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LIONEL
ABEL
to this theme: they are wrong only insofar as they seem to think it central.
It is the theme of unreality, the unreality, to be specific, of bourgeois
life.
Who is the young Sartre? A little bourgeois. A little monster besides,
leading two lives, both of them, according to the author, utterly false.
What was the grandfather, Charles Schweitzer? He was, according
to
Sartre, both "credulous and a liar," so that Sartre's grandmother doubted
even that the earth went round since her husband asserted it did. But
this "Voltairean" grandmother, and even Sartre's mother, come off little
better in
The Words
than does the grandfather, who,
if
we are to believe
the author, acted out his relationship with his grandson along the lines
laid down by Victor Hugo in his
Art of Being a Grandfather.
The
bourgeois limitations of Sartre's relatives, and of Sartre too, are under–
lined and even caricatured, often with wit, never with sympathy. And
the author's wit, never genuinely playful, is hardly enough to relieve or
lighten so much intelligent bitterness.
Now it strikes me that one cannot connect a work of any real scope
with a motive for it that is purely negative. There must be some positive
reason why Sartre was led to treat his own past in the peculiar manner
he did. My suggestion is that there was such a positive motive,
and
that Sartre's real aim in writing
The Wor,ds
was as little ideological
as autobiographical. In this work, which on the surface seems to
be
devoted to destroying the bourgeois myths of his childhood, and
the
bourgeois myths also of his closest relatives, Sartre is, I think, engaged
in creating or, more precisely, in restoring a myth as bourgeois as any
of those he has derided, the Protestant Ipyth of the "calling."
According to
The Wards,
Sartre was "called" to be a writer at
about the age of nine by his grandfather Charles Schweitzer, who treated
him at that time as if he were certain to become one. Now
in
his book
on Genet,
Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr,
Sartre similarly explains
Genet's career as a thief by the fact that when Genet was a child,
his
foster parents called him a thief. In both cases the child in question
(Sartre was about nine; Genet ten) was subject to something like a
stroke of fate: the two very different boys seemed to have had no
alternative but to become what they were "called." Accordingly,
S~rtre
became a writer. This led
him
to philosophy and politics. Genet became
a thief. This led him to homosexuality and literature.
It is to be noted that Sartre's account of his life was written,
according to his own testimony, almost immediately after
his
book on
Genet, and if one compares the two works one will find that the ex–
planations Sartre gives for how he became a writer are almost point for
point like the ones he gives to explain how Genet became a thief. What
happens in
The Words?
A fatherless boy is solicited by
his
grandfather
