Sartre traced Flaubert’s artistic drives to a loveless childhood

Evidence

What he lacks, above all, is familial love, which would have drawn him into the realm of the fully human. Instead, Flaubert is left with what Sartre calls ‘the acrid, vegetative abundance of his own juices, of the self. Mushroom: elementary organism, passive, shackled, oozing with abject plenitude.’ This abandonment in the mushroom patch of the soul makes him confused about his own consciousness, and about the boundaries between self and other. Feeling ‘superfluous’, Flaubert does not know what his role in the world is supposed to be. Out of this comes his ‘perpetual questioning’ and a fascination with the fringes of conscious experience. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 701

Categorization

• DEFINE: The ‘superfluous’ feeling and the mushroom metaphor define Sartre’s idea of abandonnement that makes one a perpetual questioner.
• XREF: connects to: Sartre read Flaubert’s vocation as a response to bourgeois exclusion — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 700

Broader Connections

• Sartre read Flaubert’s vocation as a response to bourgeois exclusion #expands (0.88) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 700