ABSTRACT
In selecting a set of cartographic tools which might be capable of mapping the topographical details of the Irish Catholic encounter with Scotland in a way that can facilitate later dialogue with Sartre’s theory of colonialism, both Sartre’s own progressive-regressive method and the oral history method presented themselves as worthy of deployment. The progressive-regressive method is taken by Sartre to refer to the value of studying biographies in their historical context; it is a variant of the Marxian maxim that men (sic) make history but not in conditions of their own choosing. Sartre introduces the method in the Critique of dialectical reason but puts it to work in his titanic biography of Gustave Flaubert which he completed in 1971 (Sartre 1987). Sartre asks; how is such a man like Gustav Flaubert possible? His search for an answer leads him to oscillate between individualised psychoanalytic and historical and societal interrogation.
