72
PARTISAN REVIEW
principal character a double: the narrator and Marcel, seeker and sought, one
character at different ages, two virtually identical characters distinguishable
only by chronology, by the contingency of time. But style and syntax con–
spire to blind us to this crucial bifurcation inside the endlessly recurring
I.
Proust's
jf
in all its inflections sounds like just one person.
You know what has happened as a result. Almost all of Proust's critics
have become fastidious purists. Since author must never be confused with
narrator, the name "Marcel" has virtually disappeared - too close to Proust's
name. The editors of the three massive new French editions of the
Search
say "the narrator" for
both
persons of the double. They spurn the name that
Proust himself twice tentatively gave to his principal character: Marcel. Yet
that name is truly appropriate in a work of fiction displaying a subtle and
unmistakable relation to autobiography. In the enacted scenes of this
Bildungsrmnal1
"the narrator" is a patently inaccurate term to designate a
slowly maturing prospective writer, one of whose principal traits is, by all the
evidence including his own declarations, the incapacity to settle down to write
or narrate anything at all. Critics should reconsider their skittishness and
return to "Marcel" to refer to the hero and principal character. Even a
Kafkaesque "M" for certain roles of Proust's" I" would be better than a
blanket "narratOl-" to cover every aspect of the fir'st pel-son.
Well, I hope I haven't botched my point completely. I see the law of
the double as essential
to
everything Proust wrote. A first person singular
tracking itself until ...
Callie:
Ned! I can't let you go on. You agreed not to get off on a rant.
Ned:
I'm sorry. I'll try to be quiet.
Prof
F:
You must be writing your dissertation on first-person pronouns
in Proust. I'm not sure you need me here. Now we have two laws out of
five. What about you , Ms. Szonic? You should answer your own question.
Surely you have an answer.
Callie:
Don't forget I'm just a radio journalist. But yes, I may. A couple
of pages before the passage about laws in Nerval, Proust describes
Sylvie
as
"a dream of a dream" or "a dream within a dream." I feel certain he's allud–
ing to some kind of law. But I can't put my finger on how it works in the
Search.
Prof. F:
In
AU/-ilia,
another of Nerval's stories, he talks about "the
spreading of dream into real life." It's really an analogy for Nerval's incipient
insanity. Proust has hidden away in the
Smrch
far more dreams than we
usually remember on first reading. After Albertine is killed in a riding acci–
dent, "the
da capo
effect" of Marcel's dreams prevents him from forgetting
her, and the narrator describes dreams as "passing intervals of insanity."
Proust was never swept away completely by dream or insanity as Nerval
