60
PARTISAN REVIEW
Whatever the models for a story or a novel or an epic work of liter–
ature may be, the author's life is nobody's business. Even autobiograph–
ical writing isn't autobiography.
As I said, I don't think that Kafka should be opposed to Proust. I am
not sure that Proust's very ample novel is more shaped than Kafka's dry,
condensed, and codified form-each is probably another artistic expres–
sion of our centrifugal modernity. Both of them, for me, are very impor–
tant, even if they are, or especially because they are, different types of
writers-great writers. I do think that Kafka is in a way a more modern
writer, and his "unformed" form of narrative is specific and important
for the entire evolution of modern literature.
Still, Proust remains unavoidable.... Proust said, "A book is a prod–
uct of a different self from the one we manifest in our habits, our social
life, and our vices." His superb novel-rather, a narrative cycle-is not a
memoir.
In
his
Remembrance of Things Past,
he succeeded in transform–
ing and transcending the frivolous experience of daily life, of biography,
into a great essential interrogation of the human soul, of memory and
loss, of the past, and of the redeeming remembrance.
In
his famous essay,
Against Sainte-Beuve,
he focuses on the drastic difference between the
social self and the creative self. He claims that our deep self, our
moi pro–
fonde,
is in eclipse during the daily commerce with society, but left alone,
it finds itself, and proves genuine creativity. He also compares the lan–
guage of literature with the language of conversation, of "chat"
(causerie),
which brings literature down to the level of gossip-exactly
what happens quite often today in too many books of memoirs, biogra–
phy, autobiography, as well as in reports on such books that are feeding
the market. "In actual fact, what one gives to the public is what one has
written when alone, for one's self.
It
is very often the work of one's self, "
said Proust. "What one gives to sociability, that is, to conversation ...is
the work of a far more external self." As we know, the famous "I" in
Proust's vast narrative, and even the equally famous Marcel in the same
work, is the product of a very different self from the social person named
Marcel Proust, manifested in his habits or vices. The writer's fear of rats,
for instance, had nothing to do with the construction of his masterpiece,
and with the incomparable voice of the narrator. "[-[ad Proust been psy–
choanalyzed," writes a recent French biographer, "the psychoanalysis
would no doubt furnish an explanation of it, linking it to anality and
masochism." Certainly this would have been the right stimulation for the
vulgar routine of reading and discussing books in today's public arena.
Finally, I should probably say something about myself. My prose has
always had a starting point in a personal experience, but it was never
