Bersani: Proust & Marcel
“the distinction between him [the narrator] and Marcel is a continuous achievement of the act of writing.” (252n3)
“The literary treatment of his past is, in fact, a constant exploration of the narrator’s ability to re-create the self imaginatively, that is, of his resources as a novelist, and the processes of novelistic creation constitute one of the principal subjects of interest in A la Recherche. The story of a life whose meaning is fully realized only when that life is transformed into literature necessarily illustrates a progress from what is given in life to what is imagined and invented in art.” (5)
“The sentences of I have been discussing suggest a longing to escape from the self; the very distinction between works of sensibility and works of imagination implies the curious notion that certain men are capable of writing works completely alien to their own sensibilities. It is as if the narrator were intrigued by the paradoxical situation of the writer’s being surprised by a self he will at the same time recognize.” (5)
• admittedly, this is still Bersani’s introduction, but it does not seem that the narrator is so much interested in escaping the Self as he is attempting to escape the dysphoria [wc] of his fractured selves, and, through the act of writing (narration), create a Self.
“The purpose of disengaging what seems to me the central obsession in Proust’s novel is therefore not to reduce everything to that obsession, but rather to trace the continuity—which, as I shall show, is a process of invention and enrichment—between what is first presented as a crippling weakness and the freest, most creative activity in the narrator’s life. The novel is, moreover, about this continuity, or rather it creates it: the metaphorical connections the narrator now establishes among the different moments of his life gives a psychological unity to what he had felt was the history of discontinuous personalities.” (6-7)
“In realizing his project of self-possession through self-description, the narrator writes a work in which we see the novel as a document of realistic observation in the process of becoming a work in which the whole burden of literary expression would be carried by the quality of the narrative voice.” (20)
• first part of this citation is pointed and illuminating, but I’m not entirely sure what Bersani means by the “quality” (his emphasis) of the narrative voice.
“The narrator’s book cannot be written in the ecstatic trance induced by the taste of the madeleine or the sound of a spoon hitting a plate. And by making his hero and his narrator the same person in A la Recherche, Proust draws our attention to the difficulties of being faithful to the moments of involuntary memory in writing about the past. For we are constantly reminded that the man who has the voluntary memories has lost them at the moment we read of his having them; it is his voice that is now making the effort to remember moments in which remembering required no erate investigation, a conscious recherche. The title of the work indicates how unimportant the experiences of involuntary memory are for the actual writing of the work...” (215)
“The literary treatment of his past is, in fact, a constant exploration of the narrator’s ability to re-create the self imaginatively, that is, of his resources as a novelist, and the processes of novelistic creation constitute one of the principal subjects of interest in A la Recherche. The story of a life whose meaning is fully realized only when that life is transformed into literature necessarily illustrates a progress from what is given in life to what is imagined and invented in art.” (5)
“The sentences of I have been discussing suggest a longing to escape from the self; the very distinction between works of sensibility and works of imagination implies the curious notion that certain men are capable of writing works completely alien to their own sensibilities. It is as if the narrator were intrigued by the paradoxical situation of the writer’s being surprised by a self he will at the same time recognize.” (5)
• admittedly, this is still Bersani’s introduction, but it does not seem that the narrator is so much interested in escaping the Self as he is attempting to escape the dysphoria [wc] of his fractured selves, and, through the act of writing (narration), create a Self.
“The purpose of disengaging what seems to me the central obsession in Proust’s novel is therefore not to reduce everything to that obsession, but rather to trace the continuity—which, as I shall show, is a process of invention and enrichment—between what is first presented as a crippling weakness and the freest, most creative activity in the narrator’s life. The novel is, moreover, about this continuity, or rather it creates it: the metaphorical connections the narrator now establishes among the different moments of his life gives a psychological unity to what he had felt was the history of discontinuous personalities.” (6-7)
“In realizing his project of self-possession through self-description, the narrator writes a work in which we see the novel as a document of realistic observation in the process of becoming a work in which the whole burden of literary expression would be carried by the quality of the narrative voice.” (20)
• first part of this citation is pointed and illuminating, but I’m not entirely sure what Bersani means by the “quality” (his emphasis) of the narrative voice.
“The narrator’s book cannot be written in the ecstatic trance induced by the taste of the madeleine or the sound of a spoon hitting a plate. And by making his hero and his narrator the same person in A la Recherche, Proust draws our attention to the difficulties of being faithful to the moments of involuntary memory in writing about the past. For we are constantly reminded that the man who has the voluntary memories has lost them at the moment we read of his having them; it is his voice that is now making the effort to remember moments in which remembering required no erate investigation, a conscious recherche. The title of the work indicates how unimportant the experiences of involuntary memory are for the actual writing of the work...” (215)
posted by E at 11:51 AM
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