1024
PARTISAN REVIEW
and experience indefinitely sufferings which are meticulous, mon–
otonous, yet always as fresh as flowers replaced every morning. Gil–
berte and Albertine are not conjured-up ghosts, called back to life
by a few drops of dark blood for just long enough to record their
passing thought. They are the figments and the inventions of a sensi–
bility which is ever on the alert and more able to supply imaginary
objects to feed its ever-present and lively suffering than to examine
objects which have vanished and are forever mute.
In creating Gilberte and Albertine, whose different names are
simply the means of distinguishing the separate crises of a single
illness, Proust lives in the present and really loves only the daughters
of his imagination. But just as he disintegrated himself to attain
greater freedom and to become the master of a new poetic universe
through which reality could be seized, here he splits himself in two
so as to gain insight into the mechanism of love, into its secrets and
its meaning, and, by going beyond his own experience and his own
sickness, to grasp the laws of sickness. He makes himself suffer in
order to see, understand, describe, and tell how and why one suffers.
He suffers at the same time, intensely, yet with detachment- a trial,
in the double sense of the word, for the cruel and lucid mind which
provokes it.
Now we see the way in which Marcel, the narrator, reconstructs
the past; he does
ask
it for witnesses, he sets up models against its
background. Since everything keeps recurring in the same way, he can
slide his intricate pleasures, his open wounds back into the past. He
asks it no questions, but himself answers the questions it might raise.
And instead of drawing ashes out of it, he finds what he needs to fill
to the top that nearly empty box, the shape of which reminds him,
after all, that he has lived in a certain way, in a certain time, and
in a certain world; that over there, far away, a few dozen dried-up
little characters are waiting for his imagination to redeem the failure
of his memory (his indifference, in other words) by giving them life;
not by resuscitating them, for it is with another kind of life that the
creatures now emerging out of their confused appearances are en–
dowed; now they live beyond themselves. Now he can indeed recap–
ture time, though not the time which he has lost; in a space beyond
the time he had abolished he can recapture those sensations and feel–
ings which escape him at the very hour of their birth.
