ABSTRACT
WHATEVER the genre involved, history, biography, or fiction, human beings, and their varied responses to the life that surrounds them, remain at the center. In that regard the second sentence of the preface of Jean-Paul Sartre’s L’Idiot de Ia famille (The Family Idiot), published in 1971 and his last major work, poses a crucial question for all three: ‘What, at this point in time, can we know about a man?’ Sartre then goes on. ‘It seemed to me that this question could only be answered by studying a specific case. What do we know, for example, about Gustave Flaubert?1 The question seems a straightforward one, but Sartre required more than a thousand pages to attempt an answer and the work remained unfinished at his death. Sartre was trying, in his attempt to articulate the connections between individual human consciousness and a larger historical understanding, to break the traditional literary barriers between the ways of ordering history and imagination, and his work stands as a much-celebrated example of a new and authentic methodology.
