Proust's In Search of Lost Time: Narrative and Memory

Introduction: Why We Read Proust

We read Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time — that greatest of his works, whose title is more commonly translated as Remembrance of Things Past — both because of the simple beauty of his language and because of the power he has to find our own lost pieces of time. While he makes us interested in his past through his marvelous descriptions of his childhood, and we become entranced by his memories because of the elegant, lush way he conveys them, we also read the book because it seems to offer a kind of magic, to serve as a talisman for 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 be more plainly stated as "grief decays more completely than beauty." In observing the subtle movements of consciousness, the effect of the narrative gap is that the logical narrative the mind is following — that is, the linear mode of thought organized into the logical structure of language — suddenly stops. Meaning is put on hold while another logical narrative arises in consciousness, and the two meanings overlay each other and are experienced simultaneously.

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 one 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 with 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.

Neither Nostalgia Nor Tragedy

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, 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 — assonances and alliterations that serve as metaphors, or perhaps metonyms, for the ways in which the similar texture of different experiences binds past to present.

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 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 in personal experience, constantly draws us back into the past while simultaneously pushing us outward to the present and the future so that we may gather 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 actually is may 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 celebrating a nostalgic mood here, and this mood has to some degree been transferred to Proust's work, not entirely doing justice to either the sonnet or the novel. This may well have occurred because so many people know only the title of Proust's work along with a touch of Shakespeare, and 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 we make to the past — whether intentionally undertaken or 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 mémoire involontaire, 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 warp, 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 central to the act of writing. Gérard Genette in fact argues that the entire novel is really an elaboration of a three-word sentence: Marcel devient écrivain (Marcel becomes a writer). For those of us who are not becoming writers — or who are becoming writers 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, in the conversations we have with those we love, 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.

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 richly detailed, but they are cohesive and they form a simple narrative.

Memory As Tool

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 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. Rather, he is suggesting that we become active agents in the process of aging, in the process of time itself. 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 Waste Land," that great Modernist poem that revisits nearly all of the important ideas in 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. Perhaps, more precisely, to write a book capable of opening the heart and soul of the reader, as it opened 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 outward into the world and back into time, or one looking inward toward the present and the future, is not at all clear. If we return to Benjamin for a moment, we find that he describes the ways in which dramatic forms of the modern era — especially German tragedy — embody what he called 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 Waste Land" for a moment, we see a flavor of Modernism in which the writer is far more ambiguous than Proust about the usefulness of making bridges to the past. We do not quite know whether Phlebas has made a lucky escape in forgetting the cry of the seagulls or is damned because of it; in In Search of Lost Time it is quite clear that Proust — and we, his readers — would be damned by any loss of connection 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 the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

Conclusion

Proust's own title for this work argues as strongly as anything in the work itself that he is indeed a man in search of lost time. That time has been lost in large measure because at the moment of former experiences, he was unable to appreciate their true and deep meanings. When the narrator has intentionally tried to resurrect what meaning should have attached to those events, he has been unable to do so because that intentional searching for meaning changes the very nature of that meaning.