The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert, Volume 2 by Jean-Paul Sartre

Author:Jean-Paul Sartre
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

ELEVEN

Scripta Manent

In this case, the conversion seems to be a phase of personalization. It is no longer only a question of internalizing what is suffered or even of assuming it in the unity of stress; in Gustave’s case it is also a matter of going with the impulse to make a brutal about-face, of gradually guiding it and, after a rotation of 180 degrees, of assuming his situation by surpassing it toward an elsewhere defined and posed by a new and spontaneous option, as if it were the chance of a lifetime.

But first, a cautionary word: for Gustave, literature was born of a thwarted vocation, and it would always bear that mark. I would recall, however, that the original vocation was no gift, in the ordinary sense of the word—it was neither plenitude nor capacity but a need. As an actor, Gustave was not gifted;1 he acted so as to launch an appeal to being by exploiting the means at hand, that is, his very derealization. But can we say that he himself did not regret being discouraged? Properly guided, couldn’t he have gone on to act before the public and known glory in the theater? I answer that the question is meaningless. Gustave is not Kean, and he knows it very well: the son of a respectable family, his first vocation was born to be thwarted. And if he had rebelled? If he had fled the paternal domain? Then he would not have been that Gustave for whom, as we know, all active revolt was forbidden. We can ask only one meaningful question: Having been an actor—in front of his comrades, his family, his peers—when he played his favorite roles—the Garçon, the Idiot, the good Giant, the Excessive, or Saint Polycarp—was he any good? Was he convincing? To find out we must examine the testimony of those who saw him. The testimony varies from one witness to another and, for some, from one moment to the next; occasionally he fascinated or disturbed. The Goncourts were stupefied by the Idiot’s carryings-on; his father took fright when he imitated the Journalist of Nevers. Sometimes he won people over—witness his influence over his schoolmates—but chiefly he was irritating. And then he was quite transparent: Jules and Edmond were quick to sense something forced and false in his game that shattered the illusion. Later, neither Laporte nor Lapierre believed in Saint Polycarp or the Giant: they played at being believers out of friendship, to please him. The main thing here is that he is destined to incarnate a single character—for all his avatars resemble each other—not entirely his own character but the persona he wants to appear in the eyes of others, which we will describe in the next chapter. Thus his first vocation seems scarcely more than the simplest and most immediate reaction to his derealization; and I mean that this, as well as his constituted passivity and his pithiatism, would have served him if he had gone into the theater. But

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