and historical materialist explanation (the so-called progressive-
regressive method) that the later Sartre was to apply to Flaubert.^37
The obviously “bourgeois” and “humanist” nature of his childhood
upbringing, his early years in his grandparents’ apartment and the major
lyce ́esthat he would attend, the religious and professional conflicts he
experienceen famille(not unlike those ascribed to the Flaubert family in
The Family Idiot), the allure and power of the imaginary and especially of
words in conjunction with the imaginary, the necessary though belated
friendships, the various episodes in the “family romance,” and so forth –
all of these can be distilled from the foregoing, as Sartre remarked that
the final volume of his Flaubert study, the capital discussion ofMadame
Bovary, could be written by anyone familiar with the previous volumes.
But the point of this initial chapter is to highlight the major formative
events in Sartre’s life that enable us to comprehend his career as a
philosopher, a “committed” man of letters, and an author who “chose”
the imaginary as his preferred vehicle of communication.
In the following chapters we shall observe many of these features of
Sartre’s life and character being played out, not so much as in a film where
the inevitability of the ending haunts the apparent freedom of the action,
but rather, as in the “game,” where the individual is the first origin, the
rules are self-ordained, and action is free, that is, “creative.” Such is the
“existentialist” view of the young soldier near the Front. It fosters
“authenticity” and is the polar opposite of the “sincerity” that marked
the lives of those around him who lack the courage to “play.” Yet Sartre is
already coming to realize, as he faces the increasing stakes of this “game”
against Nazi battalions just across the Rhine, that this is not a “singles”
match; that, despite the ultimacy of his individual effort, this is a team
effort. What his experience in the prisoner-of-war camp will soon impress
upon him (and what his encounter with Albert Camus and the Resistance
will later confirm) is that the model for this life of play is not the boxing
contest, despite its inevitable violence and trickery, but the football match,
and that one must “play by the rules” or not play at all. And his reading of
Heidegger will apprise him that willy-nilly he is “already in the game.”
But Sartre has yet to break the ontological barriers that blind him to the
objective reality of social action. His social consciousness is forming in the
(^37) SeeSM 52 n. and 140 ff.
18 The childhood of a genius