In Search of Perfection: Unfinished Literary Masterpieces

Marcel Proust is often held alongside Kafka as the writer who most deeply reflected the lives and minds of modern humanity, but the style and approach of his (just barely) unfinished masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time, could hardly be more different. Although both writers address the frustrations of the outer and inner worlds that often confound the yearnings of the heart, mind, and soul, Proust eschewed the varied narratives of the short-story writer—and even of the normal writer of separate or even sequential novels—and put everything he had into his one prismatic and all-encompassing mega-novel. Casting a wider and deeper net than that in any single creative work in history, Proust developed a vehicle in his 4,300-page novel that eclipsed the full scope of Dante’s Comedy and even rivaled Shakespeare in his endlessly swirling and metamorphosing cast of fully realized human characters. Proust’s novel is the true human comedy, and with the possible exception of St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica (an unfinished masterpiece of an entirely different kind), In Search of Lost Time addresses more aspects of our existence than perhaps any other single piece of human writing. Like Aquinas’ Summa and Dante’s Comedy, Proust’s work is a construction that must be experienced from beginning to end, its progression of parts rising to a cathedral-like majesty as it builds toward its culmination. It’s an imperfectly completed cathedral, however, as Proust’s death in 1922 halted his endless revisions and left dozens of narrative threads and characterizations unreconciled—and in fact left the novel with numerous gaps of lost time. Proust came amazingly close to completion, however, and it’s only in the last volume, Time Regained, when the inconsistencies start to pile up their tiny bits of rubble. What’s truly amazing about this final volume is that it’s so brilliantly constructed and lit by such astonishing stained-glass illuminations that it nevertheless makes the thrust of the full work attain not just to Chartres, but to a fully completed Beauvais.

I’ve often thought of Dante’s Comedy as the literary equivalent of Chartres (see Erwin Panofsky’s excellent Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism for a penetrating discussion of the summa aesthetic in Gothic architecture), but perhaps the greatest literary cathedral isn’t the one that ends in perfect cosmic balance with “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars,” but the one that, like our own irreconcilable universe, leaves us continuously In Search of Lost Time.