Existentialism and Excess: The Life and Times of Jean-Paul Sartre by Gary Cox

Author:Gary Cox
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: The Life and Times of Jean-Paul Sartre
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2016-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

18

The Ghost of Stalin

In early 1955, alongside tinkering with his own autobiography, Sartre started yet another biography of a French writer. This time the subject was Flaubert. Over the coming years the project would mushroom into his longest work, The Family Idiot, one of the most ambitious attempts ever made by one person to systematically understand another.

‘The Flaubert’, as he nicknamed it, eventually became an almost all-consuming project, but in early 1955 Sartre still felt the need to dash off another play. With a play in mind, he travelled by car to Marseilles with de Beauvoir and her new lover, Claude Lanzmann. Over seventeen years de Beauvoir’s junior, Lanzmann, a film director, writer and journalist, became chief editor of Les Temps modernes, a post he still held when this book was written.

The play Sartre wrote while on his working holiday in the south of France was Nekrassov, A Farce in Eight Scenes, a not particularly subtle though at times genuinely amusing satire. Peopled with caricatures, the play lampoons the methods and machinations of the French, right-wing, pro-capitalist press during the Cold War. Sartre saw France as suffering from the same anti-communist paranoia as the USA, an atmosphere in no small part whipped up by the media.

The play is to some extent a comment on the anti-communist McCarthy witch-hunts that had recently taken place in the USA, although Senator Joseph McCarthy is mentioned only once. ‘Here, read this telegram. It’s from McCarthy, offering me an engagement as a permanent witness’ (Nekrassov, Scene 5, p. 222).

The central Marxist message of the play is that throughout the Western world the popular press is owned and controlled by capitalists for the purpose of preserving and promoting capitalism. Inciting fear of communism, or any other non-capitalist ideology, helps to sell newspapers and to create a sense of collective identity and purpose in face of a common enemy.

The masses are persuaded that they are better off and better protected under their system of government than are people who live under alternative systems. One character points out that to the workers of Billancourt fabricated stories in the right-wing press about the terrible conditions in Russia mean: ‘Leave capitalism alone, or you will relapse into barbarism. The bourgeois world has its defects but it is the best of all possible worlds. Whatever your poverty, try to make the best of it, for you can be sure you’ll never see anything better, and thank heaven that you weren’t born in the Soviet Union’ (Nekrassov, Scene 5, p. 232).

For Sartre, as for Marx, it is simply a part of the ideology of the popular press that its primary function is to tell the truth. In reality, its primary function, apart from maximizing circulation, is to preserve the political and economic order that most benefits the kind of wealthy, powerful people who own newspapers. Exaggeration and lies further this end at least as much as telling the truth.

Stripped of the ideology it perpetuates, that truth telling and reasoned argument are sacrosanct,

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