Proust in Pieces
TILE original edition of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, as undertaken by Grasset in 1913, was to consist of three volumes, Du Ciiti de Chez Swann, Le COW de Guermantes and Lc Temps Retrouve, or about 1,500 pages. This edition, when the first volume only had appeared, was interrupted by the War. The current edition, completed by the N.R.F. in 1924, consists of sixteen volumes or about 4,000 pages. Professor Feuillerat, as he perused this final version, was sensible of grave dissonances and incompatibilities, clashing styles, internecine psychologies and deplorable solutions of continuity, such chaos in short as could only be explained by the in- harmonious collaboration of the two Prousts, the pre-War and the post-War, corresponding to the two periods of gestation, 1903-1912 and 1912-1922. Setting the separating machine in motion he restored order, extorted the original from the final text, reconstituted in fact volumes 2 and 3 as, but for the War, they might have been expected to come from Grasset. Next, anxious to establish his demonstration on the firm basis of a document, he shrewdly suspected, sought and found the uncorrected galley-sheets of volume 2 as announced by Grasset. "11 faut pent-titre porter en soi l' dine d'un de ces chercheurs de documents . . . pour coin- prendre les sentiments qui m'agitaient. Un grand espoit s'ouvrait." Professor Feuillerat, as he compared those precious proofs with his independent reconstruction of volume 2, found himself amply confirmed. And now he could offer to the public, not only a dreadnought survey of the changes imposed by Proust on a large portion of his work, but also, deduced rigorously from that cast-iron collation, the first draught of the remainder, Grasset's volume 3. And this in fact is what Professor Feuillerat has done.
• 'What was his purpose in doing this ? The publication of a great mind in the throes ? Not merely, but, la revelation d'un Proust asses different de celui qu'on a imagine, that was the real purpose.
The revealed Proust is no less than trine. Here we have the Proust of 1905-12, of the galley-sheets, the .evocator, opaquely analytic, transcribing in highly imaged terms the data of spontaneous memory ; here again the Proust of 1912-22, of the 2,500 pages annexed to the original text, the dialectician, selecting and schematizing his material, writing a language that is hard and abstract ; and here finally, lamentable resultant of the above agents, the Proust that to the casual reader, victim of superstitions concerning creative integrity, appears incomprehensible, the Proust esteemed by Gide, Cocteau, Dr. Curtius, Ortega y Gasset and others. It is only by keeping the early Proust, proceeds Professor Feuillerat in the expert tone of one meting out a canvas between del Maw and Velasquez, so distinct from the Proust of the resipiscence " as to obviate the smudge of their conjunction, that one can hope to resolve the pertur- bations and dislocations of the text as it stands and estimate the master at his true value. If Proust had lived, he would have so altered the original writing as to remove all discord and dissension, a beautiful unity of tone and treatment would have, as it were, embalmed the whole, and Professor Feuillerat's book need never have been written.
Uniformity, homogeneity, cohesion, selection scavenging for verisimilitude (the stock-in-trade exactly of the naturalism that Proust abominated), these are the Professor's tastes, and they are distressed by the passage of intuition and in- tellection hand in hand, by Mme. de Marsantes a saint and a snob in the one breath, by the narrator boy and man without transition, by the inconsequences of Swann, Odette, Saint-Loup, Gilberte, Mme. de Villeparisis and even poor Jupien, but most of all by the stupefying antics of those two indeterminates, Charlus and Albertine. And out of their distress they cry for the sweet reasonableness of plane psychology a la. Balzac, for the narrational trajectory that is more like a respectable parabola and less like the chart of an ague, and for Time, proclaiming its day of the month and the state of its weather, to elapse in an orderly manner. It is almost as though Proust should be reproached for not having written a social Voyage of the Beagle.
Professor Feuillerat rides the antithesis to death. There is no shortage of critical analysis in the original text, nor of
impressionism in'. the interpolations. That which is added
is an intensification, not a disclimer, of- theinitial conception and method. If there is misalliance, as for the purists there must be, it was there from the start: Aad is it not precisely this conflict between intervention and .quietism, only rarely to be resolved through the uncontrollable agency of uncon- scious memory, and its statement without the plausible frills, that constitute the essence of Proust's originalitY ? The book is the search, stated in the full.complexitfotallits clues and blind alleys, for that resolution, and not _the 'eom.pte rends, after the event, of a round trip. His material, pulverized by time, obliterated by habit, mutilated in the 'clockwork of memory, he communicates as heTcaa; in .drits and drabs. These, no doubt, when finally by chance the resolution is con- summated in the Hotel de Guermlicites and the comedy announced as shortly to be withdrawn, may be added up, like those of a life, and cooked to give unity. But such a creditable act of integration would not do for Professor Feuillerat who desires, nay requires, that the . right answer, the classical answer, should be ostentatiously implicit in,every step of the
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