From Illusion to Disillusion: Sartre’s Views of America

FROM ILLUSION TO DISILLUSION: SARTRE'S VIEWS OF AMERICA Renate Peters At least since the time of Tocqueville, European intellectuals have tried to explain America both to themselves and to each other. The United States, especially as it gained power and influence in the twentieth century, both lured and repelled the European intellectual. The playwrights Tucholsky and Hasenclever pictured America as an "earthly paradise," while Freud preferred to see America as a "mistake," an "anti-paradise." 1 Both views existed not only side-by-side in the European intellectual community, but were often expressed by the same individual on different occasions. This schizophrenic attitude may well be a result of the conflict between the myth of America and the reality--especially the socio-political reality--of America. The same intellectual who was lured by the myth was repelled by the reality. Jean-Paul Sartre may be counted among the European intellectuals who tried to come to terms with America. Whether or not he was representative of the intellectual community, the evolution of his understanding of America, from the mythic to the real, might be seen as the European's struggle, in microcosm, with the idea of "America." The old fictions about America transmitted to Europe by explorers, merchants and adventurers have been re-invented and r(?-cast in modern times. Popular novels, comic books and the cinema have fostered the myth of America, and as part of American popular culture, this myth has readily found a home in Europe, where it has flourished. As Roland Barthes observed, "a myth ripens because it spreads"; the myth of America spread welland ripened quickly in European soil.2 Sartre's earliest view of America was in accord with the European creation and re-creation of the myth of America. The books and films of his childhood taught him this myth. In Nick Carter, Buffalo Bill, Texas Jack and Sitting Bull, the young Sartre encountered heroes with superhuman qualities, who fought against evil in a Manichean universe and who were always virtuous and victorious. Sartre wrote that through comic books he discovered "theAmericans as you can see them in the cinema." Nick Carter, for example, was one model of this idealized view of the American: "large, strong, without 174 Renate Peters mustache or beard, accompanied by aids or a brother equally large and strong." The novels he read "marginally described life in New York. That is how I got to know New York."3 The New York Sartre encountered while reading the adventures of his favourite hero, Nick Carter, was for him "already a discovery of America," but a discovery of a mythological America. This mythology contained two landscapes: the vast Wild West and the streets of Manhattan; his heroes were either cowboys pursuing wicked Indians--the reverse of the romantic myth of the innocent savage--or denizens of the 11 puritanical and bloodthirsty" streets of Manhattan, assassins and avengers "who, by night, had it out at knife-point." His American heroes and landscapes were stereotypical and interchangeable. The cowboy-hero was the romantic incarnation of the hero; Sartre's Manhattan, the romantic essence of the exotic place: "in this city as in Africa," wrote Sartre, "under the same burning sun, heroism became again a perpetual improvisation."4 The America of Sartre's childhood, however, was an Eldorado with flaws. His ideas had, as Barthes would say, the "blissful clarity" of all mjth which "abolishes the complexity of human acts [and] gives them the simplicity of essences,"5 Like all myth, Sartre's magical America was devoid of any foundation in history or sociology. His view of America was part of what Anthony Heilbut called "a popular European image of [America as] a nation of frontiersmen," but also an image of American blacks as '"jungle' or 'circus creatures,"' and of Harlem as "a borough of primitives."6 Faithful to this European tradition, the young Sartre mythologized the New World in a manner in which, through popular literature and film, America wanted itself to be perceived by the rest of the world. Naturally, the adult Sartre distanced himself from such simplistic images of "redskins with bows and arrows in their hands and feathers on their...