Tuesday, December 4, 2012

The Sea Breeze No Longer Puffed Out Her Skirts

Closer by the day. Today, I finished The Captive. With that, I can say, decidedly, that what remains is no more a "project" by any standard than reading any other novel I have approached in the past year or so. With a mere seven hundred pages and two installments / novels to go, this experience of mine is decidedly in its tail end. As I approach this final stage, I find myself approaching the reading differently. While it is true that several times as of late I have thought to myself that I must "get this done with," I also no longer feel the weight attached to reading that I had before.

Perhaps this is due to missing my initial deadline, or to the ever diminishing number of pages left to read, or to my growing familiarity with the social structure of Proust's society and my growing understanding of the style Proust approaches narrative from; regardless of which, if not all, of those reasons is the cause, I am finding reading in these final days to be positively free of any kind of subtext. It is simply reading for, strictly, pleasure! At last!

In these last books, I am finding much to consider. Tonight, it is hard to quantify my findings in the last pages of The Captive. I am beginning to see Proust's narrator as a "normal person" more than ever before. His mythic luster, beginning at last to fade, is revealing a very flawed, very human writer expressing sentiments and findings from a life lived in a most peculiar way. Throughout most of the books, I have felt that the scale of artistic creation that this book entailed entitled Proust (and his narrator, being quite autobiographical) to a superhuman status. However, as I read his internal monologue relating to the failings and troubles cropping up in these final books, it is impossible to ignore his regular-ness.

I suspect with this dawning understanding of the man behind these pages, the insights once powerful will only grow more-so, and the places where I have missed the point will become much clearer. Understanding that an artist is a real human has a strange effect on my comprehension of that artist's work; at first, it seems less magical, but gradually, it becomes infinitely more layered in its meanings and implications for me.

No comments:

Post a Comment