206
PARTISAN REVIEW
gourmand stretches out towards the pie he stares at, which
his
nostrils
sniff, and we feel that the whole mass of his body is going to join
his head, which will have joined the object before
him.
In nature
the root of the tree pushes towards wet ground, the summit towards
the sun, and the plant thrives by changing unbalance into unbalance,
greed into greed. The amoeba deforms itself in approaching its tiny
prey, obeys that which it is going
to
convert into its own substance,
then hauls itself to its adventuring pseudopodium and reassembles
itself. This type of mechanism
is
characteristic of all organic life; the
devil, alas! is nature itself, and temptation is the most obvious, the
most constant, the most inescapable condition of life. To live means
to lack something at every moment-to modify oneself in order to
attain it-and hence to aim at returning again to the state of lacking
something. We live on the unstable, by means of the unstable, within
the unstable: it is all the work of the Sensibility, which is the diabolical
life-trick of organized beings. What could be more extraordinary to
try to conceive and what, shown in operation, could be more "poeti–
cal" than that irreducible power which is everything for each of us,
which coincides with us, moves us, speaks to us and within us,
dis–
poses of pleasure,
grief,
need, disgust, hope, power or weakness,
creates values, makes us angels or beasts in accordance with the day
or the hour? I am thinking of the variety, the intensity, the versatility
of our feeling substance, of its infinite potentialities, its countless
relays, by whose play it divides itself against itself, fools itself, multi–
plies its forms of
de..~ire
or of refusal, arrives at intelligence, language,
symbols, which it develops and combines so as to construct strange,
abstract worlds. I have no doubt that Flaubert was aware of the
profundity of his theme; but one might say that he was afraid to
plunge into it to the depth where whatever can be learned from
books no longer counts.... And so he went astray in too many
books and myths; he lost the strategic conception, I mean the unity
of his composition, which could reside only in an Anthony, one part
of whom was Satan.... The work remains a mixture of moments
and fragments; but among these are some that are written for
all
time. Such as it is, I regard it with reverence, and I never open it
without finding reasons for admiring the author more than it.
(Translated by Lionel Abel)
