The Age of Reason
The popular conception of existentialism is subject to an optimistic simplification. It evokes for many the empowering idea that we are self-determined and therefore free. But this notion, or at least the spirit of optimism in which it is given, is totally at odds with the novels of Jean-Paul Sartre; a man who, if he is not the father of existentialism, was its midwife and mouthpiece.
Sartre’s characters are free, it is true, but their freedom does not so much empower as confound and terrify them. In Nausea, for example, Roquentin attains freedom from the normative perception of reality and his reward is an incipient nervous breakdown. At one point, he collapses in a park swooning in horror at the absurdity and gratuitousness of trees. On another occasion, sitting on a tram, he starts violently at the reflection of his own hat. You might equally extol a schizophrenic’s “freedom,” seeing as his mind has broken free from the bounds of reason and self, as consider Sartre’s presentation of existentialism empowering. Roquentin's crisis of freedom is the result of his only partially-successful attempt to escape from a logocentric worldview, his attempt to free perception from the reductive mediation of language. Language, Sartre seems to imply, imposes limitations on consciousness. It simplifies and impoverishes our perceptual experience. By saying “tree” we lump together all trees, thereby denying their differences. Words cut our perceptions to a Procrustean bed because the symbolic taxonomy of language treats things which are merely similar as though they were identical. The break down of Roquentin’s semantic frame of reference frees him from these limitations but the price of his freedom is La Nausée: The world and everything in it, including his freedom, appears gratuitous, plastic and aggressively meaningless, a rebellious chaos of sensory modalities. "Infinitude’s despair," Kierkegaard remarked, "is the fantastical, the limitless." Mathieu, in The Age of Reason, experiences on a civic plane what Roquentin had undergone on the metaphysical. Both are preoccupied with freedom, but where Roquentin rejected his perceptions Mathieu rejects his beliefs. He rejects fatherhood, marriage, communism, the bourgeois, responsibility, and, in a grand gesture near the end of the novel that is the logical consequence of his predicament, freedom itself. For having spent the greater part of the novel trying to raise money to pay for an abortion for Marcelle, his pregant mistress of seven years, Matheiu proposes to her in heroic defiance of his contempt for marriage. In the philosophical context of the novel, this is as lofty and exquisite an irony as the true Dadaists’ negation of Dada. And this is the reason: For Mathieu, possibilities are the essense of his freedom. He is reluctant to believe in something because to affirm a thing is to deny its antithesis and Mathieu wants to keep himself free to believe in anything. He cannot commit himself to one course of action because he wants to be free to take any. But this obstinate insistence on keeping all his options open is precisely the irony of his final predicament: By mooting everything, and deciding on nothing, Mathieu has made of his freedom a vacuum where all possibilities exist in a state of permanent incipience. His freedom has become the ultimate captivity, and this is why his proposal to Marcelle is so paradoxical. By it, he is seeking freedom from his freedom. |