If he had been her lover, perhaps he would have suffered less because, happy in so
many other ways, he would not have thought about it so much. But this domain
would have remained inaccessible. You can possess a body and you can own the
deepest region of the soul whether because, unhappy like Fre ́de ́ric, you search it,
“love it,” or reconstruct it in yourself or because, among other joys of shared love,
you know that at the bottom of this soul there is only a single self with its own image.
But the immense intermediary zone where soul and body unite–that you never possess.
(EJ 272 , emphasis added)
One wonders whether this “immense intermediary zone” may not prove
to be the “reduced” world of phenomenological description that Sartre’s
discovery of Husserl enabled him to “possess.”^33 Or perhaps the dimen-
sion Sartre would later call “the body as for-itself ” (BN 306 ).
Fre ́de ́ric, the would-be author, confirms Beauvoir’s observation about
Sartre’s marriage of the conceptual and the imaginative in the narrative
mode when he avows in response to Organte’s (Wagner’s) question “What
do you want to write?”: “Novels. But not like those being written now-
adays. They’re rubbish. I wish that the reform of the novel make it as
difficult as a philosophical work and that it occupy our intellectual life as
much as our affective life; that it show a man at work, reasoning” (EJ 229 ).
If this ideal is sketched in the present story and the next,^34 it is more
fully realized in “The Legend of Truth” and reaches its paradigm in
what Sartre will soon be calling his “factum on contingency,”Nausea.
But that is more than a decade away, and several properly philosophical
studies will appear in the meantime.
Still, Fre ́de ́ric has a awareness of his freedom and, one could say, of his
“contingency” via the contrary experience of “fate.” Recall Sartre’s
(^33) See below,Chapter 3.
(^34) For example, Fre ́de ́ric tries to capture what Leibniz calls a “notion” (the complete concept)
of Cosima, which he describes as “a kind of concept which would enclose her entire
character” (EJ 266 ). One can easily see this as prefiguring what Sartre will later describe
as a person’s “original life-defining choice” inBeing and Nothingness. But as Sartre increas-
ingly makes allowances for the social dimension of the situation, this insight broadens into
the “singular universal” in theCritique of Dialectical ReasonandThe Family Idiot. In each
instance Sartre is trying to capture the singularity of a life in the generality of its circum-
stances. As the narrator says of Fre ́de ́ric: “His systematic spirit leads him to believe that a
character is constituted by a basic element of which the actions and the words are only
translations” (EJ 266 ). The basic principle of existential psychoanalysis, Sartre will explain
toward the end ofBeing and Nothingness, is that “man is a totality and not a collection” (Being
and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes [New York: William Morrow, 1974 ], 568 ; hereafterBN.
L’Eˆtre et le ne ́ant[Paris: Gallimard, 1943 ], 656 ; hereafterEN.)
Philosophical reflections in a literary mode 31