stones and roots and everything which has weight and tends downward; it’s because
of it that you weigh heavily on the road and press against the earth with the soles of
your feet. But you are beyond your own suffering, because you shape it according to
your will. You are light, Bariona...You are for yourself a perpetually gratuitous gift.
(Contat and Rybalkaii: 130 )
This mixture of Stoic freedom, existential hope and responsibility offers
a challenge to Bariona and solace to the captive audience. The once
despairing hero finds meaning and joy in his new found freedom:
Joyful! I’m overflowing with joy like a cup that’s too full. I’m free. I hold my fate
in my hands. I’m marching against Herod’s soldiers and God is marching at my side.
I’m light, Sarah [his wife], light. Ah if you only know how light I am! Oh joy, joy!
Tears of joy!
(Contat and Rybalkaii: 136 )
If these declamations are voiced in less than deathless prose and offer one
reason why Sartre refused to publish the script commercially, they
exhibit, as did his novels, the personal and moral significance of what
is dawning as an “existentialist” consciousness. In a subsequent drama,
The Devil and the Good Lord( 1951 ),^26 Sartre will again introduce a
decisive “religious” conversion, this time from absolute goodness to
its paradoxical equivalent as absolute evil – in another murderous war
of revolution against oppression. Its concluding line: “There is this
war to fight, and I shall fight it” is often seen as indicating Sartre’s brief
“conversion” to active involvement with the French Communist Party
that began the following year and lasted for four years.^27
Sartre’s discovery of “theater” as a philosophical-literary vehicle is
accompanying his discovery of the social – and the political. In fact, it has
been argued that he helped form the French political theater of the 1940 s
and fifties and contributed to its revival after the decline of the Theater
of the Absurd in 1968. Contat and Rybalka contend that “Sartre’s
international reputation since the end of the war is undoubtedly due
far more to his plays than to his novels, essays, or works of philosophy.”^28
(^26) Published in England as “Lucifer and the Lord.”
(^27) The Devil and the Good Lord, act 3 , scene 2. The play itself is considered patently autobio-
28 graphical (see below,Chapter^10 ).
STvii–viii.
174 The war years, 1939–1944