PROUST AT THE AIRPORT

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I am still at the airport. This time my carry-on wasn’t searched by security, for I had not packed the single tome of À la Recherche du Temps Perdu in it. Instead, I switched it for an iPad with a downloaded version of this masterpiece and many other titles, at a tiny fraction of the volume of that printed, single copy of Proust’s masterpiece. Even at a full capacity, the Apple tablet is still much thinner than any hard copy of the works it may hold, and it is not impenetrable to security X rays, like, as I learned, the thick tome of À la Recherche is. It is ironic that the latter is not only indigestible to many people but also to airport technology, whereas the iPad with all its mixed content flows through the latter and through the hands of young children alike.

Although À la Recherche du Temps Perdu is also published in a sequence of printed books, it makes total sense having this circular work contained in one single tome. Contrary to a straight line, which is the shortest distance between a beginning and an ending that have to be fixed and apart from each other, a circle is a whole in which any point can be beginning and ending simultaneously, making, therefore, all of its parts equally valuable, independently of a set sequence. Being therefore equally alive, these parts belong to an organic completeness, and the simultaneity of their presence in a single whole unique to it, when it comes to a literary work, gives them the same availability to be directly summoned to one’s sight by one’s hand, responding to this living, round and round quality of the text. After all, even the Proustian paragraphs are self-sufficient beyond being transitions to one another, and also unfold sinuously, expanding through branches of their main subject before returning to it and giving it closure.

If, on one hand, the iPad also contains the whole of A La Recherche, on the other it doesn’t, for the novel is not immediately available to be seen on it and, like any of its segments, depends on the mediation of the exact process of electronics between one’s touch on the black screen of the tablet and its coming to light from the darkness of its apparent non existence on the same surface any other text stored in the same device does. In other words, the book is not unique to that surface nor is it unique to the iPad’s gut, where it shares a promiscuous invisibility with many other titles, none of them committed to a fixed mode of existence in the world, be it a slice of pace or of time. But of all books, A La Recherche, with its circular completeness, should not be a mere co renter of a device’s screen, like it can be just a transition to the other readings that are contained in this device.

Proust, whose epiphanies were triggered by sensations of the body, was always faithful to the “fleshiness” of each moment and gave crucial importance to the physical element, which is always immediate to the senses as opposed to what is mediated by the intellect, let alone by technology. In the case of a book, the sensorial element concerns the characteristics of the copy in which one read it, like the color of its cover, of its biding, and other things peculiar to it, which, being physical, visible and touchable all the time, become uniquely associated with our life and with who we were when we read it. These characteristics and the associations they make form a world with the way the reader got the book’s content and contain the full singularity of this reader’s experience.

As an example, Proust talks of a volume of François le Champi, which he found in the Guermantes library. He says: “For things — and among them a book in a red binding — as soon as we have perceived them are transformed within us into something immaterial, something of the same nature as all our preoccupations and sensations of that particular time, with which, indissolubly, they blend” (Time Regained transl. by Mayor and Kilmartin). He concludes: “The way in which the covers of a binding open, the grain of a particular paper, may have preserved in itself as vivid a memory of the fashion in which I once imagined Venice and of the desire that I had to go there as the actual phrases of a book.” (Time Regained).

When talking about his book preference if he were a bibliophile, he explains:

“The first edition of a work would have been more precious in my eyes than any other, but by this term I should have understood the edition in which I read it for the first time. I should seek out original editions, those, that is to say, in which I once received an original impression of a book . . . In the case of novels, I should collect old-fashioned bindings, those of the period when I read my first novels, those that so often heard Papa say to me: sit up straight! . . . Like the dress which a woman was wearing when we saw her for the first time, they would help me to rediscover the love that I then had” (Time Regained transl. by Mayor and Kilmartin).

How would Proust feel about having the long text of his masterpiece in invisible shape, compressed as a digital file behind a black, impersonal screen of a tablet and only available to be summoned by a contact with the cold, technologically prostituted surface of it ? Considering the fact that he found utility vulgar (through the words of his narrator’s beloved grandmother) would he find the abstraction of his work into mere lines of code that can electronically and impersonally make it visible also vulgar? What would he think about the “irresistibility” of other prosaic ends the iPad fulfills, like allowing the reader to carry more content with much less physical weight, and actually, not being stopped by airport security?

Proust is ambivalent in relation to technology, for on one hand, he deems pragmatism, the principle that rules it, to be something “narrowly” human. Finding utility “vulgar”, according to what his narrator Marcel says through the mouth of his beloved grandmother, would he find the abstraction of his novel into mere lines of code that can compulsively make it visible also vulgar? What would he think about the other prosaic ends the tablet fulfills, like allowing the reader to carry more content with less weight and not being stopped by airport security?

When Marcel visited the Bois de Boulogne to see the autumn leaves and remember the time he would watch Madame Swann’s morning stroll, he was devastated not only by the current fashion but by the uniform, black, and “ugly” automobiles that had replaced the romantic carriages of once. The whole change of scene made him conclude that the world was no longer his world.

But on the other hand, when Marcel has the chance to be poetic about new technologic inventions, he is enraptured with them, like when he compares the operators of the newly invented telephone to mythological creatures, or still, when he gives mythical dimension to the first airplane he ever saw, flying above the horse he was riding.

Digital tablets are devices of technological reproduction, which is something Marcel’s grandmother also finds vulgar. With a touch of one’s finger on their screen, they bring to one’s sight any page of any text one has stored in the calculated void of their slim body. With another touch, the text is back to invisibility, as if robbed of its slice of space in the world. In this sense, this type of reproduction corrupts the most fundamental condition of existence — that of occupying a unique place in the world which is directly available to one’s sight and physical contact.

Due to the extensive functionality of a tablet, whose options are also invisible but available to being summoned by touches of one’s finger on specific parts of its screen, it can be used as a reading device, serve as a dictionary, a notebook, and an archive of sentences we underline in the right order and in the distinction of different colors, if we so desire. Therefore, not only is the space of the paper-printed book annihilated by the tablet’s digital processes, but the time of reading it is likely to be shortened by the dismissal of other objects we might need, like dictionaries, pads, pencils, or pens. It is certainly faster to summon the passages we found important and underlined in a tablet, than in a paper book full of pages we have to leaf through.

With a tablet, the related activities of finding the meaning of words one didn’t know, one’s underlined passages, and taking notes, are not as immediate as the sight of paper pages are, but through the mediation of digital processes the responses we need come much quicker than any result of the immediate contact between our skin and paper. They come so much quicker that in the blink of an eye the pages one reads can become something else, and if one inadvertently brushes against the wrong spot on the tablet’s screen, several of them may pass in a fast, hysterical, succession. Inhumanly fast. Because of it, a long part of the text I was reading vanished to make room for an index, just as I was in the middle of figuring a complex sentence under my eyes. The rhythm of electronics is not that of our body and emotions. When it comes to reading, it should influence our frame of mind, the tempo and mode of understanding, and shorten our availability to reflection.

Just like my iPad abstracts the physicality of the Bible-like tome of À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, the internet abstracted human identity and allows anybody to make public in it whatever it is without having to reveal who they really are.

Identity and the concreteness, sensorial availability of time and space are the pillars of existence, but they have evaporated for the profane cause of utilitarianism. So have truth and falsehood, invented and real news being equally able to claim the same visibility online.

Once upon a time, we had to count on the soft contact of paper pages on our skin in order to read, and there also existed emotional associations with particular copies of the books we read. Letting go of that, I, for one, still have to recognize that thanks to my tablet I no longer risk missing a plane, among other things.

Perhaps I have an idea of what Proust would think of a tablet swallowing his work, but I have to keep reading it on this tablet.

I am sorry Marcel Proust!

I will make sure that no coldness of electronic devices will shorten my time of appreciating your saintly union of intelligence, courage, love, and yes, physicality!

Eleonora Duvivier