Throughout my life I’ve often been told that I’m wasting time. “It’s about time you get a job, you can’t just keep recreating the JFK assassination with legos and listing it as ‘analysis’ on your resume.” “Get off the Howard Hughes Wikipedia page and stop hushedly telling your classmates about him, Computer class is almost over.” Or even, “It doesn’t count as a novel if it’s written on the wall in crayon OR feces but due to budget cuts your request for release has been expedited and granted.” To those prefects of Protestant chronology I smugly step aside and gesture to a collection of Mylar-wrapped books on my shelf that are very clearly marked “Property of the City of Albuquerque Public Library” and I tap the name Marcel Proust.

I wish I could go back to my (slightly) younger self who was struggling through Sodom and Gomorrah, the volume preceding this one in In Search of Lost Time, and share the feelings that The Prisoner has given me. Perhaps he’d start to see the perspective lines sketched out underneath the paint that are tying this entire anthology together and stringing up the whole system. I was in Hell.

But I think that’s where you need to be as you meander through the world that Proust creates. I recently read an essay by Guy Davenport (Symbol of the Archaic in his collection Geography of the Imagination) that offers up Proust’s great autofiction as one of several pivotal examples in the early 20th century of retellings of the Orpheus myth. He claims that myth defines the direction of modern literature. So perhaps my feeling that reading several hundred pages at a time of mind-numbing Parisian salon conversations about absolutely nothing is a sort of Hell is apt. Perhaps Proust lays out this landscape of Hell similarly to how Dante would in order to draw us into the scene where he places his Eurydice. I think that it's within The Prisoner that Proust places her. For Proust she is the role of art. She is an understanding that art gives of a world outside of our own. She comes to the narrator of this book, as she so often does, like a Gnostic flash of lightning in a cornfield.

She comes to in the form of music, perhaps as she came to Orpheus himself. Along with the revelatory piece that opens his eyes in the novel, Proust mentions the fugues of Bach by name in this book (Sidenote: Doug Hofstader did a better job talking about math and fugue than I ever will in Gödel, Escher, Bach so go read that if any of this seems interesting). He insists that slight variations on a theme are what let the artist expose themselves through a work and come alive for the viewer. He explicitly mentions the ability of music to do that since it shares the intangible and operates on the same level as the mind whereas literature and the written word have to suffer the humiliation of translation into verbal thoughts. Now that Proust has written this book, though, I get the luxury of disagreeing with this bleak depiction of the limits of literature. His ideas float around the room like abstract geometrical dreams in an opium den. They evade perfect analysis but above all they repeat themselves in slight variations until a haunting face peers out at you from a seat on the train. He has made himself immortal just as Vinteuil did in his sonata.

Perhaps it isn't surprising that visual art did not want to be left out of the 20th century renaissance of the Orpheus myth either. I was lucky enough this past year to see the Guggenheim’s Harmony and Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910-1930 exhibit. How fitting for our resident Orphic Parisian, Marcel Proust (1871-1922) who wrote In Search of Lost Time between 1913 and 1927 (posthumous). And like his contemporaries Duchamp and Delaunay and Chagall and so many others, there is no better description of what Proust sought to create and evoke than pure perfect abstraction. Time and again he discusses the true nature of the world towards which only something like art is able to briefly gesture. And that’s what he’s trying to do with his own art as well. He wants to unlock the instrument within himself and within us that can only be given voice in the repetitive fugue of habit. Where notes can only sound out if they have a chorus of static ululation behind them to mark the difference between the signal and the noise. We must be numbed by the salon in order for the harmonic necromancy of a sonata to take effect.

Those beautiful moments, for Proust (and hell for me too), are the dissonant notes that ring out and give life beauty without pretending that something simple and often infantilizing like meaning has to come along for the ride. Both Proust and Kant feel that the great works of our species point to a region of noumenal Platonic forms. But for Proust there is no grandiose Idealist explanation of that place beyond which we can bring ourselves. For Proust there’s only the Materialist grammar of the notes on a piano, the items in a house, the people in a salon, or the words in a book. There is only the mind exposing Infinity to another mind through entrancing repetition and then world-shattering harmonic changes, barely audible above the crackling speaker.

If we are prisoner to our lovers or our habits or to our very ability to love, then it seems that Proust thinks our only chance of clemency comes in art’s ability to chip away at the cell wall and show us that outside the Sun is still shining.

The captive

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