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some outright attacks, or indirectly by .the grotesque quality of
most of the portrayed inverts or again, tacitly, by refusing
to
have his protagonist, or Swann, be one.
This
attitu:de~
as opposed
to Gide's, to whom he confided it-"You can say anything pro–
vided you do not say "I"-is part of the subtle moral force which
gives his art, unlike Gide's, vital direction. Proust
is
a pederast,
in sum, but not
simply
one: he is a struggling and very much
concerned human being.
Equally unproductive is the charge that "Proust thought he
could use
his
homosexual experience to describe Swann's love
for Odette." In the first place, it is idle to
~ume
that
31
pederast
-if he is not
simply
one, and is there such?-cannot have sincere
experience of love, either active or imagined, for the opposite sex.
In the case of Proust there is a wealth of evidence that he had
heterosexual experience as well as feelings. And in any .case,
an
awareness of the n<l!ture of love's genesis, (after an initial vague
polymorphous phase ) from love of the mother, and father, to
all
sorts of other people including the female who "replaces" the
mother-as various mistresses of
A la Recherche
do, in Proust's
own honest and knowing words-should have rendered Sartre's
views more just and flexible here. Proust, whose work is a study
in
the evolution of emotion through quite specific historical
conditions is easily more "dialectical" than his 3ISsailant: cer- '
tainly than Sartre is in these pages where, with a boorish heavi–
ness, he implies that there are
only
differences between any two
experiences of love, or sex. In other pages of
L'Etre et le
Neant,
which he has apparently forgotten, Sartre discusses the reversible
nature of sexual possession, involving both <l!Ctive and passive
aspects in both sexes (see "the hole," p. 706). And though we
will gladly, gratefully, grant "la petite
differ~nce;"
still, fI'Qqt
Plato's androgyne to modern biological teaching about the evo–
lution of sexual differentiation and the "suppressed potehtialities,"
we have learned to approach the subject with some tolera!Ilce
of
ambiguity. Hence, for example, the male novelist has a right
to
describe the inner world of his feminine characters (Madame
