Sartre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories

Abstract

greatest literary development in France between 1929 and 1939, says Jean-Paul Sartre in a 1946 essay in The Atlantic Monthly, the discovery of Faulkner, Dos Passos, Hemingway, Caldwell, and Steinbeck. [. . .] At once, for thousands of young intellectuals the American novel took its place together with jazz and the movies, among the best of the importations from the United States.1 Hemingway s use of dialogue, short declarative sentences and his emphasis on action (instead of inner monologue) appealed to Sartre and Albert Camus, both of whom wanted to express new sensibilities in keeping with the accelerated rhythms of the machine age. In La Force de l'âge (The Prime of Life), Simone de Beauvoir writes that a great many of the rules that she and Sartre observed in their novels were inspired by Hemingway.2 Sartre, the author of La Nausee {Nausea) was reading Hemingway in the 1930s and admired what Claude-Edmonde Magny calls la technique objective dans le roman americain [the objective technique in the American novel].3 Sartre believed that psychological analysis, the hall mark of the French style from Mme de LaFayette to Marcel Proust, could no longer mirror the complexities of the new era or the sense of the absurd generated by the events of World War II. In their book, Transatlantic Migration: The Contemporary American Novel in France, Thelma M. Smith and Ward L. Miner state that in the wake of the American influence, it was much more important to express the social interactions rather than indulge in psychological analyses.4 In addition to these new stylistic changes and an emphasis on social interactions, Hemingway's work, from the beginning, was imbued with a deep sense of loss and the absurd. When Gertrude Stein referred to the author of The Sun Also Rises as a member of the lost generation she was