Page 27 [27]
TERESA ROSELL NICOLÁS
reason, voluntary memory is not valuable. But time is ambivalent, and Beckett
insists on the dialectic double structure of Proust’s novel: Time condemns,
but it also saves, and to illustrate it, Beckett uses classic metaphors like Janus’
Bifrons and Telephus’ spear, which wounds and heals at the same time.
When Beckett examines the role of habit in Proust, he also shows the dual
nature of the phenomenon. For the narrator in In Search of Lost Time, habit
serves both as palliative and blinders that obstruct the vision of the world.”’ In
the novel, when habit is interrupted, for example when the narrator sleeps in
a strange room, he suffers terribly. If habit in Proust has a dual function that
makes choosing impossible between “the boredom of living and the suffering
of Being” ** in the artist, Beckett extends it to the entire human condition and
shows it in the repetitive actions carried out by his own characters, actions
that deny a true experience. “‘If habit,’ writes Proust, ‘is a second nature, it
keeps us in ignorance of the first’.”*® In Proust’s work, man is a creature of
habit immersed in space and time. Life is a succession of agreements between
the subject and the objective world, and customary actions help stabilize
relationships and make life tolerable, even though it is monotonous. The
superficial subject that is a product of habit dies once and again during the
course of life so that a new “I” can emerge. In Beckett’s later work, the chance
of rebirth that Proust’s narrator experiences is denied, as habit suppresses
suffering and even reality.
The impossibility of a centered, autotelic unity in the modern subject is
also developed in Beckett’s article Proust in Pieces (1934).*° This short review
deals with Albert Feuillerat’s Comment Proust a composé son roman.*' While
Feuillerat strongly deplores Proust’s chaos and lack of continuity, in his critique
Beckett stresses his objection to “uniformity, homogeneity, cohesion,”” as he
had already pointed out in his Proust. According to Kawashima:
If Proust’s subject formation is fascinating to Beckett, this is because it juxtaposes
multiple and sometimes fragmentally incongruent elements which cannot
be consumed in the unification of a total subject. For Beckett, the celebrated
‘involuntary memory’ is not only the temporal duplication of past and present but
also a moment that explodes the unitary formation of the subject.°?
27 Lee: Beckett on Proust, 200.
28 Beckett: Proust, 8.
2 Ibid., 11.
30 Samuel Beckett: Proust in Pieces, in Ruby Cohn (ed.): Disjecta, New York, Grove, 1984, 63-65.
Feuillerat’s book was published by Librairie Droz, Paris, in 1934.
Beckett: Proust in Pieces, 64.
Takeshi Kawashima: Conjunction of the Essential and the Incidental: Fragmentation and
Juxtaposition; or Samuel Beckett’s Critical Writings in the 1930s, in After Beckett / D’apres
Beckett, Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui, Vol. 14, No. 1 (2004), 472.
+ 26 +