188
PARTISAN REVIEW
it is repugnant to us to leave anything indefinite in it.
ull
y
avait du je
ne sais quoi dans tout Monsieur de La Rochefoucauld,"
writes the
Cardinal de Retz. That is precisely it. , He expresses it so that the
reader will not be left to sense it for himself.
We never leave any gaps in the character whom we have brought
into being through which unforeseen inspirations could reach him.
When we make him speak, there are no inexplicable overtones and
nothing is ever heard which sounds a different note for the mind and
for the imagination. We penetrate into all the chinks of his character
with our busy wax and we cement them. A complete sealing off of its
abysses-that is the ideal toward which we strive. And I imagine that
it is this which must embarrass foreigners in Racine's Neron or even
in Stendhal's Julien. We never express the giddiness of the human soul.
We may very well conceive that rather than to send the mind
straying toward a psychological infinite, the task of the novelist is to
bring it back to an event which is mysterious, but concrete and
measurable.
Dostoevsky, he adds, "was the first writer who made me aware
of our insufficiency on this point." He goes on to say that the
French must be on their guard against their tendency to simplify, to
reduce everything to a common denominator, but that provided that
they never let it take precedence over the complexity of human na–
ture, it will enable them to show links which are real and form part
of man's psychic nature.
In an essay on
«Marcel Proust et La Tradition Classique,"
pub–
lished in 1920, Rivihe had suggested some of the ways in which
Proust "rejoined the great classic tradition." In another essay on
«Proust et l'Esprit Positif,"
which appeared
in
1923, a year after the
Dostoevsky, he was able to complete his criticism of the French novel–
ists by holding up Proust as an example of the proper approach by
the novelist to his material because he did not sacrifice "complexity"
to "coherence":
Proust's work on human feeling is of a kind that is absolutely
new. . . . The essential thing is that he repudiated all psychological
entities and set out from pure experience. Of course, he moved toward
a law and formulated it as soon as he saw it emerging; but he
was
ready to abandon it and forget it as soon as he saw another law
emerge which contradicted it.
