Having come across a fragment of Proust’s posthumously published essay collection prior to reading Peter Szondi’s treatment of Proust (1978), it doesn’t strike me as the case that Proust’s motive was to “escape from the sway of time itself,” as Szondi maintained (“Hope in the Past: On Walter Benjamin,” from On Textual Understanding and Other Essays 150).

In comparing their respective searches for lost time, Szondi set the intentions of Proust against those of Benjamin (one of Proust’s translators). Szondi cites the end of the third volume of Proust’s novel, in which the narrator relates a feeling of “consternation”, a “frightfully painful premonition” upon his father’s pronouncement that Marcel “does not stand outside of time but is subject to its laws” (150).  Consequently, “Proust sets off in quest of the past in order to escape from time altogether…(the) real goal is escape from the future, filled with dangers and threats, of which the ultimate one is death. In contrast, the future is precisely what Benjamin seeks in the past. (Szondi 153)

Yet it seems to me an evasiveness is being attributed here that was not there before. In Against Sainte-Beauve, said to contain the preparatory work for Proust’s autobiographical novel, another intention is inscribed, in which ‘resurrection’ of the past is effected in a living present.

…In reality, as soon as each hour of one’s life has died, it embodies itself in some material object, as do the souls of the dead in certain folk stories, and hides there. There it remains captive, captive forever, unless we should happen on the object, recognize what lies within, call it by its name, and so set it free. (from Against Sainte-Beauve, in Lapham’s Quarterly, vol XIII, number 1, p. 91-92)

The passage might be interpreted as Proust referencing hours that have fallen captive to ‘the laws of time.’ But this in itself doesn’t give the deduction that Proust’s intention was to find refuge in the past; it would be closer to describe any ‘intention’ as recovery of the lost hour by experiencing the sensation again in the present, with the final aim, according to Proust, to effect release. Here ‘release’ can be taken as an ontological freedom to be otherwise, perhaps the closest one can come to ‘changing the past’ by interpreting a past sensation differently in the present, i.e. preserving the differing contexts for each sensation. Granted, these sensations in Proust may have been more ‘reified’ than some consider advisable. How can there be transformation of that which never was? But in my view, one can’t just deny Being here and grant it there arbitrarily. On whose authority, political consensus? It’s hardly reassuring.

In Szondi and elsewhere, there is expressed a clear wish that Proust – instead of waiting for a surface resemblance to present itself, enabling him to say ‘this rusk is like that rusk’, or ‘this paving stone is like that pavement’ – made use of a more readily recognized poetic of unlikeness, e.g. the comparison of a lamppost with a drum, and so on. While the latter approach works on multiple levels having to do with a historical awareness, it wouldn’t be inaccurate, either, to observe the performative aspect of Proust’s ‘off-balance’ method rather than lament a perceived lack of a more explicit use of asymmetry in his writing.

In fact, the overlooking of this gesture in Proust toward ontological freedom, regardless of whether he takes for granted there being something rather than nothing, nonetheless is emblematic of what Proust seems to have most detested regarding the wealthy bourgeoisie of his time: the suffocating restrictions members of his society placed on each other, subjecting themselves to a kind of tyranny talked about in critical literature today as what Fascist societies do to their own masses, which is to cultivate a fragmented dependency obligating the other among each of them qua subject.

This actually should be the missing clarification in, for example, the staple observation in G. Richter, that Fascism ‘denies the masses their right, giving them instead an expression.’ Instead, we are left to the perils of associational logic as to what is meant by the first clause in this phrase. What is this ‘right of the masses’ specifically? The point here is not to define ‘right of the masses’ so much as it is to ask why, absent the work of remembering, we are only ever subjected to the ‘sign’ of anti-fascist sentiment via images of coordinated grimaces or exquisitely framed expressions of stupidity. In their effect, such timely reminders flashed to a reading public for like, a day and a half, signify nowadays a much-cheapened appropriation of concepts whose appropriation renders them incapable of transmitting significance. Speaking generally, this kind of overfamiliarity with a shorthand that speaks little does not oppose but is complicit with the ‘lying image’ commonly associated with a “Fascist semiotics” that has come to function like a ten-point list whose tell-tale signs exist to astonish than to advance critical engagement.

Szondi clearly favored Benjamin for his historicizing approach, whereas the conclusion with respect to Proust seems to have been that he confused intimately felt sensation for truth, for a sign of continued vitality. Perhaps the view of this as a problem was compounded once readers of Proust ‘recognized’ themselves, forcing the relinquishing of a ‘presence’ that never was in order to recover something less developed and more valuable. Some view this as a good thing. Next, Szondi was not inaccurate in pointing out the obvious, that Proust’s ‘happiness’ upon recovering a lost sensation served a different objective than Benjamin, who sought explanation for his present ruinous state of affairs in a past on the way to decay. The less obvious difference is that one of these approaches allows the past to become something else, or at least expresses that wish, while the other seems to obligate it, if not in an ontological sense, then in some way to confirm it in the future.

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