1018
PARTISAN REVIEW
springtime, and the victory of the eternal over the transitory. For
when Proust strives to destroy all that is deceptive and conventional, .
he does it to clear the field for immortality, which he has to pay for
with the death of whatever is mortal. He is not a murderer, he is a
purifier.
In his almost total retreat, isolated even more by an illness which
he broods over and nurses as others do their health, he knows now
that life cannot be lived; it has to be dreamed; and detached from
time, standing beside the stream, he will never stop elaborating its
life-giving poisons. He knows that reality is to be seized through
dreams and enchantment, that only thus can it be really understood,
its essence expressed, and its permanence secured. The sacrifice of
Marcel Proust has been accepted by the gods: it bears a magnificent
fruit.
But Proust's joy does not consist only in the steady and radiant
happiness of him who has found himself. It is also the endless rapture
of the well-digger, who with his divining rod explores the time which
he has just regained, and multiplies the discoveries and the miracles
at which he was the first to wonder. The universe is created, framed
once and for all, and its meaning is made clear to himself; but it is
still full of surprises for him. His work is a continuous creation, an
inexhaustible proliferation. He almost never erases, he adds and
adds: his manuscripts, the typescripts, the galley proofs are over–
loaded with additions which are the sign of life at its fullest. For this
man, who at first did not know how to live, and later found himself
above living, was endowed with a prodigious spiritual vitality.
As
he
reads over his work, what he has written means more to
him
as an
overture than as an accomplishment;
his
meditation and
his
dreams
give birth to new ideas, to new images, and above all, to new con–
nections, just as, with others, action gives birth to action. He really
lives a second enchanted life in the wake of the life which he did not
make the effort to cultivate. But that second life is no more that of
Marcel, the hero, than that of Marcel Proust. It is the projection of
the
elan vital
of the author who is involved in the process of creation.
And here we arrive at a new intersection of the four characters,
at the parting of the ways between fiction and reality. Now when
"I"-Marcel, the narrator-pretends to remember something, it is an
