same time understood himself admirably”^43 – and lived experience
(le ve ́cu) or “life aware of itself ” – of which Sartre said: “I suppose
it represents for me the equivalent of conscious-unconscious.”^44 When
joined to the remark that “Subjectivity is by definition non-knowledge
at the level of consciousness” (“Marxism and Subjectivity”) and
Sartre’s frequent appeal to Freudian “technical” terms and his expressed
sympathy with Lacanian emphasis on the unconscious being structured
like a language, all this does leave Sartrean “consciousness,” even in a
multilayered sense, to bear a large theoretical load. Beauvoir’s adopted
daughter Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, in her introduction to La
Transcendence de l’ego, remarks that the only position in that early work
that Sartre changed completely concerned psychoanalysis. “He totally
reversed his previous conception – his refusal – of the unconscious and
of psychoanalytic understanding and no longer defended his past preju-
dices in that field.”^45
Flaubert’s personalizing project is to be a literary artist, a practitioner
of the black art of the “lie,” whether for its own sake (l’art pour l’art)orto
tell the truth (realism). If art is derealization, then Sartre’s Flaubert must
derealize himself; if it is a realm of its own, then he will be its sovereign,
“the Lord of Nonbeing”;^46 finally, if art employs the real as analogon,
then Flaubert will “imagine being” itself, viewing everythingsub specie
phantasiaeby a sustained adoption of the aesthetic attitude.^47 Sartre
claims that Flaubert’s conception of artnecessarily implieshis neurosis,
that it is no mere de facto concomitant: Flaubert chooses the life of
a neurotic,l’homme imaginaire, in order to be able to write. Such were
the “bases and structures” of his choice.
(^43) Interview with Sartre, “OnThe Idiot of the Family,”L/S 127 – 128 ;Sitx: 110.
(^44) Yet Sartre waffles somewhat when he adds: “I want to give the idea of a whole whose surface
is completely conscious, while the rest is opaque to this consciousness and, without being
part of the unconscious, is hidden from you...This notion of the lived (le ve ́cu)isan
instrument that I use but which I have not yet theorized...For Flaubert, the lived is when
he speaks of illuminations that he has and which suddenly leave him in the dark so that he
cannot find his way. He is in the dark before and after, but there is a moment in which he has
45 seen or understood something about himself ” (L/S^128 –^129 ;SitX:^111 ).
TE 8. On the evidence for the growing influence of “non-knowledge” bordering on, if not
slipping into, the “unconscious” emerging in Sartre’s writing, seeSFHRi: 306 – 307 ,
46 nn.^2 ,^3 and^6.
47 FIi:^438 ;IFi:^452.
FIiv: 159 – 170 ;IFii: 1932 – 1942.
Flaubert: the final triumph of the imaginary? 399