Politics and aesthetics in Sartre's 'L'enfance d'un chef'

Abstract

In 1964, Deleuze referred to Sartre as one of “our masters,” one of “those who know how to invent an artistic and literary technique and find ways of thinking that correspond to our modernity, that is to say to our difficulties as well as to our diffuse enthusiasms.” (Arts) Sartre is constantly at the crossroads of political and aesthetic modernity. ‘L'enfance d'un chef’, the last and longest of the five short stories that make up the collection entitled Le Mur, published in January 1939, is part of this topicality. Truly a little novel in the work in progress of the philosopher-writer, this cruel parody of the bildungsroman uses fictional and existential examples to grasp the conceptual analysis of essences. This story, which is a contemporary of La Nausée in terms of its chronology and the themes it tackles, shines with a violent, individualistic style of writing, made up of breakdowns and abandonments: ‘L'enfance d'un chef’ is part of a speculative movement, challenging the order of anthropological or political representation. Starting with Lucien Fleurier and the misty emptiness of his existence, Sartre sketches out an open subjectivity, an inhuman figure of the anti-hero: the “bastard”, the “leader” and the “anti-Semite”. Through a rigorous phenomenological description, the philosopher describes the network of metaphors and images that run through ‘L'enfance d'un chef’ and constitute a poetics of blue, between Walter Benjamin – “Rêver de la fleur bleue, ce n'est plus de saison” (Neue Rundschau, no. 38, January 1927) - and Roland Barthes – “Le bleu est à la mode cette année” (Revue française de sociologie, no. 2, April 1960) -. The main character's discomfort cannot be conceived in terms of black and white, light and shade: his difficulty of being is rather expressed in blue-grey and violet hues, in the mode of inauthenticity, reminiscent of Sartre's obsessions with non-being and viscosity. Without erasing the innovative aspect and the power of disorientation of ‘L'enfance d'un chef’, the aim is to show that this novella cannot be reduced to a theoretical intention, but constitutes a project in itself that “gives birth to a philosophy before our eyes.” (Michel Tournier, Le Vent paraclet, 1977, p. 155)