The structural principles on which he built both his plays and his novels can be related back to the pattern of ideas explored in 1931 in the dense critical essay on Proust.
When, for example, he insists on Proust’s contempt for a literature that “describes”, or when he affirms that ‘there is no escape from yesterday because yesterday has deformed us, or been deformed by us’, or when he describes ‘the attempt to communicate where no communication is possible’ as ‘merely a simian vulgarity, or horribly comic’, it is possible to recognize the extent to which his theatrical innovation was rooted both in a literary precedent and in a coherent Modernist philosophical statement.