Marcel: The playwright philosopher

Renascence, Spring 2003 by Hanley, Katharine Rose

IN a remarkable interview given to the Alliance Francaise in Paris, Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973) spoke of the paradox of his work as a Dramatist / Philosopher; two distinctive genres, each having its own proper procedures and ends, yet Marcel merged them into complementary careers.1 In this essay I shall identify some characteristics of his drama and then indicate how his "theater of inquiry" provides an attractive prelude, which illuminates and facilitates our understanding of his philosophic investigations.

The foundation of the body of Marcel's work is that he saw his life experience and communication as three concentric rings. The first was music; the deepest and innermost, beyond words. The second, drama; the concrete incarnation of conflict expressed in dialogue. The third and outermost ring, philosophy, brought reasoned analysis to the issues affecting the meaning of life. Marcel's personal preference for drama, evident from his early years, prevailed throughout his lifetime. Most of the issues of conflict explored in Marcel plays are drawn from his own life experience and that of his extended family. Dramatic imagination allowed him to examine such situations in the light of theater, and thereby forge a path for his own freedom and understanding.

From early childhood Gabriel Marcel was immersed in drama. He delighted in hearing his father read plays aloud and on occasion, accompanying him to the theater. Isabelle Meyer Marcel, his mother, died when he was barely four years old. The young Gabriel's creative gift as dramaturge revealed itself as he invented imaginary characters to people the otherwise painful loneliness of a motherless only child. As a very young boy he wrote a play, modeled on a classic tragedy, in which a young prince expresses courtly reverence and understanding when the princess, so grieved by the death of her father the King, cannot accept his offer of love.2

Losing his mother awakened Gabriel's preoccupation with the presence of loved ones from beyond death; a theme his plays explore in many different contexts, and from various points of view throughout his life. At the age of six, on holiday with his grandmother in the mountains, he asked her what became of people after they die, to which grandmother replied that nobody knows. Young Gabriel calmly stated that someday he would know. Later, Gabriel spent two happy years in Sweden while his father was the French Ambassador there. This country's atmosphere colors "The Light on the Mountain," a play he wrote in 1905. This youthful work was favorably reviewed by French drama critic Fernand Gregh and is considered by some as prefiguring his 1922 A Man of God. "The Light on the Mountain" also anticipates his perspectives on Nietzsche's declaration of the "death of God".3

Marcel wrote in his "Essay in Autobiography"4 that he suffered from the desert universe of a household without faith. His father was an agnostic in the style of Taine, and his step mother espoused a liberal form of Protestantism as a structural support for ethical behavior. For Marcel it was the music of Bach, Mozart, and Faure which represented the presence of the sacred in his family experience. His first published dramas La Grace (Grace) and Le Palais de Sable (The Sand Castle) appeared in a volume entitled Le Seuil Invisible (The Invisible Threshold).5 Grace was a concrete interpersonal investigation of how a non-believer can come to faith. It reveals that it is the radiance of another's faith that allows one to come to believe. The Sand Castle is an inquiry into how one lives an authentic life as a believer. Rather than a superior intellectual thesis or a nobler political program, it poses that a genuine faith incites a believer to live a life of loving service to those near to him or her. These dramatic works, published in 1914, predated Marcel's tortuous struggles to think his way beyond the constraints of the idealism of his day.

As a young man, Marcel's friends were, for the most part, literary figures: Charles Du Bos, Gustav Thibon, and Francois Mauriac. His gift as a pianist and his love for music brought him to the household of the noted Protestant preacher Henri Boegner, whose sister, Jacqueline, Marcel married in 1919. His many years of work as a respected Paris drama critic and then as editor of Plon's international collection, Feux Croises, won him the respect and friendship of Jean Cocteau, Albert Camus, and Andre Malraux, among others.

Drama was not only Marcel's early preference but was his initial form of reflective writing. This preference remained throughout his life, and is apparent by viewing a chronological listing that parallels his dramatic and philosophic works. Often his dramatic inquiry precedes his philosophic reflection by as much as five to ten years.6 That dramatic imagination was his first form of reflective inquiry is also manifest in his notebooks, where often he first explored an issue by imagining the dramatic dialogue of particular characters in conflict. Gabriel Marcel leaves for posterity a considerable number of literary works. He wrote some thirty plays, and a similar number of philosophic journals and essays.7 The literary quality of his writings, as well as the appeal of his themes, reveal the integrity of his thought that brought him prestigious awards as well as invitations to lecture world wide. Marcel received the Grand Prize for Literature from the French Academy, the National Grand Prize for Literature, the Osiris and Erasmus Prizes, and the Goethe Peace Prize; and he was elected a member of the Institute of France.8 In his later years he used much of the prize money he had won to support the work of gifted young authors, many from Eastern European countries.