Continental Philosophy

Sartre’s The Flies, Freedom, and Guilt

Literary Source:

Sartre, The Flies, in No Exit and Three Other Plays (NE), pp. 49-124

Secondary Source:

Notes on Nothingness and Bad Faith (handout)

Background:
From Wallace Fowlie’s Dionysus in Paris:

When Jean Paul Sartre's The Flies was first put on in 1943, under the direction of Charles Dullin, at the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt, Sartre was known to a fairly limited public for his volume of stories The Wall and his novel Nausea. He was writing at that time his treatise Being and Nothingness. His new treatment of the fable of Orestes seemed to the public of 1943 to bear a strong relationship to the moral dilemma of the Occupation. The Parisians went to the theater not only to see a new play but also to feel united one with the other in this interpretation of the daily drama they were living through. The theme of the Resistance was far less obvious to the public that attended the revival in 1951.

Some of the essential elements of the Oresteia [the Greek Tragedy by Aeschylus] are preserved in The Flies: Clytemnestra has married Aegisthus, who has usurped the throne and is tyrannizing the people. Electra, daughter of Cletemnestra and legitimate heiress, is impoverished. Full of hate, she sits at the door of the palace. Her brother Orestes returns from exile, brought back by fate and the persistent prayers of his sister. To these familiar elements Sartre has added the figure of an ironic Jupiter and a swarm of gigantic flies, evil-smelling and avenging spirits who hold the city of Argos in a mysterious plague. Orestes returns to the plague-ridden city of his birth, in obedience, as he explains it, to a need to return home, to feel himself one with his own people. Such speeches as this, in which a facile kind of comfortable happiness was derided, seemed to the public of 1943 to extoll the life of risk and peril that they were living through in Paris.

The newest theme of the play is that of Orestes as redeemer. Aegisthus maintains in the people of Argos, by means of a yearly evoking of the dead, an obsession with their past. In slaying his mother, Orestes will commit a crime far worse than all the other crimes of the city. He commits this deed of his own free will, as an act of justice, because he makes the discovery, in his dialogue with Jupiter, that the gods are not just. His crime will draw down upon him the swarm of avenging flies. As he leaves the city, the citizens of Argos are recovering their former lightness of heart and a conscience relieved of the obsession of guilt and fear. This concept of redemption, brought about by means of crime, is of course the opposite of the Christian concept of redemption, of sanctity and martyrdom [this should be familiar from Nietzsche’s analysis of guilt].

Orestes makes a choice, and thereby exercises his freedom, when at the end of the play he takes on the fear and guilt of his people and thereby experiences alienation. The reign of Aegisthus (which is also the reign of Jupiter) has made the people slaves to a dead myth. But at the end of the play, by killing Aegisthus and Clytemnestra, he takes on the remorse of the people and frees them from their guilt. The people of Argos represent, for the existentialist philosopher, the old collective power that is enslaved and propagandized. By making his choice, Orestes exists and creates his self. Electra, who at the beginning of the play appears as a revolutionary, is terrified at the end by her brother's violence. When threatened by Jupiter, she quickly falls back into conformity and into the state of terror from which Orestes wanted to liberate her. She criticizes Orestes' freedom and thereby announces in The Flies the unexpected theme of misogyny.

Although he expresses contempt for the people of Argos, Orestes kills for the sake of the people. This is a social gesture that is quite in keeping with the program of existentialism. The people of Argos are part of a system into which they were born, which they had not chosen and which they accept passively and guiltily. Orestes, on the contrary, demonstrates the existentialist creed of “commitment.” By choosing to act, he emerges into the transcendent state of existence. We realize that the hero has renounced the collective (which the philosopher calls essences) and has accepted as the condition of his existence a state of estrangement and anguish.

This freedom, practiced by Orestes in The Flies, is defined by the philosopher as the need in each man to choose at each moment of his life the way in which he should see the world. Man's freedom is therefore his conscience, which functions only when it is thinking something. In himself man is nothing. In order to exist he has to create his own existence. As his conscience, in its free functioning, separates him from all the things in the world, he feels exile. But exile is his freedom. Jupiter says to Orestes that he is not at home in the world, that he is an intruder, a splinter in the flesh, a poacher in the lord's forest.

Man is therefore called upon, during the unfolding of his existence, to create the very meaning of his existence. This admonition of existentialist philosophy dominates all the plays of Sartre. Man's conscience has to be perpetually lucid, perpetually choosing. What may possibly be called the psychology of Sartre is his study of the various means by which man tries to evade the necessity of choosing and creating his existence. Man's dream is to become placidly immobile like a stone, insensitive. This is his fundamental cowardice, his desire to play the social comedy of conformity, to appear before all other men as one of them.

Questions:

Orestes claims that human beings are “without excuse”. What does he mean? How does this related to Sartre’s claim that freedom is always situated in a particular context of facticity? Using Orestes and Electra as your examples, discuss the relationship between freedom and facticity, either supporting or denying Orestes’ claim.
Sartre maintains that any notion of ‘original sin’ or ‘general guilt’ is an illustration of Bad Faith. What situations in this play show that acceptance of ‘general guilt’ is Bad Faith?

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