Let him unfold his chronicle as it appears in his
memory. But if he is himself the subject of his story, if the story
involves a searching exploration of his own consciousness, an account
in his own words, after the fact, is not by any means the best
imaginable. Far better it would be to see him while his mind is
actually at work in the agitation, whatever it may be, which is to
make the book. The matter would then be objective and visible to the
reader, instead of reaching him in the form of a report at second
hand. But how to manage this without falling back upon the author and
_his_ report, which has already been tried and for good reasons, as it
seemed, abandoned? It is managed by a kind of repetition of the same
stroke, a further shift of the point of view. The spectator, the
listener, the reader, is now himself to be placed at the angle of
vision; not an account or a report, more or less convincing, is to be
offered him, but a direct sight of the matter itself, while it is
passing. Nobody expounds or explains; the story is enacted by its look
and behaviour at particular moments. By the first stroke the narrator
was brought into the book and set before the reader; but the action
appeared only in his narrative. Now the action is there, proceeding
while the pages are turned; the narrator is forestalled, he is watched
while the story is in the making.
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