Les Séquestrés d' Altona of Jean-Paul Sartre

Extract

A new play by Jean-Paul Sartre is always an important and controversial event. At fifty-five Sartre is for many, however prematurely, the “grand old man” of French letters. There are, however, others who see in Sartre the supreme nihilist who has failed of artistic achievement for lack of a unifying faith and there are even some who will go so far as to speak of charlatanism. Perhaps the kindest critical view is that held by many conscientious people who think of Sartre as essentially “negative,” a well-meaning but misled philosopher whose ideas have been swept away by the flux of history. They point out that the political world as it exists today is scarcely the place for the “engaged literature” of 1940-45 with its requirements of personal commitment and anonymous heroism. Young people in France are not reading Being and Nothingness.