This is volume one, of six, of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, formerly known as Remembrance of Things Past. In Search of Lost Time is regarded as one of the major literary accomplishments of the 20th century, right up there with Ulysses or The Waste Land. If you’re the bookish sort, you might hope to read it some day the way a traveler might wish to visit the Great Wall of China. It’s as extravagant a reading project as I can envision, on a par with reading all of Shakespeare at a go, or plunging into Greek and Roman literature.
So here’s my first postcard from the farthest reaches of the literary outback. What’s it like? It’s difficult. More difficult than I had anticipated. The vast majority of books that I read assume a sort of contract with the reader. They propose to amuse me with wit, or entice me with suspense, or amaze me with insight. For Proust, the objective seems to be to render his perceptions and emotions in as complete and precise a way as possible. If I’m interested in his undertaking, fine; if not, he makes no concession.
Proust will elaborate and qualify his thoughts until he feels he has done them justice. His sentences descend on you like tsunamis. Some of the sentences are a page long and when you encounter a pronoun somewhere towards the end of one of them you practically have to send a search party out to find the antecedent. Here is an example. The author is recalling an occasion from his childhood when he encountered a Mademoiselle Gilberte Swann, who has held a place in his affections for no very clear reason—something to do with his fascination with her parents. He had seen her just once before, in the country; now he encounters her in Paris.
While I waited for [my nanny] I was pacing the broad lawn of meager, close-cropped, sun-baked grass, dominated, at its far end, by a statue rising from a fountain, in front of which a little girl with reddish hair was playing battledore and shuttlecock, when from the path another little girl, who was putting on her coat and covering up her racquet, called out sharply: “Good-bye Gilberte, I’m going home now; don’t forget we’re coming to you this evening, after dinner.”
A longish sentence, for sure, but it’s the next one that’s the tsunami:
The name Gilberte passed close by me, evoking all the more forcefully the girl whom it labeled in that it did not merely refer to her, as one speaks of someone in his absence, but was directly addressed to her; it passed thus close by me, in action so to speak, with a force that increased with the curve of its trajectory and the proximity of its target—carrying in its wake, I could feel, the knowledge, the impressions concerning her to whom it was addressed that belonged not to me but to the friend who called it out, everything that, as she uttered the words, she recalled, or at least possessed in her memory, of their daily intimacy, of the visits that they paid to each other, of that unknown existence which was all the more inaccessible, all the more painful to me from being, conversely, so familiar, so tractable to this happy girl who let it brush past me without my being able to penetrate it, who flung it on the air with a light-hearted cry—wafting through the air the exquisite emanation which it had distilled, by touching them with the utmost precision, from certain invisible points in Mlle Swann’s life, from the evening to come, just as it would be, after dinner, at her home—forming, on its celestial passage through the midst of the children and their nursemaids, a little cloud, delicately coloured, resembling one of those clouds that, billowing over a Poussin landscape, reflect minutely, like a cloud in the opera teeming with chariots and horses, some apparition of the life of the gods—casting, finally, on that ragged grass, at the spot where it was at one and the same time a scrap of withered lawn and a moment in the afternoon of the fair battledore player (who continued to launch and retrieve her shuttlecock until a governess with a blue feather in her hat had called her away) a marvellous little band of light, the colour of heliotrope, impalpable as a reflection and superimposed like a carpet on which I could not help but drag my lingering, nostalgic and desecrating feet, while Francoise shouted: “Come on, do up your coat and let’s clear off!” and I remarked for the first time how common her speech was, and that she had, alas, no blue feather in her hat.
This sentence tells you no more about Mlle Gilberte than a pearl necklace tells you about an oyster. I’ve underlined the word “them” in the middle of this sentence. It comes after a stretch in which there are three instances of the pronoun “it.” So the reader is expected to be holding at least two nouns in his head, one singular, one plural. Perhaps there are others? To which noun does this “them” refer? Perhaps it is “words,” six lines up, or maybe “impressions,” eight lines up. You may have a different candidate, perhaps even a better one. The point is that the syntax parsers in our brains will occasionally overheat and seize up as we read Proust. And if you’re the least bit tired or distracted, forget about getting anywhere with this book. You’ll wander off the path and into the trees, until you run smack into one of them and a large pinecone falls on your head.
But having read that long, long sentence a few times, and now having typed it, I have to admire what a fantastic Rube Goldberg-Chinese Dragon of a sentence it is. Our emotions are strange things: when we hear of a colleague’s good fortune, for example, we feel a vicarious pleasure at their success, some jealousy and resentment because they were able to achieve what we perhaps would have wished to achieve instead of them, shame at our recognition of the selfishness of this resentment, and perhaps three or four other subordinate emotion all at the same time. We watch ourselves watching ourselves watch ourselves. Proust has the absurd and impossible project of wanting to capture all such echoes and reverberations of the moment (as indeed it is a child’s cry that has set this all in motion); perhaps it is not so much a tsunami as a tornado, up into which various bits of the physical scene (blue feathers, dry grass, shuttlecock), extended metaphors (the Poussin landscape, the operatic clouds), events recently passed and soon to come, and various other perceptions and sensations have been whirled. I find myself writing longer and stranger sentences even just in thinking about Proust; he’s like a jazz musician, doing with words and thoughts what Charlie Parker might do with a Richard Rodgers show tune.
I’m so tempted to put Proust aside now that I’ve finished volume one and to take up a book that connects to what’s happening around me here in the United States in 2017. It’s a strange and disturbing time and it calls to me, insists that I put aside such a dilettantish, unworldly undertaking and read something with IMPACT, something that will feed into discussions, something that show me a reflection of myself in the modern world. Because whatever else I am, I’m not much like the protagonist of Proust’s novel, and so the narcissistic impulse that fuels much of my reading is an itch that isn’t getting scratched at present. As Billy Joel once wrote, “I don’t want clever conversation/I never want to work that hard.” It doesn't sound as if Billy would like Proust.
But I will press on for at least one more volume: Within a Budding Grove. Seven hundred and thirty pages. Full speed ahead.
