Table Of ContentExistential Thought and
Fictional Technique
KIERKEGAARD
SARTRE
BECKETT
by Edith Kern
New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1970
Existential Thought and
Fictional Technique
Copyright © 1970 by Yale University.
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Contents
PROEMIO Vll
KIERKEGAARD I
SARTRE 84
Appendix: Flaubert/Sartre 156
BECKETT 167
EPILOGUE 241
Selected Bibliography 245
Index 255
A fictional technique always relates back to the novelist's
metaphysics. The critic's task is to define the latter before
evaluating the former.
Sartre
Proemio
From its inception, existential thought has felt itself at home
in fiction. Because of its intense "inwardness" and the "com
mi tment" of its propo:lents, it has expressed itself more strik
ingly in imaginative writing than in theoretical treatises. En
tranced by the beauty of speech "when it resounds with the
pregnancy of thought," Kierkegaard listened to his own sen
tences many times until "thought could find itself ... completely
at ease in the form."1 According to modern existentialist think
ers, the paradox and absurdity of life can be more readily deduced
from fundamental human situations portrayed in fiction than
described in the logical language of philosophy which is our
heritage. Existentialism's abhorrence of rigid thought systems
as being alien to life and existence has equally pointed toward
a preference for poetry and fiction. Indeed, Unamuno considered
true philosophy, a philosophy concerned with the concrete man
of flesh and blood, to be closer to poetry than to any kind of
scientific thought, and he boldly proclaimed that he counted
1. Hans Peter Kahn, "Either/Or or Both/And: A Modern Interpre
tation of the Aesthetic Education Described by Kierkegaard and Schiller"
(M.A. thesis, New York University, 195 I-52), p. 49.
vii
Proemio
"among the great novels--or epic poems, it is all the same
with the Iliad and the Odyssey and the Divine Comedy and the
Quijote and Paradise Lost and the Faltst, also the Ethics of
Spinoza, and the Critique of Pure Reason of Kant, and the Logic
of Hegel."2
But the affinity the existential writer has felt with fiction has
confronted him with a dilemma inherent in his conception of
the individual. While Kierkegard, Heidegger, or Sartre hardly
can be said to agree on what they consider the nature of the ex
istent individual and his Self, they have this in common that
they think of him as a being enclosed within the horizon of his
consciousness and incapable of identifying himself with the Self
of an Other. The Other can be grasped only imperfectly and only
in terms of conjecture. Such views cannot but affect the human
relationships within the fictional world the author creates as
well as his own relationship to his fictional heroes. Is the writer
of existential fiction limited to the presentation of his own Self?
Is he to be identified fully with his fictional hero? \X7hereas
theoretical writing has tacitly assumed full identity between the
author and the ideas he expresses, fiction has tended rather to
discourage this assumption, even where it might impose itself.
Moreover, the worlds of fiction have been traditionally peopled
by a variety of characters, while their author, omniscient and
ubiquitous, has played the part of their god. Is the existential
author, forgetful of subjective limitations, to enter their minds?
Are his fictional heroes-incapable of understanding Others-to
live in totally solipsistic worlds? How, in fact, does the existen
tial writer see his universe and in what manner can he reveal it?
Disregarding such questions, most critics have been concerned
exclusively with the ideas expounded in existential writing
2. Jose Huertas-Jourda, The Existentialism 0/ /l'figueJ de Unamlmo,
University of Florida Monographs (Humanities), No. I3 (1963), p. 31.
Vllt
Proemio
and have shown little concern for the fictional techniques they
required of novelists. In doing so they have ignored problems
which have been uppermost in the minds of these writers: Kier
kegaard's striving for a complete harmony between thought and
form; Sartre's assumption of a direct relationship between a
novelist's fictional technique and his metaphysics;3 Beckett's
praise of Joyce for having made form content, content form,4
and of Proust for having made one "a concretion of the other, the
revelation of a world."5
It is my intent in this study to scrutinize such form and tech
niques in some of the works of these authors where they are
most strikingly expressive of their metaphysics. I have chosen
Kierkegaard because he is usually referred to as the father of
existentialism; Sartre because he is considered its modern ex
ponent par excellence; and Beckett because he has inherited
salient existential concerns from both. My study will lead, I
hope, to new insights into Kierkegaard's polynomous "pseudo
nymity," the monolithic quality of Sartrean characters, the "un
namableness" of the Beckettian world, and the tendency of ex
istential writers to present their heroes as authors who disclose
themselves as they disclose Being, of which they are a part, in
language, which is a part of it.
3. Jean-Paul Sartre, "On Tbe Sound and the Fury: Time in the
Work of Faulkner," Literary and Philosophical Essays, trans. A. Michel
son (New York, Collier Books, 1962), p. 84. (The original appeared
in 1939.)
4. Samuel Beckett, "Dante ... Bruno. Vico ... Joyce," in Beckett
et aI., Our Exagmination Round His Facti/ication for Incamillatiot~ of
Work in Progress (London, Faber & Faber, 1961), p. 14. (The work was
first published in 1929.)
5. Samuel Beckett, PrOtISt (New York, Grove Press, 1931), p. 67.
ix
KIERKEGAARD
Any attempt to define existentialism within strictly philosophi
cal lines inevitably leads to frustration. Coined and promulgated
by Gabriel Marcel and other French journalists during and after
World War II, the term came to smack of sensationalism and
was popularly employed to designate a philosophy of despair
even if much existentialist writing would belie this assumption.
For these reasons and others more specifically philosophical, most
writers and philosophers labeled existentialist have declined to
accept the epithet. When, in I946, a distinguished group of
philosophers met at the Club Maintenant in Paris to hear Jean
Wahl present a brief history of existentialism, they agreed that
only Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Merleau-Ponty-the phi
losophers sometimes referred to as the Paris School--could be
called existentialists, because they alone had willingly accepted
the term which had been thrust upon them.1 Yet we may recall
that even their acceptance of it had been of rather recent date.
Sartre did not use the term in his first basic philosophical work,
Being and Nothingness (originally L'Etre et Ie Neant, 1943), and
I. Jean Wahl, A Short History of Existetltialism, trans. F. Williams
and S. Maron (New York, Philosophical Library, 1949), p. 2.
I
Existential Thought and Fictional Technique
Simone de Beauvoir had, during the year of its publication, con
fided to her diary the amazement she fcIt at being asked whether
she was an "existentialist."2 Though her studies of Kierkegaard
and Heidegger had brought her in cOntact with the word "ex
istential," the term "existentialist" had nOt been familiar to her.
It is fortunate for the literary critic, however, that the philos
ophers gathered around Jean Wahl agreed on a nucleus of
thought common to all existential thinking. For this makes it
possible to study its impact on fictional forms and techniques.
Though the philosophers meeting with \"{Tahl doubted whether
Kierkegaard himself should be called an existentialist or even
a philosopher of existence (he had no desire to be a philosopher,
much less one with a fixed doctrine), they agreed that "the word
existence in the philosophic connotation it has today was first
used by Kierkegaard" Wahl realized that such thinking might
be traced back to the philosophies of Schelling, Kant, and even
St. Augustine. But he felt also that "we are able to recognize and
understand these early prefigurations of the philosophy of ex
istence only because a Kierkegaard existed." \"{That he and his
colleagues considered most significant was the fact that Kierke
gaardian thought had sprung mainly from opposition to Hegel's
passion for a logical system. As Wahl summarized it, "opposing
the pursuit of objectivity and the passion for totality which he
found in Hegel, Kierkegaard proposed the notion that truth lies
in subjectivity"3 To Kierkegaard man was an existent, a "mo
ment of individuality"; he refused to consider him a mere para
graph in a system. This emphasis on individuality and subjec
tivity has had, as we shall see, far-reaching implications nOt only
in philosophical bur also in formal literary terms.
If we turn to Kie·rkegaard himself, as he rakes issue with the
2. Edith Kern, Sartre: A Collection of Critical Essays, Twentieth
Century Views (En~lewood Cliffs, N.]., Prentice-Hall, 1962), pp. 2-3.
3. Wahl, Short History, pp. 1,9,3-4.
2
Kierkegaard
philosophers of his time and with Hegel in particular, we find
him objecting to all systematization of thought. "An existential
system cannOt be formulated," he maintained in his Concluding
Unscientific Postscript (1846),4 "Existence itself is a system
for God; but it cannot be a system for any existing spirit." For
"system and finality correspond to one another, but existence is
precisely the opposite of finality." Indeed, he continued, "Exis
tence separates and holds the various moments of existence dis
cretely apart; systematic thought consists of the finality which
brings them together" (CUP, 107). While speculative philos
ophy insisted that subjectivity is untruth, or rather that truth
lies only in objectivity, Kierkegaard went so far to to state
that to seek objectivity is to be in error, that truth can be
found only by each individual existent, and that it can never
represent a finality but must remain a persistent striving and
becoming. Truth is never realized, he believed, as along as the
subject is in existence (CUP, pp. I09-II). This means also that
"life can only be explained after it has been lived, just as Christ
only began to interpret the Scriptures and show how they applied
to him-after his resurrection.";' Moreover, since any search for
a system-be it the most perfect-necessarily had to be made by
an existent individual, this search could not be objective, unless
in a rather comical, world-historical absent-mindedness man
forgot what it is to be an existent individual (CUP, 108-09).
It was, then, the subjective experience of each human individual
that was stressed as opposed to the "objective tendency, which
proposes to make everyone an observer, and in its maximum to
4. S~ren Kierkegaard, COl1cltlding Unsciel1tific Postscript, trans.
David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie (Princeton, N.]., Princeton Uni
versity Press, 1941); henceforth cited in the text as CUP.
5. The JOtlrnals of S¢ren Kierkegaard: A Selection, ed. and trans.
Alexander Dru (London, Oxford University Press, 1938), p. 57, entry
of April 14,1838.
3
