Family Idiot

With this volume, the University of Chicago Press completes its translation of a work that is of interest not only to serious readers of Flaubert but to anyone interested in the last major contribution by one of the twentieth century's greatest thinkers. Critics have argued about the precise nature of this novel or biography or "criticism-fiction" which is the summation of Sartre's philosophical, social, and literary thought. In the preface, Sartre writes: "The Family Idiot is the sequel to Search for a Method. The subject: what, at this point in time, can we know about a man? It seemed to me that this question could only be answered by studying a specific case." Sartre discusses Flaubert's personal development, his relationship to his family, his decision to become a writer, and the psychosomatic crisis or "conversion" from his father's domination to the freedom of his art. Sartre blends psychoanalysis with a sociological study of the ideology of the period, the crisis in literature, and Flaubert's influence on the future of literature. In this fifth and last volume of the English translation, corresponding to the whole of Volume 3 of the French edition, Sartre demonstrates how Flaubert's personal "neurosis" coincided with the demands of his time for an "art neurosis," or a literature of disengagement and demoralization. While Sartre never wrote the final volume he envisioned for this vast project, the existing volumes constitute in themselves a unified work.