I decided in favor of Corneille.”^26 Now his goal was to impress rather
than to please. Henceforth recollection would do battle with imagination,
the real with the imaginary (Words 100 and see 92 ). “At the age of
eight...I launched out upon a simple and mad operation that shifted
the course of my life: I palmed off on the writer the sacred power of the
hero” (Words 104 ). But the boy’s choice of Corneille was really sleight of
hand. He transformed Corneille into Pardaillan, removing from the
former his avarice and love of lucre: “I deliberately blended the art of
writing and generosity” (Words 105 ). If we are to accept Sartre’s reading
of this metamorphosis, we are led to believe that his understanding of the
artist as the giver of a gift and the presenter of an invitation as the free
communication between artist and public is presaged in the 8 -year-old.^27
To deliver the boy from his grandfather’s force-feeding with classical
nineteenth-century German and French authors, his mother started to
let Poulou buy comic books and took him to the silent movies. Sartre
quickly became an enthusiast of both genres. In fact, the journal of
politics and opinion that he founded with Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty
and others after the war was named “Modern Times,” after the movie
made famous by his much loved Charlie Chaplin. Sartre claims that what
he liked about the movies, “the art of the common man,” was, among
other things, its egalitarian nature – the contrast of the movie house with
the social hierarchy of the theater. The only other time he witnessed
“that sense of everyone’s direct relationship to everyone else, that waking
dream, that dim consciousness of the danger of being a man, was in
1940 , in Stalag XII D,” where he was a prisoner of war after the fall of
France (Words 76 ).
Shifting to the anticipatory mode once more, we shall recognize a
similar “waking dream” in Sartre’s ideal of the “group in fusion” that
will play a pivotal role in the social theory he formulates inThe Critique
of Dialectical Reason( 1960 ). There, too, mutually separated and alienated
(^26) Le Chevalier de Pardaillan, knight-errant hero of Michael Ze ́vaco’s series of cloak-and-
dagger novelsLes Pardaillaninspired by the members of an Armagnac family who served
27 several French kings in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
“I deliberately blended the art of writing with generosity” (Words 105 ). On artistic creativity
as an act of generosity and the model of free (nonalienating relations), see Jean-Paul Sartre,
Notebooks for an Ethics, trans. David Pellauer (University of Chicago Press, 1992 ), 141 and
281 ; hereafterNE. For the French, seeCahiers pour une morale(Paris: Gallimard, 1983 );
hereafterCM. This theme will reappear inWhat is Literature?andThe Family Idiot.
Four accounts of Sartre’s childhood 11