SARTRE
VS.
PROUST
637
and back, since it is the sense of "failure" which "motivates" the
changes. On a more fully realized, artistic plane, Proust, in other
pages of his novel, depicts psychic phenomena with the intricacy
of Sartre: for example, Swann's desire to
win
the esteem of
Odette, and hence of himself, by overbidding ("transcend the
transcendence of the Other") and, conversely, to see himself as
she sees
him
and become an
object
of affection, or pity, for
him–
self.
Hence his generosity on the one hand and on the other the
odd "pleasure of the intelligence" he takes in being victimized
by
her infidelity,
knowing
the awful truth. The convolutions of
this
affair embrace rather more of the involved inter-human
reality than Sartre's abstractions. Moreover it has been noted by
critics that Sartre seems to be describing a pair of incredibly cold
and gamey lovers who never really touch each other, and this is
true of his "novels" as well; the emphasis is obsessively on oneup–
manship and no wonder, then, that Sartre shows so little personal
interest in the opposite sex, reserving all his warmth for prole–
tarians and the dream of fraternity.
Proust can easily defend himself against the charge of "in–
tellectualism," and on occasion has been goaded into taking the
trouble to do so explicitly: "The book is in no way a work of
reason ... its most trifling details have been supplied to me
through feeling; because I first of all noticed them deep within
myself, without understanding them, having as much trouble to
change them into something intelligible as if they were foreign
to the realms of the intellect. . . ." (Quoted in Hindus,
The
Proustian Vision.)
And
A La Recherche
almost throughout testi–
fies to the man's concern with "synthesis" and a "total" view:
the eternal Return of the privileged moments, the kaleidoscopic
modulations of the persons and the places, the roundaboutness of
the little promenades and the eventual meeting of the two main
Ways, the bending on itself of the macrocosmic whole which,
like the Kabbalistic serpent, through spiralling coils "bites over
and over its dazzling tail" (Valery), creating, as much as possible.
