I’ve just spent a little over 100 hours in the company of a young Frenchman in the years just before and after 1900. In other words, I’ve now reached the half-way point of In Search of Lost Time. For the most part, it’s a first-person account, so what we read is the unnamed narrator’s thoughts and experiences. What usually happens when you spend so much time looking over someone’s shoulder this way is that you slip into their skin to some extent. Literary transference. But that has not happened in this case—Proust is profoundly unlike me, to the extent that I am at various times bored, entertained, confused, and occasionally even a bit shocked by the way he sees the world. I was debating with myself whether this was necessarily a bad thing when I came upon the following quote from critic William Empson in a New York Review of Books article (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/10/26/empson-praise-ambiguity/):
The main purpose of reading imaginative literature is to grasp a wide variety of experience, imagining people with codes and customs very unlike our own.
Which makes sense, except that to some degree you also have to be able to connect with or empathize with a character if a book is to mean much of anything to you. It’s a balancing act for writer and reader. There has to be enough of a connection that your ego can stretch to cover the gap, but not so much that your imagination doesn’t have to work.
Marcel (as I’ll call the narrator, who is unnamed in the book) begins as a sickly child with a powerful imagination. He forms ideas about certain things—flowers, young girls, and aristocratic families—and then shares his impressions with us in great cumulonimbus paragraphs. You get the impression that he forms his view of the world from books and his own meditations, as many a literary child will, but to a greater extent than most. Here, for example, is what Marcel thinks as he observes two noble ladies—the Princesse de Guermantes and the Duchess de Guermantes (cousins by marriage)—at the theater. He is describing their clothing:
For my own part, I never doubted that their garments were peculiar to themselves, not merely in the sense in which the livery with red collar or blue facings had once belonged exclusively to the houses of Guermantes and Condé, but rather as for a bird its plumage which, as well as being a heightening of its beauty, is an extension of its body. The costumes of these two ladies seemed to me like the materialization, snow-white or patterned with colour, of their inner activity, and, like the gestures which I had seen the Princesse de Guermantes make and which, I had no doubt, corresponded to some latent idea, the plumes which swept down from her forehead and her cousin’s dazzling and spangled bodice seemed to have a special meaning, to be to each of these women an attribute which was hers, and hers alone, the significance of which I should have liked to know: the bird of paradise seemed inseparable from its wearer as her peacock is from Juno, and I did not believe that any other woman could usurp that spangled bodice, any more than the fringed and flashing shield of Minerva. And when I turned my eyes to their box, far more than on the ceiling of the theatre, painted with lifeless allegories, it was as though I had seen, thanks to a miraculous break in the customary clouds, the assembly of the Gods in the act of contemplating the spectacle of mankind, beneath a crimson canopy, in a clear lighted space, between two pillars of Heaven.
Nice outfits, apparently. Proust’s prose is the honeysuckle that ascends the trellis of the ladies’ haute couture. Both may be a bit overdone (sort of like that metaphor). This is about half of the full passage—it’s almost impossible to pull a succinct quote from Proust. Such rhapsodies make up a significant portion of In Search of Lost Time, and they can be strenuous.
After I had read dozens of pages devoted to Marcel’s fascination with one or another young girl, I would be a bit scandalized to discover that he eventually “falls out of love” with them at exactly the point when they begin to reveal themselves to him, despite not having passed through the expected intermediate phase of actually having a romantic relationship. I expected some interpenetration of consciousness, because that’s how I think about love. But the point at which women become real to Marcel is exactly the point at which his passion begins to recede.
He feels the collapse of his cloud castles as a kind of victory over his passions. Indeed we learn that this Marcel, so sickly and delicate, so likely to be overwhelmed by sensations, also becomes an habitué of brothels, though this information is related only in passing, for example to explain how he knows that the object of his friend’s obsession is in fact a prostitute.
Marcel’s love is a kind of visual stimulus that provokes an outpouring of elaborate prose, like the grain of sand that provokes the oyster. This extravagance seems a bit ridiculous in 2017, and I think it might have in 1900 as well, but maybe not in 1300, when knights in romances were going on quests to prove their worth to women they had only glimpsed from afar. And if there is irony or humor to be derived from the juxtaposition of stained glass windows and brothels, Proust doesn’t seem to be interested in exploiting it.
Each volume of In Search of Lost Time consists of a small number of extended episodes—in Within a Budding Grove there are two episodes: the first relates Marcel’s infatuation with a girl named Gilberte and his effort to become socially acquainted with her family. Really, he is as much infatuated with her parent as he is with her. They are Charles Swann and Odette (née de Crécy), whose love affair had made up the second half of the first volume, Swann’s Way. I was a bit surprised to learn that they are now married, since the earlier volume depicts the full course and eventual exhaustion of his infatuation with her. Proust leaves it to us to imagine how this transition was effected. The conception of a child may be relevant. Perhaps Odette had allowed herself to become pregnant for practical reasons.
The second episode is about Marcel’s season at the (fictional) beach resort of Balbec in Normandy, where he stays in a hotel with his grandmother. Here Marcel builds up his circle of acquaintance, meeting many of the characters who will populate the rest of the novel. There is Robert de Saint-Loup, the dashing military officer who doesn’t realize that his mistress is actually a prostitute. Robert pedigree is immaculate—at least on a par with the crowned heads of Europe. If Marcel’s notions of romance seem anachronistic, so too is his reverence for bloodlines:
But in Saint-Loup, when all was said, however the faults of his parents had combined to create a new blend of qualities, there reigned the most charming openness of mind and heart. And whenever (it must be allowed to the undying glory of France) these qualities are found in a man who is purely French, whether he belongs to the aristocracy or the people, they flower—flourish would be too strong a word, for moderation persists in this field, as well as restriction—with a grace which the foreigner, however estimable he may be, does not present to us.
The passage, with its Jamesian qualifications and elaborations, gets stranger and stranger:
Of these intellectual and moral qualities others undoubtedly have their share, and, if we have first to overcome what repels us and what makes us smile, they remain no less precious. But it is all the same a pleasant thing, and one which is perhaps exclusively French, that what is fine in all equity of judgment, what is admirable to the mind and the heart, should be first of all attractive to the eyes, pleasingly coloured, consummately chiselled, should express as well in substance as in form an inner perfection. I looked at Saint-Loup, and I said to myself that it is a thing to be glad of when there is no lack of physical grace to serve as vestibule to the graces within, and when the curves of the nostrils are as delicate and as perfectly designed as the wings of the little butterflies that hover over the field-flowers round Combray; and that the true opus francigenum, the secret of which was not lost in the thirteen century, and would not perish with our churches, consists not so much in the stone angels of Saint-Andre-des Champs as in the young sons of France, noble, bourgeois or peasant, whose faces are carved with that delicacy and boldness which have remained as traditional as on the famous porch, but are creative still.
This passage captures many of the weird crosscurrents the modern reader experiences in reading Proust. First of all it is as ornate and extravagant as a mediaeval cathedral. Secondly it is truly weird and rather homoerotic, though I’m pretty sure I could find similar passages describing female beauty. Thirdly it celebrates racial purity, though in the most discrete and indirect way. Many characters express anti-Semitic sentiments in In Search of Lost Time, typically in terms of taking sides in the Dreyfus affair. Marcel himself would seem to be a Dreyfusard—that is, in the not anti-Semitic camp—and Proust himself certainly was, but the currents of the novel flow both ways: to the extent that Marcel is under the spell of some count or princess, he partakes of their perspective, but as he begins to be disillusioned, he might undermine their pretensions, more by letting them ramble on idiotically than by commenting directly.
The third volume, The Guermantes Way, gives us Marcel’s obsession with the Duchess of Guermantes. His family has come to live in the “Hôtel de Guermantes—a hôtel in Paris is a sort of in-town chateau, large enough that various apartments can be rented out. But his family does not officially “know” the duke and duchess, so he is reduced, in order to be able to see her, to contriving to pass her on the street every morning as if by accident. This habit provides some potential for comedy that Proust doesn’t completely waste.
For a time Marcel is distracted from his infatuation by visiting Robert Saint-Loup at his military barracks outside Paris. Then he describes Saint-Loup’s peculiar relationship with his mistress, Rachel. This episode mirrors Swann’s infatuation with Odette in the first volume and also to some extent Marcel’s own various infatuations. The implication is that a woman is what you make of her and love is a kind of enchantment that blinds the lover to reality. Finally, there is a set piece on the illness and death of Marcel’s beloved grandmother, an episode rendered as finely as an extended death scene out of Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky.
But by page 500 or so we are back in the company of the Duchess of Guermantes. Marcel has gradually made his way up the ladder of Paris society, one drawing room at a time. He goes from encountering the duchess at the homes of others to eventually receiving an invitation to her own salon. He never tells us what sort of social capital enables him to become a regular at the very best gatherings, even as he assures us that no ordinary mortal without the requisite pedigree could possibly do so. Marcel exists in a very peculiar state—he is equal parts omniscient narrator and character, having characteristics of both roles but fully inhabiting neither. Thus we take his access to the highest levels of society for granted, without asking to see his credentials.
Of course, once Marcel is able to observe the duchess up close and converse with her, he no longer sees her as a goddess out of mythology. Instead he sees a woman with the skills and instincts (not to mention the pedigree) to position herself at the pinnacle of society. She is very well read with a good sense of humor, but also vain and insincere. Her husband the duke (first name: Basin) has long since devoted the majority of his attention to a string of mistresses, but he is still a connoisseur of his wife’s witticisms, and he feeds his prize show pony the requisite straight lines and takes care to explain the jokes for the benefit of anyone who might have missed the point. It’s as important for the duchess to be able to deliver an apposite quite from literature as it is for her to reject an invitation from the wrong person. Perhaps her greatest joy, though, is doing everything in her power to assure that one of her servants is prevented from having a few hours off to visit his girlfriend.
So that’s the world of Marcel, or at least the first 2400-odd pages or so. At this point I think it’s appropriate to take a break and consult some secondary sources—perhaps Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life. I can’t say I haven’t enjoyed Proust to a certain extent, but I’m pretty sure I’d have enjoyed the half dozen or so books I could have read instead in the same time at least as much. To this point, I’ve been strict about experiencing the text without consulting other sources, but I am sure that I will learn much—and be further entertained—when I dip into the ocean of content that has been created around Lost Time. There are works of literature, such as Don Quixote or Ulysses, that are best read in the light of what other skilled readers—critics, historians, philosophers—have learned and thought about them through the years. Interesting commentaries don’t just tell you what you did not or could not know about the original author’s mental universe, they can be creative works on their own terms, using the original text as a foundation to build upon. They are like 200-level courses, with the original text serving as the 100-level prerequisite. I’m ready to find out what I’ve been missing. Considering how bewildered I am much of the time as I read Proust, I'm sure to learn quite a bit.
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