Violent Signs
"It is only through a custom which as its origin to the insincere language or preface and dedications that a writer says 'my reader'. In reality, every reader, as he reads, is the reader of himself. The work of a writer is only a sort of optic instrument which he offers to the reader so that he may discern in that book what he probably would have not seen in himself. The recognition of himself in the book by the reader is the proof of its truth and vice versa, at least in certain measure, the difference between the two texts being often less attributable to the author than the reader. Further, a book may be too learned, too obscure for the simple reader, and thus offering him a blurred glass with which he cannot read. But other peculiarities (like inversion) might make it necessary for the reader to read in a certain way in order to read well; the author must not take offence at that but must, on the contrary, leave the reader with the greatest liberty and say to him: 'Try whether you see better with this, with that, or with another glass."
- Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vol 12, Time Regained, p265-6
If I had simply quoted that every reader is the reader of himself, without the surrounding context to allow that expression its fuller meaning I would have been doing Proust's novel a disservice. Rather than assuming that he can create a mirror to show the reader himself, Proust rather gives him a lens to see inwards. That Proust understands that a novel cannot be too rigid or unchanging in its architecture is a sign of his experience in reading literature and reflecting it within himself. The novel itself is only a novel insofar as it presents the characters with their stories, their complexities and relationships, but it is a novel that relies on the reader himself to daydream through the pages. It offers a lens for the reader to look at the text but also at his surrounding life, memories, the way he responds to the expanding nature of life and time.
The novel is a novel told in reverse, with characters who appear entire but in a single moment can expand into the distant past, those rivulets forming at the peak of their descent into the midst of everything and are lost in the habitual eddies, tides of the vaster movement. But the novel redeems literature in a way that is smoother and less brittle than the crafts that precede and follow it. This lens so similar to the lens of Benedict de Spinoza, to see the vastness of time and how identity, narrative, captures movement, stills it. The preceding volumes of the book that have titles such as The Sweet Cheat Gone and The Captive and the Fugitive, that untraceable moment between descent and being still and seeing the nature of movement as rendering time narrower or wider. The architecture of thought is the narrative thought, the thought that proceeds out of narrow and purposeful logic, whereas the thought that knows its point is nowhere, and its arrival is always is the free thought. To be trapped in a rigid time is to hold life captive, as to be flowing in non-linear time with both its lacunae and its smooth spaces is to be liberated from a sense of ends and rigid order. It is to be always adaptable, always free.
Proust's novel is not a novel of narrative or of traditional storytelling, but an evocation of new signs of love and freedom that exist in the evocation of much more qualities in the characters than would otherwise be seen, described, that creation of a place in which time can be rendered still and looking within not to know, but to understand that knowing is a process with which one needs a particular kind of lens to see beyond the self, and that the self extends further than the way it is often understood. That birth into language, relationship, culture that begins to deny us of our ability to see the magic within ourselves and no longer see our freedom as significant as entertainment, the containment of meanings that is as commonplace as it is unchanging. The cultural dilemma wherein our culture becomes our understanding of life, which is surfaces, order, and singukar expectations.
If I had simply quoted that every reader is the reader of himself, without the surrounding context to allow that expression its fuller meaning I would have been doing Proust's novel a disservice. Rather than assuming that he can create a mirror to show the reader himself, Proust rather gives him a lens to see inwards. That Proust understands that a novel cannot be too rigid or unchanging in its architecture is a sign of his experience in reading literature and reflecting it within himself. The novel itself is only a novel insofar as it presents the characters with their stories, their complexities and relationships, but it is a novel that relies on the reader himself to daydream through the pages. It offers a lens for the reader to look at the text but also at his surrounding life, memories, the way he responds to the expanding nature of life and time.
The novel is a novel told in reverse, with characters who appear entire but in a single moment can expand into the distant past, those rivulets forming at the peak of their descent into the midst of everything and are lost in the habitual eddies, tides of the vaster movement. But the novel redeems literature in a way that is smoother and less brittle than the crafts that precede and follow it. This lens so similar to the lens of Benedict de Spinoza, to see the vastness of time and how identity, narrative, captures movement, stills it. The preceding volumes of the book that have titles such as The Sweet Cheat Gone and The Captive and the Fugitive, that untraceable moment between descent and being still and seeing the nature of movement as rendering time narrower or wider. The architecture of thought is the narrative thought, the thought that proceeds out of narrow and purposeful logic, whereas the thought that knows its point is nowhere, and its arrival is always is the free thought. To be trapped in a rigid time is to hold life captive, as to be flowing in non-linear time with both its lacunae and its smooth spaces is to be liberated from a sense of ends and rigid order. It is to be always adaptable, always free.
Proust's novel is not a novel of narrative or of traditional storytelling, but an evocation of new signs of love and freedom that exist in the evocation of much more qualities in the characters than would otherwise be seen, described, that creation of a place in which time can be rendered still and looking within not to know, but to understand that knowing is a process with which one needs a particular kind of lens to see beyond the self, and that the self extends further than the way it is often understood. That birth into language, relationship, culture that begins to deny us of our ability to see the magic within ourselves and no longer see our freedom as significant as entertainment, the containment of meanings that is as commonplace as it is unchanging. The cultural dilemma wherein our culture becomes our understanding of life, which is surfaces, order, and singukar expectations.
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