A summary of Jean-Paul Sartre’s "Words"

This autobiographical novel is a merciless examination of the childhood of the boy Poulou in the respectable Parisian family of his grandfather. Sartre mercilessly demolishes the domestic myth of early chosenness, where a child replaces living things with printed signs and invents the role of savior of humanity to justify his accidental birth. The philosopher completed the manuscript in 1953 and 1954, then thoroughly revised it in the spring of 1963, published it in the fall of that same year in the journal Le Temps Moderne, and published it as a book in 1964 by Gallimard.

In October 1964, the Swedish Academy awarded the author the Nobel Prize in Literature, which he voluntarily declined.

The Schweitzer House and the Quiet Orphan

An Alsatian teacher with many children, after grocery failures, sent his sons on the clerical path. Charles Schweitzer ran off with a circus rider, earned his father’s curse, defended his dissertation on Hans Sachs, and created a profitable German language textbook. In Mâcon, this lanky lecturer married Louise Guillemin. During their honeymoon, her husband ate leeks at the station buffet, leaving his young wife with tough green leeks. The grudge lasted seventy years. Locked in a dimly lit bedroom, Louise took revenge on the noisy Alsatians with venomous skepticism.

Anne-Marie, the youngest daughter, meekly learned to sit bored on a chair, sew with a ruler, and hide her attractiveness. She was bewitched by a naval officer, Jean-Baptiste Sartre. Tropical fever quickly brought the young officer to his grave, turning a hasty marriage into a series of hopeless hospital vigils. There are no good fathers. The young widow returned to Meudon with her infant son, considered a guilty dowryless woman. The family forgot to pay the widow. In a stranger’s house, the timid mother shared the nursery with her young son, obeying the strict rules of her grandfather’s study. The officer’s portrait was removed from the wall. Having freed the boy from the clutches of others, the early death of his father left the orphan without roots, without family wealth, and without the supervision of a domestic tyrant.

Old Charles Schweitzer reveled in his resemblance to a bearded Victor Hugo. He posed for the photographer. On the forest paths of Meudon, the patriarch stood frozen like a monument to himself, raising his finger to the heavens and reciting memorized maxims of bourgeois morality. The old man declared his grandson a miracle. The elderly teacher hid from the thought of death in childish chatter, demanding constant adoration and reverent tears. Poulou obediently played the pious angel. The boy mindlessly repeated memorized adult phrases to the guests, reveling in the false rapture of the family auditorium. His grandmother mocked this buffoonery.

The Power of the Bookcase

The sixth floor of the building on Rue Le Goff was transformed into a sanctuary. Thick volumes stood like menhirs, smelling of mold and mushrooms, accumulating centuries of dust, and serving as the unshakable foundation of the family’s bourgeois well-being. Poulou didn’t know his letters. Climbing onto a chair in front of his grandfather’s heavy music stand, the child syllabled the titles and reverently touched the brown calico of the textbooks. The boy mastered literacy alone in a storage room. The enormous, multi-volume Larousse dictionary was home to genuine tragic heroes, exotic African butterflies, and beasts of prey, while outside the windows of the Parisian apartment, only their occasional, pale, and imperfect earthly likenesses wandered.

Words became the flesh of the world. From that hour on, Pulu believed in the superiority of the printed word over the living thing.

Curly haircut and silent screen

The family idyll collapsed at the hairdresser’s. The seven-year-old was proud of his lush, blond locks, carefully maintaining the imposed image of a meek, angelic girl. His grandfather took his grandson to get a haircut. The white barber’s sheet was instantly covered with chopped-off golden strands, revealing a rough scalp. The mother locked herself in at home. Anne-Marie sobbed inconsolably in the nursery over the lost illusion, discerning a cataract and her son’s ugly features beneath the shorn hair. Pulu stood frozen in front of the mirror. Trying to paralyze his shame, the frightened boy grimaced furiously, exaggerating his grimaces to the point of ugliness.

The Pantheon Cinema offered refuge from the falseness of home. In the dark, stuffy auditorium, a beam of light flickered over the heads of workers and soldiers, a pianist played Chopin, and a great silent chase with revolvers and swords unfolded on the white canvas. The music dictated an inevitable fate. Returning home, Pulu armed himself with his grandfather’s wooden ruler, ferociously slew imaginary villains, and defended fictitious maidens from bandit attacks. His exploits staved off the fear of death. At dinner, his grandfather’s pompous colleague, Monsieur Simonneau, overwhelmed those present with the granite immutability of his bourgeois tastes, evoking in the restless orphan a burning envy of others’ solidity.

Charles Schweitzer’s first experience at the lycée ended in disgraceful failure. In a rage, he threw his grandson’s dictation on the table, complete with the line "Markoff grows in Agarodee," and fell out with the school’s director forever. The teacher, Marie-Louise, complained of poverty. Her grandfather quickly fired the unfortunate girl for ruining the family’s optimism, once again locking his grandson in the privacy of his own home.

The Inkwell and Posthumous Triumph

A poetic correspondence with his grandfather marked the beginning of a new craft. The eight-year-old boy acquired an inkwell with purple ink and a thick black notebook with red edges. He copied Poulou’s plots. The cheap magazine "Cricket" generously supplied ready-made stories with bloodthirsty natives, shipwrecks, and pursuits of rare butterflies in the upper reaches of the Amazon. Poulou copied information about dangerous tropical sharks verbatim from an open volume of Larousse. The family delighted in the silence. Anne-Marie completely copied out the novel "The Banana Merchant" on expensive vellum paper to show to her female acquaintances.

Charles Schweitzer put a stop to his grandson’s boulevard amusements. Seating the boy on his lap, the elderly mentor recounted the starving plight of professional writers and offered him a secure career as a modest provincial literature teacher. His grandfather advised him to extol the monuments of Aurillac. Inspired by the elder’s admonitions about Flaubert’s writerly patience, the young scholar spent hours hypnotizing a green plush armchair with wooden knobs for the sake of a detailed verbal report. Charles sincerely hoped to cool his grandson’s ardor. The Alsatian patriarch’s plan was dashed by the impressionable orphan’s unwavering willingness to sacrifice himself for humanity.

Pulu misunderstood the lesson. His grandfather’s words compelled the child to renounce the swordsman Pardallian and humbly lay the sacred cross of literary service upon his weak shoulders. The writer became a martyr. At night, the lonely writer dreamed of sending a suitcase stuffed with notebooks to the Parisian publisher Fayard without a return address. Death seemed the highest reward. His imagination conjured up a distant future where the genius, rejected by his contemporaries, would die in a cold attic over a pile of manuscripts, after which the touched descendants of the thirtieth century would shed oceans of tears over his books. Fame replaced paradise in the afterlife.

The black notebook with the red edges his mother had bought for school looked indistinguishable from the manuscript of yet another adventure novel. The boundaries of school had completely vanished. Writing had become an exhausting chore, keeping the sleeping universe on the brink of the abyss with every new stroke of the pen. Pulu wrote voraciously. The boy would toss sheets of paper stained with purple ink onto the parquet floor of his grandfather’s office, instantly forgetting what he had read in favor of the feverish speed of a run toward imaginary immortality.

Lyceum comrades and sober craft

In the fall of 1915, a ten-year-old external student crossed the threshold of the Lycée Henri IV in Paris. The school class sobered the spoiled brat. On the Place du Panthéon, Poulou excitedly kicked a ball around with his peers, reveling in the equality and washing away the traces of his domestic antics. The arrival of the cross-eyed Paul Nizan marked the beginning of a long friendship between the two future writers. Lycée friendship supplanted religious mysticism. In 1917, in La Rochelle, the image of an omnipotent creator finally vanished from the teenager’s thoughts while he waited for his lycée friends in the morning.

The long-held illusion of a sacred calling crumbled to dust. The mature thinker abandoned his belief in the salutary power of literature, recognizing his childhood fantasies of posthumous immortality as an artificial refuge from the fear of the contingency of his own existence. The pen remained a familiar tool. The elderly writer sits at his desk day after day to work on his manuscripts, feeling like an ordinary person among billions of living people.