It isn't surprising that this is the play most often associated with Sartre. The other three are definitely fixed in time and place, even though the themes are universal (is that how that cliché goes?) The existentialist tackles the afterlife, emasculates the popular conceptions of hell, creating the most difficult situation a Situationist could envision. The most quotable line (Hell is other people) is ill-conceived though, isn't it? If hell is other people, than life on earth is hell to an infinitely higher degree. Or is that the point? As for me, I can hardly feel sympathy for Garcin. I can imagine far worse hells than sharing a room with two ostensibly attractive women. And Sartre sends a mixed message. The three occupants slowly lose sight of the world of the living. This is isolation. But they will never lose sight of their roommates. This is companionship. Is he mocking the Holy Trinity, or the concept of a threesome? Funny how these Frenchmen are fixated on the ménage a trois, but I'll take Rene Girard's conceptions over Sartre's.
Individuals placed in difficult situations, and the reader can't help but wonder how he or she would fare in the character's place. You don't need to be an existentialist to craft such fiction, and I think it unfortunate that Sartre's plays are pigeon-holed as part of a philosophical movement. This is great literature, no more or less modern because of an -ism, and will remain great literature when the intellectual pendulum sways away from the stagnant leftist swamp in which it (the pendulum) is caught. So he tweaks the noses of conservative theologians. A shame if that's the only attraction of this collection.
A common thread in these four plays is modestly liberated sexuality. If only the libertine playwrights of today had the taste to follow suit. Yes Inez is a lesbian who hits on Estelle. It isn't a cutesy lollipop flirtation ala Mrs. Dalloway, but it is definitely concrete and vital to the plot of the play. And it only goes as far as it needs to and doesn't overwhelm the play. In Dirty Hands, Hugo's love for Hoederer can either be homoerotic or Platonic (there's a difference...right?) Take your pick, the play works just fine either way. I thought Orestes and Electra got a bit too close at times during The Flies, but this is Greek drama after all. And it was very refreshing to see a twist of the man as sexual beast theme in the Respectful Prostitute. The sexual animal is not the black male, but the white male; in fact the black male is portrayed as impotent. Or that's how I see it. The embrace between Lizzie and "the Negro" is out of Little Women.
I read the four plays consecutively, and expected a let down after No Exit (which I enjoyed, but didn't consider to be anywhere near brilliant). Boy was I wrong. The Flies is laugh-out-loud funny. Sartre rubs our noses in the over-the-top repentance. In fact everything about the play is over-the-top, from Zeus' pettiness to the Orestes' embracing of heroic suffering servitude. If No Exit is a kick in the shin of Christian theology, the Flies is a lead pipe to the kneecap of Greek mythology. Zeus' diatribe to Orestes in Act III is akin to the berating that Job receives in the book that bears his name. I would argue that a connection between Greek sackcloth and ashes repentance to Christian sackcloth and ashes is a tenuous one at best. Incarnate Zeus is light years away from Jesus.
Dirty Hands blew me away. You could call this a tragedy, except Hugo truly does "do" something at the end of the play, and what he does is real and meaningful and senseless all at the same time. Does he do it out of love for Hoederer, despair for himself, to prove a point to Olga? The situation, as Sartre presents it, is inevitable. If the alliance of parties was inevitable, than every other situation of the play was also inevitable. But it isn't the situations that make the play, but the characters. A truly situationist play, with the situation as the all-powerful force, would have nameless characters without dialogue going through motions and putting audiences to sleep. Characters don't just search for meaning, they ARE meaning. This should transfer into real life as well. I'm often amused when characters in plays talk about chance. The irony is that in a play, absolutely nothing is chance. Every situation is carefully thought out by the author, calculated for maximal dramatic effect, with all the tight blocking we've come to expect from masters of the form. Hugo's intellect credits his action to chance, yet just by thinking he is conquering chance because chance is thoughtless. And if thinking is pure chance than you might as well stop reading books and go back to your GameCube or GameBox or whatever the heck they are called.
The Respectful Prostitute is a great change of pace, short and brutally severe. It also proves that the French have always been morally superior to Americans. Viva la revolucion!
Hell of course is in the eye of the beholder, and others might think that being locked in a room with two women forever might actually be more like heaven. The key idea in all visions of hell though is that it lasts eternally, just like heaven. But eternal life in bliss is just as bad, perhaps more so, than eternal life in hell. After all, in heaven one can put off goals for as long as one wants. Time constraints become meaningless. All one need do is to perhaps think about what one can do, and of course, the goals will always be successful (one cannot be frustrated in heaven).
To find hell in other people, as Garcin did, might make his sojourn with Inez and Estelle much more palatable. After all, he has an infinite amount of time to adjust. His narcissm might have a short decay time compared to infinity. Estelle might get creative and invent a mirror: unending time permits much innovation, regardless of its boredom. Inez might eventually be successful in her advances towards Estelle: Inez has plenty of time for seduction.
It might be very difficult to be optimistic facing the prospect of eternal life as these characters do in the play. The certainty of existence is painful: to be happy one needs uncertainty, or rather, the possibility of failure. But of course one could find a way to embrace this prospect of eternal life. Imagination and creativity would find the answers. An optimistic individual, i.e. an individual not engaging in a self-reflecting narcisstic excess of introspection would, paraphrasing Garcin's last line in the play, get on with it.
Life itself is hell, but moreso for,in my opinion, those with the least amount of political power or wealth. Sartre's philosophy has been criticized because some, including myself, feel he could not see the forest for the trees.
It is, in my opinion, only when we view and treat one another as equals that we become human, but society's institutions are basically authoritarian and do not YET permit that. Authoritarianism stems from and is reinforced by the law of Moses as articulated in the Torah or the Old Testament of the Jewish-Christian Bible. It is also reinforced by Islam, as well as by Hinduism.
Sartre laid down some excellent ideas that others, including myself, have "remodeled."
