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caricaturizing the real issue. What is at stake here is not whether there
are seven or ten models for Albertine, and whether Marie Nordlinger
was one of them, but what the limits of biography should or must
be.
In fact, the problem raised is the very possibility of biography.
Are the "facts" of a life permeable to a meaning and to an order
imposed after the event? How justified is any teleological vision of a
lived life, either in terms of the development of the man or the de–
velopment of his art? It is one of the achievements of Painter's book
that he does not juggle away these implicit questions, and that the
limitations of this scholarly enterprise are due in large part to a clear
awareness of them. In discussing Proust's condemnation of Sainte–
Beuve's method, Mr. Painter feels compelled to justify his own aims.
The biographical 'approach, he feels, need not be shallow and falsifying:
the biographer's task is to discover, through a confrontation of the
daily existence of the creator with his vision as artist, the occult and
universal meanings of his work. But it is here, precisely, that
Leo
Bersani, in his
Marcel Proust: The Fictions of Life and Art,
proposes
a more complex and more rewarding approach. Mr. Bersani succeeds
in demonstrating that the work of art, which is no doubt determined
by a given life and personality, in turn produces a new self and a new
reality. In other words, the artist discovers himself and the meaning of
his own work in the very process of writing.
This is not to detract from the impressive qualities of Mr. Painter's
biography. He covers crucial events and reactions with precision and
sensibility: Proust's growing independence vis-a.-vis Ruskin, his complex
attitudes toward his mother and his illness, his sense of liberation and
guilt
after his mother's death, the importance of summers in Cabourg
and the love-hate for hotel life, the vicissitudes of publication, the tragic
love for Agostinelli, the sadness of the war years, the descent into the
hell of Sodom-but above all, and increasingly as death approached,
what Mr. Painter admirably describes as "Proust's iron courage and in–
flexible ambition for his book. ..."
As for the scholarship, it appears unimpeachable. Mr. Painter pro–
vides a model of solidity, sobriety and allegiance to facts. What is more,
he succeeds in combining masterful documentation with intelligent
dis–
cussion. And yet, somehow, this second volume remains strangely
frustrating. I refer not only to some petty shortcomings, such as an
almost systematic refusal ever to quote in French (even when dealing
with puns), some needless digressions, a curious weakness for the French
aristocracy, occasional dryness and even a sense of fragmentation. More
serious is the disappointing distance from Proust's inner self. Somehow,
despite the hundreds of pages of intimate facts, we do not seem
to
"live" with the author, we do not really "participate" in
his
spiritual
