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In order for the French novelist Marcel Proust to seriously begin writing his famous novel In Search of Lost Time he had to create an imaginary deadline.1 So writes Christine M. Cano an associate professor of French and comparative literature at Case Western Reserve University. Proust found this seriousness, created this sense of urgency, Cano argues, by coming to see and understand his writing in the context of a race against and a defiance of time. In this way he confronted the temporality of his life, his writing, his publishing and whatever he read by producing this 3200 page novel, a novel which resists simplification and cursory analysis. In this confrontation with time Proust found the sense of urgency that he needed; he found an intensity and a build-up of meaning in relation to what he was writing. It was an urgency which lasted until the end of his life in 1922.
Proust gave a sense of fixity to the facticity of his life by the process of writing. His writing provided a context for his many selves and the precariousness he felt in living. This precariousness of life and its endless processes of change and duration was dealt with by means of the written word, Proust’s novel. Writing helped him to deal with the strong sense he had of his existence as an entity which was soon to run out. By slowly coming to perceive his life in terms of its transformation into a work of art, by recapturing it, his past moment by moment, he aimed to bring the myriad of those moments in that past life under a microscope.
He felt that he was halting time and wrestling it from the flux of change and duration. By fixing the events of his life forever in a semblance of eternity, sub specie aeternitatis, much like the work of a photographer, he created what for some readers was a romantic reminiscence in a plotless labyrinth, in a vast ediface of a life and autobiography. For other readers, Proust’s literary creation felt like a conspiracy against them, a conspiracy of words with their “clumsy centipedalian crawling of interminable sentences.”2
I, too, had had a sense of urgency from my childhood. I always seemed to be in a rush as my father pointed out to me frequently especially at dinner-time when I was gobbling-up yet another evening meal. By my mid-thirties this sense of urgency was supplemented by a death-wish, due mainly to the affects of bipolar disorder. This death-wish was especially strong just before going to bed. The effect of this combination, death-wish and sense of urgency, was to create in my mind by the early 1980s at about the age of 40, these same imaginary deadlines, this race against time, this sense of the precariousness of my present state and so propel me into thinking that these words, the ones I had written that day or any day--might just be my last. This death wish was delimited when, in 2001, I went on a new mood stabilizer in combination with an anti-depressant medication. At about this time a new energy was unleashed into my literary life, an energy that was arguably a bi-product of this new medication.
Proust warmed-up to write his great opus of some 3200 pages by nineteen years(1890-1909 circa) of writing reviews, fiction and doing translations. Having been thus prepared, he worked on his seven volume work of novelistic-nostalgia, a work acknowledged by some as the greatest piece of fiction by the greatest novelist of the 20th century. The work took him from 1909 to his death in 1922. I, too, warmed-up to the writing of my autobiography with at least nineteen years of literary plodding(1983-2002 circa). By the literary recreation of my life, by the transformation of the transformation that had been my life, by the immersion of myself in memories of what was lost and what was gained in the process of living my life over more than six decades, I slowly came to see my lifetime as the only adequate unit in which to express in writing my succession of selves. I slowly acquired an irresistible autobiographical impulse; it took possession of me by degrees throughout the 1980s and 1990s and, by 2002, this impulse showed no sign of diminishing. Seven years later in 2009 at the age of 65 it had captured my life. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 4 January 2009 with thanks to 1Christine Cano, Proust’s Deadline, University of Illinios Press, 2006 and 2Roger Shattuck, Marcel Proust: Chapter 1, Penguin.
I can hear them say: life is too short
and Price is too long. And who can
blame them? Millions of words and
more pages than I would even want
to try and count any more. There are
two kinds of writer-poets which I try,
quite unconsciously, to combine---or
so it seems to me, thanks to Aciman’s
review of Proust in that fine journal:
The New York Review of Books....1
The swallow’s quick, agile, speedy
travel across long, tireless stretches
of the world, taking that world in in
the ways whales gulp down plankton;
with mistakes easily corrected, bad
times put to good use, judgements
which are unwise just tweaked here
and there in some implacable line of
words where the only pieces that are
thrown away are printer-problems or
are items lost in cyberspace due to a
pressing of those little wrong keys.....
and
The snail’s slow, deliberate and fussy,
cramped and burrowing self, ingesting
choice bits down some multichambered
spiral and with an appetite for a whorled,
eternally whorled, vision. This snail, too,
was my second writer-poet-persona-anima.
I took this swallow and this snail into my
bunker, announced to the world my with-
drawal and retreat, sealed myself as far as
it was possible in my study and periscopes
up proceeded to yield again and again to my
demon, to my thought and to write on every
thing that struck my fancy to the point of an
exhaustion, producing as I went, carnivorous
vines that devoured its owner and led out to all
the corners of the earth’s world-wide cyberweb.
I yielded to a dense tropical growth within me;
I had a chart and a course; there was nothing in
it—tragic or reluctant—this quasi-abdication—
this focus on a single point’s--effective force;
for my work embodied a vision of a persona
which was not the same as the one I displayed
in quotidian reality. Writing was the product
of a work in progress, a discovery-creation,
where multiple desires-motivations converged
on my actions and inactions, impeding or, yes,
stimulating their execution, lending some type
of overdetermined quality to highly descriptive
and overwhelming attribution. But, still, this
work was not some excrescence of some sort
of psychological case-history, at least not yet.2
1 Andre Aciman, “Proust’s Way?” The New York Review of Books, Vol.52, No. 19, 1 December, 2005.
2 Roger Shattuck, Marcel Proust: Chapter 1, Penguin.
Ron Price
5 January 2009