This island Earth (Part 2)
“Each individual is his own devil, and himself makes the world a hell.” (Oscar Wilde)
What follows is based on my personal impressions of the work of two great men. As I am not an expert in either philosophy or music, I can only apologise in advance for any errors or misinterpretations that appear in this article. Otherwise the views expressed are entirely my own.
For some people the hell-on-Earth I wrote about in Part 1 is not confined to a specific place and time, like 1840s rural Ireland or 1940s Majdanek. For them hell is a state of mind, a way of seeing the world that induces a sense of helplessness in the face of some unyielding power.
Nowadays we would probably view such a mental state as having a mundane or maybe a medical basis, like innate pessimism or some kind of psychiatric ailment. One might even attach a label to it, “anomie” or “existential angst” for instance. I prefer the term ‘hell’, and not just because of my religious upbringing. French philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80), was an “avowed” atheist and he believed in hell, although not necessarily the traditional definition as discussed in Part 1.1
In his 1944 play Huis clos (“No Exit”), Sartre presents us with three characters thrown together in a hellish afterlife. But this netherworld is not quite what they expected. Their new quarters are pretty comfortable – there is even electric light!
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! 2
For Sartre, it was not just the tiresome company of uncongenial people that bothered him. He hated the idea of being subject to the bad opinion of others. He saw their judgment of him as a kind of imprisonment. To have to endure that forever would be the epitome of hell. As he wrote in Being and Nothingness, there is only one way for a fallible human to avoid this awful fate:
He must constantly put himself beyond reach in order to avoid the terrible judgment of collectivity. 3
But later on in the same work, he seemed to identify a problem with that option too.
I am abandoned in the world, not in the sense that I might remain abandoned and passive in a hostile universe like a board floating on the water, but rather in the sense that I find myself suddenly alone and without help, engaged in a world for which I bear the whole responsibility without being able, whatever I do, to tear myself away from this responsibility for an instant. 4
During World War II Sartre lived in Nazi-occupied Paris. Although his account of that experience is quite brilliant, it also reveals the seed of the impotence I detect at the heart of Sartre’s philosophy.
The occupation had stripped people of their future. We no longer followed a couple with our eyes while trying to imagine their destiny: we had no more destiny than a nail or a doorknob. 5
Another who lived with the feeling of being subject to some force outside himself was Russian composer, Pyotr Il'yich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893). The external appearances of his life were those of a popular and successful public figure living in the latter part of the 19th century. According to his younger brother, Modeste, by 1887 Tchaikovsky had:
Realised his wildest dreams of fame, and attained to such prosperity and universal honour as rarely fall to the lot of an artist during his lifetime. 6
Yet as Modeste also pointed out, beneath the surface, this feted composer was deeply unhappy.
All his life Tchaikovsky was convinced that his life and work were at the mercy of what he called “the jester Fate”.7 In a letter written in March 1878 to his patroness, Nadezhda von Meck, he outlined the thinking behind the opening bars of his fourth symphony:
This is Fate, that inevitable force which checks our aspirations towards happiness ere they reach the goal, which watches jealously lest our peace and bliss should be complete and cloudless – a force which, like the sword of Damocles, hangs perpetually over our heads and is always embittering the soul. This force is inescapable and invincible. There is no other course but to submit and inwardly lament. 8
Fifteen years later, on 28 October 1893, Tchaikovsky conducted the world première of his Symphony No. 6, known as the Pathétique, in St. Petersburg. Within nine days the composer was dead at the age of 53, ostensibly of cholera but speculation persists that Tchaikovsky committed suicide.
The Pathétique symphony is a work like no other in the composer’s extensive catalogue. Musicologist and Tchaikovsky specialist, David Brown, described it as “surely the most truly original symphony to have been composed since Beethoven’s Ninth”.9 Unusually for such a self-critical artist, Tchaikovsky himself thought highly of the work. He told his nephew he believed it
to be the best and in particular the ‘most sincere’ of all my works. I love it as I have never loved a single one of my other musical creations. 10
While the expected elements of rhythm, melody and sumptuous orchestration are to be found in the first three movements, for Brown it is the “stunningly original” fourth movement that puts the Pathétique in a class of its own.
Not a conventional vigorous finale, but a most pain-filled, tragic utterance… with an ending that suggests not resignation, but only oblivion. 11
In the case of both Sartre and Tchaikovsky, it could be argued that the persistent fatalism I find in their work was shaped by traumas in their early lives. In Sartre’s case the death of his father when he was only two left an indelible mark. Of course Sartre never knew his father but clearly felt the loss of such a figure as his childhood progressed. In his autobiographical musings, Sartre wrote, “If my father were alive, I would know my rights and duties. He is dead, and I am unaware of them.”12
One of Sartre’s biographers put it a little less bluntly:
Deprived of a father, he is also deprived of a destiny. A father would at least have given him something to revolt against. But burdensome as it may be, the Father’s law at least keeps the son anchored in reality. 13
Tchaikovsky also lost a parent in childhood. His mother, “the most important woman in his whole existence”, died when he was 14. As with Sartre, this seems to have had a lasting effect on Tchaikovsky. We are told that:
To the end of his life each anniversary of her death brought a flood of treasured memories and painful emotions. 14
Is child father to the man? Would Sartre and Tchaikovsky have felt happier inside if they had not suffered those terrible losses during their formative years? If so, perhaps neither man would have turned out to be as creative as he was.
But that is a discussion for another day. Another question demands our attention now:
Are these childhood experiences behind the feeling of abandonment described by Sartre, or the oblivion that seems to have finally overtaken Tchaikovsky?
Or is something else at work here? Did Oscar Wilde get it right when he wrote the words at the top of this piece?15
To put it another way, is what we read in Sartre’s writings and hear in Tchaikovsky’s music not merely the signs of troubled genius sparked by trauma, but perceptible evidence that here are two souls lost in a self-made hell from which they can find no exit?
No exit?
I will explore that question in Part 3 of This island Earth.
Jonathan Webber, The Existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre (New York, 2009), p. 143.
Jean-Paul Sartre, No exit, and three other plays, tr. S. Gilbert & L. Abel (New York 1955), pp. 46-7.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and nothingness; an essay on phenomenological ontology, tr. Hazel E. Barnes (New York, 1956), p. 64.
Ibid., pp. 555-6.
Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Paris Under the Occupation’, Sartre Studies International, 4/2 (1998), p. 8.
Modeste Tchaikovsky, The life & letters of Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky, tr./ed. Rosa Newmarch (London, 1906), p. 539.
Ibid., p. 168.
Ibid., pp. 275-6.
David Brown, Tchaikovsky: The Man and his Music (New York, 2007), p. 423.
Alexander Poznansky, Tchaikovsky: The quest for the inner man (New York, 1991), pp. 567-8.
Brown, Tchaikovsky, p. 422.
Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words, tr. Bernard Frechtman (New York, 1964), p. 32.
Andrew Leak, Jean-Paul Sartre (London 2006), p. 11.
Brown, Tchaikovsky, p. 4.
Oscar Wilde, The Duchess of Padua (New York, 1906), p. 112.