Sartre - Iris Murdoch

SARTRE – IRIS MURDOCH

Iris Murdoch on Sartre, and is that really so strange? Me being so shallow, however, I just buy it for the interesting cover featuring Mr Happy puffing on his pipe. According to Ray Lowry, NME cartoonist and front-line punk rock war correspondent featured on The Clash's London Calling album sleeve notes, it was actually double-glazing windows salesman supremo Ted Moult who was Britain's leading existentialist thinker though he may have been joking? In France, of course, it was Jean-Paul Sartre.

Sartre by Iris Murdoch is literacy criticism. It's an essay that chews over Sartre's philosophy, politics and body of work as he grapples tooth and nail with the absurd. Should there be a warning sign that comes with this book, I wonder? Like Dante's 'Abandon all hope ye who enter here'? Or like the message planted over sections of ancient world maps declaring 'Here monsters doth dwell'? As it's only words, then no, not really but it certainly helps if you're familiar with Sartre's Nausea and his Roads To Freedom trilogy. Which I guess we all are? Not that words and language don't come with inherent problems as well, though that's a whole other philosophical conundrum.

Murdoch does a kind of bee dance with Sartre and instead of just going for the jugular she teases, prods and pokes at aspects of his work. A lot of these prods and pokes are actually very accurate, eliciting recognition and agreement. Others, however, end up going nowhere. 'Recognition' is indeed a key word that Murdoch uses, as in less the feeling of meeting with something new than that of recognising something for which you've been waiting. This feeling of recognition, Murdoch says, attends for many people the reading of Sartre, herself included.

What is the 'truth' to which Sartre aspires, Murdoch asks? The answer, she tells us, is freedom. Freedom being 'the mobility of the consciousness', meaning we are potentially free so long as we are conscious – even within prison cell walls. To the hardened, revolutionary realist this might be a problem but we're talking philosophy here not political treatises.

When one is caught between the intolerable and the impossible nothing is justified except a state of rebellion, Murdoch deduces, however vain. And that's very true. After all, what else is there? The quandary being, what does it actually mean to be free? What does it entail? Is a yearning for freedom a means to an end or an end unto itself?

Large parts of the Roads To Freedom trilogy are composed of lengthy passages of introspective musing and internal monologues in particular from Mathieu, the main protagonist over the three books. In The Reprieve, Mathieu is alone upon a bridge and is contemplating suicide. He feels alone in the world and at that moment there is no-one who can tell him what to do. To jump or not to jump, that is the question? His life and his destiny are in his hands and no-one else’s. He is at that moment a free man but to what avail? 'I am free for nothing', he concludes. Likewise, at the end of The Age Of Reason after breaking up with his pregnant girlfriend, Mathieu feels nothing but an anger without an object. Mathieu has stolen, and now has abandoned his girlfriend when she is pregnant, all for nothing.

'If you want to understand something' Murdoch quotes Sartre as saying 'you must face it naked'. This is interpreted as doing practically the complete opposite of what is expected as when Mathieu opens his mouth to say 'I love you' to his girlfriend but says 'I don't love you' instead. Or when he tells his comrade in arms that resistance is senseless but then picks up a rifle. It's in the casting off of all allusions, delusions and illusions. In such moments, Mathieu is free but for what? That is the question. Did Sartre ever adequately answer it? Well, yes he did but Albert Camus probably answered it better and there's the nub of Murdoch's book. It's too late now, of course, but perhaps it would have been better for her (and for us) to have written about Camus rather than Sartre and it makes me wonder why she didn't? It makes me wonder if she would have danced the same kind of bee dance with Camus as she does with Sartre? It makes me wonder.

John Serpico