Metaphysics and the Novel / 39
characters. Books, after all, are full of adultery, perversion, and crime, and the critics have come across them before this. The smallest town has more than onemenage II trois.
Such a "family" is still a family. But how is one to accept the fact that Pierre, Francoise, and Xaviereare
totaly ignorant of the holy natural law of the couple and that they try
in
al honesty-and without, moreover, any hint of sexual complicity-to form a trio? The sinner is always accepted, even in the strictest societies, because he is part of the system and, as a sinner, does not question its principles.' What one finds unbearable in Pierre and Francoise is their artless disavowal of morality, that air of candor and youth, that absolute lack of gravity, dizess, and remorse. In brief, they think as they act and act as they think.
Are these qualities only acquired through skepticism, and do we mean that absolute immoralism is the last word
in
an "existential"philosophy? Not at all. ' There is an existentialisIl which leans toward skepticism, but it is certainly not that of
L'Invitee.
On the pretext that every rational or linguistic operation condenses a certain thickness of existence and is obscure for itself, one concludes that nothing can be said with certainty. On the pretext that human acts lose all their meaning when deta.ched from their context and broken down into their component parts (like the gestures of the man I can see but do not hear through the window of a telephone booth) , one concludes that all conduct is senseless. It is easy to strip language and actions of al meaning,-8nd to make them seem absurd,if
only one looks at them from far enough away : this was Voltaire's techniquein Micromegas.
But that other nuracle, the fact that, in an absurd world, language and behavior do have meaning for those who speak and act, remains to be understood.
l:p
the hands of French writers existentialism is always threatening to' fall back into the "isolating" analysis which breaks time up into unconnected i�tants and reduces life to a collection of states of consciousness.3As for Simone de Beauvoir, she is not vulnerable to such criticism.
Her book shows existence understood between two limits : on the one hand, there is the immediate closed tightly upon itself, beyond any word and any commitmen� (Xaviere ) ; and, on the other, there is an absolute confidence
in
language and rational decision, an existence which grows emptyin
the effort to transcend itself (Francoise at the begilining of the book ) .· Between these fragments of time and that 3. Sartre criticized Camus for giving way to this tendency in L'1U:ranger. [English translation by Stuart Gilbert, The Stranger (New York, 1954 ) .]
4. I am keenly aware of how regrettable it is to write such a weighty com
mentary about a novel. But the novel has won its place in the public esteem and has nothing to lose or gain from my remarks.
40 / S E N S E A N D N O N - S E N S E
eternity which erroneously believes it transcends time, there is an effective existence which unfolds in patterns of b.ehavior, is organized like a melody, and, by means of its projects, cuts across time without leaving it. There is �ndoubtedly no
solution
to human problems; no way, for example, to eliminate the transcendence of time, the separation of consciousnesses which may always reappear to threaten our commitments; no way to test the authenticity of these commitments which may always, in a moment of fatigue, seem artificial conventions to us. But between these two extremes at which existence perishes, total existence is our decision by which we enter time in order to create our life within it.
Al
human projects are contradictory because they simultaneously attract and repel their realization. One only pursuesa
thing in order to possess it, and yet, if what I am looking for today must someday be found (which is to say, passed beyond) , why bother to look for it? Because today is today and tomorrow, tomorr0\Y. I can no more look at my present from the point of view of the future than I can see the earth from Sirius.5 I would not love a per�
Pil
without the hope of being recognized by him, and yet this recognition does not count unless it is always free, that is, never possessed. But, after al, love does exist. Communication exists between the moments of my personal time, as between my time and that of other people, and in spite of the rivalry between them. It exists, that is, if Iwil
it, if I do not shrink from it out of bad faith, if I am of good faith, if I plunge into the time which both separates and unites us, as the Christian plunges into God. True morality does not consist in following exterior rules or in respecting objective values : there are no ways tobe
just or tobe
saved. One would do better to pay less attention to the unusual situation of the three characters inL'Invitee
and more to the good faith, the loyalty to promises, the respect for others, the generosity and the seriousness of the two principals. For the value is there. It consists of actively being what we are by chance, of establishing that communication with others and with ourselves for which our temporal stnicture gives US the opportunity and of which our liberty is only the rough outline.5. This idea has been developed in Simone de Beauvoir's essay Pyn'hus et Cineas.