I’ve been meaning to read something by Proust for a long time. His name gets dropped in various writings, literary writings I suppose, as if the name alone is enough to convey a world of meaning. Like Charles Dickens or Yogi Berra. “Proustian, you say? Oh my, I know what you mean!” So annoying. Finally now, I do have a sense of what that means, and it’s actually a pretty potent image. Reading a little something by Proust isn’t easy because he never wrote a little anything. This book was just over six hundred pages, two long chapters and one short one. It’s Volume I of a six volume work, In Search of Lost Time, known commonly as his masterpiece. In France he’s something of a national hero, up there with Victor Hugo, Voltaire, Dumas, Balzac, and Sartre, known I suspect, more for the reputation fashioned for him by the serious literary critics, the intelligentsia, than for pleasure or enlightenment enjoyed by a large number of readers. Proust wrote and published in the decades before and after the turn of the twentieth century, more than a hundred years ago. I’d wager fewer people have read a whole book by Proust in all that time than have read a John Grisham book in just the last ten years. Definitely not mass market material.
What’s my take? I’m not really a fan. I find a lot to respect and admire in his work, but I can’t say I enjoyed it, or that I was enlightened by it, other than that I learned something of what ‘Proustian’ means. I’m not eager to run out and pick up Volume II.
A word about the plot: there isn’t any. No, that’s not fair. There was in fact a plot to the second chapter, “Swann in Love”. In short Swann fell in love, she dumped him, he got over it. The first chapter, “Combray” was two hundred sixty pages of the author’s rapturous depictions of his childhood home, its inhabitants, trees, flowers, routines, buildings, steeples gardens, and more flowers, their colors, shapes, fragrances, seasons. For Proust the real is just a springboard for his imagination which multiplies the length of the narrative through endless flights of fancy. He goes on for pages about a simple flowering hawthorn tree he encounters on one of his many walks.
The difficulty of the reading is magnified by Proust’s use of extremely long, complex sentences in which he inserts multiple asides in the form of thoughts set off by dashes or enclosed in parentheses, some of them running on for half a page in which it’s hard not to lose track of the point of the parenthetical insertions, let along the thrust of the sentence itself. Many times I returned to the beginning of a sentence and re-read, taking pains to not let myself get drawn in to what’s between dashes or parentheses so that I could avoid getting lost in the asides. I’m tempted to say it’s like the rambling of thoughts when I’m lying in bed unable to fall asleep and they run from one thing to another and another and another until at some point I arrive at some frightening or unpleasant notion and become aware of the aimless wanderings and ask myself ‘How did I get here???’ But Proust is not like that. Proust’s wanderings are not aimless. Invariably if I read carefully I’d find that every aside is relevant to the narrative, and every long winded simile, every memory called up in vivid detail, is wonderfully apt to the circumstance.
I need to offer an example, and would love to select a short one, but that would not be representative of Proust’s style, and besides, I can’t find a short one. So here is a paragraph from “Combray”, the memory evoked by a taste of tea. “And as soon as I had recognised the taste of the piece of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-blossom which my aunt used to give me, 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; 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 colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, solid and recognisable, 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.” I ask you, reader, to read that again a time or two, and see the richness of the Japanese paper analogy. It’s a good example, good in its fullness, and good in that it is representative of the way Proust treats memory, time and again. His recollections are so vivid, so much like a reality, that at times a memory of a place is more important, almost more real, than the present. It occurs to me how horrid Alzheimer’s would be for a person like Proust for whom memory is so consuming.
There is a lot of breathless romanticism in the writing, mooning and fluttering over relatively minor events, magnifying them into happenings of great consequence. Here is an example, when Swann, who has fallen in love with Odette, and even more in love with the glory of being in love, is about to kiss her for the first time. “And it was Swann who, before she allowed it, as though in spite of herself, to fall upon his lips, held it [her face] back for a moment longer, at a little distance, between his hands. He had wanted to leave time for his mind to catch up with him, to recognise the dream which it had so long cherished and to assist at its realisation, like a relative invited as a spectator when a prize is given to a child of whom she has been especially fond. Perhaps, too, he was fixing upon the face of an Odette not yet possessed, nor even kissed by him, which he was seeing for the last time, the comprehensive gaze with which, on the day of his departure, a traveller hopes to bear away with him in memory a landscape he is leaving for ever.”
One final point I’ll make about Proust’s writing: it reveals an obviously broad and extensive education. He deploys a vast vocabulary, choosing just the right word to convey a particular meaning. This printing that I have read, of course, was a translation from the original in French, which suggests to me that, notwithstanding the claim one occasionally hears that the English language is the richest there is, the French language is no slouch. Proust also drops in from time to time a Latin phrase always apropos to the moment in the narrative, never overbearing.
I’m glad now that I took the time and persevered in reading this book. At least I’ll get the reference when I hear someone mention the name Marcel Proust. I’m sure there are useful, or at least interesting, insights to be gained from the other five volumes of Proust’s masterpiece, but I think I’ll move on to try and learn from another author. To quote the Nowhere Man from Yellow Submarine,
“Ad hoc, ad loc, and quid pro quo!
So little time, so much to know!”
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