Marcel Proust was not interested in an art that was “a mere
vain and tedious duplication of what our eyes see and our intellect records.”
He believed this kind of literature could only be false because it
“severs” the present self from the past. Proust sought to translate into words
a phenomenology of human experience, which necessarily meant describing a
geography of absence because the past exists only in our embodied minds and not
as it was but rather as we imagine it to have been.
A distinction, however, can be made between involuntary
memories that usually arrive through a sensual catalyst and memories that are
actively recalled. Much has been made of Proust’s prescience about memory and
its resemblance to thought in contemporary neuroscience, but, in fact, he was
influenced by the neurology of his time. In 1905-1906, Proust spent six months
in a sanitarium under the care of Paul Sollier, a brilliant follower of the
most famous neurologist of the previous generation, Jean Martin Charcot.
Sollier was interested in memory, and although there are no extant documents
that describe his treatment of Proust, the physician was known to have induced
in his patients what Julien Bogousslavsky in his 2007 paper refers to as the
“emotional surges of involuntary memories.” Proust’s narrator longs for a
deeply felt form of re-experience rather than an arid autobiographical account
of a personal past hardened by years of reiteration. As I pointed out in a
paper, first published in the journal Neuropsychoanalysis (2011),
it is not that the madeleine instantly conjures a chain of particular memories
in the narrator—what it summons is a feeling, and it is the feeling, which,
after a delay, acts as an opening to what once was, never as a perfect
recollection but as a particular past alive in the present.
And yet, whatever the precise neurological realities of
memory may turn out to be, Proust’s masterwork is a narrative text, not a
treatise on physiology. For me reading and rereading In Search of Lost
Time has been a long and liquid experience, an immersion in what
William James famously called the “stream” of thought. The slow accumulation of
sensual details, associations, elaborate metaphors, and meandering stories
inevitably creates an illusion that I have entered the borderless movements of
the narrator’s singular consciousness, that by following the drift of another
person’s thoughts over time, that is, page after page, I have illuminated my
own mnemonic processes and felt realities. This is, I think, the strange magic
of reading Proust.
Francine Prose
It’s a commitment, today everyone is checking their devices every ten minutes. But reading Proust… it’s a whole world not just a book. Everyone wants to live more than one life and Proust is like “here’s another one you can live.” His offers a certain interface with yours that keeps popping out… I found it completely gripping all the way. As you read more and more and realize how certain themes or notes keep coming back… it’s like life. In your life, or at various points, these things stick in your mind like memories… not of your life but Proust’s and you realize they are your memories of Proust.
Edmund White
People should read Proust because he is the most
companionable of all the great authors. Though he’s a mama’s boy and a
neurasthenic and into lots of kink, he will take your breath away because he
second-guesses all your thoughts. He may be profoundly pessimistic about love
and friendship but (and?) he understands human ways better than anyone else.
The best long biography is by Jean-Yves Tadié, the best short one is Benjamin
Taylor’s slim volume in Yale’s Jewish Lives series.
André Aciman
To read Proust is to read oneself. Nothing that Proust says
is really new to any of us. His thoughts and observations have crossed our
minds countless times; we’ve seen what he’s seen, and what he’s felt we’ve
felt. We’ve admired all the things he worships on our planet—beautiful sunsets,
beautiful paintings, beautiful faces. And we too have balked before the very
situations he fears or is squeamish about; even if, unlike him, we always
pretended not to mind them so much. All of us, without exception, have felt the
kind of emotions he describes in such minute detail—emotions that none of us is
eager to admit we’re familiar for fear of embarrassing ourselves. There is
really very little that Proust writes about that’s so new under the sun:
waiting for a mother’s goodnight kiss, being ripped apart by the most shameful
feelings of jealousy for someone we’re not even sure we’ve ever been in love
with; waiting for a sign, a letter, a phone call from someone who is almost
unaware that we exist; stopping everything because the scent of something has
reminded us of a past that is never dead or buried. Even the dead, when we
least expect it, come back to remind us of their love and of our guilt.
To repeat: reading Proust is like reading oneself. The
problem is that many of us can spend an entire lifetime with a therapist and
still find reading ourselves a very difficult, if not impossible task. We are
not just a knot of so many, many disparate strands, but finding the tools to
unravel these strands is no less of a challenge than sorting who we are.
It’s the tools that make Proust the greatest novelist of all
time. To find his way through these intricately gnarled strands without
cheating or cutting corners or taking easy shortcuts you do need a very precise
and incisive tool, and in Proust’s case that tool is his style. The style needs
to parse the convolutions that make us who we are and capture what we really
feel—not what we claim to feel or wish to believe we feel. Proust’s style is
always sobering, disabused, and all-encompassing. His sentences are long because
he needs to make certain not to miss anything along the way; but in order to
take his reader through such a laborious travelogue and do justice to what he
is really after, he needs to let each sentence tells its own story. And indeed
each sentence is a story, (1) with its hasty and frequently elegiac beginning,
(2) its laundry list of particulars and mini-particulars that remind us that an
analyst is frequently nothing more than a fussy lawyer cobbling one clause
after the other, and finally (3) its climax which reminds us that for every
insight into the human psyche, this master craftsman must start in a lyrical
vein and end with something as comic and as pithy and piquant as a limerick
written with a surprising finish. I can think of only one other writer capable
of such breadth and humanity: Shakespeare.
Aleksandar Hemon
There was a time when literature was a main means of deep
inquiry, when the human knowledge acquired by writing/reading a book was
extremely valuable. One might long—as I do—for those days, particularly now
when much of contemporary U.S. literature is pseudomoralistic epiphany peddling
and/or empathy porn. When I want to restore my faith in literature, I read
Proust.
Proust’s project was founded on the belief that literature
can make important, unique discoveries, that writing can provide space for a
mind to reflect upon itself and create an exhausting record of the process. His
total commitment to the project is evident not only in the staggering totality
of À la recherche du temps perdu, but also in his long,
syntactically marvelous sentences, each of which contains, like a fractal, the
basic structure of the book. What to an impatient reader ever craving the cheap
rewards of empathy might look like chaos is a highly ordered system, where
themes and forms recur at every scale. Reading Proust is like watching a galaxy
being put together, one particle at a time.
All great books teach us how to read them. We have to
adjust, or even abandon, our habitual expectations and submit to a
transformation we cannot fully control—the knowledge available is not always
easy to absorb. If what great books do is open new human spaces, then the
proper first reaction is a sense of being lost in such a space. But the reward
of finding our way in that new space, of figuring what is in it, of allowing
the discovery to change our thought, far exceeds merely recognizing and
confirming what we already know, which is why great books can never be merely
descriptive or entertaining.
Sometimes I teach Proust in Paris (to U.S. students), some
of whom like to get lost in the parts of the city away from tourist
attractions, because it forces them to see it differently, more intensely.
After a while, they start organizing the city in their heads from the particles
they’ve collected while being disoriented. I often see my students being
disoriented just as well somewhere, say, along Swann’s Way, blaming
Proust for not being engaged, or for not ringing the bell that would trigger
Pavlovian empathy. But then there comes the pleasure of their slowly feeling
their way around, and realizing that, like Paris, Proust needs to be constantly
revisited. Once I had a student who, just before our Proust class, approached
me with a measure of suspicion, and asked:
“Do you really like this?”
“I do,” I said. “And you will too.”
And he did.
Daniel Mendelsohn
Longtemps… dans le Temps: Proust’s vast masterpiece
begins and ends with references to Time. Even people who haven’t read the novel
know that it is preoccupied with time—or rather, the passage of time, or time
past, or “lost” time (which may be recuperable by eating a madeleine at the
right moment)—vague impressions strengthened both by the titles of the most
popular English translations (In Search of Lost Time, Remembrance
of Things Past) and by the casual and common use of the adjective
“Proustian” nowadays to refer to pretty much anything sepia-toned, anything
having to do with “memory.”
Proust’s novel is indeed about Time, just as it is about
many other things: desire, love, family, jealousy, society, class, music,
literature, art, creativity, longing, sexuality, landscapes, illness, snobbery,
politics, fashion, Venice, Paris, the seaside, airplanes, the post, the
theater, automobiles, the list goes on and on. The whole world, in a word,
refracted through the prism of the powerful and unforgettable consciousness of
“the Narrator,” whose growth and education and evolution into a figure capable
of writing this immense and yet fine-grained epic—an artist who can grow to the
size of the world—is the ostensible “story” of the novel. (Karl Ove
Knausgaard’s My Struggle, by contrast, shrinks the entire world to
the size of the narrator’s consciousness; it is the inverse of Proust, to which
it is often, if erroneously, compared. Proust’s novel grows out of soil of
19th-century fiction, with its large and confident perspectives; Knausgaard’s
emerges from the miniaturized, atomized world of the blogosphere.) For this
reason alone, the novel should be read: it gives you the world.
But to return to Time: this is not just the subject, or one
of the subjects, of In Search of Lost Time; it is also the medium
in which the novel must be read, if it is to be understood. To read this novel takes time;
there is no faking it, there are no short-cuts, like five-minute yoga (one of
the many fatuities of a frenetic era that is obsessed with “wasting” time, as
if to spend time on anything were somehow a loss). If the novel itself is very
long, it’s because the arcs of its stories are immense and drawn out; part of
the pleasure of reading it is that it unfolds much as life does—over long periods
of time during which you may forget this or that person or event only to find
yourself pleasantly surprised to run into a familiar-seeming face much, much
later. If you take your time reading Proust, you will have these
extraordinarily life-like thrills of recognition, just as the Narrator does—as,
for instance, when he realizes that the “Lady in Pink” whom he met as a child
in his uncle’s drawing room is the same person as Odette, his friend Swann’s
mistress. (My own favorite: one can assume through much of In Search of
Lost Time that Odette’s surname, de Crécy, is one of the pretentious
pseudo-aristocratic inventions favored by high-class courtesans of the era;
when, deep into the novel, the Narrator runs into an aging and impoverished
aristocrat whose name turns out to be de Crécy, you realize that there reallywas a
husband, that the name is real: and much about Odette’s past is revealed
retroactively.)
But to glean these moments you must pay attention. Proust’s
style, even, requires Time, demands the attentiveness that only taking your
time yields: the sentences themselves, immense, winding, highly subordinated,
take time to get through, to parse, to absorb, to understand. You cannot read
Proust’s sentences fast, just as you cannot read the novel fast; you cannot
read his clauses inattentively, just as you cannot read whole volumes without
paying due attention. To do so, certainly, is one sure way to have things get
“lost.”
Or to be the loser. Recently I was traveling on a train next
to a young man—a recent college graduate, I guessed—who was reading a hugely
fat Victorian novel. Since I teach literature, this made me happy. But as I
watched him I noticed that roughly every 90 seconds he’d fish out his
iPhone to check his text messages. After a while this reflexive tic made me so
nervous that I moved to another seat. As a writer as well as a teacher, I found
it nerve-wracking to think that this is how some people are reading novels
these days—which is to say, not really reading them, because you can’t read anything
serious in two-minute spurts, or with your mind half on something else, like
the messages you may be getting. Multitasking is the great myth of the present
era: you cannot, in fact, do two things at the same time.
Especially if one of them requires considerable resources of
attentiveness and intellectual commitment. To my mind, a very important reason
to have a go at Proust right now—which is to say, to read him with a mind as
receptive as his was large—is to exercise one’s powers of commitment. One
wonders if, for Proust, it will be death by a thousand textos. Only
time will tell.
__
De LONGREADS, 11/07/2016
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