3 - The novels

Summary

Recent Continental thinking, in particular in the wake of Jacques Derrida, has been keen to contest the traditional distinction between philosophy and literature, and to refuse the truth/fiction opposition which underlies it. Philosophy is no longer envisaged as giving a privileged access to ‘objective’ truth, but as presenting a partial perspective which creates rather than describes its object. And literature in consequence becomes no more fictive, false or imaginary than any other discourse about the world. In this perspective, Plato's poets are no longer seen as ‘lying’ or even fabricating, they are presenting a ‘truth’ as valid as that of the philosopher who would seek to banish them.

Sartre would not go so far as those who wish to break down the philosophy/literature distinction entirely, though his work can, as will become clear, be seen as a progressively more concerted attempt to undermine such binary oppositions. Existentialism and phenomenology are essentially concrete, situated philosophies, expressed through example and illustration as much as exposition and analysis. Conversely, in Sartre's view, novels are necessarily expressive of the novelist's world view or philosophy: ‘une technique romanesque renvoie toujours à la métaphysique du romancier’. And by metaphysics Sartre does not of course mean an obscure byzantine abstraction, but rather an exploration of man's situation in the world:

Je dirai que nous sommes tous des écrivains métaphysiciens … car la métaphysique n'est pas une discussion stérile sur des notions abstraites qui échappent à l'expérience, c'est un effort vivant pour embrasser du dedans la condition humaine dans sa totalité.