exemplifies a sense of the role the Party plays in furthering the cause of
the proletariat while denying the members’ freedom to express alterna-
tives and criticize its errors. This tension of what Sartre will later call the
need to “reintroduce man into Marxism” is personified in the dilemma
of the conflicted Brunet facing the “existentialist” Mathieu:
brunet. As for the Party, I think I’m going to quit.
...
mathieu. You shouldn’t quit the CP...You without the Party...
What is that? Just shit. A bit of pride and some filth. And the Party
without you? What will it do? Pursue exactly the politics you want it
not to follow. By quitting, you send it in the direction you despise.
b. You think there’s anything at all I could stop? You seem to think the
CP is a congress of radical socialists.
m. Try! You’ve got to try to fight from within.
...
b. You told me straight to my face a little while ago: before, I wasn’t
anyone. Now, at the present, I’m someone. Believe me, I’m not overly
proud of it, but I can’t go back either. I didn’t have a self. Resentment
and shock gave it to me, and it’s not going away. I can’t spit it back up
or swallow it down. Not used to it, I guess.
m. Right. Not used to it. But you never get used to it.
b. So you see! Even if I return to the Party, hat in hand, I won’t be able
to forget myself. A whole part of me will remain outside.
m. Exactly...Outside. Outside and inside at the same time.
Completely in on it all, and out of it at the same time, wanting the
impossible, and knowing you want it, and wanting it as if it were
within reach – that’s being a man.
(Last Chance 162 , 172 – 173 )
Sartre was moving in the direction of becoming a fellow traveler as he
was working on this volume. InChapter 11 we shall chart this movement
toward the Party that reached its height from 1952 to 1956 and descended
rapidly thereafter. His own ambivalence offers a perspective on the
interplay of the moral, the political, the imaginative and the conceptual
that we’ve come to expect from the work of Sartre.
The Roads to Freedom 161