The Inhibitions Of Company - Hell Is Other People

In Jean-Paul Sartre's absurdist drama, three people are trapped in a small room, trapped by society's imprisonment, the penitential horror of forced company, and their inability to negotiate a world without reprieve

GARCIN: This bronze. Yes, now's the moment; I'm looking at this thing on the mantelpiece, and I understand that I'm in hell. I tell you, everything's been throughout beforehand. They knew I'd stand at the fireplace stroking this thing of bronze, with all those eyes intent on me. Devouring me. What? Only two of you? I thought there were more; many more. So this is hell. I'd never have believed it. You remember all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the "burning marl." Old wives' tales! There’s no need for red-hot pokers. HELL IS--OTHER PEOPLE! 

 

In a preface to a recording of his play, Sartre said:

It is a sort of living death to be surrounded by the ceaseless concern for judgments and action that one does not even desire to change. In fact, since we are alive, I wanted to demonstrate, through the absurd, the importance for us of liberty, i.e. the importance of changing our acts by other acts. Whatever the circle of hell in which we live, I think we are free to break out of it. And if people do not break out, they stay there of their own free will. In this way they choose to live in hell.

This thought was central to Sartre's existentialism.  Far from the confinement of determinism, consignment to live in a meaningless world, he saw a way out - individual expression, will, a desire for liberty and independence. 

How easy, however, it is to become trapped in a predictable, ordinary, numbing existence where days are endlessly repetitive, people act out the same inane existence as though they had no choice, and prefer a hellish prison to world of risk, variety, and challenge. 

Yet the subtext of the play - that hell is other people - cannot be ignored.  When one's own bitterness at life is compounded by others who reinforce it, insist on its horrors without acting to reject it, life becomes intolerable, unsupportable; and yet in this play there is no way out. The co-opted, the defeated, the bitterly disappointed must not only live life within this horrifyingly desperate closure, they must live it with constant reminder.  There is no way to avoid it.  Other people close them in, offer no opening, no glimpse of anything outside their depressive despair. 

In some ways Sartre was like Nietzsche who, in his championing of the Übermensch, the Superman who rides above the herd said that the only validation of the individual in a meaningless world is the expression of pure will. Hell was not other people, said Nietzsche - they were too insignificantly monolithic in their stupidity, too trapped within a contrived morality to matter - but the two philosophers 

 

Nietzsche was the more salient in his ideas.  Sartre's existentialism only suggested some willful expression of independence and individuality and went on to say that such an expression was the vehicle for goodness.  Nietzsche was absolute in his conviction that some people are born with indomitable will, and that society's pyramid is based solely on the ability to express it and use it 'Beyond Good and Evil'. 

Like everything else, perception of other people - society - is subject to the bell curve. There are the misanthropic hermits at one asymptote, the gregarious happy lot for whom intensity, intelligence, purpose have no meaning on the other, and everyone else in the middle in a perennial pas de deux of approach-avoidance.  'Women', says the bartender to Jack in The Shining, 'can't live with them, can't live without them', the perfect ironically diffident reply that sets the tone for the existential horror of the film.

Other people, says Sartre - can't live with them, can't live without them. 

Edward Albee wrote that life is 'a delicate balance', the balletic dance that everyone does to keep equilibrium, to keep the horrors of aloneness and impinging crowds at bay, in proportion, and in perspective.  In Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf  Albee was much more explicit and brutally so.  George and Martha 'flay each other to the marrow' in one long, drunken night of a hateful emotional brawl; but there is hope if not redemption at the end of it.  Marriage is the crucible of maturity, said Albee.  Dealing with one other person within the confines of matrimony is the only way to grow up.  Hell was definitely each other in Albee's play, but not a finality. 

 

Divorce - the easy way out of the hell of marriage - only leads to other people's hell, a facile ignoring of the nature of intimacy.  There is no way that a man or woman separated after years of marriage can possibly restore whatever independence or individuality they might have had.  Hell is not only other people but the concentric circles that they form.  If one is tempted by other people, than a life of confinement within the inevitable social restrictions they will inevitably impose is certain. 

It is the extrovert who is always the happiest.  The introvert, trapped within himself, seemingly happy to have put the world aside, dealing only within himself, can find moments of peace, perhaps, and even inspiration - a Henry David Thoreau on Walden Pond - but even he or Shelley, or Wordsworth were solitary travelers only temporarily, never sadhus in the Himalayas. 

Men like Henry VIII - oversized, outrageous, impossibly grandiose and full of themselves - are never trapped in places with no exit.  Henry was a mensch and an Übermensch, a man of irrepressible vitality, energy, and supreme will. Surrounded by courtiers and ladies, enemies, traitors, friends, and lovers Henry went far beyond any Sartrean fillip.  He was exuberant, virile, and unstoppable. 

Kings, queens, and emperors have come and gone throughout history, but few ruled with such imperial desire, satisfaction, and pleasure as Henry. Men like him of will and human authority are the exceptions to Sartre's rule.  They are examples of human potential.  Their imperialism is not political, but naturally occurring, indefinable, and persistent.  Hell for them is not other people.  On the contrary people are resources to be used, apportioned, and governed.  

Company is selective - obedient, subservient consorts of royalty. Courtiers are at the service of the king, jesters are there to make him laugh, fools to help keep his moral compass.  A crew in waiting, useful company. 

For the rest of us, we can only hope that Sartre was right. Life may be a closed circuit, a place with no exit peopled by niggling, unpleasant, nasty people; but if we are canny enough to see through the awful, boring, cloying sameness of it all, we may survive.