The Writing Life by David Malouf

Author:David Malouf
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia
Published: 2014-08-15T04:00:00+00:00

This final destruction of the world he knew, first the accuracy of his view of it, then the place itself, is where the narrator begins. His world is not resurrected; it is remade by a backward process and rediscovered at the point of the narrator’s primal innocence and ignorance, so that he can once again describe it wrongly and make all its places famous in a different sense from the one Gilberte intended – famous because he creates them in all their details as they never were. The absolute destruction of Méséglise and all else, which seems so final and tragic as we are led towards it in the book, has already taken place before the writer creates it for us, and is the basis of its coming into its real existence. That is the demonstration of the power of memory but even more of the creative power of the word.

So too, if we take up another of the book’s lines of development, the narrator’s disillusionment – with the Guermantes and all they stand for, with love, with the whole innocent world of beginnings – that too has been accomplished before he enters into these things, in the work itself, with all the fullness and freshness of the enraptured child.

Innocence, Paradise, can be re-entered, but the process will lead again and again to inevitable expulsion.

It is worth stressing this double movement, forward and back, because it is easy to read A la Recherche only in terms of decline, as the destruction of innocence, the stripping of illusions, as a movement out of dreams into reality. That is certainly the traditional shape of the ‘Bildungsroman’.

But Proust reverses the process. It is not in the end his acceptance of ‘reality’ that saves the narrator and justifies the long telling, but the power of those dreams themselves, the magic of naming, the super-reality of language itself, which can, in another form, restore and remake reality and in doing so proclaim the primacy of the act of memory and of mind.

This is an anti-realistic novel. Its end is always a new beginning. Its process is cyclic and its ultimate reality, as it exists both for writer and reader, is in the act of reading, of writing:

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