![]() ![]() The episode, which had been imitated by Virgil, inspired Dante’s Inferno. Both authors were fascinated with the passage in book eleven of Homer’s Odyssey in which Odysseus visits the Underworld. It causes a rush of involuntary memory and resurrects the past that the narrator had thought was “permanently dead.” The resurrection of the dead is another theme shared by Proust and Joyce, which typifies the interplay between the narrative present and the always resurgent past of their characters. The madeleine reminds him of the ones he used to eat at his aunt’s house in Combray, the country town where he once spent his summers. The first volume of Remembrance of Things Past purports to relate the narrator’s memories of his childhood as they were brought to life for him by the taste of a madeleine (a tiny sponge cake) dipped in tea. He explains that only the power of memory can help him to reconstruct his personality, and goes on to develop a theory of two types of memory, the voluntary memory that we use in everyday life and a more powerful, involuntary memory that functions unexpectedly, triggered by a sound, smell, or taste. Proust’s narrator begins his story entirely abstracted from spatial and temporal co-ordinates (compare Joyce, who used a 1904 street directory in order to locate each event in a geographically accurate place in Dublin). Proust then presents a kaleidoscopic vision of the many bedrooms where his narrator will sleep during the course of the novel, thus plunging the reader into the novel’s fictional world and demonstrating the instability of time and space. In its opening pages, the first-person narrator recalls a time when he “used to go to bed early.” At that time, he writes, he would often wake up unsure where he was, what year it was, and even who he was. Although much of Remembrance of Things Past proceeds chronologically, the novel is framed by moments of radical temporal instability. Where Joyce reveled in short sentence fragments juxtaposed without grammatical subordination (parataxis), Proust wrote long, supple, perfectly grammatical sentences, full of dependent clauses (hypotaxis). ![]() ![]() Unlike Ulysses, which takes place on a single day, and in which each episode is assigned a time of day, Proust’s novel spans about fifty years in the life of its protagonist, who bears a striking resemblance to Proust himself (as Stephen Dedalus does to Joyce). The two novels, though sharing a conception of time, use radically different methods for representing it. Joyce claimed not to have read Proust’s work before writing Ulysses, but he had met him, was aware of his methods, and even attended his funeral in 1922, the year Ulysses was published. Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (1913-1927), also known by a more literal translation of its French title, In Search of Lost Time, is the only modernist novel that has a fair claim to being as important in the history of the genre as James Joyce’s Ulysses. ![]()
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