The Girard Reader (12 page)

and a writer in an ordinary news item.

In his "belated moment of lucidity" the parricide joins the ranks of all the heroes of previous novels. How can we deny this
when Proust himself compares this death to that of Don

Quixote?
"The Filial Sentiments of a Parricide" provides the missing link between classical

conclusions and
The Past Recaptured
. This attempt will have no immediate sequel. Proust will discard the classical method of transposition in the novel. His hero will not kill himself;

rather he will become a novelist. But nevertheless the inspiration will come from death, that

death which Proust is in the process of living in 1907, and whose horror is reflected in all his

writing of that period.

Is this giving too much importance to a few forgotten lines? Perhaps it will be objected that

the text has no literary value, that it is written in a hurry for a daily newspaper, and that its

conclusion wallows in melodramatic clichés. That may be, but such considerations carry little

weight in the face of Proust's own evidence. In a letter of Calmette, which accompanied the

article, Proust gave
Le Figaro
full permission to edit and cut his text -- except for the last paragraphs, which he demanded should be published in their entirety.

The allusion to Don Quixote's belated lucidity is all the more precious since it reappears in

the notes which were published in an appendix to
Contre Sainte-Beuve
, and this time in a

purely literary context. The many comments on Stendhal, Flaubert, Tolstoy, George Eliot,

and Dostoyevsky in these same notes show us Proust's awareness of the unity of novelistic

genius. Proust notes that all Dostoyevsky's and Flaubert's works could be entitled
Crime and

Punishment
. The principle of the unity of all the great works is clearly stated in the chapter on Balzac: "All the writers come together at certain points and they seem like different and

sometimes contradictory elements of a single genius."

There can be no question that Proust was aware of the connection between
The Past

Recaptured
and the classical novelistic conclusions. He could have written the one book on

the unity of novelistic genius which would have been worthy of such a great topic.

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Under the circumstances it is surprising that Proust never broached the theme of novelistic

unity in his own conclusion,
The Past Recaptured
, which broadens into a meditation on

novelistic creation. His silence on the topic of other novels is all the more surprising when we

consider the number of literary references he makes. He acknowledges forerunners of the

"affective memory" in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Chateaubriand, and Gérard de Nerval. But he

does not mention a single novelist. The intuitions of
Contre Sainte-Beuve
are never taken up

and developed. What happened?

In Proust, as in all persons who experience a very intense and solitary spiritual experience,

the fear of appearing extravagant is superseded only by that of seeming ridiculous by

repeating universally accepted truths. The wish to avoid both of these opposite dangers would

seem to have suggested to Proust the compromise he finally adopted. Fearing that he would

be accused on the one hand of leaving the royal paths of literature, and on the other of

plagiarizing the great novels, Proust picks out some literary ancestors but scrupulously avoids

the novelists.

Proust, we know, lived only for his work. Léon-Pierre Quint has demonstrated the forces he

could marshal in the art of literary strategy. This final "idolatry" does not blemish the

perfection of
The Past Recaptured
, but it somewhat limits its universality. The author of

Remembrance of Things Past
is not interested in indicating similarities of structure among the great novels. He is afraid of putting his critics on a track that would lead to too many

discoveries. He knows the importance given to originality in his time, and he is afraid of

having some of his literary glory taken from him. He emphasizes and brings into relief the most "original" elements of his novel's revelation, especially the affective memory which we discover upon examination to play a much less central role in the works which precede
The

Past Recaptured
than that assigned to it in this final novel
. 1.

What explanation other than "literary strategy" can be given for Proust's silence? How are we to explain the omission, in his reflections of the art of the novel, of Stendhal's conclusion

whose every characteristic we had pointed out in his
Contre Sainte-Beuve
, characteristics

which can be found in
The Past Recaptured
: "An exclusive taste for sensations of the soul, revivification of the past, detachment from ambition and lack of interest in intrigue." How

can we not be impressed by the fact that Proust is the only one to have seen the part played by

memory in

____________________

1. We are far from seeing in that central position given to the affective memory a "fault" of the novelist or a betrayal of the original experience. This position is justified by reasons of

economy in the novel. We wish only to note that Proust managed to combine very cleverly

the superior demands of revelation in the novel with the practical demands of "literary

strategy."

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Julien's death, and that he perceived this role at the very moment he was preparing to write

The Past Recaptured
?

Proust was also very interested, at the same time and in that same conclusion, in the visit paid

to Julien by the Abbé Chélan, very much weakened by age. "The weakening of a great

intelligence and a great heart linked to that of the body. The old age of a virtuous man: moral

pessimism." Julien's lucid death stands out marvelously against the background of this slow

and terrible decomposition of the flesh.

Again the attention given by Proust to this episode is not disinterested. He builds the whole of

The Past Recaptured
on a similar contrast between two antithetical deaths. The hero is lucid

when he dies to be reborn in the work, but around him people continue to die without hope of

resurrection. The spiritually fertile death of the narrator is contrasted with the cruel spectacle

of the Guermantes's soirée with the horrible and useless aging of the members of high

society. This contrast is already to be found in "The Filial Sentiments of a Parricide," but from now on it gains its classically novelistic meaning and achieves unity with the

Dostoyevskian apocalypse. In fact we must see in
The Red and the Black
and
The Past

Recaptured
the two inseparable and opposed faces of the novelistic apocalypse as they were

first revealed in the work of Dostoyevsky. In all genuine novelistic conclusions death as spirit

is victoriously opposed to death of the spirit.

Are we being carried away by our imagination? To dispel any doubts we will introduce a

final witness in favor of the unity of novelistic conclusions: Balzac. This novelist has not

been included in our group, but his creative experience is just as close in certain points to

those which we have been considering. For proof of these analogies we need only look at the

following passage taken from the conclusion of
Cousin Pons
. Balzac is describing his hero's

death and in doing so he defines the double face of the novelistic apocalypse:

Ancient and modern sculptors have often placed on either side of the tomb genies holding flaming torches. These flames illuminate for the dying their faults, their errors, as they light

up the paths of Death. Sculpture there represents great ideas, it formulates a human fact.

Death has its wisdom. Often simple girls, at a very tender age, are found to have the wisdom

of old men, become prophets, judge their family and not be taken in by any deception. This is

the poetry of Death! But it is a strange thing and should be noticed that one dies in two

different ways. This poetry of prophecy, this gift of penetration, whether before or after, is

only found in those who are merely dying in the flesh, who are dying through the destruction

of the organs of carnal life. Thus people suffering, like Louis XIV, from gangrene, consump-

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tion, people who die of fever like Pons, or of a stomach ailment like Mme de Mortsauf, enjoy

this sublime lucidity, and achieve amazing and admirable deaths; whereas people who die of

intellectual sicknesses, as it were, where the trouble is in the brain, in the nervous system

which serves as an intermediary for the body to provide it with the brain's fuel; these die in

entirety. In them, body and mind founder together. The first, souls without bodies, become

biblical spirits; the others are corpses. This virgin, this unascetic Cato, [ Pons, the hero] this

just and almost innocent man eventually penetrated the pockets of gall which made up the

heart of the magistrate's wife. He understood the world as he was about to leave it. Several

hours before he had resigned himself to the inevitable, like a joyful artist for whom

everything is a pretext for caricature and raillery. The last ties binding him to life, the chains

of admiration, the powerful knots which link the connoisseur to the masterpieces of art had

been broken in the morning. When he saw that he had been robbed by the Cibot woman he

made a Christian farewell to the pomp and vanity of art.

We must not begin from reality as we see it and subject novelistic creation to the standards of

this vision. In this conclusion, historical figures like Louis XIV are put side by side with

fictional creation like Pons and Mme. de Mortsauf. Behind the veil of pseudo-physiology, as

elsewhere beneath phrenology, Martinism, or magnetism, Balzac is incessantly telling us

about his novelistic experience. Here in a few sentences he sums up the essential

characteristics of the novelistic conclusion: the double face of death, the role of suffering, the

detachment of passion, the Christian symbolism, and that
sublime lucidity
which is both

memory and prophecy, and which throws an equal light on the soul of the hero and the soul

of the other characters.

In Balzac, as in Cervantes, Stendhal, and Dostoyevsky, the tragic event expresses the advent

of a new vision, the novelist's vision. This is why Balzac compares the dying man's state of

soul to that of a "joyful artist." The conclusion of
Cousin Pons is a Past Recaptured
.

It is easy to prove the unity of novelistic conclusions if we compare texts. But in theory, at

least, this last proof is not necessary. Our analyses inevitably lead to the message

unanimously proclaimed by all the great conclusions. When he renounces the deceptive

divinity of pride, the hero frees himself from slavery and finally grasps the truth about his

unhappiness. There is no distinction between this renunciation and the creative renunciation.

It is a victory over metaphysical desire that transforms a romantic writer into a true novelist.

Up to this point this truth had only been hinted at, but at last we have reached it; we can grasp

and possess it here in the last pages of

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the novel. All we needed was the author's permission, and this we now have: "I loathe

Amadis of Gaul and all the infinite number of his kind." The novelists themselves, through

the medium of their heroes, confirm what we have been asserting all the way through this

book: the sickness is rooted in pride and the universe of the novel is a universe of people

possessed. The conclusion is the stationary axle around which the wheel of the novel turns.

The whole kaleidoscope of appearances depends on it. The conclusion of novels is also the

conclusion of our present investigation.

Truth is active throughout the great novel but its primary location is in the conclusion. The

conclusion is the temple of that truth. The conclusion is the site of the presence of truth, and

therefore a place avoided by error. If error cannot destroy the unity of novelistic conclusions

it tries to render it powerless. It attempts to sterilize it by calling it a banality. We should not

deny that banality but loudly proclaim it. In the body of the novel, novelistic unity is mediate,

but it becomes immediate in the conclusion. Novelistic conclusions are bound to be banal

since they all quite literally repeat the same thing.

This banality of novelistic conclusions is not the local and relative banality of what used to be

considered "original" and could again be given oblivion followed by a "rediscovery" and a

"rehabilitation." It is the absolute banality of what is essential in Western civilization. The novelistic dénouement is a reconciliation between the individual and the world, between man

and the sacred. The multiple universe of passion decomposes and returns to simplicity.

Novelistic conversion calls to mind the
analusis
of the Greeks and the Christian rebirth. In

this final moment the novelist reaches the heights of Western literature; he merges with the

great religious ethics and the most elevated forms of humanism, those which have chosen the

least accessible part of man.

The theme of reconciliation has been so constantly harped on by unworthy authors that it is

easy to become convinced, in this time given to indignation and scandal, that it never did and