3
All Power to Imagination
It was now, in the midst of the most activist period of his political life, that Sartre published the most wholly contemplative of all his works. In preparation since the mid-1950s, according to Sartre's own testimony, and having monopolized his energies since 1959, Volumes I and II of L'Idiot de la famille finally appeared in 1971, Volume III the next year. Even on their own ground they are a shock to most readers. Deceptively presented in volumes the size of the Critique, Saint Genet and L'Etre et le Néant, they comprised 2,800 closely-printed pages – a total of one and one quarter million words. These three enormous tomes were equal in length to the entire ten volumes of Sartre's Situations, published over thirty years. They made up perhaps a quarter of his collected writings and, more striking still, exceeded the entire bulk of Flaubert's published works and juvenilia.
Close study of the questions left unresolved at the end of the third volume alone suggests that Sartre might have gone on to produce a fourth perhaps equal in size to the first three, had not failing health and eyesight led him to abandon the project in 1975. What was it that drove him to this herculean expenditure of energy – on a project which, moreover, he seemed to regard with deep ambivalence? Discussing it with old or new friends, he was alternately diffident and apologetic, and never accorded it any importance comparable to that of L'Etre et le Néant or the Critique.
Why, then, did he refuse to abandon it 'in the face of gauchiste demands that he undertake a more political project? He would finish it, he said, because he had by then devoted too much time to it for such a volte-face to be conceivable, because 'perhaps one day, independently of
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its value, this kind of book will be able to serve the masses',1 and because he was simply too old to change completely from a classical into a leftist intellectual. He summarized his negative feelings towards the Flaubert project in a remarkable lecture given in Brussels in early 1972: 'for the last seventeen years I have been engaged in a work on Flaubert which can be of no interest to the workers, since it is written in a complicated and definitely bourgeois style. Furthermore, the first two volumes of this work were bought and read by bourgeois reformists, professors, students and the like. It was not written by the people or for the people; it was the product of a bourgeois philosopher's reflections over the course of most of his life. Two volumes have appeared, the third is with the printer, and I am preparing the fourth. I am committed to it – meaning that I am sixty-seven years old, I have been working on it since I was fifty, and before that I dreamed about it.
'Now we must say that this work, assuming that it has some value, by its very nature represents the age-old bourgeois swindle of the people. The book ties me to bourgeois readers. Through it, I am still bourgeois and will remain so as long as I continue to work on it. However, another side of myself, which rejects my ideological interests, is fighting against my identity as a classical intellectual. That side of me knows very well that if I have not been co-opted, I have come within a hair of it. And since I am challenging myself, since I refuse to be an elitist writer who takes himself seriously, I find myself among those who are struggling against bourgeois dictatorship. I want to reject my bourgeois situation. There is thus a very special contradiction within me: I am still writing books for the bourgeoisie, yet I feel solidarity with the workers who want to overthrow it. Those workers were the ones who frightened the bourgeoisie in 1968 and who are the victims of greater repression today. As one of them, I should be punished. Yet as the author of Flaubert, I am the enfant terrible of the bourgeoisie and should be co-opted.'2
The gravamen of Sartre's self-criticism was that the Flaubert was for the bourgeoisie, not the workers; it was a work of contemplation, not of agitation or struggle. This rather adventitious act of self-flagellation obscured the fundamental truth of his itinerary even as it
1. Sartre, p.130.
2. 'Justice et l'Etat', Situations, X, pp.61-62; 'Justice and the State', Life/Situations, pp.185-86 (translation changed).
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expressed it. The Flaubert was, after all, a product of defeat. L'Idiot de la famille was erected over the ruin of the Critique, the collapse of his political hope, his role as political intellectual and the project of a committed theatre. It was a work of withdrawal, in which Sartre's thought left the world and became absorbed in the life and work of another intellectual recluse. L'Idiot de la famille was in fact unique among Sartre's works; and his self-criticism of his past as a 'classical intellectual' was both unduly harsh and misleading. If he was never 'radical' enough to try to give voice to the masses, or to place direct action above literary engagement, he had from the very outset written with a mission. Even L'Imagination, we may recall, waged a pitched battle with the theorists of the thing-image on the grounds that they were threatening human freedom. It was only in the sixties and seventies, as the rupture begun in Les Mots was made complete, that he ceased to be an activist writer – apparently under the pressure of events, but fundamentally because of the disruption of his project of engagement. His disillusionment, and consequent separation of moral-political action from writing, was a major event in Sartre's career, marking a kind of retirement which gave him the opportunity to write without practical end in view. Not since the descriptive sections of L'Imaginaire had Sartre so immersed himself in studies without immediate relevance. He was interested now not in changing his reader or achieving a political effect but in studying Gustave Flaubert so as to discover what can be known about a person. He studied Flaubert for his own sake – not for any lessons that might be learnt from his failures, as in the 1947 study of Baudelaire, and not for any paths to liberation that might be opened by thereby, as in the study of Genet five years later. In so doing, Sartre created a work which was a pioneering effort in human understanding – and returned to the imaginary pole of his earliest work.
What Can We Know About a Man?
In defeat and withdrawal, Sartre created a consummately strange work, a superb study lacking all sense of proportion. It was first of all, a remarkably ambitious biography – 'its subject: what can we know about a man these days. It seemed to me that the only way to answer this question was to study a specific case: what do we know about
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Gustave Flaubert, for instance.'3 We have seen Sartre say of his Flaubert that 'eventually, everything can be communicated and that – without being God, being a man like any other – one can eventually arrive at a perfect understanding of another man as long as one has all the information necessary'. Released from its old commitments, Sartre's intellectual energy was redirected into an exploration of astonishing intensity. To communicate everything, to understand Flaubert completely – this was the goal of L'Idiot de la famille.
How do we go about understanding a person? Most biographies, such as Enid Starkie's Flaubert: The Making of the Master, employ a range of approaches, never spelling out their goals or methodological assumptions, operating by a kind of intelligent common sense. Thus, while refusing to speculate about Flaubert's deeper motivations or his emotional conflicts, Starkie assumes that the city of Rouen must have affected his character and so devotes more space to it than to his mother. She confirms his homosexuality, assuming it to be important, but refuses to speculate about his hostility to his brother Achille. She does not explore the possible autobiographical meaning of her subject's early writings, but acutely considers and resolves many problems of Flaubert scholarship. Starkie accepts her methods as given, and is above all concerned to use them to depict Flaubert – his actions, the main events of his life, his development as a writer, his friendships and love affairs, his aesthetic doctrine, the structure and meaning of Madame Bovary. All this she does, going up to 1857 in only four hundred pages of text, with a second volume given over to the rest of Flaubert's life.4
The contrast between this successful conventional work and L'Idiot de la famille could not be greater. Sartre's declared objective was to find out what could be known about a man today; and this general question could be answered only by studying a specific case – Gustave Flaubert, 'for example'. Critics have been irritated by the apparently ancillary role allotted to Flaubert himself.5 But the purpose of Sartre's study was to develop a method. The particular interest of Flaubert quite apart, he sought to write a systematic and self-
3. L'Idiot de la famille, Paris 1971, vol. I., (f/I). p. 1; Introduction trans, in Le Monde Weekly, May 20-26, 1971, p.6.
4. Enid Starkie, Flaubert: The Making of the Master, New York 1967.
5. See, for example, David Caute, 'The Refusal to be Good', Modern Occasions, Spring 1972.
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conscious essay in biography which might be applied elsewhere. In contrast with Starkie's relatively unself-conscious, eclectic, and even self-contradictory method, Sartre was concerned to know exactly where he was going at every moment and why. It was not enough, for example, simply to suggest that Gustave's mother did not love him, that he had difficulty in grasping the meaning of language, or that he gave himself over to play-acting. In each case, Sartre set out the general framework within which these facts were analysed: how love was connected with self-valuation and so with an active approach to the world; what language meant as one of the child's first encounters with the world; the meaning of acting. This approach was maintained throughout the book, time and again taking Sartre far away from Gustave to develop the tools necessary for understanding him. In the process, biography became philosophy, then psychological theory, subsumed the biographies of Alfred Le Poittevin and Charles Leconte de Lisle, and the history of Rouen College during the 1830s, digressed to study laughter as a social fact, and to explain how pet dogs relate to the human language, and incorporated a full-length study of the contradictory demands placed on the writer of 1850.
Did Gustave's mother love him? Starkie tells us only that she was 'of a gloomy disposition', adding the few available facts of her life. Her procedure here, as elsewhere, is to stay as close as possible to her data, venturing hypotheses rarely, and even then emphasizing their hypothetical character; her goal is less to explain Gustave than to describe him. Sartre, on the other hand, used the facts as sighting-points in his project of understanding. And as explanations on one level entail yet other levels, so Sartre moved further and further from these primary data in an attempt to elucidate Gustave's character structure. Working from the available evidence he wrote an entire chapter on Caroline Flaubert, explaining how she must have felt and what her needs must have been. Orphan of a physician, foster-child of another, she became the devoted wife of yet a third. Her obedience, together with Achille-Cleophas's rural petit-bourgeois background and domination of the family, made her into an 'incestuous daughter', an 'eternal minor'. Hence, she must have wanted to furnish Achille-Cleophas with an heir and so welcomed Achille's birth. She must have wanted a daughter in whom she could relive, but with parental care and love, her own childhood. She could not, then, have wanted Gustave, and in consequence must have cared for him meticulously
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without loving him. Thus Gustave must have been cared for yet deprived, and out of this combination developed his characteristic passivity towards reality.
The exhaustiveness of Sartre's search for the core of Gustave's psychic constitution was only one cause of the extreme length of his study. By page 2,136, Sartre had reached Flaubert's seizure of early 1844, a point which Starkie reaches by page 120 of her account. Gustave was 22, and would now abandon the law for a semi-invalid state and a writing career. But while for Starkie the major events are yet to come, Sartre held that the decisive steps had already been taken. The brevity of the one and verbosity of the other were due to their very different analytic approaches to their common subject.
Starkie seeks to describe Flaubert as fully and accurately as possible. Certain areas yield no conclusive answers; they will, therefore, be omitted. For the rest, she assembles all the available facts in an interesting and swiftly-paced account. We see Flaubert from the outside, and vividly. Reading Gertrude Collier's memoir, for example, Starkie notes 'the extraordinary beauty and charm of Flaubert at twenty, and the originality and naturalness of his bearing. As we have already seen he was tall, slight and graceful in all his movements, he had the most faultless limbs and the great charm of utter self-consciousness in his own physical and mental beauty.'6 Nothing could interest Sartre less. L'Idiot de la famille sought to explain Gustave Flaubert. Sartre assumed that his readers possessed all the relevant information, that they had read Flaubert's major works and were already acquainted with the details of his life, and devoted his analysis to an interior biography. To explain Gustave, to understand why he wrote Madame Bovary and what he meant by it, he would probe beneath the available information and try to grasp the underlying character structure. Who was Gustave Flaubert? On one level, everything he did and said; but much more fundamentally, he was a particular project, energized by a particular way of experiencing and pursuing his needs in all their contradictoriness and complexity.
Existential Psychoanalysis
We return, at the end of Sartre's career, to the terrain originally sketched in L'Etre et le Néant under the heading of existential
6. Flaubert, p.79.
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psychoanalysis. In fact, although this dimension of Sartre's work has not been emphasized in this study, it was one of his constant preoccupations. In 1943 he announced a programme of existential psychoanalysis as biography; in 1947 he published a moralizing study of Baudelaire's bad faith – 'a very inadequate, an extremely bad one'7 – and soon after wrote almost five hundred pages on Mallarmé, most of which was later mislaid. In 1952 he published Saint Genet, and the next year Les Mots was begun. 1954 saw the commencement of what was to become L'Idiot de la famille, put aside after almost a thousand pages had been written. In 1957 he published part of a never-completed study of Tintoretto as well as Question de méthode, which contained important guidelines for biographical analysis. Then, in 1959, he resumed almost uninterrupted work on Flaubert. As we shall see, Sartre absorbed both Marxism and psychoanalysis into his developing biographical project; and in it, the radicalism of his early thought was preserved and deepened. His original notion of an irreducible freedom here assumed its only viable form: even if in response to impossible demands and in totally oppressive situations, Sartre argued, it is we who make ourselves.
Still, critics of Sartre's Flaubert were most discomfited precisely by his effort to reduce the richness and detail of Flaubert's life and works to a single project, however complex and contradictory.8 Indeed, Sartre's approach did submerge detail. It allowed for no pluralism or drift, either within or without. Set at a very early age, Gustave's life was his project, unfolding itself across time: the exterior was interiorized, and the interior, in turn, was exteriorized. For Gustave to have had a number of goals, or to have been ambivalent or lackadaisical, would itself have been a project, as would his passive submission to events. These are various ways of choosing to be oneself, of organizing one's needs and purposes and projecting them coherently in a life. This is to say, in Sartre's original terms, that humans are intentional – or, as he would have said in 1971, dialectical. We act in order to achieve purposes; our life is that complex but comprehensible set of actions. To understand someone therefore requires an interior study, one which first grasps the essential Gustave and then
7. 'Itinerary of a Thought', p.50.
8. See, for example, Harry Levin, 'A Literary Enormity: Sartre on Flaubert' The Journal of the History of Ideas, XXXIII, 4, October-December 1972.
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reconstructs the project behind his actions. This regressive study tries to reconstruct what might conventionally be called his underlying character structure. Then a complementary progressive analysis shows how this structure was created in his particular family situation and how it unfolded as a project in his life.
Gustave's basic project had its source in early childhood. Sartre's angry book on Baudelaire paid no attention to the poet's childhood, but rather assumed a kind of freedom to change in terms of which Baudelaire must be judged an escapist. Genet dwelt briefly on the child and discovered there the problem which must be overcome later, but not the project of overcoming which was Genet's liberation. The short study of Tintoretto began when the painter was already a young man of thirty, passionately trying to win a master's reputation. Les Mots, on the other hand, did focus on the formative power of early childhood, but not at all with an analytic eye. Sartre located there only a general sense of his schooling in the imaginary as a way of avoiding reality; no problems or contradictions were disclosed. L'Idiot de la famille was his first effort to discover the adult wholly in the infant.
Little Gustave was born into a family ruled by a paterfamilias who also happened to be a self-made man of science. This bourgeois family, bearing strong traces of the father's rural origins, produced an heir, Achille, destined to succeed his father as Master of the Hôtel-Dieu of Rouen. It also produced a second son, Gustave, destined to be inferior to the first-born, and a girl, longed for by his mother. Before Gustave, other children were born who died at or near birth, so that from the beginning he was handled and cared for as someone bound to die. Destined for inferiority by his bourgeois father, lacking any means of revolt in this quasi-feudal family, cared for meticulously but never loved, Gustave early developed his main character traits: passivity, a sense of destiny, an inability to relate to the real worl.9 He did indeed have a 'Golden Age' at around three or four, when his father loved him and took him around the countryside on his house calls. But lacking the early reciprocity of mother-love, Gustave developed no sense of the reciprocity of language: his father cast him out of grace when, at seven, he could not yet read. So, this child
9. For a good, if ironic, summary of this line of analysis see the Times Literary, Supplement, September 24, 1971, p.1133.
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would become imaginary – actor, then author, then poet, then artist. The artist would write Madame Bovary.
Contat and Rybalka provide an admirable summary of Sartre's analysis: 'Excluded from the active, positive, and utilitarian universe of the Flauberts, [Gustave] assumed the familial sentence which condemned him to inertia and, thanks to an intentional and memorable crisis which brought him to his brother's feet one night in January, 1844, at Pont-l'Evêque, avoided the necessity of "taking up a trade" and won the right to devote himself to the passive and quasi-feminine activity which writing will be for him. By means of this writing, he is going to try satanically to make the world unreal by thawing himself and the world headlong into the imaginary, thereby taking the point of view of death on life, of nothingness on being, and adopting a God's-eye view in opposition to science and to his father's triumphant reason. By Presenting Flaubert's neurosis as a passive dynamic (a choice undergone) engendered dialectically by a strict familial and socio-cultural conditioning (his constitution) which was in turn assumed by a trapped freedom (his becoming a person), Sartre gives an answer in his first two volumes to the question, How does one become a writer? Or more exactly, what kind of man did Flaubert have to be to write Madame Bovary?'10
Might this be termed a Freudian account? Certainly Sartre had changed enormously since La Transcendence de l'ego, holding now that individuals were decisively shard in their earliest years. He made no use of Freud's conceptual armamentorium – repression, the unconscious, the tripartite personality structure or the stages of sexual development. But he insisted on the absolute primacy of early childhood, of family structure, of the relations between infant and parents. Yet his was a rather unusual determinism: 'there is spontaneity but starting from a prefabricated essence.'11 That is to say, Gustave did develop his own 'free singular project', but only on the basis of the given internal and external conditions and only along the route made possible and necessary by that network of conditions. Acceptance of these qualifications, of this notion of character, did not lead Sartre to any behaviourist determinism or mechanistic causality. Even from the first day, he insisted, people are fully people and
10. crw, 71/540, p.571.
11. f/I, p.351 n.
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behave dialectically, creating themselves on the basis of, but by going beyond, the given conditions.
Sartre gave the impression that he had still not read widely in psychological and psychoanalytical theory or pondered it deeply, for he still insisted on combating the notion of the unconscious, even as he deployed his own very similar idea. What after all was le vécu (lived experience) but an effort to affirm human intentionality even at the interior of neurosis? 'The conception of "lived experience" marks my change since L'Etre et le Néant. My early work was a rationalist philosophy of consciousness. It was all very well for me to dabble in apparently non-rational processes in the individual; the fact remains that L'Etre et le Néant is a monument of rationality. But in the end it becomes an irrationalism, because it cannot account rationally for those processes which are "below" consciousness and which are also rational, but lived as irrational. Today, the notion of "lived experience" represents an effort to preserve that presence to itself which seems to me indispensable for the existence of any psychic fact, while at the same time this presence is so opaque and blind before itself that it is also an absence from itself. Lived experience is always simultaneously present to itself and absent from itself. In developing this notion, I have tried to surpass the traditional psychoanalytic ambiguity of psychic facts which are both teleological and mechanical, by showing that every psychic fact involves an intentionality which aims at something, while among them a certain number can only exist if they are comprehended, but neither named nor known. The latter include what I call the "stress" of a neurosis. A neurosis is in the first instance a specific wound, a defective structure which is a certain way of living a childhood. But this is only the initial wound: it is then patched up and bandaged by a system which covers and soothes the wound, and which then, like anti-bodies in certain cases, suddenly does something abominable to the organism. The unity of this system is the neurosis. The work of its "stress" is intentional, but it cannot be seized as such without disappearing. It is precisely for this reason that if it is transferred into the domain of knowledge, by analytic treatment, it can no longer be reproduced in the same manner.'12 In short, Sartre addressed psychoanalytic theory in the same terms as he had addressed Marxian theory, maintaining that it must be dialectical if it
12. 'Itinerary of a Thought', p.50.
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was to explain human experience, that it must see its world of study as turning on intentional human behaviour. Mental illness, as he said elsewhere, was 'the issue that the free organism, in its total unity, invents in order to be able to live in an unliveable situation.'13 This was the most radical affirmation of L'Idiot de la famille: Flaubert made himself.
Return to the Irréel
Did Sartre succeed in showing Gustave's self-creation? Almost. The book was a gamble, the most extreme in a life-time of extreme efforts. Freed from his sense of moral or political mission, Sartre was able to bring the accumulated power of his whole intellectual career to bear on this culminating work. But, freed from the customary tension between reality and the irréel, his thought now crossed barriers that previously would have limited and disciplined it, and lost all sense of scale.
It was not only that the book was so often chaotic and contorted, verbose and undisciplined – these traits were shared with L'Etre et le Néant, Saint Génet, and the Critique. L'Idiot de la famille displayed the penchant for artificial construction that its predecessors had also shown while lacking even their often minimal sense of proportion; it preserved their wordiness without their accompanying sense of drama. Free of Sartre's usual moralism, the book was also unmotivated by any need to reach the real world. Much more than the Critique, it read like the endless monologue of a patient in psychoanalysis, replete with false starts and blind alleys, self-absorbed and wholly uncontrolled, and unremitting in its demands on its audience. L'Idiot de la famille violated the elementary rules of human communication which Sartre had laid down in Qu'est-ce que la littérature?. Self-indulgent and tedious, it lacked all respect for its readers.
Moreover, it is a work which the reader is likely to experience as too long from the start. No distinction is made between the activity of research and its socially communicable results. The reader must accompany the exploration, wherever it leads and for however long it may take, attempting to elicit what is pertinent and to establish conclusions in a way that Sartre himself was wholly unconcerned to do.
13. Laing and Cooper, Reach and Violence, p.7.
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For example, analysing Flaubert's juvenilia in order to establish the elements of his attitude towards his father, Sartre takes the reader through the specific meanings of Passion et Vertu, Quidquid volueris, Rêve d'enfer, Bibliomanie, La Peste à Florence, Un Parfum à sentir, and the literary journal composed by Gustave at the age of thirteen. One hundred and thirty pages are devoted to roughly an equal number of Flaubert's. Sartre does not analyse all of Flaubert's early writings; he selects the most relevant among them. Yet with too great a sense of leisure, he plunges into them one after another, with a total disregard for proportion, for the reader's stamina, or for the norms of scholarship and argument.
Many reasons might be cited for the monstrous growth of this book, but the most fundamental is that here the themes and preoccupations of the early Sartre returned, now completely untrammelled. If the sense of interiority and attraction to the imaginary were constant aspects of his early work, in his study of Flaubert interiority and the imaginary have become the pure element of his activity. Sartre's thought had finally deserted the world for the irréel. L'Idiot is a book nearly devoid of action, a wholly inward study. The extended textual analysis of Flaubert's juvenilia, for example, is part of one of two chapters which together take up 468 pages. In these pages Gustave commits not a single physical act. Their entire space is devoted to a study from several angles of the boy's intentional structure. First the basic elements are isolated, using his early writings; then Sartre reconstructs the relationship between each developing layer of Gustave's character structure, showing how one passes into and produces the next; finally these are considered in terms of the way in which Gustave lived them in relation to his parents' ideologies. The second part of the book has Flaubert performing his first plays in the billiards room of the Master of the Hôtel-Dieu, then entering school, clowning with his classmates, reading at night, rebelling and being expelled. But everywhere the main action is internal: Gustave's slow transformation from imaginary child into artist.
In part, of course, the book's inwardness, its air of unreality, is that of its subject. But only in part: Starkie's Flaubert remains a lively account, in which events that matter little to Sartre are interestingly described. What Sartre gives, on the other hand, is a detailed analysis of the meaning of events. 250 pages near the end of the second volume are devoted to the implications of Gustave's fainting fit at
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Pont L'Evêque, which !ed to his semi-invalid life – an episode to which Starkie gives three pages. Satre's interest was not in Gustave's actions but in the ways in which he interiorized his situation and thus created himself. His achievement was to deconstruct the almost infinite complexity of an individual into the intentional unity of a single project. These explanations can have none of the drama of a narrative account, which is why L'Idiot cannot help but be a 'bad' story. It is not a 'story' at all, but perhaps a seminal work for specialists, to be studied and mastered over a period of months and even years, one which presumes a thorough acquaintance with Flaubert's life and writings, post-Romantic literature, nineteenth-century French social, economic and political history.
But can this approach give us the real Gustave Flaubert? We may accept, as I do, Sartre's claim that Gustave's intentional structure is decisive, but what he did is equally pertinent to any analysis whose purpose is total understanding. However, Sartre did not offer to explore an essential but neglected dimension of Gustave which must later be integrated with others of comparable importance. Rather, he thought of his analysis as rendering the whole person. This claim recalls the constitutional weakness of Sartre's stress on interiority – a weakness which was reproduced again and again in his writings. It fundamentally precluded any sure and confident approach to the real world. Now, as Sartre accepted unprecedented activist demands on his time, his writing surrendered itself unreservedly to a kind of pure interiority. He seemed almost to have a prejudice against seeing Gustave in action, seemed always to prefer moving behind facts to speculate about their meaning.
Moreover, the study was also a work of imagination. If Flaubert was an 'imaginary person' it was not only because he became a writer and made himself profoundly unreal in doing so. He was also, now, a character – the creation of Jean-Paul Sartre. L'Idiot de la famille, Sartre declared, was a 'true novel', because it portrayed Flanbert 'the way I imagine him to have been'.14 Let us follow a typical lengthy passage, in which Sartre's imagination is at work creating his subject: 'I imagine that Madame Flaubert, a wife by vocation, was a mother from duty. An excellent mother, but not a charming one: punctual,
14. 'Sur "L'Idiot de la famille",' Situations, X, p.94; 'On The Idiot of the Family', Life/Situations, p. l12.
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assiduous, skilful. Nothing more. The younger son was cautiously handled: his swaddling clothes were changed in an instant; he didn't have to cry, he was always fed in the nick of time. Gustave's aggressiveness did not have the opportunity to develop. But he was frustrated: well before weaning but without crying or rebellion; lack of tenderness is scarcely to the pain of love as undernourishment is to hunger. Later, the ill-loved child will consume himself; for the moment he does not really suffer: the need to be loved appeared from birth, before the infant would even be able to recognize the Other, but it does not yet express itself by precise desires. Frustration does not affect him – or scarcely does it so – it makes him: I mean that this objective negation penetrates him and that it becomes in him an impoverishment of life: an organic poverty and some ingratitude or other at the heart of life-experience. No anguish, he never has occasion to feel himself abandoned. Nor alone. The moment a desire awakens, it is immediately fulfilled; if a pin pricks him and he cries, a quick hand will remove the pain. But these precise operations are also parsimonious: everything is economized at the Flauberts, even time, which is money. Therefore he is washed, fed, cared for without haste but without useless complaisance. Particularly his mother, timid and cold, smiles hardly if at all, and doesn't chatter: why trouble to speak to this child who cannot understand? Gustave has much pain grasping this sparse character of the objective world, of otherness; when he becomes conscious of it, when he recognizes the faces leaning over his cradle, a first chance of love has already escaped him. He does not find himself, on the occasion of a caress, to be flesh and supreme end. It is now too late, for him to be, in his own eyes, the destination of maternal acts: he is their object, that is all. Why? He doesn't know: not a long time will be required for him to feel obscurely that he is a means. For Madame Flaubert, indeed, this child is the means for accomplishing her duties of motherhood; for the doctor-philosopher from whom the young woman is completely alienated, he is first a means for perpetuating the family. These discoveries will come later. For now, he has bypassed valorization: he has never felt his needs as sovereign necessities, the outer world has never been his jewel-box, his larder, the environment reveals itself to him gradually, as to others, but he has only known it first in this cold and dismal consistency that Heidegger has named "nur-vorbeilagen". The happy necessity of the loved child compensates and transcends his docility as
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an object to be manipulated; there is in his desires an intangible imperiousness which can appear as the rudimentary form of the project and, in consequence, of action. . . .'15
This characteristic paragraph is constructed from very scant information. Sartre imagines how little Gustave must have felt, based on how his mother must have acted, feeling as she must have done, given a few scanty facts about her: her childhood as an orphan, her apparent devotion to Achille-Cléophas, her sombre bearing, as reported by her niece. From these few facts, Sartre's account spirals upwards, generating its own facts as it goes, according to his understanding of basic structures of childhood, until it sights the passivity and imaginary posture of the mature Flaubert. The paragraph stands out, however, because Sartre follows it with a frank comment on its procedure: 'I confess: this is a fable. Nothing proves that it was like this. And, worse yet, the absence of these proofs – which would necessarily be of singular facts – returns us, even when we create fables, to schematism, to generality: my account fits infants in general, not Gustave in particular. No matter, I wanted to carry it to its conclusion for this reason alone: the real explanation, I can conjecture without the least resentment, could be exactly the opposite of the one that I invent; in any event it would have to pass along the paths that I indicate and would have to refute mine on the ground that I have defined: the body, love. I have spoken of maternal love: this is what gives the objective category of otherness for the newborn, it is this which in the first weeks permits the child to feel as other – from the moment he is able to recognize it – the satiny flesh of the breast. It goes without saying that filial love – the oral phase of sexuality – goes from birth to the encounter with the Other – it is the conduct of the mother which fixes its limits and intensity, which determines its internal structure. Gustave is immediately conditioned by his mother's indifference; he desires alone; his first sexual and alimentary impulse towards a "flesh-nourishment" is not reflected for him by a caress. . . .'16
This methodological aside asserts the necessity of constructing general schemata, and this on a firm and defensible basis. All children are shaped, from the outset, by the presence or lack of physical
15. f/I, pp.136-37.
16. f/I, pp.139-40.
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mother-love, and by its quality – anxious, intense, calm, ambivalent or whatever it may be. Given this woman, given who Gustave became, what must their initial relation have been? The imaginary recreation moves through rigorously defined channels, and given Sartre's goals, there is no other way to proceed. To reject the imaginary quality of Sartre's Flaubert, bizarre as it may seem, is to reject the entire enterprise. Nevertheless, to accept it is to accept as 'true' an account which is actually an endless spiral of speculation. The first two volumes of L'Idiot cannot but prompt the reader to ask whether the real, historical Flaubert has not been left irrecoverably behind.
Marxist Biography
Sartre would reply that the real Flaubert has not yet been reached. His interior and imaginary study is only the first stage of an analysis whose goal is to furnish a total understanding of Gustave Flaubert as a historical person, the novelist who wrote the great work of the Second Empire, Madame Bovary – above all, to enable us to understand Flaubert at work and in the world. So far he has merely been reconstructing the process whereby Gustave chose to become the man who later would write Madame Bovary.
Sartre's own understanding of existential psychoanalysis had undergone a deep change since he first formulated it. Saint Genet, for example, remained close to his original definition: 'I have tried to do the following: to indicate the limit of psychoanalytical interpretation and Marxist explanation and to demonstrate that freedom alone can account for a person in his totality; to show this freedom at grips with destiny, crushed at first by its mischances, than turning upon them and digesting them little by little; to prove that genius is not a gift but the way out that one invents in desperate cases; to learn the choice that a writer makes of himself, or of his life and of the meaning of the universe, including even the formal characteristics of his style and composition, even the structure of his images and of the particularity of his tastes; to review in detail the history of his liberation.'17 But, as he later commented, Genet was still 'very, very inadequate' at the level of institutions and of history. He saw Genet as an orphan placed with
17. Saint Genet: comédien et martyr, Paris 1952, p.536; trans. Bernard Frechtman, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, New York 1963.
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a peasant family; 'but all the same, this happened in 1925 or so and there was a whole context to this life which is quite absent. The Public Assistance, a foundling, represents a specific social phenomenon, and anyway Genet is a product of the twentieth century; yet none of this is registered in the book.'18 Sartre resumed work on Flaubert after completing Les Sequestrés d'Altona. In the meantime he had written Question de méthode and discussed, among other issues, the need for a biography which did justice to both the individual and his social reality. 'The idea of the book on Flaubert was to abandon these theoretical disquisitions, because they were ultimately getting us nowhere, and to try to give a concrete example of how it might be done.'19 Its aim was 'to try to demonstrate the encounter between the development of the person, as psychoanalysis has shown it to us, and the development of history.'20 Existentialist psychoanalysis did not now abandon its insistence on the individual creating himself, but it would attempt to show this praxis-process as the interiorization of a concrete lived history and its re-exteriorization as the life of this particular individual, who may, on this account, 'fulfil a historical role'.21
However, as we know, Sartre took up his Flaubert at a time of disillusionment – and perhaps, in some sense, because of it. How did he now fare as he laboured to understand Flaubert as a social individual? First of all, Sartre directly confronted his earlier weakness and negativity in relation to the social world. L'Idiot acknowledged the priority in human development of a mandate to live over the feeling of being de trop, which La Nausée and L'Etre et le Néant had made so much of. 'Pure lived life, the simple "being there",'22 was no longer primary; nor was individual praxis, which emerged only in and through a social world. L'Idiot differs from every one of Sartre's earlier biographical and autobiographical ventures in defining its subject's development wholly in terms of the socio-historical world. Sartre made this plain in his comment on the theme of 'sense and non-sense'. 'In truth sense and non-sense in a human life are human in principle and are transmitted to man in the earliest stages of his life by man himself. Thus we must dismiss those absurd formulas: "life has
18. 'Itinerary of a Thought', p.51.
19. Ibid., p.51.
20. Ibid., p.51.
21. Ibid., p.51.
22. f/I, p.141.
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sense"; "it has none"; "it has one that we give to it" – and understand that we discover our goals, the nonsense or the sense of our lives, as realities prior to this coming to consciousness, prior perhaps to our birth and prefabricated in the human universe. The sense of a life comes to the living man through the human society which sustains him and through the parents who engender him: for this reason it is also always a non-sense. But inversely the discovery of a life as nonsense (that of children who are supernumeraries, undernourished, consumed by parasites and fever in an underdeveloped society) reveals just as dearly the real sense of this society and, through this reversal, it is life-as organic need – which becomes, in its pure animal necessity, human sense and it is the society of men which, by the sentence of unsatisfied need, becomes pure human non-sense.''23 Sartre's new insistence was more than theoretical. He endeavored to show how Flaubert's character structure took shape within his society's primary formative institution, the family. His Marxist and Freudian analysis joined as he argued that adequate love led to self-worth, which alone enabled an individual to relate to the world reciprocally, from a sense of strength. Gustave's early inability to accept words as designating objects showed that he had been cut off from praxis, the cardinal social category, by his earliest contact with his mother. 'In this first moment acculturation without love reduces Gustave to the condition of a domestic animal.'24
His family – parvenu but patriarchal, resting on individual ability but seeking to found a dynasty – localized socio-historical reality and conveyed it to Gustave. For orientation and self-clarification, for example, the growing child was forced to choose between or somehow combine not an infinite variety of attitudes, but his father's bourgeois atomistic rationalism and his mother's deism. The mature Flaubert's reactionary political attitudes were prefigured in his early relationship of vassalage towards his father, in his rejection of bourgeois values of self-sufficiency and independence, in his desire to live as a rentier. Family structure and parental ideologies did not merely influence Gustave: his project of becoming a writer took shape through them; he constituted himself in terms of them.
At college in Rouen from 1831 to 1838 he experienced, with the
23. f/I, p.141.
24. f/I, p.147.
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other schoolboys, the collapse of the bourgeoisie's universalism, the realization of how narrow were its aspirations to freedom and democracy, and its capitulation to the church. The time for activism and politics was over: together, at night, they retreated into the imaginary, living out their fantasies in Romantic novels, plays and poetry. For some of the schoolboys this was a necessary preparation, for as we shall see, after 1830 the demands on literature were such that the writer had to dwell in the irréel. Those most capable of flourishing in this world of withdrawal were those, like Gustave, whose writing was an expression-solution of their neurosis.
Gustave Flaubert, then, was the person produced in and by this singular set of historical conditions. He had no unique instinctual drives, no specific talents, no inherited traits, no pre-given essence of his own which met and was affected by these conditions. Rather, he was that set of conditions as interiorized, lived, totalized, formed into a project, and re-exteriorized. Any male child, we might assume, born into that family on that date would have made himself into the author of Madame Bovary.
The Singular Universal
Nothing in this analysis mitigated the fundamental interiority and unreality of the first two volumes. Even at its best, Sartre's representation of socio-historical reality was far more ideological than material: he concerned himself far more with the father's – and later, Gustave's – ideology than with his concrete social relations. In Volume III, however, the study ceased to be an interior reconstruction and moved on to the sphere of action and concrete social reality. Sartre began what is by far the most interesting part of the study by asking its organizing question: how did this young neurotic, whose sickness made him unable to pursue law and gave him the freedom to write, create the signal work of the post-Romantic generation? Flaubert, who believed that 'the earth is the kingdom of Satan' and that 'the worst is always certain', withdrew from life, turned himself into a means to achieve beautiful, permanent works which would dissolve the world in imagination. He so resented change and adaptation to reality, so doggedly held to his morbid sense of the world's meaning, that his friend Maxime du Camp thought his neurosis an obstacle to writing. Sartre asked the opposite question: was not
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Gustave's 'nervous illness' in reality 'the means of writing Madame Bovary?'25
If Gustave did indeed choose the imaginary over the real, if Madame Bovary was indeed a neurotic work reflecting Gustave's horror of living, we are left to inquire how 'the return to the subjective had for practical result the production of an object in the social world'.26 In other words, 'how was the madness of a single person able to become collective madness, and better yet, the aesthetic reason of his epoch?'27 In other periods such morbid, misanthropic works have been passed over in silence: for so neurotic a work to become the acclaimed critical mirror of its epoch it had to strike deep neurotic chords in the 'objective Spirit'. 'To go still further we will say that Gustave's illness will permit him to objectify it in representative works only if it appears as a particularization of what must indeed be called a neurosis of the objective Spirit.'28 It was as if the objective neurosis of this moment of history affirmed itself through Flaubert's work. Sartre now turned his analysis around to seek in Gustave the interiorization and re-exteriorization of his the specific, if contradictory social imperatives laid before this new generation's art-in-the-making (art-à-faire).29
How can Gustave's neurosis be both social and individual? By what means can an objective process 'direct the internal evolution of his malaise and transform it ineluctably into neurosis because Art, to exist and pass through this disagreeable period, needs neurotic ministers'?30 In posing these questions, Sartre returned to the unresolved problem of the Critique: the nature of the ties between the individual and the collective. He now posited the existence of a practico-inert 'objective Spirit', which imposed demands, by way of the complete body of literature of any period (littérature-fait) on those who sought to create the literature of their age (littérature-à-faire). His fascinating discussion of this objective Spirit acknowledged the power of social and cultural forces but still refused them any other than a practico-inert status.31 However, to understand Flaubert's histor-
25. f/III, Paris 1972, p.25.
26. f/III, p.30.
27. f/III, p.32.
28. f/III, p.32.
29. f/III, p.39.
30. f/III, pp.39-40.
31. f/III, pp.41-66.
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icity – in the sense that Madame Bovary became the novel of a certain group of readers at a certain historical moment – was to have explained both how he interiorized the society and how he acted upon it and changed it through a great book. Such an explanation, Sartre affirmed, was the prime goal of his study. We must be clear about the significance of this intention for Sartre's work. Without necessarily having to settle the theoretical issues abandoned by the Critique, an adequate account of this particular singular universal, Gustave Flaubert, effectively entailed an understanding of the reality that had always eluded Sartre's grasp – an understanding of human sociality.
Sartre began by exploring the situation of the young writer of 1840. Faced with the universalism, concreteness, critical spirit and automony of the great works of the eighteenth century, the writer was also faced with the demand of the now victorious bourgeoisie for eulogies of itself. The revolutionary class of the eighteenth century, which had come to consciousness of itself through its literature, had ceased to represent universal values; it had installed its own particular forms of oppression, adulterated some of its early values such as equality, and established the market-place as the universal social image. No class had yet crystallized to contest the bourgeoisie, and hence, preservation of the autonomy of literature now meant a reversal of its partisan, combative posture of the 1760s. In order to preserve art, the young post-Romantic was to effect an unparalleled historical rupture with his audience: 'a brutal separation between writing and communication'.32 By placing contradictory demands upon its apprentices, the post-Romantic literature of bourgeois society posed questions that did not permit rational responses. In 'refusing to serve, to integrate itself into a class literature, the work becomes its own end, it poses itself for itself in an inhuman solitude, on the connected abolition of the reader and the author'.33 Lacking the opportunity to associate their desire for autonomy and contestation with a rising social class, the young writers remained bourgeois but became 'Knights of Nothingness', declassed themselves in an ideal, an unreal fashion and sought 'to deny everything in the name of nothing',34 Literature 'imposed itself on them, through the objective Spirit, as
32. f/III, p.98.
33. f/III, p.104.
34. f/III, p.140.
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having no other domain than the anti-real or pure unreality, posing itself for itself against the perceived world.'35 The young writer took flight from an impossible situation, choosing unreality over reality. The imaginary quality of writing – which hitherto had served literature's purpose of saying something – became an end in itself. His writing demanded 'a rupture with being'36 and so he renounced the world, became an exile living in solitude. Irréalisation was the cardinal norm of art after 1850, and the main ethical value of whoever aspired to write. Radical negation of self and of the world: 'in other words, Absolute Art insists upon itself as a suicide immediately followed by genocide.'37
If Absolute Art dictated a rupture with its audience- the writer would now write to be read by no one, or perhaps by fellow writers, or by a Supreme Reader – it must demand the artist's failure. The failure was inherent in the project of making oneself unreal. Divorced from the world but living in it, the petty clerk, teacher or small landowner would look on life as if seeing it from above, assumed the attitude of a tourist having no real links with the country visited. Living modestly, these writers sought to become a nobility of art: 'they have the duty to elevate themselves beyond the bourgeoisie, master of the world, and to make it ashamed of its petty quest for profit in producing this unheard-of luxury that no nobility has been able to create by itself, a masterpiece, free splendour and perfectly useless.'38 But this was impossible, a failure from the beginning. 'We must note that the neurotic element does not reside in the comedy itself, but in the actor's belief in his character.'
The post-Romantic writer also failed as a man, as art now became associated with social ineptitude and suffering.39 Between 1840 and 1850, these young men had already begun to define literature as feminine, the resort of men without virility who were utterly unable to adapt to society. Incapable of anything else, the writer took pride in his crippled state and gladly let himself become a means to an end: the creation of art. But the work itself must also fail, and this too became an almost religious value for Flaubert's generation. Litera-
35. f/III, p.142.
36. f/III, p.144.
37. f/III, p.144.
38. f/III, p.158.
39. f/III, p.159.
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ture was impossible because, although imaginary, it was a real activity of real people. They sought to create Absolute Art, works of pure form, wholly beautiful and saying nothing. But in seeking to create a book or poem of inflexible necessity, the author could never escape the effects of being real, of creating works permeated by the hazards of reality. Thus 'dissatisfaction and the passage to the imaginary are here inseparably linked.'40
In another period such men might not have attracted attention, or might have been regarded as cranks. How did writers so systematically and deliberately cut off from their world, so given to failure in their very self-definition, find a vast public which followed them intently? The 'rejected public accepts these negative works because, in some sense, it rejects itself.'41 By way of elucidation, Sartre described the readers of Flaubert and his generation – the upper layers of the 'middle classes': enlightened, high-level functionaries, educated members of the liberal professions, all those who produced, used, and transmitted knowledge useful to the bourgeoisie; in other words, the social ancillaries of the bourgeoisie, who lived in solidarity with rent and capital yet were excluded from political power both before and after 1848. Unable to question their exclusion from the vote without calling the social system itself into question, these 'demi-nantis' – nearly rich – agitated in the banquet campaign just prior to the February Revolution and then, after the suppression of the working class in June, were called upon to fashion new ideological supports for the bourgeoisie.
In a brilliant discussion showing the praxis of ideology-formation, Sartre sketched the new, deeply pessimistic view of human nature and society engendered by 1848. The bloody massacre of the working class by the middle-class National Guard in June was the turning point: any new outlook would necessarily have hatred of man at its core. The new ideas reflected the bourgeois view of the class struggle after 1848: man became subjected to things, was a being who could affirm himself only by denying himself radically, who treated himself austerely, as a means and not an end. A profoundly pessimistic ethics of effort was elaborated, which valued humans above all for their constant perseverance in failure. In the 'humanism of hatred' created by
40. f/III, p.197.
41. f/III, p.206.
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bourgeois scientism, 'progress', the directing principle of bourgeois ideology, became more ethereal than ever: man was sacrificed to unattainable ideals.
The intellectual reflection – and mystification – of French social life produced by the demi-nantis under the Second Empire demanded its artistic counterpart. Neurotic Art – writing which spoke to say nothing, which contested itself – appeared and became their art. 'When, from 1849, the Knights of Nothingness publish their first works, if the cultivated public adopts them, if it make them its poets and its novelists, the reason is not that they incite it to a coming to consciousness, nor further that they consolidate its false consciousness in presenting to it its imago incarnated in a poem or the hero of a novel. The truth is more complex: the artist imposes himself on both the men of talent and the rich because he differs from them radically, both because they comprehend implicitly his purpose and because they arrange to misunderstand; both because they grasp the homicidal intention which hides itself in its irréalisation, enough at least to make it serve their ends, and because a perhaps inevitable misunderstanding defines him in their eyes as a doctrinaire of realism. These strange and twisted links mean that no writer has so much scorned his public and that none has more completely expressed it – not in its historical truth but in the true pathos which founds false consciousness and ideological non-savoir.'42
This, of course, could only be the beginning of Sartre's explanation of this 'strange harmony' based on the fact that writers and readers belonged to the same social layer and reflected the same contradictions – and, above all, on their shared secret hatred of man and insistence on sacrificing man to the 'human thing'. 'Black, the literature of the 1850s fits the dominant classes exactly because they, in the interim, have been blackened by the history they made: what the reader demands of his reading is to permit him to derealize himself by the imaginary satisfaction of his hatred.'43 However, this thesis must be fully demonstrated before we can see the deep internal affinities between the realistic, scientistic bourgeoisie and the doctrinaires of Absolute Art. Internal is the key term here: how, after all, does a work or writer become representative of a historical period? Was the con-
42. f/III, p.302.
43. f/III, p.334.
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gruence of Madame Bovary and the Second Empire only fortuitous? What would it take to show an internal connection between the book and the period? The congruence would obviously be merely fortuitous unless 'the profound and distant causes of the misanthropy could be considered also as those of the movement of February'.44 And if this were so, then Flaubert's neurosis and its culmination in 1844 would in some sense be prophetic of the class struggles of 1848-51.
Sartre approached this question by citing Leconte de Lisle's direct involvement and ultimate disillusionment with the movement of 1848. The son of a slaveholder and momentarily a socialist, a minor writer compared with Flaubert, Leconte de Lisle lived the 'imperatives of Absolute Art far more superficially and formalistically than the latter. His formative historical reality – the Réunion planter aristocracy – matched mid-century France only briefly and as if by misunderstanding. In his work, the nightmare failed: he practised 'Neurotic Art without himself being neurotic'.45 His pessimism and misanthropy [were] only commodities'.46 For Neurotic Art to 'succeed', to achieve real historical salience, 'it is necessary to discover in the work a singular quality in the author attesting to the indissoluble unity of the objective neurosis – as interiorization and transcendence of contradictory imperatives, by Failure-Art, of all these contradictions – and of a well-characterized subjective neurosis whose roots plunge into his early childhood.'47 With this contrastive observation, Sartre returned to his main subject, and attempted to define the profound historicity of Flaubert and Madame Bovary. The writer of the 1850s had to reflect a general hatred for human nature while passing in silence over the events of 1848. A book was necessary, Sartre argued, that both expressed the sense of 1848 and hid it beneath a cloak of universality. Thus its author would 'justify in advance political crimes and depoliticization without ever recalling them',48 by means of an atemporal misanthropy rooted in the depths of an individual experience and felt to the marrow, and so 'in condemning man without recourse, would exonerate the men of '48, even the killers,
44. f/III, p.344.
45. f/III, p.403.
46. f/III, p.398.
47. f/III, p.414.
48. f/III, p.417.
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from all particular responsibility.'49 Granted this sense of human tragedy and universal guilt ordained naturally and from birth, the bourgeois of 1848 could derealize his own guilt. The reader demanded 'that the general themes of Absolute Art be presented to him through an incomparable and true experience which enriched, veiled and diverted them, and above all, in reaching too-evident conclusions, gave them to be felt like the very taste of lived experience.'50 The result was a fascinating object that bound reader and writer in neurotic complicity.
Thus, Sartre proposed, there was a deep parallelism whereby the life of the Flaubert family and that of French literature both expressed, in their different ways, the same development of French society, such that a young neurotic could write a book which, while compensating for and expressing his neurosis, made history. 'Thus the crisis of Pont l'Evêque, with its consequences leading to the death of Achille-Cléophas, would be, in Gustave, his February and June days, his coup d'etat of December 2 and his plebiscite; he would have lived not symbolically but for good and in advance the defeat and the cowardly solace of a class which, to accomplish its destiny and realize its secret primacy, agreed to renounce its visible praxis (that is, political action) and to enter into apparent hibernation so as to find its "cover" again – that is, its responsibility as an eternal minor.'51 Gustave had to go through the same development as his epoch – not symbolically, but really – in order to become its author. Both were conditioned by the same factors, followed the same curve, were 'oriented towards the same goal, across the same obstacles, by the same intentions'.52 The microcosm, Gustave, was only a moment of the macrocosm, the historical period. His identity was 'only that of the epoch.'53 It was the period, then, that produced Gustave's internal determination, and in a profound sense, lay at the root of Madame Bovary. Exploring his character, we find an historically and socially defined programme of life which determined his internal movement of experience and led him – as it led others, each in his own way – to realize the epoch: the epoch which permeated Madame Bovary.
49. f/III, pp.418-419.
50. f/III, p.421-22.
51. f/III, p.430-31.
52. f/III, p.440.
53. f/III, p.440.
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This discussion was, of course, only an outline of what was to come in the remainder of L'Idiot de la famille. Nevertheless, these pages were the apex of the work. Sartre seemed within sight of understanding Flaubert in his deepest individuality as a historical being, within sight of understanding the profound social reality of Madame Bovary. The discussion was far from flawless. Here too Sartre remained almost wholly on the ideological level when talking of society, emphasizing cultural to the neglect of concrete social and material history, and, even within this restricted sphere making little or no reference to specific texts or specific authors. His analysis was to this extent an interior history, whose precise contents could not be ascertained. Yet he had seldom thought so boldly, so penetratingly, as here, seldom worked so tenaciously at the frontiers of his field of analytic vision. Here if anywhere he seemed on the verge of a breakthrough to an understanding of sociality.
The breakthrough never came. Sartre never reached his projected analysis of Gustave's historical programming. As it transpired, the two hundred pages remaining of Volume III took a puzzling turn reminiscent of the last part of the Critique. Sartre now dwelt on Flaubert after the defeat of Napoleon III at Sedan, explaining what the Second Empire had meant to Flaubert, from his own testimony after its downfall. It may well have been useful to understand why the novelist was at this juncture as happy as he was ever to be, and to try to do so at this stage of the biography. But it was clear nevertheless that something had gone wrong. Sartre had deserted the main course of his analysis for a by-way. He never returned: shortly after the discussion of Flaubert's unfinished novel, 'Sous Napoleon III', L'Idiot de la famille broke off, unfinished.
The Final Unfinished Work
If the present study has established anything, it is that the promise of L'Idiot de la famille was unlikely to be fulfilled. I am thinking not only of the evident and severe flaws of the work: its suffocating interiority, even when discussing the social world; its inability to see even the social world in other than ideological terms; its almost wholly imaginary quality; its sheer interminability. I mean rather that L'Idiot de la famille was so obviously a work of withdrawal – into a sea of words, into Flaubert's interiority, into an imaginary realm which the brave
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works of the 1940s and 1950s had seemed to renounce forever – and also so evidently and deeply ambivalent towards its readers, the social world for which it was supposedly written.
There are wider grounds for the suggestion that the Flaubert was destined to remain unfinished. At their first meeting in Switzerland, André Gorz complained to Sartre about the totally subjective ethics of L'Etre et le Néant: all acts seemed equally legitimate if done in good faith.54 At the time Sartre gave Gorz a rather sophistical answer, but he later laboured long and hard to complete his ontology with an ethics – to devise an objective, worldly norm that would permit discriminations among individual acts. This work was never completed. We have seen the same dynamic at work in the Critique: Sartre's social philosophy fell short of its primary objective: sociality itself was left unexplained. In neither case was he able to transcend his original commitment to interiority, to the cogito. His last major work was abandoned at the same point. Once again Sartre stopped short of a logic of sociality. It was hardly to be expected that intellectual reclusion would succeed in grasping what had evaded him even in his most missionary and political writings – much less that an understanding of sociality could have guided the construction of a final volume whose predecessors were so permeated by antithetical themes.
Seen in this perspective, L'Idiot de la famille was predestined to failure. It was fitting, moreover, that Sartre's ultimate project, to achieve total understanding of one individual, should become a kind of novel – that in order to fathom a real person, Sartre was obliged to absorb himself in the imaginary. Beyond this, the most noteworthy feature of the book was its almost wholly negative tone. Flaubert, as seen by Sartre, was a failure, his story is one of defeat. Sartre conveys no sense of Gustave's developing literary powers. The latter dissolves again and again into his neurosis; his generation is its neurosis. Reading Sartre we are at a loss to know how this unlikable young neurotic could rise to so commanding a position in the universe of human discourse. In page after countless page, we learn only of his despair, his withdrawal into the imaginary, his 'total literary sterility', of the predestined failure of an entire generation.
54. Gorz, The Traitor, p.234.
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Exit Laughing
Interiority, individual isolation, an overwhelming word, retreat to the imaginary amid pessimism and gloom – we have traced these themes and moods through Sartre's career. From Les Mots onwards, he himself had been trying to discover their sources. His last major work can be seen as an exploration of their historical, social and psychological roots. It is not that Sartre, and not Flaubert, was the true centre of L'Idiot de la famille.55 Rather, he studied Flaubert and his generation in order to understand the literary posture that he himself had inherited, in however attenuated a form. He had questioned – and contested – this posture from the beginning, but it was his and remained his to the very end. Unable to transcend the limits of his thought, Sartre returned at last to investigate their historical foundations, as if to master them at least in understanding, on their own terrain of the imaginary.
Is it possible, now that Sartre's life has come to an end, to draw conclusions which weigh strength against weakness, achievement against limitation? Any simple set of conclusions would be as contrary to the spirit of this study as to the spirit of Sartre himself. If Sartre was unable to transcend his starting points, for example, he was able to think – and live – them to their limits, immersing himself in our world and its most powerful cross-currents. Having so much to teach us on so many planes, his adventure and its fruits will repay serious study many times over and for generations to come. When all is said and done, we must perhaps above all recognize that his work represents exactly that, a human adventure lived and thought through as fully as any in its time.
The tension between imagination and reality, between the impulse to individual withdrawal and the commitment to collective political action, was at the core of Sartre's life's work. Unresolved, it condemned his endeavors to what was, strictly speaking, failure; acknowledged and contested, worked on again and again, it was also the condition of a personal-intellectual achievement unparalleled in its own time. Driven by a sense of estrangement from history, of social superfluity, Sartre did more than any other writer of his generation to illuminate the possibilities of individual commitment in history, to dramatize the central issues of life in the twentieth century.
55. See 'Flaubert, c'est moi', Times Literary Supplement, September 29. 1972.
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The political and theoretical problems so posed were never to be resolved. But, in an appropriately paradoxical late development, Sartre came to believe that, in his own life at least, he had achieved his goal. Three years after the third volume of his Flaubert had appeared, he was interviewed by Michel Contat on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. The result was the remarkable 'Autoportrait à soixante-dix ans'. Contat, personally close to Sartre, probed intimately and deeply, showing Sartre in old age reflecting on his life and on the loss of his powers. His responses were self-deprecating: he argued stubbornly against any suggestion of his own importance or power. Unsentimental, acerbic, nearly blind, Sartre had not lost his old self-confidence, but equally he was without arrogance. He had been crippled by time, but remained very much involved in life, convinced that he had achieved the goal of living simply as 'a man among men'. At seventy, he was 'just a man !
and nothing else, like everyone else .'
'I have written, I have lived, I have nothing to regret.'56
In short, then, Contat asked, 'so far life has been good to you?'
'On the whole, yes. I don't see what I would reproach it with. It has given me what I wanted and at the same time it has shown that this wasn't much. But what can you do?' (The interview ends in wild laughter brought on by the last statement.) 'The laughter must be kept. You should put: "Accompanied by laughter." '57
56. 'Autoportrait à soixante-dix ans', Situations, X, pp.159,226; 'Self-Portrait at Seventy', Life/Situations, pp.28,91.
57. Ibid., p.226; p.92.