In the twenty-fifth chapter of The Education, Henry Adams describes with characteristic metaphoric violence his feelings about history. Trained to think that history had an ultimate meaning, that in the sequence of events there was some corresponding sequence of cause and effect, Adams discovers at the end of his researches that there is no understandable pattern; the best that Adams can tell us is that history is force: “and thus it happens that, after ten years' pursuit, he found himself lying in the Gallery of Machines at the Great Exposition of 1900, his historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new.”

Ce titre doit être expliqué. Notre intention, en premier lieu, n'est pas de parler d'influences possibles, mais de comparer les conceptions de Proust avec celles de certains philosophes. En second lieu, notre exposé sera centré sur la question du temps. Nous ne ferons intervenir d'autres questions (sur l'art, la connaissance, la morale) qu'en tant qu'elles surgissent dans cette perspective.

Although it has often been described as a work of destruction, James Joyce's Finnegans Wake was designed to be a triumphant reconstruction. It was in reference to this characteristic of his last book that Joyce is reported to have remarked during a visit to Stonehenge, “I am fourteen years trying to get here.” The task of reproducing with words the aesthetic unity of the past was an arduous one. For seventeen years Joyce, having at his disposal all the means of knowing and all the methods of expressing, labored to resolve the “proteaform” mass of modern learning in a “faustian fustian” of words. Such a process, the mixing and blending, the ordering and composing, the choosing and discarding, was necessarily a lengthy one entailing numberless revisions which bear “hermetic” testimony to the nature of the creative act while recording the artistic mind in a state of flux. It is self-evident that Joyce's manuscripts for Finnegans Wake are of immense importance to the scholar and that the French critic Louis Gillet, intimate though he was with Joyce's creative process, expressed a very limited view when he stated: “On ne comprendra vraiment la pensée de Joyce que le jour où nous l'aurons dans son premier état, avant toutes les retouches dont il l'a compliquée ... .” As material for the study of Joyce's intentions, as a “key” to the Wake, the primitive (first-draft) manuscripts to which Gillet refers are of surprisingly little value; for they generally expose little more than the armature of the work, the fundamental action which the reader might otherwise discern for himself after a brief syntactical search. On the other hand, as an aid to exegesis, the complete manuscripts are invaluable. They provide a basis for study of Joyce's method, his progressive elaboration upon a theme. They furnish material for a close examination of the mental process behind this style and of the organization which enabled Joyce to control the chaos from which he drew his inspiration. To this end, I believe a word-byword study which questions each aspect of a single sentence in progress would be of greater value than a more generalized discussion of a longer passage. If feasible, a series of such exegetic analyses might aid in more thoroughly illuminating the total stylistic of the book.

In a letter to a friend early in his brief writing career, Stephen Crane wrote, “I always want to be unmistakable”; and, at a later date, to another friend he explained retrospectively that “My chieftest [sic] desire was to write plainly and unmistakably, so that all men (and some women) might read and understand.”There is an irony in the critical fate that has befallen Crane's writings that perhaps that master ironist himself might have appreciated. For though the best criticism of his own time reveals a careful reading and understanding of his works, most recent criticism has seen Crane through a glass darkly.

Jean Giraudoux, if we are to believe certain of his friends, liked to claim he had never read Les fleurs du mal. Was this because of his scorn for a poet who had a conception of literary art too clearly opposed to that which Giraudoux proclaimed in his Prière sur la Tour Eiffel? The very fact that he expressed so strong a revulsion suggests rather that he had contemplated a sufficient number of the fleurs maladives to realize that Baudelaire's immodest genius offered only too many parallels to what his own was in danger of becoming. However unwonted such a comparison may at first appear, Giraudoux's early struggles with his conscience indicate a preoccupation with introspection strikingly similar to that of Baudelaire. Indeed we find in any careful examination of Baudelaire's works and character a young man who is hypersensitive about his uniqueness, a young man who so delights in finding himself different from other people that he does everything possible to further develop his narcissistic tendencies.

The nature of the unity in William Faulkner's Light in August, in fact, even the existence of such unity, has been seriously disputed by his critics. The debate has ranged from Malcolm Cowley's insistence that the work combines “two or more themes having little relation to each other” to Richard Chase's elaborate theory of “images of the curve” opposed to “images of linear discreteness.” Those critics who see a unity in the novel find its organizing principle in theme or philosophical statement—“a successful metaphysical conceit,” a concern with Southern religion, the tragedy of human isolation, man's lonely search for community—but they fail to find a common ground for the unity they perceive because they neglect properly to evaluate the objective device which Faulkner employs in the novel as an expression of theme. That device is the pervasive paralleling of character traits, actions, and larger structural shapes to the story of Christ. Viewed in terms of this device the novel becomes the story of the life and death of a man peculiarly like Christ in many particulars, an account of what Ilse D. Lind has called “the path to Gethsemane which is reserved for the Joe Christmases of this world.” However, that account is in itself perverse, “a monstrous and grotesque irony,” unless the other strands of action in the book—the Hightower story and the Lena Grove story—are seen as being contrasting portions of a thematic statement also made suggestively by analogies to the Christ story. This essay is an attempt to demonstrate that such, indeed, is the basic nature of the novel and that it has a unity which is a function of its uses of the Christ story.

“Some one had blundered.” The vision of Lily Briscoe reveals that it was Mrs. Ramsay.