Troubled Sleep

I have been reading Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Mort Dans L’Ãme in an English translation (Troubled Sleep) by Gerard Hopkins. The book is the third and last part of his trilogy Les Chemins de la Liberté (The Roads to Freedom).

Here’s a (longish) quote from the book, page 370, from a conversation between two french POWs, the communist Brunet and his, friend(?), Schneider. Brunet is speaking:

You know perfectly well that there are certain natural laws and that it is the way of buildings to stay standing when they have been built in conformity with those laws. Why, then, should I spend my time wondering about the policy of the U.S.S.R. and why should I raise the question of my confidence in Stalin? I have complete confidence in him, yes, and in Molotov and in Zhdanov – as much as you have in the solidity of these walls. In other words, I know that history has its laws and that, in virtue of those laws, an identity of interest binds the country of the workers and the European proletariat. I give no more thought to these things than you do to the foundations of your house; my knowledge is the floor under my feet and the roof over my head. In that certainty I live and behind that certainty I shelter. That is what makes it possible for me to carry on with the concrete duties the party assigns to me. When you stretch out your hand to grasp your mass cup, the mere fact of that gesture postulates a universal determinism. Similarly with me, my every act, no matter how trivial, affirms implicitly that the U.S.S.R. is the vanguard of World Revolution.

I’ve liked the book until now, and I only have 50 pages or so to go. It’s well written, and especially the first part of the book gives a great insigth into the ‘spirit of the time’ when the Germans broke through and the French had to deal with the fact that they were, unlike 25 years before, definitely losing the War, and losing it fast. The chaos, the uncertainty, the panic, the choices and dilemmas people confronted, the random events that would decide a person’s fate for years to come, if not for ever. Sartre does this very well. Yeah, I know, Sartre was a commie, and commies aren’t cool, but the book is about so much more than that; and when Sartre actually makes the case for communism, indirectly, you can just as easily use the very same passages to criticize him and that part of his ‘thinking’.