«Marcel Proust was born in
Paris on the tenth of July, 1871. At the age of nine he was suddenly
stricken with an attack of asthma and from that time on he claimed the
privileges of an invalid fortunately relieved by wealthy parents from the
necessity of any concern with a livelihood. The doting father and mother
watched over him with exaggerated care and developed in him a morbid
affection. He attended school irregularly, passed the summer at the seaside,
and amazed the parents of his childhood companions by the perfection of his
behavior in the drawing room. Later on he abandoned the study of law at the
Sorbonne for the career of valetudinarian and man-about-town, frequenting
the best society and occasionally writing rather precious little essays for
the aristocratic pages of Figaro.
As early as 1890 (when he was
nineteen years old) he had also begun to take notes for an elaborate work
which he was already projecting but none of his friends appears to have
taken his literary pretension as anything more than the self-deception of a
dilettante. He was universally liked because of a charm to which everyone
who knew him has testified and because of a determination, carried to
fantastic lengths, to do the considerate as well as the socially correct
thing. He had not, however, written anything which displayed any conspicuous
talent and it was not thought likely that he would. Then, in 1905, his
mother died and he began that process of cutting himself more and more
completely from the world which was to bring him at last to a strange
self-imprisonment in the bedroom from which, after the most elaborate
preparations, he only occasionally sallied forth in order to seek some bit
of information from the head waiter at the Ritz or, as one lady remembers,
to ask to see a hat worn some twenty years before.
From childhood Proust had
regarded himself as primarily a spectator. There were many things which he
could know only by watching, and this fact doubtless encouraged him to make
watching an end in itself. Nevertheless, contemplation became something much
more than merely a substitute for the activities he could not indulge. His
theory was that the quality of a direct experience always eluded one and
that only in recollection could we grasp its real flavor. Now that the death
of his mother had severed the only tie which bound him to the life of the
world, he retired in order that he might discover and record what his
experience had been. Apparently he discussed with no one the nature of the
work he was to write, but by 1906 the first seven hundred pages had been
written and by 1913 Swann's Way had been published. Proust died in 1922, but
the last volume of his work did not appear until 1927.
Even these few facts are
sufficient to make it clear that Remembrance of Things Past is a life work
in more than one sense. It was not only the thing upon which he depended to
justify his assumption of the writer's role ; it was also, and for himself,
the real meaning of his life. So far as outward events are concerned the
"I" of the novel is not exactly Proust, but the personalities of
the two are identical and if the events are not copied from life they are
intended to be a perfected equivalent of those experiences which he had or
ought to have had in order to reach what he would have regarded as a perfect
realization of his own potentialities. And what is true of himself is true
of the other personages. They are all composites but composites carefully
put together out of the most significant aspects of various real persons in
such a fashion as to make each the complete realization of some ideal
character towards which it seemed to him these various acquaintances were
tending. Having come at last to reject completely that active participation
in life which had never, in his case, been very full, he was determined to
construct for himself out of memory and imagination a more than satisfactory
substitute. That is what Remembrance of Things Past is.
One of the publishers to whom
the first section, Swann's Way, was submitted sent it back with the words :
"I cannot understand why a gentleman should employ thirty pages to
describe how he turns and returns on his bed before going to sleep."
Since that time many would-be readers have doubtless laid the volume down
with a similar reflection but the loss has been theirs alone. Proust knew
with uncommon exactness what it was he was about; he has a purpose in
everything that he does, and even what appear to be digressions of
inordinate length actually occupy a carefully proportioned and predetermined
place in a structure whose architecture can only be understood when one
stands off and regards it as a whole. The first rule for reading him is,
therefore, complete submission to an author who will certainly take you
where you ought to go and who will give you, not only vivid descriptions,
subtle analyses, precise portraits and full participation in a strange new
sensibility, but also compose all these things into a vast symphonic
structure which is probably the most amazing thing of its kind in
literature. Nevertheless the reader about to embark upon so long a journey
will profit somewhat by having a general idea of the course before him.
What, then is Remembrance of Things Past about?
II
The whole is cast into the
form of an autobiography in which, nevertheless, the narrator himself plays
a role not very much larger than that of certain other characters. It begins
with his account of how he was accustomed to spend his sleepless nights in
an effort to recapture the elusive memory of certain events in his childhood
and it describes what some of these fragmentary memories were. Presently it
tells how one of them was suddenly recaptured in its entirety when the taste
of a little cake brought back a certain instance in childhood connected with
the same taste and then, abandoning this incident until the last volume of
the whole work, the narrator launches into the recollections of his youth.
Gradually the tragic story of a certain Mr. Swann detaches itself and the
history of his jealousy-wrecked life is told in full. Meanwhile the narrator
has been growing up. He moves in aristocratic circles and becomes absorbed
in the study of manners and their meaning. He falls in love, first with a
whole group of girls, then, in succession, with two individuals in whose
company he goes through strange emotional adventures. Meanwhile he meets
many other persons whose lives cross his in one way or another and in
particular he falls under the influence of the powerful M. de Charlus whose
greatness and final downfall constitute perhaps the most impressive of all
the single stories. Presently the social organization whose traditions he
has been studying with such care disintegrates; he himself falls deeper and
deeper into his illness and suddenly we realize that we are back again where
we started. The author is ready to begin the writing of his book and we
learn at last the real significance of the little cake. Through an
extraordinary series of psychological adventures the past has been
recaptured-not merely remembered but totally recalled and become, in the
process, Art. The narrator no longer cares to live. He has lived and, what
is more, he has grasped (and recorded) in its entirety the experience of
living.
So much for the incidents. In
what manner are they told and what tlualities are revealed? These are
questions which the reader will probably find himself answering in different
ways as he becomes acquainted one after another with the extraordinary
variety of Proust's powers. In the Ineginning he will find himself in a
twilight world of extraordinary fascinal ion and will be amazed at the
precision with which Proust has recreated I lie world between sleep and
waking. No sooner, however, has he had time to formulate this impression of
Proust as a master of twilight psychology Ilian he will find himself aware
that characters and stories, remarkable now for their dramatic completeness,
are emerging. Thus the story of Swann's love, brilliantly objective, forms a
novel complete in itself and not yet perceived to be part of a larger
pattern. A little further on, the narrator returns again to the experience
of his boyhood; one is introdticed to the aristocratic Guermantes; and one
meets the group of bourgeois music lovers united under the leadership of the
redoubtable Madame Verdurin. Faced with this extraordinary collection of
vivid personages, one is tempted now to hold the opinion that it is as a
creator of characters Ihat Proust most conspicuously excels. One recognizes
a whole gallery of grotesques-almost Dickens-like in the brilliance of the
caricature-and later one will have to add many others, including even the
fascinating licit: perverse M. de Charlus who is carried through his social
triumphs, gradually allowed to disintegrate under our eyes, and then finally
is exposed at his horribly comic nadir when he complains to the proprietor
of a certain establishment where he has gone to have himself whipped by a
milk boy, that the latter is insufficiently insulting. On the other hand,
the greater part of four whole volumes in the original edition is devoted to
the story of the narrator's love for Albertine and as one reads some of the
passages of tortured self-analysis, one returns again to the idea that
Proust is most remarkable in the description of subjective states, in
following the involutions of his spirit and in communicating his egotistical
absorption in the poignancy of a cherished pain.
Yet for all its variety there
is unity in the work. Somehow all the characters and all the discourses go
together. Remembrance of Things Past is no brilliant miscellany, for it
achieves some single effect to which not only all the stories but also the
revelation of Proust's strange personality contribute. No one could possibly
be more detached than he and no one could have. less of faith in anything.
Indeed the story of the novel might with some justice be said to be the
story of his disillusion with the only thing in which he made even an effort
to believe-namely, that tradition of noblesse oblige which the members of
the aristocracy ought to follow but which, so obviously, they do not. Yet
the total effect is not one of chaos or of despair, because the work itself
is beautiful even if the material which composes it is not, and in that fact
lies the key to the secret. Proust's greatest invention was the invention of
a form, of a method by means of which events could be arranged in a pattern
having a formal beauty and a formal meaning capable of replacing the beauty
and the meaning lost to those who, like himself, had no moral or religious
faith capable of giving them any other kind.
Externally the method is one
in which the normal chronological order of narrative is often subordinated
to a quasi-musical arrangement of material by means of which similar or
antithetical persons, situations and moods are rhythmically balanced against
one another so as to create a pattern which does not depend upon the order
of time but upon the sense of recurrence. At the same time every
presentation of material is dominated by the author's obsession with Time
and the need of the artist to escape from its tyranny. The past must be
recovered; but that is not all. It must be made permanent, and it can become
that only when grasped by the imagination in such a way that every moment
implies the past and the future because its true significance lies in its
being part of a pattern extending from the past into the future. Living
experience cannot be fully significant because it is isolated and
transitory; it becomes significant only, when it is contemplated in
connection with those parts of the pattern which Time separates but which
really belong together. Let us, then, consider first the external aspects of
the method and afterwards the end to which it is subservient.
III
Proust himself spoke of the
various themes whose full significance would not be clear until, in the
later volumes, they had begun to combine. This remark of his suggests the
analogy with music, and one may begin the study of his method in some unit
like the first volume, much as one might study the structure of a symphony
by considering the first movement alone. Here one may commence by noting,
for example, how the incident of his mother's failure to kiss him good night
is first referred to on page ten, is dropped like a musical phrase,
reappears successively on pages eighteen, twenty-one and twenty-seven, but
does not receive its full development until the last volume when the
narrator is standing in the anteroom of the Guermantes residence. Moreover
this method is the one followed consistently throughout the book in which
the themes play about one another like the motifs of a fugue. Each separate
scene is related to others by the fact that some emotion or thought or
observation recurs in each. The love affair with Gilberte is looking forward
to a fuller development of the same themes in the love affair with Albertine
and even the elaborate analysis of the process of forgetting the latter,
which fills nearly a volume, is anticipated in the more summary tale of
Gilberte by a few pages on that "irregular process of oblivion"
which is destined to be later so elaborately developed.
The motifs appear one by one.
It would be possible to go through the work and to note, as-one would note
in a symphony, that at this point or that each one of the themes-love,
taste, manners, etc. is introduced for the first time merely in passing
before it is returned to again and again for more and more complete
development. In Swann's Way, for example, the slight, apparently purposeless
incident centering about the daughter of Vinteuil serves to suggest the
theme of homosexuality later so elaborately treated and, though probably no
reader who did not turn back would realize the fact, the very first pages of
the whole work hint at most of the major themes. Thus the escape from Time
is alluded to on page four where it is immediately followed by the incident
of the magic lantern, which, as the first work of art introduced, serves to
suggest the technique by which Time is to be transcended. One result of this
arrangement is to make the novel in another respect like a piece of music,
for of it may be said, more truly even than of most great novels, that the
second reading is more rewarding than the first. To know what is coming does
not detract from the pleasure-is indeed necessary to the full enjoyment of
it-since each incident is, like a musical theme, only enriched by a
knowledge of the variations to follow.
This original and
perfected form has its own self-justifying beauties, but to consider the
intention which determined its choice is to be led back again to that
obsession with Time whose influence is discoverable in every detail of
Proust's work. Thanks to the method which disregards chronology he was able
to bring together, for purposes of contrast or comparison, widely separated
periods, or, as he himself said, to show men as monstrous creatures
straddling between the distant past and the present. Moreover it was
necessary for his purpose to do just this because the full horror of 'l'ime
had to be revealed in order that the miraculous joy which comes through the
escape from it might be properly appreciated.
In the pages of the novel the
commonplace fact that faces grow old and characters change becomes, for him,
something to be analyzed with a fascinated terror. But this change in faces
is only trivially important in comparison with that change which takes place
in character. Hence it came at last to seem to him that it was folly to
speak of Albertine, of Charlus, of himself even, as though any one of them
were an entity maintaining its identity while time flowed past; and he
realized that if his novel was to attain the full significance which he
wished, it must manage somehow, not only to attain timelessness itself, but
also to suggest the triumph of Time over the persons and the experiences
which the novel alone could rescue. Proust's problem as an artist was, then,
the problem of finding the means of rescuing something from the flux, of
establishing in the eternity of art the experiences which he had undergone
or observed. But how was this to be accomplished? What was the bridge
between the two realms? There was memory of course, and memory seems to the
uninitiated the only enemy of Time. Through its aid the days that are passed
may be recovered after a fashion. But memory collects rather than joins
together, and what it gives us is a bag of detached and dissimilar
fragments. The aggregate of them is the thing which we ordinarily call
ourselves, but it remains only an aggregate, not a meaningful whole. From
the dilemma presented by the fact that memory reveals its impotence at the
same time that it seems the only instrument we possess, Proust was rescued
by an essentially mystical experience-by the discovery that for him there
was possible a kind of memory not identical with the ordinary sort: a vision
of the eternity in which even the most completely forgotten experience has
already taken its place. Since this vision was mystical, it is, by very
definition, not to be explained in any terms except its own; yet it cannot
be repeated too often that in it lies the meaning of the novel, every detail
of which it controls. And if we cannot analyze further a thing ultimate in
its own nature, we can at least note the quality which it bestows, can at
least ask how it determines the impression produced by the work which it
dominates. In the first place, it gives to Remembrance of Things Past that
curiously detached and passionless character which the novel preserves even
when passion is being so brilliantly described; it enables Proust to write a
work so cool, so calm and so pure that its artistic perfection is never
disturbed by anything which seems to arise in a mere human being whose
impartiality can be disturbed as-occasionally at least-that of most writers
is by the private passions or desires of a man. In the second place, it
furnishes him with his particular means of achieving an effect which every
really great work of art must in some manner produce; it supplies him with a
point of view from which even calamitous events can be seen as no longer
actually painful. Always aware of the whole of which any incident is a part,
he can, in his novel, calmly accept his own sufferings as well as the
sufferings of others because it is the pattern of which they are a part,
rather than either the pleasure or the pain of the moment, of which he is
most acutely aware; and by thus seeing the passing events of time as part of
a static eternity in which the end is simultaneous with the beginning, he
achieves that indifference which is not the indifference of the insensitive
but the indifference of the gods. Events become, even as he recounts them,
already a part of legend and thus life is magically transmuted into art. He
himself, as well as M. Swann and M. de Charlus, are no longer mere human
beings but analogous to the figures painted upon the slides of the little
magic lantern which had fascinated him so long ago and which he had
described at length early in the first volume of his work. The suffering and
the wickedness of his own characters have now ceased to have any
significance except as parts of a formal design; the first is no more
painful and the second no more terrifying than the distress of Geneviève de
Brabant or the wickedness of her implacable enemy Golo when these two,
emerging as they were always ready to do from eternity, bodied themselves
forth on the wall against which the beams of the lantern were directed. IV
Very diverse opinions have been expressed concerning the rank which ought to
be accorded to Proust as a novelist, but whatever other qualities he may or
may not have, one can hardly,deny him a freshness of vision which makes his
novel very unlike any other. Whether narrating a series of events,
describing a scene, or cataloguing the contents of the mind of a character
at any moment, he is certain to select incidents, to set down particulars,
and to list details which most would have omitted in favor of certain others
now in their turn passed over by Proust. The result is the creation of a
strange new world. Perhaps we recognize its elements even though we have not
ever before been consciously aware of their existence; but the whole which
they compose is new. We enter the pages of Remembrance of Things Past as we
might enter a realm totally unfamiliar, and before we are aware of the fact
we have closed a door behind us, forgetting the standards and the
conventions of familiar life as completely as we forget its personages. For
the world which the novel reveals is more than merely strange; it is also so
consistent, so self-sustaining, and so logically complete that we are never
by any reference led back to the other world of our ordinary concerns. In
contemporary literature we are far more accustomed to literary virtues of
another sort. In the novels of a Sinclair Lewis or a Theodore Dreiser it is
the closeness of their relation to everyday existence which strikes us most
often. These novelists see what we ordinarily see, stress what we ordinarily
stress, and judge as we ordinarily judge. One can, indeed, hardly
distinguish the point at which reading leaves off and daily experience
begins. The pages seem to merge into the stream of contemporary life and it
is this fact which gives to them the kind of importance which they have. But
it is this fact also which prevents us from doing what it is impossible not
to do in the case of Proust-from, that is to say, entering a possible world
entirely different from the one we know best and shutting the door behind
us. Moreover, it must be admitted that, quite aside from the delight
afforded by the mere freshness involved, the spiritual world of Proust has
elements of charm lacking in most contemporary novels because of the fact
that the sensibility everywhere exhibited is of an extraordinary sort. He
was disillusioned enough with many things-with morals, for example-and he
had neither any code nor any standards besides those which his taste
supplied. Yet in the midst of what might seem to be anarchy there were still
capacities and faiths which he retained. He still believed, for example, in
the sufficiency of the senses-at least as furnishers of the material which
contemplation might transform. On the other hand, he never, like so many
moderns, found himself in a universe limited and debased by the
impossibility of escape from psychology, anthropology and Freudianism. The
world was still absorbingly, still amazingly, interesting. Womenmost
women-were to him magical and mysterious. Conversations were witty, artists
incalculably great. In a word, he respected his desires, his tastes and his
amusements, and hence, though experience might be predominantly painful, it
was neither meaningless nor mean. And that perhaps is the secret of the
individual charm of his world. It is one viewed with the critical freedom of
modern thought and one in which skepticism rules. Yet it is somehow
glamorous as well.
No man was ever more
completely than Proust a slave to sensations; no man ever lived more
entirely by and for the nerves; but by shutting himself off from all but the
memory of these sensations he not only recovered them with unexampled
fullness but recovered them in a state more nearly pure than would have been
possible for anyone who had a living future which could occupy him with
plans and desires-recovered them, that is to say, unmixed either with his
own personal concerns or with those moral fervors and antipathies which, for
such at least as he, are in fact no part of a personal concern. It cannot,
of course, be denied that Proust's work fails to afford that "synthesis
of modern life" which has been the subject of so much discussion or
that, indeed, it fails even to treat the themes which the age seems to
impose. Most of the novelists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries felt
constrained to take life seriously in a sense that Proust does not, since,
and with a clear conscience, he permits himself to live the charmed life of
a dilettante, not troubling himself much about the fate of civilization,
acting as though there were nothing more important than the careful
discrimination between shades of feeling, and devoting himself with the
selfishness of the contemplative saint to the achievement of his own private
salvation. He does not hope to dominate or even to influence the
civilization of which he is part, but instead-and again like the most
other-worldly of monks-only to find some way of accepting the evil
inevitably woven into the fabric of any life which takes place in time. Is
it not true, on the other hand, that the very critics who have found Proust
insufficiently "modern" have also been demanding "form";
that they have grown weary of mere document and discussion; and that here in
Proust's novel they are presented with one of the most perfect formal '
designs ever achieved by a writer of prose fiction?
Is it not true, also, that he
has been more successful than any other modern writer in finding a way of
achieving order and peace for himself and his readers without removing them
from modern life?
Remembrance of Things Past is
Proust's Apologia Pro Vita Sua, and if the life which it defends seems to us
a very odd one, at least the defense is successful and Proust in his novel
has achieved certain qualities (like charm and order and peace) which seemed
to have departed forever from modern literature. His world has definitely
taken its place in the not very long list of those possible worlds which art
creates; Charlus, Saint-Loup, the Duchesse de Guermantes, Françoise and
Madame Verdurin have definitely taken their places in the not very long list
of characters who are more real than reality. Something-both in the
particular sense defined by Proust and in the more general sense in which
the phrase is applicable to all great literature-has been rescued from Time.
It is not often that that can be said.»
