Hell by Henri Barbusse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Rejecting Absolute Misery

I think the reason I enjoy Barbusse is the chance to escape into another reality, an unexpected metaphysics. I get the same sense while reading Poe. Both create an enclosed world in which things happen that are eternal and somehow immune from the trivial influences of everyday life. In the era of Trump I find this somewhat comforting.

The reader sees only what the unnamed protagonist sees in The Inferno. And since this narrator barely interacts with the fellow residents in his Parisian boarding house, what he sees is almost all there is. He and everyone else are Leibnizian Monads, self-contained, self-conscious entities which bound and re-bound off one another like balls on a billiard table. As one of his characters says, “I am crying because one is alone.” The peculiar grammar of this phrase is significant- one represents all.

But these are Monads who suffer acutely because they have windows which allow the world to touch their consciousness directly. One window in particular, a chink between bricks allowing visual access to the room next door, is the one the narrator becomes obsessed by. Life, it seems, is a matter of which window we choose to observe it from. And this one allows life to be seen without the normal social conventions so that its duplicity and perversion can be seen for what they are. People still lie and dissemble but they do so with a sort of integrity that reveals their true intentions, the ‘innards’ of consciousness so to speak.

Through this window the protagonist observes different versions of fear and love, or rather variations on an emotion of fearful love: “love is only a kind of festival of solitude.” It appears that we all share an experience of Leibnizian loneliness. The room he watches is some sort of temporary sanctuary for people whose lives have been damaged, they believe, by circumstances, or by sin, or by painful memories, or by design. But if we share loneliness, we are not entirely alone. An unexpected paradox.

This hidden perspective on life makes the observer-protagonist god-like and he initially appears to have delusions of grandeur: “I who was a spectator apart from men and whose gaze soared above them... “ But only because he is able to see reality without convention; he has no power to alter this reality, to coordinate it in order to produce a better outcome. Hence the implacability of “Fate” which is the inevitable “separation of human beings that deceive themselves.” The deception is accepting the lie that we are self-contained.

It is because we are not self-contained that we suffer. The problem of life however is not the removal of suffering; it the the realization of happiness within the suffering. As Amy, the female object of observation realizes, “‘I am the god of my own happiness. What I want,' she added, with perfect simplicity, 'is to be happy, I, just as I am, and with all my suffering... If everything that hurts us were to be removed, what would remain?'" Indeed, what would remain is the monadic shell of a human being, a husk.

In Leibniz’s philosophy, God is responsible for everything. He directs the interactions among the human entities which are enclosed by their own experiences. His presumption is that none of us can appreciate the innermost experience of any other, that we are permanently insulated from everyone else. Given the obvious suffering abroad in the world such a philosophy makes God a sadist and human beings inert particles of self-consciousness who are condemned to Hell from birth.

Barbusse’s protagonist is a morally ambiguous character. But his very ambition to be god-like reveals something important to himself: “I, like other men, am moulded out of infinity.” Like other men. This seems to me the key to escaping the inferno - the god-like quality of not individual human beings, but collectively of the entire human species. What constitutes this divinity is the ability to discern, at least partially, what’s happening inside others. This capacity mitigates suffering by diluting it with empathy for the suffering of others.

In the early part of the story, the protagonist says, apparently without irony, “If everyone were like me, all would be well.” And, remarkably, this is what he finds to be the case. People are like him. We are more than the mere individual desire not to die because we are somehow mutually contained within each other. This is why "Every human being is the whole truth.” All of humanity is within the individual, as he is within the rest. There could hardly be a more striking revelation than this in any religion.

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