over the years.^44 When Er mentions his interest in formulating an ethics,
the god exclaims: “An ethics, what foolishness! But guard the desire to
create a work of art.” He then counsels Er on how to do so: “Protect
yourself from the passions by a more violent desire than all of them, by
the mother-passion herself...Don’t think that I want to make you an
aesthete,” Apollo warns. “Such a one seeks Art that is already produced:
a painting, a sculpture, the plot of a novel” The god enjoins Er to be a
patient worker and a martyr. “You will see that nothing is beautiful
except what humans make, that everything is to be done, that life itself
will teach you nothing, and that you must offer, give, always give to
things, to men and that your true goal is the book, the painting, the
statue that will come to life at your hands.” The god’s final advice is to
believe in yourself. He assures the hesitant Er, “You have what it takes.”
This and the following suggests the kind of “aesthetico-metaphysical
idealism” that de Coorebyter attributes to the young Sartre and of which
Nauseais both the symptom and the antidote.^45 The Nietzschean aspect
of this second of three “novels” is becoming increasingly obvious: the
courageous individualism, the risky creativity, the overlap of the aes-
thetic and the moral, the pursuit and embrace of the “mother-passion”
and perhaps, at least subtly, the heroic atheism. Which brings us to the
central panel in this triptych, itself a narrative in three acts.
The Legend of TruthThe title of this third “novel” is an obvious gloss on Nietzsche’s well-
known essay “How the ‘True World’ Finally Became a Fable” and his
even more relevant “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense.”^46 This
(^44) De Coorebyter lists many of those elements in the various aesthetic genres, pointing out that
they predate Sartre’s immersion in phenomenology in Berlin (see Vincent de Coorbyter,
Sartre avant la Phe ́nome ́nologie. Autour de “La Nause ́e” et de la “Legende de la ve ́rite ́”
45 [Brussels: Ousia,^2005 ],^300 –^301 ); hereafterSaP.
Ibid., 275. The citation is his, the interpretation mine. De Coorebyter places more importance on
theCarnet Dupuis, despite its staccato and fragmentary nature: “TheLegendretains relics of
Nietzscheanism and lights the last flames of salvation by Art by evoking the production of a work
that is necessary both in its origins and in its attributes, whereas theDupuissubjects this phantasm
to a critique that, with the help ofNausea, almost liquidates it by removing every mystique of the
46 overman from these last two texts, viz.Erand theLegend”(SaP^275 –^276 ).
Twilight of the Idols, in Friedrich Nietzsche,The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols,
ed. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman (Cambridge University Press, 2005 ), 171. “Truth and
36 An elite education: student, author, soldier, teacher