kind of imagination evoked inMadame Bovaryinto the kind of imagin-
ation which producedMadame Bovary.”^32
The argument ofThe Family Idiot, volumesi–iv^33Comprising Sartre’s overwhelming response to the question “What, at
this point in time, can we know about a man?” these volumes offer an
object lesson in Sartrean anthropology.^34 He announces the work as a
sequel toSearch for a Method, and to the extent that it makes generous
use of the progressive-regressive method, this is a plausible claim. By a
subtle and exhaustive use of this method, he examines those childhood
and family relations that he believes necessarily mediate socioeconomic
conditions and individual projects. Indeed, the practical application of
this method should prove to be one of the lasting achievements of this
work. In a defensive response to his “Maoist” discussants, Sartre pro-
motes this undertaking as “a socialist work in the sense that, if I succeed,
it should enable us to understand men from a socialist point of view.”^35
The starting point for his regressive analysis is Flaubert’s protohistory –
that is, his early childhood and intrafamilial relations. This phase estab-
lishes the crucial fact that Flaubert was constituted capable of merely
passive activity, a phrase from the Critique signifying a subject as
“reflector” of others’ actions and not a true agent in his own right. “He
(^32) Howells,Sartre’s Theory of Literature, 156.
(^33) A typescript of some one hundred and thirty pages of notes seems to be all that is available of
the fourth volume. Beauvoir dates its composition to have begun in the fall of 1971 and to
have been abandoned with the onset of Sartre’s partial blindness in 1973. Arlette Elkaı ̈m-
Sartre published “Notes surMadame Bovary”asanannexeto the 1988 edition of volumeiii
ofL’Idiot, 661 – 823. The opening pages of this material are published along with an English
translation by Philippe Hunt and Philip Wood inYale French Studies: Sartre after Sartre
34 no.^68 (^1985 ):^165 –^188.
FIi:ix;IFi: 7. We noted his project of “Reintroducing Man into Marxism” (SM 83 ). Now,
with the three volumes ofL’Idiotin hand, he assures his Maoists interlocutors, who are
skeptical of this digression from direct action: “Let’s say that the Flaubert is a concrete
application of the abstract principles that I presented in theCritique of Dialectical Reasonto
35 ground the intelligibility of History” (ORR^77 ).
Sartre continues: “I hope that these books belong to a long-term undertaking, that they be
part of another culture, a people’s culture, on the condition that there be mediations”
[presumably lest one slip into the ham-fisted “economism” of party hacks criticized in
“Materialism and Revolution”] (ORR 73 – 74 ).
396 Existential biography: Flaubert and others