The Words: The Autobiography of Jean-Paul Sartre

Nearing age 60 and one of the most widely recognized writers and intellectuals of the 20th century, Jean-Paul Sartre decided in the early 1960's to sort out his early influences in the memoir THE WORDS. For anyone familiar only with the adult, his work and philosophy, this should be something of a surprise. Someone once told him that he seemed to be a person who never had parents. They might have well have said that he seemed like a person who was never a child. But he was, and a not unhappy one at that. When Sartre's French naval officer father died very young, his mother, Anne Marie Schweitzer (cousin of Albert), took her baby home to her parents. In her parents' home, Anne Marie functioned more like Sartre's sister or playmate. Her father, Charles, was a stern academician who loved the child. For the first ten years of his life, Sartre did not know other children; the trio of adults was his world. The book, an extended essay really, is divided into two sections, "Reading" and "Writing." He taught himself to read early and at a young age began writing what he enjoyed reading: adventure books. Charles tried to turn off the adventure spigot and turn the child to writing about serious literature, which did not go over well. For the most part, Sartre portrays the life of a precocious boy who, by age 10, was beginning to get a sense of the tension between the past, present and future and the question of existence. Sartre concludes the book as his young self enters preadolescence, with a foot out in the world, in the society of other boys at school. The voice of this book is surprisingly spritely, honest, 20th century modern and European. It comes out of a time when autobiography and memoir could be exercises in authentic learning, not mere navel-gazing.

"les Mots", or "Words", is Jean-Paul Sartre's autobiography about his childood, with a strong emphasis on literature; an emphasis which is only natural, since little Sartre grew up with them before he began writing himself (pun intended). Accordingly, the book is divided into two parts: "To Read" and "To Write". If you can read French, then please do yourself a favour and read this wonderful text. It is so good, it actually made me enjoy writing French prose, which is something no other text before ever did, and about the only other French text that I can remember which had an effect of "wow, that's well written!" on me was "les Liaisons Dangereuses" by Laclos. "Les Mots" is a thrilling read, with insights so profound and witty that I enjoyed every page of it. I generally love Sartre's writings, and this is no exception; it just may have a little something more, in the sense that, for all I know, it is the only explicitly autobiographic book he wrote. I can't recommend this book enough.

It is very understandable that Sartre's "The Words" is often compared to Rousseau's "Confessions". Both autobiographies seem to be brutally honest, striving to take away any romantic notions of the writers. Sartre's work however, focuses on the first ten years of his life. Sartre offers an extremely thorough psychoanalytical view of himself as a child and doesn't hesitate to apply Freud's notions of the Superego and the Oedipus complex onto himself. Sartre concludes that, lacking a father, he doesn't have a Superego or Oedipus complex, and this has made him into an extraordinary child who is able to actively create the image of himself and his identity, by using spoken, and later also written, words. My impression of Sartre as a child is that of a clever, manipulative actor. As someone who was always trying to please the adults, and be admired by them, Sartre as a child came across to me as an annoying and spoiled kid, created by his circumstances and reading, but also a self-creating identity that writes. An example of this characterization in writing is a sentence in which Sartre proves how his virtuosity and views of equality are merely an act, befitting his view of human life as a ceremony: "I treat inferiors as equals: this is a pious lie which I tell them in order to make them happy and by which it is right and proper that they be taken in, up to a certain point" (p.33). Like the case with Rousseau however, I did appreciate the author's honesty, but I also wonder whether this self-portrait in writing is another manipulative trick in order to create an image through words. After all, Sartre has left me with the impression of an incredibly intelligent child that knows how the world around him can be influenced and manipulated, but I can hardly imagine anyone thinking at this level at such a young age, and wonder if this autobiography is an attempt of the adult Sartre to re-create his identity through his childhood, literature and psychoanalysis. What I did love about this work is how Sartre explains his childhood and the world surrounding him through words and language, the books that he read as a child and the influence they had on his ideas. By doing this, Sartre emphasizes the idea that identities are indeed the products of an active creative process of using language and writing. Ultimately, this book explores and evaluates the whole use of books and language in human experience.

Sartre's world and life are dense with words. His books are dense with words. He is the kind of writer who seems to crowd the page with more and more words, so many words that words sometimes lose their meaning. But not all the time, and not in all of Sartre's work. True there is the famous metaphysical 'Being and Nothingness' with abstract words which mean mostly non- verifiable and non- understandable obfuscations. But there are also the words of ' Nausea' which do touch upon a certain experience, and Sartre's unique defnition of it. So too in this autobiography the words seem to have a meaning at times, a meaning defining a life which is a consciousness, a consciousness reflecting in words upon words. Sartre does have experiences, and a world in which he comes from and a way of seeing, and not seeing things all his own, but most of all he has words and more words. An intellectual and one enamored of his own abstractions he can make words appealing, and he can lose themselves to them so that he is blind to reality as he was in his failure to condemn Stalinism. But he also, and this autobiography shows this was tremendously precocious and a real worker one who produced hundreds and thousands of words about many different subjects including himself. This work is like all Sartre's words wordy , but it has also at times a perceptiveness, an insightfulness an intelligence which makes it for a time anyway, a worthwhile read.

Sartre writes about his very early life. He writes about things that as an adult you aren't even conscious of anymore. How reading a book about horses and armies can bring those things to life. Sartre talks about his grandfather, his mother, his absent father. He is pretty dispassionate about them. The main thing about the book is Sartres' keen observation and reckless honesty. In the usual autobiography you get alot of bluster, the secret to my success type stuff. Someone, I think it was Martin Amis, said, all autobiographies are success stories. You see that all the time. How I rose from my humble background to be a rich and famous such and such. Well you don't get that here. This is Jean Paul's life before he ever did anything noteworthy. Astonishing level of honesty. I look at memoirs differently after this.