636
ROBERT GREER COHN
need of her,
which she alone could appease by her presence or her
letters ...
Thus by the very chemistry ,of his suffering,
after having
made jealousy with his love,
he began again to
manufacture affec–
tion,
or pity, for Odette." [Sartre's italics.
VEtre et Ie Neant .]
Now, it
is
abundantly clear from the nature of his novel that
Proust is speaking metaphorically and not "causally," i.e. pseudo–
scientifically. Such metaphors as "chemistry" and "manufacture"
are quite rare in him and it is really unjust-if typical of point–
scorers like Sartre-to single out and doctor a passage like this
one. Even so, though ungraceful, it is not certain that they are
altogether inept. For, granting that causality had long since gone
out with Hume-and Proust along with his cousin Bergson and
his entire era, in full revolt against positivism, was certainly aware
of it--still,
faute de mieux,
his metaphors manage to point to a
recognizable course of psychic events. Proust's terms may remind
us of certain mysterious symbols of his coeval, Odilon Redan,
the generation of emotions from their opposites through spiralling
coils reminiscent, in turn, of the whirlpool of the Tao. Can the
vertiginous
en soi-pour soi
merry-go-round of Sartre do any
better? Let us consult his familiar pages on love in
VEtre et
Ie
Nilant:
To transcend the transcendence of the Other or, on the contrary,
bury in myself that transcendence, without removing the character
of transcendence, these are the two basic attitudes that I take
toward the Other. . .. Each of these two attitudes is the death of
existentialism and a renewed phenomenological approach. In
the other one, that is to say that the failure of one
motivates
the
adoption of the other [po 401; my italics].
The notion of
motivation,
it
is
apparent, is even more
"causal" than Proust's
chemistry
which (like Baudelaire's
al–
chemy
of art) is, though barely so, more suggestive. And con–
ceding that Sartre's terms are more complex than Proust's on
their discursive philosophic plane, underneath them there
is
the
same primordial oscillation of emotion from negative to positive
