Sartre's second century

Literature and Philosophy in Sartre's Early Writings 39
fantastic tales, adventure novels inspired by Jules Verne, Michel Ze*vaco,
and, finally, mystical fictions. The latter are written under the influences of
Charles's humanistic religion, readings such as Charles Perrault's
Griselidis and Edmond Rostand's Chantecler, and a Platonic idealism
shaped by his grandfather's library. The child's mysticism is a key to
understanding most of Sartre's early writings where the topic of salvation
through art occurs repeatedly.
Une Defaite, an unpublished novel written in 1927 and inspired by the
relationships between Richard Wagner, Nietzsche and Cosima Wagner,
relates the troubled situation which binds Fr£d6ric, an ambitious young
student, Organte, an ageing musician unable to create, and Cosima, the
bright and beautiful wife of Organte. Frederic's life is a pitiful failure
whose advances are spurned by Cosima. Organte stifles him and prevents
him from writing. However, Fr&ie'ric finally manages to finish his inspired
Empedocle, and all the hardships are thereby redeemed. The novel
concludes with the lines:
We can leave [FrddeYic] on this defeat, on this fruitful defeat. He is
humiliated and distressed. He will have doubts about himself for a long
time, he will realise the loss of his strength. He is alone. [...] but it will
soon be time for his victories. 21
The third metaphysical experience is intimately connected to the
second. It is the intuition of absolute freedom. In Being and Nothingness
Sartre asserts that "man is wholly free". 22 He adds: "We shall never
apprehend ourselves except as a choice in the making. But freedom is
simply the fact that this choice is always unconditioned." 23 Sartre does not
hesitate to retreat, apparently, from the theory of the "facticity" and
"finitude" of the for-itself given in the second part of Being and
Nothingness. He now writes: "Freedom is total and infinite, which does
not mean that it has no limits but that it never encounters them." 24
Let us now return to The Words at the moment when, as a child, Sartre
dreams about his "false birth":
When I examine my life from the age of six to nine, I am struck by the
continuity of my spiritual exercises. Their content often changed, but the
program remained unvaried. I had made a false entrance; I withdrew
21 Sartre, Merits dejeunesse, 286.
22 Being and Nothingness, 464.
23 Ibid., 501.
24 Ibid., 552, my emphasis.