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A Century of Proust
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Published: May 2, 2013
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May 9
May 8
Music Inspired by Proust
Axel Gerdau, Erik Piepenburg and Samantha Stark/The New York Times
Kelli OHara sings the love song If It Is True, accompanied on piano by
the composer Ricky Ian Gordon. Mr. Gordons music for "My Life With
Albertine" was inspired by the work of Proust.
Reading Proust: Lost in Translation, Redux
By CAROLINE WEBER
Sam Tanenhaus, Caroline Weber and John Williams are holding a
conversation about In Search of Lost Time, and welcome readers to
join their discussion by leaving comments on the right-hand side of the
blog. Once again, all translations in Ms. Webers post are her own.
To resume my discussion of the French literary references upon which so
much of the humor in the Recherche depends, I wanted to provide an
example from The Guermantes Way (1920), the volume in which the
upper-middle-class narrator makes his first foray into Parisian high
society. As Anka Muhlstein pointed out in her splendid post yesterday, the
members of the aristocratic Guermantes clan are convinced that they are
still at the apex of [that] society, and Proust has great fun showcasing
their petty vanities and elitist pretensions.
In one such instance, he describes the long-standing antipathy between
the familys two branches the Guermantes proper, for the most part
based in Paris, and their largely provincial Courvoisier cousins and
again uses a well-known (to French readers) literary allusion for laughs.
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Review: Proust,
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Another Lost Joke
Winning Narrator
Lost in Translation
Influences
First-Time Reader
Seeking Truth
Proust in Teaneck
Introduction
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nancy vance
Maybe because I'm 65 and naturally
examining memory and my past, being a
lover of Faulkner and believing that the
past is never really past, having recently
read Julian Barnes' THE SENSE OF AN
ENDING about the very subjective (and
erroneous) nature of memory.... whatever.
I'm now reading Proust for the first time.
And, no, I cannot read it in French! I think
about the nature of time all the time: is it
linear, cyclical, or what? I am reminded of
Wordsworth and the daffodils (don't
condescend, you people!) and how the first
viewing of them, later can "flash upon the
inward eye that is the bliss of solitude."
Proust (I'm halfway through Vol. 2) has me
enthralled, bewildered, thrilled, confused,
laughing out loud... and every other thing
you can imagine. Those who say he doesn't
deal in morality are wrong, I think. True,
he doesn't judge. But he certainly implies
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6/23/13 3:50 PM A Century of Proust - Interactive Feature - NYTimes.com
Marcel Proust.
The Courvoisiers, he observes, are at once appalled and intimidated by
their Guermantes relations self-
proclaimed intellectualism and
unrivaled chic; they cannot forgive their
cousins for preferring to hobnob with
members of Pariss flashy, socially
questionable smart (in both senses of
the term) set, whereas the stodgy
Courvoisiers feel infinitely more at
home socializing with fellow countrified
nobles whose background (who their
father and mother were) is no
mystery, even if their company is no
fun. And so, while the Courvoisiers cant
resist attending their glamorous
kinsmens social gatherings, in so doing
they manifest a mixture of righteous indignation and poorly disguised
envy that the narrator, spotting the charmless Courvoisier matron Mme
de Villebon in the drawing-room of the supremely (and, to said matron,
infuriatingly) elegant Duchesse de Guermantes, clinches by way of an
unexpected Victor Hugo quotation:
To encounter in their cousins drawing-room, between five and six
oclock, people with whose relatives their own relatives did not like to
associate back home in the Perche became for [the Courvoisiers] a
source of mounting rage and inexhaustible denunciations. For
example, the moment that the charming Comtesse G*** entered the
salon, Mme de Villebons face assumed exactly the expression it ought
to have had if she had been called upon to recite the line
And if only one of us remains, that one will be I [Et sil nen reste quun,
je serai celui-l],
a line that happened to be unknown to her, anyway.
For my money, this is one of the funniest passages in the Recherche, but
in translation it falls flat for a few reasons, all related to the line of poetry
at the end. First, because non-French readers are almost sure not to know
that line themselves from Hugos Les Chtiments [Castigations]
(1853), an extended indictment in verse of Emperor Napoleon IIIs
overthrow of the French republican government in 1851 they are
unlikely to snicker at Mme de Villebon for sharing in their ignorance. They
are also unlikely to grasp the sheer over-the-top weirdness of the parallel
the narrator draws (a) between a supercilious killjoy from the Perche (a
tiny agricultural region best known for its purebred draft-horses) and the
man revered in Prousts day as Frances greatest poet; not to mention (b)
between Mme de Villebons petty social hostility toward the charming
Comtesse G*** and Hugos lofty, principled outrage at Napoleon IIIs
coup dtat. (In the poem Proust cites, Hugo is directly addressing the
emperor, whose coup sent the staunchly republican poet into exile, and
declaring that he will defy Bonapartist authority to the end, even if he
proves the last man standing.)
Finally, no English translation can capture the intensely stylized,
emphatically sonorous grandeur of Hugos alexandrine: the twelve-
syllable metric form that is to French classical poetry and drama what
iambic pentameter is to English verse. To the French ear, nothing says
hero quite like an alexandrine, and the line Proust quotes here,
comprised of four perfect anapests (poetic feet in which two unstressed
syllables are followed by a stressed one, as in Lord Byrons similarly
rousing Destruction of Sennacherib [1815]: and the sheen of their
spears was like stars on the sea), is a particularly resonant case in point.
And yet there is obviously nothing in the least bit heroic about Mme de
May 8
Marcel Proust.
Villebons prickly pique when confronted with a charming Parisian
socialite, nor about her self-important resolve to remain the last man
standing in her fashionable cousins salon. By pairing her with Hugo,
Proust thus achieves much the same effect he creates with the
Franoise/Saint-Simon juxtaposition I discussed yesterday. He gives us a
complex, superbly comical portrait of an individual whose all-too-human
quirks are best sought and found [recherch and retrouv] where all
Proustian treasures ultimately turn out to reside: in literature.
Ms. Weber is currently at work on a book titled Prousts Duchess: In
Search of the Exquisite in Belle poque Paris, to be published by Knopf
in 2014.
A Narrator Who Wins Us
By ADAM GOPNIK
To celebrate the 100th anniversary of the publication of Swanns Way,
The Times asked writers and critics to share their experience of reading
the book and the other volumes of In Search of Lost Time.
I suppose that by now to announce that I first read Proust with the woman
now my wife or the man now my husband, or the woman now my
partner, or however it might work out is to participate in a clich,
touched by a not-entirely-appealing local color. Only in America has the
experience of Proust become a ritual of courtship. But, as it happened, I
did.
The girl I was in love with in college and I went out and, in a second-hand
bookstore in Montreal, bought the old Random House two-volume version
of the Moncrieff translation. What surprised me in that first reading, up
on Mount Royal, was not how impressed I was by Prousts command, the
beauty of his sentences and the confidence of his psychological
generalizations. It was, rather, that, expecting a profound but slightly
forbidding, even estranging, literary tour de force, on the order of
Ulysses or Paradise Lost a text like a mountain to be scaled, with the
reader arriving at last wearily at the top, panting for oxygen with a
Sherpa-like companion; glad to have made the ascent and yet haunted by
the frozen bodies seen fallen short of the summit, those who never made it
past In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower given that expectation, I
was shocked by how much I liked Marcel, to give the narrator the name he
only once gives himself.
We are taught sternly to announce, and
tumidly to lecture our creative writing
students, that our favorite characters
need not be our favorite people. Good
characters, from Becky Sharp to Satan
in Milton, can be rotten to the core and
still delicious to the bite. But, at the risk
of letting the waistband of my bourgeois
boxers show too largely above my
borrowed modernist pants, I do think
that narrators need to win us if they are
to hold us. Nick Carraway, Huck Finn,
and even poor Charles Ryder the
truth is that just as heroes are better
when they are heroic, narrators in long
tales are best when we are charmed by their company and are given
reasons to trust their sensations. Narrators need not be likeable, in the
sense of touched by moral rectitude, but it does seem necessary in any
successful full-length tale for the narrator to be lovable exactly as, say,
Humbert Humbert in Lolita is lovable, in his own horrible way.
Well, the narrator in Proust let us defy academic fastidiousness and call
May 7
him Marcel struck me then, and strikes me still, as the most high-
hearted, self-deprecating, joyously observant, tender, frequently funny,
always attentive voice I had encountered in literature. (Far more,
doubtless, than Proust would have been himself.) Frankly neurotic in his
anxieties, the narrators neurosis on the page registers above all as
sensitivity, mindfulness. His wide-eyed appreciations illuminate those
first volumes with affection: appreciations of his aunt Lonie, of
Franoise, the cook, of his Madame Svign-loving grandmother, above all
of his well-meaning father and loving mother. Even the secondary
characters, satiric targets, are on the whole treated with a malice rendered
affectionate by understanding: Madame Verdurin is chiefly silly, not
wicked; in over her social head.
And are there, in the old-fashioned sense, more admirable characters in
literature than Saint-Loup, the aristocrat trying to struggle out of the
limitations of his inherited world view without sacrificing its elegance
or, above all, than Swann, whose tragedy in love does not diminish our
admiration for his tact, his delicacy, his essential kindness, and his
readiness to make himself look shallow in order to avoid betraying a
friend? The book is, among other things, a manifesto against malicious
speech, and Swann moves us because he understands that true aristocracy
lies in a readiness to refrain from malice, even at the price of having others
think him simple.
And then there is, well, so much pure Charlie Brown in the narrators
voice: his worrying desperately in front of the pillar with the poster of
Bermas next appearance about how he will feel when he actually sees her
act; his anxieties about Gilberte the original Little Red-Haired Girl
and her possible presence in the playground on the Champs-lyses. That
he buys his cravat intending to impress her at Charvet rather than at Sears
does not diminish the universality of his unrequited ardor.
My first sense, confirmed by two subsequent readings (one, in French,
that did indeed have some of the exhausting aspects of an Everest
expedition) is that the philosophical and psychological theories registered
in the book are the least interesting thing about it, and the charm and
humor and social observation evident on every page, the most. Yes,
indeed, Prousts conclusions about human love are sadly persuasive: We
invent the people we love as much as we experience them; our
infatuations, even those that shape our lives, are our own inventions. And
hes right to advance nostalgia as an organizing principle: we agree with
him that time is the first principle of life, devouring our experience, in all
its intensity and heartbreak, and leaving us wondering, aghast, not just
where life has passed but where the world has gone.
But its not the profundity of these ideas that matters. Its the joy of their
enactment, which cuts the edge of Prousts official pessimism on every
page. Joyce, in Finnegans Wake, another expedition That Woman and I
attempted, ends by asserting simply that there is a mountainous male
principle in life, and a fluid female one, and life is best when one flows
nimbly round the other, as rivers round cities and one need not endorse
this rather old-fashioned, patriarchal Irish view to appreciate the passion,
the infinite resourcefulness, of its expression. Great writing, like first love,
works best as an obvious idea freshly enacted an old book, newly
bought.
Mr. Gopnik is a staff writer at The New Yorker. His books include The
Steps Across the Water and, most recently, The Table Comes First.
Reading Proust: Lost in Translation
By CAROLINE WEBER
Sam Tanenhaus, Caroline Weber and John Williams are holding a
conversation about In Search of Lost Time, and welcome readers to
join their discussion by leaving comments on the right-hand side of the
blog. Once again, all translations in Ms. Webers post are her own.
As far as translations go, John, Im
afraid Im not the best judge because
whenever I reread the Recherche, I do
so in French. That said, curiosity has on
occasion prompted me to dip into the
various English renderings of Proust
over the years, from the classic
translation by C.K. Scott Moncrieff (the
first volume of which appeared in 1922,
shortly before Proust died) to the two
subsequent revisions of Moncrieffs
version (by Terence Kilmartin and D.J.
Enright for Random House and the
Modern Library, respectively) to, most
recently, the new Penguin edition
overseen by Christopher Prendergast
(for which seven different authors have translated each of the novels
seven volumes). And all these iterations seem to me to treat Prousts
original with considerable intelligence and integrity, albeit with striking
differences of tone: Moncrieff is flowery where, say, Lydia Davis the
translator of the Penguin edition of Swanns Way (2003) is elegantly
spare. While I myself happen to prefer Ms. Davis's version to the others
to me, her voice sounds the closest to Proust's somehow I don't think
one can go wrong with any of them.
As, however, to your question about whether one can fully appreciate the
Recherche if one doesn't read it in French, I have to say that I don't believe
one can, for the simple reason that the original version is so densely
saturated with the colorful tones of other French literary lions from
Racine and Svign to Balzac and the brothers Goncourt that the
Anglophone reader is bound to miss out on myriad pleasures of
specifically literary allusion and nuance, which Proust often deploys to
tremendous comic effect.
To take the shortest example I can think of (for although Proust may in
fact be the soul of wit, brevity is not his strong suit): in Within a Budding
Grove (1919), Franoise, the narrators familys unschooled but fiercely
opinionated cook from the country, uses an antiquated expression of class
snobbery, sorti de la lie du peuple [from the dregs of the populace], to
proclaim the relative social supremacy of the young man from a good
family with whom the daughter of the attendant at the Champs-lyses
public bathrooms has recently become engaged. That this young woman
did not choose a fianc sorti de la lie du peuple an epithet the great
memoirist of Louis XIVs court, the Duc de Saint-Simon, notoriously
applied to that kings favorite architect, Mansart confirms Franoise in
her staunch belief that the mother of the bride-to-be, who presides over
her toilet fiefdom with ludicrous hauteur, is a marquise. This belief,
however, is itself patently absurd, as the covert citation from Saint-Simon
ironically underscores. While Franoise proves as poor an arbiter of class
standing as Saint-Simon (whose endless nitpicking about the nuances of
caste hierarchy and protocol made his memoirs an invaluable resource for
the class-obsessed Proust) is a discerning one, the two are united in their
vehement disdain for perceived inferiors. Her use of sorti de la lie du
peuple, in other words, is funny because it underlines the ways in which
she both is and isnt like Versailles most famous and most famously
imperious chronicler.
But the joke doesnt end there. The allusion to Saint-Simon also refers
back to one of the wittier passages in Swanns Way (1913), where the
narrator describes Franoise, at that time in the employ of his elderly,
despotically demanding Aunt Lonie, as investing the old womans
most negligible utterances and activities, her most insignificant
occupations, her waking up [son lever], her lunch, her rest, with as much
May 7
importance as Louis XIVs noble retinue attached to what Saint-Simon
called the mechanics [la mcanique] of life at Versailles. After this direct
evocation of the Sun Kings memoirist (and of the formal ceremony of the
monarchs daily waking, his lever), the narrator concludes:
[S]o it was thatan old lady from the provinces, simply by giving into
her own irresistible eccentricities, and into a meanness that was born
of laziness, couldwithout ever thinking of Louis XIV,believe that
her very silences, the slightest hint of a good mood, or of haughtiness,
betrayed in her physiognomy, were, for Franoise, the object of a
commentary as impassioned, as fearful as the one the Kings good
mood, or his haughtiness, inspired in a courtier, or even in a great lord,
who had presented him with a petition, at the divergence of an alle, at
Versailles.
Reconsidered in light of this earlier passage (and indeed, the Recherche
encourages nothing so much as revisiting previous discoveries from a
perspective refined by subsequent experience), Franoises quip about a
hypothetical, socially unqualified suitor for a pretentious bathroom
attendants daughter becomes a leitmotiv, lending coherence and
specificity to the grandiose provincial cooks inadvertently hilarious
character. And because I promised to be brief, I'll stop here for now. But
tomorrow, I'll post another short piece about Proust's regrettably
untranslatable but profoundly amusing literary humor.
in 2014.
Proust's Influences
By ANKA MUHLSTEIN
Anka Muhlstein is the author of many books, most recently Monsieur
Prousts Library. Here she writes about the books that influenced
Proust.
Prousts friends claimed that he had read everything and forgotten
nothing. As though to prove them right, he never created a character
without putting a book in his hands, and he quotes abundantly from and
alludes often to his favorite writers. It would help the reader of Proust to
know the Balzac novels that pop up throughout In Search of Lost Time:
Father Goriot, Lost Illusions, The Girl With the Golden Eyes. These
are the novels that deal with the uncommon passions so important to
the understanding of Prousts homosexual characters.
Saint-Simons 40 volumes of memoirs
of the court of Louis XIV are not
required reading, but it is useful to read
a few excerpts to get a taste of what the
irritable French duke considered his
due, and of how desperate he was to
conserve his privileges. The Guermantes
in In Search of Lost Time, who resent
any ignoring of their illustrious past and
are convinced that they are still at the
apex of French society despite the
changes brought about by the
Revolution, owe a lot to Prousts
knowledge of Saint-Simon.
To seize the full flavor of the comical
way Proust uses the playwright Jean Racines tragedies in his conflation of
May 6
Jews and homosexuals, one might also read Racines biblical plays
Esther and Athalie.
Prousts use of French writers is straightforward and easy to detect. This is
not true of his use of foreign writers: their significance is hidden, almost
subterranean, and often overlooked. Yet their presence is the clearest sign
of Prousts amazing erudition. No writers had as firm a hold on Proust as
English or American essayists and novelists, but he could not use them as
directly or freely as French authors; he knew his French readers were
most likely not as familiar with works of English literature, and perhaps
not familiar with them at all.
One of Prousts favorite novelists, one whose books reduced him to tears,
was George Eliot. He read Middlemarch very carefully and absorbed the
drama of Mr. Casaubon, the unhappy clergyman who dedicates his whole
life sacrificing on the way his young wife to labors that produced
absurd and trivial results. Prousts narrator is anxiously searching for his
true vocation, and is very much aware of the danger of losing his way in a
desert of sterile and doomed tasks.
One may not think of Robert Louis Stevenson in connection with Proust,
but Proust loved his work, especially The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and
Mr. Hyde. The curious transformation of a kind and intelligent physician
who turns into a psychopathic monster after imbibing a drug intended to
separate the good from the evil in a person is an extreme example of
personality change, a theme that runs through Prousts novel. His
characters never reveal their true personalities at the outset, and as the
novel progresses they do the contrary of what one expects.
A careful reader, however, may avoid being taken by surprise. As a young
man, Proust loved detective stories. Although he never wrote thrillers, he
knew how to prepare his reader for a revelation by seeding a clue
beforehand. Alas the reader may lose track in the thousands of pages
separating the hint from the dnouement. The only remedy is to keep
reading and rereading Proust!
Reading Proust: A First-Timer Dives In
By JOHN WILLIAMS
Over the next week, Sam Tanenhaus, Caroline Weber and John Williams
are holding a conversation about In Search of Lost Time, and welcome
readers to join their discussion by leaving comments on the right-hand
side of the blog. Mr. Williams is reading the translation by C. K. Scott
Moncrieff revised by Terence Kilmartin.
Sam and Caroline, it was my brilliant idea to tackle Swanns Way for the
first time as part of this enterprise. After reading your opening posts,
youll understand if I feel like I decided to take up basketball by playing a
full-court pickup game with LeBron James and Kevin Durant. My original
goal was to complement your expertise with a set of fresh, eager eyes. Now
Im just afraid of getting dunked on.
Im about 200 pages in, and hooked in a way I hadnt expected. I thought
gaining a foothold would take some doing. And it did. But as with any
great work, it doesnt take very long to acclimate to Prousts rhythms and
idiosyncrasies. This is not to say the reading experience picks up steam. A
nearly extinct brand of patience is required. The pages dont start turning
any faster; Im just more and more content to be immersed in them.
Like many who havent read the book, I had pictured the madeleine
moment as a moment, but its not; its an extended scene that reads like a
psychology textbook in miniature. It begins in a way that recalls the
oceanic feeling described by the French writer Romain Rolland and
discussed at length by Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents. Freud
criticized the sensation as a vague helplessness that serves as a shaky
Marcel Proust, 1921.
foundation for religious belief, but in Proust the helplessness, stayed with,
resolves into clarity. First there is the
sense of being overwhelmed. (An
exquisite pleasure had invaded my
senses, something isolated, detached,
with no suggestion of its origin. I had
ceased now to feel mediocre,
contingent, mortal.) Then the narrator
attempts, in vain, to recreate the
moment through his senses. (I drink a
second mouthful, in which I find
nothing more than in the first, then a
third, which gives me rather less than
the second. It is time to stop; the potion
is losing its magic.) What follows is an
inner concentration that borders on
meditation. (I ask my mind to make
one further effort, to bring back once
more the fleeting sensation. And so that
nothing may interrupt it in its course I
shut out every obstacle, every
extraneous idea, I stop my ears and
inhibit all attention against the sounds
from the next room.) After several
attempts at this deep diving, the
narrator gives up, and its only then that
the memories so faintly summoned by
the madeleine and tea fully return.
Having known the madeleine scene as
shorthand for Proustian experience, I was surprised by the specificity of
the ensuing recollection of his youth. Theres a lot of oceanic feeling in the
book, but theres a lot of inspecting individual grains of sand on the beach
as well.
Im hesitant to address Beckett's remarks without reading the whole of his
slim book (and with, oh, 3,200 pages to go in Proust), but complete
indifference to moral values and human justices seems an odd judgment.
If he means Proust ignored taboos well, based on your descriptions of
the later volumes, he clearly did. But I have the sense that some amount of
moral discernment is at work in the book, even if its not of the hectoring
variety, and even if the characters arent the most empathetic lot. I think
here of the great description of the servant Franoise: I came to recognize
that, apart from her own kinsfolk, the sufferings of humanity inspired in
her a pity which increased in direct ratio to the distance separating the
sufferers from herself. The tears that flowed from her in torrents when she
read in a newspaper of the misfortunes of persons unknown to her were
quickly stemmed once she had been able to form a more precise mental
picture of the victims. In this scene, Franoise is impatient with a
kitchen-maid suffering great pain right in front of her, but is found a short
time later violently sobbing while reading about the similar symptoms of
a faceless prototype patient in a medical dictionary.
And its true that the narrator writes: I imagined, like everyone else, that
the brains of other people were lifeless and submissive receptacles with no
power of specific reaction to anything that might be introduced into
them (That like everyone else is quite a clause.) This is not a
statement of great moral attunement. But Im not sure a conscious effort
at the moral education of the reader is always the top priority or effect
of fiction. If close observation is its own moral instruction, then Proust
(as far as Ive gotten with him) is as conscientious an instructor as any.
Im reading the Moncrieff-Kilmartin translation. Caroline, how close do
any of the translations come to capturing the feeling of the original? Are
English readers doomed to have an inferior encounter with Proust? And to
both of you: Where do you see Prousts influence now? It may be
May 3
Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times
French editions of In Search of Lost
Time, recently on display at the
Morgan Library, including one, front
left, from 1913 for Swanns Way.
impossible to measure up, but is anyone even trying? Of the modernists, is
Proust the least mimicked today? I have been sometimes reminded while
reading of certain David Foster Wallace sentences, which are less lapidary
but equally serpentine, and that also land on punch lines that are subtly
hilarious, if there is such a category. Like this, from Infinite Jest:
Hed kept noticing mice scurrying around his room, mice as in rodents,
vermin, and when he lodged a complaint and demanded the room be
fumigated at once and then began running around hunched and
pounding with the heel of a hand-held Florsheim at the mice as they
continued to ooze through the rooms electrical outlets and scurry
repulsively about, eventually a gentle-faced nurse flanked by large men
in custodial whites negotiated a trade of shoes for Librium, predicting
that the mild sedative would fumigate what really needed to be
fumigated.
Who, if anyone, do you see as Prousts progeny?
Mr. Williams is a senior staff editor for The Times.
Reading Proust: The Recherche in an Extra-Moral Sense
By CAROLINE WEBER
Over the next week, Sam Tanenhaus, Caroline Weber and John Williams
are holding a conversation about In Search of Lost Time, and welcome
readers to join their discussion by leaving comments on the right-hand
side of the blog. Ms. Weber is reading Proust in the original French. All
translations of Laclos, Flaubert, Proust, Gide and Benjamin are Ms.
Weber's own.
Beckett is absolutely right to stress the
shamelessness of the Recherche
(1913-1927), though it was by no means
the first French novel to evince this
quality. Already in Dangerous
Liaisons (1782), Pierre Choderlos de
Laclos had subverted the genres
morally edifying function by prefacing
his cool-as-a-cucumber tale of
unabashed libertine depravity with a
mock-conciliatory note: At very least, it
seems to me a service to public morality
to unmask the means by which the
wicked corrupt the good. This proviso
did not deter the vice squad from
forbidding Parisians to read Laclos's
novel in public places. Similarly, Gustave Flaubert stood trial for
offending public morality with Madame Bovary (1857), a meticulously
observed portrait of a vacuous, petite-bourgeoise adulteress.
Like these antecedents, the Recherche offers an unvarnished, markedly
non-judgmental portrayal of sexual activities traditionally deplored as
vices or even in the context of French Catholicism as sins. As the title
of his novels fourth volume, Sodom and Gommorah (1921-1922), makes
clear, male and female homosexuality are essential to Prousts worldview,
generally surfacing alongside other so-called perversions. While seducing
her girlfriend, Mlle Vinteuil desecrates her late fathers portrait; the Prince
de Guermantes and the Marquis de Saint-Loup both cheat on their wives
with the gigolo-cum-violinist Morel; another Morel paramour, the Baron
de Charlus, also indulges in whips-and-chains sex play at a tawdry gay
brothel.
Yet no matter how shocking the content of these vignettes (Andr Gide,
Prousts contemporary and fellow invert, feared they would set back the
issue [of homosexuality] by 20 years), their real import relates less to sex
as such, as to the much farther-reaching moral subversion that Proust
effects by rigorously investigating humanitys most essential but elusive
enigmatic truths erotic and otherwise. (In the Proustian cosmos, these
truths provide the scattered lightning-flashes to which Sam so
eloquently alludes in his post.) As outlined in Time Regained (1927), the
seventh and final volume of the Recherche, the novelists foremost task
lies in teasing out and illuminating our feelings, our passions; which is to
say, the passions and feelings of humanity as a whole. According to
Proust, those passions and feelings operate according to general laws
that remain constant even when surface particularities are different; for
instance, even the seemingly unconscionable penchants of a Charlus
illustrate a truth with which we all, sooner or later, are forced to reckon:
that love can come to us in the most extravagantly improbable,
inexplicable and inconvenient forms. (Witness the eponymous hero of
Swanns Way, declaring at what he mistakenly believes to be the end of
his disastrous affair with the faithless Odette: To think that I wasted
years of my life,[and] felt the greatest love Ive ever known, for a woman
whom I didnt even find attractive, who wasnt my type!)
In this light, the writers work is important because it alone enables us to
penetrate the thick fog of perceptual laziness and distraction and delusion
that otherwise blinds us to the truth about ourselves and those around us.
And it can only perform that function if its vision is undistorted by the
authors own moral judgments, whether favorable or condemnatory; what
Beckett calls a complete indifference to moral values and human justices
is thus a, even the, necessary precondition of the Proustian enterprise. In
fact, Becketts observation echoes that of one of Prousts earliest German
translators, Walter Benjamin, who notes in a 1929 essay that
[t]here is no individual suffering, however revolting, and no social
injustice, however glaring, against which Proust would have protested
with a candid No or an intrepid But wait! Quite the opposite: we find
in him a profound acceptance of the world just as it is, even in its
saddest and most bestial manifestations.
More often than not, the world of the Recherche proves sad and bestial
indeed. And yet the writer himself cannot be faulted if its hard-won
insights make it appear to borrow Prousts own ironic epithet for
Lacloss Dangerous Liaisons the most frighteningly perverse of
books. That perversity is simply the chaff from which the novelist
endeavors, fearlessly and tirelessly, to separate the wheat of elemental
human nature. Put another way, Proust explains:
It was not the goodness of his virtuous heart, which happened to be
considerable, that made Choderlos de Laclos write Les Liaisons
dangereuses, nor his fondness for the bourgeoisie, petite or grande,
that prompted Flaubert to choose Mme Bovary as his subject...
These authors selected their material not because they were immoral, but
because they sought the truth; and so it is with Proust as well. For this
reason, he concludes:
The vulgar reader is wrong to think the author wicked, for in any given,
ridiculous aspect [of human behavior], the artist sees a beautiful
generality; and he no more faults his subject for being ridiculous than a
surgeon looks down on a patient for being afflicted with persistent
circulation problems.
May 3
The son and the brother of noted surgeons, Marcel Proust knew whereof
he spoke: in literature, as in medicine, there is no place for shame. Or as
Flaubert who was also a doctors son, and whose exacting prose style,
likened by at least one critic to a scalpel, Proust brilliantly parodied in his
1919 volume of literary pastiches remarked just before his obscenity
trial: Writing well is its own kind of immorality.
in 2014.
When Proust Came to Teaneck
By BRIAN MORTON
To celebrate the 100th anniversary of the publication of Swanns Way,
The Times asked writers and critics to share their experience of reading
the book and the other volumes of In Search of Lost Time.
When Remembrance of Things Past first reached American and English
readers, everybody was blown away. Edith Wharton said it deserved to be
ranked alongside the work of Tolstoy and Shakespeare. E.M. Forster
called it our second greatest novel, after War and Peace. Virginia
Woolf wrote in her diary: I am in a state of amazement; as if a miracle
were being done before my eyes. She continued: One has to put the book
down and gasp.
About 50 years later, when Proust reached Teaneck High School, we were
blown away, too. After a friend who'd spent his junior year in France came
back with news about a novel that was different from anything we'd read
before, I embarked on Swann's Way. I loved everything about it: the
patience with which the narrator, Marcel, investigates his perceptions; the
evocation of the sorrow to which a child can be reduced by disturbances so
apparently slight that the adults around him don't even notice them; and,
of course, the passage my friend had been especially excited about, in
which a pastry dipped in tea opens up Marcel's entire past (a passage that
never gets old, no matter how many times you read it, and that proves for
all time that a novel can bring worlds to life in a way that makes movies
look lumbering and confined).
And I loved the humor, which is far from the delicate indirectness that
comes to mind when many people think of Proust: the socialite so fond of
showing off her big loud laugh that she dislocates her jaw; the aunts
who've received a gift from Swann, and whose fear of vulgarity leads them
to thank him in such a subtle way that he doesn't realize he's being
thanked; Swann himself, who, after spending years in a state of such
obsession for a woman that he neglected everything else in his life, comes
to the conclusion that she wasn't even my type.
But finally I got bogged down. It might have been in the second volume,
during the analysis of Marcel's love of Gilberte, which recapitulates many
of the features of Swann's love of Odette, but at a lower level of dramatic
and intellectual intensity. Or maybe it was in the third, during the account
of a Guermantes dinner party, which, now that I check, is only about a
hundred pages long, but which seems to go on forever . . . would it be
philistine to suggest that it would be a service to literature if someone
were to put together an Abridged Proust?
I've gone back to Proust many times since then, and never reached the
end. I blame this on a tic that has led me, every time, to start over from the
beginning. I read a thousand pages, two thousand, and then, yet again, I
stop. I feel like a suburban Sisyphus, pushing the seven volumes of
Remembrance of Things Past up the hill.
May 2
The New York Times
Marcel Proust, circa 1896.
Not quite Proust-worthy though I may be, I like to teach the first volume
to writing students. I begin in a spirit of full disclosure, telling my class
that I haven't finished the damned thing. (As a teacher you're often
tempted to pretend to be more literate than you are, but everything goes
better if you don't.) One of the pleasures of reading Proust with writing
students is that he breaks every one of the silly rules that have come to
be enshrined in many writing programs. Conventional wisdom holds that
we should show, not tell, but Proust tells and tells and tells.
Conventional wisdom holds that point of view in fiction should always be
consistent and logical, but Proust (like Melville, like Dickens) does what
he pleases with point of view. Very early in Swann's Way, Marcel tells us
that he often used to lie awake remembering all the places and people I
had known, what I had actually seen of them, and what others had told
me, and with that slim phrase he gives himself license to tell us exactly
what other people were thinking in their most intimate moments, during
episodes that took place before he was born.
Many of my students have gone on to read the whole thing, disproving the
idea that today's young people are too distracted to read anything but
tweets. One old student likes to e-mail me snippets from the last two
volumes, magnificent passages about art and time and memory that I
haven't gotten to yet. I'm not sure if this is meant to inspire me or tease
me. It doesn't matter. I know I'll get to the end someday. I will. I will. I
will.
Mr. Morton is the author of four novels, including Starting Out in the
Evening and Breakable You. He is the director of the writing program
at Sarah Lawrence College.
Reading Proust: An Introduction
By SAM TANENHAUS
Over the next week, Sam Tanenhaus,
Caroline Weber and John Williams are
holding a conversation about In
Search of Lost Time, and welcome
readers to join their discussion by
leaving comments on the right-hand
side of the blog. Mr. Tanenhaus is
reading the translation by C. K. Scott
Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin
revised by D. J. Enright.
One hundred years after its publication,
Swanns Way, the first volume in
Marcel Prousts cycle la Recherche
du Temps Perdu In Search of Lost Time, better known to many
Anglophone readers as Remembrance of Things Past, the Shakespearian
title used by Prousts first English translator doubles as thematic
overture and Michelin guide to the most captivating, ambitious and
elusive of modern novels.
The glittering surface of Swann's Way presents a Manet-like canvas of
belle poque France, a sumptuous world of fashionable salons and
tranquil summer homes populated by characters old and young, rich
and poor, artists and aristocrats, footmen and physicians who spring at
us with comic ferocity: their sufferings and delusions, their petty cruelties,
their self-destructive obsessions and corrosive vanities. By the end of the
giant cycle (some 4,000 pages) these fictitious beings will seem realer
than the members of ones own family.
But within the space of far fewer pages, 200 or so, the reader grasps, just
as readers did in 1913, that Proust is a novelist of limitless talent: a
preternatural observer, inspired mimic, prodigious wit, fluent narrator,
ingenious coiner of images and words. And he knows everything,
sounding at times like a botanist, at others like a painter, architectural
historian, musicologist, literary theorist. He seems to have read every
book, seen every play, and absorbed the contents of entire museums along
with the principles of medicine, diplomacy, etymology and more.
Yet all this only touches the outskirts of Prousts herculean purpose. As
the sinuous sentences unfold, aphorism following insight, metaphor
converted into syllogism, we realize Proust is as rigorous a thinker as he is
fabulist, heir to Descartes, companion to Freud. He is not simply writing
a novel. He is bending the girders of an inherited form into a new science
of understanding. He means to unlock the laws of human psychology
of hidden motive, desire and crippling habit and so perhaps arrest, if
not defeat, the ravages of Time.
We know this is his intent because he frankly tells us so. The novels
narrator addresses us with the brazen directness of our own moments
memoirists, though Proust is strangely self-effacing, even his terrifying
omniscience grounded in his repeated insistence that he really knows
nothing at all.
Inevitably, the first pages of Swanns Way announce that the grand
investigation to come must be autobiographical and must begin in
childhood, for the impressions gleaned then will determine a lifetime of
tiny misconstruals and fatal miscalculations, of revelations that would not
surprise us, and they do each time, if only Proust, and we, had been paying
closer attention.
These first pages also set forth Prousts theory of involuntary memory,
encapsulated in the famous incident of the madeleine soaked in tea. When
the narrator presses the spoon to his lips, the sensation looses a tactile
flood that transports him to the past not the known but the latent or
repressed past, hitherto concealed from him by the organized recollections
of voluntary or conscious memory, the prison of falsehood each of us
constructs in the effort, we think, to uncover the truth, though in fact it
only makes it more elusive. Not that involuntary memory, the morsel of
tasted cake, makes Proust the master of reality. On the contrary, he is
allotted only flickering glimpses, which will accost him unpredictably and,
often, woundingly.
Swanns Way and the six novels that follow can be read as the mounting
sequence of these glimpses. Everything else, in the rich and varied
universe Proust has invented, exists only as the stage for these scattered
lightning-flashes. The most cerebral of writers, Proust seeks finally to free
himself, and us, from the shackles of intellect and reason.
But what is the cost of this search for understanding, this attempt to
possess, or recapture, lost time? In his brilliant, cryptic little book
Proust (1931), Samuel Beckett argued that the author exhibits
complete indifference to moral values and human justices. Flower and
plant have no conscious will. They are shameless, exposing their
genitals. And so in a sense are Prousts men and women, whose will is
blind and hard, but never self-conscious, never abolished in the pure
perception of a pure subject. They are victims of their volition, active
with a grotesquely predetermined activity, within the narrow limits of an
impure world. But shameless. There is no question of right and wrong.
If Beckett is right, then Proust has repudiated what some maintain is the
novels most honored function, the moral education of the reader. What
do you panelists and commentators alike think?
Mr. Tanenhaus is a writer at large for The Times.
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