ROBERT GREER COHN
.that a return to the eternal debate of Montaigne and Pascal may
be an excuse for ignoring Malraux or Camus. But, though we
may welcome this youthful revolt for its own sake, as a
sign
of
continuing life or, secondarily, as a "breather" after a rich sym–
bolist harvest which threatened to ovenvhelm us, the time always
comes again when we feel that youth and revolt are not the
whole story and we need the challenge of past glories. And we
begin to wonder: must we really bury Proust in order to pitch in
with the period of Beckett and Sarraute? Camus--as indeed
Beckett and Sarraute themselves--managed to reconcile some–
thing like awe for Proust
(L'Homme revolte )
with contempor–
aneity; and though Sactre is likely the more impressive figure of
the two, there can be no doubt as to which has the greater com–
mitment to art.
In conclusion we may say that the whole force of Sartre's
wrongheaded intent in regard to
art
is summed up in his attitude •
toward posthumous fame. He is dead against any attempt to
achieve it and sees this as another kind of escapism, a failure to
pitch in like a man and take the consequences of struggle and
mortality. Yet a belief in transcendence, to which Sactre sub–
scribes in other forms, seems indispensable to human striving,
however reservedly, hesitantly, and belatedly expressed.
If,
as he
repeatedly says, man is not what he is, and this is the condition
of his freedom, his humanity, then the desire to be something
beyond the whole of our limited given condition of self is a very
human one. That is why most men continue to desire progeny
and, some, the spiritual equivalent implied in creativity. Or
would Sartre really, as he unconvincingly proclaims in his dazz–
ling slap-dash rampage through literature, have his e.'{emplary
image of man die out with his last
ad hoc
gesture? Has he really
forgotten the Socratic lesson? According to the enlightened views
of the Greek, it is Sartre who is the escape-artist, eluding the
fuller responsibilities of the hour; and it
is
only a naive material–
ism which denies that a Mallarme, whose personality produced
a vivid impact on an extraordinary group of individuals, a
