ENERATIONTHEATRE

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Is There Room for Comedy in Sartre's Hell?

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     -  I wish you were dead!

     -  [...] I am!

     -  Really?... No... What's it like?

Richard Bean, One Man, Two Guvnors, 2011

(based on The Servant of Two Masters, by Goldoni, 1746)

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     Huis clos (No Exit) has often been performed as a grim, claustrophobic, and rather hopeless comment on human condition. However, the play leaves room for a different, less disheartening interpretation.

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     After their death, three characters, who do not know each other, all guilty of poor life choices, find themselves together, locked in a room. They see their earthly life fading in the distance, and disappearing. They slowly realize that they are condemned to the eternity of a sadomasochistic triangle. Hence the line "L'enfer, c'est les autres" ("Hell is the others.")

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     No Exit is a dramatic absurdity. Sartre is asking his audience to stretch suspension of disbelief, and accept to be witnesses in a trial, in which the dead try their life and sentence and punish each other. At first sight, not a proposition that will keep the spectators rolling in the aisle with laughter.

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     Now, stop looking at it as chest-beating existentialism of the life-sucks-and-then-you're-dead persuasion, and look at it as a play, the subject of which is, not the emptiness of human condition, but the absurdity of life itself. That same absurdity that gave birth to founding myths: Prometheus's liver being eaten and regenerating itself, for eternity; Sisyphus rolling his boulder up the hill, only to see it roll down again, for eternity. Add the self-deprecating humor of desperate situations -- which is definitely present in Sartre's script -- and you have, maybe not a full-blown comedy, but a ticket to an entertaining evening rather than a prescription for Xanax.

 

     Viewed from the standpoint of their absurdity, the characters of No Exit are not so different from the Italian characters of the Commedia dell'arte. Commedia, the Italian style of street theater prevalent throughout Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was a reduction to absurdity of the society of the time. Its characters had no core identity, just stock characteristics of appearance and personality, immediately identifiable in their mask, their posture, and their costume. They were the personifications of conventions that had lost their meaning and their potency -- puppets without strings. If you place the stencil of Commedia over No Exit, Garcin becomes the Captain, a womanizer obsessed with courage and valor, but in reality a coward. Estelle is a dangerous but vain Isabella. Ines is independent and insolent, like a Columbina victim of her own intrigues. Unlike Commedia characters, the characters of No Exit reflect on their lives, but their lives are over, so what they were during their lives is unchangeable and devoid of a core identity, like Commedia characters.

 

     The play opened in Paris in 1944, in the ruins of four years of German occupation, and in the unbearable reality of the Holocaust. In Réflexions sur la question juive [Anti-Semite and Jew], an essay he wrote in October of 1944, Sartre offers a typology of three characters: The anti-Semite, the Jew, and the Democrat. In fact, some aspects of Sartre's definition of the anti-Semite seem directly applicable to the characters of No Exit. For example, Garcin, like Sartre's anti-Semite, "fears every kind of solitariness... however small his stature, he takes every precaution to make it smaller, lest he stand out from the herd and find himself face to face with himself." He is "a coward who does not want to admit his cowardice to himself." Ines, also like Sartre's anti-Semite, is a woman "who wishes to be pitiless stone, a furious torrent, a devastating thunderbolt -- anything except a [woman]." Estelle "flees responsibility as [she] flees [her] own consciousness, and choosing for [her] personality the permanence of a rock, [she] chooses for [her] morality the scale of petrified values."

 

     In a way, No Exit could be viewed as a reduction to absurdity of Chekov or Dostoevsky. Emerging from that absurdity, alongside despair, is humor. One way out of the dead-end (pun intended) of Sartre's existentialism is Camus's optimism: "One must imagine Sisyphus happy." The "happiness" of the Pale and the ghetto. No Exit is replete with such moments. Yes, the characters of No Exit were devoid of a core identity... until they died, but their after-lives proves richer than their lives. Their after-life journey is more enlightening and more transforming. They become aware of their shortcomings and of the comic absurdity of their everlasting condition/punishment, thus drawing a Camusian silver lining over Sartre's existentialist darkness. If one can imagine Sisyphus happy, No Exit can move closer to a kind of morality play, a wordy pantomine in which the dead teach the living how to live, a helpless, but not hopeless, self-deprecating commedia.

David Valayre, 2024