For a long time, I have enjoyed reading the work of Marcel Proust, who died one hundred years ago this week, in November 1922.
Proust’s most famous book, À la Recherche du Temps Perdu was initially translated into English as Remembrance of Things Past and then later as In Search of Lost Time, and both titles describe something important about the content of the work, that it is concerned with the operation of memory and that we experience the passage of time as loss, although neither English title quite captures the ambiguity and élan of the original French, and which tells of the perpetual struggle to keep fixed in one’s mind that which is forever fading away, and the paradoxical truth that as we grow older we have more experience of life to draw upon but we have also more that is forgotten, either partially or wholly, and this personal experience of the accumulation of knowledge that is never fully accessible to us – and, as Swann was to discover and Marcel was to repeat, such knowledge often takes the form of wisdom after the event – is also replicated in society at large, where we are surrounded by evidence of previous eras, accumulated over many generations, in the form of church spires, the names of towns, the great aristocratic families with their distinctive lineages and estates, the famous artworks of earlier periods hung in galleries or frescoed onto walls, and the culinary customs passed down within families that specify how asparagus should be cooked or that madeleines might permissibly be dipped into the tisanes with which they are served, all this social and cultural history both grows and fades at the same time, indubitably present in shaping our lives while often bereft of the values that once attached to it, simultaneously in and out of our conscious reach, and that consequently both our individual and our collective lives are conducted in a world that is saturated with meanings many of which we are no longer aware of, unless or until some accidental moment or event – unintended and involuntary – jolts our memory and brings back to our recollection something from our past that casts light upon the present, and suddenly – miraculously – we gain or regain insight into the true meaning of our lives.
Proust’s sentences are long and so too is his masterpiece, which, at around 3,200 pages, is equivalent in length to ten or more contemporary novels of average size, one reason no doubt why some potential readers are dissuaded from starting the first of the seven books that make up the complete work – although I note in passing that in recent years, many teenagers have been quite content to immerse themselves in septenary structured fictions concerning wizards and werewolves – although for others it might be the overt content that provokes hesitation, the meticulous depiction of the life of upper middle-class French society during the final years of the nineteenth century, torn between a desire to be fashionable and up-to-date – that is to say, à la mode – while at the same time craving at least admittance to and perhaps acceptance by the salons and parties of the fashionably snobbish nobility, thereby displaying the hypocrisy that expresses itself in fraught ambivalence towards social status, all of which Proust recounts with precision and without mercy, placing himself centrally in the drama as the embodiment of the outsider who longs to become part of a group that he knows to be unworthy of his participation, yet for those readers who persevere with the narrative, and follow Marcel along the full course of his sentimentally educative journey, while there is much to learn and enjoy about the historical context in which the story unfolds, these details become increasingly irrelevant to his personal progress towards self-understanding, his final epiphany provoked by a trip on a paving stone and the sound of a teaspoon knocking against a saucer, that the meaning of his life would take form only when he finally became the writer he had always dreamed of being, and that the work that he would author would be the account of his own life in the shape of an apprenticeship to authorship, the searching for and remembering of his past both the precondition for and the subject of the work, both a jeu d’esprit and a profound phenomenology of memory in all its richness, a book therefore that for all its numerous characters, plots, locations, diversions, and digressions is ultimately not a window onto the narrator’s world but a mirror of Marcel’s mind, a book that is truly concerned only with the discovery of self.
Of late, I have been reading a range of French authors – all in translation, since my grasp of la langue française remains basic, more conversational than literary, the product of my meagre English education which places such little value on polyglotism – including short stories by Honoré de Balzac, whose vast collection of novellas, known as La Comédie humaine, was one of Proust’s formative influences, some early work by André Gide, a contemporary of Proust who, famously and regretfully, advised a publisher not to proceed with the first volume of the book, forcing Proust to print it himself at his own expense, short stories set in Algeria by Albert Camus, a man whose background and life experience shared almost nothing in common with Proust except their facility with language, Jean-Paul Sartre’s early novel La Nausée, which suggests that the meaning of experience is found solely in the present, since the choices we make now should be understood to be unconstrained by any of our previous choices, quite at odds with Proust’s construction of personal identity, and Simone de Beauvoir’s recently published autobiographical account of an intense childhood friendship, set in Paris just after the Great War, the period immediately following the moment when Proust’s work ends, and while all these writers have their merits none writes as well as Marcel, in my view the closest in achievement of his near contemporaries being Marguerite Yourcenar, whose sophisticated interplay of historical reconstruction and psychological insight bears comparison with his work, therefore, notwithstanding my reluctance as a general rule to make lists, or suggest rankings, of authors, composers, painters, or poets, as if the arts should properly be described in the same language as sports, in this case I consider Proust to be peerless in his construction of a fictional world that is not merely evocative and engaging, but educative and enlightening, a story of its own time but a book for the ages.
Paradoxically, to my mind the two French writers who most resemble Proust, not in their literary style but in the ambition of their endeavours, are not writers of fiction but of social anthropology and history, namely Claude Levi-Straus and Fernand Braudel, and in the former case there is a direct connection since the opening sentence of La Pensée Sauvage (first published in 1962) – On s’est longtemps plu a citer, ‘for a long time it was fashionable to say’ – echoes the opening line of À la Recherche du Temps Perdu – Longtemps je me suis couche de bonne heure, ‘for a long time I went to bed early’ – and the penultimate chapter is headed, Time Regained, a direct copy of the title of Proust’s final volume, suggesting that Levi-Strauss wanted to connect his exploration of the mental structure of everyday non-scientific thought with Proust’s presentation of the role of memory in the assignment of meaning, demonstrating the underlying similarity – indeed continuity – between the so-called ‘primitive thought’ of non-European peoples subject to colonialism with the ruling classes of the European colonizing powers, a connection that I like to imagine – without much evidence, it must be said – that Marcel himself would have enjoyed, whereas by contrast, the work of Fernand Braudel complements the Proustian project not in its literary form but in its explanatory ambition, the presentation of centuries of historical evidence to demonstrate the slowness of social change, sometimes hardly faster than geological time, that the basic forms of social and economic exchange draw on patterns of behaviour that have been repeated generation after generation, with regular but gradual shifts in the balance of power and influence between nations and classes, like the rise and fall of great families, casting doubt on any contemporary sense of newness and originality, which is always and repeatedly asserted owing to the misremembering of the past, failing to recognise the predictable patterns in which it reproduces itself, albeit with minor and interesting variations, and which conditions and colours our judgments of value and our assignment of meaning, the collective historical memory functioning in just the way that the individual personal memory works according to Proust, the search for what might have been lost but which might yet be regained as essential for the historian as for the novelist, as for each one of us.
For a long time, I have recommended to friends that they read Proust, not despite the book’s length but because of it, for it is through the process of immersion into the world that Marcel himself inhabited, his failures and frustrations, his mistakes and misjudgments, his repeated deferral of the project upon which he wished to devote himself, distracted from that which mattered most to him by an endless succession of trivialities, it is through our participation in his progress towards the moment of self-revelation with which the book concludes that we – the reader – might hope to discover not just some sympathy for a man, no longer young, not in possession of good health, but who nevertheless makes good upon his promise to himself to become a writer, but also to discover the courage to devote ourselves to the pursuit of our own vocation, whatever it might be, for this is not simply a book about the writing of a book, it is also a book about the making of a life, and the tenacity that is required by each of us to gather together those moments of past time that are still accessible to our remembering, assembling them into some coherent form that satisfies our sense of personhood. In short, I want to remember Proust on the centenary of his death because he showed the centrality of memory to life’s meaningfulness, not just for Marcel but for us all.