8 - Biography and autobiography: the discontinuous self

Summary

Sartre's four thousand pages of biographical studies have repeatedly been set off by critics against his dismissive remarks on biography in La Nausée, and seen as revealing either inconsistency or at least a change of heart. Such an interpretation is indicative of both a partial reading of the novel, and a simplification of Sartre's biographical project itself. Roquentin becomes disillusioned with his study of Monsieur de Rollebon precisely because it is, as he himself senses, the wrong kind of biography. Sartre's studies of Baudelaire, Genet and Flaubert (and, of course, himself) amongst others, are of a very different nature, and indeed are not biographies in the ordinary sense of the word at all. ‘Que peut-on savoir d'un homme aujourd'hui?’ (IF, I, 7): the question would be trivial if it applied primarily to the facts of a man's life. Roquentin's comments on the Marquis could well be repeated by Sartre thirty years later with respect to Flaubert:

L'homme commence à m'ennuyer. C'est au livre que je m'attache, je sens un besoin de plus en plus fort de l'écrire – à mesure que je vieillis, dirait-on.

(OR, 19)

Je ne comprends plus rien à sa conduite. Ce ne sont pas les documents qui font défaut: lettres, fragments de mémoires, rapports secrets, archives de police. J'en ai presque trop, au contraire. Ce qui manque dans tous ces témoignages, c'est la fermeté la consistance.

(OR, 18)