B364-DES303
Review of Marcel
Proust’s Remembrance Of Things Past
Copyright © by Dan Schneider, 4/30/06
‘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.
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 other 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!’
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
unequivocally 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:
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.
[An expurgated version of this article originally appeared on the Retort
website.]
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