I’ve just read Kobo Abe’s Woman in the Sands, a pretty terrifying story of a man who is held prisoner in a sand pit by some villagers and is forced to dig out the sand which accumulates in the pit every day. He eventually becomes the mate of the young widow who is also trapped in the pit. I have a problem with giving a decent opinion of the book because I’m claustrophobic. Actually while reading the book I thought the house was on the side of a big, cliff-like dune with one side falling sharply on the sea. When I realised the man was in a pit, I felt pretty scared and started reading at a frantic pace because I wanted to know whether he would escape from it. No need to tell what happens at the end. The metaphor on man’s status in society is depressing, the more so when you realise that for a lot of people around the world, that story wouldn’t be seen at the metaphorical level, but as quasi-realism: workers in illegal coal mines in China, in clay brick works in Pakistan, in construction sites in India, for example. That’s where I find the end rather incoherent, because Jumpei, the main character, seems to feel a need to talk to the villagers of the discovery he has made about how to extract water from the sands. That is, he starts to feel part of the village. Yet somewhere else in the middle, he was angrily speculating that the Syndicate running the village must be making quite some money from selling the sand to construction sites, and the woman agrees with him on that point.

Sometimes, I had the impression that he could understand the bleak, implacable logic of the villagers ( for some reason, it is vital that he and the woman keep digging out the sand, because that prevents the other houses in the village from being swallowed by the dunes): someone needs to be made to do that job, by hook or by crook. I even thought it was a pretty neat symbol of the way all societies manufacture an underclass, big or small depending on their level of economic sophistication, because you need that underclass to do the low jobs. That is well shown in the almost gentle manner in which he is brought back to the sand pit after being captured following his failed escape. Yet at other times, it seems that he and the widow suffer from special stigma which places them well below the pale of humanity – for example when the villagers encourages them to mate in full view of everyone. It’s hard to believe a few weeks after that incident, he wants to share his discovery about the water with the rest of the village, to the point where he doesn’t escape when the rope ladder is mysteriously left to hang for him.

Maybe I’m nit picking. On the whole, the metaphor about society does hit the reader like a well-aimed finger jab from a kung fu master: we are all instruments at the mercy of society, who must do the ( mostly dreary) jobs the collectivity expects of us, and in our spare time, we may, if we want, collect insects, or lay traps for the crows. If we work hard, we may be given a radio. Seen in that light, the complaints artists sometimes make, about society not recognising their avant garde works seem rather unrealistic: after all, society uses people for its own pleasure. It expects artists to be entertainers, comforters. Of course, they can choose the straight and narrow path of artistic integrity, and produce uncomfortable masterpieces ( like Woman in the Sands itself) but they can only expect meager, reluctant rewards in return.

The problem with this kind of harsh view about society, or about the value of existence, is that behind its grittily realistic tone, I have the impression there is a hidden current of melodrama. It can feel strange to associate the words “melodrama” and “existentialism” yet , to think about it, isn’t there something melodramatic about that story ? A man who gets trapped in a pit, who refuses to work and is not given water, then the escape, then the scene where he tries to rape the woman…of course the writer captures extraordinarily well the mental processes of the character, and writes beautifully about sand. But the texture of the story.. isn’t there something rather dramatic about it ? Not that it’s wrong in itself, but I just want to point it out because we always associate existentialism with impeccable gravity and profundity.

Now think of “L’étranger” by Camus , a book I’ve never liked too much ( though it’s much better than “La Peste”, that plague of a book). I never got the point about Meursault. I see him as the extreme edge of the Byronic trajectory, that exaltation of the lonely, misunderstood individual which started in the 19th century and then saw the said “misunderstood” individual lose his humanity as the movement gathered pace. Bardamu, in Céline’s “Voyage au bout de la Nuit” ( which I haven’t finished, so my judgement may be wrong) is plunged in a horrible world, of senseless war, of factory production, of colonialism, and has to fight hard to keep his humanity. But with Mersault, there is an inner emptiness, he is not entirely human. People are awed by this novel because they secretly envy Mersault’s coldness, they wish they were like that too, living yet indifferent to others, like the trees. I think towards the end, before he is hanged, he watches a tree through the window of his cell, and wishes he would be like it, calm, drinking the sunlight and the rain. He already is. My point is that where people see profoundness in “L’étranger” I only see style, style, style in that novel. Every sentence in it is maniacally well crafted. Sartre said that “ Chaque mot dans l’Etranger est une ile”. What I want to say is that when we think of existentialism, we are thinking of a grave voice telling us plain, profound truths. But if we take a closer look at works such as “Woman in the Sands” and “The Stranger”, we find in order to make their point, the writers go to such stylistic extremes that in the end, they are not so far removed from opera writers.

I was thinking about that yesterday when I saw, one after the other , “Autumn Sonata” by Bergman and “La Regle du Jeu” by Renoir. Yes, Bergman draws an intense , harrowing portrait of human relations, especially the mother-daughter link which is such a … minefield. Liv Ullman and Ingrid Bergman are really something. But when you think of the clichés in that movie: the selfish flamboyant mother who’s phoning her agent about a concert in Los Angeles… the psychologically crushed daughter who’se married to a priest and lives in the middle of nowhere… and then there’s the crippled sister who’se been spending her life in an asylum… and as if all that wasn’t enough, you had to have the little boy who died at four… come on man. It’s inverted Bollywood.

I preferred “La Règle du Jeu” to “Autumn Sonata”. Straightforward social satire, with a touch of humour, even vaudeville. As the characters twirl and masquerade in the chateau, from time to time, like a glacial draught blowing through the French windows, comes the reminder that the “rules of the social game” are not to be lightheardedly flouted. The childish lover’s death at the end has all the elements of a masked ritual sacrifice.

I think the problem with existentialist art is that in order to make its point about the absurdity of humanity it has to use pretty outlandish devices, people trapped in sand pits by a bizzare clique of villagers, a diva mother who abandons her crippled child, a strange man who goes to see a Fernandel movie after his mother’s funeral. There’s nothing wrong about all that, it’s covered by artistic licence. The writers of magical realism go much beyond that in their flights of imagination. But the thing is that, writers such as Marquez or Rushdie, or film directors like Renoir have no special claim to be privy to some Truth about life. Whereas with the existentialists there is some kind of gloomy gravity attached to them, and which you also note
hanging on people who like that kind of artistic style.These are people with something disdainful about them, as if they had discovered something which the rest of us are too shallow or too bourgeois to understand. And that’s where it gets funny, when you realise that their films and books, which are supposed to be earnest and profound, are in the end just as contrived as other works of art. Malvolio, in the end, does have to wear flame-coloured garters when he tries to seduce the Countess.