Without pursuing any further the twists and turns of Sartre’s analytical
tale, suffice it to summarize his concept of the solitary man as an
anticipation of that synthesis of the abstract universal and the concrete
particular that for the moment finds expression in the lived body and the
work of art. It will ultimately become “incarnate” (Sartre’s term) in the
singular universal of dialectical reason brought to full comprehension in
the “novel” about the life and times of Gustave Flaubert. Though it is
unlikely that Sartre had Flaubert explicitly in mind at this stage of his
reflection, its problems as well as some of its tentative hypothesizing are
already evident in the present philosophical “novel.”
With the acuity of the accomplished philosopher-novelist, Iris
Murdoch entitled her excellent little book “Sartre, Romantic Rational-
ist.”^61 This captures the ambiguity and the tension of someone who
would be true to both genres while intertwining them, if not subsuming
them into another realm. One of the theses that emerged from the
cooperative work on the “pre-text” of Sartre’s autobiography was that
modern French literature in general displayed a similar tension between
“rationalist clarity” and “the Romantic cult of individualism.”^62
In view of the foregoing, it is understandable that the person who
thus far has studied this fragmented text most closely could judge it “the
most contemporary work in the Sartrean corpus and the one most
committed to the path of deconstructionism.”^63 Though that path may
have wandered with the passing of Derrida, there is no question of the
continued relevance of Sartre’s work to the current philosophical scene
or of the importance of these early writings for a fuller understanding of
his achievement.
(^61) Iris Murdoch,Sartre, Romantic Rationalist(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987 ).
(^62) SaP 266 and Jean-Franc ̧ois Louette, “E ́crire l’universel singulier,” in Michel Contat et al.,
63 PSM^380.
SaP 176.
46 An elite education: student, author, soldier, teacher