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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. + 27 +
