An odd collection, which might be more useful for intellectual historians than readers, like me, who just wanted a bit of Sartre to read after lunch. The important essays are almost all here, but the book suffers a bit by stuffing too many into one volume. Sartre's style is often oratorical to an absurd degree, perfect for declaiming on a Parisian street corner, perhaps, but not so good for, you know, reading.

"No one has the right to say that the events in Hungary made the intervention inevitable. No one; not even those who decided it."

NO ONE, DO YOU HEAR ME???

On the other hand, the essays on Bataille and Kierkegaard will be gobbledygook to anyone not well acquainted with their work.

None of this is to say that the book isn't worth buying, just that you might not want to read the whole thing. Philosopher types will enjoy the Bataille/Kierkegaard/Merleau-Ponty essays; literary types will enjoy the early reviews, the Black Orpheus essay, the spat with Camus; historians will get something, at least, from the various political essays. But there's very little in here about Sartre's own thought or its development, and that's a real shame. I suspect it would have clarified much of the obscurity that isn't lifted by the generally excellent annotations. ( )

“Dos Passos’s world, like Faulkner’s, Kafka’s, or Stendhal’s, is impossible because it is contradictory. But therein lies its beauty. Beauty is a veiled contradiction. I regard Dos Passos as the greatest writer of our time.” - Jean-Paul Sartre, On John Dos Passos and 1919

Thirty Jean-Paul Satre essays collected here, addressing topics ranging from a clarification of existentialism, Husserl’s phenomenology, Kierkegaard’s philosophy, the American working class, Vietnam war crimes to reflections on artists and literary writers such as Faulkner, Camus, Bataille, Calder and Giacometti. As philosophy/scholar Ronald Aronson so aptly states in his illuminating Introduction to this New York Review Books (NYRB) edition, “Sartre writes with remarkable freedom, never settling into a single, predictable tone. He engages issues with extreme, attention-getting statements, vividly and forcefully taking a position on the question at hand.” Rather than making more general statements, in the very spirit of Jean-Paul Sartre and his existential philosophy, I will be as specific as possible, commenting on direct quotes from one of his essays I find particularly vivid and forceful: On John Dos Passos and 1919.

“A novel is a mirror. Everyone says so. But what is it to read a novel? I believe that it is to jump into the mirror. Suddenly you find yourself through the looking glass, among people and objects that seem familiar.” ---------- ---------- Ha! A novel is a powerful world we leap into, as if Alice through the looking glass, a complete world into itself, familiar yet unique. How many worlds have you leaped into and thus have expanded your sense of people and objects, expanded your entire sense of life? Sartre goes on to convey the power a novel can have on a reader when written by a first-rate author like John Dos Passos.

“This is not narrative: it is the jerky unwinding of a raw memory full of holes, which sums up a period of several years in a few words, then lingers languidly over some tiny fact. In this it is just like our real memories, a jumble of frescoes and miniatures.” ---------- By Sartre’s reckoning, Dos Passos magically treats time in a way that parallels much of our own very human sense of time and memory. Even more effectively than Faulkner’s treatment of time - now that’s a real accomplishment!

“Nowhere, however, do we have the sense of novelistic freedom. Rather Dos Passos forces on us the unpleasant impression of an indeterminacy of detail. Acts, emotions, and ideas settle suddenly upon a character, make their nests, and then fly off, without the character himself having much to do with it.” ---------- So, for Sartre, John Dos Passos has created a world where actions, feelings, sensations and even ideas become forces pressing against our more internal existential freedom. And for an author who famously wrote “Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does,” it really is a tribute to John Dos Passos that Sartre judged him the finest living novelist.

“In his storytelling Dos Passos deliberately chose the perspective of history: he wants to make us feel that the die is cast. In Man’s Hope, Malraux says, more or less, that the tragic thing about death is that it “transforms life into fate.” From the first lines of his book, Dos Passos has settled into death. All the existence he retraces have closed upon themselves. They are like those Bergsonian memories that float around, after the death of the body, full of shouts and smells and light, in some sort of limbo.” ---------- By these words, Sartre conveys his admiration for Dos Passos and his ability to deal with death face-to-face. Personally, it never occurred to me that John Dos Passos was a key existentialist. On the strength of Sartre’s words I now plan to read his U.S.A. trilogy.

“Dos Passos reports all his character’ words in the style of press releases. They are, as a result, immediately cut off from thought; they are pure words, simple reactions to be registered as such, after the fasion of the behaviorists, from whom Dos Passos takes occasional inspiration. But at the same time utterances assume a social importance: they are sacred, they become maxims.” ---------- What’s fascinating is how words in the style of a press release can then take on a dimension of the sacred. For me, a novelistic turn worth exploring since never in my life have I read a press release that I discerned having even a shred of commonality with the sacred. Or, for that matter, ever becoming a universal maxim.

“Yesterday you saw your best friend and told him of your passionate hatred of the war. Now try to tell yourself that story in the style of Dos Passos.” ---------- Thank you, Jean-Paul Sartre! This is a challenge for all of us – to recast and transform our passion into a story we can tell ourselves in the style of this John Dos Passos novel. And I would even go further – what Sartre asks us to do with 1919, we can attempt with any novel having a profound effect on us.


1919 is the second of American author John Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy. The trilogy consists of The 42nd Parallel (1930); 1919 (1932); and The Big Money (1936). ( )

“Dos Passos’s world, like Faulkner’s, Kafka’s, or Stendhal’s, is impossible because it is contradictory. But therein lies its beauty. Beauty is a veiled contradiction. I regard Dos Passos as the greatest writer of our time.” - Jean-Paul Sartre, On John Dos Passos and 1919

Thirty Jean-Paul Satre essays collected here, addressing topics ranging from a clarification of existentialism, Husserl’s phenomenology, Kierkegaard’s philosophy, the American working class, Vietnam war crimes to reflections on artists and literary writers such as Faulkner, Camus, Bataille, Calder and Giacometti. As philosophy/scholar Ronald Aronson so aptly states in his illuminating Introduction to this New York Review Books (NYRB) edition, “Sartre writes with remarkable freedom, never settling into a single, predictable tone. He engages issues with extreme, attention-getting statements, vividly and forcefully taking a position on the question at hand.” Rather than making more general statements, in the very spirit of Jean-Paul Sartre and his existential philosophy, I will be as specific as possible, commenting on direct quotes from one of his essays I find particularly vivid and forceful: On John Dos Passos and 1919.

“A novel is a mirror. Everyone says so. But what is it to read a novel? I believe that it is to jump into the mirror. Suddenly you find yourself through the looking glass, among people and objects that seem familiar.” ---------- ---------- Ha! A novel is a powerful world we leap into, as if Alice through the looking glass, a complete world into itself, familiar yet unique. How many worlds have you leaped into and thus have expanded your sense of people and objects, expanded your entire sense of life? Sartre goes on to convey the power a novel can have on a reader when written by a first-rate author like John Dos Passos.

“This is not narrative: it is the jerky unwinding of a raw memory full of holes, which sums up a period of several years in a few words, then lingers languidly over some tiny fact. In this it is just like our real memories, a jumble of frescoes and miniatures.” ---------- By Sartre’s reckoning, Dos Passos magically treats time in a way that parallels much of our own very human sense of time and memory. Even more effectively than Faulkner’s treatment of time - now that’s a real accomplishment!

“Nowhere, however, do we have the sense of novelistic freedom. Rather Dos Passos forces on us the unpleasant impression of an indeterminacy of detail. Acts, emotions, and ideas settle suddenly upon a character, make their nests, and then fly off, without the character himself having much to do with it.” ---------- So, for Sartre, John Dos Passos has created a world where actions, feelings, sensations and even ideas become forces pressing against our more internal existential freedom. And for an author who famously wrote “Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does,” it really is a tribute to John Dos Passos that Sartre judged him the finest living novelist.

“In his storytelling Dos Passos deliberately chose the perspective of history: he wants to make us feel that the die is cast. In Man’s Hope, Malraux says, more or less, that the tragic thing about death is that it “transforms life into fate.” From the first lines of his book, Dos Passos has settled into death. All the existence he retraces have closed upon themselves. They are like those Bergsonian memories that float around, after the death of the body, full of shouts and smells and light, in some sort of limbo.” ---------- By these words, Sartre conveys his admiration for Dos Passos and his ability to deal with death face-to-face. Personally, it never occurred to me that John Dos Passos was a key existentialist. On the strength of Sartre’s words I now plan to read his U.S.A. trilogy.

“Dos Passos reports all his character’ words in the style of press releases. They are, as a result, immediately cut off from thought; they are pure words, simple reactions to be registered as such, after the fasion of the behaviorists, from whom Dos Passos takes occasional inspiration. But at the same time utterances assume a social importance: they are sacred, they become maxims.” ---------- What’s fascinating is how words in the style of a press release can then take on a dimension of the sacred. For me, a novelistic turn worth exploring since never in my life have I read a press release that I discerned having even a shred of commonality with the sacred. Or, for that matter, ever becoming a universal maxim.

“Yesterday you saw your best friend and told him of your passionate hatred of the war. Now try to tell yourself that story in the style of Dos Passos.” ---------- Thank you, Jean-Paul Sartre! This is a challenge for all of us – to recast and transform our passion into a story we can tell ourselves in the style of this John Dos Passos novel. And I would even go further – what Sartre asks us to do with 1919, we can attempt with any novel having a profound effect on us. ( )