Sartre’s monument to his illustrious predecessor, whose celebrated pithiatic endeavor influenced the writings of such highly esteemed authors as Guy de Maupassant, Edmond de Goncourt, Alphonse Daudet, Franz Kafka, J. M. Coetzee, Emile Zola, and Mario Vargas Llosa among other notables, remained unfinished.
Why was Sartre preoccupied with Flaubert, so indignant as to condemn him in five volumes? Authors deem themselves authorities; arrogance compensates for guilt by blaming others, especially one’s own kind. Authors may see in Flaubert and Sartre not only the dirty details of family life that each nuclear family is bound to have and to which individual members may react according to circumstance and temperament, but their own quest to free themselves of pathetic existence and to be real selves through criticizing the phoniness of others.
Alas that the closer one gets to the much advertised “real” self, the more he discovers that it is unreal. The god that we would secretly have the self become if only we were free to do so does not exist except as a figment of the imagination. Our ‘I’s are illusions. At the bottom of being there is a bum, a not-I, an existence in want of a handout. To wit: the ‘I’ is Nothing, capitalized as a proper noun to express the significance of its essential nothingness. Whosoever shall realize it at its true depth, at the Being’s bottom, shall, like Narcissus, perish.
Sartre is naturally afraid of Nothing: “When writing Madame Bovary,” Sartre writes, “Flaubert shows with Louise his deep desire as an artist: to appear to treat one subject but in fact to be treating another, quite different in quality and scope, or not to treat at all, by which he does not mean writing to say nothing, but writing to say Nothing.
That indeed is the role of the mediator in Madame Bovary: to symbolize, strictly speaking, to allude to the macrocosm of the void that is its equivalent, and above all to distract attention, to fool the reader, and, while the reader is absorbed in reading a contemporary story, to inject him with an ancient eternal poison through style.”
Sartre claims Flaubert’s style fixes the conclusion Flaubert arrived at in adolescence: ‘The earth is the realm of Satan,’ ‘I believe in the curse of Adam.’ In short,” Sartre paraphrases, “the worst is always certain, I believe in Nothing.”
We suspect that Sartre’s fear of Flaubert’s “Nothing” motivated an extended, unfinished denial of death in The Family Idiot:
“Evil is that gnawing contradiction at the heart of being,” he says, “that discovery in every being, when it invests all its forces in persevering, that it is merely an illusory modulation of nothing.”
Further: “The extraordinary purpose of art, in Gustave’s view, is the manifest the ineluctable slippage of being toward nothingness through the imaginary totalization of the work; at the same time, its purpose is to preserve indefinitely, by that regulated illusion which is the work, a sense of endlessness in the slippage, fixing it through the restraining power of words whose permanence, assures us in the imaginary that it will never reach its end.”
But “Nothing” is not the devil that possesses the hysteric nor is it a stylistic witches’ poison brewed by sophists. Nothing is the antidote for everything. Nothing does not mean nothingness; there is hope for “Being” as long as the word is capitalized. The real evil lurks in the various denials of death asserted to advance solutions to the basic predicament; for example, immortality is assured to those who engage in hate-based group-love, battling for the cause. So we write to free people from their miserable existence, and to free ourselves in the process if not first of all. The existentialists can have their respective I’s or the category of one, but give us “Being” or give us death. Being is a creation, a work of art. It is an illusion, so to speak, but a real illusion.
If some of us would withdraw from the world and its torments to paint a truer picture of it than it is advertised to be, and hold it up as a mirror so others may see themselves, the artist perchance finding himself in the picture despite his attempt at objectivity and erasure of first-person pronouns, does that mean that our solution is more neurotic or sick than any other, especially if the painting is not so pretty or doggoned cynical? I for one do not believe so. Everybody knows that our cultural reality is becoming more and more like a false advertisement, so much bullshit, for example, suggesting that we all produce things we do not really want in order to survive; our choice is to either consume or consume things we do not need at all; everyone will supposedly profit if everyone overcharges one another. Is not that evidence of mass pithiatic hysteria?
What are we to prescribe for therapy besides sex, drugs, alcohol, and noisy and violent entertainment? Rid ourselves of the nuclear family, run around naked, sleep under porches, fornicate in public, and piss on riches? So is a dog’s life not neurotic? Should we take vows of poverty, stand on one leg or hold one arm into the air, and beg for alms? Is that not neurotic? Should we limit production to a few necessaries, wear the same uniform, and live in barracks? Is that not neurotic? Should we become so anxious over the Debt Scare that we plunge the world into a Depression and turn to a charismatic fascist phony to pull us together to wage war to teach the survivors a lesson about reality? Should we not fear terrorism so much that we terrorize the world with weapons of mass destruction? Is that neurotic?
Flaubert and Sartre and kith and kin and ilk are trying to find themselves, to be somebody by writing fiction that everyone will recognized as the truth. The truth may be awful or ugly, but notice that everyone loves to see oneself in a mirror no matter what s/he appears to be in the eyes of the others. What a miserable career the intellectual would have, like a cat chasing its tail to find itself while the tail tries to lose the cat, if s/he believes the cause of the rotation is mental illness.
As a matter of fact, the pithiatism Sartre speaks of has been and is for many authors a pleasant escape from their subjects! One does not have to pay for interminable psychoanalytic sessions or religiously confess or unload on unwilling spouses and friends whose own neurosis is quite enough; the chimney-sweeping talking cure can be done at home alone by means of a diary, a journal, a novel. Now is that sick? If so, civilization is sick.
xYx
Painting by by Sebastian Ferreira