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So the reader learns that what the Search contains is indeed the Narrator’s life, but a life displaced, as I said. We’ve read a symbolic biography, or as one of Marcel Proust’s early biographers (by now there have been so many) calls it, “a symbolic story of Proust’s life.” In one of his prophetic letters Keats wrote: “A man’s life of any worth is a continual Allegory,” and Keats seemed quite certain, actually quite sanguine, about the legibility of the allegory—it was plain and pleasing to such a poet. But Proust’s favorite poet, Charles Baudelaire, had been more doubtful, more pessimistic, in fact more tragic about reading the sense of the allegory out of the given life-experience:

… as if in a shroud,

my heart lay buried in this allegory:

On Aphrodite’s island all I found

was a token gallows where my image hung …

Lord give me strength and courage to behold

my body and my heart without disgust!

Of course Proust had the courage to behold anything in his or anyone else’s body and its behaviors, but he was not so sure about what strength would be given him, or what strength remained of what had been given, and indeed in terms of his health it was a narrow squeak: Proust’s textual revisions recovered in the last twenty-five years have shown us how much was left to do, how much could not quite be done.

There is a whole other poetic drama (maker’s drama) in the recently published notebooks, the variant readings, the canceled (but plausible) versions: Marcel Proust’s wavering agon about where to place this humiliation, that death, the other sudden revelation (for instance the discovery that the two “ways” are the same). Indeed whole sections were wrested from what in linear terms would be their “right place” in order to serve the design, to fulfill the allegory; and Proust scholarship for the next twenty-five years will be instructing our inner graduate student as to what some of the decisions (and the indecisions) had been and what they became, more or less, finally. Certainly the requirements—the logic—of the allegory allowed, actually compelled, Proust to erase the differences, the contradictions between the novel and the discourse (as Descartes would have it), the treatise (as Spinoza), the essay (as Montaigne)….

This recognition brings us to the figure of Proust as a modern writer, which any introduction to the twentieth century’s greatest novelist must engage. Must, because Proust was twenty-nine when he entered that century in which he lived only twenty-two years; indeed he was thirty-five and had already written several unsuccessful versions of the Search before 1907. (Tolstoy was thirty when he completed his great autobiographical allegory Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth and began his career as a novelist.) We call Tolstoy the great(est?) novelist of the nineteenth century, though he lived a decade into the twentieth, and though the “essays” that finish off War and Peace (written the year Proust was born) seem obstructively “modern” on our first reading of that novel. Still, we do not regard Tolstoy as a “modern” novelist.

Yet Proust, who is as insistent about the “realism” of the world of the Search as anything in Anna Karenina, as inclusive about its “naturalism” as everything in The Death of Ivan Ilyich, is inveterately coupled or tripled—by Nabokov, for example—with Joyce and Biely and Kafka as indefectibly modern. I believe this is precisely because of the nature of that Narrator and his strangely absent presence, if I may put it that way. Proust’s every gigantic effort is to subtract his “empty” Narrator’s discovery (and possession) of time regained from what Gaston Bachelard calls the “false permanence” of biography. That is what pushes this enormous novel over the edge (the edge of encyclopedic allusion, of social chronicle, of literary emulation, of symbolist dithering, and of speculations concerning love, art, death, and time) into that enormous structure (abyss?) of repudiations which is