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In search of Proust - lost
Searching for Marcel Proust.
Roland Barth once said that to be with someone you love and to think of something else: that is how h have hisbest thoughts, how best discovers what is necessary for his work. And hecontinues: “It is the same thing with the text: it produces in me the best sortof pleasure if it manages to make itself heard indirectly; if, in reading it, Iam often led to lift my eyes from the page, to hear something else.”Roland Barthes - Le Plaisir du texte”
Imagine a room, with paper everywhere, each jumped out of a book, a room where artistic forms float aimlessly and undetached through space. In the corner, rest a hill of scattered books of essays, paving the way to surprising roads of insight, flatteringly –a cloud of questions is streaming out from those books, breaking down those rigid damns that tried to keep back more questions. The Proust we’ll be searching is not the writer and his biography; we are searching the Proust whosend Swan to talk for him, the Marcel Proust I shall evoke here, cares abouthis readers. He asked me to make his thoughts enjoyable to everyman.
So shall we begin?
I would like to invite you to search for the unwritten correspondence which Proust kept with the works of Homer, Zeno of Elea, Svevo, Boccaccio, and Hitchcock.
This refuses to become a work for academia, it’s rather an invitation to go on a voyage and an archeological dig. I have brought maps and compass, yet I have never ventured down the roads I invite you to share with me. All I promise is the joy of the search.
During the series, I would like to initiate analytic encounters between Proust’s A la Recherche, each time with with a different work or theory. I believe, this will allow us to see, that rather than exhausting every topic about which Proust speaks (not to mention the weary reader) – the masterpiece comes into its own when it is drawn out of itself.
Perhaps a useful way to speak about Proust, then, is to speak “around” Proust, in conjunction with a series of literary, artistic, and intellectual “others.”
I intend to search for Proust, through the indirect eyes of others, see how he measures when “around” those others.
Don’t worry, I don’t suggest to add a cycle of books to the almost four thousand pages of Proust’s oeuvre. I propose rather, to use the other books and works, as mirrors, sometimes shadows that shed a new light, sometimes somber, sometimes light and comic on a la recherche.
Proust's work most becomes itself when it is seen indirectly, “around” others.