An Outline of Williams’s Engagement with Sartre
Lukacs’s Record of a Life was not the only auto/biographical work by a European thinker Williams reviewed in 1984; he also reviewed Simone de Beauvoir’s Adieux: A Farewell to
Sartre, in which details of the last ten years of Sartre’s life introduce, much as in Lukacs’s Record, wide-ranging transcribed interviews. Sartre had died in 1980, but perhaps what is
most interesting about the review is the manner in which Williams suggests he had already ‘bid adieu’ to Sartre some time before: ‘The move from history to biography, and then to a kind of exposed biographical living … is the point at which, many years ago, one said adieu to Sartre, though still respecting the fierce energy and the rigour, and the different adieux of those who loved him within his singular and intransigent circle’ (1984b, p. 470). When did this move ‘from history to biography’, with which Williams broke with Sartre, occur? This is difficult to judge; it seems likely that Williams is referring to Sartre’s unfinished, three- volume existential-psychoanalytic biography of Flaubert, The Family Idiot (1971-72), a work which more than any other of Sartre’s sought to comprehend the ‘meaning’ of one man and his work. Williams is really dealing with two turning points in Sartre’s career in this review: a) the movement from the early, necessarily subjectivist existentialist works to the
publication of the more Marxist and historically engaged Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), and b) a period of, as it were, ‘re-subjectification’ in the later biographical output. In a sense, then, the full movement Williams is describing is from biography to history and back to biography again. Williams (1984b) expresses this trajectory in both a psychological and a literary register:
There was a time, in the sixties, when the engaging paradoxes of the earlier work seemed to have been taken to a new objectivity of inquiry: a movement, one might say, from a subjective sense of historical situation to exploration of a common and general history. It is now clear, from the whole trajectory, that this was not a
culmination; it was a heroic phase, ending in failure and then in relapse. But even his failure is of great intellectual and symptomatic importance. (1984, p. 470)
102 The period of the Critique was ‘heroic’; it is a sign of Williams’s esteem for Sartre that he does not say ‘tragic’, perhaps the more apt description given what Williams sees as Sartre’s ‘failure’ and ‘relapse’, and a word which would have conjured his critical analyses of Sartre’s plays in Modern Tragedy. Williams will argue that one of the greatest barriers to Sartre’s further progress was his over-engagement with psychoanalysis or ‘Freudianism’. And yet, it is only from a psychoanalytic perspective that we might ask whether there was something in Sartre’s original formulations that dictated there should be a ‘return of the repressed’ post-
Critique, a return of the voluntaristic atmosphere which pervaded existentialism, and
rendered it a difficult fellow traveller with Marxism.
At the core of Williams’s definition of the failure of Sartre’s heroic phase is the sense that Sartre was both the product of his time (influenced by the residual and dominant strains in his society) and the purveyor of original or emergent ideas which, from the beginning, were not sufficiently distinguishable from certain bourgeois philosophic and moral orthodoxies:
[Sartre] went into this inquiry with certain profound orientations which at the end – and over and above what can be seen as an inevitable, because in its time very general, failure – stand out as barriers to the project. It is not only the persistent bourgeois position that one’s freedom is constrained by the freedoms of others. It is also the voluntarism: [quoting Sartre] ‘One is concerned with men who would be equal if they would make a slight change in their attitude, but who in their present state are countermen’.63 (1984b, p. 470)
We can infer what Williams means by a ‘very general’ failure by referring to two related statements in his 1974 review of Sartre’s Between Existentialism and Marxism, in which he a) describes what he sees as a general weakness among the French Left-intelligentsia and b) asserts the inflexible and dogmatic nature of a certain kind of orthodox Marxism:
[Sartre’s difficulties] remain, for me, centred in the problem of the relation with psychoanalysis. Sartre maintains a stubborn reservation about what he calls,
accurately, the mythology of Freudianism, but it is clear that he is hard pressed by the prevailing structures of French neo-Marxism in just this area which is its confident and insistent weakness. (The Guardian, 1974, April 25)
What Sartre is trying to do, as a Marxist, is to restore individual and collective response and responsibility to a system which had become, internally, abstract and falsely determinist. (The Guardian, 1974, April 25)
103 There is much to unpack in these three statements. What is crucial to note for now is the critical thread Williams is drawing between orthodox Marxism, psychoanalysis and existentialism, as discourses and as (political/clinical/philosophic) practices. In Modern
Tragedy, which I will discuss extensively in the section on Sartre’s drama, Williams argues
that ‘the three characteristically new forms of thinking, in our own time – Marxism, Freudianism, Existentialism – are all, in their most common forms, tragic’ (1966, p. 189). The phrase ‘in their most common forms’ is important because, as we know, Williams’s own work will eventually attempt to assert an alternative and affirmative position within the Marxist tradition. Nevertheless, Williams is emphatic in drawing together these three twentieth-century traditions under the umbrella of a tragic discourse which, whether in the mechanistic and deterministic manner of orthodox Marxism, the pseudo-bourgeois
voluntarism of Sartrean existentialism or the psychoanalytic vision of individuals in
permanent conflict with society, evinces a view of human nature and freedom which fails to acknowledge the considerable emancipatory resources human beings hold in common.
It should not be taken, from the above, that Williams’s judgement on Sartre was damning. Sartre never receives anything resembling the upbraiding that Lukacs received on the basis of his Essays on Realism, and indeed Williams overwhelmingly appears to esteem Sartre as a man of character and compassion. In the review of de Beauvoir’s text Williams notes Sartre’s ‘characteristically brave identification with the most extreme and exposed individuals and movements’ (1984b, p. 470) in a period, from the mid-fifties onwards, in which the
atmosphere of cold war and the regressive foreign and domestic policy of the Soviet Union had led to ‘the simple contrast between communism and liberty which, in so many cases, and to a shameful extent in France, ends with an accommodation to capitalism’64 (p. 470). Sartre,
says Williams, even though ‘despairing of the [communist] project, after the suppression of the Prague Spring, was incapable of that kind of accommodation’ (p. 470), his constant mission being ‘the attempt to recover communism for liberty – still the central project of our time’ (p. 470). Such a project, in the sixties and seventies, was required to intersect at
innumerable points with struggles that could not be fitted cleanly into the class struggle, engaging Sartre in a myriad of progressive causes, perhaps most significantly the national liberation struggles of the period. Williams writes, glowingly: ‘His intense recognition of the
64 Williams may be thinking here of the French ‘New Philosophers’ around Bernard-Henry Levi and Andre
Glucksmann, former leftists who, from the mid-seventies, denounced both Marxism and communism and declared for liberal-democratic capitalism (and later neo-conservatism).
104 victims of every kind of oppression, and both his courage and his conscious use of his
celebrity to protect others, led him again and again to denounce tyranny and exploitation wherever they occurred: a rare and invaluable position within the polarisation and
opportunism of a continuing cold war. From a distance, and now also when we see its close details, this stand should engage our immense respect’ (p. 470). As we shall see, the issue of commitment, both in in politics and literature, is one of the most significant components of Williams’s reception of Sartre.
Sartre’s intellectual and political commitment to the causes he championed is a quality which signals, for Williams (1968b), a difference in consciousness between ‘England’ and the continent: ‘Sartre is not a writer and thinker who takes time off for politics and journalism: that familiar English account in which thinking is a professional activity, a job, and politics is another professional activity, on which amateurs may sometimes intrude’ (The Guardian, 1968b, Nov 29, p. 11). From his reception of Lukacs and Goldmann we know that Williams was highly critical of the English literary establishment, and that he was conscious of England lagging behind the continent in its engagement with what Williams saw as the crucial questions facing the politically aware critic of literature and culture. In his review of Iris Murdoch’s Sartre, Romantic Rationalist in 1967, Williams is equally disparaging of what he sees as the elitism and lack of imagination of the British philosophical establishment, at that time almost entirely analytic in orientation:
Since an icy upper-middle-class voice took over rational discourse in England, people have been frightened of what they think of as philosophy, and have developed a kind of bored awe. Yet “philosopher” still sounds forbidding, and “Oxford philosophy”, vaguely imagined as a prodigious intellectual exercise about returning a book to a friend, especially so. (The Guardian, 1967b, May 12, p. 8)
Sartre had strongly criticised the classical formulations of dialectical materialism (Marxist philosophy since Engels) in the Critique. Williams appreciated the way Sartre was seeking to reformulate the postulates of classical/orthodox Marxism without assimilating the analytic- empiricist assumptions of the Anglo-American philosophical establishment, traditionally the hardest opponents of Marxism as a metaphysical or epistemological position (though this does not stop Williams from criticising what he does see as a bourgeois strain within Sartrean existentialism). Time and again in his engagement with European thinkers, and even where he finally and decisively parts ways with them, Williams is finding productive seams of thought which seem to hold the promise of resolving deadlocks within the intellectual
105 Anglosphere. Rarely, if ever, are these deadlocks resolved to Williams’s satisfaction, but each attempt is a step towards a new and productive emergence, so that even the failures of
thinkers like Sartre (and Lukacs) are ‘of great intellectual and symptomatic importance’.
* * *
A key difference between Williams’s receptions of Sartre and Lukacs is the issue of access and translation. Inglis (1995) implies a less than perfect aptitude when he says that Williams ‘didn’t read French for fun’ (1995, p. 145), but the fact remains that Williams read French, and could therefore have read Sartre at any point following the French publications. In stark contrast to Lukacs’s major works, the bulk of Sartre’s output, for reasons of celebrity and commercial impact in the immediate post-war era, was very rapidly translated. All but one of the plays Williams discusses in Modern Tragedy were published in English within three years of the French; Nausea (1943) and the Roads to Freedom (1945-1949) trilogy found
translation just as rapidly. Sartre’s major philosophical works, Being and Nothingness (1943) and the Critique (1960), took longer, at thirteen and sixteen years respectively; while it seems unlikely that Williams would have read either of these highly complex texts to completion in French, he could nonetheless have read passages or fragments, as well as reviews and
analysis in French, close to their French publication. In the case of Lukacs, we were aware that Williams could have read a number of English translations which he did not directly comment upon in print. With Sartre these unknown but potential engagements extend to his entire corpus in French. Nevertheless, we must proceed on the basis of what we know Williams to have read, or can reasonably infer from his commentaries; fortunately, as with Lukacs, Williams’s published pronouncements on Sartre are considerable, spanning almost the full length of his career. Here I provide an outline of that engagement, followed by a brief commentary.
In 1947, one of the pieces on literature and political commitment that Sartre was gradually publishing in the journal Les Temps Modernes and in Situations I (1947) and II (1948) was published in English translation in Politics and Letters, the literary-political journal Williams co-founded and edited following the completion of his studies at Cambridge. This piece, entitled ‘What is Writing?’, would comprise the opening chapter of Sartre’s What is
Literature? (French 1948), published in English in its entirety in 1950. While ‘What is
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Transition, the 1947 translation in Politics and Letters is, to my knowledge, the earliest
English version of the text. The interesting question then, of course, is whether Williams himself was the translator; the edition of Politics and Letters does not inform us, so we
cannot be sure. Nevertheless, the inclusion of the piece in so early a publication of Williams’s signals a very early familiarity with Sartre’s work (I have mentioned the rapidity with which Sartre’s fiction was being translated), and is an early acknowledgment by Williams that Sartre would be a significant figure for thinking through the relationship between literature and politics. The first time Williams refers to Sartre in his own words is in Drama from Ibsen
to Eliot (1953); the brief material on Sartre here would be considerably expanded in the …to Brecht version. In both versions, a single play is treated: Sartre’s The Flies (F. 1943, E.
1946). Following this we find a gap of eight years (1953-1961) in which Williams does not explicitly engage with Sartre in his published writings (he may well have read some of Sartre’s on-going output in French and English).
Williams’s first serious engagement with existentialist themes comes in The Long Revolution (1961), in which Williams assesses the contribution of existentialism to debates around the individual and society. While Williams does not refer to any specific texts here, his
engagement with the concepts of ‘authenticity’ and ‘inauthenticity’, terms which, in English translation, originate in Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) (Sartre generally prefers ‘good faith’ and ‘bad faith’), indicates familiarity with existentialist arguments. Sartre is mentioned by name, and that Williams refers to Sartre’s use of the terms ‘function’ and ‘duty’ (2011b [1961], p. 110) suggests that he has at least read the chapter on ‘Bad Faith’ in Being and
Nothingness (F. 1943, E. 1956), in which these terms appear. The next engagement, and
perhaps the most significant for Williams’s views on the function of literature/art, comes in 1966 with Williams’s critical analysis of Sartrean drama in Modern Tragedy. Here Williams provides readings of six of Sartre’s plays: The Flies (F. 1943, E. 1946), No Exit (F. 1945, E. 1946), Men Without Shadows (F. 1946, E. 1949), Dirty Hands (F. 1948, E. 1949), The Devil
and the Good Lord (F. 1951, E. 1960) and Altona (F. 1959, E. 1960) alongside works by
Camus and Brecht. In 1967 Williams reviews Iris Murdoch’s earlier work Sartre, Romantic
Rationalist (1953 – this text deals primarily with Sartre’s novels, suggesting that Williams
was broadly familiar with them), and in 1968 (alongside the material on The Flies in DFIB), he reviews the essay collection The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre (1968), edited by Robert Denoon Cumming. In the latter review, Williams actually quotes from Sartre’s Critique,
107 which was not yet available in English, indicating that he had at least read parts of it in
French as of 1968.
In 1972, Sartre (with his Critique), appears alongside Lukacs and Gramsci as part of
Marxism’s ‘alternative tradition’. In 1974 Williams reviews Sartre’s Between Existentialism
and Marxism (F. 1972, E. 1974) alongside two critical texts, Sartre (1973) by Hazel E.
Barnes and Camus and Sartre (1974) by Germaine Brie. Two years later, in 1976, Williams includes ‘existential’ as an entry in his Keywords, elaborating on the development to
‘existentialism’ after 1945, due in large part to Sartre’s influence. In 1977, the year in which he publishes his own ‘reckoning’ with Marxism, Williams reviews Sartre’s major theoretical engagement with the Marxist tradition, the Critique of Dialectical Reason (F. 1960, E. 1976). Williams also discusses the theme of commitment in literature and Sartre’s poetry/prose distinction in Marxism and Literature (1977) and, in the same year, refers favourably to Sartre’s position on the national liberation movement of the Basques in Spain in the essay ‘Marxism, Poetry, Wales’ in Poetry Wales. Williams’s mention of Sartre’s position in the latter text strongly suggests that he had read Sartre’s essay ‘The Burgos Trials’ (1971), which had quickly appeared in English in the journal Planet: The Welsh Internationalist (1971- 1972). Williams rounded off the seventies with some significant discussion of Sartre in the
Politics and Letters interviews, including ruminations on Sartre’s materialism, his concepts
of ‘seriality’ and ‘scarcity’ in the Critique, and the relation of his pessimism to other strains of thought within contemporary Marxism. Williams also mentions Sartre in the context of the crucial question of hope in politics in his afterword to the 1979 edition of Modern Tragedy. In 1980, Williams returns to the issue of commitment in literature with the significant essay ‘The Writer: Commitment and Alignment’ in Marxism Today; Sartre’s position is mentioned as in many ways the linchpin of debates around the subject. In 1984 we have the above- mentioned review of de Beauvoir’s Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre, and in 1985 Williams briefly mentions Sartre in the context of non-economic interpersonal relations in his lecture ‘Cinema and Socialism’, appearing in print for the first time in The Politics of Modernism (1989).
In summary, then, we know that Williams reads or comments on the following texts by or about Sartre. Texts are by Sartre unless otherwise indicated and are listed in chronological order of mention by Williams, with French and English dates of publication:
108
1947: ‘What is Writing’ (French: 1947, English: 1947) 1953: The Flies (French: 1943, English: 1946)
1961: Being and Nothingness [at least the ‘Bad Faith’ chapter] (French: 1943, English: 1956) 1966: No Exit (French: 1945, English: 1946), Men Without Shadows (French: 1946, English:
1949), Dirty Hands (French: 1948, English: 1949), The Devil and the Good Lord (French: 1951, English: 1960) and Altona (French: 1959, English: 1960)
1967: Sartre, Romantic Rationalist by Iris Murdoch (1953)
1968: The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre edited by Robert Denoon Cumming (1968), Critique of Dialectical Reason (French: 1960, English: 1976)
1974: Between Marxism and Existentialism (French: 1972, English: 1974), Sartre by Hazel
E. Barnes (1973), Camus and Sartre by Germaine Brie (1974)
1977: ‘The Burgos Trials’ (French: 1971, English: 1971)
1984: Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre by Simone de Beauvoir (French: 1981, English: 1984)
The first thing to note about the above chronology is that, in comparison with Lukacs, Williams is ‘dealing with’ Sartre roughly a decade earlier. The translation of ‘What is Writing?’ in Politics and Letters comes fifteen years before Williams’s first writings on Lukacs (1962). Williams’s engagement with Lukacs in the sixties is confined to two reviews, whereas his engagement with Sartre in that decade comprises six plays, parts of Being and
Nothingness and two reviews of critical texts. By the mid-seventies Williams had probably
read everything on Sartre that he would comment on (with the exception of de Beauvoir’s book) in his lifetime, whereas he was still discovering newly translated texts of Lukacs into the eighties. This is so despite the fact that Lukacs began his career and died roughly a decade earlier than Sartre; the over-riding reasons are, of course, Williams’s language ability and relative speeds of translation. Broadly speaking, then, the key decades for Williams’s engagement with Lukacs are the seventies and eighties, for Sartre the sixties and seventies. That the overlapping decade is the seventies is in keeping with the general acceleration in translation of the fundamental texts of European or Western Marxism in the immediate post-