(Other Werks By Samuel Beckere Published By Grove Press Cascando and Other Short Dramatic Pieces Film Endgame Happy Days How Its, Krapp's Last Tape and Other Dramatic Pieces More Pricks Than Kicks Murphy Poems in. English Proust ‘Stories & Texts for Nothing Molloy Malone Dies The Unnamable Waiting for Godot Watt PROUST » SAMUEL BECKETT “E fango @il mondo” GROVE PRESS, INC. NEW YORKPROUST HE Prourtan equation is never simple, The [ ‘unknown, choosing its weapons from & hoard, of values, is also the unknowable. And the quality of ts action falls under two signatures, In Proust each spear may bea spear of Telephus. This dualism in multiplicity will be examined more closely in relation to Proust's *perspectvism.’ For the pur poses of this synthesis it is convenient to adopt the faur chronology of the Proustian demonstration, ‘and to examine in the first place that double-headed ‘monster of damnation and salvation—Time. ‘The scaffolding of his stracture is revealed to the narrator in the brary of the Princesse de Guer~ ‘antes (one time Mme. Verdurin), and the nature ofitrmaterals in the matinée that fllows. His book (akes form in his mind. He is aware of the many ‘concessions required of the literary artist by the shortcomings of the literary convention. AS a ‘writer he isnot altogether at liberty to detach effect from cause. Te will be necessary, for example, to interrupt (dsfigure) the luminous projection of sub- Ject desire withthe comic relief of features. Tt will be imposible to prepare the hundreds of masks thatrightly belong to the objects of even his most dis: interested scrutiny. He accepts regretfilly the sacred ruler and compass of literary geometry. But hhe will refuse to extend his submision to spatial scales, he will refuse to measure the length and weight of man in terms of his body instead of in terms of his years. In the closing words of hie book. he states his position : “But were T granted time to accomplish my work, I would not fail to stamp it with the seal of that Time, now so forcibly present to my mind, and in it 1 would describe men, even, at the risk of giving them the appearance of mor- strous beings, as occupying in Time a much greater place than that so sparingly conceded to them in Space, a place indeed extended beyond measure, because, lke giants plunged in the years, they touch at once those periods of their live—separated by so ‘many days—so far apart in Time? Proust's creatures, then, are victims of this pre= dominating condition and circumstance—Time ; victims as lower organisms, conscious only of two dimensions and suddenly contronted with the mys tery of height, are victims : victims and prisoners, ‘There is no escape from the hour and the days. [Neither ffom to-morrow nor from yesterday. There ‘no escape from yesterday because yesterday has deformed us, or been deformed by us. 'The mood {i of no importance. Deformation has taken place. Yesterday is not a milestone that has been passed, but a daystone on the beaten track of the years, and Srremediably part of us, within us, heavy and dan- erous. We are not merely more weary because of yesterday, we are other, no longer what we were before the calamity of yerterday. A calamitous day, but calamitous not necessarily in content. The ‘good or evil dispestion of the object has neither realty nor significance. The immediate joys and sorrows of the body and the intelligence are so many superfoetations. Such as it was, it has been assiai= lated to the only world that has reality and signif ance, the world of our own latent consciousness, and its commography has suffered a dislocation. So that we are rather in the postion of Tantalus, with this diference, that we allow ourselves to be tanta- lised. And possibly the perpetuum mobile of our illusions is subject to more variety. The aspira- tions of yesterday were valid for yesterday's ego, not for today's. We are disappointed at the nulity of what we are pleased to call attainment. But what is attainment? The identification of the subject ‘with the object of his desire. ‘The subject has died— ‘and perhaps many times—on the way. For subject B to be disappointed by the banality of an object chosen by subject A is as illogical as to expect one’s hunger to be dissipated by the spectacle of Uncle cating his dinner, Even suppose that by one of thore 3rare miracles of coincidence, when the calendar of facts runs parallel to the calendar of feelings, realisa- tion takes place, that the object of desire (in the strictest sense ofthat malady) is achieved by the sub- Ject then the congruence is so perfec, the timeatate of attainment eliminates so accurately the time-state ‘of aspiration, that the actual seems the inevitable, and, all conscious intellectual effort to reconstitute the invisible and unthinkable as a reality being fruit. less, we are incapable of appreciating our joy by comparing it with our vorrow. Voluntary memory (Proust repeats it ad nauseam) is of no valve at am instrument of evecation, and provides an image as {far removed from the real asthe myth of our imegina- tion or the caricature furnished by direct perception, ‘There is only one real impression and one adequate mode of evocation. “Over neither have we the leat control. That reality and that mode will be dis cused in their proper place. But the poisonous ingenuity of Time in the science ‘of affliction is not limited to its action on the subject, that action, as has been shown, resulting in an un. cessing modification of his personality, whose per- ‘manent realty, ifany, ean only be apprehended as a retrospective hypothesis. The individual isthe seat ‘of constant process of decantation, decantation from. the vestel containing the fuid of future time, sluggish, pale and monechrome, to the veisel containing the 4 fluid of past time, agitated and multicoloured by the enomena of four General weting, the former is innocuous, amorphous, without character, without any Borgian virtue. Lazily considered in anticipation and in the haze of our smug will to live, ‘of our pericious and incurable optimism, it seems ‘exempt from the bitterness of fatality in store for us, notin store in us. On occasions, however, it is capable of supplementing the labours ofits colleague. eis only necessary for ite surface to be broken by a date, by any temporal specification allowing us to ‘measure the days that separate us from a menace—or promise. Swann, for example, contemplates with dlefil resignation the months that he must spend away from Odette during the summer. One day (Odette says: ‘Forcheville (her lover, and, afer the death of Swann, her husband) is going to Egypt at Pentecost.” Swann translates: ‘I am going with Forcheville to Egypt at Pentecost’ The fluid of fature time freezes, and poor Swann, face to face with the future reality of Odette and Forcheville in Egypt, suffers more grievoudly than even at the smirery of his present condition. The narrator's de- ire to see La Berma in Padée is stimulated more violently Uy the announcement ‘ Doors closed at two foe han bythe mystery of ergot’ 'Jantait f and solar myth." His indifference at parting Fam Albertine a the ent ofthe day Babee 8 3transformed into the most horible anxiety by simple remark addressed by her to ber aunt oF (0 a fiend : * To-morrow, then, at halfpast eight?” ‘The tacit understanding that the fare can be controlled is destroyed. “The future event cannot be focussed, its implications cannot be seized, und itis defintely situated and a date asigned to it, When Albertine was his prisoner, the posbility of her eseape did not seriously distur him, because it was indistinct and abstract, Ike the possibility of death. Whatever opinion we may be pleased to hold on the subject of death, we may be sure that it is meaningless and valucles, Death has not required us to keep a day free, ‘The art of publicity has been revolutionised by 4 similar consideration. Thus I am exhorted, not merely to try the apetient of the Shepherd, but to uy it at seven o'clock, So far we have considered a mobile subject before ‘an ideal object, immutable and incorruptible. But ‘our vulgar perception is not concerned with other fan vulgar phenomena, Exemption from intrinsic Sux ina given object does not change the fact that it is the comeative ofa subject that does not enjoy uch immunity. The observer infects the observed with ‘his own mobility. Moreover, when itis a case of ‘human intercourse, we are faced by the problem of fan object whose mobility isnot merely a function of the subject's, but independent and personal : two 6 separate and immanent dynamisms related by no system of synchronisation. So that whatever the object, our thirst for possesion is, by definition, in satiable. At the best, all that is realised in Time (all ‘Time produce), whether in Art or Life, ean only be possessed successively, by a series of partial annexa- tions—and never integrally and at once. The tragedy of the Marcel-Albertine liaison is the type-tragedy of the human relationship whose failure is preordained. ‘My analysis of that central catastrophe will clarify this too abstract and arbitrary statement of Proust’s pessimism. But for every tumour a sealpel and a compress. Memory and Habit are attributes of the ‘Time cancer. ‘They control the most simple Prous- tian episode, and an understanding oftheir mechan fam must precede any particular analysis of their application’ They are the fying buttreses of the temple raised to commemorate the wisdom of the architect that i algo the witdom of all the sages, from Brahma to Leopardi the wisdom that consists no in the satisfaction but in the ablation of desire > “Tn ne di cat ingani non che la speme, il desderio & spent” * ‘The lawsof memory are subject to the more general laws of habit. Habit is a compromise effected be- ‘ween the individual and his environment, or be- 7‘woe the iniuel and s ow eae ecem tks, the garnee of 2 dl Ivete te lphaingconductor of hs exten tan Me bali tht chan the dog eboney Shab. “Lie thabit Orranerlies ae Of habs sine the india hs mec Ino the nerd bing» pec a india cntone (een ote indus wl, Schoener weld op ee ‘ut be continually renewed lees see uct rough up ede: The cent se nh i at tke place ones and fora oe a a Base very day. Hoi ten ete gre wet the eounlen ten conuded bets te ee le jes tat conte the abana ae count onda bees "The pea fae sn tat sept coneatne nee a by mo exit of mace waeunam, esa ie gnveshers ve mtwnddlinnsinieh ean Beperassonain electing ou renin pli wer an rb ramen he bree af nag te slleng of beng (ae tis a, eee heather nd fr scone Sgr ae Ghee nding, Ta ae cide a bret parte al the ho ae capable of neweng te Ee ny" Wa crs Neco fr wae ese 8 national anthem of the true ego exiled in habit. The Gideans advocate a habit of living—and look for an epithet, Annonsensical bastard phrase. They imply ‘hierarchy of habits, as though f¢were valid to speak. of good habits and bad habits, An automatic ad- Justment of the human organism to the conditions of its existence has as little moral significance as the casting ofa clout when May is or is not out; and the ‘exhortation to cultivate a habit as litle sense as an exhortation to cultivate a coryza,) The suffering of Ding : that is, the free play of every faculty. Be- cause the pernicious devotion of habit paralyses our attention, drugs those handmaidens of perception whose co-operation is not absolutely ential. Habit is like Prangoise, the immortal cook of the Proust household, who knows what has to be done, and will slave all day and all night rather than tolerate any redundant activity in the kitchen. But our current habit of living is as incapable of dealing with the mystery ofa strange sky ora strange room, with any circumstance unforeseen in her curriculum, as Fran Di itd Cee Seam 6 the murder of Agamemnon. And he thinks of bis sgandmother and of is crucltis towards her. Alber- tine, so remote and detached from his heart moment bpelore, is now not merely an obsession, but part of ‘imself, withia him, and the movement she makes © descend fiom the train threatens to tear open hie body. He forces her to accompany him to Balbe “The strand and the waves exist no more, the summer isdead. The sea isa vel that cannot hide the horror of Mongjouvain, the intolerable vision of sadistic ubricity and a photograph defiled. He sees ia ‘Albertine another Rachel and another Odette, and the sterility and mockery of an affection dictated by interest. He secs his lie as a succession of joyless dawns, poisoned by the tortures of memory and isla- ‘dou. The nest morning he brings Albertine to Pars and locks her up in his house. ls life in common with Albertine is volcanic, his atind torn by a series of eruptions Fury, Jealousy, Envy, Curiosity, Sufering, Pride, Honour and Love. ‘The form of this last is pre-established by the a tary images of memory and imagination, an arifcial fiction to which, and for bis suffering, he forces the woman to conform. ‘The person of Albertine counts for nothing. Shes neta mative, but a notion, as far removed from reality as the portrait of Odette by. Elstir, which isthe portrait not ofthe beloved but of the love that has deformed her, is removed from the cfAnd hat no, bean repre ne efi Goninaon, belong icine nga oH asco wi Alre bea n Sen iineponin iat and eae “Rovhwvene hecnzageova wien oe inawinld vere loves poked ne th ty In he eed of hing or nea oss Uy whats harm ame a the whol of Mterature thee oo dy ora OF kenny and emia ty ra dee asl and devloped with sch abt we snes, ter this, Adolphe is a petula in ‘ling, the miock epic of saliv ypenter om, Mane de Cambremer (whose name, One ‘antes observes to Swann, stops just i eset Brey wnt and sere ee en Inthe vonetjlony aad up eit 2 8 mistranslated, reapplied and misnpplied, Every ree membered incident is decomposed inthe ac of his Imistrist. ‘My imagination provided eqaatons for the unknown inthis algebra of desire” But Alber- tine a fagitiv, and 20 expreston of her value can be complete uns presed by vome such symbol a8 that which in physics denotes speed. A static Alber tine would scon be conquered, would soon be com pared to all the other posible conquests that her posesion excludes, and the infinite of what ie not land may be prefered tothe nally of whats, Love, he ins, can only exist with a state of dimattac- tio, whether born of jealousy or its desire. It reprevents our demand for # whole. It inception and its continuance ily the consciousness that something is licking.‘ One only lover that Which one does not pases entirely." And unit the rupture takes place—(and indeed long after it bas taken place, even when the object is dead, thanks to a reospective jealousy, a*jlouse de Psealie")— ‘warfare, Albertine mentions casually that she may visit che Verdurie, Anagram : ‘I may go and see the Verdurins tommorrow. I don’t know. 1 don’t rrtculasly want to." Translation : ‘It is abso- lately certain that Iwill go and see the Verduris to- morrow. Iti of the greatest posible importance. fe remembers that Morel has promised w conduct the Vinteul Sepewor for Mme. Verdurin, and con- 39clade that Mile. Vinteuit and her fend wilt be SioNs the guews, and that by some infernal stroke of ing tpn rence fm mig oe affords bisy the bitter satisfaction of knowing tate meen irae hn on s ve lve fr pono a ir fr Something eat ineealy et lo than nothing, but that in er nha Active, mysterious and invisible, a current that 7 ne came that im to bow down and wonky ay dee nee Pheable Goddes, and 0 make scrfcesf heavy 0 before her, And the Goddess wha vequicer this sacrifice and this humiliation, whote sole condition of ‘patronage is cormuptibility, and inva whotefaidh and ‘worship all mankind is born, isthe Goddess of Time. [Noobject prolonged in this yemporal dimension toler ates posession, meaning by passssion total poster sion, aaly © be achieved by the complete idemfica tion of object and subject. The impenetability of the most vulgar and jsignifcamt Jaman creature i rot merely an illusion of the subjects jealousy (al ‘hough this Smpenerratility sands out more clealy under the Rontgen rays of jealousy so fiercely lnypertrophied as was dhat of the narrator, a jealousy that is doubtless a form of his domination complex and his infantilism, two tendencies highly developed. in Proust), All thats ative, all that ie enveloped in time and space, is endowed with what might be de- seribed as an abstract, ideal and absolute impes- meability. So that we can understand the postion of Proust : * We imagine tha the object of our desire is being that can be laid down before us, enctosed Within a body. Alas! itis the extension of that ‘being to all the points of space and time that it has ‘cccupied and will occupy. If we do not passes con ‘act with such @ place and with such an hour we do ‘ot passes that being, Bit we cannot touch all these Points” And again: ‘A being scattered in space and time ino longer @ woman but a series of events 4“‘8 which Wwe eam throw no that cannot be solved, 2 thrash with rads in an ight, a series of problems fea that, like Xerxes, we absurd desire to punish it for ‘And he defines love Time and Space made perceptible ta the hear? having engulfed our treasure? fone morning, during a period of calm, is mind. Albertine must leave him. He lors b nelonger. Hewillgoto Venice and forget her, He e rings for Frangte to send out fora guide and a time- table, He will goto Venice to his dream of Gothic time on a veraal sea. Enter Frangoire, "Mile. ‘Aberin left at nine oelck and gave me this leer for Monsieur’ And Ske Phbire, be recogni the cverwakefil Gods + «ces dew guid mon Sat ‘Oi allume ey al & tout eon sng, (Ge dieu gut se sone tune gate enele De réduire le our dane ible morc” Shortly afterwards Albertine is killed in Touraie. Her death, her emancipation from Time, does not calm hs jealousy nor accelerate the extinction of an obvesion whose rack and wine were the days and the hour, "They and ther love were amphibious, Plunged in the past and the present. ‘There is a ‘moral climate and 2 sentimental calendar, where the ‘nurumentofennumensuration s notsolarbutcardiae ‘To forget Albertine he must—like a man struck down by hemiplegia—forget the seasons, their seasons, and, lke a child learn them anew. "Tn order 6 De consoled 1 would have to forget, not one, but in- rumnerable Albertine.” And not only “3,” bat the ‘many ‘I's, For any given Albertine thee exists ‘correlative narrator, dl no anachronism can put ‘part what Time has coupled. He must ecurn and seenact he statins ofa diminishing suffering. Thus his astonishment that Albertine, alive within him, ede ite deseibes thee ofthese stages, arrange fom Gite amat ; unc her enggement oa de Sin-Laup insgned *Aberone tech % fhe young laundreses, bathing in the Loire, This final confirmation of the orignal perspectve's typical of Prout’s characterisation. Thus there is sugges: tion of congruence between the final Duchesse de ‘Guermantes, a8 she appears at the matinge of her cousin, and the gently wanton descendant of Gene vitve de Brabant, exposed forthe first time (0 the sarato’s adoration in the church of St. Hilaire at ‘Comabray, following mass in the chapel of Gilbert the Bad, her eyes of periwinkle smiling and rates and the colour of dhe sunlight filtering through his window or f the girdle of Genevidve herself, and bathed in the mystery of Merovingian time and the amaranth and legendary radiance of her name. And Gilberte ‘ref emerges ffom her succesive transformations, fiom the Gilberte Swann of the Champs Elysées, Mlle. de Forcheville after the death of Swann, Mime ae Stint-Lovp, and finally, by the death of Robert, Duchese de Guermantes, as first seen at Tassoaville through a trellis of red hawehorm, an impudent ‘symph leaning on her spade, amidst the jasmine and the copper wallfowers. And he sees his love for Albertine asa testimony t his eriginal chirvoyance 4nd an affirmation, in spite of the denegations of his feason, of that vision of her asa rapacious and elusive Sl, hone and remote against the sea. ‘In the ‘last of the most complete blindness, perspicacty ‘subsists in the form of tendemes and predilection, 455 Ghat is «mite to spe of hte to spe ofan et csc fe tai spe of ant cae in ice he very ft of teagan ‘mpi that thas been an evi oe ene at fae in obliterating the faculty of suffering. naval atempe to eda hat exasperate that faculty, — desero.“Onedeiney ne dss be tava velopment ia in the seyge of depth. The artistic tendency is not expansive, but @ contraction, And artis the apotheosis of wolitude, ‘There is no com= munication because there are no vehicles of com- munication. Even on the rare ocesions when word and gesture happen to be valid expresions of person- ality, they lose their significance on their passage shsough the cataract of the personality that is opposed, to them. Either we speak and act for ourelves—in, which case speech and action are distorted and ‘emptied of their meaning by an intelligence that is rot ours or ese we speak and act or others—in which case we speak and acta lie.‘ One lies all one's life Jong,’ writes Proust, ‘notably to those that fove one, and above all to that stranger whose contempt would ‘ause one most pain—onesdlf? Yet surely the scorn ofhalf a dozen—or hala milion—sincere imbeciles for a man of genius ought to cure us of our absurd ‘pantigiio and our capacity for being affected by that Abridged libel that we call an insult. Proust situates ftiendship somewhere beiween fatigue and ennui, He docs not agree with the ‘ietzchean conception that friendship must be based ‘on intellectual sympathy, because he does not see ‘iendship as having the leas intellectual significance. ‘We agree with those whose ideas (non-Platonic) are at the same degree of confision as our own? For io he cnc of enhip tantamount (0 & a +1 "Nance la peme Deundentod eaae one dai be tne Inte he nr * fncon of nan fis cova an, tale Pin ke Whaley ord fringe tale. has ag a For the artist, who does not deasacrifice of hat only realandincommunicable exence of oneself tn dhe exigencies ofa fightened habit whose confidence requires © Ye restored by a dove of atten- tion. Te represents a false movement of the spinit— fom within to without, from the spistual sssimita- ‘om of the immaterial as provided by she artist, a ex- tracted by him from lif, tothe abject and indigestible drusks of direct cnutact with the material and con- crete, with what we call the material and the con crete, Thos he visits Balbec and Venice, meets Gilbeste and the Duchese de Guermantes and Alber~ tine, attracted not by what they are but implied by their arbitrary and ideal equivalents. "The only fer> tile research i excavatory, iumessiv, 3 contraction of the spirit, dewent. The artist is active, but negatively srinking (rom the nullity of extracircum- ferential phenomena, drawn in (0 the core of the eddy. Hecannot practise fiendship, because fend ship is the centrifugal force of selfear, selb-negation, ‘Saint-Loup must be considered as more general than bimaelf, as a product of the oldest Frexch nobility, and the beauty and ease of his tendemes for Bie narrator—as when, for example, he accompliges the most delicate and graceful gymnastics In a Paris restaurant 30 that his fiend shall not be disturbed — are appreciated, sot a the manifestation ofa special and charming personality, but as the inevitable ad Junct of excesively good yrites Proust, “i not a building at can receive “aitons to its supericies, uta tree whove stem and deatige are an expresion of inward sap” We are wrone, We cannot know and we cannot be kaw. “Man i the eveatare that cannot came forth fom moclt, who kuows atbert only im imaels, and who, ithe aserts the comteary, lies? seo sve Prot compel deh ot Ect eEisentine Tete gt and Co rink Eat Pa ea on eg ewe ire 2 susan ih eee Me cl. Tae © te uma Tage esa Ct near eee aon Fe ee ctareonoent etd Sc meh enter i easton 8 Tinta ; “renausboment ERUARUES ae s ‘Driving tothe Guermantes Hotel hefeels that every- thing is leet, that hie fife ia a succession of last, rydevoid of reality because nothing survives, noting of bisfove for Githerte or the Duchesse de Guermantes, fr his grandmother, and now nothing of his love foe Albertine, nothing of Combray and Balbec and. Venice except the distorted images of woluntsry emory, a life all in length, a sequense of distoea- tions and adjustments, where neither mystery nor Doeauty is sacred, where all, except she adamantine columns ofhis enduring boredon, bas been consumed in the torrential solvens of the year, a life s0 pro- ‘tracted in the past and s0 meaningless i the future, so uwesly bereft of any individual and permanent seceaity, that his death, now or to-morrow ae i. ‘Year or in ten, would be a termination but nota con ‘uéion. And he thinks how empty ie Bergone’s phrase : ‘the joys of the sptic? For art, which he ‘had so long believed the one ideal and inviolate ele- -ient ia a corcuptible world, seems now, whether because af is incurable lack of taleat ori own in herent artieiaity, a8 unreal and sterile as the con steuetions of a demented imagination— that insane barsclurgan that always plays the wrong tune’; and the materials of art—Beatrice and Faust and the * arur du ciel immense et ronde’ and the seogist itice—all the absolute beauey of » magic world, 38 ‘vulgar and unworthy in thei reality as Rachel and Cottard, and pale and weary and cruel and incon stant and joyles a8 Shelley's moon, So, ater years 50 of fruitless solicude, it ic without enttusasm that he drags himself back t0 & society that has long since ‘ceaued io interest him. And now, on the ouskirts of ‘hia fasliny, favoured by re very depresion and fatigue that had appeared tohis disgust asthe after~ math of a minute and sterile lcidity (fvoured, be- Cause the pretensions of a discouraged memory ase for the moment reduced to the mest immediate ani utltarian presenifceion), he sto receive the oracle ‘that had ivariably been denied tothe mest exalted ‘esti of his spirit, which his inteligence had Billed 4p extract from the ssmic enigma of tee and flower land gesture and art, and suffer a religious experience in the only intelligible sense ofthat epithet, at once an. ‘sumption and an annunciation, so that at lst be will understand the promise of Bergotte. anc the Achievement of Ftic and the mesage of Vinteuil fom bis paradise and the delorow and mecesary coumieof his ovm life and the ifiine futity—For the ‘ait ah that is not art. "Dhs matinée is divided into two parts, ‘The mys ‘ical experience and meditation of the narrator in the Cartesian hotcupboand of the Guermantes librarys andthe implications of that experience applied to the ‘work of act thar takes shape in his mina in the cours of the reception ise. From the victory over Thine ‘he pases to the victory of Time, from the negation oF Death to its affirmation. Thus, at the end asin the stbody otis work, Proust respects the dual significance of every condition and circamatance of lt. The ‘most ideal tautology presupposes a relation and the atfirmation of equality involves only an approximate identification and by aserting unity denies unity. ‘Crossing the courtyard he stumbles onthe cobble, His surroundizgs vanish, watimes, stables, carioge, guest, the entre reality of the place in its hou, his ansety and doubt as to the reality oflife and art di appear, hei stunned by waves of rapture, saturated fn that saone {ticity that had infgated 50 sparingly the desolation of bis Uf, Drabuess is obliterated in fan intolerable brightness. And suddenly Venice emerges from the series of forgotten days, Venice ‘whose radiant esence he had never been able to ex ress because it had been rejected by the imperious vulgarity of a workingday memory, but which shia chance reduplication of a precarious equilibrium in ‘the Baptistry of San Marco has lied from its Adristic shore and set down, 3 bright and vehement inter- oper, in the courtyard of the Princesse de Goer mantes, But already the vision has faded and he is fice to resume his social functions. He is ushered into the library, because ex-Mine. Verdurin, st once the Nora asd Vieim of Baranonie Megrims, is en- throned in the midst of her quests pasianatcly ab- sorbing Rino-Gomenol in the interests of her mucous ‘membrane and suring the most atrocious ecsases 5 | | ofSwavinukian neuralgia. While is waiting alone ‘for the music to be over, the miracle of the courtyard is renewed under four diferent forms. ‘They have already been refered tA servant sik a spoon against a plate, he wipes bis out with a heavily arched napkin, the water ci lke a siren in the pipes he takes down Frayeis e Chanpi from the elves, And jut as the Plazza di San Marco burst its way into ibe eouyard and there aserted Jumjnous and fleeting domination, 20 now the library. is successively invaded by a forest, the high tide breaking on the shore at Balbec the vast dining-rooma f the Grand Hote Rooded, Ike ax aquarium, with the sunset and the evening sea, and lastly Combray_ and its ways? and the deferential traaminion af & sour and distinguished prose, shaped and sated bY 1s mother’s voice, muted ad sweetened almost ta fotlaby, onoinding all night Song its reasturng fel of sound before a chil’ insomnia. “The mest successful evocative experiment can only project the echo oa past sensation, becawe, being an 230 of inellecton, its condidoned by dhe prejudices of the ingellgence which abaraets Goxn any given sensation, at being logical and insignificant, adi cordast and Sivolous intruder, whatever word or goturt,scund or perfume, cannot be fited into the uaa ofa concept. But the exence of aay new exe Derience it contained preseely inthis mysterious ehe- 8ment that the vigilant will rejects as an anachronism, Iki the axis about which the sensation pivots, the centreof gravity ofis coherence. So that noamount fof voluntary manipulation ean reconstitute in it tegriey an impresion thatthe will has—so to speak— Dbuckled into incoherence. But if by ecidet, and given favourable circumstances (a relaxation of the subject's habia of thought and a reduction of the radius of his memory, a generally diminished tension of consciousness following upon a phase of extreme Aiscouragement), if by some miracle of analogy éhe central impression of a past sensation recurs as an ‘immediate stimulus which can be instinctively identi= fied by the subject with the model of duplication (cose integral party has heen retained because i as ben _furgoten), then the total past sensation, not its echo nor ite copy, but the sensation itself, annihilating every spatial and temporal restriction, comes in a rush to engulf the subject in all the beauty of is ine fallible proportion. Thus the sound produced by a spoon struck against a plate is subconsciously Identi- fied by the narrator with the sound of a hammer struck by a mechanic against the wheel of a train Grawn up before a wood) a sound that his will had rejected as extraneous 10 its immediate activity. But a subconscious and disinterested act of perception has reduced the object—the wood—to its immaterial and spitually digestible equivalent, and the record of st this pure act of cognition has not merely been associ= ated with this sound of a hammer struck against a ‘wheel, but centralised about it. The mood, as usual, hhas no importance. ‘The poiat of departure of the Proustian exposition is not the crystallin aggiomera- tion butts keme!—the crystalived. The most trivial ‘experience—he says in elfect—is encrusted with ele- ‘ments that logically are not related to it and have consequently been rejected by our intelligence: itis imprisoned ina vate filled with a certain perfume and 2 certain colour and raised to a cerain temperature. ‘These vases are suspended along the height of our years, and, not being accesible to our intelligent ‘memory, art in a sense immune, the purity oftheir climatic content is guaranteed by forgetfulness, each fone is kept at its distance, atits date. So that when the imprisoned microcotm is besieged in the manner described, we are flooded by a new air and a new perfume (new precisely because already experienced), and we breathe the true air of Paradise, of the only Paradite that is not the dream of a madman, the Paradise that has been lst. "The identification of immediate with past expesi- ‘ence, the recustence of past action or reaction in the present, amounts toa participation between the ideal and the real, imagination and direct apprehension, symbol and substance. Such participation frees the essential realty that is denied to the contemplative 55‘sto the active life. Whats common to present and past is more exential than cither taken separately. Reality, whether approached imaginatively of em pirically, remains a surface, hermetic, Imagination, applied-a priori—to what is absent, is exercised in ‘vacuo and cannot tolerate the limits oF the real. Nor fs any direct and purely experimental contact por ible benween subject and object, becawe they are automatically separated by the subjects conscious- ‘sof perception, and the object loses its purity and ‘becomes a mere intellectual pretext oF motive. But, thanks to this redupliction, the experience Smmaginative and empirical, at once an evocation and a direct perepton, real without being merely actual, ideal without being merely abstract, the ideal real, the exental, the extratemporal. Buti this mystical experience communicates an extratemporal essence, iefollows that the eommunicant ifr the moment an cexratemporal being. Consequently the Provstian solution consis in 0 far asi has been examined in the negation of Time and Death, the negation of Death because the negation of Time, Deaths dead because Time is dead. (At this point a brief ime pertinence, which consists in considering Le Temps Rated almost a8 inappropriate a description of the Proustan solution at Gin and Pumas ofa master Piece that contains no alison to either crime or Punishment. ‘Time is not recovered, iis obliterated. 6 Time is recovered, and Death with it, when he leaves the library and joins the guests, perched in precarious decrepitude on the aspiring stilts of the former and preserved from the latter by a miracle of terrified equilibrium. Ifthe title isa good title the seene inthe library is an anticlimax.) So now in the exaltation of his bref etemity, having emerged from. ‘the darkness of time and habit and passion and in- telligence, he understands the necesity of art. For {in the brightness of art alone can be deciphered the baffled ecstasy that he had Known before the in- scrutable superfcis of a cloud, a triangle, a spire, a flower, a pebble, when the mystery, the essence, the ‘Idea, imprisoned in matter, had solicited the bounty ‘of a subject passing by within the shell o his imputity, and tendered, like Dante his song #9 the ‘ingogai storti€ lochi’ at least an incorruptible beauty : * Ponete mente almencom'o sn bell.” Anche understands the meaning of Baudelaire’ Aefinition of reality as the adequate union of subject and object,’ and more clearly than ever the grotésque fallacy of a realistic art—* that miserable statement ofline and surface,’ and the penny.a-line vulgarity of a literature of notations. He leaves the library and is confronted by the spectacle of Time made flesh. And whereas a mo- ‘ment ago the bright cymbals of two distant hours, 7paralysed at arm's length by the rigid spread ofinter ‘vening years, had obeyed an irresistible impulse of mutual attaction, and clashed, lke storm clouds, in flash and a brazen peal, now the mesture of their span from ep to pf written onthe face and falty ofthe dying, carved, like Dante's proud, under the Toad of thet year unwieldy, slow, heavy and pale salead? “equal pit pasenen aves nel att pgendo prea dcr Pit non paso. We say farewell to M. de Chars the Baron Palac amade de Charly, Duke of Brabant, Squite of Mon cars, Prine of Oléron, Careney, Viareggio ana the ones, the unspeakably insolent Chars, now humble and convulsive Lear, crowned by thé silver torrent of kis hair, Oedipus, senile and annulled, stooped over a mistal or raping and bowing before the astonishment of Mme. de Sainte-Euverte, scorned inthe fll strength ofhistersbe pride asthe Ducheste de Caca of the Princewe de Pipl, the Archangel Raphael in his ater day, sti furtively pursuing all the sons of Toby, exorted by the fithfal Jupien, Lord ofthe Temple of Shameless. And the dirge of his epulhral whisper falls Hike clay fom the spade of a grivedigger. “Hannibal de Bréauté—dead ! ‘Antoine de Mouchy—dead! Charles Swane—dead “Adalbert de Montmorency—dead ! Baron de Talley- sand-—dead | Sosthine de Doudeauville—dead 1" Ed ‘The aarrator accomplishes a series of identifications, of voluntary and arduous identifications—balancing those of the library, involuntary and spontaneous, From one sniggering and abject puppet, something between a beggarly hawker and a moribund buioon, hae elicits his enemy, M. d’Argencourt, as he knew. him, starched and haughty and inipeceable : from a stout dowager, whom he takes at fist for Mme. de Forcheville, Gilberte herself. So they dei past, Oriane and the Duc de Guermantes, Rachel and Bloch, Legrandin and Odette, and many other, carrying the burden of Saturn towards the light that will rite, cowards Uranus, the Sabbath star. + In Time creative and destructive Proust discovers hime as an ards: “I understood the meaning of death, of love and vocation, ofthe joys ofthe spirit and the tly of pain’ Allusion las been made to his contempt forthe Iterature that‘ deseribes, for the realists and naturalists worhipping the offal of experience, prostate before the epidermis and the sit epilepsy, and content to transribe the surface, the fagade, behind which the Idea i prisoner. Whereas the Prousian procedure is that of Apollo flaying Maryas and capturing without sentiment the essence, the Phrygian water. ‘Chi non ha la fea 59i uesidere la realth non hala forea di crear.’ But roast is too much of an affetivist to be satisfied by ‘the intellectual symbolism of a Baudelaire, abstract anddiscunive. TheBaudelarian unityis a unity ‘post rem,’ a unity abstracted from plurality. His *corre- spondence” is determined by a concept, therefore strictly limited and exhausted by its own definition. Proust doesnot dealin concepts, he pursues the Idea, theconcrete. He admires the frescoes ofthe Paduan ‘Arena because their symbolism is handled as reality, special, literal and concrete and is not merely the pictorial transmision ofa notion. Dante, if he can ver be said to have filed, fils with his purely allegorical figures, Lucifer, the Griffin ofthe Purgee tory and the Eagle ofthe Paradise, whose significance is purely conventional and extrinsic. Here allegory fails as it must always fil in the hands of a poet Spenser's allegory collapses ater afeweantos. Dante, because he was an artist and not a minor prophet, ‘could not prevent his allegory ftom becoming heated and electrified into anagogy. The Visin of Mira is ‘good allegory because itis Hat waiting. For Proust the object may be a living symbol, but a symbol of jue The symbolism of Baudelaire has become the iorplications of his art such as it has been revealed Kim, He wil write ashe has lived—in Time. "The lasial artist asumes omaitcience and omnipotence. He raises himself artifcally out of Time in order to give relief to his chronology and causality to his de- Yelopment. Prous’s chronology is extremely dift- cult to fallow, the succession of events spasmodic, and his characters and themes, although they seem to obey an almest insane inward necesy, ae presented and develope witha fine Dostoievakan cantemp for the vulgarity ofa plavsible concatenation. (Prout's impresionism wil bring us back to Dostieaki) Generally speaking, the romantic artist is very much concerned with Time and aware of the importance of memory in inspiration, (eet toi gui dor dans Yombee, Stee souvenir!) but is inclined to sensaonalise what is teated by Proust with pathologie power and sobriety. With “Muse, for example, the interests more in a vague cntratemporal Mentfication, without any real co- huion of simultanety, between the me and notme than in the functional evocations of a specialised memory. But the analogy is too blured and would lead nowhere, although Proust quote Chateaubriand and Amiel aris piritual ancestor tis dificult to connect Prout with this pair of melancholy Pan- theists dancing a fandango of death in the twilight. ‘But Proust admired the poetry of the Comtesse de Noailles, Saperlipopette! ‘The narrator had ascribed his ‘lack of talent to a lack of observation, of rather to what he supposed ‘was a nonvartistic habit of observation. “He was capable of recording surface. So that when he reads such brilliant crowded reporting as the Goncourt? Journal, the only alternative tothe conclusion that he is entirely wanting in the precious journalistic talent isthe supposition that between the banality ofife and the magic of literature there is @ great gulf fixed. Either hes devoid of talent or art of reality. And he desribes the radiographical quality of his observa- tion, The copiable he does not see. He searches for a relation, a common factor, tubstrata. Thus he is les interested in what is said than in the way which itis said. Similarly his faculties are more viow Tently activated by intermediate than by terminal— capital—stimuli. We find countless examples of these secondary reflexes. Withdrawn in his cool dark room at Combray he extracts the total estence ofa scorch ing midday from the scarlet stellar blows ofa hammer in the street and the chamber-music of fies in the loom. Lying in bed at daven the exact quality of the weather, temperature and visibility, is trans- mitted to him in terms of sound, in the chimes and the calls ofthe hawkers. Thus can be explained the primacy of instinctive perception—intution—in the 63