PARTISAN REVIEW
plays no role at all in the work of Proust. Yet, by some curious irony
of detachment not at all unusual in works of art,
A La Recherche du
Temps Perdu
is a profounder study of the breakdown of a social class
than anything given us by proletarian or "social realist" literature. No
modern writer seems to offer us a more fanatical example of detachment
than Joyce. Certainly, during the seventeen years in which he was com–
posing his last work, withdrawn from the ideological battles of the
'twenties and 'thirties, he seemed a curiously eccentric and private figure.
Yet the appearance of
Finnegans Wake
in 1939 coincided portentously
with the outbreak of a War that seemed the destruction of the whole
civilization so laboriously embedded in Joyce's pages, and by some mir–
acle of literary creation the book seemed to sum up a whole epoch. Was
Joyce a committed writer? It depends, of course, on what kinds of com–
mitment one has in mind. Joyce was committed in the deepest sense to
the fact of human language, and consequently to the whole literary
tradition in which he was working; he drew deeply upon the modern
consciousness in matters like anthropology and psychoanalysis; and be–
yond all these, he had a human commitment, which became also the
writer's deepest message, to the most primitive and universal emotions
of familial life. In the face of such formidable commitments, the absence
of a political ideology looks like a rather superficial deficiency in Joyce.
The examples could be multiplied, but the point that emerges from them
is already clear: we demand of the writer a commitment to his time in
the sense that his work incorporate contemporary mind and feeling at
their deepest levels; but to exist deeply in one's time is not the same as
to exist in the spotlight, to pass oneself off as a political leader or sage,
and to lose oneself in all the more violently public currents. Withdrawal
and silence may open to the writer resources that reflect his time at a
profounder level than those works which-in their insistence on being
relevant, committed, or conscripted-are only a step beyond the daily
newspaper. Some of Sartre's recent work gives the impression of a man
writing with the Zeitgeist breathing hotly down his neck.
In
the broad human sense, no doubt, Sartre is in the right direction.
His doctrine is an insistence upon the reintegration of literature into
life, against the idea of the priesthood of letters that germinated during
the whole of the nineteenth century to come to full and final bloom
in Flaubert and the symbolists. MaIIarme put it perfectly when he said,
"Everything exists in order to get into a book," willing to countenance
the inversion of existence that would subordinate the man to the writer.
Our own period hardly permits this attitude: we have to insist that the
writer is a man, that he never leaves humanity, and that, living in his
