BOO KS
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act asserts itself in the form of recognition. When completely realized
as self-recognition, it leads Marcel not into reverie but into the work
of art. The effort required, the direction voluntarily chosen, the renuncia–
tion of lesser pleasures and illusions to serve a larger end-all these
aspects of self-recognition give it a moral significance which the
moments
bienheureux
never achieve." What Mr. Shattuck is doing here is very
clear and rather touching; but if all other critics have failed to see
this point, the reason may be that it is not really found in Proust.
In truth, the narrator's accidental visit to the reception at the
Guermantes' is just as passive and fortuitous as the sensations that cause
the
moments.
This visit releases exactly the same kind of psychic
mechanism, which then brings the narrator's past flooding back in all
its pristine freshness and vivacity. And all the
moments
also exhibit a
similar (though unsuccessful) effort on the part of the narrator to
grasp their meaning. Finally, what does the climax of the book reaIJy
mean? Only that the narrator will now devote the remainder of his
life to enshrining and immortalizing the
moments
themselves in a work
of art! By recreating his past the narrator consecrates the inevitable;
he does not discover any principle of personal self-integration that can
work directly back on life itself.
What
is
different is the narrator's final self-recognition that his
own life has been woven out of the countless strands through which
it has touched the lives of other people, and his grasp of the "optics of
Time" through which this interconnection can be portrayed. This act of
self-recognition thus involves a shift from the personal to the social, and
hence takes on a
new
dimension that may be called more specifically
moral or ethical. But the overtones of self-mastery that Mr. Shattuck
attributes to this final scene are strained and unconvincing. He appears
to forget that the narrator's decision is not only a climax but also a
beginning; the book the narrator decides to write is the one we have
just been reading. And nothing in the pages we have traversed bears
out Mr. Shattuck's incongruous allusion to "the rugged strength of
[the narrator's] attitude toward life." The inappropriateness of such a
phrase, in so sensitive a writer as Mr. Shattuck, reveals to what extent
he has allowed a theory to overpower his responsiveness to the quality
of a character.
Mr. Shattuck comes much closer to the truth when, in the final
pages of his book, he places Proust's work in "the Oriental tradition of
works of meditation and initiation into the mysteries of life." The es–
sential meaning of the work he defines as follows: "A multiplicity of
images, laws and fleeting illuminations lie along the course of our
