Existential problems
A few years ago, I got a copy of Simone de Beauvoir's 1954 novel The Mandarins from the $1 cart at the Housing Works book store in Soho. The description and blurbs on the back cover described the book as a roman à clef about "Parisian intellectual society at the end of World War II," and I ashamedly admitted to myself that it might resonate with me. Sometimes I'm guilty of café society cosplay, of thinking of "writer" or "intellectual" as plausible identities, and this mode of self-dramatization seems to simultaneously aggrandize and trivialize everything I think about until I can banish that framing from my imagination. Then ideas can seem important again instead of "important."
"Maybe reading The Mandarins would be cathartic," I would think whenever I took it off the shelf, but usually I could find something more pressing to read than that densely printed 600-page brick of a book, composed of what I assumed would be interminable conversations about "bad faith" and "literature" and minutia about the Communist Party in postwar France. But when I flipped through it a few weeks ago, I noticed that the previous owner(s) had underlined only a single sentence in the entire book: "When everything has gone to hell, there's nothing to do but to play idiotic games." I started reading it the next day.
It turns out the book is composed mostly of interminable analyses of political factions on the French left, but it nonetheless feels extremely timely. It depicts postwar France as a post-truth era in which fascism, ostensibly just defeated, instead proves to have saturated everything and everyone with its possibilities. Wartime sacrifices and heroics are reexamined and eventually revealed as compromises, complicities, inevitable degrees of collaboration. It is literally about "existential crises," and not just because thinly fictionalized versions of Camus and Sartre are main characters.
The novel's characters find that after the "liberation," reactionary politics remain as strong and compelling as ever. Accustomed to feeling significant, the intellectuals discover that it's futile to fight fascism with essays and articles; this was just an illusion produced by the war's moral clarity and the secure sense of righteousness it gave them. Without it, they must try to come to terms with feeling useless, which Beauvoir depicts as a product of being free, of having more access to information and opportunity. The more the characters know about the world, the more helpless they feel about changing it or doing anything about it, and this has the knock-on effect of scrambling their ethics. They are left to conclude that there is no stable justification for any morality more complex than "Do what you want."
This helps explain why the novel recounts in incredibly tedious detail a wide variety of sexual flings and factional squabbles that otherwise seem to have largely inconsequential stakes. Beauvoir shows how the intellectuals are themselves embroiled in various forms of what Deleuze and Guattari would later call "microfascism" at the level of their political commitments and their personal relationships. It manifests not as a desire for jackboots and Nazi regalia, but as a demand for order and essential truth in the face of inescapable contingency — for the certainties of the either-or, of the zero-sum mentality. In the novel, this plays out as an internal spiral of analysis that rationalizes any choice in terms of expediency. Beauvoir applies it to virtually every incident, whether it's a matter of being sulky at a cocktail party, cheating on a spouse, covering up for a Gestapo informant, or helping a thug dispose of a corpse of a former comrade.
All the indiscriminate rumination brought to bear across such wildly disparate levels of experience gives the book an odd flavor, which a review in Commentary from 1956 described as a "tone of strenuous earnestness" but which I experienced as deeply deadpan satire. (The Commentary reviewer also described the novel's "sexual passages" as "heavily specific," a phrasing that I also want to read as ironic. I guess my point is I try to see satire wherever there is self-seriousness.)
The protagonists in The Mandarins all seem despicable, but it is hard to tell if we're supposed to think so. The title seems to give a clue, but the mask never slips. This too seems intentional, a kind of readerly complicity that's nonetheless never on a sure footing. I never could feel certain I was in on the joke or if the joke was on me for reading to the end.
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If The Mandarins can be said to have a pivotal plot point — and I'm pretty sure it's not supposed to — it would be the intellectuals' being handed evidence of Soviet gulags. No one in their milieu seriously doubts that this is the case, but none of them can agree on whether the information should be publicized, because it would discredit what they see as the world's best hope for a socialist alternative to capitalism. The Camus and Sartre characters ultimately have a falling out over it, even though in the end, making it public made no apparent difference and both of them conclude that it basically had been a meaningless decision.
This episode is illustrative of how a faith in "truth" and its supposed ability to set the world straight is useless if not counterproductive. One of the fascist fantasies is that the "truth" is self-evident and that if only people could be made to see it clearly, they would immediately know what to do beyond the need for politics. But no truth is so clear that it can be made to serve its own cause — facts have no telos, or rather the facts we elect to assemble are always already politicized. Any information, no matter how damaging it may seem to a particular side, can be put to any political use by any side; in fact no fact has any intrinsic meaning. Only once it is put through a political machine (like Twitter, or the news cycle) does its efficacy take shape. Factional loyalty doesn't just supersede factuality, but factuality is probably best seen as an ideological concept created to disguise factionalism.
In the media environment we are now all too familiar with, there are no inherently important "events." Instead, as in the plot of The Mandarins, there are a series of contrived, virtually arbitrary subjects on which people can take a stand and perform their allegiance; everything is a pretext to expose and denounce enemies who don't adhere to the proper line. This is how something as inconsequential as the Philadelphia Flyers mascot Gritty can become a political crux, the subject of competing left/right interpretations. Everything becomes "political" in the most limited sense, interpreted through the lens of party loyalty. In place of any other analysis, any other explanation of possible causes and effects, is substituted the simple idea that everything happens because a partisan war has been won or lost. This is basically the intellectual climate of fascism, or of modernity more generally.
It is thus always insufficient to "expose the truth" or "let people hang themselves with their own words." There isn't a neutral place where such an exposure could occur, a platform that doesn't condition what is revealed. The intellectuals in The Mandarins can't publish articles about the gulags without becoming embroiled in whose interests they are serving by publicizing something, and what unpredictable effects or opportunities putting any information out there will lead to. Exposing the gulags doesn't leads to their closure; it strengthens both the Communist Party which sees them as necessary and the right-wing authoritarians who want to impose their own forms of systemic oppression.
The Camus character repeatedly expresses dismay that his choosing what seems to him to be the right, principled thing to do never earns him any credit, and in fact merely commits him to a series of even more difficult principled stands. He can't do the right thing once and for all and then be done with politics and be left alone to his philandering. Instead, he laments that everything is swallowed by politics. Later, when he patches things up with the Sartre character and admits to him about the time he lied in court to free a Nazi collaborator and save his girlfriend some discomfort, the Sartre character responds placidly, "You can't draw a straight line in a curved space ... You can't lead a proper life in a society which isn't proper. Whichever way you turn, you're always caught. Still another illusion that has to be gotten rid of. No personal salvation possible."
This seems a totally unacceptable reaction, and I wanted to think that this was Beauvoir's ultimate revelation of the intellectual scene's moral bankruptcy, but then again I couldn't rule out that this was supposed to be the key piece of wisdom the novel was designed to impart. To avoid becoming petty fascists, we can only fatalistically embrace impotence as a kind of freedom, as if potency itself were always an illusion, a temptation. Trying to make a difference only brings forth unintended consequences, so do as little as possible, as spontaneously as possible. The book fittingly ends with the Beauvoir character contemplating suicide but finally lacking the nerve. Instead she consents to living death until the raw processes of being alive dupe her into caring about things again. "Since I am not deaf, I'll once more hear people calling to me." Very inspiring. Since I am on Facebook, I will once more receive notifications...