The words
The words , French Les mots , is an autobiographical work by Jean-Paul Sartre published in 1964 about the first ten years of his life from 1905 to around 1915, the year he started school at the elite Lycée Henri IV .
content
After a brief reference to the family histories of the Schweitzers ( Albert Schweitzer was a great cousin of his) and Sartres, beginning around 1850, little Jean-Paul began his fatherless life under the scepter of his Alsatian grandfather Charles Schweitzer, who after the early death of Jean-Paul Paul's father took on the role of “ pater familias ”. The death of my father “ became the great event of my life: it put my mother in chains again and gave me freedom . “In this grandfather-dominated family, little Jean-Paul and his mother, the“ children ”of the family, sleep in one room, while the grandmother and especially the grandfather together bear the Germanized childish god name“ Karlundmami ”. Jean-Paul lives locked up and lonely, he has no friends: “ Up to the age of ten I was alone between an old man and two women. [...] I was a child, a monster that they fabricated with the help of their own worries. "
The grandfather is a German teacher with a doctorate and has his own language institute in Paris. While his own children bore him, he adores his grandson in an immeasurable way and builds the family for little Jean-Paul like a paradise . Jean-Paul learns to play his " role " as a gift to his grandfather, he is smart and (still) handsome, an over-promoted child who, under the pressure of the family, exercises different impression poses: that of the premature, the conformist, the little verse smith, the actor and the author of adventure stories.
In this family island, which cuts him off from all other contacts, he experiences his permanent calling to be a “ child prodigy ”: “ It is enough for me to open a door to have the feeling myself that I am making an 'appearance'. “Since little“ Poulou ”encounters mountains of books in his grandfather's study, handling them seems like a sacred act:“ I had found my religion; nothing seemed more important to me than a book; I saw the library as a temple. "Now his early calling is gaining momentum and determination:" I was prepared early on to treat the professorship like a priesthood and literature like a passion. "
Jean-Paul teaches himself to read from Hector Malot's novel Heimatlos , which he knows by heart . He works his way through exotic monster words like “ Heautontimoroumenos ”, “ Idiosyncrasy ”, or “ Apokope ”, which impress him like “strange savages” and fights with sentences and contexts that are strange and incomprehensible for the child: “ In any case, my gaze worked them Words: one had to try to determine their meaning; in time I was cultivated by this cultural comedy ”- a comedy that caught his family's attention but alienated him.
Little Sartre soon reads Corneille , Flaubert , Victor Hugo : “ I lived beyond my age as one lives beyond one's means. “But Poulou much preferred to read magazines and adventure novels under the table in the dining room - and old Sartre admits:“ It never stopped: even today I prefer to read detective novels than Wittgenstein . "
Again initiated by his grandfather, Jean-Paul begins to write his first stories in a notebook , in which he first retells familiar things and then gradually creates characters that both reflect and reduce his loneliness. The grandfather, who does not starve to death as a writer but rather wants to see his grandson as a professor of literature, paradoxically reinforces Jean-Paul's career aspiration with his cautious advice.
Sartre, who in retrospect summarizes his childlike attitude towards life in the words “ surplus ” and “ bad-born ”, sees as a child in writing the best opportunity to give his life a raison d'être : “ By writing, I existed. “So he practiced early on in the art of“ capturing living things with the noose of sentences ”and lived for his imminent death in order to become immortal as a writer:“ Between nine and ten years I became completely posthumous. "
This phase of the phantasies that got out of hand in the family greenhouse ends when Jean-Paul enters the preschool of the Lycée Henri IV , where Jean-Paul meets people of the same age for the first time and makes friends with Paul-Yves Nizan . The traumas of his lonely childhood fade into the background, from where they continue to weave the early thread of his calling to a success that was not intended in this way.
Narrative style and summary
The work is divided into two roughly equal parts, reading and writing . It is not an autobiography, but an excerpt reduced to childhood. And it's not even an excerpt, but a facet of these childhood years reduced to the psychogram of the family. External dates and a chronological order are rare, family events and even social catastrophes such as the beginning of the First World War hardly play a role.
With a lot of irony, the author dissects and stages his youth, which he “ loathes, with all its remains ”, but which he sees himself propelled into his work into his ripe old age. This representation, which can certainly be compared with Sigmund Freud , the founder of self-analysis , is the painful memory of the beginning of life, which at first almost drowned Sartre and later put him in the Olympus of French intellectuals: “ I crossed out the first years of my life in particular : when I started this book, it took me a long time to decipher it under the strikethroughs. "
The subject is little Jean-Paul, who grew up in his educated middle-class family, taught himself to read and learned to invent stories. The main theme, however, is the vocation of his grandfather to higher things, which the boy takes on, which increases to an obsession with his own choice and leads the boy into a “ delirium ”, a “ long, bitter and sweet delusion ” and a “ neurosis ”, “ Which I suffered from for thirty years. “His slow recovery only begins after confrontation with real life: with his small stature (at eight years old he was still a baby carrier), with an eye disease, with his ugliness and with his mediocre school successes.
In retrospect, the obsession with a special role appears to Sartre both as the cause of his literary competence as well as his later criticism directed against his milieu of origin: " Since I was docile at home, [...] later I only became a rebel because I the submission to the extreme. “Although the biographical excerpt ends long before his political maturity, the scarring recovery of his psyche made him“ think systematically against himself: so strongly that the more I displeased a thought, the more plausible it was. "The psychotic disorder of his youth with its hallucinations, with his early literary overactivity and the experience of culture as a pretense became the starting point of an extraordinary intellectual career, which is soured again and again into old age by the early duties of his family vocation:" I am a diligence writer. “Unlike Albert Camus to his Sisyphus , we cannot imagine Jean-Paul Sartre as a“ happy person ”. But as one whose ruthless self-analysis deeply impresses the reader.
The signature of this biography is that of an irony of history that made the adapted and lonely little Jean-Paul the revolting thought leader of the masses of the Parisian May 1968. His comprehensive education, his stylistic finesse, his self-criticism, his productivity and thus his position as one of the most important French intellectuals of the 20th century are based on his first ten years of life and its aftermath. It is to the merit of this work, the dialectic of history also in To have shown Sartre's own life path.
success
The book was number 1 on the Spiegel bestseller list for 21 weeks in 1965 .
reception
- The words were added to the ZEIT library of 100 books .
proof
- ^ Jean-Paul Sartre: The words . Translated to follow-up note v. Hans Mayer; in: Ges. Werke i. Individual issues, ed. in collaboration with author v. A. El Kaim-Sartre et al. Traugott König, Autobiographische Schriften Bd. 1, Reinbek bH (Rowohlt) 1984, (hereinafter cited as) The Words , p. 12.
- ↑ The Words , p. 48
- ↑ The Words , p. 20.
- ↑ The Words , p. 35.
- ↑ The Words , p. 34
- ↑ cf. The Words , p. 30.
- ↑ The Words , p. 42.
- ↑ The Words , p. 41.
- ↑ The Words , p. 45.
- ↑ The Words , p. 87.
- ↑ The Words , p. 139
- ↑ The Words , p. 152.
- ↑ The Words , p. 125
- ↑ The Words , p. 183
- ↑ The Words , p. 192
- ↑ The Words , p. 126
- ^ The Words , p. 194; 86
- ↑ The Words , p. 124