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Sartre and the Dramatic Character:
Theory and Practice
Meili Steele
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
In his critical writings Sartre calls for a shift froma theater of "caractere"
to a theater of situations. His principal justification for this change is that in
a theater of situations a character's free choicewillnot be obscured by his past
actions or by a determining psychology: ". . . nous ressentons Ie besoin de
porter a la scenecertaines situations qui eclairent les principaux aspects de la
condition humaine et de faire participer Ie spectateur au libre choix qui
I'hommefait danscessituations. "I ThispaperwillexamineSartre'stheoryof
the dramatic character and then look at three characters from his plays,
Oreste in Les Mouches, Hugo in Les Mains sales, and Goetz in Le Diable et Ie
Bon Dieu. In these characters we will consider the gestures by which Sartre
attempts to make the audience aware of a character's freedom and whether
these gestures contrast with those of traditional characters of essenceagainst
which Sartre is trying to revolt.
To clarify what Sartre means by dramatic character, we must quickly
examine what he means by man. Behind his new concept of the dramatic
character is his philosophy of man. As he says in the same essaycited above,
"Forgers des mythes": ". . . I'homme ne doit pas ~tredefini comme un animal
raisonnable' ou 'social', mais comme un ~trelibre, entierement inde'termine'et
qui doit choisir son propre etre face acertaines necessite's. . . ."2Man's
freedom resides in his consciousness while his beliefs,personality, self-image,
and the other's image of him are part of the objective realm, the situation.
Sartre translates this concept of freedom into his plays through two types of
dramatic characters. In one category are those who make gestures implying
consciousness of freedom and who by their rapid changes, their
"arrachements," frustrate our attempts to categorize them.3The second type
consists of those who reveal their freedom negatively; that is, they make
gestures which unmask their efforts to confuse consciousness and situation,
to posit a necessaryrelationship betweenthemselvesand the world inorder to
avoid the responsibility for choice. Freedom is an ontological condition
which transcends man's situation. Though both of these types appear in Les
Mouches, our concern will be with the character who asserts his freedom,
Oreste.
In Act I we learn that Oreste was brought up in Corinth and that when
the secret of his birth was revealed to him, he decided to return to his native
Argos. 'When we meet Oreste on stage, he expresses a desire to share the
memories of the Argives, complaining that he feels too light. He even hints
that he might be willing to murder in order to overcome his sense of
separation. This information establishes Oreste as an alien in his owneyesand
in the eyes of the Argives. Though Oreste is psychologically abstract and
indeterminate, he does make portentious remarks which, as we will see,
blemish his future choice.
Oreste continues to define himself as a Corinthian until hediscoversthat
his detachment from the Argivesisa choice. When heasks Jupiter for a signto
help him decidewhether to stay or leave, Jupiter responds bylighting a stone.
This triggers Oreste's recognition that he is freeto choose without referenceto
any external authority. He feelshis past "jump back" into the situation, out of
his future. He rejects Jupiter's directive to leave, changes from a passive
adolescent into an existential hero, and without reflection decides to kill
Egisthe and Clytemnestre.
But there is a problem here. If Oreste is free, then he is freeto make any
choice: to leaveArgos, to spare his stepfather and his mother. The decisionto
go through with Electre's plan of vengeance mayverywell bea freechoice, but
Oreste's family connection, his desire to overcome his lightness, his idea of
committing murder before his awareness of his freedom, and the abrupt
certainty of the decision seem to bear down on his choice. Sartre could have
overcome this by establishing other possible courses of action an then having
Oreste act. It seems as if Sartre was so concerned with the detachment-
commitment aspect of Oreste's action that he neglectedto have his hero make
some gestures of his freedom.
The questions surrounding Oreste continue in Act III. After the murder,
he claims his act without remorse, thus avoiding the stagnating ritual of
expiation. Once committed, an act becomes an unalterable fact. However, in
avoiding repentance Oreste verges on giving his act a positive symbolic
charge. This impression is reinforced in his conversations with Jupiter in
which he appears to be more interested in defying the god than in liberating
the Argives.
In his last speech Oreste abandons his project to show the Argives that
they are free, and instead plays the role of Christ. He declares that he loves
them, that he is taking their sins on himself, and then he leaves.This would be
fine if it 'had beenmade clear that the Argiveswerenot ready to be told of their
freedom and that the best choiceisto play redeemer and depart. Without such
information and without a gesture indicating consciousness of choice, one
can easily see Oreste living out a mythological role, glowing with the
consecration of his freedom. Part of this problem comes from his lack of
awareness of self-imageand the image that others have of him. (Egistheand
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Jupiter exhibit greater awareness of their images in others' eyes, but they are
trapped by them.) This is a dilemma with which Hugo, the protagonist of Les
Mains sales, is very much concerned.
Whereas Oreste is a simple character who accepts his freedom with very
little anguish, Hugo reveals his freedom negatively. He istormented byit and
desperately tries to suppress it. Throughout the play, Hugo unsuccessfully
tries to give himself an essence, to coincide with his role as his revolutionary
models Louis and Olga do. By presenting and unmasking Hugo's strategies,
Sartre illustrates what he means when he says man is "condemned to
freedom."
One of the waysSartre tries to negate the traditional concept of character
is by structuring the play around Hugo's attempt to understand his motivefor
a murder that he committed two years before the time of Act I. In Act I Hugo
visits his revolutionary friend Olga, who will accept him back into the Party
only if his motive for the murder will make him "recuperable." Acts II-VI
present Hugo's recollection. If he can discover his reason or feel related to his
crime by remorse or joy, he can givehimselfan instrinsic substance. However,
as we examine the story, we discover that Hugo's doubts existed before the
crime and that it was the crime itself whichwas supposed to givehima feeling
of substantiality. An analysis of Hugo in Acts II-VI will help discriminate
how Sartre's concept of freedom undermines the identity of a character. The
kind of identity that Hugo unsuccessfullytries to givehimselfisthe identity of
a dramatic character from the theater of "caract~re."
When Act II opens, Hugo is yearning for a way to feel significant and to
be accepted by the others in the group. He tries to suppress any differences
between himself and personifications of the Party, Louis and Olga. He
unreflectingly submits to Louis' judgment: "Alors, s'il est contre,je suis contre
aussi. Pas besoin de savoir de quoi il s'agit."4Unfortunately for Hugo, Louis
does not have the image of him that he desires: "C'etait un petit anarchiste
indiscipline, un intellectuel qui ne pensait qu'a prendre des attitudes. . ." (p.
26). Hugo shares this impression of himself as an actor and as a bourgeois,
and he seeks to overcome it by committing a striking nonverbal act. Louis
gives him a chance with the assignment to kill Hoederer, a revolutionary
leader who is considering a compromise with the reactionary forces. To gain
access to Hoederer's compound, Hugo takes a position as his secretary.
The references to Hugo's bourgeois past increase in Act III when he
moves into Hoederer's camp. What is most curious is that it is Hugo himself
who makes these references, whether by his narration or by his persistence in
gestures which reflect this past. These gestures, whichvitiate his efforts to be
accepted by the Party regulars, need to be noted. First, he voices his political
views in abstract, intellectual language. Secondly, he frequently protests his
rejection of his family and class. Further, when he goes to Hoederer's camp,
where he must know that he will be searched, he takes along volumes of Eliot
and Lorca, as well as Hegel and Marx. This is hardly the reading list of
someone who wants to block out consciousness through mindlessobedience.
He also brings along a silk dressinggown and pictures of himselfwhenhewas
a boy. We must ask with Hoederer: "Pourquoi trimbales-tu ton passe dans
cette valisepuisque tu veux l'enterrer?" (p. 178).Abrief exploration of Hugo's
bourgeois existence will provide useful analogies for examining his behavior
in his new social setting.
Throughout the play, Hugo remains in many ways an adolescent. He
maintains an attachment to a world in whichhe felt accepted, inwhichhe had
no responsibility. Even when he broke with his family, he still had something
to negate. At critical moments in the play, Hugo often resorts to reasserting
this break with his past, as if this werethe touchstone of his identity. Perhaps
the best example of this is in Act II when Olgaasks Hugo whyhe islooking in
the mirror, and he repeats the story of his break with his father that Olgaand
other members of the party have heard many times before.
When Hugo broke with his natural world, he also exposed himself to
freedom, to an open future. He tries to cope with this responsibility by
reconstructing some of the psychological comforts of home, and hence,
reducing his possibilities of choice: he gives Louis and Olga unquestioned
authority over his life, reducing the Party, his ideas, and his freedom to their
judgments; for his natural bourgeois destiny, he substitutes the myth of a
romantic socialist hero. Louis and Olga give his role significance by their
observation and conversation. Just after Hugo is given his assignment, he
says: "Avant la fin de la semaine, vous serez ici . . . et vous serez inquiets et
vous parlerez de moi et je compterai pour vous. Et vous vous demanderez:
qu'est-ce qu'il fait" (p. 56).
From the moment he takes up his position as Hoederer~ssecretary,
Hugo's world and his role in it dissolve. His commitment to' Louis and his
abstract ideologyare stripped from himand placed in the realm of objects. He
is not a member of Louis' faction; he must choose to followthose instructions.
He is beginning to see that even as a killer he can never be his role, feel inner
solidity and certainty. At the end of Act IV, he looks in the mirror and says:
"Ecoutez donc: un pere de famille, c'est jamais un vrai pere de famille. Un
assassin c'est jamais tout afait un assassin. lis jouent, vous comprenez" (p.
62). The mirror and the reference to the head of the family echo what Hugo.
says to Olga in Act II about recallinghis father when he looks inthe mirror. If
his father, the emblem of authority and solidity, is an actor, then his own
quest to coincide with his role is hopeless.
This sense of oneself as an actor, a recurrent idea in Sartre's work, is a
corollary of his concept of freedom. It is man's consciousness of himselfas an
actor that keeps him from anchoring his identity to an internal and/ or
external necessity.The use of the metaphor of the world as a stage to express
alienation is hardly new with Sartre; however, instead of depicting a
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character's sense of himself as an actor, his alienation from the natural and
social order as a disease or an aberration, as traditional dramatists do-
Shakespeare in Hamlet, for example-Sartre presents his character's
alienation and his recognition of playacting as the definition of the human
condition.
When Hugo tries to kill Hoederer, the latter disarms Hugo by exploiting
the gap between Hugo and his role as assassin.s Hoederer, a very realized
Sartrean hero, accepts man's inescapable awareness of himself as an actor,
expresses empathy with Hugo's self-consciousness and offers himfriendship.
When Hugo leavesthe room in a quandary, one cannot help but wonder ifhe
is pondering not only his betrayal of Louis, but also the difficulty of playing
disciple to someone who does not offer Louis' substantiality, who isconscious
of his theatricality. When Hugo returns and finds his wife with Hoederer, his
jealousy and sense of betrayal are overwhelmed by his relieffromthe anguish
of choice. Two years later at the time of the narration, he still cannot posit a
motive for his crime, the act that was to give him an essence.
This brings us to Hugo's suicide at the end of the play, a difficult point.
One might interpret it as a representation of Sartre's notion that the meaning
one gives to the past is determined by one's future acts, and indeed, there are
some clues for this interpretation. Just before charging out of the house to
face the revolvers, Hugo says: "Je n'ai pas encore tue Hoederer, Olga. Pas
encore. C'est 11present queje vais Ietueret moiavec" (p. 248). However, when
hejustifies his decision not to go along with the present party line, heexhibits
the same puerile idealism that he does earlier in the play, claiming that ifhe
denied his act Hoederer would become only "un cadavre anonyme, un dechet
du Parti." (This is not true since the Party has now turned Hoederer into a
hero.) Hugo justifies his act by pointing to the newmeaning it willgive to the
revolutionary's death: "Un type comme Hoederer ne meurt pas par hasard. II
meurt pour ses iMes, pour sa politique; il est responsable de sa mort" (p.
248).
Surely Hugo must know that his own death will not change anyone's
opinion of the past, except perhaps Olga's. Hoederer would laugh bitterly at
it. No, Hugo's suicide is a pose, a romantic gesture that has finally found an
occasion to play itself out.
With Hugo, Sartre employs most of his important methods for unveiling
bad faith: analogies between past and present, blatant submission to
individuals and ideas, failed attempts to coincide with one's role,
straightforward declarations of self-deception, cowardice, repentance or
some other excuse for not accepting responsibility for choice. We have seen
these in detail with Hugo, but Sartre also dissects bad faith in Egisthe, the
Argives and Electre in Les Mouches, the Gerlach family in Les Sequestres
d'Altona, and Heinrich in Le Diable et Ie Bon Dieu. However, Sartre is not
successful in depicting characters who affirm their freedom. Oreste is an
abstract and psychologicallyambiguous character, but he articulates Sartre's
doctrine more than he exemplifies it. He spends half of the playarriving at an
understanding of his freedom, and then makes gestures which cast doubt on
this understanding. Sartre has similar problems with his most complex
character, Goetz in Le Diable et Ie bon Dieu.
Goetz is a conflation of the Oreste character who moves toward a
recognition of his freedom and the bad faith character whoseeksto avoid this
recognition. We learn in Act I that Goetz is a bastard, a social outcast, who
has become a powerful but amoral general. Goetz is attempting to be an
incarnation of evil, the fate that he thinks God has given him. Goetz plays his
role only for God, trying to establish an essence, to feel at one with his role.
Goetz never feels absorbed by his persona (his consciousness always stands
outside of it), so he persistently questions God. Since God never answers,
Goetz gives himself orders and then deceives himself into believingthat the
orders are from God. With these capacities for metaphysical uncertainty and
self-deception, Goetz shifts from malevolent general to prophet to ascetic. In
all of these cases Sartre makes Goetz's bad faith unambiguous-Goetz cheats
at dice, stabs himself, etc. In the final scenes, however, after Goetz admits that
God does not exist and that he has given himself orders, Sartre tries to make
subtler discriminations between gestures conditioned by consciousness of
freedom and those gestures which seek to avoid it.
After his recognition Goetz decides to become a soldier in the peasant
army. This decisiondoes not initself ring of bad faith as his previous decisions
have; however, Sartre wants to discredit the choice. He does so by having
Goetz make his request to join the army psychologically loaded: "Les chefs
sont seuls: moi, je veux des hommes part out: autour de moi, au-dessus de moi
et qu'ils me cachent Ieciel. Nasty, permets-moi d'etre n'importe qui."6Sartre
makes the statement tell us that Goetz is not ready to accept the psychic
isolation of freedom, to live without spectators. To reinforce this
interpretation, Sartre has two other characters, Hilda and Nasty, harangue
Goetz about his irreconcilable differences from other men until Goetz
acquiescesand takes command of the army. But what makes Goetz's bad faith
evident is a psychological interpretation of Goetz's request, inwhichwemake
a construction of the character's nature and posit a motive for the statement.
Sartre's theater of the free character rests on our understanding of a
character's bad faith, his self-hypocrisy, which is a disjunction between
psychological intention and gesture. Hence, Sartre relies on the psychological
interpretation that he denies in theory, though he puts psychology to a new,
existential use.
There is also a problem in Goetz's movement from his request to be a
regular soldier to his acceptance of command. His acceptance, coupled with
the gestures that follow-he kills the first officer who disobeys and submits to
the touch of a witch in order to give the men confidence-seem to be gestures
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of engaged freedom; however, Sartre gives Goetz the trappings of
commitment before he establishes his character's freedom, before Goetz
shows any awareness of alternative courses of action. After Hilda and Nasty
talk him out of becominga soldier, the position of commanderappears as if it
might be a necessity, particularly since this is Goetz's role at the beginning of
the play. Perhaps it is bad faith to reject command for the reasons presented
earlier in the scene; but why, once he recognizes the isolation that freedom
entails, must he accept Nasty's offer?
This freedom-commitment dilemma, whichis similarto the one at the end
of Les Mouches, points to the central difficulty in translating Sartre's theory
of freedom onto the stage: it can invalidate acts by unmasking bad faith-
ignoring for the moment the psychological construct that this perception
requires--but it does not lend itself to validating acts as authentic. Acharacter
can achieve authenticity only negatively, only to the extent that he resists our
explanations of his actions. Inventing such characters is difficult enough, but
Sartre creates additional problems by trying to make a character's
engagement concurrent with his recognition of freedom. Of course, there
cannot be any necessary concomitants of freedom.
The second problem with Sartre's "free" characters is not theorectical;
rather, it is simply a matter of the plots of the plays and the kind of
information that weare givenon the characters. As wehave noted, Oreste and
Goetz do not discover their freedom until the end of their dramas. Hoederer
may qualify, but he is not the central character in the play; hence, hedoes not
make a major choiceduring the play, nor does heundergo an "arrachement."
Sartre relies on Hugo and his wife to lend Hoederer special significance,
rather than presenting Hoederer in the process of choosing. One may object
that Sartre does not wish to solve problems but to present them; hence, his
task is to unmask his characters. But this will not do. The alternatives to
characters who represent good and bad models are not limitedto the analysis
of some obvious examples of bad faith. Characters who are aware of their
freedom from the beginning of the play, who argue, choose, change their
minds, would not necessarilyturn into the stereotypical characters of essence
that Sartre rejects. These "free" characters also translate more easily into a
committed theater, since conflicting authentic choices-that is, choices which
aspire to be authentic, since Sartre's concept of authenticity seems to be
unattainable-could be represented, instead of deluded ones. Sartre's
characters do not make errors in good faith; they only suffer under illusions
of essence. The bad faith theme would be more powerful if a character who
thinks that he understands freedom (and who convinces the audience that he
understands) comes to see that he is mistaken.
It is doubtful whether Sartre's concern with bad faith fulfilled the
theoretical revolution from a theatre of "caractere" to a theater of situations
that he announced in his essays of the 19405.Though Sartre often constructs
plays with tight situations and little fabulation, his characters exhibit"
traditional rather than realisticgestures. His innovation is in the philosophical
content of the gestures, not in the nature of the gestures themselves.
IJean-Paul Sartre, Un Theatre de situations (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), p. 57.
2lbid.
31n Les Mots (Paris: Gallimard, 1964) Sartre reaffirms that such "arrachements" are the
gestures of freedom: "J'avais fourrele progres continu des bourgeois dans mon ame etj'en faisais
un moteur a explosion; j'abaissai Ie passe devant Ie present et celui-ci devant I'avenir, je
transformai un evolutionnisme tranquille en un catastrophisme revolutionnaire et discontinu.
On m'a fait remarquer, if y a quelques annees, que les personnages de mes pieces et de mes romans
prennent leurs decisions brusquement et par crise, qu'il suffit d'un instant, parexemple, pour que
l'Oreste des Mouehes accomplisse sa conversion. Parbleu: c'est que je fes fais a mon image; non
point tels que je suis, sans doute, mais tels que j'ai voulu ~tre" (p. 197-8).
Jean-Paul Sartre, Les Mains sales (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), p. 45. All references, which are
from this edition, will be cited in the text.
5Hoerderer is in many ways Sartre's most realized character: he is aware of himself as an
actor; he does not rely on an external authority for his decisions; he is not fixated on an image of
himself; each moment he puts all of his past decisions into an objective, factual status, decisions
which are given value only by his next choice. The problem is that Hoederer never makes an
important decision on stage, and consequently we must infer these qualities from his advice to
Hugo. This secondary status contributed to what Sartre called a misinterpretation of the playas
anti-Communisl. See Un Theatre de situations, pp. 246-267.
6Jean-Paul Sartre. Le Diable et Ie Bon Dleu (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), p. 236.