The new sanatorium to which I withdrew was no more successful in curing me than the first one, and many years passed before I came away. During the train-journey which eventually took me back to Paris, the thought of my lack of talent for literature - a defect which I had first discovered, to I supposed, long ago on the Guermantes way, which I had again recognised, and been still more saddened by, in the course of the daily walks that I had taken with Gilberte before returning to dine very late at night at Tansonville, and which on the eve of my departure from that house I had come very near to identifying, after reading some pages of the Goncourt Journal, with the vanity the falsehood of literature - this thought, less painful perhaps but more melancholy still if I referred it not to a private infirmity of my own but to the non-existence of the ideal in which I had believed, this thought, which for a very long time had not entered my mind, struck me afresh and wish a force more painful than ever before. The train had stopped, I remember, in open country. The sun shone, flooding one half of each of their trunks with light, upon a line of trees which followed the course of the railway. "Trees," I thought, "you no longer have anything to say to me. My heart has grown cold and no longer hears you. I am in the midst of nature. Well, it is with indifference, with boredom that my eyes register the line which separates the luminous from the shadowy side of your trunks. If ever I thought of myself as a poet, I know now that I am not one. Perhaps in the new, the so desiccated part of my life which is about to begin, human beings may yet inspire in me what nature can no longer say. But the years in which I might have been able to sing her praise will never return."
Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 885-886
Proust reflecting, once again, on the fact that he clearly won't be a writer, and the chilling realization, at least to him, of "my lack of talent for literature." It's funny to read now because, well, it's Proust after all, and you'd have to be remarkably culturally uneducated if not illiterate (essentially, a Roy Moore voter) to not grasp the power of Remembrance of Things Past and how Proust changed the world. Even if we're giving Proust some credit for being self-deprecating (or maybe ironic), we also have to keep in mind that the words wouldn't have seemed so absurd when he wrote them a century ago. As we've been discussing for two years it's difficult, if not impossible, to separate Marcel Proust the writer from Marcel the protagonist, so when MTP opines sadly on his "lack of talent for literature" we immediately go to MPTW. Not only were those words written a century ago, but, even though I've gone out of my way to avoid doing a lot of side Proust research at this stage of the process, I also know (again, the mysteries of cultural diffusion) that people, including publishers, at best didn't know what to make of his writing and at worst were dismissive of it. When I tried to write twenty years ago (and, to be fair, it was bad) the initial indifference of agents and magazines (and friends and family) shut me down right away, and I've always regretted my lack of courage. The rejection stung, and I certainly wasn't as invested in the process (it was a side project to my life as a teacher) as Proust, so I believe him when he speaks of his fears that he'll not be a writer. I would argue that the point is even more severe, however, because if he can't write then it reflects on his entire life. As Proust writes, sadly: "Trees," I thought, "you no longer have anything to say to me. My heart has grown cold and no longer hears you. I am in the midst of nature. Well, it is with indifference, with boredom that my eyes register the line which separates the luminous from the shadowy side of your trunks. If ever I thought of myself as a poet, I know now that I am not one. Perhaps in the new, the so desiccated part of my life which is about to begin, human beings may yet inspire in me what nature can no longer say. But the years in which I might have been able to sing her praise will never return."If he can't write, then all of his observations about life, and all of his interaction with life, are pointless, and what does it say about the self he has constructed?
This passage is also another reminder of the death sentence that Proust lived under for years. "The new sanatorium to which I withdrew was no more successful in curing me than the first one, and many years passed before I came away." This had to make the pain associated with Proust's doubts about writing all the more intense, because he had to think of the years (out of what he had to know were a finite and dwindling number) that he had "wasted" on a craft for which he had no talent and/or that he had a limited amount of time to "fix" his problems and pursue his dream.
No comments:
Post a Comment