Sacred Proust
It has been remarked, that the radical change in the perception of our world, which introduced relativity over aspects of reality we took to be absolute, is due to three eminent Jewish men: Freud, Einstein, and Marx. Starting with Freud, the assertion of an unconscious realm, which can grant, in spite of our awareness, unknown reasons for our acting “this” or “that” way, made morals relative: one cannot be considered good or bad for doing something, if one does it “blindly”, that is, led by reasons one is not aware of. The freedom to choose between courses of action, in this context, is out of the picture, and with it, the responsibility of the agent. As everyone knows, Einstein, with the theory of relativity, discovered that time and space are also relative, therefore changeable according to the context in which they are being considered. As for Marx, he destroyed the absolute character attributed to religion, by electing “production” as first principle, that is, by explaining the whole of the human social and creative reality through mundane, financial values. These two men were deeply perceptive of the relative nature of what was taken to be absolute. In the same way, Marcel Proust’s masterpiece has been considered, in literature, the equivalent of the theory of relativity. It has been pointed on and again, how Proust describes the ravages of time on anything we once took to be immutable, like social prestige, physical appearance, values, youth, of course, feelings, love itself, and, what is more disturbing, what we take to be our self. Throughout our life, we are in the constant process of becoming different selves, to the point of not even recognizing, or justifying, what we were and the way we felt in different periods of our past. We are, like Proust shows, in the constant process of metaphorically dying and being reborn into new selves, as our feelings and circumstances around us change. What am I, or where is the real “me”, if there is one, in the torrential, continuous change that I underwent, from babyhood to now? Is there any “sameness” to identify us in all these stages of our life? Is there something immutable, that one can call one’s real, steady, self? In a few words, is there an essence to each of us, an individual soul, really?
The fact that Proust starts and finishes his novel with the word “time”, and that he, in fact, describes radical changes and deterioration in everything and everyone throughout the years, makes one think that his main concern is to show the relativity of all that is subject to the temporal order. And, like the two others I mentioned in connection to relativity, he brilliantly succeeded. Proust, however, didn’t stop there. Not only is the “Search” permeated with poetic insights of a timeless beauty, but, at the end, Proust spells out his experience of an also timeless, incorruptible reality, in the involuntary memory of moments of his own life, brought about by physical sensations. In rediscovering, thus, what was this “real” life, he asserts himself as the timeless narrator to write it, that is, the one whose only nourishment is the essence of things. This narrator is, therefore, the only adequate one to bring to the light of intelligence the life he really lived, and didn’t really know, in the impossibility of it to be recovered by intellectual, voluntary memory. It remains hidden to most of us, who are reluctant to dive within ourselves, and, according to Proust, decipher “the book already written to each of us”, which is the same as to say, the book that precedes us. This timeless book, concerning the deciphering of the impressions that are brought back to us by involuntary memory, is, therefore, the wording of our “timeless” life, or, still, the essence of our life. The “timeless” narrator, corresponding to the essence of the narrator, is this narrator’s individual soul.
Acknowledging relativity to its most painful effect (the law of oblivion, a byproduct of the passing of time), Proust emerges from the abyss of an all-encompassing finitude, and victoriously asserts essence; becomes soul. Proust’s narrator is the soul of Proust.
Originally published at sacredproust.blogspot.com.