Following the appearance of the first three volumes of his biographical study of Flaubert, Sartre remarked that, had he been able to spend just fifteen minutes in the company of the great novelist, he would have been able to learn more about him than by reading his entire voluminous correspondence. (Of course, this assumes that Sartre would have been capable of remaining fifteen minutes in Flaubert’s company, as he was also convinced that Flaubert was a crushing bore!) Like Freud, or like the Buddhists who were capable of finding the whole world in a bean, Sartre fancied that the whole of a subject’s personality was present – at age fifteen or fifty – in his every gesture or glance; existentially, if not ethically, drinking tea rather than coffee, scratching one’s ear with the index finger rather than the auricular, preferring sauerkraut to oysters are as significant as stealing from one’s parents, talking under torture, abandoning a pregnant partner, or devoting one’s life to writing … Of course, no biographer or critic will ever again be able spend fifteen minutes in Sartre’s presence, and, as Sartre himself might have said, ‘tant mieux’!
When I first embarked on serious study of Sartre, friends and mentors suggested that I might take myself off to Paris to meet him. I have to confess that I felt a certain relief when, six months later, Sartre died. Relief at no longer having to explain, to myself or to others, why I felt no desire or curiosity to meet him: the definitive two metres of texts on my bookshelf surely contained more of ‘Sartre’ than I might hope to find in a blind old man dying in a Montparnasse apartment. Twenty-five years on, the two metres have become two-and-a-half, as ‘Sartre’ has continued to expand and mutate with each posthumous publication. Not only that: with each notable anniversary – and none could be more notable than the recent centenary of his birth – witnesses to his life, both real and purported, partisans and detractors, critics and exegetes, have rolled up to provide the illustrious zombie with ever more textual prosthetics. Sartre long since left Kafka and Borges, Joyce and Proust in his wake as the most written-about twentieth-century author. But why? His works do not possess the spectacular verbal richness of Joyce or Proust, nor do they tease their readers, like those of Kafka or Borges, with the promise of a meaning always on the point of disclosure. The question as to why Sartre and his work have stimulated so many readers to read, so many writers to write, so many thinkers to think and so many critics to critique is one that is surely worth considering. Had Sartre worked all his life as a librarian in Buenos Aires or toiled as an obscure clerk in a Mitteleuropa insurance agency, I doubt his works would have attracted the readership they did; which is to say that his work, more than any other, has become inseparable from the image of the man himself.
This book does not propose a radical re-evaluation of the Sartrean corpus: the readings are my own, but I am not the only one to have read in this way. My aim is to sketch the ways in which a life may become ‘written’ – by the one who is living it, by those who share it and by those who come after; to explore what is at stake in such a ‘writing’; and, finally, to suggest why it may still be worth reading today.