ARGUMENTS
261
and encouraged by his mother to think of himself as a writer. He is
innoculated with a dream of future glory, which could justify and make
good
his personal failings, about which he knows a good deal more
than do his relatives. Poisoned by the dream of his relatives, the boy
Sartre dies to life, substituting in every situation his future success for
his
present inconsequence. (Has Sartre in revenge on the boy he was,
who sacrificed the present for the future, sacrificed in turn knowledge
of what he once was to what he now is?) He enters into an illness, which
Sartre claims lasted long into his mature life.
Now consider Sartre's explan:ation of Genet's character and career.
Once again, a boy, an orphan, is "called" to become what those closest
to
him call him. Genet's adventure, writes Sartre, was his "... having
been
named."
Thus he became a thief, even as Sartre became a writer.
He
too, according to
Sartr~,
died as a child. As Sartre has it, Genet's
life, until about the time Sartre began to write about him, had been
posthumous. In fact, Sartre calls his book about Genet a funeral oration.
A
certain Genet is dead; a new Genet, Sartre claims, has replaced him.
He makes a similar claim for himself. The Sartre of
The Words,
according to the author, is a new Sartre, also risen from a long dying.
It
will be seen that while the details of Genet's life were not precisely
the same as Sartre has told of his own, both of these lives, as Sartre sees
them, are expressions of an almost identical pattern. And what is a
myth if not a primary pattern uniting very different lives? In myth–
making the most diverse disciplines can be united, even as very different
lives can be summed up. Ideology, reflection, polemic, and autobiogra–
phical narration-even phenomenological description--can all be made
coherent by the act of myth-making. And they do all cohere in
The Words.
But has Sartre made himself clear in writing this book? No doubt
he thinks he has dealt cruelly with the myths of his youth, with the
myths of those closest to him, the myths of their time, of his time, and of
our time also. Certainly he has gone to very great lengths to be cruel
to
himself and
to
those most intimate with him. And yet what I think
he has done fundamentally in
The Words
has been to indulge, beneath
a cruelty to others and to himself which I cannot help but think partly
pretended, the evident talent he showed as a boy for believing in his
myths. The myth in
The Words,
like the myth in
Saint Genet,
is, I submit,
a secular version of the old Protestant myth about how those who are
singled out by destiny somehow find their real vocations. This is not
even a new myth. It is
vieux jeu,
as Thomas Man:n said of Spengler's
Decline.
Lionel Abel
