Color Me Im-Proust

Yes, in case you're wondering, it took me quite a while to come up with the title of this post. But today, if you didn't know, is Punny Thursday, aka Pun-rsday in Newfoundland, where the clocks are a half hour ahead and the puns are staggering. So there.

Anyways, I'm enjoying In the Shadow so far. As with all works dealing with the subject of love, there's a niggling question that tends to detract from the enjoyment of the piece: is what the author depicts really love?

I find it helpful to recall an early philosophy class I took, in which a professor mentioned that most social philosophical works fall into one of two general categories: "is" works and "should be" works; that is to say, either the work will attempt to explain the way things are, or the way things should be. Many authors will dabble a bit in both, but when evaluating any work or even a single statement, you must first establish which of the two you're dealing with, as it must affect your interpretation.

Returning to love. Many times in art, I encounter romances that do not necessarily conform to my interpretation of love; what it means, how it feels, what it tastes like and such. I try not to reject them out of hand, though that's frequently my initial impression, and I go back to the bromide from that professor to recall that while I may not see love that way, may not want my love to look or be like that, that is the way love is seen some times, in some places, by some people. In that sense, the work is truthful, even if that truth is anathema to us. The Last Five Years, probably my favorite musical, depicts a relationship/marriage that begins and ends over the course of five years - it's actually loosely (or perhaps not so loosely, as his ex-wife tried to sue to block its performance) based on the failed marriage of its writer, Jason Robert Brown. And while I would not necessarily want to be either of the two characters in the musical, it is undeniable that there are countless millions of people who do act, talk and think like them. The musical does not try to change this truth, which some might see as a failing (but that's a topic for a different post), it contents itself with identifying it. In the Shadow has been much the same.

There's also something else at work in it, something aside from its observations on and characterizations of love. I hesitate to type this, as I'm not sure if it's really accurate, but it seems to me to be an expression of modernism or even (gasp!) post-modernism. Yes, I hate those words. No, I don't quite know any other succinct way of expressing what I mean. I'm going to go ahead and try to explain in more detail now anyways.

First of all, the terms modernism and post-modernism exist in any art-y medium, from architecture to music. They don't, however, necessarily mean the same thing in each one. In fact, even within a medium there are any number of wildly different works that could be referred to as either modern or post-modern.

One aspect of modern and post-modern works that does happen to exist across a couple different mediums is self-awareness; that is, the characters themselves are, to a certain extent, aware of their existence in a piece of fiction, whether it be movie, book or play. Artists will play with this notion, and with their audiences. Enter Proust, publishing this book in 1919, around the same time that Virgina Woolf and James Joyce were writing. So he has this character, a young boy (14-15ish? I forget if it's ever explicitly stated) who's been struggling against the wishes of his parents to find a post in the country's ambassadorial corps - he wants to be a writer. Finally, his father says, "The main thing is to enjoy what one does in life. He's not a child anymore, he knows what he likes, he's probably not going to change, he's old enough to know what'll make him happy in life." This, however, makes the boy upset, as he realizes that, "...I did not live outside Time but was subject to its laws, as completely as the fictional characters whose lives, for that very reason, had made me so sad when I read of them at Combray...Theoretically, we are aware that the earth is spinning, but in reality we do not notice it...The same happens with Time. To make its passing perceptible, novelists have to turn the hands of the clock at dizzying speed, to make the reader live through ten, twenty, thirty years in two minutes."

So what's going on here? This character is realizing his life is just like the life of a character in a book - which is exactly what he is. I actually didn't even catch on until I had read a page or two past it, and then stopped to flip back and have a chuckle at those words laid down so long ago. Well played, Marcel. Well played.