642
PARTISAN REVIEW
tave" loves to humiliate himself as a comic. In this way, he struggles
against his father's , and by extension the world's, omnipotence and
empty values. Sartre says:
He [Flaubert] makes people laugh at him out of disgust with
himself and humanity; he destroys, in his person , and publicly,
all human values in order to show that he is unworthy of them
and, at the same time, that they are unworthy of his immense,
grotesque desire. His sole purpose is to provoke horror and con–
temptuous, condemning laughter: if
that's
all the world is , I'll
show what I think of it by becoming filth myself.
Out of impotent defiance springs the young Flaubert's mas–
ochism (and later sadism). One can see how much this brand of
"psychoanalysis" depends on the Nietzschean critique of "ressenti–
ment." As with the figure of "Poulou" (Sartre himself as a child) in
The Words,
the very young Flaubert soon runs up against a prohibi–
tion that puts an end to the play-acting and leads him to writing. In
Poulou's case it was the family itself, which originally had encour–
aged the performing, that came to object to it; in Flaubert's it is the
father who objects to a career in the theater. In other words , the
child is forced to recognize his own status, the nature of his own ges–
ture of refusal or ironization, through theatricality. As a result ,
however, he is not cured but driven further inward: the play-acting
which was directed outwards "for others" is now turned around and
becomes his "being-for-himself. " It becomes the private act of
writing: the little comic becomes a literary man. Sartre states:
Since literature , for the child, is primarily dramatic art
denied,
it
seems to him [Flaubert] to embody his unsociability - his exile in
himself. The denial circumscribes and sanctions his
anomaly:
he
is already laughable - hence the object of a minor disgrace - but
by forbidding them to exploit his social character, the others
force him to defend himself
by
taking himself seriously .
Never has a bleaker view been taken of comedy, of childhood,
or of literature. The intellectual, finally , is nothing more than a
spoiled, histrionic brat who only half-represents his theatricality by
raising it to a higher level of self-awareness and transforming it into
mendacious writing.
Where does this leave us? Sartre, when subjecting himself to a
similar analysis, was at least capable of situating it fully in the past:
