Ghost Writer

The narrator in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time refers quite often to the text we are reading, naming “the invisible vocation which is the subject of this book” and “the rest of my story.” He even recalls the moment of what we can see as the hesitations of Proust’s unfinished book of essays, Against Sainte-Beuve: His “hopes,” he says, “were…doomed to frustration every time I sat down to a desk to sketch the draft of critical study or a novel.” Sometimes, “this book” still seems to belong to the future. All he has to his literary credit, he says, are “some very thin articles,” adding, on another occasion, that he has published “some studies.” He is probably being a little too modest here, in part because he is trying to show how wrong those people are who mistake him for a successful, even a great writer. And he has made some sort of start on his novel because he has shown it to a few people, who didn’t understand it at all. But then he also talks about what “the final volumes of this work will show” and says, “we have seen” what previous episodes have proved.