BECKETT
266
an intuition of and an interest in a reality which language can't express
and from which language in fact isolates him. Novelistic invention
could be thought of not exactly as self-expression but rather as self–
dispersion, as a loss or waste of energy which writers may alternately
refuse or consent to. The novelist's answer to the optimism of Descartes'
Cogito
might be imagined as: "I invent, therefore I am not." A radical
doubt, at any rate, about the relation between imaginative language
and the self-where am I in the world I'm creating?-seems to me
implicit in certain subversions of the credibility and importance of
action and character in even the great nineteenth-century "realists."
I'm thinking, for example, of the curious role of political detail in
Stendhal. Politics fills the space of his novels, it provides the tension,
the drama, the life that keep the stories moving, but it is thought of–
by Stendhal and by his heroes- as an interruptiO'l1 of happiness, of a
paradise of play (in Mme. de Renal's garden, in the Farnese tower)
about which, however, there is very little to
say.
And Stendhal saves the
dream, the goal of his fiction, by his own tireless attention to what
destroys the dream but creates the verbal environment in which hap–
piness--essentially non-verbal and unnovelistic--can at least be evoked
as that which 'is missing. This undermining of a highly differentiated
and active world goes on in the reduction of novelistic material to
greater and greater insignificance in Flaubert. The boring failures of
Bouvard and Pecuchet leave nothing but what Proust called the
miroite–
ment monotone
of Flaubert's voice, the substitution of a c.ontinuously
recognizable voice, as the center of our interest, for a story cluttered
with events and personalities. A subversion of personality may also be
undertaken by extravagant analysis of personality: the search for motive
in
the later James and in Proust often makes us feel that a character is
being destroyed rather than illuminated or enriched; the person dis–
appears under the pressure of analysis, and density rather unexpectedly
leads to absence.
The theoretical interest of Flaubert and of James in greater and
greater dramatization, their irritation with novelists who intrude every–
where in their stories, is, then, a rather feeble defense against their own
impatience with drama, with the mediation of self
in
characters and
events from which the novelist perhaps both pretends and fears he's
absent. With Proust the novel becomes frankly, transparently auto–
biographical, but in a way that reveals language's endless resources for
invention. The
aim
of
A la Recherche
is self-possession through
self–
recapitulation, but the processes of memory tum out to be pr,ocesses
of re-creation. Marcel's past appears to
be
suggested and invented as he
writes about it, and in the light of what I've been saying, this should
