The Words (book)

The Words

Cover of the French edition
Author	Jean-Paul Sartre
Original title	Les Mots
Translator	Bernard Frechtman
Language	French
Genre	Autobiography
Publisher	Gallimard
Publication date	1963
Publication place	France
Published in English	September 1964
Media type	Print (hardback and paperback)
Pages	255
OCLC	455681411
Dewey Decimal	848.91409
LC Class	PQ2637 .A82

The Words (French: Les Mots) is the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre's 1963^[1] autobiography.

Structure and presentation

Sartre in 1965

The text is divided into two near-equal parts entitled 'Reading' (Lire) and 'Writing' (Écrire). However, according to Philippe Lejeune, these two parts are only a façade and are not relevant to the chronological progression of the work. He considers the text to instead be divided into five parts which he calls 'acts':

• The first act presents in chronological order the 'prehistory' of the child by giving his family origin.
• The second act evokes the different roles Sartre acted out in his seclusion to an imaginary world, enabled by his family.^[1]
• The third act tells of his conscious realization of his imposture, his contingency, his fear of death and his ugliness.
• The fourth act presents the development of a new imposture, in which Sartre took up multiple different postures of writing.
• The fifth act relates Sartre's delusion, which he considers the source of his dynamism, and contains the announcement of a second book which he did not complete before his death.

The first title which Sartre thought of was Jean sans terre.^[2]

Reception

The book, consisting of Sartre distancing himself from writing and making his farewells to literature, was very successful for the author and was hailed nearly unanimously as a "literary success"^{[citation needed]}. In November of the same year, 1964, he refused the Nobel Prize for Literature awarded for his work, described as "rich in ideas and filled with the spirit of freedom and the quest for truth, [it] has exerted a far-reaching influence on our age."^[3]

References

1. Aronson, Ronald. 1980. Jean-Paul Sartre: Philosophy in the World. Archived 2011-07-16 at the Wayback Machine.
2. Boulé, Jean-Pierre (2005). Sartre, Self-formation, and Masculinities. Berghahn Books. ISBN 978-1-57181-742-6.
3. "The Nobel Prize in Literature 1964".