… it is in spite of and within the limits of the unchanging character and destiny that the Proustian characters undergo a process of renewal. The head waiter is always the same head waiter; I shall come across him tomorrow in the same place, but he will renew himself because his mimicry will be even more fetching that it was yesterday… Proust enjoys showing us personal renewals, which are not merely changes in social status (there are few of them or they only happen to secondary characters) as though they had no roots in the past and are therefore not the result of a process of evolution, but the equivalent of the birth of a fresh individual…. Proustian time is not creative. Its role, while bringing about change in the social situation—minimal changes which nevertheless seem of capital importance to the interest parties and are always announced with surprise by the narrator—is to reveal the true nature of the characters, to unveil what men already were without our knowing it. The Albertine of whom we catch a glimpse on the beach is already everything which will be discovered by the narrator as a result of his posthumous investigation of her liaisons.
This strikes me a largely true. So, to use an example provided by Revel, we discover that Octave, the apparently shallow-minded teenage golfer at Balbec, has become a successful writer “whose latest work has just turned modern literature upside down!” The two cannot be linked. On the other hand, Mme. Verdurin devolves into deeper and deeper viciousness as the Search unfolds. If we are not surprised that this character trait continues to define her, we are stunned by the degree to which she unleashes it. Mme. Verdurin may be the exception to Revel’s observation, however. Just as the two ways are revealed in the last novel to be one and the same path, Proust’s characters seem to circle about themselves and one another, their personalities unchanged as they weave the fabric of Time.
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