies. Psychoanalysis can, if applied within a dialectical totalisation, reveal objective structures and aspects of childhood that are not cancelled out by adulthood 4 3 Another discipline that is consulted for the portrait studies is sociology. With its "prospective attention"44 and by applying its heuristic method and empiricism, it can contribute to totalisation within dialectics. In Kardiner's works, Sartre found references to certain types of behaviour that point to an irreducible character, to the "vecu" ("the lived")45. By proving that it was capable of describing habits within groups as real relations between humans, sociology thus assisted in the artist studies. Within the disciplines named, existentialism is supposed to help to determine the point at which a person was accepted within his class as one of its own - which for Sartre means within his family.46 This is also a reminder of his critique of Marxism, which only concerns itself with adults and wants to skip nature for the sake of history. This might create an impression of arbitrariness and of a disorderly medley of different methods, if one regards the many approaches and extremely diverse disciplines that determine Sartre's approach in his artist studies. However, he did not intend an abrupt juxtaposition of different methods and disciplines; his aim, rather, was to promote an exchange of views and that the methods and dis39 Cf. J.-B. Pontalis, Scenario Freud, scenario Sartre, in: Sartre, The Freud Scenario. Edited by J.-B. Pontalis. Translated by Quintin Hoare. London: Verso, 1985, p. IX, X. 4 ^ Sartre, Le Scenario Freud: the present author's copy contains the 1959 version, extracts from the version that Sartre wrote in 1959/60 and a synopsis (1958). 4 1 J.-B. Pontalis, in: Sartre, The Freud Scenario, p. 15. Cf. the discussion on the publication of "Dialogue psychanalytique", in: Sartre, Situations, IX, p. 329-337. Reponse a Sartre par J.-B. Pontalis, p. 359 f.; Reponse a Sartre par B. Pingaud, p. 361-364. 42 Sartre, The Family Idiot. Vol. Ill, p. 355-644. 43 Cf. Sartre, The Problem of Method, p. 63 f. 44 Op cit., p. 74. 4 5 Ibid. 4 *> Op cit., p. 57: "The family in fact is constituted by and in the general movement of History

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ciplines mutually complemented each other. He put up with the drawbacks that accompanied the lack of specialisation in order to permit links between his works to figure clearly in the portrait studies. The variety of disciplines and their methods employed by Sartre constitute - together with the methodological remarks in the artist portraits used to test his theories' applicability - a theory of art, with which he analyses the impact of art and literature. A further topic of his theory of portraiture is that of dialectics, which for Sartre amounts to hermeneutics - as will be shown in the next section.

49 "The dialectic (whether Hegelian or Marxist) only considers part of humanity." Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics*

3.3. Dialectics and hermeneutics Sartre's criticism of dialectics2 addresses the manner in which it oversimplifies reality. According to the accusation voiced in the Notebooks for an Ethics, this is particularly the case when the antithesis in its negativity is no longer congruent with the thesis and so due to its ambivalence can no longer produce a synthesis. Besides, for Sartre there is infinitely more to history than just dialectics, which he regards as a kind of dialogue and therefore calls it into question on the grounds that it cannot be applied to many historical developments or events.3 Later he attempts to put forward his own explanation of dialectics in the Critique of Dialectical Reason. After 1960, however, he ceased working on dialectics, as the second volume, which has meanwhile appeared (1985) proves. But if one understands dialectics in the sense of hermeneutics - and it is hermeneutics that determines the theoretical structure of the Flaubert study - this reveals that Sartre never actually abandoned these theoretical labours. Sartre's artist studies, and in particular the methodological approaches he uses to examine the life and work of Gustave Flaubert in The Family Idiot, are witness to how he develops theses and antitheses, without logical syntheses necessarily always resulting from them. To be sure, the results of his analyses always appear as syntheses, but in reality they derive from his personal views or from decisions that he announces as the starting point for further investigation. Thus the study of Gustave Flaubert's youth between 1830 and 1850 suffices to show that his neurosis had been a kind of "operational imperative"4. At the end of the investigation 'neurosis-art' is presented as the most important insight. It is not an outcome that necessarily had to emerge from the investigation; it is part of the idea with which Sartre had begun the Flaubert study. He wished to interpret Flaubert's neurosis as the conscious choice of a 'neurosis-art' and then to transfer it to a whole generation of authors, thus viewing it as heralding some important developments of the Second French Empire. In Flaubert's case, it was a neurosis that ceased after he had found his way to art. Sartre's critique of dialectics also belongs to his concern with history in the artist portraits and in The Family Idiot in particular. In the Presentation des Temps Modernes (1945) he contrasted individuality with his existentialist approach and, as a consequence, also contrasted human freedom with rigorous 1 2 3 4

Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics, p. 60. Cf. on the following: op. cit., p. 54 f. Cf. op. cit., p. 55 f. Ditto, The Family Idiot. Vol. V, p. 56.

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dialectics: he rejects applying thesis and antithesis to a human being for man's freedom is irreducible.5 The "One" will never find its counterpart; instead it becomes the "Other", thus depriving synthesis of all meaning.6 In the Notebooks Sartre describes dialectics as wrong, especially in connection with history.7 He justifies this rejection by explaining that the whole, the universal, is always present in any one epoch, thereby making it clear that an epoch, while only comprising a universal moment in history, is infinitely complex, even if it reveals only a few conditions of human existence. In the preface to The Family Idiot, Sartre explains the same idea with the notion of the 'universal singular', ("universel singulier")8. But this universal single person is merely an individual. A human being is completely determined by the circumstances he is part of and by his epoch, reproducing these as something unique. This means that every prediction becomes shaky. In the introduction to the chapter of The Family Idiot entitled "Personalization", Sartre refutes the idea that humans are predetermined on the grounds that they always transcend any kind of predetermination.9 His concept of the universal singular is based on a dialectical approach. But he does not accept dialectics unconditionally. The artist portraits are for Sartre a further opportunity to test dialectics' applicability in practice. Dialectics offers him a framework of ideas, though without becoming one of the main methodological components in the artist portraits. In Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason, history is made to play a prominent role. Without totality, as Sartre calls the overall account or description, there can be no understanding. But missing information can hinder 'totalisation' and thus make understanding difficult. Sartre skirts round this problem and appeals to experience, for this at least is supposed to ensure "intelligibility in principle "1°. He introduces a "secondary intelligibility", as he calls it, which embraces the principles of the first intelligibility, but which is intended to surpass it by extending its scope. The human being as an individual and as an entity that embraces the whole of mankind's history ( "tout de l'histoire humaine")H, is largely comprehended as a totality; nonetheless this concept has to be enlarged to include an understanding of his individual factors. Using the whole as a departure point, dialectics is supposed to facilitate understanding smaller entities. In The Family Idiot Sartre applied the relationship between the general and the individual as a methodological principle of investigation, which is to say, as 5

Cf. Sartre, Presentation des Temps modernes, in: ditto, Situations, II. Paris: Gallimard, 1949, p. 7-30, here: p. 26. 6 Cf. ditto, Notebooks for an Ethics, p. 47 f. 1 Cf. for the following: op. cit., p. 91. 8 Ditto, The Family Idiot Vol. I, p. IX. 9 Ibid. 10 Cf. on the following: ditto, Critique of Dialectical Reason, p. 57 11 Ibid.

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the study's "basic hermeneutic idea"12. The structure of the Flaubert study's short and precise preface reveals a plan that has only little in common with a description of Flaubert's life. The reason for this discrepancy is that the reflections in the preface are valid for all authors alike, at the same time summarising the artist portraits' methodological approach. At the centre of the preface one finds the discussion of the question: what can we know today about a person?13 Sartre explains that one can only answer such a question by investigating a concrete case, and thus proposes that of Gustave Flaubert. Even if one did collect all available information about him, it is by no means certain that this would ensure a 'totalisation'. One meets with difficulties as soon as the information is of a diverse nature - we find here the same reasoning that Sartre used to counter dialectics - and cannot be made to complement existing information. Sartre tries to get round this problem with the prerequisite that every piece of information, once it has been put in the appropriate place, will reveal how it harmonises with all the others. It follows that the irreducibility of information only appears to be a problem, and Sartre remains convinced that the overall picture will become evident. The criterion as to whether a piece of information has been placed in the right or wrong place is not a question of inevitability; it should rather be decided on the basis of the 'progressive-regressive' method he had discussed in The Problem of Method. By announcing in the first sentence of the Flaubert study's preface that it was a continuation of The Problem of Method, Sartre creates a link with the intention expressed there of wishing to understand human beings better. This methodological approach is often overlooked when regarding the study as a Flaubert biography. When we consider how much space Sartre dedicates to a discussion of methodology this is clearly a mistake. The Flaubert study is intended to produce the proof that there is no information that cannot be apportioned to some particular context, or, expressed somewhat differently, it is concerned with investigating the validity of dialectics' heuristic principle in the context of an artist's portrait. This approach is explained in the following manner: "For a man is never an individual; it would be more fitting to call him a universal singular. Summed up and for this reason universalized by his epoch, he in turn resumes it by reproducing himself in it as singularity. Universal by the universal singular of human history, singular by the universalizing singularity of his projects he requires simultaneous examination from both ends." 14

The first part of this definition contains the observation that man will never only be an individual. On the contrary, as a singular or unique being, he makes !2 The term derives from M. Frank, Das Individuum in der Rolle des Idioten. Die hermeneutische Konzeption des Flaubert, in: T. Konig (ed.), Sartres Flaubert lesen, p. 92. 13 Sartre, The Family Idiot Vol. I, p. IX, also for the following. 14 Cf. ditto, The Family Idiot Vol. I, p. IX. 51

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the mutual relationship between himself and his own times into his project. In the second part, Sartre argues the need to begin the investigation in both areas, since the individual's intentions, striving towards generality as he is, relate to the universal meaning of history. The preface to the Flaubert study is proof of Sartre's intention to complete a theory by showing how to apply it in his examination of Flaubert. With the help of this approach he succeeds later in the course of his study in linking the Second Empire to Flaubert's neurosis in the sense that the latter foreshadowed the historical developments in France in the third quarter of the 19th century. In both parts of this study, with their continual cross-references, he is able to trace Flaubert's project and check its outcome on the basis of his pronouncements about how the author and his work developed. The confirmation of a person's standing is a constitutive principle of the artist portraits and their method of procedure. The last sentence of the Baudelaire study clearly creates a link with one of Sartre's basic philosophical tenets, for a man's free choice is absolutely identical with what is called his 'fate'.*5 Sartre's own critical view of the Baudelaire study relates first and foremost to its method, the drawbacks of which he himself was already pointing out in the study;!6 instead of an overall view, he had only succeeded in presenting a succession of observations. I 7 For Sartre, "the knowledge of man must be a totality"!8, a s n e attempts to demonstrate by emphasizing the inner context and the way in which all factors mentioned in the study mutually affected each other. From this totalisation he gained the insight that Baudelaire himself chose the life he lived. This proof is in effect little more than a repetition of the study's methodological approach, which had produced the desired result. The relationship between one's choice and one's life has to be found in a different manner. The methodological allusion to the portrait of William II in the War diaries suggests an intention comparable with the above definition of the 'universal singular'. It also demonstrates the remarkable continuity in Sartre's work, which is attained by continuing to work on the theoretical foundations of the portrait studies. With William IPs portrait he wanted to prove that a historical approach and psychological prejudices tempt one into a great variety of parallel interpretations that can only be brought into a meaningful relationship if the person is regarded with respect to their "historicisation", their being embedded in the history of their times. This approach is maintained without substantial changes up until The Family Idiot ^ 15 Sartre, Baudelaire, p. 193. Cf. Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism, p. 21 f.: "[...] existence precedes essence [...] man is nothing other than he makes of himself." 16 Cf. ditto, L'anthropologie, p. 113. 17 Ditto, Baudelaire, p. 184 f. 1 8 Cf. ditto, Being and Nothingness, p. 596. 19 Ditto, The War Diaries, p. 318 f.

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With his artist portraits Sartre conducted an in-depth investigation into the possibilities people have of influencing things and thus changing their situations, and delivered the appropriate proof. Since life always moves in spirals,20 this makes it possible to test certain insights by looking at the later periods of someone's life. Sartre calls the Marxist method progressive, because it determines at the outset what is real and because Marxists know from the start what they have to find.2! He calls his own method heuristic, because it enables new insights on the grounds of its progressive and regressive aspects. There will therefore be periods in which the object only becomes recognisable through 'divination'22. Rather than there being a possible synthesis that took place of its own accord and that would be suitable for revealing the truth, the author has to take a conscious decision to give the analysis renewed impetus. To the chain of arguments he adds an assumption of a somewhat less dialectic nature: an idea of his own, divination. Sartre relates the project of writing a study on Flaubert to the following principle: "There is a hiatus between work and life."23 From the work one can recognise certain traits of character. The social relations and unique drama of the person's childhood would, however, have to be reconstructed through divination. Regressive questioning, leading from the work to the person's social relations, enable insights into his family, his friends and the other authors. Reverting to the progressive part of the analysis entails returning to the oeuvre itself to gain further biographical knowledge. But this does not increase appreciably; at the most the work offers a number of hints. In Sartre's theory of portraiture the biography and the works remain separate, for the works never reveal a biography's secrets. Biographical details are sooner a provisional attempt at understanding a work, not its sole explanation. Divination has the function of justifying the interweaving of individual factors. One aspect of divination is the 'empathy', mentioned in the preface, with which Sartre might have become acquainted through the works of Husserl or Heidegger.24 Although Sartre wanted 20

See also: Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol.11 (Unfinished). Translation by Q. Hoare, London, New York: Verso, 2006: "The Spiral: Circularity and Alteration", p. 235245. 2i Cf. Sartre, The Problem of Method, p. 133 f. 22 Cf. M. Frank, Das Individuum in der Rolle des Idioten, loc. cit., p. 94 f.: "It (i.e. the progressive-regressive method, H.W.) corresponds exactly with Schleiermacher's 'positive phrase' of hermeneutics as a 'historical and divining, objective and subjective reconstruction of the given speech'" Frank refers to the edition he himself had edited: F. D. E. Schleiermacher, Hermeneutik und Kritik, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1977, p. 93. (Translated by C. Atkinson) 23 Sartre, The Problem of Method, p. 143. Cf. for the following: ibid. 2 4 Cf. ditto, Conscience de soi et connaissance de soi, in: Bulletin de la Societe Francaise de Philosophic XL1I, Paris 1948 p. 49-91, p. 54. Cf. J. D. Fell, Heidegger and Sartre. An Essay on Being and Place, New York: Columbia University Press, 1979, p. 351 f.; cf. 53

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to begin the portrait with empathy, his judgement had already been made before the analysis'?* the difficult relationship that the young Flaubert had with words was supposed to have dictated his career. The biographical information is part of the construction with which to achieve a certain result. The result is formulated before the search for evidence. And Sartre maintains that he only realised later that Flaubert, right to the end of his life, saw written language as an insignificant way of employing words - words being only meant for spoken language. For Flaubert, writing never enjoyed any kind of autonomy.26 The essence of Sartre's supposition had a particular function for his novel about Flaubert. Only by this means was it possible to emphasize Flaubert's imagination so strongly: as the realisation of his project. The concept of the project, the critique of Marxism and dialectics - all determine Sartre's method of portraiture, the practical application of which is presented in the next two chapters.

25 26

M. Frank, Structure de Targumentation de la conference de Jean-Paul Sartre "Conscience de soi et connaissance de soi", in: Le portique. Sartre. Conscience et liberte, no. 16, 2nd semester 2005, p. 10-32. Cf. in the following, Sartre, The Problem of Method, p. 143. Cf. ditto, The Family Idiot, vol. I, p. 350 f.

55 "The art of Giacometti seems to me to want to discover this secret wound of all beings and even of all things, until it illuminates them." J. Genet, L 'atelier de Giacomettr

4. Sculptures and mobiles From Giacometti to Calder Sartre begins the portrait study of Giacometti2 by examining his sculptures, and then merges this analysis with that of his paintings. The two sections are linked by Sartre's interpretation of nothingness and emptiness. In Giacometti's studio Sartre looks at the sculpture of the four adjacent standing figures ("Quatre Figurines sur Socle [Sphinx]")3 and quotes Giacometti's own comments in a letter to Matisse,4 where Giacometti mentions the detachedness that separated him as the artist or viewer from the figures. Sartre judges this detachedness to be the result of a conscious intention on the part of the artist. "He painted them (i.e. the figurines, H.W.) as he saw them - distant"^ However, this distance is only suggested by the way the figurines are arranged; in this sense it is a constituent part that belongs indissolubly to the figurines themselves and only enables the observer to understand the group when looking at it more closely. It is only the attempt to overcome the detachedness that reveals the distance to be a negation; the negation does not claim to be insurmountable, but points to detachedness as its raison d'etre. 6 The other sculptures in the studio are of a similar kind: "His studio is an archipelago, a disorder of diverse distances."7 Sartre thus names the topic of this study. He is concerned here with the distances and sizes with which the artist lends his works meaning. The passing remark that the small sculptures repel the visitor with their loneliness is a further hint at the intentions or feelings he as1 J. Genet, L 'atelier de Giacometti, [with 33 Photos by E. Scheidegger], no place, 1995, no page no. 2 Sartre, The Paintings of Giacometti, in: Sartre, Situations. Translated by B. Eisler. New York: George Braziller, 1965, p. 175-92. Ditto, A la recherche de l'absolu, in: ditto, Situations, III, p. 289-305. 3 Cf. the illustration: Quatre Figurines sur Socle (Sphinx) (four figurines on pedestals, 1950). Bronze, partially painted, height 76 cm. Kunstmuseum Basel, Alberto-Giacometti-Stiftung, in: C. Huber, Alberto Giacometti, Paris and Geneva, 1970, p. 78. 4 Cf. A. Giacometti [exhibition, 16 May - 2 November 1986], catalogue, A. Kuenzi, Fondation Pierre Gianadda, Martigny, p. 67-74. 5 Sartre, The Paintings of Giacometti, p. 177. Cf. E.-G. Guse, Giacomettis Auseinandersetzung mit der Wirklichkeit, in: A. Giacometti, Plastiken - Gemalde - Zeichnungen, catalogue and exhibition. Edited by S. Salzmann. Duisburg, 1977, p. 30-35, esp. p. 33 f. 6 For "raison d'etre" cf. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 45. ? Ditto, The Paintings of Giacometti, p. 177. Cf. in following, p. 177 f.

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cribes to the artist. Sartre does not interpret them as misanthropy; he sees the detachedness in connection with a certain loneliness that the artist possibly wished to express here.8 This first part of the study ends with one of the conditions to which Being and Nothingness refers: determining a place or location has a negative moment: two points are separate from one another if there is a distance between them.9 Detachedness and negation also influence Sartre's method in The Family Idiot, where Sartre attempts to reveal the beginning of Flaubert's career as an author by making use of his correspondence and with the help of the "degree of presence to the world". 1° This expression helps Sartre to ascertain how Flaubert determined his relation to reality and, more exactly, when he was in the position to decide to become a writer. In his Giacometti study, Sartre adds to his phenomenological explanation of the negation and its interpretation by reference to his own experience. By remembering the cramped conditions of the prisoner-of-war camp and then remarking on the respectful restraint in bourgeois society 11 that he later rediscovered in cafes, Sartre explains the impression of detachedness. Giacometti's groups of figures show detachment as "a product of attracting and repelling forces". This interpretation reveals its unity and at the same time the dialectic relationship between someone's loneliness and the sense of belonging. Right down to the Flaubert study, this vision of a human who cannot break free from totality and therefore has to accept it as the guiding principle of his actions determines Sartre's oeuvre: "Une exposition de Giacometti, c'est un peuple." "The wood"I2 (La Foret, 1951) shows the contrast between rest and motion. Sartre understands the spatial distance between the thin and tall figures of this sculpture as symbolising emptiness. The group's figures are standing close together, but they evidently take no notice of one another. Sartre calls their mutual, non-existent relations a "distance circulaire", that can only be broken by a word or by the emptiness. This emptiness is given an importance here that correlates with that of the "neant" in Sartre's main philosophical work, for there are no bridges between things and people; emptiness appears to be everywhere, and every creature creates its own emptiness. In the chapter "Conduct in the Face of the Irreal" in The Imaginary (1940) Sartre had already pointed to the connection between emptiness and the irreal as the simple reflex of a feeling. *3 Giacometti's sculptures also show a development: "La sculpture cree le vide apartir du plein [...]."14 Is this process reversible? "The cage"!5 (1950) perhaps answers 8 Sartre, The Paintings of Giacometti, p. 177 f. Cf. Sartre, A la recherche de Tabsolu, in: ditto, Situations, III, p. 298 ff. 9 Cf. for the following ditto, Being and Nothingness, p. 43-54. 10 Ditto, The Family Idiot, vol. I, p. 292, cf. p. 292 f. 11 Cf. for the following: ditto, The Paintings of Giacometti, p. 178 f. 12 Cf. Huber, Giacometti, p. 74. 13 Cf. Sartre, The Imaginary, p. 140. 14 Sartre, The Paintings of Giacometti, p. 181.

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this question. The bust and the figure standing infrontof it are locked in a cage, the pedestal of which is supported by four legs. They maintain an imaginary distance that they cannot remove.*6 Sartre attempts to make the irreal correlate with emptiness, thus pointing to the contribution the viewer is expected to make. With the question about emptiness he turns to analyse Giacometti's paintings. In doing so he assumes that the artist is clearly pursuing a particular purpose: he wants to place people and things back in the world, "the great universal Void". The second question - how can a painter succeed in capturing a person on canvas or outlining him with the stroke of a brush? - also contains an attempt to answer it. The brush stroke lends the person a stability that allows one to interpret the inside and outside as an equilibrium. At this point Sartre introduces the term of 'passiveness'. In the Flaubert study, the term is used to interpret the author's youth.I7 By carefully observing the composition of Giacometti's paintings, one gains hints as to how to understand them. The centripetal force of the lines that give the pictures a focal centre guides the eye, and the viewer himself will insert the missing, but necessary details in the pictures. This is precisely what was suggested in the comments from The Imaginary quoted above, namely, that the viewer has to use his experience to reconstruct the continuity.!8 It is only by sharing the sphere of the imaginary with the artist that the viewer conveys meaning to the paintings. The result of the portrait study actually resembles closely, and summarises, the final remark in The Imaginary^: a work of art is something irreal. Sartre thereby makes clear the point of departure from which his reasoning can be followed right down to The Family Idiot. The artist portraits develop further topics in Sartre's oeuvre. Six years after writing the Giacometti text he completed a study of Andre Masson; Sartre describes Masson's artistic activities with the help of a series of drawings that Masson completed in 1947, and in doing so examines the link between myths and art.20 Sartre believes that he can recognise Masson's dependence on myths in his pictures. Mythologies became the key to Masson's attempt at solving the problem of how to represent time and motion in a picture. The mythologies that Sartre presents in this portrait sketch are not limited to illustrating man's singular position. It is from seeing the drawing that Masson produced in 1947, "Hommes ailes pris dans des rocs de glace et ne se degag15 A. Giacometti, La Cage (1950), bronze, painted, height 170 cm. Kunsthaus Zurich, Alberto Giacometti Foundation, in: Huber, Giacometti, p. 80 f. 16 Cf. Sartre, The Paintings of Giacometti, p. 181-184. 17 Ditto, The Family Idiot, vol. I, p. 192. 18 Cf. for the following: ditto, The Paintings of Giacometti, p. 185 f, 191 f. 19 Cf. ditto, The Imaginary, p. 189. 20 For the following: ditto, Masson, in: ditto, Situations, IV, p. 387^07, p. 389. Cf. A. Masson's own remarks in the talk with Clebert in: J.-P. Clebert (ed.), Mythologie d'Andre Masson, Geneva: Pierre Cailler, 1971, pp. 59, 77.

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eant de cet Himalaya de polyedres qu'au prix de I'abandon de leur peau"2l, that Sartre deduced how Masson used mythology. Masson was incapable of breaking away from the "Dionysiacal myth". Sartre sticks to his interpretation of the lines that create the figures in Masson's drawings, seeing them as "signposts" for the human eye. This poses the question: is it unnecessary to search for an interpretation that transcends the picture? It can safely be said that this is not the case, not least because of the variety of approaches that Sartre connects with this picture. The development of Masson's aesthetics matches the dynamics that the viewer discovers in his pictures. The portrait studies convey this dynamic moment by referring to terms in Sartre's philosophy. The opportunity to confirm his own concepts is what determines Sartre's analysis of the works of art in question, possibly causing him to pass over those other aspects of the works that one would expect to be brought up if Sartre were categorising the artist in terms of traditional art history. The interpretation of Masson's mythology is a result of Sartre's own reflections; in Existentialism is a Humanism he gave transcendence a particular meaning: "... it is in pursuing transcendent goals that he [i.e. man, HW.] is able to exist."22 This claim recalls Sartre's theory of theatre, which arose on the basis of the same ideas. On stage, the relationship between somebody's own decision regarding a certain project or choice and the determination that arises from this decision becomes, in the guise of a myth, the play's main message23. The myth only gains meaning when members of the public participate - by comparing their own experiences with the conflicts portrayed on the stage. Reverting to myths hints at the wealth of experience upon which one can fall back in extreme situations to influence the decisions of individuals. In the Notebooks for an Ethics the myth is equated with various conditions of social existence that can be overcome.24 The myth is drawn upon by Sartre not to transfigure, but to explain and characterise processes that are comparable, and that can thus be transferred to others. The claim to truth inherent in myths needs to be questioned. Myths that an author is supposed to destroy disguise rather than explain a given situation; the public has to adjust its own understanding of certain conditions or circumstances: "The real work of the committed writer is, as I said before, to reveal, demonstrate, demystify, and dissolve myths and fetishes in a critical acid bath."25 2

1 Sartre, Masson p. 401 f. and p. 391. Approximate translation: "Winged men held in rocks of ice, who cannot liberate themselvesfromthis polyhedral Himalaya except at the price of leaving behind their own skins." 22 Ditto, Existentialism is a Humanism, p. 52. 23 Cf. ditto, Forgers of the Myth, p. 40-41, 42-43. 2 ^ Cf. ditto, Notebooks for an Ethics, p. 61 f. 25 Ditto, The Purposes of writing [an interview given by Sartre to M. Chapsal in 1959], in: Sartre, Between Existentialism and Marxism, p. 7-32, p. 29.

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The author can only fulfil this task if he succeeds in gaining access to as large a circle of readers as possible. The myths he uses in doing so are not supposed to announce truths that he has laid down; they are intended to gradually enlarge the scope of generally recognised values. On his own the author can achieve nothing with these myths. Like the artist, the author is dependent on the recipients' collaboration. This is true also of the works of Alexander Calder. These range in variety from the small sketches26 to the bulky stabiles in La Defense27, which at the time looked at first glance as if they were part of the building site. Later, after the building work was finished, the curved, red steel surfaces that were welded together remained there and are now impressive eye-catchers. So, too, are the large mobiles that mostly stand in highly public places, as in the Stuttgart pedestrian zone. Here, a long pole is attached to a large, brightly coloured steel platform. At both ends there are coloured discs, which help the wind to set the mobile in motion. This movement itself then becomes part of the work of art. With animals, figures and objects formed from wire, Calder built his small automatic circus.28 The massive stabiles also betray his humour: a cow, four metres in length and created from steel plates, leans forward slightly.29 In the foreword to his exhibition catalogue Les mobiles de Calder^, Sartre addresses the recognisable peculiarities of these works of art and shows again that it suffices at first to convey his own observations: a mobile, "a small local fete", is defined solely by its movements; it cannot exist without them and ceases to exist the moment it stops. The attempt31 to understand the movements and to gain insight into the meaning of these works of art by observing them shows again how Sartre is guided by his philosophy: because the mobiles do not mean anything they are self-referential and absolute in themselves. Sartre's next attempt to produce an explanation is in contradiction to what has just been said, since he certainly does attribute a meaning to the moving metal pieces - one that is conceded to them on the grounds that they originated as products of human activity. To be sure, Calder's mobiles do not have the 26 27

28

29

30 31

Cf. A. Calder, Animal Sketching, London: Brigman, 1926, 3rd edition, no year. Calder's stabile "La Defense" (1975) on the Rond-Point de La Defense in Paris is named here by way of example, in: J. Lipman, Calder's Universe, London: Thames and Hudson, 1977, p. 326. Cf. J. Lipman, N. Foote (eds), Calder's Circus, New York: Dutton, 1972. Cf. Calder, Le Cirque, in: ibid., [exhibition catalogue:] Musee d'Art Moderne, Paris. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, July-October 1965, Paris 1965, p. 8. Cf. G. Carandente (ed.), Calder, Milan: Electa, 1983, p. 54-65, cf. Calder: Mobiles et Stabiles (with 24 diapositives), Lausanne: Editions Rencontre, 1970. A. Calder, The Cow, painted sheet-metal, 158" long, 1970, Collection of Mr. and Mrs B. Schulhof, Great Neck N.Y., in: Lipman, Foote, Calder s Circus, p. 149. For the following: Sartre, Les mobiles de Calder, in: Situations, 111, p. 307-311. Cf. for the following: op. cit., p. 308 f.

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same degree of precision as Vaucanson's automata,32 whose mechanical ducks imitate the vital functions of their natural models, but their hesitating and cautious movements still bestow on them a kind of Being somewhere between matter and life33. These movements are intended to create an aesthetic effect, and they posses an almost metaphysical meaning. This meaning is bestowed on them by human beings, by the viewer, who, rather than providing the work with an interpretation or explanation as to why it was created, makes something of it in the future. The question is: what does the recipient make of the work of art, or, in the case of Calder's mobiles, in what manner will the work of art arouse the viewer's imagination? The mobiles' material construction and the movement they are given externally form a unity comparable with the all-embracing concept of a work described by Sartre in The Family Idiot. The meaning and purpose of a work of art can never be provided solely by the author, for observing a work of art is itself subject to a dynamic process, as Sartre shows in his foreword to L 'artiste et sa conscience by the composer Rene Leibowitz; here, Sartre transfers his theories to music. This confirmation of the universal applicability of his approach is not aimed at the interpretation of particular works, since the latter always represent for Sartre an occasion to investigate just how far art can be understood at all. For Leibowitz, the work of art was valuable above all because of its positive contents: "[...] it is a block of the future fallen into the present [...]" 34 . An existing work will only be judged after it has been completed, and for this reason judgement will naturally say more about us and about our future possibilities than about the work itself. The work of art's interpretation will always remain something incomprehensible or at least something that cannot be defined unambiguously. Instead of being the bearer of a single message, the work presents the viewer with tasks that cannot necessarily only be formulated by the artist himself. Every viewer solves the task in a different way, in accordance with his own experiences and personal expectations. What is certain is that the work of art opens up new perspectives to the viewer, provided he is prepared to recognise them and does not allow his view to be blocked by the artist's biography. There can also be little doubt that the artist can employ various methods to influence how the viewer understands and feels. The results of these methods differ in a number of ways, including whether or not the artist manages to convey normative and moral ideas.

32

33 34

Cf. D. Hoeges, Julien Offray de Lamettrie and die Grundlagen des franzosischen Materialismus im 18. Jahrhundert, in: Neues Handbuch der franzosischen Literatunvissenschaft. Edited by K. von See. Vol. XII: Europaische Aufklarung III. Edited by J. v. Stackelberg. Wiesbaden: Akademie Verlagsgesellschaft Athenaion, 1980, p. 249-268, p. 261. Cf. for the following: Sartre, Les Mobiles de Calder, p. 309 ff. Ditto, The Artist and his Conscience, in: ditto, Situations, p. 219.

61 "Perverse Venetians! Fickle bourgeois! Tintoretto was their painter. He portrayed what they saw, what they felt, but they couldn't bear him." Sartre, The Prisoner of Venice 1

5. Tintoretto and the "school of vision" Venice has its very own character, one that in turn shapes the special relationship of the Serenissima with its inhabitants. "Venice seen from my window" is an impressive portrait of the city on the lagoon that appeared in the magazine Verve in 1953. Using detailed observations, Sartre creates an image of the city with its canals, squares and inhabitants like a mosaic in the reader's mind. This is the scenery that Tintoretto once experienced in almost the same manner. Venice's highly individual features do not permit the city to be compared with others. Its position on the lagoon has enabled it to develop in a unique way, that reappears in many facets in all the works of art found in its churches and museums. The many squares of diverse shapes open out before the people strolling across them, sometimes as rectangles or square-shaped, or maybe as a patchwork of several squares. Every district of the city has its own type of squares, perhaps providing space for a monument or simply as the junction of several calli. Despite the few bridges, the canal has never really split the city into distinct regions. On the contrary, it is its main thoroughfare: "But this canal aims to unite; it aspires to be a waterway, expressly made for walking."2 The pedestrians in haste halt briefly at the water's edge, then climb into a gondola, using it like a zebra crossing, remain standing with 15 or 20 other passengers for a short while, often even immersed in reading a newspaper, until they are deposited safely on the other bank. They do not deign to look at the vaporetto that is steering directly towards them; it will skirt round them as always. They are familiar with the rocking motion of their small gondola. Once on the far bank, they just continue without glancing round. The steps of the palazzi run right down to the water and remind one of better days when no-one dreamt that Venice might some day start to sink further and further. From one's window one looks out onto the opposite bank with its houses. The view shows the whole city, just as one detail on a photo of Venice represents the whole city. For when one stands at the window the city's canals make the opposite bank appear beyond one's reach, and yet at the same time give the city its unique structure. 1 2

Ditto, The Prisoner of Venice, in: Sartre, Situations, p. 52. Sartre, La reine Albemarle ou le dernier touriste. Fragments. Edited by A. Elkaim-Sartre. Paris: Gallimard, 1991, p. 193. (Translated by C. Atkinson)

62 After finishing Saint Genet Actor and Martyr in 1951, Sartre travelled to Italy. He had planned to write a volume of travel accounts on Italy: La reine Albemarle ou le dernier tour is te. The slim volume that was printed from his literary estate in 1991 probably gives only a small insight into the large number of notes that Sartre made at the time, before writing Les communistes et la paix^ the year after (1952) and putting his Italy project to one side.4 This manner of observing a town and its inhabitants as a tourist in order to fathom its secrets also moulds Sartre's account of his travels. uNo-one is really a tourist if he is not respectful"5, one reads in the chapter about Capri. With the help of just a few comments a portrait emerges of the tourist with his tasks and duties, but also of the chances that one should seize when they present themselves. A journey offers one the opportunity to become acquainted with many new things, and it is also an occasion for assembling and enriching one's own thoughts and associations: "This is the only way to take possession of a town a little: by dragging around one's own personal cares."6 The tourist who ventures to accept its inhabitants' customs does not feel like a stranger in this town. On the contrary, despite the city's reserve, if the tourist develops a taste for its finer points he can understand it and its uniqueness. In the city the tourist should behave with respect and discover it as a kind of total work of art: "After hisfirstVenetian night, the tourist-animal wakes up as an amphibian; it perceives at once that it has grownfinsand recovered the use of its feet. Here one's gait regains its original nobility, here walking is sanctified."7 Venice is a museum - and exhibits the Serenissima's history. The city's aristocratic constitution punishes every deviation from the norm. The doge Marino Faliero had attempted just such a deviation in 1355 and was punished for doing so by being executed and having his portrait hung with a piece of black cloth - even though the city had promised to give him his due if he admitted his guilt. In Sartre's artist portraits there is something important that has hitherto been largely overlooked. With his analyses of the work and life of Jacopo Robusti, better known as Tintoretto,8 Sartre planned a largish piece of work about the Venetian painter. Here he wanted to demonstrate how despite criticism from all quarters the individual can assert himself and create works that are new for his own age. The idea of writing a book about both Italy and Tintoretto had perhaps already occurred to him during his first visit to Venice in 1933. Many fragments

3 Sartre, Les communistes et la paix, in: ditto, Situations, VI, Problemes du marxismes I, Pa ris: Gallimard, 1964, p. 80-384. 4 Cf. ditto, Venise, in: ditto, La reine Albemarle ou le dernier touriste, p. 87. 5 Ditto, Capri, in: ditto, p. 23. 6 Cf. for the following: Sartre, Venise, in: La reine Albemarle, p. 66, 86. 7 Ditto, op. cit., p. 84. (Translated by C. Atkinson) 8 Ditto, The Prisoner of Venice, in: Sartre, Situations, p. 1-60.

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of his Tintoretto studies have appeared in print in various places. Apart from the texts published in La reine Alhemarle ou le dernier touriste there are further manuscript pages, from which his analysis of Tintoretto's self-portrait of 1588 was recently taken for the catalogue of the Bibliotheque Nationale's centenary exhibition.9 The pages in the appendix of the Critique of Dialectical Reason 's second volume 'dialectique\ with the notes on the history of Venice,10 are witness to Sartre's passion for the city and its history: for some, his descriptions of Venice with its canals and palaces contain more or less humdrum observations of no particular value,1! whilst others are very much more appreciative of his comments. In La reine Alhemarle ou le dernier touriste Sartre gives an account of his strolls through the city: he describes his trips with the gondola; he visits the museums and churches and tries to understand the city's structure. Venice has its own system of coordinates - this is one of his insights. The confusion of canals and streets is deserted, because there is no speed in Venice. Sartre's portrait of Venice, evoking as it does such an impressive picture of its architecture, citizens and history on just a few pages, forms the backdrop for his studies of Tintoretto. He calls the painter "the secluded one in Venice"; this was probably in order to characterise his particular ties with the city and its social relations, from which Tintoretto was unable - and presumably unwilling to extricate himself, preferring to capture on canvas everything and everyone, the city, its citizens and its history with the help of his new painting technique. The city's relationship to its inhabitants, and to one of its artists in particular, can be revealed on Tintoretto's pictures.12 There are various anecdotes and several biographical references to Tintoretto's troubled relationship with the city. Nevertheless, his reputation there cannot have been all that bad. In the Scuola Grande di San Rocco he succeeded in taking possession of every bit of free 9 Sartre, Un vieillard mystifie. Texte inedit de Jean-Paul Sartre. Fragment pour le Sequestre de Venise 1957, in: ditto [catalogue for the centenary exhibition; Bibliotheque nationale de France], ed. M. Berne, Paris: Bibliotheque nationale de France, Gallimard, 2005, p. 186-190. !0 Ditto, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. II, p. 442-446. 1 ! Cf. T. Lenain, Le roman du Tintoret sartrien et ses implications philosophiques, in: Sur les ecrits postHumes de Sartre, in: Annales de I 'Institut de Philosophic et de Sciences Morales. Edited by G. Hottois. Brussels 1987, p. 121. 1 ^ The Tintoretto studies are still unfortunately scattered about various publications; one text collection has appeared in Italian. Sartre, Tintoretto o il sequestrato di Venezia, Progetto e introduzione di Michel Sicard. Traduzione e cura di F. Scanzio. Milan: Marinotti, 2005 (the introduction by M. Sicard, Approches du Tintoret: www.michel-sicard.fr/textes.html); cf. Sartre, Saint Marc et son double. Le Sequestre de Venise. Inedit, in: Obliques 24/25, Sartre et les arts (edited by M. Sicard), Nyons 1981, p. 171-202; ditto, Les produits finis du Tintoret, in: Magazine litteraire, 176, Figures de Sartre, Paris 1981, p. 28-30; ditto, Le sequestre de Venise, in: Situations, IV, p. 291-346; ditto, St George and the Dragon, in: Sartre, Between Existentialism and Marxism, p. 179-196; ditto, Saint Marc et son double; ditto, La reine Alhemarle ou le dernier touriste.

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space to create an impressive monument to himself and his painting by placing almost 50 pictures on the walls and ceilings: the work of a lifetime, one would think, and yet these pictures!3 were only an interim halt, part of the dynamic pace, so to speak, that he kept up, hardly allowing his patrons time to judge the pictures themselves. As is recounted time and again, Tintoretto - Sartre also often calls him Robusti - once turned up at a competition at the Scuola di San Rocco emptyhanded and on being asked which design he was entering, by way of an answer he pulled at a cord,!4 letting cardboard fall from the ceiling to reveal the oval picture of "San Rocco in Gloria"!5. The viewers' eyes passed upwards through an imaginary pane of glass, on which the saint stands. The surprised fraternity was given no time to consider how to react. Tintoretto donated the picture, and because the fraternity's statutes do not permit it to reject gifts, Tintoretto won the competition and later received a lifetime pension of 100 ducats per month.!6 It is hardly surprising that his reputation suffered, given such business tactics with which he constantly outdid his rivals and put them in the shade. In his pictures one glimpses not only the painter's personality, but also the city itself. The first sentences of the Tintoretto study give an account of the feeling of aversion with which the Venetians confronted their painter. His oeuvre, however, ("... Venise nous par/e...."l7) betrays a great deal more about the author, his technique of painting, the rivalry of his colleagues and the tricks with which he outstripped his colleagues. His personality fascinates his biographers, who expose his difficult character; but this does not prevent Tintoretto from defending his independence. This is the cue for Sartre to butt in, since he is concerned with the project of an artist who asserts himself with his own personal decisions, overcomes obstacles and makes his own art into the yardstick of his times. The fragments of the Tintoretto study available today bring together the most important findings of Sartre's early works, Imagination. A Psychological Critique (1936) and The Imaginary. A phenomenological psychology of the imagination (193 8/40). 18 They consist of an attempt to make statements about 13

A. Zenkert, Tintoretto in der Scuola di San Rocco, Ensemble und Wirkung, Tubingen: Ernst Wasmuth Verlag, 2003. Cf. the author's review: "Tintoretto in der Scuola di San Rocco": www.romanistik.info/zenkert-tintoretto.html. 14 D. Baussy-Oulianoff, Le Tintoret d'apres Jean-Paul Sartre. La Dechirure jaune, (DVD, 1983), Paris: Gallimard, 2005. 15 Cf. C. Bernari, L 'opera completa del Tintoretto, Milan: Rizzoli, 21978, ill no. 67, 240x360 cm. 16 Cf. E. v. d. Bercken, Die Gemalde desJacopo Tintoretto, Munich: Piper, 1942, p. 36. 17 Sartre, Le sequestre de Venise, p. 291. 18 Ditto, Imagination. A Psychological Critique. Translated with an introduction by F. Williams. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1962. Ditto, The Imaginary. A phenomenological psychology of the imagination. Cf. E. Alloa, Imagination zwischen Nichtung

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the degree of consciousness that Tintoretto attained in his works. They also enquire into the painter's importance for his contemporaries, into the meaning the painter attached to the subject matter of his paintings and into the degree of intentionality with which he obtained the impact that he did. The Tintoretto study reveals the Venetian's sophisticated painting techniques, with which he influenced the viewing habits of his clients, instructed them, so to speak, in how to fulfil certain tasks, and perhaps even coerced them into doing so. Strengthened by his success, Tintoretto went on to overcome all opposition. Who was this artist? A few biographical facts suffice at the start: Robusti was born in Venice in 1518 and became one of the most important painters of the second half of the sixteenth century. Sartre was convinced that everything else could be inferred from his pictures. The look, the project, the choice, the freedom, the progressive-regressive method described in The Problem of Method, the conviction that a work's scope reaches out beyond the person, i.e., that it cannot be explained or interpreted by the person alone - these all belong to the repertoire of the portraiture technique, enabling the works of a 16thcentury painter to be described very successfully. Until around the year 2000, few had taken note of Sartre's treatment of Tintoretto and even today only a small circle of specialists is aware of it. The structure of the individual parts of his investigations into the Venetian painter and their recognisable links with his philosophy have hitherto only been given marginal attention. By characterising the Tintoretto study, for example, as just a piece of work from a transitional period*9, as has often been done, means that this study has been underestimated as an independent work. Le sequestre de Venise describes the relationship between Tintoretto and his city; the study in Situations, IX, "Saint George and the Dragon" contains an analysis of a painting of the same name that can be found today in the National Gallery in London. The investigation published in Obliques interprets seventeen of his paintings and demonstrates how the artist was able to assert himself. The fragment published in "Magazine litteraire" in 1981 is, according to the editors, the last part of the portrait study.20 Suggesting that the Tintoretto study is an unsuccessful Sartre autobiography is an oversimplification and says perhaps as much about the researcher and his and Ftille. Jean-Paul Sartres negative Theorie der Einbildungskraft auf dem Prufstein von Tintorettos Malerei [lecture on the occasion of the conference 'imagination and Invention". Interdisciplinary conference in co-operation with the Academy of the Arts, Berlin, 27-29 January 2005], in: T. Bernhart, P. Mehne (eds), Imagination und Invention, Paragrana, supplement 2, 2006, p. 13-27. Cf. ditto, Suspension et gravite. L'imaginaire sartrien face au Tintoret, in: Alter. Revue de phenomenologie. Image et ceuvre d'art, n 0 15/2007, 123-141. 19 Cf. M. Thevoz, La psychose prophetique du Tintoret, in: Obliques 24/25, p. 163-168, here p. 164. 20 Cf. Sartre, Les produits finis du Tintoret, in: Magazine litteraire, p. 28.

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approach to Sartre's work as about the work itself. Of course one can establish a connection between "the secluded one of Venice" and the author himself, but taking such a biased view means in effect that one only sees what one expects to see; Tintoretto's notion of art and its possibilities do not get the attention they deserve. Tintoretto does play a role of his own in Sartre's study. With his manner of painting he succeeds in liberating himself from the artistic norms of his predecessors, with which he was familiar in the town. To be sure, he needs an audience, if only to be able to observe the continually growing distance between them and himself.21 These are the first indications of his art's novel character. Sartre's enquiries into Tintoretto are divided into two independent chapters. The 'picture descriptions' and the comparison of their results with other works serve to reconstruct Tintoretto Is painting technique and to explain the impact of his pictures. Sartre's ideas about the 'painter's personality' are only indirectly connected with his paintings. Sartre was not an art historian, but with the observations that he recorded in his analyses of Tintoretto's works and that relate above all to the people depicted there, he names all the factors that constitute mannerism. His Tintoretto studies are oriented exclusively towards the artist's works. Biographical facts are just trimmings and have no explanatory function. The differences between his pictures and those of other painters elucidate how Tintoretto transcended his situation after his own fashion. The picture that caused one of Tintoretto's biggest scandals, "The Miracle of St Mark", now hangs in the Accademia in Venice.22 This painting was in the Scuola Grande di San Marco until 1797 and having been taken to France was not returned until 1815. Painted in 1548, the picture shows Saint Mark, clad in flowing robes and with the gospel clasped under his arm; in defiance of all tradition, he is depicted plummeting down from heaven,23 coming in person to rescue a slave from death as a martyr.24 Sartre's description of the picture is like a screenplay. A number of events are depicted as happening at the same time, but are described in the study one after the other, thereby reconstructing the chronological aspect. Orientals - mostly "infidels" in the eyes of the Christian West in Tintoretto's day - are in the process of torturing a Christian slave. Saint Mark is plunging down from heaven head first. About 25-30 people are depicted in this 2

1 Cf. Sartre, Saint Marc et son double, p. 186. The website www.romanistik.info/sartre.html lists a number of internet sites showing pictures by Tintoretto. 23 R. Krischel has produced an analysis of this painting, cf. R. Krischel, Jacopo Tintoretto. Das Sklavenwunder. Bilawelt und Weltbild, Frankfurt/M: Fischer, 1994, p. 10 f., p. 62 ff. 2 4 Tintoretto, San Marco libera lo Schiavone (Accademia, Venice) in: C. Bernari, L 'opera completa del Tintoretto, no. 64, table III; cf. for the following: Sartre, Saint Marc et son double, p. 175 f. Cf. the picture's description: K. M. Swoboda, Tintoretto, Ikonographische und stilistische Untersuchungen, Vienna, Munich: Scholl, 1982, p. 13 ff. 22

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scene, standing around the slave, who is lying on the ground. His tormentor is wearing a turban. This is the description of the picture and the commission that Tintoretto conscientiously carried out. Sartre's study contains a detailed description of the picture, identifying the saint's index finger as its focal point. The picture consists of two parts: firstly Mark and the Qadi, who is pronouncing the sentence from his throne, and secondly, the crowd below them, which surrounds the slave. Weights and counterbalances, semi-circles from the left turban through the saint's toe to the Qadi's head determine the picture's structure. The torturer is showing the Qadi the hammer, which like the axe has just shattered miraculously. The Qadi is leaning forward and sees even less of what is going on above him. The viewer can hardly help being fascinated by this scene. It is the unaccustomed perspective used by Tintoretto to depict it that made his contemporaries initially reject it: a saint in free fall? That is not how saints are shown. They normally look upwards, certainly not downwards. By plunging head first, however, Mark is using the force of gravity to make his passage downwards even faster. He will be able to brake in time, but his gown still shows him to be plummeting and certainly not hovering, as would behove a saint. Saint Mark has let the henchman's instruments shatter in mid-flight. The purpose of his flight, his appointed task and its execution and outcome are illustrated simultaneously in the picture. The viewer is one step ahead of the onlookers in the picture, because he realizes that most of the onlookers have not yet grasped what exactly is happening. What a scandal this picture caused!25 Of course it is not befitting for the saint to be shown in free fall; and certainly not to be depicted in the shadow of the events. He should have been brightly lit up. Due to the picture's composition of light, the saint is not at first at the centre of attention. In his analysis of the picture's composition, Sartre shows how the painter steers the viewer's gaze; the latter sees the apostle's nose-dive, then the people and, finally, he also recognises the slave on the ground, fearfully awaiting his fate. And then he understands why the instruments are shattered. Mark himself, who shoots down to the rescue at the very last minute, is reduced almost to a decorative element, since the rescue itself in the shape of the shattered instruments of torture and the gesture of amazement become the picture's main topic. Mark has only one hand free. In his other hand he is grasping the gospel. The story runs before the mind's eye like a film: "[...] each presence points to the next, and is disqualified by it"26, as Sartre writes in his analysis of another of Tintoretto's pictures, that of Saint George fighting the dragon. Tintoretto stages the events surrounding the slave, and the eye deciphers the picture's dramaturgy. Every viewer is able to recognise the slave's rescue, before the saint has even made an appearance. 25 26

Sartre, The Prisoner of Venice, p. 7. Ditto, St George and the Dragon, p. 182.

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In effect, Tintoretto has staged a miracle in a very realistic manner. Nonetheless, one needs to be cautious; it is only the picture's description, revealing the successive events, that gives one clues as to the picture's drama.27 The nose-dive shows that the laws of nature were not valid for Mark. Yet Tintoretto fulfilled his commission. He was supposed to paint a miracle. He painted, one reads in the study, the linking of cause and effect and universal determinism. Did his customers actually recognise what he intended? And why did the artist paint this subject matter if the contract stipulated the legend of a saint? Did Mark himself really have to come personally to shatter the tools? Could he not have done it from above? By depicting him in such a pose, the painter makes the apostle look ridiculous.28 Is Mark no saint after all, just some sort of miracle-healer or charlatan? It is no surprise that Tintoretto's contemporaries found the picture ugly and felt provoked.29 But the scandal only really emerges if we grasp the meaning of the picture in the way that Tintoretto had secretly prepared. He shows symbols that possess an acknowledged meaning, and the viewer discovers that the composition lends them a new one. Sartre sums up this observation as follows: Tintoretto sets his audience to work and by showing them familiar things in a new way he challenges them to assist him in creating his imaginary world.30 On a number of occasions in his study Sartre mentions well-known episodes from Tintoretto's biography. He also compares Tintoretto's pictures with one another and describes the artist's social status in Venice. The example of San Rocco has already shown how Tintoretto proceeded: the artists were supposed to appear at a competition with their sketches, but Tintoretto unveiled before their eyes his finished picture, thus outdoing all his rivals. This was how he asserted his new kind of art and his play with perspective. His unrestrained artistic energy frightened and astonished his fellow-citizens. Tintoretto reflected the atmosphere of his own times in his paintings and above all his town's restlessness, which the inhabitants would have preferred to ignore.3! '"Jacopo', said the city, 'failed to keep the promise of his adolescence'"32, Sartre judges. In the picture of the "Miracle of St Mark" the two main people are shown foreshortened. The slave, who is lying on the ground, can only recognise above him the feet of the saint hurtling towards him, if he is capable of understanding anything at all of what is going on. The way the light is distributed across the picture and the idea of leaving the saint in the shadows derive perhaps from Tintoretto's experiments, which he undertook with figures he cre27

Sartre, Saint Marc et son double. Le Sequestre de Venise, p. 176, 186. Cf. ditto, Saint Marc et son double, p 181. 29 Op.cit.,p. 177. 30 Op.cit.,p. 186. 3 1 Cf. ditto, The Prisoner of Venice, p. 56. 32 Op. cit., p. 7. 28

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ated himself and with candles. In the "Musee Grevin"33, which contains the painter's waxworks, Sartre believes he had found the answer. After making a provisional sketch, Tintoretto would build up the figures and try out all the possibilities that the three dimensions thus offered him. A woman on the left was placed on a step to counterbalance the raised position of the person on the right, who was seated on a dais holding the tribunal. Everything was carefully prepared. Making the first model becomes an important stage on the way to the finished piece of work. Tintoretto's manner of painting begins to resemble a construction technique, and this interpretation enables Sartre to trace the Venetian's intentions in such a way as to suggest that he had caused the scandal deliberately. But Sartre is disappointed: the figure theatre was not reproduced in the picture; the painter - that mad man! - ruined everything. The figures did not interact with one another. Instead of appearing as a totality, they were simply added together to form a crowd, for the painter was not capable of reflecting the intended arrangement. The discrepancy remains between the two portrayable dimensions and the figures' third one. One cannot fail to notice that Sartre's reservations about the picture are determined by a preconceived notion, which simply underlines the outcome all the more clearly. Nonetheless, his picture descriptions do have a value all of their own, as one experiences when viewing for example the "Miracle of St Mark" in the Venetian Academy. If one lets the many visitors who continually file past the painting or gaze at it for a while stand between the picture and oneself, they soon begin to fill out the semi-circle in the foreground that is missing in the picture. A moment later a few will then point to Mark, as if they had only just discovered him, after puzzling over the shattered instruments. This scene reveals how the viewers discover the picture's temporal succession of events - a characteristic feature of Robusti's pictures. But the individual, chronologically staggered scenes belong to an overall impression that Tintoretto conveys especially well in the painting. He not only shaped the figures himself; he also decided on the impression the viewer was supposed to have. The manner in which the saint plummets, and the shadow thrown by his body on arrival, underline the relation between the dramatic and plastic representation that is peculiar to so many of his paintings. Sartre feels that the saint's figure addresses our imagination directly: we are tempted to imagine how such a movement feels. Sartre explains this idea with the term of heaviness, which he repeatedly identifies as a topic in Tintoretto's works, one that points to man's position or condition. The painter would like to have created the material reality of the physical relations between humans and things, and wanted moreover to show the laws of nature in the moment in which divine will revokes them. This is the task the painter set himself, and he thus set about depicting a miracle. This miracle he duly delivered, but showed it as part of a chain of circumstances that was at the same time embedDitto, Saint Marc et son double, p. 172; cf. for the following: p. 172-174, p. 176.

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ded in a pattern of universal determinism. The patrons were horrified and thereby revealed that they secretly saw through Tintoretto's intentions. This passage in Sartre's study demonstrates how Sartre can explain a work's impact by comparing the definition of the project to its execution. Sartre also presents a conclusion: the clients' agitation was not only due to the picture; like the artist they also recognised in the picture the underlying conflict of their age. The scandal that Tintoretto is supposed to have provoked with the plummeting Mark was founded on the viewers' consent; but these viewers, while understanding the event portrayed, did not immediately grasp the implications of this new form of art. Tintoretto dazzled with a composition in the manner of Titian, but he counted on the viewers' amazement and coerced them into adopting his intuition as their own. 34 Sartre constructs this relation between Tintoretto and his clients in order to be able to derive the hypothesis of their collaboration. Having shown how the clients were influenced by the painter, Sartre intends in a further step to ascertain the relationship between the artist's personal decisions and those to which he was bound by contract. The small scope that remained for the artist to pursue his own goals is the true focus of the portrait study. Despite, or even because of, the little leeway conceded to him, Tintoretto was able to create a work that could be understood as his answer to Venice's situation. Sartre defends Tintoretto's disloyal behaviour in the competitions by pointing to the difficult market situation and the commissioners' legally binding conditions.35 Despite these obstacles, the artist still managed to assert himself by choosing an option that his colleagues saw as being precisely the opposite of what the usage of his day dictated. Regardless of all criticism, the government continued to place orders with Robusti, and as long as he was employed by them, the scandal stayed within bounds. At first Tintoretto paid no attention to the critics; he preferred to take the bull by the horns: "Until his death, Robusti raced against the time, and it is hard to decide whether he was trying to find or tofleehimself through his work. 'Lightning-Tintoretto' sailed under the blackflag,and for this driven pirate, all means were fair."3** By interpreting selected paintings, Sartre intends to reconstruct the painter's social situation and his relations with the town that made the artist's success possible and enabled him to free himself of all convention.37 Tintoretto succeeded not only from his own efforts, but because his working conditions, and 34

Cf. Sartre, Saint Marc et son double, p. 172. Cf. ditto, The Prisoner of Venice, p. 10 f. There is every reason to assume there was an atmosphere of intense competition, cf. H. Tietze, Tintoretto. Gemalde und Zeichnungen, London: Phaidon, 1948, p. 29. 3 *> Ditto, The Prisoner of Venice, p. 8. 3 ' He never succeeded in becoming completely free; as late as 1577 a board of enquiry was set up against him, cf. K. M. Swoboda, Tintoretto, p. 59. 35

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thus his success too, were dependent on his relations to his home-town. The artist was bound to Venice like a prisoner, completely at its mercy. If he had left Venice, he would have lost the whole basis for his art. The changes in his style of painting, which also include a return to earlier forms,38 are described by Sartre as a continual development. But he does not overlook the regulations to which Tintoretto possibly had to adhere. It suffices to compare the vast "Paradise" in the Doges' Palace, which measures an enormous 7x22 m - reputedly the largest oil-on-canvas painting ever created - with the very much smaller sketch of the same subject now in the Louvre.39 At the beginning of his very detailed analysis of the "Paradise" in the Doges' Palace (1588-1590), Swoboda points out the large interval of time between the painting and the earlier sketch, which Tintoretto is supposed to have made in 1579. 40 Swoboda does not consider the "Paradise" to be a commissioned work; rather, it was one which gave the painter the opportunity "to test here how well he could employ all his 'experience with figures' in the context of the painting"4!. The vast picture - one he painted, significantly enough, for the wall above the Doge's throne at the very heart of power in the centre of Venice - is an expression of the passion that united him and the city.42 In Sartre's opinion, every picture was an opportunity for Tintoretto to defend himself against his fellowcitizens. The whole city had to be convinced, since it was its officials and citizens who decided whether he would later be forgotten or become immortal. Making his own choice was a source of strength; his painting was the repeated attempt to prevail over others. On occasion, Sartre explicitly compares the works of Titian and Tintoretto, thus underlining the novel-like character of his Tintoretto studies. His description of the two artists' tombs reminds us that Tintoretto was never able to break away completely from the elder painter's shadow, and that Tintoretto was only capable of completing his own works in precisely this situation of rivalry: Titian, or rather "the old man's radioactive corpse", lies under a mountain of lard, nougat and sugar; Tintoretto, on the other hand, lies under a simple stone slab in a small side-chapel of a church in the suburbs. To the right of his tomb in the church of Madonna dell'Orto43 hangs the "Presentation of the Virgin at the Temple" (1552). Examining this picture, Sartre tries to prove the importance of the notion of heaviness mentioned above, as well as to show how this heaviness was executed. Like many of his other analyses, this one is based on a compari38 39 40 41 42 43

Cf. K. M. Swoboda, Tintoretto, p. 52, 56. Cf. Sartre, p. 299. Cf. Tintoretto, Paradise (sketch), c. 1579, 143x362 cm, in: E. von der Bercken, Jacopo Tintoretto, section with illustrations, p. 169 f. Cf. K. M. Swoboda, Tintoretto, p. 75-84, esp. p. 75. Op. cit., p. 84. Cf. for the following: Sartre, The Prisoner of Venice, p. 49-52. Cf. C. Bernari, L 'opera completa del Tintoretto, ill. no. 94, 490^480 cm.

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son. Another of Robusti's pictures, that of the "Presentation of Christ" (1554) in the Accademia44, catches his interest above all because of the young mother on the right, who, with a child on her arm, is just about to descend the steps leading down from the altar. In a second, she will lift her right foot and turn to the left: "[...] her descent of the staircase is like the prowess of an alpinist."45 She is clearly paying little attention to what is going on, and so her behaviour is at the very least reprehensible. Sartre's remark that Tintoretto believed that things were not looking too good as far as human relations were concerned is only mentioned in passing. It nonetheless contains a suggestion that the viewer should take a look at himself in the painter's pictures. Can the woman's lack of curiosity be applied to all viewers? "[...] it's our lack of curiosity that he wanted to paint, everyone's, those piles of shadows so compact that not even a trembling can penetrate them." Turning to the second picture, the "Presentation of the Virgin at the Temple" close to the painter's tomb, Sartre's invitation to cover up the whole flight of steps mentally or with one's right hand helps the viewer appreciate Tintoretto's painting technique: it leaves just the priest, the Virgin and the woman behind her clearly visible. Sartre's method is quite simple: the viewer can now discover the earlier Titian in Tintoretto's picture.46 Once the whole heaviness of the flight of steps has disappeared, taking one's hand away again also reveals the artist's manner of proceeding. The flight of steps takes up a large part of the picture, though it is really only the presentation in the temple that should command our attention. The viewer is left to make the decision: the painter's idiosyncratic treatment of the subject matter either underlines the loftiness of what is happening on the steps above or it is very much putting the event into perspective: the oppressive heaviness of the steps literally dwarfs the people struggling up the steps and shows them to be supplicants. Tintoretto did not lay down a particular interpretation. And if there was another scandal, then the viewer will have caused it himself. Sartre is in no doubt: the painter skilfully made his escape through the back door. Tintoretto represents heaviness in the picture as a feeling: "A body only weighs anything when it is crushed; Jacopo understood this: he found the means of crushing the patron respectfully." The client, the viewer, is supposed to feel overwhelmed by the weight of the stairs. To take a modern example, cinema has picked up his idea: the camera is placed in a ditch, horses gallop over it, as in the film "Ben Hur". But Tintoretto's pit was only an imaginary one, he simply placed his figures at a somewhat higher level. The manner in which Sartre

44

Cf. C. Bernari, ill. no. 107, 239^298, Accademia, Venice. Cf. for the following: Sartre, Saint Marc et son double, p. 183-184. (Translated by C. Atkinson) 4 6 Titian, "Presentation of the Virgin at the Temple", in the Galleria delF Accademia, Venice. 45

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makes a film of Robusti's pictures impressively underscores the dynamism of the latter's pictures. This does not yet imply a conclusive opinion about "the solitary one of Venice" and his art, but an interim result is evident: in none of his pictures is the sense of heaviness represented by any one single person; the heaviness always results from the relationship of all the figures to each other. From this we deduce that the meaning of the heaviness can only be recognised by viewing it in the context of the whole. Sartre is using the progressive-regressive method here, which is witness to the continuity of method in his works: one can discover the elements by looking at the whole, just as, vice versa, one can explain the whole through looking at its component parts.47 This approach, which incidentally is a dialectical method, is not explored thoroughly in the present study. Nevertheless, one begins to recognise the approach in the passages named above, where Sartre draws conclusions about particular painting techniques used by Tintoretto by describing certain details in the picture that reveal the above-mentioned whole. Sartre uses the same method to discuss Tintoretto's depiction of the crucifixion scene in the Scuola di San Rocco. Via the chapter "La Regina Albemarla o il ultimo Turisto", Sartre's description of Tintoretto's crucifixion scene in the Scuola di San Rocco has since become fairly well known. Christ is already hanging on the cross, another cross is still on the ground, a third one is just being set upright, and the man who is pulling at the rope, and whom Tintoretto uses to show the picture's third dimension, betrays his exertions. The semi-circle described by arrangement of the crosses is a very classical feature.48 The painting hangs in the small Sala d'albergo, which is accessible from the large hall in the first floor of the Scuola di San Rocco. It fills out the entire wall surface and therefore has no other frame than the boundaries of the ceiling and the side-walls. And Sartre's insight? He believes that Tintoretto replaces the missing emotions with a vision, as if in a cinema.49 Sartre will later return to a comparison of Tintoretto's works with the cinema elsewhere - one that is suggested by the depiction of movement in the pictures: "Picture in four dimensions: space-time, the event. The ladder below again pushes Christ into the foreground."50 With his pictures, Tintoretto confronted the inhabitants of Venice with a dynamic force - he depicted the events rather than their results - and thus made the Venetians aware of the city's current state of turmoil.5! for this 47

Sartre, Saint Marc et son double, p. 189. Cf. C. Bernari, ill. no. 167, 1565, 536*1224 cm. Cf. the description in Swoboda, Tintoretto, p. 37-44. 4 ^ Sartre, La Regina Albemarla o il ultimo Turisto, ebauche, in: ditto, La reine Albemarle ou le dernier touriste, p. 143 f. 49 0p.cit.,p. 144. 50 Ibid. 5 1 Cf. E. von der Bercken, Jacopo Tintoretto, p. 32.

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frankness, of which everyone was well aware, Sartre presumes, Tintoretto was nonetheless not forgiven. Criticism rained down from all quarters, and all were agreed in rejecting his art. Sartre is convinced that this was the painter's secret; he was disliked by everyone.52 But the visit to the Scuola di San Rocco shows that the disapproval cannot have been all that great. When Tintoretto turned up with his finished pictures, he created panic among his rivals, who themselves had not even had time to start.53 His business acumen secured him a lucrative portion of the market. Perhaps he said to himself: the harsher the criticism, the more well known he was. Moreover, he was careful to let the viewer participate too. Sartre's study also examines how an artist was able to assert his independence. He accepted commissions, interpreted them in his own way and let his clients collaborate quite consciously while the pictures were still being created by surpassing their viewing habits and presenting them with a new manner of seeing things which they were not able to simply dismiss, since he depicted the reality of their times. In this sense, Tintoretto was a step ahead of his times and proved to his clients with every picture that art could also make predictions and influence social developments. The moment the clients cried out "scandal!", they had understood a little more. Tintoretto pointed out their options, he did not encroach in any way on his clients' and viewers' judgement; on the contrary, he instructed them in how to develop and recognise things for themselves. The real novelty in Tintoretto's painting technique, says Sartre, is the addition of a third dimension to the two of his pictures.54 This addition of a third dimension could not be achieved in conventional painting. Sartre believes that he can recognise here a solution, already provided in the Quattrocento, to the question of how to steer the viewer's gaze: "painting became a school of vision."55 This does not mean that viewing habits changed, but rather that the pictures' composition had to take into account how the viewers were accustomed to seeing things. They were supposed to rediscover familiar things in the pictures, and to this end pictures were delivered with instructions on how to view them. The comparison between two pictures with the same motif- "Saint George and the dragon" by Tintoretto56 and by Carpaccio57 - produces the proof that 52 53 54 55 56

57

Sartre, The Prisoner of Venice, p. 56. Cf. ditto, The Prisoner of Venice, p. 9-11. Cf. esp. ditto, Saint Marc et son double, p. 190. Op. cit.,p. 190. Cf. ditto, St George and the Dragon, p. 183 f., 190, 193-196. Cf. Tintoretto, San Giorgio uccide il Drago, in: C. Bernari, L 'opera completa del Tintoretto, p. 100, ill. no. 127, 157.5x100.3 cm (National Gallery, London). Carpaccio, San Giorgio in Lotta con il Drago, in: M. Cancogni, L 'opera completa del Carpaccio (from the comparison one deduces that this picture is meant): p. 55 f. and tables XL-XLI.

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Tintoretto depicted several time sequences in the same picture: the dragon has already been lethally wounded, while the chosen victim is still fleeing.58 Tintoretto shows only part of the lance, which necessarily has to be held out of view since the horseman is holding it on the far side of the horse's body in order to be able to strike the dragon with the full might of his assault. In contrast, Carpaccio's horseman holds the lance in his right hand in full view, though this means that the lance has to run along to the left of the horse's neck. Tintoretto was able to take more liberty in the composition than Carpaccio, since he knew that his viewers expected a lance, but he did not need to place it in the foreground. In Tintoretto's painting, the action that lends the picture its name takes place in the background and is only registered when the viewer has retraced the path of flight of the woman in the foreground. The view of the saint and his horse lets one forget the lance held in readiness for the assault, and thus the horse appears to form the picture's central axis, whilst the dragon, who had provoked Saint George's actions, is neglected.59 This - Sartre's - comment points out those elements that the painter had to reject when conceiving the picture's composition: on the grounds that they would have obstructed the series of movements depicted in the picture or - and this is what counts - because they would not have evoked the intended effect in the viewer's mind. No picture is able to reproduce fully the artist's ideas in the viewer. The painter had to find an arrangement that was capable of conveying his intention in the best possible way. Sartre's line of argument recalls his categorical rejection of the unconscious. One has to ask oneself whether the painter - in this case Tintoretto was fully aware of the possible effect his picture would have, and, if he was, whether he was able to employ this consciousness to incorporate suitable elements in his picture that might give the viewer more information than the latter believed to recognise at first glance. It becomes evident that Tintoretto is only hinting at the picture's motif, namely, the killing of the dragon, which Sartre calls "the painting's secret."60 The viewer can solve the mystery himself, for nothing in the picture has really been brought to a conclusion. The choice of words in Sartre's study also invites the viewer to participate in the artistic process. This is true of "The Slaughter of the Innocents" too6*. While other painters depict the massacre of the innocents 58 59

60 61

Cf. Sartre, St George and the Dragon, p. 182. Cf. ditto, St George and the Dragon, p. 192, cf. p. 193: "This is only appearance, no doubt - but it is extremely legible: nothing seems to me more difficult for an artist than to banish false illusions from the illusory." Cf. for the following: ditto, St George and the Dragon, p. 195 f. In: C. Bernari, L'opera completa del Tintoretto, p. 129, ill. no. 267 d, 422x546 cm (Scuola di San Rocco). Cf. Sartre, Saint Marc et son double, p. 200.

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with all its brutality, swords and blood are absent in Tintoretto's painting. The brute in the right foreground is about to strike, but pauses, while the utter horror of those around him increases. The painter summed up the happenings in the picture in five scenes, linked to each other by individual people. At the front left, a child is being lifted up a wall - clearly an attempt to rescue it. Further behind a woman is falling down the same wall, thereby suggesting a connection with a further group that is likewise in dreadful turmoil. Bernari calls his introduction "II teatrale Tintoretto"62, referring to the temporal sequence in the artist's paintings:63 the movement created by the unity of the scene's subject matter, and (re-)constructed by the viewer, triggers off our reaction, for our look immediately causes our muscles to tense, imaginatively speaking, thereby setting the painted figures in motion. It is no hallucination; nothing is suggested that is not there. Tintoretto presents the picture and obliges the onlooker to examine it thoroughly and to discover the scheme of things in the picture.64 He surpasses the works of his predecessors, in Sartre's opinion, by presenting his clients with an incomparably more difficult task. "The idea of self-service is not his own, but he uses it: since the customer does the service himself, he is asked to wash the dishes on top of it."65 Sartre explains this method with the various moments in time that the viewer has to piece back together, leading from one event to the next.66 As if it were a score of music, the viewer has to decode the picture, on which the passage of his gaze has been traced out. But the painter does not abandon him, he sets out how the gaze is to move: the passage dictated to the eye consists of drops, ascents and crossings or turnstiles. The painter constantly forces the gaze to follow a preconceived path. The task consists of connecting the picture's vanishing point or the spot that most draws the viewer's gaze into it with the other parts of the picture. This method, that Tintoretto is supposed to have had mastered so well, and with which he attains such skilful effects, is called by Sartre 'the third dimension'. It results from the manifest play of contradictions caused by the gaze moving wildly in all directions.67 Thus the gaze clearly enjoys a certain autonomy. Rather than being fully absorbed in the picture, it maintains a kind of distance. This tension is caused, as Sartre fittingly remarks68, by the structure of Tintoretto's pictures, which at the same time also suggests the angle from which the 62

C. Bernari, L'opera completa del Tintoretto, p. 5-8. Cf. Sartre, Saint Marc et son double, p. 197. 64 Ditto, Saint Marc et son double, p. 197. Cf. Sartre's account of movements in the imagination, ditto, The Imaginary, p. 73-83. 65 Ditto, Saint Marc et son double, p. 191. 66 Ditto, St George and the Dragon, p. 181 f. Cf. for the following: ditto, Saint Marc et son double, p. 192. 6 ? Ditto, Saint Marc et son double, p. 193. 68 Cf. Sartre, Saint Marc et son double, p. 194. 63

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observer is expected to view them.69 The painter can influence the viewer's thinking; he can bring about the product of the latter's imagination with the help of an analogue70, but he cannot transcend the border between the irreal and the real. Perceiving this analogue is in effect the process by which the viewer can fathom out the picture and thus the artist's own ideas. Recognition of the analogue means opening up the way to the irreal.71 The imagination can only intend to objectivise the relations represented in the picture. A foundation is created on the basis of the scene's main elements, and independently of the additional associations that the viewer might understand and that are unforeseeable for the artist. Attaining a minimum of consensus in this way allows the artist to influence the viewer's imagination. But this is only possible if the painter observes certain rules. One of the options is to emphasize movement, as Sartre observes with regard to the picture of "The investiture of Gianfrancesco I"72, which now hangs in the Munich Pinakothek. Here too the viewer's eye - which the painter, according to Sartre, has borrowed - finds no escape. The painted object appears completely motionless, yet movement is effected by the dynamic interrelationship of the objects, as they are gradually discovered by the viewer's gaze. Sartre calls this process 'the brush's cunning'.73 This observation, that likewise holds true for many of Tintoretto's other pictures, contains a contradiction: movement is suggested in a motionless scene. Nevertheless, it betrays one of the ways in which Sartre wishes to describe the function of the imaginary in painting, thus fulfilling the task he had set himself earlier.74 In doing so Sartre produces some remarkable results. This can be shown by looking at his analysis of the picture "Saint George and the dragon". Here, Sartre describes a number of semi-circles75 that can be seen in the sky, on the horse's back, from the position of the dead victim and in an imaginary link to be drawn over the head of the fleeing woman. Then he recalls the painting of the same name by Carpaccio, which was mentioned above. This time, however, his aim is to compare how in both paintings the observer's gaze is guided. In Carpaccio's, the speed of the line of vision is similar to the thrust of the lance. In Robusti's, it all happens much more awkwardly. Here, the gaze is first guided in a roundabout way through many details round the horse's hindquarters. Sartre mentions this to suggest that the picture belongs to the Baroque epoch: the speed in the picture is much greater than the speed of our slow gaze 69

One can assume that in these reflections Sartre is sooner referring to his own examination in The Imaginary than to more recent research results. 70 Cf. ditto, The Imaginary, p. 57-68. 71 Cf. ditto, p. 364. 7 2 Tintoretto, L'investitura di Gianfranceso I., 1578-79, 272*432 cm, in: C. Bernari, L opera completa del Tintoretto, ill. no. 236 A. 7 ^ Sartre, Saint Marc et son double, p. 192. 74 Cf. ditto, The Imaginary, p. 192-194. 75 Cf. for the following: ditto, St George and the Dragon, p. 191-193.

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with its circulating movements. Nonetheless, we impose our speed on the princess and the saint. With these two different speeds combined in this way, the moment in time gains a particular, almost exaggerated importance in our attention, as if seen in slow-motion. "The Annunciation", which Tintoretto painted for the lower hall of the Scuola di San Rocco between 1583 and 1587,76 fulfils the prescribed topic. The archangel Gabriel hovers in through the door, while Mary has just put her book down. She steps back and has not yet heard the message that Gabriel, supported by quite a large number of angels all jostling to enter through the skylight above the door, wishes to deliver. He is supposed to deliver a proclamation and promptly brings a whole host of angels with him. Their mission is particularly important, and the task is performed all the better if they come in large numbers. A text of Sartre's, which was published in the Paris National Library exhibition catalogue in 2005, contains a description of Tintoretto's self-portrait of 1588.77 This text is distinguished from Sartre's previous analyses of the Venetian master in that in this instance he writes a very personal interpretation of one of the few pictures in which the painter depicts himself. After comparing a number of his pictures with each other, Sartre now conducts a kind of dialogue with the master. The picture was painted ten years before Tintoretto's death. The master is looking directly at the viewer; his nose, his eyes and the hairs of his beard are similar to those of other figures in his paintings. Tintoretto signed the selfportrait of 1588: "ipsiusf" can be seen above his left shoulder. His art does not permit his authority to be contradicted, even if he still had to defend himself against accusations after his death, as the imbalance between his fame and the heated debate over his pictures suggests. Reflections of this kind are an opportunity for Sartre to dwell on the impact of his own works. He is familiar with the mean tricks used by some in an attempt to sway the audience to think favourably of the artist before they have even looked at the artist's works (if they do so at all). The conclusion drawn in the last passages of this short text is surprising. At a distance of 400 years, Sartre reasons, one can now see clearly that Tintoretto killed off painting. It is a question of the artist being responsible for his work; this is the burden he bears, even if it is a burden in a more abstract sense, one that Sartre calls elsewhere "Ecrire pour son epoque"78. This was the title origi7

*> Tintoretto, L'Annunciazione, in: Bernari, L 'opera completa del Tintoretto, ill. no. 267 A, 422x546 cm, table LI. 77 Sartre, Un vieillard mystifie. Texte inedit de Jean-Paul Sartre. Fragment pour le Sequestre de Venise 1957. The portrait is illustrated in the catalogue. The following sections are taken from the lecture held by the present author in Cerisy-la-Salle on the occasion of the Decade Jean-Paul Sartre, ecriture et engagement (20-30 July 2005). 78 Sartre, Ecrire pour son epoque, in: M. Contat, M. Rybalka, Les ecrits de Sartre Chronologic Bibliographic commentee, p. 670-676.

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nally intended in 1946 for What is Literature? The artist has to ask himself whether his work is suitable to be used as a weapon in the battle fought against evil. 79 Art survives death - something that Sartre calls the last remnant of Christian immortality.80 But it is always a question of the choice the artist will have made to transcend his own situation for something in the future. In other words: even if the artist is writing for his epoch and takes this task seriously, without further ado, future generations will still assess him on the basis of his work. This should be the yardstick that in Sartre's view the author should apply to his own work; as long as his works provoke anger, shame, hate and love, the author will live on, even if only as a shadow.81 The Tintoretto studies serve as instructions on how to look at his paintings. This insight is an opportunity to broaden out considerably the field in which to apply Sartre's findings. Since Sartre's analyses of the collaboration between artist and viewer do not have to be limited to the works of Tintoretto, his method of viewing art is a stimulus for every museum visit. Sartre's portrait study of the Venetian painter shows that his method can also be applied to an artist of a different epoch. It is not his intention to judge the value of the painter's oeuvre, and in the fragments preserved one finds no definitive result. This portrait belongs to the series of artist studies because it illustrates impressively the fundamental idea that humans can transcend their own situation of their own accord. Even if Tintoretto twists and distorts everything and - as regards his colleagues - plays his cards close to his chest, Sartre is convinced that despite the great interval in time he reflects our own position.82 Tintoretto's paintings are used by Sartre as teaching aids for his own methods. On the basis of descriptions of numerous pictures that he compares with one another, he succeeds in presenting surprisingly exact statements about both the painting technique and the thoughts of the Venetian painter. With his theories about the 'look' or gaze Sartre is in the position to reconstruct - with the help of his portraiture technique - the painter's intentions and the latter's successful efforts to spellbind his viewers with his pictures. Sartre's Tintoretto studies are proof of the method's applicability, all the more so since in Robusti's case Sartre applies them to the works of an artist from a completely different epoch than that of the artists to whom he had devoted his other portrait studies. The Tintoretto studies are to be read as a summary of Sartre's own aesthetics. The method of describing pictures, which enables insights to be gained into the painter's relations to his town, also contain impulses for ways of viewing art. These will be overlooked, however, as long as the studies are understood to constitute a Tintoretto biography. The exact observation as to how pictures can

8

1 Ibid! Ditto, Les produits finis du Tintoret, p. 28.

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train the eye and Sartre's conclusions on the impact of art can be compared with the theoretical and practical account of the history of the reception of literature, which is to be found above all in the third volume of The Family Idiot. Sartre's aesthetics shows again and again that one should not underestimate the share of work given to the viewer or reader in developing art. If by way of his analysis of art Sartre ascribes to the recipients and the artists the task of representing freedom, then he shows at the same time that the involvement with all fields of art continually reminds humans of the responsibility that arises from their freedom.

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6. The intellectual is a suspicious person "L'artiste est un suspect."! In the first sentence of his study of Andre Masson, Sartre sums up the position of the artist, thereby including indirectly that of the intellectual. Everything he and the artist produce can be used against them. Owing to their commitment, intellectuals and artists are reliant on having both freedom and independence. By way of his political commitment and without jeopardising his fundamental tenets, Sartre wanted to trace out in his work, especially after 1970, the development of the classical intellectual into a new kind of intellectual. In the three lectures that he held in Kyoto and Tokyo in 1965 and published under the title The Plea for Intellectuals2-, he develops his theory of the intellectual, who is distinguished by the fact that he can transcend his narrow specialist field. His critics in Japan and Europe in fact direct the same accusation at him: "... the intellectual is someone who meddles in what is not his business... ". 3 For Sartre, scientists who build nuclear bombs are not intellectuals. They only become so if for example they jointly sign a manifest to warn their fellow humans against using the bomb. By evaluating its destructive power they transcend the boundaries laid down for them within their specialist field. In doing so they refer to value standards that their employer does not concede them. The system of values they cite ranks human life highest. In a preliminary remark4 accompanying the printing of the three lectures in the 8th volume of Situations, Sartre explains that he was presenting these lectures five years on - and after the events of May 1968 - to show (1972) the change in the definition of the intellectual. In Japan he had spoken of the classical intellectual without actually calling him such. Indeed, the term only emerged in May 1968. He uses the term to illustrate the intellectual's development. The intellectual or the "unhappy consciousness" ("la conscience malheureuse"5) - in other words the contradiction of working for the general public but of only actually being of service to the privileged - is a temporary halt on the technician's path to becoming a radical companion of the power of the masses. Sartre did not say that the technician's conversion would only succeed if the latter distanced himself from his profession and understood that he was the enemy of the masses. But the intellectual should not be satisfied with an "unhappy consciousness"; he should rather tackle the problem, deny the "moment intellec1

Sartre, Masson, in: ditto, Situations, IV, Paris: Gallimard, 1964, p. 387-407, here p. 387. 2 Ditto, The Plea for Intellectuals [Three lectures delivered by Sartre at Tokyo and Kyoto in September and October 1965], in: ditto, Between Existentialism and Marxism, p. 225-485. 3 Ditto, The Plea for Intellectuals, p. 230, cf. for the following, p. 231 f. 4 Op. cit., p. 227. 5 Ditto, A Friend of People, in: ditto, Between Existentialism end Marxism, p. 286-298, here p. 267.

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tuel" to find a new popular status. This step describes how the intellectual might possibly develop in a way Sartre would wish. But this means that his original definition of the classical intellectual, of which he was never quite able to take his leave, or even the intellectual as a type of person, can be called into question. So, on which basis should the political intellectual, as defined by Sartre at the beginning of the 70s, progress? In contrast to teachers and doctors, the intellectual is never commissioned by anyone and is not dependent on any institution. Seen from this angle, artists, too, belong to the intellectuals. One listens to their ideas, but they themselves are overlooked. Such an analysis does not necessarily correspond to reality, because it undervalues the influence of the intellectual as a matter of principle. The intellectual first becomes active as an "enquirer"6, as Sartre calls him, with the aim of transforming his contradictory existence into a harmonious whole. He should direct his attention not only to society, but also to understanding his own background in this society - one that produces intellectuals at a certain moment.7 It is only in the 'situation' that the intellectual is able to grasp himself as a "universal singular". As a result of the prejudices instilled in him as a child, he will not be able to overcome his own specific character, even if he believes he has ridden himself of it and attained universality. Sartre's analysis of the two terms "exteriorite interiorisee - reexteriorisation de l'interiorite" sketches out a dialectical process that the intellectual cannot learn of his own accord; it is dictated by the object itself, which will remind him again and again of his position as something singularly universal. Such inevitability in the process is intended to underline its unconditional validity. As long as the intellectual only works for his class, his findings do not transcend it: he needs to understand himself in his singularity within the prevailing social conditions. He is thus given the task of freeing himself from the ties that might hinder him as a 'universal singular'. The individual's development towards authenticity is analysed in The War Diaries % In his The Plea for Intellectuals, Sartre explains that in Japan the intellectuals are accepted as a necessary evil, since they impart culture and enrich it, whilst in Europe one announces their demise.9 He thus anticipates the farewell song of Jean-Francois Lyotard, who, in contrast to Sartre, understood this development as inevitable. Under the influence of American ideas, the disappearance of those who know everything was presaged, he continues. The progress of science would replace all universalists with strictly specialised research groups. 6

Cf. for the following: Sartre, A Friend of People, p. 267. Ditto, The Plea for Intellectuals, p. 247 f. 8 Cf. V. von Wroblewsky, Von der Authentizitat des Individuums zur Intelligibility der Geschichte, in: T. Konig (ed.), Sartre Ein Kongrefi, Reinbek near Hamburg 1988, p. 385-407, esp. p. 400 f. 9 Cf. Sartre, The Plea for Intellectuals, p. 230 f. 7

83 By reducing all intellectuals to one particular type of person, Sartre's reflections on this figure appear quite schematic. He talks of the intellectual, reckons writers and poets among them, and thus makes no attempt to distinguish between intellectuals and artists. However this oversimplification by no means obscures the varied manner in which he illustrates his relatively simple definition of the intellectual. In his portrait studies one finds almost all protagonists gathered under the heading "intellectual". One finds among them a teacher of English who took up writing, a Venetian painter who well surpassed the field of work allotted to him by his contemporaries, and the writer from Croisset who made no secret of his hatred of democracy and equality and who despite, or perhaps even because of the narrow-mindedness that he complained of among his contemporaries, succeeded in creating the "modern novel". Among the artists one also finds Baudelaire, who quite consciously chose his otherness, though he failed in this project.*0 Like most of the other protagonists of the portrait studies, Baudelaire becomes one of the stage extras, whose person Sartre uses as an example for illustrating his own concepts. Thus the Baudelaire study, with its numerous general and methodological comments, many of which would have fitted equally well in to one of the other portrait studies, seems like a shortened prose version of Being and Nothingness. The variety of the artists in Sartre's portrait studies makes one ask whether one can really group together all writers and artists as intellectuals. Can there be such a homogeneous type of person? Does it not exclude precisely that manysidedness with which Sartre defined the intellectual and himself? Is this a reduction that blurs differences, or is it perhaps the ideal type described by Max Weber? In The Family Idiot, Sartre asks while examining Flaubert's Madame Bovary: "Does this involve creating a 'type'"?H In one of his letters, Flaubert had given an account of the construction of his novel and of its claim to reflect truth. He underlined the realism of his account by observing that poor Madame Bovary was suffering and crying right at the moment he was writing, in twenty different villages in France. Sartre has every right to then ask what this apparent typifying signifies. The answer is: Madame Bovary is an incomparable individual, and Flaubert makes of her a 'universal singular'. I 2 The literary method with which Flaubert creates his characters can be compared with Sartre's portrait studies, for Sartre repeatedly introduced fictional passages and elements to drive on the analysis and give it greater thrust. After a certain disappointment regarding the political development of France after Francis Mitterrand's election as President in 1981 could no longer be overlooked, the speaker of the then socialist government, Max Gallo, called on the intellectuals - in January 1983 - to express their opinions about their 10

Cf. Sartre, Baudelaire, p. 27 f. * Ditto, The Family Idiot, vol. II, p. 390. 12 Ibid. 1

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situation and about the changes needed in France. In a series of articles,!3 which Le Monde published under the heading Le silence des intellectuels, attempts at repositioning the nation were sought and discussed. Jean-Francois Lyotard's analysis of September 1983 took a clear stand at defining what constituted an intellectual or intellectuals in general. Like Sartre, Lyotard places intellectuals in relation to a universal subject, whence he derives their responsibility. The intellectuals address everyone who is a part of the community they relate to. This is where the authority conceded to people like Voltaire, Zola, Peguy and Sartre comes from.14 Lyotard puts the intellectuals in inverted commas, thus signalling his reserve about the term. Among intellectuals he does not count people who are employed, because they certainly did not embody a universal subject; they were merely concerned with obtaining the best results. In his The Plea for Intellectuals Sartre basically says the same. Lyotard's first argument fell on deaf ears, especially since his claim was based on false facts. All the skilled people who reckoned themselves among the "societe des gens des letters" in the 18th century were more than just writers and philosophers. Most of them were among the elite in their specialist field. Lyotard attempts to explain how the bearers of specialist knowledge split off from the intellectuals as a historical process. But he thereby causes the whole framework of his own argumentation to start to fall apart, as Dirk Hoeges15 has proved. Lyotard maintains that artists or writers no longer knew those they were addressing. For Lyotard, anyone who sends a message out into the wilderness is an artist or writer.16 Sartre viewed the matter very differently: in 1946 he had summed up one of the main hypotheses of his theory of literature by observing that one did not write and talk in the wilderness.17 But one cannot deduce from this that one is not addressing the public, simply because the writer does not know who his readers are. "Would you write on a desert island? Doesn't one always write in order to be read?" the autodidact Roquentin asked and added: "... but, Monsieur, in spite of yourself you write for somebody!"18 Lyotard's second line of reasoning is just as invalid. Since the intellectual does not know his judges, Lyotard argues, in his work he just consults the general criteria accepted in painting or in literature.19 Every demand that he should subject his work to cultural procedures appears unacceptable to him. Lyotard tries to erect a tomb to this type of the intellectual, meaning the classical intel13

Cf. R. Rieffel, Les intellectuels sous la Ve Republique. 1958-1990, vol. I, Paris: CalmannLevy, 1993, p. 155. *4 Cf. J.-F. Lyotard, Tombeau des intellectuels et autrespapiers, Paris 1984, p. 11 f. 1 5 D. Hoeges, Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Gegenaufklarung? Lyotard and die Postmoderne, in: Romanistische Zeitschrift fur Literaturgeschichte 4/1988, esp. p. 454 f. !6 Cf. J.-F. Lyotard, Tombeau de I'intellectuel, p. 15. 17 Cf. Sartre, The Responsibility of the Writer, p.74. ^ Ditto, Nausea, p. 170 f. !9 Cf. J.-F. Lyotard, Tombeau de Vintellectuel, p. 15.

85 lectual as defined and embodied by Sartre. For Lyotard there is no longer a "universal subject", and therefore there can no longer be any intellectuals. This condemnation of all intellectuals remains, however, without effect since the line of reasoning used to justify it is faulty. However much those who cannot think beyond the boundaries of their own specialist field like to accept Lyotard's wishful thinking, his argumentation cannot be taken seriously by those who understand their specialist area, and particularly the humanities, as part of a greater whole. With his artist portraits Sartre has not shown that he can work in a particular interdisciplinary manner; rather, he shows the overall scheme with a wellreasoned selection of various methods and concepts from different specialist areas. He ensures that each of his works ties in with his complete oeuvre by constantly referring to that universality which for him means man's freedom. This in turn grants the intellectual, and him too, room to manoeuvre, which the intellectual is responsible for safeguarding. As a result of the multifaceted references in Sartre's works to different sciences, his work is exposed to criticism from many sides, since they are effectively forced to cross disciplinary boundaries with him if they wish to grasp the significance of his ideas. On the other hand, the artist also has to be able to maintain an independent position - one that protects him from being monopolised, as indeed should be the case for everybody; otherwise he would become relative to the whole.20 This preoccupation, one that Sartre had already emphasized in Notebooks for an Ethics and to which he steadfastly clung as if it to a principle - his artist studies are a manifest proof of this approach - is oriented towards the whole, which one could also describe as a universal subject or as a reference point valid for all. It is this universal subject that Francois Lyotard attempts to refute, preferring to argue that potential intellectuals fundamentally reject the whole literary scene. Sartre would only concur with such a refute in as much as the intellectual needs to defend himself against a society that makes too many demands on him for its own purposes. However great the honour might be, the writer has to refuse to be made into some kind of institution, Sartre explained in an interview of 1964 after his rejection of the Nobel prize.21 If he were to accept the prize, he would expose himself to an "objective monopolisation". And by way of explanation he quoted Figaro 's promise to no longer reproach him from now on with his controversial political past. He stood by his political past, though he was prepared to admit his mistakes. In another explanation, Sartre refers to his relationship to his readers: it certainly did matter whether he signed with his name alone or with the addendum of Nobel laureate. The latter would exert pressure on his readers -

20 2

Cf. Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics, p. 89 f. * Ditto, L'ecrivaip doit refuser de se laisser transformer en institution, in: Le Monde, 24 Oct. 1964.

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something he did not wish. 22 But in Thiviers on the Sartre family's house there is a plaque hung on the wall with the main biographical data and the addendum "Prix Nobel de literature". An individual is powerless against being classified or, as Sartre calls it, "recuperation". Lyotard, however, had far more in mind than 'recuperation', something more fundamental. He believed that it is not at all necessary for the intellectual to refer to a universal subject and take on responsibility for the human community. This touches on very fundamental ideas and is more than just an attack on Sartre's conception of the intellectual. For Lyotard, it is quite clear that the responsibility that a universal subject takes on in the context of administrative or cultural decisions does not bestow any authority on the decision-makers who embody both functions: that of the intellectual and of the citizen.23 Lyotard is right in seeing it as a great temptation to place one's name at the service of a different responsibility from the one for which one gained this very name. This was presumably what Max Gallo was thinking of too, when calling on the intellectuals to express their views about the situation. This act of transcending can only happen in a universal context. Here Lyotard coincides again with Sartre. But Lyotard believes that since the mid-20th century there is no longer a totalising unity. The international solidarity among workers did not work out in the way the Commune of Paris had once lead people to assume. A century later the ideas of the Enlightenment had failed; one just had to take a look at where school education then stood. As enlighteners, intellectuals thought that through the dissemination of education one could obtain the freedom of citizens and prevent war. But today, schools are expected to produce hard-working professionals rather than to enlighten citizens.24 Meanwhile, Lyotard fails to produce enough evidence that would justify erecting a tomb for the intellectual. His opinion that there is no longer a "universal subject-victim" that would be able to work out a "concept of the world" is provocative. Taking care of the underprivileged, as Sartre tried to do, against all forms of injustice conformed to an ethical and civic responsibility. This position, however, allowed at the most a defensive and local intervention. "Going even further, it can mislead thinking, just as it misled Sartre's."25 For Sartre the intellectual was also disappearing, but not due to a universality that had gone astray, but rather because the impact of the work of art the intellectual had created went well beyond the legacy of his biography. The outcome of Sartre's analysis becomes a criterion of a work of art's quality in What is Literature? Sartre describes the work of art as beautiful, only if it in some 22 Le prix Nobel de litterature attribue a Jean-Paul Sartre. L'ecrivain le refuse et s'en explique, in: Le Figaro, 23 Oct. 1964. 23 Cf. J.-F. Lyotard, op. cit., p. 17 f. 24 Cf. op. cit., p. 19. 25 Op. cit., p. 21.

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way escapes its author's control.26 He constantly reminds others that an artist's work cannot be explained by his life: whoever tries to do this, judges the person simply on the basis of a chance concurrence of certain opportunities.27 In his 1958 foreword to Le Traitre by Andre Gorz,28 which became a portrait of Gorz, Sartre again recalls literature's special role. A book is really a quite amazing thing - and Sartre puts his ideas on literature in a nutshell here for this object is a work that is in the process of creating its own author.29 Every particular attention, or even privileges, encroach on the artist's independence. Karl Mannheim, who, after his habilitation work had been accepted by Alfred Weber, was Professor of Sociology at the University of Frankftirt from 1930 until his emigration in 1933, also expressed his views on the intellectual. His definition of the intellectual, whose social condition sociology is hardly able to grasp with its class concepts, since the intellectual is characterised by "a midway position, but not a class-defined middle position "30, is similar to the definition put forward by Sartre. Sartre concentrates his analysis of the 'intellectual' on the development of the classical intellectual into a politically oriented intellectual, who is supposed to be striving for the realisation of radical democracy. For the intellectual, whose place is in the "middle level", Mannheim proposes "two paths": either he joins up with one of the parties fighting for control on the basis of his own choice or he reflects on his own roots and becomes active as an advocate of the intellectual interests of society as a whole. In this respect Sartre always warned of the dangers of being 'monopolised'. So he felt it was a necessary step for himself to attempt to break with his own class and announce his split from bourgeois society. The memory of the visit Sartre paid to Andreas Baader in StuttgartStammheim in 197231 and the reference to his contacts with Maoist friends32 are an indication of the many failures during his leftist involvement. The visit to Baader and the events leading up to it throw a somewhat negative light on Sartre's friends, who clearly either advised him badly or perhaps even wanted to exploit him for their own purposes. 26

Cf. Sartre, What is Literature? p. 203. ? Ditto, Notebooks for an Ethics, p. 438. Cf. R. Rieffel, Les intellectuels sous la Ve Republique. 1958-1990, vol. II., Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1993, p. 102-104. 29 Cf. Sartre, Of Rats and Men, in: Sartre, Situations, p. 327-371, p. 336. 30 Cf. for the following: K. Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia. Collected Works Volume One. New York: (Routledge & Kean Paul 1936) Routledge, 1997, p. 139 ff. 31 Cf. H. E. Holthusen, Sartre in Stammheim: 2 Themen aus den Jahren der grofien Turbulenzen, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1982, pp. 138 f., 168, 174. Cf. W. Kraushaar, Sartre in Stammheim. Der Philosoph beim Staatsfeind Nummer eins - Ein Besuch and seine Folgen, in: Lettre international, 80, Spring 2008, p. 50-56. 32 Sartre, The Maoists in France, in: ditto, Life/Situations., 197, p. 162-171; p. 162: "I am not a Maoist." 2

28

88 Even in 1973, Sartre explained to the Spiegel that with his self-appointed task of finishing the fourth volume of The Family Idiot he had still retained something of the classical book-writing intellectual.33 In the same conversation he expressed the view that the intellectual had to bear up under the contradiction between the general demands of science and the use of learning by a particular class. Before 1968 he had been of the opinion that this contradiction was part of being an intellectual. Later he realised that it displeased students if an intellectual openly showed that he was occupying a contradictory position with respect to the masses. The intellectual had to join up with the masses and place himself at their service.34 After all, the masses had a right to gain their ideas from someone who was not separate from them. This distinction between the classical and the modern intellectual will have changed, Sartre thinks, in 50100 years, when there is no longer a division between manual labourers and intellectuals. For Mannheim, an intellectual's collaboration with his own class is problematic in a similar manner to that shown by Sartre: "Nothing would be more incorrect than to base one's judgment of the function of a social stratum on the apostatic behaviour of some of its members and to fail to see that the frequent iack of conviction' of the intellectuals is merely the reverse side of the fact that they alone are in a position to have intellectual convictions. [...] The repeated attempts to identify themselves with, as well as the continual rebuffs received from, other classes must lead eventually to a clearer conception on the part of the intellectuals of the meaning and the value of their own position in the social order."3^ Mannheim's second path is to look for the position of total perspective, whence to "play the part of watchmen in what otherwise would be a pitch-black night." Sartre phrased this in a similar manner: he states that a work of art is like a renewal of existence in a world and at the same time like a confirmation of life as an absolute value and of a freedom that addresses itself to all others.36 Only by taking the second path is it possible to illustrate the 'particularism'37 of one's bias. It is the capacity "to understand the whole process by which political interests and Weltanschauungen come into being in the light of a sociologically intelligible process" that begins to make politics into a science. Alluding to Sartre's political actions, mention was made in the 1973 Spiegel interview of de Gaulle's sentence "One does not arrest Voltaire". Sartre was certainly aware of his role: "Naturally, an intellectual is a person who outsteps

33

Sartre in conversation with the Spiegel, in: Der Spiegel, 7/1973, p. 84—98, esp. p. 96. Op. cit., p. 96. 3 ^ K. Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia. Collected works Volume One, New York: Routledge (1936), 1997, p. 141 f. 36 Sartre, The Plea for Intellectuals, p. 284 f. 3 7 For the following: K. Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, p. 144. 34

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theframeworkof normality."38 If he took part in a protest activity, he could be almost sure that the police would not intervene. It is possible that if Sartre had not spoken up for his friends in the various leftist groups so intensively - usually in his own name - their activities would have been obstructed to a greater degree. He was well aware of the differences between his Maoist friends and himself. When describing the position of the classic intellectual to Victor, the latter does not understand him. Sartre reminds the other of his distinction between the new type of intellectual and the classic type, both of which coexisted in him, Sartre: the classic intellectual is the one who writes the Flaubert book. The intellectual, as envisaged by Sartre's friends, is only in a position to go along with their schemes, Sartre argues, if he has his own firm points of reference, such as his Flaubert book.39 Sartre attempts to make a distinction, but basically sticks to the intellectual who due to his existing knowledge and his experience in other areas feels the urge to meddle. And he forbids Victor to criticise him in this. After all, these were problems that did not concern Victor as a Maoist. Sartre was prepared to enter into a discussion with Victor, but the other was not entitled to demand that he, Sartre, should cease working on "Flaubert". In 1970, Sartre was accused of sacrificing himself and his theory of the intellectual by taking on numerous political editorial tasks.40 He was reproached with political radicalisation because of these activities. Just as leftist groups succeeded in winning him over together with his name, especially if the state was already scrutinising them, these political activities must have appeared equally indiscriminate and unsystematic to his critics. Sartre's prediction that the intellectual would disappear, once he had completed his fight for man's true freedom, hardly looks as if it will become true, for Sartre himself called into question the complete realization of freedom in the interview with Jacques Chancel. No-one is completely free, since oppression and mystification are only possible because we are free.4! jhe criticism of the "classical intellectual" he names in a conversation with Hallier and Savignat42 in October 1970 is directed at the discrepancy between universal ideas and specialist knowledge discussed in the three above-mentioned lectures. There was no question of him renouncing his concept of the universal subject, simply because he believed that it could only be brought about in direct dialogue with the masses, he said. His demand that the intellectual should do away with himself and thus break up the discrepancy between his specialist knowledge and the universal quality of his thinking was not articulated, because the intellectual 38

Sartre in conversation with the Spiegel, p. 84-98; here: p. 95. 9 Cf. Ph. Gavi, Sartre, P. Victor, On a raison de se revolter, Discussions, p. 105. 4 0 W. von Rossum, Sich verschreiben Jean-Paul Sartre, Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1990, p. 123. 4 1 Cf. J. Chancel, Texte d'une interview radiophonique, p. 192. 42 Sartre, A Friend of People, p. 286-298. 3

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certainly needed to draw upon the technique of the Universal and employ his specialist knowledge in disseminating it.43 Sartre's theory of the intellectual permits those who give an oversimplified rendering of it to claim that he called for the intellectual's abolition. But every limitation on the intellectual's commitment would not only call into question individual facets of his actions; it would also obstruct his search for truth and rob him of the opportunity of legitimising his efforts. The concept of truth described in Verite et existence and the call inherent in it to transcend it ("But it is part of the very essence of truth that it has to be transcended."44) is the intellectual's foundation, about which Sartre had no doubts. Everyone is suspicious of the intellectual, because he resists attempts to monopolise him. His potential opponents believe they can call on him to account for himself, but since he does not feel that anyone has commissioned him, he is also.not answerable to those who pretend to be his creditors. In his oeuvre Sartre presented this stance in his portrait studies, basing it on the works of artists from various epochs, in different forms of expression - as writers, painters, sculptors - as well as in his own commitment, and analysed it in depth. By means of his concept of the intellectual and of the precise analyses in his portrait studies, which also served as an opportunity to reflect on his own works, he tried to write in opposition to society - which liked to assign its 'pupils' to a particular place. In an interview in 1960, he summed up his concern that the motives for devoting oneself to literature were becoming fewer and fewer. "Don't forget that a man carries a whole epoch within him, just as a wave carries the whole of the sea ..." 45 For him, literature was the privileged place in which to describe humans as "being-in-the-world"46. The investigations into literary history in the third volume of The Family Idiot and his obsession with finding out how the author from Croisset was in the position to write Madame Bovary at a certain point in time are witness to his uninterrupted interest in literature and its impact. Sartre's involvement on behalf of the Communist Party, especially in the years 1952-1956, stigmatised him and his work - it was something of which he was unable to rid himself for the rest of his life. What was the point in criticising the invasion of Hungary in 1956, when one knew that Sartre continually and constantly sympathised with his leftist friends of all shades and colours. These enjoyed the benefit of his name, but seldom of his theories. When he was awarded the Nobel prize in 1964, after the publication of his Words, he refused it on principle, just as he tried to escape from all public honours for fear of be43

Sartre, A Friend of People, p. 294. Ditto, Truth and Existence. Translated by A. van den Hoven. Chicago, London: The University Press, 1992. 4 5 Ditto, The Purposes of writing [an interview given by Sartre to M. Chapsal in 1959], in: ditto, Between Existentialism and Marxism, p. 7-32, p. 29. 46 Ditto, The Plea for Intellectuals, p. 284. 44

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ing monopolised, should he accept the prize, and of afterwards not being able to write with the same freedom because of his obligations towards others. For the Communists, Sartre wanted to be a compagnon de route. There are many different kinds of fellow-travellers: the really convinced ones who believed that others were already running along with them and the half-hearted ones who only ran along because they were not able to decide on a course of their own. As a fellow-traveller he wanted to influence the P.C.F. by giving it the occasional piece of advice. His attitude, which was nothing short of pigheaded, can perhaps only be explained in the light of the differences that became apparent during the Cold War and of his intention of catching up on a hitherto neglected political commitment. Some of his friends did not go along with this. Sartre's name and support were just about welcomed by the P.C.F. His "companionship" was his offer to contribute as an intellectual to a badly needed reform of Communism. Perhaps its main spokesmen foresaw that every kind of reform would inevitably mean the end of its ideology. Others made use of his support, and his critics interpreted his commitment among others things to La Cause du Peuple as an ideological volte-face. In the meantime what seemed unimaginable to us a few years ago has now become true. The collapse of the communist dictatorships in the East presents us with the opportunity of re-reading Sartre's oeuvre under a new light and in doing so of shifting the emphasis of our study. This turning point in history opens up new perspectives on Sartre's commitment to man's freedom, which he repeatedly re-defined in his works' highly varied forms. At the same time, Sartre has reminded us again and again of the responsibility that results from this freedom. His intransigent criticism of every attempt to restrict man's freedom, and his unremitting insistence on man's self-determination and its inviolability by other humans or by institutions of any kind, form the core of his legacy. "Life has a meaning if you chose to give it one. First of all you must act, you must throw yourself into some enterprise. If you think about it later on, the die is already cast, you are already involved",47 the autodidact explains to the nonplussed Roquentin in Bouville library, summing up the core of Sartre's existentialist philosophy. Sartre was first and foremost concerned with the intellectual's independence. He devoted his entire oeuvre to criticising those who tried to monopolise others for themselves or for their own ends. In his artist studies on Flaubert, Baudelaire, Mallarme, Tintoretto, Calder and Giacometti, Sartre examined the relationship of the artists to their works as well as the public's reactions to their art. The protagonists of the artist portraits display roughly the same features: with their art they often created something new despite considerable resistance, thereby emphatically demonstrating the individual's capacity to assert himself in the face of adversity. 47

Sartre, Nausea, p. 162.

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Sartre's critics, for their part, often showed such an uncompromising attitude in judging him and his actions that their own moral condemnation hardly appears convincing. Again and again, accounts of his failure have begun by pointing to his many unfinished book projects. To be sure, Sartre's attempt to restore a human dimension to Marxism in accordance with the critique he expressed in What is Literature? failed, just as his political involvement did. But this failure was the price Sartre paid for not having yielded to the demands made on him from various quarters. To be unclassifiable, to leave to the reader the task of categorising one's ideas and works, does to a certain extent hamper the posthumous impact of one's oeuvre. But the methodological variety to be found in Sartre's oeuvre, which is expression of his relentless search for new arguments on the fundamental issue of freedom, will enable future generations to find new perspectives in his works.

Albert Camus. Art and Morals

95 "The artist reconstructs the world to his plan." Camus, The Rebefl

7. Albert Camus: In search of morals The connection between Albert Camus' prose works and the aesthetics that he establishes in his theoretical works is a key to understanding the author's whole oeuvre. Camus entertained the idea of writing a treatise on aesthetics, as did Sartre, and noted in his diary that he wished to write a book on questions of art, in which he would sum up his aesthetics2. Like Sartre he did not finish this project, but an analysis of the links between his theoretical and narrative works reveals how aesthetically demanding his works are as a whole. When reading Camus' novellas, one is constantly reminded of The Stranger's unique art form, which defines the basis for his oeuvre's aesthetic quality. It is by viewing his narrative and his theoretical works as a unity that the fundamental claim of his aesthetics becomes evident. In September 1937, Camus noted in his diary the feeling of freedom that he experienced as both a passion and an obligation and that, as the starting point of morality, influenced his entire oeuvre.3 In his Notebooks Camus is in no doubt as to how to assess the meaning of morals: his book on morals would comprise 100 pages, all but one of them empty. On this last page he would note the obligation both to love; everything else he would negate. Under morals he understands a "style of life"4, and does not derive any obligations from this other than that of championing freedom. Camus, one infers from this, retains the scepticism that he had already begun to reveal in his first works: morality can only be formulated on the basis of universally accepted values. This remark is cautiously worded - and in fact already indicates the impossibility of morals. In June 1932 the article "Essai sur la Musique" appeared in the journal Sud. In this essay Camus examines the meaning of realism and idealism for art and on the basis of these observations comments on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche's concepts of music. The last sentence of this essay reads: "Art does not tolerate reason."5. 1 Camus, The Rebel. An Essay on Man in Revolt. Translated by A. Brower. New York: Vintage International, 1991, p. 255. 2 Cf. ditto, Notebooks 1942-1951. Translated by J. O'Brien. New York: Marlowe & Company, 1965, p. 243. 3 Cf. for the following: ditto, Notebooks 1935-1942. Translated by P. Thody. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963, p. 56-60. 4 Cf. ditto, Notebooks 1942-1951, p. 17. 5 Cf. ditto, Essai sur la musique, in: P. Viallaneix, Le premier Camus suivi de "Ecrits dejeunesse d'Albert Camus \ Cahiers Albert Camus 2, Paris 1973, p. 148-175, p. 175.

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Camus' diary entries from the period during which he wrote The Happy Death and Caligula and travelled to Italy show how he was struggling to find an adequate means of talking about both art itself and the impact of his work as an author. He does not hint at a solution to this problem in his diary in January 1936, but he does formulate a diagnosis: man lives in a hostile world, but he recognises his options and is aware of his responsibility.^ From this insight he derives the juxtapositioning of the terms of absurdity and lucidity. In reflecting in this manner, Camus is contemplating his future work, thus placing it close to Sartre's philosophy of existentialism. The difference between the two, however, is that whereas Sartre explains man's responsibility in his investigation into phenomenological ontology in Being and Nothingness, Camus restricts himself in his diary at the beginning of 1935 to the following exhortation: whoever wishes to be a philosopher has to write novels. Working as an author was to have the same value for Camus as a philosophical investigation. With his entire oeuvre and above all in his theoretical and narrative works, Camus sought to find an answer to life's absurdity. In doing so he did not embrace any kind of fatalism or pessimism. The result is rather an insight into the unavoidable necessity of accepting this life as it is and of renouncing all ideology. For Camus, it is first and foremost artists - meaning all those involved in creating art, including writers - who are given the role of being a guiding intellectual force. 7.1. Literary beginnings: The Wrong Side and the Right Side and Nuptials Camus wanted to be seen as an artist, rather than as an existentialist. In the preface of the new 1958 edition of his first collection of novellas, The Wrong Side and the Right Side, which contains autobiographical recollections, he names one of the reasons why he had decided to become an artist. For him there can be no art without refusal or consent.? "As a writer, I began to live in admiration of what is, in a sense, terrestrial paradise''^, he notes in his draft for this preface in his diary. The preface to the collection's new edition^ reads like a personal commitment both to his work and to his own aesthetic principles. It is as if he is telling the opponents of The Rebel to think back on its author's origins. He repeatedly mentions here and elsewhere the light and poverty of his native country and his youth. But taking this into consideration would not alone suffice to disclose 6 Cf. on the following: Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942, p. 8-12. 7 Cf. ditto, Preface, The Wrong Side and the Right Side, in: Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays. Translated by E. C. Kennedy. New York: Vintage Books, 1968, p. 7 8 Ditto, Notebooks 1951-1959. Translated by R. Bloom, I. Dell. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2008, S.4. 9 Ditto, Preface, The Wrong Side and the Right Side.

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what Camus expected from his work. So again, the present study is in no way an attempt to explain Camus' works by way of his origins, for the biographical approach can distract one from reading a text carefully and often obstructs one's view of the meaning of his texts. For example, in the final version of the preface for "The Wrong Side and the Right Side", Camus replaced the word 'writer' with 'artist', thereby hinting, in a brief but precise manner, at how he saw himself. The fact that Camus regularly returns to the novella genre, as in The Wrong Side and the Right Side, Nuptials^ and Exile and the Kingdom^ is indicative of its outstanding role in his oeuvre. Through the topics of his novellas he prepares his novels and theoretical writings, or brings a creative period to a close, as is the case with Summer12, a collection of novellas, with which he establishes his position vis-a-vis his critics in connection with the publication of The Rebel. In The Wrong Side and the Right Side, certain important motifs are presented - a lonely old woman, a taciturn mother, a conflict between different generations of a family, poverty, the light over the olive groves. All the topics of the later works are summarised in "Entre oui et non"13. Here, in just a few words Camus sketches out his memories of his father and the latter's early death in the First World War. The manuscript of The First Man^, which he had with him when he died in an accident in 1960, is a late continuation of this novella. "Death in the soul" in The Wrong Side and the Right Side discusses the remarkable role conceded to works of art, to the appreciation of art and thus to human actions as a whole. The story recounted here becomes the topic of a novel that was not published until 1971, under the title The Happy Death 15. "Death in the soul" is also proof of the fact that Camus' novellas contain travel experiences and reminiscences of many encounters. On one of the small shady piazzas in an Italian town someone remarks: "The soul exhausts its revolts [...]"16, thereby showing how closely places and a story's characters are connected. The description of the places and the actions often turns into an account of social relations. The people's relationship to the countryside, to their town or to the local circumstances surrounding an action is as important in his oeuvre as the observations of social interactions. Both spheres of the story, the social and the topographical, refer to each other and place the individual in a network of relationships. This is true of Meursault, while keeping watch over his mother's coffin, of Sisyphus, who defies the mountain, and of the doctor Rieux, who 10 Camus, Nuptials at Tipasa, in: ditto, Nuptials, 1938, in: ditto, Lyrical and Critical Essays, p. 65-72. 11 Ditto, Exile and the Kingdom, Translated by J. O'Brien, New York: Knopf, 1958. 12 Ditto, Summer, 1954, in: ditto, Lyrical and Critical Essays, p. 107-181. 13 Ditto, Between Yes and No, in: ditto, Lyrical and Critical Essays, p. 30-39, p. 32 f. 14 Ditto, The First Man. Translated by D. Hapgood. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995. 15 Ditto, The Happy Death. Translated by R. Howard. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973. 16 Ditto, Death in the soul, in: ditto, Lyrical and Critical Essays, p. 37.

98 fights against the plague in his town by playing off his knowledge of his fellowinhabitants against the plague. Such relations are for Camus an integral part of his reflections on man's tasks and obligations, and it is on the basis of these reflections that he develops his aesthetics. It is worthwhile re-reading these novellas after reading the novels, the later works and The Rebel. They document the search for an answer to questions that Camus posed himself while travelling or while reflecting on his experiences and observations. Every human, every author, and the artist in particular, he writes in the preface to these novellas, is dependent on a network of relations. Within this he shapes his art and thus formulates a link to his own commitment and to his creative work. Art requires the capacity to deduce essential insights from certain situations, not to concucunconditionally with every human situation and not to welcome all of man's revolts. "Nuptials at Tipasa" is the first story in the Nuptials collection, which appeared in 1939. With the exception of the fourth and last story of the volume, "The Desert", these stories give an account of impressions and events in North Africa, dealing with motifs and ideas that anticipate his later works. In "The Wind at Djemila" one finds the following decisive idea that might also stand at the end of The Myth of Sisyphus: few people, the narrator says, understand that there is such a thing as a refusal that has nothing to do with renunciation. 1? This idea thereafter became the leitmotiv of Camus' moral theory, as is shown by its importance to The Rebel.

7. 2. The Stranger's art form The novels The Stranger^ and The Plague^ systematise, each in its own way, the search for morals. The Stranger is an account of an individual's unsuccessful revolt against a society that does not want to understand him; The Plague is the account of a collective, a whole town, which has to work out how to oppose threatening disaster. In The Stranger, the protagonist Meursault finds himself being tried in court for the murder of an Arab, whom he shot and killed on a beach after the Arab had pulled out a knife. The murder itself is portrayed as an acte gratuit - an important topic in French literature since Gide's depiction of Lafcadio in Lafcadio's Adventures (Les caves du Vatican)!® Lafcadio's deed was groundless. It was committed simply because someone had been playing with the locks of 17 Camus, The Wind at Djemila, in: ditto, Lyrical and Critical Essays, p. 76. 18 Ditto, The Stranger. Translated by M. Ward, New York: Vintage Books, 1989. 19 Ditto, The Plague. Translated by S. Gilbert. New York: The Modern Library, 1984. 20 Cf. M. Raether, Der acte gratuit. Revoke und Literatur. Hegel, Dostojewskij, Nietzsche, Gide, Sartre, Camus, Beckett, Heidelberg: Winter, 1980, p. 73-77, p. 167.

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his suitcase, thus prompting Lafcadio to throw his fellow-passenger out of the train together with his suitcase, just as the train was crossing a river. Similarly, in The Stranger, Meursault informs the courtroom that he killed the Arab simply because of the sunrays that reflected in the knife the Arab was about to throw at him. Meursault' trial at court belongs to the novel's second part, in which with the witnesses' statements cause all scenes from the first part of The Stranger to be re-enacted, as if on stage. The description of the characters gives the novel a strict and carefully thought out structure. The narrator lets all the characters of the first part reappear in the second and shows how with their somewhat indifferent attitude to the accused's destiny they in fact incriminate him. Among them are the director and the gatekeeper of the old people's home in which Meursault's mother had died, his friend Marie and Ramon, from whom he had taken the revolver after Ramon's argument with the Arab to stop him from doing anything stupid with it. In the preface to the American edition of The Stranger, the author explains that Meursault did not play along with the game. Anyone in our society who did not cry at his mother's funeral risked being sentenced to death. Meursault's refusal to dissemble emotions is seen by society as a threat. Meursault did not regret his crime in accordance with the phrases and emotional expressions expected of him.21 This recalls something Camus had noted in his Notebooks: one's fellow human beings often find the truth hard to bear.22 Meursault follows and comments on the court proceedings, communicating little more than his observations. He simply accepts everything, but is not apathetic, for he is very aware of every opinion and every manner of behaviour. The simple truth, which Meursault refuses to embellish, results in a death sentence. Then, when a priest visits him in his prison cell to receive his confession and says he would like to pray with him, Meursault loses his temper, screams at the priest, and vents his disappointment and anger on him. The priest, however, has no wish to recognise life's absurdity and sets about consoling Meursault with the idea that life is not in vain or absurd. The priest's self-assurance makes him appears like a know-all and a useless moral apostle, and instead of consoling the condemned prisoner this has the effect of provoking him. Even if in his outburst Meursault does call his life absurd - this is the only place in the novel where the absurd is expressly mentioned - this does not justify calling The Stranger a 'novel of the absurd'. Meursault simply represents human life in general, and in particular the fact that death is waiting for us all. Faced with death himself, Meursault is forced to accept the certainty that escape is not possible. In the last analysis, the reproaches that Meursault hurls at the fa21 Cf. Camus, Preface to the Stranger, 1956, in: ditto, Lyrical and Critical Essays, p. 335337, here p. 336. 22 Cf. ditto, Notebooks 1942-1951, p. 216.

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ther confessor must therefore be seen as aimed above all else at the priest's selfassuredness, with which Meursault wants to have nothing to do. 23 One misunderstands Camus' novel if one reduces Meursault's story simply to a description of Meursault's consciousness of the absurd. The novel's aesthetic significance is based on its form, which does not link up with any of the traditional narrative forms. The account of the fate of the employee Meursault is no kind of life-confession, it contains no reminiscences and does not resemble a straightforward report. Nor does The Stranger's form recall that of a diary, for the narrative's strict composition is not organized as a sequence of days. The first two sentences - "Maman died today. Or yesterday may be, I don't know,"24 - make the reader directly acquainted with Meursault without a lengthy descriptive introduction. There is no indication of the situation in which Meursault received the message -just the remark that the telegram contained no information about whether his mother had died on that day or the previous one. Some commentators are convinced of having found an "absurd style" in The Stranger: the use of short, successive sentences to describe individual moments, whose purpose is to relieve the monotonous progress of time. The descriptions that sum up the progress of time at the end of individual scenes just by listing them and that let Meursault appear as an exact observer do not fit into the concept of those commentators who are only interested in the novel's absurd style. These commentators do not hesitate to interpret the novel's form as a weakness of the author. In fact, however, Camus' practice of listing the impressions and events significantly increases the intensity of the experience. Each time unalterable events take their course, this stylistic device reappears. The impressions are not lined up arbitrarily; they in fact follow a precise form, underlining the impression of inalterability. Especially when the reactions of others do not coincide with his own opinion, Meursault lets one sense his amazement. Again and again he believes he has to justify his behaviour. The Stranger 's form has rightly been called "an inner monologue recorded with the help of art"25. Camus' simple language in The Stranger never refers to connections, circumstances or proceedings outside of the novel. The syntax, with its short sentences and the use of the perfect, appears almost colloquial, conveying the impression of a spoken monologue. The use of simple words is not in contrast with the chosen topic's seriousness; it even strengthens the novel's quality and the task it sets before the reader. The descriptions are an integral part of the plot, determining more than anything else Meursault's reactions and his relations to 23 Cf. the tape recording of April 1954: during the transmission "Lecture d'un Soir", Albert Camus read the entire L 'Etranger: ditto, L 'Etranger, Texte integral enregistre par Albert Camus en avril 1954, 3 CDs, R. Grenier, [Introduction], Paris: Fremeaux & Associes, 2002. 24 Camus, The Stranger, p. 3. 25 Cf. P. Gaillard, Albert Camus, Paris: Bordas, 1973, p. 79. (Translated by C. Atkinson)

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the others. His experiences are simply recounted, without commentary and with no hint of censure; and several of the work's interpreters found their criticism of Meursault's attitude on the lack of moral values.26 Meursault's own observations tempt the reader into condemning him for his passivity, apathy and amorality. But such a judgement confirms the criticism of the lack of moral reflection that the novel directs at all involved in the trial and its readers. The public prosecutor charges Meursault with moral transgressions, thus demonstrating how easily moral standards can be twisted round into their exact opposite. Nowhere at all are those who directly bring about his death sentence or contribute to it criticised. The behaviour of all involved in the second part shows how morals can be reduced to absurdity. The Stranger is exemplary with regard to style and form. The novel lays down new standards for art. The employment of stylistic means makes Camus' book a work of art that demonstrates art's autonomy in a particularly urgent manner.27 His aesthetics touches on the relation between morals and truth. Camus understands his heroes as the embodiment of a passion for the absolute and the truth, without which conquering one's own self and the world can never be possible. The portrayal is all the more forceful in that Camus succeeds in not actually discussing the underlying ideas in the novel, preferring to convert them into the novel's structure by way of the composition, language, phrasing and the characters' relations to one another. Searching for cross-connections and influences might succeed in places, but it overlooks the novel's aesthetic autonomy, which allows it to become a medium of truth.

26 Even today criticism in secondary literature is still directed at Meursault's behaviour: cf. H. Teschke, Franzosische Literatur des 20. Jahrhunderts. Uberblick und Trends, Stuttgart: Klett, 1998, p. 83: "Meursault's life as well as his account lack the meaning and coherence that his prosecutors search for in the trial." 27 For a historical view of the conditions of artistic autonomy cf. W. Ruppert, Der moderne Kunstler. Zur Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte der kreativen Individualitdt in der kulturellen Moderne im 19. undimfruhen 20. Jahrhundert, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1998, p. 289303. - On the intellectuals' claim to autonomy cf. A. Gipper, Der Intellektuelle. Konzeption und Selbstverstandnis schriftstellerischer Intelligenz in Frankreich und Italien 19181930, Stuttgart: M & P Verlag fur Wissenschaft und Forschung, 1992, p. 305-309.

103 "Every artistic doctrine is an alibi whereby the artist tries to justify his own limits." Albert Camus, Notebooks [January 1956]'

8. Art as an answer to the absurd The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus both appeared in 1942. The Myth of Sisyphus analyses man's situation in the world and defines the tasks with which art is confronted. By defining the conditions or prerequisites of art, Camus is enquiring into the question of morals.

8.1. The absurd is not the end of the matter: The Myth of Sisyphus The Myth of Sisyphus?- describes how the absurd arises from man's position, confronted as he is with a world that envelops him in silence.3 This essay on the absurd forms the first part of a trilogy, in which two theoretical works - The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel - accompany a narrative work: The Plague, The treatise on Sisyphus identifies the absurd as a fate that man cannot escape, while The Rebel combines a historical analysis of revolt with reflections on morals. The latter work's conclusion is that revolt is a human task founded in morality. The world itself is not absurd; only man himself in his relation to the world is capable of grasping this relationship as absurd. The absurd is the only connection between man and the world A From this analysis Camus develops the notion of revolt, though he does not think that this empowers man to overcome his absurd situation. It also makes no sense for someone to try to put an end to the absurd situation himself, for suicide cannot defeat the absurd. The essential senselessness of the absurd cannot be overcome by flight of any kind at all. It is only when humans have accepted the absurd nature of their existence that they possess what is required to understand their situation. This insight is the topic of The Myth of Sisyphus, whose hero continually has to roll a stone up a mountain, only to watch the stone roll back down again every time. Camus' statement - that the uphill struggle is enough to fill a man's heart entirely^ - summarises the myth in a pithy way, making it appear as a task that even attaches a little hope to man's unremitting effort. The absurd only gains any meaning to the extent that one does not consent to it, Camus concludes. This insight leads to his concept of freedom - one 1 Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959, p. 168. 2 Ditto, The Myth of Sisyphus, in: ditto, The Myth of Sisyphus and other Essays. Translated by J. O'Brien. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958. 3 Cf. ditto, The Myth of Sisyphus, p. 18. 4 Cf. for the following: op. cit, p. 30 ff. 5 Op. cit., p. 123.

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that he connects with that of revolt. Freedom is not a fundamental rebellion against fate, just as little as fate means that one has to accept everything unquestioningly. In this sense revolt has an ambiguous character because it embraces both consent and refusal. Examining the connection between absurdity and revolt, between a particular insight and options as to how to act, belongs to the field of morals and thus to philosophy, even if some of Camus' commentators believe that his work as an author and his theoretical works do not make a philosopher of him. The systematic approach Camus applies to his works, and that he often formulates in his Notebooks, places his work at least in the vicinity of philosophy^. An entry made in the mid-1950s outlines the structure of his complete oeuvre: "I. The Myth of Sisyphus (absurd) - Jj. The Myth of Prometheus (revolt) - III. The Myth of Nemesis."7 Camus' main question is: how should humans behave once they have accepted the world's absurdity? Camus is evasive at first and does not wish to make definitive conclusions on the question of morals. He simply states that he does not want to write here on morals, because someone who accepts the absurd can only accept a morality that do not cut him off from God. But this is the way he lives: cut off from God. Camus sees all other moral standards as a mere justification - one that someone who is conscious of his absurd position does not require. Camus' remark that he does not wish to understand the absurd as a carte blanche because it does not make every act permissible demonstrates the necessity of reflecting on morals. The man who has grasped the absurdity of his situation realises the consequences of his actions and is aware of his responsibility. The passages on Don Juan, the actor and conqueror, are intended to prove the division between absurdity and morality. Camus' Don Juan has comprehended the absurd and, within its limits, has taken pleasure from his own creation: "the absurd joy par excellence is creation."8. Don Juan represents "an ethic of quantity''^. As a seducer, he lives without regret and without hope. In Don Juan's view, love is neither eternal nor absolute. This is how we should understand Camus' comment that humans multiply those things they cannot unite. The connection of love with the certainty of being transitory and unique calls into question Don Juan's alleged egoism. Behind the figure of Don Juan there is the question of the yardstick with which others wish to make moral judgements on his behaviour. In Don Juan's case it is a question of whether the morality of others is valid for the individual. Another case would be that of the actor who is aware of the transitory nature of his roles and who can therefore also be reck6 Cf. Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942, p. 27. Ditto, Notebooks 1942-1951, pp. 158, 207 f., 255, 257. 7 Ditto, Notebooks 1942-1951, p. 257. 8 Ditto, The Myth of Sisyphus, p. 93. 9 Ditto, op.cit., p. 72.

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oned among the 'absurd humans', for he lives in agreement with the situation in which he acts. If an aesthetics is founded on the basis of the above analysis, then one gains yet another perspective on absurdity. It concerns the most absurd of all people, the artist, Camus writes. 10 The reason why an artist is absurd is because only the insight into the absurdity of his situation allows him to realise his artistic potential in its entirety. It is after all aesthetics - in the sense of a description of the world - with which man confronts the absurd. "The absurd world can receive only an aesthetic justification," 11 Camus writes in his diary at the end of 1944, and this observation became both the programme and the essence of his aesthetic approach. Art offers no attempt at a solution with which to rid the world of its absurdity, but it does both describe the world and create an understanding of its absurdity. To create means to live twice, 12 summarizes Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus. If one overlooks the passages on art one will misinterpret the position of the absurd in Camus' work and thus the interpretation of the Sisyphus myth. The chapter entitled "The absurd creation" 13, meaning the work of art, defines no escape route; it is itself an absurd phenomenon, for it keeps a place of refuge free, rather than cancelling out the absurd. A work of art offers a changed perspective on the world. In this chapter Camus assigns the task of providing humans with options of how to act in an absurd world exclusively to art. Through the protagonists, Meursault, Rieux, Kaliayev and later, in the story of Jonas or The Artist at Work^ the artist Gilbert Jonas, Camus' prose works and dramas provide reflections on the potential of aesthetics. The work of art is not to be understood as a flight into the absurd. Even if it is called 'absurd', it must be understood as a sign of the suffering that determines man's thinking. A work of art does not open up an escape route; it conveys an idea of how to understand the world. In this sense art is given a particular meaning in The Myth of Sisyphus, for the work of art lets the spirit within emerge to reveal itself to the other, as Camus expresses it. Moreover, it does not do this so that the other might lose himself, but it instead indicates a direction that places everyone under obligation. I5 This phrasing is supposed to make clear that the work of art itself does not aspire to providing explanations, solutions or proof. The beginning of the creation process is described as possessing a "lucid indifference." Humans come to grasp their absurdity, just as science has become conscious of its contradictions and so restricts itself to describing and portraying the phenom10 Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, p. 72. 11 Ditto, Notebooks 1942-1951, p. 47. 12 Cf. ditto, The Myth of Sisyphus, p. 94. 13cf.op.cit,p. 93-118. 14 Cf. ditto, Jonas or The Artist at Work, in: ditto, Exile and Kingdom, p. 56-80. 15 Cf. for the following: ditto, The Myth of Sisyphus, p. 94 ff.

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ena. Every attempt at explanation is out of the question in view of the variety of human situations. Camus' examination concentrates on the work of art as such, on the conditions under which it was created, and also on the starting point, i.e., on the idea that the artist wants to realise with his work. Camus writes that, for him, thinking was the first step to wanting to create a world. He sees in art the opportunity for people not to fully overcome the contradictions they face, but rather to create a universe out of these contradictions, and thus to come to terms with them, so to speak, as well as with the moral dilemma that separates the artist from the world. By confronting himself with this task, the artist must attempt both to set down rational arguments and also to be responsible for them. This is the theoretical context into which Camus places the novel, an art form which Camus ranks higher than poetry. The decision taken by great authors to create their own universe and to express themselves in the imagery of language shows they are convinced that it is pointless trying to provide absolute explanations. Characterising novels, as Camus does, as the completion of a philosophy that has not yet been expressed suggests that the novel serves as an instrument for gaining insight. The end of the chapter on "Absurd creation" demonstrates the meaningful nature of aesthetics by contrasting hope with the absurd life: if the artist does not depict the discrepancy between life and the world, and if he neither takes the absurdity of life into account nor evokes revolt, then his work produces hope and illusions and is thus no longer free of purpose. The artist binds himself to something and believes to have found a meaning in it. If life is monopolised in this way, it no longer offers the opportunity to break away and to develop the fervour that brings out man's splendour and his true non-utilitarian nature. Moreover, art cannot produce definitive statements. Behind these reflections, Camus is expressly warning against letting ideologies become an end in themselves.!6 In a short passage in The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus discusses the duration of a revolt, which he does not see as a single event. A revolt is not an isolated act of rebellion; it characterises the basic attitude of those who have recognised the absurdity of their situation. In this sense revolt is a life-long task, and human existence is only given significance through revolt. The important thing is the benefit that someone can gain from the fearless and unscrupulous use of his intelligence. 17 Understanding the rebel in this way can also help us to comprehend Sisyphus' revolt: rather than rebelling against the will of the gods, Sisyphus senses that he is in some way superior to his fate. 18 Just as many authors of studies on literary history list Camus' works under the heading of the absurd, thus presenting an oversimplified view of them and 16

Cf. ditto, The Myth of Sisyphus, p. 102. 17Cf. op.cit., p. 55. 18Cf.op.cit., p. 120 f.

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obscuring their significance, his Myth of Sisyphus is often read only as a treatise on the absurd, and the references to art are neglected. It is important to realize, however, that Camus is expressly formulating his opinions about an artist's tasks here, presenting art as the only adequate answer to man's situation in the world.19 The Myth of Sisyphus does not describe man's life as absurd. The essay attributes to humans an inalienable freedom, defined by Camus as the freedom to think and act.20 The absurd arises from the confrontation between man and his world.21 Within one's limits one has to counter the absurd with one's own initiative, but without expecting to abolish it. As long as the meaning and concept of the absurd are at the centre of attention in The Myth of Sisyphus, it is of no surprise that the book's last chapter on the absurd work22 has not received the attention it deserves. Perhaps this lack of attention is because the chapter's contents are somewhat misleading: if an artist accepts absurdity, this does not necessarily make his work absurd. However, the notion of the absurd itself has often not been sufficiently well understood. The absurd does not provide definitive judgements; it is a point of departure. In the interview with Gabriel d'Aubarede in 1951, Camus expressed his views on the meaning of the absurd in his oeuvre.23 The word had not been grasped in the way he had expected, Camus states. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus wanted to formulate a method, without looking for a doctrine, while The Rebel was an attempt to portray the various attitudes of man towards the absurd. In this interview Camus claimed that man's historical dimension and his development can be contrasted with a static characterisation of man's situation. If one traces this opinion throughout Camus' works, it will become apparent that the world's absurdity in fact only has any significance in the sense of being a point of departure. History and art do not cancel out the world's absurdity; but both will broaden man's experiences, knowledge and powers of expression and confirm his will to assert himself; they are expressly formulated here as an answer to the world's absurdity.

19 In his short analysis of L 'homme revolte, Schlette mentions the role of art and characterises well its role as described by Camus: cf. H. R. Schlette, Albert Camus' Hoffnung, in: Camus, Weder Opfer noch Henker. Translated by L. Pfaff. Zurich: Diogenes, 1996, p. 69106, esp. p. 98: Schlette formulates a desideratum for scholars: "It would be worthwhile pursuing this idea further and revealing the basic tenets of Camus' theory of art and aesthetics; that is not possible here." 20 Cf. Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, p. 65. 21 Cf. op.cit, p. 30. 22 Cf. op. cit., p. 93-118. 23 Encounter with Albert Camus [conversation with G. d'Aubarede] in: ditto, Lyrical and Critical Essays, p. 356.

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8. 2. The fight against disaster: The Plague The Plague was published in June 1947. The novel describes the outbreak of plague in Oran and the inhabitants' struggle against the deadly disease. The narrative focuses on Rieux, a doctor, who does not hesitate to start fighting against the epidemic. He persuades Rambert and Tarrou to fight alongside him, justifies his commitment and organises the resistance. The entries in the Notebooks that relate to The Plague show how Camus derived the concept of revolt from an analysis of the absurd and then transferred it to the novel's scenario. In The Stranger, an individual's revolt against a fate for which his fellow humans were partly responsible was at the heart of the plot, whereas in The Plague, the^protagonists systematically oppose a disaster that befalls the inhabitants of Oran from without, and ultimately with success. Castel, a doctor, is talking with his colleague Rieux after having diagnosed the disease that has broken out. He reports to Rieux that it is the plague, and Rieux reminds him incredulously that the plague had disappeared more than twenty years earlier. When the death toll amounts to thirty on one day alone, the prefect orders the town gates to be closed. In view of the aggravated situation the novel's two main characters, the doctor Rieux and Tarrou, develop an interpretation of the absurd and of revolt in the course of their conversations. Tarrou first has to be convinced of joining Rieux in the fight against the epidemic. But then he also realises that everyone carries the plague in himself, thus confirming The Plague as a piece of writing against totalitarianism and as a call for integrity and an exhortation to respect moral principles. The novel describes the experience of involuntary exile, the isolation of the town's inhabitants from the outside world and their struggle against the disaster that has befallen them. What measures need to be implemented to combat the deadly disease, and how do social relations change as the situation unfolds? At the end of the novel, the narrator Rieux recounts the reason for his report: he wrote about the events in Oran in order not to belong to those who said nothing, to pass on a reminder of the injustice and violence of human life and to reinforce the notion that there is more in man to admire than to despise. The novel can also be interpreted as a defence of community spirit and as a reminder of the fact that overcoming a danger sometimes first requires someone's initiative. Humans cannot evade their responsibility. Camus is possibly also pointing at attempts made by individuals to escape a common fate - ones that he wanted to examine critically in his novel. In the entries written in Camus' Notebooks after 1942, one often comes across reflections on the relations between morality and art. Reading the Notebooks reveals the connections between The Plague and The Rebel because the entries prove that Camus was working simultaneously on his novel on the plague in Oran and on a theoretical treatise on man's revolt.

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The Plague frequently indicates the parallels between the events depicted, the totalitarian systems of the day and the German occupation of France. The novel is a parable, and as such contains allusions to the atrocities of National Socialism, while at the same time posing fundamental questions about man's place in the world. Humans cannot escape from this world, but they can and must shape their situation if they want to make use of their freedom. The novel is a reminder of the fact that moral principles will repeatedly prevail, independently of man's deeds and despite human destiny. A note in his diary - "Plague. All fight - and each in his own way"24 - shows how humans, in spite of their solidarity, always have to fend for themselves and find their own way. But there is another way to read this note, namely, as saying that The Plague attempts to shape "a collective passion".25 How do humans behave in the face of fate? The plague was conquered the moment the inhabitants of Oran gained a little hope at the first sign of the disease abating. From their efforts alone, the people would not have been able to overcome the plague; but their tenacity in the face of their misfortune helped them to a memorable victory.26 Every epoch will acknowledge the novel's timeless topicality, because it urgently contrasts human impotence with man's necessary task of seizing the initiative. In his Notebooks, Camus' thoughts concentrate on the outlook that the town's inhabitants, beleaguered by the plague, had to adopt. Other entries are concerned with art's capacity to deal with reality. Man can confront the disaster that befalls him with protest and revolt. But fiction and analysis provide neither instructions on how to act nor a straightforward recipe for success, because between the causes of revolt and its potential success one begins to recognise a distance that cannot be overcome. In the Notebooks, this distance is explained via the role of art. People can make use of art's potential, but it will not be able to change their fundamental situation, for art is first of all just a way of revealing suffering.27 This aesthetic approach accentuates the artist's painful experiences. But a biographical explanation of art is not intended, since the same entry emphasizes man's transcendence in relation to himself. In this sense art reveals to people a way of surpassing themselves. In his Notebooks Camus compares art with a sense of shame, thereby explaining why art is incapable of addressing things directly. This restraint is connected with art's reconstruction of the world in the form of an image. To 'repeat' the world rather than to transform it amounts to betraying it. Therefore art cannot represent reality itself. So someone's work, even if created on the basis of the world, is always directed against the world. This creative aspect of art is closely connected with revolt, for Camus understands the art with which an artist creates the world anew as a form of 24 Camus, Notebooks 1942-1951, p. 83. 25 Cf. op. cit., p. 137. 26 Cf. ditto, The Plague, p. 242. 27 Cf. ditto, Notebooks 1942-1951, p. 84, cf. for the following: p. 81.

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protest - one at least that he has at the back of his mind when expressing himself in art. One year after the publication of The Plague, on the occasion of an international meeting of authors, Camus expressed his opinion on the artist's status and tasks in a lecture entitled "Le temoin de la liberte", pointing out that in a world of death sentences the artist has to testify to whatever it is in man that refuses to die.28 In the first sentence of his lecture he names the topic and the thrust of his attack: as a result of mediocre and cruel ideologies, humans have become accustomed to feel ashamed of everyone and everything. He means here the various forms of ideological manipulation that rob people of their intellectual freedom in an attempt to use them for their own ends. He warns artists against allowing their tasks to be dictated to thgm and thus of letting themselves be monopolised by an ideology. In this lecture, Camus calls politics and art two sides of the same revolt against disorder in the world. The definition of the artist's task cannot be viewed independently of the events of the war and of the immediate post-war period. In a certain historical situation the connections between history and politics, on the one hand, and art, on the other, pose a very urgent question about art's moral dimension. One of Camus' remarks accentuates in a particularly distinctive fashion the importance he attaches to art: Camus does not believe that fighting produces artists, but rather that it is art that forces us to fight. The reason Camus thinks that art has this effect is that the artist is witness to freedom. No artist can appeal to morals or virtue with the intention of escaping commitment. He can only appeal to what is unique in humans. In the face of the world's misfortune it is art's task to oppose this world, for the artist's world is one of lively conflict and understanding. Camus complains of life's loss of reality and of its succumbing to ideologies. His own day was one of totalitarian ideologies that were only able to envisage the world's well-being under their own rule. In this lecture, Camus examines the connections between art and politics: through its very existence a work of art refutes ideology's success. Camus is referring here to art's fundamental superiority over ideology. Parallels used to be drawn between conquerors - that is, those, such as Prometheus, who act - and artists, who with their revolt both fought against disorder in the world. Since ideologies have started to present totalitarian claims, one should no longer overlook the sharp contrast between the artists and the conquerors, Camus recommends. Artists are able to differentiate and make subtle distinctions, whereas the conquerors, pursuing an ideology, permit no differences. One can accuse such conquerors of contempt for humanity; their world is that of lords and slaves, it is the world we live in - this is Camus' sad judgement. But works of art are not founded on hate. From the act of describing the world one develops the uncom28 Cf. Le temoin de la liberte, in: ditto, Essais. Edited by R. Quilliot and L. Faucon. Paris: Gallimard, 1965, p. 397-406, here p. 406 f. Cf. for the following, p. 399-405.

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promising attitude of resistance that Camus demands of the artist. For Camus, the only coherent attitude that befits an artist is either uncompromising refusal or abstinence from art altogether. Viewed against the backdrop of the Resistance and the Cold War, this stance carries particular weight. On the basis of these reflections the moral dimension of the artist's task becomes recognizable: the artist should never become an accomplice of those who make use of the language and tools of ideology. The artist is committed, albeit involuntarily. Commitment is not a decision to champion something; it is part of the artist's situation. This commitment is not founded on morality, for it concerns living up to the demands of an art that is superior to ideologies. All artists, Camus' conclusion reads, understand it as their task to defend their opponents' right to be of a different opinion. Camus counters the suspicion that the arrogance of ideologies will be an obstacle to dialogue in Europe by challenging artists to prove the contrary. Camus does not name the tasks of an artist in so many words or in the shape of a list. But one can recognise what he believes them to be from the overall context of his works and from what he noted in his lecture "Le temoin de la liberte": the artist is above all committed to freedom; he has to oppose ideologies, he is no one's mortal enemy; one cannot demand of him that he becomes involved, he is responsible for his actions anyway - Sartre says much the same in What is Literature? He acts in the name of passion and of whatever is unique in man. Camus' humanism is inextricably bound up with the tasks of an artist.29 In the chapter "Rebellion and Art" in The Rebel, art and the process of creativity are placed on a par with revolt. Art preserves its independence owing to its superiority. Even if it expresses revolt, it should under no circumstances become subordinate to revolt. Art can only present such moral principles as serve to justify its own task. These ideas explain why every kind of ideology is rejected: ideologies demand submission and hate. Art also helps us to develop creative approaches for both supporting revolt and at the same time preventing its excesses. Struggling for morality is again and again the subject matter of Camus' diary entries: "Can man create his own values? That is the whole problem"30. At the same time Camus expresses his increasing doubt about morals. At the end of 1948, Camus decided that he had failed to answer this question, although he had tried everything to be a moral human: "Morality kills."31 Calling morality into question in this way was an important opportunity for Camus to consider more carefully its prerequisites in his theoretical works.

29

Cf. Camus, Le temoin de la liberte, p. 399-406. 30 Ditto, Notebooks 1942-1957, p. 44. 31 Op. cit., p. 200.

113 "What is a rebel ? A man who says no, but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation. He is also a man who say yes, from the moment he makes his first gesture of rebellion." Camus, TheRebefl

9.

Morals und revolt

9.1. The history of revolt The Plague first appeared in June 1947, State of Siege2 was performed a year later and The Just Assassins^ in December 1949. In State of Siege, Diego comments on the plague: "I reserve my scorn for the oppressors. Whatever you do, these men will be greater than you."4 Diego refuses to ignore the logic of the massacre, now raised to the status of a law. In The Just Assassins, Kaliayev hates despotism and carries out an assassination of the Grand Duke. For him, revolution is a chance one has to give to life. These plays are some of the ideas developed by Camus in preparation for writing The Rebel. In 1946 Camus held a lecture in Columbia University that appeared under the title of The Human Crisis^. The lecture combats the decline of values, and the decay of morality both before and during the war by advocating a revolt against violence and lies. The human crisis appears, he says, once people begin to see homicide with feelings other than those of disgust and shame. Realising that we are all responsible for "Hitlerism"6 is the main tenor of his lecture, which places special emphasis on acknowledging human dignity. This definition of revolt will later reappear in The Rebel. In his Letters to a German Friend7 Camus expressly opposed brute force, and in his fourth letter he called for resistance towards injustice in the world on behalf of human truth. He emphatically criticised the "horrible behaviour" of the Germans, not without recalling that all Europe, Germany too, was "caught in the same tragedy of the intelligence". After The Plague, Camus wrote The Rebel, in which he examines the motives of those who rebel, as well as their perspectives and limitations, thus de1 Camus, The Rebel, p. 13. 2 Ditto, State of Siege, in: ditto, Caligula and Three Other Plays. Translated by S. Gilbert. New York: Vintage Books, 1958, p. 135-232. 3 Ditto, The Just Assassins. Piece en cinq actes [1948], in: ditto, Caligula and Three Other Plays, p. 233-302. 4 Ditto, State of the Siege, p. 223 5 Cf. ditto, The Human Crisis. Translated by L. Abel, in: Twice a Year, no. 14-15, p. 19-33. 6 Cf. op. cit., p. 2. 7 In the following: Letters to a German Friend, in: ditto, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death Translated by J. O'Brien. New York: Knopf, 1961, p. 30.

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veloping a theory of revolt or rebellion. Revolt turns against developments that destroy a community's values. In this sense The Rebel cites moral considerations as a means of assessing the necessity, success and failure of revolts. Morality is not the only criterion with which to judge revolt. Art plays a special role in The Rebel because of its demand for unity and its ability to create something new. The parallels between revolt and art explain revolt's superiority over revolution. One recognises a certain reserve on the part of Camus towards acute questions concerning events of the Cold War. The Rebel is an impressive analysis of the times and one that is not satisfied with criticising ideologies merely on a political level. Camus is concerned here with man's potential to use his own independent insight to rebel against fate, and thereby to help others, though not at too great a cost. ^ The detachment from current affairs and the precision with which The Rebel contrasts art's autonomy with the totalitarian demands of ideologies, make of this essay a work that even today has lost nothing of its relevance. The prediction that revolutions fail if they neglect their foundations and thus adopt a totalitarian character matches the turning point in history of 1989. The critique of Marxism that is summarised in The Rebel under the heading "The Failing of the Prophecy"8 turned Camus himself into an outsider at the beginning of the 1950s. In view of his short interlude as member of the P.C.F. in 1936, Camus had long since crossed ground that others still had before them. The Rebel examines the options, tasks and duties of a writer, intellectual and artist with respect to a politics that had distanced itself from every kind of morality. This essay does not conclude by affirming the distance between morals and politics; it is concerned with asking how much morals can influence power,9 how the loss of values can be prevented, and how a revolt can be successful. Are there fundamental moral values that, despite all signs to the contrary, can directly or indirectly determine human actions? This question is answered on the essay's first page: the origin of every revolt is refusal, and a refusal is always the expression of something that the rebel values. The essay contains no call for a revolt. Rebellion is presented in an abstract way. After analysing man's absurd confrontation with the world in The Myth of Sisyphus, the context in which people act in an absurd world is now examined under the heading of 'rebellion'. In The Rebel a revolt arises as a result of a value judgement. It begins by someone ascertaining that his momentary situation no longer ties in with his own values. In Camus' analysis of revolt there are no detailed instructions on how a revolt ought to be conducted, only an analysis of how an individual's refusal can or should arise. The purpose of revolt is not 8 Camus, The Rebel, p. 210-226. 9 Cf. D. Hoeges, Niccold Machiavelli. Die Macht und der Schein, Munich: C. H. Beck, 2000; ditto, Niccold Machiavelli Dichter - Poeta Mit samtlichen Gedichten, deutsch/italienisch Con tutte le poesie, tedesco/italiano, Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang Verlag, 2006.

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to produce a unique event, but rather to provide the impetus for concrete change. Resistance as an act, but also as an attitude - this is how one needs to understand the beginning of The Rebel - starts the moment others cross a borderline that the person has already set himself. At this point he must say 'no'. His revolt does not necessarily have to be triggered off by another's specific behaviour. It suffices if, from a certain point onwards, a situation no longer matches the values one set oneself. Every area of daily life can provide situations that pose the question of whether, in the long term, someone has to tolerate the actions of others or, alternatively, whether they must tolerate the situation in which they have ended up. The Rebel's introduction examines the terms 'crime', 'absurdity' and 'revolt'. In the opening passages the reader is confronted with Camus' need to explain what he means by revolt. He claims that criminals use philosophy as an alibi, and that by acting in its name murderers become judges. The apparent innocence with which criminals ask their opponents to justify themselves and the reversal of morality that helped Nazi ideology conduct mass murder in the name of liberation 10 make it clear that it is not enough to counter such crimes with morals alone. The response needs to be in the form of a revolt: one that needs no further justification other than in itself. In this introduction the emphasis is on the essay's political dimension. In The Rebel, murder and protest are motives for returning to the examination of suicide and the absurd that Camus began in The Myth of Sisyphus. There is no recognisable justification for murder; as a crime, it is simply an expression of denial and is shown to be close to nihilism. As in The Myth of Sisyphus, the image of the absurd human, opposed to the silent world, serves to reject both murder and suicide. 11 Repudiating murder and suicide is a result of the absurd's irreversibility, since death cannot cancel out the world's absurdity. The analysis of revolt begins with a historical investigation of typical rebels, including authors, philosophers, politicians, whom in this context Camus calls 'conquerors', and artists. These all rebelled against something, ceased to accept existing conventions and pursued new or different paths on the basis of their own value systems. This chapter develops a phenomenology of revolt, of which the artist is the most important representative. "Rebellion and Art" in The Rebel brings moral values and a description of the world down to a common denominator. The examples - intended to prove the aesthetics of a revolt founded on values - are taken exclusively from literature and the fine arts. The close connection between revolt, morals and aesthetics is presented in The Rebel as the basis for the creation of a work of art. Revolutions and totalitarian movements are therefore not the essay's sole topic. The aesthetics of re10 Cf. Camus, The Rebel, pp. 4, 10. 11 Op. cit., p. 6-7.

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volt defines the artistic process less as a rebellion against prevailing norms than as the result of how the artist sees himself. Via his art, the artist confirms both his own individuality and the existence of morality, at the same time asking under what conditions morality can be upheld. Thus art is man's most important means of expression. The aesthetic principles Camus develops in the chapter of The Rebel entitled "Rebellion and Art" 12 are the outcome of his prior analysis of the relation between the absurd and rebellion. It is his particular reference to the values that determine a revolt that allows one to assume that investigating revolts might reveal rules on how to act and be creative such as cannot be derived from the absurd alone. Even if 'creation' is to be understood here in a general sense, this observation points expressly to man's ability to shape something. In Camus' diaries, at the end of 1945, one repeatedly finds entries that place aesthetics at the centre of attention: "Aesthetics of revolt. High style and beautiful form, expressions of the loftiest revolt."*3 For this reason 'creation' here also stands for a work of art. Artists, some of whom are discussed, put in an appearance as the "great explorers in the realm of absurdity"; they respect the consequences that follow on from their understanding of the absurd world. 14 This explains the renunciation that absurd thinking might choose in order to escape the dichotomy of a situation. Silence, too, can be a form of rebellion. Arthur Rimbaud was an example of this approach. He fell silent and forsook his work. Camus calls his silence a strange asceticism of revolt. The rebel whose protest makes him the first "theoretician of absolute revolt" is neither a politician, nor an outstanding historical personage; he is an author. The title is bestowed on the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814), for by striving for boundless freedom Sade developed a theory of liberation. Sade is the first representative of revolt who was intent not only on mere negation and destruction, but also on creation. He is thought to have formulated the first coherent expression of revolt (albeit not explicitly) and to have directed the revolt down the path towards art. It is the protagonists of literary history such as Sade, whose works Camus interprets as an expression of rebellion, that introduce a clear aesthetic element to Camus' examination of revolt. Sade's status is put into perspective by the comment that he was enthusiastic about totalitarian society two hundred years before its time. His hope that the freedom of crime would find its natural limits through thefreedomof moral codes was not fulfilled. Sade did at least also develop his own moral ideas, the meaning of which however was overlooked in his work. 15 Camus calls his revolt metaphysical. Sade was aware that he was glorifying crimes committed by others in his works. But the

12 Cf. 13 Cf. 14 Cf. 15 Cf.

Camus, The Rebel, p. 655-680. ditto, Notebooks, 1942-1951, p. 113. for the following: ditto, The Rebel, p. 9; cf. p. 36. for the following: Camus, The Rebel, p. 36-155.

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analysis calls him to account for this: his crimes were the outcome of unbridled vice. He failed with his work. The manner in which The Rebel for the first time expressly creates a link between revolt and art shows how the political and historical circumstances of the French Revolution step back to make place for the perspective of literary aesthetics. One of the proofs is Rousseau's The Social Contract,*** which is presented here as a written protest, directed against the traditional legitimacy of divine origin. Rousseau established the "general will" and proved at the same time the formative influence of intellectuals and writers. The Rebel does not present any compelling line of reasoning; the essay is built up around the enquiry's idea of describing the constructive and creative aspects of revolt. This might be judged as a weakness in its reasoning, because the outcome was already formulated at the outset. However, this manner of proceeding is not detrimental to the underlying idea and the author's concern, for Camus succeeds in presenting the essential meaning of revolt. This meaning is always highly individual because the individual himself can shape it, even if it also has a social meaning, since it has an effect on others. A revolt is not without roots, since protest is oriented towards personal values, but it needs no ideology to be triggered off. In this sense revolt is autonomous; like art, it can bring about a new situation from within. The chapter "The Dandies' Revolution"17 examines works of authors from the first half of the 19th century. An analysis of Romanticism viewed purely from the angle of revolt is at risk of describing this epoch of literature onesidedly. At the heart of Camus' analysis is an aesthetics of uniqueness and negation which is expressed by the figure of the 'dandy' in Baudelaire's sense of the term. From this particular perspective, an aesthetics is defined that, if left to its own devices, turns against God. The dandy, as represented by Baudelaire, fits into the scheme of rebels who revolted against their own times. From their refusal there emerges a coherence that, as in the case of dandies, can only develop through constant provocation. The topic of revolt and its coherent identity, i.e., the fact that it refers back to its origins, runs like a thread through the essay. The dandy as a type of person with a specific relation to art opens up a new perspective on the artist's tasks. The dandy gives the revolt a different quality, in that its protagonists no longer rebel against something on behalf of certain values, but because they make denial itself the measure of their protest. As art liberates itself from all connections, its claim to autonomy becomes evident. Since Romanticism, it has no longer been the artist's job to create new worlds and extol their beauty; he has the task of defining an attitude: "Thus the artist becomes a model and offers himself as an example: art is his ethics." This 16 J.-J. Rousseau, The Social Contract and The First and Second Discourses. Edited by S. Dunn. New Heaven and London: Yale University Press, 2002, p. 149-254. 17 Cf. for the following: Camus, The Rebel, p. 47-54.

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places him at the beginning of the age of the "directors of conscience" 18. Camus' assessment of Romanticism is on a somewhat narrow footing, one feels. By way of the character of Ivan Karamasov, Dostoyevsky poses the decisive question: can one live in constant revolt? 19 Dostoyevsky succeeds in resolving this dilemma, showing a way out of it in the legend of the Grand Inquisitor: revolt is preparing for action. Karamasov cannot change creation, but he uses it to recreate the realm of humans. Here the aim of revolt shifts from morals to politics. The outcome is sobering. Ivan Karamasov does not impart progress. He hovers between innocence and intended murder. Under his aegis the revolt of reason leads to madness. Another interpretation of revolt holds that revolt is directed against God himself. God is denied in the name of justice and at the same time is denied as a guarantor of man. Max Stirner published The Ego and its Own in 1844: "All things are nothing to me'^O, i s announced programmatically in the introduction's heading and the book's last sentence. Stirner turned against institutions or ideas that he felt to be abstractions: God, society and mankind itself. For Stirner only the individual counts - "the unique one", as he calls him. Camus' concise, impressionistic account of Stirner's tenets represents here an introduction to Nietzsche and nihilism.2' The assessment of Stirner is unambiguous, for in attempting to justify revolt he is seen to have crossed over the border to crime. In Nietzsche's works, Camus finds answers to some of the questions that Stirner had posed. Nietzsche described nihilism as a symptom that needed to be treated. The interest in Nietzsche's concept of morality underlines here the meaning attached to morality in The Rebel, Morality, Camus writes on Nietzsche, condemns the universe of emotions in the name of a harmonious and imaginary world. The works of Lautreamont (alias Isidore Ducasse 1846-1870) constitute another expression of literary rebellion. In The Rebel, Lautreamont's works represent an attempt to overcome the limitations of Creation. In Lautreamont's MaldororZL the author sings the praise of crime and turns against God, as if to suggest God had failed. In his oeuvre one finds no attempt to develop a moral philosophy. His revolt sooner resembled repentance.23 Camus' interpretation of Lautreamont goes well beyond his works. One might doubt whether these reflections explain the roots of the 20th century, when revolt was transformed into action and became oblivious of its beginnings. And whether Camus was right in 18 Cf. Camus, The Rebel, p. 53. 19 Cf. op. cit., p. 465, cf. for the following: p. 465^69. 20 M. Stirner, The Ego and Its Own. Translated by S. T. Byington. Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 5. 21 Cf. A. Corbie, Camus. L'absurde, la revoke, Vamour, Paris: Ed. de.l'Atelier 2003, p. 83 fif. 22 Lautreamont, Lautreamont's Maldoror. Translated by A. Lykiard. London: Allison & Busby, 1970. 23 Cf. Camus, The Rebel, p. 491-497.

119 acclaiming Lautreamont as a defender of pure revolt is really a question of one's standpoint and interpretation. The connections shown in The Rebel to the intellectual oppression that is widespread in our world and that was already supposedly being heralded in at that time cannot be identified quite so unambiguously as Camus would have us believe. The remark that the revolt had its dandies and servants, but that they are not its legitimate sons24, shows that Camus was well aware that the history of revolt he wished to analyse was full of ramifications and thus could not exhibit a linear succession of protagonists. Various thinkers seized upon revolt and they all drew different lessons from it and its results. Perhaps this was why Camus placed rebellion so prominently in the title of his essay. His enquiry thus gains something of a general philosophical quality, but at the same time focuses on the moral aspects of the topic in question. Rebellion arises from a situation of inner conflict, in which a poet such as Rimbaud expresses both triumph and fear. The Surrealists, Camus writes, remembered the poet's "letters of the Visionary"25 and his "rules for a rebellious asceticism'^, which expressed both rejection and endorsement. Camus' evaluation of the differences between Surrealism and Marxism determines his understanding of revolt. Camus charges the Surrealists with the pretence of absolute innocence, impatience, and rejection of all predetermination and an admiration of murder and suicide. This evaluation is to be seen in connection with Gide's "acte gratuit", an act with no specific purpose that fulfils the demand for absolute freedom. The Surrealists' attitude towards Marxism is severely condemned by Camus, whereby he is essentially rejecting Marxism because he saw Marxism as devoted to nihilism, rather than following a consistent logic of revolt. For the Surrealists, revolution was not only a goal, but also a kind of absolute and consoling myth. Andre Breton understood revolution as a special case of revolt, while the Marxists saw revolt as subordinate to revolution. The comparison of Breton's basic stance with that of the Marxists reveals differences that show the artists to be closer to reality. How this contrast is evaluated determines how one judges The Rebel. It comes of no surprise that Camus' negative judgement incurred criticism from the left. In the chapter "State Terrorism and Rational Terror", Camus examines the premises and the effects of Marxism. Observations to the effect that since Marx's death only a minority of disciples had remained true to his method or that "the end of history is not an example or a perfectionist value; it is an arbi-

24 Cf. ditto, The Rebel p. 497. 25 A. Rimbaud, Letter to P. Demeny, in: A. Rimbaud, Complete Works, Selected Letters. Translation by Wallace Fowle, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1966, p. 305-311. 26 For the following cf. Camus, The Rebel, pp. 91, 88-94, 176-245.

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trary and terrorist principle,"27 set the tune. Camus' analysis of emerging Capitalism is certainly acclaimed as a socio-historical achievement. But the author dismisses the foundations used by Marxism to formulate an ideology. He denounces its Utopian character and its readiness to subordinate justice to its goals. Its prophecies collide with reality and are only able to prevail because they have increasingly become an article of faith, he argues. The reckoning up with Marxism could hardly be clearer. The accusation of being an ideology with totalitarian demands is all the more serious, since Surrealism, in contrast, is characterised merely by its demand for some kind of coherence. For Camus, Surrealism is neither a type of politics nor a religion; he describes it as a kind of wisdom, albeit one that was not able to prevail, thus expressing his respect for Surrealism's artistic achievements. His^attitude is proof of the fact that there is no easy way to insight or restraint. He acknowledges Breton's efforts on behalf of morality in the following sentence: "In the general meanness of his times - and this cannot be forgotten - he is the only person who wrote profoundly above love."28 Here he mentions the wonderful night into which Breton withdrew, while the armies were attacking the world. But the hours of dawn, which Camus connects with the work of Rene Char, whom he calls the "poet of our rebirth", were already on their way. The political aspects of Surrealism should not be underestimated. Nevertheless, it is striking to note that it is a particular art movement that is given a decisive role in The Rebel as regards the definition of revolt. It is possible that Camus attached such significance to Surrealism because it locates art's raison d'etre in itself, just as the justification for revolt can only originate from itself. This shows clearly that for Camus there was no external yardstick for art that might measure its degree of truth. No other revolution is as much the focus of Camus' essay as the French Revolution. Other revolutions are only named as examples that confirm the lapse into terror or at least the danger of their doing so. Concentrating on the contrast between revolt and revolution actually increases the attention paid to the revolt; revolt alone and its foundations are capable of offering people a perspective. Revolt is tied to values and in this sense it is not content with achieving partial goals; it goes the whole way. Camus' conviction that even revolution will rediscover the revolt's creative strength29 is more than just a supposition; it can also be understood as the logical conclusion of the notion that historical revolution is nihilist, destructive and no longer tied to values. But since revolution is always based on hope of some kind, it will recall sooner or later the creative strength of revolt. 27

Camus, The Rebel, pp. 188 f., 224. 8 Cf. for the following: op. cit., p. 99. 29 Cf. op. cit., p. 252. 2

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The analysis in The Rebel is based, at least as far as its foundations are concerned, almost entirely on literature and its representatives. In this work, where there was no need to justify subordinating politics and history to literature, Camus' critics have overlooked the significance of art. His opponents perceived the soundness of the arguments. Yet the relations between politics and aesthetics were blended out. The title The Rebel, where the author names revolt as the book's sole topic, contributed to the general tendency to overlook the aesthetic aspect of his reflections. The detailed historical analysis of revolt, the critique of Marxism and, finally, the book's actual structure, which deals with the various forms of revolt one by one, all disguise the connection with art. The ideological debates after the Second World War also played a role in detracting from the importance of aesthetic values and ideas. As a result of the political conflicts that were dominating the stage, Camus' critics overlooked the fact that Camus' enquiry concentrated on art and its foundation on the idea of revolt. In France too, The Rebel has usually only been read as a purely political essay. The reckoning with Marxism, the contrast between revolt and revolution and the harsh criticism of ideologies clearly permitted no doubt about Camus' intentions and contributed to an understanding of his book as a political pamphlet. The quarrel between Camus and Sartre that lead to the rupture of their friendship30 appeared to confirm that The Rebel should be read as a political pamphlet. But their dispute had no bearing on this essay's aesthetic dimension. With his analyses of processes relating to intellectual history and historical processes, Camus did indeed lay himself open to attack from his opponents, allowing them to call into question the author's political intentions and thus the book's intent. But as soon as this essay's aesthetic dimension - art's task of expressing and correcting revolt - is taken into consideration a purely political interpretation is shown to be insufficient.

9. 2. Aesthetics of revolt Camus' interpretation of art needs to be analysed on two interdependent levels. In The Myth of Sisyphus he concentrates on diagnosing the absurd; later, in The Rebel\ he attempts to formulate a theory of art and artistic creativity: if an absurd person like Don Juan, the comedian or conqueror, has little contact with moral ideas, the artist in him can shape his own situation himself because he himself introduces an understanding of his absurd situation to the creative process and develops his own rules. The chapter "Rebellion and Art"31 shows how, having adopted this course, Camus carries on consistently, finally confirming the outstanding role of art at the end of his enquiry into revolt. This chapter sys30 Cf. chapter 11 "Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre" in the present work. 31 Cf. for the following: Camus, The Rebel, p. 253-277.

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tematises his enquiry's results and their relation to aesthetics. The other forms of revolt presented in the earlier chapters define it as a movement both of refusal and of new beginnings. The historical perspective illustrates how revolts were repeatedly in danger of missing their goals and lapsing into terror. Placing art expressly at the service of revolt enlarges its scope. Without art at its basis, every revolt would fail to achieve its goal. If one goes along with this line of reasoning, then it follows that art became the corrective of revolt. The work of art represents a sense of coherence that expresses to the world what it, the world, lacks. With its observations on the French Revolution, this chapter also includes a historical perspective. That epoch knew no great artists, and those who voiced their opinion at the time without subordinating themselves to the fast-moving ideologies were threatened with death or exile. But that is not a peculiarity of that epoch, for art's autonomy has been singled out as a source of opposition by the ruling ideologies of all ages. All forms of revolt described in The Rebel have cloaked themselves in their own kind of rhetoric. This homogeneity and the artist's relation to his own art are brought down to a common denominator: "The artist reconstructs the world to his plan."32 This remark is aimed at several important aspects of Camus' aesthetics. The artist is responsible for shaping his art. Only by being answerable to no-one but himself is he in the position to create something new with his art. The artist lends the world the shape that it lacks. With these words, the artist's task is defined. At the same time they sum up the basis of every aesthetic opinion. A work of art only takes on its whole force of expression by enabling the viewer to take a new look at the world. The line of reasoning used here is again directed at art's autonomy. Nonetheless, the artist does not live without ties, nor is he free from all references. He is responsible for his freedom and for that of art. Autonomy and responsibility are two of the important factors of Camus' aesthetics. With his work, the artist can encourage an interpretation that the viewer would perhaps overlook. Such works of art include sculpture, which Camus calls the greatest of all arts because it can unite the individual gestures in a particular overall impression. Painting in turn can capture individual moments, portraying people vividly and concealing their mortality. As long as one just concentrates on the overall impression, one overlooks the detail; who noticed, for example, the hands of the executioner, while he was scourging Christ? But in Piero della Francesca's picture of the flagellation, the artist depicts the actual moment of flagellation itself, just before it starts; he shows the executioner's raised arm. The individual moment stands here for the whole. Camus describes the beauty of art and the resultant accusation by way of example: "[...] the agony of Christ imprisoned in images of violence and beauty, cries out again each day in the cold rooms of museums."33 32 Camus, The Rebel, p. 255. 33 Cf. for the following: Camus, The Rebel, p. 257 f.

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The consequences and dangers of an aesthetics that is based on revolt are not dismissed by Camus. The artist has to reckon with the fact that every stylisation that creates a provocative unity or coherence, thus demonstrating the artist's rejection of the real, will be suspected of totalitarian revolution. An ideology's demands can become a trap for art. The parallel drawn between the product of artistic work and a political process outlines here in just a few sentences the potential of the works of art's aesthetic impact and deliberately directs one gaze to art's risks. Art is not total refusal, for as well as a negation it also always contains an assent. In this sense art constantly offers an occasion to return, and reflect on a revolt's origins, for art not only tries to create meaning, it also conveys an inherent meaning. Art lends a form to values that are constantly changing. The artist foresees the values and tries to wrest them from the clutches of history. Such remarks do not contradict the above criticism of the revolution's vague notion of the future, which is criticised as too inexact and not sound enough. Camus is concerned here with the tasks of the artist, as someone who takes things in hand, creates facts and through his view of things opens up in a work of art hew perspectives for others. The section "Creation and Revolution"34 repeats the criticism of revolution from the perspective of art, which counters attempts to reduce man to a product of history. But there is more involved here, for it is precisely art's relation to nature and thus to beauty that gains its own aesthetic value. If the rebel disregards this value, then he is in danger of excluding the dignity of work and existence from history. This fundamental connection with beauty reminds us of Camus' early novellas in which he sketched out the beginnings of his aesthetic reflections. The section "Rebellion and Style"35 contrasts realism with formalism, which wants to exclude every kind of real element. Both schools of style are accused of negating a creative act. Since art cannot exist without values, one cannot acknowledge any aesthetics in an approach that wants to reduce art to its formal or realistic elements. Realism also sets limits to art, and every kind of realism conveys an interpretation. Art cannot limit itself exclusively to any form of realism. A complete enumeration of all details amounts to the attempt to create a totality or whole, yet without being able to attain the world's unity. The socialist novel is no exception to this; it attempts to unite the advantages of a novel written for edification with those of propaganda literature. Camus' criticism of the term realism with regard to art and literature is convincing. However it is reasonable to doubt whether art can only be called realistic if it itemises things in never-ending lists. The rejection of modern art, which Camus describes as almost completely coin34 Cf. op. cit., p. 272-277. 35 Cf. op. cit., p. 268-272.

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ciding with an art of tyrants and slaves and not of creators, is particularly liable to be misinterpreted if such an opinion is separated from the context of this chapter and of The Rebel. The reflections on art in The Rebel amount to a search for a yardstick with which to establish value judgements. The creation of a style and the manner in which reality is dealt with, for example, influence the work's character. This passage belongs to the essay's most important statements and findings, for it emphasizes the particular importance of the revolt. The sentence "art is an impossible demand given expression and form"36 contains the demand to understand art as a constant process and struggle. Since art cannot attain conclusive results, what counts here is above all the attitude with which one approaches art. So it is important which expression a work is given. In the section "Creation and Revolution", Camus concentrates on characterising acts of creation. Art gives revolt aframework:revolt is the context within which art conducts its creative process. Art cannot reach its goal if it amounts to little more than some kind of criticism or commentary. The outcome of a revolution, on the other hand, can only become stable within a civilisation. It cannot attain its goal through tyranny or terror. Both questions about the future of revolt and revolution lead to the one question about the rebirth of civilisation. The only option is revolt, which is called here a creative synthesis. The proposal that art and society should rediscover that critical moment in which refusal, consensus, singularity and universality are balanced out sounds like a compromise. But since revolt is not merely understood as a part of civilisation, but is indeed shown to be the prerequisite of every civilisation, making revolt into something absolute does not and cannot lead to a compromise, nor is this intended. The emphasis lies here solely on creation. Rebellion is not condemned, for it is creation, the creative act, that is of prime importance. This means that in industrial society the labourer and the creator should no longer be separated. Every act of creation, it is concluded, negates inherently the world of the master and the slave.37 These are strong words, which again underline the criticism of ideology in the first part of the essay. Passages such as these are witness to the fact that Camus' aesthetics is linked with political theory. The arguments with which Camus' essay sets out the artist's obligation to go about his creative work, particularly in unsettled times, and to put up with dangers, underline its political significance. Camus' opponents used this opportunity to concentrate on a politically motivated dispute about the postulates expressed in The Rebel. Perhaps they paid little attention to the sections in which the author warns in his own way of the excesses of a politics that renounces its foundations. In addition to morals, meaning here guidelines for behaviour that is oriented to certain values, one also finds the value of convictions, which have 36 Camus, The Rebel, p. 271. 37 Cf. op. cit., p. 272 f.

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a particular influence on personal behaviour. Perhaps this is where the importance lies that this essay attributes to art's powers of persuasion and to its function as guarantor of man's freedom. The criticism of the totalitarian ideologies of his day was misunderstood precisely because it was expressed as - and seemed to his opponents like - a prejudgement. Camus delivered both the analysis and the verdict: ideologies are not a suitable means of describing the world, because they present an interpretation, too. Whoever gets mixed up in them is no longer able to behave completely as he chooses. But it is precisely in times of increased ideological conflict that Camus demands of artists and intellectuals that they oppose ideologies with the whole force of their art. Camus had recognised the fruitlessness of sterile ideologies very much earlier than others and had the courage to defend his position. Fifty years after the publication of The Rebel, one hears little about Camus' protests against murder and terror. One possible reason might be that the essay's aesthetic dimension has been neglected. Naturally, such an attempt at explanation falls short of the mark, but it is surprising that even today articles are still being published about The Rebel that mention revolt, questions of terror and murder, but do not dwell for one minute on the essay's aesthetic dimension. In The Rebel the boundary between art and politics only lacks clarity in the eyes of the essay's potential opponents. Art is certainly given an exactly defined position vis-a-vis politics. The essay's approach via literary history serves to underline the significance of authors and artists as avant-garde thinkers of social change. Revolutions are short-term events that can be influenced in a longer term by iiterati', but that go astray as soon as they are placed in the service of ruling ideologies. Historically speaking, this is also true of revolts or rebellions. However, the revolt that Camus is thinking about is founded on a dignity common to all humans. Art means for humans more than an expression of their mere position in history. But one cannot conclude from this that the author is distancing himself from history or man's historic dimension. Art actually strengthens man's position in history.38 As regards his own epoch, Camus was convinced that the ideological conflicts would present art with new challenges. His essay on revolt was a call to combat this endangering of art. Whoever did not want to perceive the dangers he had invoked in his essay and the aesthetic perspectives had no choice but to thoroughly misunderstand his book and his approach. The collective passions this is how the essay characterises the situation after the Second World War, meaning the ideologies, chiefly Marxism - gained the upper hand over individual passions. In the face of the ideologies' totalitarian claims, one must hope that creativity and art will hold everything together and give a view of the whole. No-one, not even the artist, can break out of this tense relationship. Ca38

Cf. Camus, The Rebel, p. 276-277.

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mus' observation that the artists of his day lived dangerously was both a warning and a challenge, but it was by no means intended to suggest that artistic activity should be called into question in dangerous times. On the contrary, the artist has to face up to these challenges and seek a dispute with ideologies. But in doing so the artist has to preserve both his own authenticity and the truth. Nor should he relinquish his uncompromising commitment to the goals of art that he has set himself. In a century of destruction, artists have to join forces; they have no choice in this, for the artist is no longer out on his own. This remark is no concession to the rule of ideologies; it merely underlines a threat to which art is exposed and which the individual can no longer face up to alone. Revolt demands a part of reality that is intact: one that is called beauty.39 It is an aesthetic criterion that in^the face of an existential threat lends an inviolable dignity not only to art, but also to man himself. On its own, beauty produces no revolutions, but revolutions have to become mindful of beauty again, if they want to build something new and permanent. The chapter "Rebellion and art" culminates in the affirmation of the truth of beauty and its outstanding importance, which neither tyranny nor dictatorship can dispel. Rebellions miscarry if they no longer reflect on their original values. Thus the section "Rebellion and art" highlights the dangers of revolution that threaten if the rebellion's principles are betrayed. These principles were of a moral and, as has now been shown, also of an aesthetic nature. The chapter in The Rebel on Mediterranean thought^ does not work well. Here, Camus seeks for alternatives in the light of excessive eruptions of violence during the war. The choice of phrases and the remark about the proudest of races having died whilst the other inhabitants of the Mediterranean Sea live in the never-changing light are ill-suited to a rational justification of his position. This chapter is equally unconvincing when it looks for the causes of the century's fundamental conflict in the clash between German dreams and Mediterranean tradition. Such arguments are simply not appropriate for backing up the essay's main concern. The talk of bonds with a special light and particular places strikes one as strange and can be best explained by Camus' pronounced attachment to his native country, which he has described elsewhere, e. g. in the Summer collection, much more concisely and very much more convincingly. The last chapter contains no cogent conclusions. Love and the glow of the midday light do not have the same powers of persuasion as the analysis of the connection between revolt and art. His observations - for example, that the sources of life and creation seem to have dried up or that at the climax of the current tragedy crime had become something familiar - can only be understood against the backdrop of the immediate impressions of war. These reflections lay down the border that revolt is not allowed to surpass. 39 Cf. Camus, The Rebel, p. 276 f. 40 Cf. for the following: op. cit., p. 279-293: "Thought at the Meridian."

127 In the undated "Defense of The Rebel "41, written after the critical reviews of The Rebel had been published, Camus insists that art has to oppose approaching catastrophes - meaning here the potential outcome of the Cold War. It should not comment on our times, he writes; it should help to give them form. Even if the tasks of the artist appear to be defined quite vaguely, it is at least made clear that artists and intellectuals should become involved in political life. The remark that "the time of armchair artists is finished"42 is a passionate call to artists not to remain inactive despite or precisely because of the approaching dangers. The Rebel is an essay. A diary entry dating from the beginning of 1945 that deals with the search for morals and its relation to art starts with this statement43. A work of art does not want to cancel out the confrontation between man and the world; such an intention is not to be found anywhere in Camus' works. Camus is concerned here with understanding this confrontation. His Notebooks contain ideas that often have a purely personal connection, but also take a closer look at the area of relations between humans that he had attacked in The Fall: "Moral: One can't live with people when knowing their ulterior motives."44 In the final analysis, by linking revolt with art Camus is attempting to turn the work of art into a revolt, a lasting rebellion against every form of external influence: against dishonest attempts of all kinds to exert influence, against monopolisation and paternalism. The artist should not accept these; otherwise his freedom of action will be at risk. It is a question here of defining the fundamental aesthetic idea, on the basis of which art and the artists' intentions are expressed as a constant revolt. The Rebel is not exclusively concerned with revolt - with a revolt that is occasionally favourably influenced by art; the essay's real topic is the fundamental meaning of art itself. This is an art that places at man's disposal the best repertoire for describing the world, analysing it and influencing it. Camus is convinced that the greatest impact of art is in a certain sense an enduring revolt.

41 Cf. Camus, Defense of The Rebel, in: Sartre and Camus. A Historic Confrontation. Ed. and translated by D. A. Sprintzen and A. van den Hoven. New York: Humanity Books, 2004, p. 205-220. 42 Ditto, Defense of the Rebel, p. 219. 43 Cf. ditto, Notebooks, 1942-1957, p. 61. 44 Op. cit., p. 79.

129 "Art and the artist remake the world, but always with an ulterior motive of protest." Camus, Notebooks 1942-1951x

10. Art as a moral obligation In The Rebel Camus analyses the connections between revolt and crime. The essay also enquires into the links between art and morals, whence Camus tries to derive a yardstick for both his aesthetics and his own work as a whole. Art's autonomy and the conditions under which an artist is able to create his work are the focus of his reflections. Autonomy should not be confused with dissociation. Art's autonomy involves an art that is independent, but one that has to enter into a dialogue with its opponents. As a criterion for art's aesthetic quality and thus for the greatness of artists such as Moliere, Tolstoy or Melville, Camus names achieving a balance between the artist's creative act and humane values. The author expresses this in a nutshell: one has to work in the service of both pain and beauty.2 The artist needs to declare his solidarity with others in order to be able to speak on behalf of all. He cannot bring about the necessary renaissance of values by himself, yet he alone can give it a form. Camus is thinking here of the artist's independence, which has to be upheld in the future too, for without culture and freedom society degenerates into a jungle. The artist's task should not be made subordinate to any social prophecy, with which he means any kind of ideology. In the works that appeared after 1953, Camus continues the search for a moral philosophy applicable to art. He also writes some more novellas and in The Fall he is again concerned with formulating moral principles, as is exemplified by the story's protagonist Clamence, who examines the decisions that had changed his life. A further work, "Jonas or the artist at work'\ narrates the story of an artist whose sudden success brings him many admirers, but who has difficulty in satisfying their demands. The fact that he was awarded the Nobel prize in October 1957 caused Camus to reflect on how to define the artist's tasks and art's claim to truth. Finally, there is his last novel, The First Man, which, in part at least, is a masterpiece as regards style and artistic quality; unfortunately the novel remained unfinished.

1 Cf. Camus, Notebooks 1942-1951, p. 88. 2 Ditto, The Artist and his Time, in: ditto, Le Myth ofSisyphus, p. 212.

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10.1. The artist and freedom: Summer Summer, the collection of essays3 that appeared in 1954, contains texts that were written between 1939 and 1954. Here, Camus sets down ideas that accompanied him during the war and later, while working on The Rebel. The mixed reviews with which his book on revolt had met, and the disappointment and bitterness that he must have felt as a result of the rupture with Sartre are in extraordinary contrast to the poetic quality of the novellas. In "Return to Tipasa" he succeeds in penning impressive reminiscences of his origins. He also evaluates his previous works and, as a result of the excitement surrounding The Rebel, develops some new perspectives for later thinking, at the same time concentrating doggedly and imperturb^bly on his work. His attachment to his native country and the certainty that others could not rob him of his values were sufficient to arm himself against self-doubt. Even if he had possibly written the novellas of the Summer collection at an earlier stage, their publication might still have been intended as a response to the criticism of The Rebel. But reconstructing the chronology is not crucial here; it is sufficient to recognise what these novellas have in common and to appreciate the fact that they describe what it is like to be an artist much more clearly than some of his other works. The Summer collection contains seven novellas of varying length, in which the work of an artist is successively examined from different angles. The questions posed there and the conclusions they reach let the Summer collection as a whole appear like an essay on an artist's commitment. In 1946, Camus asked what Prometheus meant for people today and put his ideas to paper in "Prometheus in the Underworld"4. This rebel, who revolts against the gods, is for him the model of contemporary man, whose half-hearted protest simply ends in a crisis. Prometheus gave man fire, freedom, technology and the arts. But man, as Camus' dismal analysis states, only cares for technology. Art is an obstacle for man and a symbol of slavery. But Prometheus saw art and humans as a unity, a whole, and thus wanted to liberate both body and soul. If Prometheus were to reappear today to explain his myth, he would again be nailed forcibly to the rocks in the name of the very humanism of which he was the first symbol. This pessimism does not amount to renouncing every hope. But the sceptical assessment of the initial situation will not be counterbalanced by any work, no matter how successful. Just as revolt was called an 'attitude' above, art is also to be understood as an 'attitude'. It is hardly possible to judge its potential as a regulative high enough. The Prometheus myth is a reminder of the fact that each of man's limitations is only temporary. Prometheus retained his belief in mankind despite his chains: it was harder than rock. With this way of thinking Prometheus resembles 3 Cf. Camus, Summer, in: ditto, Lyrical and Critical Essays, p. 107-181. 4 Ditto, Prometheus in the Underworld, in: ditto, Lyrical and Critical Essays, p. 138-142.

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Sisyphus, who defies the gods by not giving in to despair, no matter how senseless his efforts appear. The remark that tireless tenacity is to be preferred to revolt shows one of the basic tenets of Camus' thought: he is concerned with intervening on behalf of justice and, more specifically, on behalf of justice as the foundation of human society - a justice he is convinced will always come out victorious. So, by expressing freedom and human activity, art acts against violence and oppression. Art should not separate people from their world; it should create a balanced relationship between depicting man's suffering and making possible a fresh start. The novella "Helen's Exile"5 contrasts the Greeks' ideal of beauty and their notion that all things are limited with the European urge towards totality and excess. A striving for power, the loss of all balance and the denial of nature lead, in Camus' opinion, to an incapacity to recognise beauty. Camus lays the blame for this on Christianity, which replaced Antiquity's world view with the tragedy of the soul. Camus is aware of the temptation to turn one's back on the world, but he is convinced that its beauty will always gain the upper hand and that aesthetic thought will sooner or later prevail over every kind of totalitarian struggle for power. "The Enigma"6 confirms the impression that with this collection's essays Camus wishes to analyse and justify his position as a writer and artist. He recalls that he wrote on the absurdity of the world. After this, he opines, he was not able to shake off the reputation of being an author of the absurd. The public did not even accept his attempt to write objectively, i.e., without connecting the topic at hand with his person, because it would not concede the author such a degree of freedom. The artist's only option is to search perseveringly for truth and independence. The reputation that society confers on an artist on its first encounter allows of no contradiction. Such reflections hint at the disappointments that Camus had experienced in the fifties, which nevertheless strengthened his convictions regarding the tasks of art, as his Nobel prize acceptance speech was to confirm several years later. The Summer collection's novellas explain some of the basic tenets of his oeuvre. From the confrontation between the memories of his native country and the demands of his own times Camus develops his notion of morality, though here too this remains somewhat vague and leaves the pursuit's goal indefinite: "[...] we live for something that transcends ethics."? "Return to Tipasa" shows how reminiscences of his youth almost lapse into the irreal. If his memories of his native country and his youth are not understood as nostalgic yearnings, then one can recognise the value of beauty as inextricably bound up with the present: "But if we give up a part of what exists, we must 5 Camus, Helen's Exile, in: ditto, Lyrical and Critical Essays, p. 148-153. 6 Cf. ditto, The Enigma, in: op. cit., p. 154-161. 7 Ditto, Return to Tipasa, in: op. cit., p. 170.

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ourselves give up being... Thus there is a will to live without refusing anything life offers: the virtue I honor most in this world."8

10.2. The Fall and Exile and the Kingdom In The Fall (1957), the lawyer Jean-Baptiste Clamence begins a conversation in the Mexico-City bar in Amsterdam with a guest who only puts in an appearance as a listener and whose answers are anticipated by Clamence. Clamence's story becomes a kind of life confession. The listener remains silent; his role is taken on by Clamence, who interprets his own words, attitudes and decisions on his own. This clever trick hints at Clamence's awareness of the moral opinions of his listener. Clamence's observations are at the same time an indication of man's prejudices. The manner in which Clamence recounts the highlights of his career show a trace of arrogance, especially when he points out that he feels committed to his fellow human beings without actually owing them anything.9 In this way he even considers himself superior to the judge: "[...] Monsieur, I lived with impunity." 10 Although The Fall's form is distinct from that of The Stranger and The Plague on account of the protagonist's monologue, here again an individual person's observations and judgements are at the heart of the narrative. An interpretation of The Fall needs to consider a further distinction: Clamence does not become involved in a story with a conclusive ending that takes its inexorable course, as did Meursault, nor does he successfully fight like Rieux with the support of others against a concrete evil. Clamence is in fact more like Tarrou, the journalist in The Plague, viewing his life only retrospectively. He says he is a "judge-penitent", an 'atonement judge', and yet he clearly possesses no firm yardstick with which to examine decisions before putting them into practice. It is only in retrospect that he tries to develop moral principles with which to judge and justify his own behaviour. While maintaining the basic idea of revealing the options open to various individuals, the wealth of topics in Camus' fictional works demonstrates the general coherence of his oeuvre. Nor is it his theoretical writings alone that provide the oeuvre's main framework. But the reader should not jump to conclusions in light of the protagonist's lack of success in The Fall, for the question of whether Clamence is solely to blame for his failures and defeats remains unanswered. The beginning of the end was the sound of laughter he heard behind him late at night while walking across the Pont des Arts. After this Clamence tries to regain his sense of balance. In the analysis he provides of his relations to his fellow humans, he al8 Ditto, Return to Tipasa, p. 169. 9 Ditto, The Fall. Translated by J. O'Brien. London: Penguin Books, 1957. 10 Op. cit.,p. 21.

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ludes to the fact that in the light of his experiences he considers explaining morals a difficult, if not to say impossible, task. He feels the judgement of those around him to be weightier than that of the Last Judgement. Every artist is concerned about how his works will be judged. Clamence's comments on the judgement of others, who can only really grasp someone's motives when the person being judged has died, let one suspect that he is convinced he cannot expect anything of his fellow humans. Many commentators have connected The Fall with the author's personal experiences.il For many, it was quite understandable that Camus, who, despite the honour of receiving the Nobel Prize, remained full of disappointment, wished to document his personal failure with the confessional monologue of The Fall. Clamence is supposed to have lived a long time in the illusion that his fellow humans more or less approved of him until, all of a sudden, criticism began pouring in from all sides. He recalls his preference for the theatre and football stadiums in which he performed: the stage was the only place in the world where he was ever happy. In fact, Camus himself used this statement at the opening of a television programme in 1959 to explain his preference for the stage 12. Clamence mentions being discharged from military service, making contact with the Resistance and contracting tuberculosis. Camus hardly leaves out an opportunity to hint at parallels between the story's main character and his own biography. But as long as one only looks through Camus' works for autobiographical details, his intentions will remain unrecognised. The Fall contains more than just the author's bitterness. The Fall's unconventional style is dominated by the technique of the monologue. The narrative's title sums up in one word the life of the Paris lawyer, who reports of the difficult times of recent years. He had failed to rush to the assistance of a young woman, who fell from a bridge into the Seine. In the course of the narrative, the temporary end of his professional career turns out to be less the outcome of one or more concrete events than the inevitable result of life's general circumstances, from which people can never free themselves, not even by committing suicide. The only escape route is to accept life unconditionally and to understand the options open to people in a world without God and morals. In this respect, one cannot overlook the parallel between The Fall and The Myth of Sisyphus, even if The Fall is characterised by the author's experiences 11 Cf. J. Guerin, Camus. Portrait de I 'artiste en citoyen, Paris: Editions Francis Bourin, 1993, p. 125-136: chap. 7: "Sartre et Jeanson coauteurs de La chute". - A different opinion was expressed recently by M. Weyembergh, Albert Camus ou la memoire des originesy Paris, Brussel: De Boeck, 1998, p. 215-224. 12 Camus, Pourquoi je fais du theatre? "Gros plan" televised (12 May 1959), extracts in: ditto, Theatre, recits, nouvelles. Edited by R. Quilliot. Paris : Gallimard, 1962, p. 17201728. An extract from this interview: Presence de Albert Camus [3 records], ed. L. Ades, les Services de la recherche de PO.R.T.F. et Madame Albert Camus, Production Disques Ades 7037, no year.

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in the fifties: "[...] I shall wait for it resolutely, for I have known what is worse, the judgement of men"13. The disappointment and disillusionment that Camus expresses here were not yet present in The Myth of Sisyphus. A further aspect confirms the singular position of The Fall in Camus' work: the word "revolt" 14 occurs only once in the whole narrative, when Clamence accepted without revolt that the laughter behind his back had not stopped. Although he does not expressly mention revolt elsewhere, Clamence nevertheless describes a history of revolt as he explains how at every point in his life he had deliberately obstructed, with his own decisions, a course of life that others would call normal. With his confession, Clamence, the dropout, also formulates an accusation, rebuking others for their false understanding of freedom. The portrait he draws of himself is intended to be the portrait of anyone and at the same time of no-one: "But at the same time the portrait I hold out to my contemporaries becomes a mirror." 15 He resolves to give up his thriving law office, after having discovered that people become dangerous as soon as they notice that they are no longer in the right. He becomes wrapped up in the idea that he is no longer respected: he hears only abuse; whether it is imaginary or real remains to be seen. Is Camus investigating in this story the question of whether and how morals can be formulated? Clamence reflects on alternative options without actually naming them, though he does begin to evaluate them. The Fall shows why morality is effectively impossible, for no-one would adhere to it: "As for suicide, they [i.e. the friends, H.W.] would be more likely to push you to it, by virtue of what you owe to yourself, according to them." 16 The story acquires its pessimistic undertone from the many remarks with which Clamence repeatedly proposes topics and issues to his conversation partner that might represent an aspect of morality. All these statements, however, each of which would be suitable as a component of morals, remain rooted almost without exception in something negative, just as if every kind of optimism were fundamentally incompatible with morality. Clamence's experience, and in particular the conclusion he draws from his observations, let one assume that his fall had been staged so that he might deliberately experience his own decline. His readiness to derive generally negative explanations, which are then mostly confirmed, from the quick succession of mishaps and defeats increases the impression of the hopelessness of his situation. As in The Fall, the novellas in the collection entitled Exile and the Kingdom^ published in 1957, deal with forms of exile. Camus describes the kingdom as a free town that people would have to rediscover to escape from exile. They only find the path out of exile by rejecting servitude. 13 Camus, The Fall, p. 81. 14 Op. cit.,p. 80. 15 Cf. for the following: op. cit., pp. 102, 16 f., 96 f. 16 Op. cit., p. 25.

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In the novella "Jonas or The artist at work?^1 Camus examines the connections between artistic work and the fame that can obstruct an artist in his work. In 1953, he had already published a "mimodrame" about an artist, "La vie d'artiste"18, in the Oran journal Simoun, in which he recounts the external influences that can turn an artist's life into a failure. The references to parallels with the author's biography are possibly intentional. How much room for manoeuvre can the artist claim for himself if his own aesthetics are to remain the basis of his work? The artist can only be successful if he either meets the public's expectations or is in the position to influence their judgement at the outset of his career. Otherwise his options are limited. It is difficult to influence a judgement, once pronounced, with a new piece of work. Jonas continues the reflections on art Camus began in The Rebel. In Jonas, Camus examines the social relations from which an artist has difficulty escaping. On his last canvas, Jonas wrote only "solitaire", but in such a way that it could also be read as "solidaire"19. This is a way of posing the elementary question of morals: does the artist have to acknowledge his responsibility? Does the artist demonstrate his solidarity with all others or is he alone in the midst of others? The story of the artist's rise and fall sums up the fundamental conflict many artists find themselves in. How does a rupture in an artist's career come about? Is it his half-hearted dealings with his critics or the narrow-mindedness of his family that brings about his downfall? Does art present one with the task of championing something ("solidaire"), or is loneliness the prerequisite for pursuing art? Art offers no other option than to continue one's artistic commitment. Moreover, an artist's growing degree of fame probably forces him to play along with the rest of the world to an ever greater extent. Can an artist still trust in his own inspiration without endangering his work? The loneliness that Jonas chooses is a capitulation in the face of his admirers' expectations. Their attempt to pretend to be superior robs Jonas of his self-confidence.

3. The Nobel prize Throughout his work, Camus was constantly engaged in the issue of defining what a writer or artist ought, in his opinion, to do. He was in no doubt that the questions that were at the heart of all of his works, namely those relating to the artist's role, also had to be discussed in his Nobel prize speech. Without pathos, but with the whole weight of his experience as an author, he lectured in Stock17 Camus, Jonas or The Artist at Work, in: ditto, Exile and The Kingdom, p. 56-80. 18 Ditto, La vie d'artiste. Mimodrame en deux parties, in: ditto, Theatre, recits, nouvelles, p. 2054-2061. 19 Ditto, Jonas or The Artist at Work, p. 80.

136 holm on the quintessence of his reflections on art and the obligations that arose from it. In spite of the fact that a new era has meanwhile been ushered in, his speech has lost nothing of its relevance. At first, the speech only mentions moral considerations in passing, but later on, when Camus maintains that authors and intellectuals, rather than remaining silent, should voice their opinions on the issues of the day, they finally take centre stage. Camus convincingly links his personal attitude to art - "For myself, I cannot live without my art"20 - with his desire to live with everybody. By pointing to art as a suitable means of moving the largest number of people, Camus speaks the decisive sentence: "It [i.e. art, H. W.] obliges the artist not to keep himself apart; it subjects him to the most humble and the most universal truth."21 In this sense the demands an artist makes on himself are part and parcel of his aesthetics; this in turn is the yardstick against which his works ^re to be measured. The artist is not a loner, nor should he be one at the cost of renouncing his position. He maintains his credibility only in the context of the whole and by constantly and unconditionally respecting truth and freedom: "Truth is mysterious, elusive, always to be conquered. Liberty is dangerous, as hard to live with as it is elating."22 Camus is reluctant to establish a clear relationship between, on the one hand, the artist's goals of freedom and truth, and, on the other hand, moral virtue. Both goals are difficult to reach, and there are no clear-cut paths leading to them: "The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from."23 In his lecture entitled "L'Artiste et son temps"24 that Camus held in Uppsala he examines the artist's position and tasks and sums up his own aesthetics in doing so. Every artist is in the midst of the events of his day.25 The present situation is a challenge, and the artist has to face up to the questions of the times. The basic question at the heart of Camus' aesthetics is how, in the midst of all the ideologies, the freedom of creation can be preserved: "Every publication is an act, and this act exposes [one] to the passions of a century that forgives nothing."26 The dangers that Camus believes he can recognise emanate from the artists themselves, who have doubts about their art's necessity. Today, Camus writes, it is asked whether art is a hypocritical luxury. He is not surprised that society had not made art into an instrument of liberation, preferring to use it instead as a kind of exercise without any particular consequences, one 20 Camus, Acceptance Speech, in: Nobel Price Library, published under the sponsoring of the Nobel Foundation & the Swedish Academy. Albert Camus, Winston Churchill\ New York: Alexis Gregory, Del Mar, California: CRM Publishing, 1971, p. 7. 21 Ditto, Acceptance Speech, p. 7. 22 Op. cit.,p. 10. 23 Op. cit., p. 8. 24 Cf. ditto, Conference du 14 decembre 1957, in: ditto, Essais, p. 1080-1096. 25 Op. cit., p. 1079. 26 Op. cit., p. 1080. Cf. in the following: p. 1081 ff.

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which is at best suitable for providing diversion. Such an attitude gives rise to the artist's lack of a sense of responsibility, to the theory of "Fart pour Tart" and to the artist's loneliness. Camus understands art as a revolt against the world, in as much as the latter is imperfect. Art gives reality another form. He understands art therefore neither as a complete refusal nor a rejection of what exists. It is the artist's business to decide how much reality a work may dispense with. "Art in a certain sense is a revolt against the world in as much as the latter is fleeting and incomplete: it therefore proposes nothing other than to give form to a reality which it is nonetheless forced to preserve because it is the source of its emotions."2? In making these comments Camus repeats one of the most important demands that he makes of a work in an aesthetic sense: one reckons among the greatest works of art those in which the artist maintains a balance between reality and refusal. This statement is not merely a recommendation; it contains an exhortation and at the same time a condition. An artist can only succeed in creating this balance if he is prepared to share the common lot and not to found his work on hate and contempt. He also applies this demand to how the work is actually shaped. It is only by maintaining the balance between beauty and pain that the artist can tread the narrow path and find art's freedom. Camus banishes works that do not exhibit this degree of effort to the region of nihilism and sterility. The times when artists bore no responsibility have passed; they must be aware of the dangers they expose themselves to - this is Camus' message.

4. The First Man With no other work was Camus preoccupied for so long in the fifties than with The First Man. The novel was unfinished at the time of Camus' death, and only appeared in 1994, having been pieced together from Camus' notes. Although its central character is called Jacques Cormery, it is widely recognized as an essentially autobiographical novel. In his Notebooks, Camus repeatedly names this project's title and expresses ideas for the book. His entries are not only retrospective, his experiences amount to an agenda, with which he was able to compare what he had achieved up to that point in time. The individual chapters give accounts of different periods. Certain text displacements are intentional and, just like the poverty of his origins, his relation to his mother and his progress through school, they belong to a well-conceived plan, which allowed Camus to write not only his autobiography, but also one of his finest books. The title The First Man, in which Camus summarizes his respect for life, hints at the fact that everyone has to discover the world for himself anew.28 27 Camus, Conference du 14 decembre 1957, p. 1096. (Translated by C. Atkinson.) 28 Ditto, Notebooks 1951-1959, p. 125.

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The novel's first pages give an account of his parents' journey to their new domicile. The dark clouds moving across the sea finally let raindrops fall onto the tarpaulin of the horse-drawn carriage, which is driving through the night; these clouds constitute a simple yet impressive backdrop, which sets the tone for the rest of the story. In all of his earlier novels or novellas the reader is typically confronted with the story's topic or plot in the opening sentences. As we have already seen, in The First Man Camus gives the main character a different name, thus distancing himself, at least to some extent, from the protagonist. Over several chapters - each of which could be read on its own as a novella Jacques Cormery gives a non-chronological account of the different phases of his life. The interconnections that arise between these chapters heighten the novel's charm. The first chapter tells the story of how, after a long train journey, Jacques' parents set off in a horse-drawn carriage, travelling all night long in the rain, to the father's new place of work, where Jacques is born before daybreak. There is no suggestion in this chapter that Cormery will narrate his childhood in this book. It is only in the second chapter, when he sets out to visit the cemetery of Saint-Brieuc, that the connection with his father becomes evident, for the forty-year old Cormery visits the grave of his father, who was fatally wounded in the battle of the Marne in 1914. The First Man holds a prominent place in Camus' oeuvre, for Camus devoted particular care to its aesthetic qualities. None of his other works contains chapters that are interrupted in their chronological sequence and which are arranged in a way that is constitutive for the work as a whole. After a chapter on his childhood, which is described by way of the young Cormery's reminiscences during a sea-voyage, a chapter follows in which Jacques visits his mother, and the two of them talk about the circumstances of his father's death. Another chapter narrates family life in Algiers. Even if in the definitive version the chapters' arrangement might perhaps have been changed - the version currently available does hint at such an intention - the impression nonetheless remains of a masterly composed narrative framework. Camus evokes many of the basic themes and principles explored in his works, but he does so most unobtrusively, completely integrating them into the story and experiences of the young Cormery. If The First Man is the first of Camus' works a reader comes across, he will not require explanations for why Camus addresses certain topics, and will even be able to understand them without the help of Camus' more theoretical texts. Indeed, very few of The First Man's allusions to other works need any explanation at all. The account of Jacques' family life and school-years in Algiers are stories in their own right and can also be understood as self-contained novellas, quite apart from their status as autobiography. If the reader turns to this novel after having read Camus' other books he will discover references to circumstances already familiar to him. This novel's

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singular status in Camus' whole opus will also become immediately apparent. In the above-mentioned succession of his prose writings and theoretical works, with which Camus systematically conceived his entire work as a system and not as a matter of chance, The First Man has a prominent place. The Fall and "The Wrong Side and the Right Side" exemplify a phase of his life that Camus was only able to overcome as an author. The references in the Notebooks to his most recent novel suggest that The First Man was intended to introduce a new phase. Thus the topics of his last novel are all the more important, since they point beyond his oeuvre, hinting at things to come and, unfortunately, only vaguely suggesting what was not written. The First Man amounts to more than just a retrospective account of Camus' youth, for it also conveys insights into Camus' understanding of the aesthetics of literature and in particularly into his demand that an author should participate in everything. Camus does not express things that are absolutely certain; on the contrary he is always searching for a description of man's relationship to the world about him. Camus examines the conditions of revolt and the morality inherent within it in different genres. He never allows himself to be tempted into renouncing his demand for morals, which he sees as an important responsibility for the artist. Nevertheless, as a diary entry from June 1959 proves, Camus was aware of morality's limits: "I have abandoned the moral point of view. Morals lead to abstraction and to injustice. They are the mother of fanaticism and blindness. Whoever is virtuous must cut off the heads. But what to say of those who profess morality without being able to live up to its high standards? The heads fall and he legislates, unfaithful. Morality cuts in two, separates, wastes away. One must flee morality, accept being judged, saying yes, creating unity - and for the time being, suffering agony."29

Camus takes stock and does not conceal his disappointment and resignation here. He simply lays down, in a very concise manner, the outcome of his search for morals. It was not a failure, for in striving for morals he attained far more than if he had opted for a precise formulation of a particular moral code. A month previously he had written something similar, suggesting that he wished to live with the morals of all humans. He shows he is convinced of having to restore a truth, after having lived his whole life in a kind of lie. If he combines this search with reflections on morals, and notes resolutely in his Notebooks during the last days of his life that he wishes to give up the search, then this realisation should not be interpreted as a total defeat. In the notes he made that were published in the appendix of The First Man, Camus writes that what had always helped him was the particular conception of art that he had always possessed.30 Art is not superior to all else, he concludes, and it should not let itself get cut off from real people. So, in his own way, Camus confirms the moral 29 Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959, p. 248; cf. for the following, p. 246. 30 Cf. for the following: ditto, The First Man, p. 320.

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standards that determine aesthetics and, in his view, art itself. Camus' doubts about morals are thus to be seen as a confession that morals can never be anything unequivocal and must instead be understood as a call addressed to art to always turn to humans directly. Aesthetics is the means by which art and literature can reach as many people as possible. Just as the process of revolt is to be contrasted with the mistakes committed in revolutions, so too the products and efforts of aesthetics are to be upheld in opposition to every kind of fatalism, to the absurdity of life and to the supposedly unalterable course of history.

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11. Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre The meaning of art in the works of Camus and Sartre is not yet sufficiently understood. On the one hand, the fact that their works are usually grouped together under the heading of either existentialism, philosophy, or political thought has frequently obstructed the view of the ideas on aesthetics that one finds in their works, and which always played a part in each and every one of the individual projects the two authors carried out. But reading their works for their own merits, rather than from a comparative or ideological angle, best reveals the meaning of art in each of the authors' works. Their aesthetics, their moral commitment and their theories of literature will ensure that their writing continues to exercise considerable influence. Many who are of the opinion that the two authors' works are outdated are not familiar with their significance beyond the politics of their day. It is useless to compare them with each other and ask to which of them we should ascribe the greater influence. In the field of aesthetics, as well as in the manner in which they became mixed up in current affairs as a result of their personal theories, each developed his own principles and methods. But these were often ignored by the different political sides, because they wanted to win over one of the two. The lack of attention paid to art in most commentaries on Sartre's oeuvre is evidenced by very recent investigations, which still concentrate above all on his philosophy or his political activities. Compared with Camus, Sartre is undoubtedly the more influential theoretician and was also much more concerned with the systematic interpretation of works of art. Camus reflects on the question of morals throughout his oeuvre; Sartre likewise often dwelt on morals in his works, but he also wrote on them in depth in his Notebooks for an Ethics^. As an author, Camus proved his incontestable talent above all in his prose works a talent that is not shared by Sartre in quite so marked a manner. It is indicative of Sartre's reception today that in the acclaimed Rowohlt monograph series, a reissue of the Sartre volume2 has appeared in Germany in which the attention paid to his oeuvre's aesthetic dimension is, apart from a few pages on The Family Idiot, all but negligible. His studies on Baudelaire, Genet and Mallarme are the only other artist studies mentioned, and even then only in passing. Sartre is usually written about as a philosopher or as an intellectual. His interest in art, his numerous contacts with artists, for whose catalogues he wrote forewords, as well as his preoccupation with Tintoretto, are still only rarely mentioned. As far as one can tell, his criticism of literature and his philosophy were developed alongside each other; they clearly share common 1 Cf. Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics, p. 547-554. 2 Ch. Hackenesch, Jean-Paul Sartre, Reinbek near Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2001.

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ground, yet right up to this day the intensive exchange between the two areas via his theory of art has still not been adequately acknowledged. Camus and Sartre, who together influenced a whole generation, grappled with defining human existence and its implications. They both made art - as one of man's most immediate means of expression in the field of tension between morals and responsibility - into a touchstone of human activity and behaviour. Sartre, the more rigorous thinker? Camus, the better novelist? Since their works developed in parallel to each other, at least for a certain length of time, and including the period in which both established the basis of their approaches to literature, it is an obvious enough step to compare certain aspects of the ideas they developed. This task is all the more urgent when we consider that both offered reflections and solutions for similar problems of their times, proposing to their readers directions of thought, albeit with different emphases, as answers to the turmoil of their day. Comparing the protagonist Roquentin in Sartre's Nausea with Camus' Meursault3 underlines the singular nature of The Stranger, Both authors expressed critical opinions of the other's novel. The comparison of their reviews4 lends fundamental insight into their respective concepts. In contrast with The Stranger, which, as a novel, conveys no specific message in the sense of a prescribed interpretation, Nausea contains the interpretation of Sartre's philosophical ideas, these being presented by Roquentin. In a fictive diary Antoine Roquentin gives an account of his last months in Bouville, where he wants to write a biography of the dubious Marquis de Rollebon. Roquentin reports of how things around him were changing and of his intention of getting to the bottom of it all. In doing so he notices how his relations had changed not only to the things, but also to the other people around him. It is not a passing feeling of unease, for his existence itself also changes as he becomes aware of how he himself is affected. What seemed to take hold of him like an illness reveals itself to be the fear of losing the very basis of existence. Later, the autodidact with whom Roquentin became acquainted in the library explains to him his view of life's meaning. This view correlates with Sartre's theory of commitment: "Life has meaning if you choose to give it one. First of all you must act, you must throw yourself into some enterprise. If you think about it later on, the die is already cast, you are already involved."5 On the same evening, Roquentin, who had sat down on a park bench under a chestnuttree, realises that his feeling of unease was nothing other than existence itself. He reflects on the meaning of the absurd and relates both absurdity and exis3 Cf. A. Robbe-Grillet, Nature, humanisme, tragedie, in: La nouvelle nouvelle revue francaise, no. 70, Oct. 1958, p. 580-604, esp. p. 592-599. 4 Cf. Sartre, A Commentary on The Stranger, in: Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism. Translated by C. Macomber. New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2007, p. 73-98. 5 Ditto, Nausea, p. 162; cf. p. 184 ff.

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tence to contingency. In this way he discovers the individual's freedom. His feeling of being superfluous makes him realise that existence is not necessary, and therefore contingent. The realisation that he is superfluous causes in Roquentin a sensation of revulsion. At the same time he gives an interpretation of the absurd as something that can always only originate in relation to a certain situation. This names just about all the important concepts that Sartre explains in his main philosophical work, Being and Nothingness (1943), and to which he later returns in his artist portraits, right down to the Flaubert study, The Family Idiot. Roquentin finally does put his pessimism behind him. The thought of writing a new book gives him the renewed hope that he will later be able to accept himself after all. The novel's autobiographical elements are unmistakeable, and the references to the philosophical ideas of Being and Nothingness are obvious and intentional. With the exception of the diary no particular formal element supports the novel's dramaturgy; one is left with the impression of a traditional novel in which the main character's fate is recounted by means of a diary. In Nausea, Sartre connects his philosophical reflections with the account of Roquentin's experiences, enabling a carefully constructed web of relationships to emerge between existence, freedom6 and contingence. The Stranger, on the other hand, concentrates on Meursault's judgements, which the latter formulates only on the basis of his feelings and observations. Whereas Nausea illustrates a particular theory of existence, The Stranger narrates the story of an individual, which starts off as nothing other than the story of a minor employee in Algiers and is thus far removed from any philosophy. Camus and Sartre each wrote a novel in which they recounted, each in his own way, their heroes' absurd situation. Neither of them limits himself to dealing with the absurd as the sole topic. For Roquentin, his book's failure was the basis for a fresh start and thus for a new book. In the newspaper Alger republicain, Camus published a review of Sartre's novel Nausea in October 1938. Despite all the tribute that Camus paid to Sartre - "we are impatiently waiting to read future works", he writes politely - the reviewer insists expressly on there being an imbalance between the work's ideas and its images. He thus defends his own standpoint: "A novel is never anything but a philosophy expressed in images,"? the first sentence reads. This is one criterion with which Camus intended to examine the novel.

6 Santoni recently compared Sartre's and Camus' ideas on freedom with each other from a philosophical point of view: cf. R. E. Santoni, Camus on Sartre's "freedom"—another "misunderstanding", in: The Review of Metaphysics, June 2008, p. 785-813. 7 Cf. for the following: Camus, On Jean-Paul Sartre's La Nausee, in: ditto, Lyrical and Critical Essays, p. 199.

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As soon as the philosophy steps out, in the novel's imagery, beyond the people and their deeds, it becomes a label attached to the work: the plot itself loses its authenticity, and the novel its life. The reviewer qualifies his harsh criticism by establishing that both parts of Sartre's novel are equally convincing, though he does find fault with the abrupt transitions between the two. By referring to the disproportion between Roquentin's hope of being able to write again and the preceding revolt that gave rise to this hope, Camus substantiates his criticism. The question is: why did Sartre not go the whole way? Why did he not examine more carefully the moment in which, as he calls it, the decor collapses? Incidentally, in The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus will try to find an answer to this question. In his review of Sartre's Nausea, Camus maintains that he wants to restrict himself to the .revolt and the feeling that arouses or accompanies it, i.e., to revulsion. It was not a damning review, but it did not deliver the positive judgement Sartre had perhaps hoped for. On pronouncing their opinions on the book in front of them, Sartre and Camus each had a similar problem at the back of their mind and each presented an attempt at solving it and made this solution the yardstick with which to judge the other's work. Both reviewers confirm the incomparability of their accounts and their heroes' developments. Sartre is the "philosopher", who is engaged in preparing Being and Nothingness, and is also about to examine in detail the projects of many different artists and how they were put into effect. Camus refers to his 'weltbild', which he thinks allows him to gauge his protagonists' behaviour. Without wanting to cast doubt on Sartre's own efforts in this respect, one can safely say here that Camus tries to give the protagonists a morality "as a companion", so to speak, and then explains, discusses and assesses its implications. Whereas in his artist portraits Sartre analyses the artist's role as an intellectual and assesses their works' impact according to how much influence they had, Camus limits himself to the artist's own role and tries to develop a morality, exploring it in depth by portraying the main characters and their actions in his novels. The "adventurers of the absurd"8, as they are called in The Rebel, know the absurdity of their situation in life. This absurd situation enables all artists who reject it and at the same time acknowledge it to formulate their answers. In What is Literature? Sartre describes the "aesthetic joy"9 as being not the author's concern, but rather a result of the finished work, equating it with the viewer's or reader's consciousness. Comparing this with what, in the case of Don Juan, Camus calls "... the absurd joy par excellence in creation"10 illustrates the differences between their two approaches. A work of art's phenomenology is described more completely by Sartre, because he examines in much greater depth 8 Cf. Camus, The Rebel, p. 9. 9 Sartre, What is Literature?, p. 52. 10 Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, p. 93.

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than Camus how the work is created and, in so doing, defines its reception as a part of it. Camus, on the other hand, has a much greater tendency than Sartre to relate his reflections on the work of art's impact and tasks to his own person. Both in the preface to the reprinting of The Wrong Side and the Right Side, where Camus looks closely at how he began to write and confirms the validity of the tenets he had developed at the time, and on other occasions, Camus repeatedly returns to the question of the artist's tasks. Artistic work is for him "an intellectual drama"! 1. in this context, it is striking that in Camus' oeuvre one cannot recognise a particular type of artist, such as is portrayed for example in Sartre's portrait studies. Each of the artists or writers, whose work and life Sartre examines in a study, whether it be Tintoretto, Flaubert or Mallarme, had created something fundamentally new for his own times and often asserted himself and his art in the face of his contemporaries' prejudices. Among them one finds Jean Genet, whose life and work he investigates in Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr. Sartre concentrates his enquiries on a certain type of artist - one that comes close to the definition of the intellectual described in his lectures in Japan. 12 Camus, on the other hand, is concerned with the artist as such, whose general moral obligations he tries to reveal. Without doubt, both Camus and Sartre explicitly emphasize the artist's freedom as a condition for fulfilling his tasks. Sartre develops his concept of freedom and explains it in his main philosophical work, Being and Nothingness. Camus, in contrast, is content with short statements on this topic: "The only one [i.e. freedom, H. W.] I know is freedom of thought and action."13 But it is Camus' criticism of ideologies, as formulated mainly in The Rebel, that Sartre was not able to share, at least not in so pure a form, during a certain period, at the beginning of the fifties. But one should not overlook the fact that on many other occasions Sartre himself likewise found harsh words against totalitarian ideologies and in particular of the Stalinist variant of Marxism. Existentialism is a further topic on which they differ. It is talked about negatively by Camus, as a bearer of exaggerated hope. 14 No, he was not an existentialist, Camus says in a conversation published in November 1945.15 And he adds that the only theoretical work that he had published, The Myth of Sisyphus, was directed against so-called 'existentialist' philosophy.

11 Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, p. 98. 12 Cf. Sartre, The Plea for Intellectuals, in: ditto, Between Existentialism and Marxism, p. 228-285. 13 Cf. Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, p. 56. 14Cf.op.cit.,p. 135. 15 Cf. ditto, Non je ne suis pas existentialiste ... [conversation with J. Delpech, in: Les Nouvelles litteraires, 15 Nov. 1945], in: Camus, Essais, p. 1424-1427, esp. p. 1424.

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Such comparisons show both common ground and contrasts, though they do not shed much light on the true significance of Camus' and Sartre's works. The quarrel that lead to the rupture in their friendship in 1952 16 is more revealing, although it more or less took place on the stage of contemporary history, where fundamental differences of opinion were voiced that both might possibly have put in a different perspective in a political dispute less bound up with current affairs. Camus founded his accusation - that authoritarian socialism had confiscated real freedom in exchange for an ideal, future freedom - on Marxism's mistaken scientific predictions and its theory's shortcomings. Marxism could not be dogmatic, dialectic and, to top it all, prophetic all at the same time, Camus argued. I7 With his criticism of ideolpgy, Camus had cut to the quick those who revealed themselves to be his unbending ideological opponents. His book not only contained a critique, it also presented findings and a description of the dangerous consequences of ideologies: ideologies that claim to be absolute are a public danger and are bound to fail. The Rebel was the occasion for a public clashing of swords in Les Temps modernes. This hit Camus quite personally - there is much to indicate this - and certainly more forcibly than Sartre. Perhaps their dispute would have been less fierce if the connection between philosophy and politics had not been at the heart of the ideological disputes at the beginning of the fifties. The Cold War was well under way. Many intellectuals were defending their own camp, assuming, that is, that they had already espoused an ideology. Sartre had just finished his study of Jean Genet (Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr) and had returned from a journey to Italy. When Jeanson attacked The Rebel in May 1952, Sartre was already writing his series of articles "Les communistes et la paix"18, which appeared in Les Temps modernes in the same year. The ideological chains with which Sartre had shackled himself in writing these articles left him no more room for manoeuvre, when holding The Rebel in his hands. Timing might explain Sartre's uncompromising attitude towards Camus' The Rebel. Camus wrote this book at a time when Sartre was just trying to offer his services - unsuccessfully as it happened - as a "compagnon de route" (fellow-traveller) of the PCF. Sartre's lack of success was not necessarily a stigma, for the PCF was more to blame for that than Sartre, since they were unable to accept certain principles that Sartre did not wish to renounce. Sartre's stance has to be viewed in more detail. In 1950, the article "Les jours de notre vie" ap-

16 Cf. R. Aronson, Camus and Sartre. The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel that Ended it. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. - Cf. the author's review: www.romanistik.info/aronson-sartre-camus.html. 17 Cf. Camus, The Rebel, p. 220, 218. 18 Sartre, Les communistes et la paix, in: ditto, Situations, VI, p. 80-384.

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peared in Les Temps modernes^, written by Merleau-Ponty, but also signed by Sartre. It criticised the Soviet camps, in which ten to fifteen million prisoners were being held: "[...] these facts raised grave doubts about the sense of the Russian system."20 Camus and Sartre's relentless insistence on their respective personal standpoints can be understood as a resolute expression of their own principles. The stubbornness with which they championed their own convictions, at the same time also preserving their own independence, is typical of both men. Camus was not able to persuade the staff of the journal Les Temps modernes of his theory of revolt and his critique of revolution, while they likewise were not prepared to give up their principles and even begin to acknowledge Camus' arguments. The way the dispute was fought shows neither of them, Sartre in particular, at their best. This was no technical discussion among friends, it was an uncouth exchange of blows. Both accused the other party of behaving inconsistently and of not wanting to understand the other. Without recalling for one minute the basic humanist outlook of their own works, each pushing tolerance aside, they both stuck self-assuredly to their own views. Sartre behaved condescendingly, Camus let himself be provoked and paid back in his own coin. The irreconcilability of their standpoints made their quarrel more acrimonious. Both even accepted that they were dealing the opponent a moral blow and hurting him, perhaps even intending this. A review of The Rebel was not published in the journal Les Temps modernes until a few months after Camus' work had appeared. The book had clearly sparked off vehement discussions in the editing committee. At first, Sartre expressed no opinion of his own, letting Francis Jeanson write a review that took the essay's findings to task. Under the heading "Albert Camus or The Soul in Revolt", Jeanson explains that The Rebel was a failure above all because of its notion of history. Jeanson's proofs are clearly ideologically motivated. If one reduced Camus' arguments to the essential statements, then nothing much would remain, Jeanson maintains, quite manifestly quoting only those of Camus' arguments that he was capable of refuting.21 Jeanson only begins to analyse Camus' remarks on revolt, and his assessment of The Rebel is in effect little more than a look at Camus' interpretation of history. Camus had not expressed the intention of writing an investigation from the perspective of the history of philosophy. Jeanson used Camus' critique of Marx and the Marxist conception 19 in 1951 Sartre likewise criticised developments in the USSR; cf. the article, also signed by him: M. Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Les jours de notre vie, in: Les Temps modernes 51, Paris 1950 (1153-1168), p. 1155: "What we say is that that is not Socialism, if one in twenty citizens are in a camp". (Translation by C. Atkinson.) Cf. M. Contat, M. Rybalka, Les Ecrits de Sartre, p. 230. Cf. Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, in: ditto, Situations, IV, p. 225-228. 20 Cf. M. Merleau-Ponty, Les jours de notre vie, p. 1154, cf. p. 1154 f. 21 Cf. F. Jeanson, Albert Camus or The Soul in Revolt, in: Sartre and Camus A Historic Confrontation, p. 79-105, p. 82.

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of history as an opportunity to give Camus a dressing-down for his scruples about sharing Marxism's belief in progress, calling this a lack of understanding and a complete neglect of history. As a result of this review, a quarrel arose between Camus and Sartre, with the latter concentrating above all on The Rebel's political statements, without actually arriving at its aesthetic level. Camus addresses his answer directly to the editor of Les Temps modernes, "Dear Editor [...]", in order to emphasize that Jeanson's slating had been inspired by Sartre. He defends himself against Jeanson's accusations without directly naming him, and complains to Sartre that the member of his staff had omitted his, Camus', theory of history in his line of reasoning solely in order to be in a better position to reproach him with having side-stepped it.22 The reviewer Jiad not understood his work, Camus claimed, and had deliberately distorted its contents. Insulted and disappointed, Camus let himself be drawn into the dispute. "As everyone knows, you are doubtless not a Marxist, in the strict sense of the term,"23 Camus insinuates, and accuses Sartre of putting everyone who criticised Marxism on the side of the right-wingers, of calling idealism a right-wing ideology and of ignoring every revolution named in The Rebel that was not of a Marxist nature. At this point he is clearly targeting Jeanson, who wanted to ascribe to history an inherent meaning and the goal of establishing definitive freedom. The attempt to introduce a more nuanced approach sheds light on the differences in Sartre's and Jeanson's positions regarding Marxism, but these differences played no role in this dispute, since Sartre backed Jeanson. The questions Sartre directs at Camus in his answer, published in the same issue of Les Temps modernes, intensifies the dispute. Was Camus perhaps mistaken, he wonders? And was the book simply witness to his philosophical incompetence? Sartre begins his retort with "My dear Camus", and then reproaches him also for the book's rhetorical form.24 The manner in which Sartre advises his friend to read Being and Nothingness, and his assumption that the other will surely find it difficult reading, reveal both arrogance and a patronising attitude towards Camus. As interesting as Sartre's pithy summary and his own commentary on Being and Nothingness are at this point, it is evident that he does not examine Camus' arguments in detail. In a manner that is calculated to wound the other, Sartre reminds him of his, Camus', modest origins. And he says that he was not interested in any further

22 Camus, A letter to the Editor of Les Temps Modernes, in: Sartre and Camus. A Historic Confrontation, p. 107-129; p. 116. Cf. B.-H. Levy, Le siecle de Sartre. Enquete philosophique, p. 408-424; p. 415. 23 Camus, A letter to the Editor of Les Temps Modernes, p. 118. 24 Sartre, Reply to Albert Camus, in: Sartre and Camus. A Historic Confrontation, p. 131161; p. 137, 144-147.

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discussion with him: Camus was welcome to reply, but he would not do so any more. Sartre's stance appears odd, because although he himself had repeatedly emphasized the particular significance of art in his own works, he ignores the importance of art in The Rebel Their friendship did not protect them from ideological differences of opinion. Camus embodied the conflicts of his day and overcame them through his fervour for life, Sartre does acknowledge in his obituary of 1960. He calls Camus Chateaubriand's last and most brilliant heir.25 The two authors, whose works are often cited together, and who are named in the same chapter of every history of literature, definitely fell out. Both had, each in his own way, dedicated an important part of their oeuvre to the tasks of the intellectual and the artist, and thus also to their own sphere of activity. The reason their dispute was so acrimonious was that it represented the uncompromising clash of two different answers to the challenges of their times. The dispute is all the more astonishing, since Sartre and Camus both represented very similar views - perhaps even identical views - regarding their assessment of art's efficacy and the artist's influence. In the same issue of Les Temps modernes in which Sartre publishes his last reply, addressed to Camus, Fiancis Jeanson likewise writes an essay directed at Camus: "To tell you everything"26. There had been a misunderstanding, Jeanson explains. It was a question of how one interprets history. No, Camus was not right-wing, he was just "up in the air", Jeanson writes, refuting the other's earlier objections. And he accuses Camus of having suppressed history himself, substituting for it a kind of metaphysical conflict between revolt and the human condition. After Camus' death in January 1960, Sartre emphasized the former's commitment in an impressive obituary2? and pointed out how close Camus was to the French moralists. Camus, he writes, was, in this century, one of the heirs of a long series of moralists, whose works represent what has to be reckoned among the finest examples of French literature. Through his stubborn refusals in the face of the proponents of Machiavellian ideas and the golden calf of realism, Camus had confirmed the existence of morals.28 These were conciliatory words, and they testify to Sartre's respect for his erstwhile friend. Sartre's words here correspond much closer to the principles of his works than the intransigence with which he had opposed Camus during the quarrel about The Rebel. Comparing Sartre's Words with Camus' The First Man helps us to understand how the two authors viewed themselves. Both portray in their own par25

Sartre, Albert Camus, in: ditto, Situations, IV, p. 126-130. 26 F. Jeanson, To tell you everything, in: Sartre and Camus. A Historic Confrontation, p. 163-203. 21 Cf. Sartre, Albert Camus, in: ditto, Situations, IV, p. 126-129, p. 128. 2 8()p.cit.,p. 127.

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ticular manner how they discovered literature. While Camus depicts in some depth his teacher's encouragement and, later, his visits to the library, Sartre concentrates on his discovery of words and how he gradually assembled them into stories. In Words he constructs his own portrait, that of the young Poulou, who discovers books under the gaze of his benevolent grandfather and quickly learns to read because he realises that the books contain something that the adults conceal from him. Words is the autobiography of his childhood,29 an account written with humorous detachment of how the young Sartre discovered literature or of how any future author might do the same. The book contains many allusions to the effect literature can have. Many notions that Sartre develops in his theoretical works and that acted as guidelines while writing his artist portraits are projected here intojhe young Sartre's world of ideas, so that the older Sartre might again examine the potential that literature offers. With hindsight, Sartre identifies earlier experiences that appear to explain his success or that even act as the source or cause of his desire to be successful later. Such exaggerations do not impair the book's purpose, which does not deal exclusively with his childhood; on the contrary, it uses the author's childhood experiences to develop an aesthetics of literature. If The First Man can lay claim to a particular place in Camus' oeuvre, then a different significance must be attributed to Words. Sartre implicitly demands of his readers that they be familiar with his works. Without knowing these works, Sartre's readers would overlook his humour in Words, his skill in alluding both to his theories' concrete foundation in reality and at the same time to their deep-rooted connection with his oeuvre; they would simply read his book as an autobiography of his childhood days. The criticism of his bourgeois origins, which Sartre uses rather pro forma as the impetus for his mind's development, distinguishes him from Camus quite considerably. The poverty of the latter's family and his fortune in finding a teacher like Louis Germain, who made it his task to advance his pupils as much as possible, instils in Camus a great respect for his own origins - something one continually senses in The First Man, and not only there. The most important differences between the two authors are also revealed in their aesthetic theories: Sartre establishes an artist's projet and then tries to judge the artist's work using this project as a yardstick, for example, by asking whether the artist or author made something of his project and what significance the works he had produced actually attained. Camus investigates the principles of art in a more general sense, for example, by comprehending life's absurdity as a fate common to all men - one that we should confront in a form of rebellion that is accessible to all, albeit without trying to evade fate. Sartre's aesthetics is directed at the impact of works of art and at the attention an artist can attract 29 Cf. M. Contat (ed.), Pourquoi et comment Sartre a ecrit "Les Mots" Genese d'une autobiographie. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1996.

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with them. At the same time he concentrates on describing individual works of art. With his theory of literature, especially in What is Literature?, Sartre had laid down the foundations for a reader-response criticism long before German scholars began to use other sources to develop a fully-fledged analysis of the relation of the reader to the text. Camus, on the other hand, understands reflecting on art as a personal obligation; and, as an artist, he also thinks aloud, so to speak, about this task in public. Like Camus, Sartre wanted to write on aesthetics^O, but, like Camus, never produced a fully coherent piece of writing on the topic. One can, however, access Sartre's ideas on aesthetics by analysing his artist portraits. By examining the works of Flaubert, Baudelaire, Mallarme and Tintoretto, and attempting to reveal the intentions that lay behind their realisation, Sartre shows the links between his main philosophical works and his literary works, among which his artist portraits can also be reckoned. His aesthetics concentrates on a work of art's impact. In his view the work of art is not an isolated incident; it is part of a complete oeuvre, by means of which the artist transcends his personal situation. It is the recipients who pass judgement on the work of art, who only actually confer an effect on it by what they themselves make of the work of art. In this sense Sartre develops an aesthetics that transfers a share in the responsibility of continuing to develop fine arts and literature to the viewer and reader. Neither of the authors is concerned with boundless freedom, in which every act would become arbitrary and thus without purpose. Each develops in his own way a theory of freedom and of man's individual responsibility. It was presumably largely political and ideological reasons that meant that the importance of their theories of aesthetics has for a long time and with lasting effect been overlooked. In innumerable studies Sartre's and Camus' approaches to existentialism have been compared with each other, whilst the moral responsibilities that both developed from their analyses were rarely taken into account. The role of art in Camus' oeuvre is not the result of a philosophical train of ideas, a theory or even a system of thought; art and its impact is an elementary component of his convictions and of the way he viewed himself as an author. The notes in his diaries and his rather cursory reflections on art are an indication of the fact that in his creative work it was writing itself, rather than a theory of ideologies, that figured most prominently. This is incidentally also true of his notion of art's autonomy, the whole weight of which Camus pitted against the ideologies of the 19th and 20th centuries. Interpreting his writings as a selfcontained theory is detrimental to an understanding of how Camus conceived artistic work as a personal obligation.

30 Cf. Sartre, M. Sicard, Penser Part. Entretien, in: Obliques 24/25, (15-20), p. 15.

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Conclusions The findings of the two studies united in the present volume testify to the importance of art in the writings of Sartre and Camus. Sartre's re-working of the reader-response theory, which derives from the ideas of the French literary theorist Emile Hennequin,! reminds one of the constant exchange taking place between, on the one hand, the author or artist, and, on the other hand, the reader or viewer, as well as of the obligations and responsibilities of all concerned. Camus' work, in contrast, is based on the search for a morals - one that ultimately finds expression in art. Alongside the topical opinions expressed by both authors, it is the connection between art, theory and philosophy that lends their works their respective structure. The portrait studies that Jean-Paul Sartre developed, chiefly with the help of his philosophical concepts, produce evidence of the freedom vital to all artistic work and of art's function as an invitation or appeal. A work of art's aesthetic quality is all the greater, the more the work challenges the recipient to transcend it. The artist himself is only indirectly involved in this process. Sartre's artist portraits deserve to be recognised as playing an outstanding role in his oeuvre - as the link between his criticism of art and literature and his main philosophical works. In producing them he aimed at verifying certain hypotheses, for the portrait studies repeatedly partake in, and thus continue, his philosophical work. All the artists whom Sartre portrays or, rather, whose relationship to both their own works and to art in general he examines again and again, have something in common: they created something new. With the help of his imagination, each of these artists succeeded in asserting himself in defiance of a sceptical public. Sartre's artist studies are more than biographies; they are case studies, or "situations", in which philosophy and aesthetics inform one another. The work of art functions as an appeal, reminding humans of their responsibility towards freedom - a responsibility from which they cannot be released. "The real forces are those of the conscience and of liberty. I have never accepted mindless materialism that reduces man to being one thing among many."2 As a summary of the intentions embodied in the portrait studies, this statement confirms the astounding continuity of thought in Sartre's oeuvre. The artist studies constantly refer to all the other works in Sartre's heterogeneous oeuvre. Observing these connections between the various parts of his oeuvre reveals the continuity and tenacity with which Sartre continually devel1 Cf. E. Hennequin, La Critique Scientiflque, and D. Hoeges, Literatur und Evolution, Studien zur franzosischen Literaturkritik im 19. Jahrhundert. Taine - Brunetiere - Hennequin Guyau, Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitatsverlag, 1980. 2 Sartre, [interview with J. Chancel] in: Chancel, Radioscopie, p. 200. (Translated by C. Atkinson)

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oped his ideas, all of which had by and large been named by the end of the 1940s, and the applicability of which he also tested in the field of art. The variety of approaches with which he reconstructed art's impact and comprehensibility also opens up new ways of interpreting works of art, though without permitting his work to be attributed to a specific doctrine. The fixation on the absurd in Albert Camus' works has long deprived them of the attention their aesthetic quality merits. Camus' theoretical works and his prose works show how systematically he examined relations between art and morals from various angles. Viewing his works as a whole reveals that Camus approached the question of the links between aesthetics and morals in a systematic manner, not randomly. He accorded each of his writings a particular place in his entire oeuvre. In the latter, one recpgnises the beginnings of a morals, with which Camus intended to formulate principles of artistic involvement, focusing on the tension between art and freedom. Sartre's view of the complementary links between art and literature on the one hand, and philosophy on the other, can be found especially in those writings that contain reflections on aesthetics or which centred on a discussion of art. The Family Idiot is rightly regarded as the work that best demonstrates the fundamental link he saw between literature, art and philosophy. The fusion of art andfreedomhere is both coherent and indissoluble. Common to the works of both authors is a particular kind of humanism one that they developed in response to the major European and global problems of the 20th century. Seen from this perspective, their political dispute needs to be examined in a different light, for viewing their works in an ideological context will not reveal the significance of the ideas on art developed by the two authors. These ideas have proved to be the fertile ground on which Sartre and Camus were able to conceive their existentialist interpretations of freedom and responsibility.

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Literary and Philosophical Essays. [Some texts from Situations I, III] Translated by A. Michelson. Criterion Books, Inc.: New York 1985. Mallarme, or, The poet of nothingness. Translated and introduced by E. Sturm. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988. Morale et histoire, in: Les Temps modernes, Notre Sartre, July-October 2005, nos. 632-634, Paris 2005 (268-414). Nausea. Translated by R. Baldick. Penguin Books: London 1963. Notebooks for an Ethics. Translated by D. Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Le prix Nobel de litterature attribue a Jean-Paul Sartre. L'ecrivain le refuse et s'en explique, in: Le Figaro, 23 Oct. 1964. CEuvres romanesques. Edited by M. Contat, M. Rybalka. Paris: Gallimard 1981. The Problem of Method. [Tworczosc, no. 4, 1957] Translated by H. E. Barnes, London: Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1963. Les produits finis du Tintoret, in: Magazine litteraire, 176, Figures de Sartre, Paris 1981. La reine Albemarle ou le dernier touriste. Fragments. Edited by A. ElkaTmSartre. Paris, Gallimard 1991. Reply to Albert Camus, in: Sartre and Camus, A Historic Confrontation. Edited and translated by D. A. Sprintzen and A. van den Hoven, Humanity Books, New York, 2004, p. 131-161. The Responsibility of the Writer, in: Reflections on our age. Lectures Delivered at the opening session of UNESCO at the Sorbonne, Paris. New York: Columbia University Press, Morningside Heights, 1949, p. 67-83. Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr. Translated by B. Frechtman. George Braziller: New York, 1963. Sartre ont Theater. Documents assembled, edited, introduced and annotated by M. Contat and M. Rybalka. Translated by F. Jellinek. Pantheon Books, New York, 1976. Das Sein und das Nichts. Versuch einer ontologischen Phanomenologie. Translated by H. Schoneberg, T. Konig, Sartre, Gesammelte Werke in Einzelausgaben, in collaboration with the author and A. Elkaim-Sartre. Edited by T. Konig. Philosophische Schriften, vol. 3, Reinbek near Hamburg 1991. Critiques litteraires (Situations, I), Paris : Gallimard, 1947. Situations, II, Paris: Gallimard, 1949. Situations, III, Paris: Gallimard, 1949. Situations, IV. Portraits, Paris: Gallimard, 1964. Situations, IX, Melanges, Paris: Gallimard, 1972. Situations, VI. Problemes du marxisme 1, Paris: Gallimard, 1964. Situations. Translated by B. Eisler. [= Situations, IV, without the Wols texts "Doigts et non-doigts", on Lapoujade: Le peintre sans privilege, on Andre

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Masson: Masson, and Un parterre de Capucines, Venise de ma fenetre] George Braziller: New York, 1965. Tintoretto o il sequestrate di Venezia, Progetto e introduzione di M. Sicard. Traduzione e cura di Fabrizio Scanzio, Milan: Marinotti, 2005 Truth and existence, original text established and annotated by A. ElkaTmSartre. Translated by A. van den Hoven. Edited and introduced by R. Aronson. University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London, 1992. Un vieillard mystifie. Texte inedit de Jean-Paul Sartre. Fragment pour le Sequestre de Venise 1957, in: Sartre, [Catalogue for the centenary exhibition, Bibliotheque nationale de France, 2005]. Edited by M. Berne. Paris: Bibliotheque nationale de France/Gallimard, 2005, p. 186-190. The War Diairies. November 1939/March 1940. Translated by Q. Hoare. New York: Pantheon Books. 1984. What is Literature ? Translated by B. Frechtman. New York, Harper & Row, 1965. Words. Translated by I. Clephane. London: Hanish Hamilton, 1965.

Interviews with Sartre: Aubarede, G. d \ Rencontre avec Jean-Paul Sartre, in: Les Nouvelles litteraires, Paris, 1 Feb. 1951. Sartre parle ..., interview par Yves Buin, in : Clarte, no. 55, Union des etudiants communistes de France, Paris, March/April 1964 (42-47). Chancel, J., Texte d'une interview radiophonique, in: ditto, Radioscopie, vol. Ill, Paris: R. Laffont, 1973 (182-215). Gavi, Ph., Sartre, J.-P., Victor, P., On a raison de se revolter. Discussions, Paris: Gallimard, 1974. Life/Situations. Essays, Written and Spoken. Translated by P. Auster and L. Davis. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977. Sartre im Spiegel-Gesprach, in: Der Spiegel, 7/1973 (84-98). Special numbers: Sur les ecrits posthumes de Sartre, in: Annales de VInstitut de Philosophie et de Sciences Morales. Edited by G. Hottois. Briissel: Editions de PUniversite de Bruxelles, 1987. Magazine litteraire, 176, Figures de Sartre, Paris 1981. Numero special sur Merleau-Ponty: Les Temps modernes, nos. 184-185, Paris, October 1961. Obliques 18/19, Sartre. Edited by M. Sicard. Nyons: Ed. Borderie, 1979.

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Obliques 24/25, Sartre et les arts. Edited by M. Sicard. Nyons: Ed. Borderie, 1981. Catalogues: Sartre, [Catalogue pour Pexposition du Centenaire, Bibliotheque nationale de France, 2005]. Edited by M. Berne. Paris: Bibliotheque nationale de France /Gallimard, 2005.

DVD: Baussy-Oulianoff, D., Le Tintoret d'apres Jean-Paul Sartre. La Dechirure jaune, 1983, Paris : Gallimard, 2005.

Bibliographies: Contat, M., Rybalka, M , Les Ecrits de Sartre. Chronologie, Bibliographic commence, Paris 1970. The writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, [without the annex containing important texts of Sartre] Compiled by M. Contat and M. Rybalka. Translated by R. C. McCleary. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974. This bibliography was compiled with the assistance of the following: Groupe d'etudes sartriennes, Paris: www.ges-sartre.fr Sartre-Gesellschaft, Berlin: www.sartre-gesellschaft.de, Michel Sicard: www.michel-sicard.fr Wittmann, H., www.romanistik.info/sartre-camus.html

Albert Camus: Aceptance Speech [Discours de Suede], in: Albert Camus, Winston Churchill, in: Nobel Price Library. Published under the sponsoring of the Nobel Foundation & the Swedish Academy, A. Gregory, New York: CRM Publishing, Del Mar California, Helvetia Press, Ibnc. 1971, p. 7-10. Caligula and Three Other Plays. Translated by S. Gilbert. New York: Vintage Books, 1958. Defense of The Rebel, in: Sartre and Camus. A Historic Confrontation. Ed. and translated by D. A. Sprintzen and A. van den Hoven. New York: Humanity Books, 2004, p. 205-220.

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Essai sur la musique, in: P. Viallaneix. Le premier Camus suivi de „Ecrits de jeunesse d'Albert Camus", Cahiers Albert Camus 2, Paris 1973, p. 148-175. Essais. Edited by R. Quilliot and L. Faucon. Paris: Gallimard, 1965. The FalL Translated by J. O'Brien. Penguin Books: London 1957. The first man. Translated by D. Hapgood. New York: Knopf, 1995. Exile and the Kingdom, Translated by J. O'Brien. New York: Knopf, 1958. The Happy Death. Translated by R. Howard. Harmondsworth: Penguin 1973. The Human Crisis, in: Twice a Year, nos 14-15. A Letter to the Editor of Les Temps Modernes [30 juin 1952], in: Sartre and Camus, A Historic Confrontation. Edited and translated by D. A. Sprintzen and A. van den Hoven. New York: Humanity Books, 2004, p. 107-129. Lyrical and Critical Essays. Translated by E. C. Kennedy. New York: Vintage Books, 1968 Notebooks 1935-1942. Translated by P. Thody. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963. Notebooks 1951-1959. Translated by R. Bloom. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2008. Notebooks, 1942-1951. Translated from the French and annotated by J. O'Brien. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1965. Resistance, Rebellion, and Death. Translated by J. O'Brien. New York: Knopf, 1961. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Translated by J. O'Brien. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958. The Plague. Translated by S. Gilbert. New York: The Modern Library 1984. The Rebel. An Essay on Man in Revolt. Translated by A. Brower. New York: Vintage International, 1991. The Stranger. Translated by M. Ward. Vintage Books, New York 1989. Theatre, romans, nouvelles. Edited by R. Quilliot. Paris : Gallimard, 1962.

Recordings: Presence de Albert Camus [3 records], edited by L. Ades en collaboration avec les Services de la recherche de 1' O.R.T.F. et Madame Albert Camus. Production Disques Ades 7037, no year. L 'Etranger, Texte integral enregistre par Albert Camus en avril 1954, 3 CDs, R. Grenier, [Introduction], Paris: Fremeaux & Associes, 2002.

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Secondary literature:

Alloa, E., Imagination zwischen Nichtung und Fulle. Jean-Paul Sartres negative Theorie der Einbildungskraft auf dem Priifstein von Tintorettos Malerei, [lecture on the occasion of the conference "Imagination and Invention". Interdisciplinary conference in co-operation with the Academy of the Arts, Berlin, 27-29 January 2005], in: T. Bernhart; P. Mehne (eds), Imagination und Invention, Paragrana, supplement 2,2006, p. 13-27. — Suspension et gravite. L'imaginaire sartrien face au Tintoret, in : Alter. Revue de phenomenologie. Image et ceuvre d'art, n ° 15/2007, 123-141. Aronson, R., Camus and Sartre. The Story of a Friendship and the Quarel that Ended it. University of Chicago Press: Chicago 2004. Bauer, G. H., Sartre and the Artist, Chicago: University of Chicago Presse 1969. Beauvoir, S. de, The Prime of Life, Translated by P. Green. London: Andre Deutsch and Weidenfeld and Nicolson Ltd., London 1963. Bercken, E. von der, Die Gemdlde des Jacopo Tintoretto, Munich: Piper, 1942. Bernari, C , L 'opera completa del Tintoretto, Milan: Rizzoli, 2 1978. Bondy, F., Jean Genet - der Dichter, der sich freischrieb, in: Merkur 347, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1977. Calder, A., Animal Sketching, London (1926), 3rd ed., no year. Mobiles et Stabiles (mit 24 Diapositiven), Lausanne: Editions Rencontre, 1970. — [exhibition catalogue:] Musee d'Art Moderne, Paris. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, July-October 1965, Paris 1965. Carandente, G. (ed.), Calder, Milan: Electa, 1983. Clebert, J.-P. (ed.), Mythologie d'Andre Masson, Geneva: Pierre Cailler, 1971. Cohen-Solal, A., Sartre, London: Random House, 1985. Contat, M., (ed.), Pourquoi et comment Sartre a ecrit „Les Mots". Genese d'une autobiographie, Paris : Presses universitaires de France, 1996. Corbie, A., Camus. L fabsurde, la revolte, Vamour, Paris: Ed. de 1'Atelier 2003 Farias, V., Heidegger et le nazisme. Translated by M. Benarroch, J.-B. Grasset. Lagrasse: Verdier 1987. Faye, J. P., Heidegger and his French translators, in: Vermittler. H Mann, Benjamin, Groethuysen, Kojeve, Szondi, Heidegger in Frankreich, Goldmann, Sieburg, (ed. J. SieB), Frankfurt/Main: Syndikat Autoren- und Verlagsgemeinschaft, 1981, p. 161-196. Fell, J. D., Heidegger and Sartre. An Essay on Being and Place, New York: Columbia University Press, 1979. Frank, M., Structure de Fargumentation de la conference de Jean-Paul Sartre „Conscience de soi et connaissance de soi", in: le portique. Sartre. Conscience et liberte, no. 16, 2 e semester 2005 (10-32).

161

Freud, S., The Interpretation of Dreams, Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1997. ~ The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Translated by A. Tyson. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975. Gadamer, H.-G., Truth and Method. Translated by J. Weinsheimer and D. G. Marshall. Second, revised edition. New York: Continuum, 1989. — Hermeneutik II. Wahrheit und Methode, Erganzungen, Register, (= Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2) Tubingen: C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck) 21993. Gaillard, P., Albert Camus, Paris: Bordas, 1973. Genet, J., L 'atelier de Giacometti, [with 33 photos by E. Scheidegger], no place, 1995. Giacometti, A., [exhibition, 16.5.-02.11.1986], Katalog: A. Kuenzi, Fondation Pierre Gianadda, Martigny. — Plastiken - Gemdlde - Zeichnungen, Katalog u. Austellung. Edited by S. Salzmann. Duisburg 1977. Gipper, A., Der Intellektuelle. Konzeption und Selbstverstdndnis schriftstellerischer Intelligenz inFrankreich undltalien 1918-1930, Stuttgart 1992. Guerin, J., Camus. Portrait deVartiste en citoyen, Paris: Editions Francis Bourin, 1993. Hackenesch, C, Jean-Paul Sartre, Reinbek near Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2001. Heidegger, M, Being and Time. A Translation ofSein undZeit. Translated by J. Stambaugh. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996. Hennequin, E., La Critique Scientifique, [Paris 1890]. Edited by D. Hoeges. Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitatsverlag, 1982. Hoeges, D., Aufkldrung und die List der Form. Zur Zeitschrift „Il Caffe" und zur Strategie italienischer und franzosischer Aufkldrung, Krefeld: Scherpe 1978. — Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Gegenaufklarung? Lyotard und die Postmoderne, in: Romanistische Zeitschrift fiir Literaturgeschichte, Carl Winter Universitatsverlag, 4/1988 (449-465). ~ Julien Offray de Lamettrie und die Grundlagen des franzosischen Materialismus im 18. Jahrhundert, in: Neues Handbuch der franzosischen Literaturwissenschaft. Edited by K. von See. vol. XII: Europdische Aufkldrung III. Edited by J. von Stackelberg, Wiesbaden: Akademie Verlagsgesellschaft Athenaion, 1980(249-268). — Kontroverse am Abgrund. Ernst Robert Curtius und Karl Mannheim. Intellektuelle und tifreischwebende Intelligenz" in der Weimarer Republik, Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1994. — Literatur und Evolution, Studien zur franzosischen Literaturkritik im 19. Jahrhundert. Taine - Brunetiere — Hennequin - Guyau, Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitatsverlag, 1980. — Niccolo Machiavelli. Die Macht und der Schein, Miinchen: C. H. Beck, 2000.

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~ Niccolo Machiavelli. Dichter - Poeta. Mit samtlichen Gedichten, deutsch/italienisch. Con tutte lepoesie, tedesco/italiano, Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 2006. — Jean-Paul Sartre, in: Kritisches Lexikon der romanischen Gegenwartsliteraturen (KLRG). Edited by W.-D. Lange., Tubingen, Gunter Narr, 1984. — Die wahre Leidenschaft des 20. Jahrhunderts ist die Knechtschaft (Camus). Die Nationalintellektuellen contra Menschen- und Burgerrechte. Ernst Jtinger, Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, in: W. Bialas, G. I. Iggers, (eds), Intellektuelle in der Weimarer Republik [Schriften zur politischen Kultur der Weimarer Republik, vol. 1], Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 1996, (91-104). Holthusen, H. E., Sartre in Stammheim: 2 Themen aus den Jahren der grofien Turbulenzen, Stuttgart: Klettt-Cotta, 1982. Huber, C , Alberto Giacometti, Paris, Geneva 1970. Jaspers, K., Allgemeine Psychopathologie fiir Studierende, Arzte und Psychologen, 3rd enlarged and revised edition, Berlin: Springer, 1923. — Psychopathologie generate, translated from the 3rd edition by A. Kastler et J. Mendousse. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1928. — General Psychopathology. Vol. I. Translated by J. Hoenig, M. W. Hamilton. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, (1963) 1967. Jeanson, F., Albert Camus ou Tame revoltee, in: Les Temps modernes 79, Paris 1952(2070-2090). ~ Pour tout vous dire, in: Les Temps modernes, August 1952, p. 354-383. Joseph, G., Une si douce occupation. Simone de Beauvoir et Jean-Paul Sartre, 1940-1944, Paris : Albin Michel 1991. Kanapa, J., L 'existentialisme n 'est pas un humanisme, Paris : Editions sociales, 1947. Kant, I., Critique of the power of judgment. Translated by P. Guyer and E. Matthews. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Klee, P., Notebooks, Volume 1, The Thinking Eye. Translated by R. Mannheim. Woodstock, New York: The Overlook Press, 1961. Knopp, P., Wroblewsky, V. von (eds), Carnets Jean-Paul Sartre, Eine Moral in Situation, Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 2008. Konig, T (ed.), Sartres Flaubert lesen. Essays zu "Der Idiot der Familie", Reinbek near Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1980. — (ed.), Sartre. Ein Kongrefi, Reinbek near Hamburg 1988. Kraushaar, W., Sartre in Stammheim. Der Philosoph beim Staatsfeind Nummer eins - Ein Besuch und seine Folgen, in: Lettre international, 80, Spring 2008, p. 50-56. Krischel, R, Jacopo Tintoretto. Das Sklavenwunder. Bildwelt und Weltbild, Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1994. Lanson, G., Essais de methode de critique et d'histoire litteraire (edited by H. Peyre), Paris: Hachette, 1965.

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Lautreamont, Comte de (= I. Ducasse), Lautreamont's Maldoror. Translated by A. Lykiard. London: Allison & Busby, 1970. Lenain, T., Le roman du Tintoret sartrien et ses implications philosophiques, in: Sur les ecrits posthumes de Sartre, in: Annales de Vlnstitut de Philosophie et de Sciences Morales (edited by G. Hottois), Brussels: Editions de l'universite de Bruxelles, 1987 (107-130). Levinas, E., Theorie de I'intuition dans la phenomenologie de Husserl, Paris: Alcan 1930. Levy, B.-H., Le siecle de Sartre. Enquete philosophique. Grasset: Paris 2000. Lipman, J., Colder's Universe, London 1977. - and Foote, N. (eds), Calder's Circus, New York 1972. Ludwig, E., Guillaumell. Translated by J. P. Samson, (German title: Wilhelm II.), Paris 1927. Lyotard, J.-F., Tombeau de Vintellectuel et autres papiers, Paris 1984. Mannheim, K., Ideology and Utopia. Collected Works Volume One. New York: (Routledge & Kean Paul 1936) Routledge, 1997. Ollivier, A., La Commune (1871), Paris: Gallimard, 1939. Ott, H., Martin Heidegger. Unterwegs zu seiner Biographie, Frankfurt/Main and New York, 1988. Pico della Mirandola, G., On the Dignity of Man. Translated by Ch. Glenn Wallis. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hacket Publishing Company, Inc. (1965) 1998. Raether, M., Der Acte gratuit: Revoke und Literatur. Hegel, Dostojewskij, Nietzsche, Gide, Sartre, Camus, Beckett, Heidelberg: Winter 1980. Rieffel, R., Les intellectuels sous la Ve Republique. 1958-1990, Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1993. Rimbaud, A., Letter to P. Demeny, in: A. Rimbaud, Complete Works, Selected Letters. Translated by W. Fowle. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1966, p. 305-311. Roche, M. W., Why Literature Matters in the 21st Century. Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 2004. Robbe-Grillet, A., Nature, humanisme, tragedie, in: La nouvelle nouvelle revue frangaise, no. 70, October 1958, p. 580-604. Rossum, W. van, Sich verschreiben. Jean-Paul Sartre. 1939-1953, Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1990. Rousseau, J.-J., The Social Contract and The First an Second Discourses. Edited by S. Dunn, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002, p. 149-254. Ruppert, W., Der moderne Kunstler. Zur Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte der kreativen Individualitdt in der kulturellen Moderne im 19. und im fruhen 20. Jahrhundert, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1998. Safranski, Rudiger, Ein Meister aus Deutschland. Heidegger und seine 2&it, Munich and Vienna: Hanser, 1994.

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Salzmann, Y., Sartre et Vauthenticite. Vers une ethique de la bienveillance reciproque, Geneva: Labor et Fides, 2000. Santoni, R. E., Camus on Sartre's "freedom"—another "misunderstanding", in: The Review of Metaphysics, June, 2008, p. 785-813. Schlette, H. R., Albert Camus' Hoffhung, in : A. Camus, Weder Opfer noch Henker, translated by L. Pfaff (contains "Ni victimes ni bourreaux", first appeared in Combat 1946, republished in: Camus, Actuelles, Chroniques 19441948, in: A. Camus, Essais, Paris 1965, p. 329-352) Zurich 1996, p. 69-106. Schleiermacher, F. D. E., Hermeneutik und Kritik, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1977. Sicard, M., Essais sur Sartre. Entretiens avec Sartre (1975-1979), Paris: Editions Galilee 1989 SieB, J., (ed.), Vermittler. H. Mann, Benjamin, Groethuysen, Kojeve, Szondi, Heidegger in Frankreich, Goldmann, Sieburg, Edited by J. SieiJ. Frankfurt/Main: Syndikat Autoren- und Verlagsgemeinschaft, 1981. Stirner, M., The Ego and Its Own. Translated by S. T. Byington. Cambridge University Press, 1995. Swoboda, K. M., Tintoretto, Ikonographische und stilistische Untersuchungen, Vienna, Munich: Scholl, 1982. Teschke, H., Franzosische Literatur des 20. Jahrhunderts. Uberblick und Trends, Stuttgart: Klett, 1998. Tietze, H., Tintoretto. Gemalde und Zeichnungen, London: Phaidon, 1948. Voltaire, Lettres, Gens de lettres ou Lettres, in: ders., Dictionnaire philosophique. Edited by R. Naves. Paris, Gallimard, 1961. — Philosophical Dictionary, Part 2, Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2003. Weyembergh, M., Albert Camus ou la memoire des origines, Paris, Brussel: De Boeck, 1998 Winock, M., Le siecle des intellectuels, Paris: Seuil, 1997 Wittmann, H., Albert Camus. Kunst und Moral, Reihe: Dialoghi/Dialogues. Literatur und Kultur Italiens und Frankreichs. Edited by D. Hoeges. Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 2002. — Kunst und Moral, in: Knopp, P. Wroblewsky, V. von (eds), Carnets JeanPaul Sartre, Eine Moral in Situation, Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 200, p 159-170. — Sartre und die Kunst. Die Portratstudien von Tintoretto bis Flaubert, Tubingen 1996. — L 'esthetique de Sartre. Artistes et intellectuels (Collection L'ouverture philosophique). Translated from German by N. Weitemeier and J. Yacar. Paris: Editions L'Harmattan, 2001. — Von Wols zu Tintoretto. Sartre zwischen Kunst und Philosophic, Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang 1987.

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Reviews: — Aronson, R., Camus & Sartre, Amitie et combat, Translated by D. B. Roche, D. Letellier. Paris: Alvik Editions 2005: www.romanistik.info/aronson-sartrecamus.html. Wols (= A. O. W. Schulze), Cites et Navires [exhibition catalogue, 15 May-30 June 1964], Paris 1964. --Drawings and Water-Colours. Zeichnungen und Aquarelle, edited by E. Rathke, [exhibition in the Goethe-Institut, London 17 May-29 June 1985], London 1985 (German edition, Stuttgart: Cantzsche Druckerei, 1985). Zenkert, A., Tintoretto in der Scuola di San Rocco, Ensemble und Wirkung, Tubingen: Ernst Wasmuth Verlag, 2003: www.romanistik.info/zenkerttintoretto.html.

166

Index Alloa, E., 64 f. Aristotle, 30 Aronson, R., 146 Aubarede, G. d\ 107 Baader,A., 87 Balzac, H. de, 24 Baudelaire, Ch., 11, 24 f., 52, 83, 91,117,141,151 Bauer, G. H., 12 Baussy-Oulianoff, D., 64 Beauvoir, S. de, 46 Benn,G., 41 Bercken, E. von der, 64,71,73 Bernari, C , 64, 66, 72-78 Breton, A., 119 f. Buin,Y., 13,20 Calder,A., 55, 59 f., 91 Cancogni, M., 74 Carpaccio, V., 74,77 Chancel, J., 43,89,153 Chapsal, M., 27, 32, 58 Chateaubriand, F.-R. de, 149 Cohen-Solal, A., 37,43 Contat, M , 37 f., 46, 78, 147, 150 Corbie, A., 118 Corbin, H., 42 Dostoyevsky, A., 45, 118 Faliero,M, 62 Farias, V., 41 Faye, J. P., 42 Fell, J. D., 53 Flaubert, G., 11, 22-24, 27, 34, 38, 40, 44 f, 47, 49, 51-54, 57, 83, 89-91,151 Foote,N., 59 Francesca, P. della, 122 Frank, M., 51,53 Freud, S., 44-47 Gadamer, H.-G., 20,29 Gaillard,P., 100

Gallo, M , 84, 86 Gaulle, Ch. de, 88 Gavi, P., 40 Genet, J., 24,55,61,141,145 Germain, L., 150 Giacometti, A., 55, 56 f., 91 Gide,A., 98,119 Gipper,A., 101 Giraudoux, J., 30 f. Gorz, A., 35, 87 Guerin, J., 133 Guse,E.-G., 55 Gurvitch,G., 42 Hakenesch, C , 141 Hallier,J.-E., 89 Heidegger, M., 30,41-45, 53 Hennequin, E., 32, 153 Hoeges, D., 9, 12, 20, 25, 41 f., 60, 84,114,153 Holthusen, E., 87 Huber, C , 55 f. Husserl,E., 30,41,43,44,53 Jaspers, K., 41, 43,45 f. Jeanson,F., 146 f., 148 f. Joseph, G., 42 Kanapa, J., 39 Kant, I., 19 Kardiner, A., 47 Klee,P., 14 Knopp,P., 29 K6nig,T., 42,51,82 Kraushaar, E., 87 Krischel,R., 66 Lanson, G., 34 Lapoujade, R., 19 Lautreamont (= I. Ducasse) 118 f. Lenain, T., 63 Le Poittevin, A., 7 Leconte de Lisle, Ch., 26 f. Leibowitz, R., 60 Levinas, E., 43 Levy,B.-H., 148

167

Lipman, J., 59 Ludwig,E., 23 Lyotard, J.-F., 82, 84-86 Mallarme, S., 13, 22, 24, 26, 91, 141,145,151 Mannheim, K., 86-88 Marx,K., 118,146 Masson,A., 13, 57 f., 81 Matisse, H., 55 Mauriac, F., 31 Melville, H., 129 Merleau-Ponty, M., 147 Mitterrand, F., 83 Moliere, 129 Monet, C, 17 Nina de Villard de Callias (=A.-M.Gaillard),27 Nietzsche, F., 18 OHivier,A., 23 Ott,H., 41 Peguy,Ch., 84 Perrin,M., 42 Pico della Mirandola, G., 21 Pingaud,B., 47 Pontalis, J.-B., 46 f. Raether,M., 98 Rieffel, R., 84, 87 Rimbaud, A., 166, 119 Robbe-Grillet, A., 142 Robusti, J. = Tintoretto Roche, M.W., 33 Rossum, W. von, 89 Rousseau, J.-J., 117 Ruppert,W., 101 Rybalka,M., 38,46,78,147 Sade, Marquis de, 116 Safranski, R., 41 Salzmann, Y., 20 Santoni, R. E., 143 Savignat,T., 89 Scheler,M., 41

Schleiermacher, F. D. E., 53 Schlette, H. R., 107 Schmitt,C, 41 Schulze, A. O. W., = Wols Sicard,M., 11,63 Stirner,M., 118 Swoboda. K., M., 66, 70 f., 73 Taine,H., 32 Teschke,M., 101 Thevoz, M., 64 Tietze,H., 70 Tintoretto, 9, 11, 16, 26, 61-80, 91, 141, 145, 151 Titian, 70-72 Tolstoy, L., 129 Vaucanson, J. de., 60 Viallaneix, P., 95 Victor, P., 39 f., 89 Voltaire, 84,88 Weber, A., 87 Weber, M., 83 Weyembergh, M., 133 William II, 23,52 Winock,M., 40 Wittmann, H., 12,29 Wols, (= A. O.W. Schulze), 13-17 Wroblewsky, V. von, 29, 82 Zenkert, A., 64 Zola,E., 84