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PARTISAN REVIEW
novels-even
if
she fails to point out how faded and stale that pseudo–
Platonic metaphysics is. She well perceives the fallacy in Sartre's attempt
to assert philosophical conclusions on the basis of psychological, subjec–
tive deductions; even more, she sees that
La Nausee
is jottings from a
journal mixed with bits of fiction-that its insufficiency comes from a
confusion of genres (although she does not see that a formal philosophical
thesis is out of place in fiction only when it compels the progression to be
logical instead of dramatic). Mlle. Magny sums up Sartre's case with the
remark: "In any case, as long as he presents himself to us as a novelist
and story-teller he lacks the right to impose on us his own view of the
world to the exclusion of every other."
,
In the first of her two excellent essays on Kafka, Mlle. Magny
discards, correctly, thooe interpretations of his work that would
reduce
it to a religious or any other kind of allegory. Affirming that Kafka's
very concrete method is applied to concrete situations and that the latter
manifest in their concreteness the profoundest aspects of his art, no
matter how much they may welcome exegesis, anagogical interpretation
or psychoanalysis, she subjects Kafka to the most thorough, perceptive
and well-balanced, if sometimes repetitious, analysis I have yet seen him
receive. Here her method comes fully into its own--or almost fully, for
it does overlook a factor that is of major importance in explaining Kafka:
the history of both the society and the literature that led up to him.
Toward the close of her second essay on Kafka we discover, however,
what Mlle. Magny has been leading up to. We begin to understand why
she dwells so long on the inconsistencies of Morgan's and Sartre's meta–
physics.
Kafka's metaphysics, she says, is incomplete,
if
not inconsistent–
it contains no God or justifying principle. Thus, along with Morgan and
Sartre, he too is a philooopher of despair. Most literature, Mlle. Magny
continues, speaks a philosophy of despair today. But what is wrong is not
so much the despair as the illegitimate claim literature has been making
more and more frequently since Rimbaud to be a means,
if
not the
principal means, of extending experience, of creating philosophy, of
mastering the whole extent of knowledge, and even of grasping the abso–
lute. Yet literature, she counters in the last essay of her book, is not
"co-extensive with the life of the mind." Given the total realm of con–
sciousness as field, abstract thought, or philosophy, functions more fruit–
fully and more honestly. A work of fiction has not the right to make such
a sweeping conclusion as is expressed in total despair, because the
evidence it brings to bear is too partial and too distorted by concerns
that have nothing to do with the objective truth.
Mlle. Magny goes on to say that literature today, because it arro–
gates to itself the tasks of philosophy or religion, suffers from a confusion
of genres, of which Sartre's novel
La Nausee
is a typical case.
La Nausee
is more the description of a "phenomenological experience" than a work
