294
VICTOR BROMBERT
and affective journey.
Is
this :a fault or a virtue of the disciplined
biographer? One thing is certain: Mr. Painter refuses to write a novel.
The pleasures to be derived from Leo Bersani's
Marcel Proust: TM
Fictions of Life and Art
are of a different kind. With refined critical
perception, Mr. Bersani succeeds in plunging
his
reader into the very
heart of the Proustian creation. The first striking feature of this book
is the intelligence and skill with which the general problems of the
novel are discussed. Not only does Mr. Bersani analyze with considerable
subtlety the erotic complexities of
A
la
Recherche du temps perdu,
the
subversive handlings of point of view, the degrees of reality; but, equipped
with a solid literary background, he raises many practical and theoretical
questions which cast light on the art of the modem novel. His remarks
on Flaubert, for instance, are brilliant.
Mr. Bersani proceeds from Proust's own comments on the inter–
changeability of imagination and sensibility. He might have illustrated
this remark historically and esthetically by references to Stendhal, whose
entire work is the product of a chronic tension between autobiography
and fiction. The approach is fruitful, because it permits Mr. Bersani
to
do away with some of the hackneyed notions of sources, models and
creative determinism. For what counts here is the search for a specific
literary self to be discovered in the very act of creation. Thus the work
can be said to create the man. Writing becomes an exercise in 5elf–
revision. Mr. Bersani insists, justly it seems to me, that involuntary
memory does not create a sense of continuity, that in fact Proust's
artistic efforts do not ultimately tend toward recapturing the im–
mediacy of a past experience, but rather toward a psychological, meta–
phoric and analogical sense of structure and unity. It is in this light
that the discussions of memory as metaphor, and of the analogical
density of Proust's social themes and satire, are particularly relevant.
I only wish Mr. Bersani had omitted, or streamlined considerably,
the somewhat ponderous account, at the beginning of the book, of
recent French criticism (Bachelard, Mauron, Richard, Poulet, Starobin–
ski). There is something too didactic and too precautionary about these
pages. Why so much theorizing at the beginning of the book? But these
matters are trifles. My one real disagreement with Mr. Bersani
has
to
do with his shocking underestimation of Proust's discussions on art. But
even this sinful blindness is largely redeemed by an otherwise exciting,
unpretentious and yet intensely sophisticated study.
Vidor Brombert
