What’s James Dunnigan Reading?

I did it because I’m always up for a challenge and because my PhD also happens to be in modernist literature, so I’d be taking care of two orders of business and one of pleasure all at once. I’m now at the beginning of the final volume and it’s been a wild ride.

It’s hard to add anything to what brilliant people have already observed about Proust and hard not to repeat clichés, but I have a few impressions. One is that the sheer length of the novel is absolutely necessary. Even the parts that feel like a slog are there for a reason: to distract you from the magic at work in the background. It is designed so that you can recall patterns, details, repetitions, across distances not of 200 but of 2000 pages. The huge distances in the novel’s fictional space and time emulate the vastness of the real space and time. When you recall this or that detail across so many pages, it almost feels like you’re remembering something from your own distant past. In other words, he doesn’t just tell you that involuntary memory episode with the madeleine cake in Swann’s Way. He actually gives you the experience of involuntary memory, over and over. The novel is your madeleine and teacup. It makes a work of art out of your mind in the act of piecing its huge patterns together.

Proust is also giving me new ideas about how to divide a piece. The action of the novel progresses almost by virtue of digression, and that makes you think (rethink) the internal divisions a novel can have, like: what is a chapter? What is a paragraph? What is a sentence? You can never think too much about those basic building blocks, really. The rhythm with which you tell something is even more important than what you tell: it creates what you tell. The whole composition of “Nat in New York” was a story of finding the right rhythm—as is that of every project I’ve got going now.