Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Age of Reason is a soap opera. It follows the life of Mathieu Delarue, a philosophy professor whose main preoccupation in life is freedom. But he is enmeshed in the lives of other people and this causes him to confront himself in a way he never thought he would need to.
First off there is Boris, one of Mathieu’s students at the university and his friend. Boris comes from a family of Russian emigres who fled to France after the Bolshevik Revolution. He also has his own concept of freedom and his passion in life is stealing things that he really does not need. For example, he has a collection of twenty-four toothbrushes that he never uses. His crowning achievement is stealing an antiquarian book that has no relevance to his life. Boris steals to prove to himself that he is above and outside ordinary humanity; it makes him feel unique and liberated but he fails to see how pointless this freedom is. His big dilemma though is his relationship with Lola, an older woman and an aging nightclub singer and drug addict who clings to Boris because she can not handle the pressures of getting old. Boris and Lola are a shadow of Mathieu and his relationship with his girlfriend Marcelle.
Mathieu is also pursuing the affections of Boris’s sister Ivich, though it is not exactly clear why. She is not in love with him and she isn’t exactly a great catch. Ivich spends a lot of time with him and Boris but she takes very little interest in him. Mathieu appears to be more like a big brother to her than a possible romantic partner. His fasciantion for Ivich is probably more interesting than Ivich herself. She is unobtainable to him and he knows it but his fawning over her is like a flight from his advancing years. His belief in freedom entails a turning away from maturity and the responsibilities that go with it.
Another character is Daniel, a financially secure stockbroker who is secretly gay. He fantasizes about ruining and destroying other people’s lives. He desires to turn his envy, self-loathing, and malice outwards but ultimately can not do it. He acts as though he fears causing harm to others and suppresses his cruelty, holding it inside where it eats away at him, causing him to contemplate suicide. When first introduced into the story, he sets out to drown his cats in a basket but he can not bring himself to murder them. Throughout the novel he thinks about wounding everybody he meets up with, all except for Mathieu’s lover Marcelle. Secretly, he has a relationship with her and Mathieu does not know about it. The climax of the story involves Daniel’s calculations to hurt Mathieu who he envies for his calmness and self-composure.
Then there is Marcelle herself. Boris is sleeping with the elder woman Lola and Mathieu is sleeping with the elder woman Marcelle. The two pairs play off each other because both involve a young man in a relationship with an older woman who they like but do not actually love. Neither of the younger men have what it takes to end the relationship even though the possibility of it working out in long run is obviously not in the women’s favor. This is further complicated because Marcelle is pregnant with Mathieu’s baby. Mathieu insists on having her abort the fetus and the plot of the novel revolves around him wandering around Paris trying to borrow money for the procedure. Then Marcelle decides she wants to keep the baby.
Mathieu is the central character and it is to him that we look to find Sartre’s philosophical illuminations. Mathieu has a strong belief in freedom but what that means in reality is not revealed to him until the end. Until that point he is entangled in the lives of everyone he knows. When he goes to visit his brother Jacques to borrow money, Jacques explains Mathieu’s life to him. After all, as Sartre would say, the eye can not see itself and an individual is too close to themselves to clearly see who they are. Other people are needed for that. Jacques explains that Mathieu has reached the age of reason. In the younger years a man develops himself ideologically and then reaches a liminal point where he has to stop thinking and starting acting according to the reality that surrounds him. This is the age of reason and that is where Mathieu is. Before that point, he avoided decisions and responsibilities, letting life take him where it would. His play-acting at living a free-spirited bohemian life was nothing but an escape from his bourgeois origins. Mathieu is living a lie, a life of bad faith, refusing to see or be what he really is. Now the time has come for him to make an existential choice and start to grow up. What he decides to do with Marcelle will be a significant turning point that will effect him for the rest of his life. Mathieu’s dilemma is that he is not ready to make that choice or accept full responsibility for who he will become. The circumstances have thrown him into an existential crisis.
It is common for people who don’t like philosophy to say that it does not apply to real life. Sartre wrote this novel to show how his existentialist philosophy does apply to people and the internal struggles they face. Ironically, Mathieu’s philosophy of freedom appears to be detached his own life and unfortunately we see how his mentoring is causing Boris to avoid making good decisions as well. This is one strength of The Age of Reason. Another is the way in which Mathieu and the other characters are so well-written. The reader gets to know them inside and out. By the end of the book, the reader feels as though they are as real as people they know in their own lives. The only exception to this is Marcelle who plays such a marginal role in the narrative which seems wrong since she is such an important component of Mathieu’s problems. Maybe Sartre, the husband of Simone de Beauvoir, was making a statement about the marginal status of women in French society but somehow this really seems more like an oversight.
This near masterpiece is a soap opera but it is a soap opera for intelligent people. The plot is simple but that is significant because too complicated a story could distract the reader from the more important points being addressed. The characters embody the ideas of existentialist philosophy: freedom, the importance of choice, emotions, rationality, and the examination of morals in the absence of religion.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. The Age of Reason. Bantam Books, New York: 1959.
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