Sartre's play Les Mouches (The Flies), first performed in 1943 under German occupation, has long been controversial. While intended to encourage resistance against the Nazis, its approval by the censor indicates that the regime did not recognize the play as a threat. Further, its apparently violent and solitary themes have been read as irresponsible or apolitical. For these reasons, the play has been characterized as ambiguous or worse. Sartre himself later saw it as overemphasizing individual autonomy, and in the view of one critic, it conveys an “existentialist fascism.” In response to this reading, it is necessary to attend to the elements of the play that already emphasize duty to society. From this perspective, the play can be seen as anticipating the concern with collective responsibility usually associated with the later Sartre of the 1960s. More than this, the play's apparent “ambiguity” can be found to exemplify a didacticism that is much more complex than sometimes attributed to Sartre. It is not only an exhortation about ethical responsibility, but also a performance of the difficulties attendant to that duty.
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Sartre's Theater of Resistance: Les Mouches and the Deadlock of Collective Responsibility
Andrew Ryder
In Sartre Studies International
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2009
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 78–95 (18 total)
Les Mouches and Le Malentendu: Parallel Plays
Benedict O'Donohoe
Sartre's Resistance myth, The Flies (1943), and Camus's contemporaneous modern tragedy, The Misunderstanding (1944), show remarkable similarities in conception, composition, themes, characters, relationships and intrigue. However, from the moment when the plots converge—each protagonist choosing to remain in his precarious new situation—they also diverge diametrically: Camus's Jan is doomed to reified passivity and death; Sartre's Oreste is galvanised into decisive action and new life. Does Camus's orientation toward nihilistic despair translate a negative assessment of his war-time role as an intellectual, and Sartre's much more positive disposition equally represent his affirmation of writing as a valid resistance activity?
In Sartre Studies International
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2007
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 113–125 (13 total)
“I’ll Do Business with Anyone”
Arab Teachers in Jewish Schools as a Disruptive Innovation
Rakefet Ron Erlich, Shahar Gindi, and Michal Hisherik
for disruptive innovation as it is a low-investment solution that flies under the governmental radar with the potential to become widespread and change the existing social order. Our findings indicate that the new service is generally accepted. Arab
In Israel Studies Review
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2020
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 72–91 (20 total)
Orality, Censorship and Sartre's Theatrical Audience
John Ireland
Sartre's conflicted relationship with his theatrical audience is explained by showing how Sartre's initial theatrical venture, Bariona, created in a POW camp in December 1940, sparked an idealized conception of the audience. The particular context in which the play was produced brought its performers and audience together into an almost mystical fusion. But these virtues, derived from pre-textual “oral“ culture, lost much of their luster with Sartre's second play, The Flies. Like its predecessor, The Flies used myth to counter German censorship, but in occupied Paris in front of a much more heterogeneous audience. The resulting comparative failure complicated Sartre's relationship to the mass audiences he sought in the post-war years. Theater audiences became emblematic of a wider public Sartre never fully trusted to accept or understand his ideas. Furthermore, Sartre's decision to stage almost all his plays between 1946 and 1959 at the “bourgeois“ Théâtre Antoine only made him even more mistrustful of audiences he often found himself writing “against.“
In Sartre Studies International
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2012
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 89–106 (18 total)
Simone de Beauvoir on Existentialist Theater
Dennis A. Gilbert
My article focuses on Le Théâtre existentialiste (Existentialist Theater) by Simone de Beauvoir, recently translated and published in the volume of the Beauvoir Series on her literary writings. The first part introduces the original sound recording of this text and the circumstances behind its possible production in New York City in 1947 and my discovery of it at Wellesley College in 1996. The second part analyzes the divisions of Beauvoir's remarks as she presents Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and their principal plays from the period of the Occupation: The Flies, No Exit, and Caligula. The third part then evaluates certain of Beauvoir's key concepts in terms of how they were able to define adequately the substance of existentialist theater for a postwar American audience and whether they remain valid for a more contemporary theatrical public some six decades later.
In Sartre Studies International
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2012
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 107–126 (20 total)
'In Company of a Gipsy'
The 'Gypsy' as Trope in Woolf and Brontë
Abby Bardi
Halfway through Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928), the title character, who lives for over three hundred years, wakes up and discovers that he has become a woman. Although Woolf evidently does not intend us to take this novel entirely seriously, it is clear from the contemporaneous A Room of One’s Own that she is quite serious about deconstructing the boundaries of gender; in Orlando, she calls its categories into question by depicting them as permeable, even arbitrary. In so doing, she flies in the face of her Victorian forebears, as was her wont, critiquing and complicating the prevailing model of male/female as binary opposition.3 Orlando’s sudden, mysterious transformation from male to female initially appears to reflect this binary: ‘Orlando was a man till the age of thirty; when he became a woman, and has remained so ever since’ (139). However, his/her transition is complicated when Orlando enters into a somewhat indeterminate state, escaping from both Constantinople and gender by running away with a ‘gipsy tribe’ (140).
Sartre's Conception Of Theater: Theory And Practice
Adrian Van Den Hoven
This article analyzes articles and interviews published in Sartre on Theater and focuses on five plays (Bariona, The Flies, No Exit and The Condemned of Altona) in order to arrive at a coherent conception of Sartre's theater. Sartre views the stage as “belonging to a different imaginary realm“ in which the characters' language, gestures and the props function in a synecdochical relationship in respect to the spectators. It is their task to grasp these “signs“ and bundle them into a coherent and meaningful whole. Because Sartre views the theater as an imaginary realm, he can free himself from the strictures of his philosophy: 1) the irreversibility of time; 2) the fact that life does not give us a second chance; and 3) that death means that our life falls into the public domain. This freedom allows Sartre to deal with temporality in a novel way and to deal with “life after death“ as life simply continued. Conversely, he can scramble temporality for psychological reasons in order to bring out deep rooted personal conflicts, as he does in The Condemned of Altona.
In Sartre Studies International
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2012
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 59–71 (13 total)
Le théâtre de Sartre: Morale de la liberté, morale nietzschéenne
Christine Daigle
This article shows that Sartre’s theatrical works offer a reflection on morality, in particular The Flies, The Devil and the Good Lord, and The Sequestered of Altona. The ethical reflections that we find in his plays fill a philosophical gap left after Being and Nothingness. The plays offer an exploration of freedom’s rootedness in situation which complements the more theoretical notes of the posthumously published Notebooks for an Ethics. Additionally, I link Sartre’s ethics and Nietzsche’s ethics showing that both thinkers rest their philosophies on a strict atheism. Further, their elaborations on morality follow a similar path by emphasizing individual freedom and thus subsequently the responsibility of the individual as the creator of values.
Cet article fait la démonstration que les œuvres théâtrales de Sartre, plus particulièrement Les Mouches, Le Diable et le bon dieu et Les Séquestrés d'Altona, tiennent lieu de réflexion morale chez Sartre. La réflexion éthique qu'on y retrouve comble un manque laissé par les écrits philosophiques suivant L'Être et le néant. Les pièces et leur exploration de l'ancrage de la liberté dans la situation offrent un complément aux notes plus théoriques des Cahiers pour une morale, publiés à titre posthume. En plus de faire cette démonstration, cet article explore les liens entre la morale des pièces sartriennes et la morale nietzschéenne. Il ressort de cet examen que ces deux morales s'appuient sur un athéisme pur et dur et s'élaborent de même façon en mettant l'emphase sur la liberté de l'individu et son rôle en tant que créateur de valeurs.
In Sartre Studies International
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jan 2014
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 43–57 (15 total)
Putting Anthropology into Global Health
A Century of Anti–Human African Trypanosomiasis Campaigns in Angola
Jorge Varanda and Josenando Théophile
, The Tempest Act 4, Scene 1, 148–158 Three is the magic number for human African trypanosomiasis (HAT), or sleeping sickness, in Angola. Sleeping sickness occurs when trypanosomes, flies and humans all coincide. Three also refers to the number of
In Anthropology in Action
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2019
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 31–41 (11 total)
Toward Transnationalism
A Reading of Life of Pi
Supriya Agarwal
Carol Ryrie Brink, Lord of the Flies (1954) by William Golding, Island of the Blue Dolphins ( 1960 ) by Scott O'Dell, Castaway (1982) by Lucy Irvine and Life of Pi by Yann Martel (2001) . This subgenre, during its development over three