Swann's Way - Marcel Proust [3]
Oh, there is one more thing you ought to be aware of if you’re going to confront these new readers of yours with a modicum of good will. Even though you managed to include, with a really Tolstoyan appetite, such “modern” manifestations as the Great War, and airplanes, and telephones (wonderful what you did with them), for new American readers in the twenty-first century, the time you keep referring to as lost—in French lost means “wasted” as well—is over and done with, of no account. And a search for the past, even one recent enough to include automobiles and airplanes, is an unlikely, even an unlikeable enterprise. You see, we have a kind of allergy to the past; it’s our national disease, and the very assurance with which you insist that the past is within the present is likely to seem quite repellent, even offensive, to these new readers. I know you intend to be gentle with them—your ferocity is elsewhere—but I feel I must warn you about the reception you’re likely to meet when you release one of your zingers on the subject. I think it will take the American readers of the twenty-first century a long frequentation of themselves as well as of you to believe it when you say:
It’s no use trying to evoke our past, all the efforts of our intelligence are futile. The past lies hidden beyond the mind’s realm and reach, in some material object (in the sensation that material object gives us). And it depends entirely on chance whether or not we encounter that object before we die.
Finally, what your new readers will want to know is Who’s saying such a thing? Who tells it like it is? Who is the discoursing person? And these questions bring me to the other part of my project: introducing your new readers to you, Proust.
You’ll notice, dear new readers, that I haven’t said, “introducing … Marcel Proust …,” for I don’t believe that (biographical) person speaks in the Search at all. You’ll find that the discoursing person who is in fact the Narrator of the Search is hardly ever named, and if indeed he seems to be called Marcel once or twice, it’s extremely difficult to assign him the attributes of autobiography; he is the self who writes, and his relations with the self who votes and pays rent and has bad (or good) sex are uncertain and in some sense displaced. Proust himself has explained this neatly when he insists that Sainte-Beuve, for example, “fails to realize that a book is the product of a different ‘self’ from the one we manifest in our habits, in society, in our vices.” In other words, it is futile to wonder if the Narrator of the Search is the Marcel Proust so many people remembered knowing after the book was published, and even before; the Narrator is simply another Proust, one quite frequently unrecognized by the author (in fact Marcel Proust couldn’t recognize the Narrator, since this other Proust is created by what is written, not by the author’s intention to write …).
For the Proust I want to introduce is a new, an odd, a modern kind of Narrator (I’ll try to explain what I mean by modern in a little while), for if he does really narrate (rather than philosophize or write what are now called “personal essays”), the narrative he writes will not apprehend a life perceived in a linear course of time, from year to year until the moment he decides to write “the story” down.
What is narrated is not the Narrator’s life, but his desire to write. Time thwarts this desire, tends it toward a conventional chronology (which must be continually subverted, for what is merely successive is surely lost: only the circle can be retrouvé, a word that means not only regained but rediscovered, recognized, repossessed)—and how many challenges, discouragements, and rivalries must be endured before the desire to write achieves an ultimate triumph (this is the best reason to read straight through to the end of Le Temps retrouvé, where the Narrator arrives at the Guermantes’s party and discovers what it is that he has to write (time regained) and thereby realizes, indeed reassures himself, that he will