One of the greatest pieces of literature on the planet (according to literature scholars) and probably the best one ever written (according to me), is Marcel Proust’s “À la recherche du temps perdu”- “In search of Lost Time”. This masterwork consists of 7 tomes so hard to read for some readers, it’s become a  subject of many jokes and it is considered to be quite snobistic to even know it. I cannot express how much I disagree with that notion and how much of an intellectual laziness I consider not reading this one.

The best review of the saga I have ever heard was a single phrase by a Canadian policeman protagonist Benton Fraser in the “Due South” TV series in 90’s. “It basically a one long phrase.”. Indeed it is…  Tomes, published between 1913 and 1927, are a work of life of Proust. It is probably one of the best refined and edited pieces of work ever created in literature. The popular story says that the publisher had to force the author to stop editing and actually publish the thing. One may ask – what made it so important for mr Proust to edit and refine his work continuously and endlessly?

First of all it’s imperative to know that all saga is a … fractal. A literary fractal. Yes. I have analyzed it wide and long for several years now and some things are more and more visible as the story progresses:

a) as a “one long phrase” the work is a “stream of consciousness” of sorts, as author/narrator is reviewing his life and the past (the time he had lost)

b) the progression of the narrator’s review is majorily linear and steady in pacing, but only until one of the focal points (“milestones”) are reached. One of those is the famous “madeleine” cake, that allows the author to switch the memory lane traversal to another path. It’s linear until the subject is exhausted, and then it goes back to the last uncontinued focal point.

c) the storyline is a combination of elaborate, interconnected “slices of life”. This is important, because as narrator explores his own memory, the more and more intertwined events or story arcs there are. For example, the earliest memories of narrator’s grandfather’s female companion from the first tome will return later on as a sudden realization of her role, appearing with a review of other events.

d) it’s extremely consistent. To be honest I don’t know any other piece of literature as consistent as this one. All 7 books are in fact a one “solid”.

e) as depicted in point b – one thing becomes immediately visible: the book is recursive.

Now look at this fractal object, to visualize what I have in mind:

The study about human behaviour says that brain is extremely focused and processing every byte of information when it stumbles upon chaos (and therefore a big entropy! – the term also applicable to plot analysis, according to me) – this also makes it really hard to process the information as there is no immediate pattern to be recognized (at least in the beginning).  This may be an explanation why actually it is so hard to read for some. However, every fractal is chaotic only locally (take a look above again). After one realizes there are patterns everywhere, the bigger picture becomes a “cathedral of meanings”.

And what a beautiful and interesting patterns these are! First of all, the internal homosexual anguish and the neurastenia of the author marks the narrator, also named Marcel, but also allows him to view things not accesible to another viewer. His neurotic reactions allow him to feel every moment tenfold, and in fact act as an enhancement,  reinforcement of his memories, allowing deeper and deeper insights on an internal voyage. He becomes a voyeur of his internal life and the externals. Observing others makes him learn psychological aspects of the individuals he meets. This becomes almost an obsession when he analyzes the immoral yet distinguished baron de Charlus and his lover Morel. When Marcel meets his lover Albertine Simonet, the keen observations of the human nature become a sinusoid of an intellectual boredom mixed with the jealousy and lust. With events passing by and timeline being explored we, readers, receive a gallery of psychological portraits of insanely interesting people.

And all of it is dipped in the cultural and political sauce at the turn of 19th and 20th centuries. The Dreyfus affair,  aristocratic meetings, the gap between various strata of society – it’s all there.

Mathematically, the function of the story is always the function of time. It evolves with time, it takes time to show the effects of actions. As said before, this story is recursive, meaning – there are multiple events taking place in the same time in the story, but also – events are chronological but not shown chronologically. But these are there as the same function of time, but enhanced by additional parameters and called recursively by the author, if you forgive my information theorist’s argot. As Marcel learns some new truths (or rather – rediscovers them in his memory) he often “rewinds” to the desired moment to enrich it. This is just brilliant in my oppinion. The lost time he searches for, the forgotten events he tries so remember so eagerly, are in fact but another dimension he uses – the same as he does with space and characters populating said space. It’s hard to express how immensely absorbing for the reader it is.

This strict approach, and perhaps my analysis of it, might seem cold and…well, mathematical. But above all – the saga is beautiful. Expressions and language author uses is just this – amazing. The stories and characters – engaging and interesting.  The lost time – re-acquired, and in the end, with Time (a capital letter for a reason), one truth is exposed: no matter how difficult, complicated and “neurastenic” the human existence is – it’s worth living through as memory is all we truly have.