MY EXPERIENCE WITH” IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME” : Marcel Proust–6 packs ( PROUST COMPLETE) (PB)
Depending on how one looks at it , this seven volume masterpiece
is the most beautiful work on human consciousness , or the most
overstated piece on time and memory. Whatever the energy expended in the
production, the reading is strangely without arduous labour. One does not
‘plough’ through Proust. I would never have ploughed through anything in one full
year. Instead I found myself pleasurably swept along by Proust’s
meandering stream . Of all great novelists , Proust to me was the easiest
to read, easy in the sense that , for most of the 12 months , I was unconscious
of the effort of reading . When more pressing exigencies, intruded on my life ,
i would leave Proust aside for several weeks at a time , but only
to return to him as one returns to wearing one’s favourite shirt . Perhaps this
weird sense of effortlessness and, at the same time , finding it
absolutely indispensable , is a function of its main concern , which is TIME
and MEMORY. There are no plot devices to push the reader forward .
Instead the TIME-NARRATIVE is filled with the inanities of the quotidian . A
shaft of sunlight falling into the bedroom can take up many pages. A
smell, a taste , acn open up enormous floodgates of memory.
Of Proust , it may be said he could turn an egg upside down and
spin a tale of 1000 pages . His persistence with a certain image or
an object is astonishing .
Among the first things that struck me about this novel is its
paradoxical nature; its both intimate and eppic . It is limited in its milieu
and vast in its treatment of that milieu. It is minute , delicate brain surgery
done on Tolstoyan scale.
At the centre is the narrator Marcel ( though , in all the
4000 pages , he is named only once or twice) . He wants to be a
writer , but finds that he cannot sit down and write because
he is unable to recapture the TIME-MEMORY of his life.
His writer’s block lasts through seven volumes . His tenacity in trying
to pin down his sensations has much to do with his artistic
ambitions, but all his efforts are in vain. And one point he
decides to give up altogether . When in the end he does regain ‘his
time’ , it is only because of memories and sensations coming
back to him quite accidentally , despite himself. . He is finally able to
write. The delight here , however, is ambivalent and bittersweet , for as he
says in a memorable line :’The true paradises are those that we have lost
‘. Literature has its limits. In calling his magnum opus into question Proust
is thoroughly a modern writer.
The Book has pleasures aplenty, the most surprising of
which being its humour . Proust has created a vast portrait gallery
of characters , each one vividly imagined , and it is the interaction
amongst them that provide the book’s funniest moments. Proust ‘ s
world is a world of fading dukes and duchesses , counts and barons , princesses
and kings. It is a sort of the caste system ameliorated by an
imperceptible upward or downward social mobility . Whichever way they go , none
of them can abandon their pretensions or noblesse oblige , the most
ironic example of which is the denigration of the aristocracy where
they are firmly ensconced , and the pleasures and privileges of
which they would not want to eschew for anything in the world.
Proust ‘s frank treatment of male homosexuality and lesbianism
is something I have not encountered in any other great writer. One
entire volume , is titled SODOM and GOMORRAH . Here these inverts behave
like regular couples: they love, they get jealous, they break up . But they are
not treated kindly . They seem another reflection of the decadence of the
upper classes. Is this self chastisement by Proust , who was himself a
homosexual ? The characters who are later discovered to be
homosexuals are portrayed as descending to death or degradation.
Great books seem somehow to attract great translator s. This
translation ( Scott Moncrief, Terence Kilmartin) renders Proust’s French into
delightfully quaint , slightly archaic English . Proust’s sentences are very
long indeed , interfaced with subordinate clauses within clauses
which contributes to the breathless earnestness of the narrative.
But is is perfectly readable , once you get used to it , and positively
addictive once you are well into it.
Need the novel have been so long? Proust ‘s mission is not so
much to examine Time , but to look at how human beings change in relation to
their past , how memory , reality , sensations, ought to traverse the whole
vast canvas that he has laid out. In this sense the novel’s length is an
invitation to invest a considerable part of our own Time to participate in this
great Proustian odyssey and in his quest to regain his own time.
The very act of reading , then, is part of the story. It is best to
appreciate Proust sans the intrusion of any ‘ism’ , to love IN SEARCH for
all its luminous qualities.
Dr. Ijaz Durrani
Dr Ijaz Durrani” My Experience with Marcel Proust”