character of “totalization” in the Flaubert text.^55 But now the vocabular-
ies ofBNand theCritiquewere superimposed, if not synthesized, to
yield a totalizing praxis that brought the “materialist” or “realist” side of
facticity into creative tension with the “idealist” (read “phenomeno-
logical”) component of the lived situation (le ve ́cu). But it did so at the
price of moral probity – authenticity – in the sense that the “givens” of at
least some situations seemed to render ethical action nearly impossible –
the lesson ofSaint Genet.
A jaundiced view of bourgeois society had infected Sartre from
the moment he met his stepfather. We watched it surface inNausea
and in several of his novellas and plays – in fact, in most of them. But
if the idealist strain was overpowered by Communist “realism” in the
early 1950 s, did the rediscovery of “the ethical” with the Maoists suggest
a gesture toward idealist principles once more? Or was it merely a
version of Sartre’s political search for a “third way” between the Soviet
and capitalist ideologies in the immediate post-war years, now played out
in the ethical field? WhatSaint Genettaught us was a lesson at least
as old as Aristotle: the difficulty (if not impossibility) of being a moral
person in an immoral society. In Sartre’s terms this became the seeming
corruption of the practico-inert and its poisoning of the “creative
freedom” of the individual agent. Still, the existentialist light shines
through, however dimmed it may be by institutional greed and individ-
ual oppression. That becomes clear in the dialectical ethics and, as we
saw, illumines the “dialogical” ethics as well.
The ambiguous relation between the “given” and the “taken” is writ
large in the guiding methodological principle of the Flaubert text: what
we called “the principle of totalization.” This is dialectical reason in the
grand style. It functions not only in the relation between author and
work (Madame Bovary) but also in a curiously “prophetic” reading of
the Pont-l’E ́veˆque incident that symbolically foretells the rise and
demise of Second Empire society. The degree of this mutual totalization
is as ambiguous as was the initial situation inBN. In the Flaubert case,
one may ask whether we are dealing with some kind of “preestablished
harmony,” minus a divine organizer. Is Sartre indulging in the dis-
credited practice of “foretelling the past” (vaticinium post eventum)?
(^55) Granted that “totalization” is absent fromNotebooks for an Ethics, its anticipation via
Hegelian dialectic pervades these notes. For example, seeNE 464 , andCM 480.
402 Existential biography: Flaubert and others