I am going to be twenty-three in a few more months. Twenty-three!! Fuck, I am growing old. With every passing day, slips away any chance I may have of a precocious undiscovered talent unexpectedly blooming in me; slipping away like sand through the fingers of time. I often ask myself, if I am indeed worth remembering after I am gone.
Proust asked himself the same thing. In his opus, among other themes, probably the central theme- the thread that holds the whole story together, from inception to its closure- is that of Proust's struggle with his creativity, his struggle with his realisation of a lack of talent and against chronic procrastination. He constantly struggles with the book he feels is burgeoning within him. He compares the growth of the novel to the growth of a foetus in the womb. You feed it, nourish it, are weighed down by it; it seeks constant attention, is impetuous and unreasonable in its appetites; you love it, live for it, feel as if you are the shell and the novel/foetus is the real organism, the 'life'. And then you hate it as well, you hate its constant plea for attention and its eating away at the root of your existence, your being wants to reject this new being which is sucking the being-ness out of you. For poor Marcel, it’s a constant struggle, this incubation of the novel. As he reaches the last volume you can almost feel his labour pangs start. He becomes short-tempered, out of sympathy with his characters and his readers; he begins to write with a ferocious quality, with a hate engendered of his irritation with the onerous task of carrying this being within him. He feels the novel sapping his vitality away, slowly killing him, and he rushes on towards that dread end with unparalleled ferocity and hate. He wants to be rid of it.
In the last volume of the Search Proust is at his supremely acerbic best. All the threads, all the nebulous ideas he has engendered and explored in the previous five volumes he evokes again, for a last time and with all the threads firmly in his hands he expertly, with a last flourish ties them all together to give form to the nebulous story he has been telling. In the last few hundred pages is the resolution of all that was proposed and like a piece of music, say a grand classical composition, ends in a crescendo that takes you to the heights of ecstasy and leaves you feeling dizzy, like such divine music the novel ends in a crescendo of pain, poised on the brink of existence and non-existence, leaning into the future precariously.
In the end Proust feels confident of his talents, discovers what his unique approach to literature is, makes a break with the past (as represented by the episode with the Goncourt pastiche) and decides to write the book we read. In the process he has killed or brought down to utter humiliation the characters I had grown to love inspite of all their faults. He himself is conscious of this when he says, if I remember rightly, "my characters will descend to great depths and I will have to follow them there". And follow he does to the very depths of humanity. And in the end I see that all the characters I loved and whose degradation pained me are slowly forgotten and in the failure of collective memory they find a fate worse than mere disrepute. I mean, when I see Madame Verdurin as the Princesse de Guermantes and when Proust shows that the Verdurin infact fits into the role of the Princesse, as if the title were no more than play acting, no more than a template that can mould anyone to fit its grooves. The dazzling original Princesse is forgotten and in a sense identified and merged with Madame Verdurin. This forgetfulness of people and slow but inexorable change in the history of those being forgotten wipes out the whole social structure that Proust had built up in the course of six volumes.
The destruction of all that was created strangely parallels the Indian conception of sacrifice. The whole of creation has its inception in the sacrifice of Purusha. His limbs are apportioned to form all that is. The whole of creation, life and all its concomitant occurrences are a part of this sacrifice and in the end when the ritual ends all this is wiped out and nothing is left behind. Ritual consumes itself and leaves behind only an indefinable essence, an 'uchchista', something that remains behind when all is gone. When a Hindu ritual is performed, the ceremony generally involves selecting a suitable place, purifying the location and lighting a sacred fire. There are precise rules for all this. The ritual finally ends, the fire is put out and the altar is dismantled. The ground is smoothed out if it was dug. All ritual accoutrements are removed and the place is swept. What remains behind is a clearing in the forest, a few grains of rice maybe. This left over after everything is said and done, when action has consumed itself is the 'uchchista'. It is the indefinable essence left behind when the world ends. In it is the seed of a new world, of new life and action.
I often think of Proust's work as a sacrifice or a ritual. All the characters, the Baron de Charlus, Oriane, Jupien, Albertine, Duc de Guermantes, Swann, Gilberte, Robert and everyone else are creatures created by the genius of Proust to dance this macabre dance of death, of forgetting, of sacrifice and to be finally consumed in the fire of time. What remains behind after this sacrifice must be the essence of the universe. But what it is, is a question to which I scarcely have an answer.
