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The Words: The Autobiography of Jean-Paul Sartre

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Sartre writes about his very early life. He writes about things that as an adult you aren't even conscious of anymore. How reading a book about horses and armies can bring those things to life. Sartre talks about his grandfather, his mother, his absent father. He is pretty dispassionate about them. The main thing about the book is Sartres' keen observation and reckless honesty. In the usual autobiography you get alot of bluster, the secret to my success type stuff. Someone, I think it was Martin Amis, said, all autobiographies are success stories. You see that all the time. How I rose from my humble background to be a rich and famous such and such. Well you don't get that here. This is Jean Paul's life before he ever did anything noteworthy. Astonishing level of honesty. I look at memoirs differently after this.

Nearing age 60 and one of the most widely recognized writers and intellectuals of the 20th century, Jean-Paul Sartre decided in the early 1960's to sort out his early influences in the memoir THE WORDS. For anyone familiar only with the adult, his work and philosophy, this should be something of a surprise. Someone once told him that he seemed to be a person who never had parents. They might have well have said that he seemed like a person who was never a child. But he was, and a not unhappy one at that.

When Sartre's French naval officer father died very young, his mother, Anne Marie Schweitzer (cousin of Albert), took her baby home to her parents. In her parents' home, Anne Marie functioned more like Sartre's sister or playmate. Her father, Charles, was a stern academician who loved the child. For the first ten years of his life, Sartre did not know other children; the trio of adults was his world. The book, an extended essay really, is divided into two sections, "Reading" and "Writing." He taught himself to read early and at a young age began writing what he enjoyed reading: adventure books. Charles tried to turn off the adventure spigot and turn the child to writing about serious literature, which did not go over well. For the most part, Sartre portrays the life of a precocious boy who, by age 10, was beginning to get a sense of the tension between the past, present and future and the question of existence. Sartre concludes the book as his young self enters preadolescence, with a foot out in the world, in the society of other boys at school.

The voice of this book is surprisingly spritely, honest, 20th century modern and European. It comes out of a time when autobiography and memoir could be exercises in authentic learning, not mere navel-gazing.

This is Jean-Paul Sartre's brief autobiography about the impact the printed word had on his life. The book is divided into two sections, the first is titled "Reading," and the second "Writing," and I think that's an excellent summary of his life. Sartre recounts his early childhood, being born into a family without a father, and ultimately living a secluded a childhood submerged in his grandfather's library. Sartre then discusses life at the Ecole Superior, when he began to develop as a writer of prodigious genius. Sartre doesn't discuss his work particularly; this text is not a critical examination of his literary and philosophical work. Rather, it is a deeply introspective reflection and inquiry into the powerful and lasting effects words can have in life. I recommend it to all fans of reading.

It is very understandable that Sartre's "The Words" is often compared to Rousseau's "Confessions". Both autobiographies seem to be brutally honest, striving to take away any romantic notions of the writers. Sartre's work however, focuses on the first ten years of his life. Sartre offers an extremely thorough psychoanalytical view of himself as a child and doesn't hesitate to apply Freud's notions of the Superego and the Oedipus complex onto himself. Sartre concludes that, lacking a father, he doesn't have a Superego or Oedipus complex, and this has made him into an extraordinary child who is able to actively create the image of himself and his identity, by using spoken, and later also written, words.
My impression of Sartre as a child is that of a clever, manipulative actor. As someone who was always trying to please the adults, and be admired by them, Sartre as a child came across to me as an annoying and spoiled kid, created by his circumstances and reading, but also a self-creating identity that writes. An example of this characterization in writing is a sentence in which Sartre proves how his virtuosity and views of equality are merely an act, befitting his view of human life as a ceremony: "I treat inferiors as equals: this is a pious lie which I tell them in order to make them happy and by which it is right and proper that they be taken in, up to a certain point" (p.33).
Like the case with Rousseau however, I did appreciate the author's honesty, but I also wonder whether this self-portrait in writing is another manipulative trick in order to create an image through words. After all, Sartre has left me with the impression of an incredibly intelligent child that knows how the world around him can be influenced and manipulated, but I can hardly imagine anyone thinking at this level at such a young age, and wonder if this autobiography is an attempt of the adult Sartre to re-create his identity through his childhood, literature and psychoanalysis. What I did love about this work is how Sartre explains his childhood and the world surrounding him through words and language, the books that he read as a child and the influence they had on his ideas. By doing this, Sartre emphasizes the idea that identities are indeed the products of an active creative process of using language and writing. Ultimately, this book explores and evaluates the whole use of books and language in human experience.

Sartre's world and life are dense with words. His books are dense with words. He is the kind of writer who seems to crowd the page with more and more words, so many words that words sometimes lose their meaning. But not all the time, and not in all of Sartre's work. True there is the famous metaphysical 'Being and Nothingness' with abstract words which mean mostly non- verifiable and non- understandable obfuscations. But there are also the words of ' Nausea' which do touch upon a certain experience, and Sartre's unique defnition of it. So too in this autobiography the words seem to have a meaning at times, a meaning defining a life which is a consciousness, a consciousness reflecting in words upon words. Sartre does have experiences, and a world in which he comes from and a way of seeing, and not seeing things all his own, but most of all he has words and more words. An intellectual and one enamored of his own abstractions he can make words appealing, and he can lose themselves to them so that he is blind to reality as he was in his failure to condemn Stalinism. But he also, and this autobiography shows this was tremendously precocious and a real worker one who produced hundreds and thousands of words about many different subjects including himself.
This work is like all Sartre's words wordy , but it has also at times a perceptiveness, an insightfulness an intelligence which makes it for a time anyway, a worthwhile read.

At present one can only experience-Sartre's-absence, but his words are always present if needed, being embedded in the volumes that now populate the world's libraries, or "temples" as Sartre called them. Sartre divided his life into two sections: reading and writing, and in this book, his autobiography, he expounds, but does not explain, his transitions from one of these sections to the other. This lack of explanation was done on purpose by Sartre: conscious purpose of course. To explain his life would be to institutionalize it, and this is an anathema to Sartre. However, the reader is granted many explanations of Sartre's existence, regardless of Sartre's intent. Such is the nature of the written word: Sartre's choice was not to explain, but the reader is free to choose otherwise. Sartre has condemned all readers with such choices some might say, others would say he has blessed them.

The reader learns of Sartre's "bourgeois" origins": explaining his very baffling attempt to reconcile his view of freedom with Marxism; of his belief that a library is a temple: explaining his command of the literature during and before his time, and inducing his characteristically eclectic philosophy; of the origins of Sartre's idealism, and his thirty-year attempt to rid himself of it: explaining his overwhelming emphasis on consciousness; of his Protestant/Catholic "doubly affiliated" religious background, explaining his atheism (even a mind as free as Sartre's could not reconcile the conflicting doctrines given by these two religions).

Sartre's life can be characterized as about a man who definitely had time on his hands, and controlled it with efficiency of an American. The artistic Sartre, the philosophizing Sartre, the political Sartre, all came about because of his command of time. His works, far from exhibiting spontaneity, as one might expect considering his philosophical view of time, reflect rather an organized, rational view of time. Sartre kept schedules and met deadlines. A profilic author such as Sartre cannot do otherwise. In once criticizing the Faulknerian-Sartorian view of time, Sartre it seems wanted to set the record straight for himself: he did not want to speak of himself and his deeds as past history. This would make him de trops, as in the way of himself, as superfluous as Roquentien in the park. But all we now have of Sartre is his past: his musings in this book, and what he set down in the philosophical and theatrical literature. He is now an institution due to these works.

Everyone's life is unique - the result of events, circumstances and particular sequences of incidents. George Sand in her novella 'The Devil's Pool' says `..... everyone has a story (and everyone would be able to rouse interest in the novel of their own life, if they had really understood it.....)' But perhaps, sometimes, a person's story is largely irrelevant to most of their potential readers simply because the events of their life are too extraordinary. Sartre's events are not all that extraordinary and yet they are sufficiently distinct to separate him from many people (his father died when he was very young and he was brought up largely by his maternal grandfather and mother - coupled with this Sartre was not a robust person and seems to have been extravagantly protected and praised, apparently with the intention of getting the best out of him). That upbringing did achieve significant outcomes, and yet still I wonder about this autobiographical account. Can it be meaningful to most readers - and especially those readers whose own extraordinary 'events' may have headed them off in another direction?

This book is not a labour to read. It has many unusual and fascinating stories and accounts. It does have some extraordinary people (not just Sartre himself). You can make what you want of the psychological insights.

other recommendations:

'The Confessions' - Rousseau
'Memoirs of a Revolutionist' - Kroptkin
'Memoirs' - Berlioz
'I Felt the Eagles Heart' - Macnab

He wanted us to read about his life, to discover how he turned himself into a genius, to find the turn that made him conclude earnestly, "God does not exist." It's as if atheism became his raison d'etre, a true a priori thinker though he professed exactly the opposite. As Marvin Farber wrote, "Some reading in the literature of evolution, and especially of cultural anthropology, might have (had) a salutary effect on his thinking and writing." In short, Sartre confused his literary devices with actual reality. That he thought his words would provide him immortality attests to his intellectual arrogance. "I am the giver and the gift," he wrote. Actually, his right hand didn't know what his left hand was really doing. His ignorance of what was really happening behind the Iron Curtain is his true legacy.

I loved The Words, but I read it in French. The story was not really fascinating (still this book helps us to understand Jean-Paul Sartre), it is about Sartre's childhood. But it is perfectly written, in a rare style that is both beautiful and easy to read, like in Balzac or Malraux. If somebody has read it in English, please let me know if the translation is as great as the original.

Surpassing the likes of Huxley and Orwell in its vision of dystopic horror, told in the guise of a childhood memoir, the story is simple yet brilliantly complex. Jean-Paul is a little boy with no personality ("no super-ego") who longs for fame and eventually takes over the world by creating a new religion, sold as an antidote to fascism. The final irony in this self-reflexive work of fiction is in the title: the boy discovers his own power in that of words, the power to change perceptions and to obscure individual differences (the author knows his Wittgenstein). Infinitely more subtle than any outspoken critique of the Soviet Union, it perhaps has more in common thematically with Nabokov's 'Bend Sinister': the boy's description of himself as 'toady' suggests a kinship with that book's villain, The Toad, founder of the 'Average Man Party'. I would suggest this book was both the peak and death-knell of the existential / nouveau roman era that combined narrative objectivity with moral-ambiguity-by-numbers, a belief attested by the extraordinary poetic and imaginative range of the great French authors since 1964, such as Jean Barth, Donald DeLille and Thomas Pynchonne.