78
PARTISAN REVIEW
the others in the wrong direction. 00 you know Paul de Man's essay on
Proust in
Allegories of Rending?
He spends half his time discllssing metaphor
and metonymy in the two paragraphs just
before
the garden reading scene–
paragraphs in which Marcel essentially fails to read. Then he quotes at length
from the paragraph I just read and examines what he calls a "reversal."
Consciousness is captive within us, yet it chooses "to submit itself to the test
of truth" in the outside world. De Man says that Proust's novel leaves no
doubt that the test must fail, and that this failure is affirmed right here "in a
passage whose thematic and rhetorical strategy it reduces to naught."
Proust's passage never attains the desired "totalization" or synthesis. Now,
de Man's Hegelian vocabulary is difficult enough to follow. But the principle
flaw is that de Man has read the passage wrong. The narrator - here very
close to Proust - is not trying to synthesize or "totalize," anything. He is
presenting a contrast, an opposition between
real life,
in which our attempts
to communicate with other beings are inevitably thwarted, and the special
activity of
reading,
relying on transparent images, which permits a closer
approach to the conquest of'truth, to knowledge. Far from deconstructing it–
selfby an inner contradiction or a failure to "totalize," this passage presents
the special rewards of reading as an activity complementary to living, not
replacing it but opening up its potential spaces. The earlier lessons about
reading £i'om "Journees de lecture" hover close by. Although time spent
reading is "fully lived," it brings us only to the threshold of spiritual life, pro–
vides incitements to it. De Man fails to take account of the close symbiotic
relation Proust describes between reading and living.
There's one more step. As a philosopher I have to take it, even at my
peril. Near the beginning of these pages on reading, the narrator speaks of
Marcel's "belief' in the philosophic richness and the beauty of the book he is
reading. Belief. It may be the key to everything. At the end of "Combray,"
the narrator undertakes
to
explain why the two "ways" - Swann's Way and
Guermantes's Way - have provided the essential structure and the most
significant episodes of his intellectual life. Belief, a child's belief in the beings
and things he lives among, lends them unforgettable reality and meaning. A
kind of transparency without
trouble.
The child's belief in his world corre–
sponds to the belief that we can provisionally reassemble and direct toward
the book we are reading. In the
Search,
Proust casts doubt on many of our
treasured values -love, friendship, social attainment, idolatrous forms of an.
Beneath it all remains a startlingly invincible
faith
-
blith in childhood experi–
ence and in reading.
Sam: (He has
corne
in and w([itfd during the last
selltences.)
Sorry to
interrupt. The cab driver out front says he's come for you, Professor.
Callie:
How did it go? Did you get it all ?
