• they/them

plural system in Seattle, WA (b. 1974)
lots of fictives from lots of media, some horses, some dragons, I dunno. the Pnictogen Wing is poorly mapped.

host: Mx. Kris Dreemurr (they/them)

chief messenger and usual front: Mx. Chara or Χαρά (they/them)

other members:
Mx. Frisk, historian (they/them)
Monophylos Fortikos, unicorn (he/him)
Kel the Purple, smol derg (xe/xem)
Pim the Dragon, Kel's sister (she/her)


I've been kicking our host's arse with some of the heaviest plays I can think of from the Western canon. In the last few days we've gone through:

Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts, and we started A Doll's House but only got halfway
Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Endgame
Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh
Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman
Euripides's Medea

And earlier today we both read a text of Jean-Paul Sartre's Huis clos, or "No Exit" as it's usually translated into English, and played a performance of it. There are so many great dramatic performances on YouTube, as it turns out.

I've been desperate to give Kris, our host, some kind of perspective on the human world and modern society. When you're heavily dissociated all the time like Kris has been, and plural introjects (like myself) are jumping in all the time to do your acting and your talking...at least you're spared from having to think too hard about the state of the world. At least, when you're lost in a dissociative fog, you don't have to make too much sense of the world. But the fog is clearing, and Kris is now forced to deal with the appalling shitshow of "real life" more directly. At some point this had to happen; Kris has to develop their own sense of will, apart from me...I may have been a wretched guardian and guide, but I have a long memory and a deeply embedded sense of ethics. Not the best memory, certainly not the best ethics, but they've kept Kris stumbling along. Now, though, they're forced to form their own ideas about these things...and it's not been easy or fun, at all. They have been questioning the point of going on. How do you keep going in a world that seems more and more, every day, like some sort of unhinged carnival of suffering and cruelty?

cw: Sartre's "No Exit", death and murder, sin, Hell, other fun stuff like that


Which brings me back to Sartre and Huis clos, which is explicitly about Hell—or at least, about a place whose inmates clearly think of as Hell. When the first of the three main players arrives—a former journalist named Garcin, who attempted to flee being drafted into an unnamed war rather than risk arrest as a conscientious objector, and was thus executed as a deserter—he's expecting "racks and red-hot pincers", but gets instead a ugly Napoleon-III-era drawing room and two fellow dead sinners for company. There's Estelle, who murdered a newborn baby she'd conceived while cheating on her husband with a younger man, and later died of pneumonia; and there's Inèz, who broke up the marriage of a woman named Florence in order to carry on an affair with her, but Florence grew disgusted with her after the ignominious death of her ex-husband, and eventually she killed both herself and Inèz by turning up the gas in their flat. Both Estelle and Inèz, in their way, expect to be tormented. All three of them clearly regard themselves as in Hell, but they all react differently to their predicament.

Inèz accepts her situation. She's damned—in fact, she points out, she was "a damned bitch" to people while she was still alive, so she's not surprised now. She's determined to extract as much glee as possible from the sins of her companions; she relentlessly taunts Garcin for his cowardice and Estelle for her lusts. For her part, Estelle stills hopes for the comforts of lust even in Hell, and she works hard to seduce Garcin even though she's plainly going after him simply because he's available. But Garcin's not able to enjoy Estelle's attentions, because he's clutching to the most forlorn of hopes in Hell: he's hoping that somehow, he can get out. Somehow, Garcin hopes, he can effect his own salvation.

He tries a few things. At one point he declares that if everyone stops talking so they can contemplate their sins silently, in private reflection, then maybe they'll attain salvation. Of course that doesn't work, whence Garcin sexistly grumbles that if he'd been sent to Hell with two other men, they'd have been able to stick to the silent treatment. But then he hits upon a more desperate plan: if only he can get one of his two companions to declare their faith in him, then Garcin can be saved. What sort of declaration of faith is Garcin wanting? In fact he wants a flat denial; he wants someone to tell him, "you're not a coward," even though Garcin is rather obviously still cowardly.

He tries Estelle first, but Inèz wrecks his confidence in her—which prompts Garcin to declare that only Inèz's faith will do, because Inèz actually understands sin and therefore an affirmation of faith, i.e. the flat denial of cowardice that Garcin demands, will mean more from her. Inèz basically laughs in his face and taunts him with Hell's eternity: she declares her desire to remember Garcin as a coward forever, and refuses to let him off the hook. Inèz's situation and Garcin's desperation has given her a tiny measure of power over him, and she chooses to exercise it. It's better to rule in Hell, &c.

Why does Garcin need Estelle or Inèz to prop him up? There's always the alternative of living with cowardice, but Garcin is...well, he's too cowardly to live with cowardice on his conscience. He struggles vainly to make his crucial failure of courage seem like a triviality in comparison to the rest of his life, but Inèz won't let him get away with that. Hence Garcin takes what consolation he can get from blaming Inèz and Estelle for not believing in him. He'd rather have companions in misery—indeed, he's so attached to them that Garcin even rejects the opportunity to leave his cell. He hollers to be let out of the locked room where he's been confined with the other two sinners, but when the door flies open of its own accord Garcin doesn't even try to exit. Hell may be other people, but Garcin could leave the "other people" behind if he wanted, striking out on his own...yet he doesn't, because he's unable to break out of his cowardice.

The option is there, though. Garcin could have left that room.

At the start of the play, the jailor (who acts like a porter at a hotel) says there's nothing outside the room but more rooms and hallways and stairs. When Garcin asks the fellow what's beyond the walls of the establishment, the jailor seems a bit confused; there's just...more rooms, he says. And maybe that's all that Garcin would have found, if he'd left. But at least he would have seen it for himself. And who knows? maybe the jailor wasn't actually telling the truth—maybe the jailor didn't know the truth.

The implications of Huis clos are disquieting, but also hopeful: Sartre seems to suggest that people keep themselves in Hell, or in hellish states of existence with each other anyway—they'd rather wallow in mutual recrimination and petty infighting than break loose. Inèz boasts that she's going to tie down Garcin forever with the memory of his cowardice, and Garcin just...goes along with it. He didn't need to! He didn't need to attach so much weight to Inèz's opinion of him. He didn't need to leave his "salvation" in the hands of others.

And I suppose that's my final word to my long-suffering host, Kris Dreemurr, who has been a remarkably good sport about my pushing them through one downer play after another...maybe wondering what was the point in all that anguish and absurdity. Ultimately my point is simply this.

Kris...you can save yourself. If it helps...I do believe in you. Even if I didn't, though...I hope you can learn not to be afraid, on your own.

When you're ready...walk through that door.

~Chara of Pnictogen


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