After consuming Atlas Shrugged, I was inspired to seek out other pieces of philosophical fiction. For while Ayn Rand's classic has its problems, it has an intellectual power absent in the vast majority of popular literature. And so I settled on this fascinating and self-destructive novel from Mr. Sartre, the French philosopher and soldier in the Second World War. It's safe to say that I've never read a piece of fiction that is more profoundly a product of its cataclysmic times.
Published in 1945, after France had been liberated from the Germans, The Age of Reason returns to the more free-spirited Paris of the late 1930s to tell the story of Mathieu Delarue, a brooding professor of philosophy who, upon learning that his kept girlfriend is pregnant with his child, sets about trying to rustle up enough money to pay for her to have a safe and secretive abortion. Though Mathieu initially expects this to be a fairly simple mission, it becomes an odyssey when his friends, for various reasons, fail to grant him a momentary loan. Refusing to even consider keeping the child, Mathieu turns to his brother and his bank, but lawyer and institution both reject him, leaving him with two unappealing options: steal the money from the middle-aged girlfriend of one of his students and friends, or abandon the abortion and keep the child. Mathieu, shockingly, is far more tempted by the former than the latter. Theft is a smear on ones character, but sacrificing his treasured freedom for a child? His code will not allow it.
Though the exploits of Mathieu's friends occasionally intercede to make his life all the harder, The Age of Reason is primarily consumed by Mathieu's belief that freedom of ones mind and spirit can only come through ridding oneself of obligations and dependencies. Mathieu offends his girlfriend by not for a moment considering keeping the baby, but of course, to Mathieu, this would be an intolerable obligation, a decades-long commitment to a creature utterly dependent upon him. It's this core idea of freedom through nothingness, through the avoidance of permanent, social bonds, that gives this story shape and purpose. It is also what makes it only applicable to its time.
Mr. Sartre was writing from the midst of a period of European history convulsed by extraordinary bloodshed. He had witnessed two world wars and no doubt, as many others would have, expected a third to come soon after. Though I'm no expert on the man, it strikes me that this is at the heart of Sartre's philosophy. If the world is going to repeatedly succumb to orgies of nihilistic chaos and devastation, then true freedom can only be found in floating above that chaos, detached from it, beyond whatever ugly torments the world can concoct. The central flaw with this idea, and indeed with Mathieu's mission here, is that true freedom, as Defined by Mathieu, can only be found in death, or the total abandonment of society. Anything short of that tempts the seeker of freedom into trading away some of his precious autonomy for the seductive charms of marriage and parenthood. In other words, if this is how we define freedom, then life is a series of events tempting us to trade liberty for obligation. What kind of life is even possible with this as its core principle? Freedom should be defined by the extent to which we are allowed to pursue our joy, whatever that joy may be, inso long as realizing our joy doesn't harm someone else. At least this is an achievable goal.
This is a thought-provoking read, but the pacing is thrown off by a few too many pouts from Mathieu. Had I the opportunity to read this while part of the fabric of Europe during the inferno that was the 1940s, I would have been far more sympathetic to Mr. Sartre's case. But the passage of so much time, time in which the world has mostly righted itself from such madness, leaves the sentiment here flawed and isolated. (3/5 Stars)
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