1020
PARTISAN REVIEW
testimony is turned into a novel by the device of
"1."
Instead of
choosing the form of the
Confessions or of the Memories d'outre–
tombe,
Proust adopts this false "I" in order to secure complete free–
dom of composition, of invention, and of detachment- thus turning
this direct testimony into something which is truer, more universal,
and ultimately a more faithful picture.
One must feel quite free- and, above all, freed from oneself-–
to be able to testify about truth; it implies, in the first place, that
one knows what it is, and then, that one wishes to tell it; that one
has managed, in other words, to remove and set in a new pattern
whatever obscures it in the confusion of reality. But this false "I" is
bound to the real "I" by right of birth. Unlike those ancient kings
who claimed to descend from fabulous gods, Marcel is born out of
the very real sensations experienced by Marcel Proust, out of the deep
and intermittent pleasure which they conveyed to him and which he
could not grasp until the very day when Proust felt and then under–
stood that their repetition,
in
obliterating time, also gave him a
secret clue to reality. The part played by the man did not go beyond
that; he was no more than the blind and sensitive instrument of a
miracle. But that was sufficient to compel Proust to use the personal
form in his narration, even though he had to resort to a false "I"
when he started to describe his discovery and to delve from the begin–
ning, without explanation, into all its possibilities. The universe which
he has thus created is an internal universe whose reality consists not
in objects but in their perception and their metamorphosis. He can
~nly
express himself through direct language.
In coming down from Carqueville to Hudimesnil in the car–
riage of Mme de Villeparisis, Marcel says:
. . . I was overwhelmed with that profound happiness which I had
not often felt since Combray; happiness analogous to that which had
been given me by-among other things-the steeples of Martinville.
But this time it remained incomplete. I had just seen, standing a little
way back from the steep ridge over which we were passing, three trees,
probably marking the entrance to a shady avenue, which made a pattern
at which I was looking now not for the first time; I could not succeed
in reconstructing the place from which they had been, as it were,
detached, but I felt that it had been familiar to me once; so that my
mind having wavered between some distant year and the present mo–
ment, Balbec and its surroundings began to dissolve and I asked myself
whether the whole of this drive were not a make-believe, Balbec a place
