No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre

This book contains four plays by Sartre: No Exit, the Flies, Dirty Hands, and the Respectful Prostitute

No Exit

Three of the deceased--Inez, Garcin, Estelle--expect hell in the afterworld but find themselves in a drawing room in the Second Empire style. Where is the torturer? they wonder. 

There is no torturer but it is still hell: "hell is--other people" as Sartre's celebrated bon mots goes, as the three are stuck in the unblinking gaze of the other two forever and ever. (This reminded me of Bunuel's Exterminating Angel, although the two works are motivated differently.)

What does it mean to say that hell is other people? This is not a mere discomfort at a lack of personal space, it is the acknowledgement of the subjectivizing power of the gaze of others. In every person an image of me exists, and this image is present when the person forced onto me his or her persistent gaze, constraining my freedom with these set of expectations... I'm glad I'm not an instagram influencer. 

I find it interesting to compare Sartre's idea of the gaze that constrains freedom with Jean Rouch's (visual anthropologist) idea of the camera's gaze which acts as a generative and disruptive presence. In Rouch's conception, the camera's gaze constructs a performative context for individuals under the gaze--this is a key part of Rouch's camera psychoanalysis (I cannot remember the exact term) that facilitates the discovery of deeper individual truths.

Both these ideas are the same, in my opinion, but just worded differently--I still prefer Rouch's conception.

The Flies

Sartre's rewriting of the story of Electra and Orestes. I have not read the original, so I cannot make a comparison.

Basic story: Agememnon returns from the Trojan War, gets killed by Aegisthus, the lover of his wife Clytemnestra; Orestes, who is in Athens, and Electra, who remains in Argos, avenge his death.

Argos is infested with flies, who were sent by Zeus as punishment, and the whole city is burdened by guilt, both on the level of the collective from the murder of their former King Agememnon and on the individual level.

Orestes, in contrast, is the pure, the unburdened, and represents a sort of childish freedom: he is light-footed and memory-less and without responsibility, with nothing to call his own. He desires maturity and even envies the Argos townspeoples' suffocating guilt, even if "that would mean killing [his] mother-"

Electra, while one of the Argos people (Argosans?) seeks to rise above and absolve herself. In one moment in the play, she dances courageously in the face the dead and the flies that come to haunt the people of Argos once a year--a freedom with the burden of responsibility.

However, only Orestes is able to take the final leap into this true freedom--after murdering Aegisthus and Clytemnestra, Electra succumbs to guilt, while Orestes conversely realizes his freedom through this act.

Zeus attempts to bring Orestes back under his control, offering him the Kingship of Argos in return for his guilt, but Orestes refuses. 

"I am doomed to have no other law but mine" Orestes says, and Zeus admits defeat: "In the fullness of time, a man was to come, to announce my decline."

Ends with quite an exhilarating and affirmative Nietzschean moment.

Dirty Hands

A play that probably concerned Sartre's own life as an intellectual left-wing Communist sympathizer of bourgeois origins.

Hugo is a bourgeois intellectual who belongs to the revolutionary communist party during WWII. His code name is Raskolnikov, after the protagonist in Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov the overman commits a murder and spends the rest of the novel deteriorating in guilt; Sartre makes a clever inversion for his play. As a bourgeois intellectual, Hugo's hands are already dirty--to make himself pure he must commit a murder (and act) and wash his hands clean in the blood of Hoederer, the reactionary and compromising leader within the Communist party who wants to strike a deal with reactionary forces.

The above is the main point, some additional notes below. Hoederer becomes a surrogate father for Hugo, who disowned his family to attempt purification. Hugo and his wife Jessica cannot help but feel as if they are playing a role in a play (dramatic irony), they are mere children. Hugo gets his opportunity to act, but his act becomes meaningless; Hugo was not the agent who pulled the trigger, it was chance--a tragedy. Hugo's childish idealism leads him to an ultimate rejection of life in the end, at the moment of the great reversal.

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