Remembering Proust and His Literary Masterpiece

Karolina R. Swasey

“For a long time I used to go to bed early.” With these words, of what is most likely the most famous first line of French literature, begins a magnum opus that is described as a cathedral by its own author: A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time; originally translated as Remembrance of Things Past). Never before has a writer operated the introspections and mechanisms of memory in such a masterly way. Generations of readers all over the world accompanied him on his wondrous search and experienced the nearly mythical dimensions of a simple madeleine. The riddles this masterpiece allures us with might act as invitations to follow up on the mysteries and secrets of its exceedingly imaginative author, whose contemporaries shaped the reductive image of Proust as the nervous, extremely shy and reclusive hypochondriac hidden in his cork-lined room. Above all, the story is a journey into the monad-like structures our consciousness is trapped in.

 

Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was born in Auteuil, a suburb of Paris, on July 10, 1871, to the doctor and author of several books, Adrien Proust, and Jeanne Weil who sprang from a wealthy Jewish family, and who in Marcel’s eyes, was a beautiful, dark-haired, soft-featured woman — much more intelligent, sensitive and sympathetic than his father, as can be extracted from his letters to her.

 

Along with the deep love and attachment to his mother, his letters also indicate that she was the focal point of his neuroses. His asthma, the first severe attack of which he suffered in 1880 at the age of nine, the demand for money, and constipation, are the three main subjects of their correspondence. Many of the lurid passages of accusation towards her can be recovered in the pages of Remembrance, like the famous scene where the young narrator Marcel writes his mother from his room “in a fit of rebelliousness,” while they are both living under the same roof.

 

Before he withdrew himself from public, due to a severe depression following his mother’s death and the exacerbation of his asthma, into the renowned sound-insulated apartment, where he began to work on his monumental piece, he lived with his parents and the life of a dandy until his late 30s.

 

He was introduced to the world of literature at an early age and his taste was patterned on the classics. Proust’s literary career was foreshadowed by passionate reading as well as his affection for art, architecture, and music. It actually began at the age of 21 though, with the publication of his first pieces in a small magazine called Le Banquet, followed by his first published book Les plaisirs et les jours, before he occupied himself with two major translations of John Ruskin for the next several years. It was not until 1913 that Proust had his rocky breakthrough with the publication of Du côté de chez Swann (Swann’s Way), the first of seven volumes, in which the author manages to introduce all the principal characters and themes he intends to develop in the 4,000 pages of In Search of Lost Time.

 

 

This was also the section that Andre Gide (back then the editor at the famous Gallimard publishing house) had in mind, when he refused to publish the manuscript on the grounds that Proust was “a snob and literary amateur” — a decision he later regretted deeply, saying it was the biggest mistake of his life. The extreme slowness of narrative movement of the first half of the volume had and probably still has a similar effect upon many other potential readers of Proust. All that can be said to such readers is that if they will suspend their skepticism long enough, Proust will compensate them for their trouble.

 

The word time is not only present in the title of the cycle, it also dominates its principal subject, which is a Bergsonian becoming of Proust’s masterpiece itself. According to Roland Barthes, this was the only story that Proust told in there. The tendency to relate Proust’s work to his life has a long history within literary criticism, though Proust vetoed this kind of interpretation in the last volume of his own work.

 

Whether a fictional biography or not, In Search of Lost Time is a quest for moments and memories that are believed to be lost, in the sense that they can’t be filled with life by one’s consciousness, or rather, the deliberate act of remembering. A person can only remember things that were classified and organized by his intelligent mind into a system of memories. A major part of the memory therefore remains unreachable — it is dead forever. It can only be evoked by a coincidental, explosive sensory experience — like the taste of a madeleine dipped in tea or a melody heard.

 

This literary masterstroke of the early 20th century is based on a challenge to the scientific concept of linear time as an essential condition for one’s perception of reality and thus the self. It is about the actual nature of things, habits and ordinary occurrences, and the truth of the world that is buried beneath them, and accessible only through one’s memory.

 

In Ernst Robert Curtius’ words: “Time in Proust’s novels is not the chronometrical time of calendars and science, but the durée réelle, the emotional reality, whose rhythm can be infinitely multifarious, and whose quality and succession interacts closely with the changes in atmosphere, emotional disposition and space. The Proustian time has an elasticity and relativity that all external measuring founders on. … In his novels we don’t count in months or years, but in changes of emotional seasons. … One weather shift suffices to create the world or ourselves anew.”

 

Author Bio:
Karolina Swasey is a contributing writer at Highbrow Magazine.

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