About Proust

I have just spent a year living with Marcel Proust.

Last summer I read Alain de Botton’s entertaining and enlightening “How Proust can change your life”, which prompted me to make a serious attempt on the entirety of “A la recherche du temps perdu”. I had already read “Du côté de chez Swann” but I felt it important to start again at the beginning of the 3000 plus pages (as type-set in the Pléïade, which I was reading in the Folio paperback reprint).
I started in September 2009 on the train to Strasbourg. It was my first trip down there to work for the plenary of the European Parliament. I had heard that this involved a lot of hanging around, so it seemed to me that “In search of lost time” would be a rather poetic choice of reading for filling in those idle hours.
In the end I didn’t read the novel just during my monthly trips to Strasbourg but on and off over the whole year finally reaching the end in September 2010, almost a year to the day since starting.

Was it worth it? Most definitely, yes! However, before you rush out to buy a copy on my recommendation, I must warn you that it is not at all like reading any other book you may know.
For a start not a great deal happens. The Monty Python “Summarizing Proust” sketch is most relevant in this respect. It is impossible to summarize Proust in a meaningful way. You don’t read “A la recherche” to find out what happens next. This means that not infrequently you get bogged down in it, saturated, fed up and the best thing to do is to go off and read something else, returning to it when you’re in the mood. Generally I found I could not read much more than about 40 pages in one go. Still, having at this rate got to the end after a year, here is my entry in the summarizing Proust contest.

The narrator (who only once drops his guard and reveals his name to be Marcel) relates to us at length in roughly chronological order the events which most shaped his life. We read especially of his childhood visits to Combray in the countryside, his seaside summers as a young man at Balbec attracted to young women, his introduction to high society particularly through the aristocratic Guermantes family, and especially the homosexual Baron de Charlus, his obsessive love of Albertine who he attempts almost to keep prisoner, but who escapes through untimely death, and his final realization that he has been wasting his time on snobbery and infatuation and better get on with writing his magnum opus.

If you know the work, you will have spotted how my sectioning of the summary corresponds to the initially obscure titles of the seven volumes. Gradually the intricacy resolves itself into a grand overall well balanced design - rather like how you might visit and observe a cathedral admiring the craftsmanship in individual parts before standing back and appreciating the whole (a metaphor of Proust’s own, also taken up in the Folio paperback covers which feature different Monet views of Rouen cathedral). I wrote after the first 1000 pages “It’s not unlike doing a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle: images start to emerge slowly and fit together into a greater picture, but sometimes you just sit staring at the same piece for ages” and that analogy proved to be true as the further I got into the novel the more I knew where to put the pieces.

Some of the pieces are indeed very beautiful. Proust is a master of style and his French is fastidiously precise, often making use of unusual vocabulary. He is justly famous for his seemingly endless sentences and paragraphs. This makes it difficult to find a place to break off when you’ve had enough. Sometimes it even becomes necessary to turn back a page to the start of the sentence as you realize your attention has wandered and you’ve lost the thread. Still it may surprise you to learn that sometimes “A la recherche” is quite direct and laugh-out-loud funny as Proust is quite merciless in his observation of human foibles and people’s use of language.

You may well have wondered what the title of the first volume “Du côté de chez Swann” means. It refers to the countryside walks taken on Sundays by the narrator’s family in his childhood. They had two favourite routes, one taking them past Swann’s property, the other towards the land associated with the Guermantes. This becomes a metaphor for the different influences on the narrator’s life and the direction it takes accordingly: fascination with the arts (personifed by Bergotte for literature, Berma theatre, Vinteuil music and Elstir painting) and fascination with the aristocracy (personified in particular by Robert de Saint-Loup, the Duchesse de Guermantes and the Baron de Charlus). Finally he comes to see art as all important for its evocative power, and the aristocracy as worthless for its superficial hypocrisy.

The central section of “Du côté de chez Swann”, “Un amour de Swann”, is the only part of the book written in the third person and its story predates the narrator’s account of his own life. However, Swann’s obsessive love of Odette, prefigures Marcel’s own of Albertine and the key characters in this section reappear as important figures in the narrator’s own life, not least Swann himself who plays a key rôle in initiating him into the arts. Mme Verdurin, a social climber, also reappears as she dabbles too in the worlds of the arts and high society, but in a much less appealing way.

The rest of “A la recherche” is written in the first person interspersing reminiscences of things past with reflections on the narrator’s inner life, describing how events and his relationships have their impact on it.
In the course of the five middle volumes the indecisive narrator successively struggles to come to terms with: the uncertainty and contradictions of his attraction to the three key women in his life, Swann’s daughter Gilberte, the Duchess and Albertine; how to make himself known in high society while wondering about the true nature of his new acquaintances; the changing nature of his one true friendship with Saint-Loup; the implications of Charlus’ homosexuality; his suspicion that Albertine is also homosexual; Albertine’s death; his vocation as a writer.

Proust brilliantly draws all the threads together in the last volume, “Le temps retrouvé”. He starts it by revisiting the “madeleine” episode which is right at the start of the first volume and is the one bit known to (especially French) people who have not read all the book: it’s the particular flavour and texture of a small cake dipped in a cup of herb tea that brings childhood memories flooding back to him. The notion that lost time can only be regained through this kind of revelatory sensual memory is expanded on much more in “Le temps retrouvé”.
Then, in one of the best sections of the whole work, the narrator attends a party bringing back together all the main characters twenty years or so later on in life. The narrator himself realizes how much they and more importantly he himself have aged and are the same people only in name.

Names and how they suggest notions to the individual that may not tally with reality and which change over time with experience are another thing that fascinates Proust. Key characters in the book also change name through marriage in a way that is deliberately paradoxical and confusing.

At the end of the novel the Swann side and the Guermantes side merge as the conclusion of the “plot”, which I won’t give away. Then in the final reflective digression from the narration of events, which is the book’s standard modus operandi, the narrator realizes he is the sum of these ultimately chance influences and that it his resulting life that forms the substance of his book to be.

It should by now be apparent that what most interests Proust is how objective outer reality impinges on our inner subjective reality through how it is percieved and misperceived. The “madeleine” moment is one of heightened perception that can transcend time by tapping into what is unchanging in ourselves. But the novel is also littered with far more countless moments of misperception where characters, not least the narrator himself, get the wrong end of the stick, especially in their mistaken conclusions about the nature of others, misjudging from their external behaviour. This does indeed result in wasted time.

Thus the subject of “A la recherche du temps perdu” is how we experience life. This may sound odd as Proust’s and therefore the narrator’s life is far-removed from our own: it is that of an unmarried man in France at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, sufficiently well-off not to have to work but in ill health, largely living as a recluse engrossed by the arts and introspection, now and then venturing forth into high society, while all the time trying to get his act together to write a book. And yet as Proust observes himself, the reader must recognize as right and true everything which in the work of the writer corresponds to the reader’s own experience of life. As you read this does happen time and time again. So as you plough on thinking “What the hell do I care what late 19th century French high society was up to?”, you suddenly feel “Wow, I’ve felt that too!”.

One of the key ways in which De Botton believes Proust “can change your life” is by bringing you the reader to rediscover the delights and fullness of life in its banal and everyday form. That is not unlike what French painters of the time such as Monet were trying to do and what in a rather different way his contemporary Joyce does in “Ulysses”.
This is what great literature can do for you: help you to grasp that this life we experience is all we have, but it is sufficient.

So Proust too writes “about being here”.