PROUST AND THE DOUBlE "I"
1017
are transitory and futile. He has wasted
his
time. Even better, he has
lost
time; and has lost himself. It is not the lover of Gilberte or of
Albertine who matters, the friend of Bergotte, of Elstir, of Saint-Loup,
of Charlus, the familiar of the Guermantes, the grandson or the son.
That figure is endowed with no more importance, no more reality
or with no more definite age than those goods which he desires, pos–
sesses, and loses. The more indeterminate he is, the more evanescent,
nonexistent, the better he is characterized, for that is his meaning in
the scheme of the work. He is nothing but the meeting-place of sen–
sations he does not understand.
What matters is the narrator, the one who has discovered the
secret of these sensations; and having discovered it, regulates not
his
life but
his
art,
writes not a biography but assembles a universe, de–
picts not a life in progress but rather, starting from the data presented
to him, elucidates the general laws of truth.
The analysis of feelings, their death, their resurrection in their
pristine state when a new object reawakens them, the dissolution of
successive egos, carried away on the same tides that take the objects
which once owed them life or around which they crystallized, the
decomposition of the external appearance of people, the futility of
social and worldly life, the soon-extinguished flash of reputations, the
uselessness of whatever time marks out for death, all this black pessi–
mism, this sacred horror of life, matter a great deal more than the
false reality of feelings, of ambitions, of pleasures, of attractions, of
lacerations, of sorrows, and of anxieties which take place within a
being who is himself void of reality. But that pessimism of which
Marcel, the hero, is himself the atoning victim, is compensated, re–
deemed, transfigured by the radiant optimism of Marcel, the nar–
rator, the possessor of the secret. Although he does not love life, he
loves what transcends it, what gives a being its permanence through
the carnage of egos so joyously slaughtered. And the whole work
piles up defeats, and spreads out this pessimism without once belying
its tone of resilient joy. These supple, plentiful, flowery, and long–
stemmed sentences, springing in their pure outlines out of a fruitful
soil, swelling with
all
the juices exuded by the rich earth of a well-fed
burying-ground, keep quivering under the caress of an invigorating
breeze and of a perpetual sun. And that joy, which bursts out like
spring, is truly a springlike blooming, the explosion of a regenerating
