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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 +
