Sartre's second century

CHAPTER TWELVE
CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVES:
SARTRE, CLOONEY, MCCARTHY, MURAKAMI
BENEDICT O'DONOHOE
One of the most remarkable features of Sartre's work, in all genres, is
its uncanny knack of updating itself as time passes. This might be because
history tends to repeat itself, so that there are few really new situations
under the sun, and—since Sartre's project as a writer was unapologetically
comprehensive and totalising—therefore few situations to which Sartre
had not, at some time or other and in one guise or other, turned his incisive
attention. This no doubt explains why scholars engaged with his work tend
to sustain their interest over many years, frequently whole lifetimes,
without diverging much or flagging in their enthusiasm. This Sartrean
phenomenon of intuitive prescience coupled with universalist ambition is
particularly well brought out by the intellectual historian and philosopher,
Tom Flynn, in his centennial essay on Sartre and Foucault, and by the
philosopher and political scientist, Bill McBride, in his chapter on Sartre at
the "twilight of liberal democracy" in the same volume. 1 Sartre is a writer
for our times, and this is no less true in his theatre and fiction than in his
philosophy and political essays, as I propose to show. Thus, the first part
of this chapter is devoted to an unfinished play of Sartre's, whose belated
publication happily coincided with a significant American cinema release
in 2005, while the second part examines the contemporary legacy of
Sartre's most famous novel, La Nausee {Nausea, 1938), for Japan's most
fashionable novelist.
1 See Thomas R. Flynn and William L. McBride in Leak and Van den Hoven (eds),
Sartre Today.