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Existential biography:

Flaubert and others

T

oward the endof his biography of Jean Genet, Sartre pauses to

issue the following warning to anyone considering a similar task:

In a good critical work, we will find a good deal of information about the author
who is being criticized and some information about the critic. The latter, moreover,
is so obscure and blurred that it has to be interpreted in the light of all that we know
about him.^1

Sartre’s caveat to the contrary notwithstanding, his critical biographies
yield a considerable amount of information about the critic himself. Still,
his caution that a necessary condition for avoiding the “obscurity and
blur” of this information is that it be interpreted in the light ofallthat
we know about him invokes an ideal that is clearly impossible to attain.
Of course, the caution is Hegelian in tone: anything less than the whole
truth is false.^2 Without venturing along that dark path, let us be satisfied
with the insights, less than complete but cumulatively informative, that
the previous chapters afford us as we begin to read Sartre’s interpret-
ation of three giants of nineteenth-century French literature. Our goal is
to “totalize” these studies and the earlier chapters, in our reading of his

(^1) SG 563 n.
(^2) Consider Hegel’s famous and famously misinterpreted claim: “The truth is the whole” (“Die
Wahrheit ist, die ganze,”Phenomenology of Spirit§ 384 ). On this account, anything less, if not
false, is at least inadequate. What William James might have called the “weasel word” in this
case is “only.” Recall the fable of the six blind people describing an elephant. The moral of the
story was that they were correct in their affirmatives but wrong in their negatives (their
exclusions: “It’s only like a tree trunk, a snake, a fan, etc.” depending on the part of the animal
that each was touching).
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