ARGUMENTS
THE RETROACTIVE
''I''
Each of us, according to Plato, is always older, younger, and
the age that he is.
If
this be true, then Sartre in the beautifully written
fragment of his autobiography,
The Words,1
covering
his
life until the
age
of twelve, has narrowed his interest in himself as a boy
in
a very
peculiar, a very special way: the young Sartre, as seen
by
Sartre the
writer, is always older, he is never younger; he is never even the age he
was.
How much older? Older enough to be the writer of this book about
his
life between birth and twelve; older enough, even, to be the father
of his
father, Jean-Baptiste Sartre, of whom Jean-Paul writes he "could
DOW
be
my son."
Sartre never saw his father, who died shortly after Jean-Paul was
born.
Now one would like to know how the boy responded when informed
that his father was dead. We are in fact told that the death of Jean–
Baptiste was the big event
of
Jean-Paul's life. But this judgment seems
to
be
that of the mature Sartre, the author of
The Words,
and not of
the young Sartre, who might have felt differently. Instead of the feelings
of the boy we get these reflections of the writer:
There is no good father, that's the rule. Don't lay the blame
on men but on the bond of paternity, which is rotten. To beget
children, nothing better; to
have
them, what iniquity! Had my
father lived, he would have lain on me at full length and
would have crushed me.
As
luck had it, he died young. Amidst
Aeneas and his fellows who
carry
their Anchises on their backs,
I move from shore to shore, alone and hating those invisible
begetters who bestraddle their sons all their life long. I left
behind me a young man who did not have time to be my father.
Now these observations about being without a father may be true or
false,
as Sartre himself notes; but, in any case, it is unlikely that they
could
have been made by a child. What did young Sartre think about
being
fatherless? Sartre does tell us this much:
"As
for me, I think
I
was
delighted." Which would seem to be a definite enough response to
hisloss. However, Sartre does not reveal
when
he:as a boy was "delighted"
10
find himself fatherless. In fact, it is by no means clear that Sartre
1 THE WORDS. By Jean-Paul Sartre. Braziller. $5.00.
