This is the final volume of In Search of Lost Time. It’s taken me over three years to work through all seven volumes; this will be my fourth Proust post. The three previous posts are:
#62: Swann’s Way#64: Within a Budding Grove and The Guermantes Way
#72: Sodom and Gomorrah
I did enjoy the experience, despite the demands it occasionally made on my patience. If the first three volumes tended to be more of a chore than a pleasure, the balance tipped the other way for volumes four through seven. You come to know how the author works, to tolerate the parts you don’t enjoy so much and more fully appreciate the parts you do.
The great comic characters, such as Mme Verdurin and M. Charlus, began to stand out more in the later volumes. In the early volumes the narrator (or “Marcel,” as he identifies himself just once in over 4000 pages) mostly writes about himself—except for when he writes in the third person about the love affair between Charles Swann and Odette de Crécy, which section from Swann’s Way is sometimes published as a stand-alone book. Maybe “writes about himself” is imprecise: he describes his own consciousness, which is an inherently recursive thing to do: in describing his own consciousness he frequently dips into describing his own consciousness describing his own consciousness.
In Time Regained, Proust gives us the key to his unwavering determination to excavate his subjective reality, to avoid selecting or framing or sampling from memory and experience:
…the slightest word that we have said, the most insignificant action that we have performed at any one epoch of our life was surrounded by, and coloured by the reflexion of, things which logically had no connexion with it and which later have been separated from it by our intellect which could make nothing of them for its own rational purposes, things, however, in the midst of which—here the pink reflexion of the evening upon the flower-covered wall of a country restaurant, a feeling of hunger, the desire for women, the pleasure of luxury; … --the simplest act or gesture remains immured as within a thousand sealed vessels, each one of them filled with things of a colour, a scent, a temperature that are absolutely different one from another, vessels, moreover, which being disposed over the whole range of our years, during which we have never ceased to change if only in our dreams and our thoughts, are situation at the most various moral altitudes and give us the sensation of extraordinarily diverse atmospheres.
This observation is intuitively satisfying: any memory we articulate is necessarily just something we have attempted to detach from the continuity of existence. When a paleontologist discovers a fossilized set of dinosaur footprints traversing what was once muddy ground, the value is less in any single footprint than in the surrounding context: the alignment, spacing, and so forth, of the footprints are what say the most about the ancient animals who made them. Perhaps there are also footprints of an immature animal present, or of additional species that might have preyed on or been preyed on by the first species. It would be impractical to excavate the entire site and bring it back to a museum, but that’s the kind of thing that Proust is trying to do. He isn’t actually interested in the taste of the famous madeleine; it’s a catalyst that he wants to use to revive the living moment when he tasted it. He believes he is able to do this—that he can on certain occasions obliterate time and actually be the person he was at some point in the past, without being obliged to select or frame or sample.
For most of us, I think, we come closest to this kind of experience through our sense of smell. One day we might get a whiff of something that we instantaneously know we first smelled when we were only a few years old—for example, the smell of the modeling clay we used to play with (a.k.a. Playdough: this was my experience), or of a forgotten food or place. Somehow, smell is not like sight or hearing. It’s a primitive sense, not conveniently available for voluntary recall. It’s almost impossible to categorize smells, to isolate their components or recall them at will. We cannot control smell. Taste is similar, but we know that taste is composed of discrete components: sweet, salt, bitter, and sour, and we can to some extent recall tastes at will, though not entirely: if you try to imagine the taste of maple syrup, and then sample some, you will instantly recognize the taste, and also have to acknowledge that you failed to adequately summon it from memory in advance.
Proust’s mission to capture the past and bring it back alive is ultimately futile: his dinosaur tracks traverse his entire life. Instead, he is trying to invent a technique whereby he can capture the flavor of those interludes when memory brings us back to an incident from long ago. Renaissance painters, like their predecessors, could only work in two dimensions. But they invented techniques that gave us the impression of three dimensions. Flat surfaces were made to suggest depth and distance to the eye. Proust is striving for something similar. He is only able to do this by applying ever more paint—that is, more words—to his surface, and in so doing he taxes himself and his readers to the limit. No writer is his or her right mind would try to emulate Proust today. It’s a wonder to me that the publishers and readers of a hundred years ago were up to the challenge. Proust was writing at the dawn of the electronic age, and it’s easy to assume that once radio and cinema were widely available, that nobody would be interested in trying to capture reality by writing or reading multiple volumes of endless sentences. In an alternate universe, where radio and cinema never existed, or where modernist literature had come along fifty years earlier, Proust’s way of writing might have had wider appeal and set more of a precedent. It’s like imagining what the world would be like if zeppelins and airships were the only kinds of flying machines that had ever been invented. In Search of Lost Time is like a mile-long zeppelin that’s as large and as elaborate as the most luxurious ocean liner. It’s got gardens and ponds and maybe even little cities spaced out on its various decks. It would have been obsolete before it had ever been launched.
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The last half of Time Regained, about 300 pages, describes the events of a single afternoon. The narrator has been invited to an afternoon party at the home of the Princess Guermantes. (Two books that end with elaborate parties: In Search of Lost Time and Go Dog Go.) Except this isn’t the Princess Guermantes we know from the first six volumes—it is in fact the former Mme Verdurin, who has married the Prince Guermantes after the deaths of their respective spouses. How wonderful that this relentless striver has at a stroke achieved the exalted status she so strenuously pretended to have for so long.
Proust himself barely lived past his 50th birthday, yet in this episode he gives us the impression that he is reviewing his cast of characters, most of whom are in attendance, well into their declining years. Proust must know that most of his circle would outlive him by decades, but in the world of his novel he leaps decades into the future to review them in their 70s and 80s. How strange to consider that in 300 pages the story only advances by about six hours (the afternoon and evening of the party), yet gives us the impression that we have jumped ahead two or three decades. Literary critic A.C. Bradley wrote of the notion of “double time” in Othello. Halfway through the play, after a sea journey from Venice to Cyprus, it still seems to still be the wedding night of Othello and Desdemona, an affair which had begun hundreds of miles away in Venice. Yet just a few pages later, their marriage seems to be a long-established fact. Is Shakespeare deliberately weaving a kind of spell over his audience, such that we do not notice this manipulation of time, or is it just a detail that escaped his attention? Proust is up to something similar, but there is no doubt that his manipulation of time is deliberate.
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Why should anyone invest 300 or 400 hours reading Proust? Most people, of course, don’t. To take it one step further, why spend time reading novels at all? When a person goes to a museum they’re likely to spend more time looking at the Rembrandts and Van Goghs than they do looking at these artists’ contemporaries. If you have educated tastes you might seek out different, less well-known artists’ works, but hardly anyone over the age of 10 would give every painting equal weight and bring no assumptions or priorities to the experience.
When I first saw a Rembrandt painting I was not able to “see” what made him special. His paintings seemed murky and indistinct. To this day I cannot see what makes Jackson Pollock so special. But I’m comfortable with the notion that he is special, and that someday I might be able to see why this is so.
You cannot “consume” a painting the way you can consume a book—you don’t ever come to the last page and close the cover. With a book, you come to the end and decide for yourself whether you consider it worthwhile or not. But that doesn’t mean you don’t bring preformed opinions and expectations to the act of reading a particular book. Sometimes this can be a distraction, when your experience of a book is at odds with what others have said and written about it. It’s work to really decide what you think about a book. It helps to know about the author’s life and times and goals, and also what others have written and thought, but the more you immerse yourself in this kind of information, the harder it can be to see a book for what it is. The objective should be to find the right mix of received opinions and subjective impressions. It’s often nice to read a recent book that has received hardly any publicity, so that your own opinion is pretty much the only one available. But I think it’s equally nice to read a book that’s been famous and celebrated for decades or centuries. In this case, there are likely to be multiple interpretations and opinions available. The ideal experience, if you’ve got the time and patience, is to read the book, read about it, and then read it again, so that you can construct your own idea of the book using both your subjective experience and the received ideas.
I’m not likely to use this approach with In Search of Lost Time—life is just too short. There is also the fact that Proust writes about the same things in the same way, throughout the seven volumes, so by the time you’re reading the latter volumes you are already re-experiencing what it was like to read the early volumes—especially if, like me, you spaced the experience out over a few years. Every time I started a new volume there was the sense of “Ah yes, this again.”
Nobody who hasn’t read Ulysses or Middlemarch or Madame Bovary is likely to want to tackle In Search of Lost Time. Similarly, nobody who doesn’t know something about modernism and Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and even Richard Wagner and Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein and Nicola Tesla, is likely to be interested. You have to be attentive to how the world has changed over time and what people have tried to do in the various arts. You needn’t be an expert or an academic. But if you are somewhat grounded in these matters, and if you have the time, then it can be worthwhile to read Proust. He made his own way, he is wiser and shrewder than his neurasthenic protagonist, he is funny, profound, passionate and even courageous. He is also at time boring and fatuous. It’s hard to imagine how anyone, especially today, could ever be like Marcel Proust. Though he was writing just 100 years ago, the world he describes seems as strange and as distant as Shakespeare’s. Those moments when you are in synch with him, when you see what he sees and understand what he understands, are worth the effort of plowing through the whole thing. Or at least they might be.
