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PARTISAN REVIEW
tentions, combined with a more knowing betrayal of literature and
his talent for it.
If
anyone in France was qualified to succeed Gide,
Claudel, and Valery, it was Sartre, who instead took a principled
pleasure in refusing to support literature as an establishment or as a
way of life, treating it rather as a myth in need of demolition. Ac–
cording to Roland Barthes, Sartre's importance lies partly in his be–
ing the man "situated at the precise historical point of literature's
disintegration."
If
the reason Leonardo da Vinci failed to complete
any of his works is that he had such a high regard for the greatness of
art, Sartre failed for the opposite reason.
Not that he could possibly have succeeded. His Flaubert
biography was intended to swallow the ocean of available data. "We
have at the outset no assurance that such a summary is possible and
that the truth is not multiple." His object in the second part of the
Critique
was nothing less than to prove that history added up to a
single truth , a single meaning which could be explained without
postulating a divine, extraterrestrial observer. The Marxist view–
point was valid, Sartre believed, only if dialectical materialism could
be made to reveal the unity of history. Could its "diverse multiplici–
ties" be viewed as "connected and merged in their very oppositions
and diversities by an intelligible totalization from which there is no
appeal"?
No doubt Sartre would have achieved less if he had not set
himself impossible tasks; he poised himself in a highly unusual way
between the past and the future. He pictures consciousness as a
blank, aimed like an arrow at the task ahead. This idea derives from
Husserl, but we need to look at Sartre's temperament to see why in–
tentionality appealed to him so strongly. It is no accident that one of
his favorite words was
de
passer
(to go beyond, subsume, transcend):
like a runner, waiting for the starting pistol with his weight poised
forward, or like a child trying to fall asleep on Christmas Eve, Sartre
found it almost unbearable that the future hadn't already begun.
La
vie commence demain .
Simone de Beauvoir has written shrewdly about
his indifference to the present and the past. "Sartre refuses to admit
that he has any identity connecting him with his past.. .. He rarely
reminisces." He could talk with complete critical detachment about
what he had said, written or done: "The truth is that he has already
stopped recognizing himself in the old Sartre he is talking about.
What he really is, he believes, exists in the future, and in consequence
he never feels any vanity about what he has done in the past. ... On
