Literature

On his death seventy-five years ago, Marcel Proust was, beyond all his expectations, to succeed in passing brilliantly into posterity thanks to Remembrance of Things Past1 (la Recherche du temps perdu), the book of books, his life work. Considered by some to be the ultimate achievement of the 19th century novel and, by others, as the precursor of that of the 20th century, his work which « transcends time and space » - in the words of the preface to the Chinese translation - became emblematic of French literature, his influence considerably exceeding his actual number of readers. The bibliography devoted to him both in France and abroad is also the most important ever enjoyed by any French author. Quite a legend.

When Marcel Proust died, on November 18th, 1922, he had, only a few months earlier, written the word « End » at the foot of the manuscript of A la recherche du temps perdu. The last three volumes of the novel - which has seven in all -, and yet to be published, needed some revisions; while The Captive (la Prisonnière) was almost complete, we still do not know where The Sweet Cheat Gone (Albertine disparue) was to have ended and Time Regained (le Temps retrouvé) begun, which was not to be published until 1927. But by 1909, Proust had already drafted the bare bones of his life work so that whenever death might surprise him, Remembrance would provide its key for the reader.

It all began in 1908, when he sketched out an essay presented in narrative form and directed against literary criticism as conceived by Sainte-Beuve2. Proust was then seen by his contemporaries as a cultivated, sophisticated, even slightly snobbish, intellect; he was known for having published a delightful collection, Pleasures and Days (les Plaisirs et les Jours), (1896), a few articles and some translations of the British art critic and sociologist, John Ruskin, but, what no-one knew, was that he had put aside, because he could not decide on an ending, a long novel3 whose hero was called Jean Santeuil.

Towards the summer of 1909, the essay By Way of Saint-Beuve (Contre Sainte-Beuve) metamorphosed into a novel. By imagining that his hero, invited to a matinée at the home of the Princesse de Guermantes, had a revelation of time in its two modes of being (inner time through a series of reminiscences, and outer time through the ageing faces of the Princess’s guests), Proust changed the conclusion of his essay into a fictional ending; but it was already full of imaginary scenes and characters, to the point that the thread of his critical discourse had been lost. In short, the project had developed rather than lost its way.

---

Hailed by art

Fascinated by Madame Swann’s clothes and by her husband’s cultivated mind (Swann’s Way / Du côté de chez Swann), disturbed by the vulgar manners of young cyclists on holiday by the sea (Within a Budding Grove / A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur), eager for invitations to salons, with their exchange of banalities (Guermantes Way / le Côté de Guermantes), tortured by stories of worthless love (The Captive and The Sweet Cheat Gone), the hero of Remembrance - much more at one with Proust than with the narrator who refers to himself as « I » -, has a masterpiece within him. If Sainte-Beuve’s method were applied to it, who would suspect it?

His admiration for Elstir’s paintings or for the music of Vinteuil does not seem to weigh heavily as against the idleness which so distressed his grandmother. But this « idleness » was primarily a fearful respect before the work for which he was destined. The hero of the novel reflects his creator: if he had been a young man in a hurry and eager for success, Proust would have completed his Jean Santeuil somehow or other and, in 1908, less attention would have been paid in the Parisian salons of Saint-Germain or on the sea front at Cabourg, to his affected ways than to his literary talent and success. In short, his reputation for frivolity was the reverse side of his rigour. It earned him, in 1912, the famous rejection by the publishers of the Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF) of the first volume of Remembrance, Swann’s Way: leafing through the manuscript, the writer André Gide glimpsed in it, as he was expecting, stories about duchesses and, a victim of the Sainte-Beuve syndrome, exposed himself to what he was later to call the greatest regret of his life, to have misjudged the significance of a work in gestation.

From the moment he first conceived the ending of Remembrance until his death, in other words, for thirteen years (1909-1922), Proust multiplied character sketches and episodes, reworked or amplified some of the plots, filled out his comparative passages in order to link the particular to the general. Having at first feared that his novel would exceed a thousand pages, in the end he in fact wrote more than three thousand. This length itself made sense. That the hero’s journey finally ends in the discovery of his own sense of time (which enables him to successfully unify his self) is reminiscent of Parsifal’s conquering of the Holy Grail. Yet, while we still have only a little knowledge of the nature of the Holy Grail, or of the work of the hero of Remembrance, the time and effort they were to cost at least give us a high opinion of them.

As in the romances of courtly love, some of the protagonists that Proust stages are prevented from completing their journey. Thus Swann would prefer to enrich his life with ready-made beauties rather than sacrifice it to one beauty created by himself. He is an aesthete, as his contemporaries labelled Proust himself, although he criticised them in his writing.

In Balbec, probably based on Cabourg, the hero of Remembrance learns that the sails of a regatta or the dresses of young women do not, in the eyes of an impressionist painter, spoil the spectacle of the eternal sea. The outside world holds no interest save that it permits an alchemy of self. By bringing back to him the involuntary memory of an entire part of his childhood, the taste of a small cake is as important to the hero as the Dreyfus4 affair or the aerial bombardments of Paris. Once before, in Balzac’s Lily in the Valley (le Lys dans la vallée), Madame de Mortsauf’s shoulders were of more importance than the Hundred Days5 and, in Flaubert’s Sentimental Education (l’Education sentimentale), the sale of Madame Arnoux’ furniture eclipsed, in Frédéric’s eyes, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup d’Etat on December 2nd, 1851. Since fiction refracts the world in an individual consciousness, the novel often gives the frivolous primacy over the essential.

But, while in the work of the two masters of the 19th century novel, amorous passion caused this inversion of values, love for Proust is no more than an illness. His hero must experience it to heighten his sensitivity, but only a work of art justifies the rehabilitation of what one at first believed insignificant. This demystification of love lies behind the total subjectivity of Remembrance. That neither Swann nor the hero ever manages to find out whether Odette or Albertine is deceiving them is the product of a traditional analysis of jealousy ; Proust’s modernity lies in the fact that the question, in his work, is destined to remain unanswered.

Like an impressionist painting, Remembrance trembles with uncertainties. Actually, Proust contributes to a literary revolution comparable to that accomplished in painting in his day and that the non-figurative painters were to achieve in a more radical way. Proving that the interest of a book resides less in the reality it reflects than in the unique view that it expresses, he inaugurates what Nathalie Sarraute - one of the leading figures in the New Wave6 of fiction - was to call « the age of suspicion », in which the suspicion is less that of romantic and jealous characters than that of the reader invited to decipher the arcanes of a style.

1. Recently translated as In Search of Lost Time, although still normally referred to as Remembrance of Things Past.
2. A determinist theory in which a literary work is explained in terms of the historical and social context to which its author belongs.
3. A thousand page manuscript, that Proust never put in any order and the pieces of which have been published in the chronological order of the hero’s life.
4. A politically significant legal case which shook France from 1894 to 1906.
5. A very short period in 1815 when the Emperor Napoleon I briefly returned to power.
6. An expression first coined in the nineteen fifties to describe all the writers who questioned the formal existence of the novel, by venturing into an exploration of writing confronting itself.