SARTRE
VS.
PROUST
635
II, and coming as
it
did after a long interval of peace amidst the
pleasure-whirl of
La belle epoque,had
much to do with the
"breakdown" aspects of art: a sort of symbolic purging of the
shellshocked nightmare. Even more importantly, I believe, the
eccentric, fitful, compulsively provocative manifestations have to
do with the formidable challenge of the Symbolist masters–
Mallarme, Valery, Proust, Joyce, etc.- and in this the sensitive
youth were undoubtedly behaving like some well-known ex–
amples of individual sons of mercilessly eminent men. Proust,
accordingly, along with some other Symbolists/ will continue to
show up in Sartre's pages like a revenant father-ghost, a bit
reminiscent of the one in
Hamlet,
or
Wilhelm Meister.
His at–
tempts to exorcise it are, like much of his writing, fairly peremp–
tory, but nonetheless worthy of attention, considering the stature
of the opponents.
In
L'Etre et le Neant
(1943), Sartre deals Proust a glancing
blow:
Proust seeks continually to discover, by intellectualistic decomposi–
tion,
in
the temporal succession of psychic states, bonds of causality
between these states. But at the end of these analyses, he can offer
us
nothing but results like the following: "As soon as Swann could
think
of [Odette] without horror, as he saw once more kindness in
her smile, and as
the desire to keep her away from everyone else was
no
longer added by jealousy to his love,
this love
became
again a
taste for the sensations that Odette's person gave him, the pleasure
he derived from admiring as a spectacle or from interrogating as a
phenomenon the lifting of one of her looks, the formation of one of
her smiles, the emission of an intonation of her voice. And this
pleasure, different from all others
had ended by creating in him a
1.
Sartre has long been preparing a book on Mallarme which, it is said,
will
try to make up for the unfair "job" he performed on Baudelaire. The
title of
Un Coup de
Des
haunts the memory of a character in
Le Swrsis,
and there are m;my allusions to Mallarme in his study of Genet. Rimbaud
is
often present in
Les Chemins de la liberte
(particularly
Le Sursis)
and
L'Enfance d'un chef.
Joyce's influence is obvious in various episodes of
L,
Mu,
and
La Naus/e.
