My Years With Proust - Day 733

Other errors, though of a more serious kind, I might continue to commit, placing features, for instance, as we all do, upon the fact of a woman seen in the street, when instead of nose, cheeks and chins there ought to be merely an empty space with nothing more upon it than a flickering reflection of our desires.  But at least, even if I had not the leisure to prepare - and here was a much more important matter - the hundred different masks which ought properly to be attached to a single face, if only because of the different eyes which look at it and the different meanings which they read into its features, not to mention, for the same eyes, the different emotions of hope and fear or on the contrary love and habit which for thirty years can conceal the changes brought about by age, and even if I did not attempt - though my love-affair with Albertine was sufficient proof to me that any other kind of representation must be artificial and untruthful - to represent some of my characters as existing not outside but within ourselves, where their slightest action can bring fatal disturbances in its train, and to vary also the light of the moral sky which illumines them in accordance with the variations in pressure in our own sensibility (for an object which was so small beneath the clear sky of our certainty can be suddenly magnified many times over on the appearance of a tiny cloud of danger) - if, in my attempt to transcribe a universe which had to be totally redrawn, I could not convey these changes and many others, the needfulness of which, if one is to depict reality, has been made manifest in the course of my narrative, at least I should not fail to portray man, in this universe as endowed with the length not of his body but of his years and as obliged - a task more and more enormous and in the end too great for his strength - to drag them with him wherever he goes.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 1103-1104

There is a reason why someone can make reference to Proustian detail and an educated person will nod knowingly (and not simply that academic nod we learn in graduate school where you nod in a subtle but convincing fashion even though you have no idea what they're talking about).  Even if Proust was not able to prepare "the hundred different masks which ought properly to be attached to a single face" he did strive to dig deeper with his characters.  Obviously, this is a tremendous, and necessary, challenge for any writer, because when you're writing there are characters in your work who are clearly just plot points.  Granted, Dr. Watson was more than simply a plot point in the Sherlock Holmes stories, but in the end his role was often just to just record events and to, more importantly, ask Holmes how he figured things out.  Now, the beauty of the Sherlock Holmes stories is that Watson does have a backstory and he's not simply that guy who asked his brilliant friend to explain it once more again and a bit more slowly.  Now, the irony of this, ans this is a point I've made several times, is that I still think Albertine, Marcel's greatest foil, remains maddeningly out of focus in the novel.  Maybe if we understood her personal motives better we'd find her less interesting, and, knowing human nature, Marcel would have found her less interesting.