(no subject)

[proximoception]

Proust's remembered houses - which you're constantly shocked to remember are the main ordering principle of his novel, since you spend from fifty to a thousand pages with each - are these precisely invisible? Maybe it's the one Marcel is doing his remembering in that is.

One of the things I associate with my one reading of Proust is a sense of safety, probably the very thing that turned McCarthy away. Was it the length - insulation from the fear of endings? The introduction of the war in the last volume provided a useful modulation of tone he might have otherwise found difficult, assuming endings must in some way reckon with death.

But maybe not the length so much as something enabled by it: the sense that thoughts, objects, persons would be returned to again and again, that nothing had been exhausted. Something we get in our own memories when we start to walk around in them, though at the risk of the opposite feeling when the plug's yanked.

I don't know if I've said this here before but maybe the very best of the several very best things about his book is how Proust's length ensures his book about memory becomes memory for you as well - not just the various stabs you make over the years, but the successful read or reads. Each is at least a month between covers, both of him and of you.

Which is part of why we don't tend to think of the book using its title as handle but instead his name. Could he have chosen his unwieldy title to consciously enhance that? Ensure it, even?

Nor do we tend to think of him apart from the book, strange biographical sex anecdotes aside. Christ's sacrifice makes no sense to me, but Proust's does. He makes me understand something of the gratitude flaring in others at the mere mention of that first name. But it's not outside: Proust becomes part of your life. And feeling gratitude toward your own past - is that not what we seek? What true safety, a promise of continuity transcending mere physical invulnerability, must feel like?

Comments

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

This is fantastically great.

(Except that I never, never, ever call the narrator Marcel.)

[thelican.livejournal.com]

I agree with nightspore. You're so very right about how the length works. (Yes, that sense of just taking my time with those volumes. Just living with them.)
And just calling the book "Proust" ("In Proust," "There's this part in Proust," "The first time I read Proust," etc.)

[mendaciloquent.livejournal.com]

Which is part of why we don't tend to think of the book using its title as handle but instead his name. Could he have chosen his unwieldy title to consciously enhance that? Ensure it, even?

Proustian conspiracy theory. Well done.

I've not been able to square with McCarthy's criticism even after warming to him over the last five or six years.

[tdaschel.livejournal.com]

"One of the things I associate with my one reading of Proust is a sense of safety, probably the very thing that turned McCarthy away."

McCarthy's houses - in Suttree, at least - are all East Cokered / naturally i was impressed ..

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

If I had to choose among the episodes I'd go with that pilgrimage.