they require a philosophical vocabulary. Thus I saw that I had to duplicate,
so to speak, each novel with an essay. So at the same time I was writing
Nausea, I was writing ‘The Psyche,’ a work that will soon come out and
which will deal with psychology from a phenomenological point of view”
(Contat and Rybalkai: 57 ). Portions of that text, we saw, did appear as
Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions( 1939 ) but the rest of that 400 -page
manuscript was never published. We have noted this strain between the
imaginary and the conceptual in Sartre’s work. It will continue through
his multivolume existential biography of Gustave Flaubert,The Family
Idiot. But remarks like this have led commentators to seek anticipations,
parallels and applications of Sartre’s philosophical writings in his works of
imaginative literature. The dialogue betweenNauseaandThe Imaginary
mentioned above is but one example. The application of themes from
Being and NothingnesstoNo ExitandDirty Handswould be another,
though in the latter case, we must take into account the political situation
of the time as well. And one could continue the parallels, associatingThe
Devil and the Good Lord( 1951 ) withSaint Genet( 1952 ) and his various
polemical essays of the 1950 s andThe Condemned of Altona( 1959 ) with his
essays opposing the war in Algeria.
Is life to be lived or narrated? In a remark critical of the then prevalent
Hegelian philosophy, Kierkegaard commented: “It is perfectly true, as
philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget
the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.”^32 Sartre seems to
have read the Danish Socrates for the first time as a soldier. Whether
directly inspired by SK or not, the following early entry in Sartre’sWa r
Diariescertainly resonates with the remark just cited: “I was imbued to the
very marrow with what I shall term the biographical illusion, which
consists in believing that a lived life can resemble a recounted life.” But a
life, so conceived, was “a whole existing before its parts and being realized
through its parts” (WD, December 2 , 1939 ). He harkens back to a passage
fromNauseain which Roquentin questions whether there could ever be
“adventures” in one’s life as his girlfriend Anny passionately sought:
This is what I thought: for even the most banal to become an adventure, you must
(and this is enough) begin to recount it. This is what fools people: a man is always a
(^32) The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, trans. and ed. Alexander Dru (New York: Harper
Torchbooks, 1959 ), 89.
Art and life 147