Sartre and Communist Party Plots in Fiction

After finishing Madame de Staël's De l'Allemagne extracts from the Larousse volume, I've begun reading Les Mains Sales by Jean-Paul Sartre. I'd never heard of it before.

The premise of Sartre's play is intensely interesting: The client king of Illyria (~Yugoslavia) bypasses his weakening Nazi hegemons to reach across political lines to the establishment liberal democrats and even to the communists. The communists partly wish to ally themselves against the Nazis with the other political parties, as the king requests, but other communists resort to assassination to prevent the alliance from forming.

A young communist party member who has grown tired of his prosaic work as a writer for the party's newsletter, and wants to emulate the violent activists amongst his comrades, becomes the instrument of this faction. He is the protagonist of the play.

While the plot, as described, has far-reaching historical and political implications, the scene starts small in the utilitarian lodgings of Olga, a devoted female communist party member, with various conversations about ways and means. As Sartre was a member of the French Resistance movement, I wonder how much the conversations and plottings of his fictional characters reflect the methods and discussions of his experience.

Sartre published this play in 1948, I think, about imaginary events in the previous five years. His exploration of contemporaneity is not made vague or distorted through excess subjectivity, and his matter-of-fact lack of reinterpretation or emotional overlay in his depiction of wartime political agitation is something that I think most filmmakers, etc., began to lose in the 1950s as one began to kitschify, retouch, or moralize more.

And the 'tableaux' are scripted with perfect tension — Agatha Christie might feel envy. The words (each, at times, seems to let fall a new insight or a new turn of the plot) have even greater weight because of his basically worded yet impeccably aimed French. The film is ripe for a film adaptation; I could imagine one in the vein of Witness for the Prosecution. I think Sartre's conscious exploitation of suspense verges on the sensationalistic, but the play is not a chore to read.

I haven't greatly enjoyed Olga's character. She is superficially tough. But whether Olga is an 'idealized' figure who sets forth Sartre's wishes or whether she represents an observation of gender roles in that milieu and at that time, either way this idea that a woman is a handy party-political tool is depressing.

The main gripe I have is that 'disappearing into the 1940s' in imagination before and after work, is a weird feeling and not a nice thing. To be both preachy and prim, the murder and mayhem should not be enjoyable because the playwright repeatedly raises and gratifies curiosity about these intrigues that take place as part of an especially gruesome moment in history. In Sartre's time, people would have lived this world firsthand, but through the buffers of the intervening decades I think it is too easy for the reader to feel detached, as if these things didn't happen to people like you and me. Sartre's fictional Illyrian communists also make use of death squads, however, and in the year of Jamal Khashoggi's murder this is as immediately nauseating and grim as ever.

Lastly, I suppose it is a commentary on the twists and turns of history that the only other time I've read a play or any work set in Illyria, it was a Shakespeare play (Twelfth Night?). And, riddled with poverty and the Armada and other strife though Shakespeare's era was, his Illyria was infinitely more cheerful and innocent.