At last Flaubert’s self-hatred and resentment converge with his project
of personalization: in derealizing himself as artist, he will derealize the
world.^40 His vocation crystallizes on that traumatic night in late January
1844 near Pont-l’E ́veˆque, when he has an epileptic seizure,^41 falling at
his brother’s feet in symbolic death to rise as artist,l’homme imaginaire.
Freed from the hated family burden of continuing his law exams,
Flaubert is allowed the leisure, afforded by his poor health, to pursue a
career in art. Such, in brief, is Sartre’s reading of the formative events in
Flaubert’s biography.
Before we turn to four issues that bindThe Family Idiotto Sartre’s
other studies to form a kind of totalizing compendium of his entire
oeuvre, two questions must be answered: What is the link between
Flaubert’s concept of art and his personal neurosis? And how does this
concept reflect the general condition of French society in the last three-
quarters of the nineteenth century? These are the existential psychoana-
lytic and the historical materialist (Marxist) questions respectively.
In response to the first query, one must assume that the clear eye
of Sartrean consciousness seems to preclude unconscious motives on
Flaubert’s part. (We have already cast suspicion on the accuracy
of this claim. As we proceed in the text this misgiving may be confirmed,
leaving the existential psychoanalytic vision somewhat clouded.)^42
Flaubert’s neurosis, therefore, is conscious, chosen in the sense that
one “chooses” one’s meaning/direction (sens) by the practical projects
that one sets for oneself. Still, we must acknowledge the concepts of
“comprehension” – as in “Flaubert did not know himself and...at the
(^40) “To imagine is at once to produce an imaginary object and to become imaginary (s’imagi-
nariser); I did not stress that adequately inThe Imaginary”(FIi: 912 n.;IFii: 251 ,n. 11 ).
(^41) Sartre considers it an attack of “hysteria” or “Pithiatism,” which would fit better into his
emphasis on Gustav’s autosuggestion, the psychosomatic and the “responsibility” of the ill
for their maladies. But that doesn’t seem to be the received view. One biographer points out
that it was “temporal lobe epilepsy,” a form unknown in France at the time, possibly a
hereditary ailment. It left Flaubert without the easy flow of words that had been his delight
42 till than. (See Benjamin F. Bart,Flaubert[Syracuse University Press,^1967 ],^95 .)
Remember Sartre’s reference to thenon-knowledgethat led the Communist to be a practical
anti-Semite when theoretically (reflectively) he was tolerant toward a Jewish Party Comrade
(“Marxisme et Subjectivite ́”), inChapter 14 above, page 365. This could be a somatic
version of the “shadowy side of lucidity” previously discussed. But in the earlier case,
something like Merleau-Ponty’s “operative intentionality” might be involved. It would easily
conform to Sartre’s theory of Flaubert’s “autosuggestion,” “hysteria” and “Pithiatism” at
Pont-L’E ́veˆque. SeeSFHRi: chapter 8 , “Biography and History:The Family Idiot.”
398 Existential biography: Flaubert and others