Becoming quite obsessed with Proust. The other day I suggested to someone who was "between books" that they should read Proust. She had never heard of him and asked me what it was about. Taken aback by the question I told her it was "about turn of the century France and society and stuff". She then suggested she wasn't intelligent enough for it, at which I scoffed, because she is obviously very intelligent, but she didn't seem convinced enough to want to read him. So that's my task - to explain exactly why someone should read Proust. As well as to convince that one doesn't have to be super-intelligent to approach the novel. The novel has a certain reputation, but one that is, as far I am concerned, unnecessarily off-putting.
(Before I start, as a kind of status update, and for any bearing it might have on the content of this, I'm about halfway through Volume 4)
So, first off, what is In Search of Lost Time about? Everything. And it really is. It is ostensibly about memory and remembering but within that framework it becomes a collection of thoughts on just about everything. The main themes are, I guess, art and love, and, because of the nature of remembering it is in a way an aesthetic of life; each moment, each feeling almost, is viewed in the same one views a work of art. It is not so much that each episode is captured by virtue of references to art (which they generally are) but that each moment is viewed as an artwork itself, and this creates the links with other artworks. Rather than the other artworks being mere reference points, they become embroiled in the very framework of life, and life becomes embroiled in the framework of art.
There is also a lot on social appearances and how a person can only ever be known through these appearances. We start from a name from which we imagine what a person will be like, the narrator putting all the history of a name into his imaginings of what the current holder of the name will be, but when he finally meets the person he cannot match the person with the name. The same procedure occurs with reference to places as well, all the history comes to nothing when he finally goes there, it is the individual perception and the circumstances one visits the place in that form the place. Consequently there is no stable person/place but only the person/place of the moment, and it is these moments which Proust aims to capture.
The thing that remains elusive in Proust, despite all his attempts at capturing it, is love. For all the words on love in the novel he can never pin down what love is, instead he concentrates on jealousy or desire, with long sections spent detailing such emotions without ever pinning down the cause. Love. I am reminded of the Dexy's Midnight Runners song, "This is What She's Like", where for the first section, when asked to explain what she's like, he can only come up with negative answers, she's not this, she's not that, and when he finally gets to the positive he can only emit a number of beautiful moans and groans while the music drives forward. And that is what love is, unexplainable but irresistible. If one could pinpoint why one loved another, it would not be love. And so, for all the words of Proust he can never approach an explanation of love, he can only circle it by talking of jealousy and desire. The whole novel's thesis that, for some, love is always pain can be seen to be a metaphor for this, the narrator as writer finds it impossible to explain love, just as the narrator as lover is unable to love happily.
Yet this in itself makes the novel beautiful. The message being that for all love's impossibility it is impossible to escape. Impossible and undesirable. For all that the novel spends over 3000 pages (not having finished my rereading this of course still amounts to speculation) not being able to describe love, it is still central to the novel. For all that the narrator knows that love will, for him, always be pain, it can not be denounced, it is still what drives, it is still beautiful, still...
There is a passage in volume four which remarks upon this elusive nature of love and connects it with the novel's approach to history which we identified above:
The paradox is that despite this ahistorical nature of love, it is history (our's, their's, History) that leads us to the loved object. Proust has many instance of this, where, for example the place the narrator is in will lead him to a certain girl, or type of girl, to love, or where speculating on the nature of Albertine and her friends leads him to fall in love with them one by one, before finally resting on Albertine, and even this final choice is driven by circumstance.
The problem lies in the narrator's inability to fully let himself go and leave history behind. Alain Badiou argues that love is an Event, it is something that changes the current situation - things are never the same again, the situation itself is changed into something else - but is separate from it (and this is just a brief summary from memory and without reference), is not included in the situation. And isn't this what we see in Proust, where love is separate from all the history of the persons involved but springs, necessarily, from it. The narrator's problem is in not recognising this, in not be faithful to the event and clinging to the previous situation, still working within the old co-ordinates.
So, to return to the question I started with, what does all this have to do with "Why read Proust?" Because, rather than endless banalities about the nature of love, the very circling round the question tells us more about it than nearly every other book, and it's absence in the novel allows for our own love to rise, to inform the reading, and our love to be informed by the novel. It does not create some nostalgic impulse to remember old loves, but allows old loves to come flooding back and inform our present self on the magic and majesty of love.
And what better reason to read could there be than that?
I also noted that this self-evidently intelligent person said that she didn't feel intelligent enough for it, so a few words on that. First off, how does one become intelligent if one never reads anything "difficult"? One can dumb things down as much as one likes, but one has start rising up at some point. Secondly, I think it is a great myth that Proust is somehow difficult. The writing flows beautifully (standard only-reading-translation disclaimer), so even the longest, most convoluted sentences read easily. Compared to Henry James he is a an absolute pleasure. And while there is a lot of allusions to art and artists, even when one hasn't heard of them, the context generally makes the references intelligible and it can only serve as good thing to be made aware of new things in such a wonderful way, for the inquisitive it can open up many new avenues to explore.
So, I highly recommend reading Proust to everyone, don't be put off by the elitist equation of great art with difficulty. Obviously reading a 3000 word novel brings difficulties of its own, but every word is a pleasure, rather than a chore.
(Before I start, as a kind of status update, and for any bearing it might have on the content of this, I'm about halfway through Volume 4)
So, first off, what is In Search of Lost Time about? Everything. And it really is. It is ostensibly about memory and remembering but within that framework it becomes a collection of thoughts on just about everything. The main themes are, I guess, art and love, and, because of the nature of remembering it is in a way an aesthetic of life; each moment, each feeling almost, is viewed in the same one views a work of art. It is not so much that each episode is captured by virtue of references to art (which they generally are) but that each moment is viewed as an artwork itself, and this creates the links with other artworks. Rather than the other artworks being mere reference points, they become embroiled in the very framework of life, and life becomes embroiled in the framework of art.
There is also a lot on social appearances and how a person can only ever be known through these appearances. We start from a name from which we imagine what a person will be like, the narrator putting all the history of a name into his imaginings of what the current holder of the name will be, but when he finally meets the person he cannot match the person with the name. The same procedure occurs with reference to places as well, all the history comes to nothing when he finally goes there, it is the individual perception and the circumstances one visits the place in that form the place. Consequently there is no stable person/place but only the person/place of the moment, and it is these moments which Proust aims to capture.
The thing that remains elusive in Proust, despite all his attempts at capturing it, is love. For all the words on love in the novel he can never pin down what love is, instead he concentrates on jealousy or desire, with long sections spent detailing such emotions without ever pinning down the cause. Love. I am reminded of the Dexy's Midnight Runners song, "This is What She's Like", where for the first section, when asked to explain what she's like, he can only come up with negative answers, she's not this, she's not that, and when he finally gets to the positive he can only emit a number of beautiful moans and groans while the music drives forward. And that is what love is, unexplainable but irresistible. If one could pinpoint why one loved another, it would not be love. And so, for all the words of Proust he can never approach an explanation of love, he can only circle it by talking of jealousy and desire. The whole novel's thesis that, for some, love is always pain can be seen to be a metaphor for this, the narrator as writer finds it impossible to explain love, just as the narrator as lover is unable to love happily.
Yet this in itself makes the novel beautiful. The message being that for all love's impossibility it is impossible to escape. Impossible and undesirable. For all that the novel spends over 3000 pages (not having finished my rereading this of course still amounts to speculation) not being able to describe love, it is still central to the novel. For all that the narrator knows that love will, for him, always be pain, it can not be denounced, it is still what drives, it is still beautiful, still...
There is a passage in volume four which remarks upon this elusive nature of love and connects it with the novel's approach to history which we identified above:
Doubtless I had long been conditioned, by the powerful impression made on my imagination and my faculty for emotion by the example of Swann, to believe in the truth of what I feared rather than of what I should have wished. Hence the comfort brought me by Albertine's affirmations came near to being jeopardised for a moment because I remembered the story of Odette. ... Was there not a vast gulf between Albertine, a girl of good middle-class parentage, and Odette, a whore sold by her mother in her childhood? There could be no comparison of their respective credibility. ... I should therefore be guilty of an error of reasoning ... in reconstructing the real life of my beloved solely from what I had been told about Odette's. I had before me a new Albertine...It might be a bit of a leap to read this passage in the way I am about to; the first time I read it I saw this in it, but the next time it had gone. It was an almost Proustian moment as I continued reading over it, trying to rescue my original impression from becoming lost in the more intellectual returns I was making. The point is that this "new Albertine" is an Albertine separate from all history, an Albertine who can not be reduced to everything that has gone before, who can not be built up from the past, but who just is. It is an Albertine who, on the one hand can only be known via her history, the narrator's history (both with and away from Albertine), and all history (represented here by Odette), but, on the other hand, there is the Albertine who is loved, separate from everything. It is the former Albertine who the narrator's jealousy constantly sees; it is the second Albertine that the narrator only ever sees fleetingly. After this section he goes on that he should never have seen Albertine again, gone away, and just kept the feeling he had at that moment, unspoilt. Here, again, we see the Proust of the aesthetic of feeling, wishing to keep the feeling for himself, collect it almost, so he can revisit it whenever he pleases without the other Albertine coming in and ruining his feeling. We can see why love, for Proust, is equated with pain - being with the loved one is the one sure way to ruin his love.
The paradox is that despite this ahistorical nature of love, it is history (our's, their's, History) that leads us to the loved object. Proust has many instance of this, where, for example the place the narrator is in will lead him to a certain girl, or type of girl, to love, or where speculating on the nature of Albertine and her friends leads him to fall in love with them one by one, before finally resting on Albertine, and even this final choice is driven by circumstance.
The problem lies in the narrator's inability to fully let himself go and leave history behind. Alain Badiou argues that love is an Event, it is something that changes the current situation - things are never the same again, the situation itself is changed into something else - but is separate from it (and this is just a brief summary from memory and without reference), is not included in the situation. And isn't this what we see in Proust, where love is separate from all the history of the persons involved but springs, necessarily, from it. The narrator's problem is in not recognising this, in not be faithful to the event and clinging to the previous situation, still working within the old co-ordinates.
So, to return to the question I started with, what does all this have to do with "Why read Proust?" Because, rather than endless banalities about the nature of love, the very circling round the question tells us more about it than nearly every other book, and it's absence in the novel allows for our own love to rise, to inform the reading, and our love to be informed by the novel. It does not create some nostalgic impulse to remember old loves, but allows old loves to come flooding back and inform our present self on the magic and majesty of love.
And what better reason to read could there be than that?
I also noted that this self-evidently intelligent person said that she didn't feel intelligent enough for it, so a few words on that. First off, how does one become intelligent if one never reads anything "difficult"? One can dumb things down as much as one likes, but one has start rising up at some point. Secondly, I think it is a great myth that Proust is somehow difficult. The writing flows beautifully (standard only-reading-translation disclaimer), so even the longest, most convoluted sentences read easily. Compared to Henry James he is a an absolute pleasure. And while there is a lot of allusions to art and artists, even when one hasn't heard of them, the context generally makes the references intelligible and it can only serve as good thing to be made aware of new things in such a wonderful way, for the inquisitive it can open up many new avenues to explore.
So, I highly recommend reading Proust to everyone, don't be put off by the elitist equation of great art with difficulty. Obviously reading a 3000 word novel brings difficulties of its own, but every word is a pleasure, rather than a chore.
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