Hell

By Henri Barbusse and Joshua Andrew

A young man, tired of life and love, indifferent to the people and world around him, takes up a room in a Parisienne boarding house.
Noises from the adjoining room draw his attention to a hole in the wall, and he observes its occupants through it.
He becomes obsessed with the individual episodes of human life that play out before his eyes; love, adultery, incest, childbirth, death, thievery and betrayal. Through his voyeurism, the unnamed narrator becomes an omniscient godlike character, observing the room's inhabitants in their most private and naked moments. The hole becomes a window to the very soul of humanity and the human condition.
But as with Prometheus, his godlike powers come at a cost.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gothic World Literature Editions
• Release date: Sep 8, 2021
• ISBN: 9781914090486

Henri Barbusse

Henri Barbusse (1873-1935) was a novelist and member of the French Communist Party. Born in Asnières-sur-Seine, he moved to Paris at 16. There, he published his first book of poems, Pleureuses (1895) and embarked on a career as a novelist and biographer. In 1914, at the age of 41, Barbusse enlisted in the French Army to serve in the First World War, for which he would earn the Croix de guerre. His novel Under Fire (1916) was inspired by his experiences in the war, which scarred him and influenced his decision to become a pacifist. In 1918, he moved to Moscow, where he joined the Bolshevik Party and married a Russian woman. Barbusse briefly returned to France, joining the French Communist Party in 1923, before moving back to Russia to work as a writer whose purpose was to support Bolshevism, illuminate the dangers of capitalism, and inspire revolutionary movements worldwide. In addition to his writing, Barbusse took part in the World Committee Against War and Fascism and the International Youth Congress, as well as worked as an editor for Monde, Progrès Civique, and L’Humanité. His final work was a biography of Joseph Stalin, which appeared in 1936 after his death from pneumonia in Moscow. Buried in Paris, his funeral was attended by a half million mourners. Among his many friends and colleagues were Egon Kisch, Albert Einstein, and Romain Rolland.

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Contents

Title Page

Introduction

Introduction to the 1918 edition

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Chapter XV

Chapter XVI

Chapter XVII

Copyright

HELL

or THE INFERNO

BY HENRI BARBUSSE

AUTHOR of UNDER FIRE

TRANSLATED FROM THE 100th FRENCH

EDITION WITH AN INTRODUCTION

By EDWARD J. O’BRIEN

RESET WITH AN INTRODUCTION

BY JOSHUA ANDREW

GOTHIC WORLD LITERATURE EDITIONS

EDINBURGH 2021

INTRODUCTION

by Joshua Andrew

Henri Barbusse was born on the 17th of May in Asnières-sur-Seine, to a long line of protestant farmers. In his youth he was sent to Geneva to be trained as a pastor, however, during his studies, he lost his faith and returned to his family a left-wing atheist. Yet he continued to be influenced by Protestantism throughout his life, with a mixture of Kantian philosophy, and vehemently opposed absolutism, irrationalism and Catholicism.

In 1908, at the age of 35, Henri Barbusse published his second novel, L’Enfer (translated in 1918 by Edward J. O’Brien as The Inferno). However, it would be Le Feu (Under Fire), published in 1916, after, and based on, his service in ‘The Great War’, that would gain him worldwide celebrity and recognition as a writer. For this reason, L’Enfer, despite being an excellent philosophical meditation on the human condition, is often overlooked and not as widely known as his later works.

His early works focussed on realism, existentialism, pessimism and the suffering of mankind, which all had a large part to play in L’Enfer. As a young writer he was deeply involved and interested in social issues, and would go on to found the World Committee Against War and Fascism in 1932. In 1914, he signed up to fight in the First World War, where he fought in the trenches for 17 months, until he was removed from active service due to his age, exhaustion, dysentery and damage to his lungs. After which, he became a pacifist and opposed imperialism and militarism. From 1919 onwards, he became a staunch supporter of Bolshevism, and in 1923 he became the first French writer to join the French Communist Party, inspiring a wave of French intellectuals to do the same.

He spent the rest of his life fighting against tyranny and fascism, and upholding human rights, liberty and peace. He was involved in numerous socially conscious committees and organisations that spanned across the world, founding the Clarté (Clarity) movement and magazine, named for one of his books. Henri Barbusse died on the 30th of August 1935 of pneumonia in Moscow, 500,000 Parisians attended his funeral, and he was buried at the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

The novel format allows Barbusse to explore, and deal with, philosophical ideas in a manner that engages the reader and takes them with him on his meditative wanderings. The story follows a young provincial man who comes to Paris to work in a bank, and takes up a room in a boarding house. He has grown indifferent to the world and its people. On his first night, he discovers a hole in the wall, through which he can see and hear the goings on in the next room. He witnesses the entire spectrum of humanity and quickly becomes obsessed with the lives and stories of the people he observes, gradually realising this is a means of better understanding the human condition. The young man seeks to understand what lurks beneath the masks people wear; who they are in their most private and intimate moments. The narrator becomes obsessive and spends so much time observing the goings on he becomes blind, sore and unable to move. At the end of the story his own life becomes a living hell, and he despairs when he realises that he can no longer live the life he dreamed of, and never again bear witness to anything. The hole in the wall gave him godlike powers, to see people for who they truly were, but much like Prometheus his godlike powers came at a terrible price.

Suffering plays a major role in Barbusse’s novel, from Amy’s outpourings of misery to her lover, to the narrator’s own pain in not being able to realise his hopes and dreams due to his decrepit state at the end of the story.

In the scenes with the couple having an affair, the narrator realises Amy is deeply unhappy and is using the affair to escape her misery. But her lover tells her one cannot escape misery, and that happiness can only exist with its counterpart, stating: It is an error to believe that we can be happy in perfect calm and clearness, as abstract as a formula. We are made too much out of shadow and some form of suffering. If everything that hurts us were to be removed, what would remain?

Barbusse’s tragic tale does, however, have an overall optimistic element to it. Just as we benefited from Prometheus’s sacrifice, so too must we learn from that of the nameless narrator. He has left himself blind and crippled so that we may learn something from his journey. His book hints at a better future, despite the suffering of mankind. Happiness needs unhappiness. Joy goes hand in hand with sorrow. It is thanks to the shadow that we exist. We must not dream of an absurd abstraction. We must guard the bond that links us to blood and earth. ‘Just as I am!’ Remember that. We are a great mixture. The Young man, observes the whole of humanity, and discovers that true infinity lies within each of us. He discovers that though the world around us has no meaning, it is in each of us that lies the meaning we seek and indeed the opportunity for greatness

Barbusse was deeply influenced by Kantian Ethics, believing that, through rationality and the categorical imperative (essentially do unto others…), we could create a fairer and more just society. He believed that by taking the best parts of the religious framework one could create a modern religion/morality in which all strive to be the best they can be, akin to Nietzsche’s Übermensch. Barbusse was however deeply critical of religion, and particularly the absolutism found within Catholicism, demonstrated clearly in his scene with the priest and the dying man.

In order to create this new, fairer, more morale world, we would have to sever ties with what ails the current one, and dispense with notions such as patriotism, which will ever continue to maintain war and exhaust the world, yet he acknowledges that we, as people, cling to what we know, and are deeply fearful of change. This all too human struggle is best represented in the discussion between the two doctors, which shows us Barbusse’s views on the matter, and is indeed a foreshadowing of Barbusse’s future with the French Communist Party. They talk of a need for progress and people’s clinging on to, and refusal to dismiss, notions of the past. The older Doctor demonstrates the irrationality and hypocrisy inherent to the human mind, despite acknowledging that change/progress must take place, we as humans fear and hate change, we refuse to take the plunge, fearing a change of state.

The omniscient powers, the hole in the wall gives the narrator, allow him to see through the characters he observes, coming upon truths of which they themselves are not aware. A great example of this is the affair between Amy and her nameless poet. He sees that despite the declarations of their love to one another, they do not truly love each other. When they embrace, instead of witnessing joy and happiness, as he expected, he saw in them sadness and pain, as though it were a heart-rending farewell rather than a passionate meeting of lovers. He sees that what Amy seeks from her lover is not his love nor his embrace but the opportunity to escape and forget her miserable existence for a brief moment, and her lover desires only her body. Barbusse writes: Their desires were not the same. They seemed united, but they dwelt far apart. They did not talk the same language. When they spoke of the same things. They scarcely understood each other, and to my eyes, from the very first, their union appeared to be broken more than if they had never known each other.

Throughout the story the narrator witnesses the entire spectrum of humanity, he witnesses birth and death, love and betrayal, and suffering and happiness. We, the readers, like Barbusse’s nameless narrator, are voyeurs; flies on the wall. Yet we leave unscathed and can benefit from the lessons he learnt.

Humanity is the desire for novelty founded upon the fear ofdeath

Henri Barbusse, Hell

Happiness needs unhappiness. Joy goes hand in hand with sorrow. It is thanks to the shadow that we exist. We must not dream of an absurd abstraction. We must guard the bond that links us to blood and earth. ‘Just as I am!’ Remember that. We are a great mixture.

Henri Barbusse, Hell

INTRODUCTION

to the 1918 edition

By Edward J O’Brien

In introducing M. Barbusse’s most important book to a public already familiar with Under Fire, it seems well to point out the relation of the author’s philosophy to his own time, and the kinship of his art to that of certain other contemporary French and English novelists.

L’Enfer has been more widely read and discussed in France than any other realistic study since the days of Zola. The French sales of the volume, in 1917 alone, exceeded a hundred thousand copies, a popularity all the more remarkable from the fact that its appeal is based as much on its philosophical substance as on the story which it tells.

Although M. Barbusse is one of the most distinguished contemporary French writers of short stories, he has found in the novel form the most fitting literary medium for the expression of his philosophy, and it is to realism rather than romanticism that he turns for the exposition of his special imaginative point of view. And yet this statement seems to need some qualification. In his introduction to Pointed Roofs, by Dorothy Richardson, Mr. J.D. Beresford points out that a new objective literary method is becoming general in which the writer’s strict detachment from his objective subject matter is united to a tendency, impersonal, to be sure, to immerse himself in the life surrounding his characters. Miss May Sinclair points out that writers are beginning to take the complete plunge for the first time, and instances as examples, not only the novels of Dorothy Richardson, but those of James Joyce.

Now it is perfectly true that Miss Richardson and Mr. Joyce have introduced this method into English fiction, and that Mr. Frank Swinnerton has carried the method a step further in another direction, but before these writers there was a precedent in France for this method, of which perhaps the two chief exemplars were Jules Romains and Henri Barbusse. Although the two writers have little else in common, both are intensely conscious of the tremendous, if imponderable, impact of elemental and universal forces upon personality, of the profound modifications which natural and social environment unconsciously impress upon the individual life, and of the continual interaction of forces by which the course of life is changed more fundamentally than by less imperceptible influences. Both M. Romains and M. Barbusse perceive, as the fundamental factor influencing human life, the contraction and expansion of physical and spiritual relationship, the inevitable ebb and flow perceived by the poet who pointed out that we cannot touch a flower without troubling of a star.

M. Romains has found his literary medium in what he calls unanimism. While M. Barbusse would not claim to belong to the same school, and in fact would appear on the surface to be at the opposite pole of life in his philosophy, we shall find that his detachment, founded, though it is, upon solitude, takes essentially the same account of outside forces as the philosophy of M. Romains.

He perceives that each man is an island of illimitable forces apart from his fellows, passionately eager to live his own life to the last degree of self-fulfilment, but continually thwarted by nature and by other men and women, until death interposes and sets the seal of oblivion upon all that he has dreamed and sought.

And he has set himself the task of disengaging, as far as possible, the purpose and hope of human life, of endeavouring to discover what promise exists for the future and how this promise can be related to the present, of marking the relationship between eternity and time, and discovering, through the tragedies of birth, love, marriage, illness and death, the ultimate possibility of human development and fulfilment.

The Inferno is therefore a tragic book. But I think that the attentive reader will find that the destructive criticism of M. Barbusse, in so far as it is possible for him to agree