JEAN-PAUL
SARTRE
During my youth Sartre
was, for a while, my favourite author, particularly with regard to Nausea, his first
and, in my opinion, best novel, which I must have read at least eight times by
the age of 22, identifying, in some degree, with its antihero, Roquentin. Of all
French authors, probably Sartre came closest to being a guru and hero of French
youth. Unattractive in appearance, he
was yet attractive in prose, both fluent and profound, though not always true.
As, for instance, in Anti-Semite and Jew, his little book against
anti-Semitism, wherein I read of the Jews as Israelites! Israelites? But there was, at the time, no
Well, I'm not here encouraging people to be anti-Semitic - far
from it! An open society does not permit
of a supertheocratic opposition to tribalists ... except on the basis of a lunatic fringe, a
basis that can entail serious penalties if taken too far! No, but in relation to Nazism, which was the
relationship Sartre was mostly writing about at the time, anti-Semitism was a
logical ideological procedure, even if cooked-up for the benefit of the masses
in some crasser, more tangible guise that makes no reference to Jews as tribalists (though the expression 'submen',
also applicable to Gypsies, autocrats, priests, and communists, whether Russian
or Polish, carries approximately the same weight).
Well, Sartre was certainly wrong in his own logical position,
which is, after all, only to be expected from a French bourgeois writer, since
the French, along with the British and to a lesser extent the Americans,
usually prove themselves ethnically and ideologically incapable of coming to
intellectual grips with extreme ideological positions, particularly when, as in
the case of National Socialism, such positions are of a supertheocratic
bias, albeit one that was seriously flawed and therefore of no real credit to
religion.
Yes, I read Sartre but, like all the other authors I shall be
writing about, I eventually grew out of and beyond him. After all, the bourgeois is a dying breed.
