Starting with Freud, the assertion of an unconscious realm, which can grant, in spite of our awareness, the unknown reasons for our acting "this" or "that" way, made morals relative: one cannot be considered good or bad for doing something "blindly", that is, led by unconscious reasons. The freedom to choose between courses of action, in this context, is out of the picture, and with it, the responsibility of the agent.
As everyone knows, Einstein, with the theory of relativity, discovered that time and space, rather than absolute realities, are also relative, therefore changeable according to the context they are being considered.
As for Marx, he destroyed the absolute character attributed to religion, by electing "production" as first principle, that is, by explaining the whole of the human social and creative reality, through mundane, financial values.
These three men were Jewish, and deeply perceptive of relativity.
In the same way, Marcel Proust's masterpiece has been considered, in literature, the equivalent of the theory of relativity. It has been pointed on and again, how Proust describes the ravages of time on anything we once took to be immutable, like social prestige, physical appearance, love itself, and, what is more disturbing, what we take to be our own self. Throughout our life, we are in the constant process of becoming different selves, to the point of not even recognizing, or justifying, what we were and the way we felt in different periods of our past. We are, like Proust shows, in the constant process of metaphorically dying and being reborn into new selves, as our feelings and the circumstances around us change. What am I, or where is the real "me", if there is one, in the torrential, continuous change that I underwent, from babyhood to now?
Is there any "sameness" to identify what we were, in all these stages of life? Is there something immutable, that one can call one's real, steady, self? In a few words, is there an essence to each of us, an individual soul, really?
Because Proust starts and finishes his novel with the word "time", and because he, in fact, describes radical changes and deterioration in everything and everyone throughout the years, it has been generally taken that his main concern is to show the relativity of all that is subject to the temporal order. And, like the three other men I mentioned in connection to relativity, he brilliantly succeeded.
Proust, however, didn't stop there. Not only is the "Search" permeated with poetic insights of timeless beauty, but, at the end, Proust spells out his experience of an also timeless, incorruptible reality, through the involuntary memory of moments of his own life, brought about by physical impressions. In rediscovering, thus, what was this "real" life, he asserts himself as the timeless narrator to write it, that is, the one whose only nourishment is the essence of things.
This narrator is, therefore, the only adequate one to bring to the light of intelligence, the life he really lived, and wasn't really aware of, in the impossibility of recovering it by intellectual, voluntary memory. It remains hidden to most of us, who are reluctant to dive within ourselves, and, according to Proust, decipher "the book already written to each of us", which is the same as to say, the book that precedes us.
This timeless book, concerning the deciphering of the impressions that are brought back to us by involuntary memory, is, therefore, the wording of our "timeless" life, or, still, the essence of our life. The "timeless" narrator, corresponding to the essence of the narrator, is his individual soul.
Acknowledging relativity to its most painful effect (the law of oblivion, a by product of the passing of time), Proust emerges from the abyss of an all-encompassing finitude, and victoriously asserts essence; becomes soul. Proust's narrator is the soul of Proust.
No comments:
Post a Comment