Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #193264 in Books
• Published on: 1969-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 126 pages

Synopsis
Samuel Beckett's celebrated early study of Marcel proust, whose theories of time were to play a large part in his own work, was written in 1931. It is a brilliant work of critical insight that also tells us much about its author's own thinking and preoccupations. In its own right it is a masterpiece of literary and philosophical creative writing. This edition was published in 1999 - ten years after the writer's death. The volume also contains the equally celebrated dialogues with the art critic Georges Duthuit - written to record their different points of view after the discussions took place. Beckett always let Duthuit win, but his very unusual and often opposite point of view on the nature and purpose of art is all the more forceful and memorable on that account.

From the Back Cover
Samuel Beckett's celebrated study of Marcel Proust, whose theories of time were to play a large part in his own work, was written in 1931, a brilliant work of critical insight that also tells us much about its author's own thinking and preoccupations. In its own right it is a masterpiece of literary and philosophical creative writing. This new edition is published ten years after the writer's death.

The Volume also contains the equally celebrated dialogues with the art critic Georges Duthuit, written to record their different points of view after the discussions took place. Beckett always lets Duthuit win, but his very unusual and often opposite point of view on the nature and purpose of art is all the more forceful and memorable on that account.

Customer Reviews

Beckett prefigured by Proust
'Proust is long' wrote Anatole France 'and life is short'. How many have felt the same way when faced with the 12 volumed one million word novel Remembrance of Things Past? Those involved, convoluted sentences, sometimes a paragraph, sometimes a page long; the steady piling up of metaphore on metaphore; the deep analytical dives into the subconscious, soon exasperate the average reader expecting a Forsyte Saga of French high society.

Yet the aspects of the novel which initially repel are seen later to constitute an integral part of its great originality and power. We have to slow down to Proust's pace and learn to follow his tortuous excursions into the undergrowth of psychology on what is still literature's most mind-altering journey.

Beckett's criticism, Proust first appeared in 1931 when he was 25. It isn't a balanced introduction like Edmund Wilson's in Axel's Castle or the essay by Martin Turnell in The Novel in France, but a concentrated inspection of the philosophical ideas which support Proust's massive structure: the deformation of personality by time, the smothering yet protective nature of habit, and the distortion of the past by our conscious attempts at remembrance.

Proust's dark landscape is lit only by flashes of involuntary memory, 'accidental and fugitive salvations in the midst of life'. These vivid recollections cannot be summoned, they are spontaneous evocations triggered by a simple event which has a correspondence in our past.

Jealousy, love and the impossibility of ever possessing, or even communicating with another are also important motifs in Proust's work. 'Surely in the whole of literature, there is no study of that desert of loneliness and recrimination that men call love posed and developed with such diabolical unscrupulousness' writes Beckett.

And he illuminates his own later novels - Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnameable when he goes on to say 'Art is the apotheosis of solitude,. There is no communication because there are no vehicles for communication.'

He sees in Proust an implaccable amoralist. 'There is no right and wrong in Proust, nor in his world'. True enough as far as it goes, but the discrepancy between the lyrical heterosexual love scenes in the earlier volumes and the grotesque catalogue of depravity which describes the homosexual world of the Cities of the Plain might be thought to imply a condemnation: a masochistic self-flagellation on the author's part.

The critique tells us as much about Beckett as it does about Proust and is doubly valuable for that reason. Its elegance and dry sarcasm prefigure the wit and flinty hardness of his late style. The nihilism of his subject obviously meets with his approval and his own development begins where Poust's leaves off. With Beckett the process of thinking itself becomes the subject of the novel. The bed-bound Malone scribbling in his exercise book is an ironic reflection of the reclusive Proust. It's the last logical twist in the contracting spiral of the modern novel.

A masterful study of Proust's "In Search of Lost Time"
Samuel Beckett's text on Marcel Proust's work was published in 1931, when Beckett was 25 years old. Even though it was written before Beckett had reached his "mature" phase, this is a brilliant piece of criticism. Beckett's close reading (see, for example, his detailed list of the eleven points of departure for Proust's involuntary memory) is supplemented by deep analysis - not "cheap flashy philosophical jargon". Though focused on his discussion of Proust, Beckett also shares with us numerous aphorisms of wider import (e.g. "Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit.").

Also included in this volume are the famous three dialogues between Beckett and Georges Duthuit (1949). In them, Beckett states his opinion on artistic creation: "The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express". Duthuit's conception of art seems to be much more traditional, and the dialogues sometimes (supposedly) become heated.

A word of advice: it makes much more sense instead of buying this edition to buy Volume IV (Poems, Short Fiction, Criticism) of the Grove Centenary Edition of Samuel Beckett's works, since both texts ("Marcel Proust" & "Three Dialogues") are contained therein.

a different view on Proust
"The Proustian equation is never easy." This is the beginning of the essay about Proust. Beckett is locking for the being in his roman. He started with the time. The people are captured in the time. It had an effect on us. This is the mean aspect in his book. The recollection of the past is the centre of his memory. It is separated into two parts, the conscious and unconscious part. The second part is the unconscious recollection. It reminds us of the past witch is gone and the recollection of the people we meat. This includes his remembrance of Odett, Swann, his love to Albertine and Gilberte and the remembrance of his childhood in Combray. These are the best parts of the search for lost time. Beckett follows his analyse in a way that Descartes takes. It is his discours de la methode. He embodies the memory and habit. During his second visit to Balbec the author remembers his dead grandma. This reflection comes as he lace up his shoes. It is a melancholic memory witch stays for a while. The recollection stays through the whole story. It changes between reality and recollection. In the end everything fades. The search for lost time is a series of defeats. The death is the only escape out of time.