648
PARTISAN REVIEW
masterly appraisal of another version of the eternal feminine-the
Empress Theodora. In a dozen pages Gibbon gives us the whole
series of Theodora's incredible avatars--born the daughter of a circus
master, beginning life as a child buffoon, becoming in tum a strip–
tease artist (with footnotes, in Greek, as to the nature of her G–
string), the most famous and expensive courtesan in Byzantium, the
adored wife of the general and heir-elect, Justinian, and finally the
most holy empress, for whose pilgrimages roads were built at enor–
mous expense, and at whose approach crowds flattened themselves to
the earth. And in all these phases there is a negative, mysterious con–
sistency. Theodora was no more responsible for Justinian'S infatuation
(a piece of luck, cunningly used) than she was for her birth. The
same may be said of Odette, and of Swann's infatuation for her. But
enclose Odette within the obituary-length of Gibbon's summary and
she ceases to be remarkable. Her phases become consequential and ob–
vious enough. Whereas in the narrative, each phase, from being the
dubious lady in pink in Uncle's boudoir, to her final appearance, in–
credibly smart, senile and ridiculous, has the value of a strange dis–
covery. Even the fact that an impeccably aristocratic but penniless
Comte de Crecy, whom Marcel invites to tea out of charity, proves
to be the first husband whom Odette had ruined and deserted, comes
as a revelation, another key to the mystery.
Proust's claim to have modeled his work on the Arabian Nights
has usually been regarded (or ignored) as a personal foible. Yet the
claim can be consistently justified. Proust looked at life and time
with oriental eyes in which childlike credulity and absolute doubt
were simultaneous. No writer outside the Arabian compendium has
ever dwelt so much on the magic of the wish fulfilled, and none
more so on the disillusion of fulfillment. The magic of the Arabian
Nights is made from the realization of wishes which everyone can
share, and recognize as being impossible: Proust's magic is concocted
from the extravagant and, at first sight, hopelessly inconsistent details
of reality. Throughout
his
narrative the great magician and trans–
former is Time. Time brings the fulfillment of every wish-and along
with it the irony of change which makes that fulfillment valueless.
Only the ultimate wish, the most difficult of all, the wish to be an
artist, to make a creative discovery, is free from that accompaniment.
Like the Arabian Nights,
A la Recherche du Temps Perdu
is a chain
