Time Interpolated

Is a novel more like a military offensive, a bout of fatigue, a rule, a church, a diet, an obstacle, a friendship, a child, a world, a stew, a cathedral, a dress? In the final pages of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, the narrator—surely here as much of an avatar of the author as he ever is—wrestles with the best comparison. One of these images has taken hold more than the others, perhaps because it seems most accurate to this novel in particular: the cathedral. “How many great cathedrals remain unfinished!” the narrator exclaims. It’s hard not to think mournfully of a dying Proust, that inveterate reviser unable to intervene in the final volumes of his monumental novel. We remember the looming and chronically incomplete cathedral and forget the other options.