Throughout much of the course on Proust, we often referred to other long novels and to these ends I have started to read some of these novels. Right now Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain has my attention. During Eva-Lynn’s lecture on the “long novel” at the conference, she noted the similarities between the long novel and psychoanalysis. Thomas Mann, perhaps, picks up on this very question, he writes:
A human being lives not only his personal life as an individual, but also, consciously or subconsciously, the lives of his epoch and contemporaries; and although he may regard the general and impersonal foundations of his existence as unequivocal givens and take them for granted, having as little intention of subjecting them to critique as our good Hans Castorp had, it is nevertheless quite possible that he senses his own moral well-being to be somehow impaired by the lack of critique. (31)
Aside from the gut-recognition of psychoanalytic terms, there is something more, I think, to be taken from this. The long novel – like psychoanalysis – perhaps requires that we become critical not only of the character in question but also of ourselves. I wonder how often each of us thought that they had something in common with Marcel while reading In Search of Lost Time. I guess what strikes me here about this is that we probably all had moments where we saw ourselves in Marcel and then moments where we were annoyed, angered, or repulsed by Marcel. How do we come to terms with these moments of reading and being? I think the correlation between psychoanalysis and the long novel is likely to be found in these “moments of reading and being” wherein our reading becomes about our being and our being about our readings. It is the moment when we can no longer recognize the difference between being and reading that we must focus on and consider deeply, intimately, closely, textually.
J.A.
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