is deprivedfrom the startof the cardinal categories ofPraxis.”^36 Denied his
mother’s love and his father’s preference, young Flaubert reads family
romance and sibling rivalry in terms of being and nonbeing. If father and
family name represent the realm of being, Gustave “will distinguish
himself from his older brother in direct proportion to the quantity of
nothingness he could incorporate.”^37 So begins the odyssey of Flaubert’s
self-derealization, in which, in Sartrean fashion, he makes himself into
the nonentity that others have prepared and expected him to be – the
family idiot.
A new term enters Sartre’s lexicon,personalization, meaning that
“the individual is nothing more than the surpassing and preservation
(assumption and inner negation) at the core of a project to totalize what
the world has made – and continues to make – of us.”^38 Sartre calls it
by another name for “this totalization which is endlessly detotalized
and retotalized.”^39 The progressive method now traces four turns
in the spiral of Flaubert’s personalization: the imaginary child, the
actor, the poet, and finally the novelist. These are all forms of self-
derealization wherein his ego remains an alter ego, reflected off family,
friends and the public. Sartre interprets the final turn from poet to
novelist as follows:
Thepoeticattitude was merely the flight from the real into the imaginary;artistic
activity consists of devalorizing the real by realizing the imaginary. In state-of-the-
soul poetry, the flight left reality intact: you escaped into the nonreal; the negation
concerned Gustave’s being-in-the-world and not the world itself. Now the move-
ment [of personalization] inverts itself: Flaubert reconsiders the world in order to
annihilate it, which can be done only by totalizing it.
(IFii: 1488 ;FIiii: 375 )
(^36) IFi: 136 ;FIi: 143. Elsewhere he claims that “Gustave suffers from truth sickness (une
maladie de la Ve ́rite ́); he lacks its cardinal categories: praxis and vision” (Flynn, “Praxis and
37 Vision,”^21 ).
38 IFii:^1140 FIiii:^36
This claim to originality is not quite true. As early asTranscendence of the Ego, Sartre refers to
a “prepersonal” consciousness as a refinement of his “impersonal” consciousness, and
“person” occurs inBeing and Nothingness(EN 665 , 662 ), and “common person” inCRD
i: 391. We must distinguish “person from the process term “personalization” described as a
39 “spiral” movement quite appropriate to the progressive dimension of the P-R method.
IFi: 657 , 656 ;FIii: 7 , 6. Constitution and personalization are reciprocally related in a
manner similar to but more markedly reciprocal than that previously ascribed to facticity
and transcendence inBN(seeIFi: 654 , 659 ;FIii: 3 , 9 ).
Flaubert: the final triumph of the imaginary? 397