Marcel Proust is often cited as a crucial contributor to modernist literature. His chapter on “Combray” is a remarkable study of the fragile nature of memory and remembering. Upon first glance, Proust draws the reader in by the using words that seem to occupy a liminal space between sleep and consciousness, that mimic the confused state of the main character in the book, who is experiencing confusion upon waking up in his room. He arouses a feeling of loneliness in the reader, by populating the setting with great detail, yet positioning the character as feeling empty, in a desolate space. His vivid descriptions of the room, coupled with the descriptions of the objects within it, seem to be longing for the company that the rooms once inhabited.
In a traditional novel, the reader expects a linear time sequencing, a reliable and singular narrator and descriptions of any art form, such as literature, imitating life. Proust’s work, which is an embodiment of modernist work, unsettles and challenges all these expectations in a myriad of ways. The unnamed narrator takes a journey into the past, travelling seamlessly into moments of past that position him as a child, occupying space in the same house he lives in today. He outlines conversations, and moments, and his longing for maternal comfort in great detail, through a narrative tone that is, at best, unreliable. This unreliability is turned inward for the main character, as he struggles to discover whether his memories of the past are locked in time, or moulded into something different as he looks back with the benefit of hindsight. He remarks, “these recollections abandoned so long outside of my memory, nothing survived”. This challenges the idea that every memory, every caveat of the past should fit like a piece of a missing puzzle. Instead, this style of writing encourages the reader to reject the idea of categorizing and recalling the past as a neatly woven structure, and instead look at it as an ever-changing form, with no certain beginning, middle or end.
Memory is described as a window into the past, that looks different from various angles and periods of time. The narrator, when he writes about his childhood, is lacking the obvious nostalgia one expects when describing his home, family members and the private memories of their household. This is yet more evidence of an unexpected style of writing, and provides testament that Proust’s work embodies the modernist agenda. Hence, the window into the past, is not transparent (full available) or opaque (fully blocked), but instead translucent, allowing limited, incomplete and malleable glimpses.
-Astha, K
Food for thought:
A question that I pose from his work is- Were you, as a reader, a) surprised by the narrator’s commentary on class, caste and social status? and b) what did you make of these observations? (page 21).