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PARTISAN REVIEW
mean? Should we believe that these are four great universals of all thinking
and all art? I'm not sure I want to be told that there are just so many laws
that cover all cases.
Callie:
They're not so different from one another if you look carefully.
I think there may be an almost infinite number oflaws of this kind all repre–
senting one principle:
interference.
The interference of one domain with an–
other, one sense with another, one time with another, one place with another,
one state of mind with another, one social level with another, and so on .
Proust blurs everything, all our classifications, even our sense of character.
Still, the
Search
represents a deep and strong faith in something - in the life
of the mind, I suppose.
Prof F:
Perhaps you can group all the laws so
far
under the heading of
interference. But there's at least one more major law that does not belong
with the rest.
I
think of it as the principle of self-determination. At three dif–
ferent stages in his career - in
1904
writing about Ruskin, in
1908
writing
on Sainte-Beuve, and then some ten years later quoting Elstir in his studio–
Proust states his conviction that "we cannot receive the truth from anyone;
we have to create it for ourselves." Here we have the opposite of interfer–
ence. In another place he describes every writer as having to start out from
scratch, like Homer. Each time Proust seems to be reaH-irming that ontogeny
recapitulates phylogeny - not just in the embryo but in life itself He had his
own monadology.
Ned:
Isn't this what all the critics refer to as radical subjectivity? The
impossibility oftrue communication between human beings?
All
the extended
social occasions in the
Search,
which is full of them, and all the scenes driven
by some form of appetite or love for another person, describe only the most
superficial form of exchange between individuals. As you write yourself,
gossip drives out all other forms of exchange. Marcel cannot even kiss
Al–
bertine properly because her face gets in the way. And in the opening scenes
of "Combray," Marcel and his mother cannot converse easily with one an–
other, even alone. Her goodness and tenderness reach him, unalloyed, only
when she begins reading George Sand aloud to him in a voice whose lack of
affectation expresses true "moral distinction." But there is a yawning
dilemma here. If we must learn everything for and by ourselves, if we can–
not communicate essential truths to one another, why write books? Why
read them? Isn't literature a hoax exposed in the very pages we are read–
ing?
Callie:
And why are you in graduate school scrutinizing these contra–
dictions and digging yourself into an intellectual hole?
Prof F:
That may be what graduate school is for. But now you two
are going to have
to
let me talk about what's on my mind instead of asking
