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geoisie in either case was never fully separable from a self-loathing.
All the more reason, then , for Sartre to condemn Flaubert for his
refusal to side with the Commune in 1871; Flaubert, like Sartre, was
a bourgeois at war with himself, but instead of siding, according to
Sartre, with those (the workers) who could help give his life a mean–
ing, who could direct him away from his state of inner conflict, he
sided with an
enemy
sworn to maintaining the very bourgeoisie that
both men hated.
We can say, then, that the Flaubert biography is an adjunct of
Sartre's own autobiography. The biography's central problematic,
however , the analysis of bad faith, can be seen in Sartre's writing a
good twenty years before the publication of
The Words
(1963), his of–
ficial autobiography. For already in "Childhood of a Leader," the
longest short story in the collection
Intimacy
(1939), we see the same
"complexes" that mark the young Flaubert. Lucien Fleurier is a
pampered rich child, given to play-acting; his bad-faith gestures at
home are inseparable from his latent sadism and masochism. As he
matures , these tendencies develop , and he first becomes a surrealist,
then a homosexual. Finally he leaves these juvenile diversions be–
hind and becomes what he concludes he always was destined to be: a
fascist.
This is the model that Sartre used, with very few changes, in all
his biographical writings. The rationale for the analysis is presented
in
Being and Nothingness.
As "existential psychoanalysis," the critique
attempts to find the source of the "neurosis" not in any mysterious
Oedipal complex linked to an unconscious, but in an originative
choice taken freely by the subject at an early age. This choice is pre–
cisely to refuse to make choices or to take responsibility for what he
does ; the play-acting child both recognizes that he "is" what he acts
before his elders, but at the same time he posits himself as
other
than
his dramatic or comedic creation. He is always at some lofty remove,
not really involved in his everyday behavior. The unfortunate result
of all this is that reality itself comes to be "inauthentic" and torn in
two: everything is "mugging," nothing has substance. Little Lucien
sadistically lashes out at all those "unreal" objects (and, in the end,
people : the Jews) and in a parallel effort to give himself some "real–
ity, " no matter how degrading, he masochistically accepts humilia–
tion from a homosexual .
Flaubert's childhood "complex" is no different. Addicted
to
dramas that he puts on in his parents' billiard room, the little "Gus-
