Bad Faith and the Romantic Lie
As a zoomer, I am aware of the great capital sin of our age usually known as spoiling. So, in order to preserve the integrity my soul, I start this presentation by confessing that I consciously incur in sin. In my defense, however, I should say that spoiling a story 80 years after its publication is not as grave a sin and deserves, in some way, a kind of atonement.
The story that I am about to spoil is Jean Paul Sartre’s “No Exit”, a play first performed in May 1944, just before the liberation of Paris, that is, in the midst of the 2nd world war. The play was of course limited by the, let’s say, inconveniences of the time. Because of the reduced budget and limited resources, “No Exit” has only 3 characters and 1 scenery.
The plot is also rather simple. In what looks like the beginning of a bad joke, a lesbian (Inez), a nymphomaniac (Estelle) and a coward (Garcin) enter a room. But we soon find out that this is no mere room. The three characters are actually in hell, but a very peculiar form of hell, one must say. Instead of Bosch’s diabolical creatures or Dante’s fiery punishments, No Exit presents us instead four plain walls and three troubled characters.
This simple scenario is the perfect frame for a narrative incarnation of the thesis and ideas developed by Sartre in his, at the time, recently published book, Being and Nothingness. There, Sartre poses that ther are two basic and distinct modes of being in the world. The first is being-in-itself, the self-contained and fully realized being that characterizes the objects existing in the world around us. The other is being-for-itself, which Sartre regards as the specifically human mode of being, whose main features are consciousness and the unique property of free will.
This distinction gives Sartre the tools to posit being-for-itself as the type of being capable of determining its own existence. Human beings are, in Sartre’s famous formulation, “condemned to be free”. No Exit is a tale about this condemnation. More specifically, it is the tale of a specific reaction to this condemnation, something that Sartre calls “bad faith”.
Bad faith is, in a way, the price we pay for freedom and responsibility. The majority of people can’t cope with it. That’s where existential anxiety begins. Instead of embracing their freedom and responsibility, some human beings just give it up to others. They become unable to transcend their social roles, for example, growing entrapped by them. The tyranny of the other’s gaze, what Sartre calls being-for-others, dominates them.
This tyranny is already clear in the beginning of the play. None of the characters wants to admit the real reason why they are in Hell. Instead, they try to portray themselves as something they were not. They prefer third-party approval to authenticity.
However, through the course of the play we slowly find that Garcin was a serial cheater; Estelle drowned her child because it was a product of extramarital relations; and Inez had relations with her cousin’s wife. But each of these revelations is masked in various layers of bad faith, as if each of the characters needs the other two in order to create some illusion about themselves. Bad faith becomes the root of eternal torture that characterizes this Hell, as Garcin wants Inez to believe that he is not a coward, Inez wants Estelle’s love, and Estelle wants Garcin’s love.
Estelle, for example, is the perfect example of being-for-others, of relying on external perceptions of her to give her an identity. At some point of the play, Estelle realizes that there are no mirrors in Hell, and frightened by this, she states “When I can’t see myself, I begin to wonder if I really and truly exist,”. Inez, who is attracted to Estelle, offers to act as a mirror for her, describing aloud what she sees to Estelle. In this process, it is as if Inez stoles Estelle subjectivity from her. This becomes evident when Inez falsely leads Estelle to believing she has a blemish on her cheek. Estelle becomes flustered until Inez admits that there was never a pimple in the first place. She confronts Estelle, asking “Suppose the mirror started telling lies?”
But the mirror can lie indeed. In fact, lying is what Garcin does best as he also rejects becoming his own subject to avoid self-criticism, preferring the false reality that the other’s gaze gives us.
Garcin will also use Inez and Estelle as mirrors. In his case, mirrors in which he will see a complacent and reassuring picture of himself. His cowardice prevents him from really projecting himself into the future, to really be a being-for-itself. He prefers rather to passively become a part of a social game that castrates his own inner freedom.
This becomes clear as Garcin dismisses his own bad faith as politeness. When Inez begins badgering him for just merely moving his face, saying: “There you are! You talk about politeness, and you don’t even try to control your face. Remember you’re not alone; you’ve no right to inflict the sight of your fear on me.”, Garcin just obeys her without a second thought because he is afraid of confrontation. He does not want to be put in a position in which he must defend his actions, he refuses to take himself accountable for anything. Garcin bends to the will of others because he depends on the Other to form his own identity.
But he is never successful in that. Estelle does not give him the pleasure of thinking that he is some brave soul, which in turn destroys his already damaged ego. At one point nearing the end of the play, the three get into a fight and Garcin, in anger, begins banging on the door, and says, “Anything, anything would be better than this agony of mind, this creeping pain that that gnaws and fumbles and caresses one and never hurts quite enough… Now will you open?” To his surprise, the door swings open, and Inez prompts him to leave, like he said he would. But Garcin refuses to leave. He prefers staying to giving Inez the satisfaction of his absence. Bad faith leads you, indeed, to Hell.
Inez, on the other hand, comes closest to Sartre’s ideas of being-for-itself, evidenced by her acceptance of her condition and her control over the other characters. From the outset, Inez never deludes herself. She lives in the moment and accepts her fate. “Life begins on the other side of despair,” becomes her mantra.
She is the only one that can admit: “Yes, we are all criminals […] — all three of us. We’re in hell, my pets; they never make mistakes”. But she is not completely free from bad faith either.
She utilizes their weaknesses to control the other characters: acting as a mirror for Estelle, she falsely leads her to believe a pimple exists on her face when it does not, and she also refuses to call Garcin a courageous man. However, Inez has a profound understanding of Sartre’s idea of the gaze of the other. “Forget about the others? How utterly absurd. I feel you there, in every pore. Your silence clamors in my ears. You can nail up your mouth, cut your tongue out — but you can’t prevent your being there. Can you stop your thoughts? I hear them ticking away like a clock, tick-tock, tick-tock, and I know you hear mine. […] every sound comes to me soiled, because you’ve intercepted it along the way. Why, you’ve even stolen my face; you know it and I don’t”.
The tyranny of the other’s gaze stops affecting Inez when she realizes it. She becomes, in a way, authentic, embracing her freedom.
But this seems curious to me. It is as if Sartre wants to avoid the consequences of his own system. In fact, No Exit is the only work of art that I know that grasps what the 20th century anthropologist René Girard called “romanesque truth” but prefers to live the “romantic lie”.
To put it briefly, according to Girard, the “romantic lie” is the idea that our choices are completely autonomous, independent, and self-directed. Someone under the power of the Romantic Lie never thinks of his behavior as mimetic. But, according Girard, every form of desire is mimetic. We are always entrapped by the other. The very way we conceive of ourselves, is through the eye of the other. This is the “romanesque truth” that Girard finds in the great novelists, from Shakeaspeare to Dostoeievsky, passing through Proust or Stendhal. All of these writers reveal the romantic lie and destroy it. As Shakeaspeare puts it “The eye can’t see itself, except by reflection in other surfaces.” We are not autonomous, we are not masters of our will.
We are mimetic beings. The question, then, is who to imitate. Sartre seems to strangely understand the Romanesque truth but prefers to inhabit the romantic lie. That is why he ends up proposing the myth of authenticity as a solution to bad faith. However, No Exit curiously show how naïve the idea of authenticity is. One just needs to remember what Inez said about the gaze of the other. It is as if Sartre shows us how we are not the real masters of our desire, how our being is deeply social and always looking for approval, but he seems to think that we can magically resort to authenticity and escape this trap.
At the end of the play, Garcin complains of dying too early. He did not have time to make his own acts. Inez counters this with the full Sartrean proclamation: “You are nothing else but your life.” No further argument seems possible after this sentence, and the play ends when full knowledge of their fate enters the consciousness of the three characters and Garcin speaks the curtain line: “Well, well, let’s get on with it.”
Condemned to be in the company of one another for eternity, the play ends with the characters still at one another’s throats — will they ever be able to escape their bad faith and coexist?
No Exit doesn’t need Bosch’s diabolical creatures or Dante’s fiery punishments because, as Garcin puts it, “Hell is other people”. There is no need for an executioner because each character tortures the other two. Sartre built the perfect Gothic tale.
But one doesn’t need to believe that hell really is other people. Maybe hell is authenticity. Maybe hell is not being able to recognize that we are mimetic beings. And maybe the only way to avoid hell is by letting go of this desire for authenticity. When we realize that we are not masters of ourselves, that we are mimetic creatures, we only have one option: to choose a good model to imitate. And maybe, that good model is Heaven.
Some sources I used
-“Mentira Romântica e Verdade Romanesca”, Rene Girard, 2019, ULisboa
-“Entre Quatro Paredes”, Jean Paul-Sartre, Civilização Brasileira
