empirical modifications of his environment [which] may lead him to alter
his original project” (M 97 ). Such, for Mallarme ́, is the death of his
mother and his father’s remarriage. Sartre sees a more positive poet
emerge from this crisis. “No has become transformed into Yes. Since his
impotence will not allow him to write poetry, he will write poetry about
his impotence” (M 117 ). What Sartre sees as “a constant and silent
appeal to authenticity” (M 116 ) might well exemplify a recurrent
Sartrean motto: loser wins. Mallarme ́decides to write tragedy.
In a note, Sartre used an expression from Mallarme ́ that Arlette
Elkaı ̈m-Sartre added as a subtitle to the published text: “The Shadowy
Side of Lucidity” (La lucidite ́et sa face d’ombre). Without explicitly
appealing to an unconscious, Sartre sees this “shadowy side” of our
consciousness as making the secrets of Mallarme ́’s life available to an
existential “hermeneutic” such as he introduced inBN. The following
admission is crucial to our sense of Sartre’s growing acknowledgment
of a quasi-unconscious dimension to our lived experience. We saw this
in his open appeal to “lived experience” (le ve ́cu) and saw it again in
the distinction between knowledge and understanding in his discussion
of Flaubert. Now he seems ready to flesh out this concept with the
following admission:
There is, indeed, an unconscious lodged in the heart of consciousness. This is not
some obscure power [he continues to caution], for we know full well that conscious-
ness is consciousness through and through; it isintrojected finiteness. Mallarme ́was
deeply tormented by things we understandtodaybut which were beyond his ken in
his own time. “Our aim,” he continues, “is to comprehend his images (gaps in his
knowledge, biases, unjustified choices, etc.) – in short, the negative features of the
poet, rather than the positive characteristics he unwittingly possessed. What he then
considered normal or self-evident or natural is no longer so for us now.”
(M 83 n.)
Let us add this to our list of indicators of what Pontalis called Sartre’s
“love–hate” relation to psychoanalysis. That list will continue inThe
Family Idiot.
Hero, prophet, wizard, tragedian – it is fitting that this discreet and effeminate
man with little interest in women should die at the threshold of our century; he is
its herald. More profoundly than Nietzsche, he experienced the death of God. Long
before Camus, he felt that suicide was the fundamental issue facing man. Later,
others would take up his ceaseless struggle against contingency without ever going
394 Existential biography: Flaubert and others