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Review Article The Total Intellectual T.H. ADAMOWSKI Jean-PauISartre. The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert, 1821-1857. Volume 1 , trans Carol Cosman Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1981. x, 627. $25.00 Hazel E. Barnes. Sartre and Flaubert Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1981. x, 449. $25.00 doth; $10.95 paper When Sartre completed Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr (1952), he invited Genet to examine the manuscript. According to Sartre, Genet's 'first impulse was to throw it in the fire.' To read TheFamily Idiot and not to feel that impulse is to be a Hero olthe Spirit. However, the University of Chicago Press has done its best to soften the book's blow. Carol Cosman's fine translation of part I of the first volume of L'Idiot de la Famille (1971) is the first of a five-volume project that will make Sartre's book physically more manageable than the bulky three-volume French edition. And as the translator makes her lonely way through the 2100 pages thatare still to appear, there is also Hazel E.Barnes'sjudicious and generally sympathetic commentaryon the volumes Sartre completed before blindness forced him to abandon a fourth volume on Madame Bovary. Barnes has also had access to Sartre's notes for that volume, and these allow her to speculate in a compelling fashion on the approach Sartre might have taken to Flaubert's masterpiece. Despite these aids to the reader, The Family Idiot remainsbrutally formidable and yet indispensable both to an understanding of Flaubert and his century and of Sartre and our century. One ignores it as one reads it: at one's peril. If not perilous, it would certainly be foolish, however, to attempt here a summary of Sartre's argument.This would have on the reader theeflect that snapshots ofDeath Valley have on relatives ('I thought it would be more ... impressive'). Better to report on some of the issues raised by the book and to 'raid' it - and Barnes's tracing of its labyrinthine onward course - for appropriate illustrations of the method Sartre employs. The Family Idiot represents the culmination of Sartre's career as what the French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, has called 'the total intellectual,' the man who moved with assurance among the domains of fiction, drama, the essay, criticism, UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 53, NUMBER I, FALL 1983 108 T.R. ADAMOWSKI philosophy, and biography, bringing to each field the 'totality of the technical and symbolic capital he had acquired in others." In what he called his Flaubert, Sartre continued this effort to 'totalize' (his term for the synthesizing or unifying dimension of all human activity) intellectual spaces by bringing together the ideas and styles he had dispersed across the time of his career. His commentators have often argued that the Marxism of Critique ofDialectical Reason (1960) represented a break with the existentialist commitments of Being and Nothingness (1943), butit is clear that in his last major work Sartre set out to demonstrate the compatibility of these two periods of his thought. The ideas and terms of the Critique and of Being and Nothingness peacefully coexist in The Family Idiot. Moreover, in his effort to make Flaubert 'transparent' to the modern eye, Sartre has revived his novelistic impulse, dormant since the 1940s. The bristling abstractions of the Sartrean dialectic are not in themselves sufficient to answer the ruling question of the Flaubert: 'what, at this point in time, can we know about a man?' (p ix). To answer that question also required that the book be a kind of novel: 'a true novel.'2 Of the many obstacles the book places in the way of the reader whose interests are primarily literary, the first is that of literary biography in the service of 'existential psychoanalysis.' Sartre's 'totalizing' ambition destabilizes any notion of the 'strictly literary.' Since his biographies have always reflected his phenomenological background, they have never proceeded by an accumulation, more or less chronologically ordered, of the details of a life. Sartre prefers, instead, to call attention to those aspects of his subject's experience that he considers representative and that serve, therefore, as keys to the 'project' - that choice the selfmakes of...

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