1012
PARTISAN REVIEW
of quite unequal significance: their conflicts and their relationships
lead us from the realm of the autobiography into that of the novel.
There are no longer three elements but four.
As
soon as the
hero becomes independent of the man, or at least tends to become
so, the author, in order to match the complexity engendered by
this new division of parts, creates a new character, just as the com–
plications of social life compel a modem state to multiply its func–
tions. This new character is the narrator. He is delegated by the
author to assume one of his functions, that of presenting and giving
substance to the hero as he moves in time. From that point on, the
hero becomes part of a fiction, but he is neither invented nor merely
observed by the narrator, for the narrator is none other than that
same hero, himself arrived at his final destination. The man who
writes "I" is then a fictional character whom we see living also as
his creation; we may call him Marcel, since on one occasion he is
referred to that way; the actual man can go under his legal name,
Marcel Proust; and as for the author, posterity will use a single syl–
lable, Proust, to refer to the genius.
This fictional character who writes "I" is dual in his action
and in his duration. As in memoirs, the man who writes and the
man whose life we see are distinct in time, but tend to catch up with
each other in the long run; they are moving towards the day when
the progress of the hero through his life stops at the table, where
the narrator, no longer separated from him in time nor tied to
him by memory, invites him to sit down beside him so that both
together may write: the End.
But the author of memoirs runs a risk (among many others
which need not be discussed here ): while he is telling what has
happened, he knows what will happen next. Hence a strong tempta–
tion to fake (all the more so, since nearly always he sets to work
for no other reason ). Instead of painting the true picture of a life
which moves blindly along, of actions which are almost always illog–
ical, of chance happenings that upset or require substitute schemes, of
an essential absurdity in other words, he sets forth a predetermined
and orderly pattern which is rearranged, contrived, selected, twisted,
and mutilated to fit into what may be the panegyric of a difficult
and deserved success as well as the bitter and vengeful vindication of
an undeserved failure . This
is
what he calls the cumulative experience
