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PARTISAN REVIEW
temporizer even treats those closest to him already as people whom he
will unavoidably lose. To buffer the blow he knows must come, he
rehearses and steels himself to their loss while they're still very much in
his life. He looks at his grandmother and sees the dead woman she is
likely to be soon; he looks at his mistress and already sees his "sweet
cheat gone." He is taking a distance that life itself has by no means
made necessary. He is mourning someone who is still quite alive, the
way he ' ll find ways to feel jealous of someone who has already died. He
regrets what he hasn't lost or, for that matter, isn't even in possession of
to worry he might lose.
I am, of course, thinking of Proust. And yet this is the irony with
Proust. Marcel always wishes he could have anticipated losing someone;
for then, he thinks, he would have suffered less. Similarly, he always
wishes his mind could catch up with his wishes when they're about to
be realized, for then, so he thinks, he would maximize his pleasure.
These, however, are merely strategies for managing the unmanageable
intensity of the present, for rehearsing, for "scripting" the present.
Caught unprepared, Proust's protagonist is either totally disabled or
totally devastated. When Albertine is finally willing to offer herself to
Marcel, Marcel prefers to take a rain check instead. When Marcel has
finally overcome what seemed like mild grief over his grandmother's
death, he is suddenly caught by a spasm so violent as he bends down to
tie his shoelaces that he bursts out crying.
Everything in Proust's universe aims to prevent similar outpourings.
His temporizing antics aim to diffuse experience, to make experience
unavailable, to thwart experience in the real world unless it has first
passed through what one could call a literary time filter. His whole life
is spent crafting that filter. One can see this even in his sentences, which
are prototypically crafted to do one thing best of all: to temporize. They
throw their net ever wider, waiting, never rushing in, prodding, teasing,
coaxing, luring, angling, as if something far greater, but whose charac–
ter or profile the author still ignores and is certainly not about to dis–
turb or risk losing by reaching too soon for it, is waiting for him at the
end of the line in some hitherto unknown illuminated point in the future
which, once we get to it, will-as is so typical of the span of each of
Proust's sentences-"illuminate retrospectively all that preceded it."
Despite Proust's shrewd and fretful comings and goings from one time
zone to the other, Marcel, the character, is never prepared
in time.
He is
always surprised by the unexpected, as though Proust were always
reminding himself that no matter how cautiously Marcel shields himself
and defers contact with the cruel world, the way Oedipus tried to avert
