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PARTISAN REVIEW
also a heterogeneity, the impossible melding of the inside and the
outside, of writing and the world.
The second volume of the projected five-volume English
language edition of Sartre's
L'Idiot de la jamille
has just been pub–
lished. (It was originally published in French in 1971.)
It
is easy to
see why Flaubert "got under Sartre's skin" to such an extent: they are
the "freres ennemis" of modern French literature . Both loathed the
bourgeoisie, and their response to it was in many ways similar. One
thinks of Flaubert's "Dictionary of Received Ideas": this collection of
banalities which were supposedly articles of faith of the bour–
geoisie - or at least manifestations of its thought process - was prob–
ably the project Flaubert considered the most central. Most of his
novels were in a sense generated out of it; his last work,
Bouvard and
Picuchet,
depicts the lives of two hapless bachelors who actually at–
tempt to live by a kind of credo of "received ideas." Through these
stupidities, Flaubert depicted the bad faith of the bourgeois, their silly
smugness, their refusal to think for themselves, their grasping pre–
formulated opinion that was as mindless as it was omnipotent. This
kind of depiction of the bourgeoisie is really not that far from Sartre's
conception of a modern man who hypocritically attempts to find
salvation through arbitrarily imposed and accepted absolutes, who is
happy to accept a dictator before he confronts the responsibilities
and inevitable failures of action in a Godless world. But there the
similarity stops . While Flaubert was an utter nihilist who saw
nothing beyond the bourgeoisie except a yawning abyss, Sartre was
able to maintain an optimism, at least to the extent that he ap–
parently continued to believe in the working class, political action,
and the possibility of the betterment of the lives of most of the world's
people. The critique (and hatred) of the bourgeoisie by these two
thinkers was the same, but it went off in two different directions.
Flaubert still fantasized about an inherently elite caste, an impossi–
ble aristocracy (a "complex" that Sartre analyses in the last chapter of
this volume), while Sartre wanted to throw in his lot with the work–
ers and at times, without ever joining it, with the French Commu–
nist Party.
This might seem like a radical difference after all, but the gap
between the two authors may not appear to be so great when we
recall that both continued to recognize that, like it or not, they them–
selves would always remain "bourgeois ." The hatred of the bour-
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