Nicholas Zurbrugg
Colin Smythe/Barnes and Noble, Bucks. UK and NJ USA.
Between "habitual Boredom" and "non-habitual Suffering" swing the characters in Beckett's writings. They wait only for that sleepiness which indicates to them some temporary respite from their contradictory, slivered selves…"things seem fated to go from bad to worse, and then, with luck, to bad again"…1
Beckett's essay on Proust (1931) has served to misintroduce a number of generations of critics to Á la recherche de temps perdu. Nicholas Zurbrugg has turned around this classic essay so that Beckett's formidable depression concerning human relationships, art and self no longer subsumes Proust's analysis of discontinuous perceptions and modes of being. Rather, Beckett's wracked and misformed self is introduced into a new understanding of a dualism in Proust's system. For that modernist author discusses also positive modes of existence, as well as the negative, "inauthentic" modes of being which are the only ones acknowledged by Beckett and, after him, most other critics (specifically those looking for the sources of post-modernist, fragmented texts and characterisations).
Although he consciously avoids a biographical approach (preferring to argue from within the texts), Zurbrugg has restored a view of Proust which revivifies the image of the ultra-cool, disenchanted dandy of Parisian society who once confessed himself to be lacking in all moral sense. Arguing for the defeatist silliness and inconsequence of such a statement, Zurbrugg has shown Proust's superlative concern to be that of self-realisation through ethical behaviour. Far from believing "art" to be the one and only justifiable activity and the only means of attaining self-understanding, Proust analysed the way also of selfless, discriminating, ordinary human behaviour. Zurbrugg shows how precisely and clear-sightedly Proust was able to cut through the fantasising imaginations of the ego
