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logically by portraying the pathological because it began by taking
the so-called average man as its special subject. One can thus explain
the considerable number of "innocents" utilized in this universe.
The innocent is the ideal subject for such an undertaking since he
is completely defined by his behavior. He is the symbol of this de–
spairing universe, where unhappy automatons live in the most me–
chanical kind of coherence, a universe which the American novelists
have raised up as a pathetic- though sterile-protest in the face of
the modem world.
With regard to Proust, his effort was to start from reality,
stubbornly contemplated, and to create a closed, irreplaceable world
that belonged to him alone and would commemorate his victory
over the flight of time and death. But his methods are opposite.
They consist, above all, in a calculated choice, a meticulous col–
lection of privileged instants that the novelist chooses from his most
personal past. Immense dead spaces are thus rejected because they
have left no trace in recollection.
If
the world of the American novel
is that of men without memory, the world of Proust is nothing but
memory. Only, it is the most difficult and demanding of memories,
which refuses the dispersion of the world and draws out of a redis–
covered scent the secret of an old- and yet new- universe. Proust
chose the interior life, and in the interior life what was most interior,
against the forgetfulness of the real; that is, the mechanical, the
blindness of the world. But out of this refusal of the real he did
not draw its negation. He did not commit the error, parallel to that
of the American novel, of suppressing the mechanical. On the con–
trary, he reunites, in a superior unity, the souvenir of the past and
the sensation of the present, the foot which slips and the blissful
days of earlier years.
It is difficult to return to the haunts of happiness and of youth.
The budding young girls laugh and chatter eternally before the
ocean, but he who contemplates them loses, little by little, the right
to love them, as those whom he had once loved lose the status of
being. This melancholy is that of Proust. It was powerful enough
in him to burst forth into a refusal of all being. But a relish for
the sun-lit aspects of the world bound him to it at the same time.
He did not consent to give up forever the joys of his carefree holi–
days. He took as his task to re-create them anew, and to show, in
