TIME AND THE NOVELIST
641
ous relief all the "orts, scraps and fragments" which make up the
ordinary, mysterious life of every day.
For one kind of reader, or for one kind of mood,
Jacob's Room
is
an irritating series of snapping close-ups of haphazard details of
appearance. Given the sense of time as trance, the book begins to
assume an order gathered from a thousand hints. But in either case
there
is
a pause on the edge of articulacy, and Jacob himself remains
a silhouette on a screen, the meaning of whose eloquent but unap–
proachable gestures is to be no more than guessed. Later the writer
was to indulge in a scherzo on the time theme in
Orlando,
a flight
through three and a half centuries within the space of one high–
spirited but allegorical lifetime. There is a sense of excessive daring,
of dizziness almost, in the smooth and accomplished flight of
this
fantasy. And its slenderness
is
weighted, not only with a feminist
grievance but with an acute sense of pain. The sibylline view must
see time as an interim-an interim between what immensities? And
in the back of the writer's mind was the inherited void of an ascetic,
unshakable agnosticism. It is this poised conflict between the opposites
of irresistible dream and inescapable conviction which gives her writ–
ing its peculiar eloquence. With her last novel the whole subject has
become an interim, at whose close the unimaginable drama only
commentes.
Any consideration of time in the novel must end, and perhaps
ought to have begun with Proust. But there is little to be added to
the exhaustive philosophical discussion of it as his central theme. As
the secret of his technique, it has not perhaps been so much considered.
The recent publication of
Jean SanteuiL,
the novel which occupied
the years halfway between
Les PLaisit's et Les
J
ours
and his final work,
shows that this must have been the last of his secrets to
be
discovered.
It has been said that the whole of Proust is implicit in his first youth–
ful volume. The same can be said, with greater emphasis, of
Jean
SanteuiL.
Nevertheless the creative agony of evolving the whole plant
from the germ was still to be undergone.
Jean Santeuil
presents, on
a small scale, nearly all the
donnees
of the secret without any real
hint of a solution. The result is a curiously desultory brilliance and
disunity. Proust himself described the book as being both less and
much more than a
novel-((L'essence rnerne de rna vie, recueillie sans
