Proust and Narrativity We Read Marcel Proust\'s

Proust and Narrativity

We read Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time - that greatest work of his the title of which is more commonly translated as Remembrance of Things Past both because of the simple beauty of his language and because of the power that he has to find our own lost pieces of time. For while he makes us interested in his past because of his marvelous descriptions of his own childhood and we become entranced by his memories because of the elegant and lush way that he conveys them to us, we also read the book because it seems to offer to us a type of magic, seems to serve as a talisman to all pasts, not just his alone. This paper examines the narrative structure of In Search of Lost Time and the ways in which that structure, joined to Proust's language and symbolism, can help each one of us gain a better sense not only of our own past but of time itself and the changes it creates in us.

Proust writes at the beginning of this novel:

Of that state of mind which, in that far-off year, had been tantamount to a long drawn out torture for me, nothing survived. For in this world of ours where everything withers, everything perishes, there is a thing that decays, that crumbles into dust even more completely, leaving behind still fewer traces of itself, than beauty: namely grief. (Time Regained, 8)

The basic thrust of the first sentence is "of that state of mind... nothing survived." And the second sentence could of course be more clearly put as "grief decays more completely than beauty." In my own observations of subtle movements in my consciousness, the effect of the narrative gap is that the logical narrative that the mind is following - that is, the linear mode of thought organized into the logical structure of language - suddenly stops, the meaning is put on hold while another logical narrative arises in consciousness, and the two meanings overlay and are experienced simultaneous.

This occurs during the gap, and then when the original logical narrative returns and concludes it is experienced with enhanced profundity and impact as the mind races back to connect the current meaning with the logical narrative that preceded the gap. This distance gives it beauty, a principle that the narrator recognizes when returning to his childhood home:

And so I was obliged, after an interval of so many years, to touch up a picture which I recalled so well -- an operation which made me quite happy by showing me that the impassable gulf which I had then supposed to exist between myself and a certain type of little girl which golden hair was as imaginary as Pascal's gulf, and which I thought poetic because of the long sequence of years at the end of which I was called upon to perform it.

It is all too easy to read Proust's work as an exercise in nostalgia; this may be exacerbated by reading the work even in an excellent translation such as this one, for the work in translation loses some of the lush insistence on connecting to the world of the past. The translation holds fast to the beauty of Proust's language, but there are internal assonances and alliterations that are lost when shifting from French to English that serve as metaphors or perhaps metonyms for the ways in which the similar texture of different experiences binds past to present.

Neither Nosalgia Nor Tragedy

Proust's work is often discussed as a catalogue of nostalgic longings, a catalogue of griefs. But, as Walter Benjamin, in the opening of his essay "The Image of Proust" (in Illuminations) argues, Proust understands that the losses that time brings are a fair exchange for the practice of memory. What he is seeking in this search for lost time is the pleasure that comes from the winding together of memories, from the ways in which we weave memories together as the essential act of creating ourselves. The book is both a complex text and an escape from the confines of textuality: Proust is continually seeking to draw us into his own particular story and to thrust us out into the world. (In the same way that memory, both within the novel and within my own personal experiences, constantly draw us back into the past while at the same time push us outward to the present and the future so that we may gain new materials for yet more memories. In its reliance on the reliability of narrator and text (which are complex, but not mendacious), the work is an essentially Modernist one. The clear belief that Proust has in the power of his novel (or of any text) to transform us and to perform real work in the world is something that we have, for better or worse, lost in our postmodern era.

This sense of the novel as more fundamentally tragic than it is fact is may in fact arise from the common translation (and one might argue mistranslation) of its title by pegging it to a line from Shakespeare's thirtieth sonnet - "When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought." Shakespeare is certainly here celebrating a nostalgic mood, and this mood has to some degree been transferred to Proust's work, not entirely doing either the sonnet or the novel justice. This may well have occurred because so many people know only the title of Proust's work along with a touch of Shakespeare, and so they have transferred what they know of Shakespeare onto what they do not know of Proust.

Proust understands that there is indeed sadness in the world, and any trip that we make to the past - whether one intentionally undertaken or one pursued against our own intentions because of the alchemy of memory - is likely to expose us to sadness. But sadness is different from both tragedy and nostalgia. Nostalgia is too frail to build bridges with, and tragedy too self-absorbing. Benjamin summarizes the goal of Proust's work:

For the important thing for the remembering author is not what he experienced, but the weaving of his memory, the Penelope work of recollection. Or should one call it, rather, a Penelope work of forgetting? Is not the involuntary recollection, Proust's memoire involuntaire, much closer to forgetting than what is usually called memory? And is not this work of spontaneous recollection, in which remembering is the woof and forgetting the wharf, a counterpart to Penelope's work rather than its likeness? For here the day unravels what the night has woven. When we awake each morning, we hold in our hands, usually weakly and loosely, but a few fringes of the tapestry of lived life, as loomed for us by forgetting. However, with our purposeful activity and, even more, our purposive remembering each day unravels the web and the ornaments of forgetting. This is why Proust finally turned his days into nights, devoting all his hours to undisturbed work in his darkened room with artificial illumination, so that none of those intricate arabesques might escape him.

Benjamin is of course correct to suggest that Proust sees the act of weaving memories as something that is central to the act of writing: Gerard Genette in fact argues that the entire novel is really an elaboration of a three-word sentence: Marcel devient ecrivain. For those of us who are not becoming writers, or who are becoming writers but of our own texts rather than of this one, the purpose of such weaving of memory - that closing of the gap between the present and the past - is more an act of constituting the self than of creating literature, although for many these two acts are the same.

All of us tell stories - if only to ourselves, in our journals and the conversations that we have with our lovers and in our dreams - that weave together elements of past and present to make sense of both. Proust simply does the same thing - in public, with a far greater sense of style.

Memory As Tool

We cannot read In Search of Lost Time without believing in the power of memory to give meaning to time, especially the fragmentary time of childhood in which memories swim in a blackness of ignorance about our own past. The maturation of the individual is in many senses the ability of that individual to form connected memories: The adult is able to look back on life in a more or less continuous line. We remember yesterday and the day before, and last year. The memories may not be well detailed, but they are cohesive and they form a simple narrative.

Proust, by himself returning to childhood and by urging us to return to our own childhoods, suggests that such simple narrative strategies for memory are poor indeed and that we must learn from the memories of childhood as well as the magic of sensory input to be able to make great leaps across time. We should not try, as we take an evening stroll, to remember what happened yesterday but rather think about the first time that we ever saw the sunset stain the West with that particular shade of plum, should try to recall the first time we heard a certain birdcall.

By linking memory to memory in a checkerboard across time, we do not defeat time - Proust is in no way advocating that we try to escape from the changes that time makes in each of us - but is rather suggesting that we become active agents in the process of aging, in the process of time. Time is not our master, but a tool given to us to understand our lives, and we may consciously choose, through that alchemy of memory, which strands we will use to weave the meaning of our lives.

Life - Time - is a great muddle, and it is we who must decide what it all means in this middle ground that we occupy between birth and death, as T.S. Eliot suggests in the opening lines of "The Wasteland," that great Modernist poem that revisits nearly all of the important ideas in Search of Lost Time. Eliot, so English in so many ways, is overwhelmed by the power of memories that in the Gallic hands of Proust are so appealing:

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

The goal of Proust in writing this book - one of the great works of Modernist literature - is to write a work that contains the entire world, that is equally respectful of and demanding of both memory and desire. Or perhaps to write a book that was capable of opening the heart and soul of the reader (like that of the writer so that the work could serve as a gateway to the world. The book certainly stands as a portal to experience (which is another of our words for time), although whether it is a portal looking out into the world (and back into time) or one looking inward, to the present and the future, is not at all clear. If we return to Benjamin for a moment longer, we can see that Benjamin describes this sense of the ways in which dramatic forms of the modern era (especially German tragedy) embody what he referred to as a "torrential" aspect in which events seem to pour over the tragic hero until he or she is swept away by them. For Proust, that torrent is time, and all of those who are lucky are indeed swept away by it.

While this work is often cited as one of the greatest of all Modernist novels and Proust one of the greatest of all Modernist writers, it is important that we do not become overly attached to such labels. Proust's relationship with his text is certainly Modernist, and his beliefs about the ways in which past and present may be linked through the constancy of individual experience and the power of memory are certainly Modernist, but Modernism comes in many flavors.

If we turn back to Eliot and "The Wasteland" for a moment, we see a flavor of Modernism in which the writer is far more ambiguous than is Proust about the usefulness of making bridges to the past. We do not quite know here if Phlebas has made a lucky escape in forgetting the cry of the seagulls or is damned because of it; in Search of Lost Time it is quite clear that Proust - and we, his readers - would be damned by a loss of connected to the past.

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,

Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell

And the profit and loss.

A current under sea

Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell

He passed the stages of his age and youth

Entering whirpool.

Gentile or Jew

O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,

Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

Work Incomplete Without Its Readers

Benjamin argued that the torrential quality of experience on the part of the narrator and protagonist (and at least potentially reader) is a sign of Modernism. Classical literature, and especially classical tragedy, is inwardly directed: It is in many ways a dialogue between the writer and the gods: The reader or audience is essentially superfluous. But this is no longer true within the realm of the modern, which require a readers who laments the tragic circumstances along with the characters and along with each other.

Benjamin argues that one of the conditions of modernity within literature is that the text requires a witness to be made complete, and the consensual nature of the experiences and events within the modern work is one that is based on the use of symbols and emblems. The shift between the classical world and the modern world in terms of tragedy is a shift in focus: The ancients were alone in their experiences; we are isolated by ours but continue to seek to make connections even in the face of continued failures in this regard. Proust can thus be seen as essentially Modernist: He has no intention of tragedy because he has no intention of speaking without being heard.

The aesthetically and psychologically central event of Proust's book - one that is well-known to many who have never in fact read the book at all - is that after opening scenes in which Proust dreams himself to be the narrator and subject of a book that he is writing and in which the reader fears that there may never be an end to the circularity of experience and perception, the tasting of a madeleine gives to the world of the book and the world beyond it a clarity before unthought of:

And as in the game wherein the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little pieces of paper which until then are without character and form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch and twist and take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, solid and recognisable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and its surroundings, taking shape and solidity, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea (Time Regained, 51).

This is the leap across that gap from the present to the past, but it is more than that. This is not merely a traveling into the dead past; rather it is the building of a bridge that will stand if not for eternity than for a very long time between the present and the past. And Proust is always aware of the fact that bridges allow traffic to flow both ways. The madeleines connect him to the past, but they also connect the past to the future. They place him - even if he should not want this to be so - within his historical moment, within society. Such a bridge denies him the terrors of loneliness as well as the epistemological privileges of solipsism. Such memories not only connect us across time but also across distance: They both allow us to see Combray as one of those unknown, blurred towns that we see from the windows of railroad cars as well as part of a larger whole, a piece of a quilt that is both unique and integral: