By Danny Bloom
CHIAYI CITY, TAIWAN — When the witty and always insightful Jewish-American writer Jonathan Rauch — who writes for the National Journal and the Atlantic, in addition to a host of books about his travels in Japan and life as a gay man — wrote in a 2003 Atlantic article about introverts and extroverts that French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once said “Hell is other people are breakfast,” his ”faux quote” was picked up by thousands of bloggers and readers over the past 9 years who now believe that Sartre actually said that. He said no such thing.
Sartre, of course, was the famous French lapsed-Catholic intellectual and existentialist who is well known in Jewish circles in France, Israel and America for his perceptive book about anti-semitism, first published in French in 1945. Titled “The Anti-Semite and the Jew” in later English-language editions but in its original French as “Reflexions sur la question juive” (“Reflections on the Jewish Question”), the book was written by Sartre shortly after the liberation of Paris from German occupation in 1944. The first part of the essay, “The Portrait of the Anti-semite”, was published in December 1945 in ”Les Temps Modernes.” a French literary magazine. The full text was then published as a book in 1946. I read it in English when I was a college student in the 1960s in Boston.
Sartre confronted Christian antisemitism directly and tried to explain how Jews reacted to it over the centuries. He also tried to explain the etiology of hate by analyzing that special category of hate known as ”anti-semitic hate”. According to Sartre, antisemitism (and hate more broadly) was, and is, among other things, a way by which middle-class citizens of a country lay claim to their cherished nation.
An important book, and read it if you haven’t read it yet.
Now back to our story at hand: Sartre is also famous for a play he wrote titled “No Exit” and for a famous line in that play that goes, in French: “L’enfer, c’est les autres” (”Hell is other people”).
But Sartre never wrote “Hell is other people at breakfast”! Not one word about hell being other people at breakfast. It’s a good joke, but it’s not what Sartre wrote. But Mr. Rauch, mixing up his p’s and q’s, quoted Sartre that way in his 2003 piece in the Atlantic and all hell broke loose after that. Maybe Rauch was trying to be funny, as some pundits have said. Maybe he knew Sartre never said that that way, but he wanted to be snarky and funny and comical at the same time, without giving a thought to the hellish false quote he was setting up in this Age of Un-Reason and Internet rumors,.
The false quoted launched in 2003 still has a life in 2012. Recently, an American woman living in Africa noted on her blog: “Alain’s gone to the market this morning without me. We usually go together on Saturday mornings for each week’s produce and essentials. But today I needed some time alone. My friend Charlie recently sent me an article in ‘The Atlantic’ about the nature of introverts. The author calls on Sartre with the quote, “Hell is other people at breakfast.”
Oops.
And her blog has been echoed by dozens, hundreds of other blogs, that quote the faux Sartre quote as if it was real, and at this point in time, even after several polite emails to Monsieur Rauch — a very smart and perceptive writer who I’ve known ever since his good book about his travels to Japan — the Atlantic misquote from 2003 has not been corrected online. How much longer must one wait for Jonathan to wake up and admit he made a huge gaffe that has resounded around the world. Or if he was joking, and he might have been, I do admit, how his cute breakfast joke did not compute as a fake quote with most readers and took on a life of its own.
Poor Jean-Paul Sartre. He must be turning over in his grave after eating breakfast in Hell, which of course, that is where all existentialists go when they retire. Kidding! I’m kidding!
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Bloomn is Taiwan bureau chief and an inveterate web surfer for San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted at danny.bloom@sdjewishworld.com