Proust!

I find that knowing something about the writer's background is helpful for me in understanding their work. I should have been a historian, I tend towards categorizing writers not by personality but historical epoch. One thing wholly lacking in prison is information. The federal Bureau of Prisons is quite terrified of the internet, so no Google. This lack of information aids in infantilizing prisoners. This is part of a series of writers that I did look up when I got internet access. Some will be about the writer, and others may feature the writer. I went to YouTube for my main source, but others will also include some other material relating to the book or author discussed. One thing I did not have when younger was access to information about how writers wrote. I think that kept me from understanding the actual work, which, in turn, led me away from writing.

Proust is not a writer I thought I would either enjoy or learn anything from. Both prejudices demonstrate my foolishness.  

 How to read Proust:

Time Interpolated - Public Books

But the cathedral is not actually the comparison that wins out in Time Regained, when the narrator envisions his future at a white wooden desk: “Pinning here and there an extra page, I should construct [or baste, bâtir] my book, I dare not say ambitiously like a cathedral, but quite simply like a dress.” Not like a cathedral, but like a dress. Not like stone, but like fabric. Not building, but basting. Not lasting, but provisional. Not ambitious, but simple. Not medieval, after all, but contemporary. Not fixed, but expansive—which perhaps applies to cathedrals, too. There is something more than a veneer of false humility to Proust’s sudden rejection of the cathedral in favor of the garment: Pinning and basting evokes text at its most textile. The word text comes, we know, from the Latin verb texere, to weave. The implication is that like cloth, the text can be materially manipulated in certain textile ways: unfurled, rewoven, thickened, patched, and stitched.

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Etymologically, interpolation means “to place among” (from the Latin prefix inter + verb polire). Like the word text, it too stems from the world of textiles. In its earliest usage, it described the process of fulling, in which fabric is thickened and refined. Over time, the Latin verb interpolare, from which our noun derives, came to refer to patching cloth and, more infamously, texts. Interpolators insert later material into a preexisting work. Since antiquity, philologists have decried the harmful effect of interpolation on textual authority and purity, marking later insertions as spurious and excising them whenever possible. Proust knew about this negative technical connotation. In The Captive, he writes of learning of Swann’s death as an experience akin to encountering a distracting interpolation: “It was the same death whose striking and specific strangeness had recurred to me one evening when, as I ran my eye over the newspaper, my attention was suddenly arrested by the announcement of it, as though traced in mysterious lines interpolated there out of place [inopportunément].” Scott Moncrieff’s tepid “out of place” doesn’t quite capture the negativity of the French adverb: Proust is clear that the lines whose mystery finds an echo in the death announcement are interpolated unfortunately or at the wrong time. He intimates that interpolation is intrusive and unsettling in a way that has to do not only with textual authenticity but also with time. Although he knew about interpolation’s bad reputation in manuscript contexts, Proust exploits its latent temporal quality. His writing process, with all its pins, paste, and “paperies,” craftily reproduces the centrality of interpolation to his conception of time.

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Cryptic and illegible, the impossible inner book is a three-dimensional, reeflike Voynich manuscript. Its “unknown symbols” are the impressions made by the ideas that arise through living, not through thinking. But for all its obscurity and its unplanned formation through sensory experience, this manuscript is of singular importance: In it, Proust locates the source of all creativity, and indeed of all literature. To read it is to participate in lawless and independent creation. I translate: “The book with its figured letters, not traced by us, is our only book.” “Figured letters” is a confusing phrase in any context other than that of medieval manuscripts, where illuminated and inhabited initials made by long-ago artists beckon. The self is not just any book: It is a unique manuscript requiring decryption and translation.

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Proust makes interpolation into an object of longing but also warns that it can be a mechanism of distortion. In The Fugitive, taking stock of his period of grief after the death of his lover Albertine, the narrator speaks of his continued wish “to repair lost time,” suggesting that time is susceptible to patching, if only he could find a way to do it. In the same breath, he says that his memory resembles the moth-eaten manuscript that Françoise will later repair. It is punctuated by the “empty space” of oblivion, which, “by its fragmentary, irregular interpolation in my memory—like a thick fog at sea that obliterates all the landmarks—confused, dislocated my sense of distances in time, contracted in one place, extended in another, and made me suppose myself now farther away from things, now far closer to them than I really was.” Interpolation here figures not the patches of involuntary memory, but the intrusive holes of lost time. It is a distorting fog, temps in the sense of weather. Forgetting causes uncertainty about the scale of time. Even when it is composed of absences or gaps, interpolation retains the generative possibilities of dislocation for bringing the past back whose power the narrator will realize only years later, crossing a courtyard on the way to a party.

And how he can change your life:

 sch 6/30