190
MARY McCARTHY
And in science the only hero can be the scientist; the rest is data.
The difference can be felt by a comparison with Proust. Proust's
Marcel is still a hero, followed by the reader with suspense, to
learn what will happen with his grandmother, what
will
happen
with Gilberte, what will happen with Albertine-something more
can
happen to him than to become Proust. Marcel is a pure
subject, despite the attention he pays to studying and analyzing
his reactions; if the book is, in part, a reconstruction of anterior
cvents, it is Marcel himself, not just the reader, who is trying to
find out what actually took place before the book started, and
this quest for certainty is itself a hero's goal.
In the old novels, there was a continual fluctuating play
between the hero and the "characters," that is, between the
world as we feel it to be subjectively and the world as we know
it as observers. As subjects, we all live in suspense, from day to
day, from hour to hour; in other words, we are the hero of our
own story. We cannot believe that it is finished, that we are
"finished," even though we may say so; we expect another chap–
ter, another installment, tomorrow or next week. In moments of
despair, we look on ourselves leadenly as objects; we see our–
selves, our lives, as someone else might see them and may even
be
driven to kill ourselves if the separation, the "knowledge," seems
sufficiently final. Our view of others, on ·the contrary, cannot
but be objective and therefore tinged with a sad sense of comedy.
Others are to us like the "characters" of fiction, eternal and in–
corrigible; the surprises they give us tum out in the end to have
been predictable-unexpected variations on the theme of being
-themselves, of the
principio individuationis.
But it is just this
principle that we cannot see in ourselves. What is happening
in
modem literature is a peculiar reversal of roles: we try to show
the object as subject and the subject as object. That is, can I
be
inside Professor Mulcahy and outside me? The answer is I can–
not; no one can. There can only be one subject, ourselves, one
hero or heroine. The existentialist paradox-that we are sub–
jects for ourselves and objects for others-cannot be resolved
by
