BOOKS
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passive pleasure in fortuitous recollection." All one could then say is
that Proust has been deceiving his reader for the other twenty-eight
hundre<j pages, and that the ecstacy and transcendence feIt in the
moments bienheureux
is merely self-deception.
If
the recognition-scene
is neglected, then the last two hundred pages are superfluous;
if
the
moments bienheureux
have no positive importance, then the value at–
tributed to them in the text is inexplicable. This should be enough to
show that any attempt to make too sharp a distinction between these
complementary aspects of the book, whether in favor of one or the
other, is critically indefensible.
One may well wonder why Mr. Shattuck is so determined to assign
the
moments
to a position of subordination and inferiority. The answer
can be found in the epithets he uses about them in the passage quoted
above ("fleeting passive pleasure in fortuitous recollection"). For the
moments
represent the workings of an involuntary memory completely
independent of the will of the individual; and critics have used this
fact to draw some invidious conclusions about the novel.
Proust depicts each such experience as restoring a past personality
that exists in the narrator at a deeper level than conscious lite-a
personality which, through the passage of the years, has remained un–
affected by the more superficial level of personality that lives and acts in
the world. Ramon Fernandez, in a penetrating article on the famous
"intermittences of the heart" episode in Proust, pointed out forty years
ago that such a conception of personality implied the existence in each
individual of a set of isolated egos that did not interpenetrate with or
react on each other. But such an interpenetration obviously is the pre–
condition for all development of character, all capacity to learn from
experience and to apply one's knowledge to life. Fernandez, who was a
personal friend of Proust and a great admirer of his work, nonetheless
feIt impelled to point out that Proust's universe was deficient as a
total
image of human life because it lacked such a principle of spiritual
progress. Mr. Shattuck does not directly controvert Fernandez's thesis
in his text, but in his notes he expresses disagreement with a more recent
statement of it by Robert Champigny. There can be little doubt that
his own approach to Proust is motivated by a chivalrous desire
to
wipe
this blot from the Proustian escutcheon.
Hence Mr. Shattuck tries to place the whole weight of the book on
the final recognition-scene, which he desperately endeavors
to
read as
containing exactly the principle of moral self-determination that Fer–
nandez found missing. "The triumph of Marcel's career and Proust's
novel lies in the fact that . .. a larger, more responsible, more mature
