Louis Martin-ChauHier
PROUST AND THE DOUBLE "I"
OF TWO CHARACTERS
Proust once remarked to Gide, who was speaking of his
memoirs, "You can tell everything but only on condition that you
never use the word
'I'
"- and Gide comments: "This does not suit
me at
all."
The author of the
Journal
refrains from adding that this
is rather strange advice, coming as
it
does from a writer whose
monumental work is written in the first person. For, as he is doubtless
aware, the "I" whose restraining testimony Proust rejects and which
prevents one from telling everything, is the "I" of Rousseau, and of
Si Le Grain ne meurt,
the "I" which aims at and lays claim to imme–
diacy, confuses the man and the author under the same signature,
forces the man out of his obscurity and natural insignificance, and
makes him the hero of a true story-his own life. In pledging itself
to report faithfully "what happened" not only in its true sequence
but also in its actual process,
it
assumes the responsibility for a whole
past which it believes that
it
remembers.
The "I" which Proust, far from rejecting, draws towards him
and unfolds like a screen behind which he can move freely, dis–
sembling and assuming new identities, the "I" of
Adolphe,
of
The
Immoralist,
of Edouard's diary, of
A La Recherche du temps perdu,
is a false "I," an alibi, a
trompe l'oeil;
in other words, it is a creation.
A false "I"? That is putting it too simply. For the "I" of Proust
is dual. The identification of the man, the author, and the character,
which Gide and Rousseau strive to achieve in their autobiographies
with a varying degree of success (not in terms of their lucidity or their
sincerity, but of their scrupulous submission to the rules of their
medium: "A fiction is not a lie," states the author of the
R everies)
is replaced by a well-established distinction between four elements
