The Words by Jean-Paul Sartre

First published:Les Mots, 1964 (English translation, 1964)

Type of work: Autobiography

Time of work: The early twentieth century

Locale: Meudon, France

Principal Personages:

• Sartre| Jean-Paul, a young writer
• Anne-Marie, his mother
• Schweitzer| Louise, his grandmother
• Schweitzer| Charles, his grandfather

Form and Content

Jean-Paul Sartre decided, when he was about twenty years old, that at the age of fifty he would write an autobiography. He began writing “Jean-sans-terre” (one without inheritance or possessions) in 1952 and worked on it for nearly a decade. This unpublished volume was conceived from a political point of view. He later referred to it as an ill-natured work, revealing him to be a person uneasy with others in his milieu, one who at last became the Communist he ought to have been. Realizing that this book would require extensive elaboration, he eventually abandoned it in order to do other things.

He restarted the project in 1961, fashioning the book from a different perspective, one more literary and social than political. He aimed to blend the confessional method of Jean-Jacques Rousseau with something not unlike the reflective meditations of Blaise Pascal, bidding farewell to belles lettres with a very literary book about his childhood. He labored over the style, spending more time and effort than he had ever devoted to any previous work. The Words reveals the childhood of a precocious and pampered but lonely boy as he begins to perceive the reality of his existence; the style charms the reader by turns of phrases more felicitous than those found in Sartre’s previous writings.

A relatively short book (slightly more than two hundred pages), The Words is divided into two parts of nearly equal length, “Reading” and “Writing”; it deals to a large extent with Sartre’s immersion in language as a child, the development of his interest in literature, and his longing to become a writer. “Reading” relates how he learned the alphabet from his mother and then virtually taught himself to read; “Writing” describes his first efforts to express himself on paper with stories and novels before he was ten years of age. His reading was first directed by his grandfather toward the French classics (he especially liked the plays of Pierre Corneille), but his taste soon led him to prefer cloak-and-dagger romances and tales of swashbuckling heroes. His early writings reflect similar interests: He rewrote the fables of Jean de La Fontaine in Alexandrines; a story, “For a Butterfly,” elaborates upon adventures which had appeared in a popular picture magazine. As a child author Sartre often plagiarized, but he managed to liven things up by blending imagination with memory while including long, didactic passages copied directly from the encyclopedia.

Simple in structure, this autobiography expresses Sartre’s reflections on his intellectual and emotional development; it flows smoothly and gracefully from beginning to end. The author’s view of himself as a child is expressed from the perspective of a mature thinker unembarrassed by the pranks and disgraces of his past, and he writes with a considerable amount of affection about nearly everyone he remembers.

Sartre’s tone is casual and informal—essentially conversational—though the style is highly wrought and polished. He touches on a wide variety of topics which affected him during his childhood: the early loss of his father, his relationships with his mother and grandfather, school friends and experiences, the development of his interest in classical music and silent films, and the first glimmers of philosophical reflections which were later to result in the production of an elaborate system of thought. Philosophy, in fact, binds the whole of Sartre’s work together, and The Words reveals the childhood sensibility and imagination of a person who was to become one of the great French writers of the century.

Critical Context

Sartre’s autobiography is essentially a semi-Freudian, semiexistential analysis of himself as a child. The incidents and situations he recalls marked his being, uniting to produce his character and personality. It is what might be called “literary autobiography”: Avoiding any direct presentation of sexual matters, it relates his early exploration of the world of books, both good and bad, and his own first efforts to become a writer. Probably no previous author has penned such a detailed account of his own intellectual development.

The Words is often viewed as a sort of confession, an effort made late in life to seek the sources of what he had become. His efforts to create “committed literature” and excite political action from his readers had often been swallowed up by the purely imaginative expression in novels and plays. By the early 1960’s, Sartre had to ask himself why. The answers reposed in the past, in the childhood of a precocious and pampered youth. The tales of heroes and buccaneers and the silent films about exotic adventures had left a permanent mark on his mind; try though he might to be an engaged political activist, Sartre could not quell the energies of imagination and fantasy in his spirit.

A concept of the self as perceived both internally through reflection and externally by responses of others, which was elaborated philosophically in Being and Nothingness, permeates this entire volume. Observations and insights into a child’s developing self-image, along with perceptions of the adults who surrounded him, are related with charm and innocence, spiced occasionally by a barbed comment. Conflict between the self and others is the sine qua non of Sartre’s works; in The Words one finds its genesis.

In this honest and beautiful self-portrait Sartre is sometimes rather evasive. He sought to justify his existence by writing, by becoming a priest of the word; he ended with the disillusioned feeling of having played at “winner loses.” He continued to write out of habit, having nothing else to do, cultivating a literary self-indulgence which expressed his changing flow of thought. Not believing himself particularly talented, Sartre wrote in order to save himself, to become a man as good as others but better than none.

Bibliography

Aronson, Ronald. “Introducing a Crisis: Les Mots,” in Jean-Paul Sartre: Philosophy in the World, 1980.

Beauvoir, Simone de. Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre, 1984.

Bree, Germaine. Camus and Sartre: Crisis and Commitment, 1972.

Champigny, Robert. “Sartre on Sartre,” in The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, 1981. Edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp.

Champigny, Robert. Stages on Sartre’s Way, 1938-1952, 1959.

Davies, Howard. “Les Mots as Essai sur le Don: Contribution to an Origin Myth,” in Yale French Studies. LXVIII (1985), pp. 57-72.

McMahon, Joseph H. Humans Being: The World of Jean-Paul Sartre, 1971.