What Does It All Mean?
Last night at 10:10, I finished the last volume of In Search of Lost Time. I don't think that I've acquired any super powers as a result, but it is damned satisfying. The last 50 pages, wherein the narrative of the novel catches up to the process of writing the novel and both are racing to be completed before the narrator/author dies, are among the most compelling I've ever read, and that feeling is driven in part by the weight of the Time invested in the hundreds of preceding pages.
The maxim "Show, don't tell" is one that I believe is too little followed in all of the narrative arts. The multiple voice-overs in Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas, for instance, drive me up a wall--if Scorsese can't show the characters' thinking in their actions, then his narrative efforts have failed. Proust's novel is so long, and ultimately so powerful, because he shows and shows and shows, leaving readers to draw their own conclusions.
I was also struck by the unexpected similarities to that other contemporaneous mammoth of a novel, James Joyce's Ulysses. Joyce's concept of epiphanies has a great deal in common with Proust's concept of involuntary memory; Joyce's idea to structure the lives of three common people in early twentieth century Dublin on the model of characters from Homer's Odyssey, demonstrating the universal applicability of certain themes and relations, is a trans-generational take on Proust's idea of the universal truths expressed in the interactions of specific individuals; and just as Joyce had to go into exile on the European continent to write his comprehensive novel of Dublin, Proust had to go into exile in his cork-lined room to write his comprehensive novel of Parisian society.
8:24:21 AM 
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