Time #19, Books on Books #6

[L]a plupart des grands auteurs contemporains, Proust, Joyce, Dos Passos, Faulkner, Gide, V. Woolf, chacun à sa manière, ont tenté de mutiler le temps. Les uns l'ont privé de passé et d'avenir pour le réduire à l'intuition pure de l'instant ; d'autres, comme Dos Passos, en font une mémoire morte et close. Proust et Faulkner l'ont simplement décapité, ils lui ont ôté son avenir, c'est-à-dire la dimension des actes et de la liberté.


Most of the great contemporary authors, Proust, Joyce, Dos Passos, Faulkner, Gide, and Virginia Woolf, have tried, each in his own way, to distort time. Some of them have deprived it of its past and future in order to reduce it to the pure intuition of the instant; others, like Dos Passos, have made of it a dead and closed memory. Proust and Faulkner have simply decapitated it. They have deprived it of its future, that is, its dimension of deeds and freedom.

Jean-Paul Sartre (1939)