The childhood in Combray knows many rituals, and going to Saturday Mass is one of them. Time becomes a principle of free associations that do not refer only to the Narrator’s subjective time. The whole work is conceived according to that complex structure of metamorphic overlap and transition from one state to another, hence there are several times in Proust: Time understood not only as a memory, but as a complex phenomenon dissected and objectified in all its manifestations. Hence we can consider Proust’s conception of the body that remembers, as opposed to the mind, which sets the past and the present according to the principle of metaphor or metamorphosis, that is, as a combination of two opposing points in time and as a transition of one matter into another. Although in his writing Proust is reminiscent of a phenomenologist trying to institute the primordial contact with the world and with the other, his Time is quite different from that of philosophers, because it is primarily fictionalized. For almost a century, Marcel Proust’s novel has provoked philosophical debates that tried to explain it according to one of the already known conceptions of Time: from French phenomenology to German idealism, from Bergson and Schopenhauer as contemporaries of Proust to Hegel and Husserl (Henry, 1981, 2000), and more recently Merleau-Ponty (Merleau-Ponty, 1945, 1961, 1964 Simon, 2000).
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