Marcel Proust totally changed the way I look at literature. His magic book “In Search of Lost Time” had a significant impact on my mind. I’m hoping that my longread can give you a glimpse into Proust’s world or bring back the emotions you felt when reading the book.
Diving into the world of Proust is like finding yourself in the center of a giant cake with a variety of fillings, which can only be navigated through the slow consumption of this sweet matter, consisting of multi-layered metaphors and contrasting emotions of the author, tearing apart the pseudo-objective reality into the only true one — personal.
The novel “In Search of Lost Time” is unique in many ways and, despite the untimely death of the author, which did not allow him to edit the work to the end, some consider it the pinnacle of literary art. I agree with this statement and am convinced that Proust’s novel better than other works of modernism describes the most complex phenomenon of our life — live thinking. If you are not familiar with the book or are in the process of reading it, I will try to share with you my experience of acquaintance with the work, so that you can get the maximum pleasure and not waste your time in vain.
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##What’s it all about?
For the inexperienced reader, it may seem that Proust’s goal was to describe the aristocratic elite of the Saint-Germain district of Paris in their complex family relationships or to show the vices and debauchery of society in all its manifestations. For others, Proust is a “conceptual” writer who experimented with literature, detailing every nuance of his surrounding reality with thousands of words and almost completely eliminating the plot — which is only worth a 16-page description of a door handle. Indeed, in this seven-volume work (one and a half million words), the whole plot boils down to secular conversations and formal dinners, which sometimes take up half a volume, and the number of characters exceeds the allowed limits.
But to find the first key to understanding Proust and not waste time in vain, one must turn to the title. Being a genius of self-observation, Proust is more insightful than any philosopher in finding the most important component of our perception of reality — time. Sorry: not perception, but experience, and not just physical, but the fleeting time of our lives, which has the property of expanding and contracting, moving in different directions. Proust’s work is a volume of time in which the hero’s experiences unfold, forming his individual temporal flow. Childhood impressions may be closer here than yesterday’s dinner, so when working on the book, Proust imagined his work not linearly, when we need to go from one point to another with the hero, but volumetrically, comparing it to a cathedral — you choose yourself which direction to move in and what to pay attention to.
In this space, different from the linear narration of the classic novel, all the characters and seemingly mundane events acquire a new lively meaning — they are refracted in the soul of the protagonist’s experiences and, in fact, we read not a “historical essay” (Proust made it all up!), but the soul of the hero. How these experiences interact, changing their accents depending on circumstances and time, and who real people turn to in the author’s soul — this is the true taste of Proust’s book. The choice of topics that the author reflects on is almost arbitrary: Proust compared the book to a dress that can be tailored as you like.
Proust’s task — how to understand own experience?
Proust did not create this kind of space from his own imagination, but rather in an attempt to answer a simple question: how to understand and unravel his own experience? It is important to note that for Proust, a book is not an abstraction through which he expresses his thoughts and imagination, but a real participant in his own life — one could say that it is a scientific experiment in which the author digs up artifacts of his own life in order to change life itself. At the same time, “we are not free in the face of our own work” and “the duty of the writer is akin to the duty of a translator” — a translator of one’s own life.
By making this translation, in his work Proust sought to recreate the magic and “velvety charm” that characterizes important events in our lives. In order to grasp the velvety surface of our fate, the writer is harmed by reflecting on “smart” topics and it is useful to look for real spiritual equivalents that people and events leave in our souls, without claiming objectivity. In this regard, a date with a girl for the writer was more important than an “intellectual conversation”, which always proves to be unproductive for our soul and does not put us on the map of reality — does not force us to make fundamental decisions that will reflect in our experience.
For Proust, discovering new areas in the soul was a writer’s most important duty, and literature is an open and clarified, therefore, the only really lived life. You cannot tear a book into quotes or look for wisdom there, because its task is much deeper — the reader must do the work in his own soul, and the book will become only a tool for him. Proust makes us, as readers, the main characters of his book — yes, we did not participate in the described events, but we have experienced the same feelings many times.
Proust’s Style
At first glance, Proust’s narrative style seems extremely complex and sometimes gives the impression that the author is going too far by cramming five hundred words into one sentence, but…
«If it were a matter of making it accessible to the masses one would have to sacrifice the delicacies of form “suitable for idle people”; and I had frequented people in society enough to know that it is they who are the veritable unlettered not the working electricians».
To say that Proust’s descriptions are detailed is to make a mistake, as the author himself points out, stating that his text is not a microscope but a telescope. Proust uses his text to try and reveal something immense that appears insignificant to the ordinary observer, rather than breaking everything down into atoms. These immense space bodies are the emotions of the hero, which he does not notice in the events taking place, but discovers them through literature, retrospectively reflecting on his experience.
Proust’s metaphors are not just a stylistic device, but a real instrument that helps people recognize reality that cannot be broken down into ordinary “objective” terms, and in this sense, they are simply essential for literature like commas and periods. At the Marcel Proust level, metaphors begin to acquire meaning because he does not compare things themselves, but their soul, their nature. He very clearly defines their place in this world: in the musical phrase that constantly pursues the hero, he does not compare music sounds with natural phenomena — he genuinely feels their natural spirit, they are his essence, and they make him suffer in some way. To avoid false objectivity, Proust prohibited himself from writing about a girl: “how beautiful she was.” Instead: “I enjoyed kissing her.” According to these principles, Proust crystallizes his style, which can be reflected in two of the author’s quotes:
“It is that essence which art worthy of the name must express and if it fails, one can yet derive a lesson from its failure (while one can never derive anything from the successes of realism) namely that that essence is in a measure subjective and incommunicable.”
“Accumulated little by little in the memory, the chain of all the obscure impressions where nothing! of what we actually experienced remains, constitutes our thought, our life, reality and it is that lie which a so-called “lived art” would only reproduce, an art as crude as life, without beauty, a reproduction so wearisome and futile of what our eyes have seen and our intelligence has observed, that one asks oneself how he who makes that his aim can find in it the exultant stimulus which gives zest to work.”
In the style of Proust, it is also important to note the unity of narration — there is no clear division between dialogues and descriptions, but everything is part of one organism, flowing from one to another (by the way, a wonderful application of such a remarkable technique can be found in José Saramago’s works). This once again refers us to the hero’s way of thinking, for whom everything that happens has a unified nature of his own sensations.
Proust’s Philosophy
For Proust, a book is a scientific experiment and a heroic journey into one’s own soul:
“But to those who came to see me or sent for me, I should have the courage to answer that I had an urgent appointment about essential matters it was necessary for me to regulate without further delay, an appointment of capital importance with myself.”
He was a big fan of French philosopher Bergson, who believed that creativity is a way of recreating reality: “Life in its entirety, regarded as a creative evolution, is something analogous; it transcends finality, if we understand by finality the realization of an idea conceived or conceivable in advance.”
Clearly understanding his task and being meticulous with his words, Proust attempted to find points of contact between reality and our souls, through which the “creative evolution” takes place. The main character in his work goes through this path of creative development, and if you look closely, in each volume of Proust’s work, he lays out simple themes that pile on top of one another with the course of the narrative, leading to the main conclusion (you can come to your own conclusions, but the theme of each volume is well-defined, so each book is self-sufficient).
Memory is like a dream (“Swann’s Way”).
The book begins with the adult Marcel biting into a piece of cake during one of his infamous social gatherings, and suddenly experiencing vivid memories of his past. Through the use of scents, sensations, and emotions, he is transported back to his childhood bedroom where his first spiritual experiences took place. In fact, Proust’s entire work is like a dream that synthesizes reality in unexpected ways. The protagonist’s childhood dreams and tribulations resurface and become the foundation for his relationships with women, society, and art. In the first book, Proust identifies crucial components of memory (i.e. spiritual reality) such as scents, colors, characteristic gestures, farewells, primary perception, and names. According to Proust, these things cause humans to constantly die and be reborn, or wake up and fall asleep, which are one and the same: “I realised that death is nothing new, ever since my childhood I had been dead numbers of times.” When the protagonist sees a naked woman for the first time, his primary perception is linked to the scent of hawthorn; however, she died then and there and is resurrected when Marcel smelled hawthorn again. The same goes for gestures and names: at first, they carry a magnificent beauty, such as the name Guermantes, but upon close acquaintance and unmasking, these feelings die, only to be reborn when Marcel remembers his primary perception, separated from specific individuals. Proust’s characters are so realistic because they are unreal and consist of the author’s memory.Love Makes a Person (“In The Shadow Of Young Girls In Flower”)
In Proust’s world, love is not discrete. One thread of love connects all the girls in whom the protagonist falls in love throughout his life: his mother, his grandmother, a peasant girl he happens to see, his peer, his future lover, his lover’s friend, and for a while, the elusive Duchess of Guermantes. According to Proust, they are all one love, meaning they are practically one person. Specifically in this volume, Marcel falls in love with various girls who belong to one group when he is vacationing by the sea, and he creates these girls from the enchantment of his surroundings. This thread of love is continuous — there is no state without love — but it all ends in the soul of the protagonist, finding only disappointment in real people, born not from other people, but from Marcel himself: “I had indeed suffered successively through Gilberte, through Mme de Guermantes, through Albertine. Successively also I had forgotten them and only my love, dedicated at different times to different beings, had lasted. I had anticipated the profanation of my memories by unknown readers.” The author repeatedly notes the importance of suffering for the writer and the importance of crazy love for enriching the soul, not for achieving the object of love, which is never attainable because it is not objective. Proust crowns this line of thought with the great words: “To kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey.”
To kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey.
Society is Names (“The Guermantes Way”).
Proust pays great attention to names and titles, which carry important meanings for memory. Names create the smoothness that people themselves cannot create in their prosaic states. Proust shows how the majestic name of the Guermantes goes through stages of ascent and decay, as the hero becomes closer to people who bear this proud name. The name provides a benefit for the writer (and for the person) in that it creates a primary equivalent in the soul, a starting point for perceiving a specific person in the future, and the depth of the mismatch between the name and the person forces one to search for worthy truths not in people (since they are never there), but in their own soul, which gave names their lively meaning. Proust’s society suffers from the fact that it thinks through names, which supposedly objectively describe a person, and as a result, it often gets confused in its definitions of people who are present nearby — people simply do not know how to relate to each other because they do not know how high someone’s name stands. This is the wickedness of society, but moreover, Proust points out that this is the only way that we can think of people because names are easy to remember, unlike complex and multifaceted personalities. It is impossible to remember a personality — it can only be perceived and perceived anew each time, so in essence, we constantly encounter a new person. The same goes for the names of places, which are not just geographical points but true spheres in the hero’s soul. The novel has two symbolic directions in which the hero constantly travels (physically and spiritually): Swann — the direction of creative and spiritual search, and Guermantes — the direction of “social” development. Venice stands alone as a direction: the hero is always wanting to make a journey and constantly postpones it due to amorous and social experiences, due to his illness, and when he finally undertakes it, he finds only disappointment, but it regains meaning and charm when Marcel begins to describe it in a literary work, that is, excavating it from his memory, “the only complete reality”.Vice is lonely and that’s why it’s so common (“Sodom and Gomorrah”).
Proust devotes a large part of his book to homosexual relationships (as he himself was gay), or rather, to the vice of such relationships. If it were another author, we might assume that he wants to show the corruption of human nature, but this is Proust and he must be read differently. Proust shows the path that leads not to humans, but to social decay, to the unbearable loneliness of members of high society who reveal their true nature far from prying eyes and are forced to constantly hide, just as Marcel’s lover hides from his (possibly justifiable) jealousy, or his best friend makes his wife jealous of other women, when in reality he prefers men. There is nothing sexual in this kind of loneliness, only an attempt to satisfy spiritual hunger — an attempt to find a kindred soul. In this frenzy of society, the author shows the unnaturalness of fake relationships of the secular public and it is no coincidence that in this book he uses the brightest strokes to connect two seemingly completely unrelated themes: homosexuality and death. By depicting the loneliness of vice, he shows how this very vice is unable to notice the most natural thing — the death of a loved one. In the novel, there is an example where people do not actually notice the death of a loved one, convincing the doctor that he is exaggerating the patient’s condition because they don’t want to miss a dinner invitation. However, Proust does not give us such an observation as a lesson, but to more fully reveals the spiritual nature of Marcel, who also hides his true feelings from loved ones: “In these moments, thinking at once of my grandmother’s death and of Albertine’s, it seemed to me that my life was stained with a double murder from which only the cowardice of the world could absolve me.”Jealousy is the highest vice (“The Captive”).
Expanding on the theme of loneliness through the character of the Baron, who is known in high society circles as a homosexual, Proust shows how vice finds its highest expression in jealousy — the Baron is constantly jealous of his lover. One could point to the wrongness of same-sex relationships here, but Marcel experiences the same jealousy despite loving only women. Here we see the unity of love, which does not depend on gender and is a choice of affection, yet nonetheless, vice love (i.e. “social,” “class-based”) always leads to mutual imprisonment: “But now all that I had to do when the time came for me to receive caresses, was not to set forth upon a journey, was not even to leave my own house, but to return there. And to return there not to find myself alone, and, after taking leave of the friends who furnished me from outside with food for thought, to find myself at any rate compelled to seek it in myself, but to be on the contrary less alone than when I was at the Verdurins’, welcomed as I should be by the person to whom I abdicated, to whom I handed over most completely my own person, without having for an instant the leisure to think of myself nor even requiring the effort, since she would be by my side, to think of her. So that as I raised my eyes to look for the last time from outside at the window of the room in which I should presently find myself, I seemed to behold the luminous gates which were about to close behind me and of which I myself had forged, for an eternal slavery, the unyielding bars of gold.”Memory is more important than reality (“The Fugitive”).
In the novel, when the protagonist’s beloved dies and can no longer cheat on him, he embarks on a quest to uncover her lifetime betrayals in order to fill the gaps in his memory. As he tries to remember her, he experiences vivid emotions and consistently concludes that “Albertine is dead.” This way, he kills every equivalent of Albertine in his memory. The theme of death pervades the entire work, but it is used in a special sense — for Proust, a person’s real death is the death of their spiritual equivalent in our souls. When a loved one dies, we must acknowledge that it is not just their personality that dies in us, but also a whole spiritual and multifaceted sphere. Therefore, after one death, many people must die in us. When I enter the room of the deceased person, he/she is still there; I look at her favorite dress, and the memories of killing this equivalent flow rapidly. The same applies to those who are still alive, whom we are forced to perceive anew every time. In our souls, they too can die before their physical death, and when we encounter them again, we will find nothing but our own experiences associated with that person in a vain attempt to dig up the old familiar in their appearance. But Proust also paid close attention to physical death, which he saw as evidence of the gap that separates people. It is worth noting that the author was always on the brink of death while working on the novel.“Finding Time Again”
Proust’s last book is essentially a creative manifesto, which, by the way, he wrote together with the first book of the work and therefore managed to fully edit. Here, all lines of Marcel’s reflections and torments come together, who through an epiphany comes to the conclusion that art is the only true reality that can restore lost time…
Art — Proust’s main conclusion
The main conclusion for Proust becomes the revelation that came to him when, after a long seclusion due to the death of his beloved, he came to a breakfast party where he met more of his acquaintances and realized what imprint time had left on them — how mindlessly he had lived his own years. But in the hysteria of this revelation, he finds not disappointment, but a path to a meaningful sphere that fills the soul — to art. Proust’s environment believed that one can spiritually educate a person by surrounding them with material objects of spirituality, but Proust understood the inadequacy of his acquaintances and saw a path only in gradually cultivating spiritual equivalents within himself through art, which is an instrument for exploring the soul.
“To convey its scope would necessitate comparison with the noblest and most various arts. For the writer, in creating each character, would have to present it from conflicting standpoints so that his book should have solidity, he would have to prepare it with meticulous care, perpetually regrouping his forces as for an offensive, to bear it as a load, to accept it as the object of his life, to build it like a church, to follow it like a régime, to overcome it like an obstacle, to win it like a friendship, to nourish it like a child, to create it like a world, mindful of those mysteries which probably only have their explanation in other worlds, the presentiment of which moves us most in life and in art. Parts of such great books can be no more than sketched for time presses and perhaps they can never be finished because of the very magnitude of the architect’s design.”