continues] he indicated what status revolution necessarily and effectively grants
the idea of freedom. At that point his line of thought stopped short, for he had
not determined the freedom-in-situation relation and was even more vacillating
about history.^5
In effect, she is claiming that the combination of existential psychoanaly-
sis formulated inBNthe year before and of historical materialism built
on an expanded notion of being-in-situation elaborated in his writing
of the late 1940 s and early 1950 s would yield an account of the artist’s
concrete “choice” of the imaginary (theirreal). That choice was already
present in the Baudelaire study, though in bad faith,^6 problematically
functioning in theMallarme ́,^7 clearly articulated inSaint Genetas we saw
inChapter 11 , and fully realized inThe Family Idiot. This, at least, is my
development of her remark and the thesis of this chapter.
Since the Baudelaire was written the year afterBNwas published,
it comes as no surprise that the philosophical core of this essay is the
metaphysics of that work.^8 That is both its strength and its limitation.
In his valedictory interview with Beauvoir, Sartre acknowledged that
his interest in criticism was primarily metaphysical: “Basically, my
critique looked for the metaphysics through the [author’s] technique.
When I found that metaphysics, then I was satisfied. I truly grasped the
totality of the work...His way of seeing the world” (Ce ́r 269 ).
Of course, his interest is not only metaphysical. Sartre’s diagnosis
of his version of the “progressive-regressive” method inSearch for a
Methodassures us: “Everything took place in childhood” (SM 59 – 60 ).
There his example was Flaubert. But when the example is the marriage
of Baudelaire’s mother to General Aupick – a perceived betrayal similar
(^5) Beauvoir,Force of Circumstance, 44 – 45 , emended; F 56 – 57. The English translation omits the
hyphen between “freedom” and “situation” that Beauvoir employs and on which Sartre
insisted, when he claimed on several occasions that human reality is concretely free only “in
situation.” That omission leaves the expression “freedom situation relation” weaker or even
unintelligible. I characterize Sartre’s critical style in this work as “rather cavalier” in view of
his famous jibe at Franc ̧ois Mauriac early in his career: “God is not an artist. Neither is
6 Monsieur Mauriac” (“Franc ̧ois Mauriac and Freedom,”LPE^25 ).
7 Baudelaire(Paris: Ide ́es/Gallimard,^1963 ),^101 and^125 ; hereafterB.
8 SeeM^86 –^87.
As we explained earlier, despite the clear distinction between metaphysics and ontology that
he draws inBNand occasionally elsewhere, Sartre often uses the terms interchangeably.
I shall do the same when describing the conceptual structure of his arguments and the
fundamental terms of his theories, respecting the distinction when he actually employs it.
384 Existential biography: Flaubert and others