massive Flaubert “biography” as a summation of his metaphysical,
aesthetic, political and ethical pursuits described and analyzed in the
previous chapters.
The end of the story? Scarcely, as the lively dispute over Sartre’s
“dialogical” ethics reminds us. But we are seeking a perspective from
which to interpret a life, while keeping to a minimum the “obscurity
and blur” that threatens a briefer inquiry. Remember that Sartre’s
“totalization” is a process word. Of course, employing his distinction
between totality and totalization, we could regard his former life as
a “totality” subject to our totalizing accounts. AsBeing and Nothingness
warns andNo Exitdramatizes, “the dead are prey to the living.”
Baudelaire: an essay on bad faith
This existential biography, written in 1944 , appeared in print in 1947
(also the year in which Sartre’sWhat is Literature?was serialized inLes
Temps Modernesand was dedicated to Jean Genet, whose biography
Sartre would publish five years later. Sartre never liked his short book
or its subject.^3 Originally conceived as an introduction to Baudelaire’s
Intimate Writings, just as the Genet volume was intended to introduce his
collected works, this essay “caused a scandal and was violently attacked
on all sides.”^4 In short, Sartre was rather cavalierly dishonoring one
of the icons of French poetry. Beauvoir explained:
Of course, Sartre was still far from having understood the fecundity of the dialectical
idea and of Marxist materialism; the works he published that year are proof of that.
His study of Baudeaire’se ́crits intimeswritten two years earlier, is a phenomenological
description; it lacks the psychoanalytical dimension that would have explained
Baudelaire on the basis of his body and the facts of his life...[Alluding to
“Materialism and Revolution,” published two months after Baudelaire, she
(^3) When asked by an interviewer from theNew Left Reviewabout his book on Baudelaire, Sartre,
joined his critics in responding that the book was “very inadequate, an extremely bad one”
(BEM 42 ). Still, it does exhibit what one critic called a “dynamic potency” (Michael Scriven,
4 Sartre’s Existential Biographies[New York: St. Martin’s Press,^1984 ],^119 ; hereafterEB).
Contat and Rybalkaii: 147. The eminent Baudelaire scholar Georges Blin remarks percep-
tively: “One often asks whether Sartre, playing the inquisitor rather than the investigator, is
not taking up the Baudelaire case to provide the example that a judgment of guilty would
furnish a preface to a future treatise on ethics” (George Blin,Le Sadisme de Baudelaire[Paris:
Librairie Jose ́Corti, 1948 ], 123 ).
Baudelaire: an essay on bad faith 383