Something to Declare: Essays on France and French Culture (22 page)

Sartre liked to argue that there was one great and significant difference between himself and Flaubert: he was loved and pampered as a child, whereas Flaubert was
mal aimé.
Even if we accept this thesis (which is, of course, Sartre's own, in both cases), its effect, paradoxically, is to bind the two men together as biographer and biographee even more closely: for Sartre in a way envied Flaubert his unlovedness. Sartre's infancy was shamelessly happy, as he recalls in
Les Mots:
but after reading
L'Idiot de la famille
it's hard not to feel that this early happiness was in part begrudged. How selfish and irredeemably unfair of this bourgeois family to have inflicted untarnished contentment on the future Marxist, Existentialist, and creator of Roquentin. The Flaubert family, on the other hand, was more properly bourgeois and supplied the correct degrees of trauma and unhappiness which Sartre was deprived of. His father died, it is true, before Jean-Paul was aware of him, but even this (he makes clear in
Les Mots)
was a deeply fortunate occurrence: while every other male child was an Aeneas slogging around with an Anchises on his back, he alone was free—free and filled with loathing at the sight of all those invisible progeni tors astride their sons for the whole of their lives. For there is a horrid shadow to his fatherless felicity: “The speedy departure of my father deprived me of a proper Oedipus complex.” The tone is amused, ironic, of course: but not that ironic. What is a properly instructive bourgeois upbringing without an Oedipus complex? Every home should have one.

So a subsequent incident from Jean-Paul's childhood curiously prepares the ground for
L'Idiot de la famille.
The boy, encouraged to believe that “a book can never do harm if it is well written,” asks his mother for permission to read
Madame Bovary.
“My mother put on her most musical voice: ‘But if my little darling reads these sorts of books at his age, what will he do when he grows up?’” The young Jean-Paul retorts precociously,
“Je les vivrai”
(“I shall live them out”)—a reply which proved a lasting success. Even more durable, in fact, than his family imagined. First, Sartre lived out the threateningly anti-bourgeois life described in the dangerous classics. Now, for long tracts of
L'Idiot de la famille,
he is able to go even further: he lives, relives, the author himself.

Flaubert's line of life, in Sartre's version, runs like this: idiocy, passivity, interiorization, neurosis, breakdown (the famous incident at Pont-l'Evêque in 1844—fainting, epilepsy, or Sartrean “false death,” according to your terminology and interpretation), then genius. How to explain what Sartre calls “this scandalous occurrence: an idiot who becomes a genius”? And how,
a fortiori,
to explain it when the documentary evidence is thin, misleading, fictional, or piously shuffled together after Flaubert's death?

“We recognize at the outset that we cannot know the vicissitudes of his intrauterine life.” Not even Sartre will invade Mme Flaubert's womb. And there are some other frustrations for the investigative psychobiographer: “the nursing, the digestive and excretory functions of the infant, the earliest efforts at toilet training … about these fundamental givens, nothing.” If only Gus-tave's parents had had the foresight to preserve one of Gustave's earliest stools; if only the fossilized excrement had been passed down to the Musée de Rouen … Ironically, just before
The Family Idiot
came out here, De Beauvoir was publishing
La Cérémonie des adieux,
in which she usefully records the bladder malfunctionings which set in during Sartre's final illness.

But there are few other areas where Sartre fails to tread. As he prowls round the infant Gustave—necessarily mute from such a distance—he sometimes reminds us of another French experimenter and theorist: Jean-Marc Itard, who spent years trying to make the Wild Boy of Aveyron talk. In the same way, Sartre prods and pokes at Gustave, treats him alternately with kindness and frostiness, and is everywhere indefatigable.

The psychoanalytic insights offered by Sartre are always Olympian and frequently crass. The father of Flaubert's mother died when she was ten: this makes it inevitable that “she would only marry her father.” Her mother had died in giving birth to her: consequently, when she suckles her first daughter,
“she gave herself the breast
in order to obliterate from the present the indestructible frustrations of the past; she made love to herself so that she could at least
give
the tenderness that she had not received.” Achille, Gustave's elder brother, is naturally kitted out with an off-the-peg Oedipus complex. Unfortunately for him its working-out goes wrong. When the father, Achille-Cléophas (head of the hospital at Rouen), falls ill, he instructs his elder son to operate on him. In the course of the operation he dies. Sartre comments: “The most unexpected result of this relationship is that the old man, by giving himself up to the knife, deprived his elder son of even the possibility of deliverance through the classic murder of the father; certainly Achille killed him, but he made himself the docile instrument of a sacred suicide.” The proof that Achille has been cheated out of the necessary liberating murder comes in the next paragraph: when he stepped into his father's shoes as head of the Hôtel-Dieu, Achille also stepped into his father's old goatskin coat. This garment, the argument runs, was already eccentric and unfashionable when his father had worn it on his rounds: it would have been “aberrant” by the time the son took it on. Yet he could not now avoid this flapping symbolic mantle. “Polished, refined by his new friendships, he was urbane in the salons, a clod on his rounds; in both instances, actually, he
perpetuated
the paterfamilias.” Or maybe he just liked the coat …

There is a matching inflexibility in Sartre's Marxist analysis of Flaubert's social origins. His parents were mere functioning units going through their bourgeois programme; the ambitions, social behaviour, attitudes to property and family of this “semi-patriarchal community” can all be easily predicted. The Flauberts automatically pursue their dream of upward mobility (as if anyone ever pursued a dream of downward mobility), and the relations between Gustave and Achille-Cléophas “incarnate the drama of French society.” Moreover, the sly wrong-footing of Marxist criticism is also in evidence: characters can first be reduced to easily comprehensible social automata, with scarcely an atom of free will, reliant (like Flaubert's father) on the chance mutation of intelligence in order to advance themselves; and then these ruthlessly conditioned social automata can be despised for not being more humane, more enlightened, more twentieth-century Thus Sartre, of Achille-Cléophas's (undocumented) firmness with Gustave when teaching him to read: “125 years later, better-informed about the nature of childhood, we accuse the medical director of having aimed too high, too quickly, and of having bewildered his unhappy pupil by allowing him to see his exasperation.”

“We accuse …” Yet perhaps this arrogance is not quite what it seems. There are times—many times—when Sartre seems impatient and scornful of Flaubert's immediate family, when he seems to want that family to be in as great a state of postulated discord as possible, when he seems to cry openly, with Gide: Families, I hate you. But perhaps this is to overemphasize Sartre's political and biographical presence in
L'Idiot,
and to underestimate his literary presence. In part, the biographer adopts the bullying, chivvying tone he does because the characters under examination are his own creation. He has revived them and fleshed them out, so he naturally awards himself extra rights in their behaviour. Thus he is at the same time the scientific, unsurprised Marxist and the intuitive but irritated novelist. It is easy to forget this ambivalence, to underestimate the fictional alloy present in
L'Idiot,
though the literary company Sartre keeps sometimes looks a bit seedy. Take the account of Mme Flaubert's pregnancy, which led to Gustave's birth:

Nine highly agitated months. She must have imagined everything, poor Caroline, she must have hoped and despaired, sometimes welcoming a future daughter as celestial manna, at others spitting into the ashes to deny the imminent son. No doubt these agitations of the soul remained hidden. But she could not dissemble her ardent wish to have a girl, to re-create herself …

Given that paragraph blind, where would you place it? Somewhere in the Imagine-the-Heartbreak school of popular biography, I should imagine, where the word “must” is always a giveaway.

Of course, to say that swathes of
L'Idiot
are fiction is not to deny them the possibility of truth. Nor, on the other hand, is it to assert that they are well written.
L'Idiot
is, indeed, an outstandingly badly-written book (the dust-wrapper of Carol Cosman's translation disarmingly warns us that it conveys all the nuances of Sartre's style “from the jaunty to the ponderous”). The contrast with
Les Mots,
swift, supple, and economical, is saddeningly instructive. But then Sartre was always fighting against the allure of lucidity, against the guilt induced by pleasing the reader. There is a warning exchange in
La Cérémonie
where de Beauvoir quizzes him on the value of good writing. “Sometimes even,” she begins, “you were disgusted with literature; you used to say, Literature is shit. What exactly did you mean? And from time to time, more recently, you have said to me: after all, it's stupid to work at expressing oneself; you seemed to be saying that one only had to write, as it were, any old how. Moreover you told me that this is how you wrote your Flaubert, which isn't entirely true.” Sartre growls back: “It isn't true.” De Beauvoir retreats with, “There are many felicities in your Flaubert,” and Sartre replies: “I write faster now. But that comes from having worked at it.”

No one, of course, would admit that he wrote
worse
than he used to, especially not by design. I just write differently, that's all, more quickly; but then, as Sartre goes on, “I believe that the best writing is always done without too much working over.” However generously we feel inclined to interpret the ageing Sartre's remarks, his is an ironic conclusion to reach while engaged on a study of the finest, the most literary, and the least
engagé
of French nineteenth-century novelists.
“La littérature, c'est de la merde.”
“Oh yes, who are you working on at the moment?” “Flaubert, of course.” This makes shocking, almost insulting, the rare occasions in
L'Idiot
when Sartre chooses to quote Flaubert: suddenly we are reminded that it is perfectly possible—indeed, it seems actively desirable—for high intelligence, piercing insight, and scrupulous concentration to be combined with extreme lucidity of expression. One of the rogue myths of criticism is that difficult ideas can only be expressed or elucidated in dense and difficult language. When one falls routinely on sentences like “Praxis becomes the
efficacy of the passive
because the child's conditioning strips him of any means of affirming himself, even the positive act of negativity,” it pays to remember the first act of practical criticism inflicted on the young Flaubert. When Louis Bouilhet and Maxime du Camp rubbished his ornate first version of
La Tentation de Saint-Antoine,
they reminded him of La Bruyère's advice: “If you want to say that it is raining, say: ‘It is raining.’”

As you machete your way through the prose, however, the jungle partly begins to clear. The heart of the first volume is a rich and plausible imaginative hypothesis about the inner life of the young Flaubert, with its profitable passivity and fecund neurosis. The evidence is of two sorts: occasional documentation (Flaubert's letters, his niece's memoir of him), and internal evidence drawn from the adolescent stories (largely inaccessible to English readers). In his exposition of these stories Sartre is at his most resourceful: a swift and ruthless pursuer of the subtext and the Freudian implication (here Flaubert is shown wanting to kill his entire family; there just his brother; over here Satan represents Gustave, God represents Achille-Cléophas). No one will now be able to read these texts without bearing in mind Sartre's psychological parallels, and the “proud confessions” of hatred, envy, and sublimated murder which he discerns.

Whether Sartre's critical reading is
right
is another matter, of course. It is frequently plausible, but it is vigorously one-sided in method. These early stories—rancid items of romantic sex and violence, for the most part—are highly derivative, sometimes direct parodies or exercises. The scented influence of writers like Petrus Borel is paramount. Yet Sartre declines to discuss literary genesis, to examine how far the motifs he interprets as being Gustave 's private neuroses writ public are in fact provided ready-made by the writers he imitates. Sartre's reason for not doing so is curt: of course Gustave is being imitative—but the real question is, what made him choose to imitate
this
rather than something else? His unconscious clearly directed him to rewrite, parody, expand items of direct psychological concern to him. Perhaps; yet how wide was the choice of imitable texts—the real, likely choice, given Gustave 's age, reading, and surroundings? Is it all that surprising for an adolescent to produce stories littered with sex, madness, and death when he lives above the morgue, and when from the age of six he had been taken for educative walks by an uncle who liked to drop in at the lunatic asylum and then linger in the prostitutes' quarter? And what, furthermore, is the likelihood of Sartre
not
being able to read envy and revenge into whatever adolescent stories Flaubert might have written?

As for the documentary evidence, even Sartre admits that it is thin and unreliable. His starting-point for this whole enterprise— for the presumption of the young Gustave's “idiocy”—comes from a piece of “decorous gossip” written by Flaubert's niece, Caroline Commanville, after his death. She reports the family tradition that he was slow in learning to read (adding, however, that he was “avid for knowledge and his brain was always working”); then records that he would often as a child sit “for hours, one finger in his mouth, absorbed, looking almost stupid,” and that once, when he was six, “a servant called Pierre, amusing himself with Gustave's innocence, told the boy when he pestered him: ‘Run to the kitchen … and see if I'm there' ”—which the child duly did.