When a young Flannery O’Connor was writing her first novel Wise Blood (1952), the novelist and critic Caroline Gordon told her that it took three strokes of sensuous detail to immerse a reader in any given scene and provide the illusion of reality. This is especially true the farther the events of a story are from our daily experience, as our imaginations are formed by what we’ve already seen, heard, smelled, and felt. In illustrating something foreign to most readers, such as the gulag Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn reveals in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), a writer might provide a vision of something familiar, even deceptively so. I remember distinctly imagining the gruel he describes eating in the closest analogue available to my eighth grade mind: something akin to a delightful bowl of maple brown sugar oatmeal. Somehow the contrast of that simple pleasure with the unimaginable pains of the work camp made Solzhenitsyn’s a story I could never quite forget.
W. C. Hackett’s historical thriller, Outside the Gates (2021), possesses a similar ability to lodge deeply into one’s memory. Although it is a story of a real philosopher, and delves into existential thinking, it is not abstract. It is filled with vibrant details which draw the reader into the apparent contradiction of the beauties and horrors of occupied France in the midst of World War II. Hackett’s subject and narrator is the middle-aged Jean Wahl (1888-1974), who was the nephew of the influential philosopher Henri Bergson, and a poet and philosopher in his own right. About a decade before the story begins, Wahl lost his post at the Sorbonne because of his Jewish heritage and was imprisoned.
The novel opens right after he escaped the Drancy Internment Camp in Paris’ northeastern suburbs. The reader finds him trying to evade Theodor Dannecker, the SS officer pursuing him, in an attempt to gain permanent freedom from Nazi control. As Wahl wanders the streets of occupied Paris in winter with his new friend Gilles Alain, Hackett provides profoundly luxuriant pages of descriptive prose. Wahl enters a small boulangerie and sees a celestial banquet of French pastries on display. The enticing descriptions of the full shelves is Wahl’s testament to the beauty of human culture, which he describes as a fit and even necessary habitation for human nature: “our animal selves inhabit culture like the slimy snail in its shell.”
“Wait!” we might be inclined to cry. “Hasn’t this man just emerged from the brutalities of a Nazi camp? How can he be this blasé about the works of man?” The Wahl we hear from is no naïf, but a realist, perhaps more attentive to ordinary beauty because of the shadow-world he inhabited before the novel’s opening. Hackett’s civilized fictionalization is a rebuke to the claim attributed to Theodor Adorno that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz. If this were so, it would mean that the camp redefined the human life such that no escape from it is possible. Wahl’s journey to the zone libre of a France liberated by the Allies reveals the philosopher’s own thinking through of the question of freedom and transcendence, as much on a philosophical as on a political level.
The major philosophical vistas which the novel overlooks concern the question of transcendence, a topic which Wahl contemplated in his book, Human Existence and Transcendence (1944), translated by Hackett in 2016. In the novel, once Wahl returns to his Paris apartment, he is besieged by a dream, in which a shadowy man confronts him with a rough approximation of an argument made in the Bridhadaranyaka Upanishad, one of the key writings considered holy by Hindus composed between 900 and 600 BC: namely, that ultimately we cannot distinguish between the world of dreams and the world of reality, that the body is the shadow of the soul, its suffering ultimately unreal. Wahl struggles with the temptation to accept this upon remembering the horrible reality of the camp at Drancy; to deny that it ultimately had any meaning, to accept transcendence as an escape from pain and suffering and the mechanisms of totalitarian control. But the transcendence Hackett reveals to us is of another kind, one which does not deny the body but accepts incarnation and the social reality of human beings, specifically that highest friendship which tyranny seeks to root out: the friendship of virtue.
A great deal of the novel’s particularity lies in Wahl’s friendships, from his fellow Drancy survivor, Gilles Alain, to his former student Francois Houang. Houang had coordinated the plan for Wahl’s escape with members of the French Resistance and some Jesuit priests from Lyon, where Wahl once taught. During the brief time back in his Paris apartment, Wahl recalls his first meeting with Francois, then a biology student newly arrived from China. He was curious to understand what philosophy is and what it can do. He told Wahl that he believed in the project of modern science to “relieve man’s estate,” as Francis Bacon put it, but could not understand why someone would devote their time to purely theoretical matters. Hackett uses this to demonstrate the existential urgency of man’s need to seek and know the truth In a letter the escapee finds back in his apartment, Francois intimates his discovery of some of his question’s answers within the Catholic Church.
This section of the novel lulls the reader into a sense of complacency with respect to its major plot (Wahl’s escape) in order to reveal its narrator to us from another vantage point. He is not simply a survivor of great evil; he is also a teacher and friend. He leads others to seek the source of human happiness, namely beatitude, the sight of God, even within the limits of his own discipline of philosophy. It is these very friends and others who, while distinguishing theory and practical action, refuse to separate them and therefore act practically to rescue their mentor from the grasp of the tyrannical Theodor Dannecker.
The second half of the novel becomes more harried, reflecting in its very form the increased pace of life as Wahl flees Paris in the dead of night, steps ahead of his one-time tormentor and imprisoner. The novel’s chapters shrink to just several pages each. The reader feels the suspense amplified. Even under such circumstances however, when most of us would be beneath the waves of an interior shipwreck, Wahl reflects rather a careful eye for detail that embodies his openness to the world. Gone are Francois, Gilles Alain, his apartment-keeper Louis Baptiste and his wife Madame David. He and we are plunged into a world where even his new friends have no names, but are simply the Catholic husband and wife, the husband who dips his morning bread into his coffee while his wife drops the pieces of hers in, allowing them to soak thoroughly before drinking down the full draught.
Outside the Gates is a quick read. It has the rare quality, simultaneously charming and compelling, of forbidding you to put it down and rewarding your attention. However, it continues to stir thoughts and emotions long after you have read it. It shows readers that we experience transcendence, not by escaping from the body, but incarnationally. It is through our flesh that we attain communion with old friends and perhaps even a new friend who makes himself known in the breaking of the bread.
