Oldal 25 [25]
OCR
TERESA ROSELL NICOLÁS 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. s 24 e
