TIME AND THE NOVELIST
647
present painfully or ecstatically restored. From the moment when the
child lies awake, waiting for his mother to come up to him, there is
the double presence of Proust as he was, and Proust as he is at the
moment of remembering and writing. So that each past incident is
given the solidity and mystery of a double perspective. I have already
spoken of the unifying faculty of memory in the case of Constant.
Proust succeeded both in enforcing this quality and in recapturing the
sense of shock, of nonrecognition which is what memory most tends
to minimize. Memory is a betrayal of past reality in that it is always
reconciling insuperable inconsistencies, flattening out difficulties, an–
nulling the prejudices, however strong, that were done away with,
the hopes that were disappointed. It is always trying to make of the
past a
fait accompli. Vide
most historians and autobiographers. It
was the essence of Proust's genius to recognize the falsification of this
process, and to re-establish the sense of the past in all its immediacy
and unexpectedness.
Another means to this end was his use of subjective and objective
time. One of the triumphant crises of the book is when these are
made to fuse: the moment, in
Le Temps Retrouve,
when the hero,
looking at the fantastic changes wrought by time in all the people
he knew, and quite innocent of the suspicion of any such change
in himself, approaches young debutantes, the children of his friends,
with all the ardor of a possible
soupirant-and
they receive him as
an elderly person, someone that father knew years ago. Up to this
moment we have shared his sense of time as a lucid trance, in which
other people undergo the transforming process, improve, deteriorate
and die. Now comes the shock that he too is subject to this strange
process, and the shock is fully transferred to the reader.
Of the dimensions of character in time I think Odette Swann
remains his most perfect realization. More than the Duchess, or
Albertine, or Franc;oise, she is his version of the
Ewig Weibliche,
a
consummation of the banality and mystery of woman as a thing of
time and fashion. She is the most persistent and intermittent of all
the characters in the book, and most of her reappearances are trans–
formations in which a startling difference dominates and precedes the
fundamental sameness. Being a born virtuoso, Proust could not resist
applying this principle to excess in the case of some characters. But
with Odette he never errs. Compare her for a moment with Gibbon's
