142
PARTISAN REVIEW
imagination! how completely depend upon spurts of thought coming
as I walk, as I sit; things churning up in my mind & so making a
perpetual pageant, which is to me my happiness ."
Mrs. Dalloway
has
left her "plunged deep in the richest strata of my mind. I can write
&
write now: the happiest feeling in the world."
It
is the
Diaries
in the end that fling the shutters open, suggesting
in the evolving artist they reveal the multi-faceted woman.
NONA BALAKIAN
AUTOBIOGRAPHIZING
BETWEEN EXISTENTIALISM AND MARXISM. By Jean-Paul Sartre.
Translated by John Mathews. Pantheon. $10.
LIFE/SITUATIONS: ESSAYS WRITTEN AND SPOKEN. By Jean-Paul
Sartre.
Translated by Paul Auster and Lydia Davis. Pantheon. $8.95.
Jean-Paul Sartre continues to add to the fil e which he
opened with the 1964 publication of his autobiography,
The Words.
At
the time, those who expected that the philosopher-writer would revea l
secrets of his adult life were doubtless disappointed by the se lf-portrait
of his childhood. For the philosopher whose task is to "situate" the
individual,
The Words
could at most be the first gesture. Yet in this
account of the early years, much of his mature thought is present–
albeit in an oblique and barely explicit form. By 1964, Sartre's thought
had already undergone a sign ificant revision from his ea rly theory of
consciousness. The young boy's "fundamental project" of becoming a
writer is revealed in
The Words
as an autobiographizing which
incorporates a theory of individual action as conditioned by, but
attempting to overcome, social institutions and social class.
The generations of "existentialists" who formulated thei r self–
understanding on the basis of
Being and Nothingness
(1943) or its
literary variations, i.e. ,
Nausea
(1938),
The Flies
(1943),
No Exit (1945),
