646
PARTISAN REVIEW
y
rien meler, dans ces heures de dechirure ou elle decoule. Ce livre
n'a jamais ete fait, il a ete recolte."
This is both, an apologia and a verdict. Without what followed
it,
Jean Santeuil,
for all its merits, could be dismissed as not being
the work of a true novelist at all. It is a series of vignettes. What–
ever elements of unity it has are awkward and factitious. There is
an abrupt and personal harshness in some of the scenes between Jean
and his parents; and on the other hand the quality of personal com–
pensation, particularly in the social scenes, is naive to the point of
enormity. It is there, of course, in the final work, as when the Guer–
mantes hold up dinner indefinitely while their guest, Marcel, is brows–
ing among their paintings. But in
Jean Santeuil,
when the hero is
accused by a social rival of cheating at cards, and threatened with
ostracism, he is gloriously reinstated by nothing less than the inter–
vention of royalty (via the influence of a duchess) -paraded at the
theater on the arm of a protective King of Portugal, before the as–
tonished and admiring eyes of the whole faubourg!
With the completion of
Jean Santeuil,
the author must have
been left in despair.
It
was clearly not publishable as it stood. And
when he came to his final work, how was he to use what was already
written? How much more he made of what he did use is as remark–
able as what he left out.
Jean Santeuil
is a work which continually
crystallizes into distinct episodes. The best of them-for example
Le
Scandale Marie,
a masterly
nouvelle
hased on the Panama scandal–
had perfected themselves beyond the possibility of re-adaptation.
They are all too self-contained. Characters appear for their particular
scene or story, and then disappear altogether, or else the mention of
them fails to evoke any sense of their continuous presence in the book
as a whole. Time here is something which stops and starts with the
impulse of writing. Time as the interfusing element which holds and
hides all things in its own continuity, and can be made to disclose
them, time such as this was yet to be apprehended.
The change from the third-person hero in
Santeuil
to the first
person in
A la Recherche du Temps Perdu
w,as the first essential to
Proust's particular, bifocal use of the function of memory. Most
writers dealing with a remembered past tend to see it with one eye,
flattened and sentimentalized. But from the beginning, in the final
work, there is this double focus. The past is seen as past, and as a
