The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle Read Free Page A

doubtful, more pessimistic, in fact more
tragic
about reading the sense of the allegory out of the given life-experience:
    as if in a shroud,
    my heart lay buried in this allegory:
    On Aphrodite’s island all I found
    was a token gallows where my image hung …
    Lord give me strength and courage to behold
    my body and my heart without disgust!
    Of course Proust had the courage to behold anything in his or anyone else’s body and its behaviors, but he was not so sure about what strength would be given him, or what strength remained of what had been given, and indeed in terms of his health it was a narrow squeak: Proust’s textual revisions recovered in the last twenty-five years have shown us how much was left to do, how much could not quite be done.
    There is a whole other poetic drama (
maker
’s drama) in the recently published notebooks, the variant readings, the canceled (but plausible) versions: Marcel Proust’s wavering agon about where to place this humiliation, that death, the other sudden revelation (for instance the discovery that the two “ways” are the same). Indeed whole sections were wrested from what in linear terms would be their “right place” in order to serve the design, to fulfill the allegory; and Proust scholarship for the next twenty-five years will be instructing our inner graduate student as to what some of the decisions (and the indecisions) had been and what they became, more or less, finally. Certainly the requirements—the logic—of the allegory allowed, actually
compelled
, Proust to erase the differences, the contradictions between the novel and the discourse (as Descartes would have it), the treatise (as Spinoza), the essay (as Montaigne)….
    This recognition brings us to the figure of Proust as a modern writer, which any introduction to the twentieth century’s greatest novelist must engage.
Must
, because Proust was twenty-nine when he entered that century in which he lived only twenty-two years; indeed he was thirty-five and had already written several unsuccessful versions of the
Search
before 1907. (Tolstoy was thirty when he completed
his
great autobiographical allegory
Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth
and began his career as a novelist.) We call Tolstoy the great(est?) novelist of the nineteenth century, though he lived a decade into the twentieth, and though the “essays” that finish off
War and Peace
(written the year Proust was born) seem obstructively “modern” on our first reading of that novel. Still, we do not regard Tolstoy as a “modern” novelist.
    Yet Proust, who is as insistent about the “realism” of the world of the
Search
as anything in
Anna Karenina
, as inclusive about its “naturalism” as everything in
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
, is inveterately coupled or tripled—by Nabokov, for example—with Joyce and Biely and Kafka as indefectibly modern. I believe this is precisely because of the nature of that Narrator and his strangely absent presence, if I may put it that way. Proust’s every gigantic effort is to subtract his “empty” Narrator’s discovery (and possession) of time regained from what Gaston Bachelard calls the “false permanence” of biography. That is what pushes this enormous novel over the edge (the edge of encyclopedic allusion, of social chronicle, of literary emulation, of symbolist dithering, and of speculations concerning love, art, death, and time) into that enormous structure (abyss?) of repudiations which
is
our modernity.
    This matter of locating Proust in such modernity is the most vexed question with which you must contend. For Proust is a writer between two centuries, between two aesthetic postulations (the “realism” of Balzac, Flaubert, Goncourt, etc., and the “symbolism” of Baudelaire, Huysmans, Mallarmé, etc., or, as Antoine Compagnon, the best critic of Proust-between-centuries, puts it, between etymology and allegory. Proust can be perceived as epitomizing the past achievements, but he can also be