ABSTRACT
In a well-known 1965 interview with Pierre Verstraeten, Sartre opines that his Critique of Dialectical Reason was a superior philosophical text to Being and Nothingness because it remained throughout in a resolutely ‘philosophical’, that is ‘denotative’, discursive mode, unlike Being and Nothingness which, said Sartre, too often gave in to the temptation of the literary (E&L: 56). Surprisingly, it is the phrase ‘Man is a useless passion’ (B&N: 636) that Sartre regrets in retrospect (he finds the phrase excessively ‘poetic’, and thus opaque), but he makes no comment on the ‘novelistic’ interludes that are such a memorable feature of that work. Whether the sixty-year-old Sartre liked it or not, it was the readiness of Being and Nothingness to depart from the aridity of philosophical dialectic in order to illustrate its theses with banal but striking examples that earned it a readership beyond the academy. How many named ‘characters’ are there in Being and Nothingness? Many readers might struggle to name more than the omnipresent Pierre – omnipresent in his omni-absence as it were: Sartre seems to have spent his life waiting vainly in cafés for Pierre to arrive! – but the cast of characters is actually far more extensive: Paul, Simon, Claude, Jeanne, Thérèse, René, Lucien and, of course, Anny (with a ‘y’, as in Nausea); is this the same Annie as the one with an ‘ie’ at the end of her name? For she, too, appears in Being and Nothingness. And does it matter? In Nausea it does: the connotation of Englishness imparted by the spelling with a ‘y’, along with references to the time Roquentin and Anny had spent in London, adds to the unresolved mystery surrounding the character and her origins. But in Being and Nothingness, connotation is regarded by the philosopher as an undesirable distraction. Who can forget the café waiter, or the woman on her first date? Who has not continued in their imagination the story of the resistance fighters preparing to storm a white farmhouse set atop a hill? And why is the farmhouse white? – a detail that adds nothing to the philosophical point of the example. Time and again, Sartre conjures up scenes that could be episodes in a story or maybe even starting points for a whole
novel. Indeed, some even were. When, towards the start of Being and Nothingness, Sartre writes: ‘The alarm which rings in the morning refers to the possibility of my going to work, which is my possibility. But to apprehend the summons of the alarm as a summons is to get up. Therefore the very act of getting up is reassuring, for it elides the question, “Is work my possibility?” Consequently it does not put me in a position to apprehend the possibility of quietism, of refusing to work, and finally the possibility of refusing the world and the possibility of death’ (B&N: 61), he could hardly have known that he had just summarized a novel that would be written twenty-five years later by a young man who also happened to be the cousin of his erstwhile lover, Bianca Bienenfeld!1
