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Logicians or theologians can demolish this position, but that does not change the fact that there is a certain grandeur in it. What is less grand is Sartre's endless posturing. After having been an almost demonic writer all his life, Sartre recently seemed to reject literature itself when he said, "I ha^ seen children dying of hunger. Over against the dying child, fa novel] cannot act as a counterweight." To which Critic Claude Simon answered impatiently, "When have corpses and books ever been weighed on the same scale? Why write at all, why publish?"
Nevertheless, Sartre will continue writing and publishing. Nevertheless, he will complain about the uselessness of it. Nevertheless, the French would not have it any other way, for he has become a kind of national institution. During the bitter war with the Algerian rebels, he joined other French intellectuals in publicly urging Frenchmen not to take up arms. Many others were jailed for it but not Sartre. When a French Cabinet minister asked him why not, President Charles de Gaulle simply shook his head and said, "Sartre is also France."
*Russian Novelist Boris Pasternak first accepted, then was pressured by the Soviet government into refusing the 1958 award.