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IN SEARCH OF LOST IMAGE
PROUST, THE ESSAY: THE FRAGMENTED MODERN SUBJECT
A thorough analysis of the essay Proust reveals that one of the strongest links
between Proust and Beckett is the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.”! On 25
August 1930, in a letter to Thomas MacGreevy, Beckett says that he intends to
study Schopenhauer’s Aphorisms: The Wisdom of Life, as Proust admired it “for
its originality and guarantee of wide reading — transformed.”” Beckett felt that
grasping what Proust had read was part of his work as an essayist and critic.”
In Proust, Beckett constantly uses Schopenhauer’s thought as a reference
point in order to expose the central pillars of Proust’s novel, and it can be
said that what Beckett admires most in Proust’s approach is the influence of
the philosopher: the prospect of an anti-conceptual, anti-intellectual idea of
art. If Proust and Beckett shared common interests, their common themes are
present in Schopenhauer’s thought: the failure of intellectualism, time and loss,
the relationship between time and space, habit and repetition or the relation¬
ship between victim and offender.” In his essay, Beckett questions rationalist
and positivist approaches and chooses intuition — a kind of élan vital.? In
this regard, Beckett highlights Proust’s option, involuntary memory, in clear
opposition to the conscious attempts of reason to reconstruct the past. Beckett
also uses philosophical terms like “correlative objects” or “the ideal-real” that
reinforce Schopenhauer’s philosophy to build Proust’s theoretical framework.
The main themes developed in Proust are time, habit and memory. In the
essay, Beckett analyses characters in In Search of Lost Time as “victims,”
“prisoners” of Time, “lower organisms” “deformed” by “yesterday”: “Yesterday
is not a milestone that has been passed, but a daystone on the beaten track of
the years, and irremediably part of us, within us, heavy and dangerous. We
are not merely more weary because of yesterday, we are other, no longer what
we were before the calamity of yesterday. A calamitous day, but calamitous
not necessarily in content.”*®
Time creates a subject that is multiple, and this fact conditions the relation
between this subject and the object. According to Beckett, nothing can be
apprehended in a reasoned order of succession because the subject and the
object are in constant transformation. The object does not have its own
significance, but it is dislocated in the always-moving consciousness. For this
?! See Ulrich Pothast: The Metaphysical Vision: Arthur Schopenhauer’s Philosophy of Art and
Life and Samuel Beckett’s Own Way to Make Use of It, New York, Peter Lang, 2008.
2 Martha D. Fehsenfeld — Lois M. Overbeck (eds.): The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929-1940,
Vol. 1, Cambridge, Cambridge University, 2009, 43.
3 Van Hulle - Nixon: Samuel Beckett s Library, 13.
One of the longest passages commented in Proust is the relationship between the narrator
and Albertine in The Prisoner and The Fugitive.
25 Vera G. Lee: Beckett on Proust, Romanic Review 69 (May 1978), 199.
2 Ibid., 3.