Word: agee
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...AGE OF REASON (397 pp.)-Jean-Paul Sartre-translated by Eric Sutton -Knopf...
...latest incomprehensible fashion from France. U.S. audiences now have a thorough chance to sample the brew that has been boiling furiously in Europe's intellectual teapots. The pontiff and leading practitioner of existentialism is France's stubby (5 ft.), scholarly Jean-Paul Sartre. His Age of Reason is a dolorous, idea-clotted novel full of moldy characters and philosophic yawpings about life. It is sure to win its author some critical praise. It is not likely to earn his fashion many wearers...
Like Sartre's first novel, La Nausée (Nausea), and his plays (TIME, Dec. 9), The Age of Reason is an attempt to translate philosophy into fiction. The Age of Reason is the first volume of a trilogy which will chart the salvation of contemporary man. In this first installment, however, nobody is saved; the characters are condemned, instead, to simmer in their own existentialist juices-a form of Sartrian purgatory from which they all will presumably be able to free themselves in the other two books...
Spinach v. Gin. Americans who wonder what existentialism is about will find a simplified translation in the comic strip Popeye, whose "I am what I am!" is existentialism stripped of its dialectical jargon. Like Popeye, the hero of The Age of Reason keeps low company, often talks in unprintable expletives, believes supremely in his own powers of action. But Popeye grows strong on spinach; Sartre's characters in The Age of Reason feed on a pasty mixture of atheism and bad gin. The diet symbolizes existentialism's greatest weakness: the futility of attempting moral regeneration through a philosophy...
Free to Be a Fool. It is only after the hero has sampled the conventional attitudes of Bohemia that he realizes their inadequacy and achieves absolution by embracing "the age of reason" (i.e., an understanding of his own self-dependence). Writhing in an existentialist trance, he proclaims the Sartrian gospel: "... It is by my agency that everything must happen." The author sums up: "Even if he let himself be carried off in helplessness and in despair ... he would have chosen his own damnation: he was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine...