Winterson on a Rant

I started trying to learn French. Don’t ask me why. I think I just want to occupy my mind and I found several good resources online. And I’m also having a lot of trouble with my second novella idea. The beginning for me is always the hardest. So I’ve put it away for a while, because sometimes the best thing to do when stuck on something is to move off to something else. It seems to me that that is what Jeanette Winterson is doing in her article on “Sartre and the problems with British public transport.” It’s a rant they way many of us rant, flowing from one thing to another, one complaint opens up our eyes to another issue.  I think her dread of the “doom” of public transport, the cramped and sweaty anonymity of it lead her to think about tearing down of other people.  It’s strange.  I found it interesting when she writes that:

It is only two years since Hazel Rowley’s excellent Lives and Loves appeared, but that book is kinder, more sympathetic, and perhaps less tough on the two French giants of culture. A Dangerous Liaison is one of those take-apart-the-engine types of biography, with no care for the damage done to the vehicle, the vehicle being the work, which is really the only thing we can legitimately ask of a writer.

The trouble with the fashion for exposing everything – yes, everything – about the lives of writers and artists, is that no one, genius or window cleaner, can survive such a process. Inevitably, a biography such as this plays to the envy and inertia of those hellish others, who, achieving little themselves, froth with delight at the failures of those who have made a difference. For all the sex, power, drink, arrogance, failure, and compromise, Sartre remains a hugely important cultural figure. Contradictions and oppositions lie side by side and do not cancel each other out. I read the best of him, skip over the rest, but A Dangerous Liasion might encourage new readers and students to skip it all – and feel justified. A pity.

I agree with parts of this, but I don’t know if I can agree with the whole.  I agree that tearing down people, just for the sake of tearing them down, the culture of the expose is, at all times problematic.  But can we only legitimately expect to review the work of a philosopher.  The thing about the love of knowledge is that it seems requisite that the proponent have follow his or her philosophy and that the thing be internally consistent.  Of course, an open mind on every side is key, and it is important to know all sides of an issue before assuming a position.  But if Sartre’s reputation gets a little cut up in this whole learning process of opinion vs. opinion, fact vs. fact, and book vs. book, so be it.