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PARTISAN REVIEW
in the army and the stalag; his later writing is not nourished to any
comparable extent by the life that was going on all around him. He
was allowing himself to be seduced by his own powers of analytical
improvisation, rather like a composer who refuses to compose except
by improvising. Sartre's fluency was prodigious, but even in his
earliest fictions the narrative impulse was liable to be overtaken by
impulses towards description, analysis and satire. At the same time
as chronicling the movements of a consciousness, he was not only
philosophizing about the nature of consciousness and the nature of
reality, he was also competitively measuring himself against other
chroniclers. The crude feeling, "anything you can do I can do better,"
was elaborated into a sophisticated game of pastiche. But once he
had proved that he was capable of becoming the greatest French
novelist since Proust, he lost interest in both artistry and art. "Ar–
tistic activity," he wrote in
L'Idiot de lafamille,
"consists of devaluing
the real by realizing the imaginary." Though he had been moving
towards this position since his early work on the image, it does not
seem that his sabotage of his own artistry was entirely deliberate,
even if destructive and self-destructive tendencies were at work. Is
he rationalizing these tendencies in himself or justifiably exposing
them in Flaubert when he condemns the great novelist for making
the world unreal by making himself into an artist?
The activity of philosophizing had never been entirely separate
for him from forming theories based on generalizations. Traveling
when he was young to new countries, he would start to formulate
theories about them before he had given himself time to observe
what was going on around him; later on, at editorial meetings of
Les
Temps Modernes,
he would talk authoritatively and at length about
books he had not read and films he had not seen, constructing
elaborate theories on the basis of what he had been told by a friend.
This tendency is paralleled in his later books by the pronounced drift
towards abstraction. On a minimum of observation and research he
erects a vast superstructure of theory. At the same time his growing
distaste for literary artistry accompanied a growing aversion to sub–
jectivity, interiority and individuality. Temperament and political
conviction both pushed him towards the collective. A glance at the
essays collected in the ten volumes of
Situations
shows how as time
passed he concerned himself less and less with literature, art and the
private self, more and more with politics and public issues. His mind
was such that almost any experience or observation would prompt
