When I was little, I read a classic novel. Events unfolded consistently in time as a chain of blocks, the narrative built up facts, intrigues and adventures. The main character became with every page more courageous and courageous.
Certainly number 1 was Walter Scott's Ivanhoe novel. I read it many times, more than two dozen. But the further drowning repeated in medieval chivalry, the stronger the question arose: what next?
Romantic hero overcame all adversity, defeated enemies, won the heart of a beautiful woman, and then what? They settled in the castle, so it was necessary to manage the surrounding lands. And maybe a craft and trade town?
In the Middle Ages, there was weak medicine. Could the beloved of the three-time romantic hero be able to give birth to children or died like the majority during childbirth?
Ivanhoe became a knight in the service of the king. At that time there were endless wars. Did the brave knight participate in them? Is it still alive? Or maybe the city residents drove him and his family for excessive extortion?
See how my brain at a young age produced a new reality in the space of understanding. And how many were there! And which one was really real?
The whole protagonist of Proust’s novel, he himself, lies sick on the bed and recalls his life with the help of the production of these sets of realities. There are no exploits in the real world, castles do not burn, nobody needs to save anyone except himself.
The whole novel is pitiful. That Marcel goes for a walk with the family through the main gate, then through the gate in the backyard. He talks about throwing Swan, catching up, fleeing Odette, then he plays with Gilberta on the Champs Elysees.
Then he goes to Balbec, invented by Proust from beginning to end. After all, in fact, this city is called Baalbek. Marcel walks through the balls, where he listens to the endless white noise of various audiences.
Well, what is he a hero? In real life, no. But in the space of understanding, Marseille creates a new world and shows the architecture of human inner life. After all, each of us does not live in the physical world at all, but in our own space between the ears.
In the first scene of the novel, the process of regaining consciousness after waking up. During sleep, a person loses the connection of times, surrounding objects disappear, consciousness produces many spaces, each with its own time, each with its own gravity. In their fields, even the same objects change, flatten, increase, decrease, increase, catching perception.
An infinite set of times and an infinite set of Proust spaces killed a classic novel.
At first, Marcel could not find a publisher for a novel. Failures went one after another. The editors, who were accustomed to publish texts with a single storyline, connected by a single temporal sequence unfolding in a flat two-dimensional space, could not understand in any way what Proust’s narration is about.
After some time, a copy of the novel came to the lover and connoisseur of the arts. He saw these worlds, exciting the mind of man and gave a recommendation for publication. In a short time after publication, the public appreciated the novel. On December 10, 1919, Proust received the Goncourt Prize for the part of the novel titled “Under the Shade of Girls in Blossom”.
Many authors have tried since then to write a psychological novel, but the first was Marcel Proust.
Somehow Proust compared the writing of a novel with the construction of a cathedral. A lot of storylines, starting in the first part, go through hundreds of pages, images, experiences are formed into finished structures in the last part. Yes it is. But that is not all.
The fact is that, as is evident from the text, a person does not live only in one of the worlds created by him. Their infinite number and they do not exist in the sequence, and simultaneously. There is a collapse between them all, each of them is trying to capture and keep a person entirely. But the irony of fate lies in the fact that a person falls out as soon as one of the worlds has mastered it completely.
How to describe this phenomenon of human life, how to show a multitude of worlds with different, different-speed times? Through romance like a cathedral? And maybe through the novel as a lot of their own lives?