The Roads to Freedom
The Roads to Freedom is a series of novels by Jean-Paul Sartre. Intended as a tetralogy, it was left incomplete, with only three of the planned four volumes published.
The three published novels revolve around Mathieu, a Socialist teacher of philosophy, and a group of his friends. The trilogy includes: L'âge de raison, Le sursis, and La mort dans l'âme. The trilogy was to be followed by a fourth novel, La dernière chance ; however, Sartre would never finish it: two chapters were published in 1949 in Sartre's magazine Les Temps modernes under the title Drôle d'amitié. The last part of The Last Chance was later reconstructed and published in 1981.
The novels were written largely in response to the events of World War II and the Nazi occupation of France, and express certain significant shifts in Sartre's philosophical position towards 'engagement' in both life and literature, finding their resolution in the extended essay L'existentialisme est un humanisme.
Background
In April 1938, Sartre's first novel Nausea was published. Three months later in July, he wrote to Simone de Beauvoir, "I have all at once found the subject of my novel, its proportions and its title... The subject is freedom." Originally it was to be titled "Lucifer," and written in two parts – "La Revolte" and "Le Serment". In the autumn of 1938, Sartre began writing the novel that was to become The Age of Reason, and continued working on the novel on and off for the next year. In early September 1939, Sartre was called up into the French Army and was assigned to the meteorological unit. Except for some regular meteorological observations, this war work was not exacting, and Sartre had plenty of time to work on his novel, his war diaries, and numerous letters to friends. At one point Sartre produced seventy-three pages of the novel in thirteen days. By December 31, 1939, he had completed the novel, and immediately started a sequel, which he originally wanted to call September, and which became titled The Reprieve. He finished writing The Reprieve in November 1943. However, he was constantly editing the manuscripts, and also turned them over to Simone de Beauvoir for critique.His writing in these novels was semi-autobiographical. His separation from his accustomed life in Paris and the leisure and structure of his war work led him to continued introspection during this period. Mathieu was based upon himself, Ivich was based on Olga Kosakiewicz, Gomez was based on Fernando Gerassi, and Sarah on Stepha Advykowitch, and Boris was based on his friend Jacques-Laurent Bost. Marcelle, perhaps loosely based on Simone de Beauvoir, was the character most removed from the real-life model.
The Age of Reason and The Reprieve were published together after the war in September 1945. "Sartre was by now France's leading intellectual voice, and the novels, not least because they defined a critical period in French history, were received with great enthusiasm by the French public." However, some reviews were mixed. Louis Parrot writing for Les Lettres francaises said, "Jean-Paul Sartre has definitely taken his place among the greatest French writers of our day... His powerful talent has affirmed itself with rare brilliance." Gaéton Picon writing for Confluences said, "If Sartre's ambition was to force the doors of literary history, he has succeeded.. Like all great novelists, he also enjoys the privilege of having a universe of his own." However, Louis Beirnart, writing for Etudes said, "If books could smell, one would have to hold one's nose in front of Sartre's latest books... Sartre's objective is, very clearly, to show life through its excrement and lower the value of existence to the level of the gutter and the dump." Orville Prescott, writing for The New York Times, mentioned "His Cast of Characters Dull".
Extracts of the third novel in the trilogy, Troubled Sleep, appeared in the journal Les Temps Modernes January and June 1949, and it was published in book form later that year. The reviews were not good. As for the reception, Sartre scholar Michel Contat says: Troubled Sleep "failed to provoke the anticipated and promised positive responses, as critics transferred their moral disappointment into an accusation that represented an exhaustion of Sartre's literary creativity. Although Sartre always said that he accorded no importance to the judgments of literary reviewers, his partial failure in their eyes intimidated him in the face of the fourth volume..." Consequently, Sartre was unable to complete the series.
Characters
- Mathieu Delarue – an unmarried philosophy professor whose principal wish is to remain free
- Marcelle – Mathieu's pregnant mistress
- Daniel – a homosexual friend of both Mathieu and Marcelle – he offers to marry Marcelle
- Boris – a student of Mathieu
- Ivich – Boris' sister, to whom Mathieu is attracted
- Brunet – Mathieu's Communist friend
- Gomez – a painter, who is fighting with the Republicans in Spain
- Sarah – Gomez's Jewish wife
Overview of the series
The second part of Troubled Sleep focuses on Mathieu's communist friend Brunet in the POW camp. Drôle d'amitié also focuses on Brunet, and his fellow prisoner Schneider, in the POW camp. In the final part, La dernière chance, it is revealed that Mathieu was in fact not previously killed—He reappears in a stalag after two months in the hospital.
Shifting viewpoints within the novels
In L'âge de raison, "the perspective changes from chapter to chapter throughout the account of a 48-hour period. In volume 2, Le Sursis, the time-span is a week, but the viewpoint shifts more rapidly, moving sometimes within a single phrase from one character's perspective to another's... The lack of punctuation, the juxtaposition of perspectives, and the intensity created by the single focus of a multiplicity of characters work together to convey the common humanity and intersubjective experience of the French on the verge of war... Volume 3, La mort dans l'âme, reverts to a slower pace of perspectival change."As for the experimental style of The Reprieve, Sartre wrote in 1945:
Of the first two books in the series, Sartre once said:
Interpretation
Overall, "the Roads to Freedom as a trilogy reflects many of Sartre's best-known existentialist concepts, including bad faith, or self-deception, the acknowledgment of freedom that comes with both anguish and personal responsibility for one's actions, and how those actions embody the personal and social morality that one promotes."In his book Sartre and Fiction, Gary Cox discusses the implications of the Roads to Freedom series:
The unfinished fourth volume, ''The Last Chance''
In 1981 a text of La dernière chance was published in French with Sartre's complete works of fiction in the Pléide edition. George H. Bauer and Michel Contat had painstakingly reconstructed the intended novel from Sartre's "completely unorganized manuscript pages." In their "Critical Note on The Last Chance," the authors note: "Let us also add that Sartre had come to be aware of the work we were doing on his drafts, and that he allowed it."In 2009, Craig Vasey translated and published this work into English. Vasey's edition, titled The Last Chance: Roads of Freedom IV, includes two parts: 1) Strange Friendship The Last Chance – the text reconstructed by Bauer and Contat from Sartre's notes. This is the first time that these two parts have been available in English.
Why Sartre did not finish the series
Sartre's biographer Ronald Hayman theorized that one reason Sartre did not finish the Roads to Freedom series was that Sartre "deeply disliked bringing anything to a conclusion." Hayman pointed out that although Sartre "managed to complete nine original plays, seven short stories, and several screenplays, nearly all his other major projects in literature and philosophy were abandoned." These included the planned sequels to Nausea, Being and Nothingness, and Critique of Dialectical Reason, and "other uncompleted projects including the autobiography, the enormous biography of Flaubert, La Psyché, a book on Mallarmé, one on Tintoretto," etc. As for the Roads to Liberty, Sartre "had relatively little difficulty in completing the first three volumes: nothing needed to be concluded. He wrote 223 pages of the last volume, La derniere chance, and he did not give up hope of finishing it until nine years after publishing the third volume in the series."According to Hayman, one reason for Sartre's unfinished projects was his restlessness: when Sartre "worked at long-term projects, it was tarnished by ambivalence. Other work would be clamoring for his time, and simultaneously he would feel guilty about enjoying words instead of taking action." Simone de Beauvoir is quoted as saying, "Without having abandoned the idea of a fourth volume, he always found work that needed his attention more."
For another possible interpretation, Hayman goes on to quote the writer Michael Scriven, who said that Sartre was "shattering the myth of the coherently finished text, the myth that the contradictions that gave rise to the work have been resolved by an apparently cohesive textual narrative."
Michel Contat, in his "General Introduction for Roads of Freedom," points out that Sartre was no longer in the right frame of mind. His experience had become "extremely restricted and particularized. It became the experience of a man of letters, a celebrity intellectual, who, apart from his old circle of friends, almost only encounters people like himself, even when he goes abroad." Also, the reviews of the last novel in the series, Troubled Sleep, had not been good. Contat further suggests that "it is in developing the idea, near the end of 1953, of an autobiography that Sartre decides – or rather that the decision takes place in him – to leave his novel where it is, for this new project represents a way out of the dead-end in which he finds himself with the novel."
In an interview in 1973 concerning The Roads to Freedom, Sartre revealed at least one of the reasons he discontinued the series: