Flaubert, Sartre and Asperger Syndrome – revised April 2008
I read somewhere that Jean-Paul Sartre, the famous existentialist philosopher, had written a biography of Gustave Flaubert, the author of Madam Bovary, in which Sartre said something to the effect that Flaubert’s very detailed descriptive style and poor understanding of social relationships exhibited in his fictional writings, were due to Flaubert being “Autistic”.
This aroused my interest as I have a liking for Flaubert’s novels and wondered if this may be due to both Flaubert and I having Asperger Syndrome.
I hunted down copies of Sartre’s work: Sartre, Jean-Paul: The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert 1821-1857, University of Chicago Press, 1981. It is in fact an enormous three volume biography and is an almost incomprehensible analysis of Flaubert’s life combining historical, philosophical, psychological and psycho-analytical approaches.
I started to read Volume One. I doubt I’ll finish it. I’ve skimmed through it and found no reference to Autism. (An index would have been useful addition to such a large book, 627 pages; I expect the translator was exhausted after managing to translate Sartre’s impenetrable musings!) However, I did discover stuff about Flaubert’s naiveté and credulousness as a child and one revealing incident in particular.
Sartre quotes Flaubert’s niece writing of Flaubert:
The child had a calm, meditative nature and a naiveté, traces of which he preserved all his life. My grandmother told me that he would sit for hours one finger in his mouth, absorbed looking almost stupid. When he was six, a servant called Pierre, amusing himself with Gustave’s innocence, told the boy when he pestered him: “Run to the kitchen….and see if I’m there.” And the child went off to question the cook, “Pierre told me to come see if he’s here.” He didn’t understand that they wanted to fool him, and in the face of their laughter he remained a dreamer, glimpsing a mystery.
(Sartre, Jean-Paul: The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert 1821-1857, Volume One, University of Chicago Press, 1981, p.7)
It was incidents like this, and his proneness to falling into long stupors that led to the young Gustave coming to be seen as the “family idiot”.
Sartre then goes on, in his usual way, to speculate upon psychological and philosophical interpretations of this incident. How could the young Flaubert have been so credulous to believe the servant, Gustave was old enough after all to know that it was impossible for one person to be in two places at the same time. Sartre talks about the Other, language, etc. and attempts a “regressive” analysis of the incident
However I believe the reason Flaubert believed the servant was because Flaubert had Asperger Syndrome: it was not in his nature to expect people might tell him lies or play tricks on him, he thought people just used communication to transmit factual information with each other, he had no awareness of the social aspect of it and the games which non-Autistic people love to play with each other.
This may be an extreme case of Asperger naiveté but I believe that is all it is. There is no need for Sartre endless intellectual perambulations.
[It is now well known that many famous artists, writers, scientists and musicians had Aspergers and that this explains their peculiar combinations of eccentricities (including extreme naiveté sometimes) with great intellectual abilities. Other great Aspies include Einstein, Newton, Mozart, Beethoven, Erik Satie, Bartok, George Orwell, Herman Melville, Edison, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Edvard Munch and Andy Warhol.
For more on Aspergers and famous creative artists read: The Genesis of Artistic Creativity: Asperger's Syndrome and the Arts, by Michael Fitzgerald, Paperback, ISBN: 9781843103349, available from Jessica Kingsley Publishers.
I have to say I get extremely tired of reading endless critiques of so-called “tortured geniuses” of the Art world such as Van Gogh and Mozart. To me it’s no mystery why they were such incredible geniuses and they were so "tortured", they had Aspergers!
Michael Fitzgerald has just recently explained how the structure of Asperger brains leads to artistic creativity, at The Autism 2007 - Third Awares International Online Autism Conference].
In order to get to the bottom of whether Sartre really thought Flaubert was Autistic I decided to read a critique of Sartre’s 3 volume work on Flaubert: Sartre and Flaubert, by Hazel E. Barnes; University of Chicago Press, 1981.
Having read Barnes’s book I have come to the conclusion that in analysing Flaubert Sartre only e used the terms “autism” and “autistic”, both with a small “a”, and that he was using these terms very loosely in a way similar to how “conservative” with a small “c” is used. (What he means in the instances he used these terms I cannot begin to fathom or explain).
So I don’t think Sartre thought Flaubert was Autistic. Sartre was writing before Aspergers Syndrome was widely known about. It’s my contention that Flaubert did have Aspergers and that if Sartre had known about the condition his biographical study could have been markedly different. However, as Sartre was so wedded to psychological and psychoanalytical approaches he may have still held to his long-winded intricate explanations.
If one looks at some of the features of Flaubert’s life and personality which Sartre brings to attention, we can see that they could be explained in terms of Asperger Syndrome, rather than psychology, for example: Flaubert’s passivity; his self-doubt, his lack of confidence in his artistic ability; his artist creativity; his high ambitions or perfectionism and his workaholism in their pursuit his jealousy towards others ho are able to empathize and feel very strong emotions about others; his naivety as a child as seen in the servant incident ( see above); and his feeling “different” from everybody else.
Even Flaubert’s nervous breakdown or neurotic crisis in 1844, which “saved” him from a life of bourgeois drudgery and freed him to become an artist, could be seen as related to Asperger Syndrome. I’ve heard increasingly of people on the Spectrum who have had a breakdowns in their early 20’s, including psychotic incidents. Flaubert described seeing fantastic images or hallucinations when his breakdown struck, and felt he was going mad. I’ve also heard of people with Aspergers descending into psychosis. It’s not surprising really. There is a failure of mutual understanding between the Autistic world and non-Autistic: someone on the Spectrum finds it hard to understand the seemingly illogical way that most people behave, and the derision to which he or she is subjected is very hurtful and at the same time hard to understand for the victim because he or she has no awareness of what he/she is doing “wrong”; on the other hand the neuro-Typical cannot understand why the Autistic person behave so strangely, seems so naïve and stupid and at the same time appears very intelligent. It is no wonder that some that people with Aspergers go mad. It’s more amazing that we all don’t lose our sanity!
In conclusion I think that Flaubert is just another person, and yet another great artist, with Aspergers who has been misunderstood and analysed psychological terms when he really had a neurological developmental disorder. Join the club!
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For those interested in Sartre’s main points on Flaubert’s life, personality and work like this here is a quote from Barnes’s book:
“……I find Sartre’s central thesis convincing : that he has traced a unifying pattern of development in Flaubert’s life history which finds its climatic moment in the crisis of 1844 and spreads its consequences over the future as the rivulets of water trace their way to the shore from the breaking wave. At the very least Sartre has effectively demonstrated the essential and inextricable internal relationships of the following: Gustave’s feeing (well developed in early adolescence and never abandoned) that this life is unadmirable and nonnfulfilling, that the universe is indifferent, that reality and limitations of human nature frustrate all attempts to achieve the impossible ideals that some few amongst us can imagine; his growing conviction that the artist, creating his creative imagination with the imaginary survol [the overseeing author], could give being to his impossible dreams of absolute beauty and harmony and in so doing rise above the horror and triviality of the real world; his determination that he would be a writer; the psychosomatic pattern of behaviour leading up to the crisis, a desperate strategy intended to free him fro a hated professional career so that he might devote himself to art; the conviction that his aim could be accomplished only by the sacrifice of one part of himself; the final liberation at the time of his father’s death and his own subsequent cure; Flaubert’s ambivalent attitude toward Napoleon III, his delight in moving in court circles and his disillusioned despair at the demise of the Second Empire, his feeling at the end that he had outlived himself. To this extent at least Sartre has demonstrated that we need not concede that the detailed study of this man’s life has revealed only “heterogeneous and irreducible layers of significations.” To my mind he has successfully interwoven this individual thread with the strand of literary history and the surrounding social fabric. His accomplishment is splendidly evident in the discussion of the way in which the public accepted Madame Bovary, responding to the book’s inner meaning yet distorting it by proclaiming its author a realist. Despite my criticism of certain points in Sartre’s discussion of the literary tradition, I believe he has succeeded admirably in showing how Flaubert’s personal conflicts and literature itself find their solution in the aesthetic creed that, in opposition to the realists, lead us to Mallarmé and the twentieth century. Whether or not one is willing to accept everything that Sartre says about Flaubert, his society and the literature of the period, I think nobody can well deny that he has brought them altogether. He has made good on his promise to describe how a particular person is inserted in his period, how he both reflects and modifies it, how he is “a singular universal.”
(Sartre and Flaubert, by Hazel E. Barnes; University of Chicago Press, 1981, p.407-408).
