No Exit and the Other-One

"Hell is other people" because they change how we see ourselves.

“Hell is other people” declares Garcin, the womanizing egotisical coward in Sartre’s No Exit. He says this to Estelle, who is selfish and straight, and Inez, who is spiteful and gay. They are three flawed humans left together in a stuffy room to eternally torment one another with their very existence. This is Hell.

Before the others arrive, Garcin believes his torment is himself, himself with no rest, no sleep. He tells the “valet” who has escorted him to this room how he understands the situation:

I shall never sleep again. But then, how shall I endure my own company? Try to understand. You see, I’m fond of teasing, it’s second nature with me — and I’m used to teasing myself. Plaguing myself, if you prefer; I don’t tease nicely. But I can’t go on doing that without a break. Down there I had my nights. I slept.

Eternity alone with one’s own self-loathing does sound bad. But Garcin is in for something worse. Inez shows up, and she knows what cruelty one person can inflict upon another, being, she admits, an expert on the subject — she has driven two people to suicide, rather than endure living in the shadow of their happy marriage. She quickly understands that she and Garcin are to torment each other. He proposes they resist their torture by being polite, but it doesn’t last long.

INEZ: Can you keep your mouth still? You keep twisting it about all the time. It’s grotesque.

GARCIN: So sorry. I wasn’t aware of it.

INEZ: […] You talk about politeness and you don’t even try to control your face. Remember you’re not alone; you’ve no right to inflict the sight of your fear on me.

What is worse that being trapped with one’s own misery? To be assaulted by another for expressing that misery, even in the smallest and most unconscious way. “You’ve no right” she says. The presence of another person changes everything. The kingdom of loneliness now seems less awful — at least there you have the right to express your own feelings, if only to yourself. Here, with another, you may or may not — depending on what they allow. You are at their mercy, if they have any.

I got to thinking about Sartre’s “Hell is other people” reading about the behaviorist concept of the “Other-One” — the idea that subjective self-knowledge is irrelevant or misleading, and that we must understand humans, even ourselves, as “the other” as an object, as an experimental subject, that we must observe and experimentally affect this subject’s behavior with the distance of the outsider — even if the humans who are our subject are ourselves.

In a way, it is viewing the self as though the self were another person — viewing the self from the perspective OF another person. Your insides are moot, only your outsides, your behavior matters. Your twisting mouth, of which you are not even aware, is your true being. And your anguish is irrelevant.

In this way, I got to thinking, the behaviorist perspective is a kind of Hell, or at least Sartre made it into a vision of Hell in this play.

A third person, Estelle, joins Garcin and Inez. She is young and beautiful, and Inez is immediately attracted to her; but Estelle is only interested in men, and Garcin, his mind still fixed on his life on earth, couldn’t care less about her. Finally Inez fully understands: “each of us will act as torturer of the two others.”

In an even more hopeless attempt to escape torment, Garcin proposes they surpass “politeness” and just ignore one another. But Estelle cannot stand to be without attention. She immediately attempts to refresh her makeup, which is in her purse, but to her extreme displeasure the devils have taken her mirror.

ESTELLE: […] When I can’t see myself I begin to wonder if I really and truly exist. I pat myself just to make sure, but it doesn’t help much.

INEZ: You’re lucky. I’m always conscious of myself—in my mind. Painfully conscious.

ESTELLE: Ah yes, in your mind. But everything that goes on in one’s head is so vague, isn’t it? [ . . . ] I’ve six big mirrors in my bedroom. There they are. I can see them. But they don’t see me. They’re reflecting the carpet, the settee, the window—but how empty it is a glass in which I’m absent! When I talked to people I always made sure there was one near by in which I could see myself. I watched myself talking. And somehow it kept me alert, seeing myself as the others saw me… Oh dear! My lipstick! I’m sure I’ve put it on crooked!

As Estelle can see her empty bedroom, so do the other see the sites of their former lives on Earth. Inez sees the small apartment she shared with the couple she drove to misery and suicide. She sees it emptied, cleaned, re-let out, and then it disappears. Estelle’s view of her former life also fades, as the people who knew her move on. For a longer time, Garcin can see the newspaper office where he worked, all the men whose opinions he cares about still working and occasionally mentioning him, dismissing him.

Estelle’s whole sense of being a real person depends not ONLY on the attention of others, but on the attention of herself — she must see herself “as the others saw” her, as an object, a desireable, beautiful object. Inez absolutely sees her as such, but Estelle rejects her, even when she offers to be her mirror:

INEZ: […] Look at me. No, straight. Now smile. I’m not so ugly either. Am I not nicer than your glass?

ESTELLE: Oh, I don’t know. You scare me rather. My reflection in the glass never did that; of course, I knew it so well. Like something I had tamed…. I’m going to smile, and my smile will sink down into your pupils, and heaven knows what it will become.

The experience of the self is altered by the other. Estelle is desperately social, even needy. She wants affirmation from others, but in a way she can monitor and control — a way that is “tamed,” not wild and free.

Inez is not a man, and in life Inez was a “mere” postal clerk, far below Estelle’s social class, and so Estelle rejects Inez in every possible way. Inez doesn’t like it, and so tells her: “hullo, what’s that—that nasty red spot at the bottom of your cheek? A pimple?

ESTELLE: A pimple? Oh, how simply foul? Where!

INEZ: There… you know the way they catch larks—with a mirror? I’m your lark-mirror, my dear, and you can’t escape me…There isn’t any pimple, not a trace of one. So what about it? Suppose the mirror started telling lies? Or suppose I covered my eyes—as he is doing—and refused to look at you, all that loveliness of yours would be wasted on the desert air. No, don’t be afraid, I can’t help looking at you. I shan’t turn my eyes away. And I’ll be nice to you, ever so nice. Only you must be nice to me, too.

As this escalates, Garcin implores them again to ignore each other. But it’s impossible.

INEZ: To forget about the others? How utterly absurd. I feel you there, in every pore. Your silence clamors in my ears. You can nail up your mouth, cut your tongue out—but you can’t prevent your being there. Can you stop your thoughts? I hear them ticking away like a clock, tick-tock, tick-tock, and I’m certain you hear mine. It’s all very well skulking on your sofa, but you’re everywhere, and every sound comes to me soiled, because you’ve intercepted it on its way. Why you’ve even stolen my face; you know it and I don’t! And what about her, about Estelle? You’ve stolen her from me too; if she and I were alone do you suppose she’d treat me as she does?

Garcin doesn’t care, though. The feelings and opinions of women mean nothing to him. He only cares about the feelings and opinions of men, and he continues to observe the goings-on back among the living, where he is remembered as a coward who tried to flee conscription and wound up blubbering before a firing squad. He was a man who maintained a public face as a pacifist, but died having abandoned any pretense of principle or dignity. He tells the women, “You’re lucky, you two; no one on earth is giving you another thought. But I—I’m long in dying.”

Estelle is as desperate to seduce him as Inez is to seduce her, but Garcin, who was a vile womanizer in life, doesn’t give a flying shit about them. His name among men is mud, his reputation among men is laughable, and this beautiful woman will seduce him into a sex act over Inez’s objections, but he cannot continue when he hears himself dismissed back on earth by the men who knew him. Enraged, he attempts to leave.

GARCIN: Open the door! Open, blast you! I’ll endure anything, your red-hot tongs and molten lead, your racks and prongs and garrotes—all your fiendish gadgets, everything that burns and flays and tears—I’ll put up with any torture you impose. Anything, anything would be better than this agony of mind, this creeping pain that gnaws and fumbles and caresses one and never hurts quite enough.

And then, the door opens. Inez tells him to go—repeatedly to go. She is eager to get rid of him—but he stands fixed and says “I shall not go.” He is, after all, a coward, as the men on earth found out. He’s a lot of bluster and bloviation, no real courage. Did the door open because the devils agreed to his deal? To give him “hot tongs and molten lead” and so on? Maybe. And so he retreats to the stuffy room. And Inez is annoyed.

But Estelle wants to get rid of Inez, and so she says, “Garcin, come and lend a hand. Quickly. We’ll push her out and slam the door on her. That’ll teach her a lesson.”

Garcin won’t help. He wants Inez to stay, because he wants to convice her that he’s not a coward. “I couldn’t leave you here, gloating over my defeat; with all those thoughts about me running in your head.” He can no longer hear the men who knew him: “Probably that means they’re through with me. For good and all. The curtain’s down, nothing of me is left on earth—not even the name of coward. So, Inez, we’re alone. Only you two remain to give a thought to me. She—she doesn’t count. It’s you who matter; you who hate me. If you’ll have faith in me I’m saved.”

Yes, he turns to the admittedly manipulative and cruel person who despises him for salvation. As though salvation were possible in Hell.

INEZ: […] No you’re going to pay the price and what a price! You’re a coward, Garcin, because I wish it. I wish it—do you hear?—I wish it. And yet, just look at me, see how weak I am, a mere breath on the air, a gaze observing you, a formless thought that thinks you. […] You can’t throttle thoughts with hands. So you’ve no choice, you must convince me, and you’re at my mercy.

Estelle, who does not “count” to Garcin in any way, tells him: “revenge yourself!”

ESTELLE: Revenge yourself.

GARCIN: How?

ESTELLE: Kiss me, darling—then you’ll hear her squeal.

GARCIN: That’s true, Inez. I’m at your mercy, but you’re at mine as well.

[He bends over ESTELLE. INEZ gives a little cry.]

ESTELLE: That’s right, Inez. Squeal away.

And so we find Garcin concluding that Hell is not “fire and brimstone,” not “red-hot pokers”: “Hell is—other people.”

What really resonates with me through this play, though, is not just how these three characters become one another’s tormentors in a Hell constructed for that purpose.

It’s how everything we learn of their lives on earth show that there, too, Hell was other people.

Inez was tormented by the happiness of a straight married couple in an era when she could not have had similarly socially-approved relationships. Her pain made her cruel, and her cruelty led the others to suicide.

Estelle was poor and helpless but beautiful — her beauty snagged her a marriage to a rich too-old man, and an affair with a man much younger. When she got pregnant, she was afraid of being poor again, so she left the country, gave birth, and drowned the baby in a lake. Fear of poverty (and dare I say: lack of access to contraception and abortion!) made her a monster only capable of cherishing the beauty that helped her escape poverty for another day.

And Garcin was a “pacifist” newspaperman who wrote bold political ideas. But when a war started and he was expected to fight, instead of standing for what he believed in, he ran for the border. Caught, he faced a firing squad — and blubbered and begged the whole way to his death. He cared so much about what other men thought of him, and cared nothing for the woman who loved him, or the many women he cheated with. He only cared about his image in the eyes of men. And in the end, that was his torment: all men alive ridiculed him, dismissed him, forgot him, and he was left only with two women, one who wished to use him for her own ego gratification, and another who despised him as an obstacle to her own gratification.

Hell, in this story, is not just “other people” when they are in a constructed Hell-space built for the purpose. Hell was other people back on earth too. Other people were the Hell that drove them to their living misery, and then from their miserable lives to their eternal damnation. The pain of other people’s judgments, opinions, biases, and needs simply continues in this Hell in a way that is inescapable — no sleep, no dreams, no rest, no breaks. Eternal commentary from the hostile and needy.

Why does Sartre’s Hell remind me of social media, which Jaron Lanier calls a Skinner box in your pocket, a behavior modification machine that follows you wherever you go? Have we created a No Exit like Hell for ourselves, in which we are tormented by others, but are terrified to leave?

As Ms. Cobel says in the first episode of Severance: the good news about Hell is that it’s just a product of a morbid human imagination. The bad news is that whatever humans can imagine, they can usually create.