Adieu to a Philosopher

I was living in exile in Amsterdam 25 years ago -- the night of April 15, 1980, to be precise -- when I heard the news that Jean-Paul Sartre, one of the towering intellectual figures of our time, had died. I did not hesitate. Two days later, my wife Angelica and I were on a train bound for Paris and his funeral.

During my late adolescence in Chile and all through the subsequent years of my young adulthood, Sartre had been my guiding light. More than anyone else, he had popularized the existentialism that was all the rage back then, giving it, however, an ethical twist that appealed to so many of my generation worldwide.

Emerging from the bleak, moral landscape that had shown man at his worst during World War II, Sartre demanded that we live in incessant anguish and doubt, while simultaneously proclaiming our equally unrelenting need to be responsible for what we do to ourselves and one another. This stark message was accompanied by an alluring streak of hedonism, a bohemian lifestyle -- endless discussions in cafes, rejection of bourgeois values, the giddy embrace of free love -- that so many of us tried to imitate.

Then came the rebellious ‘60s and Sartre’s opposition to colonialism and the Vietnam War, his love affair with the Third World, his conviction that writers could engage deeply in political struggle -- all of which accompanied and echoed my own commitment to drastic change in Latin America. Perhaps just as important for me and so many of my fellow radicals was the way in which Sartre combined his essays and journalism with path-breaking plays and novels, serving as a model for the “intellectual engage,” and personifying the belief that political struggle could not be separated from art.

It is true that by the early ‘70s my worship of Sartre had started to diminish as he aligned himself with extreme Maoist positions and I found myself involved in the difficult day-to-day compromises of a real revolution -- first the years seeking to create socialism through peaceful means under President Salvador Allende in Chile and then the ferocious repression that followed our failure to do so. In spite of this, I still hoped to meet my literary hero, and when I was banished from my country after Allende’s death, I went to Paris with that hope in the back of my mind.

But the meeting never took place. When the possibility was finally offered to me by French friends of his who were sympathetic to our struggle in Chile, I balked. I could not stand the idea of speaking in my broken, clumsy French to the man who had contributed so brilliantly to my own ability to analyze the world with sophistication and elegance, who had provided me with the somber vocabulary with which I had defined liberty, alienation, being, nothingness.

Indeed, a bit after my arrival in Paris, I had been introduced to Michel Foucault -- another of my academic idols -- and I had been embarrassingly tongue-tied, unable to express the ideas that were coursing through my overwhelmed brain. I did not want to repeat that awkward experience with Sartre. All these years I had been carrying on a dialogue with the great Jean-Paul, silently addressing him in my mind -- and I preferred to keep it that way. Some day, I lied to myself, my French will be good enough to truly meet him.

And now, he was dead.

And we had crossed Europe in order to be there at the Montparnasse Cemetery.

Prepared as I was to howl my heart out in typical Latin American fashion, I was surprised at the lack of fervor in the multitude. No one in that solitary, laconic, almost ironic coterie of mourners seemed willing to participate in the burning rituals of a true funeral as we understood it in the countries that Sartre had himself defended so fervently.

Not a shout, no tears, no fury. As if they were bidding farewell to a book rather than a human being. Only in the grieving face of Simone de Beauvoir -- glimpsed through the window of her car -- was the consternation of a lost love manifestly present. Sartre, whose relationship with De Beauvoir had survived for 50 years, had left her alone, just as she had feared and prophesied in “The Second Sex.”

Perhaps it was unfair to feel astonished at the lack of vehemence and passion of that crowd. Why should the French react as we did in our lands when we said goodbye to the cultural giants of our lives, an almost obscene popular fiesta that challenges death and promises some sort of resurrection.

It is possible that Sartre would have adored the modesty of that leave-taking, the lack of solemnity, the almost diagnostic containment of sentiments, the anchorless individualism of the participants. For my part, I paid him homage in the only way I knew how, quietly sobbing my goodbye among the tombs. Because I owed so much to Sartre, I wanted everybody else near me to show the same emotion. But he had taught me, among other things, that the truth tends to be a profanation of our expectations, uncomfortable and startling.

And so, as his body disappeared from view, I remembered that lesson, I kept on hearing his voice in my ear, and 25 years later and 100 years after his birth, I write what I saw and not what I would have liked to have seen; I try to be loyal to him beyond the grave and the distance.

Ariel Dorfman’s latest books are the award-winning “Desert Memories” (from National Geographic, 2004) and “Other Septembers, Many Americas,” (Seven Stories Press, 2004) a book of essays. Website: www.adorfman.duke.edu.