Oldal 28 [28]
IN SEARCH OF LOST IMAGE
In Proust in Pieces Beckett praises Proust’s emphasis in showing the fact that
inconsistencies and contradictory oppositions are affirmed without synthesis
instead of opposing contraries in order to attain intellectual unification.*4 Only
uncontrollable, unconscious elements can lead to a sort of deep knowledge of
the subject. If for Feuillerat, accidental, incompatible, and clashing aspects
show dissolution, in Proust’s novel, “Beckett foregrounds inconsistent and
aleatory features which are incommensurable with the tendency toward
calculated, essential integrity, rather than the latter’s dialectic subsumption
of the former.”
Ihe new constituent element of this process is “involuntary memory,”
which differs from “voluntary memory,” a concept that Proust introduced
modifying Bergson’s “pure memoire.” In Proust, Beckett defines “involuntary
memory” as the ability that is required to evoke an image both from the past
and from the unity underlying the complexity of human action.* In In Search
of Lost Time, the “miracle of evocation,” which starts from intense sensory
perceptions and which Beckett called “fetishes”*’ or “privileged moments” —
the famous madeleine dipped in tea — occurs when a sense of the past is
repeated to recreate the original experience in the present and make it real
for the first time.
On the other hand, “voluntary memory” is the “uniform memory of
intelligence.”** The images evoked by it are “arbitrary” and “remote from
reality” and their actions can be compared to the gesture of turning the pages
of a photo album: “the material that it furnishes contains nothing of the past,
but merely a blurred and uniform projection once removed of our anxiety and
opportunism — that is to say, nothing.”*?
KRAPP’s LAST TAPE: AN ANTI-PROUSTIAN PLAY?
Like the narrator in Proust’s novel and Krap, the character from Eleutheria
(1947), Krapp has rejected the world in order to obtain a higher goal: writing
his magnum opus. The result ofthis rejection, however, is notthe culmination
reached by Marcel in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. It is evident that in
Krapp’s Last Tape some basic issues in Proust’s novel continue to show an
34 Ibid., 472.
35 Ibid., 473.
36 Beckett: Proust, 20.
37 Ibid., 23.
38 Ibid., 19.
39 Ibid.
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