Recommendations from our site
“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…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.” Read more...
Eva Hoffman recommends the best Memoirs
Eva Hoffman, Memoirist
“This 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.” Read more...
The best books on France in the 1960s
Richard Wolin, Political Scientist
