Literary Impressionism: no. 1 The Idea of “Waiting” in French Literature

“What to do in Casablanca?”

Much of Sartre’s novel Le Sursis (The Reprieve), (c. 1945), set in 1938, follows the line at the beginning of Casablanca (1942), regarding the refugees. They “wait… and wait… and wait….”

Sartre’s novel seems to stress the malaise of war. The book presents a world where the worst thing about the Occupation isn’t the food shortages or the Gestapo, but the boredom. Not for nothing has Beckett penned:

POZZO: …. But I must really be getting along, if I am to observe my schedule.

VLADIMIR: Time has stopped.

POZZO: (cuddling his watch to his ear). Don’t you believe it, Sir, don’t you believe it. (He puts his watch back in his pocket.) What ever you like, but not that. (Waiting for Godot 1949/1955)

If time has stopped, is it then impossible to wait? Or is waiting a way of stopping time? Let’s ask Simone Weil:

The extinction of desire (Buddhism)––or detachment––or amor fati––or desire for the absolute good—these all amount to the same: the empty desire, finality of all content, to desire in the void, to desire without any wishes. To detach our desire from all good things and to wait. Experience proves that this waiting is satisfied. It is then we touch the absolute good. (“Detachment” Simone Weil: an Anthology, ed. Siân Miles, (London: Virago Press, 1986) p. 278.)

But the French were waiting even before the world wars. Consider this passage from Pierre Loti’s Pêcheur d’ Islande (An Iceland Fisherman) (c. 1886):

Usually there is some information concerning the wrecks off Iceland; those who return have seen the tragedy from afar, or else have found some wreckage or bodies, or have an indication to guess the rest. But of the Leopoldine nothing had been seen, and nothing was known. The Marie-Jeanne men, the last to have seen her, on the 2d of August, said that she was to have gone on fishing farther towards the north, and, beyond that, the secret was unfathomable.

Waiting, always waiting, and knowing nothing! When would the time come when she need wait no longer? She did not even know that; and, now, she almost wished that it might be soon. (trans. Jules Cambon, (New York: P. F. Collier, 1902) V, vii, pp. 263–64.)