Review of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance
Of Things Past
‘I
wondered if a memory is something you have or something you’ve
lost.’ -Another Woman, Woody Allen
Introduction
A la recherche du temps perdu, by
Marcel Proust is not really a novel, by any stretch of the imagination,
for it violates the precepts of novel writing- plot, characterization,
etc., to an even greater degree than Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick
does, and it is not considered an autobiography, because it twists
facts, and uses fictive techniques for its nonfiction. In that
sense it predates Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood by half
a century in the claim to creating a new genre of writing. It
might best be called a fictive memoir. Its only clear novelistic
technique is the specificity of dialogue, although that is so
specific as to almost totally abnegate the claims that it’s
a memoir of any sort. The literal translation of the book is In
Search Of Lost Time, which Proust preferred, for its duplicity
of meaning- as both searching for time that has passed and time
as literally lost, but the book has come to be called by the Shakespearean
title Remembrance Of Things Past in English, due to the first
translations by C.K. Scott Moncrieff, not long after the book
was published, and the later amendations by Terence Kilmartin
in the 1970s. I read the three volume, seven book boxed gray paperback
version first published by Vintage Books in 1981. The first volume
contains Swann’s Way and Within A Budding Grove, the second
The Guermantes Way and Cities Of The Plain, and the third The
Captive, The Fugitive, and Time Regained (translated by Andreas
Mayor). Of the many misconceptions about the book, including the
contretemps over its being a novel or memoir (it’s really
more of a memoir), and the correct title for the work, I feel
the most compelling is whether or not the entire thing is a single
work or seven distinct books in a series. I think it’s manifestly
a single work, like Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, for like
that book, divided into five ‘books’, Remembrance
Of Things Past really is a single narrative. And while the books
of Les Miserables can all stand reasonably alone, none of the
books in Proust’s work can, save, of course, for the first,
Swann’s Way. Thus, I will refer to the whole work as the
work, from hereon in.
That all said, Proust’s work
is to literature what the sitcom Seinfeld was to television- a
piece of art that glorifies nothing, in the sense that the whole
work really is a document of thirty-three hundred plus pages of
high society 19th Century French gossip. It is well-written, at
its best, but ultimately barren in a philosophic and intellectual
sense. Nothing really occurs in all the pages. This is mostly
why, due to its lack of any real plot, the book cannot truly be
called a novel- even if one were to grant it a hundred percent
in the fictive department. The lead character, unnamed but presumably
Marcel Proust (although I cannot recall a single utterance of
the protagonist’s name- but I will from now on refer to
him, the quasi-fictive lead, as Marcel, and the writer himself
as Proust), is a typical French subject of the period, who has
his ups and downs, and relates this in astonishing detail to the
reader. Some of the descriptions are breathtaking examples of
prose- the equivalent of what it must have felt like the first
time someone peered into a microscope:
For a convalescent who rests all
day long in the flower-garden or an orchard, a scent of flowers
or fruit does not more completely pervade the thousand trifles
that compose his idle hours than did for me that color, that fragrance
in search of which my eyes kept straying towards the girls, and
the sweetness of which finally became incorporated in me. So it
is that grapes sweeten in the sun. And by their slow continuity
these simple little games had gradually wrought in me also, as
in those who do nothing else all day but lie outstretched by the
sea, breathing the salt air and sunning themselves, a relaxation,
a blissful smile, a vague dazzlement that had spread from brain
to eyes.
Proust’s sentence structure
can impress, but it can also bore. Much of the work is like riding
a rollercoaster- there are a few pages of breathtaking excitement
when the ‘moment’ described is in full fall from the
top, but the long slow climb to the next peak is often excruciating.
Not to belabor the point, but Proust makes Hugo look concise and
cogent, even ‘sketchy’. This lends itself to very
stop and start reading- the dull pages whiz by you by the dozens,
even hundreds, and then a few pages slow you down and overwhelm
you with quality and depth. It is difficult to break away from
the text of the work, especially at those moments, and even read
another work of literature while reading Proust, for there is
a demand of focus required to most appreciate this plotless work,
where description is the supreme reason for its existence. That
said, the overall book is a very quick read. I read it in about
the same amount of time most folk would read Moby-Dick, about
fifteen percent of its length. Proust is more a philosopher than
a wordsmith, and that’s the strength of the book, as well
its weakness. Here is an excellent example of Proust at his absolute
best, from Swann’s Way:
When a man is asleep, he has
in a circle round him the chain of the hours, the sequence of
the years, the order of the heavenly host. Instinctively, when
he awakes, he looks to these, and in an instant reads off his
own position on the earth’s surface and the amount of time
that has elapsed during his slumbers; but this ordered procession
is apt to grow confused, and to break its ranks. Suppose that,
towards morning, after a night of insomnia, sleep descends upon
him while he is reading, in quite a different position from that
in which he normally goes to sleep, he has only to lift his arm
to arrest the sun and turn it back in its course, and, at the
moment of waking, he will have no idea of the time, but will conclude
that he has just gone to bed. Or suppose that he gets drowsy in
some even more abnormal position; sitting in an armchair, say,
after dinner: then the world will fall topsy-turvy from its orbit,
the magic chair will carry him at full speed through time and
space, and when he opens his eyes again he will imagine that he
went to sleep months earlier and in some far distant country.
But for me it was enough if, in my own bed, my sleep was so heavy
as completely to relax my consciousness; for then I lost all sense
of the place in which I had gone to sleep, and when I awoke at
midnight, not knowing where I was, I could not be sure at first
who I was; I had only the most rudimentary sense of existence,
such as may lurk and flicker in the depths of an animal’s
consciousness; I was more destitute of human qualities than the
cave-dweller; but then the memory, not yet of the place in which
I was, but of various other places where I had lived, and might
now very possibly be, would come like a rope let down from heaven
to draw me up out of the abyss of not-being, from which I could
never have escaped by myself: in a flash I would traverse and
surmount centuries of civilization, and out of a half-visualized
succession of oil-lamps, followed by shirts with turned-down collars,
would put together by degrees the component parts of my ego.
Perhaps the immobility of the things
that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they
are themselves, and not anything else, and by the immobility of
our conceptions of them. For it always happened that when I awoke
like this, and my mind struggled in an unsuccessful attempt to
discover where I was, everything would be moving round me through
the darkness: things, places, years. My body, still too heavy
with sleep to move, would make an effort to construe the form
which its tiredness took as an orientation of its various members,
so as to induce from that where the wall lay and the furniture
stood, to piece together and to give a name to the house in which
it must be living. Its memory, the composite memory of its ribs,
knees, and shoulder-blades offered it a whole series of rooms
in which it had at one time or another slept; while the unseen
walls kept changing, adapting themselves to the shape of each
successive room that it remembered, whirled round it in the dark.
As can be seen, Proust’s prose
is clarified, it is not allusive, ala James Joyce’s Ulysses,
nor is it larded with ill-wrought sentences like the garbage Post-Modernists
like a David Foster Wallace or Dave Eggers spew. Yet, no amount
of two or three hundred pages of excellent oases can possibly
make up for the deadening desert of three thousand pages that
surround them. Similarly the islands of profundity are often lost
in the glare from the seas of gossip. Also, the first few times
a memory is examined, it is a very penetrating experience. After
a few times, though, you know exactly the sort of approach Proust
is going to take- he will go close up, he will back away, he will
repeat this several times, with little or no variation over several
pages, and then come to a conclusion that, while often beautifully
phrased, could have been reached well before Proust actually gets
to it.
Let me now give a brief summary of the book and its sections,
with the proviso that because little actually happens in the work
the summaries will be relatively brief, compared to those of often
far shorter works, as the fact is that the how of what little
occurs in the work is far more important than the what.
Syllabus
Proust spent most of his life as
a typical dilettante, and this work very well captures that truth.
In the last decade or so of his life, and posthumously, he worked
on and published the work in eight installments in French (from
1913-1927), and the seven, previously mentioned, in English. The
Marcel that Proust sketches is a Hollow Man of the sort T.S. Eliot
limned in his poem of a similar title. The work starts with Marcel’s
earliest perceptions, including his insomnia as a child, and sprawls
out across his foppish life and many effete characters and caricatures.
The legendary genesis for the book comes from the famed ending
of the first section of Swann’s Way, Overture, where Marcel
bites into a madeleine dipped in tea, and his memories unfurl.
Writers as prestigious as Milan Kundera have used variations of
this simple technique in their work, but the end of Overture is
none the less for its later influence, and justly famous. It is
a brilliant distillation of moment, idea, and art:
Many years had elapsed during which
nothing of Combray, save what was comprised in the theatre and
the drama of my going to bed there, had any existence for me,
when one day in winter, on my return home, my mother, seeing that
I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily
take. I declined at first, and then, for no particular reason,
changed my mind. She sent for one of those squat, plump little
cakes called ‘petites madeleines,’ which look as though
they had been molded in the fluted valve of a scallop shell. And
soon, mechanically, dispirited after a dreary day with the prospect
of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the
tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had
the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a
shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary
thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded
my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of
its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent
to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory- this new
sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling
me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in
me it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal.
Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I sensed
that it was connected with the taste of the tea and the cake,
but that it infinitely transcended those savors, could, no, indeed,
be of the same nature. Whence did it come? What did it mean? How
could I seize and apprehend it?
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 it magic. It is plain that the truth I am seeking lies
not in the cup but in myself. The drink has called it into being,
but does not know it, and can only repeat indefinitely, with a
progressive diminution of strength, the same message which I cannot
interpret, though I hope at least to be able to call it forth
again and to find it there presently, intact and at my disposal,
for my final enlightenment. I put down the cup and examine my
own mind. It alone can discover the truth. But how: What an abyss
of uncertainty, whenever the mind feels overtaken by itself; when
it, the seeker, is at the same time the dark region through which
it must go seeking and where all its equipment will avail it nothing.
Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with something
which does not yet exist, to which it alone can give reality and
substance, which it alone can bring into the light of day.
And
I begin to ask myself what it could have been, this unremembered
state which brought with it no logical proof, but the indisputable
evidence, of its felicity, its reality, and in whose presence
other states of consciousness melted and vanished. I decide to
attempt to make it reappear. I retrace my thoughts to the moment
at which I drank the first spoonful of tea. I rediscover the same
state, illuminated by no fresh light. 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 sound from the next room. And then,
feeling that my mind is tiring itself without having any success
to report, I compel it for a change to enjoy the distraction which
I have just denied it, to think of other things, to rest refresh
itself before making a final effort. And then for the second time
I clear an empty space in front of it; I place in position before
my mind's eye the still recent taste of that first mouthful, and
I feel something start within me, something that leaves its resting-place
and attempts to rise, something that has been embedded like an
anchor at a great depth; I do not know yet what it is, but I can
feel it mounting slowly; I can measure the resistance, I can hear
the echo of great spaces traversed.
Undoubtedly what is thus palpitating
in the depths of my being must be the image, the visual memory
which, being linked to that taste, is trying to follow it into
my conscious mind. But its struggles are too far off, too confused
and chaotic; scarcely can I perceive the neutral glow into which
the elusive whirling medley of stirred-up colours is fused, and
I cannot distinguish its form, cannot invite it, as the one possible
interpreter, to translate for me the evidence of its contemporary,
its inseparable paramour, the taste, cannot ask it to inform me
what special circumstance is in question, from what period in
my past life.
Will it ultimately reach the clear
surface of my consciousness, this memory, this old, dead moment
which the magnetism of an identical moment has traveled so far
to importune, to disturb, to raise up out of the very depths of
my being? I cannot tell. Now I feel nothing; it has stopped, has
perhaps sunk back into its darkness, from which who can say whether
it will ever rise again? Ten times over I must essay the task,
must lean down over the abyss. And each time the cowardice that
deters us from every difficult task, every important enterprise,
has urged me to leave the thing alone, to drink my tea and to
think merely of the worries of to-day and my hopes for to-morrow,
which can be brooded over painlessly.
And suddenly the memory revealed
itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which
on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did
not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her
in her bedroom , my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping
it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little
madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it;
perhaps because I had so often seen such things in the meantime,
without tasting them, on the trays in pastry-cooks' windows, that
their image had dissociated itself from those Combray days to
take its place among others more recent; perhaps because of those
memories, so long abandoned and put out of mind, nothing now survived,
everything was scattered; the shapes of things, including that
of the little scallop-shell of pastry, so richly sensual under
its severe, religious folds, were either obliterated or had been
so long dormant as to have lost the power of expansion which would
have allowed them to resume their place in my consciousness. But
when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people
are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and
smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial,
more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like
souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the
rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable
drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.
And as soon as I had recognized
the taste of the piece of madeleine soaked in her decoction of
lime-blossom which my aunt used to give me (although I did not
yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory
made me so happy) immediately the old grey house upon the street,
where her room was, rose up like a stage set to attach itself
to the little pavilion opening on to the garden which had been
built out behind it for my parents (the isolated segment which
until that moment had been all that I could see); and with the
house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the
Square where I used to be sent before lunch, the streets along
which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it
was fine. And as in the game wherein the Japanese amuse themselves
by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little
pieces of paper which until then are without character or form,
but, the moment they become wet, stretch and twist and take on
color and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people,
solid and recognizable, so in that moment all the flowers in our
garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne
and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and
the parish church and the whole of Combray and its surroundings,
taking shape and solidity, sprang into being, town and gardens
alike, from my cup of tea.
Unfortunately, there is not a single
moment, despite later peaks, that comes anywhere near the brilliance
of that moment, even in the later ‘autonomic reveries of
memory’, although the death of Marcel’s grandmother
is another justifiably famous section of the work. Each ‘book’
of the seven book work also gets more and more unfocused. The
‘real’ moment of the madeleine supposedly occurred
in 1909. Three years later, Swann’s Way was done, and after
failing to find a publisher Proust subsidy published it in 1913.
Within A Budding Grove, the second book, was published in 1919,
after being written through the First World War. Over the next
few years The Guermantes Way (1920) and Cities Of The Plain (1921)
were published, before Proust died in 1922. The last three books
were published posthumously, although not in a finalized state:
The Captive in 1923, The Fugitive in 1925, and Time Regained in
1927. That Proust did not get the final edit in these books shows
in several ways- with the first two books, the so-called Albertine
Cycle, being easily the two least well-written works, and Time
Regained containing numerous errors of historical continuity from
the earlier works. While a Proustian might dismiss criticisms
of the final book by claiming that the whole work was just a dream,
it does not wash, for there is no hint that the initial dream
that opens Swann’s Way is continued unabated through the
remaining books. Yet, from this moment of despair comes Proust’s
whole work.
Marcel, the narrator, presumably
born in 1871, the same year as Proust, is obsessed with his elders’
behavior, most prominently that of a powerful but ill man named
Charles Swann, who resides in his town of Combray, and who falls
in love with and marries a prostitute named Odette de Crécy
(this all before Marcel’s birth), and has a daughter named
Gilberte with him. Odette plays with Swann’s emotions and
he seems to lap it up masochistically, even ignoring the advice
of friends as to her true nature. Gilberte then becomes Marcel’s
first love. Other prominent players are the elitist Guermantes
family. They include the rakish Palamède de Guermantes,
the Baron de Charlus, his nephew Robert de Saint-Loup, Marcel’s
good friend, who later marries Gilberte, and the beautiful Albertine
Simonet, who replaces Gilberte in Marcel’s heart, and becomes
Laura to his Petrarch. There is also the phony Madame Verdurin,
and the painter Elstir, whose paintings sometimes stir Marcel’s
inner soul. Other, lesser, lights include pompous boors, self-righteous
moralists, gutless politicians, talentless artistes, annoying
dandies, naked hypocrites, and social climbers of every stripe.
Much of the overall work is devoted to Marcel’s existential
despairs, and how he extricates himself from them. That Swann’s
Way, set earliest in time, parts of it even before Marcel’s
birth, is the only book where Marcel is not the putative ‘lead’
character is why it is also the strongest of the books, as it
is the least solipsistic of the books. Only in the last book,
Time Regained, does anything resembling a typical novel structure
return, as we again reach the point in Marcel’s life where
Proust (or Marcel) originally gets the idea for the work, which
is where we began Swann’s Way. One might even say that the
fictive Marcel conjures up another version of Proust- the meta-fictive
Proust, at this point.
In the othe books the reader alternates
between the ultimately selfish and puerile lives that Marcel describes,
and his own contempt yet envy of them. In Proust, impressions
of things matter more than the weight behind them, and the work,
in essence, is an extended philosophical tract, even more than
being a memoir, or novel. Of course, Proust’s apologists,
when trying to justify the mounds of dull writing, usually state
things like, ‘Well, he was trying to capture life, and thus
he had to write dull passages.’ Uh- no. Art is artifice,
and there’s absolutely no excuse for bad writing, dull nor
otherwise, save the failure of the artist. And Proust fails far
more than he succeeds in the thousands of pages, but the successes
are far greater than anything other obscenely long works, like
Infinite Jest or Finnegans Wake offer. One might even argue that
Proust occasionally fails magnificently, as well.
The work is ultimately written memories,
and it occurred to me that the best way for a reader to read it
is to approach it as something that has already happened to you,
that you’ve fussed and obsessed over, not something happening
before you, as in most prose fiction. In that sense, absolutely
nothing happens in the work, it has all happened. Yet, no reader
has the obligation to do that, take a stance different from the
common approach to reading a work, and this is one of the other
major flaws of the work- that Proust never gives back as much
as he asks from his readers. Had the work been a quarter the length,
or a third, or a half, even, he might have come closer to meeting
that expectation he has of his reader with his own largess, but
he does not.
The work is at its weakest midway through, in Cities Of The Plain,
which mostly charts the ethical and sexual demise of the Baron.
Yet, perhaps the very nadir of the book is the linking passages
that end The Guermantes Way and start Cities Of The Plain. Not
only is the imagery and scene a weak end, but the start of the
next book is a very poor start for a work that is claimed to be
self-contained, as it immediately references prior incidents that
end The Guermantes Way, and scenes from earlier in the whole work.
Here is the end of that book and the start of Cities Of The Plain,
back to back:
‘Well,’
said M. de Guermantes to Swann and myself, ‘we poor, down-trodden
husbands, people laugh at us, but we are of some use all the same.
But for me, Oriane would have been going out to dinner in black
shoes.’ ‘It’s not unbecoming,’ said Swann,
‘I noticed the black shoes and they didn’t offend
me in the least.’
‘I don’t say you’re
wrong,’ replied the Duke, ‘but it looks better to
have them to match the dress. Besides, you needn’t worry,
she would no sooner have got there than she’d have noticed
them, and I should have been obliged to come home and fetch the
others. I should have had my dinner at nine o’clock. Good-bye,
my children,’ he said, thrusting us gently from the door,
‘get away, before Oriane comes down again. It’s not
that she doesn’t like seeing you both. On the contrary,
she’s too fond of your company. If she finds you still here
she will start talking again, she is tired out already, she’ll
reach the dinner-table quite dead.Besides, I tell you frankly,
I’m dying of hunger. I had a wretched luncheon this morning
when I came from the train. There was the devil of a béarnaise
sauce, I admit, but in spite of that I shan’t be at all
sorry, not at all sorry to sit down to dinner. Five minutes to
eight! Oh, women, women! She’ll give us both indigestion
before to-morrow. She is not nearly as strong as people think.’
The Duke felt no compunction at speaking thus of his wife’s
ailments and his own to a dying man, for the former interested
him more, appeared to him more important. And so it was simply
from good breeding and good fellowship that, after politely shewing
us out, he cried ‘from off stage,’ in a stentorian
voice from the porch to Swann, who was already in the courtyard:
‘You, now, don’t let yourself be taken in by the doctors’
nonsense, damn them. They’re donkeys. You’re as strong
as the Pont Neuf. You’ll live to bury us all!’
While fine enough as a representation
of the dilettantish speech of that crowd, it’s a very poor
end, in and of itself, that just stops flat with a meager bon
mot. Read as a single work there is not a reader who would not
claim that Proust had ripped them off, intellectually and artistically.
Here, now, the start of Cities Of The Plain, that could very well
be the start of another paragraph, rather than the start of a
separate, and claimed self-contained, work of fiction:
The reader will remember that, long before going that day (on
the evening of which the Princesse de Guermantes was to give her
party) to pay the Duke and Duchess the visit which I have just
described, I had kept watch for their return and had made, in
the course of my vigil, a discovery which, albeit concerning M.
de Charlus in particular, was in itself so important that I have
until now, until the moment when I could give it the prominence
and treat it with the fullness that it demanded, postponed giving
any account of it. I had, as I have said, left the marvelous point
of vantage, so snugly contrived for me at the top of the house,
commanding the broken and irregular slopes leading up to the Hôtel
de Bréquigny, and gaily decorated in the Italian manner
by the rose-pink campanile of the Marquis de Frécourt's
stables. I had felt it to be more convenient, when I thought that
the Duke and Duchess were on the point of returning, to post myself
on the staircase. I regretted somewhat the abandonment of my watch-tower.
The Captive follows Marcel’s love life. Yet, Marcel remains
barely sketched, overtly, even as we learn a great deal of him
from his views of others, and his self-serving claims (within
and without the artifice of the work) of the elites’ fawning
over him for his company and insights. The two female loves of
his life, Gilberte and Albertine (as well as the later Andrée),
modeled after men (for the real Proust was a homosexual- thus
all three have masculate names), are described in great external
detail, but not internally. We only get Marcel’s most superficial
impressions and imbuements of them, and because we have the limited
point of view none of the vast panoply of characters in the work
ever rises to ‘reality’ in the way, say, even the
overtly heroic and swashbuckling Jean Valjean of Les Miserables
does, much less the Nolan clan of far truer realist fiction pieces
like A Tree Grows In Brooklyn. Marcel remains, by his own descriptions
(or lack thereof) a veritable cipher. Marcel loves (or deludes
himself into thinking his obsession is love) Albertine, but fears
revealing his feelings, which she knows, and in turn fears hearing
of, for she is ashamed of her sexual past and orientations. Regrets
by both parties pile on until she eventually dies (or not?).
Yet, again, since this is not a
novel, in conventional terms, realism is not a requirement (not
that it is in stricter novels either), and by Time Regained the
real thrust of the work comes into view, as Proust, and Marcel,
lays out his views of life, truth, reality, memory, etc. To him
there is the experience only, in retrospect, for the percipient
is too busy with life at the time any particular occurrence happens,
not the thing itself. Proust seemingly rejects any idea of objective
reality, thus conveniently providing himself legal and literary
cover for any possible charges of libel, as well. Thus, his past
is modified, as all pasts must be, and his very acuity of detail,
utterly impossible in reality, is explained away, and justified,
for Proust has declared his past’s reimagining in memory
is more real than its being was in reality. Yet, here is where
another of the work’s greatest flaws enters- its and its
author’s solipsism, for the book, in essence, is the book’s
own tale of its creation, and its plot may be seen as the road
Marcel took in becoming Proust. Some may term calling Proust solipsistic
to be itself a tautology, but it’s not, for his self-reflexiveness
takes its toll on the text and the reader. While Proust may exhibit
great insight into his past, he does not do that with the other
characters, and it could be argued he does not even try to do
it. He simply does not care for the true motivations of the real
people who inspired his non-Marcel characters. And when he does,
or seems to, there seems to be a self-servingness to the inconsistencies
a good reader will spot. While Proust is at his best describing
both the inner terrains of his past, and the outer world he lived
in- from telephones to airplanes, gossip to existential angsts,
his dialogue, by and large, is very weak. His characters speak
in ways that real people simply do not, be they 19th Century French
elitists, or 21st Century Texans (differing accents and languages
aside), and with none of the wit and charm that Oscar Wilde’s
fops do. For example, the painter Elstir, advises Marcel with
such banalities as:
We do not receive wisdom, we must
discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness
which no one can else can make for us, which no one can spare,
us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at
last to regard the world.
Much of the dialogue is on this
low and artificial, level of communication. Wit occurs in sparse
little moments, and Proust’s reputation as a witticist is
vastly overrated. Again, Oscar Wilde he’s not. Also, Proust
seems to be a forerunner to the Politically Correct misconception
that ‘we’re all artists’. He argues repeatedly,
in direct and indirect ways, that everyone is capable of art-
a palpably false claim, even as he- in the tenor and rest of his
work, argues against it. He has one of his characters, Norpois
the diplomat, even state:
I am aware that this is to blaspheme
against the sacrosanct school of what these gentlemen term ‘Art
for Art's sake,’ but at this period of history there are
tasks more urgent than the manipulation of words in a harmonious
manner.
In other sections, discoursing on
Classical music and homosexuality, his ideas and phrasing are
similarly weak. Marcel’s work-long vacillations over whether
or not to write, or become a ‘writer’, become tiresome
long before we circularly return, in Time Regained, to where we
started in Swann’s Way.
By the second book, Within A Budding Grove, Marcel is with his
grandmother, at a beach resort in Balbec, and later replaces the
indifferent Gilberte with Albertine as his love, when he realizes
Gilberte simply has no feelings for him. Yet, he remains ever
effete, as well a narrator and character difficult to identify
with. That is a key point in selling a story to a reader- not
to have a ‘likeable’ character, but one that is ‘identifiable’
with, and Marcel simply is not someone easy for any reader to
relate to, for he is effete, snobbish, and long-winded. I suspect
this, even more so than the work’s length, is why it has
never been a popular work of fiction. Yet, this second book simply
does not stand alone. Within a few pages you would be lost if
you have not read the first read Swann’s Way. If the whole
work is viewed as a series of works this is a fatal flaw that
manifests early, so the work has to be viewed as a unified whole,
to even begin to argue for its success as a work of art. Marcel
simply drifts along in this book, wondering if he will or should
write, swooning over the actress Berma, or the works of the writer
Bergotte, or Elstir’s paintings. Yet, in a deeper sense,
the character he most connects with is Gilberte’s mother
Odette, whom he admires unendingly:
And
I learned that these canons according to which she dressed, it
was for her own satisfaction that she obeyed them, as though yielding
to a Superior Wisdom of which she herself was High Priestess:
for if it should happen that, feeling too warm, she threw open
or even took off altogether and gave me to carry the jacket which
she had intended to keep button up, I would discover in the blouse
beneath it a thousand details of execution which had had every
chance of remaining unperceived, like those parts of an orchestral
score to which the composer had devoted infinite labor albeit
they may never reach the ears of the public: or in the sleeves
of the jacket that lay folded across my arm I would see, I would
drink in slowly, for my own pleasure of from affection for its
wearer, some exquisite detail, a deliciously tinted strip, a lining
of mauve satinette which, ordinarily concealed from every eye,
was yet just as deliciously fashioned as the outer parts, like
those gothic carvings on a cathedral, hidden on the inside of
a balustrade eighty feet from the ground, as perfect as are the
bas-reliefs over the main porch, yet never seen by any living
man until, happening to pass that way upon his travels, an artist
obtains leave to climb up there among them, to stroll in the open
air, sweeping the whole town with a comprehensive gaze, between
the soaring towers.
At the resort he meets his grandmother’s
friend Madame de Villeparisis, and her grandnephew Robert de Saint-Loup,
a young military man. Then, he meets Albertine, who will dominate
his emotions through the rest of the work, and attempts to kiss
her, but is rebuffed. But, these events are just touchstones for
the excursions Marcel indulges in- such as describing in detail
the Swanns on a routine walk through Paris.
By the third book, The Guermantes
Way, Marcel is ready to enter Parisian life at the fin-de-siecle,
living at the Hotel de Guermantes, and the book spends a great
deal of time exploring the effect of anti-Semitism and the Dreyfus
Affair on the social scenes of the wealthy and wannabes of the
day. Marcel is a pro-Dreyfusard, but does not speak of his views
in public. In Paris, Marcel meets up again with Robert de Saint-Loup,
Madame de Villeparisis, who is writing her memoirs, and the nutty
Baron de Charlus, who offers to show Marcel the ropes of hobnobbing.
His relationship with Albertine also grows. Nothing much of substance
occurs in this book, for it is more a satire and study of the
elites, mostly the crowd about Madame Verdurin, than a book that
chronicles any ‘big event’ (although one could say
that of the whole work), and the ‘cliffhanger’, of
sorts, is whether or not the Guermantes clan has extended an invitation
to Marcel to go to yet another party. On a psychological level
there has been critical comment over Marcel’s ‘sexual
awakening’ in this book- his possible hints of his true
sexuality, and a contrast made between him and the debauched Baron
de Charlus.
The Cities Of The Plain (aka Sodom
And Gomorrah) revolves around two archetypal society scenes: an
evening party at the manse of the Guermantes, to which Marcel
doubts he has been properly invited, and a dinner at the seaside
house of the Verdurins, larded with banal conversation. Again,
had Proust found the natural moments of poesy in such settings
the scenes would have worked much better. The fact that he probably
was true to the pallor of intellect afforded at such events does
nothing to satisfy the poor reader. It is here where homosexuality
is dealt with most blatantly- first as Marcel spies the Baron
in an act of pederasty, then as his love Albertine tries to make
him jealous with her lesbian flirtations with Andrée. He
vows to woo Albertine forever from Sapphism and marry her, even
as he joys in psychologically toying with her, making her jealous
over other women who have an interest in him. Love, where once
with Gilberte, was fresh and innocent, is now shorn of its ideals
and idylls. In another of his existential riffs, Marcel wonders
of the androgynous state of affairs between the sexes- both in
mere looks and sexual attraction, in how much persons of the same
sex can desire each other vis-à-vis desires for the opposite
sex:
As by an electric current that gives
us a shock, I have been shaken by my loves. I have lived them.
I have felt them: never have I succeeded in seeing or thinking
them.
And
later on in the whole work he states:
Personally I found it absolutely
immaterial from a moral standpoint whether one took one’s
pleasure with a man or a woman, and only too natural and human
that one should take it where one could find it.
Everyone seems to have secrets and agendas, even the Duchesse
de Guermantes, whom he idolizes. Of her, he states, that she:
….allowed
the azure light of her eyes to float in front of her, but vaguely,
so as to avoid the people with whom she did not wish to enter
into relations, whose presence she discerned from time to time
like a menacing reef in the distance.
This aura of sexual and personal
subterfuge leads into the first two books of the third volumes,
what is called The Albertine Cycle, and the first of the books
published posthumously, and thus never given final approval by
Proust. These are The Captive and The Fugitive. Both chart Marcel’s
and Albertine’s lives in Paris. He seems to be the possessive
type, especially fearing her bisexual urges. They continue to
play psychological games with each other, but these are quite
weak works, and have often been correctly criticized for exactly
that. Yes, Proust brings insight and a craft of word to their
relationship that average writers lack, but neither Marcel nor
Albertine are anything special- individually nor together, so
the whole thing feels like one of those lesser Woody Allen sexual
film comedies that his earliest fans grew to despise. Proust mixes
petty jealousy with questions about ‘the quest for beauty
and truth in art’, etc., but it’s old hat, being utterly
solipsistic, and both done by others, and by Proust, better, in
earlier soliloquies in the work. In The Captive he resorts to
banalities as this:
It is better not to know, to think as little as possible, not
to feed jealousy on the smallest concrete detail.
The two titles of the cycle refer to Marcel and Albertine, but
it’s not clear which one occupies which role, and one could
argue both fulfill both roles- Albertine as Marcel’s captive
of love, and a fugitive from her self, and his captive state to
his jealousy- to the point where he rhapsodizes about watching
her asleep, as well a fugitive from reason. He writes:
She was so effectively caged that on certain evenings I did not
even ask her to leave her room for mine, she whom at one time
all the world pursued.
Yet the two books are weak, from start to end, especially the
end of The Captive:
I rang for Françoise to ask
her to buy me a guide-book and a timetable, as I had done as a
boy, when I wished to prepare in advance a journey to Venice,
the realization of a desire as violent as that which I felt at
this moment; I forgot that, in the interval, there was a desire
which I had attained, without any satisfaction, the desire for
Balbec, and that Venice, being also a visible phenomenon, was
probably no more able than Balbec to realize an ineffable dream,
that of the gothic age, made actual by a springtime sea, and coming
at moments to stir my soul with an enchanted, caressing, unseizable,
mysterious, confused image. Françoise having heard my ring
came into the room, in considerable uneasiness as to how I would
receive what she had to say and what she had done. ‘It has
been most awkward,’ she said to me, ‘that Monsieur
is so late in ringing this morning. I didn’t know what I
ought to do. This morning at eight o’clock Mademoiselle
Albertine asked me for her trunks, I dared not refuse her, I was
afraid of Monsieur's scolding me if I came and waked him. It was
no use my putting her through her catechism, telling her to wait
an hour because I expected all the time that Monsieur would ring;
she wouldn’t have it, she left this letter with me for Monsieur,
and at nine o’clock off she went.’ Then- so ignorant
may we be of what we have within us, since I was convinced of
my own indifference to Albertine- my breath was cut short, I gripped
my heart in my hands suddenly moistened by a perspiration which
I had not known since the revelation that my mistress had made
on the little tram with regard to Mlle. Vinteuil's friend, without
my being able to say anything else than: ‘Ah! Very good,
you did quite right not to wake me, leave me now for a little,
I shall ring for you presently.’This end, as can be read,
sort of withers on the vine, and again reinforces the notion that
the work is not a series of stand alone books, for The Fugitive
picks up right where its predecessor leaves off. By The Fugitive’s
end, however, Albertine and Marcel have broken up, as he seems
to gravitate back to the idea that art is a higher pursuit than
love, and she flees, apparently faking her own death in a riding
accident. When she attempts to reconcile, later, it is Marcel
who has lost interest.
The final book of the work, Time
Regained, is the closing of the circle opened in Swann’s
Way. Marcel has aged quite a bit in the interim between The Albertine
Cycle and this book, and many of the other characters in the work
are now dead. He is now a writer, or closer to the cusp of becoming
one, but still feels unfulfilled and without purpose. He reflects
on life, then decides to pursue what will become the work that
has brought the reader to this point within it. After much of
the pettiness and banality of the last three volumes this book
is closer in tone to the first book as it, naturally, describes
getting closer to the time of its own composition. There are some
what would be called in the motion picture business, continuity
errors, for people who have died resurface and other little things
are off, but this is to be expected with these last three books
since Proust did not give a final edit to the book, having died,
and likely, due to the book’s acclaim, no editor felt he
should touch the work. It’s a detriment, no doubt, although
few will admit it. The book follows France during the Great War,
in which Marcel’s friend Robert de Saint-Loup dies. At this
point Marcel feels he has wasted his life, until he is invited
to a matinee at the home of the Guermantes. It is there he is
enthralled by his own memories. Their power revives in him his
belief that he should write. He feels he owes it to the people
in his life to revive them, restore their gigantism in his life
via words. Despite the last book, itself, being four hundred pages,
there are only three real events: a country stay with friends,
the Great War, and a final party.
Yet, there is always Proust’s playing of mind games, such
as when he declares:
I thought more modestly of my book
and it would be inaccurate even to say that I thought of those
who would read it as ‘my’ readers. For, it seemed
to me that they would not be ‘my’ readers but the
readers of their own selves, my book being merely a sort of magnifying
glass like those which the optician at Combray used to offer his
customers- it would be my book but with its help I would furnish
them with the means of reading what lay inside themselves.
In a sense, this is true, for precious
little truth is revealed of Marcel’s, nor Proust’s,
family life- his Roman Catholic doctor father, nor Jewish mother,
nor his vast familial wealth, nor his mother’s death in
a sanitarium, are ever plumbed. And his real life of living asthmatic
and hermitic in a cork-boarded apartment for the last fifteen
years of his life is never touched upon in the work. To end, if
this summary or syllabus seems somewhat pallid, I admit it is,
for the actual work by Proust is not really about any of the above.
Analysis
There is a fundamental difference
between acts of greatness and actual greatness itself. Proust
defines this difference as well as any other artist. While certainly
Remembrance Of Things Past contains much great writing- in fact
a hefty-sized novel’s worth of about three hundred pages,
the whole work of thirty-three hundred pages cannot realistically
be termed great. To willfully ignore the three thousand pages
of often puerile, repetitive, obsessive, gossipy writing is to
actually demean the three hundred pages of unequivocably great
writing, by smearing the totality into a gray fog of undifferentiable
verbal sludge. Yes, he has needlessly digressive, and clause-filled
sentences that can occupy a page, but if many meander and die
of their own ennui and/or heft, is that a thing worth celebrating?
It reminds me of the seemingly pointless world’s records
that are charted by the Guinness Book Of Word’s Records.
So what if someone made a kielbasa three hundred yards long, or
the like? Did it taste any good?
There is also a question over what sort of writer Proust is. He
is most often claimed as a precursor to the Modernists, or an
early Modernist of the stream of consciousness variety, but even
in his obscenely Byzantine sentences there is a clarity and lack
of obfuscation that is not present in James Joyce, Virginia Woolf,
nor even William Faulkner. In fact, Proust is the absurdly baroque
and filigreed end of the Romantic movement, with ornate frills
and all- more of an Impressionist, though, than full on Romantic.
He is a literary Monet on steroids, rather than a Picasso with
a new vision. If he were a dinosaur he would be one of those lumbering
hundred plus foot sauropods of the Jurassic Period, not a sleek
Velociraptor of the Cretaceous. There is a child-like preciousness
to Proust’s writing, at its worst, that most Modernists
reviled, and while it may look, from the outside, to be Modernist
in design, its soul is purely Romantic, and technique Impressionist.
Ultimately, the overall work fails
to sustain itself. Its entertainment and readability simply cannot
weather the repeated barren stretches of hundreds of pages between
a half dozen or so pages of brilliance, and the Romanticism of
the whole work negates the very notion of it being an act of memory.
It is far more an act of imagination, and its English title would
have been more accurate, if less Shakespearean, as Imagination
Of Things Past, or Re-Imagination Of Things Past. Yet, as much
as is written, and as little as actually happens, nothing really
much of depth occurs, and the solipsism of the work damages it
even more than the Romanticism, for Marcel- the creation of Proust,
is simply not that interesting a character. In a sense, he is
an Ishmael, of Moby-Dick, on with the pedal to the metal. And
his life is just as empty. Marcel is not only an unreliable narrator,
but likely an actively dishonest one, and this has to be said
again: Proust is in no way, shape, nor form as able and witty
a social commentator nor satirist as Oscar Wilde was. He lacks
the ear for convincing dialogue, and even more so the concision
and wit. As Wilde knew, and the old apothegm says, brevity is
the soul of wit, and brevity is a virtue Proust was not acquainted
with. Perhaps the best comparison of Proust would be with someone
like E.M. Forster, who similarly dissected his times across the
English Channel. Proust is more thorough in his examinations than
Forster, but also far more self-indulgent in his prose’s
length and devices.
Even taking my earlier advice and
trying to squeeze as much enjoyment as possible out of reading
the work as if it has happened cannot save it from its own arterially
clogging heft. Nor can any relatively minor argument over whether
it’s a memoir or a novel. It is a bildungsroman, to be sure,
and is akin to James Joyce’s Portrait Of The Artist As A
Young Man, in that both his Marcel and Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus
become writers. Yet, as a Romantic, Proust’s immaturity
and naïve-te in regard to things non-Marcel, puts him at
a distinct disadvantage when compared to writers like Leo Tolstoy
or Fyodor Dostoevsky- or even Herman Melville or Mark Twain. Despite
his hundreds of pages describing dilettantish forays, there is
not the least hint of the cosmopolitan in Proust. He is, in many
ways, the eternal naïf. Many of his pontifications, while
well wrought, show an absolute lack of deeper understanding of
the world and the human- even if we step outside the artifice
of Marcel as distinct from Proust. He often makes grandiose leaps
of illogic from the particular to the general, but it is not the
intuitive Negative Capability John Keats so valued, but the young
fool prancing his ignorance and idiocy for all to see. That this
idiocy was written my a man in his forties belies the idea that
it is merely the fictionalized Marcel that utters these pallid
sentiments, for most often these leaps are even Marcel speaking
from a future retrospect on his own youthful follies.
While it takes a certain amount
of ballsiness to do so, to repeatedly do so, a few dozen times
over the course of hundreds of pages, only manifests the need
for Proust’s work to have been rigorously edited, first
by himself, then by an objective and qualified editorial eye that
could have uncovered many other gems fatally larded under the
sclerosis of verbosity that weighs the whole work down. The biggest
pile of lard that plows through the work’s veins is his
obsession with capital T Time. Proust, nor his Marcel, never asks
any of the other big questions of life, on ethics, ontology, provenance,
teleology, etc. This renders the whole work into a melodrama,
rather than a real drama. Don’t get me wrong, the work is
the largest and greatest melodrama ever penned, far greater than
the romances of Shakespeare- maybe even all of Shakespeare’s
combined, but, at the end, it’s still just a melodrama.
Woody Allen once described drama, vis-à-vis comedy, as
‘sitting at the grown ups’ table.’ His implication
was that, in contrast to many critics and artists who claim comedy
is a more difficult thing to write than drama, it is only through
drama at its highest, that the human experience is fully realized
and ennobled. While I agree with Allen’s posit about drama’s
place as the highest form of narrative, I would not assign the
role of sitting with the children to comedy- which I’d put
at the middle of the grown ups’ table, not the head; but
to melodrama, which is drama ‘lite’, drama free of
the striving for deeper meaning both within and without the material
at hand. Melodrama is pure entertainment- soap opera, professional
wrestling, film serials, natural mythos, whereas drama is that
plus enlightenment, and it’s that factor which separates
the two, assigning chopped up veggies to the former, and a well
done sirloin to the latter. Proust is, ultimately- if not unfortunately,
simply not all that deep, no matter how entertaining at times,
and like Chinese food, when you’re done with Proust, you
want to keep reading, preferably something a little meatier, for
most of Remembrance Of Things Past is merely empty (if sometimes
delicious) calories.
And this is true from the very start of the work. Here is how
Swann’s Way opens:
For a long time I used to go to
bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would
close so quickly that I had not even time to say "I’m
going to sleep.” And half an hour later the thought that
it was time to go to sleep would awaken me; I would try to put
away the book which, I imagined, was still in my hands, and to
blow out the light; I had been thinking all the time, while I
was asleep, of what I had just been reading, but my thoughts had
run into a channel of their own, until I myself seemed actually
to have become the subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the
rivalry between François I and Charles V. This impression
would persist for some moments after I was awake; it did not disturb
my mind, but it lay like scales upon my eyes and prevented them
from registering the fact that the candle was no longer burning.
Then it would begin to seem unintelligible, as the thoughts of
a former existence must be to a reincarnate spirit; the subject
of my book would separate itself from me, leaving me free to choose
whether I would form part of it or no; and at the same time my
sight would return and I would be astonished to find myself in
a state of darkness, pleasant and restful enough for the eyes,
and even more, perhaps, for my mind, to which it appeared incomprehensible,
without a cause, something dark indeed.
How many works of literature open
with sleep or dream, and the promise of something more? Perhaps
the greatest example of this is Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis,
wherein the whole of the book could be termed a dream. While Proust
starts some ‘books’ well, and ends others well, all
seven have, to say the least, very flabby middles, for his characters
never do a blessed thing. They quibble and gossip, bitch and moan,
but by the end of Time Regained, the survivors are lumbering dinosaurs,
both literally and literarily, wholly reliant on the fictive Marcel’s,
and the real Proust’s, desire and ability to resurrect and
reinvent them, which he ultimately fails to do, though this is
his stated goal at the work’s end:
But at least, if strength were granted
me for long enough to accomplish my work, I should not fail, even
if the results were to make them resemble monsters, to describe
men first and foremost as occupying a place, a very considerable
place compared with the restricted one which is allotted to them
in space, a place on the contrary prolonged past measure- for
simultaneously, like giants plunged into the years, they touch
epochs that are immensely far apart, separated by the slow accretion
of many, many days- in the dimension of Time.
Yet, even this hope for reinvention
reads rather sedentarily, however well phrased. The whole work
passes by the reader as if a soporific interlude, and of how little
consequence are most slumbers? This is because Proust’s
life, both in reality, and redacted in this memoir, seems to have
been staggeringly dull- like his work, filled with dozens of great
observations, but few great moments.
As a poet who understands the fundaments
of great writing, and the absolute need for concision far more
often than not, I have a distinct advantage over many other critics,
for I can see and diagnose Proust’s failures for what they
are, and make no excuses for them, such as: his conversations
are far too detailed to be real memories, but in being so detailed
they drag fatally with their Victorian dilettantism and render
an irreality to the work that works against the idea that it is
the ‘ultimate in realism’. In a sense, Proust is no
prose Whitman, whose poetry was both excessive yet concisely excessive,
in that Proust’s excesses are not what really define his
best writing. Despite the length of many of his best passages,
when he is at his very best Proust is detailed and concise. This
is why it takes several hundred pages before the work starts to
really drone on a reader- itself quite the achievement. If you
doubt Proust’s ability to be concise, just reread some of
the best selections from the work that I quote above, and the
lack of flab is manifest. This fact, however, makes the rest of
the flabby work so much more obviously in need of editing, and
why the work as a whole sinks in a reader’s estimation as
time passes away from reading it. The flabby parts of Marcel’s
(or Proust’s) memory close in on the reader’s memory
and drown out the concise, well-written parts.
If only Proust used his best techniques on the deepest and most
unique moments in the book, and let the rest fall away, Remembrance
Of Things Past would have been immeasurably improved. As it is
it is merely almost immeasurable
Dan
Schneider
© Dan Schneider 2006
www.Cosmoetica.com
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