PGS Lit Soc: The Proustian Revolution

 This term, the Literary Society will feature speakers on a range of subjects, from literature to architecture, physics, history and philosophy, to celebrate 1922, one of the most significant years in intellectual and cultural history. This week, James Burkinshaw discusses the work of French writer, Marcel Proust.

A la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust, translated into English as Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time, and usually referred to in France as La Recherche, was published in seven volumes, totalling 3,300 pages, between 1913 and 1927, with the first English translation appearing in 1922. Its sheer length and its experimental style have attracted defenders and detractors from the very beginning. In 1919, Virginia Woolf declared “My great adventure is really Proust. Well, what remains to be written after that? Nothing seems left to do.” However, rejecting the novel for publication, the publisher Alfred Humblot wrote to Proust, “I fail to see why a chap needs thirty pages or so to describe how he tosses and turns in bed before falling asleep.” Even Proust’s loving brother, Robert, noted, "The sad thing is that people have to be very ill or have a broken leg in order to have the opportunity to read La Recherche." Well, I didn't need to break a leg, but I decided to dive into La Recherche twelve months ago, when we went into the second lockdown, finally completing the seventh volume during a period of Covid-induced isolation just before Christmas.

In light of his brother’s comments, it is perhaps fitting that Marcel himself wrote the novel while lying in bed - over a period of 16 years, from 1906 to his death in 1922 (aged just 51). Severely asthmatic with a debilitating skin condition, Proust would have fits several times a day, often lasting over an hour at a time; he was unable to go outdoors, especially in the summer. He suffered excruciating stomach cramps. And he always felt cold.  Regardless of the season, he wrote from under a pile of blankets, often wearing a coat, scarf and gloves, in a cork-lined bedroom with the windows sealed shut and the curtains drawn. Proust would wake up each day at around 5 pm, and then write through the night until the morning, when he would go back to sleep.

However, for the first three and a half decades of his life, Marcel Proust had been at the heart of French society, at the height of La Belle Epoque, that period of unprecedented peace and prosperity leading up to the First World War. He associated with Parisian celebrities: aristocrats, actors, artists and politicians. He was seen as a witty, entertaining, but also rather trivial figure; few predicted that he would eventually write one of the most revolutionary works in literary history. Proust himself declared talking to be “a futile activity, a superficial digression . . We may talk for a lifetime without doing more than indefinitely repeat the vacuity of a minute.” However, as La Recherche shows, Proust was also an extraordinary listener and observer, with a Wildean ear for the rhythms of dialogue and a Dickensian flair for characterisation. His semi-autobiographical narrator, Marcel, is initially dazzled by the glamour and celebrity of the Duchess of Guermantes and her social circle, modelled on the wealthy and powerful people with whom Proust mixed. He is drawn to their witty and often waspish conversation. Much of the dialogue and description is laugh-out-loud funny. 

However, the novel explores Marcel’s growing disillusion with their superficial charm and cynical wit, their snobbery and also their prejudice. A dark thread running throughout the novel is the Dreyfus Affair, a historical event in which a French Jewish army officer, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, was imprisoned for espionage, but later released when it was eventually revealed that he had been the victim of anti-semitism among fellow-officers and a corrupt cover-up involving the Army and the political establishment. The case bisected French society for many years afterwards in a way that we can appreciate in this age of Brexit and Trump. Attitudes towards the case reflected subterranean prejudices and resentments beneath the dazzling cultural surface that, within two decades, would lead some to eager collaboration with the Nazi occupation, including the transfer of 75,000  French Jews to the death camps. For all of his own bourgeois privilege, Proust, as a Jew, remained aware that he was considered an outsider. 

La Recherche ends with the shattering experience of the First World War, a cumulative symbol of the disruptive and destructive power of modernity. Proust himself enthusiastically embraced technology, for example listening to live opera and theatre from his bedroom,  using a new phone service. He was also addicted to the ‘news’, his bedroom floor littered with old newspapers. However, he was simultaneously horrified by the way in which technology not only accelerated but flattened our experience of time:  “The abominable and sensual act called “reading the newspaper”, thanks to which all the misfortunes and cataclysms in the universe over the last twenty-four hours . . are transformed for us . .. into a morning treat, blending in wonderfully . . with the recommended ingestion of a few sips of cafe au lait.” As philosopher Alain de Botton notes, the more an account is compressed, the more it seems that it deserves no more space than it has been allocated. In a world saturated by words and images, there is room only for cliches and surfaces. 

At the heart of La Recherche is a disconnect - between that cliched surface-world of distraction and dissociation, and the individual consciousness that seeks significance and integration. In probably the most well-known scene in the novel, the adult narrator eats a madeleine cake while drinking lime-blossom tea. The combination triggers involuntary memories from his childhood growing up in the village of Combray.  What makes the novel so distinctive is Proust’s ability to  convey the physical sensation of being deep inside someone’s mind. His labyrinthine, looping, spiralling  sentences (which often go on for several pages, the longest reaching 958 words) embody the network of connections between sensations, impressions, emotions, words and meanings, evoking the fluid, restless movement of consciousness itself, a continuous web of reactions and connections, in which the mind inhabits meaning. I talked earlier about diving into Proust; Jacqueline Rose famously compared reading a Proustian sentence to going for a swim. Not only does reading some of them take an almost muscular energy, but there is something tidal about Proust’s narrative style, as Marcel’s consciousness is tugged backwards (through memory) and forwards (through desire). Proust’s frank descriptions of sexuality, particularly same-sex relationships, shocked many contemporaries. La Recherche is not just a modernist classic but an LGBTQ+ landmark. Unlike fellow-LGBTQ writers such as Oscar Wilde and Andre Gide, who represented homosexuality as a higher aesthetic form, Proust presents it as a natural, biological force. For example, he foreshadows the introduction of the Baron de Charlus and his partner, Jupien, with an extended description of a bee pollinating a plant, suggesting their sexuality is hard-wired. Human sexuality throughout the novel is described in organic, Darwinian terms, mirroring the oceanic, Freudian imagery Proust uses to characterise consciousness.  

But how does one attain integrity and significance within a consciousness in continuous motion, endlessly  desiring, remembering and associating? Like his contemporary, Ezra Pound, Proust’s focus was on the image as ‘an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time”, creating a metaphorical bridge from lived reality to artistic vision. Writing of Chardin’s painting, ‘The Ray’, Proust compares the innards of the skate to  “the nave of a polychrome cathedral”. This is a telling image, connecting the physical and natural to the spiritual and artistic. In La Recherche, the fictional artist, Elstir (loosely based on Monet), helps teach Marcel how to see things in a new light. Some of the most beautiful descriptions in the novel feature the play of light on a brick wall, on the skin of a peach or even slowly crossing some crumpled bed sheets (in the scene which led the publisher, M. Humblot, to hurl the manuscript in the bin with an exasperated cry). A sudden shift of light leads Marcel from dismissing a beached jellyfish as a hideous gelatinous lump to appreciating "the transparent velvet of their petals, like the mauve orchids of the sea." "The greatness of true art”, writes Proust, “is to find, grasp, bring out that reality which we live at a great distance from, which we run the risk of dying without having known and which is quite simply our own life.  True life, finally discovered and illuminated, is literature . . . Style has nothing to do with embellishment, it’s a quality of vision, the revelation of the particular universe that each of us sees and that no-one else sees.” The significance of the scene with the madeleine and the lime-blossom tea is not as a moment of recollection, but as  a moment of illumination, of significance. Marcel’s consciousness is presented as inhabiting the memory of light falling across the village square in mid-afternoon, the smell of Aunt Leonie’s bedroom, the aroma of fresh asparagus for lunch, the moistness of the air on the banks of the Vivone. Proust is presenting this involuntary, subconscious world, as more coherent than the more conventional, more restricted conscious mind - which, of course, counters the conventional wisdom. He suggests that, as adults, “our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits, have long been at work and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us.” Marcel is re-entering his own existence as a work of art, liberated from those cliched frames of reference that limit our appreciation and understanding of our experiences, preventing them from being, in a meaningful sense, our own.   

And where does the reader figure in all of this? Proust sees a literary work as “an optical instrument . . .  to enable (the reader) to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have experienced in himself. This is the only way in which art can affect rather than simply distract us from life . . . perceptions we recognise as our own, yet could not have formulated on our own . . . Reading is for us the instigator whose magic keys have opened the door to those dwelling places deep within us that we would not have known how to enter . .” However, as Alain de Botton observes, reading becomes dangerous when, instead of awakening us to the personal life of the mind, it takes its place, when the truth no longer appears to us as an ideal which we can realise only by the intimate progress of our own thought and the efforts of our heart but as something material deposited between the leaves of books  . . . for us to sample passively. de Botton gives the example of Illiers in France, Proust’s model for Marcel’s childhood village of Combray, which in 1971 (half a century after the author’s death) renamed itself Illiers-Combray so that it could trade on its Proustian connection, including bakeries selling madeleines and lime-blossom tea, and the like. Perhaps it makes commercial sense, but it is the exact opposite of what Proust was trying to show the reader in La Recherche, which is that each of you must individually make a return trip to your own reality through art. Art must lead you back to life so that you can make your life a work of art.