PROUST AND THE DOUBLE
"I"
1021
to which I had never gone save in imagination. Mme de Villeparisis a
character in a story and the three old trees the reality which one has
been reading and which describes an environment into which one has
come to believe that one has been bodily transported.... I recognized
that kind of pleasure . . . that pleasure, the object of which I could
but dimly feel, that pleasure which I must create for myself, I experi–
enced only on rare occasions, but on each of these it seemed to me that
the things which had happened in the interval were of but scant im–
portance, and that in attaching myself to the reality of that pleasure
alone I could at length begin to lead a new life.
On this invisible sign exhibited here and later confirmed lies our
own revelation as well as Marcel's of the whole secret of the "search";
but being as blind to it as he himself
is
we do not see it. But this
secret is not only that of a vocation suddenly revealed; it
is
the secret
of the very work which is born out of the revelation; it is the rationale,
the necessary form which genius, at last fully conscious of itself, must
use to express itself fully, shaping a personal experience into a novel
and thereby endowing it with universal value;
in
other words, to
reorganize wholly the data of his experience so as to make us aware
not of its progress but of its ultimate meaning.
A La Recherche du
temps perdu
is
not primarily the story of a discovery, or an animated
and contrived retrospective. The discovery which apparently crowns
and completes the book, recovering the
temps perdu
as the search
ends, is, in reality, like all discoveries, a starting point. What is made
available to us is the creation of a new universe, made possible and
nourished by this discovery, or to put it differently, the application of
laws, not new but unknown until then, which change the appearance
and the structure of the world by revising our knowledge of it. That
is
why, despite all appearances, the autobiographical element is neg–
ligible, just as it is in that most inaccurately labeled of literary cate–
gories, the "autobiographical novel"- two words far more contradic–
tory than they appear to be. For the order and the abundance which
characterize the novel are due to the imagination aroused by the
fluid operation of the mind; and the more ingenious and abundant
the fruits of that imagination, the duller and more artificial appear
the sterile gifts of the exact memory in contrast to this harmonious
. flow of treasures.
As
we shall have occasion to point out, the past is
not a well-stored box from which we draw at leisure but a nearly
empty box which has to be filled; it is enough to be presented with
such a box.
