[In the essay below, Simon compares Sartre's "The Room " with Frantz von Gerlach's Les Séquestrés d'Altona, both of which feature protagonists who sequester themselves from the world with physical and mental walls. Simon asserts that "Sartre's emphasis is upon lucid despair and the mockery of false, self-delusive solutions. "]

A Nazi torturer is the intellectual hero of Les Séquestrés d'Altona. Frantz von Gerlach is an existentialist Luther beside his unscrupulous industrialist father, a sensitive prodigal to his weak-kneed conformist brother, a pitiful victim for his incestuous sister. We are positively oriented toward the madness that has caused Frantz to sequester himself during the thirteen years since the close of the war. While Germany and the world have continued on into a meaningless prosperity devoid of guilt and of the quest for innocence, the young officer, with his time frozen at the moment of the Nuremberg trials, plays out and perpetuates the cycle of guilt and purge in outraged self-confinement. To the end of the play we hope that he will not be enticed from his room, his strangely lucid world of insanity, out into the materialistic reality below.

Yet Frantz' madness is deliberate self-delusion, an effort to escape from involvement, thus running directly counter to Sartre's political and philosophical sympathies. What is the significance of the ambiguity with which this kind of sequestration is treated? In Sartre's first novel, nausea is equally ambivalent since it constitutes a personal obsession, a "sickness" plaguing the narrator and revolting the reader, while also revealing the formless, obscene nature of life as it breaks through the illusory compensations of normal, complacent vision.

Although he often claims in his criticism and philosophical treatises to have transcended Gide and foreign influences of his formative period, such as Kafka and Faulkner, in his literary works, Sartre reformulates certain of their basic themes, that of internment, for example, and also the magic of hallucinations. After all, it was at the beginning of his flirtation with political and social concern, that Gide published a curious book, La Séquestrée de Poitiers.

The gruesome story of Mélanie Bastian, who was discovered in 1901 to have remained prostrate in filth and semi-idiocy, locked-up—voluntarily or at the will of her mother—in a respectable bourgeois apartment, is apparently a factual document. Nevertheless one senses a literary aura, almost a hoax, in the incredible details which emerge from the investigation. With its epigraphs from Pascal (quoted above) and from Les Faux-Monnayeurs, the text seems to progress naturally out of Gide's preoccupations with the pathological mystery of Dostoevsky's heroes. Various aspects of the pathetic creature's seclusion recall the Russian novelist (who incorporated faits divers frequently in his works himself), and must have been suggestive to Sartre: the very scandal of insanity, the placards with mottoes on the wall, the important fear of objects, the schizophrenic presence of childishness and sophistication, of a desperate need for purity and a wallowing in the obscene, finally the insolubility of these contradictions.

Sartre's preoccupation with madness during the 1930's is obviously related also to his readings in Freud, the development of his philosophical thesis on the dissolution of the ego. In La Force de l'âge, Simone de Beauvoir recollects a significant visit that they made together to an insane asylum at that time. The unfinished sentence at the start of La Nausée—"In one case alone it could be of interest to keep a diary: that would be if"—could be completed ". . . I were about to go mad." But Antoine Roquentin, in spite of his first-person narrative, seems always to stay a far enough distance from the nausea he is experiencing so that he may treat it discursively, as Sartre himself does.

Less philosophical, the images of madness created in "La Chambre" (1938) and Les Séquestrés d'Altona (1960) suggest that insanity is a potential form of the truth. Sartre has succeeded in neutralizing the expression bad faith to such an extent that at first the obvious artificiality of the madman's performance, his form of tricherie as Claude-Edmonde Magny analyzes it in Les Sandales d'Empédocle, does not undercut the authenticity but adds to its grandeur. The movement of each of these works is devised to bring the reader or spectator into sympathy with the madman. There are three successive points of view in the forty pages of "La Chambre." The story shifts deliberately from the grotesque paralytic mother-in-law of the mental syphilis victim Pierre, to the philistine father-in-law on his way to make his apprehensive weekly visit, finally to the devoted wife Eve who tries desperately to enter into the madness.

Similarly, during the admirable first act of Les Séquestrés, the exposition of the play, conducted by the family of the hero, takes place in an atmosphere of veneration and fascination for the young man sequestered in the room upstage. In each work, an attempt is made to destroy the sequestration in some way, by removal to an asylum in the case of Pierre, by return to normality for Frantz. One identifies, however, with the women who, in each instance, hopelessly seek to continue, and to take part in, the insane proceedings.

The sacred aspect of the madman's room is a measure of Sartre's reversal of the "sane" order. Pierre's dark incense-filled sanctuary and Frantz' bolted and windowless room on the stair landing are both like theatrical property closets, filled with all the accoutrements for a performance of magic. They serve to enact with continual variations what would be considered merely a personal persecution complex in psychoanalytical terms. But Sartre's hero is intensely aware of the vulnerability of man, constantly threatened by the inanimate, the mysterious danger lurking in things. The room constitutes his effort to stage a perpetual battle with the forces of inhumanity. These forces are death or the deathlike, external interpretation of human conduct. Pierre protects himself against the attack of the circling statues with their pieces of flesh indicating that they are coming to life while he is dying, against the objects and parts of the body which can turn immediately into semi-vegetal crustaceans. Frantz, fearful of an identical dehumanization, defends himself also against the "crabs," representatives of a non-human form of life, the only one in existence ten centuries from now. In opposition to anthropocentrism—the false unity of normality where the dual aspect of man is ignored—the hallucinations create a tension where man is flesh as well as mind, object as well as subject. This tension is externalized in the mad idiom of the room. It is thus maintained and controlled.

Both Frantz and Pierre fail: the former comes down from his room to join his father in a double suicide; the latter is about to slip into complete idiocy. Their failure, however, appears in a larger sense in Sartre's literary structure. The symmetry of Les Séquestrés and the realistic setting for the play suggest that the early attraction toward Frantz' room had to be matched by a fatal return to the salon below; his room remains attached to the bourgeois mansion, is contained within it. Frantz' sister-in-law who goes first to bring him back to reality and then finds herself drawn toward his madness, cannot divest herself of her ordinary feelings and abandons him.

Likewise, the narration of "La Chambre" makes the reader approach Pierre only through Eve. The latter cannot participate in her husband's hallucinations and seems moved to do so mainly through negative reaction to the normal life represented by her parents and the people in the street outside. Indeed, Pierre's madness itself appears conceived as a reaction to the outmoded belief in subjectivity and rationality attributed to his Proustian mother-in-law and athletic father-in-law. Eve prides herself in belonging nowhere, in a void between conventionality and initiation into Pierre's mystery. The situation of her self-conscious detachment, which suggests that of Sartre, is symbolized by the salon from which she watches her father leave and where she hesitates before re-entering the Room. The reader, like Eve, is figuratively left in this antechamber, on the threshold of madness.

The dialectic framework on which Sartre bases his conception of madness is reflected in the importance of words. At the end of "La Chambre" the imminent collapse of Pierre is prefigured in a lapsus: he says "recapitulation" instead of the contrary. The pair of opposites is significant, recalling the verbal antitheses of much of Pierre's (and Sartre's) theatricality. We realize the fragility of the intellectual game when he stutters now. In Les Séquestrés, Frantz, who tape-records his defense of Man, finds that his voice is dead and admits to saying white when he means black. The tape-recorded voice that he leaves behind reverberating at the end of the play is a tragic reminder of the artificial intellectuality of the device.

There are significant differences between the story and the play. The singular, private case of "La Chambre" has become plural and public. Frantz claims to be defending Man, not himself alone, talks of History and a less abstract guilt. The portrait of Adolf Hitler has replaced Pierre's anonymous, hallucinatory enemy. Frantz' room opens onto the arena of actuality, war crimes of the immediate past and present. The hero wants not only to protect himself from the Crabs but to justify himself to them. The voice, recorded, is intended for other ears, just as the play is meant to be seen especially in France and Germany. Frantz' sister-in-law leaves him to return to the indifference of reality when she learns that he has tortured.

For Sartre as for his hero it would seem that the sanctuary-like room (above Saint-Germain-des-Prés?) must become the infernal hotel-room of Huis clos. The latter is no room at all, but rather the open arena of incriminating exposure and persecution. After the sympathetic portrayal of Pierre's refuge, the nostalgic regret toward Annie's den in La Nausée, Sartre's subsequent works show a refusal to accept a private place susceptible to self-deception. Thus, in a succession of rooms, no prison is free from the "public" gaze, and the respectful prostitute Lizzie's flat, for example, with its shades and curtains drawn to create a "night" world and cover the black sin, is grossly exposed. Since Sartre appears to condemn the individual's haven which denies time and amoral history, it is strange to see this theme revived in an ambiguous way in Frantz' case. Here once again the room is surrounded by the invincible pressure of the outside world in the person of the Gerlach family waiting below. But does Sartre really think, as he is quoted in the interview mentioned above, that Frantz' death at the end of the play is a "liberation," that Frantz is good because he left his room and committed suicide? Rather than clearly rejecting the myth of sequestration, the mystery of madness, Sartre, in reformulating these themes, confuses them with his topical convictions, his political commitment. He is not able to produce a spectacle specifically on the subject of torture in Algeria but would like to have done so anyway. He seems almost tricked by his own vocabulary: sequestration and the insane monologue are part of an older and more personal dialectic.

Pierre's or Frantz' room, as a scene for a certain "idiotic" way of revealing the inhuman chaos beneath things, is a real creation. But Sartre deliberately moves by negation and refuses to achieve a Dostoevskian figure of synthesis on the edge of madness. In his philosophical works as in his literary and critical efforts, Sartre's emphasis is upon lucid despair and the mockery of false, self-delusive solutions. An exchange in Les Séquestrés clearly shows where the stress lies in Sartre's use of madness:

"Madmen tell the truth . . ."

"Really. Which?"

"There's only one: the horror of living."