I02b
PARTISAN REVIEW
the creature thanks to whom he understands and experiences what
Marcel Proust and Marcel could never have experienced fully, be–
cause they would never have understood it. The immediate "I" of
the living artist radiates on the past and endows it with the very
elements he seems to draw therefrom.
Everything is new in the universe created by Proust. Every–
thing-that
is,
his vision. Everything, except himself. For the live
being who survived the death of those egos which time carried off
in its own wasting away, has been illuminated by the revelation, not
created by it. Divine grace does not alter and run counter to the
fundamental elements of nature; it exalts them, sets them upright,
and casts upon them supernatural light which throws their virtues
into relief. Thus unity is reestablished. Marcel Proust and Marcel, the
characters at either end, bring or receive the raw materials they do
not themselves use. But the magical, chemical process of the creative
imagination, transforming these materials beyond recognition so that
they can enter the Proustian universe, does not project that Proustian
universe outside of the being who has conceived it, and does not grant
it the appearance of an independent life. It is always, in any case,
a matter of appearance, for it is a rather obvious truth that the uni–
verse shaped by each one of the great creators stands directly for
them and gives a more revealing and authentic picture of them than
what is called their life. But whereas in Balzac, for instance, that uni–
verse is the product of a double explosion of thought and of tempera–
ment, and in Stendhal, a compensation for a frustrated poetical, poli–
tical, heroic, and amorous ambition which for a long time was con–
fused as to its aims and its means, in Proust it is wholly intensive and
subjective, and subordinated to a private spiritual adventure which
gives it its shape and its law. Between these two cast-off envelopes,
Marcel Proust who
is
the "old man" and Marcel who represents him,
Proust dictates to the narrator the story of the Pentecost from which
emerges the creation of a world. And the false "I" becomes the true
one because the story is true, even though the world itself is a poetic
vision of reality.
( Translat ed
by
A. d. B. )
