French philosopher Sartre, Jean-Paul’s term for what it is that sets apart great writers like Gustave Flaubert---they are the singular instance of that which is universal. Sartre develops this concept in his five-volume work on Flaubert L’Idiot de la famille: Gustave Flaubert de 1821 á 1857 (1971), translated as The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert 1821—57 (1981), which begins with the question: what can we know about a person? He argues that every detail about a person’s life, from the most mundane to the most momentous, is at some deep level profoundly homogenous, which is to say all are parts of a greater whole. Every person is a product of their history, Sartre argues, and at the same time a producer of their own history; as a result, the universal is always singular and the singular always universal.