452
PARTISAN REVIEW
L 'Etre et le Neant
and
Critique de la raison dialectique ,
he indicates that
the work is not to be regarded as complete. The gesture appears to be
made more for his sake than the reader's, though there are those who
applaud his failure to finish projects: he is shattering "the myth of the
coherently finished text, the myth that the contradictions that gave
rise to the work have been resolved by an apparently cohesive textual
narrative"
(Sartre's Existential Biographies
by Michael Scriven) . But
he tried hard not to leave his promises unredeemed. After ending
L'Etre et Ie Neant
(1943) by offering to follow it with a book on ethics,
he went on until 1949 struggling with the problem of goodness: the
notebooks contain even more words than the book, but he finally
gave up. After finishing the first volume of the
Critique
in 1959, he
wrote 782 pages (about 200,000 words) of the second. All this un–
published work was not entirely wasted. Some of the material from
the abandoned book on ethics went into
Saint Genet;
some of the ideas
from the unfinished second volume of the
Critique
went into the
Flaubert biography . The ideal way to read Sartre's work is not as a
series of separate books but as a discontinuous and open-ended
whole .
In the tetralogy
Les Chemins de la liberte
(a title which is mislead–
ingly translated as
The Roads to Freedom)
he had relatively little dif–
ficulty in completing the first three volumes: nothing needed to be
concluded. He wrote 223 pages of the last volume,
La Derniere chance,
and he did not give up hope of finishing it until nine years after pub–
lishing the third volume,
La Mort dans l'ame-
the title is mistranslated
as
Iron in the Soul.
Other uncompleted projects include the autobiog–
raphy, the enormous biography of Flaubert,
Le Psyche
(a phenom–
enological psychology), a book on Mallarme, one on Tintoretto,
Les
Communistes et Ie paix
(an apologia for the Party, abandoned in 1956
after Soviet tanks invaded Hungary) and
Pouvoir et liberte,
a collabo–
rative book based on conversations with Benny Levy (Pierre Victor).
Towards the end of Sartre's life interviewers often questioned
him about the mass of unfinished work, but less is to be learned from
his answers than from the sequence in
La Nausee
when with an ex–
quisite mixture of pleasure and pain Roquentin decides to give up
his work on a historical biography . "The true nature of the present
stood revealed. It was what exists , and everything that was not pres–
ent did not exist. The past did not exist. . . . For me the past was
only a retreat: it was another way ofliving, a holiday, passivity." But
Roquentin can now picture the subject of his abandoned book, the
Marquis de Rollebon, more vividly than ever before. "I sighed, let
