The Words

"The Words is a memoir of Sartre’s childhood. It takes him up to the age of 10, and it is a brilliant piece of self-analysis. I think of it as philosophical psychoanalysis , because he decodes philosophically his inner conflicts and his very deep and perhaps unconscious motivations. Sartre’s childhood was spent in a bourgeois household, full of heavy furniture, grandfather clocks and books. He grew up with his mother and his grandfather (his father died when he was very little). His mother was related to the Schweitzers , so it was a very distinguished French family. He was a very coddled, adored and stifled child. His grandfather initiated him into the cult of culture. And the memoir is really about the effect of the cult of culture on him – about a childhood spent among books, and a child who has no self outside of his relationship to books and the written word. If not quite of literature, it is a renunciation then of the worship of literature. In order to confirm his grandfather’s and his mother’s idea of him, he reads all the time. He hardly goes out of this rather stifling apartment. He creates himself, a kind of false self, through his identification with literary characters. He begins to strike literary postures. He has no access to himself and to his emotions except through literature. Eventually, he realises that this prevents him from having a real self, from living a real life, from engaging with the present and from taking risks. Among other things, it is a brilliant analysis of bad faith. So Sartre’s leap from his early youth to his later philosophical notions is quite direct, through a reaction against the worship of culture and the unengaged, tradition-formed self. That is what’s so wonderful about this book. It’s really a very deep decoding, of himself, his surroundings and the bourgeois lifestyle – but it’s steeped in his later ideas and his analysis of the whole tradition of literature and the culture cult. He deconstructs particular moments of his childhood with great acumen, as when he strikes a literary pose and how strangely false it makes him feel. It’s a work of great brilliance."

"It was shortly after writing this book in 1964 that he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature which he declined. The Words , of course, is his autobiography and is a wonderful example of Sartre’s excellence as a prose writer. It brims with self-knowledge and self-criticism too. I think it helps balance out our sense of Sartre’s achievements and shows what an outstanding figure he was. You really get a sense of how he was as a person, which can sometimes be lost if you just concentrate on some of his more extreme political pronouncements in the 1960s. It’s an outstanding exemplar of what he represented as a literary figure. He was obsessed with the idea of self-knowledge. He wrote biographies of other great French writers, the most important being the one about Gustave Flaubert which went to three volumes. All these undertakings were an indirect attempt at self-knowledge, what makes a person who he is, how does this talent develop from humble origins, what are the genetic pre-dispositions? What he sought to explain in The Words was how he became Jean-Paul Sartre. It is a paragon of self-knowledge and an outstanding accomplishment."