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or even put a name to any of these wax-like faces. Ihis exaggerated, sardonic
effect is prolonged." It is epic and comic, but it also reveals a tragic feature:
the portrait of failure and the evidence of finitude through an image of lost/
wasted time. As Albérés suggests, the problem of art is a problem of "vision."
In this sense, what is "real" does not depend as much on reality as on the
variable focal system with which to see. This is how the narrator begins to be
aware of his own finiteness: he simply cannot see clearly; his visual system is
not working properly as he is becoming old.
Following this procedure, Proust denies the time that is purely external
and the possibility of an objective representation of the world. Memory is
unable to reproduce the feeling of a lifetime, which can only be replaced by
distorted images. In this sense, the French author repudiates art as a collection
of conventional postcards. For him, and also for Beckett, they are only clichés
as opposed to a text to be deciphered.
Beckettian scholars including John Pilling, Hugh Kenner and Lawrence
Harvey have recognized echoes of Proust in Beckett since the 60s and claim
that traces of Proust should not be underestimated.” Molloy begins with the
sentence “I am in my mothers room" and finishes evoking the revelation
in In Search of Lost Time with the resolution of writing the book: “But in the
end I understood this language. I understood it [...] It told me to write the
report [...] Then I went back into the house and wrote.” Hugh Kenner also
points out that Molloy and Malone write in bed, like the narrator and Proust
himself, and compares the dustbins in Endgame with the imaginary perfume
bottles in Proust, in which the past is closed and sealed:
A quarter century later in Endgame, where Hamm’s active lifelong denial of love
translating the Proustian apathy into a rhetoric of revulsion has made everything
go wrong, those perfumed jars where the past is sealed away are transmogrified
into two ash cans, which dominate the left side of the stage in metallic obduracy
and contain his legless parents. His mother, in one of them, is rapt back by a
chance remark to Lake Como, and for a few minutes enjoys before our eyes the
Proustian bliss (‘It was deep, deep. And you could see down to the bottom. So
white. So clean.’). And emanating from the other ash can the father’s rebuke recalls
the child’s insomnia.?°
16 Ibid., 82-83.
Lawrence Harvey also suggests possible Proustian elements in Beckett’s early works, such as
Cascando, Watt and More Pricks Than Kicks. See Harvey: Samuel Beckett.
18 Samuel Beckett: Three Novels, New York, Grove, 2009, 3.
1 Tbid., 170.
20 Hugh Kenner: Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study, New York, Grove, 1961, 44.
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