Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (that’s the new translation, it was known as Rememberances of Things Past for a long time) was the prototype autobiographical novel. Kerouac took many of his ideas about writing and novels from that model. In fact, Jack always envisioned The Duluoz Legend, the series of novels that traced his own life from childhood to “old age,†as a parallel to In Search of Lost Time.
Jack said in the introduction to Visions of Cody, a part of The Duluoz Legend, “My work comprises one vast book like Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, except my remembrances are written on the run inÂstead of afterwards in a sickbed.â€
In any case, I thought that this discussion of what Proust’s autobiographical novel was all about was interesting in it’s own right and when thinking about Jack.
The story is told in the first person, the protagonist is referred to several times in the course of In Search of Lost Time, though not in Swann’s Way, as “Marcel,†and the book is filled with events and characters closely resembling those of Proust’s own life, yet this novel is not autobiography. For although Proust’s own life experience is the material from which he forms his novel, this material has been altered, recombined, shaped to create a meaningful fictional artifact, a crucial alchemy – art’s tranformation of life – which is itself one of Proust’s preoccupations and a principal subject and them of the book.
The episode of the madeleine, for instance, was based on an experience of Proust’s own, but what Proust apparently dipped in his tea was a rusk of dry toast, and the memory that then returned to him was his morning visits to his grandfather… Similarly, the characters in the novel are composites, often more perfectly realized ideals or extremes, of characters in his own life: the annoying Mme. Vinteuil is based closely on a certain Mme. X of Proust’s acquaintance, but to avoid offending her by too blantantly describing her, Proust attributed her habit of incessantly painting pictures of roses to another character, Mme. de Villeparisis…
Maybe someday a publisher will be brave enough to release a compiled volume of the dozen or so novels of The Duluouz Legend just like In Search of Lost Time has always been recognized as one piece of work.
To top things off, and just because I also have this book from the library and I can, a few random entries from the new collection of Kerouac’s journals, Windblown World.
1947 [three years before his first novel, The Town and the City would be published and 10 years before On the Road]Monday, November 3
12 [midnight] Overpowered by the sadness of not knowing what there is in the world, and what I’m doing… Nothing got written.Tuesday, November 4
I had to go out and walk in the rain in N.Y. and rage around with my friends. We smashed recordings of Mozart over our heads, I and the daemonic one. We got drunk. I came out of it beautifully, remembering the simple beauty of life, and came home.Friday, November 7
2,500-words today in a few hours. This may be it – freedom. And mastery! – so long denied me in my long mournful years of work, blind powerful work… How could I praise heaven for something like this, towards which I’ve struggled so long: mastery of my art, instead of slave to it! 1500-more words at night, just like that. That’s five thousand in the past 24 hours. Not that it’s easier, it’s only more myself.
I’ve read The Town and The City, the book he was working incredibly hard on during this period, and I would have been elated too after writing some of those passages. Yeah, it’s his first novel, but somehow it is also his finest, written before a lot of the stuff and a lot of the people that would get him off track.
** bolding all mine. Italics not.
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