14 - Jean-Paul Sartre: ???in the soup???

Summary

Like all the other writers considered in this volume, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) was a figure of the twentieth century, which is no longer our century. What this means goes far beyond a mere mathematical statement, based on an arbitrary division of time. Although not surprising given this arbitrariness of the decimal and centile divisions, there are numerous continuities between his world and ours today – for example, there are still many living human beings who interacted with him, as with most of the other figures discussed here – it is also importantly true that the milieu in which he flourished is a distant memory. As he himself said in an interview with John Gerassi, conducted thirty-five years earlier but only published in 2009, there are still many “who remember what France was like twenty years ago. It was [even as late as 1968] in the center of the world.…Paris was the most stimulating city in the world.…Today, that's all gone. No one has the illusion that we are the center of the world.” With some sadness, I must agree, as did Gerassi, with Sartre's assessment, projected from 1974 to the present time. For some reason, Sartre, in these interviews, repeatedly employed a banal and not very common metaphor, “in the soup,” which for him meant “in the thick of things,” deeply involved. That was indeed his own situation at midcentury, the century of which Gerassi himself, in the title of a short biographical work, called Sartre “the hated conscience,” and which Bernard-Henri Lévy, although a Sartre critic of sorts, has simply identified as Sartre's century. Although these identifications may be somewhat hyperbolic, they do point to the confluence of major political events and ideas of which Sartre was at the center.