Tuning Up: Exit No Exit: Whatever happened to existentialism ?

Author(s): David Lehman

Source: The American Scholar, Vol. 77, No. 2 (SPRING 2008), pp. 16-17
Published by: The Phi Beta Kappa Society
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41222725
Accessed: 01-01-2018 15:59 UTC

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 Tu N i N g Up

Exit No Exit

Whatever happened to existentialism ?

David Lehman

postwar New York, existentialismchoice, the squirt of moutarde de Dijon that

was sexy,
debonair, chic, and antiacademic. It was
spiced up the hot dog of a banal observation.
either a philosophy or something It was irresistible. To Norman Mailer, existential
resem-
signified
bling one, a bundle of linked ideas and the cool of John F. Kennedy at the
assump-
tions, largely imported from Europe, Democratic
that National Convention in Los Ange-
les in I960
attracted the herd of independent minds - or maybe it meant a mutual cli-
feed-
ing the cultural discourse on this maxsideachieved
of the by anal intercourse. If you wore
Atlantic. Advocates quoted Jean- sunglasses in the subway and lis-
Paul Sartre ("existence precedes tened to Miles Davis, you were
essence") and called it an action probably existential.
philosophy, a survivor's answer Was there a difference
to nihilistic despair. Whatever it between existential and cool? Yes.
was, it went well with berets and Though it was possible to be
saxophones, abstract expres- both, as the example of Miles
sionists in cold-water lofts, and Davis attests, there were a lot of
heroes of novels searching for cool cats without an existential
authenticity in a universeJean-
of Paul Sartre bone in their body. Think of
chance, a North African desert, Johnny Carson or James Bond or
the pages of the Partisan Review,Mickey Mantle. At the same time some bona-
or a movie
theater outside New Orleans. fide existentialists would bore you stiff if you
had to spend an hour in their company at La
For a certain extraordinary period of time,
everyone wanted to be existential. Not every-
Coupole or Les Deux Magots. I feel certain, for
example, that an hour with Heidegger, whose
one knew what this meant, exactly, but every-
one wanted the distinction. Misused and
existential credentials are impeccable, would
be harder
overused, the very word existential began to to endure than an hour with Wittgen-
stein orof
function as a sort of highbrow condiment Bertrand Russell.
According to Albert Camus, Algerian-born
hero of the French Resistance, practicing exis-
^"^ David Lehman teaches writing and literature at
the New School in New York City. He is the author was like fishing in a bathtub. A well-
tentialism о
Ой

meaning
of seven books of poems and editor of The Best Amer- neighbor, thinking to humor the q

ican Erotic Poems: From 1800 to the Present. His non- fisherman in the bathtub, says, "Catch any-
fiction books include The Perfect Murder. thing?" "No, you fool," the fisherman replies.
l6

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 Exit No Exit | Tuning Up

"Can't you see this is a bathtub?" Delmore • The first time Herman Melville's Bartleby,
Schwartz sticks with the bathtub image. "Exis- an existentialist avant la lettre, says, "I would
tentialism," he wrote, "means that no one else prefer not to," declining to perform a task
can take a bath for you." assigned him by his boss.
• The evening in John Updike's Rabbit, Run
(1960) when the hero, a young family man,
Some of the greatest
of existentialism are:moments in the history drives off and decides not to return home. The
• Nietzsche's announcement in Die fröhliche hero's last name, Angstrom, includes the Ger-
Wissenschaft ( The Gay Science, 1882) that God man
is word for anxiety or dread, Angst, which
dead. was second only to alienation as the term of
• Time magazine's confirmation that God
choice in the bars below 14th Street during
is dead in its cover story of April 8, 1966. those heady postwar days when existentialism
• The moment Jean-Paul Sartre realizedruled the discursive roost.
that in hell he would have to room with Albert Existentialism died with the dawning of the
Camus. Age of Aquarius. Relief pitchers began to sport
• The moment when, in a BBOTV produc- flamboyant mustaches, feminists insisted that
tion of a Sartre novel, a man who has impreg-the personal was political, Andy Warhol made
nated a young woman and now, in a fit ofsilkscreen prints of Liz Taylor and Marilyn
conscience and remorse, lifts a cleaver to lop
Monroe, the phrase Deep Throat referred first
off his offending organ, has second thoughts.to a porn flick about a blowjob queen and
"I cannot do it," he says, putting down the
then to a clandestine news source spilling the
cleaver. "I am condemned to be free." beans on Watergate, and Lennon and McCart-
• The moment when David Hemmings ney's as 'Yesterday" eclipsed Jerome Kern's "All
the no-name photographer in Antonioni's Blow-
the Things You Are" as the most recorded love
Up (1966) retrieves the nonexistent tennis ball
song of the 20th century. All this plus Viet-
that the mime troupe pretends to have lost.nam and deconstruction spelled the demise
• The moment in The Spy Who Came in From of existentialism.
the Cold (1965) when the spy, played by RichardSuch perhaps is the fate of certain avant-
Burton in his seedy trench coat, decides to die
garde movements in art or thought. They arrive
with the librarian, played by Claire Bloom, with the intent to move heaven and earth, and
rather than abandon her on the wrong side after
of they've gone, what they leave is their faded
the Berlin Wall and escape to his freedomglamour,
in and it's the same old hard earth, and
the West. heaven's as remote as ever. ♦

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2
Mime troupe in Blow- Up

17

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