Words (Penguin Modern Classics)

The man knew people.

Unique, at times hilarious.

Great read,as usual sartre leaves you a lot to question and ponder about,difficult to put down once you start it..

A treasure to be read by everyone.

awesome story of an awesome man

Sartre’s father, a naval officer, died two years after Jean-Paul was born, whereupon he and his mother went to live with her parents. Sartre thus grew up under thesupervision of his grandfather, Charles Schweitzer (uncle of Albert Schweitzer), who exercised a powerful, and not altogether a benign influence on the boy’s development. He was sequestered at home, and there encouraged in precocious literary aspiration until the age of 10,when he was sent to school, to enjoy for the 1st time the companionship of other children. Sartre’s own account of his childhood in Les Mots (1964) is mostly negative, and his grandfather is subjected to extremely unfavourable criticism. He was like the God figure. Due to his father’s death at an early age Sartre had no superego.In 1964 Sartre renounced literature in a witty and sardonic account of the first ten years of his life, Les Mots (The Words). The book is an ironic counterblast to Marcel Proust, whose reputation had unexpectedly eclipsed that of André Gide (who had provided the model of littérature engagée for Sartre's generation). Literature, Sartre concluded, functioned ultimately as a bourgeois substitute for real commitment in the world. Sartre is inducted into literature from his grandfather’s library. His whole experience was through books rather than nature or real events, hence his idealism which took 30 years to get rid of. Charles despises the trashy literature read by his wife and daughter. But from thrillers and magazines Sartre derived his most personal fantasy world: optimism. From his grandfather he forged a will to write.In some ways Sartre’s mother was the most important woman in his life, to which we can attribute his genius, the love of a beautiful young mother, the conviction that she has a genius, and the very strong relationship between mother and child. Sartre remembers his mother as an elder sister whom he would grow up to marry. However his mother remarried when he was 12. Sartre fostered the illusion he was her husband, her lover. That he‘d become a famous writer. Later in his life in 1946, Sartre found himself living with his mother again when her husband died. He lived with her for 16 years until it became too dangerous due to OAS bombs. He was her‘3rd husband.’ He was fulfilling to his mother what she wanted him to be when he grew up, her little boy. He also fulfilled his promise to marry mummy when grown up.Sartre was convinced his mother wanted to give birth to a daughter; in the end she had to make do with Poulou, giving him the ‘sex of angels, indeterminate but feminine around the edges.’ He was ‘feminised through his mother’s tenderness.’ It made him stay away from rough games and boys. He reflected himself in his mother’s eyes, was ‘pretty and pampered’: he ‘lorded it like a little king in the world of women’. There is a famous episode where his grandfather took him for a haircut and he has all his beautiful blonde curls cut off, leaving him looking ugly. Satisfying his grandfather, he’d disappoint his mother: “I was pure object doomed to masochism.” Sartre begins to construct a sense of himself from the images that get projected to him from his doting mother and grandfather. Sartre is lost in illusions about how he’s going to become a great writer. He doesn’t really understand who he is; he begins to understand it when his locks are cut off. Sartre sees through his mother’s eyes how ugly, small and nasty he is. Always our sense of ourselves comes from other people. Expressing both grandiosity and vulnerability, he suffers a narcissistic wound to his body. He will feel shame every time he feels vulnerable, associated with his mother. The writing self is the powerful self that will protect him from vulnerability. It's the phallic consciousness.Sartre records in Les Mots how his father's terminal illness precipitated his premature weaning, prompted his own attempt to die (in emulation of his father and resentment against his mother), and produced the estrangement from his mother which cast her forever in a different role : an elder sister, for whom there was no contestant in her possession. This is a crafted version of his childhood where his rational self takes over and is in control. His father’s death, he says ,was the « great event of his life : it gave me my freedom ». He wasn’t crushed to death by his father. Sartre describes his early childhood as paradise. « I was treated as a young prince that the Schweitzer family had begotten, a treasure that had not been clearly defined, but that exceeded all its outward manifestations ». » I had been told I was a gift from heaven, much longed for, indispensible to my mother and grandfather ». The child prodigy. However Sartre is aware of the abscence of his father, giving him a loss of self respect. He felt unstable and impermanent, and with Anne-Marie,having neither land,goods or home. She was treated as a child by her parents. Poulou becomes abstact,disembodied,dead,an impostor. Play-acting for the benefit of the adults, wantingto please them.Although Sartre never wrote about Rimbaud, he takes Le Poetes de Sept Ans, as a model for Les Mots : like Rimbaud he’s cut off from other children but can see/hear them playing ; he’s also writing adventure novels set in jungle and desert ; he’s a solitary soul dreaming in the study ; he doesn’t believe in God, but loves maman.Literature became a replacement for outmoded religious beliefs in favour of the view that it should have a committed social function, however in the closing pages he despairs of that function : « For a long time I looked on my pen as a sword ; now I know how powerless we are. » He is the 60 year old man looking back with clarity on this formative episode, and the writing is crystal clear and beautiful. Part I is more embedded in that early life than part II as it discusses the complexity of family life.

Sartre gives us his childhood and a book filled with characters, the exception being... `that one who's lacking' till the end... Sartre himself.The man is, of course, present throughout as narrator and master writer, comic even. With the first few pages we find fathers weighing down sons as Anchises, crushing them. Further, we find peasant grandfathers betraying the future, the `myth' of the family, social hierarchy as `ritual', and religion...I cannot describe how. The man, as narrator, looms formidably over his work like the tyrant fathers and grandfathers he sees handling between themselves the lives of their offspring and dependents.The man, as the character Sartre of Les Mots, is however an `indelible transparency', a mere `reflection in a mirror' as against the deadweight of other people, heavy with their own inertia and `carved in stone'. It is only by a vicarious life in reading, and later, by the creative act of writing that he describes himself for the first time `carving out a glorious body in words'. We find the child Sartre locked away in the towering rooftops of Parisian houses, peering down on other children below and, (he admits) regrettably, shunning them for Platonic relations with Corneille, Hugo, and Wells. Other places of his youth, the public gardens and classrooms, are ever allusions, context only for the evolution of a primarily noetic being, already (at ten) seeing himself as a dead one.Nonetheless, this is a glorious work of revival; a working out of existence from it's opposite, the juvenile reaction; a working out of self-belief from a void authority might otherwise have colonised as its own. Sartre's story, whilst neither too conventional nor applicable in modern terms is still valuable for illuminating our own childhood and our own absurdities therefrom.

Excellent book. A book in the mould of all classics and a must read for all those interested in English literature.

The power of words is lived on tbe pages of Sartres telling of his life. I purchased this book seeking affirmation for the power of words in an increasingly cynical communications environment in north american culture...i found validity in the essence of human interaction often in the form of words as impact in shaping ourselves and our children.

i saw the movie and cried. i always like to read the books to a good movie. LOVE JEREMY RIMES(?)

Recommended!

Know Sartre in his own words