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ROIHRT GREER COHN
organized form. We do not conceive the possibility of
analysing
love
because the evolution of this sentiment, as of all others, is
dialectic.
Thirdly, we refuse to believe that a homosexual's love has the
same character as a heterosexual's. The secret, forbidden character
of the former, its aspect of black magic, the existence of a homo–
sexual free-masonry, and this damnation to which the invert
is
aware of dragging his partner with him: it seems to us that all these
facts influence the whole sentiment to the very details of its evolu–
tion. We maintain that a person's various sentiments are not juxta–
posed but that there is a synthetic unity of emotional functions and
that each individual moves within an emotional world which
is
his
own.
Fourthly, we deny the individual's origin, class, milieu, nation,
to be mere concurrents in his sentimental life. On the contrary,
we
think that every affection, as any other form of his psychic life,
manifests
his social situation. This worker, who gets a salary, who
does not own his working tools, who is isolated by his work
from
the substance of his material, and who protects himself from
being
oppressed by becoming conscious of his class, would not feel, under
any circumstances, like this analytical-minded bourgeois, who,
be–
cause of his profession, entertains polite relations with other bour–
geois.
, So, against the analytical mind, we tum to a synthetic concep–
tion of reality, the principle of which is that a whole, whatever it
is,
is different, by nature, from the sum of its parts.
We have already dealt with Proust's supposed intellectual–
ism, so let us address ourselves now to the other issues
in
some
detail. Firstly, Sartre reveals here considerable and wilful ignor–
ance about the nature of the "poet's responsibility"-willful
because in his
Qu'est-ce que La litterature
he made a sharp (and
arbitrary) distinction between poets and prose writers
in
the
matter of
engagement,
leaving the fonner a free independent
status to create the "ornaments" of culture; and Proust is nothing
if not
3i
poet. But 'actually the fuller truth
is
more elusive than
Sartre would have it in
either
of these two texts. Perhaps the
best
answer to Sartre's simplifications is to quote his rejoinder to a
