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Throughout
his life, Sartre was questioned about whether the conclusion of Garcin,
the main protagonist in Huis Clos (1944), that 'hell is other
people' was also a summary of his own philosophy about social relations.
Sartre would continually remind such questioners that the characters
of Huis Clos were all dead and the conversations were taking
place for eternity, without sleep, in the afterlife. All life-choices
had been made and the protagonists could exact no influence upon the
world whatsoever. He would argue that the difference between humans
living and dead should be glaringly obvious.
This is
no Endgame, where characters consciously await the end of the
world. The game is absolutely over for them. All that is left is for
them to reflect upon choices they made during their lives and attempt
to seduce or destroy each other in a futile battle for some kind of
concrete recognition that might ease their minds.
The Kizmetic
theatre have opted to call the play In Camera - rather than No
Exit, the more common translation of Huis Clos - suggesting
that the locked, Edwardian-furnished room is akin to a judge's private
room where testimony can be heard that is deemed unsuitable for the
public. There is, however, no objective judge of their actions; rather
something far worse - the ambiguous, changing and unreliable judgements
of their peers.
The solution
proposed to escape this is for each of the three characters to retreat
in a stoic silence to their own corners of the room with their heads
down and only their own thoughts as company. This, predictably, lasts
about a minute before the chatter begins again. This chatter gradually
takes the form of 'group therapy' as each of the characters tries to
explore the possible reasons as to why they might be in hell. One was
a coward, one a controlling lesbian and one was a murdering narcissist.
These confessions can be seen, as the Rosemary Branch bills it, as the
'ultimate voyeurism'. But to indulge in the voyeurism is to miss Sartre's
point entirely.
The particular situations of the characters don't really matter; they
simply give the play its dynamic and a splash of dramatic colour. This
is, after all, a play in which there can be no action and indeed no
happenings whatsoever, and individual obsessions with the particular
are mere fetishes. Sartre's intention, and his great achievement, in
Huis Clos, is to present the audience with a particular instance
of his account of social relations with others, his phenomenological
ontology, which he maps out in Being and Nothingness, written
the year before. This is effectively Hegel's master-slave dialectic
without the happy ending of mutual reciprocity. For Sartre, individuals
are trapped in a sado-masochistic circle of relations with others as
they struggle to liberate themselves from the objectifying gaze of the
other.
All the dialectical moves described by Sartre are packed into 90 minutes.
The masochistic attempt to love the other so completely that one loses
one's sense of self. The resort to murder in order to annihilate the
consciousness of the other; the attempt simply to inhabit one's body
and indulge in a physical relationship, treating the other purely as
an object, even the omnipresent 'third' whose gaze shatters the illusion
of a shared consciousness between the two lovers.
One of the most effective results is the demonstration of the complete
impossibility of trust between the characters. The individuals are so
suspicious of each other that no act of kindness or love can be seen
as altruistic; everything is assumed to be part of a long-term strategy
(be it conscious or unconscious) that is driven fundamentally by self-interest.
Much is revealed in Estelle's utterance of frustration with Garcin:
Oh,
what a nuisance you are! I'm giving you my mouth, my arms, my whole
body - and everything could be so simple...My trust! I haven't any
to give, I'm afraid, and you're making me terribly embarrassed. You
must have something pretty ghastly on your conscience to make such
a fuss about my trusting you.
Estelle
has offered her body to Garcin and wants him to treat her purely as
an object. This is motivated by her desire to escape memories of her
past actions and to avoid facing up to who she is and what she's done.
But Garcin isn't satisfied with solely possessing her physically. He
needs her to love him, to understand him as a person, so that he can
feel she has given herself to him with a full recognition of who he
is. In doing so, however, Estelle would have to open up to Garcin and
to face her past, which would wreck her project of trying to become
an object for him in the first place. She chooses to escape this situation
by trying to objectify him through talk of a ghastly conscience, and
the dialectic continues infinitely without resolution: The perpetual
contradictory divide between mind and body gains no resolution in the
other.
In Sartre's hell there can be no trust. But Sartre is not using this
'hell' as a metaphor for the world - indeed his intention in Huis
Clos is precisely to raise awareness of the difference between the
situation of his protagonists and that of us as humans existing in the
world. As human beings we have no essential meaning to our lives, this
meaning is something that must be chosen.
We give meaning to our lives through the way we act in the world. For
Sartre, the act is everything. All actions can be judged positively
or negatively and we ultimately cannot hope to convince others of the
authenticity of our choices. It is important, instead, unlike the political
coward Garcin, to demonstrate our conviction through our actions (a
major theme of David Edgar's more contemporary theatrical odyssey Continental
Divide).
There is a point in the play when the characters realise that they are
all being forgotten:
Garcin:
But THEY won't forget me, not they! They'll die, but others will come
after them to carry on the legend. I've left my fate in their hands.
Estelle: You think too much, that's your trouble.
Garcin: What else is there to do now? I was a man of action once...
Oh, if only I could be with them again, for just one day - I'd fling
their lie in their teeth. But I'm locked out; they're passing judgment
on my life without troubling about me, and they're right, because
I'm dead.
The awareness
of being forgotten strikes all three of the characters at different
times and they realise that they have a complete dependency upon each
other in the room. This means that even when leaving the room becomes
an option, they choose not to take it. For Sartre, however, the characters'
being forgotten in the world demonstrates the fact that our self-absorbed
internal worlds are of no significance whatsoever: Garcin's pathetic
self-absorbed nature is reflected as much in his obsession with his
memory living on after death, as opposed to the political project his
comrades were continuing, as it was reflected in his acts during life.
Even in 1944, Sartre was beginning to realise the limitations of his
individualistic phenomenology. Although we are thrown into the
world and must initially try to make sense of it as an individual. Sartre's
great error in Being and Nothingness was to think that our only
possible life project was one of individual freedom. Simone de Beauvoir
forced Sartre to engage seriously with, rather than just define himself
against, Hegel and the early Marx, and by 1944 Sartre was gaining a
greater historical awareness of the human condition. Indeed the Hegelian
image that haunted Sartre was that of the 'Unhappy Consciousness'. Several
eminent thinkers at the time, including Jean Wahl, dismissed Sartrean
existentialism as a manifestation of this.
However, it's best to read Sartre's phenomenological ontology as a map
of the many pitfalls of the individualistic mindset (most notably his
concepts of bad faith and his account of love), which can be used to
raise awareness of many of the individualistic patterns of our actions.
The greatest mistake a lay-philosopher can make is to align subjectivism
with a philosophy that takes as its starting point the vantage point
of the subject. Indeed when people so often retreat to the subjective
standpoints of 'that's just your view' or 'this is how I feel', Sartre's
emphasis upon the responsibility of the subject for their own decisions
can be used as an effective tool to shatter such retreats.
The Sartrean emphasis upon choice is crucial in an age when people
are continually making excuses for their own failures in life, be it
blaming their genes for a lack of intelligence or blaming their social
upbringing for not giving them sufficient opportunities. These are 'truths'
that we choose to accept and, although there are often cases where is
it exceptionally rational to accept them, the decision always first
has to be made to do so. To the extent that we try to deny responsibility
for these choices we are in bad faith: simply lying to ourselves.
In his later masterpiece, The Critique of Dialectical Reason
(republished by Verso later this month), Sartre would use an analysis
of social groups to demonstrate that the forging of successful communities
is possible when individuals choose to participate in a common project.
This is a 'self-sacrifice', but the great achievement of Huis Clos
is to remind us that to the extent that we choose to indulge in our
own self-centred individualistic worlds or try to hide away from a responsibility
for the way we act in the world, we might as well already be dead and
forgotten.
In
Camera is at the Rosemary Branch Theatre till 18 July 2004.
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