It's an odd feeling to have after reading 2 and 3/4 long, painstaking novels that there is no global purpose---no plot, no moral. That the sum of the parts is no more than the parts, or that morals and plots are so numerous that no overarching structure emerges. (Though clearly...I've not yet regained time, so my opinion may be worthless.)
A la recherche du temps perdu seems to be an entirely local story. Its observations and anecdotes obtain their full force without much reference to other sections, books. The work can be read in minute snatches (say just before falling asleep). Maybe my thoughts on this will change as I read further.
Certainly Proust seems less concerned with this...meta-coherence than many modern authors are. For example, W. G. Sebald (who is as close to Proust's intellectual heir as I've read) in The Rings of Saturn drops so many hints in the first 10 pages about silk (sericulture's the 'topic' of the book's last section) that on readings other than the first his writing can seem almost heavy-handed. His whole book is bound up (sorry about the pun(s)) in this manner.
This is grasping: Perhaps part of the point of the books is the local nature of life, the importance of experiencing and realizing the depth of every moment, sensation, memory as it occurs? The importance of deep analysis of the seemingly insignificant? Maybe. It seems more that he was just a rushed artist.
By which I do not mean that that is not one of the primary thrusts of the book. Just that Proust might have striven for those kinds of threads from section to section, book to book---a work's self-referential instances of involuntary memory---if he had had the time to finish the final parts of the book and revise the whole. Though I'd be the first to allow that it may be that I just haven't perceived them, either because I've not finished the books, or I'm not an attentive enough reader.
Proust communicates this meaning through his exhaustive analysis of the tiny (his life is about making mountains out of molehills)---not by the fact that he doesn't link up these analyses.
A la recherche du temps perdu seems to be an entirely local story. Its observations and anecdotes obtain their full force without much reference to other sections, books. The work can be read in minute snatches (say just before falling asleep). Maybe my thoughts on this will change as I read further.
Certainly Proust seems less concerned with this...meta-coherence than many modern authors are. For example, W. G. Sebald (who is as close to Proust's intellectual heir as I've read) in The Rings of Saturn drops so many hints in the first 10 pages about silk (sericulture's the 'topic' of the book's last section) that on readings other than the first his writing can seem almost heavy-handed. His whole book is bound up (sorry about the pun(s)) in this manner.
This is grasping: Perhaps part of the point of the books is the local nature of life, the importance of experiencing and realizing the depth of every moment, sensation, memory as it occurs? The importance of deep analysis of the seemingly insignificant? Maybe. It seems more that he was just a rushed artist.
By which I do not mean that that is not one of the primary thrusts of the book. Just that Proust might have striven for those kinds of threads from section to section, book to book---a work's self-referential instances of involuntary memory---if he had had the time to finish the final parts of the book and revise the whole. Though I'd be the first to allow that it may be that I just haven't perceived them, either because I've not finished the books, or I'm not an attentive enough reader.
Proust communicates this meaning through his exhaustive analysis of the tiny (his life is about making mountains out of molehills)---not by the fact that he doesn't link up these analyses.
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