Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past is a unique literary-philosophical text, exceeding the standards of the usual novel of both its time and ours in its breadth, depth and complexity. Committed students of these four thousand pages need to hold a multiplicity of elements in mind while reading the volumes. Some of the philosophical, psychological and literary ideas, as varied as Bergsonian reformulations of time and memory, the validation of the Freudian subconscious, and the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative strategy are all woven into the stories of several dozen eccentric characters. Modern readers are treated to long, unbroken reflections on the various categories of memory or aberrant love or the fanciful qualities of the imagination, for instance, all the while trying to follow plot lines and character development. If one adds the sometimes suffocating depth of detail presented by the narrators (sometimes omniscient, sometimes first person, sometimes he is a young man, sometimes old), the task of assimilating all that is written can appear impossible.
But the effort expended yields considerable satisfaction if the reader persists to the last volume, Time Regained, where the novelistic responsibilities of the text are completed (the fate of all the characters is revealed, closure is established) and the philosophical underpinnings of the novel are distilled into a few pages of explanation. The narrator, after revisiting the the people and places that have shaped his life, after sharing with us some new secrets and introducing one or two new characters to the saga tells us of his epiphany:
Then a new light arose in me, less brilliant indeed than the one that had made me perceive that a work of art is the only means of regaining lost time. And I understood that all the material of a literary work was in my past life...stored up by me without my divining its destination or even its survival…
The message is hugely optimistic: the passage of time is not necessarily negative. In fact it can lead to a work of art: the narrator believes that if he can recall events, impressions and details of his life and then reshape them via his imagination, he will be able to transform a life lived and eventually finished, into a work of art that may resonate past his own death.
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