One Year In Search of Lost Time ~ 2015 discussion

"My hand, too, was raised and lowered, like the pearls, by Albertine's breathing: my whole body was gently rocked by its regular movement. I had set sail on Albertine's sleep" (15.58%).

If I didn't already know that our narrator tells us everything, all of his emotions and thoughts, flitting and fleeting, I might be thinking at this juncture that he's a psychopath!

I haven't finished the reading yet, about half way, but he would appear to have control issues, at the very least!

The passage of Albertine sleeping is one of my favorites in the entire Recherche.

Teresa, I understand your comment even better now! Though the writing is beautiful, the behavior is obsessive and scary.

There are a couple of sentences in this section that are significant to Proust's unique blend of pseudo-biography and autobiography.

...my nature has always made me more open to the world of the possible than to that of real-life contingencies.

And on the next page:

Reality is always a mere starting-point towards the unknown, on a path down which we can never travel very far.

I've been fascinated throughout our read with the narrator's past and his retelling of the past. These quotes only emphasize the distinction, that retelling the past is never a return to the past. I'm very interested in the philosophy of time so these sentences are loaded with potential meaning. The "world of the possible" and "the unknown" could be understood in two ways: the future or our return to the past via memory, history, or autobiography. In my view both are functions of imagination rather than sensory experience. The "reality" and "real-life contingencies" that he's talking about are just that, his sensory experience of the present, but he's drawn to the experience of what is absent from his senses in the past and the future.

In Search of Lost Time deals with these themes on a second level that I rarely mention, that of the author. It's well known that Proust's novel is thoroughly autobiographical. I've never read something that balances itself between fiction and nonfiction with such subtle mastery. Admittedly I've mostly been interested in the relationship between the narrator with his narrative. I should point out that whenever I ramble on about narrative my analysis (actually I only point out Prout's more subtle, nuanced analysis) could equally apply to the relationship between Proust's own past and his novel and the relationships between our own past and our memory and sense of history. That's why I'm so interested in these themes: I think Proust gives us one of the best accounts of the nexus of the human of time.