The existentialist craze was so pervasive it drew affectionate parody from inside.

Evidence

Sartre’s friend Boris Vian spoofed the craze in his 1947 novel L’écume des jours, translated as Froth on the Daydream or Mood Indigo. This surreal and playful romance includes, as a side character, a famous philosopher called Jean-Sol Partre. When Partre gives a lecture, he arrives on an elephant and mounts a throne, accompanied by his consort the Countess de Mauvoir. An extraordinary radiance emanates from his slender body. The audience is so enraptured that his words are drowned out by the cheering, and at the end the hall collapses in rubble from pressure of numbers. Partre watches, delighted to see everyone committing themselves with such engagement. The real Simone de Beauvoir enjoyed Vian’s satire, and called it a work of ‘enormous tenderness’. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 532

Categorization

• CANDY: The elephant-mounted philosopher parody whose fans literally collapse the lecture hall is a delightful, standalone anecdote.
• XREF: connects to: Viral mockery brought sincere affection to a once-despised subculture — W. David Marx, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the…, 287

Broader Connections

• Viral mockery brought sincere affection to a once-despised subculture #exemplifies (0.78) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 287