THE EXTREME AND THE PLAUSIBLE
existence, aloneness, anxiety, freedom, responsibility, death, despair. In
the world of
Th e Blood of Others,
a man can't jump into bed with a
girl until they have annotated freedom, existence and guilt.
She looked at me reproachfully. "You are funny. You have said to me often
that you respect other people's liberty. And you make decisions for me and
treat me like a thing."
"I don't want you to be unhappy."
"And if I prefer to be unhappy? It's for me to choose."
"Yes,'' I said, "it's for you to choose."
She leaned her cheek against my hand. "I have chosen.
"It's not true, it's not
me."
I wanted to shout those words when Helene
looked at me with eyes full of admiration and love. And yet it was true: it was
I. . . . "I dither about between my guilty conscience and my scruples; my one
and only aim is not to dirty my hands. . . ."
Helene interrupted me by placing her soft, fair lips on mine.
"That's what's so wonderful about you, you're so self-sufficient that I feel
that you've created your own self."
Often it is tossed together with proletarian-novel jargon. At this
level:
"The main point is to get the same result."
"But it's impossible to dissociate the result from the struggle that leads up
to it. Hegel explains it so well; you ought to read him."
"I haven't time. . . ."
As long as you wonder if the workers' cause is really your own, it won't be.
Just say: it is my cause.. . ."
"You know, intervention might entail heavy consequences."
"Why don't you try striking? Perhaps Blum would give in."
"I don't want a strike for political reasons.. .."
"In any case," he said, "it wouldn't be difficult to get arms through
clandestinely and to authorize the signing up of volunteers. ..."
"But," I said, "it's no small matter to drive a country into war."
It's really rather dreadful. Mlle. de Beauvoir just doesn't seem to
be
a novelist. Her book is neither philosophy nor fiction . The philos–
ophical problems, never fused to the concrete, are diluted into platitudes,
a name-brand flavoring for pulp-level tripe.
The trouble is not the philosophical starting-point. The novel has
proved the most yielding of aesthetic forms. Example shows that though
the writer's original impulse may be directed toward some factor closely
bound to the medium-plot or character or verbal symbol, it is often
attached to such aesthetically accidental goals as social reform, his–
torical interpretation, ethical standard, or salvation. But in every case,
the novel is not exempt from the rule of all art, that meanings are legiti–
mately present only when they are translated into specific terms of the
particular medium that is being used. A painting, too, can be philos–
ophical, but not by stating a syllogism.
1021
