Robert Greer Cohn
SARTRE VERSUS PROUST
In
his latest important work,
Critique de La raison
dialectique,
Jean-Paul Sartre writes from a frankly neo-Marxist
position, a highly theoretical Marxism laced with modem French
existentialism and a renewed phenomenological approach.
In
some broadly-sketched early pages of the book, he describes the
sort of compromise position- midway between the old "escapist"
bourgeois idealism and the new " totalizing" commitment to the
struggle for liberty-which characterized Parisian university
thought in his student days, around 1925, when he was twenty
years old:
We set out blindly along the dangerous path of a pluralistic realism
which sought men and things in their "concrete" existence. Never–
theless we remained within the framework of the "dominant
ideas" . . .
We are reminded of the earthy Nietzschean individualism
and
deculture
of Gide's influential
N ourritures terrestres,
and we
understand better the word "dangerous" here if we think of
Celine and Montherlant and their affinities with fascism. The
scandaJ of the underprivileged had begun to haunt the con–
sciences of the upper classes (including the academic world)
with a fresh insistence, bringing inner conflict and "disaggrega–
tion"-familiar Marxist tenns- but still, in Sartre's view, the
youth managed, through the ever-available
mauvaise foi,
to skirt
the deep issues. This hidden conflict was evidenced by the am·
bivalent attitude of the writers of the time, who not only turned
