ARGUMENTS
259
of his life in any true detail is bound to be something of a phenomeno–
logist. One has only to look into the models of autobiographical writing
we
have in order to test the truth of this observation. It was Tolstoy'S
interest in his own past and his continual suspicion of the distorting
powers of rhetoric and reflection that
mad~
him
one of the greatest
phenomenologists who ever lived, especially in his
Childhood, &yhood,
Youth,
in which the Russian writer seems to have recaptured
in
their
exact-details his experiences as a boy and as a young man. Or take Joyce's
Portrait of the Artist.
The Irish writer, unlike Tolstoy, was unsuspicious
of rhetoric, and always self-conscious about his mastery of language. All
the same, in
Portrait of the Artist,
Joyce seems
to
prize even beyond
the literary skill of which he was so proud any direct or intuitive grasp
of what he actually was as a young man, as a child, and even as an
infant. Finally, Proust, in the autobiographical parts of his narrative,
out of his great concern to live his past life once again, down
to
the last
mory detail he could wrest from memory, brought into play a good
number of the precautionary devices for protecting memories from
reflection which the phenomenological school has recommended. In
addition, Proust invented certain devices of his own. All of these writers
were,
I should say, phenomenologists in their autobiographical works.
Yet none of them had any knowledge of phenomenology as a general
method. Now Sartre knows the method very well.
It
was the method
he adopted at the start of
his
career-there were other intellectual
methods available-yet in
The Words
he seldom adheres to this method
and consistently confuses what as a trained phenomenologist one would
expect
him to distinguish immediately, namely, what he thought when
something happened
to
him from what he thought long after that
happening.
One wonders: can Sartre have so little interest in his actual ex'
periences as a child as to
be
unwilling to discriminate these from his
present assessment of them? But if he is not interested in his own past,
why has he chosen to write about it? He could have found some other
topic.
To be sure, Sartre long ago gave up the strictness of the phenomeno–
logical method, contaminating it, for reasons which were, I think, mainly
political, with moral polemics and ideological constructions. And it might
well
be asked: why wonder at the fact that he has done this again in
considering his own past, when he has done this
so
many times already
in
his theoretical writings, in fact, ever since he announced
his
adherence
to a radical view of politics? Certainly there is an ideological theme in
The
Words.
Mr. Rosenberg and Miss Nott are not wrong in pointing
