PARTISAN REVIEW
they are obviously explained by an unhappy childhood, a class hatred,
or an incestuous love. Let them not presume to think
in
earnest;
thought conceals the man, and it is the man alone who interests us.
A bare ·tear is not lovely. It offends. A good argument also offends,
as Stendhal well observed. But an argument that masks a tear-that's
what we're after. The .argument removes the obscenity from the tears;
the tears, by revealing their origin in the passions, remove the aggres–
siveness from the argument. We shall be neither too deeply touched
nor at all convinced, and we shall be able to yield ourselves in security
to that moderate pleasure which, as everyone knows, we derive from
the contemplation of works of art. Thus, this is "true," "pure" litera–
ture, .a subjectivity which yields itself under the aspect of the objec–
tive, a discourse so curiously contrived that it is equivalent to silence,
a thought which debates with itself, a reason which is only the mask
of madness, an Eternal which lets it be understood that it is only a
moment of history, a historical moment which, by the hidden side
which it reveals, suddenly sends back a perpetual lesson to the eternal
man, but which is produced against the express wishes of those who
do the teaching.
When all is said and done, the message is a soul which is made
object. A soul, and what is to be done with a soul? One contemplates
it at a respectful distance. It is not customary to show one's soul in
society without an imperious motive. But, with certain reserves, con–
vention permits some individuals to put theirs into commerce, and
all .adults may procure it for themselves. For many people today,
works of the mind are thus little straying souls which one acquires
at a modest price; there is good old Montaigne's, dear La Fontaine's,
and that of Jean-Jacques and of Jean-Paul and of delicious Gerard.
What is called literary art is the ensemble of the treatments which
make them inoffensive. Tanned, refined, chemically treated, they pro–
vide their acquirers with the opportunity of devoting some moments
of a life completely turned outward to the cultivation of subjectivity.
Custom guarantees it to be without risk. Montaigne's skepticism?
Who can take it seriously since the author of the
Essays
got frightened
when the plague ravaged Bordeaux? Or Rousseau's humanitarianism,
since "Jean-Jacques" put his children into an orphanage? And the
strange revelations of
Sylvie,
since Gerard de Nerval was mad? At
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