other, break the ties that they had just established."17 Thus, the concept of time and its unifying principle in the fictional texture of reminiscence is common to both Murasaki and Proust Perhaps this extremely subjective idea of time can be seen as a sign of an epoch of decline. Both Murasaki and Proust have portrayed a decadent society at a time when it was losing its self-confidence and its sense of permanent values. But this is about all they show in common, general traits and features which can be found in many novels of similar length. If we carry our analysis further, we shall find that Murasaki and Proust followed completely different paths.
Murasaki's concept of time was essentially poetic. In Japanese poetry, time is a part of the movement of the universe and also a link between all living beings. This link is stronger than with Proust, became for Murasaki, a Buddhist, there are no breaks in time; death is not a stop but an interruption in a life which is extended in an infinite number of reincarnations. Thus the passing of time is life itself, and this is the substance of the novel: the transience of passions, joys, sorrows, social position, and power; the brevity of youth, with love and its glory; and decay, with suffering and death. The eternal renewal brought by the wheel of time. In the Tale time is cyclical and unilinear; the novel occupies only a section of the infinite line of cosmic time.
Proust meditated on the problem or time in the novel, and brought about a total revolution. He found a process of using several planes of time. Time does not flow, it is broken into fragments which slide on top of each other. That is why it is difficult to find a chronological order in his novel. Proust found a new time relation between characters; he used the fragments into which he broke time at his will, giving them elasticity, obliging them to expand or to dwindle. He isolated time, and in this process the fictional world broke into a multiplicity of partial worlds. As R. M. Albérèes has noted, Proust's work initiates the "polyphonic, musical, stereophonic forms of novelistic enchantment. Proust explored the idea of time to limits never known before him. He himself considered Gustave Flaubert one of the forerunners in this field, and wrote that Flaubert was the first novelist who put into music the mutations of time.
Proust explained that he saw the characters of his novel as puppets in a show bathing in the immaterial colours of the years, puppets exteriorizing Time, Time that usually is not visible, which, to become visible, searches for bodies and wherever it finds them takes hold of them in order to show on them its magic lamp."18 Poetized time is one of the fundamental themes of Proust, together with that of involuntary memory.
Georges Poulet, in a very interesting study on time, from Montaigne to Sartre, Etudes sur le Temps Humain, explains the idea of time in Proust's work:
The characters in Proust never develop, so to speak. As in Gide, we don't see them progressing along a story. Anachronic, intermittent, through the multiplicity of their appearances, or of their experiences, they can well give an "impression of continuity, an illusion of unity, but their lives are but a collection of moments. Every particular experience is immediately grasped in each of the thousand sealed vases, everyone of which would be filled with a colour, with an odour, with a temperature absolutely different. In Proust, not only the moments are isolated from each other, but their isolation is eternal, so to speak. From the moment in which such fugitive experience developed in the actuality of its short particular duration, this life, infinitely preserved, in an hermetically sealed cellule of the memory, pursues there an occult and always momentaneous existence, until the day when a chance will bring up that moment to a new and fugitive actuality.19
These brief indications are enough to show the fundamental differences between Proust and Murasaki: Proust was lucidly aware of the parcelling of time, and he aimed at giving each moment such an importance that it comes out as if it were independent, a moment without precedent: "From the first line of the work of Proust a consciousness arises from the naught where it was sunk and, thus arising, founds a moment which does not depend on that that precedes it."20
Murasaki never shows this minute consciousness of the value of time. She individualizes some particular, privileged moments with a skill as subtle as Proust's, but she does not do it following a clear and established programme, nor according to a special technique. That is why her concept of time is not as rich and as round as Proust's. Time is not projected on the characters in a multiplicity of reflections in order to light a net of complex relations or of multiple destinies. As Murasaki follows a linear treatment of her characters, the idea of time does not unfold in such diverse planes. For Murasaki time is a line; for Proust time is a multiplicity of broken lines, a labyrinth, a perennial complex structure giving consistence to the present. The Tale of Genji passively follows the process of time, its action flows with the flowing of time, whereas the action of Proust's novel is a combat against the powers of time.
In the Tale time does not exist incorporated into the characters; it is an irresistible force, changeable and flowing, visible in the mutable face of beings and things. That is why the idea of time is connected with the feeling of sorrow and loss. Buddhism teaches that suffering originates in the impermanence of the world. The Tale of Genji begins: "At the Court of the Emperor (he lived it matters not when)…" It is of no avail to fix a precise moment in time, because the world of time is a delusion. Man dissolves in time.
In Proust's novel, man, instead of dissolving in time, seizes and reconstructs himself through time. Time is reality. Through Proustian time man finds himself again, picking up from memory those fragments of himself which he let fall into naught. Proust's novel begins with a moment emptied of all contenu and ends with a series of moments as different as possible from the first, since they have for contenu, as Proust says, "truly full impressions, those which are out of time. Proust has not recaptured time, but he has found a liberation from it: "A profound idea which has enclosed in it space and time is no longer subject to their tyranny and has no end."21
Georges Poulet contends that on one hand Proust's novel appears as a novel without duration; on the other hand, it embraces the duration of a life, but with a retrospective existence of a life which does not advance but is, in Proust's words, an "ulterior existence discovered among pieces which only need to be joined together." In Proust's novel, concludes Poulet, can be found not only the time of an individual experience and the intemporal traits of a particular genius, but also—in a retrospective way—all the time of French thought back to its origins. Man there reaches that total structure of himself which human existence had lost since the Middle Ages.22
In that double-headed monster of damnation and salvation, in time creative and destructive, Proust discovered himself as an artist. Through time he "understood the meaning of love, of vocation, of the joys of the spirit and the utility of pain."23
The exploration of the idea of time in the novel is not a unique Proustian preoccupation. We can say that it translates one of the most revolutionary, exciting new experiments in the Western novel In the days of Proust, Thomas Mann showed very clear ideas about this problem in the Magic Mountain, which is also a novel about time (published in the same year as La Prisonnière, 1924);
For time is the medium of narration, as it is the medium of life. Both are inextricably bound up with it, as inextricably as are bodies in space. Similarly, time is the medium of music; music divides, measures, articulates time, and can shorten it, yet enhance its value, both at once. Thus music and narration are alike, in that they can only present themselves as a flowing, as a succession in time.
Modern writers, through further exploration of the planes of time, have created more richness and complexity in the fictional world and have changed the temporal perspectives, inserting the past into the present in order to grasp unrevealed facets of the personality.
It was through such new developments—the Proustian concept of multiplicity of experiences running in parallel in the same instant—that Lawrence Durrell found the original seed of his Alexandria Quartet. Durrell explores time through the multiple faces of reality, as it is reflected in one protagonist of the Quartet in regard to each of the other three. The
